To Be

To be or not to be. How old were you before you even began to understand Hamlet's opening words to his most famous soliloquy? I recall clearly that it was so much gibberish to me before I began to absorb even the obverse meaning, the literal meaning. If you accept Christian dogma, including the dogma of Original Sin, then what right could we possibly have to exist: unless and until God forgives us, saves us? On another hand if your a naturalist, then surely we have a right to be born, to breathe, to eat ... to move around ... to breathe out, to defecate, to pollute ...

How's this for literature?
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.Recognize it? Does this help?Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.I first saw those lines printed in a church on the south shore of Lake Geneva. It thrilled me. It was a Christian church, pseudo gothic, but I tell you the prose is pure blasphemy: there's no original sin in it, and the God doesn't jibe with any Christian orthodoxy. This is a secular poem with a God you can make up as yo go along. The church's post offered a provenance: "found in a Baltimore church in 1692." In fact here's the whole quote:Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass.

Take kindly to the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.Makes you feel holy? It's a secular holiness, not at all Christian. And trust me: I know seventeen-century English: and that prose is post-Eighteenth Century! But then the story is well known by now. See for example this. Another church passing around more misinformation.

Before the Romans (and the Jews), cultures of law, no one, nothing, needed a right to exist. It's only in an over-crowded over-managed (kleptocratic) world, a world full of laws and lawyers, a world run by manipulated ambiguities, that anything needs a right to exist.

Christianity is kleptocracy that would shame us, then allow us relief: salvation: if we behave (not the way God said; the way the kleptocrats say!) Contemporary kleptocracy, kleptocracy descended from the eighteenth-century rationalists (ha ha, meaning atheists, of course, deists, like Jefferson, Adams, Washington) would shuck us of our designer guilt and recloth us as innocent thieves (who don't even know what they're stealing, that they're tresspassing).

Aside: Do you know this Woody Guthrie verse? Everybody knows his This land is your land, this land is my land ...
As I went walking
Along the woodlands
I saw a sign there,
Said No Trespassing.
But on the other side
It didn't say nothin'.
That side was made
for you and me!Never mind if my words are slightly different from some printed version: Woody wouldn't have. He changed his own lyrics as he sang: there's no one correct version. He's a folk hero, not an editor.

Note further: Woody wrote that and many another song in a project for FD Roosevelt. The politics are very complex. The sentiments are largely left: meaning government control, government interference, meaning socialism; on the other hand the anarchist sentiments are ineradicable. I love Guthrie for the anarchism, and the humanity, not at all for the alignment with the Democrats.

Sutter's Gold

It isn't just that we stole Sutter's gold, while we invaded his domain, destroyed his farm, killed his livestock; it's also that we had ignored him when he invited us to join him as associates.

Sutter was born in Switzerland. He began setting his life in the new world up in New York (hung out in Brooklyn, knew Edgar Allen Poe), but soon headed west: at a time when it was well established that no one knew how to cross the Rockies: the Pacific wasn't the limit; the mountains were the limit. Sutter looked for fellow explorers to discover such a passage. He found no helpers. He found a way alone. We learned the way because he had found the way: unaided by us.

Sutter got to California, saw that the Sacramento Valley was ideal for agriculture. Again, he looked for partners, for associates, for fellow laborers and investors. He found none. He sailed further west, to Hawaii. There he found partners: Hawaiians who would invest their labor in return for a share of results. Sutter named his enterprise New Helvetia: New Switzerland. He sought, and obtained, treaties recognizing his sovereignty with Mexico, Russia, and the US. By 1849 Sutter's domain had rich farming, mighty live stock, not only employees and associates, but a private army.

Everything going swimmingly, he began to branch out into the lumber business. It was at his mill, all on "his" property that gold nuggets were found in the stream that powered the mill. It was Sutter's mill. Sutter's employees found the gold. Rightly, they reported their finding to Sutter. They were due some of the value: they found it; he was due some: they found it because they were on his land, doing his bidding. The owner gets some, the finders get some. But Sutter told them to keep mum: develop the lumber, then I'll think about developing metals.

Meantime the employees' kids played openly with the gold. Strangers passing by saw the kids, scoffed that the kids had real gold nuggets. Their moms said, "Oh, no: it's real gold alright." And that was the end of Sutter's New Helvetia, his agriculture, his lumber, his army, his mining.

People from the east poured west: over Sutter's route (finding other routes as well: once traffic was possible, it spread). (Did we thank him for the knowledge? Did we pay him a toll?) No, we tresspassed, panned for (his) gold, got hungry, killed his livestock.

The US put a court house in a rapidly developing San Franciso. Sutter summed his losses and sued. Twelve judges saw justice in his claim, awarded him hundreds of millions of dollars. The new citizens of San Francisco, suddenly finding themselves due for back rent and damages burned the court house to the ground. The judges scattered for their lives.

The US was used to gobbling land. The US, like any imperial kleptocracy, was used to taking whatever it wanted. What was different here was that we were stealing from a "white" man! It's doubly wicked irony that he'd invited us to share with him in the first place.

Oh, I don't doubt that Sutter wanted the lion's share. Why shouldn't he? Maybe he would have been difficult to work with, or for. Still, even if we'd declared emminent domain, we're building our highway through your living room, we should have paid him something for the land, the cattle, the lost profits ...

Sutter may have been the first white man robbed by the mob of white men. (He's the first I can name, where we all know the name.) But he wasn't the last: I offered social networking to the public in 1970 (as an alternative to social coercion in education: establish a cybernetic data base of learning resources, then every body mind their own business). (Johnny can learn to read: if he wants to. If Johnny choses not to and starves to death, it's nobody's business but Johnny's. If Sammy learns to read in twelve days instead of twelve years, then corners the rock-and-roll market, good for him. School was nothing really but a Procrustean bed anyway.

I asked for help, for resources, to build infrastructure. Years passed, decades. Then suddenly coercive governments and their institutional tools shove digital record keeping up our noses. I offered cheap public software development years before Microsoft was founded. I tried to engage IBM in my ideas in 1971, decades before they invested a penny in internet-related R&D. Bill Gates still didn't want anything to do with "the" (stolen) internet even after the internet was a world-wife phenomenon!

"You" all could have had convivial cheap versions of all of these things before there was such a thing as the PC! Once you did decide that you wanted them (after the kleptocracy's version was shoved up your nose) (after the money was taken from your pocket), someone should have noticed me: impoverished, a pariah, my son kidnapped, afforded no protection from the law, not published, now censored: all because I devoted my life to trying to deliver God's messages of social salvation (to people who still don't get Jesus' messages of spiritual salvation!)

I should have been killed the second the school noticed that I was intelligent. At least I should have been killed the second the fed realized that they wanted to steal and pervert my ideas. But I'm still alive, somehow, among the double-damned.

The End Is Coming

Media-laden society is always hearing about doomsday predictions. Only careful readers and listeners will realize how many there are. Only scholars will document how many doomsdays come and go without the forecast-doom arriving. Jim Jones may have known what he was doing when he led his group of believers to suicide before they could all be disappointed in his election.

Churches destroy evidence the way Alexander killed his brothers once the king had died. Alexander knew he would have civil wars enough, enough challenges to his anointing, without his brothers coming up with alternate wills. If the Apocalypse of John is the only apocalypse Christians know, then they'll think it's unique: a dime a dozen lowers the value (to make a redundancy joke).

I just read online about another. And John, and Nostradomos, and some of my own rhetoric came flowing past me. What brings me here to scribble these words is a thought of the purpose of false predictions in a media-laden society: if the sheeple hear false prediction after false prediciton, they'll become skeptical about doomsday predictions and lull themselves into a belief that they're secure, that nothing can harm them. If Jim Jones was full of it, and even Jesus' Kingdom of God didn't arrive soon after his death (or since, so far as we can tell), why then global warming can't harm us: and neither can smoking, or cheating, or lying, or the medacious ignorant politically agenda'd school board!

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I foisted a The End Is Coming joke decades ago. A friend gave a costume party under the theme Vicars and tarts. Males were supposed to dress church-related; the females were supposed to dress as though they were hawking their wares. I dressed as a prophet: beard, long robe. I carried a doom sign. Hung from my waist, over my cod, was a sign that said "The end is c-c-coming": with an orthographic joke on orgasm you see, and over my behind was a matching sign that said, with relief, "The end is come."

German and Jew

German and Jew moved to pKnatz blog.

Society

We're social animals. Me too. Thus, naturally, I love society: depend on it, agree with our ancestors survival choice to group.

But I hate this society.

Society in contrast loves itself ... and hates me.

Society in general says it follows God, worships Jesus, but of course it does just the opposite. Those who follow God, or try to, or who ally with Jesus, or try to (those who overturn the money changing tables in the temple, or try to), are still isolated, persecuted, silenced. And society has no conscience about it. (Neither is society very conscious.)

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I started drafting this intending it for InfoAll, my deschooling, deregulation, deprofessionalizing blog. But now I remind one and all that the major part of my Knatz.com, a censorship casualty of the fed destroying my AgainstHierarchy.org, was my Teaching area, and the largest area of that was my Society folders (with their myriad sub-folders!)

More on the same set of metaphors will appear at a range of blogs, including this one, and including InfoAll.

God Is Not Mocked

Gregory Bateson's last book, Angels Fear, argues the truth of the statement God is not mocked by explaining it in a way that thrills me to my toenails. I translate his explanation thusly: in the long run, the truth counts. At the end of the day, the territory is the territory, no matter what the map depicts. In other words, in human terms, in human social terms, if nicotine is carcinogenic, but the myth says it's the cigarette (and the scotch) that makes Bogie so attractive (not his genes, the makeup, the script, the lighting ... Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall), and you think Camels are mild, or, It's the taste! then at the end of the day, you'll still have cancer. God is not mocked.

If human beings are expelled from the Garden of Eden, but then stumble on the Americas and take them from the natives, saying that God rewards the good guys, but then we black ball the best guys, gush goods at the most compliant mediocrities, in the end, will our votes, our will, our self-deceits trump the truth? or will we all have cancer no matter what we edit for television, or drivel at the universities?

Can the actual universe be a dangerous place if we all conscript children into school and tell them they're free?

Is it the carcinogen that causes cancer? or the Nielsen rating that prevents it?

In other words (if Bateson is right, and Korzybski, and pk): reality will have the last word: only it won't come as words.

There are and will be consequences for human behavior. The pathological lies told by our major institutions: government, school, church can pacify us only so long. In the end it won't be just Jesus and his disciples who are dead.

1%er Association

My GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog. It offers another metaphor for the theory of social homeostasis I've been developing at Knatz.com/Society (and here at this Iona Arc blog. The term "1%" here refers to intelligence, to learning, to discernment, discipline, and imagination inreading: but I can't use the term without recalling another use I learned about when I taught at Colby in Maine. My nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that It's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, We're that !%!"

Now that's a very different sort of 1%, isn't it? But maybe there are similarities. In social homeostasis it's both ends of any spectrum that are rejected by the mean. Those of average intelligence, of average learning, of average morality won't listen to the Gandhi or the Jesus or the Tolstoy, but they also don't honor the village idiot or the purse snatcher. I gloy in my intelligence, in my ethics, in my honesty, the more so becuase they are rejected by others: well, these bikers gloried in being bad to the bone.

Im-phatic Iago

A line illustrating Iago's manacing diction in Shakespeare's Othello just floated into my head (apropos of nothing I'm aware of): "But for a satisfaction of my thought; / No further harm." The diction is an intrusion: where did harm come from? It's purely, ingeniously gratuitous on Iago's part as he begins to poison the atmosphere around Cassio (and around Othello, who's passed him over for promotion) (that's the imagined harm!)

Make of it further what you will: I pass my thought along here to initiate one point: "99%" of human communications are phatic. It's verbal musak. It's for soothing relationship, not for conveying information. There's little content. Sweetie pie! Coochie Coo! Hey, Babe! That's what we're used to: so Iago's "harm" sticks us like a frozen ice pick.

Note: the basic prosody for the scene is iambic pentameter. Iago's "But for a satisfaction of my thought," is perfect meter: ten syllables, five accents. The following line is also perfect iambic pentameter, but Iago speaks only the first two beats: No further harm: (though they read like three beats, don't they?) It's what Othello asnwers that fills out the technical meter: "Why of thy thought, Iago?" Now, reflectively, we can see: Iago gets two of five beats, Othello three.

Let me tell you: even the damn meter is dramatic, and establishes character. Well, damn it, it's Shakespeare!

Evolution, Society, and the "1%"

Context: See GRE's Top 1% at the PaulKnatz blog. (Also see my Knatz.com/Society module on the subject: an earlier post here at IonaArc.)

I just added this PS at the former post: Understand all along how my points all fit into my workings of the theory of homeostasis: any system, certainly any living system, structures itself to preserve what's preserved, and to make slick paths of change. Averages claim to value excellence but what they really value are averages. Thus an individual of "IQ" 200 will barely be able to communicate with an individual of IQ 180, while neither will be understood by the staff at the NYT, The Smithsonian, Harvard ... Though in time, without credit, ideas, observations, admissions from such a stratosphere may filter inward toward the mean.

In other words, the mass of humans don't hear anything from more than a little bit "above" them: messages from geniuses, from artists, from divinities, from saviors ... may take millennia to filter down (inward, toward the core of men): or, may never get there at all. Not all seeds germinate; not all ideas become seeds. Evolution follows a random path, not an ordained path to perfection. Meantime: human institutions are there to pretend to facilitate communication while actually blocking it, editing it, managing it: supervising it.

God didn't tell me to get credit for offering a cheap internet in 1970, he just told me to offer it: the way he told Jesus to offer salvation. Only enough of what Jesus said penetrated to assure damnation; only enough of my cybernetic public records keeping penetrated to shore up kleptocracy. Still: it's all only temporary.

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Eve's sisters didn't see that Eve was the mother of a new species, a species that would wipe her sisters off the face of the earth: out-performing them in fitness for survival. If they had, if her parents had, if her brothers, or uncles, or cousins had: they would have killed her. For all we know her relatives did sort of see it, maybe they kept her in a cage. Piers Anthony's Isle of Women imagines her as a pariah, the family weirdo. Still: Eve managed to attract Adam, Even managed to keep Adam attracted to her. She managed, exiled at home or not, to get Adam to bring her red meat, and to help feed and care for her children. That's how Eve was different: and its her descendants, her species, us, that have choked the earth and gobbled and wasted its resources in the five-or-six figures-of-years since.

Societies believe that they are entitled to know everything, to think anything, to understand what needs understanding. Of course we don't; the part is not the whole. Theologies posit a god who understands everything. No, no: not my god: I don't want any god who could muck up evolution. Between god and evolution, I'll take evolution: learning, growth, maturation, change ... adaptation. The worst curse I ever offered the Roman Catholic Church was that it should remain stuck with its teaching: that is, go under: hard.

When I taught at Colby in Maine my nextdoor neighbor rode a BSA Victor: a one cylinder off-road bike with big knobby tires — a lot of torque in any gear, even at modest revs, which this garbage-pickup-truck Maine Tibadeau had customized with ape hanger handlebars: his bike was an oxymoron: it contradicted itself by the microsecond: road! off-road! road! off-road! road! off-road! Hells Angels ride on pavement, showing off for the pimply girls, and they put high handlebars on their chopped Harleys. Dirt riders have to be on top of the action, with strong handlebars below their shoulders: for control, in the dirt. Anyway, This Tibadeau once told me that his friends were "1%ers" I told him I didn't know what that meant. He said, "You know, they say that it's only 1% of bike riders who give motor-cycling a bad name: well, we're that !%!"

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GRE's Top 1% appeared at the PaulKnatz blog: 'cause it's about me! Spin off material appears here: because it's not about me. That is to say, the PaulKnatz blog is at least titularly biographical; IonaArc is philosophical ...

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We humans say that we're "intelligent": as though intelligence were an absolute, all-or-nothing condition. I say it's a position (or a range of positions) along a specrum: along which we claim to belong more via ignorance and prejudice than objective measurement. Do we have IQ tests for snails or dolphins to match our tests for ourselves? Are our tests for ourselves worth anything? Will our tests for ourselves be worthy anything when we meet ET? or god?

Think of this: accept for a moment a "Christ" as something divine, resembling something human. Give this Christ an IQ test. Compare his performance to yours or mine: or Einstein's. Have we accurately mapped Christ's intelligence?

How did Christ's IQ test performance match Jehovah's? or Baal's? or a cobblestone from old Geneva?

Where do human institutions get the hubris to pretend that those institutions are competent to pursue their supposed goals? I mock my IQ test. I mock my school performance. I mock my performance in this society. None of our tests prove anything but institutional incompetence, the pathetic naivete of civilization. Now: the other side of that same coin:

Our institutions claim purposes and functions that would not be supported by falsifications administered by ET. My schools pretended that their purpose was to train me, to civilize me, to educate me ... My schools never demonstrated competnence to do any of those things: they were just fiated into power by the thugs of our kleptocracy. I've spent my adulthood offering disproofs; the society has spent my entire life ignoring my messages.

Well, that would be OK perhaps in a world in which Christ was a falsehood. Or in a world where there was no Truth other than that stage-dressed by the kleptocrats. In that universe the carcinogens in the tobacco won't kill anyone until a majority votes for it to be so. But what if we live in a world were truth cannot be compromised? What if the poison is poisonous whether we officially publish it to be so or not? In other words: can false authorities fiat their false authority into passing for truth in reality?

I say not. My society tackles me, knocks me down, holds me down: so there's no contest.

Did you ever hear such a story? Sure: it's told in the Bible. Not very accurately. Not at all honestly. But still. Mythically it's true. It's there: a truth we tell, but ignore.