Black Hole Meditations 092008

Meditation the First:

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

- Peter Ustinov

Meditation the Second:

• Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.


• The solutions all are simple... after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

- Robert Pirsig

Meditation the Third:

The elections are an illusion. A totalitarian state loves nothing more than elections, which gives the illusion of choice on the part of the people. The people, after so many generations of this illusory choice, believe it themselves.

America is already a second world nation, but the aforementioned shiny commercial skin and charming digital gizmos leads the citizenry to believe otherwise. No health care, no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money . . .

- Joe Bageant

I see dozens of such examples social callousness and mean spiritedness as I walk around in everyday America. Most of them are right up there with that of Nazi Germany (actually, Hitler's regime treated Germans better) and the Spartans, who are much admired in America for their war making skills, mostly on the grounds of what the military class was willing to suffer . . .

Despite what the American left believes, we cannot blame politicians and corporations for everything. At some point waaaaay back there it was our human and social responsibility to stand up, throw ourselves "onto the wheels of the machine," as Mario Savio put it forty years ago. And we did not. Instead we allowed and continue to allow the persecution of those who did or still do. And on and on it goes. Forty-five years after Allen Ginsberg wrote "Howl" I am still seeing the best minds of my generation sobbing on the madhouse steps. Seeing them be medicated, lose marriages, rant on the Internet for years, then give up hope. It's like screaming into a vacuum. You mouth moves but the somnambulant crowd passes silently by in oblivion.

I do speaking engagements and radio interviews when I am here. And I find that I must tone down the truth into something that fits into the consensus reality, even when speaking to lefty crowds. I have to pretend more or less that I think it can be fixed, that some politician can be elected who will turn around 200 years of observable social trajectory. People say, "Well, at least some people are trying to fix the problem from within the system. And I want to scream: THE SYSTEM IS THE PROBLEM! IT'S RIGGED, YOU DUMB FUCKERS!

I wish I could at least call this denial. But if people are incapable of even perceiving the facts because of state conditioning, serving up the facts is useless. Which is why all that powerful truth out there on the net has no real effect. It exists outside our indoctrination's reference framework. Therefore it does not exist. What exists is the system. The ward on which we all live and secretly fear Nurse Ratchett. But it is still the system and the U.S. is still a ward in which the citizen patients are carefully observed and managed to best result for the corporate state. Best result meaning economical producers and consumers for (allegedly) free market capitalism. And every patient and affinity group has a cherished unreality which allows them to live in denial. For instance, there is the cherished notion among liberal and left leaning Americans that all this is recent, and sprang up simply because George Bush was elected. I don't think so friends. No one man can establish cruelty in 300 million people in eight years. He can only heighten it by squeezing the people harder, encouraging fear and alienation and coldness of spirit.

How much more time the American people can muddle along, the muddle slowly becoming an even more mindless slog toward the unthinkable? My guess is until we hit that economic and ecological wall we are careening toward. In which case we will start killing anybody in the way of arbitrary conquest of resources in the age of peak everything. Even people who understand what is coming are hedging their bets -- as in, "Well, I won't be around when it all comes down." Or "I can make enough money to be in a safe place when the shit hits the fan." . . .

- Joe Bageant

Meditation the Fourth:

The tyrant, indeed, has nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? . . .

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.

- Étienne La Boétie

Meditation the Fifth:

Categories: black+hole, meditation

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