Thursday, April 26, 2007

THE FUTURE!!!

We watched IDIOCRACY on recommendation from Brother Lupo last night. I felt that it was barely satire, this is already the world we live in, it was just presented hyperbolically. While watching the movie, i realized that this is the world that i've been ready for my entire life! A world full of idiots, chemical weapons, gross marketing campaigns, sex sells, police verbiage & extreme nacho pro-wrestling. I was not raised with a lot of expectations from society, & i've been actively expecting some kind of apocalypse ever since i understood the dinosaur's getting wiped out, so i'm pretty much ready for anything. In many ways, the present is alot stupider than the future as presented in Idiocracy. One example is Wackipedia, which seemed like a good idea for a minute, but then, i realized that it is perhaps, one of the stupidest things ever made. It's supposed to be an authoritative source, but it can be edited at any moment by anyone, usually by people who have way too much time on their hands, you have to source your information, which is pretty arbitrary & there is no telling who is actually writing or editing the articles, given that everyone uses handles & doesn't disclose their actual identity. In the world of hyper-democracy, no one matters! Ultimately, it is going to create an ouroborosised or hamf'd (ham fed ham) effect on information, that is, it will all come from the same source, echo away from itself, get modified, interpreted to serve interests & then be redigested. This will only continue, as is the case with all democratic institutions, until all of the information is the consistency of gruel. Taking this into account, Idiocracy presents a future that is too exciting, because the current trends are towards blandness. These futuristic ideas most likely come from humanity's attempts at understanding evolution & applying evolutionary concepts onto humanity. Alot of the bigger mistakes in recent history come from applying scientific & political theories onto humanity, i'm thinking of things like eugenics, environmentalism, psychotherapy & feminism. The other likely source of this devolutionary notion comes from the idea that we as humans reached the pinnacle of our existence already, whether that was during Greco-Roman times, the Renaissance, the height of industrialism, the fifties, Clinton era liberalism or whatever, & that the only way is down. My feeling is that things are usually the same with humanity, there is a large mass of pretty average people who just need solid culture to keep them on the right track, there are a large number of idiots who just need some help, there are a small number of geniuses who can be dangerous or useful, but are usually a combination of both, & that's a good thing. It is stupid to allow the mass to determine its own fate, because it is ouroborosised, just like Wackipedia. It is also stupid for the geniuses to look to the mass for leadership or direction, also polling the masses in terms of the success of their various projects, because this is not what the masses actually want.

2 comments:

Luke P. said...

Right on Sean. I think the future presented in Idiocracy is also too happy; at least in that future, no one is really lying to one another per se; the creators of ad campaigns actually believe their own hype in that world. It's like saying the Bush administration is actually as stupid as they'd like us to believe.
And, it lends itself to the idea that the "masses" are too stupid to organize themselves, which I don't agree with- It's important to keep in mind that when someone speaks about the "masses" , they are talking about you. The logic is seductive because it makes the speaker and whoever they are communicating to feel like it's them vs. this giant "other", the mass of idiots and they're somehow not among them.
I choose to apply my own sense of being able to take care of myself just fine to everyone else- and , even if they can't, those who , from a position of authority and power identify them as a helpless idiot, cannot and have no interest in taking care of them in any way that's truly beneficial to them; they can only "help" in the same way they've hurt; by vieiwing the mass as some biologic entity and not as individuals- the solutions offered to help this mass spell it out; military service, communism (where you're a loyal "worker"), eugenics ( read up on Margaret Sangers' love of hitlers' eugenics policy, and how she identified American Black people as "weeds", "dysgenic" (( Is it a coincedence that Planned Parenthoods are more often than not in poor, minority areas and that minorities have far more abortions than us whiteys?)), behavioral control programs like public education and mass-psychologizing ( A.D.D! Depression! Anxiety!- give 'em some dope) via big Pharma.
Also, you should check out Kennth Smiths' writings. I can email you a big pile of them.
He identifies three essential characer types that kind of mirror your bit about average people, idiots and genuises. I can't recall what he called each one of them, but they're like this:

1. The "slave" caste. Not as horrid as it sounds. These people are enslaved by their own nature, which only allows them to seek the next high, the next source of stimulation. No foresight or planning for the future. Grist for the mill.

2. The bureaucratic mind. -Only understands life in terms of rules- mechanistic, "whatever works" without any understanding of real values. Money obsessed.These people fucking rule us. The Merchant class. this is not to say that they aren't "intelligent" as we understand the term; the smartest among them view life and culture like a "Grand Chessboard" .the goal is "winning", of course

3. Kenneth Smith calls these guys the "aristoi"- the artists, thinkers, etc., that are determined to understand life in terms of deeper values. As I understand it, this doesn't mean "genuis" as we understand the term; there are plenty of these guys who , while walking that tightrope, fall into delusion and false conciousness. The ones who 'make it' are the ones who maintain discipline by engaging in constant quesioning of self and perception.

The way these three castes interact is realy dynamic and complicated.It's by no means a static system, where A,B or C act out predetermined roles. For instance, the mechanistic class will often use the concepts of an aristo, but only if it meets their ends; they used MArx for communism, manufacured feminism out of its wake , all with the help of Freud, Malthus, Darwin and more who identified humaniy as a mass of untrustworthy, violent animals that needed to be controlled by any means necessary. From the positioning of these ideas to the fore, we get an all but total domination of these ideas in the media, academia, literature and even in entertainment ( the slaves need to know why they're worthless, you see..)

I do believe K. Smith is correct about these "castes", but I think I take a different route when it comes to what we should do about it. I'm kind of in the "let the chips fall where they may" school; people need to rediscover their potential to take care of themselves; educating eachother, accrueing wealth and security, treating eachothers' wounds, counseling eachother - these are all things the State wants to "provide" for us and they've convinced us the world is too crazy, dangerous and complicated for us to exist without them- when we buy into their schemes, we sign a "social" contract that amounts to infinite servitude.
the Socialist who wants to pay more and more in taxes for these services, in actuality, pays more and more for the State to do her caring for her, to allow her to indulge every whim - "feeling" a "strong community" without getting her hands dirty ( and yes, it's a 'she") . And she'll never, ever pay enough, as the kind of "care" we're provided only makes the States need for more and more seem obvious in the left-hand/right-hand system they've mastered.

Aeron said...

BOOJI BOY!!!!!

http://devodude.com/graphics/boojiboysbasementlink.PNG

http://www.nervoustick.net/images/uploads/popups/o_booji_boy.gif

http://www.devo-obsesso.com/obsesso/images/latest_news/atlanta_05/gd_booji1.jpg