Ran posted something interesting today, about how the stock market will never crash because it's purely symbolic; the Dow will keep rising and quality of life will keep falling. So it's not an accurate gauge for the economic situation, like, down here, in the real world. Which reminds me of a pet peeve I have with so much of the anti-civilization movement: in most anti-civ rhetoric, the "Crash" is in the future. Not now. Not in the past. It's some horrible, singular eschaton that will shatter the foundation of the world in just one day. But not today. Tomorrow. This is the central problem of the apocalypse cult.

By confusing processes with events, apocalypse cults can be identified by exhibiting traits and actions opposite to their teachings and beliefs. Anarchists touting freedom from authority argue over who gets to be leader by eliminating any who aren't "real" anarchists. Catholics raging against the tyranny of Empire adopt its behaviors, ultimately becoming half-absorbed in Empire. Whenever a Truth is cast into some future event, we allow ourselves to put it off. Worry about it tomorrow. We've got plenty of time between now and the revolution. The carpenter said he'd be back in a year.

A few months ago I reread a ton of U.G. Krishnamurti books, and one of the things that jumped out at me and really sank into my skin this time was the idea that, by struggling against something, we ensure its continued survival. Never made any sense to me before, but in the context of striving for personal perfection, something clicks. By pursuing perfection, you project your achievement of perfection onto some unknowable future date: you're not perfect now, but some day you will be. This isn't very useful for living.

Tim Boucher expressed this beautifully with,

"The apocalypse is nothing but the perfection of the moment: the removal of all veils which separate us from how we could and should be. Setting an arbitrary date on when it will occur is giving yourself excuses to continue acting the way you are now instead of immediately changing once and for all."

By pushing the apocalypse into the future, we give strength to the veils of today. Perfection, unveiling, awakening, peace, stability and justice become impossible dream things, always just out of reach. We have put them Over There, instead of living them Right Here. Regardless of how things appear, we must act as though the Empire has Fallen, the Good King has returned to the Throne, flakes from the Age of Iron have uncovered the Age of Gold, we are perfect and wise and compassionate and eternal and incorruptible. And think about what to do with that.

I'm going to found my own cult, the core tenet of which is,

"You have died and are living in the Kingdom of Heaven, but you've only just been told. What now?"

I'm feeling rather light today so instead of half-coherent musings on the root of suffering being miscommunication between body and mind or some equally mind numbing crappola like that, I present you with

The Very Best of Uncylopedia

On Jorge Luis Borges:

In the beginning Borges existed as a plot element in someone else's story, but as he found his own peculiar voice -- his personality -- he gradually took over this fiction and made it his own.

Of course this is what we all do. Born into the story of our parents' lives we at first live in their narrative. Their story includes our diaper changes, our first steps, the time we spat strained peas on the ceiling and the time Uncle Norbert filled our baby bottle with beer, and our fascination with the procreative acts of our pet hamsters. Only as we find our own interior voices do we begin to create our own separate existences: only then do we create our own narratives. Jorge Luis Borges was no different...except that he created himself as a self-conscious metafiction.

The rest of us are more like badly-produced TV mockumentaries.

On Grant Morrison:

Grant Morrison is a fictional DC Comics superhero. In 1989, Morrison succesfully wrote himself into real life, impressing both his fans and his owners at DC. Since then, he has been working as a comic book writer.

Though his solo series was originally supposed to be limited to four issues, Morrison refused to stop at that number and the comic upgraded itself into an on-going series. The comic's strong sales are often attributed Morrison's ease for jumping into other comics to advertise his series, as well as his tendency to join minor superteams without being invited. These included the Justice League France, the Doom Patrol, the Teen Titans, and, briefly, the Suicide Squad.

Morrison's anarchist ideas didn't sit well with the members of the Justice League, and he was kicked out within a year (though he managed to retain his croissant shaped signal device). He was also ordered to remain within 50 ft. of the Teen Titans, after his affair with teenage witch Raven was exposed. He had similar bad luck with the Suicide Squad, which dissolved after their first mission due to a sudden shortage of members. However, the far more obscure and unpopular Doom Patrol, a comic bordering on cancellation since 1967, proved to be desperate and misguided enough to follow Morrison's ideas. During his tenure as leader of the team, the Patrol stopped fighting supervillains and their comic became a sequence of disconnected and unrelated absurdist scenes (most of which involved bovines and kitchen utensils). Any resemblance to an actual plot within the comic is to be taken as purely coincidential.

Meanwhile, in his own series, Morrison insisted on gazing at his readers through the page during innapproapiate times, sometimes causing them to spill their beverages. He also began replacing his lines of dialogue with personalized insults towards whoever was reading the comic at the time, especially if they were jewish. After teasing and flirting for months, Morrison finally raped the Fourth Wall in Animal Man #26, walking out of the comic and into the real world to the utter shock of readers, especially those reading in the bathroom. The comic went on for another 54 issues after Morrison abandoned it, with various household items from his empty house serving as protagonists (an obvious attempt on DC's part to recreate the success of Houseplant).

On Salvador Dali:

Random Journalist: "Hey, cool paintings Salvador! That's some trippy shit. What drugs did you take to do a painting like that?"

Sir Salvador the Mighty of Dali: "I am a drug. Take me."

The random journalist then attempted to do this, much to the disgust of Salvador's beloved wife Gala, who did not think that climbing into a giant bong shaped like an egg and allowing any middle class idiot with a camera to take a toke on him was entirely beneficial to his career. She then proceeded to have the local constabulary remove the journalist from her property and had a restraining order taken out on him.

On long articles:

Repeating the same thing over and over again

When this is applied to real text, it is advised to repeat more than one word at a time and to add the repetition after the repeated part, thus grouping them. When this is applied to pointless or irrelevant messages, it is advised to do this on the end of the page, you can make use of a variant of tools for an extra effect. An alternative style of this method might include mentioning a lot of things which mean the same thing, like with synonyms.

It is enough

I guess a way to rephrase my last post in a more positive way is to say that it's looking around at your life and saying to yourself, "I have all that I have, all that exists is what is presented before me, and it is good. It is enough." There is something deeply unsatisfying about satisfaction in a consumer culture; you can never have 'enough.' 'Enough' is not even a valid concept for many people. It's seen as giving up, or dropping out. You only have enough if you're too weak to grapple for more, more, MORE! But to first question if life is not all that it appears to be, and then to gradually accept that there is nothing more (any added layer will confuse things; if there is a "world beyond," would it not be a part of "the world?" if the mind is a-physical, what does that mean?) is enough.

I don't want to confuse satisfaction with 'peace.' The latter implies, at least because of my background, permanence. Permanent peacefulness is impossible; we'll always feel hurt or angry or violently depressed, and there's no reason for us to cut those things out of our life completely. They're an integral part of living, and satisfaction comes from accepting that there is no escape from negativity and that it actually serves a useful purpose. There is no state of wanting-less-ness (I know I need to work on my coining new words skills) but we can come to a state in which we choose what to want, and decide for ourselves if that desire is realistic and if so, how to achieve it. There are too many Gimme Gimmes that cling to the heart; satisfaction is telling them they don't have to go home, but they can't stay here.

My line of thinking is approaching something dangerously close to, but not quite, nihilism. It’s difficult even for me to draw together enough threads to weave this into something coherent, but the basic ideas are:

-If you want anything, it doesn’t matter what it is, because even if you get what you want, you’ll replace your want with another thing that you don’t have.
-Wanting anything keeps your fundamental Being in a state of Wanting, not Having.
-All you can have is all that you do have.
-Which makes you utterly helpless.

The mind cannot do. Only the body is capable of doing, and if the body is put into an unpleasant or dangerous situation, it will instantly react to get out of that situation. The body is almost (but not quite) deaf to the mind’s sufferings, desires and needs: it reacts to these subtly, with depression, anxiety, loneliness, higher blood pressure, and shorter life span. So wanting, a product of mind, is utterly useless, even detrimental, in life. Instead, it would be better to shift into a state of having. By this I don’t mean “being happy with what you have,” but actually accepting that all you have, all you know, and all you’ve experienced is, probably, all there is or at least all you are going to get. Only by redefining “you,” or ideas about the self, does this get us out of almost-nihilism. And even then, retaking a broader sense of self in the present world is unimaginably difficult, after the gradual and systematic (and intentional) breakdown of the tribal unit, the extended family, and now even the actual family. To redefine our sense of self in a broader spectrum requires other humans out there doing the same.

In other news, I’ve recently bought a new computer that I have not actually had a chance to use yet because I’ve been too busy trying to fix the million and one problems I have had with it right out of the box. Some part of me in the back of my head privy to primitivism and the critique of civilization is drawing a parallel to the fall of any civilization: as civilization “progresses,” the added complexity to the structure makes it gradually more unstable, and more and more of our time is spent simply trying to hold the whole thing together instead of letting it fall and creating a functional, living society again.

Growing Up With Machines: Jerry Mander

"Technological evolution is leading to something new: a worldwide, interlocked, monolithic, technical-political web of unprecedented negative proportions."
-Jerry Mander

Friction Magazine has a great interview in their archives with the always insightful if terribly depressing Jerry Mander, author of In Absence of the Sacred, anti-technology activist and reigning god-king of Mad Science Haircuts.



Mander's philosophy is easy enough.

Jerry's message: Technological civilization is destroying nature and human life.

Jerry's solution: Dismantle technological civilization. Simple as that.

How he presents it is another case. After all, the likes of Daniel Quinn and William Burroughs have had much the same to say. Mander's critique of civilization is a little different, though, relying on rigorous research, richly developed insight, and, oh, coherency.

Just as other creatures co-evolve with their environment, we are co-evolving with our technologies. In nature, creatures evolve by adjusting and reacting to other creatures. It used to be that way with human beings as well. But now we are co-evolving mainly with machines. Our compromise with them is that we start to become like them -- we have to become a little like them in order to use them.

The heart of what we call civilization is the deification of the machine. The invention of the wheel, the taming of fire, the triumph of heliocentrism are all cultural myth points along the ladder taking us from the state of Mere Beasts to our proper, ascended, near-divine state of Civilized Humans. None of which looks the same after you've taken Mander's point of view: we are becoming increasingly machinelike because we culturally deify machines because we have grown up in wholly technological environments. Machines, rather than other organic life forms, are the competing and collaborating species within our completely artificial ecosystem!

If you’re going to play a video game, for example, the point is to speed up your hand-eye coordination. The better you get at the video game, the faster your hand-eye connection. What you are doing with your hands and eyes is involving yourself in the computer program. So you are creating a cycle of actions and reactions with the computer technology. As your awareness and your nervous system become tuned to the computer, you are changed accordingly.

This is true of any technology. Look at television, for example. To watch television is to take in images that are artificially created for a specific purpose. By carrying these images, you begin to turn into them. That's basic to education and to all experience: as you ingest your environment you begin to evolve with it. In the case of television, you are evolving on the basis of carefully selected and programmed images, so you are getting acted on in a very aggressive manner. Television turns you into its own images. It rearranges your mind.

That this process has such a negative impact on human participants can be linked to an incompatibility between organic life and dead machines. It is possible to think of modern technology as viral: dead matter exhibiting qualities of life only in the presence of a living host (us). As we change accordingly to our exposure to the technology virus, we begin to acquire more and more of its own qualities: unrestricted growth, increased computational ability marred by decreased intuitional ability (the right hemisphere of the brain is sometimes called the "silent hemisphere"), an unchecked, unexamined, unquestioned drive to ever greater "efficiency," and other ill adapted, negative mutations. If technology as we know it is viral, the manifestation of that technology in human activity ("Progress") is cancerous.

Art is either medicine for a culture, or it is a poison

There's a fantastic, short interview with Chilean/Mexican/Parisian/transnational director, comic book author, playwright, poet, transpersonal psychologist and Tarot reader Alejandro Jodorowsky over at the Fortean Times from July of this year.

Jodorowsky belongs to the certain class of people who, while I could understand if some are turned off by his actual work, I always find large chunks of insight and intelligence in interviews. The language used in this exchange reveal a Gurdjieffian influence or bent I hadn't tacked onto Jodorowsky before: "hypnotism" to describe an artist manipulating his audience's emotions, "prison" to describe the contract between the individual and society, binding individuals to roles and functions they feel no connection to, the quick mention of three brains possibly forming a fourth, etc. The more I look at it, the more there is to unpack.

You have no fear of death?

Not anymore. I am completely prepared to die – spiritually, not corporally. My body wants to live. The body always wants to be immortal, not to die. And the soul accepts death - that is good. But it’s not good if my body wants to die, because my life is shorter. You menace me with a knife, and I will defend myself, I will ask somebody to protect me, no? Even if I say [to myself], “I can die.” I understand that.

This is something I think we all understand on one level, and protest against on another. Either death is something (and that's not so bad), or death is nothing (and there's nothing there to suffer so, again, not so bad). There is no logical reason to fear death--that fear only acts as a stumbling block to natural living. But this is not bravery! The body and mind still do not want to die! The body is incapable of wanting death, and will do everything in its power to act toward self-preservation, even without the consent of the mind and spirit. The mind, in turn, will usually do everything in its power to maintain a sense of continuity between thoughts and experiences, being all that it is. So one can accept death consciously, while still struggling against it! That this is seen as a contradiction or hypocrisy is only because, in a dominator culture, death is the one forbidden topic of thought. After all, fear of death is the foundation stone of our concept of civilization. If death is nothing to be afraid of, what exactly are the robber barons protecting the rest of the tribe from? Why do we still employ them? Are we afraid of them? What's the worst they could do, kill us? We are constantly bombarded with phantom barbarians at the imaginary gates to keep us from reaching these thoughts.

So, Hollywood film is mind control?

Yes, mind control. And all American pictures are US propaganda, it's a form of imperial power.

Look at 300. First it is propaganda against Iran. Second, it deifies physical strength. It is preparing the young person to kill for his country in the anti-Islamic kamikaze! 300 is also racist towards black people – the bad people are monsters and black. And the emperor of the bad guys is also gay! Your initiation comes when you begin asking “Why? Why?! Why a gay? Why [is he] the biggest black person? The Persians are not like that! Why?!” It’s a critical initiation; that is when you start to know the limits of the jail we are born into.