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To: Jerry in Omaha who wrote (337)	7/4/1998 6:14:00 AM
From: Stitch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3536

Jerard, Many thanks for that link. It is a fascinating read. I need a bit of time to digest it however. Best, Stitch

To: Jerry in Omaha who wrote (337)	7/4/1998 11:28:00 AM
From: Jerry in Omaha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3536

The Y2K problem we all face and the uncertain outcomes it represents are anticipated in Philip Slater's book clearly in 1974. Continuation of excerpt from Earthwalk: "I observed that control means putting a bit of ourselves in the environment. But which bit? Something good or something bad? Something known or something unknown? Of what is our man made environment composed? From what parts of ourselves do these choices come? Norman Brown summarizes psychological thought on this question, and it is not reassuring. "The self...is maintained by constantly absorbing good parts... from the outside world and expelling bad parts from the inner world." If this is true, then pollution is not merely and accident -- a function of carlesssness or old-fashioned industrialism. Pollution is an inescapable part of humanity's relationship with the environment -- our very identity rests upon psychic pollution, just as our physical integrity rests upon expelling organic wastes. But the environment can absorb a man's organic wastes, and even turn them to good use; and as to this psychic pollution, what difference to fantasies make? Let him project his evil-heartedness wherever he likes -- what does it matter? The danger arises when a man's psychic excretions are given material form -- when his projections appear as physical objects. We cannot ignore his fantasies of superpotency when they are represented by overpowered automobiles that claim a thousand lives a week; his paranoid fears when they are expressed in bugging devices and security data banks; his hatreds when they appear in the form of a nuclear arsenal capable of eliminating vertebrate life on our planet. Our psychic excretions, in other words, show an annoying tendency to become part of our real environment, so that we are forced to consume our own psychic wastes in physical form. Instead of being recycled, as they are in emotional exchanges between people -- thus keeping the level of psychic poison relatively constant -- their materialization leads to increasing poison accumulation. People have known for centuries that any place inhabited by large numbers by humans is not healthy. Recycling requires an acceptance of the mortality of individual structures, and the technological impulse -- that is, the tendency to give material rather than interpersonal form to psychic impulses -- is strongly influenced by the need to deny human mortality. A science-fiction film some years ago dramatized the problem of psychic waste materialization in the following way: Space explorers discovered a planet that had once boasted a civilization of the highest order, the inhabitants of which had found a way to materialize thoughts directly. The explorers could not understand why this civilization had vanished utterly, until gigantic monsters began to appear. They then realized that the planet's inhabitants had neglected to consider that unconscious wishes and fantasies would materialize along with their consciously purposed thoughts, and had been destroyed by this lack of perspicacity. This drama is a parable for our time. Our own reality differs from the space fantasy primarily in that (1) thought materialization takes a longer time, and (2) there is no separation between conscious and unconscious products. Every technological advance contains within itself a monster, for each one expresses in one form or another man's monstrous narcissism as well as the simple desires of which it appears superficially to be an expression."

To: Jerry in Omaha who wrote (337)	7/4/1998 5:09:00 PM
From: Harmattan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3536

Jerard, Thanks for linking to Malone's article. I feel like I just endured a techno-philosophical whirlwind tour through Plato's cave. But in the end the article's POV is metaphorically more likened to an alcoholic sitting at a table, halfway through a bottle of fine Scotch, ruminating on the inevitable consequences of his disease, even as he puts the bottle to his mouth. He will not put lifestyle meat to the bones of his words. Nor will I or you or we (as a whole). All summed up in the phrase, " we are doomed to repeat history". Picking up the ball and running with the concept of human "progress" ( in its late 20th century incarnation - the digital revolution) requires one humungous set of blinkers to shield one from the total experience of humankind from day one to now. In response to But its different this time I highly recommend, to the serious, a study of Rene Guenon's thoughts on cycles. A relatively philosophically accessible starting point might be his book, The Reign of Quantity and Signs of the Times in which he rigorously argues (demonstrates?) that the conceptual movement over time from "qualification" to "quantification" (and the computer microprocessor is the ultimate "quantifier"), from wholeness to fragmentation (specialization), from unity to "unit" (byte), is a process that necessarily carries the seeds of its own destruction within. Thanks again for the link and BTW, you wouldn't know how to find an electronic version of the Tom Wolfe article that Malone refered to, would you? ghunk