The crazy things I like to read about, Pt. 1

"Today, the technologies of deception are developing more rapidly than the technologies of verification. Which means we can use a television camera, plus special effects, plus computers, etc. to falsify reality so perfectly that nobody can tell the difference. And the consequences of that eventually could be a society in which nobody believes, everybody knows that seeing is not believing, and nobody believes anything. With the exception of a small minority that decides to believe one thing fanatically. And that's a dangerous social/cultural situation.

One of the consequences of living through a period like this, which is in fact a revolutionary period, is that the entire structure of society and the processes of change become nonlinear. And nonlinearity I think is defined almost by the statement that 'small inputs can have large consequences.' While large inputs can sometimes have very small consequences. That also means in a political sense that very small groups can, under a given set of circumstances, achieve power. And that is a very threatening idea for anything remotely resembling what we believe to be democracy. So we're going into a period, I think, of high turbulence and considerable danger, along with enormous possibilities."

--interview with Alvin Toffler, in Modulations: A History of Electronic Music

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Sometimes when I get really caught up in an “Us vs. Them” mentality, I start to wonder if any side really has the right to claim that they know how things ought to be - if there is in fact a correct and proper map for relating with the world around us. It’s the whole hashishim chaos maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permissable” that’s permeated a lot of post-modernity. Grant Morrison’s own ontology speaks to this implying that the material world is simply placental waiting for us to be birthed into the supercontext. Somewhat implicit in this view is that it doesn’t really matter what we do while we’re here. Such concerns are left for moralists and philosophers.

From this notion the modern archetypal conflict of Right and Left - economy vs. humanity - can be imagined as merely a battle of mythologies or behavioral paradigms. The Right is predicated on the notion that nature is a resource and personal preservation is paramount - at least until death or Revelations and we all move on to the next level. This speaks to the preservation of the individual over community and environment. It is the evolutionary inheritance of the alpha male fighting to accumulate and protect resources. Like Morrison’s own ontology, the Right seems wholly invested in the transiency of our time on this humble planet.

The Left however prefers a softer humanitarianism coupled with a desire to live harmoniously with nature. It is extended from ape communities and predicated on an inherent equilibrium or balance with life on Earth. The underlying subtext of the progressive movement is that the conservative designs of nature should guide the development of human culture. As such, it’s invested in the long-term, supposing that through harmony our longevity on Earth will be much greater.

So who’s right here? And is there a Right anyhow? (What’s right for one may not be right for all). Is it all just a battle of relative wills struggling for dominance on an inherently meaningless playing field? Or is there really a correct way of doing things that will ultimately prevail? If the latter, then who’s got the winning ticket?

-- Key 23 --

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"Remember that human consciousness - that is EVERYTHING WE CAN THINK ABOUT - occupies a very narrow bandwidth. Of the 11 million bits of information our senses receive from the environment every second, the conscious mind edits out 10,999,984 bits, leaving 'us' with very little to think about and to look at - only 16 bits of information per second, in fact. Let THAT sink in. The world around us is seething and swarming with multitudes of things we refuse to or don't need to process into conscious awareness - hence those troubling 'sub'-conscious tremors and blinks we call feelings, intuitions, hunches, deja vu. There's also a half a second time lag between any given external 'event' and our consciousness becoming aware of it. Everything we see and do is actually happening half a second ago and we've already done it before our mind catches up to our actions and assigns them a meaning in our ongoing self-narrative. 'Conscious awareness' offers only the tiniest of perceptual pinholes on the universe and yet we tend to think we have it all worked out. The truth is that we're scantly aware of what's happening all around us, quite literally, as science has shown. The magician tries to bring a little more of this 'dark' unconscious life into conscious light and thereby learns to 'see' the universe better and to work with its mechanisms, to more profitably enrich his/her own experience and that of others. Magic only seems 'spooky' because it often deals with these normally-veiled areas of awareness."

-- Grant Morrison --