The Plague of Frogs in Our Land
There's a story in the Bible of ancient Egypt. The Pharaoh was enslaving and oppressing the immigrant Hebrew population. God comes to the rescue of the Hebrew people. He commands Pharaoh to let the people go. Pharaoh refuses, asking "Who is God that I should listen to him?" In other words, he challenges God to make him let the people go. And so God inflicts a series of plagues on Egypt, and finally a defeated Pharaoh lets the people go.
Frogs everywhere
The second plague that comes on the land of Egypt is interesting. God gives the Egyptians too much — way too much — of what they themselves desired. And when they get what they wanted, they realise their lives were miserable.
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go in to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, “Let my people go, that they may serve me. 2 But if you refuse to let them go, behold, I will plague all your country with frogs. 3 The Nile shall swarm with frogs that shall come up into your house and into your bedroom and on your bed and into the houses of your servants and your people, and into your ovens and your kneading bowls. 4 The frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your servants.”’”
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Then Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and said, “Plead with the Lord to take away the frogs from me and from my people, and I will let the people go to sacrifice to the Lord.”
My Pastor pointed out in his sermon last Sunday that the frog was an animal considered a god by the Egyptians. The Egyptian goddess of fertility and generation, Heqet, was pictured as a frog-headed woman or as a frog itself. In other words, the Egyptians liked frogs because it was their god. Frog amulets were popular.
It's interesting that God plagues the land with something that the people of the land supposedly like. There's so much of it that the people grow sick of it. The people grow sick of their god!
Getting too much of what we want
Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, wrote an essay in 2010 titled "The Acceleration of Addictiveness.1" He argued that technological progress makes something do what it does in a concentrated form. This can be good (making solar cells work x% better). But the same progress can also make opium do what it does in a concentrated form. It turns opium to heroin.
His entire essay is 100% worth reading. But here are a few paragraphs:
As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.
The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.
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as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.
This was written in 2010. This is more true today than it was in 2010.
Food is a good desire. But processed food (such as French fries) can intensify the good feeling that food gives us, and make us addicted to it. The desire to be aware of news and current happenings is a good desire. But technology can intensify the knowledge that news can give us by bringing us news from all over the world. This can in itself become addictive. We can endlessly scroll Twitter or a news website to keep knowing what's happening in the other side of the world (which have no direct relation to us).
Enslaved to our own desires
In a letter to the church in Rome, the apostle Paul wrote that human beings exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the creator God. And God's punishment of humans was to just let them do what they want to do. The deadliest punishment could be to allow humans to pursue their desires — their desires, which are self-destructive in nature.
As we start getting more and more of what we desire, the desire starts getting more and more of us. This is to our own harm. We begin losing ourselves as we give ourselves to our desires. As Paul Graham argued, what everyone does (normal in the first sense) is no longer what works best — or what is best for us. We stop functioning in a sense that works best for us — we stop being fully human.
77 year since independence, freedom still evades us
When I was young, we used to try and trap rats in the house. We used to keep a bit of food in a trap. When the rat came to eat the food, the trap would activate and the rat would be enslaved. Traps for humans are not much different -- they lure you in with a reward.
A nation was lured into the world of the internet through the promise of free internet in 2016. From 100 million active users of YouTube in 2014 to over 500 million today, India has become one of the top consumers of the Internet worldwide2. We have become enslaved to our own desires.
We once desired the frog gods of the internet. We desired a range of gods from the innocuous ones such as food recipes and music tutorials, to the more ambitious ones such as knowledge and fame. Today we are enslaved. We are enslaved to our gods, worshipping the screens with the blue-backlights. Just like the ancient Egyptians, we have received intensely high amounts of what we desired. And we’ve realised our lives are miserable as a result.
https://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2147/AMEP.S438215