Thank you again, Daniel, for another of your succinct and cogent synopses.
I found this both sanity-making and contextualizing, supporting me to move into what Jonathon Rowson calls the “post tragedy” space of the Metacrisis, metabolizing yet a little more of the reality and keeping my nervous system regulated as the chaos and destruction ensue. I believe, much as Chris Bache and Duane Elgin do, that the death part of the death-rebirth cycle is inevitable and will be way more consequential than any of us would like, and yet we still need to stay present and regulated so that we can participate in the specific local way that our gifts and talents predispose us to serve.
This: In our current civilizational meta-crisis, could the forces seeking domination and control and the forces oriented toward symbiosis and freedom somehow mesh together, evolve each other, to unleash something new? At the threshold of technological progress and climate collapse, could we attain a new mutation of creative complexity?
That quote hit me right in the gut instincts. There Daniel, you’ve expressed a vital part of my own current ideas about how we need to move through these times. I will go off and explore those and report back (via my own set of writings and stories, coming soon!)
I look forward to reading your ideas about how we shape the new world. I, and many others will be doing all we can to bring it about.
It’s frustrating that even people who see what’s going on, don’t get it. Or more accurately, they get it, up to a point. Yup, tax breaks for billionaires. But that’s just a strategy for their insane end game. A part of me, deeper than I was aware, knew some version of “now” would happen. I remember conversations, in the late 70s and beyond, with activists, friends, people who knew what was going on in Central and South America. And the US, CIA, USAID - yes, that newly “sainted” organization that does (or I should say did) some good stuff that should be allowed to continue, and that has also done some horrific stuff that perhaps we’re meeting the karma of right now. On the spiritual/etheric levels there has been plenty of foreshadowing, for lack of a better word for what I feel, that I sense also goes way back. We - humans and our cultures and civilizations - have been around and playing this game for a very long time, and (here’s my crazy speaking) I sense this is connected through families and organzations well before the advent of Christianity. That sect added it’s unique twist, in a way like capitalism has to how we structure out economic systems.
It’s frustrating to me that more people can’t see beyond what is happening right here today in the US to grasp the larger picture and extrapolate further and deeper, as you have done here in this piece, Daniel. The past few generations in this country anyway, including my own, maybe starting with my own (born in 1952), have lived (with the obvious exceptions of race, class, sex) protected lives compared to the past. And over time we were dealing with issues of race and sex though class . . . not so much. I think we became almost anesthetized, and so much more self-focused. Most gave in to the “good life” of the after war years. Most serious “events” seemed to take place in other countries, not here, even if our country was involved and an antagonist. Like you said, we are not prepared for this total war being waged right this moment.
I woke up this morning writing something in my head. It was something about how my emails (that I check while drinking my coffee, as I am writing this now), are such a juxtaposition it’s crazy making. A mix of newsletters (that I skim until I think if I skim more my heart will break or I’ll pull out my hair), ads for cruises and the latest fashions, home and garden how to’s, politicians begging for money for their upcoming special election (I wish I could help), newsletters and updates from Native/Indigenous organizations (whose projects are amazing and inspiring and I wish the rest of us would pay attention!), good guy legal organizations fighting against the worsening assault on Earth and ultimately all of us. . . . And under this “normal” is the energy of now. The knowing that those ads for fashion and vacations and expensive conveniences and “decor” are where most people, still, are at. In their mindset anyway. They have no clue of how irrational and irrelevant extravagant consumerism has become. All those nice things will NOT save anyone from this total war being waged. No longer hidden. No longer whispered in dark corners in back street pubs and lounges and offices. Or in the basements of churches. It’s blatant. Right in our faces every day.
How much time do we have before it’s too late to rescue ourselves from this? It feels like not much. Like a month maybe, two? Once the process is so entrenched, once the drills start in our National Parks, once the social security system fails and checks don’t get deposited and there’s no one there to fix it, once it gets really hot this summer, and the first major disaster hits, with no FEMA, and not enough warning thanks to no NOAA … The world on the way, if you take that logical train of thought, is mean and cruel and it will be a long, drawn out process with lots of death and destruction as part of it. Rising from it will be hard. That does not have to be the future though. I pray it is not. I don’t want my grandkids to have to live in that world.
I sense the way through has everything to do with energy and intention and Love and also groking Earth’s/Nature’s processes. I say “grok” because WE humans are part of the processes. And then this comes into my thoughts: There is information and wisdom in consciousness of mycellium, its form of awake awareness, communication and evolution-in-the-moment. I sense there is an equivalent network above the ground, that even includes humans (and all species). I sense we are going to be learning a lot about this, and I’m grateful for the folks who are currently doing research and writing about these amazing life/light/networks. I think I’ve gone off the deep end. 😉
You make perfect sense to me! I feel the exact same way — reading this kind of stuff, getting catalogues for Commonwealth Travel and (the grotesquely enormous) Restoration Hardware, which I’ve cancelled a thousand times to no avail. We are all living multiple lives. I know I am.
Watching from afar (Aotearoa) there is such a grief in me around all this. I watch now, but also see how our own government here is learning very fast, or perhaps is already intricately involved in what is happening in your country. My heart goes out to us all
There is incalculable value to your ability to take the oil spill of phenomena unfolding around us and give it a shape we can wrestle with. I guess I have my many-years love of Russell Brand to thank for being here: if not for your grappling with wtf happened with him, I’d have probably never found your work.
I love human beings so, so much. I also find people to be super fucking annoying and infuriating. It’s both. Navigating that tension requires a LOT of self-inquiry; being honest, even with ourselves and in the quiet of our own minds, is hard. It’s been a bit since I’ve checked in with the Integralists, but that foundation definitely prepared me to be in full agreement with your presentation of synthesis. There is an aspect of human life where leadership and decision making is essential. Horizontal collaboration alone isn’t always viable. You are leading us in this inquiry; there’s no doubt about it. We need the healthy form of both; at the moment, we’re probably at the peak pressure point of being confronted with their shadow sides, which could indeed be a signal that we are on the precipice of “transcending and including.”
Meandering to my half-formed point:
Within each of us, as individuals, there is much confusion. I’ll speak for myself: I try to keep a disciplined spiritual practice, like doing the ACIM workbook daily, or doing my TM meditation that I paid quite a lot to learn about a decade ago. Each day, it’s a whole new ridiculous dilemma: keep doing the “important work” (reading, writing, work-work, family work, household work, relational work (keeping up with a zillion people), community work, etc) or take 5 minutes to do those practices. Why is it so fucking hard to take 5 minutes to know my own mind, encounter my own self?
I don’t know, but I always come back to that scene in Wall-e, with the bloated, vacuous humans drinking soda from their mobile recliners on the Axiom.
There’s something within me that frantically and frenetically works to avoid that outcome, but it’s probably the greatest irony that slowing down and knowing myself quietly is probably the greatest possible inoculation. Maybe, with my frenetic activity, I’m actually feeding the paradigm that hastens the arrival of that fat future. Maybe what I’m really doing is trying to control things so that doesn’t happen, rather than trusting a greater intelligence. Which is just a subtle but related form of domination.
This is a great step in the right direction. As you point out Hegal's theory of the unfolding of history and consciousness. There are no mistakes only movements. The first step is to own the reasons for the current anthesis and synthesis. It's us. It's our lack of ownership and responsibility for what was going off course in society. Us so called progressives had taken power away from people behind closed doors as part of the machine of bureaucracy and the power of stars and progressive money. There was always going to be a correction and new synthesis. So now it is up to us to stop bleating about what is wrong and propose a new anthesis to this current thesis. A new synthesis. We need to recognise the democracy we had was not real and was controlled by a few. The people were numbed into becoming robots scrolling and not engaging. The issue is not the power the of the tech lords but our choice to be dumb and scroll and chill with Netflix. We need to embrace real openness. Real equality for all. Real transparency in government not just exposing the bits we don't like. We need to embrace real participation not just when it is not going in our preferred direction. We need to become agent of respect and non-judgment for those we don't agree with. The examples you mention in Taiwan are excellent examples. Politicians of all colours despise participatory democracy as it gives away the very power that they stood for election to get. So it will take a higher level of consciousness and a new type of politician to embrace these ideas. We will not win and move forward by seeking to go back to old systems and old power structures. The dialectic movement embraces the reasons for the current state and includes that in the new synthesis. It doesn't reject outright where we are at and the motivations of those with power currently, with a moral superiority. That just keeps us stuck. Again it takes a higher level of consciousness and courage to understand what is right and good with the current movement and to include that in new transcendent proposals.
Excellent and helpful analysis, Daniel. I especially appreciate the philosophical frame you offer in which to hold all of the possibilities/uncertainties. I was just contemplating this idea this morning before I read your post. The truth is that nothing is ever resolved in life, things are always in transformation toward something else. To quote Ram Dass, "whether it's the first day of the Apocalypse or the first day of the Golden Age," the work remains the same: to "love each other and ease as much suffering as possible".
'Most of never needed to develop the muscle of courage or fortitude or any idea of sacrificing for the greater good' - that's right, and that's what we saw from many people (particularly men in Western countries) during Covid, who didn't want to give up any individual liberty for the sake of the common good. Not saying that every Covid-hesistant person was doing it for that reason, of course there are legitimate questions about mRNA vaccines and so on. But it appears that a significant percentage just weren't willing to make any kind of sacrifice.
Learning of Audrey Tang in this essay leaves me inspired and hopeful! In How Soon Is Now, you introduced me to the concept of humanity as a superorganism. I recently wrote a song for NPR’s tiny desk contest about this, land stewardship, and the rise of a feminine energy overcoming our fearful aggression. Thank you for your consistent inspiration!
I remembered my original thought in response to this comment. @incognito encouraged me to read Shock Doctrine, and I’m only at the beginning but it is helping me to start seeing the bigger economic picture, the economic tactics that Ezra Klein and his latest guest were discussing/trying to discern.
Your point about total war feels unarguably true. People seem to think that the market response and other negative indicators bode ill for T. But what if that’s all just part and parcel of the 360 degree destabilization assault? Ie not even bad, from their POV, but part of the strategy? It’s so alarming that it’s so hard for even the most brilliant people (Ezra and his amazing guest) to tell what they’re thinking. Seeing T unfazed by the economic feedback seems like a point in the column marked “intentional,” beyond the temporary pain of a necessary correction. But (shrug)
In her poem "Rant," Beat poet Diane di Primi writes: "The only war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it." And, "There is no way out of the spiritual battle / the war is the war against the imagination / you can't sign up as a conscientious objector"
Here's the whole poem for those who don't know it:
Rant by Diane Di Prima
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not "make" it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create
every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky
w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire
history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
"find out for yourself"
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum
of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.
the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination
it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else's world
the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
There is no way out of a spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman's life / a man's life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can't sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
Maybe. But my view is that, given that the very mechanism of AI is by definition controlled by power elites, I would be concerned that they would always have the upper hand. One step ahead of the game always. And every time we use it, we incrementally play into the Grand Seduction of the transhumanist takeover which pulls us ever deeper into a kind of existential dependency on these systems. I think the real resistance will be in not only thinking but living "outside the box" as it were. For many this will translate into living off the grid.
Thank you again, Daniel, for another of your succinct and cogent synopses.
I found this both sanity-making and contextualizing, supporting me to move into what Jonathon Rowson calls the “post tragedy” space of the Metacrisis, metabolizing yet a little more of the reality and keeping my nervous system regulated as the chaos and destruction ensue. I believe, much as Chris Bache and Duane Elgin do, that the death part of the death-rebirth cycle is inevitable and will be way more consequential than any of us would like, and yet we still need to stay present and regulated so that we can participate in the specific local way that our gifts and talents predispose us to serve.
All hands on deck!
This: In our current civilizational meta-crisis, could the forces seeking domination and control and the forces oriented toward symbiosis and freedom somehow mesh together, evolve each other, to unleash something new? At the threshold of technological progress and climate collapse, could we attain a new mutation of creative complexity?
That quote hit me right in the gut instincts. There Daniel, you’ve expressed a vital part of my own current ideas about how we need to move through these times. I will go off and explore those and report back (via my own set of writings and stories, coming soon!)
I look forward to reading your ideas about how we shape the new world. I, and many others will be doing all we can to bring it about.
It’s frustrating that even people who see what’s going on, don’t get it. Or more accurately, they get it, up to a point. Yup, tax breaks for billionaires. But that’s just a strategy for their insane end game. A part of me, deeper than I was aware, knew some version of “now” would happen. I remember conversations, in the late 70s and beyond, with activists, friends, people who knew what was going on in Central and South America. And the US, CIA, USAID - yes, that newly “sainted” organization that does (or I should say did) some good stuff that should be allowed to continue, and that has also done some horrific stuff that perhaps we’re meeting the karma of right now. On the spiritual/etheric levels there has been plenty of foreshadowing, for lack of a better word for what I feel, that I sense also goes way back. We - humans and our cultures and civilizations - have been around and playing this game for a very long time, and (here’s my crazy speaking) I sense this is connected through families and organzations well before the advent of Christianity. That sect added it’s unique twist, in a way like capitalism has to how we structure out economic systems.
It’s frustrating to me that more people can’t see beyond what is happening right here today in the US to grasp the larger picture and extrapolate further and deeper, as you have done here in this piece, Daniel. The past few generations in this country anyway, including my own, maybe starting with my own (born in 1952), have lived (with the obvious exceptions of race, class, sex) protected lives compared to the past. And over time we were dealing with issues of race and sex though class . . . not so much. I think we became almost anesthetized, and so much more self-focused. Most gave in to the “good life” of the after war years. Most serious “events” seemed to take place in other countries, not here, even if our country was involved and an antagonist. Like you said, we are not prepared for this total war being waged right this moment.
I woke up this morning writing something in my head. It was something about how my emails (that I check while drinking my coffee, as I am writing this now), are such a juxtaposition it’s crazy making. A mix of newsletters (that I skim until I think if I skim more my heart will break or I’ll pull out my hair), ads for cruises and the latest fashions, home and garden how to’s, politicians begging for money for their upcoming special election (I wish I could help), newsletters and updates from Native/Indigenous organizations (whose projects are amazing and inspiring and I wish the rest of us would pay attention!), good guy legal organizations fighting against the worsening assault on Earth and ultimately all of us. . . . And under this “normal” is the energy of now. The knowing that those ads for fashion and vacations and expensive conveniences and “decor” are where most people, still, are at. In their mindset anyway. They have no clue of how irrational and irrelevant extravagant consumerism has become. All those nice things will NOT save anyone from this total war being waged. No longer hidden. No longer whispered in dark corners in back street pubs and lounges and offices. Or in the basements of churches. It’s blatant. Right in our faces every day.
How much time do we have before it’s too late to rescue ourselves from this? It feels like not much. Like a month maybe, two? Once the process is so entrenched, once the drills start in our National Parks, once the social security system fails and checks don’t get deposited and there’s no one there to fix it, once it gets really hot this summer, and the first major disaster hits, with no FEMA, and not enough warning thanks to no NOAA … The world on the way, if you take that logical train of thought, is mean and cruel and it will be a long, drawn out process with lots of death and destruction as part of it. Rising from it will be hard. That does not have to be the future though. I pray it is not. I don’t want my grandkids to have to live in that world.
I sense the way through has everything to do with energy and intention and Love and also groking Earth’s/Nature’s processes. I say “grok” because WE humans are part of the processes. And then this comes into my thoughts: There is information and wisdom in consciousness of mycellium, its form of awake awareness, communication and evolution-in-the-moment. I sense there is an equivalent network above the ground, that even includes humans (and all species). I sense we are going to be learning a lot about this, and I’m grateful for the folks who are currently doing research and writing about these amazing life/light/networks. I think I’ve gone off the deep end. 😉
You make perfect sense to me! I feel the exact same way — reading this kind of stuff, getting catalogues for Commonwealth Travel and (the grotesquely enormous) Restoration Hardware, which I’ve cancelled a thousand times to no avail. We are all living multiple lives. I know I am.
Watching from afar (Aotearoa) there is such a grief in me around all this. I watch now, but also see how our own government here is learning very fast, or perhaps is already intricately involved in what is happening in your country. My heart goes out to us all
There is incalculable value to your ability to take the oil spill of phenomena unfolding around us and give it a shape we can wrestle with. I guess I have my many-years love of Russell Brand to thank for being here: if not for your grappling with wtf happened with him, I’d have probably never found your work.
I love human beings so, so much. I also find people to be super fucking annoying and infuriating. It’s both. Navigating that tension requires a LOT of self-inquiry; being honest, even with ourselves and in the quiet of our own minds, is hard. It’s been a bit since I’ve checked in with the Integralists, but that foundation definitely prepared me to be in full agreement with your presentation of synthesis. There is an aspect of human life where leadership and decision making is essential. Horizontal collaboration alone isn’t always viable. You are leading us in this inquiry; there’s no doubt about it. We need the healthy form of both; at the moment, we’re probably at the peak pressure point of being confronted with their shadow sides, which could indeed be a signal that we are on the precipice of “transcending and including.”
Meandering to my half-formed point:
Within each of us, as individuals, there is much confusion. I’ll speak for myself: I try to keep a disciplined spiritual practice, like doing the ACIM workbook daily, or doing my TM meditation that I paid quite a lot to learn about a decade ago. Each day, it’s a whole new ridiculous dilemma: keep doing the “important work” (reading, writing, work-work, family work, household work, relational work (keeping up with a zillion people), community work, etc) or take 5 minutes to do those practices. Why is it so fucking hard to take 5 minutes to know my own mind, encounter my own self?
I don’t know, but I always come back to that scene in Wall-e, with the bloated, vacuous humans drinking soda from their mobile recliners on the Axiom.
There’s something within me that frantically and frenetically works to avoid that outcome, but it’s probably the greatest irony that slowing down and knowing myself quietly is probably the greatest possible inoculation. Maybe, with my frenetic activity, I’m actually feeding the paradigm that hastens the arrival of that fat future. Maybe what I’m really doing is trying to control things so that doesn’t happen, rather than trusting a greater intelligence. Which is just a subtle but related form of domination.
This is a great step in the right direction. As you point out Hegal's theory of the unfolding of history and consciousness. There are no mistakes only movements. The first step is to own the reasons for the current anthesis and synthesis. It's us. It's our lack of ownership and responsibility for what was going off course in society. Us so called progressives had taken power away from people behind closed doors as part of the machine of bureaucracy and the power of stars and progressive money. There was always going to be a correction and new synthesis. So now it is up to us to stop bleating about what is wrong and propose a new anthesis to this current thesis. A new synthesis. We need to recognise the democracy we had was not real and was controlled by a few. The people were numbed into becoming robots scrolling and not engaging. The issue is not the power the of the tech lords but our choice to be dumb and scroll and chill with Netflix. We need to embrace real openness. Real equality for all. Real transparency in government not just exposing the bits we don't like. We need to embrace real participation not just when it is not going in our preferred direction. We need to become agent of respect and non-judgment for those we don't agree with. The examples you mention in Taiwan are excellent examples. Politicians of all colours despise participatory democracy as it gives away the very power that they stood for election to get. So it will take a higher level of consciousness and a new type of politician to embrace these ideas. We will not win and move forward by seeking to go back to old systems and old power structures. The dialectic movement embraces the reasons for the current state and includes that in the new synthesis. It doesn't reject outright where we are at and the motivations of those with power currently, with a moral superiority. That just keeps us stuck. Again it takes a higher level of consciousness and courage to understand what is right and good with the current movement and to include that in new transcendent proposals.
Excellent and helpful analysis, Daniel. I especially appreciate the philosophical frame you offer in which to hold all of the possibilities/uncertainties. I was just contemplating this idea this morning before I read your post. The truth is that nothing is ever resolved in life, things are always in transformation toward something else. To quote Ram Dass, "whether it's the first day of the Apocalypse or the first day of the Golden Age," the work remains the same: to "love each other and ease as much suffering as possible".
'Most of never needed to develop the muscle of courage or fortitude or any idea of sacrificing for the greater good' - that's right, and that's what we saw from many people (particularly men in Western countries) during Covid, who didn't want to give up any individual liberty for the sake of the common good. Not saying that every Covid-hesistant person was doing it for that reason, of course there are legitimate questions about mRNA vaccines and so on. But it appears that a significant percentage just weren't willing to make any kind of sacrifice.
Learning of Audrey Tang in this essay leaves me inspired and hopeful! In How Soon Is Now, you introduced me to the concept of humanity as a superorganism. I recently wrote a song for NPR’s tiny desk contest about this, land stewardship, and the rise of a feminine energy overcoming our fearful aggression. Thank you for your consistent inspiration!
https://youtu.be/F86yN0k_QNA?si=yhoo064XU9N7Klck
I remembered my original thought in response to this comment. @incognito encouraged me to read Shock Doctrine, and I’m only at the beginning but it is helping me to start seeing the bigger economic picture, the economic tactics that Ezra Klein and his latest guest were discussing/trying to discern.
Your point about total war feels unarguably true. People seem to think that the market response and other negative indicators bode ill for T. But what if that’s all just part and parcel of the 360 degree destabilization assault? Ie not even bad, from their POV, but part of the strategy? It’s so alarming that it’s so hard for even the most brilliant people (Ezra and his amazing guest) to tell what they’re thinking. Seeing T unfazed by the economic feedback seems like a point in the column marked “intentional,” beyond the temporary pain of a necessary correction. But (shrug)
I enjoy your posts, Daniel.
In her poem "Rant," Beat poet Diane di Primi writes: "The only war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it." And, "There is no way out of the spiritual battle / the war is the war against the imagination / you can't sign up as a conscientious objector"
Here's the whole poem for those who don't know it:
Rant by Diane Di Prima
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not "make" it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create
every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky
w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire
history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
"find out for yourself"
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum
of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.
the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination
it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else's world
the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
There is no way out of a spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman's life / a man's life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can't sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant
intellectus means "light of the mind"
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun
the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central
Fire in the Heart❤️🔥
Thank you for spotlighting Audrey Tang. I’ll definitely be following her doings.
CivTech
I agree it’s a war but not split on those lines. The real issue seems to be philosophical realism vs nominalism.
So AI is the solution to the problems created by AI?
The same tool can be a weapon or an instrument of liberation depending on who uses it with what intention
Maybe. But my view is that, given that the very mechanism of AI is by definition controlled by power elites, I would be concerned that they would always have the upper hand. One step ahead of the game always. And every time we use it, we incrementally play into the Grand Seduction of the transhumanist takeover which pulls us ever deeper into a kind of existential dependency on these systems. I think the real resistance will be in not only thinking but living "outside the box" as it were. For many this will translate into living off the grid.