The Dam conspiracy conspiracy conspiracy
“what the thinker thinks, the prover proves”—recurring theme in the book Prometheus Rising, by Robert Anton Wilson.
Everything seems connected. Some things seem more interconnected than others. Networks connect. New information travels fast. Novelty powers the meme-space race. Reality, from the whole tribes perspective, maybe only what trends on twitter when the question is asked. Its as if relativity is getting more relative, to paraphrase a saying, while the exponential information explosion ripples ever outward, or inward, pulsing, simultaneously. Pull and push.
Dam Conspiracy everywhere! but which ones are worth the time and effort pursuing, if any? And to what end? Do you really hope to piece it all together, create the one singular, most probable scenario universe to one particular space-time event? Or is this an exorcise in information warfare, defense in the art of ratting out the fake and untruths from the real and true. Good luck with that. Perhaps simply thinking in probabilities takes us much closer to the truth?
In my estimation, the whole purpose of
The Illuinatus Trilogy, and the collected works of RAW are to force one to think, to decide for yourself what is real, what is put on, what is mostly put on and a little bit real, and/or mostly real with a little bit of put on. Reality is both what YOU make it, but also how those around you perceive it in the ideaspaces we share. This is not to deny that things happen as we perceive them, that would be falling into solipsism, that I aim to avoid like the void.
“whatever you say it is, it isn’t”—Alfred Korzybski
The conspiracy, in one sense, is that our brains, and our hearts and senses all seem to push toward making meaning and truth, and beauty for that matter, out of the signals we receive. What these signals are, how they came to be what they are, and why we put them into patterns and recognizable forms, symbol systems, pictures, song, remains as much a mystery as proposing what is outside the limits of the inflating universe.
My purpose for writing this is not to put down conspiracy research, or theories, or individuals who propose them, but simply to try and reinforce what RAW says so much better than anybody else I have known, read or heard tales about:
“According to Alfred Korzybski, any “idea” or mental state is a brain circuit which the brain itself can contemplate, thereby having an idea about the idea, or a mental state about the mental state, etc. There is no theoretical or real limit to the higher ordering process; it is the “infinity within” of which mystics speak.—Dr Robert Anton Wilson, the metaprogramming circuit, Prometheus Rising, pg. 195.
Alfred Korzybski, should be at the very top of any serious conspiracy researchers list of founding individuals who developed principles and methodology for doing good honest research. At the least this may lead to a kind of probabilistic reasoning, or a system of communicating based upon a wide array o f data.
RAW for instance, crafted complete books of non-fiction abiding by the pretty strict rules of English Prime (E-Prime), or English language with the remove of beingness, or the beingness of isness. A major cause for confusion in Aristotelian either/or reality tunnels: see politics, religion and the music press. I advise any conspiracy researcher worth their weight in paperclips, to delve into E-Prime, for the sake of sanity. Familiarize yourself with disinformation and the ego tripping wizards of what is, often accompanied by the ongoing lyric of ‘I’. The mix of fact and metaphor. The mix of ‘isness’ with ‘I’ ness...running wild into the cage of certainty.
“to is, or not to is, maybe NOT a question worth thinking about too long”—Steve fly
Don’t get me wrong, ‘I’ would call myself a conspiracy researcher due to having read most of RAWs output, and I have built my own scheme of things, based on what I have read and heard, seen and intuited in my own life. RAW would probably list Alfred Korzybski, Ezra Pound, Karl Popper,
Carl Oglesby, Noam Chomsky and Paul Krassner as some of his top conspiracy theory quality critters. Read them. Search each one at
DuckDuckGo.com, or another search engine and see for yourself why these individuals and their ideas are important for us all now, and how they distinguish themselves from the popular sensationalist ‘pop conspiracy boom’ co-opted by the global entertainment market, and questionably extended the reach of the gov-corp disinformation ops themselves. I once met
Richard Metzger who started up Disinformation.com, and who was a good friend of RAW, the use of the word disinformation by no means refers to him or the website by that name, Metzger flipped in back in the face of the gov-corp disinfo IMHO.
Let RAW clarify for us, once again:
“Every secret police organization is engaged in both the collection of information and the production of misinformation euphemistically called “disinformation.” That is, you score points in the secret police game both by hoarding signals (information units)—hiding facts from competitors—and by foisting false signals (fake information units) on the other players. This creates the situation I call Optimum SNAFU, in which every player has rational (not neurotic) reasons for suspecting that each and all may be trying to deceive him. As Henry Kissinger is alleged to have said, anybody in Washington who isn’t paranoid must be crazy. Maybe the UFOs really exist objectively—or maybe the whole UFO phenomena is a cover for a secret police disinformation ploy. Maybe there are Black Holes where space and time implode—or maybe Black Holes were invented to befuddle Russian scientists and send them into “the little man who wasn’t there” semantic spookery. Maybe Jimmy Carter really exists—or maybe he is, as National Lampoon once claimed, an actor named Sidney Goldfarb trained to project an attractive down-home “image”. Perhaps only three alpha males at the top of the security pyramid really know the answers to these questions—or perhaps these three are being deceived by certain subordinates, as Lyndon Johnson was deceived about Vietnam by the C.I.A.—Robert Anton Wilson, The SNAFU principle, Prometheus Rising. Pg. 226.
To continue, I suspect one good measure of a characters contribution to humanity could be based on how much, and in what way, they share signals. With particular focus on factual, useful, scientific tools that help benefit all humanity, simplifying the equation, creating a new synthesis, balanced, fair, funny and obviously to the benefit of all. Like a good contract.
I am leading to a critique of the new whistle blower phenomena, and the way in which the information is communicated. When filtered through some of the most balanced sources that I personally like and can get along with, like boingboing.net, the Guardian, The Huffington Post, io9, dangerous minds, etc; still lack the attention to the whole human organism that a character like Amiri Baraka and Alan Moore exhibit. I mean in the special cohesion found in great works of art, often more detailed and obscure, the sense of time when reading a novel vs. a typical blog entry or news item. The urge to fill in the missing information often pulls us toward massive generalizations about our senses, processes sensed and how everything fits together, self, the individual in history, and our moving experience of wakefulness, now.
Each to their own, and give thanks to the wondrous diversity of forms we can get our information, in the age of global Internet. However, I feel a good question concerns the difference between scripture and regular writing? How do we create special writing and communication that celebrate the human traits of humanity, the triumph of the individual over the state, over ideology and the deceptions of perceptions. How to break free from alphabetical chains, categorical cages and get beyond language?
RAW might point us to James Joyce, Marshall Mcluhan, Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound in this respect. All whom dipped a toe to five into the future and dared to propose, and to perform by example a whole new style, a new synthesis, an innovation and condensation of past knowledge and psychological craftsmanship into never before seen language. Language art, the art and crafts of poetry, and the antidote to the infinite conspiracy conspiracy conspiracy regress, IMHO.
James Joyce might be my favorite conspiracy author,the master of connectivity in language. I think that Joyce and Pound, Yeats, and Burroughs stole back the fire from the big bad thief, they stole back the arts of disinformation, the double cross, Orwellian double-speak, and created quintuple agents with missions way beyond anything any Harvard spy professor or Oxford/Cambridge cocka could compete with. Not a chance. And the great Irish poets and writers--to call up a nationality and apply a stereotypical and misleading title for them--stand atop the world in the field of capturing the tragic/comic truth of life, whole. Or, truths in the plural. True enough I like to think. A strong maybe, probably true, like the second law of thermodynamics.
If you choose to follow any of this advice about reading RAW and checking out some of his in depth works concerning the characters I mention above, or not, please go ahead and have some fun with it, write your story, your own conspiracy, pull it apart and build it up again. Do it again. Critique your own strongest arguments. Eventually you may be able to meditate upon such activity before engaging, and save a lot of time and effort which cd. be applied elsewhere, perhaps working toward gaining some agency, or agency on behalf of your local community with which to at the least install protections, possibly some semantic standards with which to weed out disinformation at the root?
In light of the principle that blinkered and limited perception shrinks and limits the universe, we could say that the common jewel of the conspiracy theorists tackle-box--the all powerful, all controlling super Illuminati--makes the biggest fool out of those who shout the loudest. That is, unless the shouting turns to singing, dancing, storytelling, jokes and some good old fun such as RAW and Robert Shea demonstrate in
Illuminatus Trilogy! And RAW demonstrates throughout his entire life's work as a writer, teacher, playwright, scientfic philosopher, and genuinely really nice guy. Read him! Compare this with the monotonous paranoid ravings of those who proclaim to have discovered some universal truth about a highly complex historical event, no jokes, no alternative models, just an advertisement to sell books or other schwag.
“It is what it is”—James Brown
“Nothing is”—Sun Ra
--Steve fly
Amsterdam, 26/3/14
