In the post Industrial Revolution age, the religious era declines in proportion to the increase of the as man's capacity to enter pseudo or virtual worlds of his own imagining, and so the confessional system of establishing guilt has suffered greatly. However, with the technological era has come new means of accumulating data on the individual, and the various devices now inhabiting the world such as computers, phones, surveillance cameras, are part of a metaphysical surveillance network to perform the old duties of the confessional.
This naturally a thought-piece, but interestingly it brought to mind something distinctly similar in tone, and that is the American governmental body, the Information Awareness Office, and its desire to have total information awareness . The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter transnational threats to national security. The IAO mission was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness", which prosaically means absolute knowledge by 'the state' of the details of its citizens' lives. Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003, although several of the projects run under IAO have continued under different funding. A rose by any other name.
And what was the logo for this totalitarian body? Quelle surprise, the old masonic All-Seeing Eye on the pyramid, with the Latin phrase scientia potentia est proudly adorned beneath. "For also knowledge itself is power." Yes, knowledge and power for whom?
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"imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness"
Try reading this line out loud as if it were a poem. It cannot be done. Metrically dead and flat as lead. This in itself is worrying. The bureaucraticised, techo-virtual, mind of our matrix world, has no soul. Let us be aware of this.
I suppose a difference would be that you could always conspire to keep some things secret from the Priest if you wanted to, though I accept how this attitude would itself suggest a less than total commitment to theological orthodoxy of a kind that might be difficult if you had been brought up from infancy to believe that God angrily sees and is appalled by all (or much, at least).
Surveillance by camera gives you no such choice. A consolation however is the thought that most of the footage CCTV records is so staggeringly dull that most of it is hopefully/probably/possibly (?) never viewed by anyone. Though of course it could be if it needed to be.
I like to wave into CCTV cameras..cheer up my fanbase:) Actually, its just to mock the whole nonsense of course.
Though I hope it's understood the imaginative first half of the piece is just running with a humorous thought, a little artistic exploration of a paranoid metaphysics. Though probably not any more weird & absurdist than limbo for unbaptised babies & the like.
As for the totalitarian information awareness gang & their inability to resist their obsessive symbolism...well they're just fucking nuts, I think is the technical term.
Dear Andrew: The All Seeing Eye atop a decapitated pyramid is from the backside of the US dollar bill. Does this add to your paranoia? In other words, there is George Washington on one side of the dollar, and the Eye-Pyramid on his backside. That is to say, George Washington's obverse side is now the symbol of the CCTV. I repeat, does this add to your paranoia?
No need to repeat, Tony. The same words in the same sequence twice don't become twice as intelligent. No, they simply sit there in naked inanity labouring under the the mistaken notion of repitition being a substitute for eloquence. Yes, the fact that the All Seeing Eye on the pyramid is on the dollar simply means the symbol is also in another location. It says nothing about their significance. Of course, FD Roosevelt was a 32nd Degree Freemason, under whose tenure the masonic symbol made it onto the dollar. And of course his successor, Harry "Atom Bomb" Truman was a 33rd Degree Freemason. Does this add to your servility, Tony? I repeat, does this add to your servility? Sorry bout the pointless repitition, but perhaps you're hard of hearing.
Fortunately for gutless servility, it is a psychological reality that is its own defence, so I'll happily let you wallow in your superior thoughts of my paranoia. I've a piece called The Slave Mentality written earlier you may enjoy. Begins with an extract from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground:
"Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition."
My closing paragraph goes:
In the pure form, because of the absolute alignment of the person with the slave mentality, a truth revealing attack on the social order of things is experienced as an attack on his personal being, and despite the power of the evidence presented to awaken him to reality, the structure of self which he believes himself to be acts as an impenetrable force-field exactly like in those sci-fi films where incoming misssiles are annihilated by this defence mechanism. This shield is doubly effective in that it actually tends to re-direct the attack back on the person trying to wake him up- this typically rendered where the messenger of the uncomfortable truth is mocked as a conspiracy theorist or madman, and the slave strucure left intact & even reinforced. As in the films, however, in all but the purest slaves this defence-shield can be weakened if enough outside force generated, or ideally from an enlightenment experience within where this hallucinated self vanishes of its own non-real accord.
Dear Andrew: My repetition was a kind of cry in the wilderness, an existential shout, hoping you would hear. Of course, you did. We are told in the US that the repetition of Martin Luther King Jr. causes a rhetorical and rhythmic intoxication. Unlike MLK, I have no dream, only mind numbing repetition.
Concerning confession, I am fond of it both as a metaphysical exercise and a Sacrament. It takes some doing. Confessing to a priest doesn't carry any burden of worry. He won't tattle to the state. What is said sub rosem stays there. This means the onus is on the one making the confession to change habits. As society moves from metaphysics to rationality, the metaphysics doesn't go away. It just becomes more palpable and tangible. There may or may not be a God watching over you, but for sure, behind that camera there is an officer with a uniform and a badge possessing the full weight of the policing power of the state behind him (or her), to bring the point home. As I said, palpable and tangible metaphysics - but that is repetitious. The old system was more genteel and less degrading.
Concerning slavery: I have often thought things haven't changed much through the centuries. Tell the serfs what ever you have to, just keep them plowing in the fields. Today the rewards are cars and plastic trinkets made in China. But the serfs just keep plowing in the fields.
Well at least we have perhaps established a foothold, even if of uncertain substance, of neither of us simply being an idiot, Tony; the necessary foundation of any intelligent exchange of views. Just to repeat as replied to Jonathan, the first creative half of the piece is a humorously inspired take on guilt-ridden metaphysics. Though it's nothing like so rationally conceived. Simply a comical flash in the mind that I found interesting enough to put to words.
The second half of Total Information Awareness & the like certainly isn't the creation of my paranoid mind, but of other metaphysically & otherwise strained beings. The desire for ever more power by people with lots of it is naturally a well known historical reality.
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