(Apologies - this post is all over the place - added to the fact that Tamlin's having his annual pre Halloween Jitters - for reasons obvious - We're trying to straighten out a few legal things so that that we maintain control of the musical material and so that it doesn't wind up appearing under someone else's name - as has happened. In the Music business the signing of the artist is a critical period and can determine things for years to come - plus we want a new kind of contract in several ways, which maybe I'll talk about later. I'd just as soon sign as little as possible - but you can't do things on a handshake and shouldn't. Plus I know who the good guys were in the past - the Wexler's Warronkers, Alperts, Gordy's - even Clive Davis but am unfamiliar with current scene so must tred lightly.
Plus we want to - in business terms - gain market share and so want to get the material to as wide an audience as possible - which probably means multiple distribution points. Etc Etc And suffice to say when dealing with clear channels market share is everything because they have perfect monopoly and hacks in congress.
here's Tamlin
Reductio ad Absurdium
It’s been a long weekend here at the Tamlinmediaco, both literally (It’s the Columbus day weekend) and more so, figuratively. I have to suss out where I want to take the site. My first reaction (See Below) was to have ALF refute Tamlin’s assertion about having to protect the ALF. It may be true in some sense but truth is always multifaceted. It is contingent on context and even within those parameters it is still multifaceted, which is probably the reason why even the greatest philosophers have trouble with defining it.
Suffice to say we could continue where we left off, bringing to mind the limitations of the technostate, but I think we about did that one to death. There’s no real, final methodology for dealing with it, most of what we can come up with entails minimizing it’s effects, but that still doesn’t prevent it’s ongoing progress.
Or, we could manufacture/identify an enemy or threat – this is how leadership works. You convince the followers that they are at risk and only you can prevent some bad things from happening. This then justifies whatever you do. As the phrases goes “He’s an SOB but he’s our SOB.”
In a similar way we could manufacture a need. This is how marketing works. You never realized how badly you need an I-Pad, for instance, until someone tells you. In show business it’s a matter of being in touch with what everyone’s thinking about. Never discount the fear of loneliness when you ask about the origin of desire.
This being the Tamlinmediaco, after all, we’d try, at least, to present these schemes, in ways that they could be recognized for what they are and then, possibly the visitor might begin to recognize them in other aspects of life. They are omnipresent, of course, and to some extent they are religious in origin. Don’t ask me how, we’ve studied ancient mythology to a good extent and when we ask for instance “Why a Minotaur?” all you can really say is people are trying to, if not make sense of, at least be aware of the things life throws at them.
I considered, mildly, a few other possibilities, but in a way we’re dealing with the opposite of Dante’s question –“How can one speak about transhuman change to human sense?” I’ve long intuited and believe in more now in the necessity of what the guru’s call “Direct transmission.” When the Budda held the flower up to the disciple it was something that could never be transmitted or said even with spoken words. When his realization came, when all realizations come, they don’t come in verbal form. This must be because one of the aspects of the realization is the incompleteness of verbal communication. Lovers know of what I speak.
As I say “Life is rational, but humans, maybe not so.”
If words alone were sufficient to inspire and lead then how do you explain Ronald Reagan? This is to say that anything said can be refuted. Investigate the art of Rhetoric and you discover how many ways there are to negate the fact that one is wrong.
So anyway, being lost as to what to do I paid a visit to the ALF, who was, as always, working on a tune. This was called “Leave my Teddy Bear alone” and it’s one of the children’s series of songs called “Toyland.” The thing about ALF (among others) and especially his creative process is with him nothing happens by coincidence, or maybe it’s better to say, everything happens by coincidence. It’s related to the gift of prophecy that he sometimes displays, and like all mystical things at heart there’s a scientific explanation – but we are nowhere near being able to understand it. It’s a perceptual thing that humans have not achieved, yet at least.
In the same way there are gravity waves, in which the inate composition of the universe ebbs and flows so too there are waves of probability and ALF, unlike us, can sense them. It’s part of the reason he’s been able to survive among us for so long. He ‘rides’ probability the way a surfer rides ocean waves.
The immediate instigation of the song was a Teddy Bear ALF found on a garbage pile and took home with him. But with ALF things are never as they seem.
In any case there’s a reason why I shy away from discussing the singularity (Google it if you need to). Aside from the many different interpretations and definitions of what it means there’s a psychological aspect that advises caution. Essentially it bears many of the hallmarks of the recurrent apocalyptic fears and and movements that have plagued, especially western civilization for the past two thousand years. Casual observation might also suggest that in a society known for it’s messianic proclivities the fear of the apocalypse is the other side of the picture, so to speak. When things go good we assume we are going to save the world and when they go bad, we conclude the world is coming to an end.
The mind, can well be compared to a labyrinth and as such there are some roads you just don’t want to go down – not from lack of courage but more so because it just isn’t worth it. We may love to be explorers but that doesn’t mean we have to explore every permutation of the psyche – believe me the psyche can get pretty funky – with or without chemical additions.
Also there’s what I refer to as the Da Vinci Syndrome. Yes, Leonardo was a bright puppy and many admire his paintings and his technology, but the dude made war machines. He conceived of horrific machines of death seeming indifferent to their consequences. Other scientists did this too and there’s no black and white about it. But we just have to decide what life is for, is it to sing and dance and reproduce, or is it to make ever more complex machines?
I speak simply because I’ve done the homework. There are and will remain those who are fascinated by machinery and complexity and have no idea of what they are doing to other people. We sometimes even admire these folks, but by and large I don’t. One also hastens to remember that Da Vinci , at the end of his life was tormented by visions of floods and great storms. This is needless very much in the Faustian mode and what I suggest, as a practical would be shrink ( which I almost was) is that the fear of the end of the world is primarily based on the projection of what my friend Al Jesson used to call “the possibility that the patient might die.” He was an analyst with many years of experience and one of his axioms was that no one understands death. No patient believes they will actually die and for the record Al’s suggestion about post life experience was that there was nothing there. No sensation, no perception, zilch, end of story. But of course that is not the norm among people, at least as they state it.
I shall now digress a bit. Roughly five thousand years ago there was a major change in the way humans lived. We developed cities and the nuclear family, father , mother child. This meant that lineage was no longer exclusively traced by the mother but by the father. The religious aspect meant that the old three in one mother goddess was replaced by the multiple “thunder gods” God changed his sex, so to speak. The change was not entire smooth as one might expect.
Some of the female held on for a long time, and some were quite nasty. The cult of Cybelle for instance demanded that male devotees ritually castrate themselves. The Ur- Celts moved out of the middle east and went north and west bringing their goddess, Anu, who survives today as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary the Virgin. The People of Anu, in Irish, the Tuatha de Dannan , were fairly gentle as these things go and the cult of the virgin mother went on to play a large role in Roman Catholism.
Another of the Goddesses who did not go gentle into the night was Ishtar, a Babylonian Goddess, who replicated the monomyth as a woman. In other words instead of, as we often hear today, the male going into the underworld and rescuing the female she went to hell and got her husband. To do this she divested herself of articles of clothing until she got to the bottom of hell, naked, and found her husband who in fact was having a good old time cavorting with the female she demons.
This can be compared to the far more humane story of Isis and Osirus. Osirus, like a shaman was killed and his body was spread out in the world and she then went around collecting him until, finally she gets to his penis and he is resurrected. This was a strong myth. Egypt lasted a long time and was, again, as these things go, a fairly decent society.
Babylon did not last anywhere near as long. Goddesses when angered can be fierce. There is none of the calm, objective anger by which, for instance God sends satan to hell, but there’s real violence involved. So Ishtar is angry at things and she delivers a curse upon the human race for their punishment.
“The dead shall rise from their graves
And the dead shall outnumber the living.”
In other words sort of a Zombie Holocaust. It recalls something that used to be occasionally said in the dark hours of the cold war. “In the event of a nuclear exchange it is quite possible the living will envy the dead.”
Recall then the period of most extreme apocalyptic fears. The middle ages. The plagues, which were the result of the free trade of the day, struck all without regard to class, sanctity, or anything else. The one’s who stood the best chance of survival were, strangely to say, those the furthest away from civilization. People would go to churches to gain protection and this of course led only to infection. In different areas the percentage of dead varied. Edinburgh suffered tremendous losses, time and again, because, it was a seaport and thus continually importing new variants of the plague, and because the way the town was built, in a northern clime, with people living virtually on top of each other.
The odds of the bubonic plague wiping out an entire society however were not great, because the more people it killed the fewer there were around to carry the disease.
In a certain sense the enemy then as now was fear and ignorance. The problem is you just can’t just snap your fingers and become smart about things.
This leads me to a very difficult thing to explain, which is that in some ways rational thought is insufficient, to assure survival, yet it is all we have. Consider the cult of competition. It seems to make sense that we reward the capable, the hard working, the gifted. But if we do so we run a grave risk of making them obsolete. It’s the old second law of thermo dynamics. Entropy increases in a closed system.
Imagine a world where everything works – where we know everything. We know just how capable each person is and assign them a role in life at their birth, according to that knowledge. As the Italians say “Capice?” In other words freedom is out the window. There’s no need for it and what is more is it is not cost effective.
Let’s snowball the concept. You’re born poor – you stay poor. Not only that but since you are not delivering a return on investment comparable to your betters then there’s no need to invest in you in terms of nutrition, health, or even genetic enhancement. The only genetic enhancement you’ll need is that which allows you to do mundane tasks without become bored. In the same way store bought tomatoes have cold water fish DNA added, in order to increase shelf life, genetic modification of the species will center around utilitarian goals – at best.
Here I go a little further then Chomsky and manufactured consensus. That our desires, for products and other things (such as wars) are created and are done so in a specific sequential process is nowadays generally accepted as fact. Classically if you can’t, or don’t feel like, increasing the quality of life of the servants then what you would do is reduce their ambitions, or demands. The actual thing is that perceived happiness is not absolute but rather a factor of desire and fulfillment. Reduce desire and you can fulfill ambitions more easily result happiness, or in our case we don’t care if the servant class is happy per se as long as they can be effectively controlled.
In other words, the stupider you make people the more controllable, and hence more valuable they are to you. You don’t hire a nuclear physicist as a butler, and one thing we know for certain about technology is it reduces the number of intelligence workers (“increased productivity, all other things being the same, equals decreased demand for employees”)
As they mentioned in the much maligned, but prescient book “The Bell Curve” , in the past persons of substandard intelligence could become farmers, miners, dockworkers – in short any of many respectable trades, whereas increasingly in the future those trades are mechanized. The real controversy over the Bell Curve was misplaced. It should have been the suggestion of growing need for what are called “poverty zones” which will exist in contrast to “gated communities” and will centralize the facilities needed for the warehousing of the tens and hundreds of millions of people who no longer are needed for society to function.
To put it simply, the acquisitive society teaches us to want things but it doesn’t do a very good job of teaching us how to get them. Manufactured consensus is a means by which we control people, both in terms of lifestyle and even in terms of allowing the privileged to make decisions of war and peace as they see fit, without undue constraints on an otherwise unwilling population. What I suggest however is that possibly in addition to the constructed ambitions and desires there is a counter force.
It may sound a bit mystical but no science can proceed without leaving room for what I like to call “the void.” Einstein said it well when he said the origin of science is the sense of mystery. Again, if you think you know everything, you may as well pack it in.
Thus, ordinary logic would tell us that the more carrots we offer the donkey the harder the donkey will pull the wagon. But man is not a machine, or a donkey for that matter and one can easily imagine a time when the donkey realizes that no matter how many pictures of carrots are placed before them they are not going to get them. In that case the donkey may turn to crime, or drugs, or some sort of fanatical belief system that may seem pointless but at least offers the benefit of some sort of community. Why do some women stay with jerks? Because they are afraid of being alone and we ought to understand that.
Interestingly in my cogitations here I find actually I’ve undergone a conceptual dialectical leap. Like nearly everyone else I spend years bitching about the banks, and “the system” and even the limitations of human behavior, as if somehow doing that would change people. I sought to, like a news reporter, point out what was wrong. Eventually I came to the point where, as in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome (where the prisoner identifies with his jailor) I grew tired of looking at things from the point of the oppressed and started thinking like an oppressor!
And having done so has opened up a whole weird box of Pandoric possibilities. Like most of us I’ve at times been lectured to by people I have little respect for. I hold my peace because I don’t even care enough about what they say to argue with them. As the joke goes “Satire is wasted on a moron.”
There’s a frightening element to this as well. We all identify with the common man - is this not so? I don’t see any one in public life that would fess up to being otherwise. But what if?
What if our minds have been churned into a not too appetizing soup where the connections are not logical, nor even emotional, but fusions created by some media glue? What if we think to ourselves - “There’s no sense of doing anything because the people that matter already have it locked up?” Remember that corny poem, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it shrivel like a raisin in the sun?” It’s the same deal.
Unless we convince people that playing by the rules will pay off you may as well have no rules.
Epilogue
This is all quite rational. We sometimes forget that America was one of the birth places of the science of eugenics. It’s not all that rational however. As the Rabbi’s would say, (the smarter one’s that is), would suggest, any truth taken too far becomes a lie. I hesitate to bring current events into the picture but there seems little to gain by reducing the opportunities to grow and to learn to as few people as possible. Imagine if instead of judging a society by how well it treats it’s most well off we judge it by how well it treats it’s poorest?
One more thing that is especially germane to the Tamlinmediaco. We have fought, we have run, scavenged, starved and suffered for a long time now – in the wasteland. But we have been lucky nevertheless because we’ve held on. This came about not from knowledge but from love.
It is certain that someday, many times, even after we here have departed this life there will be those who will be judged and found lacking. They will be informed that ‘We are sorry but we at present have no use for you.” Not every genetic experiment will be a success. Even those deemed successful will carry with them features that diminish the soul. They will have no reason to live, just like we were told we had no reason to survive. The rewards given the fortunate will be denied them.
It will all make perfect sense. It is then they will have to go outside the boundaries of the game and create not a better version of the present game but a new game. You only have one life.
Now here's ALF speaking
Tamlin got a little carried away the other day so let's get something straight. The immensity. which is to say all time and space in the universe is not going to go away. The earth and all it's sentient beings may cease to exist but in the greater scope of things that's not all that important. There have been, for all intents and purposes countless earths and countless sentient beings and there will continue to be countless more, all predisposed to thinking they are the center of all things, which they are not.
The singularity is the moment when the man the tool maker makes tools that are smarter then him. It happens on every planet and there are not that many that survive it. It's just nature doing her thing.
Look what happened on my homeworld. A guy who called himself the new world unifier chanced to get a hold of some technology that gave him domination over my world. Myself and a few others managed to kill him but it didn't do any good because there were forces that wanted things that way and they simply went on pretending that nothing had happened - they didn't even bother to clone the guy.
Let's face it the people that rule you and determine your lives you are never going to meet. You're never going to have anything but the very slightest influence on them, about as much as a mosquito. That's why if you choose to do good don't do it because you think you'll be rewarded - you won't be - on earth you'll most likely be punished because that's how humans are - they look out or number one. If you insist on doing good do it for it's own intrinsic value because that's all there is.
I have no interest in the extermination of the human race - which is more then I can say the human race feels about me!
My being here is a complete fluke. It was a deal made between Tamlin's father and mine which was supposed to be of mutual benefit and there have been some good times. I met Norma after all.
Sic Transit gloria mundi
The ALF
================
Tamlin's Apology
Okay ,so I apologize for maybe going over the edge last time. Norma read me the riot act. She told me that ALF spends a lot of time trying to live a normal life where no one knows where or what he is and what I did was not going to make that any easier.
And recall, as we investigated the effects of technology on societies in the past, one of the things to be aware of is that it tends to be appropriated by the most aggressive elements of society for their exclusive benefit, but people eventually bounce back and catch up with things. The classic example is radio in the thirties where it was proven to have immense propaganda power because what else can people believe but what there are told and Doctor Goebells used that to maximum effect.
The same thing happened to a lesser degree when cable TV came along, and at the same time local newspapers and other media outlets died, during the 1980’s. This gave trememdous power to a very few people and they saw their chances and took them. No one disputes that Reagan did an end run around the Republican party regulars via using media to go direct to the public.
As an aside, It’s interesting to see Reagan as a sort of special agent. Control, in his case was Annenburg, Coors and the other fellow whose name I forget. As is said in the secret service the best agent is the one that knows the least about what they are doing and as such Reagan was very useful. I am willing to grant that he actually believed that he was responsible for his effects and this allowed him to play his role with perfect conviction.
The free market and the scientific method are not very different from each other but we have to remember for them to work we have to see the negatives as well as the positives.
Clinton in some ways was more depressing then Reagan because he was smarter and we have to assume understood his betrayals of his responsibilities more. But again the real issue is the interest of the individual verses that of the society and we can’t expect people to dedicate their lives towards social good alone. One seeks a happy medium.
That said, as an administrator; when you come across a person more interested in their career then in getting the job done, sometimes you just have to bust chops.
Incidentally the failure to cover the ---
Occupy Wall street movement is one for the text books If it were Prince Ruperts people they'd be discussing it from morning til night
Tamlin
---- Norma's Comment
That’s better Tamlin. That’s the way the leadership game is played. The first priority is the ability to manipulate people and make them do what you want them to do. You find candidates early on and teach them to be smooth as silk on the things that are trivial and hard as steel on the things that matter and from the resultant confusion one gains power. Academics and such never have these attributes because, as you say, they are taught objectivity.
You're getting better.
Norma Deren
No comments:
Post a Comment