WEDNESDAY, AUG 19, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
Reality 101 for Beginners
Question everything
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: ECHO-CHAMBERS OF THE MIND, FROM THE WIRES, CONSENSUS TRIBAL NARRATIVES
Abstract: Starting with first order what-is, humans are the storytelling animal, i.e. delusional, awash/afloat in a sea of error, ignorance, and illusion overlaid by a tsunami of denial able to submerge mere facts while floating unattached alternative facts high above all. Then the ebb tide comes.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Perhaps some corvids and cetaceans tell stories, but they don't believe them as evidenced by their continued existence. They listen to Nature.
Human minds cling to their mental image of the world, kludged together tales told by their concept-forming, tribal consensus-forming minds. They call their narratives true, good, beautiful, right..., real only because of their ignorance. Humans seek after truth, but come merely to cherish their opinions. That they don't know enough to have an opinion, or suspect the vastness of what they don't know, is a matter that escapes their attention. We do not listen to Nature. Would we, could we, should we?
Ten months ago, early November, I was out protesting unsustainable denial and had a long conversation by the bay on a wide range of topics with an observer errant. My fellow sojourner was a chess master and Buddhist, a bodhisattva helper of the homeless, living out of his station wagon. I had a 1925 house overlooking the bay nearby under renovation that was habitable. He did not do drugs and did not seem mentally ill or dysfunctional, sort of a chess bum, a Paul Erdős of chess, who had little interest in serving the SYSTEM (making money). He was on disability and so had enough income. He did stuff in the garden area (transplanting bamboo, laying brick walkways) in return for a room and modest use of electric. The house was to be a vacation rental and is still under reconstruction, but otherwise uninhabited. In April my wife and I left the state and his presence meant the place could not be taken over by squatters without him noticing in the several months we remained on lockdown in Arizona.
During this time he made increasingly bizarre claims of deliberate torment and persecution: listening devices planeted, holes drilled in the floor, snakes and ants released, weeds transplanted into the garden, small drops of paint put on the brick garden paths night after night, despite his removing them each day. The people across the street, one of whom had a friend with ninja training, used trap doors to enter the house, and he could hear them at night under the floorboards whispering. He got little sleep.
We thought perhaps covid isolation and lack of sleep could take its toll on someone not used to being alone. Wife Sue took to calling him everyday from Arizona for a chat, to see how he was doing, and it seemed to help. Within a couple of weeks of our return, the neighbors across the street were using 'sonic lasers' at night to blind him. One climbed on the roof to hang over and laser his room through the window. He claimed he had to call the police who arrested one of the worst of the lot. We went to the police station for information about what was going on, and the police had gone out when he said on a social disturbance call, but no one detained or arrested.
The chess master had stopped playing chess, online or otherwise, and had wanted to go camping. I came with my stuff to take over watching the place, but found the shop roll-up door locked from the inside, and when I unlocked the front door, he had barricaded the door. The day before the neighbor who had not been arrested called us over and we walked across the street and listened to his story. This collusion had been observed, so that we were also complicit in seeking to do him harm was evident.
We called the police about the barricade who explained it was 'a civil matter' and could/would do nothing. Breaking into 'his' home would be illegal so I camped out overnight on the front steps and knocked on the door occasionally through the night, which I deemed legal. He locked the barricaded door and I would unlock it. He refused to answer the door. About 3am I heard him relocking the door and knocked. I heard him say something in surprise and told him all I wanted was for him to unlock the shop door, but he never did. About 5am I heard him yelling and caught a 'go away' and I repeated my 'unlock the shop door' demand.
I had been up all night, but so had he, and in the morning I forced entry to the shop by prying up some siding and barricaded its connection with the house so he couldn't relock the door. Later that afternoon my wife bought dinner from Subway for three and we walked into the house despite his attempt to use ropes to prevent an inner door from opening. We announced we were having dinner in our dinning room with a view of the bay and that he was welcome to join us.
He was extremely distraught. I clarified that as the contractor would be here to continue working in the morning, that I was staying. He refused to talk about the situation, of his issues, nor eat the poisoned food we had brought. I was going to say he could pick any of the three sandwiches, and we'd eat the other two, but he was no one's fool and would know that such an offer merely meant we had poisoned all three and had already taken the antidote, so it didn't matter which he picked. If he had, then as he lay dying we would offer him the antidote if he was willing to consider the possibility he might be wrong. But he escaped our most fiendish of plans.
He threatened to call the police and we encouraged him to. It was a civil matter. They offered to standby, to protect him while he took his stuff to his car, if he wanted to leave. We paid him what he said we owed him and he left. He did not say to where, so we could not follow to harass and further intimidate him. But he failed to consider the possibility that I had put a tracking device on his car.
I am tempted to wonder if he had a history of paranoid schizophrenia and that as things were going so well, he decided to go off his meds. But that would be a story. His story is that I had intent to harm him as I am in league with the others who had been working for months to do so. My story is that his story is false. I could probably get more people to believe my story than would believe his, but that wouldn't make me right. He suffered horribly to see that everything I did confirmed his worst fears.
I had no legal right to evict him without due process, and thanks to covid I could not expect a day in civil court for months, perhaps years. So I tormented him until he left while pretending to be the normal one. The fascist police took the property so-called 'owners' side against him. This is the straight up truth, though I claimed my forced entry was not about evicting him.
I could tell a story of mental illness (his, of course, not mine). I would likely cast myself in the role of the sane one, the aggrieved one, because I would be telling the story. But he had a different story in which I was the evil genius, another 'Dr. Mengele' as he called me who mistakenly also thought he was doing praiseworthy work, whose attempts to checkmate him had to be thwarted, and were. I could believe firmly in my story, even cite supporting evidence, but then I'd be just as insane as him and everyone else I could name, with the possible exception of my mother when not under the influence of Rush Limbaugh.
I have heard accounts of those attending Trump rallies, of some being comforted as best they could be by others, as they railed mournfully against the deep state and shed bitter tears for the children, mere babies, that Hillary Clinton has taken to eating. And on the other end of the political spectrum, there are others who lament all the FEMA camps now in place ready for use by Trump to send all the homeless and 'mentally ill' (e.g. progressive liberals) to disappear into. And as all police departments are now hopelessly racist, all must be defunded, disbanded, and all who have been imprisoned set free. Antifa is our only hope.
So am I, like, you know, seriously suggesting that all normal people are bat-shit fucking crazy? Or maybe barking mad? That those who have beliefs are thereby had by them? Yes. But don't believe anything I say or type. We products of industrial society are all increasingly becoming humans of NIMH who run the complex society asylum we are inmates of, and those born and raised within become even more dysfunctional as the generations pass—for a time (8-12 generations?). Perhaps the most facepalming delusion is the unquestioned belief that humans are different in kind from rats.
'He who is sick-minded, but knows he is sick-minded, is not truly sick-minded.' —Laozi
'The total number of minds in the universe is one.' – Erwin Schrödinger
'The mind clings to its image of the world, to its narratives of it. We call it real only because of our ignorance of the One Mind. Do not seek after the truth, merely cease to cherish your opinions.' —Jianzhi Sengcan
'People would rather believe than know.' —E.O. Wilson's definition of insanity
'The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas [domain of discourse], that is what makes him a philosopher.' —Ludwig Wittgenstein
'Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.' —Mark Twain
'The more he became truly wise, the more he distrusted everything he knew.' —Voltaire
'Much Madness is divinest Sense - To a discerning Eye - Much Sense - the starkest Madness - ’Tis the Majority In this, as all, prevail - Assent - and you are sane - Demur - you’re straightway dangerous - And handled with a Chain -' —Emily Dickinson
'Knowing that you do not know is the best. Not knowing that you do not know is an illness.... True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true. Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right. Those who know are not learned. Those who are learned do not know.' — Laozi
'And much of madness, more of sin, and horror the soul of the plot.' —E.A. Poe
'Many people are startled...' [or if they could question everything they would be startled] 'to learn that most of what they believe to be true, most of what they think they know, is literally made up... products of the human mind, massaged or polished by social discourse and elevated to the status of received wisdom by custom or formal agreement. All cultural narratives, worldviews, religious doctrines, political ideologies, and academic paradigms are actually “social constructs” [domains of discourse].... One passively acquires the convictions, values, assumptions, and behavioral norms of his/her tribe or society simply by growing up in that particular milieu.... Some well-known constructs are entirely made up – “capitalism”, “communism”, “civil rights”, and “democracy” [aka human exceptionalism] for example, have no true analogues in the non-human world. These and similar concepts were birthed in words and given legs entirely through socio-political discourse [as honed into fine words by products of a broken educational system].... Science is unique among formal ways-of knowing in that scientists explicitly test the validity of tentative constructs (hypotheses) about the real world through observation and experiment [i.e. they listen to Nature] and adjust their understanding accordingly....'
'Things can get complicated – any economic paradigm is an elaborate socially-constructed model that may contain (or omit) other models that are themselves socially constructed. By now it should be clear that much of what humans take to be “real” may or may not bear any relationship to anything “out there”. More remarkably still, most people generally remain unconscious that their collective beliefs may be shared illusions – a cognitive enigma that may well determine the fate of humankind. No matter how well- or ill-founded, entrenched social constructs are perceptual filters through which people interpret new data and information; and, because our constructs constitute perceived reality, they determine how we “act out” in the real world. Millions [or billions] of lives may be jeopardized if those in positions of authority [fail to listen to Nature,] cherry-pick data guided by some dangerously faulty but comfortable social construct.... Let’s acknowledge that all economic theories/paradigms are elaborate conjectures and that none can contain more than a partial representation of biophysical, or even social, reality. If this is an important general limitation, we should be particularly concerned about today’s dominant neoliberal economic paradigm (the economics of capitalism)... enamoured with the idea of a self-regulating (free) market, would have the real economy adapt to fit their models.' —William Rees, End game: The economy as eco-catastrophe and what
needs to change 2019
3/31/22 SUBNOTE TO FILE:
Nate Hagens' four pillars of subsidies that support our modern living standards and expectations that are rarely talked about: energy, credit, complexity, trust.
Each pillar has pillars and so on such that a minor pandemic or regional was could collapse a low level pillar that collapses the modern techno-industrial monetary culture's house of cards.
Whether there are 'really' three or three hundred pillars doesn't matter in complex systems, especially overcomplex systems.
But to simplify to help humans focus, I would boil it down to three pillars:
- Energy
- Economy (financial system intact and global non-fragmented supply chain working)
- Belief (in consensus narrative, i.e. belief/trust in monetary culture/socio-political/economic/techno-industrial humancentric narrative).
