Falling resembles flying if the pit is bottomless and it is easier to fall than fly. There is no committee at the bottom, nor perhaps, if weâre lucky, any welcoming party on top. Namespaces already polluted by the gaze of the other cannot be earnestly called elysium by any measure, even if that other is God.
Nor are aliens more important than God even if they exist and God doesnât. But just like not everyone can write smut, not everyone can practice their religion, especially in a public setting. Religion is, more or less horsing around, but it demands a sincerity and commitment the west remains wary of due to their tendency to over-commit, over-compensate, and in the worst cases over-determine.
There is already this insincerity visible in the native americans, which were faux âIndiansâ only to the extent that they got trampled under the invaderâs feet. To get disrupted out of existence by an alien force is not out of the question but Jimmy is insincere, which is a repellant to higher life forms.
Impossible is something, just ask Icarus - âjust f***ing do itâ is often the war cry of the desperate. But my friends all drive porches, I must make amends and in this comparison is evil born.
At its heart hedgemony is about measuring stuff, including appendages, and keeping score within the generallly accepted paradigm of bigger is better, greed is supreme and so on. This is true from sea to shining sea and not just a localised industry.
The problem is, all measurements are wrong. More often then not, this is a repeated civilizational pattern, the ancient egyptians are not present to confirm this sadly but their end was an empiricism of similar latitudes. Or the Babylonians for that matter, or the Sumerians - the first victims of language.
The truth cannot be written about, for everything else, thereâs Wittgensteinâs credit card. No sooner does one speak of faith is it corrupted by the limitations of language, which are patently exhibited by the holes in the whole of technology trying to emulate or model language.
If Quine is correct in that âLanguage is social artâ, then appropriations would have been futile, but appropriations are wildly successful within all languages. The empirical virus in our minds is not religion but language, and appropriated via technology, language has grown chthuluesque appendages that are reaching inside our brains, reprogramming it. The empire of language is universal but not ulimate for it is only symbolic. Religion is the ultimate empire because it forces us to go beyond mere fantasy of symbols and be more empirical than the lesser domains of sciences including language. It would not be a stretch to claim that as empire, religion is empiricism.
Forget how, and ask why did we end up here? The attempts at modelling language are not yet the birthpangs of whatever shall be the offspring of information technology, but the seeds have been sown and sown well. All technology reproduces, for example internet was born not out of a wedlock between the telephone and the television and so on.
The technology that is the offspring (or if you hate this analogy âthe next intermediate representationâ, abbv. TNIR) of language and compute is an image, or at least closer to a visual appendage into spacetime. This much is clear but the reason why industries working on turning the eye outward have lagged is a natural fear of observation because like in any conjunction, there is risk (in observation) and all this already sounding way too heavy for the baby boomers already.
There is inherent risk in any observation seemes to be the message, so insecurities are not without common-sense. Where common sense ends is where they admit âfrom dust to dustâ and then gatekeep that dust with all the zeal they can muster.
These gatekeepers of dust, or more colloquially, âtime creatorsâ are spirits caught inside the graveyard, looking out. That is all âcountryâ has come to mean, an open graveyard where little else shifts but dirt. If that sounds even remotely romantic, consider that the frame is ghettoised beyond recognition, and not as an existential compromise, but wonder of wonders, as excess.
Jimmyâs eyes look out from a ghetto graveyard trying to find at least one locus of control but nothing but death stares back, causing further isolation, regret, guilt, and fear as he shrinks into nought. The drive from fear had delivered them into a permanent state of fear.
Theirs is an older fear. In fact, âIn god we trustâ is just another euphemism for the total lack of trust amongst them as a people, hence the deferred respect to money, which nowhere in history of man is a subject of such abject and brazen worship. The paranoidâs thrill-seeking attitude has followed his DNA âacross the pondâ, across the frontier as if something chasing him. Not that this FOMO is the whole story, but it informs a big chunk of jimmyâs current psyche, which, like Carvaggio, is a lot of Black Mirror lately.
If the political house of cards is one wolf whistle away from total collapse and hope wears thin across a landscape plagued not only by a fundamental lack of any futuristic infrastructure but the wholesale depreciation of existing works.
Wall Street is cooked in so far as its programme of âcelestial hedgingâ has been exposed by the last crises, causing a direct vanishing of absolute alpha at the edge. Here too, the frontier that once wove sweet dreams of independence lies shrinked now in frays and gets hustled over because there is nought left to do. It is not the case that only the low hanging fruits have been picked, but they are eating the leaves and bark!
The maintenance of market cyclicality is exactly the continuation of a hypocrisy that had propelled boomers into their plastic success, but money is not the only bubble that can last forever.
Not only have the proliferation of alternate energy sources, climate disaster etc led to a reduced dependence on oil which is bagging a smaller fraction of the total energy blend, getting more irrelevant with each new birth, but even even commercial electric vehicle sales cannot pull jimmy out from the darkness.
Increasingly rarely does Hollywood drop a fat lice on Jimmyâs forehead which he eats promptly and with all the relish diminishing returns of manifest destiny can afford.