three roads to Memphis

                 There’s a saying which I believe is true - that there is no such thing as coincidence.  I suppose once you get to the point   where coincidence does not contradict, but affirms the world, then you have achieved the proverbial first step into being.

        That is to say being the real you. 

                 In the present instance  a yard sale brought me a copy of the six volume videotape of Bill Moyers interviewing Joe Campbell  and  my reaction  upon viewing it was that Mr Campbell must have delivered these lectures many times because one had the sense that his presentation was the essential elements and little filler.

                    Then I had the briefest of intimations. I imagined another Joseph saying to his wife, “Come dear, see the kingdom I have put into the mind of Pharaoh.”

   That said I too, like Joe, have begun to condense and edit the work that follows - and of course it is rather long. I don’t know if it needs shrinking. One of the delights in writing this extended blog over  the years   has been to follow the loose threads where ever they may lead.

      And I cannot let this pass without mentioning that many a tale begins with the main character  riding though a woods, only to have thier attention caught by some exotic bird  and then it is too late. Elvis has left the building and we can never return to the  lives we lived.

              Perhaps someday some such a thing will happen to you

n.b. Onr other thing.  Moyers, in passing asks Campbell about contemporary myths.  Campbell give the correct answer in tha myth as defined academically requires time to form. (Like a danish pastry)

That in fact touches upon the cutting edge of the discipline which is either the absence of myth, or even that time honored shibboleth, the end of myth.  We covered it a few months ago and often it is spoken of in connection with Nietzsche’s  famous death of God dictum. 

              I don’t have any problem with any of the theorists and am especially interested in the work of Jacques  Ellul  who had first hand experience of the techno state in occupied France.

          My field of interest then is one that may or may not exist- the presence of myth in the modern state.  I  find it amusing an hubristic that we so easily delegate mythical  thinking to little  guys round campfires round jungles in South America,

          And of course another word for the  modern mythical process is propaganda- one ordinary way of discounting the presence of such factors is to claim the  time frame is too short.  So for instance when the Reagan administration wanted to remove the  requirements for truth in advertising   they suggested that if the ads were untrue they would very soon be found out - this is not good logical thinking.

      Logic without context is worthless, or in other words if another proposition is advanced  before the initial question  is asked the question is irrelevant,  As Dr Goebbels would say to make a lie work just tell another lie before the first one is disprove and so on. As long as you control the process you control the outcome.

          And given the forms of Teknos that are evolving lies are no big deal for the truth can lie as loud as anyone else.  It is very clear that we must learn to master our machines or they will master us.  Strange to say in recent years I have been less concerned about the former possibility.  It fuses psychologically - that is to say that the urge to freedom  often accompanies the urge  to remain a child-  and I don't know if that is all that bad.

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               The following is very long for a blog entry. I would recommend, if interested that you print it  or at the very least save it for offline reading.

  It had it’s genesis about twenty years ago, prior to the internet as we know it in the age of Bulletin Boards, specifically a BBS out of Coney Island called Dreamland. There were several young Jews who had grown up in Brooklyn and had yet to experience the ways of the gentile.

     As such, when a society exists as a somewhat independent  subculture within another very often the accommodations  that smaller societies  make to co-exist are not as extreme. Certainly immigrants are more likely to experience insecurities then  people who have lived in a country for generations

               One youth  asked me why, if they were so smart and advanced and civilized, were the Germans capable of such as they were.

        For the record I answered, conventionally enough that anti-Semitism, or racism, was like Cancer   we all had the cells floating around inside us and circumstances  could trigger the full blown disease. (This was not my original idea - I had asked my mentor, Albert Jesson the question and the disease analogy was his.)   The young man, Seth, did not buy that answer. He accepted it but did not feel fully satisfied.

              Perhaps the only American I am aware of who understood the gravity of this question was Mark Twain. At the end of Huck Finn, Huck lights out for the territories, lest one of the local ladies “Civilize” him.  Most don’t realize it but this is contrary to what 99.8% of people believe.

            When I first encountered Rousseau, years ago, I felt his doctrine of the natural man to be totally unworkable.  It seemed solipsistic, selfish, egotistical and childish.   Tolstoy delivered  a similar message in a more digestible palliate, but we all know that Tolstoy was crazy, isn’t that so?

       Like the former soldier Leo Tolstoy I have spend a good deal of  life in the company of men. Men drinking, men doing dope, and men pretending they were not in competition with each other.  After awhile one developes tha attitude of the experience courtroom judge - to wit - everyone lies. They lie to protect themselves, they lie to advance themselves , they lie from trust in events and they lie from fear.

        In most cases age brings not wisdom but a certainty that lying is the only path to self preservation.

         In retrospect I imagine a conversation between Tolstoy and Twain to be quite interesting  - a contest in bitterness. 

          Getting back to our story. The Internet came and within a few years it revealed it’s flaws, mostly of human creation. When I began this exercise I felt not unlike others that humans tended to be more emotional then rational.  There seemed no other way to explain Reagan, for instance.

          And  likewise, like many others I felt that people had been hornswoggled - that they had been victimized by clever ad men and manipulators of myths - and that furthermore - it had been like that for a long time.

             If this is the case then the question would have to be reformulated to “Why now?” Is it really so, as it sometimes seems, that we have lost the ability to think  for ourselves?

           This can be asked in the context of the singularity - that moment in time when the  creations of man surpass their creator in cognitive abilities. One answer to this question, that many accept whether consciously or not, can be called the anthropological answer, an answer based on the historical record. Indeed history itself seems focused on the wealthy and exceptional and one could conclude that all throughout man’s history he has never by and large had the ability to think freed of superstitions  and subjugation to his superiors.

             By this reasoning man is the hierarchal animal par excellence - like a pharaoh with his million subjects most people really matter, they never did and never will.

             One of the defining characteristics of science is that one proceeds until they reach a point where they learn something new and then stop and set off in another direction.

           The first time that happened on a large scale to me is when I realized that progress, in the form of the industrial revolution, and now in the form of the information age,  does not  benefit all people equally.  This is contrary to prevailing myth. It is even contrary to word usage. The most common work in German magazines is “new”.

      As you can imagine this discovery did not win me many friends, nor even a paycheck - but the worst was yet to come.

        We ordinarily see the middle class family as the core of society, yet when all the horrific and monstrous things happen who is it clapping hardest ? The middle class.  This was the second realization.

              They are the monsters. The creatures from the id.

    Once the illusion is shattered you can’t go back and all the lies are obvious. The love lie - the truth lie - the God lie

            All the middle class has was gotten by violence and it is all preserved by violence and yet it claims to be horrified by violence.

       That is what we cannot face up to.  We lie. We prefer to place the blame on others so like children we say, he made me do it, but the reality is if he made you do it, it was because he was aiming a gun at  you,

              If you don’t want to read all the words that follow I can summarize it.   I warn the reader immediately however that the conventional “answers”   will not appear. If you scan the web for sites telling you how to make money they tell you that the best bet is to do a “how to”   page.

              Likewise experts are experts because they have an answer - right or wrong often make little difference - it is the presumption of wisdom that counts.   I make no such presumption.

          Overall then though I hope to leave you with two suggestions and an observation.

         One suggestion is that technology benefits those who use it and conversely it  retards those who have no access to it and man, the selfish gene  tries to make that the case.

             Secondly, to say it in a clumsy way “Civilization is a fungible concept.”  Distinguished looking scholars  may forever   chuckle at lifes ironies as they glide through antiquarain  halls, but  those ironies  are based on  irony number one which is that the  originator is an animal.

   And the observation that follows is that the problem is not metaphysical, nor perceptual.   We need not put the carriage before  the horse, nor the myth before the fact.

     In the current day much is made of the warrior, the spiritual warrior,   but real soldiers will tell you it is no game and no fun.

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                     Brilliant!  - The art of appearing to be far more intelligent then you really are.

      Pay attention today chillum because whereas in the past I have spoken of the future and what will br today I speak of what is.

        What is more , for the benefit of those for whom English is a learned or second language I shall be using mostly, entirely all short  words and sentences.

           We will begin with the famous running man joke. It goes like this. Two men are in a jungle. A tiger appears. One man begins to run. The other man says, “Why are you running? It is well known that a man cannot outrun a tiger.”

       The first man replies,”I am not trying to outrun the tiger. I am trying  to outrun you!:

         So it goes - especially on the internet it matters not that you are not intelligent or smart or nothing. It matters only that you can convince someone that you know something - only one little thing-  sightly better  then the sucker 0h pardon me,  reader that you are seeking to “help”.

       The core principle here applies across the board, up to and including the famous net commerce,  where you can sell anything as long as you have a picture of it. Once you have have the cash in hand the great distances involved between buy and sell my be relied upon to discourage the buyers of product.

            Suffice to say, as the case may be, in any event, never the less  in the selling of actual goods the product will always be impacted upon by the cost of obtaining the actual  object or service sold. This is not so in  that vast majority of cases where in effect nothing is traded for a price.

             These are those cases where the product sold is information- which im my day used to be called wisdom, or sometimes, advice. The imparting of such information used to be considered a courtesy.

               The fact that what used to be considered a social obligation between people is now reduced to a salable commodity may be pointed to as evidence of disintegration of the social order.  To make a  poor pun there is nothing “long” with it except the fact that it exists.

                  Here is something I have only referred to in recent months  which is that when change occurs the context in which it happens  also changes correspondingly.   This means that when for instance slavery is reinstated as a social mechanism it is not viewed with the same abhorrence and disdain as would have  greeted it in a previous era.

  This is all wonderfully abstract and I make it so because I am a nice person  and don’t want to jump to conclusions, considering what they may be. I will therefore give three examples of visualizations,  one humorous, one philosophical and one deadly serious. 

 Recall, we speak  of change - not the habitual buzzwords of candidacies

Pt 2

  Tom Peters in the middle 80’s wrote a book that was very influential in the American business world called, I Search of Excellence”. It told a lot of war stories about CEO’s who turned companies around.  I read it and was not overly impressed. The tales seemed self evident, but what was amusing was listening to all these otherwise uneducated CEO’s parroting admonitions to stay close to the customer and deliver a quality product.

        For the record I’d much rather deal with an uneducated CEO who knows about the product then one with superb marketing skills and an MBA.  There’s plenty of evidence as to why this is.

        Peters problem was his next book - “Thriving on Chaos”  which was so confusing it was effectively unreadable and indeed ended Mr Peters big time career as a business guru.

       

   I similar thing happened to Francis Fukuyama with “The end of history” - in that the follow up  did not provide answers only questions. My respect for Mr Fukuyama increased greatly but obviously I do not represent the norm.

    Fukuyama’s premise was that the world had adopted liberal free market economic and the various cycles had slowed down.  A perusal of Finnegan’s Wake might have convinced him otherwise.    The following  book sincerely asked what was going to replace history and he realized that the contest for hierarchal  supremacy, genetic dominance,  personal hegemony or whatever you wish to call it, was not about to end.

    The problem with both these efforts was that no matter how well they proved their points they did not enlighten the greater picture. The expression we use here is they relied upon  linear thought, or cause and effect reasoning, which sounds harmless enough but is not effective in a multivariate context. 

       If anyone, which I do9ubt, has followed the progress of reasoning here in actuality the scope of  comprehension has been spirally inward and outward at the same time.  By inward I mean with gone from broad questions to specific ones.

         What you may find remarkable is the continuity of the questioning process. The first question was “Why don’t things work?” That lead to a wagon load of smiler questions such as  “Why do we believe myths rather then evidence?”  or in other words, “Why are we incapable of doing that which is best for ourselves?

          That yielded, after many years, the conclusions that technology isnot guaranteed to raise the immediate standard of living  and secondly, more brutally that man will not relinquish any behavioral advantages willingly.

     To restate myths are like propaganda  and most often are used to induce behaviors in subordinates by their superiors. And secondly when the myth no longer works the only recourse is to power and or violence.

   It’s therefore quite easy to suggest that people behave certain ways are brainwashed or because they are lied to.

 But what if the opponent is no fellow man, but raw nature? n the event of a plague people believed their malady was the result of God’s displeasure and so gathered to churches for safety and were slain in greater numbers then ever before.

       What in the past was attributed to God’s displeasure is today blamed on conspiracies.  This all begs the question which is “How do we survive?”    There’s  way this can be asked in the past tense as well, which is  “How could we have gotten it so wrong?”

       The question is not asked nearly so often in the past tense however, because most of those who would ask it are dead. The dead tell no tales and ask no questions.

            I could solve  America’s economic problems in a paragraph; reinstate the graduated income tax, institute negative rewards for corporate crime and increase human capitol. But it won’t happen. That is to say it will happen but not in our lifetimes.  The question is only  whether we can avoid a full scale civil war to attain our goals.

           Until then we’ll  be asking the same question which cannot be answered in todays context.   That question is “Why , is democracy works, does it consistently move to destroy the lifestyle of the common man?”

       Years ago when I was actively dating different girls and they would as often as not fall head over heals for the “hunk” and leave me flat I joked that they were emotional and not rational beings. (I also disregarded the fact that physical attraction played a role in my own selection of partners.)

             Well, I am not going to attempt to answer the question as to why people would vote for an obvious charlatan.  As time goes by and anger recedes I recall the words of the anonymous Saint, “I know the different between right and wrong but still  I do wrong.”

            Is there then some greater truth then good and bad?

Who knows?

           Here’s three examples of clasic mindf*cks.

Gore Vidal, in describing the collapse of the American Democracy repeatedly told the story of the fog and the hot water. If you drop a frog into pan of hot water it will jump out , but if you gradually increase the temperature of the water it will remain and boil to death.

            Plato, for his part tells the story of the philosopher king. This is the highest role a man may seek to achieve but it cannot be recommended because everything must be called into question before the would be king can see through to the eternal truths that guide a harmonious society.

         Dick Gregory, a pacifist comedian long ago told a story about violence. He said, “We are told that violence is not the solution.“What happened in Chicago was there was only one public swimming pool for black kids  and that had been closed, so they started a riot.  When they was shot they shot back. Now you can’t walk two blocks in Chicago without stepping into a swimming pool.”

          Incidentally you’re probably aware that one the problems with media in the US is it is too consolidated  and too much under the control of the government, which makes for things like Iraq.

           While today all we hear about is Martin Luther King, when it was happening the Civil Rights movement was far more diverse. As It happens I have a few issues of LIFE  magazine  from 1966 and the entire theme then was the “negro” revolution. It is nothing like what is taught in the text books.

          The third element here is the most radical because the most difficult thing a person can do it to think about familiar things  in   new ways.

           Just off high Street in Oxford there’s a close. A  close is what we in the states can a dead end.   On the wall, readable from the double decker bus in tall letters is spray painted   “One solution - Revolution” and if you don’t mind my saying so I don’t think it’s about the flavor of a new soft drink.

          When Goebells announced “Total war” in 41 we may ponder   what sort of war the Nazis had been fighting. The fact is he and Hitler envisioned conquering the earth as no big deal.  It would be sort of like your company being taken over by new management.

         This is because they had a modern view of government, one where legislators stay out of the way of business, and where personal rights were unheard of. As such they were fifty years ahead of their time

 The   term often used to describe the fascist states is techno state and the trick question on the history exams states the US had to become a techno state to defeat them, but there more to it.  Although such mentality brought us victory in the past today we have to learn to stop thinking that was.

        Americans in the past had no notion of the bourgeoisie. To them the word “middle class” was a positive thing. Up until Reagan  being middle class was a goal we strived for.

The war that Hitler and Goebells wanted to fight was one that would cause the least inconvenience to the middle class.

     They really planned on a continual warfare that would be enough to keep the economy thriving and would be paid for by a new form of colonial exploitation.

        The insane thing is that theoretically at least the scheme works! 

 And it would be held together by the middle class white heterosexuals all over the world imposing their way of life on everyone else.  We may then take a page from the Book of Reagan

   “The middle class is not the solution

                 It is the problem.”

       As well we must prepare ourselves for the thought, as Orwell said, of perpetual war.  A young Kenneth Galbraith  was given the burdensome task of calculating how muc actual damage the allied bombing of Germany did.

     His conclusion was that the more the cities of Germany were bombed the more it actually increased productivity of munitions. When the cities were bombed, at first at least, people left their jobs in the bakeries and hired on in the war industry in heavy guarded and hidden locations.

         As we have said previously the sea change in warfare over the past hundred years or so is whereas in the past the casualties were nearly entirely military today they are entirely civilians.

   Likewise we may say the same for the undeclared war of the state against it’s citizens.  The people in the legislature do not take casualties, nor do the aristocrats of capital - it is understood that they must be protected at all costs  for they are the sine  qua non of society.

           In the study of myth, or theology, one of the mind games we often play is the question of origins. God being defined as he without origin if you can point to an origin then you probably are not dealing with an authentic God.

          Likewise if you are creating a myth to gain a specific purpose -- say the myth of an altruistic political leader- you must be careful not to allow contradictory ideas into the story. This is why nearly every civilization worth the title has a creation myth, the purpose of which is not to shed light,   but rather to provide an alternative history to mask the actual one.

          The actual story is rarely ever said because wherever and whenever we look we see that it is achieved by force and the terror that man lives with is that that which has been gained by violence will be lost the same way. It is as if having won the game we immediately set out to change the rules.

                        We may also suggest that the third world man does not love or value his family any less then anyone else.  In fact, freed from the presence of serial polygamy  that is a part of life in a  hierarchal society one could go so far as to  say he might even love his family more - it being the only family he has.

    Still there remains the  productive myth, A productive myth is nothing more then what it says.  When we say, for instance the Asian does not value human life we are suggesting granting carte blanche to exterminate  them.

                   For a better sense of how this works let’s recall the evolution of laws.  What is a  proceedure in a given instance, the collection of a tariff, becomes a custom ( and in the  UK the term  custom retains the meaning of a financial transaction)  and then in time custom is  codified into law.

         A similar thing happens in the evolution of fact and myth.  A girl is raped and murdered in a specific location and then perhaps as little as fifty years later the location is commonly believed to be the  habitation of a hostile spirit - hense the origin of the virgin spring myth                                                                     

     I go through all this trouble to elaborate this because having reached a degree of reality as myth to make the reality into a concrete reality is fairly easy. Thus we have the recipe for genocide.  It is a knowledge familiar to tyrants and pimps - shatter the mind and the body will follow.

        If there is an optimistic side to this it is that  without the “preparation” of the  productive myth.  People and societies don’t decide things overnight.

           Awhile back we spoke of the fourty year phenomenon.  Moses led the the tribes of Israel a merry chase around the Sinai for forty years and it wasn’t because he had no sense of direction - it was because they had to learn to lose the ways of servitude and learn to think for themselves.

                 We must be aware of this if we wish to take mankind to a new era.  We must ask if having been reduced to slaves of the  corporate state  the population that remains is capable of accepting it’s own destiny. This is by no means a rhetorical question. The English revolution fell apart once Cromwell died and the French revolution could not resist

the urge to bloody retribution.

        And also when the lust for war overtakes us it is standard to require a period of time to prepare the population for the butchery ahead.  We mistakenly believe that the “Pieces are being put into place” but I suggest at least that the real reason is the need to prepare  the population psychologically.

    

This is  hardly new. The Roman empire was built tribe by tribe, region by region and in each case each invasion was preceded by a notification that the area, no matter how seemingly insignificant posed a deadly threat to the vital interests of the Empire. 

j