A phone call from Connecticut last night got me thinking about how thoughts are corralled to make inescapable realities. In the conversation, the caller told me about new gun laws in the state (following the Newtown Massacre) that are unbelievably draconian. He also claimed that the state is flying drones over large swaths of suburbia, and has built a prison camp by an airfield on the coast to confine those who do not register or turn in their guns or otherwise comply with the new rules. So far, 84% have not, but the camp remains empty - and waiting.
Several years ago, I had a conversation with a neighbor about guns. As her husband is a regular hunter, I brought up the notion by some that concealed carry laws make for a vast increase in gun crime - what is often called a "Wild West" scenario. I mentioned that everywhere that this law has been enacted, gun related crime has either stayed the same or decreased. She replied, "I know - but it shouldn't!" That was her argument for gun control.
This essay is not about gun control, though, but about how ideas about reality are formed, and then tightened. In Connecticut, as well as other densely populated areas, more laws and more government control has been escalating for decades. In one way it makes sense - more people bump into others, necessitating laws that resolve certain conflicts. But it is more about a feed-back mechanism than anything else - if more laws are good, then more government control is good. The mentality of the lawmakers is thus formed, and the population often becomes like a victim of a boa constrictor - with every breath out, the snake squeezes a little more, until finally no breath can be taken. Thus we get a natural progression, and one that is almost certainly inevitable, barring intervention of some kind, sometimes even revolution. So inevitable was this thought to be by the American founders that they purposefully hampered the abilities of the government, making one section fight against another for power - leading to inefficiency, but also to a check on power consolidation. So strong was this idea that Jefferson thought it good that we have a revolution every generation or two.
The same is at work in our consensus about reality. This is not about the reality of a chair, say, although it could be; but more about how the chair and the house and the tree and people and so on fit together. We start from a consensus - maybe newly formed by a Copernican revolution of some sort, or the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. In the wake, a new premise about reality is formed, generally in response to the ashes of the old (we find this idea in Hegelian and Marxist dialectics). However, just as in politics, there is a kernel or tendency in the consensus that is born to grow and consolidate. In neo-Marxism, the kernel is always POWER, and so it often seems in hierarchical societies, but this is not always, or even often, the case. It could be a vision of humanity and its place in the Cosmos. In Christendom, this led to certain concepts of the Divine Right of Kings, and an attack of apoplexy when Copernicus offered the realm a heliocentric universe. In time, new paradigms would grow that reacted to, rather than dovetailed with, Christendom. Thus our place in history.
The Aztecs had a concept of a devouring world, one that required the life of humans for life to continue. This metastasized into massive formal rituals of slaughter, some including a hundred thousand victims or more. It so terrified the satellites of this empire that they willingly sided with Cortez to bring down the Aztecs, and bring in another form of tyranny - but anything, apparently, was better than what they had.
This reality progression works on the individual level as well. Many authors discussed in this blog talk about the "disenchantment" of the modern world, a world modeled by the rejection of theocracy. I have personally found this to be true. Living with autonomous Indians of the Amazon area, I found them to be childlike - not because they were immature, but because they were open to wonder. We have lost that. A working progression has affected us, and like all progressions, will run its course - into what, we can only guess.
The discussion of UFO's come to this point. Certain people in our world hierarchies know that a full knowledge of aliens in our world (let us take for granted that they exist, for now) would shatter the flat but known and manipulable mentality of modern societies. They would. The idea, then, has been to marginalize anyone with more than a passing belief in them - especially those who have actually witnessed them. While the reality of aliens might not be firm, the reality of others who say they have experience them certainly is - and so is their marginalization.
Beyond UFOs, though, and science and history, is the indisputable fact that our reality is shaped by consensus. Today, we believe OTHERS have been shaped - primitives, North Koreans, Jihadists - but certainly not us. We have, at last, the truth, dreary as it is. But we do not, and regularly dismiss facts that do not fit in with this flat but predictable mentality. But it is not whole, and somewhere, we know it, as people always do who are brought face to face with their marginal reality systems. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson thought that our entire thought process included all the fundamental realities of nature - as we ourselves are natural - and that we choose, for various reasons, only certain elements to form a manageable whole of sorts. But the other intuitions of truth remain, buried within, striving to get out.
Our current dead-end is just this, disenchantment. We grow tired of it, of the knick-knacks and machines and games that try to quell our boredom. This, too, shall pass. What comes next is, again, not knowable, but we can help it along by searching for Bateson's inner sense, the whole that makes us part of the true, greater reality. FK
Several years ago, I had a conversation with a neighbor about guns. As her husband is a regular hunter, I brought up the notion by some that concealed carry laws make for a vast increase in gun crime - what is often called a "Wild West" scenario. I mentioned that everywhere that this law has been enacted, gun related crime has either stayed the same or decreased. She replied, "I know - but it shouldn't!" That was her argument for gun control.
This essay is not about gun control, though, but about how ideas about reality are formed, and then tightened. In Connecticut, as well as other densely populated areas, more laws and more government control has been escalating for decades. In one way it makes sense - more people bump into others, necessitating laws that resolve certain conflicts. But it is more about a feed-back mechanism than anything else - if more laws are good, then more government control is good. The mentality of the lawmakers is thus formed, and the population often becomes like a victim of a boa constrictor - with every breath out, the snake squeezes a little more, until finally no breath can be taken. Thus we get a natural progression, and one that is almost certainly inevitable, barring intervention of some kind, sometimes even revolution. So inevitable was this thought to be by the American founders that they purposefully hampered the abilities of the government, making one section fight against another for power - leading to inefficiency, but also to a check on power consolidation. So strong was this idea that Jefferson thought it good that we have a revolution every generation or two.
The same is at work in our consensus about reality. This is not about the reality of a chair, say, although it could be; but more about how the chair and the house and the tree and people and so on fit together. We start from a consensus - maybe newly formed by a Copernican revolution of some sort, or the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. In the wake, a new premise about reality is formed, generally in response to the ashes of the old (we find this idea in Hegelian and Marxist dialectics). However, just as in politics, there is a kernel or tendency in the consensus that is born to grow and consolidate. In neo-Marxism, the kernel is always POWER, and so it often seems in hierarchical societies, but this is not always, or even often, the case. It could be a vision of humanity and its place in the Cosmos. In Christendom, this led to certain concepts of the Divine Right of Kings, and an attack of apoplexy when Copernicus offered the realm a heliocentric universe. In time, new paradigms would grow that reacted to, rather than dovetailed with, Christendom. Thus our place in history.
The Aztecs had a concept of a devouring world, one that required the life of humans for life to continue. This metastasized into massive formal rituals of slaughter, some including a hundred thousand victims or more. It so terrified the satellites of this empire that they willingly sided with Cortez to bring down the Aztecs, and bring in another form of tyranny - but anything, apparently, was better than what they had.
This reality progression works on the individual level as well. Many authors discussed in this blog talk about the "disenchantment" of the modern world, a world modeled by the rejection of theocracy. I have personally found this to be true. Living with autonomous Indians of the Amazon area, I found them to be childlike - not because they were immature, but because they were open to wonder. We have lost that. A working progression has affected us, and like all progressions, will run its course - into what, we can only guess.
The discussion of UFO's come to this point. Certain people in our world hierarchies know that a full knowledge of aliens in our world (let us take for granted that they exist, for now) would shatter the flat but known and manipulable mentality of modern societies. They would. The idea, then, has been to marginalize anyone with more than a passing belief in them - especially those who have actually witnessed them. While the reality of aliens might not be firm, the reality of others who say they have experience them certainly is - and so is their marginalization.
Beyond UFOs, though, and science and history, is the indisputable fact that our reality is shaped by consensus. Today, we believe OTHERS have been shaped - primitives, North Koreans, Jihadists - but certainly not us. We have, at last, the truth, dreary as it is. But we do not, and regularly dismiss facts that do not fit in with this flat but predictable mentality. But it is not whole, and somewhere, we know it, as people always do who are brought face to face with their marginal reality systems. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson thought that our entire thought process included all the fundamental realities of nature - as we ourselves are natural - and that we choose, for various reasons, only certain elements to form a manageable whole of sorts. But the other intuitions of truth remain, buried within, striving to get out.
Our current dead-end is just this, disenchantment. We grow tired of it, of the knick-knacks and machines and games that try to quell our boredom. This, too, shall pass. What comes next is, again, not knowable, but we can help it along by searching for Bateson's inner sense, the whole that makes us part of the true, greater reality. FK
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