On Compulsive Diarists, of Which I Seem To Be One

As of yesterday, I've been "keeping" a journal for 27 years now. I've probably missed writing something for a given day maybe 20 times, probably less. It is compulsive, and obviously a habit.

I've filled cheap spiral-bound lined notebooks - the cheapest I can find at a stationery store or supermarket - both sides of the page, with lots of lists of things in the top margin of the page, little bits of arithmetic.

I'll fill one up over 11 to 16 months, find a swatch of cheap masking tape and write the beginning and ending dates on it, then plaster the tape onto the cover of the notebook, then stash it away in a closet with the others.

Sounds kinda sick? Maybe. Sounds like something Prozac might help? Maybe. After a couple of years of doing it, I went on a kick of reading all of Gore Vidal: his historical novels, his quasi-surrealist "outrageous" novels (like Myra Breckinridge, but there are others), but - and Gore would've hated to see this - I think he was a better essayist than novelist. Even though I often vehemently disagree with Vidal - especially on the value of certain writers over others - I'm always impressed with his quite great ability as an essayist.

                            Gore Vidal, who half-jokingly asserted that diarists were dangerous.
                            When he was in his early twenties he lived with Anais Nin.

And one day I was reading an essay when the topic of diarists came up. Vidal thought - perhaps this was part arch-humor - that diarists were suspect. He linked assassins (like Arthur Bremer, for example) to their diaries. People who wrote only for themselves were suspect. It hurt, a little. But I kept on.

What the hell do I write? Well, the first few years I'd write a lot, every day. Because my life seemed exciting, and I wanted to remember it. Many years later I sat down and read the things I wrote in my early twenties...and it seems like I'm reading someone else's life. Frankly, I sound like a precocious 14 year old girl. "I fixed my bike!" Exclamation points. I'd like to think I'd been putting off re-packing the ball bearings, but I probably just fixed a flat and...was glad I was able to ride again. (!)

Now, I'll often note the mundane. I'll cover four days on one page. Whether I did yoga or not, stuff I ate, people I exchanged emails with. A particular interaction with a guitar student from the day. Oh-so quotidian, and I know you'd be bored to read it.

A reader may note I used the term "diarists" in the title of this blogspew, but when I talk to my friends, I say "journal." Because I've read many famous published diaries (Anais Nin, Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, the usual suspects) and they seem like "literature" to me. We know Nin thought there would be readers of her diaries. Having an audience in mind greatly changes the content and tone, to put it mildly. Certainly there are entries among my logorrhea that seem fit to be read by others, but when I think about it, I'm one of those compulsive jotters who's really okay with them not being read after my death. What the hell? Page through them for a day or two, have a laff, learn something new and lurid about beastly-dead Michael, then fer crissakes: burn the things for warmth. Or light.

Or just to buy space in a closet.

Okay, some of you actually liked finding great-grandma-ma's diary from the late 19th century. I get it. Do I see myself as great grandma-ma? No. But perhaps I should...

Another reason I don't call myself a "diarist" is that I used to think it gendered: women keep diaries; men write in journals. I don't believe that anymore, but I'm okay with being stuck in my ways. Also: there's a sense in which the bulk of my dull recordings of my days seems almost more like a "log" and don't even deserve the same term as what Anne Frank did.

To return to Gore Vidal's riff - which he repeated a few times - I think he has a point. When Jodi Arias was arrested she wrote a memoir (apparently) in prison, "in case I become famous." Ted Kaczynski, rather famously, had a manifesto. Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 and left over 300 injured, gifted us with a 1500 page Facebook document in which he railed against immigrants, multiculturalism, how Western culture is dead, how he felt close to his "Viking" heritage, etc. He also dropped some of his charm onto YouTube, which I haven't seen. Breivik plagiarized from Kaczynski too. The unkindest cut.

Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others, was found a paranoid schizophrenic concerned with the English language, alternative currencies, and a fear of mind control. He bequeathed something for us all on YouTube before heading down to the rally to shoot. (Understanding and representation of Loughner in my neural circuits are adjacent to Robert De Niro's character in Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle and secret service guys, and in a private moment, "Are you talkin' to me? And no wonder: Screenwriter Paul Schrader had Arthur Bremer in mind.)

The Virginia Tech killer, Seung-Hui Choi, sent an 1800 page statement to NBC, with a cache of personal videos and photos. He was inspired by Columbine. LAPD cop Chris Dorner, who was fired from the Ramparts division, left an 11 page manifesto about why he had to kill (it was a "necessary evil"), and he was pissed about the Rodney King incident and how he was treated by fellow cops. So he lost it. I remember watching that manhunt live on TV in Los Angeles. The cops looked about as ready to take Dorner alive as they were ready to take the SLA alive, once they were sure Patty Hearst wasn't in that safe-house in Los Angeles.

I could go on. And on and on. And you may say, "Yea, but you're talking about manifestoes and YouTube videos and Facebook rants." And I say, yea: I think social media has made a lot of people into diarists of a sort.

But really: the Vidal riff is too arch by half. Most of us do it for therapy or simply to ward off "real life" when it becomes a bit too intense. When I read a greatly abridged version of Pepys's diary a few years ago, I was struck by how often he went to the theatre and saw Shakespeare. He notes which play, and I think, "Gee, he saw Taming of the Shrew just a few months ago." But I'm like that with film noir. Read my...errr...journal and note how often I re-watched Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or The Killers or even Armored Car Robbery (saw this again two nights ago: lots of 1950 location shots near places in LA I used to live, and Charles McGraw may be the most hard-boiled actor in all of noir)...

The writer Sarah Manguso published a 93 page book about her 20+ years of compulsive diarizing, and I found this interview with Julie Beck interesting. I think Manguso's sickness (rare autoimmune disease that she wrote a book about) and middle class upbringing must have something to do with writing 800,000 words and counting. I have never counted words, not really caring. Manguso resonates with me about when she started: things in her life seemed momentous, and so much had happened to her, to her own mind. And she wanted to remember it. It is a way of dealing with mortality and memory, no doubt. She thinks keeping a diary will serve as a prevention against "living thoughtlessly." I can see that. But I'm too close to it all to be know to what extent it worked. It does provide solace amid anxiety. The word "graphomania" comes up.

For Manguso, pregnancy and its hormonal cataclysm changed her view of her compulsive diarizing: ordinary "reality" became as important as those "momentous" events, which usually, in hindsight were not so momentous. My favorite line from the interview:

Every exchange that I had with another person, everything I observed, every little throwaway moment I had on the subway observing this and that, the denseness of the experience just seemed unmanageable without writing it down.

For me, this is redolent of a Borges piece, or maybe something from Oliver Sacks.

Here's a huge difference between Manguso and me: I tend to want to "manage" my excitement over ideas I've read in books. Rarely have little impersonal moments with strangers made it into my log/journal/diary, unless they were exceptionally funny or wonderfully weird. I have witnessed verbal tiffs between friends and acquaintances and wrote what I could remember when I got home, in case anyone asks later. What did we do last Christmas? Hold on, I'll go look it up.

In the Beck interview Manguso comments on her diary book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, but also her other books. She says narrative, whether in reading or writing, doesn't come easy to her, hence her style. Then she adds, "and I don't need to read or re-read an entire book or re-watch an entire movie." But I love to re-read my favorite books. With each re-reading I'm able to see more and go deeper into that world. Same with films. But: I am not enamored with narrative either; I return to my books and films for mood, style, effects, form. Last night I saw Truffaut's Jules and Jim for maybe the eighth time. And still, it's only as the film nears the climax, that I'm reminded of the ending, which I remember being shocked by the first time. It's quite a climax...so why do I seem to only remember it hazily? I think because I watch it for the friendship of Jules and Jim, the depiction of countryside in France and Germany 1900-1930, French manners, the simmering mental illness of Catherine, the way they negotiate the menage, the accepted insanity of WWI and Jules and Jim being terrified they might kill each other, the interspersed file footage, the cuts and freeze frames and sheer beauty of Jeanne Moreau. The voice-over. Last night I noted that the first five minutes seem "new" to me (they're not, of course: my brain is blitzed by the romantic mood of the opening), and that the denouement seems to barely register for me.

I guess some relatively compartmentalized area of my self sees the climax, remembers the shock from my first viewing, sort of shrugs it off as "Of course you had to end a film like this that way for it to have the emotionally logical effect of such a plot, its syntax, the chaotic madness of the femme etc..." Then I quickly go back to being bathed in the incredible pathos of the film. (In truth I love Truffaut's 400 Blows even more.)

What actually happens to the characters at the end of Jules and Jim seems trivial to my emotional needs, apparently. I once worked with a librarian who could give a detailed chronological synopsis of what happens in a work of fiction, and I thought her simply marvelous for this display, so different was her mind from mine.

This apprehension of how individual nervous systems abstract signals from our environment and concentrate them: this otherness of other peoples' minds is what makes me love them. Because, somehow, perhaps my diarizing helped me in this appreciation, via personal feedback?

Finally, I put forth the idea that "social media" has made many of us diarizers. This may be part of why I don't "do" social media. I've yet to Tweet. I was on Facebook for one day. I've heard of "Snapchat" but I don't really know what it is, nor do I care.

However, I started blogging in order to see what I think about ideas, and maybe entertain certain strange minds that resonate with mine. If blogging of the OG sort can be considered social media, so be it: I do social media. But no doubt that rare handful of posts that are mostly about "me" must qualify as social media. And this post seems the most self-indulgent one I've done. I'll try to wait a long time before I write in such a personal way again. Some aspect of my nervous system seems to be pushing itself to the fore and saying "This wasn't an OG post!"

Oh, well.

Some Sources Read Just Before Writing This
"Poor Historians: Some Notes on the Medical Memoir," by Suzanne Koven
"The Pleasure of Keeping - and Re-reading - Diaries," by Elisa Segrave
"Personal Manifestos: Never A Good Sign"
Jia Tolentino's insightful review of Manguso's book about her diary

                                         ont bob campbell faire oeuvre graphique pour 
votre blog en demandant ici!

Deep History and Popular Amnesia

Recently a blogging colleague of mine, Bogus Magus at Only Maybe, linked to the TED talk by Yuval Noah Harari, whose epic history book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was published in Hebrew in 2011, but translated into English in 2014. I have not yet read it. I've read a lot of reviews. A rising academic "star", the Israeli historian gets a glowing blurb from Jared Diamond, and a funny and not-so-impressed review from the formidable Christopher Knight, who, incidentally, has my favorite take on Noam Chomsky, in a 2010 interview in Radical Anthropology HERE. (<---I've already digressed!)

Knight's take on Harari's thesis: that we need a planet run by Green Intellectuals, but all we need is the myth...I find this on the level of cosmic hilarity. Because I basically agree with Harari - and Knight sorta does, too; it's just that he's not all that impressed by Harari's scholarship. The Conundrum. What to do?

I used the term "cosmic hilarity" just above. Perhaps more apt: hilaritas, a term/idea I got from Giordano Bruno via Robert Anton Wilson: roughly, it means, in every deeply funny thing there's something deeply painful. And vice-versa...

                     Now just reeeeelaaaax...you're feeling very calm...calmer...you've never
                     felt so relaxed. Now repeat after me: The State, borders, money, God,
                     corporations and the National Debt are just as real as your own hands.                        

Recently in these spaces I touched on the 1992 trialogues with three acid head intellectuals, who would agree with Harari.

For as much as an anarchist like Chris Knight can pick on Harari, if you haven't read Harari or watched the TED clip I linked to above, or heard him talk, or anything, just note that he hammers on perhaps humankind's biggest problem: somehow the species went from dealing with what's real: other people, animals, rivers, feeding ourselves, and finding a comfortable-enough place to sleep...to actually allowing "fictions" to rule over our lives and consciousness: god, corporations, money, the State, borders...what Harari calls the "legal fictions." We've gone from an actual order of "reality" to an "imagined order." And our only way out is an "alternative imagined order."

As Robert Anton Wilson said about this: we talked our way into this.

And with talk comes hypnosis. I catch myself - or "snap out of it" - every day. "Nations" have an ontological status via the legal system. So do corporations. Money too, although it originated as sort of a convenient fiction: easier to carry a little piece of silver or gold in order to walk over the hills and buy two yaks than to haul three pigs with me in barter. But first, the guy who had the yaks on CraigsList had to believe that a piece of metal was "worth" or "equal to" his yaks. And I guess I believed it too, when I saw his ad.

The "god" Q? You be the Judge.

Speaking of Jared Diamond, his Guns, Germs and Steel was so engrossing to me the first time out - when it first arrived - I'm re-reading it, and it's even better the second time. Here is my gold piece.

Because certain types of thinkers who actually read books like Diamond's or Harari's tend to get emotionally invested in the possible political motivations of writers (and a certain caste of mind will see a surname like Diamond or Harari and go into their books with a specific bias), one thing I'm looking for in Diamond is his politics. I know he followed G, G&S with Collapse, a grand historical warning about the fates of previous human societies that wrecked their own environments. I even saw him give a talk about that book in Berkeley one evening, to a rapt, packed audience.

On page 90 of G, G &S Diamond's talking about how profound the shift to agriculture was. And he tips his hand. There's no hierarchy in hunter-gather band societies because every able-bodied person has to devote a lot of their time to finding food, but under agriculture:

In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of the food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage in full-time political activities.

Yep. The old schoolyard game from here to eternity. Why do some of us regularly forget this stuff? How did these posited original "takers" pull it off? Probably at first by brute strength? "Gimme yer lunch money!"

In HG Wells's Outline Of History, there's always a recurring bunch of heathens on horses who ride in from the north and rape and pillage and take the food.

(Or: I guess "take the food" really is part of pillaging. It's been a while since I've pillaged and I fess up I plum fergit. I'm pretty sure pillaging involves a handful of things, which I do not have the time to list for you here, but when I say something like "the Saxon hordes," what scenario pops up in your imagio? Just go with that.)

In Vico, the savages wandering the forests of the world happen upon a latifundia, and settle for serfdom, which is the beginning of class warfare. It's probably a variation of all these themes?

Later, on the same page (p.90 of Guns, Germs and Steel) Diamond is telling us about how stockpiles of food allowed for people to specialize: there are kings, bureaucrats, and a standing army. And there are those Weird Ones who heat the metals found in the ground and see what they can do with this stuff. Ah-HA! a spear so long, heavy, durable and sharp you can probably run a guy through with it and take all his wheat and cattle!

Oh, and another specialist arises:

Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest.

Note that in the NPR interview Harari says that the Agriculture Revolution is history's biggest fraud. Then he attributes this idea to Diamond. But it's a favorite left-ish political trope. It's in McKenna. It's in Rousseau. You can name others. Probably many others...

Certain things happened, which caused trillions of other things. And I get to sit here, well-fed, and read fat books and blog. I did not grow my own food. I have never hunted. The only gathering I've done was mostly for kicks, and some of it would you might call "stealing." There: I said it.

Back to the Yearn For Green.

It seems like a desperate move. There's no going back. Harari seems to engage in some sort of satirical reductio in saying we may as well download ourselves into silicon and live forever as merged-AI robotic something or others. Other times, only the richest of us get immortality; the rest are losers who have to die the olde fashioned way. (See Harari's bit with Daniel Kahneman.) I see Harari as a legit scholar who's also a skilled polemicist, with a touch of the hermetic-trickster in him; I said above I had not yet read his Sapiens. For now, in my minor discussion of Harari I have merely been practicing Bayard's Art.

How does all this forgetting about the "imagined order" occur? How does it occur that many people seem to have never even encountered these ideas at all? And how are we doing, collectively as a species, with this new "alternative imagined order"?

No way Harari really believes all that stuff about what's in store for our future. At least I hope he's trying to make a satirical point. Myself? I tend to favor sentient flesh. No robot sex for me. We fall for a lot of stuff that thugs and con-artists pull out of the Imagined Order of Reality. Perhaps all we can do today and tomorrow is talk a little bit about the Imagined Order vs. our new Alt. Imagined Order with our friends and loved ones. Maybe?

And I, like Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake (and Ezra Pound?) would like to get back to the Garden. After all, we are stardust. We are golden.

Herbert Marcuse and Repressive Desublimation

Also called "institutional desublimation," Marcuse first expounded at length on this idea in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man. It seems influenced by his Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno and the quasi-Frankfurter, Wilhelm Reich. Though Marcuse studied under Heidegger - who dressed in Nazi regalia and gave the fascist salute at the end of each lecture, making Marcuse wonder WTF had gone wrong with German culture - he still wanted to unite Existentialism with Marxism. Certain events led him to flee Germany, where he worked for the Unistat Government's OSS (forerunner to the CIA) as an expert in explaining fascism to US government officials. Eventually Marcuse taught at UC San Diego.

                                         Herbert Marcuse (say "Mar KOO-zuh")

With the Vietnam war going on, Marcuse tried to tell his white, affluent students at UC San Diego that their surfing, drinking beer and listening to rock and roll, and increasingly promiscuous sexual forays were not "real" freedom. It seems few of those students understood him. Which brings me to "repressive desublimation."

Marcuse thought that society had become so technologically advanced that it could meet basic needs and give its citizenry a feeling (a simulacra?) of democratic participation in the processes of their lives, but this was a ruse.

Why was/is it a "ruse"? In taking Freud's ideas about artists sublimating their erotic impulses and producing High Culture, Marcuse noted that by 1964 technological society/capitalism had evolved by which the owners/Authoritarian class (recently renamed the 1%) could distract the masses that an ever-growing chasm between themselves and workers was underway by allowing free reign for everyone to "desublimate," whether as artists (probably not) or consumers (oh, most definitely this).

Music can not only move the soul, it can sell shoes.

So: I've seen this idea of Marcuse's presented as a sort of very erudite, High Concept conspiracy theory by Wall St. and the Pentagon and other fascists against The People. I find the idea too highfalutin' and would rather consider repressive desublimation along the lines of an idea to think with and not "believe", at other times as fitting under Chomsky's term "intellectual self-defense."

Rather than send out secret police to knock off dissidents, let there be dissidents, to foster the illusion that there's "freedom." (Who actually reads Chomsky anyway? Exactly.) What freedom do we non-One-Percenters have? We can buy stuff! And invest our emotional energies in games, and games played by professional athletes. We can get very involved in shows, especially TV. We can follow the relentless idiocy of corporate non-news (Nuzak) 24-7, which drum-up soap opera stories for all of us to yell and scream at each other about. We should always feel free to "vote" about which story was the best of the week. See? We're participating in the process!

Above all, we need to constantly internalize the values (but where did they come from?) of "personal responsibility" and "individualism." Express yourself! Have an opinion on everything!

Even if you have no real idea of what's going on and haven't read anything of substance about the issue.

Repressive desublimation is a "happy consciousness" in the midst of runaway gangster capitalism and institutions that don't work anymore. You don't identify with love and knowledge and a vision of better worlds for your fellow humans. You identify with what you consume. What you own. What you can display to others about your "self."

But making an effort towards finding out what's really going on? It's not sexy. And worse: acting on what you've found out and trying to do something about it? You're just going to piss off guardians of the One Percent, and they will marginalize your ass. Did you fill out your bracket? Did you see what happened in the Season Finale? Wasn't that just wild?

Happy consciousness: the safe way.

It seems like a brilliant move by the Owners: get everyone free to express themselves sexually, but with no rhetoric about liberation and beauty. Having known about Marcuse's repressive desublimation for years now, I'm a tad surprised They didn't make a move to legalize cannabis sooner.

But there I go again: They. The Owners. The One Percent. I reiterate: I don't think there's a conspiracy here to massively divert attention from a structural understanding of our lives. I think it's extremely complicated. But the irony here is: too much Irony among the quasi-educated. And what were "liberal values" in a dumb-game "Culture War" turned out, in tandem with a default philosophy of Consumerism, to have inscribed the mass consciousness we see in this particular moment, this Epoch.

Or: Well, yes. That's one way to look at it. <cough> (Back to my idiosyncratic interpretation of this high abstraction...)

So: we celebrate our Free Society even while knowing we're under a Panopticon. The Unistat government spends $700 billion a year on "defense" and almost no citizen likes that idea. There's over $1 trillion owed in student loans and no jobs for those graduates, and what jobs there are kinda suck. And escalating technological unemployment seems inevitable. There is almost zero talk about a Basic Income in Unistat, as of the date this blogpost is written. The political process is evermore transparently bought and paid for by the Owners.

And just about everyone knows (most of ) this, while celebrating our Free Society and all our fancy gizmos, which some people camp out in front of the store for, overnight, on pavement. They will do this also to see Part VI of the latest film extravaganza. They will stampede to death each other at 6AM the day after Thanksgiving, at Wal-Mart, in order to get the Best Deals. They will text while driving. (Which reminds me: please watch the best PSA ever, by another filmmaker of German descent.)

Let us consider "repressive desublimation" as a mere model for describing present mass culture. As Marcuse scholar Charles Peitz paraphrased this unwieldy term: "Alienation in the midst of affluence, repression through gratification, and the overstimulation and paralysis of mind."

OR: what the hell: it's one of the greatest high-concept conspiracy theories out there. And I mean "out there."

Finally, when I recently re-read Marcuse on this topic (see here?) I marveled at how intellectually inventive and fecund the idea was, but it gnawed at me for a few days. It struck me (in the shower, as usual), that he was not only fairly accurate but that we may have moved beyond this, to something closer to Mass Cluelessness or Baudrillardian/Philip K Dick-like simulacra. This idea bummed me out, but I found this passage in a book from 1998 (O! The humanity!), by Frankfurt School scholar Martin Jay:

Now ironic reflection, camp parody, and awareness of manipulation have themselves become part of mass culture, which is no longer predominately grounded in seductive immediacy and the deliberate fostering of what Herbert Marcuse ironically dubbed the "happy consciousness" of "repressive desublimation." What seems to prevail today instead is what the German theorist Peter Sloterdijk has called "cynical reason," which he defines as "enlightened false consciousness," a "hard-boiled, shadowy cleverness that has split courage off from itself, holds anything positive to be a fraud, and is intent only on somehow getting through life." - from "Educating the Educators," p.107 in Cultural Semantics: Keywords For Our Time

The preceding quoted passage reminded me of a passage from Woody Allen's "My Speech To The Graduates":

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
-from Side Effects

Which is to say: whatever is going on, let's try to keep our sense of humor.

Here's a 51 minute documentary on Marcuse and his role in 1960s New Left politics at UC San Diego:

Recent Research on Odors

Last July I read a delightful essay by a former chemistry teacher, who was responding to an article in Scientific American that defended the minor, competing theory of how olfaction works in humans, and presumably, other mammals and critters: that each molecule has quantum vibration, and this is what distinguishes smells for us. A hydrogen atom in a molecule was substituted with a heavier deuterium isotope, which technically did not change the molecular structure of the original, but both flies and people could smell the difference. Previously, the idea of a quantum vibration working in the nervous system was laughed at by detractors as "fashionable junk science." The reigning idea of olfaction is that  a molecule docks in one of our 400-or-so different receptors on the olfactory bulb, and each receptor acts in concert with the others. Once docked, a chain reaction occurs and the brain recognizes, "Hey that smells like sandalwood," or "Ewww! What smells like rotten eggs in here?" The author of the essay, Ruchira Paul, wasn't entirely convinced of the quantum vibrational theory, but was still open to it.

What I liked most was Ruchira's observations that we have a limited vocabulary for odors, we don't have accurate standards for measuring smells, that our memory of odors lasts longer than our memory of sights, and that our sense of scents seemed uniquely intimate in its link with our own biographies and memories, our history. Thus seems probably because olfaction is part of the limbic system. She writes that smells are the "forgotten sense" in the semantic sense that, among psychophysical testing of our perceptual apparatuses, researchers have had better instruments to test our range of detection of differences in sight and sound, because they are purely physical phenomena, while our sense of smell and taste are chemical and thus more unwieldy and difficult to measure.

The physics: we have three light receptors, and researchers have estimated humans can distinguish about 10 million colors. Wavelengths of light turned out to be quite amenable to measurement.

Our ears are very complex, miraculous little organs working in concert, and biophysical research in the branch of physics called acoustics found that humans could distinguish differences in around 500,000 wavelengths of sound, and we now know that this number diminishes with age. (<---Depressingly, I found I dropped out at 14kHz. And yes, I'm close to twice 25.)

But what about odors? Chemistry-detection/measurement turned out to be more of a sticky wicket. Many of us grew up hearing and believing that we humans are completely defeated by dogs in our ability to detect odors. If you have an old biology textbook hanging around the house it probably says humans can perceive about 10,000 different odors, while dogs detect 300,000,000. This turns out to be a vastly un-empirical guesstimate from the 1920s. How far-off the guesstimate was we'll get to in a moment.

A year ago, March 2013, I began doing some research on medical diagnoses via analysis odors, because of all those articles on dogs I'd read over the years: how they could detect cancer and all that. It turned out to be fascinating, hot, exciting stuff, and maybe I'll do a separate blogspew on it one day, but just a quick diversion into that area...

Researchers at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles say, of course: obesity is not difficult to detect. I mean, just look at that dude! And why are people obese? Well, obviously: they eat too much and don't exercise enough. Jeez, no foolin' Sherlock? Tell me something we don't know! How about this: when you breathe out certain gas-emitting bacteria from the microbiome in your gut, this may be a deeper reason why you're obese: the ratio of gut bacteria that are associated with fatness versus the gut bacteria that are not? The implications are <ahem> large. And this gives our overweight loved ones cause for hope, because if we can figure out how to alter our gut bacteria ratio via drugs or even simple probiotics? We could be on the way to defeating obesity. (And oh man! This has become a hot research topic; there's a lot riding on making this work.) ("Doctors Detect Obesity Bug On Breath")

Also, dig: 11 months ago, in PLOS ONE, a possible discovery of individual human metabolic phenotypes! (Human wha?) Okay, our gadgets are now becoming so sophisticated that the chemical world is becoming much easier to map, finally. Maybe it will soon catch up with purely physical phenomena we can measure. But researchers in Zurich, noting that, despite fluctuating factors involving diet and the gut microbiome, people's urine remained "highly individual," and that urine phenotypes (phenotypes: that which we can observe; genotypes: an organism's genetic makeup which codes for genetic expression that largely gives rise to that which is phenotypic) persist over time. The Zurich researchers used a group of subjects over nine days, exhaling into a machine that handled mass spectrometry, found that "consistent with previous metabolimic studies based on urine, we conclude that individual signatures of breath composition exists." I've even heard this individual-breath signature idea bandied about as a way to get rid of all our passwords, but I'm not sure if the geek was joking or not.

Back to our general sense of smells...

Last September a study appeared in PLOS ONE that I found intriguing: in 1985 a book appeared called Atlas of Odor Character Profiles, by Andrew Dravnieks. Researchers used this book as a basic data set to start with, and with it they have determined there are around ten basic, tightly-structured categories of odor. They are:

1. fragrant
2. woody/resinous
3. fruity (non-citrus)
4. chemical
5. minty/peppermint
6. sweet
7. popcorn
8. lemon
[The last two are both "sickening"]
9. pungent
10. decayed

What they hope to do now is demonstrate the soundness of this - to me, overly-rationalistic take, but what do I know? - model by predicting how a given chemical compound is likely to smell. (My first guess? Number 4.) The researchers used very elaborate statistical techniques to arrive at the 10 and will continue to do so as they test their model. And maybe I shouldn't be so snarky: the basic model for the sense of taste has remained the same for very many years, only going from four to five since 1985 in the West (sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, with the relatively recent addition of umami).

I hope these guys are on to something, if only for the reason that we can all internalize these ten categories and then invent more words to describe nuances within each category. With this research, Ruchira Paul's observation that we don't yet have accurate standards by which to measure smell will have been eclipsed by some new, "objective" model.

The Latest: Humans Can Detect One TRILLION Odors ("Conservative Estimate")
You may have heard the news from last week. See HERE for a decent overview. Researchers at Rockefeller University took 26 participants and used 128 different odor molecules. (In the actual phenomenological-existential "real" world there are vastly more odors, but that's why this research is so brilliant: they would test a person by mixing two of three vials with combinations from the 128 odors, and the third one was not the same as the other two. The result: if less than 50% of the molecules are identical, people could still smell the difference! People could tell the difference between the two (same) vials and the one different one. If 51% of the two vials were identical, people could tell. The researchers admitted that often the admixtures of odors from the original 128 were "nasty and weird." Think about it: they could mix 10, 20, or 30 odors, in any combination from the 128. This yields trillions of different scents. And people could detect the differences! One basic odor of the 128 may have been "orange," another "spearmint" or "anise." But they mixed them together in all sorts of groupings. No wonder they were "nasty and weird."

We have around 400 different small receptors, working in concert. A smell of a rose would have around 275 different molecules in unique combination.

One of the olfactory researchers, Andreas Keller, said, "The message here is that we have far more sensitivity in our sense of smell that for which we give ourselves credit. We just don't pay attention to it and don't use it in everyday life."

I want to see this study replicated many times. It almost seems too wonderful to be true. I hope there's no Clever Hans Effect tainting the research. It makes me wonder about training humans to smell cancer like dogs, but we seem so biased toward sophisticated gadgetry in this regard, and against dogs and human perceptual apparatus alone, that I won't hold my breath...or nose.

Imagining Smells: An Uncommon Gift
Or so Oliver Sacks tells us. Most of us have little trouble conjuring in our minds a sight or sound from our vivid past. But it's rare to summon an induced hallucination of odor. However, some can do this, and Sacks relates what one "Gordon C." wrote to him in 2011:

Smelling objects that are not visible seems to have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember....If, for instance, I think for a few minutes about my long dead grandmother, I can almost immediately recall with near-perfect sensory awareness the powder that she always used. If I'm writing to someone about lilacs, or any specific flowering plant, my olfactory senses produce that fragrance. This is not to say that merely writing the word "roses" produces the scent; I have to recall a specific instance connected with a rose, or whatever, in order to produce the effect. I always considered this ability to be quite natural, and it wasn't until adolescence that I discovered it was not normal for everyone. Now I consider it a wonderful gift of my specific brain.
-pp.45-46, Hallucinations

On the other hand, there are other, more terrifying olfactory hallucinations described in this wonderful book: people who had traumatic accidents who were violently attacked or witnessed something horrific will, when by-chance experiencing the smell or similar smells associated with the traumatic moment, might experience a shell-shocked "replay"back to the Very Unpleasant Moment.

Let us tend to those more-common moments when some odor sends us back in time to a more comforting or interesting moment, which seems more common with the olfactory/memory nexus than the triggering of traumatic memories.

Trust Me On This: Deception, Biology, Politics

"Reality is the temporary resultant of the struggle between rival gangs of programmers." - Robert Anton Wilson

When I was 16 I lived with my father just outside of Denver, and he and his childhood friend and drinking buddy got into watching pro-wrestling on TV. The absurdity and theatricality of it all made them howl with laughter. Later I attended a few live shows in downtown Denver, and was struck by the idea that a few people sitting near us seemed to believe the "matches" were on the up-and-up.

Later I read then-structuralist Roland Barthes's Mythologies (I should say I tried to read Barthes, but the  epistemological [semiotic] assumptions - derived from Ferdinand de Saussure, who I had not read at the time - rendered much of Barthes's work opaque to me) and this 1957 book had an essay on pro wrestling, which I'll link to here, if anyone is interested. Barthes contrasted boxing - in which the thrust is to see who wins, with wrestling, which was a sum of episodes, the point not being about winning, but the sheer spectacle of the thing, which with its pantomimes of characters Good and Evil, had an underlying message of playing on the ideas in mass culture about Justice.

Later I read much of Murray Edelman's work in sociology. He had a lot to say about politics as a spectacle. (Here's the NYT obit for Edelman, which gives a thumbnail of his concerns.) Edelman seems a quite underrated figure; he was writing about things that Jean Baudrillard took up much later, and, while in academic language, Edelman was still quite readable. Some have called him the first postmodern political scientist. Politics? It's a show, sorta like wrestling. Edelman says that people fall into the drama, play parts, internalize the totality of the show, and increasingly take it seriously. What? I'll try to elaborate.

Look at the foggy, mystifying language surrounding politics and its main delivery system, the mass media. Look at how many people seem to not question the semantic content of the jargon and glossary in political-speak. (Because they don't know how? Or they'd rather stick with the "fun" of playing inside the melodrama of politics? I don't know. Edelman seemed to wonder too.) Political institutions are symbolic acts that must be interpreted within some schema or another. But the institutions and acts tend to serve to more or less keep things the same rather than change things. Oh, changes do occur. If they didn't, the Show would get stale, and the players wouldn't be able to take it seriously anymore. It must perpetually seem vital to the players within. Voters who don't show up or who don't follow politics? They're onto the game and don't want to play. They see the game as bullshit. I think Edelman is right here to an extent, but I also think there are people who would rather not know anything; they don't see into/through Edelman's elaborate socio-political spectacle because they never had a serious look in the first place.

Rituals in politics are elaborate. The quantity of them is large and they are repeated so often that people cannot "see" the rituals as rituals. Rather, something solemn about Justice and Freedom and Democracy and The Good and Fairness and Meritocracy is being upheld. (Sorta like...wrestling?) The rituals of politics invest in the authority of the main players on the stage, and we are meant to hold the whole show in awe.

Now, irony and provocation being two of my favorite tropes from intellectuals, I appreciate Edelman's ouvre and I think quite a lot of it is accurate and generally edifying discourse, but, like most of those thinkers we call postmodern, there tends to be an inexorable taking of the thesis to extremes, so that something begins to waft up...what's that? Do you smell it? You do? Then it's not just me, thankgod. Yea, but what is it? Does it smell like burning garbage to you? No? Like unpleasant incense? Really? Oh! Now I know what it is! We've been reading postmodernists, and we smell a reductio ad absurdum. Whew! I was about to get the fire extinguisher.

What I like about Edelman's work is the Things Are Not As They Seem-ishness of it all; I also like that he concentrated on language and semiotic/symbolic analysis, which fits into my main model and along with valued thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson, Alfred Korzybski, Marshall McLuhan, George Lakoff, and even, in a way, Noam Chomsky. Also, there's a thread running from Giambattista Vico's 2000+ years of class warfare of the Rich vs. Everyone Else that Edelman can fit with.

What I don't like about the over-baked aspect of Edelman is the lingering hopelessness, and there's quite a clash between an idea that I think holds much sway - that if you don't "do" politics it'll be done to you - and the sort of paralysis via analysis I get from Edelman, which leads to passivity. He has made me question my role in the political Show, and now I'm far more ironic about it all, but I'm verging away. Back to deception.

In the blogpost from four days ago, I briefly discussed Edward O. Wilson. Another giant in Sociobiology, who was there at creation, was Robert Trivers. In the bibliography for Wilson's revolutionary 1975 work, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis a handful of Trivers's papers are listed. Trivers has been perhaps most noted for being a sort of hardcore exponent of Dawkins's kin selection idea, but with particular emphasis on reciprocal altruism (shorthand: "you scratch my back and then I'll scratch yours" in Biology). When you get into reciprocal altruism, you also allow for "deals" between non-kin. It gets very abstruse when you start to run with it, especially when you're trying to keep in mind what Hamilton wrote, how EOW took it compared to Dawkins, how they sought to create new ideas to separate themselves as the first-line sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists, etc.

As Trivers elaborated on reciprocal altruism, he began to concentrate on something that seemed to spin out of it: deception. And now, after a few decades of writing and thinking about it, he's maybe the foremost thinker on deception from biology on up to humans.

Trivers, a manic-depressive genius since childhood, a longtime pot smoker, classic anti-authoritarian, who, in May of 1979 joined the Black Panthers and, according to David Jay Brown, Trivers's colleague Burney Le Boeuf, called Trivers "the blackest white man I know." (Mavericks of the Mind, p.54)

In John Horgan's review of Trivers's book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, we see this passage:

Trivers calls deceit a “deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune system. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.

So how much of this stuff goes on, in all the domains of our lives? It seems easy to fall into paranoia when contemplating The Spectacle, language as virus, conspiracy, double and triple crosses and agents, counterfeiting, prevarication (the very word seems to be hiding something, no?), "spin," fakes, secrecy, claims of "transparency," the information deformations that occur within status hierarchies, advertising and PR and hypnotic techniques, etc. Let us consider this list as The Shadow of ourselves, vis a vis what we'd prefer to think about "reality": that most of us care about the Truth and act trustworthy, because we want others to act honestly with us. The Shadow would be all that which is...less than trustworthy? 

The vast data from the animal kingdom shows how common camouflage is, how many animals have developed a way to APPEAR far more menacing than they are, on and on. Is deceit built into the fabric of all biology? It appears so. But then so is the attempt to detect...

It's common to read about deceit and lying and note the linkage between our very complex intra-species signaling system (i.e, human language) and how it's exquisitely available for the purposes of deceit. When ants communicate via very elaborate pheromones, the lying has its limits, it seems, at least compared to our signaling systems.

What I also note is the biological metaphor often used in writings on deceit: that lying is "parasitic" upon the truth, and that too many people engaged in deceit tend to ruin a system. From The Oxford Companion To The Mind:

Conveying useful information from one person to another about 'facts' is the essence of this extraordinary human invention. Lying is therefore parasitic upon general truthfulness, and if its incidence becomes too high the system becomes useless.

So here we have a reason for truthfulness that's not lame-brained ("The Bible sez..." or "good people tell the truth!", etc): the system is preserved. But then we must ask, "Is the system worth preserving?" Since Ronald Reagan, people running for office as Republicans have made it part of their platform that government doesn't work and should get out of the way of "people's lives," by which they mean corporations should be able to do whatever they want. Convince people you want a job that you don't think should even exist? What "system" do they favor? And do they really believe what they say or are they being deceptive? Hoo-boy...

The "parasite" metaphor brings us back to biology, but other writers have borrowed a metaphor from physics: that deception is like entropy. But I'd rather return to wrestling.

                                 Eric Weinstein, popularizer of the kayfabe idea
                                                  for thinkers caught in "ordinary" economic reality

Eric Weinstein, relating his ideas about information and deceit in economic systems, has drawn on the obscure wrestling term kayfabe. In an article in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (edited by John Brockman), Weinstein cites recent work in evolutionary biology by the aforementioned Trivers and Richard Alexander that says deceit plays a bigger role than accurate information transfer in systems with selective pressures. "Yet most of our thinking treats deception as a perturbation in the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory that uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information." (p.321) 

Weinstein says that in the early years of wrestling, matches went on for too long, guys got hurt, the matches became boring, and eventually the "sport" became a ritualized thing, "negotiated, choreographed and rehearsed," its complex dramaturgical "rules" closed to outsiders. This seems something like our financial system now, "an altered reality of layered falsehoods, in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears." Wait, there's more.

Why didn't the "freshwater" Chicago school of economists foresee the 2008 economic meltdown? Why didn't the "saltwater" Ivy Leaguers catch it? Probably because they're caught in the kayfabe: there is a quiet agreement to not let the outsiders know the game is fixed. Note: neither group suffered for not knowing. And still they are "experts." 

Weinstein says that, if you're wondering why there are no investigative journalists doing the real work they used to do and seemingly "bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts," we'd understand this better if we knew what a kayfabe is. And it comes out of the traveling-carnival of hokum that is professional wrestling. 

"What makes kayfabe remarkable is that it provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery." (p.322) Weinstein sees kaybrification as an important feature of love, science, war, finance and politics. And we would all be better served to know this term and its mechanisms. The truly horrifying thing about kayfabe, as I read Weinstein about it, is that it shows the 1%/Ruling Class and its managers how many layers of disbelief the human mind is capable of suspending before fantasy melds seamlessly with reality.

Add to that: wrestling eventually became so over the top that it had to admit it was fake...but the public loved it anyway, or as Weinstein puts it, "Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience." (p.323) (an online link to the Weinstein article I'm drawing from is HERE.)

Going back to my idea about secrecy and spin and deceit and advertising and other such terms as part of the Shadow of truth, and given the kayfabe and Trivers's arguments (even bacteria and viruses employ subterfuge to sneak past your immune system)...to quote a famous painter: Who are we? Where are we going?

My favorite philosopher, Robert Anton Wilson, was not an academic and more like a great generalist-thinker. He gave an interview 36 years ago and here's one Q and his A that, I think, pertains to these topics, and provides a slight slant that allows us more perspective:

Science Fiction Review: How serious are you about the Illuminati and conspiracies in general?

Robert Anton Wilson: Being serious is not one of my vices. I will venture, however, that the idea that there are no conspiracies has been popularized by historians working for universities and institutes funded by the principle conspirators of our time: the Rockefeller-Morgan banking interests, the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, the Trilateral Commission. This is not astonishing or depressing. Conspiracy is standard mammalian politics for reasons to be found in ethology and Von Neumann's and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Vertebrate competition depends on knowing more than the opposition, monopolizing information along with territory, hoarding signals. Entropy, in a word. Science is based on transmitting the signal accurately, accelerating the process of information transfer. Negentropy. The final war may be between Pavlov's Dog and Schrodinger's Cat.

However, I am profoundly suspicious about all conspiracy theories, including my own, because conspiracy buffs tend to forget the difference between a plausible argument and a real proof. Or between a legal proof, a proof in the behavioral sciences, a proof in physics, a mathematical or logical proof, or a parody of any of the above. My advice to all is Buddha's last words, "Doubt, and find your own light." Or, as Crowley wrote, "I slept with Faith and found her a corpse in the morning. I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." Doubt suffereth long, but is kind; doubt covereth a multitude of sins; doubt puffeth not itself up into dogma. For now abideth doubt, hope, and charity, these three: and the greatest of these is doubt. With doubt all things are possible. Every other entity in the universe, including Goddess Herself, may be trying to con you. It's all Show Biz. Did you know that Billy Graham is a Bull Dyke in drag?
-The Illuminati Papers, p.47

Question from the OG: Where is The Shadow? 

Here's 7 minutes of Chomsky and Trivers, riffing on the topic of deception:

Some Very Recent Forms of "The Dialectic" (?)

[I've still got a nasty cold/cough and I'm in a general(ist?) state of bile and snark, so please forgive the odd tones, I beseech thee! I'm experiencing full-on phlegmaticness! Not fun. This article is about some brief tiffs between late 2011 reality-based communitarians in Unistat vs. entrenched interests and what I might deem - in my current moment of snark-bile state - the "reality-impaired." Have fun! - the OG]

There are many definitions of "dialectic." Plato thought only educated men talking to each other about ideas can reach an ever-higher level of understanding of True Being. More specifically for Plato and his followers, it was the process of defining terms and ideas and how they interrelate and have to do with One ultimate idea, which emanates from an Ideal World of Perfect Forms. Dialectic was spotted being used in English in the 14th century, in a sense that we would now call "logic." It had migrated rather scholastically into the art of discussion and debate, or argument...among school-churchmen who assumed Aristotle and the Bible were the ultimate wellsprings of Truth. <cough>

                                        Plato, looking stoned, from file photos. This was obviously after a night on the town. The wine 
                                        those guys drank was ultra-strong, and who knows what drugs were used for 
                                        the Eleusinian Mysteries. Man, I've heard of bloodshot eyes, but whiteshot eyes?
                                                     
Sometime around the early 18th century, in or near present-day Germany, the term dialectic began to be discussed in terms of contradictions and disputes not only in discussions but in "reality." I will not go into an excursion of the term in Kant, Hegel, and Marx. I am using the term in this particular blog post in a rather grandiose way that persnickety scholars might call debased, but aside from that I mean something like: clashes of political ideas in late 2011 Unistat between what I consider people in what one George W. Bush official told journalist Ronald Suskind was the "reality-based community,"(Suskind's) and...whatever the Birthers and right wing billionaires/Americans For Prosperity and Heritage Foundation and Tea Party rank-and-file and John Birch Society, et.al call their "reality."

(I'm guessing they'd call their "reality" the One True Reality, but that's only a guess, and I am being unfair in lumping all those people together, as no doubt we will find at times substantial differences among all those who'd self-identify with one of more of those groups. They all seem to hate Obama, though.)

First up: A wonderful post from earlier today by a Maryland-based blogger-colleague of mine, Annabel Lee, denizen of the reality-based community, who tells us of her surprising experience at a Tea Party rally in Durham, North Carolina very recently. There's also something not-very-surprising. In the context of dialectic this speaks to a down-and-dirty overall story about the current state of beastly mundane and debased political discourse in Unistat, late 2011:
When a Liberal Visits a Tea Party Rally,What Happens? from Annabel Lee's razor-sharp blog Double Dip Politics. Of all the dialectical clashes in this OG post, this one from DDP contains a kernel of hope for something truly revolutionary: Occupyers and Tea Partiers (and those cheering for either group, from the sidelines) making common cause. (Note I said a "kernel.")

                            Co-Founder of the Yippies, self-described Investigative Satirist Paul Krassner.
                                     He did LSD with, among others and at different times, Groucho Marx and 
                                     Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme. Read his books!

Next up: Somehow Playboy got Paul Krassner and Andrew Breitbart into a conversation. It seems to me the more one knows about Breitbart and Krassner the more fascinating this exchange seems, but all I'm perhaps biased because I know Krassner's books, his biography, his history so well, and I love him. Krassner's one of my favorite Unistatians of the 20th century, born in 1931, if memory serves, and the founder of The Realist, and by dint of that, often introduced as "The Father of the Counterculture,"or "Father of the Underground press," for which he'd always yell out, "I demand a paternity test!" All I know of Breitbart is his appearances on TV, and he just seems like another Angry White Male with deep emotional issues. There's my bias. At any rate: primo dialectico!...but are the two of them really trying to get to the truth? Or uncover a new layer of truth? Your call...

Third - these things come in threes, as Pythagoras and Plato and Jeanne Dixon always asserted - comes what appears to be an editorial by Keith Olbermann, heaping vitriol on Michael Bloomberg while interspersing the castigation with ironic gratitude. There is a basic strong rhetorical style - immanent critique, comparisons, use of a thesaurus, clipped rhythms, about Olbermann. He's witty and angry and righteous and seems a justified heir to his broadcasting hero Murrow. (And Olbermann has a voice and seasoned telegenic mannerisms that shapes his rhetoric in a way that shouldn't be underestimated.) But within the context of dialectic please take Olbermann here and consider almost everything you see and hear tonally from the mainstream corporate electronic media about WHO the Occupiers are and what they want, and how the laws and Constitution comes into play. I invite you to consider this special comment-rant as a dialectic with, say, what Fox News is saying about the same situation:

Sooooo...how is this all playing from the vantage point of dialectic? Where are the misunderstandings? How can we model these chasms of understandings about, oh...I don't know...."facts"? What's The Reader's favorite way to model this...errr..."problem"?

I'm sure everything will work its way onward and upward, towards some Golden Mean of grace and empathic understanding and then we will All realize our common humanity and there will be no hungry, no homeless, no jobless, no health-insurance-less and everyone has access to World of Warcraft. Just as Plato and his dialectic said it would.

 <bittersarcasm-mode OFF>

Missing Public Discussions: A "Reality" Problem

Continuing from yesterday: check this out:


"In fact, the wealth gap in the United States is wider than it has ever been. In 2009 alone, the pay of America's highest earners quintupled, while more Americans found themselves on food stamps than ever before. Wealth inequality in the United States had already hit its highest level since 1929 two years before that. Throughout the recession and its jobless aftermath, that gap has only grown bigger. Andbigger. And bigger. We're now roughly on par with China."


That's from Larry Womack's article "Where 30 Years of Real Class Warfare Has Left America," which can be read in its entirety here.


Why do only "we" see this? How can the Far Right Tea Baggers actually believe that we need to lean on the poor more?


My best read on this is that the public has been dumbed-down by an increasingly atrocious public school system (I am NOT attacking teachers!), coupled with the vastly underappreciated knowledge that watching moving images in one's own home is akin to self-brainwashing if one has not been educated to understand how electronic media - or better, all media - "work." In this case, TV "information" has been overwhelmingly non-progressive (putting it mildly) in that area that purportedly seeks to "inform" the public via "news" or "the issues."


So, what we have...is a failure...to communicate. I don't like it anymore than you do!


Aye: the Right has been so brilliant at framing information about the economic/business/political/social sphere on the Idiot Box (because it's all owned by giant corporations, what would you expect?) that we now have enormous numbers of people who believe in innumerable aspects of phenomena which I consider baseless; they were made up a long time ago. These ideas are "facts" to their adherents, because they've heard them  repeated so often, for years on end. We have a large segment of Unistatians who believe in a almost completely fake "reality" that was dreamed up mostly in right wing think tanks, and they mostly did it via manipulation of the fear response by an ingenious use of language and images. And this is a humongous problem.


Call this my Conspiracy Theory, but the rise of Rush Limbaugh and his clones was tailor-made for the Five Percenters: with NAFTA/GATT, etc: the jobs in middle America were going to disappear extra-quickly; they needed an amped-up Noise Machine that made up "facts" and developed a Big Narrative so that men who suddenly couldn't make their mortgage payments had someone to blame: homosexuals, "liberals," women, poor people, people of color, educated people, people who consumed items like latte or Volvos, "rap music," heavy metal, Hollywood, the Great Society programs of the 1960s, people who thought a background check before buying an automatic weapon was a good idea, and...everyone but Jedd and his friends! Blame! It's an underrated drug. 


It's a narcotic, methinks.


I could catalog my own list of non-realities that a large number of the population believe in, but I would use up too much space. Here's a list of 23 dippy realities that Tea Partiers tend to believe in. Each, I consider, patently absurd. Apparently these ideas "really are" believed by folks who somehow think that Bachmann, Palin, and Rick Perry are fit to take helm.


This is not a "difference of opinion." I know an opinion when I see one. This seems far more like a DELUSION. 


Here's a morbidly fascinating problem: among epistemologists, it's been long discussed that a bad social idea, if it gains enough adherents, becomes "real" even if the Idea In Itself seems baseless. We must deal with human beings who believe things that have no base in "reality." 


That's an unpleasant philosophical problem we must deal with, but I must admit: it is interesting. I only wish I was reading about it in some ancient history text, not current politics.


Even more fascinating: "reality" bites back. If I believe I can fly off the roof of this building by flapping my arms, a "reality check" is fast approaching, at 32 feet per second per second. Likewise, in the social-political "reality" sphere: how long can the Ruling Class continue to feed extremely sophisticated garbage about "reality" down most peoples' throats? Because the business class surely must feel the sting when people are too stupid to manage their interests. Having a load of crap in your head to try and think with in "reality" is not good for business, at a certain point. Now: some of my friends think it can go on like this for much longer, because the Five Percenters who own most of the land, businesses, banks, etc, have enough smart college-educated people to manage their concerns; the Idiocracy will just lap up more and more and more Trash and blame anyone but the Five Percenters for their own squalor. 


But I do wonder. I sincerely do not believe Unistatians are born stupid; they must be made that way. And what can be made can be unmade. Or altered in interesting ways. But WHAT will actuate this process of change?


I put the word "reality" in quotes because one of my favorite philosophers, Robert Anton Wilson, convinced me that "reality" seems a very dodgy concept. I do not claim to know "reality." I strongly doubt any one person alive has a direct hotline to True "Reality." But I am saying what I think is close to something truthful. I am giving my truth here. "Reality," I strongly suspect, is a great example of a word that, because we can creatively conceptualize that such a "thing" exists, that It must somehow "really" exist. But I think that whatever it "is," it isn't a noun, and doesn't exist as much as that big fat hunk of government cheddar we might have to subsist upon if more of us don't get smarter, quicker. Indeed: "reality," in almost all of the semantic senses in which we encounter it, may not have much of an ontological status at all! 


[What I mean is: it might help to de-conceptualize the idea of "reality" and work on better definitions of whatever it "is" or whatever dynamic processes we are groping toward when we attempt to say anything about "it."]


And my truth is: there are some ideas that are widely believed, that, if I were allowed on national TV with enough time, I could make a very persuasive case that much of what is believed as "fact" by, say, the Tea Partiers (see link above), has ZERO basis in "reality." 


I do, however, admit that when enough people believe in a package of patently absurd, idiotic ideas, that "reality" comes into some sort of "being" and it's quite unfortunate, but the rest of us have to deal with it, and it's a difficult problem, because part of the delusional "reality" is that anyone outside their delusional "reality" are the ones that are delusional!


Here's one of the biggest Morons I've seen in a long time, a Murdoch-Fox "News"- Tea Party favorite, Sarah Palin, who does a version of Josef Goebbels's "big lie," accusing others of doing what she herself does: makes things up: (2 mins, and videlicet):

I leave you with the High Drama of Anonymous! Vive ANONYMOUS!