Nor am I, reading back. Fortunately it doesn’t affect my point, which was more to do with finite resources (the earth is spatially finite and has a finite number of atoms - indisputable) and you seem to be ok with that. Finite knowledge? I guess the current amount of knowledge each person has is finite, the amount of knowledge in a finite number of receptacles of knowledge is also finite: knowledge is currently finite. Is it potentially infinite? I would say yes, given that knowledge is just an interpretation of our experiences, and you can interpret things in a potentially infinite number of ways - although practically speaking, as you say, this requires novel thinking, which isn’t a common occurrence. I might also say no, given that no knowledge is certain. Knowledge can be better or worse making it a sliding scale, along which presumably there is a threshold of whether it is sufficient to be deemed knowledge, meaning that knowledge doesn’t need to be certain to be regarded as knowledge - so I don’t think I might say no in this way…
Anyway, tangent.
an outside state must be established to force them into check
How does this work, though? A state is just a bunch of humans going to work. How do you persuade them to do this? A lot of manpower is necessary to effectively oppress an entire population, so even if the current army were ok with just following orders, it probably wouldn’t be nearly enough people for what you have in mind. Perhaps you are relying on the same kind of consent to do terrible things as we saw in Nazi Germany, given that you probably think it’s just human nature to act in such a way - maybe the incentive is to join the state military just so you can do the oppression rather than be oppressed. The required discipline to be in the military is oppression in itself, though perhaps less so compared to what you might have in mind. Who oppresses the oppressors? I guess they just need to oppress themselves into dishing out oppression… I can tell you though, that the reported mental toll of people “just following orders” and doing terrible things was significant - I’m unconvinced that the majority of the population would be able to oppress in the long term. Psychopaths sure, but they’re only about 1% of the population.
In short, I don’t think “get the state to force people into check” is a notion that you can just throw around.
Reincarnation of Stalin? No, I equally detest communism as much as I do with capitalism.
It really does sound like Stalinism, what you’re suggesting. Or at least a kind of North Korea. Not a model society in practice at the very least. And who said anything about Communism? Perhaps you didn’t read the various things I’ve been saying about what Communism was originally designed to be (as opposed to the bastardised use of the term that we hear the uneducated masses using today). It’s a decentralised working class run economic model, not a centralised authoritarian oppression of social freedoms like Stalinism - that’s literally the exact opposite.
So basically you’re waiting on a world leader to emerge, convince enough people to forcefully enlighten civilians (a dark enlightenment? Was that an intentional contradiction? Perhaps an endarkenment ), like I’m waiting on technological advances to replace at the very least unskilled jobs. How long do you expect to wait? You think the state of our democracy is on the verge of total collapse, starvation and civil war. Given how things are in the worst places in the world right now, never mind even worse places historically, there’s a longer way to fall for things to get really really bad than I think you’re appreciating. Honestly I don’t think primitive humanity can be transcended - the way that the brain is structured, it’s basically moderated and imperfectly channeled into socially acceptable behaviour, and I believe it’s based on necessary tendencies for humanity to endure. I think if you transcended it, you’d end up weakening and killing off humanity… I’m not saying I support what you mean by your reductionism of human natures, I just accept that it could be no other way. Technology though? It can be built to be foundationally different to the human brain, which cannot so easily be fundamentally rebuilt. Computers, the internet, mobile phones, GPS, technologies tend to be passed down to the masses and not just kept by elites. This is at least one good thing about Capitalism that you can rely on, there’s simply more money to be made if you make technologies available to the plebs. Self-driving cars is basically a dead-cert, it’s happening and it will be soon that huge numbers of people will be made redundant - forcing a response that will shake the core of capitalist workings and its fundamental assumptions and tenets. This is far from transhumanism and technological enslavement and it’s already threatening the status quo significantly - I’m not talking that far into the future.