Amerika

Much has changed over the centuries. Most visibly, our technologies have changed shape. Often, it is the less readily visible changes – in our hearts and minds – that we tend to uncover here.

Still, as the old saying has it, there is nothing new (in substance, behind its outer shape) under the sun. The needs met with our novel technologies and our perceptions are chained to the form of our own human species, something we did not create, ourselves.

Much as we are not the original cause of our own human species, so too are we not the fundamental cause of our own creations. This is why Plato spoke of an ideal form as a blueprint or template, from which both our objects and our systems are instantiated.

Insignificance is our existence,
Hear the litany of life’s persistence.

Bolt Thrower, The IVth Crusade

All ideal forms exist independent of us, forever there to be discovered. A rock is a great simple object for bashing things from a distance. Lower primates have come to learn this independent of us teaching them.

Twigs can be bundled as a sort of dense thatching to stop water flow. We didn’t teach beavers this trick either.

These ideal forms are there to be discovered by whatever creature has the minimum required threshold of intellect to perceive and put to use. Such templates, as ways of doing things and ways reality functions, are eternal and exist independent of humanity.

All we can do is remain uncomprehending of reality, better understand it or withdraw into denial because we discovered something inconvenient, offensive or uncomfortable along the way, then declaring a taboo or an off-limits method, crippling ourselves in small ways.

In affirming reality and engaging with it congruent with its immutable design function, we have a chance at success. In denial and what is often moral taboo-making holding mere instances as sacred (e.g. humanism) while blind to resilient, eternal blueprints, we set ourselves up for failure, always.

Even as the wheel of time and history turns without end, we reiterate civilization patterns that have come before. While the outer packaging may be much different today, the contents inside cannot but remain essentially the same.