Social Intelligence

Never forget: humans are social. Human intelligence has a social matrix: and the society, the culture, governs what intelligence is acceptable, gets nourishment, recognition, and what intelligence gets ignored. What gets published is governed: by an editor (typically an editorial board) if not by a commissar (who himself has a matrix, support). What graduates and what gets left back is typically a committee decision.

(Of course nearly every one of these word/concepts has to be italicized.)

History, science, ... these are socially determined. Thus the reality our consciousness emerges within is social.
Simultaneously, we (all life) are organisms, populations ... species in an actual (non-socially determined) universe (Pleroma). Our maps are made in a real territory. Where the maps are too discrepant from reality, over time (after the oil runs out), corrections are made: by nature, truth, god. Subjectively, they appear as revolution ... death ... extinction; or as learning.

Literate societies, those with the thus-far most efficient means of propagating their memes, have thus far all been kleptocracies, hierarchically organized. Democracies claim to be bottom up, but anyone, no matter how map-ridden, can see it’s a lie. Jefferson, Franklin ... decided what the "people" were, what they wanted: and who qualified as people.

This of course is written by pk. pk advertises himself as a suppressed intelligence: ignored by the committees, by the commissars, by the public. As a child no one in my church, no one in my family, understood my theology. It doesn’t matter that I myself now reject it: the point is that it never got heard: at least not associated with pk. As a young man my reading, my explication, of Shakespeare’s sonnets never got heard, still hasn’t been heard: the best I can tell, not by a single individual, anywhere: even though I "taught" it in a college, even though I’ve now been writing it online for a decade (not that I've yet written it well, or completely, there or anywhere else). My adult (1970) offer of a bottom-up internet made a little bit of news by 1972: then none. The truth and history do not match.

After a revolution maps may be adjusted (which still doesn’t necessitate their being accurate). Before the 1960s all blacks were ignorant; since the 1960s black history is rich and complex. Facts get unburied (which still doesn’t make them complete). Under Communism, the Communists invented everything since the wheel. After its fall, maps get adjusted. Under the British Empire, God was an English gentleman (living off his investments). In America, Jesus was American: spoke English, shared the local prejudices (until the oil runs out).

Every institution has a crypt in which secrets are kept. I’m not saying for a moment that the secret Vatican archives are complete, wholly true. I am not saying that an accurate account of the theologies (or anti-theologies) of every heretic tortured is in that library, nor all Vatican science that didn’t get published to the public, nor all non-Vatican science repressed by the Vatican ... I am saying that there was a distinction, a discrepancy, between what the Vatican "knew" and what the Vatican published to the public. Elsewhere I’ve told how I learned that the Metropolitan Museum knew of many forgeries and misappellations among its collection NOT reflected in the labels shown the public. The Times too, Washington DC ... have unpublished archives: any item of which may be released when the Times, Washington DC ... decide is desirable: or necessary. Back to the wall, things get released.

And what gets released has a social matrix. The post-revolutionary society has its own agenda. With the revolution the doors to the Bastille are thrown open. The jailed thinker is released, the pickpocket is celebrated as a jailed thinker. Then the revolution makes its own new Bastille.

Knatz.com talks of how young pk loved jazz. I loved Bach too, but Satchmo was alive! Dave Brubeck was making great music NOW. I labored as hard as I could to promote the integrated swing of Benny Goodman to my school, my schoolmates. They didn’t want to know about it. Or, they already knew about it -- it being obvious; but they were unwilling to acknowledge what they knew officially. One teacher scratched the Lionel Hampton record she had given me permission to play in her haste to then stop the class from hearing it.
I couldn’t know at that time that what we were waiting for was Elvis! A white man we could give the adulation to, the money, the credit. We were waiting for Mick Jagger: don’t tell us about Muddy Waters.
See? That was BEFORE the 1960s.
Even today: we listen to the integrated music; but not if the integration struggle is acknowledged.
Thus our "history" is like a TV drama: suddenly we all have black best friends, gooks over for diner: so long as there’s no consciousness of how it came about.

These days my IonaArc blog gives a first look at Knatz.com-type new drafts. (Actually, I hope to develop the habit of noting all significant changes at Knatz.com through IonaArc: thus far only partially realized. Understand: these are drafts: first drafts (then second drafts). (N drafts go to Knatz.com: the real deal.)

Anyway, a lot of work remains to be done on this one: revisions, extensions.