It's all around you, like smog. This train isn't bound for glory.
Background by Deak Ferrand, who pwnz.
If you were referred here by Technorati, please note that the entry you are looking for is probably the one PRIOR TO the one you were actually referred to, due to a bug in their indexing process. Please see previous entry.
There is one person from whom I would very much like to hear on this issue, because I am ignorant of so much that is relevant, and likely making a fool of myself. You know who you are!
I am entirely embarassed at how late I am in bringing this up, but it is certainly relevant. I would like to draw your attention to an interesting development, apparently out of the American Indian Movement - who you should remember from Wounded Knee II - or a related faction. If Wounded Knee II is news to you, it may also be news to you that the U.S. government has never completely stopped warring against the continent's orignal nations.
On behalf of the Lakota Nation (though possibly without the authority to speak on their behalf), Russell Means (and some less-flashy associates) have announced the withdrawl of that people from existing treaties with the U.S. government, and the (re)creation of an autonomous Republic of Lakotah covering portions of several U.S. states. The movement apparently has a website.
Per Uncannily Obvious, "The nation would issue its own driver's licenses, passports, and would purportedly levy no taxes upon its citizenry. Means has promised that any who wish to live there may do so, given that they first renounce their US citizenship." Overall, this sounds like a reasonable deal to me. Although the crushing poverty, poor infrastructure, and so on, may drive some off, an influx of immigrants might arguably bring with it the resources and sympathy to help things develop in a more positive direction. Cultural dilution might be a possible danger, though.
A cautionary note is struck by The Wild Hunt - we also may observe very divergent perspectives in their comments section.
Technoccult, as usual, were hip to this all along.
Additional information here (with extensive and useful comments), and here.
From my (all too well-documented) point of view, this could be a positive development IF (1) the Lakota themselves are in near-unanimous sympathy to the idea, (2) they have some support from other presently and historically adjacent or collocated native groups, and, for good measure, non-natives resident in the region, and (3) there is massive "external" support (including lots-o-cash) coming from other native groups, the usual progressive groups, and libertarians and others opposed to the unwelcome imposition of power. I fear that none of these will come to pass, but I fear especially that the movement may become semi-viable, which would be much worse than it not being viable at all. "Worse" in this case means that the Lakota community gets divided against itself, outsiders attempt to impose their vision of what the Lakota "must" want on the probably more pragmatically-minded people at ground zero, and the conflict with the gummint gets escalated to fruitless violence. On the other hand, if this is the start of a new Civil War... I can hear the voices now: "Well, I've gotta die someday, right?"
Ah, but the "militant" fantasies of urban radicals or rural militiamen are not likely to count for much when the inevitable jackbooted thugs show up and start shooting at Lakota. Smart money says that very few white wannabes will actually show up willing to die on the barricades, should it come to that. Nor will the news media. So, I suppose that my greatest fear is that the gummint will be provoked into yet more anti-Lakota brutality, which will go largely ignored or suppressed.
One has to wonder who, in the end, will benefit from this attempt at secession. And there is the approaching Presidential race to consider... Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the flamboyance of this gesture fuels a huge media and memetic flap, focussing world and national attention on the plight of the Lakota and other original peoples - which may very well be the point. In which case: Well played!
I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were to attempt to re-enter academia, and my potential colleagues were to come across this 'blog. I suppose I might be criticized for a lack of rigor, for all the ranting and violent invective, for the abusive tone taken toward opposing viewpoints, and, especially, for all the cussing. The latter is particularly pitiful, because it rests precisely on the notion of bad words. This is a very odd notion, if you squint at it carefully under good light. And by "odd" I mean completely batshit insane. Roll the term over on your tongue a bit: Bad. Words. Words that are bad. What did they do? Steal their grandparents' Social Security checks in order to buy crack, in order to force-feed it to puppies - perhaps puppies with fibromyalgia?
Fundamentally, the restraint of the academic style is admirable - one can't even begin to do philosophy, for example, unless one can dispassionately consider the possible grounds upon which opposing positions might be seen as legitimate. One must perform the analysis of ideas with a surgeon's detachment. However, once the papers have been written, there still lingers a certain excessive delicacy about academics. At the very core of this tender sense of decorum is a patrician notion of civility.
And, yes, civility is nice, of course. But "nice" is not synonymous with "good"! Witness for example the hideous cowardice of British intellectuals in the face of the Rushdie affair - anxious not to slander any Muslim religious leader no matter how vile and inhumane, and totally unwilling to face the fact that militant fundamentalism is a large and in many places mainstream faction of that religion. (Do you know what religion looks like if you don't believe in it? Jonestown.) Subtler than this is the handling of economics, say, or politics - particularly of the policies and activities of one's own government. By its nature, a large government is inevitably involved in much larger-scale atrocities than any terrorist, by virtue of funding if nothing else! And every bit as involved in money laundering, drug running, collusion with Nazis and deathsquads and gangsters...
For myself, I would call this the Neville Chamberlain school of rhetoric. "Perhaps if we speak softly to the monster, it will calm down and come to see how right we are, as evidenced by how friendly we are toward it." Meanwhile, it's killing your students and large chunks of the Third World. But, of course, academia has, perhaps, taken much of its tone - not to mention its leadership and its funding - from priests, artistocrats, robber barons, and suchlike, so let's not forget that the "monster" in question is, as often as not, the people at the foot of whose beds academics often find themselves kneeling.
I have been experimenting with Shelfari recently - it allows you to list and discuss books you have read or are reading (etc.) and compare notes with others. It functions as a sort of cross between a social networking site and a bibliophile's Project Playlist.
Find me there, and tell me what you think! Since I apparently like foisting my views on others, I will regard this as an opportunity to tell you what to read. If you know what's good for you, you will comply. Or, you can regard this as an entryway into an entire network of people willing to help you find the bibliomanic Holy Grail - something good to read, for a change. Find someone who likes what you like, find out what else they like... Well, you get the idea.
Speaking of things to read, I would like to draw your attention to the Internet Sacred Texts Archive. This is a tremendous resource, with literally thousands of free texts available. The site's factotum, John B. Hare, has done a huge amount of strenuous labor, and maintained a respectable level of scholarship in the process. And he seems to be a real mensch. From the FAQ:
Q: Why did you do it? A: To do something nice for people.
What higher calling could there be?
I highly recommend supporting this project, and Mr. Hare's Herculean labors, by buying the archive on DVD, or the less expensive CD-ROM - you will enrich your personal library with most of the core scriptures of all of the major and many of the minor religions of the world, along with all sorts of secondary material on those religions, and on fringe culture, Forteana, esoterica, occultism, folklore, philosophy, history, etc. Even if none of these topics have grabbed much of your attention before, you can and will find the elusive "something good to read" here. Indeed, there is, without exaggeration, enough Good Stuff to keep you busy for the rest of your life, or a significant fraction thereof. Of course, if buying things is not a reasonable goal for you, then, by all means, dive into the online archive itself - you may never resurface!
For those already attracted to such things, I must also mention the extensive translations from the Tipitika, or Pali Canon, available at Access to Insight. The Pali Canon is the standard collection of sacred texts of Theravada - Southern, or "Hinayana" Buddhism, and is Not Crap. I would particularly direct "newcomers" to the Khuddaka Nikaya, where you will find such well-loved texts as the Dhammapada and the Milindapañha ("The Questions of King Milinda"), as well as what may be the original version of the familiar story of the blind men and the elephant. As a matter of principle, the texts are free of charge, as it is not considered proper to charge for the Dhamma - which is a very convenient feature for a religion to have. (Are you listening, Mr. Hubbard?)
And, of course, no discussion of free books online can ignore the venerable Project Gutenberg, which is a very diverse collection of free digitized books, and, well, fucking huge.
So: Go Read Now! And don't say I never done nothin' for you.
Yesterday, my connection to the internet was doubleplusungood, and so I was unable to properly observe RAW Chaos Day - a novel Discordian Holyday instituted by consensus, or rather, by contagion (other methods, such as authority, not being available!) on the occasion of Robert Anton Wilson's recent (actual) death. Now, a day late and a fnord short, I would like to remedy this by offering a few words in memery of RAW.
The most suitable memeorial I can build is to pass on a vision I might have gained by other means, but which I in fact first saw in fullness through RAW's intervention. Because it suits my whimsy, I will borrow a framework, not from RAW, but from the Nation of Gods and Earths (or "Five Percenters"), an African-American Muslim group, of sorts - a doctrine also found, in a different form, in the Church of the SubGenius. It runs like this:
The 85% are those without the knowledge, the mentally blind, deaf and dumb who are bent on self-destruction. The 10% are the bloodsuckers of the poor, those who have knowledge and power but who use it to mystify and abuse the 85%. The 10% include the "grafted" white devil as well as the orthodox Muslims and Christian preachers who preach that god is a "spook" or a "mystery god." And the remaining 5% are the poor, righteous teachers, who are aver [sic] all of the 'dealings' of the 10% and their mission is to rescue the 85%.
(Obviously, the SubGenius variant on this soteriology takes a rather different view of how properly to (ahem) deal with the 85%!) Like most statistics, these numbers may well be distorted - I suspect the breakdown is much closer to 98:1:1 - but the message is clear: Most people don't Get It. Some Get It, but keep It to themselves in order to profit from the unGettingItness of the Flock (let's call them Bad Shepherds). Others Get It, and are inclined to benign or even benevolent use of their Hipness.
I would say that the Five Percent, so-called, may themselves break down into three subtypes (fixing the total breakdown in accord with the Law of Fives), and these are: (1) those who Drop Out of the game, to cultivate their own gardens, and don't interfere with the Flock; (2) those who use the same techniques as the Bad Shepherds, but to the presumed benefit of the Flock - shockingly, I would designate these Good Shepherds; and (3) those who, following the model of the Nation of Gods and Earths, encourage the Flock to become like themselves - thus properly earning the title of Poor Righteous Teachers.
But what's all the fuss over? With what are we in or out of Gettingness? Well, opinions differ! I'll take a crack at what I think RAW's version was - or at least what he sometimes seemed to say that It was. From the point of view of Shepherds Good and Bad, I suppose this means that I am breaking kayfabe again. Shame on me, I guess!
It is widely known, but rarely understood, that all of our knowledge is obtained through experience and reflection - and that the processes underlying these are primarily sensory perception, thought, and memory. All of these, are of course, functions of the mind. And this applies not just to knowledge, but also to beliefs and expectations generally, and to the specific objects to which our hopes, fears, and values become attached. Any new experience is processed by reference to prior mental content. I see an object of a certain size, shape, color, etc., and I recognize it as, say, a cabbage. In this way, it becomes linked to my desire for food, or to my fear of cabbages, and, more than this, seeing the cabbage means experiencing it as embedded in an entire map of the world which includes beliefs about botany, agriculture, economics, gastronomy, physics (I don't expect it to levitate, e.g.), and so on. One might say that experience is conceptually loaded. We cannot have an "innocent" experience of the object as a naked perception of color and form - we are condemned to see it as a cabbage, bearing with it with all that cabbagehood implies for us, and as part of an entire world about which we have a brainful of beliefs, expectations, hopes, fears, moral and practical imperatives, and so on.
That world is not what we think it is - the actual, objective state of affairs; it is, instead, the sum and product of everything that has up to the current moment transpired in our minds. The world we actually live in - the world of economies, of agriculture, of dangers and opportunities - is driven by information derived, via the senses, from the actual state of affairs, (maybe) but is nonetheless located entirely inside our minds. To use the language of materialism, the brain is trapped in the skull and cannot get out of it in any meaningful sense. Or: It's all happening in your head. What we endure or enjoy of life in the world is entirely constructed by us out of the available flow of information (which I agree (probably) derives from an outside source). For each person, that "world" will differ - slightly for people who have lived similar lives, perhaps very radically for people of different cultures or eras. The world in which the Sun and stars travelled 'round the Earth must have felt very different from ours. And so for worlds which include or exclude the afterlife, dangerous sorcerers, justice and other moral imperatives, gravitational and electromagnetic forces, hope, fate, gods, ghosts, the government, the law, race, and please insert your favorite concept here. RAW called these worlds "reality-tunnels" - enclosing spaces within whose boundaries we move.
The art of the Shepherd is to skillfully manipulate the flow of information in order to design and construct the worlds in which the Flock will live. (Read that again!) Shepherds are the architects and masons who build the houses in which we live and the temples within which we worship. It is probably impossible for most (if any) of us to dig our way out of our cave and into the open air above and the light of the actual Sun, except perhaps for a fleeting moment (a.k.a. the Beatific Vision) - I certainly haven't managed it! But the experience of recognizing our condition is quite something - both liberating and empowering, in the full and robust senses of those words.
RAW's peculiar talent was to reveal our situation to us - thus playing the role of the Poor Righteous Teacher - and then (as a Good Shepherd) to deftly manoeuver us into a novel and exquisitely crafted reality-tunnel, only to suddenly tap us on the shoulder and remind us, artfully: "Oh, by the way - none of this is real!" Repeatedly. He was like those master stage magicians who can tell you that they are about to do a magic trick, perhaps even tell you a bit about how the trick is done, and then do the trick so perfectly that it still fools you. He repeated this routine as many times, and in as many ways as he could, hoping, one imagines, that the third (or the twenty-third) time's the charm.
Did he ever succeed? I hope, for all our sakes, that he did.
In order to maximize impact, and to clearly convey the Big Clue, I have deliberately simplified the picture presented in "RAW Bits - and Credo". Since I suspect few are interested in these "details", I am appending them here under a false date and time to prevent them from driving away new readers. The following, in short, may be a little dry.
A great deal about us cannot be attributed to the effects of experience, or even of reflection, but must necessarily be attributed to inherent properties of the human nervous system. If Kant is to be believed, many of these are necessary preconditions for the existence of any individuated conscious mind. In any case, we do manifestly have them, and in some cases the neural infrastructure is fairly well known, or in the process of being investigated.
Regarding that cabbage, it is fair to say that its cabbagehood and the matrices of import in which that quality is embedded are, as claimed, learned. However, much of the construction of that object is due to inherent mechanisms. We come into our lives with significant brain structures devoted to language, and to perception. Associated with these are inherent functions of reasoning, and, as it were, of world-mapping. We necesssarily experience the world in space and time. This immediately implies such concepts as location (and associated with this, distance, size, shape, etc.), sequence, simultaneity, and (arguably) causation and explanation. Language in particular requires the capacity to oganize perceptions under concepts, to divide the spatial field into discrete objects, to attribute properties to these, and to conceive of matters in terms of structures and processes. And let's not forget identity, similarity, affirmation, negation, number, and difference. (And there are others!) All of this is largely pre-reflective, and already built into our immediate perceptions, quite apart from any learned interpretive framework of the sort I attribute to "Shepherds". Reflection, an important component of which is reasoning, also supplies us with widely-applicable conceptual tools such as consistency and implication, which also severly constrain us - though this can hardly be seen as a bad thing! Again, no "Shepherds are required for this.
A major task for the best sort of "Good Shepherds" - philosophers - has been the careful delineation of best practices for the construction of our individual and culturally-shared "worlds". A broad consensus among the better contemporary epistemologists such as Quine (referred to in the original post) provides an attractive account of the better sort of world-making, which importantly constrains the excavation of reality tunnels according to minimal, but strict, standards of rationality (like consistency), which govern not only the internal relationships between our various ideas, but also the relationships between our internal map of reality and the ongoing stream of sensory experience. Fully embracing modern science as embodying our most refined - and successful - forms of knowing the field of experience, they provide a robust model of revision and reorganization of our "world" which allows us to continually or periodically rebuild our reality-tunnels. Since this rebuilding is constrained by the direct evidence of experience, by the careful incoporation of observations by others, and by those logical constrants whose abandonment would make any type of world-building completely arbitrary, it is reasonable to suppose that a world constructed according to this plan is as close as possible to the presumed objective order underlying our sensations and our inner lives. (It should be noted that the incorporation of others' observations is, itself, subject to the constraints provided by direct experience and reasoning, which provides some protection against "Bad Shepherds".) The assumption of an underlying order is, perhaps, unfounded, but without it, there is actually nothing left for us to do at all, and so, in order to be able to conduct our daily affairs (like buying cabbages at the grocery store), we have to go with something - and this is the something we have.
Triangulating between these observations, and those in "Raw Bits", it is clear that we are still very much in the thrall, first of all of our hard-wired mental structures, and secondly of the "Shepherds" of whatever Fold we find ourselves in. Nonetheless, we have quite a bit of room in which to manoeuver. For all that the "philosophic" model provided above may seem to commit us to dull and relatively conservative "reality-tunnels", the sheer fact of the matter is that not one in a thousand people actually tries it to see what results obtain. These are in fact quite radical, as many common conceptions will not survive this trial by fire, and many matters commonly considered uncontroversial are revealed as so far unsettled - thereby requiring suspension of judgement, and gifting us with the sort of opened mind that can with great excitement freely expect that even the most remarkable things may yet happen, and that even the most outlandish claims may yet be true.
I have had occasion when writing here to feel very sharply the sting of regret that comes from saying what is true, but perhaps best left unsaid. Don't get me wrong - I have no reservations about shouting the ugly truth from the rooftops. Actually, I take that back; I derive sublime pleasures unknown to lesser mortals from forcing unpleasant truths on anyone unguarded enough to listen, or unlucky enough to hear.
No, what I regret instead is the possibility of breaking kayfabe, or of fucking someone'scon. If you don't know what a con is, don't worry; someone will educate you on that matter soon enough. (On a totally unrelated note, I will mail you an exciting account of the Astrological Secrets of the Atlantean Adepts for a mere $30 donation to my Atlantean Research Foundation. Dig?) As for "kayfabe" - it is a word used in various ways to refer to the professional mores of carnies, and, later, professional wrestlers - in particular, to the tabu against destroying the illusion of such enterprises as straightforward, unscripted, and "honest" in the sense of being exactly what they superficially appear to be. Some illuminating reminiscences upon the carny millieu can be found at Quest for Slack.
Now, I maintain that kayfabe is good, and breaking it is bad. Consider the cases of Santa Claus and Bigfoot. Of course, in both cases, one wants the believers to eventually grow into non-believers in a certain sense, but there is a certain ineffable value brought into the world through such benign lies. There is even a certain kind of truth to be found in each case. Considering Bigfoot as potentially real at some point in one's life allows one a vision of the world as mysterious, uncharted, and as exceeding the grasp of even our most advanced knowingness. And what kind of pissant world excludes strung-out carnies ripping you off with rigged games?
On bad days, I sometimes think of the world's organized religions as resulting from the child's version of the story being remembered long after the adult's version has been forgotten - so that Santa remains a literal flesh-and-blood dude living at the actual North Pole (etc.) rather than what he is. I suppose this is a perhaps undesirable side-effect of kayfabe having been kept too strictly.
My perception of Crowley changed considerably when I for some reason asked myself this question: After he squandered his inheritance, How did he make his living? After all, Heroin is (or was) expensive. Another data point: his involvement with the irregular (means "bogus") masonic group known as the OTO (New! From the folks who sold you the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim!) began when they approached him accusing him of having revealed their innermost secrets in a chapter of his Book of Lies. Many (including the always-straightforward Robert Anton Wilson) have suggested that this must have been Chapter 69, which deals with sex magick in a suspiciously transparent manner. I suggest that the smart money is on Chapter 88, which is a meditation upon the Barnum Principle. Certainly, this should make a great deal of sense to anyone who bothers making a sober investigation into the history of the pre-Crowley OTO. Indeed, given their overall history, the moral of that chapter makes more than one kind of sense. Oddly, none of this stops Crowley from having been a genuine visionary and critter of great insight - even, arguably, a great mystic. And somehow that doesn't stop him from having been an asshole. There is no contradition in him, or perhaps there is.
In a similar incident, Manley Palmer Hall (late of California) - esotericist, scholar, sometime crackpot-genius, man-about-town... - himself not a free-mason at the time, published a little hothouse flower of a book titled The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, which is bursting with unfounded speculations on the matter at hand. Somehow, this publication caused him to be encouraged by actual masons to join, and in due time he enlisted in the Craft, after which time his book was effectively endorsed by some of his fellows in it (themselves, of course, sworn to secrecy, etc.). Between this and the equally overheated works of Albert Pike, one suspects the masons of a conspiracy to promote as much nonsense about themselves as possible. Consider how much good, by way of recruiting, is done for them by conspiracy theorists! One imagines the young would-be initiate, lured in by Illuminatus! or, "Bob" help him, The DaVinci Code. He kneels before the Grand Poobah. The hoodwink is removed. And....
"So - You fell for it too, huh? Heh. Okay, here's the secret handshake; now you're in. Beer's on you, tonight, sucker. Why the long face? Get yours back the way I got mine!"
And yet, this is not necessarily incompatible with free-masonry as a system of personal development. Having your illusions shattered is an unqualified win.
Having dwelt among free-thinkers and heretics, it seems natural to look into atheism - particularly the sort that draws on Nietzsche and Sartre. How can one claim to be beyond good and evil if one insists on being seen as good - especially by oneself? How can one claim to be free of the God concept if one still fears Satan? One might say that the most sincere expression of atheism is to profess Satanism. In this way, one makes it clear that the mythology of the prevailing religion has no more power over one than any other source of amusing myth and imagery that may supply entertainment - or inspire new means for freaking the mundanes. Oh, and costumes - lots of costumes.
"But" - I hear you protest - "None of them do that! Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Ayn Rand, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris - none of the leading atheists seem to agree with you on this. All one sees are a scattering of real Satanists - those poor misguided fools! Why, Satanism doesn't even make sense..."
Erm, right. It doesn't. Perhaps - well, perhaps you are citing the wrong names when you speak of "leading atheists". Perhaps you forgot a big one. Hint: Friend of Jayne Mansfield.
Now - name all the most famous Satanists you can think of. How many of them are in show biz? Or even started out in show biz, and then later branched out into Satanism?
It seems to me that we don't play games to live, or to "play" - we play games in order not to live. We play games instead of talking to each other. We play games in order not to think about the war - and maybe our game-playing is why the war continues.
Every moment devoted to our hobbies moves us more deeply into a pastime paradise, which removes us from public life and walss un the more thoroughly into a purely private world of masturbatory selves who do not care for, or interact with, the larger world in which others are dying - and they die through our inaction, and their dying facilitates our lives of "comfort" and isolation. Our greatest privilege - our luxurious vice - is to not need to care.
A culture of game-players, pop-culture fanatics, and hobbyists is a spectacle of alienation. As we disengage from the real world, and retreat further into our fantasies, that world - the only world - dies from our neglect of it. Soon enough, we will join it.
Or: On the Care and Feeding of the Recalcitrant Ego
Dear Mr. New Age Dude:
We can talk all day about the evils of the Ego, and the transcending thereof, but at the end of that day, your Ego is like your stomach - still there, and still hungry.
Dude, you are never getting rid of your Ego - you are stuck with it, and it's not going away. You can (and from the looks of you, probably should) take a vacation from it now and again - turn down the volume of Radio Me a little, at least - but like your stomach, it's built in.
What's more: The Ego drives art and literature, and the development of culture generally. As George Carlin said of comedy, the name of the game is "Dig me!" History would be a prolonged yawn without Ego-driven people doing Ego-gratifying, Ego-sustaining, and Ego-defending things. No Ego, no action.
The completely selfless person (sustainable only under laboratory conditions, and rarely for very long) is potentially like a satisfied junkie - passive, unmotivated, and rather dull. At any rate, it's not happening to you any time soon - just look at how much pride you take in being selfless!
Like the stomach, the Ego needs to be fed to avoid becoming an annoyance and a distraction. Consider Breatharians and anorexics - by trying to suppress the stomach, they make it the center of their lives, their activity, and their identity. Ultimately, their spurned and abused god consumes and destroys them. (It's like a character in Carrie Fisher's Postcards from the Edge said about twelve-step program members - "All they do is not take drugs!") A healthier approach to the stomach and Ego is to respect that you have them, as structural features of who and what you are, to learn to manage them, and to remember not to identify with them - and to take them out for a nice dinner now and again.
So care for it and try to keep it off other people's lawns, and maybe toss it a bone now and again, because it likes treats.
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