On a Few of the Many Varieties of Codes and Deceptive Behaviors in History

Buckminster Fuller writes about the earliest Polynesian navigators, who were wizards who learned to sail East to West against the winds, with secret knowledge that was only shared orally with their sons, or coded in their chants: 

"Knowing all about boats/These navigator priests were the only people/Who knew that the Earth was spherical,/That the Earth is a closed system/With its myriad resources chartable./But being water people,/They kept their charts in their heads/And relayed the information/To their navigator progeny/Exclusively in esoterical,/Legendary, symbolical codings/Embroidered into their chants."- Synergetics, pp.749-751

I see this as an example of a small group who protect their knowledge because it was powerful and probably because it was thrilling for small-group cohesion.

-----------------------------------

How do we decode writing such as what you're looking at right now? In 11th century Fatimid Egypt, under science-loving Al-Hakim (who had become ruler at age 11, but then disappeared mysteriously during a solitary walk 25 years later), Cairo was the apex of learning in the world: lots of trade with Mediterranean neighbors, a fearsome army recruited from Sudanese, Turks and Berbers, the Polynesian's sailing code long since cracked. Among the brains that drained toward Cairo at this historical moment was al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Western scholars called him "Alhazen"), from Basra. One project was to explain perception. Al-Haytham had read the recent translations of Aristotle and agreed that things we see enter the eye via the air, but al-Haytham elaborated with more physiological and mathematical suppositions about how perception happens. Furthermore, he said we perceive via a faculty of judgement, after inference. Pure sensation was different from perception, the latter requiring a conscious, voluntary act on our part. Here was a theory of gradations of consciousness, 900 years before Korzybski: there was first pure sensation (whatever we experience before words, analogous to Korzybski's "event level"); then we voluntarily attend to some phenomena (say, paying attention to letters and words and sentences on a page: perception); then we "decipher" the words, and finally: we are reading. Al-Haytham died in 1038. (I mention the 20th century polymath Korzybski; in the first half of the 18th century the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista Vico wrote, "People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner stress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind."- The New Science, #53

                                 al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, b.965

                                 wrote possibly the first great work in 

                                 optics, influenced Roger Bacon and 

                                 Leonardo da Vinci

Roughly 200 years later, under Europe's Catholic mullahs (led by Pope Clement IV), Roger Bacon - one of those guys interested in everything - was interested in optics. He'd read Al-Haytham, but was keeping it on the QT and yet still got persecuted for "unorthodox teaching." There were a lot of Churchmen who insisted rather violently that scientific research was dangerous to Church dogma (They have made some progress since then...). Bacon explained to the Pope how optics/perception/reading probably worked. Bacon and al-Haytham had both realized it's got to be far more complex than they'd suspected. In 11th century Islam, al-Haytham was not persecuted. Roger Bacon, soon after trying to explain to the Pope roughly the same theory, found himself in a cell. 

250 or so years later, Leonardo da Vinci was interested in this same problem of decoding perception and reading. But he was smart enough to know he could get in trouble: he wrote about it in his notebooks in a secret code that could only be read when held up to a mirror. 

It's only in the last 80 years that we've gotten a thick neurobiological account of how reading occurs and there's still interesting problems being worked out at this minute.

------------------------------

When looking into codes and ciphers, codes are one thing, ciphers another; all translation from one language to another is codework; any language you can't read can function as a code to crack; at one time only priests, kings, and scribes/accountants knew how to write and read: for everyone else in the culture "writing" was a code. 

O! So many codes! And right out in the open. If only we could crack/hack/decipher/decode...

-----------------------------------

Not long ago I yet again re-watched one of those films from the Great Age of Hollywood Paranoia (c.1971-1976): Three Days of the Condor, in which Robert Redford plays a CIA agent whose specialty is reading novels, looking for codes embedded in them. These codes would apparently qualify as steganography. Messages hidden within other messages...and how do you know I'm not doing that right now? (If I'm doing it, please take my word for it: it's all in good, clean fun.)

I remember when I first saw Condor: I thought Redford's job was a fiction-writer's fancy. But apparently it's a real thing, and being taken more and more seriously by...yes, CIA, but all sorts of others working in the (not so) Great Game.

What if some of our best conspiracy writers and novelists of exquisite paranoia were leaving code in their books that hadn't yet been cracked? I mean...it could happen, right? Maybe not, but we never know. Let's not rule it out completely. Which reminds me of a passage in Don DeLillo's haunting, hilarious, deeply paranoid and postmodern White Noise. The main character - who is a professor specializing in "Hitler Studies"? - his ex-wife works for the CIA:

She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. She spoke Spanish to someone on the telephone, was a hyperactive mother, shining with an eerie stormlight intensity. The long novels kept arriving in the mail. 

It was curious how I kept stumbling into the company of lives in intelligence. Dana worked part-time as a spy. Tweedy came from a distinguished old family that had a long tradition of spying and counterspying and she was now married to a high-level jungle operative. Janet, before retiring to the ashram, was a foreign-currency analyst who did research for a secret group of advanced theorists connected to some controversial think-tank. All she told me is that they never met in the same place twice. (p.213)

Maybe it's just me, but "high-level jungle operative" makes me laff. 

White Noise is one of DeLillo's short novels, but there are some really "long serious novels with coded structures." Hmmmm...

---------------------------------

Speaking of postmodernists, Douglas Rushkoff, in his wonderful book Program or Be Programmed, writes that the postmodernists were right to be suspicious of language and "reality," but they didn't go far enough: they hadn't accounted for the hidden biases of code writers whose codes were embedded deep within our digital gadgets. (see pp.83-84, ibid)

-------------------------------

Well, the pre-postmodernists, often called simply Modernists? A few of them left works so cryptic (and therefore threatening to dull minds, like J. Edgar Hoover's), that they became suspect. 

Even though James Joyce never set foot on Unistat soil, Hoover saw him as a threat. Joyce had an FBI file. Because someone in Joyce's extended circle was a known communist, Joyce was suspected as one, too. (He was more of an individualist-anarchist of some sort.) From Claire Culleton's Joyce and the G-Men:

Even as early as 1920, Joyce had been plagued by rumors about him and his work, and he was (laughably) reputed to be a spy for the Austrians, the British, and the Italians. He even complained to his brother Stanislaus that Ulysses was believed to be a prearranged German code; Ezra Pound had heard that "British censorship suspected Ulysses of being a code." (p.45, Culleton)

Anyone who's looked at Finnegans Wake for 5 minutes might wonder what the eternally paranoid agents of Control thought Joyce must have been up to. If we go back to the early distinction between codes and ciphers, and al-Haytham's and Roger Bacon's and Leonardo's forays into human perception and reading, well, then surely Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are written in code, only in a different semantic sense than what an asshole like J. Edgar Hoover would sense as "code."

Similarly, Ezra Pound, after being captured by the Allies in Italy, had to answer to the charge that his Cantos were some sort of code. (see one of my earlier posts on codes, HERE, skip down to "Modernist Investigative Poets Are Suspects (By Definition?)"

-----------------------------------------

The great cryptologist David Kahn writes about the enigma of the "emotional bases of cryptology," reminding us that "Freud stated that the motivation for learning, for the acquisition of knowledge, derives ultimately from the child's impulse to see the hidden sexual organs of adults and other children. If curiosity is a sublimation of this, then cryptanalysis may be even more positively a manifestation of voyeurism." (p.755, The Code Breakers) Kahn follows with a long line of later psychoanalysts who basically agreed with Freud, and many who challenged his idea. Nevertheless, I find the idea cosmically funny. I mean: if Freud's right - and I don't think he is, but anyway - then if you've read this far and feel like you acquired some knowledge from the OG, 'tis only 'cuz you're some sort of very well-practiced voyeur! Which reminds me of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

Fairly early in the book, you'll recall, Allied spies have noticed that US Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop has sexual conquests all around London, and they're followed by V-2 rocket hit - in the same place he had sex - a couple/few days later. They don't know why, but there are theories. Rockets and hard-ons...Slothrop's penis must have a "code" to crack...it - his dick - was possibly encoded by...who? Does he know? Slothrop seems to not know. How are they going to crack this code? Talk about an Enigma!

                                       psychedelický grafický umělecké dílo Bob Campbell

Solo Flight: On Masturbation

May is International Masturbation Month, because hey, why not? You've probably already celebrated it without even knowing it. I say glibly "hey why not?," but its genesis had to do with Unistat Surgeon General under Bill Clinton, Joycelyn Elders, saying publicly that masturbation is a safe way to explore sexuality and (gasp!) maybe we should tell kids that in school. She also had enlightened ideas about drug use, so she had to go. Unistat was and still is chock-full of anti-sex hypocrites and sexual fascists and "morally correct" authoritarians with major sticks up their asses.

So, in comparatively enlightened San Francisco, the response by sex-positive activists was to make May the month to celebrate masturbation, about which James Joyce once praised its "wonderful availability," and try to turn the cultural tide against the hypocrisy and lies and fear-mongering of anti-masturbationists. It's been almost 22 years since the Erisian Ms. Elders was forced out, and it could be that she will be talked about as a cultural hero, a sexual freedom fighter, in a decade or so. It's in our hands, ladies and germs, so get to it!
========================================
Singular Pleasures by Harry Mathews

Q: What is the question to which the answer is: 9 W?

A: Mr. Wagner, do you spell your name with a V?

I remember this from an interview with OULIPO member Harry Mathews (b.1930), often cited as the sole American member of that group. Mathews has talked about how Stravinsky and Bartok opened up his mind to breaking the rules in writing poetry, when he was 13. So far my favorite book by Mathews is his Singular Pleasures, which is nothing but 61 very short literary snapshots of people masturbating, all over the world. Compared to most of his work, it's extremely accessible, but I find it sweet and daring and frank and funny and therefore liberating.

A native woman has disappeared into the jungle upstream from Manaus. She is alone. She wants to do what she had so often done until the day of her fifteenth birthday, ten years before, when she became a woman: straddle once again the resilient trunk of a young rubber-band tree.

A man of sixty-three belonging to the Toronto chapter of MAID successfully masturbates in a slaughterhouse while steers are being killed and disembowelled. His achievement is not recognized after it is discovered that people of both sexes bribe their way into the slaughterhouse every day in order to perform this very act.

A twenty-four-year-old cellist is sitting naked on a stool in her bedroom in Manilla. Her legs are spread; her left hand pulls back the folds of her vulva; her right hand is drawing the tip of the 'cello bow over her clitoris in fluttering tremolo.

Somewhere north of the Bering Straits, sitting on the edge of an ice floe, his face impassive, all movement concealed beneath thicknesses of pelt and fur, an Eskimo male of thirty-one is bringing himself to an orgasm of devastating intensity in the slickness of dissolving blubber.

Mathews's OULIPO colleague Georges Perec - perhaps best known for A Void, a novel accomplished without use of the letter e, which he tied down in his typewriter - called Singular Pleasures "a great ecumenical work."

                                              Joycelyn Elders, heretic     
=============================================

You Too Can Become a "Solosexual"

That's how a gay man with the pseudonym "Jason Armstrong" is describing himself. A "bate sesh" should take three hours, or why bother? He lights candles, looks at himself in a mirror, jerks off alone with other guys online (a very special way of being alone?), just really takes his solo pleasure seriously.

His spirit is with the sex-positive female activists who started Masturbation Month is the wake of the Elders travesty, saying he talks publicly about masturbation (asserting it was more difficult coming out gay than as a confirmed masturbator) because a "discourse about sexuality that affirms us" is like a utopia. I was moved by his drive to alter his consciousness via jerking off; getting into the "batehole," which is "That place where you completely lose yourself to the experience and broach another consciousness." In another place he says it's like "flying," which suggests I should take my own masturbations more seriously.

Some reading this may think about Armstrong and say, "Come off it," but I think he's describing an essential move away from ordinary reality. We all do this. The sociologist Peter Berger called these altered states "finite provinces of meaning.":

"Now, there is one reality that has a privileged character in consciousness, and it is precisely the reality of being wide awake in ordinary, everyday life. That is, this reality is experienced as being more real, and as more real most of the time, as compared with other experienced realities (such as those of dreams or of losing oneself in music)."

Berger says his mentor in phenomenological sociology, Alfred Schutz, called the primary reality the "paramount reality" and departures from the paramount reality were "enclaves," but Schutz also used William James's term "subuniverses."

I know for some readers this discussion has taken a rather odd turn, but it's my own weirdo turn of mind, so, here's more of Berger writing about subuniverses/finite provinces of meaning/enclaves, and Armstrong's "batehole":

"These are not abstruse theoretical considerations but rather are explications of very common experiences. Suppose one falls asleep - perhaps while working at one's desk - and has a vivid dream. The reality of the dream begins to pale as soon as one returns to a wakeful state, and one is then conscious of having temporarily left the mundane reality of everyday life. That mundane reality remains the point of departure and orientation, and when one comes back to it, this return is commonly described as 'coming back to reality' - that is, precisely, coming back to the paramount reality."
-all Berger quotes from The Heretical Imperative, p.35

To get into Armstrong's "batehole" is to depart from your paramount reality and enter a finite province of meaning, or subuniverse. And you thought you were merely "rubbing one out"!

                                                    Prof. Ingvild Gilhus    

                                                                                     ===========================================

Amazon Is There For You

There's a LOT of nasty things I could say about this company, but now is not the time. Rather I will link to two items and see what you make of them.

1. A 55-gallon drum of Passion Lubes, Natural Water-Based Lubricant. No comment, save for the wonder of who buys this and how it's used. And the possible scenarios, one of which I just noticed flitted through my mind: a scene that makes anything from Caligula look like a child's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.

2.) Kleenex Everyday Facial Tissues, Pack of 36. Since 2013, consumer James O. Thach has received over 10,000 "review helpful" votes, and if you read his review you can see why. The warm reception for his review probably fits best into the third of Ingvild Gilhus's three theories of laughter: the "relief theory," which says we laugh and feel relief for being able to express something over that which is forbidden. Or: be an audience to someone who says forbidden things. Robert Anton Wilson told me he thought this was one of his favorite theories of laughter, and why humor must be used if you're going to discuss taboo issues. To me, George Carlin was the master of this stuff.

=============================================

Fapping in the Great Books

Wikipedia does a good job on meat-beating, flogging the bishop, wanking, self-polluting, jerkin' the gherkin, beating around the bush, polishing the pearl, muffin buffin', roughing up the suspect, engaging in a menage a moi, and juicing. (These are just some of hundred-plus euphemisms I picked up from Spears's dictionary of Slang and Euphemism, and this Internet article. If you have a favorite that's not mentioned here, lay it on me in the comments.)

Kant and Voltaire seemed to buy Tissot's idiot ideas about self-pleasure. If you didn't read the Wiki (I don't blame ya), you're probably still not surprised that, soon after the Romans (who thought you ought to fap or schlick with your left hand, something sinister about that), masturbation suddenly caused idiocy, cancer, weakened spines, moral degeneracy, blindness...really: just about any disease you can think of. Mark Twain had a negative attitude, probably 'cuz he got more pussy than he knew what to do with. William James, it is theorized by scholars, may have associated it with epilepsy due to a haunting experience he had after visiting a sanitarium.

Freud thought masturbation was like addictive drugs, and represented an inability to face reality, according to his fantastically wrong and yet interesting and brilliant and influential Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality. I bet he jerked it a hour before writing that, but who knows?

Not until around 1897 do we get Havelock Ellis, one of the great early sexologists, who called BS on all the fear and danger about masturbation. By the time of Kinsey in the 1940s? Everyone does it! By 1972 the AMA calls masturbation "normal." The great renegade psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said that masturbation was the "disease of the 19th century" and the "cure" of the 20th. But if it's 1994 and you've been appointed by the POTUS, you can't say what Ellis, Kinsey, the AMA, and Szasz say: you get canned. (Tonight, or this morning, or during lunch break, do it for Joycelyn!)

Sin, vice, self-pollution, etc: how in the hell did this idiocy stick with us for so long? How much suffering it caused! It's wonderful and normal and safe and free, and yet Authority had almost everyone believing it's HEINOUS! (This symptom of the emotional plague is still with us, but I do see an...<ahem> abatement.)

Friends, let's not let Joycelyn Elders's termination be in vain! To paraphrase Ben Franklin, "Fap proudly."

Interestingly, David Foster Wallace thought a lot like Freud. (In other places DFW called himself a "puritan.") In the book Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, about writer David Lipsky's time with DFW just after Infinite Jest came out, Lipsky's book being made into the very moving little film The End of the Tour, DFW says masturbation is part of the addictive "pleasure continuum" along with drugs and TV. -pp.84-85 I read this and realized, "Oh my god I'm addicted!" On p.128 DFW tells Lipsky that people have wet dreams even if they've been masturbating, which I think may only apply to males, aged 14-19? I do not consider DFW a sexologist, but I do consider him part of the continuum of the Great Books.

Speaking of the canon, Rabelais joked about masturbation (which I will call right now, "Being one's own best friend"), and my friend Mark Williams, who, in writing a paper for his degree in English from UCLA, on Tristram Shandy, told me he had to jump through some hoops in order to get his hands on 1716's Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution And All Its Frightful Consequences In Both Sexes, Considered: With Spiritual and Physical Advice To Those Who Have Already Injured Themselves By This Abominable Practice, by the - I'm not making any of this up - Dr. Balthazar Bekker.

'Cuz in Tristram Shandy there are jerk-off jokes galore.

And hey check out Gulliver's Travels. Swift gets into it on the first page, repeating Gulliver's benefactor's name "Master Bates," three times. Because it was hilarious back then.

But things evolve.

When in the late 1990s, after Madonna and Britney Spears tongue-kissed on the MTV Music Awards, conservatives got all lathered up in their moralic acid, and the comedian Jon Lovitz was on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, when Conan asked Lovitz what he thought about the kiss. Lovitz complained that the kiss wasn't long enough, because by the time he'd pulled his pants down to his ankles, it was over...And I (the OG) call this progress!

No, but seriously: I knew I was addicted around age 15, and I hope they never find a cure.

Men? You Wanna Stay Healthy? Jerk It Every Day

If you read about the Xtian Era of masturbation terrors, you'll see we've done a 180:
"Masturbation Actually Has Health Benefits"
"Is Masturbation Good For You?"
"Good News For High Frequency Masturbators"
"New Study Confirms Link of Frequent Orgasms To Lower Prostate Cancer Risk"

So, you may be a confirmed Ladie's Man, but on your off days, even though you may not approve of it "morally," just do it. (Progress!)

Sir Francis Crick Anecdote

"Finally, a decade ago, I was at the home of a friend when someone visited him in order to borrow some pornography - it was the late Francis Crick, who in 1962 won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his seminal (yes I said seminal) discovery with James Watson of the double-helix structure of DNA.  In a best-selling 1968 book, The Double Helix." - One Hand Jerking, Paul Krassner, p.95 Krassner thought it ironic that "DNA" is now so publicly equated with semen.

Other Sources I Dipped Into
"Welcome To The Masturbate-a-thon," by Paul Krassner

Interview with Prof. Thomas Laqueur of UC Berkeley, who wrote the end-all scholarly book on the history of masturbation.

3 min video with popular science writer Mary Roach, about female masturbation

"Is Female Masturbation Really The Last Sexual Taboo?": a review of a Taschen book titled La Petite Mort

Feminist writer Amanda Hess says women don't masturbate as often as men for logistical reasons

Whitey Bulger Gets Solitary For Masturbation (Sure, Bulger is a vicious murderer/gangster, but I thought this was monstrous; every prison official should have to do a week of solitary before they sentence someone else to solitary confinement. It's fucking medieval, and just plain evil: Let's stop it! - OG)

                                                   Kunst von Bob Campbell

Stranger Than We Can Imagine, by John Higgs: A Review

A magisterial "alternative" Tale of the Tribe-like history of the 20th century, and something that was desperately needed. Higgs has produced a book that somehow manages to function as a page-turner and to speak to three different classes of readers:

1. Those quite well-read folks over 30 who perhaps need to view the century they were born in from such an "alternative" angle Higgs provides.

2. Those of us over 30 who have tended to assemble a narrative of the 20th century from the occasional history book, TV, radio, newspapers, and now Internet. Like water to fish, we all lived in a world where individualism was one of the primary values. Higgs shows us how vital the movement toward individualism was in that chaotic century, and how we must learn to see how the downside of individualism as a primary value has led us homo saps into the quandary we're in now. This is a real eye-opener for many of us.

3. Those born after 1990, who probably feel "how odd" that people lived in a world without massive digital connectivity. Higgs shows them how uncanny, how weird, how what we found out about ourselves in the 20th century was indeed "stranger than we can imagine," and Higgs reminds us where he got this phrase. After a brief discussion about HG Wells and how, around 1900, Wells was able to predict many seemingly amazing things that did indeed come true, proving Wells as one of the great forecasters of all time, "But there was a lot Wells wasn't able to predict: relativity, nuclear weapons, quantum mechanics, microchips, postmodernism and so forth. These were not so much unforeseen as unforeseeable. His predications had much in common with the expectations of the scientific world, in that he extrapolated from what was then known. In the words commonly assigned to the English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the universe would prove to be not just stranger than we imagine, but, 'stranger than we can imagine.'" While I read this book, I thought of young, smart artistically-minded people I know, and how I wanted to press this book into their hands and say, "You will really love this one. Trust me on this."

Stranger Than We Can Imagine is written from the standpoint of the generalist intellectual who is not beholden to a larger institution, and I see Higgs as a good example of the type of intellectual Karl Mannheim wrote about in his Ideology and Utopia, still the ur-text in the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim wrote of a "relatively classless stratum" of "free-floating"thinkers who, because they were not beholden to institutions, probably had the most valid overview of social life and current ideas. Higgs's erudition is quite great and yet he wears it lightly, and I found the book difficult to put down once I started it. Whether he's discussing Einstein and how artists contemporary with him who couldn't understand Einstein's math yet were still projecting a worldview that demanded a relativistic /multi-perspectivalist view, or a stirring encapsulation of the horrible irony of the space race (Jack Parsons, Werner von Braun and Sergei Korolev were visionaries who ended up beholden to nations who demanded their research be used to develop killingry, or hi-tech nuclear missiles)...there are no dull moments in this book.

There are chapters on chaos mathematics (Higgs makes it understandable to the most math-phobic among us), the advent of "teenagers" (a word that wasn't coined until 1940!), feminism and the rise of "free sex" with its misunderstandings and missed opportunities, post-Hiroshima nihilism and existentialism, how quantum mechanics showed that uncertainty is baked into the human condition, and the function of Freud's metaphor of the "Id" as it relates to fascism, advertising, individualism and alienation. The author manages to thread together all of these disparate ideas, which I find marvelous.

Higgs's work is vital in a world filled with paramilitary death squads answering to corporations, nuclear weapons, and banks/corporations that behave like psychopathic individuals and are in many cases more powerful than many countries and not subject to criminal law to boot. In a world of ISIS and the prospect of someone like Donald Trump as leader of the free world, we citizens in 2016, bombarded by information about our comparatively "little worlds," need broad overviews of How We Got Here. In a very substantive sense, this book can function as a map that will help us avert catastrophe. Higgs cites climate change and that the 21st century appears to be the penultimate century "in terms of Western civilisation." Id est, it's curtains for humanity in the 22nd c. But: "That's certainly the position if we look at current trends and project forward. We can be sure, though, that there will be unpredictable events and discoveries ahead, and that may give us hope."

Most of the books I've read on 20th century history address relativity, cubism, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, cultural anthropology, quantum mechanics, postmodernism (which Higgs compares to New Age thought in a provocative section), neuroscience and perception, and the "linguistic turn" in philosophy as a world that found itself foundation-less. Or, as Stephen Dedalus thinks in Joyce's 1922 Ulysses, we can never be certain about our big ideas, because they are "ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." Higgs uses the metaphor of the omphalos. Is the ultimate Source for our normative claims the Church? Our "selves"? Our money? Our country and our ways? Logic? Rationality and science? All of these were severely undermined during the Roaring 20th century, some moreso than others.

The deepest structure of Higgs's argument about what just happened to all of us in the 20th century, and where we might be going seems of the utmost importance in our understanding of our prospects as a species. With the demise of at least 30 centuries of rigid hierarchical institutions that governed every aspect of our lives falling apart at the start of the 20th century, individualism reigned. But an overweening individualist ethos turned out to cause more problems than it was worth. What arose at the end of the century was something to combat it: massively networked sociality and constant feedback and accountability, and those who grew up in this digital world seem to intuitively understand game theory: the zero-sum games we're running (especially with banks/corporations and politics) are no longer sustainable: the generation born after 1990 implicitly understands that we must all come together, under no hierarchy, to solve problems, then disperse back to our own lives. The only semblance of omphalos we have is the articulation of our own values and the idea that all of us are in this together. This younger generation - certainly younger than me - may be the best card history has dealt us. Let's hope Higgs is right, 'cuz if he isn't, we probably are living in the penultimate century for human Being.

It has shimmering prose, luminous details, and a rhythm I can dance to. Oh yea: it could also help save our species, and I'm only about 1/3 joking. You can't afford NOT to read it. 23 stars out of a possible 20.

Paranoia: A Few Items

Today I was mindstreaming through Webstuff, and every now and then, if you're like me, you approach your computer with some intent: you want to verify a quote, see if you can get a good deal on a used whatsis, return that email you've "been meaning to get to," find out who so-and-so is, check your Facebook while not facing your checkbook, und so weiter. And you find three hours have gone by and somehow you'd read a number of things you probably could not have guessed you'd encounter before you sat down and entered the hive-mind of the Web. Terence McKenna once said that a god is "somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with." Sounds like Google to me, but maybe I'm feeling paranoid.

Dr. Olney
Amid this extended yoga of info-flow and effortless, painless lost time, I encountered the story of Dr. Richard K. Olney. He died very recently of ALS/Lou Gehrig's Disease. You know: the Thing Stephen Hawking has. It eats up your nerves that serve your muscles. Your mind stays intact, but your overall deterioration just gets worse and worse until the muscles that keep your lungs going give out.

The thing is: Dr. Olney was one of the world's experts on ALS. And then he got it. Here's an interview with him from 2005, after he diagnosed himself.

Well, the Statistician in me says, "Yea, well, it's creepy but statistically quite plausible, blah blah blah." And while I know that's probably correct, I think a lot - if not most - of us are wired to irrationally respond to the emotional aspect of fear of a dread disease, the emotional and intellectual concentration on that disease as it manifests in fellow humans for many years, and then contracting the disease itself. There's not a scintilla of evidence that ALS is contagious. But our paralogical thinking styles can lead us to entertain ideas about being "intimate" with something very dangerous, which in time devours us.

This reminds me of a well-known phenomena regarding medical students: they are in a sort of intellectual boot camp for years, chronically sleep-deprived, and very intimate with blood, trauma, screaming, violent patients, cadavers and death. And all sorts of hideous, heinous diseases they are forced to read about in their textbooks. And even the staunchest ones are subject to self-diagnosing with a dramatically fatal, if rare disease. They'll have been up for 27 straight hours going to lectures and lab assignments then studying for three tests the next day, glance in the mirror, notice their skin looks splotchy, and immediately diagnose Bokonowski's Disease (I just made that up...I think), rather than think, "I need about nine hour's sleep."

If you get a vicious headache and think, "I have a brain tumor," you probably have a headache that will go away soon. You're stressed out. A tumor? Where do you get that? Catastrophize much?

A "zebra" in medical student lore, is a product of this. When you hear hoofbeats outside your window, we know it makes sense to assume we're hearing a horse. Why would it be a zebra? Because zebras are more dramatic, and when you're stressed out, you "hear zebras" too. And assume tumors, which do exist and do happen to people, but it's not likely you've got one. (Some of us will readily admit this rational thought comes easier at some times rather than others...which sorta feeds into my point.)

It used to be labeled hypochondria, but seems now to be referred to as - at least with regards medical students - nosophobia. But if you're not a medical student, sorry, you're a hypochondriac. Welcome to the club! Now, before you sit down, please go wash your hands...

I wonder about our information-drenched culture and its propensity to heighten our...perceptions. And hear zebras. But zebras do exist...

Whatever we hear: RIP, Dr. Olney. Tough break.

Out-Manchurian Candidating The Manchurian Candidate
What a fantastic, phantasmagorically paranoid film John Frankenheimer made of Richard Condon's 1959 Cold War paranoia book; I liked the book, too. But I read it only after I'd seen Frankenheimer's film about seven times. I think I even saw the remake before I read Condon.

                                           Philip K. Dick, native of Berkeley, California

There's another 1959 work of fiction that isn't as famous, but to me, it's more fantastically paranoid than Condon. It's by Philip K. Dick, and it's called Time Out of Joint. Here's the basic plot, so if you plan to read it, skip ahead, or rather, SPOILER ALERT!:

A guy in 1950s suburban Unistat drinks beer and, oddly, seems to support himself by being a very adept player at a puzzle-game that the local newspaper runs, called "Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?" He starts to receive unlisted programs on his ham radio. He finds a telephone book that has numbers that aren't normal, aren't supposed to "be." He begins to freak out in suburbia, in an already paranoid Cold War era of bomb shelters in people's back yards, etc. The main character, last name Gumm, begins to believe he's living in some sort of fake world. This is pretty weird, spooky stuff, but I haven't even gotten to the best parts: it turns out it's really 1996, and Earth is at war with someone who has colonized the moon. (Newt Gingrich, trying to realize his first phase of Galactic Triumph, channelling Philip K. Dick? Now who's paranoid?)

The Earthians know Gumm has for some reason the uncanny ability to predict the next hostile bombing by the moon colonists, and he's become sympathetic to the moon colonists while still living on Earth. So the military-industrial complex creates a fake environment and drugs him and provides him with the newspaper puzzles in order to obtain the knowledge about the next bombings.

Let that scenario sink in before we move on.

Freudian Riff on Paranoia
Freud seemed, to lil' ol' me, to overintellectualize paranoia - which is funny in itself to me, because I see the hyperextended thought processes in a really good paranoid narrative as being a byproduct of something akin to too much analysis - but anyhoo: Freud's explanatory schema for paranoia, short version, goes something like this: somebody becomes fixated on something. Then aspects of the fixation are seen as somehow threatening, so the fixation becomes repressed. It stews in the unconscious, bringing out the juices of emotion there, but remains repressed. Then some sort of rupture occurs, and the emotions are reconstructed as an external perception and projected onto some object or event. "What was abolished internally returns from without." I forget if Freud was using cocaine at the time of this insight/formulation, or if he was maybe a bit overly spooked by Daniel Paul Schreber. What am I? A Freud expert? Let's move on...

Robert Sapolsky Anecdote
I've learned a lot from Prof. Sapolsky of Stanford, and in his book The Trouble With Testosterone there's a joke about diagnosing the paranoid schizophreniac. It goes like this:

Doctor (to patient): What do apples, bananas, and oranges have in common?

Patient: They're all wired for sound.

It's funny, aye. But if you've had a loved one who was a paranoid schizo, it's far, far too familiar. I had a brother who was a victim of this disease. The only thing I can think of that could be worse would be seeing your loved one dwindle away to Alzheimer's.

As a result of studying Sapolsky and a few others in his field, I've come to see almost all diseases on a continuum. I'm pretty weird, but somehow my other brother and I did not become full-blown like our brother did. Why? I really don't know. But it's safe to say: even if your genes are almost the "same," it's genes PLUS environment PLUS accidents/chance.

When we're talking paranoia, let's always be aware it's on a continuum. When I caught myself today thinking about Dr. Olney somehow "contracting" ALS from his thought-environment, I quickly dismissed the idea. Because I can, and with justifiable "reasons" that the majority of the more thoughtful and assumed "normal" population would accept. (Still...does that warrant justification? Oops!...) There are others who can't. They might not be able to shake the notion that Olney caught ALS via thought-beams emanating from the patients...Oy and ugh and sigh.

Fruitful Use of Paranoia: Hamlet, J.S. Mill, and Chomsky

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.

In Randy Allen Harris's terrific work on late 20th century linguistics, The Linguistics Wars, Harris writes about how Noam Chomsky seems to use paranoia fruitfully, and something along the lines of what John Stuart Mill meant when he said, "Both teachers and learners go to sleep at the post, when there is no enemy in the field." Harris surmises that "isolation and embattlement" have been psychological motivation for Chomsky's work as a linguist. When previous brilliant students have broken with him, he's held his ground, but used some of their ideas.

The gist of the Hamlet analogy with Chomsky is that he's so creative as a thinker you can substitute Chomsky for Hamlet, language or mind for cloud, and a rapidly changing core of bright and dedicated linguists for Polonius. 


And Noam's linguistic models have changed into weasels and whales. But, as Harris argues, this is how science tends to go. Aristotle and Ptolemy said the Earth was the center of the cosmos, and their followers agreed. Copernicus said Earth revolved around the sun, and his followers agreed. Why?

Robert Anton Wilson and Paranoia
In an interview with Michael Taft early in the 21st century, Wilson said that this childhood polio was behind the realization that all of his fictional characters have: that the universe is out to get them; they must find a way out of this horrifying mental state. As Wilson himself did.

This was a man who, as a Mad Scientist doing psychological experimentation on himself from roughly the period 1962-1976 to see how plastic and malleable the mind, his mind, was, had plenty of acquaintance with paranoia. At the end of the experiment his daughter was brutally murdered, and Wilson's experiments had nothing to do with the random act of violence. But, for him, it would, it seems, be very easy to fall prey to a debilitating, spiraling paranoia because of all the non-Aristotelian "logical" things that happened to him in his 14 year self-experiment.. He didn't. And I think the reasons why he didn't had to do with part of the 14 year mind change self-experiment, which always contained what he'd learned diligently studying logic, scientific experimentation and skepticism, philosophy, psychology, General Semantics and linguistics, and various forms of yoga and psychotherapies. He could do very deep Thelemic magick and psychedelic drugs, and write thick novels and read for many hours alone Finnegans Wake and Pound's Cantos and still keep it together.

A good place to start for a RAW neophyte interested in paranoia and how if manifests and how to deal with it would be Cosmic Trigger Vol 1. 

Of paranoia: he basically saw it as "a losing script." The paranoid will perceive phenomena in a confirmatory biased way madly; this cycle feeds upon itself and is no way to be happy, to put it mildly. Further, he used mythology to model paranoia as a Chapel Perilous in which one must be armed with inner tools - especially an educated skepticism or wide-ranging agnosticism - in which to make it outside the walls.

CAVEAT LECTOR (let the Reader beware): If you want to experiment with this, read as many conspiracy theories as you can for six months. Steep yourself in the deepest and most interesting - and possibly plausible? - conspiracy ideas and just keep reading, listening to conspiracy talk, reading more...you WILL become paranoid. It's highly likely you'll find yourself in your own Chapel Perilous. It is highly advised that the reader be well-practiced in breathing techniques, literary deconstruction, and some form of linguistics. But far better: an agnosticism towards just about everything.

            This is one of the last known photos of the mysterious Thomas Pynchon, born in 1937.

Pynchon's "Proverbs For Paranoids"
Here's a list, from Gravity's Rainbow. My favorite has always been, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

The Sociology of Knowledge: a Micro-View

A simple tripartite system, circular-causal, easily modeled as your own way of being, phenomenally, in the world.

I have randomly numbered each of the three parts, but any one can come first, second or third, as they are always interacting with each other. I hope you cop an intellectual buzz from this simple system, which you may find "profound," to varying degrees, depending on who's reading/thinking about it:

1.) Externalization: Everyone is pouring forth themselves, their "being" into the world, whether physically, or with mental activity. I'm doing it right now as I write this. "Reality" becomes a human-produced byproduct of externalization, and we cannot help ourselves. We externalize. It is an anthropological necessity. Whether you're building a treehouse, gossiping at a cocktail party, or planning an invasion of Yemen, you are externalizing.

2.) Objectivation: There seems something - call it "omnipresent hypnosis"? although some sociologists and other thinkers would vigorously dispute using "hypnosis" here - that has us constantly attaining the products of other people's physical and mental activity. Other people's externalizations flow through us and confront us - and, it seems the producers of externalizations themselves - as somehow "facts" that are external to all of us, and, further, appear as if in the order of the natural world, although there seems some crucial differences between these human-made "products" and oceans, butterflies, microbes, and the West Wind.

3.) Internalization: We take in other peoples' objectivated "reality," let it work around in our own nervous system, try to make sense of it all. We therefore transform that objectivized "reality" into part of our own subjective world. "It" becomes part of our consciousness, and then...see #1 above.

And on and on and on and on it goes, seemingly to some sort of eschaton...
------------------------------------
The above heavily indebted to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, but especially Berger. Both sociologists were heavily influenced by Alfred Schutz, yet another emigre from fascist Germany/Austria, who worked at The New School for Social Research in New York. Schutz was in turn heavily influenced by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and William James the great American pragmatist.

Husserl was very much influenced by Franz Brentano. Brentano influenced Sigmund Freud.

Freud seems to have been influenced by a plethora of the most interesting thinkers in Vienna and the entire European scene of the 1870s-80s, but also he seems to have chewed, swallowed and digested the entire Western canon, and then externalized himself with his books, his psychoanalysis, which in 2011 university life, seems to mostly be read by literary critics and teachers, historians, and other social scientists. Which seems ironic to me, because what he wanted was for his thought to be a "hard" physical science.

Say what you will about Sigmund Freud, but I applaud him for his heroic artistry as a cartographer of the human mind, an invisible landscape, and for pointing out the correct idea that most of what goes on in our nervous system is non-conscious, or at least not available to ourselves.

This simple/profound phenomenological model and daisy-chain brought to you by:

The Overweening Generalist, blogging since May 6. See the OG on most any Internet connexion!