One Sucker's Saga, Epilogue: The Power of Myth
Throughout our history, we humans have gazed upward and considered the night sky. We have noted the passage of celestial bodies and marked their changes, especially those changes that appear to be predictable and regular. We have paid special attention to the phases of the moon and to the moving stars we now call planets, for those lights, when understood, can be used to signal plantings and migrations, storm seasons and calm.
Sometimes we go too far, though. Calamity is sometimes called "disaster," literally "ill-starred event." The acceptance or rejection of burned offerings such as those found referenced in the Old Testament tales, was simple: if the smoke from your offering rose into the sky, God had accepted it; if the smoke hung low, your toasty goat or lamb was rejected, and you are probably toast in His eyes. (Lesson: Don't make offerings to the gods during an atmospheric inversion.)
As we became more technologically advanced as a people, we developed the ability to predict the motions of the heavenly spheres and to translate those movements mechanically. All it took was centuries of direct celestial observations, occasionally corrected to allow for more precise measurements, and the mathematics sufficiently complex to model those observations . . . right?
Well, no. Not at all. We also needed to fit those observations into a paradigm that matched what we were actually seeing. For example, the first devise I pictured to the left is an armillary, a devise that plots the path of the planets and sun. The second devise to the right is an orrery, a devise that plots the path of planets and sun. The difference is more than merely the sum of the more than two hundred years of observations separating the construction of these two devices.
You see, the armillary shows the universe surrounding us as it would move from a geocentric origin, with the sun and everything else spinning around the Earth. The orrery shows the planets and moons - including Earth - spinning as they do, around the sun.
The difference is one of myth. It turns out that myth guides our observations. I'll let John Michael Greer explain:
Many people nowadays think only primitive people believe in myths, but myths dominate the thinking of every society, including our own. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world. Human beings think with stories as inevitably as they see with eyes and walk with feet, and the most important of those stories - the ones that define the nature of the world for those who tell them - are myths.
(John Michael Greer, The Long Descent, 2008, New Society Publishers, p. 36.)
What has all this astrological mythology to do with a series supposedly outlining one sucker's acceptance that certain forces in the government under which he is a subject have conspired to execute a master plan involving drug money, oil supplies and the events of September 11, 2001? Everything, really.
I've decided, though, not to dwell on the details. Why bother? What was done 10 years ago today is done. No amount of dental gnashing or tearing of hair - something I find I have in dwindling supply today as it is - will change anything a single whit. The wars started years ago in response to the initial attack are either progressing nicely or falling apart, depending upon the real reasons for each invasion. Without knowing that literal sub-tile distinction, the real reason verses the ones we were publicly given, it's impossible to know in which direction the hostilities are developing.
Besides, look what happens to those who dwell. Let's take the armillary verses the orrery. Nicolaus Copernicus got lucky, in that he published his theory of celestial movements just prior to his death in 1543. He got to avoid the ugliness the Copernican Revolution had on its proponents. Galileo developed the telescope powerful enough to confirm Copernicus' observations by offering a microcosm of the solar system in the movement of Jupiter's moons (unseen until then). He did ask permission of the Pope to publish his results, but went too far, insulting the Pope and the church's official position on the planetary motions. This earned him a lengthy trial, a forced "apology", and the right to live the rest of his life at home under arrest.
There are a couple of lessons one can gather from Galileo's example. One, people don't like having their myths confronted, especially if those myths form a dogmatic canon. (I'm sure in his post-arrest years he more than once regretted naming the church's character in his cosmic dialog "Simplicio", meaning he not only confronted myths but mocked them.)
Two, it sometimes takes a leap of information to prove the old myths are wanting. Galileo needed the power of his telescope to do this. Had he not invented it, he would not have seen those moons in their Jovian orbit, and never would have made the connection it offered to the solar system at large. In this second lesson, though, we find the fundamental rub for today's anniversary: What if there are people invested in maintaining the daily mythos, people who would go to extraordinary lengths to quashing new information?
For example, almost a year ago I shared an article by Alfred McCoy. In 1972, Mr. McCoy wrote a seminal piece of investigative history called The Politics of Herion in Southeast Asia, outlining the role of the CIA in developing, distributing and profiting from this product. Before its publication, the CIA attempted to challenge the veracity of his claims, going to hitherto unheard of lengths to prevent its publication. To their dismay, though, McCoy had done his homework, documenting his claims with "more than 250 interviews, some of them with past and present officials of the C.I.A." His work led to a general acceptance that this government complicit drug running actually happened.
Why, then, do many people today doubt the accusation that the CIA has done this, going so far as to dismiss it as "conspiracy theory?" We have today the testimonies of US soldiers who note they were sometimes assigned to guard poppy fields in Afghanistan, as well as other links in the chain outlined briefly in my LJ entry from December, yet so very many people balk at accusing the Agency of such illicit activity.
Could it be the Galileo Effect in action? Just as the Pope sentenced the man who first saw the Jovian moons to house arrest, others have had their lives destroyed by, weirdly, a single accusation; sexual behavior with minors. Sometimes these people have had a history, other times the charges arose only after military personnel insisted on actually reporting evidence of cocaine or heroin found on military vehicles (sorry, lost the link to those - yes, this happened to at least five people - but I'll keep looking).
There is also an Overton Window Effect at work here. Simply by keeping repeat mention of an avalanche of evidence quiet while raising the prominence of voices that question any evidence, a vast majority of the populace will automatically regard such evidence with suspicion. All it takes is a news agency with ties to commercial advertisers that have no trouble dropping a dime on the chief editors whenever controversy arises. "Say, Bob, that report you did the other day. I have to say I'm disappointed in the quality of the journalism. And by the way, that ad run we had scheduled? Something's come up, and I had to cancel the check."
Whoever funds the media owns the media. If whoever funds the media gets some of that funding either directly or tangentally from activities best left unmentioned, all the stronger the motive for keeping those activities unmentioned.
I wrote the above, up to the sentence starting with me not dwelling on details, over a year ago, maybe as much as two. I broke up the lengthy draft into individual posts in the Tin Foil Morterboards tag, but kept the Armillary v. Orrery until today. It just seemed like the conclusion seemed both too obvious and too obscure.
After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with believing that the Earth is the center of the universe. As with many lies, people can lead productive lives living it.
Consider the Greeks and their Antikythera Mechanism. Turn the handle, and the planets move not as they actually travel in a solar orbit, but as you see them move from Earth. For someone just needing to know the position of the planets as a reference to the time of year or astrology, this is far more useful than knowing that one of those moving lights, Jove, has its own moons. One can use the latter knowledge to determine not just the day but also the time of day to within two minutes - Galileo's celatone and Jovilabe worked pretty well - but without needing to know the time of day with greater accuracy, this information just clutters up the head and becomes, by definition, needless.
Likewise, to a fervently patriotic American, perhaps September 11, 2001 is best remembered as the day We Were Attacked, not as the day we may have attacked ourselves by proxy. These Americans, after all, will probably be happier, will probably suffer fewer headaches and sleepless nights. They will not worry about forces they cannot affect, and perhaps focus on the things that matter; family, friends, goals both large and small.
I outgrew my fervent patriotism, but I kinda miss it. Things were simpler back then. I could take information or reject it without weighing probabilities or contradictions based on a conscillience of evidence. It's not dissimilar to being good for the sake of Santa, rather than just being good because it makes your life run more smoothly. Santa is comforting, and close to patriotic. Just throw a little blue into his garb and he's practically wearing the flag, a fat flying Uncle Sam bearing chimney gifts.
In essence, it doesn't matter who pulled off - or facilitated, coordinated, conspired in, knew about or whatever - 9/11. It's done. Perhaps, after half a century or more passes, someone will find some compelling evidence that outlines what many (like me) suspect, something that by then will find a home in a history book footnote. Someone will find a Galilean telescope that answers the questions deliberately obfuscated today.
I can only imagine how patriot German citizens must have felt when the truth of the camps and ovens was first confirmed. Actually, I can. 9/11 differs only in scope and the number of necessary participants. Still, both events are but footnotes today . . . provided history does not repeat itself.
Maybe that's why I'm still a bit concerned, that whole "those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it" stuff. Could be. Still, getting any decent investigation started is backing a horse that has left the stable. Too late and all that. And starting that inquiry would involve challenging myths in a very real and substantive way, one that confronts what people already "know" about the events ten years ago.
Better, for me at least, to challenge those myths that, by challenge and subsequent change, can lead to some improvement in our future lives. One might as well target the challenges to correcting not the past but the future, since the act of challenging myth proves difficult enough. Remember what Tolstoy noted about doing just that:
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Leo Tolstoy, 1897
Sometimes we go too far, though. Calamity is sometimes called "disaster," literally "ill-starred event." The acceptance or rejection of burned offerings such as those found referenced in the Old Testament tales, was simple: if the smoke from your offering rose into the sky, God had accepted it; if the smoke hung low, your toasty goat or lamb was rejected, and you are probably toast in His eyes. (Lesson: Don't make offerings to the gods during an atmospheric inversion.)
As we became more technologically advanced as a people, we developed the ability to predict the motions of the heavenly spheres and to translate those movements mechanically. All it took was centuries of direct celestial observations, occasionally corrected to allow for more precise measurements, and the mathematics sufficiently complex to model those observations . . . right?
Well, no. Not at all. We also needed to fit those observations into a paradigm that matched what we were actually seeing. For example, the first devise I pictured to the left is an armillary, a devise that plots the path of the planets and sun. The second devise to the right is an orrery, a devise that plots the path of planets and sun. The difference is more than merely the sum of the more than two hundred years of observations separating the construction of these two devices.
You see, the armillary shows the universe surrounding us as it would move from a geocentric origin, with the sun and everything else spinning around the Earth. The orrery shows the planets and moons - including Earth - spinning as they do, around the sun.
The difference is one of myth. It turns out that myth guides our observations. I'll let John Michael Greer explain:
Many people nowadays think only primitive people believe in myths, but myths dominate the thinking of every society, including our own. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world. Human beings think with stories as inevitably as they see with eyes and walk with feet, and the most important of those stories - the ones that define the nature of the world for those who tell them - are myths.
(John Michael Greer, The Long Descent, 2008, New Society Publishers, p. 36.)
What has all this astrological mythology to do with a series supposedly outlining one sucker's acceptance that certain forces in the government under which he is a subject have conspired to execute a master plan involving drug money, oil supplies and the events of September 11, 2001? Everything, really.
I've decided, though, not to dwell on the details. Why bother? What was done 10 years ago today is done. No amount of dental gnashing or tearing of hair - something I find I have in dwindling supply today as it is - will change anything a single whit. The wars started years ago in response to the initial attack are either progressing nicely or falling apart, depending upon the real reasons for each invasion. Without knowing that literal sub-tile distinction, the real reason verses the ones we were publicly given, it's impossible to know in which direction the hostilities are developing.
Besides, look what happens to those who dwell. Let's take the armillary verses the orrery. Nicolaus Copernicus got lucky, in that he published his theory of celestial movements just prior to his death in 1543. He got to avoid the ugliness the Copernican Revolution had on its proponents. Galileo developed the telescope powerful enough to confirm Copernicus' observations by offering a microcosm of the solar system in the movement of Jupiter's moons (unseen until then). He did ask permission of the Pope to publish his results, but went too far, insulting the Pope and the church's official position on the planetary motions. This earned him a lengthy trial, a forced "apology", and the right to live the rest of his life at home under arrest.
There are a couple of lessons one can gather from Galileo's example. One, people don't like having their myths confronted, especially if those myths form a dogmatic canon. (I'm sure in his post-arrest years he more than once regretted naming the church's character in his cosmic dialog "Simplicio", meaning he not only confronted myths but mocked them.)
Two, it sometimes takes a leap of information to prove the old myths are wanting. Galileo needed the power of his telescope to do this. Had he not invented it, he would not have seen those moons in their Jovian orbit, and never would have made the connection it offered to the solar system at large. In this second lesson, though, we find the fundamental rub for today's anniversary: What if there are people invested in maintaining the daily mythos, people who would go to extraordinary lengths to quashing new information?
For example, almost a year ago I shared an article by Alfred McCoy. In 1972, Mr. McCoy wrote a seminal piece of investigative history called The Politics of Herion in Southeast Asia, outlining the role of the CIA in developing, distributing and profiting from this product. Before its publication, the CIA attempted to challenge the veracity of his claims, going to hitherto unheard of lengths to prevent its publication. To their dismay, though, McCoy had done his homework, documenting his claims with "more than 250 interviews, some of them with past and present officials of the C.I.A." His work led to a general acceptance that this government complicit drug running actually happened.
Why, then, do many people today doubt the accusation that the CIA has done this, going so far as to dismiss it as "conspiracy theory?" We have today the testimonies of US soldiers who note they were sometimes assigned to guard poppy fields in Afghanistan, as well as other links in the chain outlined briefly in my LJ entry from December, yet so very many people balk at accusing the Agency of such illicit activity.
Could it be the Galileo Effect in action? Just as the Pope sentenced the man who first saw the Jovian moons to house arrest, others have had their lives destroyed by, weirdly, a single accusation; sexual behavior with minors. Sometimes these people have had a history, other times the charges arose only after military personnel insisted on actually reporting evidence of cocaine or heroin found on military vehicles (sorry, lost the link to those - yes, this happened to at least five people - but I'll keep looking).
There is also an Overton Window Effect at work here. Simply by keeping repeat mention of an avalanche of evidence quiet while raising the prominence of voices that question any evidence, a vast majority of the populace will automatically regard such evidence with suspicion. All it takes is a news agency with ties to commercial advertisers that have no trouble dropping a dime on the chief editors whenever controversy arises. "Say, Bob, that report you did the other day. I have to say I'm disappointed in the quality of the journalism. And by the way, that ad run we had scheduled? Something's come up, and I had to cancel the check."
Whoever funds the media owns the media. If whoever funds the media gets some of that funding either directly or tangentally from activities best left unmentioned, all the stronger the motive for keeping those activities unmentioned.
I wrote the above, up to the sentence starting with me not dwelling on details, over a year ago, maybe as much as two. I broke up the lengthy draft into individual posts in the Tin Foil Morterboards tag, but kept the Armillary v. Orrery until today. It just seemed like the conclusion seemed both too obvious and too obscure.
After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with believing that the Earth is the center of the universe. As with many lies, people can lead productive lives living it.
Click to viewConsider the Greeks and their Antikythera Mechanism. Turn the handle, and the planets move not as they actually travel in a solar orbit, but as you see them move from Earth. For someone just needing to know the position of the planets as a reference to the time of year or astrology, this is far more useful than knowing that one of those moving lights, Jove, has its own moons. One can use the latter knowledge to determine not just the day but also the time of day to within two minutes - Galileo's celatone and Jovilabe worked pretty well - but without needing to know the time of day with greater accuracy, this information just clutters up the head and becomes, by definition, needless.
Likewise, to a fervently patriotic American, perhaps September 11, 2001 is best remembered as the day We Were Attacked, not as the day we may have attacked ourselves by proxy. These Americans, after all, will probably be happier, will probably suffer fewer headaches and sleepless nights. They will not worry about forces they cannot affect, and perhaps focus on the things that matter; family, friends, goals both large and small.
I outgrew my fervent patriotism, but I kinda miss it. Things were simpler back then. I could take information or reject it without weighing probabilities or contradictions based on a conscillience of evidence. It's not dissimilar to being good for the sake of Santa, rather than just being good because it makes your life run more smoothly. Santa is comforting, and close to patriotic. Just throw a little blue into his garb and he's practically wearing the flag, a fat flying Uncle Sam bearing chimney gifts.
In essence, it doesn't matter who pulled off - or facilitated, coordinated, conspired in, knew about or whatever - 9/11. It's done. Perhaps, after half a century or more passes, someone will find some compelling evidence that outlines what many (like me) suspect, something that by then will find a home in a history book footnote. Someone will find a Galilean telescope that answers the questions deliberately obfuscated today.
I can only imagine how patriot German citizens must have felt when the truth of the camps and ovens was first confirmed. Actually, I can. 9/11 differs only in scope and the number of necessary participants. Still, both events are but footnotes today . . . provided history does not repeat itself.
Maybe that's why I'm still a bit concerned, that whole "those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it" stuff. Could be. Still, getting any decent investigation started is backing a horse that has left the stable. Too late and all that. And starting that inquiry would involve challenging myths in a very real and substantive way, one that confronts what people already "know" about the events ten years ago.
Better, for me at least, to challenge those myths that, by challenge and subsequent change, can lead to some improvement in our future lives. One might as well target the challenges to correcting not the past but the future, since the act of challenging myth proves difficult enough. Remember what Tolstoy noted about doing just that:
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Leo Tolstoy, 1897