finished 7/7/1999 Ghef Ashbrook
The small boy followed his mother in line down the aisle, letting her drag him by a fist full grip of her skirt -thus freeing his eyes to wander over the scenes of ceiling, floor, employee and customer faces. Throughout this store he had seen many wonderful plants, many with a beckoning under-population. The shiny chrome rails that separated the Enter and Exit doors to go outside, the rails that then appeared ‘here’ at the checkout line, the rows of rakes and hoes (or snakes and shoes) and shovels (for the top soil outside, he thought), bad music that made the floors look harder and whiter and made the place feel like a waiting room, seasonal ugly plastic goods that didn’t seem to serve any purpose, and, as it was summer, cold gusts of dry air pumping into the store between hotter gusts through the outside doors. All this he had seen and now he was boxed into channel by the high walls of items displayed for his or his mother’s last minute panic-purchases.
He rubbed his eyes and let go of the skirt, and turned around and tapped a foot on the floor, and made a little jump. His eyes took in the display rack from the top. Candy bars, which he knew better than to ask for, shaving razors and portable sewing kits (for emergency-escape and rescue while in traffic jams, he thought), key chains which made eight sounds you’d never use, and pens which perpetually displayed a loop of greetings on a digital screen nearly too small to see at all. Next: Magazines about food and travel, magazines by and for women about their shared womanhood. Small books about Nostradomus, Christ, how to design your house in accord with the I-Ching, or trace the lines of time in a fractle algorithm which reflects the rush-flow of time and from the trends guess your future, or learn how to pray and "keep your woman under control and out of control"- advice from The Promise Keepers. Yada, yada. Next row, popular games miniaturized to the detriment of function for hours of confusion during car rides. Decks of cards, air scenters, cigarette lighters depicting cowboys and aliens. Then sitting on the bottom platform nearer the floor he noticed bins for various causes to deposit your unwanted change into, but there was something else about them.
Behind these three bins stood three semi-transparent people about six inches tall. They seemed to be talking to each other, and though he could hear them now he’d missed it before under the general sounds of the store. He grabbed his mother’s dress again and pulled on it. "Mom? Mom, what are those little see-through people?"
His mother turned and looked, her eyes almost glinting in half interest for a split second, "Oh, those are holograms dear. Do you remember when your father explained what a hologram is?"
The boy nodded. "What are they doing here?" he asked.
Though his mother felt she knew, she was even the more feeling adventurous, and so she said "Why don’t you go and ask them?" She’d seen displays like this before set up by someone like the red cross, for cancer research, or dolphin or redwood protection programs.
So he walked up to them, a little nervous, and said, "Excuse me? What are you doing here?"
One of the little men cleared his throat and said to the others. "Guys, we have a customer."
Then the middle man stood up. "We, my fine young man, are here to tell you tragic tales of your people’s own undoing, and to hope that you shall give us even a small bit of money which will go to repairing some of the damage that has been done." The small man smiled.
The boy turned to his mom and made an awkward ‘what’s the deal’ face. But his mother couldn’t hear what the little people were saying, and so she just smiled and motioned him back to the people, which he took as her word of honor on the respectability of these mannequins.
So, already loosing interest, the boy turned back to the three figures. "Good," said the middle man upon seeing his return. "There are three of us and we all specialize in different areas." Then he pointed up behind him and his two mates to a holographic screen which had just appeared. "And this will help too, I’m sure."
"I’m Jed," said the first little person, "and I’m going to talk to you about environmental destruction." And he grinned and winked and pointed at the boy.
"I’m Drat," said the middle one, "and I’m here about the misuse of information."
"And I’m Paula," said Paula, "and I’m going to show you videos about hostility and domination. Oh, and if at any time while we’re talking you want to give us any money, don’t worry about interrupting us, just put the coins or bills into the collection bin which corresponds to whoever is speaking."
The boy was starting to feel tired, he looked over at his mother but she was talking to the checkout person, and the person who’d just been in line before her had stayed to chat as well.
When he looked back he found Jed had stepped forward. The little man cleared his throat and put his hands together before him in a silent clap. "No one is exactly sure when human beings came to be here on this planet," he said. "Another way of saying this is that no one knows when there was a push which broke out beyond what anything animal or vegetable or warm blooded or cold blooded had ever been able to achieve. It isn’t thought that there were people who looked like you do any earlier than two hundred thousand years ago." Then the foot-and-a-half tall screen lit up. Immediately there appeared on it images of whatever the man was talking about; animated scenes, artifacts, etc. "But primates, who looked something like you, had been using fire more than five hundred thousand years ago. So determining when people, as modern people, physically arrived is a real mess. But there is something else which is a little easier to date, and that’s the effects of what people brought with them. What exactly it is which makes people different from other organisms is very hard to say. But two areas of it which are perhaps the easiest to talk about are Art, and your ability to abstract into linear space, giving you technologies, and many of the things people call ‘unnatural.’ Of course it isn’t quite so simple at that, but that’s the general idea.
"While people debate over the point of whether other animals experience what people experience between their ears, what you can say for sure is that people can express it in ways which nothing else can, and by virtue of that, that you can develop and empower it. For example: without humanity, the word ‘dream’ would only refer to when animals dream in their sleep, but people push the meaning of that word into a whole new territory, which never existed, or which was never expressed and developed, ever before. The case is pretty much the same for Language, and Love, and Art as well. In all of these areas you were building off of things which all animals did or had. There is an artistic sensibility inherent in nature, but before people it had never become something which existed alone which could be given a lone name. All animals experience some kind of love, but it was people who developed romantic love, and carried it quite a bit further. Love for people seems the most removed from a need for reproduction. And for Language. It is said that many animals use language, and some argue that language is part of the basis of anything which exists; but there is some difference between language as people use it and language the way it works into the rest of the world. In fact in discussions of language, non-verbal ‘communications’ are not considered to be language at all on their own. This doesn’t mean that body language isn’t language, but there is such a gulf between human and non-human language that the distinction has to be made somehow, even if it’s only made crudely.
"The only area which is easily talked about which is more or less completely unique, is the ability to abstract space into the linear visual field. And it isn’t clear why you have this ability. It is a big part of what allows you to step beyond anything which came before you. It is half of what makes your use of language so different. The other half is harder to articulate, but you could call it ‘meaning.’ So you could loosely say these are the two different sides of what is new and emergent about you. This ‘abstraction’ development led to Math, or it evolved into math, but it was the beginning of your being able to engage with the fabric of reality; which is something your species is still in the process of discovering. On the other side: meaning, which is somehow not abstract, the way it is with your species is practically something you brought with you when you came here, like your dream.
"Something which has meaning for a person isn’t completely separate from anything in nature, nature is full of meanings and memes, which is why it’s so hard to picture what is different about meaning as people experience it. It may be that meaning behaves differently under different conditions, and that there is a density of meaning which only occurs in people; and in some of the plants which people take because of the information they hold. Many people don’t know how full of meaning they are themselves until they’ve heard what a plant has to say on the matter. Different groups through history have even thought that when made dense enough, meaning forms a substance which is as real as physical substance. It is very difficult to say where meaning is, even though it seems to be everywhere. The fact is most people can’t see it. It’s hard to tell where something dense with meaning stops and where something inversely without meaning begins. You seem to be tangling yourselves up with this world, and shaping it with yourselves. You have dreams right?" He asked. And the boy nodded, and began trying to think of his favorite one in case the man asked. "Well, even though your parents probably don’t believe this, your dreams are stitched into the world. For example, freedom and democracy were good ideas someone thought of along the way, but once associated with your dream, they carry the dream wherever they go, and the two become intertwined. Freedom itself is a kind of dream. Do you ever dream of being able to fly, or stop time?"
The boy nodded, "Stopping time." The boy said. "I want to be able to move it around."
"Good," Said Jed, his little eyebrows raised. "Very good. Because there is something about meaning which is build on top of that, which is even harder to define. It has long been a wish of people to be able to make their dreams touch reality, and to be able to contact more easily the more dream-like aspects of the physical world. And there are parts of the world which are still, how should we say, unresolved? which animals other than people don’t seem to care much about. For example: I think most people would agree that people were the first animals to talk about the land of the dead, the idea that there is something alive which does not end when the body dies, but which goes off to do other things elsewhere; let alone to suggest bridging the two sides of that line between worlds."
Then Jed went back and sat down and drank from a glass of holographic water, and Drat stood up and walked forward, and the images of illustrations from Alice in Wonderland were replaced by equation charts and schematics and pictures of buildings and structures from around the world.
"Ever since people began to discover the tools with which they could image things from their imaginations and from their dreams," said Jed, "people have been creating great feats. Great bridges, dams, walls, towers, domes, arches, cathedrals, temples, pyramids, ziggurats, gigantic burial monuments often of great size and stature." Then the pictures of these things on the screen were replaced by pictures of written words and paintings. "Even written language is an enclosure of space just like a building is, and so is perspective in the world of art. And the works of art and fiction which people have created should be included in any list of ‘great feats of building.’ But there is something else which people don’t usually know about, and it is tangled up with why people usually don’t know very much about their own imaginations. As true as it is that there is something alive and of value in people which rests on the foundation of Nature, there is something within people which can swing the other direction with the same relation to Nature.
"The abstraction which you can use to image objects from the imagination, can be configured to drain nature of what it needs to be alive. Usually this involves throwing something out of balance, or harnessing and extracting something. The same ability which empowers you to nurture and select and develop, enables you to exploit and eradicate -should that be allowed to happen. And, though it may sound strange, even though the end result of what you are doing is fairly obvious when viewed from a distance, what causes these differences is obscure enough that it can’t be told to anyone. It can not be encapsulated as a exchangeable unit of understanding, or a meme. Events which seem to be going in one direction can reverse at the last minute. Or when all is said and done: something which seemed to be going one way at the time, can be seen to have been just part of something bigger which was going in the opposite direction. If you try to focus in very closely on what exactly this is, and turn it into a rational equation, you end up getting further from it; and it will slip entirely out of view. So we’ll back off from that for now, and let the point make itself if there’s any validity to it. Jed?"
Jed came jogging back up front. On the screen there came a slide show of images depicting everything from landfills, to strip-mining sights, to polluted water, animals dead from pollution, plant life in disarray, prisons, and then slides of people, hoards of white men in suits on city streets, women in kitchens, black and Hispanic work crews and housing projects, Indian reservations, the untouchables on the streets of India, holocaust concentration camp clips, rain forests being cut down for buildings and for short term poor soil farming, billboards, television channel surfing, religious evangelists, graffiti being removed from bare walls, rows of identical housing, trailer parks, shanty towns, scenes from classrooms all over the world, and on and on.
"An environment," said Jed, "Is not just a natural resource or space on the earth which can be taken care of or misused. There are many different spaces which people live in and all require a sense of responsibility, some sense of awareness, and the misuse of any of these spaces can be considered a pollution, or environmental destruction, or exploitation. In the same way that you throw recyclable material into landfills, more than 70% of which are taken up by recyclable paper of all things, you also create prisons and ghettos. In the same way that people ‘develop’ large areas of land without planting vegetation or even bothering to use tasteful architecture, vast expanses of your informational space are taken up by eye sores, or ear sores, which most people simply try to avoid; endless television and radio stations to be surfed through and discarded. In the same way that you use chemical fertilizers, and feed grain to cattle for beef while people go hungry, the pipeline of information for educating is directed hierarchically with wealthy white people at the top. And resources which could go to educating go to military build up. It is not just some of the environments of the living planet which are being mismanaged, it is also your own environmental mind space. There isn’t a developed nation on your planet which recognizes the human imagination as valuable, even though they are beginning to see trees and clean water and healthy ecosystems as valuable; which is definitely a start. The ecological spaces of animal and plant life should function as models for you to find what you do and don’t want to include in the places and tools you design. But people seem not only to be unaware of how they are handling these spaces, you don’t even seem to be aware that you are operating in all these different spaces. But to turn things around again, every space which you are misusing, or impacting negatively, is a facet of the world which people touch, and which you can lend what abilities you have to; even if that strategy becomes leaving the space alone to manage itself. Your people haven’t quite gotten to the point where you realize that you are the designers of your part of your world, and that your part of the world touches all other parts.
"So if the subject changes from ‘political management strategy’ to the best suggestions you can think of, which should be what’s driving the management-strategy anyway, then all of these spaces become sources for collage, and paints for the pallet, or grist for the mill. Every one of those spaces can achieve something of the smooth proliferation of a rain forest or a coral reef. And that’s just the beginning. While you are the creatures of mind and meaning, you haven’t yet discovered that either is real; they’re both only disbelieved rumors, like the new world was before the age of exploration.
"Your going to have to take back your world from the companies and agencies and institutions who are grinding it into pollution, or living off of it like parasites, as if it were money to be spent. All this is doing is chaining you down, and distracting you from your lives. If a person has to worry about food or becoming a slave, they can’t concentrate on what’s in front of them. And a lot of people sincerely believe, sad at it is, that there is nothing in the universe other than fighting and starving, because they have been kept from it for so long. They are unable to imagine being free because it seems so incredibly far away, it seems impossible. And getting through this isn’t something a committee can do. This is up to all of you to realize that your choices are what shapes the world. Your liberties aren’t being taken by bad groups who should be stopped by good groups. You’re the ones who give power to those control groups by cooperating. That is the only way they have any power. But people are realizing this, and it is getting harder to oppress people. So let’s take a look at that human arena. And let’s start by looking at ‘information,’ which is Drat’s department. Drat?"
Drat walked back up, "Thanks, Jed," he said. And they shook hands and Jed went and sat down. "I’m going to talk about some good things and some bad things in terms of information, but there isn’t such a thing as good or bad information. And I’m not saying: ‘information isn’t good or bad, it’s what you do with it,’ because that’s usually information too. As I go into this you should be able to see how it sort of becomes an issue of freedom and control. But I’m going to try to argue that this is a red herring. I think this is something that people get caught up on, and which is not true. When anyone analyzes ‘freedom and control’ it makes freedom slip from mind, and it eclipses the actual discussion. The same people who say that freedom is the opposite of control, would tell you that freedom doesn’t really exist. And these people will also tell you that meaning doesn’t really exist, and that your mind doesn’t really exist. These people are much more comfortable saying that something doesn’t exist than saying they don’t understand it.
"But I don’t want to explain why freedom is hard to understand, because I don’t know why that is. So I’ll just try to show you. So let’s start at some sort of beginning. For one thing, you have to ask, even if you don’t get an answer: What is information?
"It’s a rather large thing, most likely too large for us to ever say completely. Though of course we can still use the word, and move deeper into it which you can’t do with something static. In that sense it’s like ‘love’ or ‘meaning’ or even ‘language.’ The word refers to both the medium and the message, and most things between and besides. What people usually refer to when they say ‘information’ is something which is isn’t physical, but there’s a grey area where even mater might be seen and manipulated or transported as information. But generally: information is the non-physical mind space of this planet. And so it would be the space where all the minds on the planet interact with each other, and store information; kind of like the Internet. And as the Internet takes shape it becomes easier see and think about information. Usually when two people are just talking, neither one is aware that there is a space filled with air which must be crossed between the two of them; but this is easier to notice when talking over the Internet to someone on the other side of the planet. Often information is talked about more when two things have to be connected, or interfaced. This interface is very important, because in a world like yours, where people don’t understand who or what they are, they become whatever they understand about the interface between them and other people. A lot of people forget they’re doing this, and they end up defining themselves too narrowly. Many people are in the habit of only thinking of hardware or instructions as information, and this is how a lot of people view themselves, but they don’t see a connection. So if information is a way of looking at people and the space between people, what would a misuse of information be?
"First, let’s just list some of the bad and good things that happen with information; to see if anything jumps out of that." As he spoke the screen showed images of what he mentioned; speech clips, moral posters, booklets, laws documents, footage of buildings and the people inside.
"Some of the major misuses of information which have occurred in the twentieth century have been: The intense propaganda campaigns used by the Axis forces during WWII; the control of information behind the iron curtain in the Soviet Union, which is now mostly down and changing over; but in China and North Korea and in many smaller countries people still live under intense governmental regulation, inspection, and general meddling. In the world of science, which is supposed to be the temple of information, there is the bias against the quantum sciences, the chaos sciences, and they have a rather unscientific method of accepting or rejecting theories, from Tesla to Einstein to Bohr to Immanuel Velikovsky to Rupert Sheldrake. The body of scientific review is about as objective as a chamber of politicians and Lobbyists. There was the ban of psychedelics in the late 1960’s without any investigation or review or discussion; President Nixon’s claim that Timothy Leary, a scholarly LSD advocate, was the most dangerous man in the world; and of course the regulation of research; there is the dilapidation of schools, and the degeneration of collages into businesses; and the compartmentalization of the sciences into non-communicating groups or factions who don’t communicate at all but who are supposed to be working together; there is the government interference with encrypting information transmissions over the Internet, because they want to be able to access private information, for national security of course.
"That was only a partial list, but it should give you a general idea.
"Now some good things about information are: For art: the access to art itself, as well as tools and training, and new media for art. Teaching: the spread of information seems generally to be a good thing. Advanced interconnection between people closing the barrier of space: information technologies have allowed people to communicate who otherwise would not have been able to. Advancing people’s ability for self expression. The increase of personal and collective space: the Internet is a new environment which is a part of people which never existed before, though many things in the past have been similar within degree. Freeing people from the necessity of manual labor jobs. People extending themselves into linguistic networks. Video games. Accessibility to information, & ease of creating information: in the past it would take someone a month to do the same research paper that it would take two days to do now. Most governments who are leeching off of their people control the information in their territory to help themselves stay in power. They turn their land into a kind of information bubble, and they control what goes in and what comes out. But now that you have an Internet, the ability of anyone to control information in any area is quickly becoming a joke. People are going to access the information they want to find out about, and no one will be able to stop them.
"Ok, so those were the two lists. There are a few things which should jump out right away.
"It seems the good list is loosely centered around people, and the imagination; enhancing the freedom of people by increasing the accessibility of spaces and tools, etc. Which means that in your society it’s centered around something which isn’t thought to exist.
"In this same way the negative list seems to be centered around the restriction of people, or the controlling of people. Not just anything controlling anything else, but something trying to artificially control the behaviors and flows of the whole environment which it should be interacting and participating in. There is a difference between interacting and dominating, even though during interactions things do influence eachother.
"I said before that I didn’t think that you could simply say that ‘control’ is bad and ‘freedom’ is good. For one thing, a control is simply a structure, an object, and the lack of that isn’t particularly anything at all. It’s very hard to talk about this without missing the point.
"One of the biggest obstacles to using words is when someone gives a word two different definitions. For example, with "control." There is something which seems to be associated with control which is bad, but that doesn’t mean that that’s what ‘control’ means. So what do you do? How do you avoid mentioning control, even though it sucks the discussion down a false avenue? Restrictions and structures are close enough to eachother, that is it doesn’t make sense to say that restricting people is all bad. The back bone restricts people, it also supports them. But this may be where information being mind space comes into play. How much do you know about the space of the mind? The only space which people recognize other than physical space, is the hypothetical space of logic, and rationalism, and mathematical interactions. But is this the same space you go into when you dream at night? Is this the space of ghosts and monsters and mythic creatures? Of Elves and talking plants and puzzle boxes which hold the fates of nations and dynastic families? At some point your understanding of the world appears to collapse, if all you can do is deny whatever you can’t explain away. If there isn’t a word for something, it’s much easier to ignore than articulate.
"There is something you need to avoid which isn’t simply control, and there is something you should be free to do, which isn’t simply to not have any structures built.
"So what is it, if it isn’t a struggle between control and freedom? Which I still think is a trick identity, almost a test to see if you can see through the mask. If freedom is a skill, and not simply the absence of boundary alone, than what is the equivalent for possessive control? The problem is you can’t stop talking about control and structure, you can’t separate the neutral technical definition of ‘control’ from the pathology of domination. The word is doing the same thing TO your discussion as it’s doing IN your discussion. The whole thing’s become self-referential.
"If we were to stop looking at this point, what we would have is: letting information do what it does is good, meaning that letting people do what they will is good; which looks like saying that people are the definition of good, and that the best thing is for a person to live without having more obstacles than opportunities, and that if a person doesn’t take an opportunity that they were not ready for it. Leibniz said this kind of thing, and Voltaire yelled at him for it. But still, what is information doing, and what are people doing? It’s somehow inaccessible to speech.
"Because words can’t say things directly on the level of meaning, there is a barrier to what we can say about good and bad information. The furthest we can go is to say that it is bad to restrict people and information, but this leaves us with either: ‘people and information are the definition of good,’ or: that we have no connection to the difference between good and bad in any technical way. Does it really sound right to say that no person can do anything wrong? And would it even make sense if ‘good’ and ‘bad’ were just operations or functions of logic? But then: does this have to mean that no person can do anything wrong? If someone says that it’s better to give someone a choice, and that in time that people will learn from their mistakes, does that really mean that the person doesn’t think anyone will make any mistakes? It’s much easier to get caught in extremes than it is to see between the lines.
"This still doesn’t tell us what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are, but wasn’t supposed to. So what does it mean that we have no technical grip on right and wrong? Is that bad? Do we just throw the whole thing out the window because we can’t turn it into mechanics? This makes you take meaning out of the arena abstraction, and put it back into the area of the person’s life, or a story, even a fictional one; which is where meaning came from in the first place. You are living in some sort of story, only your species has convinced itself that stories aren’t real, and so you’ve make yourselves not real.
"So, are we talking about the relationship between structure and information? Something which people try not to talk about, and try to pretend they understand, is the nature of substance. What gives something substance? A lot of people pretend that substance is all physical and mechanical, which incidentally gives them control over substance, but in order to pretend this you have to declare that the imagination, and dreams, and feelings, that anything which isn’t visibly mechanical isn’t really happening, that somehow none of it exists. Which is precisely what your species has done.
"If you look at your history from a distance, there seems to be an oscillation, an alternating, between too much structure and then the release of that excess, which creates an identity, a meme, which is only ever partially exposed, which is something ‘free from structure’ and affirmative and substantial and good, but slippery and mysterious. So what happens when this mystery of yours is fully exposed?
"Another way of saying this, from a different view point, is that as the Internet expands, information crimes as we know them (on the level of the list of crimes we went through) are going to become impossible to commit. Or at least the crimes will become minor crimes. Hacking into a web sight and lying to a nation are different things. So far the issue has been, ‘are people free to live or not(?),’ but this means you have no such context for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ once people are free. Once people are free your whole understanding of reality is going to have to change, because you have biased possibility on subjugation.
"Life will be so different with even a small move toward the imagination, that your present vocabulary is unable to view it. And I’m spent, but Paula will pick it up. Paula?" Drat said, and started walking back to his chair.
At this point the display screen was showing a few dichotomies:
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And then the screen flickered off.
Paula walked up and bowed a short bow, her long brown hair in braids bounced off her shoulders and back again. "Now, somebody could probably argue that most of the environmental crimes, and a good deal of the misuses of information, were simply cases of negligence and a lack of foresight. If you don’t take care of something it will ware down, if you lie to get a short gain you set yourself back. But there is more to it, and it’s interestingly linked to a key facet of your history. A lot of your people use the phrase ‘male dominance’ to express a certain type of fairly compulsive control-crazed behavior. You don’t call it ‘male’ dominance because it is only observed in males, but rather the phrase comes from an earlier phrase which is simply a phenomenological description of social groups, in particular with primates. The way all primates, with the option of an exception in human beings, organize their social groups is in what is called a ‘male dominance hierarchy.’ This consists of the biggest, meanest, strongest, sharpest clawed, and longest toothed, and most loudly voiced, male taking control of everyone else, the weaker males, the females and the younger animals. This male is called the Alpha Male, and is the leader of the group in the least democratic of governments. But even though the origins of this model domination are predominantly physical, the same forceful pursuit of control occurs in spaces of information."
At this time Jed stood up and walked up behind Paula "I’m sorry, Paula. Can I just interject one thing?"
"Sure, sure."
"There is an interesting tidbit which is just sort of a side-note here, but it turns out to be a very poignant side-note. [cough] Do you remember how before we were talking about how it’s hard to say when exactly people physically emerged into the world?" The boy nodded. "Well, it turns out that there is one strange exception to the otherwise complete rule, which Paula mentioned, that primates live in male dominance hierarchies. For a comparatively brief period, say- between one hundred thousand years ago and ten thousand years ago, and it might have begun a bit earlier or later but that’s roughly it, human beings lived without being in a male dominance hierarchy. It is the only time in the history of all primates that any group or species has expanded beyond a social style based on physical strength and fighting ability. And up to this point your species hasn’t realized what kind of anomaly this is. And ‘coincidentally’," and with this Jed made quotation marks in the air with his fingers, "this is the same exact time as when people began reaching out into all the areas which they uniquely extended into. Art, religion, more complex societies, the development of language and fiction. It was in this short window of a break from dominance hierarchies that people stepped through into their present unique status."
At this point Drat came up and tapped Jed on the shoulder and said, "I’m sorry, do you mind if I just point out one thing?"
"No, no. Go right ahead." Jed said,
"Thanks." Drat said, "So, you probably guessed that there is a strange kind of end to this proliferation of development, this window? Did you figure that?" The boy squinted and then shrugged. "Because you’re pretty much back to living in a male dominant society, even though there are groups calling to try to turn that around. Anyway, there is another interesting ‘coincidence’ which happens at the point where your species relapsed back into male dominance. The end of the era of equality is also the place where people make another landmark realization, this was the ability to abstract the world into linear visual space; which I mentioned before. Now, you have been developing and elaborating on this for a long time, but it began with the insight which allowed agriculture, and buildings, sedentary living, and then written language not too long after; which on the surface doesn’t seem related to math. The relapse into dominance could even be tagged to the invention of war. A lot of people think that there was always war, but war was invented about ten thousand years ago. War and agriculture go hand in hand. Usually people say this is because with the surplus of farming you get ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ One of the greatest examples you have of architecture from 10,000 years ago are the grain towers of Jericho, built with high walls like a fortress to keep out the invading hoards of people who found they could steal other people’s surplus grain. The double edge of the ability to abstract is that not only can you build and cultivate and distill things you never had before, you also can fight to take things which other people made. This is sort of the beginning of the age of possession. Some think that at the same time people realized that planting food yields food next season, that a similar realization was made regarding sex and birth, in particular with the males wanting ‘his’ children to belong to him and not to the tribe. For any of a number of reasons, for a long time, men didn’t know which of the tribe’s children were ‘his.’ But out of somewhere came the desire to possess them. This strange transition point about ten thousand years ago is what people are taught in school to be the beginning of history."
Then Jed jumped in, "Many Christian Fundamentalists even believe it to be the beginning of the world, the universe, while the standard ‘respectable’ people just tell you that nothing relevant to people ever happened before that. They teach you that everything began with the invention of war and agriculture, and possession, as if it all began there."
Then Paula said, "But look, it wasn’t that simple.
"In that sense domination was a natural progression, and it implies that the only people who don’t squabble over who owns what are the people who don’t own anything, or it implies that ‘ownership’ is bad. But we have many examples of clashes between symbiotic cultures who were highly developed, and dominator cultures who came in and took what they could and burned the place down. Over and over there have been movements which have sought to overcome the domination-paranoid strength-hierarchy and each time it was destroyed. More happened than people just realizing they wanted what was ‘theirs.’ Most symbiotic cultures didn’t fear death, they saw it as moving back into the other side of the living world. But the Dominator groups were terrified of death, and would kill large numbers of people and animals as a tribute of grief when someone important died. There is an anxiety and distrust which wasn’t there before. Also the dominator groups turned women into second class citizens, if not worse, which is just wanton. There is something extra which people bring to Domination just like they took art further than bird songs. They will enslave, commit genocide, they will declare a person or a group to be fundamentally inferior to another, they will crush dreams thinking they are somehow threatening. The ‘Dominant’ forces in nature, from which you got the term, do operate in some balance, where at least they do not infringe upon their own ability to survive. But ‘dominance’ in people is a control and thievery beyond management. The manager has become the slave driver, the prison warden, the person or group who takes other people’s rights and ads them to their own power, and anything which is a threat to this power, which includes personal empowerment, is crushed to maintain the power that the controlling group has, even if it destroys what they are trying to hold on to so tightly. And under this strict rule you have been trained to feel guilty for saying you are not free, when you would not accuse anyone in history, who was less free than you are now, for saying so. Why do so many of you assume that you are as free now as you will ever be? To some degree a lot stands on people not being told about their history, in particular that the efflorescence into humanity occurred during the first breech in dominator politics ever to touch a primate.
"This is part of the dominator model, not to tell people things which would suggest that there is more freedom than what they have. As it is now, people don’t see themselves as living in Dominator cultures. As long as people don’t have a context for something it is very hard for them to recognize it, let alone criticize it. The Renaissance in Europe was the first time in the West when people were taught history with some sense of a place in time, only back then they began the story with Greece and Rome. Today you begin with Agriculture. And arguably you haven’t known that this earlier period was really a period until about the 1970’s when more details began coming in from anthropologists. Now for the first time in many years you are beginning to hear about your Goddess, among other things. But for 30 years this information, now in the open again, has been suppressed and sand blasted into a corner of ‘fringe extremism.’
"So the ‘emergent’ qualities of your species came out during a period which ended when you are taught that everything begins. Catal Huyuk [Cha-tal Hue-Yook], a giant Goddess worshipping city much earlier than the western Indo-European cities you learn about in school, fell in 5,700 BC. In 1,500 BC the small flourishing goddess outpost on Minoan Crete, which for all its art had no army, was crushed by the Myceneans. And on until the most recent suppression, in 1966 when hallucinogenic plants were made schedule one illegal in direct conflict with your own Constitution, and in conflict with common sense since one of the plant ‘Schedule one drugs,’ on the list is also a neurotransmitter in your own brains; that’s DMT. Aside from all sloppiness and lack of attention, the most vital part of your species has been under outright attack in plain view for ten thousand years. Do you think the other people shopping in this store have any idea what is going on around them? Do you think they know what their imaginations are capable of, which they have lost to neglect or crushed out of fear? Do you think they know there is still a war going on against half of the world, which includes half of themselves, which, by playing along with the people who enslave them, they are fighting on the side against their own freedom? Do you think they know that there is such a thing as life which isn’t under the thumb of domination? Do you think they have even seen the edge of what they are shutting out of their lives, the loss of which eats away at them every day of their lives? Did you know there is name, which everyone knows, for the oppression the human spirit lives under? Have you ever heard anyone say ‘The human condition’? And yet people think it is simply a quality of the world, never thinking that how you live could have anything to do with it. People die inside because there in no meaning in their lives. ‘Meaning’ has become such a trivial thing, which people just assume isn’t really there; or if it is there that they’ll never find it. They think it is a pipe dream. And as long as people believe this, as long as people have learned to be helpless, then the Dominator culture doesn’t have to lift a finger, the people put on their own shackles on every morning when they get up. If you would stand up right now in the middle of this store and tell people that they are living in chains, that they should wake up, and snap out of it, and stand up for themselves for once, and take seriously the idea that their lives are important, if you said that right now they would probably be completely surprised that you would say such a thing. They would laugh at you, or get mad at you, or solemnly think you were crazy, and then they’d quickly go back to the process of killing off all their dreams, and they’d take their stations operating that great machine which grins life into fuel. They wouldn’t believe it. They don’t know their own history, they don’t know their own present. They don’t know what that dream or spark or click is which makes people different, and they can’t see that that spark is being taken away from them. It’s like their walking while asleep, in or a trance, unable to see the dream to claim it for their own, unable to realize the nightmare and reject it. If only there were a single act of awakening serving both these acts in one motion off in some impossible and natural direction… But who knows, perhaps you don’t believe a word of this. Perhaps you will go back to your life and never remember any of this. Perhaps it would be too painful to realize, or perhaps you just don’t understand, or perhaps this is all a trick and you know better. Anyway. It’s been wonderful talking with you. Take care of yourself."
"Yes," Jed said.
"Splendid." Drat said. "Well, Deja Vu,"
"Deja Vu," said the others, waving together. And then they turned around and walked toward the holographic screen which was now blank, and it began to spin and changed shape into something like a great decadent spinning flower, and they walked through it, and just like that they were gone.
The boy ran over to his mother and tugged at her dress, and she gave him a quarter. "Go ahead." She said, with a great big grin and receding gums. He tried to give it back to her, he wanted to ask her all kinds of questions that were spilling out onto his tongue, he wanted to tell her what he had just heard, but she was back to talking with the other ladies at the checkout. Not knowing what to do with the quarter he walked back and put it in one of the three canisters, he heard it knock against something as if fell, and he heard a strange humming tone sound.
He looked out the window of the car as they pulled out of the spot, the tall plants waving back and forth in front of the window in the back of the car. His mother sighed, "It feels so good to buy some plants," she said. They pulled out of the lot and onto another road, and from there they went streaming onto the highway which would take them home. He looked out the window. He wondered what all the people who were driving were thinking. ‘What does she mean when she says that?’ he wondered. He thought his mother sounded like an alcoholic, or at least now she did. For the world to be such a big place, and to do nothing but get a high off of something, consumption. To forget? Did she even know what was happening around her, doing nothing about it but forgetting in a fervor. He couldn’t decide which would be better, or more excusable, to forget or to never have known. What a choice. Was it bad to rationalize the behavior of his parents? Did he not owe them a respect and reverence? But how could he now? He didn’t want to be a rat. But why hadn’t he ever been told about who he was? About his own past? An education of reluctant admission. Outside the window the world seemed volatile, calm but thin and ready to erupt from some social or mental thrust of linguistic magma which could not be contained by the cold crust of the controlled surface.
When they pulled up at the public swimming pool, his mother turned and said, "Your suit and towel are in the bag, all right? Your father will be here at six to pick you up. Give me a kiss." He kissed her and scrambled out the door. He waved his id card as he walked past the security desk. The sight of the pool was like a breath of fresh air. People playing, the sun out, people sunbathing, nothing but the sounds of laughter, it was a light happy feeling. He looked around, and he saw a young woman, about twenty perhaps, looking in her bag or something. She began shaking the bag furiously, finally dumping out its contents all around her in the grass, as if a five year old, control lost in a hissy-fit. Then she greedily snatched up what she’d been looking for. She calmed down, and began putting the suntan lotion on her arms and face. Suntan lotion. He thought of his mother saying how it made her feel better to buy plants. The sun tan girl laid out, smiling, calm, assuaged. While nothing was wrong with swimming, something wasn’t quite right. The top crust of the swimming pool scene was beginning to fall apart before his eyes. Nervous inhibited people, trying to create an answer in a place to swim which would make the world outside disappear, which would make them disappear. Two older boys walked by him laughing nervously. Before it would have sounded like the natural nervousness of youth, but he could see something corrosive behind it, almost an agony in the pauses between the laughter, which itself seemed forced somehow. Was it agony because they were not free, a realization too crushing that it had to be suppressed, bottled away? He thought, the problem ‘outside’ (as if they could get away from it) is only there because we don’t look at it. Were these people the scared slaves of a titanic force, themselves guiltless, or were they the force itself in pseudo-schizophrenic denial? This strange people, the originators of slavery, persecution, domination, and of freedom, expression, exploration, wonder, and mystery; simultaneously. Before them the planet had seen neither but in suggestive pieces. Who knew about this? Historically, was this a major subconscious phenomena only recently making its way through to conscious awareness? Despite that they wore it like neon sign, was anyone else out there consciously aware, of either the nightmare or the dream? And who was he now that he’d had a taste?
He walked out from under the roof of the entrance way and turned toward the locker room. But he stopped when he saw a group of kids off on the far side standing under an oak tree. They were all watching him. And they weren’t dressed for swimming, their bags were all heaped in a great pile yards away. He walked down the hill and over to the group of them, and stood there holding his bag in his hand.
A girl, who was a few years older than himself, walked up to him, took his bag and tossed it into the pile with the others. "You again?" she said. "What’s in the bag this time? Chocolate covered Scarabs?"
The boy began to worry. "What-do-you mean? I’ve never seen any of you before. I mean it." He said.
"Hay," one of the boys said, "You know, he’s not half bad." And he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and turned it upside down and shook it, and out of it came a small lizard which fell into the grass and scampered away.
"What does your note say?" said the girl.
The boy just squinted nervously. Then he felt something on the back of his neck and he turned around, and standing there was a tall police man. The thick necked cop leaned over and put his hands on his knees. "Hello there, do all of you know where your parents are?"
The girl grabbed the boy’s hand and pulled him back with the rest of the them. A boy in the back with thick glasses spoke up, "We’re here with our cub scout den, Officer. We’re waiting for Mr. Manly to show up. But I don’t think he’s arrived. If you’d check the entrance to help us find him, it would save us ever so much trouble. He should be here any time."
The man stood up straight, slowly, and turned to look at the entrance of the pool grounds. The kids ran as fast as they could over to where all the families were sitting in a clearing, and then they scattered, the girl dragging him with her, and they all sat down just about anywhere, blending in, so it would be impossible to find them. "Wait," the girl whispered in his ear. "Don’t stand up quite yet."