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     
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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.

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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

Cosmic Schmucks: Addenda in Rhetoric, Metaphor and Digression

Just a few items and then I'll let you get back to your porn. But first, if you'll permit me:

Addenda on Robert Anton Wilson's "Cosmic Schmuck" Principle
I recently read a summary of academic philosopher and specialist in argumentation theory Daniel H. Cohen's TED talk (linked in this article). The most interesting thing to me was that, in the "argument as war" metaphor, the "winner" of the argument wins ego strokes, maybe some prestige, or maybe a firmer conviction that s(he)'s "right." What does the "loser" get? The loser learned a better way to think about an idea. (I am bracketing those who are truly interested in thinking better about topics from those who, when admitting the other has a much stronger argument nevertheless revert - everyday perversity? - to their comfortable positions.) The "war" metaphor presupposes "losing" as "learning." That's wonderfully wrong, it seems to me. I love Cohen's idea here. (My bias, stated outright: learning seems much more like "winning" something than the feeling of "losing.")

The monstrous and firmly-embedded "war" metaphor in our culture isn't going away soon, although Cohen has a vision of how we can improve on the quality of arguments, and move away from the structure of "I win/You lose" ugliness. Which I'll get to shortly (or you can watch his 9 minute spiel on a TED stage and skip ahead; the porn's tapping its toes).

Cohen doesn't mention George Lakoff or Mark Johnson, who, very early in their landmark 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, show how "argument is war" is a basic assumption in our culture, built into the fabric of our metaphors we subconsciously think with, viz:

Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I've never won an argument with him.
You disagree? Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all of my arguments.
-p.4, op. cit

Prof. Cohen also cites two other argument structures: argument as proof, which seems much closer to deduction and therefore more collaborative-in-agreeing-upon-principles or axioms. And then there's the argument as performance, which seems underrated to me, at least in the sense I imagine Cohen means and definitely in the senses that I imagine. But the argument as war (equality of the sexes, whether utilitarianism is the best ethical philosophy, whether we ought to let the poor starve, etc, etc, etc), is the most common and in Cohen's words, "deforms" our thinking because it accentuates tactics over logic, magnifies the differences between "me" and "you" and "us" and "them," and glorifies winning while encouraging the idea that the loser has been an abject, embarrassing failure in "defeat." (But the "loser" is the one who gets the "cognitive gains," remember?)

[But first: Let me get this out of the way: I've played the argument as war game far too many times. More than I can remember. Quite often I think I probably pretended to "know" more than I actually did, and so I was being a Cosmic Schmuck...which, by the Principle, makes me a little less of one by admitting it, just so you know I've fully internalized the meta-game rules of the Cosmic Schmuck Principle.]

What is it with all this pretentious chest-thumping in our culture? Do we secretly feel we're at sea, afraid we're clueless, so we become as much the Prosecuting Attorney as possible to force our fears back down, and keep up the Game that we're "right" on the Tough Questions? Prof. Peter Berger, one of the gods of late 20th/early 21st c. Sociology, wrote much on what he called the "epistemological elite," who were high-ranking intellectuals in institutions such as the church, psychoanalysis, Marxism, economics: these people were the masters of sectarian knowledge in their domains: "Any epistemological elite, religious or secular, must develop a system of cognitive defenses to defend its claims against outside criticisms but also, very importantly, to assuage the doubts harbored by insiders."
(see p.37 Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist)

The argument as war "winner" would seem to be heavily concentrated within the epistemological elite, although no doubt every street gang and sports team and gang of white collar business criminals has one of these guys too...

Maybe the worst aspect of argument as war is, according to Prof. Cohen (and I very much agree with him here), that it pretty much forecloses on deliberation, negotiation, compromise, and collaboration. (I'd add there seems to be something utterly antagonistic about the argument as war mode of thought and the ludic, fun-loving beings most of us want to "be.")

                                             Kenneth Burke, who changed the field of
                                             Rhetoric from an idea about literary and
                                             oratorical devices to basic human 
                                             communication, which seeks largely to
                                             persuade.

I think Robert Anton Wilson wanted much more of all of that (deliberation, negotiation, collaboration, compromise, playfulness) in his thinking that actuated the Cosmic Schmuck Principle. Why? Well, for one: the need to be "right" all the time seems linked with being repressive and Authoritarian. RAW used a term he attributed to Mike Hoy: "Correct Answer Machine": this is an assumption deeply embedded in out culture, so we take it in, seemingly, with mother's milk: that we must have The One True Answer to any question, as if there were a little machine in our brains that always knew the "correct" answer to everything. Wilson thought this was basically the same as an ideology, but an authoritarian one, almost always based on Aristotelian two-value logic, with no room for the Excluded Middle. Wilson called it "robot circuits in our brains." (see Email To The Universe, p.135) This seems cognate with the I Am Right You Are Wrong problem that Edward Debono wrote so engagingly about. Let's have more arguments using "water" logic and less having "rock" logic. Here! Here!

Wilson thought, somewhat Dao-istically that, from the most elemental forms of energy and life systems on up to inter-accomodative systems in nature and society: cybernetic feedback loops, unhindered by rigid and artificial stumbling blocks, were a key aspect of freedom and evolution. I simplify his views far too much here, but suffice: the need to consult a stupid-making Correct Answer Machine (installed when? by your daddy or the priest at age 13?) led to human misery. Open systems in nature, open minds in society: we go with the best we know, we make "gambles," but it's always contingent; we ought always be ready to take in new forms of information in order to hone our thought, and to never decide one day we needn't do this any longer, for we Have Arrived at The One True Way...

So: the need to be "right" is a big problem.

For another: "reality" does not seem to conform to the structure of our Indo-European sentences of SUBJECT +(linking verb) + PREDICATE all that well at all, at all. Not as well as we seem to assume. Especially those sentences with the troublesome linking verb forms of BEING (am, is, are, was, were, be), which tend to hypnotize us into going along with a static eternal Thing-ness to abstract nouns and ideas. Also: these linking verbs tend to make us forget the thousands of other "things" an idea could stand for. That's why he advocated for the use of E-Prime, or English without "is" forms in it, as a tool for improved communication and to root out bullshit in one's own thinking. (See any comments by Eric Wagner left on this blog for examples of E-Prime.)

I use E-Prime only some of the time, mostly because I "am" lazy, but I think some forms of "be" or "is" in sentences, while ontologically misleading according to D. David Bourland's standpoint, my language becomes stilted. I have not learned to use it in a consistently eloquent way. Finally: I am more impressed with ideas about how metaphor and rhetoric actually function in our nervous systems and culture, and the Big Names that have influenced me here are: Vico, Nietzsche, Cassirer, I.A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, and George Lakoff. I see E-Prime as a valuable tool for exploration as of this date.

As a way of making my way toward some sort of detente and the ethical problems around subtly hypnotizing others into possibly false artificial ontologies ("Xs are Qs" or "P is Y, and at times W and V"), notice any sentence I use with the form of "be" in it and "be" just a little bit suspicious of my intentions, okay? If I write, "What the NSA is doing will be found in any history of totalitarianism; with the Obama administration's blessings, Obama's being a fascist now," E-Prime would put it as, "From the reports I have read about what the NSA has done, this reminds me of my understanding of what gets labeled 'totalitarianism' in books and other discourse, and Obama seems to have over-rode the Constitution, which reminds me of certain historical examples often called 'fascism.'" Say what you will about the stilted style, but don't I sound a lot less know-it-all-ish in the E-Prime version?

Take away: stay vigilant about the OG's use of "is" "am" "was" "be" "being" "were." (This seems another way for me to lessen my Cosmic Schmuckitude.)

Back to Prof. Cohen: I loved his idea of changing the argument as war assumption in our culture with changing how we perceive the role of arguer. What he idealizes goes something like this: with deliberation, negotiation, compromise and collaboration (and I'd add our ludic nature), we enter into an argument as an arguer, but also as an audience member to that argument. The goal would be to arrive at the endpoint of an argument and have the participants (including any audience members) saying, "That was a satisfying argument!" So: even if you "lose" you feel no shame. And the "winner" feels a sense of accomplishment in bringing about an invigorating aesthetic experience for all. (I might be reading into what Prof. Cohen wants here, so these observations can be considered as Cohen/OG ideas, but let's give Cohen the kudos; I don't wanna come off as some Cosmic Schmuck!)

Prof. Cohen's ideas about improving the quality of argumentation remind me of a similar sort of idea that I first ran across in the journal Etc: A Review of General Semantics, when Edward MacNeal used the term "grokduel" on p.270 of vol.63, #3, July 2006. Apparently he coined the word in 1999, and here's a definition:

grokduel: a contest in which two or more parties vie to see who best understands the positions of the others.

MacNeal quite likely got the "grok" aspect of his coinage from Robert Heinlein's 1961 mindbending cult novel Stranger In A Strange Land. The idea plays out in my mind, somewhat ideally, as very much like what Prof. Cohen would want in new argumentative forms. There seems a sort of possibly ironic chest-thumping aspect to MacNeal's "grokduel," but I do think much mirth and learning could take place during such experimental arguments.

Back to Cosmic Schmuck: You know who's a quite a lot less of a Cosmic Schmuck these days? Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a very charming and handsome TV Doctor, who admitted recently - and quite publicly - that he'd been duped by anti-cannabis government propaganda. He - finally! - actually looked at lots of evidence for himself and concluded he'd been wrong, wrong, wrong. (I assume most readers of the OG wonder why anyone would believe what the government said in the first place!) And I barely know who Gupta is, but Unistatians love him, so his play within the game rules of the Cosmic Schmuck Principle (which no doubt he's never hoidda!), with regard to the subject (cannabis prohibition and the efficacy of marijuana for health reasons), makes his recent lessening of Schmuckiness quite a felicitous thing, aye?

So: get to grokdueling, my fellow schmucks! And lessen your schmuckiness a tad for the day! And then: on to porn! (829 gadzillion troglobytes of new porn went up while you read this...stuff you haven't yet seen! Have fun!)

                                     computer scientist Lofti Zadeh, who developed a 
                                     fuzzy logic that admitted a very large number of
                                    values between 0 and 1, but Zadeh took great pains to 
                                    distinguish his logic from probability theory.
                                    
                         

Neologizing Ad Infinitum: Words, Memes, Religion, Humor, "Reality"

Social Phenomenon of Language
Picking up from the Robert Anton Wilson riffs from The Widow's Son, here's Peter L. Berger, the great phenomenological sociologist, in his book on the sociology of religion, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. He's talking about how an individual grows up within an environment and society, and how the local social world's roles, institutions, and identities are actively appropriated by a person; no one is an inert being being solely molded by outside forces. At an early age, a person derives a subjective and objective identity (how we see ourselves and how others see us). As a person living in constant interplay with the given world we're born into, we are part of the ongoing "conversation" in that society, and participate in its active, ongoing construction. A profound mediating aspect of this construction is the language we use. Here's Berger on this:

"The relationship of the individual to language may, once more, be taken as paradigmatic of the dialectic of socialization. Language confronts the individual as an objective facticity. He subjectively appropriates it by engaging in linguistic interaction with others. In the course of this interaction, however, he inevitably modifies the language, even if (say, as a formalistic grammarian) he should deny the validity of these modifications. Furthermore, his continuing participation in the language is part of the human activity that is the only ontological base for the language in question. The language exists because he, along with others, continues to employ it. In other words, both with regard to language and to the socially objectivated world as a whole, it may be said that the individual keeps 'talking back' to the world that formed him and thereby continues to maintain the latter as reality." (18-19)

My two favorite ideas here are the inevitable modifications of language we make, which subtly change the reality, the ontological basis of the very language being spoken. Yes, the world is "objectivated," but there's a feedback loop - which Berger and other phenomenological sociologists often refer to as "seen but not noted" - between the "world"and the language used to describe it. The second idea I like is that talk itself maintains the world.

It seems probable that this is the basis for why we say "Hi how ya doin'?" and "Fine, how're you?" and hundreds of other little things. They're a way of saying, "I'm here acknowledging your existence. Will you please acknowledge me back?" It's mammalian.

Altered states of consciousness, states that make us "more aware" or aware of the everyday in some new way, will go a long way to shedding light on this. Maybe this is why cultural creatives will neologize much more than others: they spend more time alone, in solitude, doing their thing. New words or the idea that there might be a "need" for a new word or phrase or metaphor will tend to come to them, they will share it with their fellow creative friends, and then the word or phrase might jump out of the local creative community and "go viral" which seems like a neologism that has piggybacked on Richard Dawkins's "meme."

                                   Dawkins, never one to back away from controversy

Dawkins Coins "Meme"
In his discussion of DNA and genes and how maybe they are in the driver's seat, making us think we're in control when they really are - they're so wily! - Dawkins said that the "god" idea, while we don't know how it arose in the meme pool, probably arose very many independent times via memetic mutation and is a very old idea indeed. It replicated itself via spoken word (see Berger, above), great music, great art. It survives in the meme pool, says Dawkins, "From its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next." (The Selfish Gene, 192-193 in 2nd [1989] edition)

But how did Dawkins coin "meme," a word which has become an incredibly powerful meme itself? He tells it with a thrilling High Drama I find very appealing. He says that besides the DNA-RNA-gene replication processes, there is another replication process, and we don't have to go to "distant worlds" to find it. "It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting, far behind." It is "Staring us in the face."

This new soup is human culture, and we needed a name for the transmission of human culture, something like the word imitation. "'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene.' I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme."(192, ibid)

"Meme" must be one of the most effective neologisms deliberately concocted by one man. Bravo!, Dawkins.

Neologisms as Mildly Psychoactive Non-Substances
Because they get into your brain and nudge between the circuitry of words/concepts/phrases that are already instantiated in groups of neurons that "know"how to express some feeling in your own language, I heartily recommend reading books that collect words from other languages that express something we don't have in English. When I was a young teen, some columnist for the Los Angeles Times wrote about these words, and the French term le esprit l'escalier stuck with me: it's the feeling that you're just a tad too late in coming up with the appropriate thing to say; you missed your chance. It translates to "the spirit of the stairs," as if you had had a heated talk and someone got the better of you because, while you felt you knew what you needed to say, nevertheless the words didn't come to you in time. A few minutes later - when it was too late and you were ascending the stairs on the way out? - the words arrived in your brain.

Prof. George Carlin noted that we had a word for "yesterday" but are still waiting on one for "the day before yesterday." We can see how neologizing can possibly takes us down a rabbit hole towards utter ridiculousness, but than again also: humor? (See Lee Camp video, below)

Howard Rheingold wrote an entire book on these - words from all over the world - that express some idea or notion or feeling that we probably need in English, but we don't quite have it yet. See his They Have A Word For It. Here's a blog-like piece by a guy who admires the book, and includes a small sample of the words. If you read pp.3-7 of Rheingold he's knowingly in the Whorf camp, and this book came out when the Chomskyans had made Whorf persona non grata in the groves of academe.

Pei-Ying Lin, on emotions we have but don't have a word for them. Serendipitously discovered today by me.

This is subjective, but I find it wonderfully weird to know that there are all sorts of spaces in our language. It allows me a sense of freedom, of possibility. To be a free play with language, to twist metaphors, appreciate a good simile yet more than ever. To neologize and pun. All of these terms seem as first cousins, and as we learn more from the cognitive neurolinguists: afford more of a psychedelic ("mind-manifesting") appreciation of language and our often unconscious rhetorical ploys and how they make "reality" far more than we may have ever guessed.

Lee Camp's neologizing like a madman recently here. He seems to owe Lewis Black an ounce of weed with the theatrical anger bit, but I like this guy. He's snotty and smart; a terrific punk comedian. My favorite one so far is calling the Democratic party "limpotent." It's even better than what I usually call them: "invertebrate." Here he is, for 4 minutes or so:

How To Become A Dictator

Opening Pitch: A Curveball, Low and Outside
If you look at a map of Africa, and gaze down its West Coast, 20 miles off the coast of Cameroon, in the Gulf of Guinea, you'll see a little island named Bioco. For nearly 500 years it was called Fernando Po, after its discoverer.

In the early 1970s Captain Ernesto Tequila y Mota read and re-read from Edward Luttwak's book Coup d' Etat: A Practical Handbook. Reading from yet another book that addresses Mota's coup: "He set up a timetable, made his first converts among other officers, formed a clique, and began the slow process of arranging things so that officers likely to be loyal to Equatorial Guinea would be on assignment at least 48 hours away from the capital city when the coup occurred. He drafted the first proclamation to be issued by his new government; it took the best slogans of the most powerful left-wing and right-wing groups on the island and embedded them firmly in a tapiocalike complex of bland liberal-conservatism. It fit Luttwak's prescription excellently, giving everybody on the island some small hope that his own interests and beliefs would be advanced by the new regime. And, after three years of planning, he struck: the key officials of the old regime were quickly, bloodlessly, placed under house arrest; troops under command of officers in the cabal occupied the power stations and newspaper offices; the inoffensively fascist-conservative-liberal-communist proclamation of the new People's Republic of Fernando Poo (sic) went forth to the world over the radio station in Santa Isobel. Ernesto Tequila y Mota had achieved his ambition - promotion from captain to generalissimo in one step. Now, at last, he began wondering about how one went about governing a country. He would probably have to read a new book, and he hoped that there was one as good as Luttwak's treatise on seizing a country."

I'm having you on, of course: that long passage I quoted was from the rollicking, psychedelic book of conspiracy theories, the eldritch and menacing underground fiction book, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. (pp.18-19)

OG Loves His Crazy Books
Except...the Luttwak book is a real book. I own it. It's one of my favorite "Walter Mitty" books: I have a large collection of outrageous literature: Hitler's autobiography, The Turner Diaries, John Birch Society classics, books on how to get revenge on your enemies, Lyndon Larouche tracts, books explaining how advanced aliens have been herding humans like sheep since Day One, Report From Iron Mountain, a book called How To Start Your Own Country, on and on. There's a frisson I cop from owning these books; the reason I call them "Walter Mitty" books is because they have solely to do with some sort of ironic fantasy life: it's not that I would ever adhere to the ideologies in those books, much less take the same actions. The ideas are almost 100% abhorrent to me, but maybe they make for fascinating sociology? A large chunk of my epistemology is influenced by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's phenomenological sociology: knowledge must be anything that is taken as "real" by anyone. For my literary mind, these tomes represent possible habitable worlds. Possibly: worlds that some of my fellow Citizens take seriously as "real." (So...:"oppositional research"?)

These sorts of outrageous books also fuel the anthropological imagination. I like to imagine I could or would, but know I couldn't or wouldn't (I really want us to be nicer to each other: what a friggin' dreamer!) be in some racist, nazi terror group, for some inexplicable reasons not entirely clear to me. When friends see my couple shelves of Weirdo Lit, the easiest - and indeed very true - explanation is: I'm a hardcore 1st Amendment person, especially when it comes to books. But then there's my digression...

                                    Edward Luttwak, prodigious amoral scholar of power,
                                      born 1942.

Edward Luttwak
My, but Luttwak is a learned person, if an amoral one. I've seen him interviewed a few times and he's guileless. And smart. The amoral intellectuals scare the crap out of me, but fascinate me in roughly the same way that Mad Scientists do. I don't consider myself a Moralist, but when I'm confronted by the mind of a Luttwak, or Kissinger, or Herman Kahn, who experimented with LSD and found it a delightful enhancement to his schemes for winning a nuclear war, or...the King of the NeoCons, Leo Strauss...it makes me think.

Let me quote from Luttwak's Coup d'Etat:
(He's discussing France's ineffectual 4th Republic [1946-59]): "The France of 1958 had become politically inert and therefore ripe for a coup. The political structures of most developed countries, however, are too resilient to make them suitable targets, unless certain 'temporary' factors weaken the system and obscure its basic soundness. Of those temporary factors the most common are:
(a) severe and prolonged economic crisis, with large-scale unemployment or runaway inflation;
(b) a long and unsuccessful war or a major defeat, military or diplomatic;
(c) chronic instability under a multi-party system." (p.31)

Near the end of the book, in Appendix A, "The Economics of Repression," we read:
"Once we have carried out our coup and established control over the bureaucracy and the armed forces,  our long-term political survival will largely depend on our management of the problem of economic development. Economic development is generally regarded as a 'good thing' and almost everybody wants more of it, but for us - the newly-established government of X-Land - the pursuit of economic development will be undesirable, since it militates against our main goal: political stability." (p.175)

In 1999 Luttwak published an article in one of the foreign policy journals called "Give War A Chance." Some more idealistic scholars attempt to take him to task HERE.

                                        Out of the mouths of morons...

These Books Have Been Around For Yonks!
From Sun-Tzu's Art of War to (my personal fave) Machiavelli's The Prince, to Clausewitz on to today, polymathic scholars of realpolitick  have written books like Luttwak's. And what always strikes me when I read them: how refreshingly empirical and rational they are! I know that may sound horrible, but hear me out: given the 24/7/365 of corporate propaganda and punditocratic mush we're all subject to, I feel a sense of no-bullshit relief when reading the scholars of realpolitick. I'm not saying I agree with them - I cop to a certain idealism - but at least they are saying the stuff that you're not supposed to say. And if they have wit, all the better.

Back to my Walter Mitty frisson-dealio: I distinctly remember working in a posh old public library in a very rich and conservative area of Los Angeles, and I happened upon a field manual for how to conduct guerrilla war, by Che Guevara. Of course I checked it out and read it cover to cover. How it managed to stay on the shelves of that library (I doubt anyone had read it in at least 15 years), I don't know. That's one big reason I love physical books in physical libraries: the shock and joy of finding something that you didn't even know existed!

                                This is probably pretty close to what Machiavelli looked like

The Latest In This Hallowed Tradition: The Dictator's Handbook
Appearing in 2011 and subtitled, "How Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics," from NYU political scientists Alastair Smith and the very Robert Anton Wilson-y and Robert Shea-ishly-named Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (I actually thought that was Alastair Smith's nonexistent writing partner, a nom de plume of sorts), but Mesquita (not to be confused with the fictional character Ernesto Tequila y Mota) is not only real but he's a big deal. Apparently he has a odd track record of making predictions that come true, which, if you've been reading me for long, know is quite rare. HERE is a five minute piece on "the new Nostradamus" (as Mesquita's been called) on NPR, from November 2009.

Aye: "Using the logic of brazen self-interest" pretty much sums up Smith and Mesquita's approach to political power, whether it's Obama or some dictator in a war-torn little African country. The only difference, our NYU profs think, between democracy and dictatorship, is that the guy operating in the democracy has to deal with more constraints. For any leader, the goal is simple: to get power, keep it, and control the money as much as you can. Perusing The Dictator's Handbook reminded me of reading Luttwak, but it was more breezy, and had a Freakonomics-like vibe.

If "using the logic of brazen self-interest" makes you think immediately of Game Theory, then you're one of those I wanna party with. 'Cuz you're smart, not due to any adherence to a singular "logic of self-interest." Yes: Smith and Mesquita use game theory as both a method and as a motor of considerable rhetorical effectiveness. It's as if their deftness about embedding their ideas in the theory of games makes the book not only compelling due to argument, but thrilling due to mood. And why would I, a non-Gamer, who's never played Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, find something thrilling in a popular-poli-sci book that seems to be imbued with a chunk of that same zeitgeist? I don't know, but it's not because I feel emotionally removed due to feeling like a disembodied player for hours-on-end of intense and involving video games. I think it's more that I'd rather my body not be as much affected by what I now - pessimistically? - call realpolitick. Fascistic, money-driven politics of the spectacle tend toward depressed moods. Therefore, I'll cultivate an...ironic mood?...towards... "reality"?

Let me think this through a bit more over the next week or so. And back to Mesquita and Smith.

Forget about the complex logistics and strengths and weaknesses of states, what "they" want, the grand strategies and even national interest and good and right and wrong and justice: you need supporters to keep you in power, and you need to draw from as large a pool of supporters as possible (which our profs call "the selectorate"). Who will keep you there? Billionaires and fanatical leaders of coalitions, which explains why a democratically elected leader will champion spending programs that a large chunk of the population don't really want.

There's soooo much bullshit in political reality - especially as we're ramping up for another Prez Election in Unistat - that reading a book like this might feel to you like going through the looking glass. One of our new Machiavellis, Alastair Smith, says, "It's virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own interest."

Another one: "If you're working for the common good you didn't come to power in the first place. If you're not willing to cheat, steal, murder and bribe then you don't come to power."

And every man's vote counts, right? Well...I have talked to a whole lot of very brilliant, well-read young people at Occupy rallies. They have read everything and they're articulate and passionate and they can't get a job to pay off their student loans. And they know why.

But when they vote, who reading me here believes their vote goes as far as a billionaire's or the leader of some fanatical coalition that will rally voters to the polls?

Furthermore: the leader must not terrorize his supporters or take money out of their pockets to make other people's lives better - says Smith and Mesquita - but it's okay for Occupy folk to feel terrorized; it's always better to tax the crap out of people and make them fear for their next meal; it is bad to let them grow their own food. So: Occupy kids: no change, plenty to fear, almost zilch for power. The CEOs on Wall Street?: they're part of the leaders' supporters, they take care of the members of the board and big investors and senior management people. No terror there. And for their "work" they receive mega-outrageously large bonuses.

When we were in grade school, the answer to the riddle, "What do you get when you cross a penis with a potato?" had a funny answer. Now? Maybe "funny" in another, darker way. And I'm reminded of Gore Vidal, who died last week. I paraphrase, but he often said that the American public were so gullible that they harbored the perennial belief that if we just elected a "good, nice man" as Prez, we'd be fine.

for extra credit:
How Will the 99% Deal with the Psychopaths in the 1%?
10 Mad Dictators From the 20th and 21st Century
Dictators and Fascists and their musical tastes: Kim Jong Il loved Eric Clapton?
Osama bin Laden smoked pot and watched "The Wonder Years" and was crazy about Whitney Houston?
George W. Bush 43: "Eight years was awesome and I was famous and I was powerful."
Got a budding scholar of dictatorships? Read 'em all!

Political Corruption: Three Takes, Possibly Illuminating?

I can't count how often I read some Citizen complain how the Democrats are so corrupt, always have been, always will. They're incurably rotten, those Democrats. Another Voter opines in three steady shades of black that the Republicans have ruined the country, because, why...dontcha see how "corrupt" they are?

I think I remember sorta buying this in my early twenties. I thought the Republicans were more corrupt than the Democrats. And of course this...needed to end? How could I have ever been so naive?

Since then I've changed my mind quite a lot. The charges of "corruption" on the part of one or both parties leave me a tad embarrassed for the naivete of the speaker. It's called "projection" in Freudian terms: I'm projecting myself onto the speaker who's agonizing over a world that, gosh dernit, would be so much better if not for all that corruption.

The unpleasant corollary for me in this is that I now realize how many times I've looked back and remembered that I actually sorta believed certain political ideas, and I blanche; this seems to strongly imply that whatever I think now might embarrass me a few years hence. It's a tough one to swallow, but I gotta live with it.

Perhaps it's a small price to pay if I'm trying to be intellectually "honest."

I said "trying." Gimme some slack? Some slack from the Slacktivists?
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I remember reading a lot of history in my late twenties and just being overwhelmed to the point of amusement over how utterly normal political corruption is. And after awhile, maybe you start to develop your own scale of how much true damage corruption can do to the Average Joe, Mrs Calabash down the street, poor kids, someone's dad who's trying to eek out a living for his family, etc.

There's a sort of corruption that seems partisan. I guess it hurts almost everyone a little, but if almost everyone, then hardly anyone, right?

(Is there a sort of corruption that does hurt almost everyone? Say 1% hurt the other 99%? What sort of corruption would that be? What do you call it? I know it sounds far-fetched. Forget I ever brought it up.)

Then there's the kind of corruption that various factions of the Ruling Class deem too damaging to the official narratives. I think that's a big reason Nixon went down. (There are many more historical examples.)

I guess a Reader starts to develop some vague, inchoate and heterogeneous taxonomy of corruption. But the thing is, you do expect it. It's not cynicism, it's realpolitick, or maybe just "living in the real world." Hence, my visceral reaction when a fellow citizen complains about corruption. I often feel a mixture of contempt, embarrassment, and admiration of a naive yet noble worldview.
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1.) Noam Chomsky
When I started reading Noam Chomsky I quickly came across numerous variations of his views on corrupt politicians. Basically, the Chomsky view is this: He's glad when politicians are corrupt, because that's normal. One corrupt one undermines another, then the undermined one's allies return the favor. It cancels power out. If some dipshit politician is in it for the money and himself and his pals, the local machine: at least they'll eventually get busted by some other competing corrupt group of opposition. On and on, welt sans kaput.

For Chomsky, the problem is the True Believer with charisma, who really wants power in order to change Everything and make it right. Like Hitler. And Chomsky has been saying for at least 30 years that American fascism, just below the surface, harbors these creeps, and we're subject to one sooner of later. And that's scary. He's perfectly happy to see yet the same old narrative of some jackoff preacher-politician, railing about "morality" and then getting caught with 15 Rolls Royces and a homosexual boy in a motel room. On tape. On the Six O'Clock News. That's no threat.

Here's a typical Chomsky bit on corruption, among many variations:

"If Hitler had been a crook...We're very fortunate in the United States, we've never had a charismatic leader who weren't a gangster. Every one of them was a thug, or a robber, or something. Which is fine, they don't cause a lot of trouble. If you get one who's honest, like Hitler, then you're in trouble - they just want power." - interview with Matthew Rothschild, 1997.

                                                      Boss Tweed, synonymous with "political corruption" in 
                                                                 Unistatian history

2.) Robert Anton Wilson 
The middle period writings of RAW (which I consider as 1975-1985, with 1959-1974 the first period and 1986-2005 the third and last, not that anyone had asked) contains an abundance of non-Euclidean political writing, by which he meant that he saw value in left-libertarian and traditionally anarchist thought, and individualist-"right" libertarian ideas. Thinking beyond the stale left/right metaphor of political ideology. And other ideas too. (For a particularly brilliant elaboration of breaking out of right-left political thinking, see this Wilson essay here.) He rarely had much use for the Democratic or Republican parties. Which is an understatement. He seemed to pretty much loathe the Republicans always. And when I interviewed him we took a break on his balcony so he could smoke and I distinctly remember him talking about the Democratic party (in 2003) and ending his funny little diatribe with a big audible raspberry.

He used various sorts of libertarian ideas in a whole host of ironic moods, and I think he not only liked to play with any idea that was about individual freedom, but he thought there should be far more Ideas about politics in the public mind, period. And in his 1980 book The Illuminati Papers he used his pirate-libertarian free market anarchist-individualist character from his novels, Hagbard Celine, as a persona in articulating a set of "Celine's Laws."(see pp. 118-125) I consider each "Law" a gem of ingenious political satire, and yet each one holds a profound "truth," also. The First Law is National security is the chief cause of national insecurity. The Second Law states Accurate communication is only possible in a nonpunishing situation. It's the Third Law that applies to our subject of corruption.

Celine's Third Law states, An honest politician is a national calamity. Wilson explains that do-gooders, politicians who truly "mean well" tend to pass more and more laws, which creates more and more criminals. Why didn't I realize this before I read RAW? The more laws, the more restrictions on individual freedoms. "The chief cause of the rising crime rate is the rising number of laws being enacted. An honest politician, who keeps his nose to the grindstone and enacts several hundred laws in the course of his career, thereby produces as many as several million new criminals."

The thing about RAW here: this is hilarious and sorta mostly "true." The man had a gift for being wise and cosmically comedic at the same time. An interviewer once told Wilson that when he read his books he was never sure when he was serious or when he was joking. And RAW replied:

"I'm most serious when I am joking."

Back to RAW's Hagbard and our topic of corruption, and that an honest politician is a national calamity.

"At first glance, this seems preposterous. People of all shades of opinion agree at least on the axiom that we need more honest politicians, not more crooked ones. Please remember, however, that people of all shades of opinion once agreed that the Earth is flat."

Which then follows RAW's take on corruption, and compare and contrast this to Chomsky's:

"Your typical dishonest politician (bocca grande normalis) is interested only in enriching himself at the public expense, a goal he shares with most of his fellow citizens, especially doctors and lawyers. This is normal behavior for our primate species, and society has always been able to endure and survive it." (p.124, The Illuminati Papers)

3.) Gustav Papanek
Who he? Here's some background on Papanek. I encountered him a year or so ago when reading desultorily in economics. I was reading a bunch of sociology of religion stuff and was interested in emerging economies (like China and especially Indonesia and the Far East, but also Latin America) and how religions linked to development of markets, modernities (I'm convinced there are many variations of "modernity"), and just generally the weird mix of belief systems and economics. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss and Al Franken: O! The Things I Don't Know!

I took a load of notes, and I have some good ones from Papanek in a book with the boring title of Business and Democracy.


But more recently I read the semi-autobiography of one of my favorite intellectuals, Peter Berger,  who I tend to not harmonize with on politics, as he's too conservative for me, but I love his thought, his writing, and he's funny. His 2011 book is titled Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore.


Berger's talking about his collaborations with Papanek near the end of the book, about certain ideas that contribute to emerging economies - such as "the state pursues intelligent economic and social policies - that is, it favors economic growth and has a concern for the welfare of its population." Another item that caught my eye and which pertains to our subject: "Corruption should be kept within reasonable limits."

Berger wonders why economists can't seem to tell the difference between "bad" and "good" corruption, and Papanek tells Berger he can elucidate the difference, calling it "the Papanek principle of corruption." Very briefly, "the corruption may not exceed the corruption itself." Wha?

It gets unpacked this way by Berger, after talking with Papanek:

"It is acceptable corruption if the head of government appoints his wife's uncle to a position in which he has nothing whatsoever to do (indeed he may have an office without a telephone that he ritually visits once a month to collect his salary check). But, as a result of the position, he draws a huge salary, lives in a government-supplied villa, and drives a government-supplied Mercedes. However, the corruption becomes unacceptable if the position entails real power over a sector of the economy - such as the power to wreck the state-controlled electricity company." (p.219)
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There may or may not be a "lesson" to be learned by combining Chomsky, Wilson, and Papanek in these ideas about political corruption. I don't wanna get all didactic on my Dear Readers, if any. And besides I'm stoned and want to go play my guitar now, but before I send this blogspew into the Ethernet, I'm reminded of a zen anecdote I gleaned from the aforementioned Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.

I remember it thus:

A zen student asks the zen master, "What is world peace?"

And the zen master replies, "Two drunks fighting in an alley."

Thanks for reading, grasshoppers!

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...
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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!