feb 2, 2009: I was born 3 years after WW II ended and grew up in a right wing N. England town (Bircherville). The Cold War was on, making me a "child of the Cold War Era": like all of us born in those days, I carry the psychic burden for life. We boomers are, above all, a generation of escapists, of reality deniers: GW denial, gated communities, SUVs (for "security"), the drug culture, religious cultism (1960s - oriental / neopgan exotica, post 60s - "christian" fundamentalism). Could we be other than a generation of escapists and deniers, given the times we were born into? Around age 12, in a department store, I heard a woman - about my mother's age, say that my generation was growing up in a bad time. The constant threat of nuclear anihilation and the practice bomb alerts in school - hide under your desk - couldn't, she felt, be doing us much good. I imagine she was right.
At any rate, that world I grew up in is dead. The Soviet Union is no more; Mao's social engineering, a historical curiosity. Good riddance, one is tempted to say!
Even at the time, I felt I was living in an era of constriction, of repression, closed borders - physical and mental, a time of living on the surface of things. Depths were not plumbed, too many secrets were not shared, too many feelings went unexpressed, unexplored.
When "secrets" - like black resentment - exploded like bursting pus sacs into the public consciousness, the accumulated toxins suddenly entering the common circulation provoked fever shock. The world went mad at Selma..
It was, still is (some things haven't changed), a time of hysterical bottled up energy which - eventually - must be released. The question is how? Violently or "rationally"? In those days, the 50s, 60s, even the 70s, I still believed in a naive version of Enlightenment Rationality - without having yet read les philosophes: people SHOULD be rational in order to express their humanity (man being a rational animal by nature). Quelle naïveté!
The Cold War is now dead - really cold! - but strange new wars of religion and access to resources loom on the horizon. In a sense, things are not better: the shit is now really in the fan, we are in the dragon's mouth: IPCC climate change reports..
Odd as it may seem - even to myself! - I take some real pleasure in this situation. My ennemies, the neocons, are faltering. Isn't vindication sweet?
I don't deny the tragic, the stupid, the infuriating, the terrifying and uncanny aspects of the times. How could I? I saw nearly all that is happening today in my early 20s, back in the 70s, simply by extrapolating the dominant themes and values of industrial N. America into the future. A no-brainer, from my perspective..
What I DO find amazing is that the "masses" were so godamned stupid that they passively accepted - even embraced! - the suicidal tendancies fo the age. Nietzsche rightly saw nihilism as the disease of modernity, after all - but WHY?
What the "masses" and their rulers did do is obvious: they push doubt and fear out of consciousness. The tragic price they paid is a lowered level of consciousness: dumbing down, race to the bottom, groupthink (think of the McCarthyite "Red Scare" witchhunts of the 1950s and early 60s). This is also the reason we have such an imperious need for scapegoats these days..
The "masses" accepted to be programmed like cyborgs to consume! consume! consume! and work till you drop in order to consume yet M-O-R-E / consume till you drop in order to fill corporate coffers and offer CEOs ever growing lust for emoliants.
Et voilà! Here we are, facing demographic collapse, starving for energy, land, food, water, clean air, dignity.. The planet can't take such consumption, given our numbers and the botched nature of our technology.
How would appropriate (non-botched) technology function? See the first 4 entries:
http://www.runboard.com/benvirows.f2.t79
feb 9, 2009 (full moon): "The System" - our world, our civilization - is fucked, too fucked to be fixed.
Analog: Scientists claim that Canada's dying, overexploited east coast codfish population is now too dilapidated to recover. Human greed and stupidity has lethally wounded the ecosystem and the resident cod population, once top predators, will expire in about 40 years. Oh, the depravity of Late Patriarchal Culture! When Europeans arrived cod were "as big as a man" and weighed about 100 pounds! They swam in "streams of fish so thick that our ships were slowed in their passage"!
Hegel realized that an old order - "thesis" - eventually becomes shot full of paradoxes, antinomies and internal contradictions which, he claimed, coalesced into a coherent "antithesis". The "thesis" and "antithesis" go to war from which a new thesis - the "synthesis" - arises to begin a new 3 step cycle: thesis - antithesis - synthesis.
The Chinese expressed similar ideas in the Yin-Yang philosophy: the decadant Romans persecuted the Christians who, now in their decadance, morph tragically and stupidly into the New Romans. And so the Big Wheel turns. Rueda la rueda..
Stop the world! I want to get off!
OBSERVATION: Some say a new Copernican Revolution is taking place in the new (meta-)science of Complexity Theory: ADD REFERENCES
17 february, 2009 (3rd quarter moon):
Götterdämmerung
We live a sunset time, a world ending.
Will a new one be born
or is void the other side of dawn?
The price to pay to stay the course is high,
too high for man to live, too high for earth to give.
The lords of the earth run to ground, shut their gates,
shut out a world spinning down, spinning out of control.
Shut the gates, shut out the unwashed,
rage on the road, call out the patrol!
They are damned our clever ones,
our entitled, our witty, our learned ones.
Their world is dying.
Will a new one be born
or is void the other side of dawn?
The price to pay to stay the course is high,
too high for man to live, the End Times near..
Seasons are disordered, unclear.
Fervid seas rise, refuse former bounty.
The goat is scaped in the public place.
The learned, the wise, the mighty -
they buy a pittance of time
with the blood of innocence.
Run behind your gates, shut out the world,
spinning down, spinning out of control.
Rage on the road, call out the patrol!
Today, the mad lead the blind,
a state that cannot endure:
look, the signs are everywhere!
Some nights stars fall from the sky
and draw down worlds in their wake.
Our lands are cursed, our croplands dry,
rivers rampage, cities die,
storms surge, forests fry,
Strange plagues snatch the unaware:
the three merry hags to MacBeth lying
wouldn't have wound a more wicked charm..
Our world is dying.
Will a new one be born
or is void the other side of dawn?
The price to pay to stay the course is high,
too high for man to live, too high for earth to bear.
The masses find too scant their share.
They bought the Great Lie - now they must die.
Oh Lord! Oh Lady! What will the day of their wrath bring?
The wind rises at our backs, threatening worse.
Life seeks the dreamer, death those who cling.
We live a sunset time, the leaves of autumn fall.
A world is ending.
Will a new one be born
or is void the other side of time?
21 july, 2009, wedenesday (new moon)
Lament for the world
The world's sorrow reads in its fury. Fools are happy, excessively so (being fools), else they are good actors. They rush headlong into hell's fury - just see them go! With blind eyes, they rush unseeing..
They make a lot of noise, too, to distract themselves from their fear, to render themselves blind with folly, the folly of the securitizing herd. They seek to become drunk with rage which empowers the afflicted.
See how they play at being children in a playground; they attempt to deny they are really child demigods rolling dice over the world's future: it's easier to look away, one does not feel responsible..
No, the world doe not want to see; it wants to be blind, it wants to be unfree: this is why democracy sells so cheaply these days on the global market! This is why the perverse "psychology" of the schools teaches that man is not free, that mind and soul - even emotion! - do not exist. (Note 1) Our poor world seems ruled by fools, madmen and their dupes..
Should we, then, feel sorry when the world - the sorry, deluded world - stumbles and falls: but how else could it learn ?? Who, then, to blame but the world for its sin, its error, its dereliction? Each daft fool brings the brick of his own self-destructionto to add to the common edifice: they build the blasted tower, the new tower of Babel (also know as the House of God). Now the sign of the blasted tower is fire, signaling the light which devours: "let the light devour men and eat them up with blindness" (liber al vel legis, II, 14).
Tonight, we write to cleanse the heart, to let it weep and unburden itself. Perhaps one or two or three will hear and that is good. Will they find my text a cheer, well-thumbed, clear..
For me, at least, the writing is therapy (I need it man!)
On a cheerier note. Today, I read Edgar Morin: La Méthode, tome 2 on ecology. Self-Organizing Complexity! This is the way the world runs, lacking practical knowledge of which we - or our civilization, at least - will die. This teaching seems destined to become the probable root of the desperately needed "New Paradigm-of-Everything" (its first draft anyway..). Our technology has simply become too powerful, too universal, too invasive to permit false ideologies: we are on the road to becoming roach food. But now at least, a sufficient number may understand: in this lies our hope..
Note 1: Only the educated could come up with such an absurd counter-evidence as an article of faith! The Upanishads observe: a sufficiently intelligent mind can prove any proprosition - a corollary of Goëdel's theorem yet predating Goëdel by centuries!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
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