Man Not Capable of 21st Century
Well, well. I've had a look at your developing and developed nations -- about 17
of them. Basically, you're not capable of the civilization you're attempting to
build.
But here we go anyway. As they say, time and tide wait for no man. Oh, well,
better wait than never, but in this case you'll have to settle for never. It's
like the man that had more food in his mouth after he sneezed, he had bitten off
more than he could achoo.
Humankind is like a tide, it ebbs and it flows. It goes in fits and starts; it
trembles upon a new echelon, only to falter at the last minute and crumple up
into lethargy. Does that disappoint you, Bunkie? I'm sorry kid, I know you
wanted to wave the flag and feel good about your planet, that the industrialists
will triumph or the greenies will win -- or somehow your special little
cooperative effort will save the world.
Sometimes, you know, it's better not to set for your peers too high or lofty a
goal. Most of these guys are going to sell out and settle for business as usual;
a mundane and meaningless life; happily ever after till death do they part with
the only significance and meaning they play merely a figment of their own
imaginations -- a self-imagined delusion of greatness; a sense of
self-importance that can only be fueled by the destruction around them of those
who are truly important or could have ever done anything significant.
It is a ship of fools fooling themselves into an imagined greatness like a bunch
of prisoners locked up for long periods of time who have established their own
pecking order: the forgers and kingpins at the top and the petty criminals at
the bottom and the child molesters dead. It's as I wrote in my poem, "Poverty
Protects the Slender Hope": "The delicacy and the art of cunning craftiness
engendered false dependence, and left all men bereft of anything of value, and
in mediocrity that which was significant was stolen by the thief."
It's often characteristic of those who stand out amongst all the rest, to think
too highly of the others and waste their positions of importance trying to
improve the lot of all the rest around them, failing to realize that most people
don't want to be improved. Oh, they'll get your computer, they'll try out your
TV, they'll buy the latest cars or try out your innovations or gadgets or
whatever else you want to place before them. But don't expect them to go
anywhere with it.
In fact, one way of
determining what sort of gadget the public will buy is that if it's something
that merely makes their lives more convenient and allows them to enjoy their
mundane existences more thoroughly and more pleasantly. I'm sorry if this
disappoints you, but let's face it folks, you're never really going to anything
done unless you get your priorities right.
You have to set varying goals for a variegated society; a society, no matter
where, that is peppered with all sorts, those who enjoy thinking, those who
actually can do something in spite of all odds, and those who just don't care.
And the majority, those who don't care, who have brilliant minds as all people
do, use only a part of their brains that is about the size of a garden pea --
hence the term pea brain. Never intended to be an insult, it is a statement of
reality; of where most people want to be.
It reminds me of Lyndon Johnson's concept of the Great Society. It never
happened. Do you realize what would happen if only one human being out there
actually used a reasonable amount of his or her brain? It's easily done. All the
person really has to do is become a part of the actual cosmos; to begin to treat
the stars and the environment and the living beings therein as teachers and
begin to absorb some of the things communicated to him or her, without placing
preconditions on the input or acting prejudicially against acquiring any
information that doesn't meet with his or her stilted preconditions of what they
will except.
But here's the rub. If you get that far, it would only be for you yourself. When
people get to that kind of savvy, they might cappiche but they would invariably,
and each turn of the way, find themselves totally unable to share that with
anyone else. When people get that far, it's an individual thing. Everyone else
could and probably would be totally oblivious that someone in their midst got
that far. I think maybe quite a few Native Americans managed to get there, maybe
some of the Mongolians, maybe someone out on the Alps or in the peninsula of
Norway or in prehistoric Australia (hey, that could have been up to 20 years
ago).
What about you? I'm not talking about religious stuff here, I'm talking about
the basic physiology of the actual human brain. It's a co-relative thing, a
correlation of reality; the human brain is a part of reality. Oh, I know some of
you pea-brains out there have come up with the science-fiction, which you
conveniently call science theories, that the human brain caused it's own
existence. That's exactly what makes a pea brain: the snobbishness it takes to
be so exclusive as to shut out the real input of the real world around a person,
dooming that person to intellectual incapability. Oh, that's okay with them,
they can always fool everybody around them into thinking they're really
something. Just as long as they destroy everybody who actually is really
something.
All brains everywhere, from the lowest coelentera to the human being, all have
one common thing in common: the Gray Matter, brains. Where one brain starts and
another one stops is a fuzzy line I'm telling you. It's a fuzzy line, not a
stilted, snobbish demarcation set by those who imagine themselves to be
superior. There may not be demarcations; the concept of genus and species may be
false.
Everything with a brain may actually be in the same genus; it may even go
so far as you could have more in common with a butterfly or bird than a fellow
human being with a stilted academic mentality, or another fellow human being
with a criminal mentality. A person's brain beyond the "pea" may be totally
dependent on how much a part of reality that person really is. It may be that a
person's negative attitude actually "locks them in" to the pea.
A wild dog in Australia, alone and excluded from any pack, may end up using more
of his or her brain than a human being on drugs in some slum somewhere stoned
out of their mind and never using, to any extent, that mind ever more; looking
only for the feel-good stimulus. A cougar with a 6-inch paw print lurking
undetected around the Ronald Reagan Center in California, spying from it's cover
upon all the visitors coming and going, may end up using more of his or her
brain than a human graduate student in UCLA, buying a degree for the sole
purpose of earning more than 100,000 a year to keep him or herself above the
poverty line.
The brain is capable of astounding things. A lot of things we just don't know
that the brain is capable of are not known because nobody's gotten that far --
the human societies over the ages have locked everyone in to the proverbial pea.
And something worse that also keeps societies under wraps, the types that
organize themselves that don't want any individuals because that would threaten
their power base. They also have their techniques, including such things
as hypnotism and destabilization, to keep the peoples in the pea. Those
types are easy to recognize because of their lack of creativity or originality,
as well as their extreme incompetence.
But it certainly is possible
for anyone at any time to simply step out from those boundaries. Folks, I don't
have the instant formula here. I'm just saying it can be done. What it takes to
get that far is open to further discovery. But it takes somewhat of a departure
from the norm;
a willingness to be unpopular and to avoid the destruction and
character-assassination of those in the crowd.
I went to the school in the island of time in the class where I learned to read
the rocks and the animals and the stars in the skies, and life's strange
mysteries. It's a tiny little island in forever. Call it "time". You read the
books so written in the stars and in the life; success and also failures of all
the struggles there and how you too must struggle in order to prepare.
--Fine art,
digital art,
music,
several voice
introductions by me about my work, articles about
my artwork
and other topics such as
sociology,
the cosmos,
economics,
education,
medicine,
mathematics,
poetry,
humor,
something I call premonitions,
and a series about covered bridges,
all by
yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are
feedback,
a website search engine, and exhaustive
contents pages. Plus
my weblogs are
on site, an
art
school and
classes.
Humankind is like a tide, it
ebbs and it flows.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul A. L. Hall.
The brain is capable of astounding things.
13 March, 2005
|