Principia Hypnotica

Principia Hypnotica

or “Right before our eyes”

Ah, tia a rare, rare tyme that beginneth eyes in such cauld pragmatismics and the moos shift, cow eyed, dawning anew.

But hey, when you've written as much as I have, you'll do almost anything to kick start the ,little grey cells and to antagonize “The white bull.”

And that goes even so far as the following. (This makes not the lightest pretext to being of an artistic nature.)

About a month ago hurricane Sandy rolled through the northeast. It was especially unpleasant inasmuch as no one wanted to admit it, but it is one of the first major climactic events to hit the northeast since the collapse of the economy. Obviously economies don't crash over night.

It takes a long time usually and then what happens is something happens and the usual response is not there.

Before proceeding further in understanding what happened it's useful to call forth an axiomatic truth – the rule of hypnocratic advocacy. This law states that in human society the more money a person makes the less will they allow it to become the focus of attention. The converse is also true which means the less money one makes, eg the more poor they are, the more self interested will be their claims of monetary demand.

This means the CEO will insist that he works to serve the public, to do good and for a transcendent awareness of progress, whereas the janitor will insist that *he* works to pay the bills and feed his family. The CEO is interested in the spirit of man, in God's purpose here on earth, in promoting morality and family values, whereas the janitor wants to know when he will be paid.

Hypnocratic advocacy is so commonly understood it need no further definition. Indeed it is so commonly referred to in explaining economic events that one can hardly imagine a world view without it. Galbraith used to refer to the Orange County Paradigm. When teaching in the California University system he often had die hard right wing independent conservative students, such as are known to exist out there. When the professor heretic-ally mentioned the fact that their entire way of life and existence was contingent upon a series of levies and waterways that brought water, at no small expense, to the valley, he was immediately corrected, being informed that in that case it was not liberal, big government economic planning that established the multi-year, mult-billion dollar projects – but common sense!

If you had read this blog for a few years you'd know that part of the reason for it's inception was to avoid a sense of loneliness. Nearly everyone I knew growing up moved away a long time ago. Thos who stayed did so mostly because they were economically beyond the needs to earn a living. They, by and large did not see much purpose in my hanging around and made that evidently clear.

I likened my being in the northeast in the 80's and 90's to Churchills situation in the 20's and 30's – there was a bad thing happening. It was growing and could have been controlled fairly easily, but there were too many people with too much to gain from that control not being put into place. The irony of both our conservatisms is that our faiths were in the end put at the service of conserving those good and lasting things of the past, things which the newer self proclaimed conservatives seem hell bent on destroying.

One of those friends of mine that held out against the tide for a long time eventually gave up and moved to Florida whereupon his economic situation immediately took a turn for the better. What happens is every two or three years, like clockwork, a hurricane moves through and devastates the area, and then, like clockwork, the government votes multiply billion dollars to rebuild the area until the next time a hurricane comes along.

So when the rains come, he celebrates. Of course we're talking about half million dollar homes and the numbers are not that large. Katrina was the exception and merits a book or two on it's own.

When Wendy hit the northeast it was a different situation. Subways were flooded, entire communities washed away and most of all the shear numbers involved were staggering. Million of people were dispossessed, many of them who had just begun to get on their feet after the crash of 08.

I must call the readers attention to something.

We purportedly value hard work, initiative, effort, persistence and the like. If something good is to happen to a person we'd like that something good to result from the person themselves. I have no problem with this but hasten to remind the reader that most often when something bad happens the individual has nothing to do with bringing it about.

Listen , the Tamlinmediaco has never been of the newspaper perspective that implies that somehow, if the public is made aware of something, it can be corrected. Call that the optimistic scenario. Nor do we believe that making fun of things from a pseudo elite perspective is going to do any good. Amazing how little do tyrants care about sarcasm.

We're hackers and in this case it means finding ways to avoid or minimize the collapse of the empire- but we're not going to stop it.

And weakness and strength are two very problematic concepts.  Sun Tsu knew what he was talking abuot when he said the strong should appear weak and the weal appear strong.  Ask the cop in the patrol car what will get you a ticket and the answer is – aggressiveness. People seek power because they have problems and if you understand how that works you can control them. We used to speak of mind hacking, or social engineering. This is when by purporting to be one person or another you can gain knowledge.

Knowledge is a language. If you know how a line engineer talks you can call a dispatcher and they will co-operate with you. Most people however don't have these skills. To some extent we're at a period like that of the advent of the Masons. A lot of early hackers were phone phreaks and that's nearly unheard of today.   In the same way the early Mason were Mason in spirit so too today we have a lot of Kackers in spirit. People dedicated to learning things

The key is not to threaten anyone and what is more to massage their egos. So may regard it as humiliating, but in the final analysis we are not fighting to survive the attack of other humans, we are fighting attacks by improperly coded machines. The drone that takes you out because of a spelling error is not to be blamed.

What can hurt a great deal is when we seek to communicate with someone new and they regard that as an attack. If a girl has been raped, you may not know it, but the minute you enter her personal space she will panic. The odds of this happening with an “authority figure” are slim, but put yourself in their place. Forget previous notions of power mad fiends – think of the authorities another way.

They like to see things work. Many of them feel they are taking a cut in pay in order to do something for the public benefit. It is not uncommon for public employees to wonder about and calculate how much more they've be making for the same work in “the private sector.”

Classically you see the case of a cop who experienced a brutal childhood and they take conscious comfort in thinking to themselves that they may just prevent such miseries from happening in someone elses life. Or maybe they are working out issues. Suffice to say you never know for certain what will trigger an attack. They could be shaking the bushes. They could be looking for a promotion, or win an election.

So the northeast has been told, once again that, it's priorities are o the bark burner. The region wants about 60 billion dollars, but, contraries to promises no action has yet been taken. With these things it takes a long time just to get started. And one speculates that in several months te issssse. The simplle truth is non of the states voted republicann in the pres election so why do they expect pauonoooo

Here I begin to become somewhat apprehensive. As a general rule, as much as possible I don't write anything that I think might be commonly available anywhere else. This isn't possible but it's something to strive for, if only to keep my own interest piqued.

And of course there's always that time of disillusionment when we discover that what we had thought to be our personal discoveries had been made by others, sometimes millions of others, at the same time. In addition to that one of the overt purposes of the Tamlinmediaco is to discover the semi-hidden levers that trigger psychological response. Most of us know what a meme is, and understand the concept of going viral, but few of us can deliver such packages on a consistent basis.

The one who could do that could conceivably rule the world, or at least be a hell of an advertising man.

To follow this path we've done a great deal of research into the ways people communicate, and in particular the ways that the underclass communicates with itself. The Brits during the Norman conquest provide good examples, as do the African Americans during their long bondage in slavery and after.

It has become more and more apparent that the dismissal of conceptualizations as “myth” does a disservice to the complexity and depth of these beliefs. Immediately one could think of the developmental myth the fairy tale that teaches a child a lesson, on a practically unconscious level, then theres the social myth wherein one group is held to have a characteristic, or series of characteristics , then there is “the law”, a series of practices that become customs and are eventually codified into jurisprudence.

One could suggest that the previous one hundred years have either seen an abandonment of myth, an explosive growth of myth, or even both things at the same time. Certainly myth in the religious sense is no longer adhered to as strictly as it once was, but we have replacements, propaganda, and advertising that provide subjects with new needs and fears.

As well and indeed one can always resort to the irreducible – to aggression – to the use of mythical formulation for the purpose of enhancing one persons genetic positioning in the gene pool at the expense of others.

I find it amusing that in the case of one of mankinds early myths, that of the garden of Eden and the snake rarely does anyone consider the story from the snakes point of view. I know I have. It would be impossible to maintain ones perspective without doing so. The long and the short of it is the snake hates God. To the fate of the human race it is indifferent. To some extent it knows that it cannot give God the blues, but it figures its worth a try,

What is the difference between the snake and God? God understands what it is to be a snake but the snake has no idea of what it is to be God. God pities the snake and no matter what it's crimes would not have it forever banished from the universe ( something easily enough done) the snake consumes itself in hatred and wonders each morning that it still has form and content.

So, to review briefly, the last century, roughly beginning with Freud, has brought to mind the notion that myth is an outgrowth of biological processes as they are perceived by the mind and psyche. There are opposites, dialectic realities such as warm and cold, day and night and life and death that make this easy enough.

Along with the biological processes, that for intents and purposes we may regard as constant, there is also a technological aspect of life that is effecting, at some speed, the development and maintenance of the organism, (the human being being of our primary interest.)

Man being self defined as “the creature that uses tools” (homo sapiens)

whatever man made circumstances that effect the way he gets things done can be loosely described as technology; for instance, the placing of a yoke on a horse, the use of sails on a boat, or in modern terms the replacement of printed money with credit cards. As well the social structure plays a large role' in how humanity gets along.

This brings us to a class of myth that may be referred to as the Paradise Lost Syndrome. It insists that all technology, whilst useful, removes us from nature and thereby imposes a cost on life. By these lights the country is always cleaner and more peaceful then the city, the businessman is always of purer intent then the politician and ultimately the individual is less corrupt then society.

However you look at it these distinctions are not valid. There is no dividing line between the city and the country or between the individual an society. Yet, I can vouch for this. As a youth I spent several years hitch hiking around the country and met many a person who was adamantly opposed to venturing into the city. In one case a truck driver had relations in the New york area and he would on an an annual basis drive the family to spend a few days with them, but he himself would spend those days in a motel, safely ensconced outside the wicked temptations of the city.

There is another story, one I've told before, but one that needs to be understood if only because of the number of false explanations that people grasp. I am also going to tell it in a convoluted way, not because I understand why, but because I don't. This is because given the choice of seeing through a dream or seeing through reality I would choose the dream. It is somehow more complete.

My father had a somewhat wealthier background then most of the kids in his neighborhood. It was a status the family was unable to keep but as a boy and young man he was able to associate with people in the then upper class neighborhood of Amityville. Thus when he was able in later life he insisted my family move to Locust Valley on the north shore of Long Island, a place my mother, a short squat Italian looking woman, was never comfortable in.

The town next to us was Glen Cove, which despite having the vaguely Scottish name had a large Italian contingent. One who lived there was Thomas Pynchon. We're about the same age. He may be a little older. Our lives, other then the fact I had multiple hospitalizations, were not that dissimilar. Both of us worked for the government initially, he in missile guidance, I in criminal justice and then, interestingly both of us choose a life of obscurity.

To understand this one has to know the evils of suburbia. At the time at least the best way to deal with them was to hide in basements and attics, smoke dope, and listen to music. In what can only be described as a bizarre way we lived the lives of the rural gentlemen. I won't deny that it was isolated and we paid a heavy price as time went one because when the cats away the mice will play, and because we could not be bothered to take a hand in our communities, bad people found their ways made smooth.

That said let's not kid ourselves. Both the immediate rulers and those further away had no interest in seeing our causes advanced. It is no secret that the northeast was unable to protect itself from the southern strategy of Richard Nixon. Having forced the south to accept the black man as a human being it became our task to pay the price once we lost the whip hand.

I've never met Tom but here's why I mention him (other then the fact he's a book writer person) His family was mentioned in Nate Hawthorns book “The House of Seven Gables.” Nat, furthermore was the grandson of Judge Hathorn who was the man that had all those women and children killed in Salem Village.

Nate changed the family name because he was not proud of what had happened. What is interesting is the same Puritans who were later on insist on emancipation of the Negro were those who burned women at the stake for being witches. I reminds me of the proclivity of generals and business leaders to commit suicide. Likewise the Japanese, who tend to take things seriously, practice sempaku.

Over the three centuries since then there have been several explanations. Bread mold that turned hallucinogenic is one, and many of the explanations concern the deep stains of puritanical conscience.

Giving all due deference to defense lawyers, who after all make their living by somewhat strange explanations, in order to determine truth, or at least probability we have to ask ourselves how often in similar circumstances there were similar out comes. This means we must look for the unique causality.

As it happens there was one. Thanks largely to the failures of the monarchal systems Europe had been in religious warfare for centuries. The puritans had had enough. They were convinced if only they were left alone they could make a heaven on earth of only them and their God.

At the first opportunity then they came to America and lo and behold it was very good. The first few years were rough but the land was good, the game was good and there were no taxes what so ever. The preachers were the big shots and they got all the easy action.

But time went on an soon the people in the waterside communities started to flourish as well. These were, by Puritan lights, “bad people” - to wit people who danced and sang on sundays, people who who played skittles, people who drank and people who engaged in commerce on the Lords Day. There was a terrible thing about all this however. God, instead of laying down his almighty wrath on the sinners instead rewarded them. The sinners became rich!

The great puritanical experiment, which had seemed on the edge of success, and which so many had hoped and prayed for for so many years was on the verge of failure. As in past similar cases the priests arranged for ritual sacrifices to be held and they were, to it was all to no avail.

The sinners came forth, and fifth. From their hovels and from their brothels, from the sewers of europe and the opium dens of the fast east they came, distorting the purity of pure devotion, on and on they came, never ceasing, always wanting money, wanting sex and wanting more money.

And yet we cling to the notion that in the country all things are natural – as made by God.

But it just ain't so things are more or less the same all over.

Tamlin