In The Interval

I thought about Darwinism today and Hitler being its most literal and psychotic interpreter by his mastery of control systems that relied on advanced technology to the point of pioneering regularly scheduled television programming and giving away free radios in order to steer consensus by manufacturing it.

I thought about the Mayans and how some wags have opined that mankind is at the top rung as a predator and we consider ourselves immune from being another's species food source.

The Mayans thought differently and attempted to appease what hunted them which was the natural world and so rather than being randomly killed off willy-nilly, they made regulatory sacrifices as to control nature. One could say all this in Freud’s world would be the games of the Superego. As belief systems synthesized the past into more fully fleshed explanatory narratives that some now look back upon as myths, nature became literally became a God but with a twist.

This God as developed by the Egyptians later transposed by way of Jewish and later Christian innovating further became a God with interestingly enough, human characteristics. The playing field was somewhat leveled. We could now bargain, appease, follow the rules and be rewarded in this conceptual model of a monarchical universe in a contest opposed to nature. What was once an adversary became a mentor with conditions attached which later then was and is today used as a social control that is political in nature whether it is advocating for legislating behavior toward abortions in this country or the Islamic variants who conduct “holy wars”

All of this began with our odd place in nature. Gnostics termed nature an attractive whore as did the earliest component of Christianity in Sumer, the marsh Arabs at the confluence of the rivers of the Garden of Eden that Sadam Hussein tried to exterminate..who worshipped the planet itself as a deity which roughly translates into “The Peacock Angel.” They were considered to be "devil worshipers"

Then came technology from the wheel to the stirrup to the invention of the internet which complicated this strange series of reactionary postulates in a manner that would make Ahab’s revenge against the white whale a more diffuse and variegated multiplicity of contests, an adventure in cross purposed self sabotage betting against the house, that control via though as an incomplete knowledge base would trump the unpredictable.

We are beginning to see the apex of yet another cycling of the Atlantean mythos which Grahame Hancock has suggested occurred once before at the end of the last Ice Age. One could say human behavior as defined by its adaptation to the planet has, in essence remained unchanged in this context. Michio Kaku in terms of the exobiology of an extraterrestrial species that develop societies, this relationship between what is driving what is at the crux of this apex we now approach in terms of self awareness and introspection he considers to be a make or break in evolutionary terms which brings us back to Darwin and social control systems.

The issue seems to this writer is that we have no basis of comparison outside of ourselves unless we rely on analogies or abstracted metaphors that end up being self referential.

In planetary terms we are isolated.

It is no surprise that upon the rise of existentialism, and the announcement that God was dead after the Holocaust, that followed by the technology of the atom bomb, what should appear but flying saucers as emblematic of both a cargo cult search for an arbiter to solve our issues on our own behalf as well as perhaps the arrival of an advanced species in terms of having  balanced being with knowledge whose interest was the ecology of our species as this drama plays out in a seemingly zero sum game. It may even be televised on Zeta Four or be the subject o a conference of multidisciplinary researchers. One does not know beyond our own projections on a blank slate.

Now we come to the elusive and illusory now of all this stagecraft and role playing worthy of Beckett….

Technology mimics nature in it’s design and as an extension of our senses some of called the advent of more complex systems, neo-biology, wherein it’s evolution leads to a synthetic ecology and our relationship to this ecology may become more driven by it than rather than we being the driver, which Marshal McLuhan observed some time ago. By consensus, this development is viewed as benign which could be translated as meaning to be necessary. Who can avoid using an automobile? If the grid vanished overnight, what would we do? One could say everyone is responsible therefore no one is “the driver” in a programming sense.

Some have suggested that human consciousness as an aggregate sum resembles a hive whose analogy is the internet composed of individual processing units linked together which become emergent, that is to say any individual process pales in comparison to the total process, and this interdependence between a synthetic ecology and the natural ecology seems to have an increasing amount of instability at both ends.

Communities and tribes of machines live alongside of us, utilizing the natural environment as do we to sustain their motility. In evolutionary terms, one could say these two tribes are extensions of one another and yet Darwin might suggest this also involves competition and cooperation.

In other words, we are competing for natural resources.

In psychological terms as a canary perhaps in the coal mine, we see an enormous cookie cutter popularity in “reality” programming wherein Alaska becomes a signet in sustainability sans technology as “infotainment” in versus the psychology behind naming a controversial pipeline, a “Keystone”

One can see a parallel system that lodges itself between the neo-biology of technology and the biology of the natural world within the thermostatic relationship between social politics and industrial corporations as an interdependent communities that increasingly rely on mass media propaganda as social control systems.  They increasingly evaluate progress in economic terms as the arbiters of viability and\or sustainability. In other words, their own version of competing for resources to sustain themselves.

Walmart, Exxon and others promote themselves as contributing tribes toward the welfare of all whose sloganeering is wedged as repetitive programming  via “‘commercials” between infotainments that serve as diversions for those employed by them between “shifts” of the worker bees.

Add to this the territorial prerogative of all vested parties in terms of the tribalism vying for the resources no one owns in the reality of our realities, and of course the Pharisees sold off real estate to the Romans leading to the overturning of the money changers tables at the foot of the temple. One thinks of the Gnostic interpretation of their leader of this revolt riding backwards on a donkey on his approach to the city as a metaphor for mastering a stubborn vehicle.

Gurdjieff might say we either chose to suffer for an aim or suffer without purpose and die like dogs.

Who has this wherewithal to chose?

Are we in a interval between what has not yet died and what is to appear?