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The Scriptures of the Church of VirtualityReality 07
/qix/taperave
/lizi/conspire
/qix/necro
/qix/taperave
Transcript of a tape recorded Tue night /Wed morn , around 9 Dec 1992,
transcribed that evening.
SIDE I
testing, testing...
Okay. For lack of anything better to do, and to fill in the next seven hours
or so, I'm going to sit here and record some tapes over the top of tapes that
I recorded at the ISEA afternoon.. at the Institute of Modern Art. The reason
I am sitting here frustrated for another seven hours or so is because I have
to wait until I can catch a bus out to Griffith to log on to the net again. I
had what I thought was a very good idea this evening, and that is.. an
electronic zine devoted solely to interviews conducted by email, or, in other
ways through the net. First person I want to interview is Jagwire X, who
interviewed Andy Hawks in one issue of Scream Baby. Hmm.
..and, just being frustrated at.. the stupidity of having something like the
net which permits instantaneous communication, instantaneous performance of
all sorts of things, and the reality of my situation here with no computer and
no phone link, having to wait hours and then having to commute for about an
hour in order to get to a terminal where I can start to do things. That
frustration has made me ask myself, what do I actually want to do, what sort
of things do I want. One of the first things I was thinking about is this idea
of moving overseas.. I've toyed lately with the idea of moving to California,
simply because it's a place where so many of.. the people whose ideas I find
interesting live - like, um, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Avital Ronell,
FM-2030, the Extropian people - and also it's a place where a lot of social
processes are happening which I find interesting, such as American rave
culture and the whole "New Edge" business.. and that's made me ask myself:
Where *specifically*, in the world, would you consider moving, if you were
going out of Australia.. and the two places I've thought of are Berkeley and
Oxford. Berkeley for all the reasons I just mentioned - and also because if
you're in the United States - if *I* was in the United States I could travel
overland to future events like Phenomicon.
And the other place - Oxford - the only reason at all I would consider
moving to Oxford is basically because that's the home of the Institute for
Psychophysical Research - in other words, it's where Celia Green's group is.
There's no other particular attraction at all, for me, to being in England.
The fact that I would still consider Oxford against everything else in the
United States is a sign of how unique I think the IPR is, I've simply never
heard of a research institute anywhere else which has its apparent qualities.
So.. so that - yeah well, I don't think there's a good chance I'll be moving
to either of those places any time soon, at the very best what I might be able
to do is duplicate my achievement of '91, perhaps get a return trip to London,
in which I can visit both places again, perhaps for a bit longer this time..
But this leads me to write down on my list, "MONEY", and have a little pointer
to "Drug Trials", so when I start making phone calls, like phoning Kevin
Solway and phoning various other people, I should make sure to phone Clinical
Sciences at the hospital.
Okay. Now. As far as net access goes.. at the end of the year there's
probably going to be about a one-week period where labs at all of the
universities will be shut. So, during that period of time, my only form of
access.. my only means of getting messages *out*, in any case.. will be
through people like Jack and perhaps Kevin, perhaps Lara, who have modems. One
sort of thing I could do I guess would be to set up a forward from lambada to
Jack's account, the only problem is I wouldn't be able to get on to reset that
and since his account disappears on December 31st.. hmm.
And also in the longer term, I do think I need something better than I have
now. I was thinking before, I *do* want a Unix account so I can do things like
telnet and ftp and decompress and so on.. Now at Nyx, if I get shell access,
as I understand it I would be able to do all those things except telnet, and
if I can reach Nyx then I can telnet anyway. And my other options are, in
trying to get a local Unix account, are.. buy one for $500 at Griffith, or,
um, enrol at UQ again next year, part-time, in a subject which allows me to..
in a computing subject which would give me net access. A third possibility I
guess would be to enrol part-time and then try and get an account at the
Prentice Centre again, but this time as a student and not just as a member of
the general public. I don't know whether they'd look favorably on me having
grepped the password file once, though. Hmm.. and of course there's BrisNet to
consider as well, but BrisNet isn't very attractive for me so long as I don't
actually have my own modem and computer. I can try and save in order to get
Blinky back from Lara.. If I was to buy a phone and a computer and an account
at Griffith that would be almost $2000. Hmm.
Okay, the question of moving overseas really is relevant even in the short
term, even if only in the long-term is when I would actually be able to move,
because it raises the question of how.. deeply would I want to set down roots
here in Brisbane. For example I could try to aim for a situation analogous to
Dayalan's in '91, that is having apartment somewhere and my own little
computer terminal in it, and so on, and that could be a sort of a safe base,
which I could make my.. material centre of operations. That would require a
certain amount of energy invested in constructing a sort of a stable, "safe
haven" here in Brisbane, whereas if my long-term future really does lie in
Oxford or Berkeley, then I should perhaps consider only temporary arrangements
here, with a view to only settling down once I get over there.
And for what reasons does anyone ever want to settle down anywhere anyway.
It's only to get what security there is, in a very simple survival sense,
having a place where you can store your material possessions, and.. yeah,
generally not being susceptible to things like landlords raising rent or
deciding to kick you out, although as far as governments are concerned you're
alwys vulnerable to that..
Now, my drive to get the texts of my favorite books online, at least.. and
also, my hope of getting things like my diaries available at ftp sites or some
sort of archive like that.. is part of an attempt on my part to make it
possible for me to move around, and still be able to access all the things
that I want to be able to access. This is where I think FM2030 would be
useful. I still haven't seen "Telespheres" I don't think, the only book I saw
when I was in Indiana was "Upwingers". But the idea of.. not being fixed in
space, means that wherever you may happen to move you still need to be able to
reach everything that you want.
And as far as the serious aspect of GAIA 2000 goes, the Earth Summit in
cyberspace, I think FM really has the agenda for that [garbled], because he is
concerned with things like the megapolitical situation, if you want to call it
that, and the sort of things which the UN would already consider to be on its
agenda, but he's striving to interface those with topics which are still only
being considered in futurist circles, such as the concept of a telespheral
world, and a "smile-squared" agenda.
So the focus there, would be on people like FM2030 and Barbara Marx
Hubbard.. I think Earth Summit number one is already doing whatever anyone
might be doing as far as "saving the Earth" goes, in the conventional sense..
um, that plus Greenpeace - It'd be interesting to know more about what sort
of net access Greenpeace has, because they have their internal communications
network which I saw a bit of, but I haven't seen evidence of a direct
Greenpeace presence on the Internet. So, um, hmm.. A source of information for
NGOs and the nature of their connection to the net, might be, um, various
documents on the political ftp site, like the list of political addresses
around the world, that might have some email addresses in it as well. And then
there are also some documents that I've got on disk, under the names ECONET,
PEACENET, and GLASNET. I'm not sure where I got those from, I downloaded them
from somewhere when ftp from QUT was still working, and they listed
organizations which were on various alternative electronic nets, around the
world.. so that would be something else to add - and I still need to find out
about the damn model UN, what the hell is it.. and what's its relationship
toi the *real* UN? ..and for that matter, what does the real UN do with *its*
net access, because it has its own domain, un.org, so perhaps - perhaps I
could consider interviewing the UN rep who has been mentioned a few times when
I do a "whois un.org" - I'll just write that down, "whois un.org interview".
Now, well it's still only 11:30 so I'm not doing much for passing time.
I hope Kelly gets back within a few days because I want to discuss with her
either me moving out or us getting a phone here right now, because I'm getting
tired of not having a phone, basically.
In particular I wouldn't mind the opportunity to phone occasionally to, some
of the people in America, perhaps like Scotto or Max More or whoever..
because, although that is very expensive, at least that way I don't have to
commute. So it's expensive as far as money goes but it saves time.. I could
save money as well if I did Gordon's scheme of going to Redcliffe Airport or
wherever it is, and doing a sort of a phone-tapping thing, but that again
requires travel to get out there.
I should ask myself, can I *briefly*, or concisely, or clearly state, what
"Alpha and Omega", as a project overall, is about? I remember when John
Esposito was talking to me and Nathan, or before that, I was thinking that I
might explain my goals with this - my ultimate goals - as being to
"immanentize the Eschaton, or a reasonable facsimile thereof". So, the idea as
I have explained it at various times in the past, is to have "Alpha and Omega"
as a novel which exists in draft form on the Internet, which is anticopyright
so anyone anywhere can print it, and the novel will describe the event at the
end of the century, and it will also try to bring about the event. So the
whole idea is to try to achieve the superior coordination which might make
possible important things on a large scale.. but I do have to ask myself -
what can.. what really significant can a mass of people achieve except in
opposition to some sort of dictatorship. In terms of, an extropian sort of
agenda, or even a.. something like.. I have imagined that you could try to do
a paranormal-type.. or.. a paranormal experiment or an occult operation on a
planetary scale, through the means of the sort of global multimedia
intercontinental event that I have vaguely envisioned. Now with something like
that you might want masses of people for some reason or other, but to make
progress towards the singularity in a technical sense, requires discoveries,
which don't come from masses of people, they come from individuals. So in that
sense what is needed is a way for individuals to communicate with each other,
which I guess is what CafeNet-like projects are about.. A lot of the
individuals who might make technical contributions would already be in
universities - but, on the other hand, the existence of things like, people
making a living as programmers at home shows that there is a place for the -
the what? The technical hobbyist, who is somewhat removed from the centres of
their profession.. so I'm thinking here of the relationship of, say, someone
who might be writing shareware in Brisbane, like Kevin - although without the
philosophical aspirations as well - compared to programmers who work for large
corporations or who are on university faculties, and who have access to
something like the Internet in its full range. The first programmer can
nevertheless come up with something which is significant and, even if it's
only a small part, can still be crucial in the development of some larger
system. So a similar thing will probably apply with something like
nanotechnological design, so there's every reason to push for something like
CafeNet, for *that* reason as well, so those people can also contribute to the
collaborations which will bring into being new generations of software and of
hardware. Hmm.
But to return to "Alpha and Omega" - so, the idea is.. Well, I could compare
it to something like "The Book of the SubGenius", which has this fictional
aspect, but certainly you can lead a SubGenius lifestyle, even if "Bob" isn't
a real person, simply by making yourself a "Bobby" for one thing, or more
creatively by creating your own SubGenius spinoff. But either way, Ivan Stang
clearly has dreams or schemes of.. a TV revolution - he says somewhere in
"High Weirdness by Mail", that "Not only will the Revolution be televised, but
it will *be* the television show!" So I think he's.. he's plotting something
like, what if Bob Black were head of network programming on CNN - something
like that - inundating the world with artistically contrived messages in order
to, break the hold of the Conspiracy on our minds, so to speak. So he's
conspiring or plotting, or he's trying to bring about the means for him to get
in that sort of position; I don't know whether he'll get there or not, or how
high a profile "Bob" will have in 1998... But "Alpha and Omega" is similar to
that in that it is trying to set a very specific time - the 24-hour period at
the end of 2000 - in which something significant could happen, if people
managed to coordinate their efforts beforehand. Now, the actual event that
might happen could be any number of things. I listed these in part 6 of the
Scriptures, as I will be putting them out shortly, but.. but the
possibilities, even the mundane possibilities, are very very broad - and so
that's why the input of others is so crucial at this point.. because what I've
managed to dream up, is a framework, which I think is more detailed than any
previous.. attempt of this nature, in terms of setting a Date with Destiny.
But at the same time the specifics of what is to take place have been left
entirely up in the air, simply because I can't quite decide myself what I
would want. So, it's like I'm creating a framework which other people will be
able to come along and inhabit. And my specific ideas for what I would like to
happen on that date, have generally revolved around something to do with GAIA
2000, that's the sort of thing towards which I might actually work, in an
organizational sense. My other projects - the ones which have to do with,
conceptual progress I guess, research - I don't believe can be assigned a date
in that fashion, that simply has to be an ongoing thing. So in a sense, this
is - I'm partly anxious to try and get at least a first stage of "Alpha and
Omega" out of the way, so that I can concentrate on research again. But, the
fact that I thought of the ideas and that noone else is going to bring them to
at least that first stage of fruition means that I have a responsibility to
try and, crystallize "Alpha and Omega" enough for other people to understand
what it is that I'm on about, there.
Okay, so thinking it through a bit, my current agenda maybe could be divided
into the Research part and the Organizational part. The Research part
encompasses philosophy, science, and perhaps at some future date something
like magick. Um, that's the part where I'm trying to find, what is real, why
is it here, what are the limits of possibility. The other part, the
Organizational part.. is currently all within "Alpha and Omega", in a sense.
That's the part.. that's the future role which I can imagine myself playing,
in a sort of a futurist-activist sense.. trying - agitating for things like
life extension research and the construction of telespheral infrastructures.
Something like Li Po, in the draft of a draft of "Alpha and Omega" I guess.
So, what should I be doing now. I have a list of dozens of things to do on the
net, little things like trying to get talk.psychedelic going, interviews with
various people and so on..
Actually this seems a germane moment to go off on a little digression about
the problem of this perspective of urgency. I've acquired from Celia Green,
and the same idea is in Kevin Solway and I guess in a few other places as
well, that given the brief amount of time that I may have, and the possible
positive returns that may exist given sufficient effort, then I ought always
to be thinking of stripping unnecessary activity from my life. So, to a
certain extent this happens all the time simply as you get bored with things,
but this means actually making sacrifices, making decisions, prioritizing as
Rez would say.. deciding to forego certain things which might otherwise be
pleasurable in the interests of pursuing some more important goal.
So for example, something I used to think about when I was 16 or 17 and I
was thinking about trying to end death, and the idea of some sort of global
campaign to do that. And I was thinking, here I am, 16 or 17, or 18 or 19
later on, and millions of people around the world are still dying every day,
and I'm not directly doing this thing, of being an anti-death activist. Should
I be, somehow, doing something more, trying to think of a way to do something
more than simply talking about the idea with the occasional person? And, hmm..
I just had a thought a while ago, that if the world requires such urgency
then, somehow that says that it isn't perfect, from my perspective anyway, or
some - what's the relevance of this point, there's this idea that there is no
hope for anything, which I mentioned briefly on leri-list recently, and which
I see in Kevin Solway as well, and which is also in "Schismatrix" for that
matter, although it is not the ultimate philosophy [there] and that's one of
the things I want to ask Bruce Sterling about.. The proposition that the Regal
puts forward in one of his short stories, that "the emptiness of the Kosmos is
absolute and in time it kills us all. That's pure terror but it's also pure
freedom." And the other idea that "Futility is freedom". So the idea is that
no enterprise succeeds from the perspective of eternity. Or, to put it in
Celia-Green language perhaps, that we are doomed to finitude in all of our
enterprises, which I think is what that would amount to. So, for example,
Terence McKenna I think is, or in his wilder moments anyway, envisions 2012 as
being an entry into an eternal state of being - roaming in the fields of the
imagination, however you want to put it. The point is that he.. yeah, McKenna
is another person with this same idea, on a cosmic scale, he's saying that
there is an opportunity for us, as a planet or as a species, to enter into an
eternal condition, but that it is not a foregone conclusion. That it will
require "cognitive activity", he says somewhere is the essence of what is
required - we have to understand our situation, or else we cannot pass the
death of the species in the way that an individual who doesn't understand the
nature of consciousness presumably has trouble at the moment of death,
assuming that there is some sort of passage to another state of being which
opens, which again is one of McKenna's propositions in the essay I
transcribed. Whereas, the posthuman philosophy which the Regal puts forward in
Bruce Sterling's story, is one of ultimate despair and freedom arising from
that despair - you can do anything you want, because it's all hopeless anyway
in an ultimate sense.
So, to my mind the attraction of the second philosophy - the only attraction
that I can see - is the freedom of action that it implies, because if nothing
matters in an ultimate sense - so in other words there is no ultimate payoff
possible for any [course of] action - then you really are free to do whatever
you want. On the other hand, the attraction of the point of view which says
that there *is* something to strive for with an infinite payoff, is that it
opens the possibility of an infinite payoff. Of course there are philosophies
as well which would say that there's an infinite payoff for everyone, I guess,
and that's not just philosophies in the sense of possible philosophies, but I
think that some brands of Buddhism.. or at least - probably Buddhism, at
least, say that everyone achieves Enlightenment ultimately. Exactly what
Enlightenment is and whether it's desirable and whether it's an infinite
payoff of sorts is a valid question, but, placing it in that category for the
moment, that is an example of a world-view in which it doesn't matter what you
do and you still get everything in the end, or everything worth wanting in any
case. If the world is like that, then it really doens't matter what I do and
there's a happy ending to it all.. The cases that I'm considering, or.. that I
want to think about more, are the ones where there is an infinite payoff for
the right path being taken, but it's not a certain outcome, and the one where
there is no infinite payoff at all.
Now to actually decide whether the world falls into either of those
categories falls into my Research agenda - the limits of possibility in
particular. I would like to be able to get some idea of possible
epistemologies - what are the ways which the world might be? because at
present I feel as if I don't even have a single adequate ontology or candidate
metaphysics which does justice to everything, and that the main sticking point
in that as always is the mind. Because material things existing in space can
be conceived of in geometric or other mathematical ways whereas the content of
thought is..ore puzzling. That is not to say that it is ncecessarily beyond
mathematical modelling, but simply that I don't feel the same clarity of
perception when I contemplate thought or my own thought, or models for that
thought, as I do when contemplating potential models for material reality, or
matter, or physics. So, the relevant fields might be phenomenology, or
semantics, or some things arising out of cognitive science, but I definitely
want to see something which either accounts for the mind and relates it to
the physical paradigms, or subsumes the physical paradigms - because that's
always a possibility, that someone could advance a philosophy or a metaphysics
in which the concepts of physics as we know it are somehow secondary to the
account of mind given. That could be perhaps a pantheistic sort of philosophy
in which mind is omnipresent, the sort of thing which is described in "The
Great and Secret Show" by Clive Barker, or it could come out of a philosophy
arising out of esotericism, if I understood them better I might be able to
judge that question better, in which the world as we see it is held to be
entirely the product of magickal operations, most of them performed.. not
consciously, or not.. with.. the thought that they are magickal operations. A
similar outlook would be the one mentioned by Charles McCreery in one of his
books, where he says that it seems perfectly possible that you could have a
world in which you have discarnate entities, or at least not incarnate in the
sense that we are, having minds and then bodies, which possess the
capabilities of psychokinesis or materialization or similar things, that they
collectively create a world, and then for some reason repress the knowledge of
these abilities in themselves, or perhaps use the abilities without being
conscious of those abilities as.. or in the fashion that I just described
them, so it was just something that we did - we brought the world into being
or the mind brought the world and us into being, and only now through us is it
looking around and saying, What is this? How did it come to be here? This is a
bit like the idea I outlined in trying to understand one of Rez's posts on
leri..
Okay, a note for the future: whatever form my living arrangements take place
in the further future - whether I'm mostly here in Brisbane or mostly in
oxford or Berkeley or whether I'm some sort of global nomad - I know that I
can do my best work on the net, in the sense that whatever it is that my
talents are I've been able to exercise them more fully in the past two months
of net activity, than I ever have in any other medium I've ever had access to.
So this means that it's important for me to have a proper Unix account
somewhere which I can have access to, so that i can do things beyond sending
mail and reading and posting news, which makes validation of the Nyx account
important, because that is a free Unix account, I presume once you have shell
access, which you don't have to pay for and which I should be able to reach
from anywhere in the world. It's all very well to actually buy an account at
Griffith or to get one as a result of being enrolled in a subject but that's
not a long-term arrangement. The Griffith account only lasts a year, and the
UQ account only lasts a semester. So - *get the Nyx account validated*.
Another future note: one of my goals definitely is mass Internet access or
mass access to whatever the world net becomes, even for people who don't buy
their own hardware.. in fact that is especially an important option to take
into account.. anyhow, the point is that CafeNet-style projects and
communications centres projects as I originally conceived them, in the form of
public communications centres, video arcades, or like computer labs
transplanted to downtown urban area, would appear to be the only way, given
existing accessible technologies, to achieve that. At some future point it
might be possible to have a wireless mobile-phone-like connection to a portable
laptop etcetera and so you might not need a walk-in place like that, but
certainly at present that would require a cheapness and sophistication of
technology which doesn't appear to exist, and so - not on a commercial scale
anyway - and so this is the importance of emphasizing any
communications-centre style project. So one thing I should consider doing is
repeating my post of the first week of '92, which was the initial sort of
nucleus of CafeNet, and asking again for contacts. There was the guy in
Holland in particular who sent me a long list of details about a cafe he
wanted to set up, but the cafes don't interest me so much, because even then
it's still too much of a bother. You need somewhere like a lab where a lot of
people can go.
Okay.. just finishing drawing up, in nice big letters on a large piece of
paper a sort of agenda for myself. In the middle I've got "A.O as project -
Formal structure: 24 hours - McKenna - Leary", so that's what I was talking
about before. The formal structure of "Alpha and Omega" is the specific date
and structure that it provides for this attempt to.. do something. End the
world. happily. And then the specifics of what I'm trying to do, partly
through "Alpha and Omega", so in other words the content to put into that
structure, on the Organization side I've got two sections, "GAIA 2000" and
"The Posthuman Condition", which are the classic two sections of AO. And
they're also two different but potentially complementary political agendas.
GAIA 2000 is the Earth Summit in cyberspace, and so that's referring to
ordinary New-Age aspirations, you might say.. you know, uh, no more sickness,
war poverty or hunger, peace on earth, save the environment, and so on. And
then the "Posthuman Condition" section is about things like Space Migration -
Intelligence Increase - Life Extension, in other words trying to go beyond the
human condition and the classic limitations which still exist no matter how
much economic and social progress is made. So in the first section I've got
"?" and "politics" and "the Last International", and, the reason I've got that
there is that that sort of Discordian politics, is the most neglected
political stream in a sense - probably because it's the most extreme, calling
for things like the abolition of work, and so I would want somehow to
highlight that possibility even if wasn't the sort of thing that I ultimately
agreed with, simply to give it a better hearing. Because all the classical
political strategies, whether it's violent revolution led by a vanguard, or
democratization and the election of people to do stuff for you, or what have
you - workers' councils', the net analogues of that are pretty easy to imagine
- but they're all there - they are strategies or ideas which can be called
upon, which I may actually choose to dramatize in writing "Alpha and Omega"
and which may ultimately be appropriate if the whole thing goes ahead.
But. Anyhow, I have down the bottom in the list of organizations, "SubGenius
Foundation", "Otisian Congress". This has to do with actual organizations or
associations in real life which I would consider relevant to what I'm trying
to do. I mean, other people are going to work through different means -
[SIDE 1 ENDS, THANK "BOB"]
SIDE II
- but I'm talking about looking for an organization, or an association, which
might be compatible with the way I'm considering operation. And the two things
which come to my mind are the SubGenius Foundation, because it has the
potential to evolve into a really global grouping which still preserves as
much of the Discordian spirit as is possible on such a scale; and the idea of
the Congress of Weird Religions, which Mal was discussing with me today. It
may fall to the Otisians to actually organize the real thing. My particular
creation <garbled> is the Committee of 333.. these are all just ideas I'm
throwing around a bit at the moment, but, um, I think so many of the other
things here, like GAIA 2000 and so on, it's just too good a joke to waste,
it's just a joke, particularly the way it interfaces with Campus Crusade for
Cthulhu and maybe this can link up with Scott's plans, somehow. Hmm. Anyhow,
so, so.. so.. notes for the future.
Other things in GAIA 2000 section: alt.save.the.earth plan. Since - oh,
and I've also written "emphasis on net aspect as Real Life already exists". So
the point here is that if I'm going to be working through the net - this is
actually what I wrote in t15.txt in the Scriptures, that the point is to bring
about a historical event in which the Internet enters real-life history, so if
the point is to do something using the resources of the net, something which
has been potential but which resoucres haven't been used to actually do it
before, I don't want to simply try and create, say, an "online World Future
Society" because a World Futurist Society already exists. What I should
instead be doing is concentrating on creating online interfaces *between* say,
the World Future Society and the Lindisfarne Association, things of that
nature.. associations which can only link up through the means of the net.
Okay, so moving on to "Posthuman Condition", I've written "5th Plateau",
"Extropian Institute", "Upwingers", "SMIILE". The last three are sort of
self-explanatory but the Extropian Institute I'm particularly interested in
because it's the first organization which seems to have Up-Wing or posthuman
aims. At present as far as I know it is mostly a mailing list and the
*Extropy* magazine, so the extropian corporations or TAZs or nation-states,
whatever they turn out to be, still haven't come into being, but this will
certainly be a nucleus of them, in some respect. I don't know how
organizationally evolved UpWingers is, I suspect that extropians may already
have outpaced it actually, but that's just a supposition.. The 5th Plateau,
hmm.. that might serrve to bridge the GAIA 2000 - Posthuman Condition gap, by
taking Maslow's hierarchy of needs and then adding the need which I think
Barbara Marx Hubbard identified and which is also identified in "The Human
Evasion", the need to transcend the human condition as it is, the point once
again being that politics can rearrange existing resources, it can change who
orders what or even *whether* anyone orders anyone to do anything, but
politics alone does not lengthen the human lifespan, or dispel ignorance about
our position in the universe, or even invent a new means of production.
I've also got in the Organization section "Truths during the event". Now
that's referring to the possibility that - to use a specific example - suppose
I became convinced that an important thing, or *the* important thing to do,
was to try to communicate certain ideas, certain key memes, in the course of
that event. This would mean trying to influence the entertainment or the
multimedia aspect of it so that at certain critical moments, certain thoughts
were communicated - so for example, I could run through "Poison for the Heart"
and pick out certain aphorisms, and have them flashed up on screens at raves
happening around the world, things like that. So that's another thing which
could fall into the scope of Organization.
It seems to me that the thing which characterizes the Organization half is
that in some sense you suppose that you already know what you're doing or
what you're trying to achieve, and it's a matter now of working out how to do
it. So for example in GAIA 2000 you're working out how to save the world -
how to keep things sustainable, and so on. The question is one of logistics in
all of these - even the logstics of transcending the human condition or
developing nanotechnology, the goal - of thorough control of the structure of
matter at the molecular scale - is *there*, and what is needed to be developed
is the logistics of how to get from here to there. Whereas if you look at the
other half, the Research half, this is where the unanswered questions are, and
the point of these investigations is to get a clearer picture of things, um,
in case there's some new factor which invalidates, or otherwise supersedes or
should be added to the ones which are already present within the organization
half. So up the top I've got Philosophy first of all, and then I've written
"Objectivism" and then "Nietzsche" and "Stirner", and then "foundations of
Mathematics". Now Objectivism - just out of all the philosophical *systems*
that I've ever heard of, is the one which makes the most sense to me. I think
radical skepticism is in a sense superior to Objectivism, intellectually, in
that total uncertainty seems to be the chief proposition that I can be certain
about in my current state of being or state of knowledge - but that's not a
system. Objectivism is a system, and as systems go, as I said it's the best
I've ever heard of. I added Nietzsche and Stirner as a sort of a tribute to
Solan I guess. When someone on talk.philosophy.misc asked, "Who do you think
is the best philosopher?", Solan wrote Nietzsche, largely for his critical
insights, he mentioned Stirner for some reason, I think from the perspective
of morality, and mentioned Ayn Rand I think in terms of systematic
consequences of the philosophy. Something like that. So - I should add
"skepticism", there. Skepticism and Objectivism, and a note to look at
Nietzsche and Stirner again.
Fopundations of Mathematics, is the form of applied philosophy which
interests me most, because I'm very interested in the ontological status of
mathematical entities... Um, yeah, I don't even feel as if I can say very
clearly what the state of affairs is there since I lack the technical
knowledge of mathematics and also the.. a settled enough line of thought, or a
definite angle from which to address this, since there seem to be so many
approaches to that question: intuitionism, constructionism I think is another
one, or, let alone more radical ideas like something analogous to, Penrose
crossed with Philip K Dick, in which you might have the Platonic forms being
real but emerging from the specific somehow, so that the specific exists
first, and then the activities of the mind, in generalizing and perceiving
mathematical forms actually brings them into being, so that the act of
percxeption is actually the act of creation. This is the problem of
perception, it's the general problem of reality as well.. do the things.. what
things exist before we think they exist? do we bring them into being as we
think about them - and that's related to the, the sort of generalized magickal
possibility that I was talking about on the other side, the idea that the
world is in fact totally the creation of mind and that the worldviews of the
present century in which mind is an epiphenomenon of matter are in fact
intellectual errors arising from the extreme, or.. the particular form that
the magick has created here, the particular world that has been created here
is one in which a heavy reliance upon things that are already there, so that
the application of the creative faculty (assuming that such a thing is
fundamental, for the purposes of this) - so that the applications of this
hypothetical magickal creative faculty become rarer and rarer, and so it
starts to seem as if the structure which has been created, preceded the
creative faculty - but of course it really could be that way, and it really
could be that there is a natural order to things which determines all
thoughts, actions and perceptions, in which case there really is no such
thing as creation, or, let alone magick in the Crowleyan sense.
Anyhow, next category after philosophy is Research, and I've got categories
here for Matter and Mind under that, which is a bit redundant there.. okay, so
matter is basically Physics, and what's there is "Quantum Mechanical
metaphysics", "Fundamental Theory' - so in other words actually having a
Theory of Everything, just in physical terms, and then - I've written
"Prigoginic levels" as well, which is just a sort of vague reference to
projects like the Principia Cybernetica - I should - I'll make a note of
*that*, "Principia Cybernetica", "cybsys-LIST" - um, and the general attempt
to work out a formal theory of emergent properties, spontaneous orders and so
on. Since that could address every level of the hierarchy that seems to exist
in nature at once. Then there's mind: "cognitive science, neural nets,
phenomenology, semantics, methodological solipsism (knot theory)" - that's my
personal.. favorite, um.. yeah, the mind is the more complex of the two in
terms of planning how to address it because there seems to be much less
agreement about the mode of investigation. Hmm..
Okay, continuing with research: "IPR", in a little square box. Above
"Anomalous phenomena: database, typology".. I still don't know in detail the
IPR's research plan, program, but I would think that it would possibly be the
best in the world as far as the category of paranormal phenomena goes, given
the intellectual quality of the people there and the number of years which
it's been going. So I'd sort of rely on them to provide some good ideas at
this point. "Magick - question mark", "Occult - question mark": sooner or
ter I'm going to have a go at something here, like either, I don't know, go to
some wiccan circle and see if anything happens or perform the Mass of the
Phoenix on 200 grams of LSD the way that Robert Anton Wilson did -
*micrograms*, that is - um.. but um, because those are the sort of things
which, accoding to the philosophy of them, you cannot just approach them
intellectually, you actually have to do things if you want to be a magician.
"COMPLEX: Maps of everything, maps of the maps". This is saort of a general
reference entry calling for the synthesis of all existing information in forms
that are accessible, so this is like World Wide Web in particular.
And then at the very bottom of the sheet I've got "Historical trajectory -
possibilities - panspace". So, part of the reason for the philosophical
investigation - metaphysics, and mathematics - is to form a clearer picture of
possible worlds - that's probably related more to logic than to mathematics
actually, "Logic and Kripke". <writing> But.. the idea of seeing the possible
forms that the world might take is the preparatory step before deciding
between them. So I want to say, okay, the world may be .. may possess an
idealist metaphysics or a realist metaphysics or something else.. so then,
okay, now I have range of possibilities. Now the world presents this aspect to
me, is it compatible with one of these or all of these, some of them, none of
them? So that's astep towards actually trying to find out the truth. Then the
"historical trajectory".. this relates to the question of infinite payoff - I
might actually write that in alongside this: "Infinite.. payoff". So the
question there is.. multifold. The first one is: Is there an infinite payoff?
of some sort. If yes, then the next question is, what do we have to do to get
it? And if no, then the question is, what now; if we're necessarily finite in
some respect; and - and I wonder, if we were necessarily finite, could we even
know it? I wonder of knowledge of[one's] finitude, absolute knowledge of
finitude - absolute knowldeg seems to imply a sort of limitlessness, because
absolute knowledge would not be able to be doubted, there could be no
criticism of it which could cast any doubt. So therefore if a person was
capable of absolute knowledge then in that respect at least they would not be
finite. Yeah. It would be somewhat ironic if that was the only respect we were
not necessarily finite, and we could know it! Knowing it would be something at
least. But it's also possible that we can never know any of these things.. but
anyhow, so there is this question: if there is no path out of finitude, what
do we do? That i think, would become more of an individual question, for me
anyway.. maybe if I spent years of my life convinced that the human condition
was necessarily limited in a certain way, then maybe I would start to think in
social terms anyway.. because I would know that the horizons *were* limited in
a certain respect. But at this stage I'm not even - I mean, even given the
vagueness of the term, infinite payoff, it nonetheless suggests the idea that
there is a possible trajectory to human existence which would carry it beyond
the human condition as we believe it to be into some transcendent state; for
example, Leary's scenario, McKenna's scenario, FM2030's scenario. And.. the
meaning of "Panspace", that last entry after "Possibilities" and "Historical
trajectory".. that was my term made up for something even bigger than
superspace.. since superspace after all is sort of a phase space of possible
geometries with a particular topology, that of.. um, or not topology, but
possible 4-spaces out of general relativity whereas panspace was to be a much
bigger domain, more like the class of all sets or the class of ordinals, and
so the idea of translating panspace to physics or to reality, is to say that
this is the range of possibilities within which we dwell, and one way of
conceiving the infinite payoff is to say that it would constitute an entry
into panspace. I guess I might as well jst put it as "becoming God", in that
sense, but.. that would imply achieving unlimitedness in every way that you
can be unlimited, whereas perhaps we can be unlimited in time but not in some
other respect. So, panspace is my designation for the potentially achievable
ultimate, the payoff itself, the payoff, the ultimate degree of freedom
attainable would be freedom in panspace. Hmm..
Another observation which just occurred to me. This is the way .. that I
always used to think and plan.. in my first year at college people would come
into my room and they would be freaked out by all these flowcharts on the
walls, which were talking about things of a similar magnitude, ah, you know,
that in the next twenty years there would be things like artificial
intelligence and space colonization and so on, and I was, and I was just
trying to put them all up there next to each other so I could get an idea of
the totality. And part of my depression in this year, I think is related to..
becoming preoccupied with distractions. I think the net for one is a great
provider of distractions.. there's just so many things you can get lost in,
like exercising your wit satirizing newbies, or inventing little in-jokes and
then stretching them out. The other factors in my depression, what were they:
"Bob".. Nathan.. and America.
Now.. let's see. "Bob". When I was reading "The Book of the SubGenius",
early on, with no one else around me - no.. contacts who knew about it - I
remember I was very resentful at different times, because.. I think just
because I didn't like what I was being told, or the message that I was picking
up, which seemed to be saying that utterly *everything* is fucked. Hmm. So
that was one.
I mentioned Nathan because he I think had a viewpoint like the one that I
characterized as the "Regal" one, the Posthumanist one out of "Schismatrix",
the Hassan i Sabbah one, the idea that futility is freedom, that the cosmos
kills us all in time, although he had a Lovecraftian sort of slant on this.
And it's interesting that he may in fact have changed his mind as his concepts
have evolved in recent months, he talks about "returning to the Light" and so
on now. But um.. in particular "seeing the Void", whatever it was that
happened the first time I took mushrooms, I was *very* depressed after that ,
and that was because I saw all of my integration of concepts and my experience
and so on which I was planning to communicate in "Alpha and Omega", leading
back to nothingness. That was what I thought I had seen, or that was the slant
I came to put on it the more I thought about it in the next few days. This
idea that, there is only one mind, and that the whole of the complexity of
existence is its evasion of the pointlessness of that existence. I'm not even
sure if that concept makes sense, that.. that a sort of an empty mind could be
repelled by its own nature. But certainly there was this elemental repulsion
from this state, which makes me think of Barbara Marx Hubbard talking about
how in becoming a mystic, and aligning yourself with the Creative Intelligence
at work in the universe, you come to introspectively identify with the
creative.. *motive* or desire or drive, and I wonder whether she means having
an experience like that, in which you yourself become, or face, this utterly
featureless void and, are driven away from it or are recreated from it.. hmm.
And then, the third thing was America. Um, or my travles in general, so I
should include London as well. Because I was very depressed for a great deal
of that, and that .. hmm. Possibly what I was seeing there was the reality of
large urban centres, or something like that; the nature of life.. I thought of
saying "animal nature", and perhaps it's true in a sense, like the guy in
London was saying, that all the people are after is money, sex and drugs,
that doesn't exactly facilitate the "life of the mind". So, um.. the lack of
opportunities for elevation, I think that above all depressed me - I certainly
wouldn't have expressed it that way to myself, but, just the circularity and
evident pointlessness of what people were doing.. just seemed to be leading
nowhere.
And then there's Kevin Solway, aswell, who's interesting, because on the one
hand he has himself a tremendous purpose, and a purpose to which he would like
to call other people, in what he expresses as "the survival of wisdom". But on
the other hand he does his best to destroy what he would see as false or
futile hopes, not through mockery as the SubGenii would do it, but through
explanation and devaluation. So the explanation comes from rendering
transparent - or simply comprehensible - processes which were controlling a
person, whether it's political, religious, or something to do with love. By
trying to expose the inner workings - true motivations, and so on - once
you've truly understood those concepts, presuming that they're accurate, they
are then a part of how you view those things, and if.. if for them to operate
in the way described you had to be unconscious of the mechanics of that
operation, they can no longer operate in that way, because you are now
conscious of it. So.. I think that some of his propositions are intended to
have that consequence.
So that was explanation. And the other part was devaluation, and that is the
method of trying to make you feel shame or disgust at something in which you
might previously have taken pleasure, I think again the foremost example is
love.. Not simply the *rhetoric* which he uses to address it, say in talking
about "the evil of love" or phrases like "despicable game", I don't know if he
uses that specific phrase - but also in his analysis of the motives of it -
and this links back to the first category of explanation, that, by say
explaining something which was taken to be elevated or spiritual or a higher
pursuit, and explaining it as being say just another means of achieving
happiness, it is thereby devalued somewhat, and in some cases he would attempt
to explain such things like religion, politics again, things into which people
may have pured a lot of passion as truly debased activities which have been
rationalized as exalted. Hmm.
So, to a certain extent his thoughts have been at work within my own psyche,
so.. So, yes, the contradiction here is this - or, I don't know if it's a
contradiction, but anyhow - what.. the principal object of his attack I think
is in fact the desire for happiness. That if you can kill that or extinguish
that, then you are free. And that is the condition which he is aiming at, I
think.. I think that would be a quality of being "fully human", in the fashion
he intends that term to be understood. But. Or not, but, but okay, How does
that relate to my own goals. I've taken to calling them extropian, the
particular category I'm thinking of.. whether I should call them UpWing or
perhaps simply posthuman, transhuman, I'm not sure, because extropian is a
specific cluster of concepts.. I'll call them posthuman. Okay, what am I to
make of my posthuman goals, the ones about transcending the human condition..
for example, physical immortality. Um.. now, one motivation of trying to
extend one's life, is to ensure one's own future happiness. If you could be
assured that you weren't going to die, that would be the anxiety of death
gone. There might be further anxieties about, say, whether you were going to
spend that eternity in a hell of sorts, but it is nonetheless another
expression of a desire for happiness, a desire to get things the way you want
them to be. So, an attack on happiness as being in general something not to
strive for.. because .. now, now, what is the because? The argument seems to
be that happiness, or, he says explicitly, "Happiness is the cause of
suffering, and suffering is the cause of happiness". ..so that happiness is
the cause of suffering, because when happiness goes away you suffer, and
suffering is the cause of happiness, because when the suffering goes away, you
become happy. Whereas the extropian sort of goals almost like trying to the
limits of .. possible happiness. For example, make it eternal, rather than
something that ends when you die. Hmm. So, if that were possible, would it
invalidate the argument against happiness in the first place or is there
another argument against happiness?
Because I think Kevin is saying that truth - Absolute Truth - and happiness
cannot coexist, because the absolute truth is that all things are transitory,
but happiness .. wishes for eternity. <moan of contempt at this phraseing> Oh,
no, that's, that's not a .. it's - so long, so long as there is still a desire
for infinity, perhaps, in some respect.. this I think is where I perceive a
difference between him, and Celia Green. Celia Green would appear to consider
the infinite payoff still possible in a sense which might be conventionally
considered positive. She does her own share of destruction of illusions, or
seeking to expose true motivations and so on, but nonetheless, she still
writes things like "The most exciting thing possible is actually true", which
is not an outlook of *cosmic* cynicism. Whereas Kevin writes things like,
"Life appears overfull of beautiful things, but is very poor underneath". So I
think he would hold to this - Buddhist? - view that happiness is necessarily
transitory and doomed to extinction, or even interestingness for that matter;
anything in which one might take pleasure or joy.. and that because he wishes
to value truth above all, and since truth and happiness cannot coexist, then
he will value truth to the exclusion of - happiness or personal satisfaction.
And for this reason he demands that the desire for happiness must die.
Whereas, because Celia Green would not say that the infinite payoff is
necessarily impossible, .. or even given her contempt for happiness as it is
conventionally conceived - for example saying "happiness never sounded
interesting" and so on - even seeking interestingness is a form of desire -
and perhaps I should be using the word desire more often than hapiness here..
To continue: so, she is saying that truth and the realization of an infinite
desire, or a core desire or any desire - the true realization, can conceivably
coexist... Well, she doesn't say it, but it seems to be an implication of her
open-ended approach. Kevin has an infinite aspiration of sorts, in the
survival of wisdom, because he is saying there in effect that he wants wisdom
to continue into eternity, so that is an infinite desire of sorts; but,
wisadom here seems to be, um, the knowledge that desire is pointless and ought
to be extinguished. So the desire is, to carry the knowledge that desire ought
to be extinguished, into eternity.. or, to.. for that to always be present in
consciousness.. that knowledge, or supposed knowledge. Now, Celia Green wants
people to cultivate centralised psychology and in particular the existential
perception.. which is just the awareness that existence is there, that things
are real and the concomitant percpetion of total uncertainty. Now, does that
amount to the same thing as, wisdom, as Kevin would conceive it? Is there a
difference here? Because as I have portrayed Kevin's wisdom it has concerned
mostly desire but I simply selected that aspect of it out, in particular. For
example, he himself writes somewhere, that "The wise man knows nothing and is
uncertain of everything, and yet ironically for this reason he knows
everything". Perhaps that should read "knows everything that can be known.. by
a finite being".
Now.. it seems to me that, Celia Green talks of the existential percpetion
as having certain consequences, and.. although she doesn't draw this
connection explicitly, among those are the various despairs that she lists.
..which were, what: "The despair of urgency, the despair of significance and
the despair of being itself". Now.. it took me a while to understand those.
The despair of urgency is the despair that arises upon perceiving one's own
apparently finite lifespan, or resources and in particular time, which causes
one to be urgent about whatever it is that you're trying to do. The despair of
significance is simply not knowing what's important. The despair of being
itself... N ow that might be.. a perception that existence is necessarily
flawed or frustrating, that in all possible worlds it must be inadeq -
[TAPE RUNS OUT]
necessary part of a happiness..
/lizi/condest
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Subject: Re: Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth?
Message-ID: <1992Nov9.033532.23410@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
From: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter)
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 03:35:32 GMT
Sender: usenet@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu (netnews admin account)
References: <1992Nov6.003254.22217@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>
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Xref: wattle alt.conspiracy:14534 alt.slack:2414
I am posting, with the author's permission, a detailed response to my
original "Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth?" posting which I received via
email; I am posting it on Usenet because I think it is a very good
exposition of all the reasons to be *extremely* skeptical about the
story I was told, and similar tall tales.
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 16:54:06 -0800
From: Cosma R. Shalizi <lizi@ocf.Berkeley.EDU>
To: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu
Article 1049 of alt.destroy.the.earth:
From: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter)
Subject: Conspiracy to Destroy the Earth?
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 00:32:54 GMT
I started writing this article about the events of last night intending to
send it off to a mailing list to which I subscribe, but I am posting it to
Usenet News instead because it's not really on-topic for the list, whereas
here I think it is. I am not a regular reader of alt.conspiracy or
alt.destroy.the.earth, so perhaps these topics have come up here before.
Anyhow, on with the story...
Before I read this morning's mail I want to have a go at describing some
strange things that happened last night. I was walking home from the train
station and overtook a guy who had been walking along slowly ahead of me
(it was about 12.30 am). He said a few things by way of talking a little,
but I was thinking about net-related matters and it was damn cold anyway,
so I said I wanted to keep going.. so then he pulled out a $10 note and
gave it to me. This slowed me down a bit. We did end up talking for a few
minutes, in the course of which he told me a bit about his life: briefly,
he was born in Algeria just before the Revolution, a "pied-noir", so
neither the French nor the revolutionary Algerians would accept his
generation; he went to Europe as a young man - said he knew London and
Paris like the back of his hand; now he was here in Australia, married
with five children, and his advice to me was 'to follow your mind, not the
money or the carrot'.
Anyhow, after we separated, a few minutes later I ran into *another*
guy, who was hurrying past until he saw me and stopped to say hello. I
recognized him after a few moments: we had spoken in a cafe a few times -
then he was telling me of the necessity of space colonization, so the
human species doesn't have all of its eggs in one basket. We talked a bit,
and then a bit longer (but it was mostly him talking and me listening),
and I will have a go at summarizing what he told me:
He is now homeless - but he has a list of dozens of addresses that he
tries to visit every day. Basically his aim is still to try to save some
fraction of the human race from extinction, but his preferred means have
changed and this time I got to hear more of his worldview. He began by
saying how we're all living in a sick society, citing as an example an
incident within the last few days where he had seen a street kid carrying
several ?ounces of pure speed, who was handing it out to anybody who
wanted it. "Now how do you think that sort of stuff gets on the streets?"
he asked.
1. Even if this happened, there is an exceedingly simple explanation.
Selling drugs makes lots of money. Giving away free samples, as
laundry-detergent makers know, can be quite effective - especially
when the product is addictive. In other words, the answer to his
question is, "Free enterprise at work."
After a few other examples, he went on to say that this overall
sickness was largely attributable to universal corruption - "the police,
the government minister, the US senate". "Kids don't believe the teacher,
they don't believe the minister, they don't believe their parents. If you
lie to a five or six-year-old, they may not really have an idea of what a
lie is just yet, but they know they're being deceived."
"Overall sickness ... attributable to universal corruption?" Hogwash.
I could just as plausibly say that universal corruption is
attributable to society's overall sickness, or attribute both to a
"degenerative virtue." ("Virtue" in the now archaic sense of "specific
property.") Most five or six year olds _very well indeed_ what a lie
is - certainly I and my friends did.
He went on to say that a state of massive denial is near-universal -
people don't want to see how bad things are, how bad they are getting, or
what is just around the corner - which, he said, is nuclear Armageddon. He
recounted a few stories about the way geopolitics supposedly really works;
eg the Russians saying to the US, "OK, we give in, we surrender, just so
we don't have to fight a war. But as the price you're going to have to
support all these people that *we've* been supporting" - (I think he was
talking about ex-Soviet Central Asia here) - "that's the price *you'll*
have to pay for getting us to drink Coca-Cola and accept the rest of your
shit."
This story in re the Russians is, to be blunt, bullshit. Certainly, for
a long time the US more or less implied that, if, by some miracle,
Communism "withered away" in a Soviet-bloc country, then the Marshall
plan would be repeated, but by the time the Cold War ended, the US was
too poor to follow up on this. We sure as Hell aren't supporting Soviet
Central Asia. Mind you, this was how the sharper people on the US side
predicted the Cold War would end from the beginning - that the US would
win because Russia would go broke first. They neglected to consider
that the US might also be broke. The Soviet government couldn't even
keep itself fed, much less make deals with the US.
For me the most interesting geopolitical story he told was his version
of China 1989. The US began by trying to entice China, with things like
aerospace technology transfer, and later exchange student programs, all
carefully calculated to try to spread the American system. "Several
thousand exchange students were sent to China, and there were no
restrictions on what they could take - sports cars, flashy clothes - and
of course your ordinary Chinese hasn't seen anything like this..." (This
is all meant to suggest what he said of course - it's not a word-for-word
quote, I didn't have a tape recorder running.) Essentially, their presence
was such a stimulus to the Chinese students, who in turn were a stimulus
to the urban workers, that the 1949 "democracy movement" turns out to have
been the result of American conspiracy. So *then*, the Chinese government
"made a really heavy decision: they sent in the tanks, and they shot their
own children, in order to send the message, that they were prepared to use
the bomb." (ie "if they were prepared to do that to their own children,
what
would they do to America?") This action apparently reined in the
interference of the American government in China.
Urk. Taking "sports cars" from the US to _China_? _Exchange
students_? No. What happened was that, following the power struggles
after Mao's death, the Chinese leadership fell to people who recogn-
ized that capitalism is a very good way indeed of industrializing -
after all, it grew up with it. So they set up parts of the economy
as more or less capitalist, and it worked. People got richer.
Rich people - especially rich, young, highly educated people - tend
to demand a voice in the government. You may have noticed that many
of the Tiananmen protesters carried placards of Mao - lots of them
were people who believed the rhetoric about a _people's_ republic,
etc. The message the Chinese government sent was to its own people:
Dissent and be crushed. In re the exchange students: Many more Chinese
students went and studied in the West than Westerns went to China.
On their return, these may well have had some ideological influence -
but the 1989 movement was not brought on by Americans flashing
their Levis and trolling in their Pontiacs. (The idea that "the
average Chinese" has never seen anything like a motor car is so
incredibly wrong-headed and patronizing that I won't bother to
comment.)
Later on he briefly praised the virtues of Chinese civilization - "4000
years; America is just 200 years old, it's just a little brat", and
"they've never invaded or raped and plundered another people, they've been
nonaggressive for four thousand years"; he even advised me to go to the
library today and read some books on Chinese history. He then contrasted
East with West, saying "the fucking American government, it's out of
control..."
5. China has a fascinating civilization and history. He doesn't know
squat about it. 4,000 years is _barely_ defensible if you count
illiterate villagers with semi-interesting pots as civilized.
Try more like 3,500 - whereas Europe, dating from Crete, can claim
at least 4,500. But that, and the fact that "American civilization,"
as opposed to a subspecies of Europe, doesn't exist, is a tangent.
The main point is that Chinese culture originated in a region much
smaller than the present main-land China, and it spread by the
usual methods - invasion, rape and plunder. The classical age of
Chinese philosophy was the Warring States period (c. -700 (memory
fades) to -221). During this time China was, in fact, a bunch of
warring feudal states, the rulers of which filled their time much
as rulers always have - with depravity, taxation, war and general
cruelty to commoners. Chinese schools of philosophy - at least the
ones which prospered - all claimed to have ways out of the chaos.
The school whih got itself put into practice was the Legalists,
who were, after Plato, the second group of people to elaborate
a totalitarian ideology. It delivered what it promised, and unified
China as a vast prison-camp. There was a revolt, a brief relapse
into anarchy, and what emerged was the Han empire. This based it-
self on a mixture of Confucianism and as much Legalism as it
could get away with. Chinese history is a succession of dynasties,
between which it was divided into squabbling principalities that
set their people to killing each other with as much gusto as any
other section of the human race.
As to their not being imperialistic, it is worth noting that
(as always, through the usual methods) the Tang dynasty ruled, in
addition to modern China (not including Tibet) modern Indo-China,
Korea, and so much of Central Asia that Li Po, the second greatest
poet of the dynasty, was in all probability born in Afghanistan.
It took the trauma of the Mongols to turn the Chinese even temp-
orarily isolationist. No doubt they will recover from this fairly
soon.
As to the East vs. the West - modern Europe (including its colonies,
such as the Americas and Oz) is the spoiled grand-child of old Asia.
It owes a lot to China and India and Mesopotamia and Egypt and
Persia. But it has definitely made its own, unique contributions:
modern science and its application to technology; the ideals of
representative democracy, the secular state and toleration; the
creation of truly global civilization. Some other ideas, which I
consider truly and deeply bad, it must take the blame for: nation-
alism and Marxism, for instance. But the fact is that not one of
the older nations is as it was. The Islamic world today, for in-
stance, is not the unified empire from which the West learned
mathematics, science, philosophy and even theology, but a fragmented
bunch of dirt-poor countries wasting themselves in ridiculous and
bloody quarrels, and a handful of oil principalities maintained by
the West. China today, certainly, is _not_ the China that was.
I don't know how clear all this sounds, but anyhow, his essential
allegation is that there is an inner core of extremely powerful people in
America who are planning to launch the missiles soon (when he mentioned
this he would look at his watch, and say things like, "I hope we have at
least two years" - I don't know why he looked to the watch, perhaps for
dramatic emphasis).
For the love of Cthulhu, WHY??? If the US launches, everyone else with
nukes launches too - AT US!!! Power-hungry people are not usually
thrilled by the prospect of ruling of radioactive rubble while watching
their thyroids swell. And why not know, why wait two years? Why not
wait eight? Or have done it the moment Ronnie came into office?
(Of course, I can here the answer: "I don't know why they set their
time-table like they do...")
He told me that because of a 50-year secrecy act of
some sort, you can't find out, say, who the first 300 people in the CIA
were, since it is held to be a matter of national security.
Again, false. The political appointees - Director, Assistant
Directors, etc., are matters of public record - they are appointed
by the President and confirmed (or not confirmed) by the Senate.
Requests for the "first three hundred people in the CIA" under the
Freedom of Information Act _might_ be turned down on the grounds of
national security. For a wonder, he's right about the 50 year limit
on this - but as the CIA was founded in 1947, if he can hold out
five more years, he can know for certain. Since it _was_ so long ago,
they might give the names to him anyhow. Definitely they couldn't
hide behind the national security clauses for the first 300 in the
Office of Strategic Services, the precursor agency of the CIA, since
that _was_ founded more than fifty years ago.
(This is where
he gave me a recap of Oliver North's appearance before the US Senate -
saying how North had said he was ordered to do what he did, but he
couldn't say who gave him his orders, since he would then be executed for
treason, and so the Senate agreed because North was thus following the
letter of the law stating that you can't divulge these names.)
This is false - utterly, utterly false. North claimed that some of
his orders came from his immediate superior, Admiral Pointdexter;
others he refused to say. He didn't have to say he'd be shot for
treason if he revealed them, for two reasons: A. The fifth amendment
to the U.S. Constitution gives any person the right to refuse to
testify if testifying would incriminate him, and B. The Congress
(not just the Senate) granted North immunity to prosecution on
the basis of his testimony _before_ he began to testify. Certainly,
no Senator with half a brain _approved_ of North's actions, or his
hiding them. Sen. Inoyue (?sp?) compared him to the defendants at
Nuremberg. I can say all this with utter certainty, because, like
anyone else with half a brain in this country (not many, alas) I
watched the hearings as they were broadcast. Unless your friend
cares to claim those were all a show, the real hearings were quite
different, and he just _happened_ to find out about them...
And
presumably it is these people who are the only ones who have the capacity
to launch the missiles - and I think he assumes that they intend to do so
because he can't see any other reason for continuing to produce them. And
the fact that nobody even *knows* who the power-wielders are - he said -
was why he was looking for schemes to make a safe haven for part of
humanity to make it through a nuclear apocalypse, rather than trying to
avert the missile-firing altogether.
"Presumably," indeed. The only person with missile-launching
capability in the US is the President - though I've no doubt there
are some fall-back arrangements in case he's in Washington when it
gets vaporized. Of course, the elaborate apparatus of cyphered codes
and keys and all _could_ just be a ruse, but he hasn't given us any
reason to think so.
There are two reasons the bombs keep getting made. First, the military
budget in this country is a gigantic - if not terribly productive -
jobs program. There are communities, and definitely companies, whose
livelihoods depend on new bombs, new missiles, new bombers and new
submarines. Until someone finds a way to effectively convert them
to civilian production, any US government which makes serious cuts
in "defense" risks loosing the next election ignominously. Second,
bombs are made of radiocative materials. They decay. Fifty, even
twenty year old nukes aren't reliably usable, and must be replaced,
if arsenals are to be kept up to strength. (Personally, I see _no_
reason not to let them wither away, but...)
He used the phrase "the serpent's head" a few times, as in "You have to
find the serpent's head and chop it off,
At least he knows his Mao: "Though a serpent be a thousand (meters?)
long, to kill it one need only chop of the head." (Quoting from
memory, and no doubt distorting it.)
if you want to do it that way."
This is either ungrammatical or meaningless.
He said thousands of people around the world were trying to find out who
these top people were, but "they went underground 20 years ago... And
these are really ruthless people. They shot their own president on TV,
after all!"
"20 years ago" means 1972 or thereabout. Kennedy - he was bound to
show up here, wasn't he? - was shot in 1963, i.e., they were "above
ground" when they orchestrated the assassination of the President.
This seems improbable. So does their date of disappearence - a cabal
running the US could _never_ afford to be visible; certainly if they
could have managed this for the first 25 years (counting from the
start of the CIA), there was no reason for them to hide in the age
of Nixon.
I am pretty sure he said at one point that he knew seven
people who had been shot dead in the course of such investigations (as he
was talking, he was contantly looking around us to see if anyone was
approaching). Whether these seven were people he knew personally, I'm not
sure.
Indeed.
I briefly mentioned the Internet, saying "couldn't you reach all these
millions of people you say you can't work out how to reach, by putting
your information out there". In trying to explain the net, I said that it
was a computer network linking mostly universities all over the world. He
said, in effect, that it was still probably not enough - that you could
tell all the college students the truth, and people would just panic
Of course. I saw this coming, too. There's never anything sensible
and construcive you can do against Them, and people are such insecure
and feeble little sheep that a conspiracy theory (!!!) will send them
raving off into the night.
("You'll probably start to panic when you realize how bad thngs are", he
warned me at the beginning; and indeed I was shivering violently
throughout a lot of the conversation, but I think that was because I was
standing there in the cold in just shirt, shorts and thongs.)
Glad to see you, at least, had a firm grip on reality...
"The
students might try to start a revolution, but in that case the people who
run the show would just go ahead with their plans now, rather than later."
Indeed - why _not_ now, rather than later? Why wait? So there can be
a few million more people in the Third World to kill?
"On the bases where they have these weapons stationed, once they're
getting ready to launch, those places are completely sealed off - no
communications from the outside world. They wouldn't know what was going on."
No. They are in communication with the NATO command centers - places
like NORAD and SAC and so forth. This is essential - command _must_
be able to give orders and get feedback, and for this reason we can
say that the same is true of the Russians and Chinese.
This is why he emphasized the necessity of finding "the head of the
serpent" - if you knew who the conspirators were, and got the names to the
right people, they could perhaps stage a coup and head the thing off. But
he saw no way of finding out who they were. When I said, well isn't it
better to give it a go, rather than say, I can't stop the bombs from going
off, I'll try to save a few at least; he said no - if people are gong to
die, you should let them die peacefully, rather than have them spend their
last days in panic and terror.
How considerate of him. So he goes and talks about this horrible
conspiracy to a person who just explained to him that he can reach
nearly every technogeek on the planet...
After all, when "5000" bombs went off it
would be "like the planet passing through the sun"
Wrong. Bombs are big, destructive things, but _anything_ humans
can do at this point pales to insignificance beside, say, a big solar
flare. If we were to somehow drop the planet into the Sun, the atmo-
sphere would go, as would the oceans, soil and rock would melt if not
vaporize, etc. If every nuclear bomb were to explode simultaneously
with every reactor melting down, we wouldn't get anywhere near there.
From the alt.destroy.the.earth point of view, this is a crying shame,
but it is true.
- "all the oxygen in the atmosphere being destroyed".
This is, as we say in the trade, lizardshit. Oxygen - and every other
kind of atom - would have some interesting things done to it in the
immediate vicinity of a blast, but even a few miles away the chances
of it getting "transmuted" are very, very low. You'd have to worry much
more about getting engulfed in a firestorm - and no, the bombs would
not set off enough fires to burn up all the oxygen.
I had to this point not expressed any
criticisms of what he had said, simply in order to find out what he might
say, but the idea that after such an event everything would be over and
done with stuck me as absurd. "It might be over quickly in the major
population centres, where the bombs go off directly overhead, but if
you're outside..."
It is absurd. You're right. (You had me worried, though, Mitch...)
In any case, I didn't get much of a chance to argue
this, because at this point *another* guy happened along, who overheard us
talking about bombs, and said "You have more to worry about than atomic
bombs these days... There's the electromagnetic bomb." When I asked him
what that might be, he said it "used" electromagnetic radiation to "turn
one atom into another". "It's a bit like alchemy." I asked him for
details, and he said "It changes the number of electrons that the atom can
hold... You happen to have run into a drunken physicist."
There isn't an electromagnetic bomb. There certainly can't be one
that does what he described. Electromagnetism is the force that
holds the electrons in the atom, and governs interactions between
atoms, but the number of electrons an atom can hold is determined
solely by the number of protons in its nucleus, and is, in fact, equal
to the number of protons in its nucleus. This number gets changed in
one of three ways: A. Radiocative decay, B. Nuclear fission or
C. Nuclear fusion. Electromagnetism is so much weaker than the
intra-nuclear forces as to make it impossible to change nuclei with
it. If this person was a physicist, it was either only in the sense
an incompetent hack like Fritjof Capra can be considered a physicist,
or he making fun of you and your friend to the point where he probably
ruptured his lungs laughing afterwards. (I have serious problems
restraining my sarcasm - no real offense intended. May I recommend
J. Trefil's _From Atoms to Quarks_ as a nice, non-technical intro-
duction to the wonderful world of atomic and subatomic physics? It
got me interested in this business in the first place...)
Now this "electromagnetic bomb" idea might be defended by the usual
"Oh, that's the _old_ theory. In my new one it is clear that-" But
it so happens that the current theory of electromagnetism, quantum
electrodynamics, is the single most successful theory in physics
today. There is a wonderful and not at all technical explication
of it by one of its founders: R. Feynmann's _QED: The Strange Theory
of Light and Matter_. The evidence needed to abandon it would have
to be compelling indeed - and it's not forthcoming.
The first guy said, "Oh well, I don't want to hear about it if there's
something even worse,
Typical.
it doesn't change our situation..." and said something about the
importance of dealing with the conspiracy behind the weapons machine. The
second guy said, "Oh well, if you're talking about conspiracies, the
military-industrial complex isn't the *real* one", and I said, "So what
is? The Committee of 300?" but it turned out he just meant the Masons.
"You don't get anywhere in US politics without being a Mason.
In re the Masons: crap.
(The first
guy had already said that *they* have lookouts everywhere, in the fof
organizations which are backing or banking the group which is planning to
use the bombs: such groups include the Illuminati, the Masons, the Roman
Catholic Church...)
Of coure. Just how far back does this merry little cabal go, and
what were they planning to do _before_ nukes were invented? This
couldn't, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, predate
the discovery of the nucleus in 190-something. (THE ILLUMINATI???)
At this point I coldn't stand the cold any more and didn't want to
pursue any of these matters right there and then, partly because I wasn't
sure *where* I would want to start asking for clarifications,
justifications, etc. So I simply got the second guy's number (I haven't
yet phoned him; it's now only 9 am); and I may well run into the first guy
again, if I keep my eyes open.
Okay. I have basically attempted to describe what I heard without
inserting too many critical comments. About the only factor I haven't
mentioned so far, I think, is that the first guy also said a few times that
he thought the whole thing was probably Satanic ("this is the devil's
planet now"), which I guess means that he has an outlook similar to that
expressed in (for example) the Australian book "The Cosmic Conspiracy",
which alleges that human geopolitics is a battleground for cosmic forces
of Good and Evil (not a rare claim, actually).
Indeed. This is probably one of the most blatant and disgusting
forms of human _hubris_ - the idea that a bunch of plains apes are
the focus of the Power That Be, who have nothing better to do than
intervene in our sensely and bloody quarrels. It was marginally
defensible to to hold such views in the time of Augustine; by the
time of Hegel and Marx it had become embarassing to persons of
sense; today it is probably pathological. (N.B. people holding
such views _never_ think the world is in the hands of Good at the
moment.)
Anyhow, if you inhabit a
reality-tunnel anywhere near that of consensus reality, you can probably
think of lots of reasons not to believe this world-picture. I know I can
think of all sorts of arguments against the idea of a (possibly satanic)
conspiracy to bring about a nuclear apocalypse.
"Reality-tunnel" seems altogether appropriate for such world-views
as his: Narrow, blinkered and dark.
But, I also recognize that
my major motivation in thinking up counter-arguments is simply that I do
not *want* to believe in such a conspiracy, since to put it mildly it
makes life somewhat more difficult.
True enough, but that doesn't invalidate the arguments. The fact that
geometry originated in measuring land for taxation purposes does not
make geometry invalid for anarchists or objectors to taxation. Your
friend's statements of fact have proven either false, dubious on the
basis of other evidence, or simply lunatic.
What future for extropian hopes such
as indefinite life extension wheneverything's gong to go up in a few years
anyway? And the problem is, how can anyone who is *not* a member of the
hypothetical conspiracy prove that the conspiracy is *not* there, unless
they actually are part of the "inner core"?
Proving such negatives is indeed difficult. But consider this: How
can you prove that invisible, intangible pink furry gremlins that
feed on petroleum aren't what _really_ make cars go, and that they
live in the cylinders of the engine? Is there any reason to believe
in this conspiracy? No. Is there reason to think this conspiracy
is a piece of paranoid raving? Yes. Would it be rational to believe
in it? Only if you have a preference for more rather than less
falsehood and insanity.
You can remove the part about Satanism and still retain the idea of a
conspiracy whose aim is global genocide. This idea I have actually seen
expressed before,
It's not _that_ uncommon. At least a few science fiction novels on
this theme, besides the usual paranoid screeds...
in the final chapter of "High Weirdness by Mail", of all
places. In stark contrast to the cuttingly sarcastic reviews which make up
90% of the rest of the book, that whole last chapter is devoted to
excerpts from a newsletter called "Further Connections" put out by Waves
Forest (PO Box 768, Monterey CA 93940, USA). Here are Ivan Stang's comments:
"One of the Robin Hoods of suppressed data. Anyone who wants to
seriously look into the possibility that major scientific breakthroughs
ARE being hidden by THEM owe it to themselves to send for his info, which
includes listings and addresses for many fringe research groups not
covered in this book. Not funny at all... horrifying, yes;
outlandish-sounding, HELL yes; but funny, no. Very persuasive, sobering,
almost poetic essay/rants with attached bibliographies on the various
technologies and metaphysical discoveries. Be prepared, however, for some
real shocks to your programming. $4 should cover expenses for the first
mailing, which contains more than 400 sources. A penny a source, folks.
You gonna pass it up? *Huh, boy?*" (I have sent away for this mailing
myself; no response so far.)
Some technological innovations might well be surpressed. But as a
test, when this mailing arrives, see if there are any references
to the "gasoline pill" story. If so, Mr. Forest (or Ms. Forest)
is one of those wonderful, gullible cranks this country produces
so well...
And some words from Waves Forest:
Imagine you are among only a few hundred masters of a whole planet's
resources, with five billion slaves surronding you, many in bad shape
because you've mishandled some resources, many others starting to wake up
to the situation. In your attempts to strengthen your psition you have
seriously mistreated a lot of them, or hired others to do so, and you are
slowly losing the struggle to keep the extent of your crimes and cruelties
a secret.
If you were in such a position, would it feel safe to share with all
citizens the advanced technolgies developed in your top-secret "defense"
laboratories? Some of these discoveries could free mankind from dependence
on your resource monopolies, and provide tools for a mass uprising and
overthrow of your regimes.
Why would the defense laboratories work on such things _in_the_first_
place_? Fortuitous (?sp) discoveries are not as common in science as
the mythology makes them out to be - and notice that now, mind you,
you have to rope in hundreds or thousands of scientists, engineers
and technicians into the conspiracy. Not just ones working on, say,
refinements in bomb technology, but alternate energy sources, advanced
communications, etc., etc.
When a man does something his fellows would strongly object to, and
decides to keep the misdeed a secret, he mentally withdraws somewhat from
the others, because now he has to watch himself to make sure doesn't
mention what he did. More misdeeds bring on further withdrawal. The
intensity of the misdeeds and the secrecy surrounding them can increase to
astonishing proprtions.
It has actually reached the point where certain very powerful men, to
ensure their presonal safety and the perpetuation of their empires, plan
to kill off two thirds of the world's population and overtly enslave the rest.
Since most of the general public just somehow doesn't feel right about
genocide, the blatant exterminations of the '30s and '40s have been
replaced by artificially induced wars, plagues, accidents, and "natural"
disasters.
What's a naturally induced war? An example of a artificially induced
plague? (Forest says "AIDS," then we shouldn't worry because Their
genetic engineers are incompetent - it's hard to catch and takes years
to kill. If you really want a planet-killer, look to the pneumonic
plague or influenza. I worked out a scheme for that once, and would
be happy to send you the details.) Now, about those natural
disasters...
Earhquakes can be induced artificially by precise placement and timing
of nuclear "tests". The shock waves sprad out over the globe, then
recombine at various harmonic intervals around the sphere to deliver a
strong jolt at the desired location within forty-eight hours of the
initial blast.
The physics of this is so utterly horrible I'm at a loss for words...
There's not enough energy in bombs, the shock waves don't "recombine
at various harmonic intervals" and they definitely don't delay 48
hrs. This seems like a descendant of Tesla's shake-the-earth-to-bits
scheme...
So there it is again, the idea that "certain very powerful men... plan
to kill off two thirds of the world's population and overtly enslave the
rest." Hell, I recall a similar idea - although the motivation here was a
religious/occult hope of achieving immortality - on the part of the Saures
in "Illuminatus!"
This is very different from blowing the world to smithereens with
nukes. I find it less incredible (in the litteral sense, i.e.,
unbelievable) but by no stretch of the imagination persuasive.
As you point out, it is not an uncommon idea, certainly not
in the fringe culture - which includes thee and me and he.
So what I want to know is this. Where did this idea originate? Does
anyone know more about Waves Forest, about the secret 600 at the top of
the CIA, about the logistical problems of organizing such a conspiracy, of
what forms this idea has taken, who communicates it, who argues against it?
I know nothing about Waves Forest; the secret 600 at the top of the
CIA are, to the best of my knowledge, the creation of his fevered
brain; the logistical problems are immense - the cabal must be at
once everyhwere, omnipotent, omniscient, indiscoverable and its
goals and structure intimately known to the conspiracy theorist.
This is a tall order to fill.
PS: If the "first guy" of my story is in fact wholly correct, and some
member of the Conspiracy reads this post, then according to the argument
he gave the bombs will be set off now rather than later...
If the conspiracy can't prevent a homeless religious fanatic
(i.e., someone who litterally believes in Satan) from finding out
about its existence, goals and methods, and can't keep a stray
technogeek & known extropian from spreading the news across the Net,
what CAN they accomplish.
PPS: I have just recalled another anecdote from the same guy's monologue.
He said he approached a few US sailors (on shore leave here, I presume)
with a similar set of claims and ideas, and asked what they thought of it;
and one guy said, "Well, if I was to give you my opinion I would probably
agree, and probably so wold my friends, but we can't give you opinions
because when we join the Navy we sign a little piece of paper that
forbids us from expressing political opinions, and we'll get shot for
treason if we violate that paper..." This is one claim (amongst many!) of
which I am sceptical - can anyone confirm or deny this? I can imagine a
courtmartial, dishonourable discharge, etc - but execution?
Sailors on shore leave are not noted for sobriety or seriousness.
Some people humor cranks like your friend, others tell them they are
lunatics. This depends on how violent-seeming the crank is, how
entertaining the rant, etc. Which is more likely: That They are
known to every grunt in the Navy, or that some drunken sailors
were having fun with a semi-entertaining lunatic?
Government employees are restricted in their expression of political
opinions - a bizarre and senseless piece of law, but there nonetheless.
(They can vote, but not volunteer for campgains, donate more than nom-
inal sums, etc.) The penalties are not, of course, execution for
treason, but getting fired - in the military, a dishonorable
discharge, I suppose. (My mother is a biochemist at the National
Institutes of Health & an ex-Trotskyite - every four years the law gets
her _extremely_ upset...). BTW, in the United States "treason" is
defined in the Constitution, and consists _solely_ of providing aid
and comfort to the enemies of the repbulic, punishable not by execution
but by imprisonment - admittedly for a fairly lengthy number of years.
Your friend might mean simply "get shot" when he says "get shot for
treason," but it does little to bolster my confidence in his accuracy
as to fact.
\qix\necro
Newsgroups: alt.horror.cthulhu,alt.necromicon
Subject: NecroMicon FAQ
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 05:13:09 GMT
The alt.necromicon F.A.Q.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. What is the NecroMicon?
The NecroMicon (literally, "The Book of Dead Mice") is a near-legendary text,
also known as "Al As-if". It was written in Damascus in 730 A.D. by Abdul
Alhirra (known irreverently in the modern West as: "Bill the Cat"), of
whom little is known, other than that he travelled widely and may have
been the originator of the "Ackankar" cult.
Q. Where may the NecroMicon be found?
Unfortunately, the original Arab text has been lost, and only fragments
remain of the various translations that were attempted. The most notable
such translation was the work of an otherwise unknown cleric called "the
mysterious Wormius"; we even know of his name only through tertiary sources
(for example, the fine historical researches of Dr Phileus Sadowsky). Most
likely Wormius encountered Alhirra in the course of an inspection of booty
brought back from the Crusades.
It is believed that the exiled cabalist Ignatz Eliezer carried a copy of
Wormius' translation with him to Prague, where he met Dr John-D, the
famous English magician and rapper (best known in this regard for introducing
the magickal cry "IAO!" to rap, the modern form of which is "Yo!"). John-D in
turn translated Wormius into Enochian, encoded the result with a complex
multivalent substitution cipher, and sold the new manuscript to Rudolf II
of Bavaria, as the work of Roger Bacon. Over the centuries many scholars of
the occult puzzled over John-D's handiwork; perhaps the most notorious of
these was Adam Weishaupt, who as a young man was fascinated by the mysterious
"illuminated manuscript".
Rudolf's collection was broken up with the passage of time, with his
collection of rare manuscripts making its way to the venerable Jorge's famous
library in Italy. It survived the fire that destroyed Jorge's abbey and
took his life, and along with the other remaining fragments of Jorge's
collection was stored at a Jesuit college for many years.
In 1912 it was discovered there by Wilfred Voynich, a Polish scientist
and lover of rare books. He was also the son-in-law of George Boole, the
logician, and he may have had the impression that the manuscript contained
certain ideas of Bacon's that anticipated modern combinatorics.
Ever since then there has been a global effort to decipher the Voynich
Manuscript, as it is now known. A history of this effort can be found in
"The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma", by Mary D'Empirio (ADA 070
618; US Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service,
Washington DC, 1978). Several times solutions have been announced, but all
have been found wanting. The text of the manuscript itself is available via
anonymous ftp from rand.org (192.5.14.33) (/pub/jim/voynich.tar.Z).
Q. What is the content of the NecroMicon?
The book is generally agreed to have contained Alhirra's metaphysical
speculations. "Bill the Cat" appears to have outlined a baroque cosmology
in which our world is one of many "fabricated" worlds, made for various
purposes. Alhirra's philosophy is not unusual for its time in possessing
teleological elements, but what truly sets it apart is that the purpose of
our world is seen to be the performance of a giant *calculation*
(ironic, given Voynich's likely presumptions about the manuscript's
content, mentioned above). In this respect he is remarkably modern (see,
for example, Edward Fredkin's recent attempts to view the universe as a
computational process).
From the modern viewpoint, Alhirra subsequently diminishes the
attractiveness of his thought by then introducing his pet obsessions -
cryptozoology and numerology. He believed that the overseers of this vast
computation (the "Archons" or "Sysadmins", in occult jargon), although
originating in another dimension ("the spaces between"), had incarnated in
a form visible to us - as *mice*. (Hence the book's title.) He believed
that their centre of operations was "an alien city in a cold land to the
north" - presumably the Antarctic. Alhirra had several visions of this
city from space, perhaps while scrying (these visions later formed the basis
of the "Piri Reis" map); he described the city's physical environment, and
its flora and fauna, in considerable detail, and it is for this reason that
the NecroMicon is also sometimes known as "The Penguin Opus".
Alhirra also attached great significance to the number 42, suggesting
that this number somehow lay at the heart of the planetary entelechy, but
never explaining why. It is a frequent observation that 42 is twice 21,
the number of characters in John-D's Enochian alphabet, but otherwise no
one know what "Bill" meant by this. Colin Low has written that Alhirra's
scrying technique involved the use of "an incense composed of olibanum,
storax, dictamnus, opium and hashish", and it has been surmised that the
NecroMicon was not meant to be understood except by individuals who had
ingested certain rare psychedelic plants. (For more on this line of
thought, see ethnopharmacologist Terence McKenna's article on the Voynich
manuscript in Issue #7 of "Gnosis" magazine, and the scene in Wilson and
Shea's "Illuminatus!" in which Weishaupt attempts to fathom the NecroMicon.)
Alhirra himself may have been unhinged by his exploration of
consciousness. He is said to have written that to free oneself from "the
click of the mouse" (an unclear phrase, apparently referring to the means
of their alleged control) one must become "like that cat, dwelling in the
midpoint between Something and Nothing, which is neither alive nor dead."
Perhaps this is similar to the sentiment that one should be "in the world,
but not of it." In any case, Alhirra is said to have met his end while
standing on a chair, literally frightened to death by his invisible
persecutors; his last words were, "Ia! Cthulhu ack-phffftagn..."
Q. What about the Necronomicon?
A. A modern superstition, in my opinion, but there are some people
on alt.horror.cthulhu who take it seriously.
