LOOT THE WORLD WITH FLASH JORDAN

"Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture."
- marshall mcluhan, the gutenberg galaxy

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THE HISTORY LIE



"history is not doomed to repeat itself. history cannot repeat itself. history, as commonly understood, does not exist... history is a drug: it provides an illusion of control where none exists." - flash jordan, the felt way

how can we explain the seemingly obvious cycle of time? the cycle of creation, collapse, regeneration? the cycle of our shift from an oral society to a literate society and then back again?

much like a man is said to see his life flash before his eyes before experiencing certain and sudden death, time remembers itself as it collapses (the man who loses his hand to an axe thinks only of the joy and pain his hand has brought him). time recognizes itself, leaving an indelible imprint. in turn, humanity has its own recollection of time, and this is known as history. there is no field more wrought with distortion than history, because history exists for the sole purpose of distortion. the closer humanity comes to its own collapse, the more religious humanity becomes about history. the distortions lead to distruction.

why is there history?
man cannot predict events in time or change the course of time, he can only choose:
1)to accept it/reject it
2)to remember it/forget it

and neither of these choices can even be made consciously! this does not mean that humanity is a slave to time, but rather that time is something broader than what man would have it be. man does not yet have workable maths with which to massage time (time moves with humanity as the moon moves with the sea). man can only work with his own recollections, and his recollections of others' recollections: history. history is man's attempt to fool himself into believing that he is in control of time. history is one of man's greatest lies, and its vaulted importance in our society is integral to its own survival as "truth" (one cannot mangle the untouchable; one cannot open a lost box).

how humanity bought the history lie
how has history acquired untouchable status in the western world? through fear. any commonly accepted view of the history of humanity contains terrible events. this terrible remembered past, coupled with the misconception (by the public) that the future can be altered through collective effort, gives the public the illusion of history being a useful tool (history is the bomb that can destory the terrifying unknown coordinates of the future).

the secret danger of history
instead of serving as a tool for the good of humanity, history can only act as chains, wrought by their author for the purpose of furthering the acceptability of the author's decisions regarding his own personal opinions/recollections. all of humanity wants to be loved, and every individual is the conscious center of their own universe. we all desire the great mass of humanity to gather around our perceived order. when an altar is built for history, the scrifices are offered up to the opinions of the men who wrote it.

in conclusion
the statement that "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is false on several levels:
1)no event in time can be replicated willfully or accidentally
2)the chaos of mass individual opinion leaves us forever powerless to change the course of history
3)history is memory. the memory of others. we could only ever learn from history what we could learn from each other. whether this learning is accompanied by the stamp of 'history' or not is irrelevant.

Love, Flash Jordan