Amerika

Among humans, who consider themselves proven wise by their own estimation of their intelligence, it is considered absolute fact that human intelligence dwarfs everything else in the universe.

All those miraculous planets, spaces older than we can count in years, distances longer than we could travel in a thousand lifetimes, all that stuff came about accidentally.

There are two versions of the accidental theory, by the way. The first is that the universe is an accident; the second is that it is merely a sandbox where we create drama before getting to the real life of real life, Heaven.

Most people see the latter as a benevolent kind of religion and antidote to the materialism of the common modern existence, but in fact it is materialism of another variety, worship of the human intent.

In human intent, the world is bad because you can lose at life game, be ugly, fart in elevators, and not be as wealthy, healthy, or sane as your compatriots. Life makes hierarchy and this terrifies the human individual.

Consequently humans make an antimatter to this world called Heaven. In neoplatonic (i.e. not Platonic) metaphysical dualism, Earth is imperfect and bad by nature, and only Heaven is good, and the rules are different there.

On Earth you can get bored if things do not change; in Heaven, you exist in a perfect state of suspended animation without boredom. On Earth, you can die, defecate, fail, or screw up, but not so in Heaven. It is Equal Grace for all.

Humans in their wisdom like to think that nature is bad, but what humans intend is good, so we should sacrifice this world to get to a Heaven promised to us by learnéd words in sacred books, or at least popular ones.

These arrogant little monkeys also hold that there are no absolutes, only grey areas, and that reality is never what it seems (that is, when we accept that reality might be important after all, a rare admission).

As little narcissists, since narcissism is the social form of solipsism or believing that we are more important than the world, humans embrace anything paradoxical because it sabotages logic and clear thinking.

The whole goal is to focus on the self, and that means that reality, nature, and hierarchy must die. After all, we are pining for a human Heaven where everything is good, not Earth where we can fart and die.

This means that humans constantly seek to break down continuity, organization, consistency, and holism. They do not want you looking at the big picture; they want you staring at details until they become grey areas.

We as voyagers in not just this world but our own consciousness will never find proof of anything, only conjecture. Our world is above all else consistent, and we observe these consistencies and derive notions from them.

However, it could all be a simulacra, a seer’s trance, or a fever dream. We could be from the twenty-four century, stuck in their version of Meta, thinking what we see is real when it is entirely fantasy.

Does it matter? No: even if this is a logical puzzle, it must be solved, the question of what we can know, how we can be sane, and how we can make a species that can organize itself self-destructing via social pressures.

Although humans adore grey areas, at some point you either look at the holistic or not. The holism fans tend toward a transcendent view that is both grim reality and serendipitous vision of the beautiful beneath the visible.

Everyone else wants to break down the continuity of life, interrupt the consistency, and shatter every pattern so that they can view a detail as a world, find it as incoherent as Heaven, and revert to solipsistic materialism.

This manifests in multitudinous ways. They hate culture, yes, and race, but only so that they can hate caste and hierarchy. They fear having a goal because it means we will be ranked.

Even more, they fear history and memory themselves. These show us who we are and what we are made of. They want to erase the past, but mostly so that they can exist without a past, not for denial of death but to deny inequality.

After all, in nature, which is consistent, we have zero examples of equality. Everything is hierarchy so that it is always in motion and does not become static and granularized, broken down into packets of entropy like the human mind.

Around you, idiots keep blaming technology, Jews, Negroes, capitalists, and Whites for the problems caused by urbanization, overpopulation, democracy, and diversity. Equality is literally killing us.

Very few of them realize that you need holism to integrate the different moving parts into sequences so that cause-effect can be derived, and when you do enough of that, you find consistency and transcendence at the core of this world.

Instead people fall into two camps, the detail-oriented and the aesthetic-oriented, and cannot combine the two by organizing the details into a hierarchy that reveals an (accurate) whole picture:

“Basically, the processes in a Petri net can be described through two separate approaches. The first approach regards a process as a series of events, while the second approach sees the net as a graphical expression of the interdependencies between components and events,” says Joachim Kock.

“The serial approach is well suited for performing calculations. However, it has a downside since it describes causalities less accurately than the graphical approach. Further, the serial approach tends to fall short when dealing with events that take place simultaneously. The problem was that nobody had been able to unify the two approaches. The computer scientists had more or less resigned, regarding the problem as unsolvable.”

Some want aesthetics, but they project human aesthetics, so you get a vision as far removed from reality as the human Heaven is from the Earth it disdains. Others look at details as a means of avoiding the big picture.

Those who want to look at the big picture are seen as idealists and fascists because the big picture minimizes human individuals while ranking them. Some are genius inventors, warriors, thinkers, and leaders. But the rest are not.

This is what unnerves humans about life. In every venture, the Bell Curve rules. About ten percent get to live a really good life, and the rest get varying degrees of mediocre.

Ten percent of athletes are any good, with some of those pushing hard enough to go pro, but only a percentage of those take it any further. Of all the novels written, only a percent of a percent are worth re-reading.

Humans adore granularization because it liberates us from both past and future. We can forget who we are and pretend we are kings, and we have no obligations toward the future, since we are equal bourgeois citizens.

This produces the modern system where because of a collectivized reward system for individualism, people become granular, little bubbles of their own desires and feedback loops of egomania, and soon no one shares anything except periodic convergence of financial interests:

“Oh, perhaps,” said Craddock. “But — but don’t snoop around… I’ve a feeling — I have really — that it isn’t safe.”

Miss Marple smiled a little.

“But I’m afraid,” she said, “that we old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”

“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.

“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.

She went on: “Because that’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it? And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St. Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house – and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys… They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served on the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new — really new — really a stranger — came, well, they stuck out — everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.”

She nodded her head gently:

“But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come — and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all
over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who lived in France and Italy, in cheap places and quaint islands. And also those who made some money and could retire. But no one knows any longer who’s who. Somebody can own Benares Bronze objects and speak of ‘tiffin’ and ‘chota Hazri’ – or own statues from Taormina and speak of their English church there – as Miss Murgatroyd and Miss Hinchcliffe. He may come from the Orient or the South of France. And everybody accepts the newcomers without hesitation. They don’t expect, for the first visit, to first receive a letter from a friend, saying that so-and-so is a charming person, a childhood friend, etc…”

And that, thought Craddock, was exactly the source of his trouble. He didn’t know. They were all just faces and personalities vouched for by rationing and I.D. cards… well – printed but without photographies or fingerprints. You could get an I.D. for the asking – and partly due to this the subtle ties that hold the structure of the rural society together were loosening. In a city nobody knows their neighbours; neither in the country, but sometimes you have the illusion that you do.

Thanks to the tampered door, Craddock knew that one of the occupants of the living-room of Little Paddocks wasn’t the good neighbour he or she pretended to be…

And so he was afraid of what could happen to Miss Marple, who was so frail and old, even if she was so clever…

“Up to a point,” he said, “we can check the past lives of these people…”

But he knew that this what harder than it seemed. India, China, Hong Kong, South of France… much harder than it would have been fifteen years ago. He knew well that many people went around with borrowed identities… mostly borrowed from people who died in tragic circumstances in the big cities. There were organizations who bought or faked I.D. cards – there were hundreds of kinds of small illegal activities around.

Humans adore granularization because it hides them from themselves and each other. Like Heaven, it rejects Earth, but only later do the humans find out that without Earth, Heaven has no meaning.

Eternal life has no significance without death. The absence of suffering is meaningless without pain. The love of God conveys nothing without a knowledge of hatred. These are all two sides of the same coin in a relative universe.

Once you get over this Hegelian dialectic, you may see that real life begins outside the dialectic. We do not need Heaven-versus-Earth, but a continuity of divine thought through Earth into the Heavens.

We do not need an end to suffering, but that our suffering — which is inevitable: life is suffering — mean something as a sacrifice to some form of beauty, benevolence, excellence, victory, sanity, or goodness.

Our species wanders lost, adrift in the sand dunes of the sea of its own inconsistent thought, looking for a world that rejects the world without requiring it, leaving only our golden idol selves to languish in emptiness.

Tags: agatha christie, god, granularization, petri net, religion, solipsism