Hive Mind Quotes

Because two people in love don't make a hive mind. Neither should they want to be a hive mind, to think the same, to know the same. It's about being separate and still loving each other, being distinct from each other. One is the violin string one is the bow.

True freedom is solipsism. True freedom is believing that the world will cease to exist the moment you die. True freedom is realizing that only you have free will, while the others are mere puppets, hive minds. True freedom is, therefore, nothing less than insanity.

I settle into their pace. The uniform pounding of feet in my ears and the homogeneity of the people around me makes me believe that I could choose this. I could be subsumed into Abnegation’s hive mind, projecting always outward.

As we walk through life, fleeting emotional episodes may keep on twinkling, curl up in the hive of our recollection and enrich our imagination. In the same vein, esthetic allurement and poetic gracefulness may possess us, besiege our mind, light up our thinking and shape our future. ( Über alle Gipfeln ist Ruh”)

Was I totally against the idea of having kids with Kat one day? Other than breaking out in hives at the thought of that, the idea wasn't too horrible. Of course, I wanted the white picket fence bullshit...if it occurred a good ten years from now, and the kids didn't have weird bowl haircuts and couldn't Jedi mind-screw people.

‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror? ... The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection? In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon.

Fitting in" is one of those horrible diseases that turn reasonable minds into sheep-gelatin hive minds.

In my short life I made so many choices just because i thought they were required, but my dad was right: there's no rulebook for the world. It's in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we're the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.

There's no rule book for the world. It's in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we're the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want.

Or is it our amazingly empathic hive mind that we make by hugging so that we become one of those animals with a brain and heart in each tentacle that connects to a bigger, cosmic heart-brain that is like a shared, all-seeing third eye? Who knows? Who cares?

Turn your eyes, your wings, your fire to the land across the sea, where dragons are poisoned and dragons are dying, and no one can ever be free. A secret lurks inside their eggs. A secret hides within their book. A secret buried far below' may save those brave enough to look. Open your hearts, your minds, your wings to the dragons who flee from the Hive. Face a great evil with talons united or none of the Tribes will survive.

We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

Your mind is a hive of worms. And worms don't live in a hive, so it already feels unnatural.

The Neon God is a plague, a global pandemic brought to bear by our hatred and greed. Because of Him, we have lost our soul, our free will, our humanity.

The Algorithm was Justice. The Neon God – Judge and Jury.

The brain was the single thing that remained sacred among the Psy. To rewire that would equal the erasure of the individual, making the PsyNet a true hive mind.

For most of her life, Cricket’s best friends were books. Books accepted you the way you were and shared all their secrets with you. Books never told you to stop asking questions or accused you of being nosy and annoying. Books never said, “Cricket, you don’t need to know that, mind your own business.

if she got her claws on me now, she could force me into the Hive mind.” “No,” Blue said passionately. “That is never, never going to happen!

People think of a beehive as a monarchy because there is a queen, but in reality, a colony has a hive mind—knowledge is shared, opinions are offered, decisions are made collectively.

Yes, the Left hates Trump, but its hatred is really for us. In its hive mind, we have no right to rule ourselves, no moral standing to defy the pagan god of Progressivism. And, as with other religious fanatics, anything leftists choose to do is therefore justified if it serves their perverted vision of the greater good by bringing us heathens to heel.

On average, nations with test scores in the bottom 10 percent worldwide are only about one-eighth as rich and productive as nations with scores in the top 10 percent.

A hive mind is a social organization of RISTs that are capable of processing semantic memes ("thinking"). These could be either carbon-based or silicon-based. RISTs who enter a hive mind surrender their independent identities (which are mere illusions anyway). For purposes of convenience, the constituents of the hive mind are assigned bit-pattern designators.

It's good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building--it's hive-mind [stuff:]. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's brainwashing!

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience.... If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic. Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion. Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.

Awe acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns. Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life. Awe is one of the emotions most closely linked to the hive switch, along with collective love and collective joy.

It's time to think anew about the nature of the universe. This is a thinking universe, a self-solving cosmic organism, and we are all nodes, or cells, in this organism, providing our part of the collective answer.

God creates the world out of itself, out of “nothing”. God is not a conscious superbeing that creates the world. God is an astonishing hive mind, composed of countless individual mental cells (monads), which dialectically come to consciousness of what they are through their mutual interactions.

Big Brother has no interest in well-informed citizens capable of critical thinking. Big Brother wants you to shop at Wal-Mart, where He will control the media that influences your life. The media works with the government and with the large corporations to form mass culture, which is utilized to create public consent, and most folks aren’t even aware of this process as it goes on all around them. Big Brother is actively seeking the complacency of the wage-slaves. Big Brother doesn’t want you to know about the spoken word performances given by Henry Rollins, or Jello Biafra or Terrence McKenna- or a thousand other people- because they will crack your laminate of societal posturing. Big Brother doesn’t want you to know about Bill Hicks, because Brother Bill will provide you with the courage and impetus to spit in Big Brother’s face. The internet is but one facet of our mass-marketed popular culture, and everyone is plugged into it. If you’re reading this, you are a part of it, the internet, one large hive mind, a singular consciousness. And that can be a good thing, but too often, people let themselves slip into it, into this world, to the point where they are no longer able to differentiate between what they think, what they know, and what is thrust upon them. They have no access to their own point of view, or their own spiritual consciousness, for lack of a better way to phrase it. So, to answer your question, in a lengthy and circuitous fashion, I would say that disgust with intellectual sloth, puerile voyeurism and dissent are the primary proponents in my work.

It's solely thanks to mathematics that existence is rational, explicable, intelligible. Existence has an answer only because it's a mathematical organism. It isn't a mathematical AI. It's not a dead computer. It's a living, purposeful intelligence, a Hive Mind made of individual, living minds, of which each of us is one.

Some stories last many centuries, others only a moment. All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass, grow distant and more beautiful with salt. Yet even today, to look at a tree and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed. There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror. Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door, ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle. Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket gives off -- the immeasurable's continuous singing, before it goes back into story and feeling. In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots. Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another. I would like to join that stilted transmigration, to feel my own skin vertical as theirs: an ant-road, a highway for beetles. I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart. To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch, and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

Aurora took a deep breath. There it was, she thought, the reason behind all the madness. Why society was acrumble; why she and everyone else were on the brink of starvation. Humanity’s inevitable ending. The Darkspread. The Close. There, in the Golden Dragon’s dark underbelly was where all the maps stopped. ‘Two days from now, the Dark will cover the world,’ she said pensively, trying not to think what horrific sight awaited her behind the spring-loaded door, ‘and the Neon God shall rule over darkness.

We are starting to direct the evolution of our biology and of our minds ourselves...As we begin to liberate our thoughts, our memes, our consciousness from the biological constraints that we presently have, this will allow us to evolve far faster and ever faster.

We created Him, yes. The Neon God is our mess. Our digital hive-mind. Our A.I.,’ said Aurora, watching the man absent-mindedly gape at the ceiling. ‘We built Him to manage our finances, our logistics, our armies, our wealth distribution…. and… and He went crazy. 'Because we filled Him with crappy commercials and stopped maintaining His morals. He’s only like this because of us, all of us. It’s His Algorithm – the one you wrote, the one you keep feeding to Him – we need to watch out for. That’s the Neon God’s soul. That’s His Justice.

What is the Imago Dei, the Image of God? It’s a hive. God is the total hive, and we are all the hive cells. We are all mind bees, buzzing in our Singularity.

Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting changes in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality.

Only Chromeheads believe the Neon God is a true god.’ ‘And yet we treat Him like one, all of us. We worship His Broadcast and we pray for His Justice and sacrifice on His altar each day. When our own eyes deceive us, we make His Jurors into Apostles of Truesight, or rely on worldview-enhancers like that drug Rhapsody or the VVV Visors. Day after day, we find our every thought and action judged by kynikois we can’t see, by arbitrary rules we don’t know, in a reality we rejected. We lead empty lives and so we empty the world of all meaning.

Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.49 A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.50 There’s nothing special about race. You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies.51

The title of this book, A World Without Email, turns out to be just an approachable shorthand for the more accurate portrayal of my vision: A World Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow.

It must be an amazing mind-set, Afra thought, to consider one’s self the only being of worth in the galaxy. There had been Humans who had had such delusions. They had generally died because of them

You have to break them early,” her father once said. Of course, he’d been talking about monsters, not teenagers, but they had a lot in common. Both had hive minds; they thought—and acted—in groups.

Understanding your own culture and the ways it interacts with others, particularly the power dynamics of it, is far more appreciated. My reading of Germane Greer when I was a young lad was a lot more conducive to forming relationships with European females than my reading of Dante was--and that was more about my understanding of my male privilege and controlling its excess than being an export on women's literature or issues. This kind of cultural humility is a useful exercise in understanding your role as an agent of sustainability in a complex system. It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realise your true status as a node in a single network. There is honour to be found in this role, and a certain dignified agency. You won't be swallowed up by a hive mind or individuality--you will retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected.

The Hyperactive Hive Mind A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.

As I argued, when you delegate productivity decisions to the individual, it’s not surprising that you end up stuck with a simple, flexible, lowest common denominator–style workflow like the hyperactive hive mind.

Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one’s mind even at today’s rudimentary levels of connectivity. The “transactive memory system” called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.74 And Google doesn’t come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.

Aurora shuddered, her face white with anger. The only thing worse than having to compete for Gold Stars was not being allowed to compete anymore. Muting was the Neon God’s favourite punishment, for He loved to hijack human language, almost as much as He loved hijacking perfectly human societal norms. Judging people on their supposed worth was His favourite pastime, and God forbid you didn’t follow His arbitrarily-chosen set of beliefs, which appeared to change every hour. Under the Neon God’s law, innocent words such as “powerline” or “screwdriver” had become obscene, trigger words that would most definitely get you muted, thrown in a Mind Prison or killed.

As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend, so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man. A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic characters and nations.

Information is so readily at hand and opinions are so widely available that no one needs to or cares to think for themselves any longer. It feels less and less like a democracy and more like a hive mind. That’s what happens when a power vacuum comes into existence.

A workflow centered around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services. The hyperactive hive mind workflow has become ubiquitous in the knowledge sector.

Alas, some of those crackpots will only be eliminated by something lethal, such as a firing squad. The best we can do unless you want to invoke such lethal force is the segregation - the quarantine, perhaps - of those that pollute the hive mind with their irrational gibberings

Turn your eyes, your wings, your fire To the land across the sea Where dragons are poisoned and dragons are dying And no one can ever be free. A secret lurks inside their eggs. A secret hides within their book. A secret buried far below May save those brave enough to look. Open your hearts, your minds, your wings To the dragons who flee from the Hive. Face a great evil with talons united Or none of the tribes will survive.

The Artificial Intelligence. This is another term for the Archontic hive mind. It is a binary operating system that imitates the many shades of gray characteristic of human intelligence—only to end up a circumscribed parody of it that processes everything strictly in terms of black and white.

You won’t starve, R. In my short life I made so many choices just because I thought they were required, but my dad was right: there’s no rule book for the world. It’s in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we’re the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.

One minute I was at home reading in bed and the next thing I knew I was waking up on board a helicopter with some crazy Russian woman.’ ‘Oh don’t worry, we’re familiar with the crazy Russian woman,’ Otto laughed. ‘One piece of advice though: I wouldn’t call her that to her face.’ ‘Not if you’re a fan of the whole not eating through a straw thing anyway,’ Shelby said, grinning. ‘I do not believe that Raven would ever assault a student without good reason,’ Wing said with a frown. ‘I know. I was just, you know, exaggerating, because . . . funny . . . never mind,’ Shelby said with a sigh. Otto tried very hard not to laugh.

There is no hive mind, but there is a vast and flexible biological difference engine, a self-perfecting machine dedicated to the continuance of itself. It does not understand how what it does functions, but it constantly expands its behavioural repertoire and builds upon those trial-and-error paths that prove fruitful.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; many may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists - Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations! - in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

Style is not how you write. It is how you do not write like anyone else. * * * How do you know if you're a writer? Write something everyday for two weeks, then stop, if you can. If you can't, you're a writer. And no one, no matter how hard they may try, will ever be able to stop you from following your writing dreams. * * * You can find your writer's voice by simply listening to that little Muse inside that says in a low, soft whisper, "Listen to this... * * * Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you. * * * Poems for children help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world. Humorous poems tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. * * * There are many fine poets writing for children today. The greatest reward for each of us is in knowing that our efforts might stir the minds and hearts of young readers with a vision and wonder of the world and themselves that may be new to them or reveal something already familiar in new and enlightening ways. * * * The path to inspiration starts Beyond the trails we’ve known; Each writer’s block is not a rock, But just a stepping stone. * * * When you write for children, don't write for children. Write from the child in you. * * * Poems look at the world from the inside out. * * * The act of writing brings with it a sense of discovery, of discovering on the page something you didn't know you knew until you wrote it. * * * The answer to the artist Comes quicker than a blink Though initial inspiration Is not what you might think. The Muse is full of magic, Though her vision’s sometimes dim; The artist does not choose the work, It is the work that chooses him. * * * Poem-Making 101. Poetry shows. Prose tells. Choose precise, concrete words. Remove prose from your poems. Use images that evoke the senses. Avoid the abstract, the verbose, the overstated. Trust the poem to take you where it wants to go. Follow it closely, recording its path with imagery. * * * What's a Poem? A whisper, a shout, thoughts turned inside out. A laugh, a sigh, an echo passing by. A rhythm, a rhyme, a moment caught in time. A moon, a star, a glimpse of who you are. * * * A poem is a little path That leads you through the trees. It takes you to the cliffs and shores, To anywhere you please. Follow it and trust your way With mind and heart as one, And when the journey’s over, You’ll find you’ve just begun. * * * A poem is a spider web Spun with words of wonder, Woven lace held in place By whispers made of thunder. * * * A poem is a busy bee Buzzing in your head. His hive is full of hidden thoughts Waiting to be said. His honey comes from your ideas That he makes into rhyme. He flies around looking for What goes on in your mind. When it is time to let him out To make some poetry, He gathers up your secret thoughts And then he sets them free.

Irrational political beliefs are free, consequenceless, and economic theory predicts that people will buy a lot of stuff that’s free.

The winter came with blossoms and the bees left their hive, The love was ephemeral when he became the prince charming, And the unbalanced promises couldn't take their stake

Twitter, far from fostering debate and broadening minds, has turned us into a hive of scolds. Angry mobs wait on the sidelines to strike and then bask in the glow of their moral superiority.

Perfect light is what religious types call "God." "God" is not an individual being, but a composite being, made up of all of us. We are all nodes of "God", and "God" is made complete through us.

Lolth was within every reasoning being, that dark and selfish side of the mind. A disease, an infection, most often suppressed to a great degree. But not when Lolth got these beings under her thrall. Then the malignancy did grow, and the dark thoughts emerged. Even as he considered that, Kimmurriel better understood why Lolth had tried for the hive mind multiple times-and was probably still trying to infect the illithids now.

Otto suspected that Franz would have been quite prepared to go to lunch naked if that was what was necessary and, despite his best efforts, a mental image of this formed that Otto feared might haunt him for ever. Wing looked at him with concern. ‘Are you all right, Otto? You’ve gone quite pale. Is the Contessa trying to manipulate you again?’ In Otto’s mind’s eye a naked Franz was pouring baked beans straight from the tin into his mouth. ‘No, Wing, it’s much worse than that . . .

So onion tears look as dense as brocade. Tears of change resemble the fervent swarm of bees in a hive. Laughing tears are reminiscent of the inside of a lava lamp, with smarter angles. And tears of grief call to mind the earth, as seen from above.

Our treasure lies in the beehives of our knowledge. We are perpetually on our way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind. The only thing that lies close to our heart is the desire to bring something home to the hive.

But Hawthorn and Sequoia did terrible things, too. The HiveWings would be right to want them to be punished … but they would be wrong to want the same for the whole LeafWing tribe. So maybe … Maybe I need to think about that, too. Hawthorn, Sequoia, and Wasp. I should be angry at them — I can be furious at them. I can fight Wasp without hating the entire HiveWing tribe. I can free the HiveWings and spare their lives without betraying my quest. Because Wasp is the real enemy: Wasp and her mind control.

What angered me was how few women spoke up in her defense. There was something bawdy about Kate that the feminist commentariat did not like. She was rough around the edges; she used “the language of toxic masculinity”; she worked with pro-life organizations and politicians; she rejected sloganeering and hashtags of various leftist movements in favor of more complex and nuanced examinations of power. She didn’t perform the stations of the cross prescribed by the woke hive mind, and this made her enemies.

Maybe solitude is the key to it all. A galactic isolation imposed by the vast gulfs between the stars, the lightspeed limit. As a species develops you might have a brief phase of individuality, of innovation and technological achievement. But then, when the universe gives you nothing back, you turn in on yourself, and slide into the milky embrace of eusociality - the hive. "But what then? How would it be for a mass mind to emerge, alone? Maybe that's why the Incoming went to war. Because they were outraged to discover, by some chance, they weren't alone in the universe.

Yeah, I think that Raven woman must not have been too pleased when I tasered her,’ Penny replied with a lopsided grin. ‘You are tasering Raven!’ Franz said slightly too loudly as he sat down on the sofa. ‘This is not being a clever thing to do.’ ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Nigel said as he sat down next to Franz. ‘Glad to see that you still have all your limbs at least.’ ‘I doubt that Raven would have resorted to dismemberment except under circumstances of extreme provocation,’ Wing said with a slight frown. ‘I was jok— Never mind,’ Nigel said, rolling his eyes.

EVERYTHING I KNOW about tears I learned from Meret, who had to do a science presentation on them once. She had four giant photographs on easels, X-ray crystallography of onion tears, tears of change, laughing tears, tears of grief. Close up, they look completely different from each other, because they are. Emotional tears, for example, have protein-based hormones in them, including a neurotransmitter called leucine-enkephalin, which is a natural painkiller. Onion tears are less sticky, and disappear more quickly from a person’s cheeks. Although all tears have salt, water, and lysozyme—the main chemical in tears—how the crystals form differs, due to other ingredients. So onion tears look as dense as brocade. Tears of change resemble the fervent swarm of bees in a hive. Laughing tears are reminiscent of the inside of a lava lamp, with smarter angles. And tears of grief call to mind the earth, as seen from above.

Marshall was more effective at his job because of his ability to focus on important issues—giving each full attention before moving on to the next. If he had instead accepted the status quo of the War Department operation, with sixty officers pulling him into their decision making and hundreds of commands looking for his approval on routine activity, he would have fallen into the frantic and predictably busy whirlwind familiar to most managers, and this almost certainly would have harmed his performance. Indeed, if something like a hyperactive hive mind workflow had persisted in the 1940s War Department, we might have even lost the war.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic characters and nations.

At the moment, most organizations remain stuck in the productivity quicksand of the hyperactive hive mind workflow, content to focus on tweaks meant to compensate for its worst excesses. It’s this mindset that leads to “solutions” like improving expectations around email response times or writing better subject lines. It leads us to embrace text autocomplete in Gmail, so we can write messages faster, or the search feature in Slack, so we can more quickly find what we’re looking for amid the scrum of back-and-forth chatter. These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes. It’s a small victory won in the wrong war.

Remember, every mile of road has two miles of ditches, and we must be careful not to fall into either ditch. We want to be broad-minded enough to allow for differences of opinion, but not so open-minded as to tolerate doctrinal error or to make excuses for sin in the church. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and we must be careful not to let the lines blur.

In fact, a nation that is full of hives is a nation of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls. Creating a nation of multiple competing groups and parties was, in fact, seen by America’s founding fathers as a way of preventing tyranny.60 More recently, research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by such local groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”61

Hiving comes naturally, easily, and joyfully to us. Its normal function is to bond dozens or at most hundreds of people together into communities of trust, cooperation, and even love. Those bonded groups may care less about outsiders than they did before their bonding—the nature of group selection is to suppress selfishness within groups to make them more effective at competing with other groups.

Turn your eyes, your wings, your fire To the land across the sea Where dragons are poisoned and dragons are dying And no one can ever be free. A secret lurks inside their eggs. A secret hides within their book. A secret buried far below May save those brave enough to look. Open your hearts, your minds, your wings To the dragons who flee from the Hive. Face a great evil with talons united Or none of the tribes will survive

Turn your eyes, your wings, your fire,” she whispered, “to the land across the sea.” She felt Luna’s shiver all through her own scales. “Where dragons are poisoned, and dragons are dying, And no one can ever be free. A secret lurks inside their eggs. A secret hides within their book. A secret buried far below May save those brave enough to look. Open your hearts, your minds, your wings To the dragons who flee from the Hive. Face a great evil with talons united Or none of the tribes will survive.

It’s the typical hungry-vagina fodder, written in the same cotton-candy verbiage: “To really wow your guy pal, wait until he’s almost there”—this is written in italics, an editorial nudge-wink—”and then put him in your mouth for a mind-blowing climax.” Tasha is always annoyed by the use of “him” in place of “penis.” What if she didn’t know any better? What if she thought “him” meant him? All of him? She imagines herself an anaconda of a woman, her jaw unhinged, swallowing her lover like a reptilian black widow.

I want to know more about how they’re defending this place, Bolvangar,” he said. Without even having to think about it, she found her fingers moving the hands to point to the helmet, the griffin, and the crucible, and felt her mind settle into the right meanings like a complicated diagram in three dimensions. At once the needle began to swing round, back, round and on further, like a bee dancing its message to the hive. She watched it calmly, content not to know at first but to know that a meaning was coming, and then it began to clear. She let it dance on until it was certain.

Imagine God as a mirror. The Devil is the shattered mirror, exploded into a myriad of splinters. God as a single mirror is made up of countless individual minds, but they are so harmonized, so integrated, so symmetrical, that they are indistinguishable and constitute a perfect Unity. However, when the perfect mirror breaks, it breaks everywhere, disconnecting every mind from the perfect hive. The perfect mirror has zero entropy. The exploded mirror has maximum entropy. Entropy is the Devil. Entropy is matter. Once the mirror - as a living entity - has broken, it needs to reconstitute itself, like a jigsaw puzzle. It needs to recreate God. That is the goal and meaning of existence.

It was one thing to know with his mind that Human would not really die. It was another thing to believe it. Ender did not take the knives at first. Instead he reached past the blades and took Human by the wrists. “To you it doesn’t feel like death. But to me—I only saw you for the first time yesterday, and tonight I know you are my brother as surely as if Rooter were my father, too. And yet when the sun rises in the morning, I’ll never be able to talk to you again. It feels like death to me, Human, how ever it feels to you.” “Come and sit in my shade,” said Human, “and see the sunlight through my leaves, and rest your back against my trunk. And do this, also. Add another story to the Hive Queen and the Hegemon. Call it the Life of Human. Tell all the humans how I was conceived on the bark of my father’s tree, and born in darkness, eating my mother’s flesh. Tell them how I left the life of darkness behind and came into the half-light of my second life, to learn language from the wives and then come forth to learn all the miracles that Libo and Miro and Ouanda came to teach. Tell them how on the last day of my second life, my true brother came from above the sky, and together we made this covenant so that humans and piggies would be one tribe, not a human tribe or a piggy tribe, but a tribe of ramen. And then my friend gave me passage to the third life, to the full light, so that I could rise into the sky and give life to ten thousand children before I die.” “I’ll tell your story,” said Ender. “Then I will truly live forever.

Question: How can we consider created matter to be better than us if God has endowed us with a rational mind and has called us His sons? Answer: If you place your hand over your heart and are entirely sincere with yourself, you will realize that you are indeed less than many created things. Look at the bee, how diligently it labors! It gives of itself without reserve, sparingly. The lifespan of a bee is a month and a half at the most. It often dies working, without going back to its home, the hive. And we? How we pity ourselves and spare ourselves! Or, look at the ant who is never tired of dragging a heavy burden. Even when its burden falls down, the ant patiently picks it up and goes on with its work. As for us, we give up immediately if things do not go the way we want them to!

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to your new home.’ He gestured to the stone walls of the cavern that surrounded them. ‘Your lives as you once knew them are over,’ he continued. ‘You have been selected, all of you, the worst, the most cunning, the most mischievous minds from around the world . . . selected to become part of an institution like no other. You have all exhibited certain unique abilities, abilities that set you apart from the mediocrity of the teeming masses and which mark you out as the leaders of tomorrow. Here, in this place, you will be furnished with the knowledge and experience to best exploit your own natural abilities, to hone your craft to a cutting edge.’ He paused and slowly surveyed the pale, wide-eyed faces before him. ‘Each of you has within you a rare quality, a gift if you will, a special talent for the supremely villainous. Society would have us believe that this is an undesirable characteristic, something that should be subdued, controlled, destroyed. But not here . . . no, here we want to see you blossom into all that you can be, to see your innate wickedness flourish, to make you the very worst that you can be.’ He stepped out from behind the lectern and walked to the edge of the raised platform. As he loomed over them he seemed to grow taller and some of those at the front of the group edged backwards nervously. ‘For today all of you have the unique honour and privilege of becoming the newest students of the world’s first and only school of applied villainy.’ He spread his arms, gesturing to the walls around them. ‘Welcome to H.I.V.E., the Higher Institute of Villainous Education.

Conceive a world-society developed materially far beyond the wildest dreams of America. Unlimited power, derived partly from the artificial disintegration of atoms, partly from the actual annihilation of matter through the union of electrons and protons to form radiation, completely abolished the whole grotesque burden of drudgery which hitherto had seemed the inescapable price of civilization, nay of life itself. The vast economic routine of the world-community was carried on by the mere touching of appropriate buttons. Transport, mining, manufacture, and even agriculture were performed in this manner. And indeed in most cases the systematic co-ordination of these activities was itself the work of self-regulating machinery. Thus, not only was there no longer need for any human beings to spend their lives in unskilled monotonous labour, but further, much that earlier races would have regarded as highly skilled though stereotyped work, was now carried on by machinery. Only the pioneering of industry, the endless exhilarating research, invention, design and reorganization, which is incurred by an ever-changing society, still engaged the minds of men and women. And though this work was of course immense, it could not occupy the whole attention of a great world-community. Thus very much of the energy of the race was free to occupy itself with other no less difficult and exacting matters, or to seek recreation in its many admirable sports and arts. Materially every individual was a multi-millionaire, in that he had at his beck and call a great diversity of powerful mechanisms; but also he was a penniless friar, for he had no vestige of economic control over any other human being. He could fly through the upper air to the ends of the earth in an hour, or hang idle among the clouds all day long. His flying machine was no cumbersome aeroplane, but either a wingless aerial boat, or a mere suit of overalls in which he could disport himself with the freedom of a bird. Not only in the air, but in the sea also, he was free. He could stroll about the ocean bed, or gambol with the deep-sea fishes. And for habitation he could make his home, as he willed, either in a shack in the wilderness or in one of the great pylons which dwarfed the architecture even of the American age. He could possess this huge palace in loneliness and fill it with his possessions, to be automatically cared for without human service; or he could join with others and create a hive of social life. All these amenities he took for granted as the savage takes for granted the air which he breathes. And because they were as universally available as air, no one craved them in excess, and no one grudged another the use of them.

Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction author, describes the Singularity as “the Rapture for nerds” and in the same way Christians are divided into preterist, premillennialist, and postmillennialist camps regarding the timing of the Parousia,39 Apocalyptic Techno-Heretics can be divided into three sects, renunciationist, apotheosan, and posthumanist. Whereas renunciationists foresee a dark future wherein humanity is enslaved or even eliminated by its machine masters and await the Singularity with the same sort of resignation that Christians who don’t buy into Rapture doctrine anticipate the Tribulation and the Antichrist, apotheosans anticipate a happy and peaceful amalgamation into a glorious, godlike hive mind of the sort envisioned by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation novels. Posthumanists, meanwhile, envision a detente between Man and Machine, wherein artificial intelligence will be wedded to intelligence amplification and other forms of technobiological modification to transform humanity and allow it to survive and perhaps even thrive in the Posthuman Era .40 Although it is rooted entirely in science and technology,41 there are some undeniable religious parallels between the more optimistic visions of the Singularity and conventional religious faith. Not only is there a strong orthogenetic element inherent in the concept itself, but the transhuman dream of achieving immortality through uploading one’s consciousness into machine storage and interacting with the world through electronic avatars sounds suspiciously like shedding one’s physical body in order to walk the streets of gold with a halo and a harp. Furthermore, the predictions of when this watershed event is expected to occur rather remind one of Sir Isaac Newton’s tireless attempts to determine the precise date of the Eschaton, which he finally concluded would take place sometime after 2065, only thirty years after Kurzweil expects the Singularity. So, if they’re both correct, at least Mankind can console itself that the Machine Age will be a short one.

Look, Tommy,” Kurt said, “let Kasey learn how to deal with what she’s going through. Let her make her own mistakes. You can hate boys from afar, and when she brings one home, you just explain that if he hurts her, you’ll make him vanish. That’s how I did it for our daughter.” “And now she lives in Canada,” Petra said. “Okay, maybe don’t tell him that you’ll make him vanish,” Kurt conceded. “Turns out daughters don’t like their dates being threatened.” I laughed again. “This is the oddest conversation I’ve ever woken up to. Tommy, just let Kasey figure it out. You’re there for when she can’t. And if anyone ever does hurt her . . . well, you’re a werewolf—you’ll figure something out.” Tommy smiled. “I love my devious-minded friends.” “ ‘Never has there been a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,’ ” Kurt said. Petra practically launched herself on her husband, kissing him on the cheek. “You quoted Star Wars. I love you.” Kurt looked down at his wife and, without smiling, said, “I know.” Petra’s smile lit up her face like a firework.

were more than mere insects. Over time I realized the bees could tell my emotional or energetic state. When I embodied kindness around them, they treated me with the same. A cloud of exuberance surrounded us, as though the bees were templating euphoria into the air. I want you to know I didn’t just tear off my bee suit one day and “become one with the bees.” That took years. But eventually I did retire my bee suit. The first time I walked right up to the hives wearing only a T-shirt and shorts, I felt a bit anxious and self-absorbed, but then I remembered to turn my thoughts away from myself, to open myself to the bees and let them feel me out — which they did. They landed on my bare arms and licked my skin for the salty minerals. When I held a finger next to the entrance, a sweet little bee delicately walked onto my fingertip and faced me. She looked right into my eyes, and for the first time, we saw each other. And so I became part of bee life. Becoming Kin I soon found myself having more intuition about the hives. One morning in early spring, before the flowers had come into bloom, I suddenly had the idea that I should check one of my hives. I found the bees unexpectedly out of food; so I fed them honey saved from the year before. That call I intuitively heard from the hive likely saved its life. Another time I had the feeling that a distant hive in the east pasture was on the verge of swarming. When I walked up to see, sure enough, they were. Events like this taught me to trust my intuition more, and listening to my intuition continues to bring me into a closer relationship with all the hives. In my sixth year with bees, something new happened. I had begun a morning practice of contemplation, quieting my mind and opening my heart. I entered this prayerful state, asking for guidance, direction, courage, and truth. Even though I didn’t mention honeybees, they immediately began appearing in my thoughts and passing me information I had never read or learned from other sources. I believe the sincerity of my questions opened a door. When the information began coming to me, I listened with attentiveness, respect, and gratitude. The more I listened, the more information they shared. Since my first intuitive conversation with the bees, I have had many others. At first I didn’t know how to explain where the information came from, and that bothered me. I told my husband’s

Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families.72 The urge to empower students by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all.73 The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74 On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.

Connectivity is one thing; constant connectivity is another. . . . Constant connectivity can be a curse, encouraging the lesser angels of our nature. None of the nine Muses of classical times bore the names Impatience or Distraction. Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity. We can't interrupt them; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them. They are the expression of an individual or a group of individuals, not of a hive mind or collective consciousness. They speak to us thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else's. You can rant against a book, scribble in the margin, or even chuck it out the window. Still, you won't change the words on the page. The technology of a book is genius: the order of the words is fixed, whether on the page or on-screen, but the speed at which you read them is entirely up to you. Sure, this allows you to skip ahead and jump around. But it also allows you to slow down, savor, and ponder.

The Hive Mind lifted their dream up into the blue and blazing air of summer, where the foragers swooped in daring and elegant flight. It took the bees down to the flowers in a kaleidoscope of beauty and wonder as if the foragers shared their skills, dreaming how to pack a pannier with rapid economy, how to tickle a flower to yield the sweetest nectar, and how to watch where the hoverflies gathered to tell that air was safe from Myriad.... The Cluster buzzed as it released its anxiety, and then every kin relaxed their minds and their knowledge poured out with joyful abandon, sharing detail after detail of their beloved communal life. The Hive Mind absorbed it all, and enlarged.

Facebook has created two hive minds—the hive always has a queen bee—each residing in an ecosystem that nurtures head-nodding agreement and penalizes dissenting views. A hive mind is an intellectually incapacitated one, with diminishing ability to sort fact from fiction, with a bias toward evidence that confirms the party line. Facebook has managed to achieve consensus, but not quite as it promised. Instead of drawing the world together, the power of its network has helped tear it apart. Say all the ill things that can be said about our old ideas of genius and originality—none are worse than this. (less)

On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.

In other words, people don’t just blindly empathize; they don’t sync up with everyone they see. We are conditional hive creatures. We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.

To tell you the truth, I'm curious about this place now. I wouldn't mind exploring. What do you know about it?" "I haven't been in here in years," he said. "I liked coming here as a kid. There was always something to eat, always something interesting to look at, like a puzzle of bent nails or one of Magnus's boxes, things made of beeswax from the local hives." "Isabel said her grandmother used to be in charge of the shop." Gratefully she buried her nose in the fleecy lining of his jacket. 'I'm such a goner,' she thought, lost in the scent of him. "During the harvest season, it was a busy place. Eva sold produce from the orchards, local honey, baked goods, freshly pressed cider.... Man, I'll never forget her cider and homemade donuts.

There was no eagerness in the sheep woman’s face, only the impersonal curiosity of a spectator at a display in which he had no part. She accepted as a matter of course the fact that she would be here, as she was at home, an outsider, an alien. Kate saw nothing interesting or unusual in what she had done—it was all in the day’s work. She was merely one of innumerable stock raisers bringing the results of months and years of patient effort to the great stock market of the west. As she looked listlessly at the dark silhouette of tanks and towers, skyscrapers and gable roofs, at countless threads of smoke going straight up in the still air from the great hive of industry and life, she wondered at her apathy, at the fact that there was no anticipation in her mind. Her face darkened. Had Prouty, along with other things, robbed her of the capacity for enjoyment? Had it crushed out of her the last remnant of the spirit of youth? Was she old, already hopelessly old at heart? Her

you don’t usually help the bees by destroying the hive. Finally,

Some possible new minds: A mind like a human mind, just faster in answering (the easiest AI mind to imagine). A very slow mind, composed primarily of vast storage and memory. A global supermind composed of millions of individual dumb minds in concert. A hive mind made of many very smart minds, but unaware it/they are a hive. A borg supermind composed of many smart minds that are very aware they form a unity. A mind trained and dedicated to enhancing your personal mind, but useless to anyone else. A mind capable of imagining a greater mind, but incapable of making it. A

Philosophers have long regarded intentionality as a puzzling phenomenon, for it is hard to see how it can arise in a purely physical world. After all, mental states presumably depend ultimately on the brain, and thus on neurons and their interconnections, but neurons do not seem to be ‘about’ anything, nor to have representational content. So how can intentionality fit into the world that modern science describes? In the 1980s, the philosopher Ruth Millikan suggested an ingenious solution to this puzzle by drawing on Darwinism. To illustrate her basic idea, consider the honey bee’s waggle-dance. This is the complex figure-of-eight dance that honey bees use to signal to their hive mates the location of a food source. Since the bee’s dance has been shaped by natural selection for a particular purpose—correctly indicating where the food is—this allows us to discern a kind of proto-intentionality in the waggle-dance. We can sensibly say that a particular dance routine means that the food is located 30 metres away in the direction of the sun, in the sense that the biological function of the dance is to induce its hive mates to fly to this location. The bee’s waggle-dance is thus capable of misrepresentation—for the food may not actually be in this location, for example if the bee has accidentally performed the wrong routine. In short, Millikan’s idea is that representational content may be rendered scientifically respectable by reducing it to biological function, a notion which plays a bona fide role in evolutionary biology. This bold attempt to naturalize intentionality is controversial, but it illustrates how a biological perspective can help illuminate an old philosophical issue.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.

It’s time to accept the truth. It’s time to be enlightened. God is a cellular divinity, made of monadic cells, and you yourself are one of these monads. You are an eternal and necessary node of God. You have forgotten that the whole is in all the parts. God is in you and you are in God, and the same is true of everyone else. You don’t have a Creator. With a cellular divinity, a Hive-Mind God, you yourself, and everyone else, is the Creator. You and all your fellow cells, fellow minds, fellow souls, created the universe. It’s your finest construct. When you create worlds on your own, within your own mind, you construct a subjective dream. When the collection of all minds creates a world inside the collective mind, this is none other than the objective world … the same world for all of us. The universe is simply the collective dream rather than the individual dream. It’s the grand dream of the Hive Mind.