Kant Get You Out of My Head

[...]Neuroscience has come to the general conclusion that conscious awareness plays little to no part in human activity. Our unconscious, or “subconscious” as people who adhere to misquotes of Freud like to call it, decides things before our conscious mind initiates an action. They’ve tested this. It’s not controversial. The same you that breathes without thinking too much about it also decides to put your finger in your nose before you are even aware there’s a dry, prickly booger up in there. And don’t try pulling any surprises, like wiggling your fingers for no reason; the you beneath is way ahead of the you on top.

It’s almost as if you have a shadow puppeteer pulling the strings. And that shadow puppeteer’s thought processes are not available to you. Surely you’re familiar with the fact that people often say things they don’t mean, or have entirely divergent motives behind their actions from those they are willing, if they are even able, to express.

So we’re all just façades, paper masks, wandering through the motions of our lives, operated by invisible puppeteers whose motives and plans are an elaborate secret, gears, servos, and processes winding and unwinding like secret clocks keeping a secret time. A whole other invisible world is operating behind the scenes. Whether or how much the individual worlds are conspiring together is a question too far beyond our investigative abilities to even approach answering. If we fall in love, who in fact is falling in love, and why? If we react to another with fear or hatred, whose prejudice is it? Where do our feelings come from? Are they made by a shadow committee of our ancestors’ ghosts in our unremembered past? Can we ever overcome the training our unconscious puppet masters have undergone without our knowledge so we can abort the cycle of failure our species seems fated to ride forever and ever?...

Moment of Truth: Design Your Own Dementia

a reply to: rickymouse

Sounds like a song from when I was much younger.

first thing i thought of.



might as well add another,

a reply to: PublicOpinion

When we relate to the world that is being constructed by thought as if it were the world, as if it were not merely a construct, then we will not in any way be conscious.

Logic’ is a system of abstractions; it is a set of relationships that exists between ‘assumed things’. Although these relationships are crystalline in their clarity, definition and predictability, they are based on divisions that are entirely arbitrary, that are entirely dependent upon ‘where we decide to draw the line’. In reality, there are no such divisions, there are no such ‘things’. ‘From the very beginning, not a thing was’, says Bodhidharma.

www.thenegativepsychologist.com...

Very well made documentary, thank you OP.

originally posted by: PublicOpinion
However, I'm not sure he isn't reflecting on himself and his circles. And does it really matter when the piece goes a long way to communicate the symptoms? I think it takes a real artist to merely touch on things, leaving people some room to discover more unmapped territories for themselves, just like we did.

I'm not questioning his artistry, his talent or his purpose, just my ability to relate to it. He didn't speak to me, he certainly didn't speak for me. It felt like a lament. And there is that element of dissection, autopsying the historical record versus the at-the-time reportage that I do like to do myself so perhaps his perspective rubbed up against mine a little too vigorously and got my ire up a little. That is quite possibly the case.

I've just finished re-watching the first three seasons of Fargo and you know, it's TV and of course fiction and not a great comparison, but it's high-art and it is social commentary. It's like watching Chekov. It's right down there in the human of it all. Curtis is somewhere over it all - removed - detached? I can't relate to that but I do appreciate that that is the way a lot of people feel, particularly here in these parts there's that sense of the world having turned without some people being on board. Curtis I think, in that context, is a potential bridge and I'm just a jealous critic.

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

Don't get me wrong, all that criticism is valid and much appreciated. There's a certain element of propaganda at play here, it's like a trap luring us into the same old normatives that brought us here in the first place. I'd say it's more about philosophy than about politics and psychology, and he disregards that aspect entirely. But at least we've touched on that a few times, good times.

Curtis I think, in that context, is a potential bridge and I'm just a jealous critic.

Fair enough. Pretty much anything will look pale and dead in comparison to Fargo or Twin Peaks cuz ya know... Aliens!

a reply to: PublicOpinion

It's not really the aliens I was thinking of but yeah, why not and if you look at the way that is used in Fargo, as a WTF moment, the eye-in-the-sky over the (urban(e)) battlefield - the momentary pause of wonder, of questioning before the bloodshed reconvenes as if nothing reality altering had even occured...we can recognise a literary tradition going all the way back to Homer, to Lugal's Sumeria even. Curtis on the otherhand, is more Quantum Leap derivative, in that he can only look for answers in his own lifetime, a flashback of random imagery organised by the mind into a neat and tidy narrative. Propagandist philosophy sounds like a fair summation. Which is not to say that there isn't a place for that, and that place is probably the BBC, that is after all, in part, their remit, to transmit for the purposes of "social learning". And, soft shoeing it, keeping to sound bites of uncomfortable information, may be an effective means with which to raise wider awareness of events that were concealed at the time but have since become public, such as MKULTRA and other uses of torture but have yet to be satisfactorily consequentially examined.

Tame, genteel and terribly Oxfordian English would be another way of looking at it. Curtis' editorial choices are reflective of that particular brand of Oxford US-centrism. Fargo, and Twin Peaks, give the US an identity that is very much at odds with that Rhodesian scholastic world view, one that is very much the consequence of that unique combination of intellectual elitism and blind profiteering.

I was watching a Simon Schama documentary and he was talking about the piece of ochre found at Blombos Cave that is incised with a criss-cross-forming-diamonds pattern. Schama goes on to point out beyond whether this is art or just a tally of events or time, it is still design, that we are the designing apes because we cannot help but find and create patterns. Schama took seconds to say what Curtis spent several hours expounding upon but never really getting around to...but then, in mentioning Chekhov (correct spelling this time) previously, I came across a quote from him to the effect that it is not the role of the artist to answer questions just to ask them. So,Curtis, the artist, asks the question and Schama, the scholar, the answers. Have you read Narziss and Goldmund? Hesse, tearing himself in two for literary purposes, recognised the difficulties or dissonance maybe, of what happens when you try to be both question and answer.

a reply to: PublicOpinion
I recently stumbled across this youtube channel that I think you will enjoy.
youtube.com...
Here is one of the uploads on the channel

a reply to: Itisnowagain

Gonna look into that right away, thanks for sharing.

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

OMFG! My wak alien angle has been woven into the bigger tapestry, as a moment of self-reflection that doesn't happen? I didn't even look at it that way but you're definitely on to something there.

Have you read Narziss and Goldmund? Hesse, tearing himself in two for literary purposes, recognised the difficulties or dissonance maybe, of what happens when you try to be both question and answer.

It's been a while, to be fair. Good call!

“There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.”

― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

a reply to: PublicOpinion
True freedom is freedom from fear.

"Start Living, Free From Fear — Salvadore Poe"

originally posted by: rickymouse
Sounds like a song from when I was much younger.

ELO

a reply to: Itisnowagain

Why is worshipping celebrities so destructive to both ourselves and our world? Chris Hedges explains why.

To many in both business and government, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power is truly moved into the hands of the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How is the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interest?

Adam Curtis - The Century of The Self

originally posted by: KilgoreTrout
I will say, so far, that it is, for me, a singular perspective - I do though accept his criticism of my "ilk" on the chin - and I am interested in what he has included, what he hasn't and what he has skimmed across. For example (and again - no spoilers please), he mentions that "some" dischordants worked at Playboy and they devised Operation Mind# - goes into vast detail about Thornley but doesn't even mention (so far) who that someone was at Playboy and how they were more fundamental in the divising and actioning of OM. Maybe he gets to that.

He didn't get to it - and it's still bothering me. I am leaning towards Curtis being just high-brow doom porn. Like Wilson or not, and I lean a little further toward the latter, he is a democratiser of the tools to overcome the type of conditioning and socially programmed materialism that Curtis is merely documenting. To exclude him so pointedly, well, how can I take it any other way than as a willful omission? Hence, high-brow doom porn, he doesn't want us to have the tools, he wants us to feel helpless.

a reply to: KilgoreTrout

I can see where you're coming from with that. But is it really wrong to present us with this helplessness? We are literally on the brink of extinction, with no help in sight. Except for mass-movements and radical change maybe. Are we not?

I'd take "Cosmic Triggers" over "Illuminatus" any day, and I think there's another reason why he didn't go after RAW. You mentioned empowerment, but what exactly do we mean with said tools for deprogramming? And what happens afterwards? He didn't delve much into religions either. And this focus on the positivist aspect in life would be exactly what we can't get out of heads, innit? What's this "esoteric humbug" about anyway, does it pay the bills?

Keeping this distinction between discordianism and chaos-magick in mind, I feel his critique on "Operation Mind#" is pretty much on point. I'd go even further - this discordian focus on the Illuminates went online, with Q-Anon as a modern variation of that myth. But if we really wanted to get rid of elite deep state conspiracies, happening in the backrooms of our democracies, we'd have to make them stop conspiring in backrooms first. Everything else would be another distraction I couldn't care less about.

originally posted by: PublicOpinion
I can see where you're coming from with that. But is it really wrong to present us with this helplessness? We are literally on the brink of extinction, with no help in sight. Except for mass-movements and radical change maybe. Are we not?

Are we? Extinction is a way off yet but, yes, everything that we do now matters. Everything. Each and every individual and their actions matter in bringing about a future we can move towards confidently because it's sustainable. Extinction, not just ours, can still be avoided and no, no one is going to come and make it all better, take away all the pain and suffering or re-institute a lost paradise, those come about in the same way as everything else we've created does, with time and expended energy. Just look at what we are capable of. So yes I accept that some people feel helpless but I suppose what I am saying is that I am increasingly losing my sympathy for those people. They need to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and see that they are part of the problem and get behind the solution instead. Curtis has a platform and therefore a responsibilty, even more so if he gets it.

originally posted by: PublicOpinion
I'd take "Cosmic Triggers" over "Illuminatus" any day, and I think there's another reason why he didn't go after RAW. You mentioned empowerment, but what exactly do we mean with said tools for deprogramming? And what happens afterwards? He didn't delve much into religions either. And this focus on the positivist aspect in life would be exactly what we can't get out of heads, innit? What's this "esoteric humbug" about anyway, does it pay the bills?

What's esoteric about RAW? (I realise that all my questions, given the circumstances, are rhetorical even if I would like to know your reply - but there you go, I feel the need to reply anyway) That's my whole point about democratising. I've only read Quantum Psychology. It's a crude tool but it's a start, something to build upon, a place from which to begin (depending on where you came from before that). Tools help you refine your skills, intellectual tools help you refine your choices...so yeah, they kind of help pay the bills?

If a bad worker always blames his tools, a wise workman knows that the tools are only as good as the worker that wields them.

originally posted by: PublicOpinion
Keeping this distinction between discordianism and chaos-magick in mind, I feel his critique on "Operation Mind#" is pretty much on point. I'd go even further - this discordian focus on the Illuminates went online, with Q-Anon as a modern variation of that myth. But if we really wanted to get rid of elite deep state conspiracies, happening in the backrooms of our democracies, we'd have to make them stop conspiring in backrooms first. Everything else would be another distraction I couldn't care less about.

If we really want to get rid of "elite deep state conspiracies" we need to move to greater transparency that demonetises political careership, as in we need to prevent corrupt officials from gaining power, or from being bought in or into power. The American susceptibility to hoaxes and as a consequence certain types of conspiracy thinking that has led to a distrust not just of their political representatives but the institutions themselves is a cultural issue that apparently, I am learning, goes back to their creation. The book I've just finished, The Mound Builder Myth by Jason Colavito, points out that the root of that problem is the "utter failure of America's educated class to deliver facts to the public." (p323) Consider that in relation to that quote that gets bandied around mirageman's threads about everything that the American public thinking they know being a lie - well that, it seems, long before the "century of self", long before the CIA was even a twinkle in Allen Dulles' eye, was how the West was won through the deployment of the popular press. I don't think that there is a better short-hand form illustration of US history than the episode of South Park where reality gets lynched.