Hi All,
Some thoughts on the evidence recently posted that appalling
conspiracies are currently in play, including powerful circumstantial
evidence that (elements of) the current US administration at least
colluded in the 9/11 atrocity, and are currently planning Mad Max
megadeath horror.
I don't deny that these things are happening. They've always been
happening. Thomas Jefferson said, "When men of the same profession
gather together, they do so to conspire against the general public."
After all, we have the open statement from before the 2000 election by
the so-called American Century group of which Dubya & Co are members,
that a "major incident" would be very beneficial for their agenda. What
I do argue is that these things do not require us to suppose that
persons of special knowledge or abilities are involved. It's just what
normal sub-human consciousness does, given the opportunity. That's
frightening enough on it's own (Gurdjieff wrote of "The Terror of the
Situation") - but it's a monster we have already met. The goings on in
any firm or local council writ large. There are no worse monsters. I've
certainly seen nothing in the behaviour of Dubya, Blair, etc.
indicating that any more than normal scheming, reality denying
self-aggrandizers are involved, or that their objectives are any more
than power crazed, personal material enrichment for their cronies, or
the willingness to kill vast numbers in the pursuit of wasting even more
resources for a brief while longer. I'm even willing to acknowledge that
Dubya is a screwed up mapper (a macker). After all, he is an alcoholic.
So despite his manifest cowardice ("I do not have anthrax. I do not have
anthrax. I do not have anthrax."), low thinking centre intelligence and
ignorance, he might be a quite inventive little toad, and hence all the
more dangerous. I've never suggested that an active inductive mind
*automatically* ensures goodness or wisdom if the person is emotionally
damaged, as often occurs in current social conditions.
Instead I'd like to look at two other situations which at first look
like sith might be involved, and demonstrate that we do not need to
assume the existence of sith. The first situation has more than one
thread to it, so please bear with me. I shall not pretend objectivity,
since the whole business still annoys me.
In the late 1970s an artist called John Berger became concerned with
what he saw as a growing retreat into delusional meeting room reality,
and a consequent loss of all values. He believed that a return to basic
physical reality was needed to reacquire our grounding. He moved to a
village in rural France, and set forth his views in a novel called "Pig
Earth". Berger is an able artist. First a photographer, his TV series
"Ways of Seeing" was a landmark in making the arts accessible to a wider
audience, and 30 years on his book which accompanied the series is still
in print. On page one of the novel he wanted to engage the reader's
attention before presenting his thesis, and did this by presenting a
graphical visual image of a pair of elderly peasants making a complete
mess of attempting to slaughter a cow. Berger can produce a strong
visual image even when his medium is prose, and his description of the
layers of bone, muscle and blood vessels revealed in the cow's shoulder
as the peasants attempt to kill it is certainly strong. But it's just an
attention getter. The point - which is all about the base reality
revealed in the first page - comes in the rest of the book. "Pig Earth"
was first published in New York in 1980, but didn't do well. It was
republished in London in 1984 and did much better because it was
marketed very aggressively by a close friend, which is why I know all
the details of this aspect of the tale. My friend made sure "Pig Earth"
was in some chains and every independent and arts bookshop in the land.
At the same time a Turkish embezzler called Asil Nadir was exploiting
the growing retreat into self-delusion, enriching himself with a junk
bond scam called Polly Peck. Nadir currently resides in the largely
unrecognised state of Turkish Cyprus, where he is free from extradition
and arrest. As an embezzler, Nadir would benefit from a more relaxed
financial regulatory environment, and culturally impoverishing the
population, since both would make them easier to swindle. Accordingly,
he supplied a great deal of money to the then opposition Conservative
Party (elected to power in 1979), via it's bagman Jeffrey Archer, later
Lord Archer, who later went to prison for perjury. The Conservatives
received so much money from Nadir that their finances have never
recovered from it's loss, after it was revealed that they were
bankrolled by a foriegn criminal. Much of the money then went to the
advertising firm of Saatchi and Saatchi, which ran their propaganda
campaign. One Charles Saatchi , now Lord Saatchi, who has never been to
prison, is the candidate for a neuroarchaic sith lord in this story.
Now in every land, in every era, there is always found hanging around
real artists a group of elderly degenerates who call themselves "the art
world". Although they are utterly talentless, they find they can conceal
their natures more easily in the vicinity of people who behave in more
varied ways than is usual in society. Colleges of art therefore end up
serving two functions. Talented students attend to learn the technical
skills they need to express their inspirations, talentless students
attend because they wish to meet the "art world". They are the sort of
people who are willing to do absolutely anything, for small material
rewards, so long as it does not take effort on their part. As these
students age, they turn into the next generation of elderly degenerates,
and so the cycle of corruption continues. To maintain the fiction that
they are artists, each of them must as Gurdjieff put it, "manifest
themselves absurdly" at least once. One of the least talented - but
loudly self-advertising - students at the Royal College of Art in 1985
was one Damien Hirst. When it was time for him to manifest himself
absurdly, he was completely stuck for ideas. Fortunately, there were
plenty of copies of "Pig Earth" around, and he set out to re-create
Berger's page one prose image, without the content of the book, in a
literal, physical fashion. At least he had the grace to change the
animal. The result was a shark, cut in half with a chainsaw and pickled.
(When Marcel Duchamps did this kind of thing it was novel and
challenging. Now it is purely formulaic.) Needless to say, this blatant
act of empty plagerism caused considerable mirth amongst everyone who
was even slightly aware of real contemporary arts at the time.
And there it would have ended, were it not for Saatchi, who very
publicly handed Hirst a huge amount of Nadir's dirty money, and loudly
announced, "He is a genius!" Of course, the ignorant, the gullible, the
greedy and the easily led became hypnotised by the sight of the money,
wished to follow fashion, and repeated the cry, "He is a genius!" In
this way the talentless er... friend... of the "art world" Damien Hirst
became the centrepiece of a group of similar creatures, entirely created
by Saatchi, called BritArt. It was an evil scheme. A subtle tactic which
removed all the value of real arts by replacing it with rubbish, and so
impoverishing the population - although to be fair, the British working
class never fell for it. Just the people with more money than sense,
whom Saatchi wished to impoverish on behalf of his master, Nadir.
Indeed, it was sufficiently subtle that people who didn't appreciate the
importance of the cultural context doubted that Saatchi had done
anything malign at all when it was pointed out to them. It is this that
makes Saatchi a candidate for the honourific "Darth".
Except he is not so entitled! He's even less original than Hirst, and no
special knowledge was required. The entire strategy, and the thinking
behind it, was laid out in detail by Ayn Rand, in the 1943 novel, "The
Fountainhead", which loudly proclaims on the cover of the 1983 printing
I have before me, that 5,000,000 copies have been sold. I quote:
"Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or
to achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want any great men.
Don't deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The
great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of
achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept - and you stop
the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive
to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold
Peter Keating as a great architect. You've destroyed architecture. Build
up Lois Cook and you've destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you've
destroyed the theatre. Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you've destroyed the
press. Don't set out to raze all shrines - you'll frighten men. Enshrine
mediocrity - and the shrines are razed. Then there's another way. Kill
by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as
a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to
laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humour is an unlimited
virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul - and his soul
won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in
man. One doesn't reverence with a giggle. He'll obey and he'll set no
limits to his obedience - anything goes - nothing is too serious....
Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man's soul and the space is yours to fill."
BritArt is to the Council of American Artists in Rand's novel, as
Hirst's pickled animal parts are to the cow in Berger's novel. And in
case there's any doubt, the final artistic wonder in Hirst's repititions
of his plagerism, each heralded as a greater work of genius than the
last, was indeed a cow cut in half. Here's Rand's 1943 description of
Saatchi's wretched, sneering, 1980s assembly:
"The Council of American Artists had as chairman a cadaverous youth who
painted what he saw in his nightly dreams. There was a boy who used no
canvas, but did something with bird-cages and metronomes, and another
who discovered a new technique of painting: he blackened a sheet of
paper and then painted with a rubber eraser. There was a stout
middle-aged lady who drew sub-consciously, claiming that she never
looked at her hand and had no idea of what the hand was doing; her hand,
she said, was guided by the spirit of the departed lover whom she had
never met on earth. Here they did not talk so much about the
proletariat, but merely rebelled against the tyranny of reality and of
the objective."
So while Charles Saatchi did something malevolent and destructive, we
might almost say clever, a Sith Lord he is not. He simply implemented an
exploit documented in Rand's 1943 advisory. The only thing that was not
in Rand's book was the smell. Rand never mentioned personal hygene
problems amongst the members of the Council of American Artists. Thus
was Berger's artistic cry for values stolen and perverted by Saatchi
into destruction of values. Afterword: Nadir himself had part of his
ill-gotten gains squirreled away in a huge collection of exquisite
watercolours. I know this because the curator he engaged was an artist
and restorer of considerable talent and technical ability. He was
fascinated by the concept of computer networking, and filled his house
with CP/M machines connected by twisted pairs. As a young hacker I
helped set up some of his curious network.
The second situation I'd like to mention, corny though it may be, is
that of Adolf Hitler. There's no doubt he was a macker, and a master
manipulator of a group of humans close to a marching point. Few today
appreciate the significance of his funny little mustache, for example.
What's interesting about him is the rallies. He stands there, making his
curious, foppish little hand gestures, and shrieking things like, "You
must give in to the compulsion to obey!" Now every generation thinks
itself so much more worldly that it's predecessors, but if that we're
true, we'd all be very wise now - and we're not. So why didn't the
grandparents of today's Germans burst out laughing? I think we may be
looking at an example of the use of microsynch, the study and perfomance
of body language regimented by mass boredom addiction. The effect which
(in reverse) can make people like bank clerks go mad wirth demented rage
if an immune so much as walks up to them. The effect demonstrated by
Gurdjieff, documented by Ouspensky and quoted in V2.0 chapter 2. I have
twice heard a person describe another as "godlike". One was a minor
civil servant who had reported to me that another civil servant had once
more buggered up the paperwork, and prevented us receiving the supplies
we needed. "Christ!", I exclaimed. "Who does that guy think he's working
for? Slobodan?" The reporter's response was extraordinary. His demented
rant of defence of his imcompetent and feckless colleauge included the
word "godlike". Both, as I would currently express it, were very boredom
addicted, with the screecher less boredom addicted because of his
occasional contact with teams I was keeping productive. The other case
was an eldery man (a doctor, not a rabid fascist, not a member of the
SS, just a regular German who after WWII moved to the UK), who described
meeting Hitler. Over 40 years later his knuckles were white as he
grasped the arms of his chair, and he used the same word, "godlike".
Something very odd was going on here. Also add the determination to wipe
out all members of groups who I conjecture have an unusually large
minority immune to boredom addiction.
The thing about Hitler, if he did learn this stuff from members of an
authentic school, is that he only got *partial* truths. Not all immunes
are Jews and Poles, and not all Jews and Poles are natural immunes.
Exterminating all Jews and Poles does not leave a population entirely
vulnerable to mass hypnotism in this way. Indeed, the only effect of his
evil work in these terms, was to *enrich* the proportion of immunes in
those populations. According to all understanding of military history,
what happened in Israel in 1973, where Moshe Dyan had to completely
reconstruct his entire national defence plan with the enemy in country
and moving fast, and all his armour gone, simply can't happen. The
mostly mapper Linux community could do it though, with the power of
distributed, creative problem solving loosely structured by the overall
guidance of one person. If someone told me that Hitler was wound up and
set on his way by an authentic school, for the purpose of accellerating
change (which he certainly did), then I would have no trouble believing
it. But his effectiveness was constrained by partial truths. I find the
idea uncomfortable that authentic schools would be willing to resort to
such methods, but an implication of V2.0 chapter 6 is that people with
advanced consciousness *are* willing to break eggs to make omlettes. A
2000+ year strategy to break boredom addiction, with little things like
the Spanish Inquisition along the way.
But Hitler would not count as a sith, just a wind-up toy. Neither would
the informants who limited his effectiveness so that he achieved the
reverse of what he wanted. If the informants are serving a long term
self-org objective of bringing the local planetary mind to awareness,
then their objectives, however dubious their methods might seem to us,
would be good. They are not nihilists.
And this brings me to my final point. There's really only one thing
going on - the reconstruction of the universe and growth of
consciousness. I suppose a person might attend an authentic school, such
as the Sarmoung described by Gurdjieff or the mysterious teachers of
Steiner, which we have intimations of existing, and somehow fail in
their development. Then we might have a person with an exterior
perspective, who could see M0 for what it was, and manipulate it. He or
she might have astonishing powers of precognition, the ability to
translocate, and the ability to "kill a yak by the power of thought at a
distance of several miles" (Gurdjieff). Yet for all this, the person of
distorted development might be interested in serving only their own
material greed, like a crack SAS soldier equipped with night vision
goggles, flashbangs and so on, who breaks into the nursery and steals
all the toys. But why would the authentic schools, who are populated by
people of full development, permit such an individual to do harm? They'd
take him or her out of commission rather than let them damage the
programme. Indeed, I see no evidence that any such persons are active in
the world. As William of Occam said, let us not multiply hypotheses
without necessity.
None of this removes the terrible danger posed by the zombie packers and
screwed up mappers. It seems like a miracle will be needed to solve the
problem, either in some "fail safe" predicted by the authentic schools
that I believe engineered the present situation in order to take M0 out
of it's stable envelope and break it, or something... else. Since my
integrated deductive and inductive mind is convinced of the self-org
imperative of our making it, with our deductive mind culture intact
including the Internet, I am therefore anticipating a miracle.
Film at 11...
Alan
