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17
Dec
2009

Is there a relationship between the singularity and 2012?

By zlrstavis

Daniel Pinchbeck doesn’t seem to think so. In the article about him in the rolling-stone-griagoriadis-pinchbeck-article-screenshot August edition of Rolling Stone, Vanessa Grigoriadis reports the author saying the following about 2012:

“But there is no escape,” his eyes burning into mine. “We have to fix this situation right fucking now, or there’s going to be nuclear wars and mass death, and it’s not going to be very interesting. There’s not going to be a United States in five years, OK?”

However, when I spoke to Daniel Pinchbeck, he asked me what came next. As an integral theoriest, speaking to Quetzocoatl, I was able to figure out the answer in about five seconds. In fact, Daniel Pinchbeck just asked me what was next?Was just speaking to Daniel pinchbeck about the new system. His works are on the singularity (of 2012), and as an integral theorist in my own right, I drew on the massive works of Ken Wilbur to offered a synthesis with History (and posterity, based on the works of Ken Wilber). Mr. Pinchbeck is afraid of the point we are at in history because he doesn’t see beyond it. However, it is only useful to associate points with history so we can discuss the greatness of its arcs and sweeps with more precision.

As Gorgias says,

“For if all men on all subjects had both memory of things past and awareness of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar, since as things are now it is not easy for them to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future. “So that on most subjects most men take opinion as counselor to their soul, but since opinion is slippery and insecure it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure successes.”

Gorgias tells us. To understand the sweep of history, so that we get a better perspective of the singularity and 2012 with it.

According to the following diagram of Wilber’s integral theory of consciousness, evolutionarily we should be progressing from an agrarian, republican state to one on a global, informational level. <strong>Why then is the republic only now becoming possible?</strong>

In part, this could be because of the loss of the Republic until the 19th century, when it was discovered that Augustine had written his City of God over the Cicero’s manuscript of The Republic, pillaging both his framework and the constitution for his own construction. Although the manuscript now is (oh!) much more fragmented because of this, once again thanks go out to the Catholic Church for preserving civilization through the dark ages.

<strong>What should we be planning for after the singularity? Is there a right answer? </strong>As a keeper of the platonic keys, I can tell you there is a correct thing to be planning for after the singularity, and (and not bogus Burner culture in some faux 60’s revolution, because we all saw how far that went. The 60’s, psychedelics, that’s where we get our afterculture, but not our model.

According to Ken Wilber’s diagram, the afterculture should be a global information one :) . This actually fits well into the republic, which is necessarily more democratic (by modern standards) than a democracy, and should include (literally) universal suffrage. To a rebirth of knowledge!

For those of us who see clearly, it clear that those who scratched their heads when Hegel said history had ended need to rethink the nature of history. What is history?

For Baudrilliard, who wrote on the simulacrum in 1923, histories’ Baudrillard’s time was perhaps a bit more depressing,

“Politicians on both Left andnd Right are equaly useless. But those onn the Left wear themselves out in finding a moral angle for their depression; they ha not quite the measure of their real corruption. Whereas all out free market liberalism provides those on the Right with an insight that is fully equal to this depressed situation.”

From his standpoint in history, both his views and and his theories on the simulacrum seemed a little more fatalistic. But this is a Renaissance, a time of rebirth and rediscovery of the gods and their works. Whereas from his point of view, it seemed that history was ending, now we see that it is beginning anew.

When one has a linear view of time, it is very difficult to get back to point A from point B. However, if one has a cyclical view of time, they bend all time to their dimension. Geometry and tautology and trigenometry carry us through.

If we have hte key to understanding history, then the mystery of its knowledge will be revealed.

What is the simulacrum? [can hypertext to thesis] When Cicero envisioned the future from the standpoint of a Rome in crisis from agrarian legislation

Integral Theory of Consciousness

For ie have failed to take advantage of the alignment of events heralding the existence of the informational planetary ___, thus plunging consciousness back to the agrarian nation-state status, at seems wt say [poss. in 129], such a time as when Rome faced that first agrarian law that brought the whole republic tumbling down.

Moreover, it seems we have also failed to reach the state of that Republic in its height in 63 BC. If we cannot even achieve the ideal state of governing a nation, how do we propose to organize a (community[much less lead an offense] on the global scale)?

He predicted at that time that agrarian legislation was the state of affairs that threatened both the position of the people in society (most land was owned by the wealthy, who kept a large number of slaves, leaving citizens landless) and to corrupt the republic. If senators could sell of land as gold, if the republic was just gold, then . Likewise, black gold, and corrupt interests of major officials of our government seeking

How come the thing which was possible before is only manifesting now? Was it because the works of Cicero were hidden for so long?

Let’s turn to our most integral thinker to date to report to us thinking since then. Accordingn to the bottom left quadrant of his theory, the evolution of consciousness, society (how does he define this quadrant?) shows that we proceed from ann a

which validates our research.

Now what does this tell us? This tells us that the people are now once again poised to take their place at the base of the republic, sweeping the mat out from under certain officials feet, taking back their rightful place at the basee, thus making an ideal republic, which is a mixed constitutional system. Thus the people are as an important part of a republic as elected officials, as it is their duty to vote upon the laws.

Likewise, if this is now possible, two thousand years after we progressed passed the agrarian state in Wilber’s diagram (thus ascribing points 129 BC and 2012 – simply so that we can have a discussion, and to this point we can ascribe not only the end of the galactic cycle as bespoken by the myans, but the end of a cycle of the simulacrum of history as we move to the next phase of our evolutionary history and it is convenient to begin talking about how to go about the future now that it has arrived. Thus it become now and it is our duty to project the future for the next epoch.

Thus the singularity is a useful denomination for this transition. It refers to the acceleration of communication, thus accelerating the plans of history to their zentith as events and communication begin to happen instantaneously, opening out onto new possibilites. Just as the fall did for Rome can be modeled upon the diagramn for facollapse of the wave theory in quantum physics, the singularity can likewise be a physical and historical phenomenon. As a poinnt in flux, it is a time of possibility.

Lest we fritter it away on Burning Man like the hippies did with the Civil Rights Movement, living in the moment and forgetting the glorious lessons of the past. This is where acquire our afterculture, but should we let that be our model? it is important that we do not go forth blindly but bearing our ideals, carrying the wisdom of ancient philosophers who taught us the meaning of truth and justice with us. Lest we be disillusioned, Plato wrote a Republic, and Cicero wrote a Republic as well, and it is important that we use their words to understand the agrarian state, and our political system, as we move into a global era of information.

Even as with the internnet we sweep the mat out from under the feet of the administration that attempted to usurp our republic, we have access to the knowledge to preventing such a thing from happening again. This is rightly a Renaissance and the launch of a golden age. As we rediscover the beauty of the ancient authors, our new ability to understand them will balance our fall, preserve our state from collapse, saving our civilization, an important stepping stone in our further quest for meaning.

In them is preserved all the ancient knowledge to steer the ship of state in the right direction, and the knowledge to usher in an alchemical age for us. Rather than be disillusioned by the cylcle of decay affecting our history, government, and philosophers, like Baudrillard, let us remember that even by Zarathustra’s “God is dead” didn’t mean that God was truly dead; in a Dionysian spate Nietzsche said we killed him. Nor was he sacrificed with Quizalcoatlean grizzliness. Like history, he is only being reborn!

Nor do we have to manifest the next epoch before its time, but allow it to grow organically. Rather than having a specific plan for this age, let us remember the ideals of our forefathers. This is the plan we have to set in motion to prevent corruption of our government and gaps in our knowledge in the future.

Originally posted 2007-12-26 12:40:50. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Category: Integral Theory, Philosophy, Simulacra  Tags: , , , , ,  One Comment
17
Dec
2009

We came through a dark age

By zlrstavis

WE came through a dark age and the end of the ice age for christ’s sake. and everyone’s trying to pretend like it didn’t happen. But those were dark years for Europe and Rome. That we camGe through it we thank to the providence of Cicero and the Greeks (at Constantinople) for carrying us through.

 

Scholarship will try to tell you otherwise but trying to forget that there was a dark age only causes us to  pay less tribute to the ancients, to whom we owe all the renaissances and revivals of classical thought, certainly petrarch but also newton owe a great deal to classical "philosophy" (science meets spirituality).the fundamental knowledge was there.

c If all philosophy is just rheotirc, then the reublic is very important. Not only must we fulfill the former age, but we must be the vangaurd for the

 

where did the ancients get it all? there have been many ages of human history, the greeks recorded with the alchemist hesiod that they’d come out of a dark age.

Originally posted 2007-12-08 08:41:42. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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17
Dec
2009

The Paradox of Elections in Democracy

By zlrstavis

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Thomas Jefferson

I’ve seen plenty of posters identifying our American system with the Athenian’s democracy. When defining democracy, or what type of government we have, people tend to get a little confused.

For example, people think that voting makes a country a democracy, when in fact voting was considered undemocratic in the ancient world, as it is considered “mob rule,” or ochlocracy, which is the opposite of democracy. Rather, voting is characteristic of a republic.

In Athens, rather than elections, every eligable candidate put his name in an urn, from which one was selected. It was the Romans who had elections for important public offices, and theirs were notoriously stacked. Elections there were held once a year, so that people from the countryside, large estates mostly owned by the senatus turned nobilitas , and manned by slaves, or farmers who rarely came in, even though their vote comprised the largest percentage of the comitia. Citizens of the city, although numbering about one million, had less representative votes. The 51 states are divided unevenly in the senate, like the comitia. Contrary to popular belief the United States was not founded to be a democracy, but a republic.

An Athenian urn

An Athenian urn

“In ancient democracy, as now, wealth made a difference to elections; people without money or family connections almost never won elective office in Athens. Because the Athenians wanted to curb the power of wealth, they severely restricted the powers of those who held elected office. So the representative bodies in Athens were filled not by elections, but by a lottery that drew from a large panel of citizens who had met certain conditions, and were drawn equally from the ten tribes (Paul Woodruff. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. Oxford UP: New York, 2005.).”

In their “Cycle of Governmental Decay,” Polybius, like his amicus, the great republican statesman Cicero, defines a republic as a mixed constitutional system. Composed of three parts, each part left to itself would decay into its opposite. Kingship into tyranny, oligarchy into aristocracy, and democracy into mob rule. Anarchy, or a power vacuuum, just leads to another king, and so the cycle continues…unless, at some fortuitious moment, it is formed into a republic.

In addition to as Plato, both men considered the republic to be the most evolved and ideal form of government – not democracy. Our government demonstrates the same agreement between the three branches of government as did the Magna Carta and our own constitution. Even in Athens, which we consider a top example of a democratic city (besides Rousseau’s mountaintop villages) a number of notable Greeks, including philosophers like Socrates, who disagreed with the Athenian system, proponed a republic as the more ideal system.

However, a republic has many enemies. Foremost, corruption. It is like decay, the anti-republic. Caused by money, corruption can be encouraged by ignorance in the voting populace. In a mixed-constitutional system, where the republic is for the people, by the people, ignorance among the people allows corruption into the republic, encouraging avarice into the senate, and can cause the republic to fall.

Even as our collective consciousness continues to evolve, we have hardly begun to comprehend our own systems.

“It is her spirit, customs and constitution that we are bound first to learn, both because she is the motherland of all of us, and because we must needs hold that wisdom as perfect went to the Establishment of her laws as to the acquisition of the vast might of her empire.” -Cicero, De Oratore, I. xliv. 196

Originally posted 2007-05-16 12:18:19. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Category: Statecraft  One Comment
17
Dec
2009

Simulacrum in Philosophy

By zlrstavis

The simulacrum has long been of interest to philosophers. Although I stumbled upon this concept myself, it has a long and distinguished lineage, including Plato, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Baudrillard, of which I am only the latest.

Last but not least, indeed, the concept comes full circle. For the simulacrum is the model of history itself (and a properly non-linear one). It is fitting that the concept the philosopher’s who launched it, hacked it, and later during WWII were despondent about it (Baudrillard lamented the end of history), now rises anew: for with the singularity, history can be reborn.

Nietzsche himself represents philosophy coming full circle since Plato; he is a dialectical antithesis, taking up the reigns of the arguments of Glaucon and Callicles in Plato’s Republic, playing chaos to Plato’s order. Indeed, he represents the decay, or break down of philosophy, a sign that it is completing a lifecycle (and ready to be born anew.

Wikipedia sums up the lineage of our discussion on this philosophical topic, the simulacrum. This will be useful to you integral theorists who are trying to grasp how the simulacrum fits into all this:

In his Sophist, Plato speaks of two kinds of image-making. The first, faithful reproduction, attempted to copy precisely the original. The second distorted intentionally in order to make the copy appear correct to viewers. He gives an example of Greek statuary, which was crafted larger on top than bottom so that viewers from the ground would see it correctly. If they could view it in scale, they would realize it was malformed. This example from visual arts serves as a metaphor for philosophical arts and the tendency of some philosophers to distort truth in such a way that it appeared accurate unless viewed from the proper angle.

Nietzsche addresses the concept of simulacrum in The Twilight of the Idols, suggesting that most philosophers, by ignoring the reliable input of their senses and resorting to the constructs of language and reason, arrive at a distorted copy of reality.

Modern French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. Where Plato saw two steps of reproduction — faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum) — Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality, (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretense of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatever.”

Baudrillard uses the concept of god as an example of simulacrum. In Baudrillard’s concept, like Nietzsche’s, simulacra are negatively perceived, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which accepted ideals or “privileged position” could be “challenged and overturned.”

Simulacra are in fact, the model we collectively use for our reality. If we’re revealing the symbol now, that’s pretty apolcalyptic. Cicero uses it as the model for the republic, and after hearing my Cicero professor mention it a number of times in class, I was surprised when he greeted my paper topic with the question, “What is the simulacrum?”

My first piece to answer him, I felt, did not do his question justice. And so, I used the simulacrum to historiography my history of Rome. My reviewers wrote, “Professor Billows thought you were doing something new, using the simulacrum as an analytical tool,” the head of the History Department at Barnard wrote in her revivew, referring to the head of the Ancient Studies Department at Columbia. “He said, ‘there she does something which isn’t just what you’ll find on the better modern literature on the topic.”

For more on the import of this, check out Simulacrum and Singularity, in which it is expounded how we should NOT despair, for these world wars are indeed the dialectical argument of the republic playing itself out, and until we will learn the lesson of the republic (in doing so, we will learn how to bring the wisdom of the last age into the next one), thus launching the next epoch.

Actually, maybe that article relates it to the launch of the next aeon.

Originally posted 2007-09-09 23:39:03. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Category: Integral Theory, Simulacra  Tags:  Leave a Comment
17
Dec
2009

What is the Fourth Estate?

By zlrstavis

Any with a voice to speak is a member of their government.” -Cicero

If you flip to the BBC, you can still find thriving radio programming: the like which has not existed in the US since TV first hit the airwaves. Taxpayer-supported media of Britain means that older forms of media – including newspapers – will continue to be supported. But with no such system in place in the U.S., what does the future hold for our Fourth Estate?

The Fifth Estate has always been clearly figured in the British collective conscious. Edmund Burke, who coined the term, was a British politician.

"Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all."
This historical recognition, in England, of the press as a branch of the government led to the British Broadcasting Network, a nationalized media system.

In England, citizens support the BBC with a tax, and so the media is beholden to the taxpayers. American media is beholden not to the people, but to advertisers.

No doubt these taxpayers will continue to support England’s newspapers, as they supported the radio. Meanwhile in the U.S., while we had Burke’s quote, we also had advertisers paying the bills, and no one seemed inclined to nationalize the media system in the United States until it was on the verge of collapse.

We lacked the British conscious of this topic. The discussion of the fourth estate in Britain is so complex and vibrant it makes the writhings of our press look like children’s play. Is a similiar situation how the BBC started?

We could place the blame on our own media for not standing up to this system they griped under, but it seems unfair given their impending fate. Does the discussion include freedom of the press as the root of their “fiscal” independence? Perhaps the media feared a propaganda state, or lacked the momentum to create a nationwide movement of the press.Nonetheless, the American press did have an opportunity to move the nation away from advertising-funded media.

Having failed/by this fluke, the unique opportunity is created to have journalist citizenry in the United States, to have – in effect – a fourth estate. Actually, Steven D. Cooper calls bloggers the fifth estate. We’ll see if the fourth line of defense hold. Either way, if citizens of the world take to the streets with their camera phones and see it as their duty to report on local news, it would be a triumph for the press. We could be looking at an evolutionary phase in the media.

Originally posted 2007-12-05 22:31:42. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Category: Statecraft  Tags:  Leave a Comment
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