The really deep doubts
Jan. 5th, 2004 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aberrantangelsThis is that one more in-character Hugh entry I promised. It's based on a true story. Originally, the parts where he used the event as a jumping-off point to discourse on Trinity Universe phenomena were to be LJ-cut. Now, the whole thing is being cut.
A while ago, I got into a discussion with a friend about objective reality and whether it's meaningful to speak of it. It got me thinking about a variety of topics. Her question was, if you see the color green differently from the way other people see it, what's the reality?
Well, in the case of color, the reality is a wavelength of light measured in angstroms. The colors (red, blue and green as well as yellow) are, in the immortal words of Stoppard's Guildenstern, "a mystical experience shared by everybody." And if they don't all experience it the same (if, say, one person's "green" looks like what another person would call "brown"), well, Eris tells us "The Truth is five but men have only one name for it." If they use the same name for the same wavelength, in my considered opinion, the difference in their perceptions of it is meaningless.
Or nearly meaningless, anyway. Certain nova powers, or some psychic powers (yes, those do exist, sometimes in a way that has nothing to do with quantum powers or the M-R node), can allow one person to share another's entire consciousness. Many of these powers, however, exist only as theoretical phenomena whereof Aeon has never confirmed an observation, and probably not many people will ever experience the ones we have observed. Thus, they're not especially relevant, just worth mentioning.
Then again, maybe I'm missing her real point. Certainly, I wouldn't argue with the view that reality isn't necessarily what we think it is. A lot of people don't even understand the difference between questioning their own reality-tunnel and questioning reality itself. The so-called "true history" movement that's getting started on our college campuses is a good example of this. Toren Cargill, Lynne Cheney and other true-historicists say that what they're presenting is "a view of reality as actually real." If they can't tell the difference between the majority of postmodernists who question the specific received small-t truths of white heterosexual male Anglo-Saxon Protestant capitalist civilization and the fringe that questions the very existence of any such thing as objective capital-T Truth, I say that's their problem, not an excuse to make the rest of us suffer. Not to say, of course, that post-modernism is free of excesses, but those excesses are a lot less widespread than you might think from all the noise made by those with axes to grind against pomo. They point out that Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstructionism, was a collaborator in the German-occupied Netherlands, implying that he developed his philosophy solely as a justification for his actions and that it's thus as inherently immoral as the "aviation medicine" experiments of Hubertus Strughold. If it's possible to have negative sympathy for a person, that's what I have for these well-poisoners.
On the other hand, I don't have much room to complain about people trying to rewrite the past. My job is with Aeon's Triton division (Motto: "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it"). That motto is ironic as hell, because a lot of our work involves making sure that certain elements of history are not so much ignored by Joe Sixpack as never made known to him in the first place. (And where we fail at that, Proteus division takes up the slack.)
It wasn't always like this. My study of Aeon's early history revealed to me that, for the first two decades or so of the Society's existence, anyone who walked into the Chicago clubhouse and asked to see the files would be allowed to. That changed in 1950, when new management took over Aeon in the wake of Max Mercer's disappearance.
I don't know why they felt the need to change it, but they did. They make noises implying a correlation with Mercer's buddy Michael Donighal quitting the Society in '43, and a few other things, but it's obvious (to me, anyway) that those are just excuses. For some private reason they refuse to reveal, it was vitally important to these people that all the strangeness the world had known since the Hammersmith Incident be forgotten, and that nobody know it was still going on. Even now, they want it believed that novas began with the Galatea, and want the world arranged so that only we who guard the mystery shall know any better. The frightening part is, they have their wish.
Aeon's unofficial motto, since before I was on their payroll, has been what Agent K said to James Edwards: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it." The people who say that are usually the people who have made them so ignorant, and who have a vested interest in keeping them asleep.
In his J'accuse (I accuse), Emile Zola repeated, vis-a-vis the Dreyfus affair, what he had said elsewhere: "if the truth is buried underground, it swells and grows and becomes so explosive that the day it bursts, it blows everything wide open along with it." I have that quote printed out and stuck on the wall of my cubicle in the Harrisburg chapterhouse. Next to it is a quote from Robert A. Heinlein's "If This Goes On—": "...of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious. [...] When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives."
The people of the world deserve to know what's really going on. Sad to say, those who do know have ways of making sure that nobody finds out what's really going on until he's been a long time complicit in the cover-up. That's what happened to me the day I finally quit merely applying my eye for patterns to the news and decided to find out what else was being done with the stories I analyzed for signs of the paranormal. (The ones in reputable newspapers were being made to disappear into the Babel Dossier. The ones in the hot sheets were being discredited in direct proportion to the amount of truth they contained.)
But they can't keep the secrets forever. Besides the Zola and Heinlein quotes, there's another that seems relevant, from the biography of Y'shua ben Yusuf attributed to the apostle Luke. Twelfth chapter, second verse: "For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known." Eventually, the truth will come out. But as Zola implied, the longer it's kept hidden, the more disastrous will be the consequences, when it does, for those who've kept it.
And I think people can handle the truth. People are starting to notice that no nova has successfully reproduced for as long as the Nova Age has been going on. Sooner or later, they'll put two and two together. I think if other novas knew the hazards of having a baby with an active Mazarin-Rashoud node, they could restrain themselves. Hell, the most dangerous second-generation nova out there is the Weekly World News Bat Boy, and he can't do much more than keep running. Why shouldn't the world know?
A while back, a chap calling himself Waves Forest wrote: "The world situation has reached the point where learning what is really going on is far more important than maintaining confidence in governments, corporations, schools, and established media. Or perhaps nations of sheep deserve to be fleeced, and then...? Come on! It's time to stop pretending we don't know any better."
A while ago, I got into a discussion with a friend about objective reality and whether it's meaningful to speak of it. It got me thinking about a variety of topics. Her question was, if you see the color green differently from the way other people see it, what's the reality?
Well, in the case of color, the reality is a wavelength of light measured in angstroms. The colors (red, blue and green as well as yellow) are, in the immortal words of Stoppard's Guildenstern, "a mystical experience shared by everybody." And if they don't all experience it the same (if, say, one person's "green" looks like what another person would call "brown"), well, Eris tells us "The Truth is five but men have only one name for it." If they use the same name for the same wavelength, in my considered opinion, the difference in their perceptions of it is meaningless.
Or nearly meaningless, anyway. Certain nova powers, or some psychic powers (yes, those do exist, sometimes in a way that has nothing to do with quantum powers or the M-R node), can allow one person to share another's entire consciousness. Many of these powers, however, exist only as theoretical phenomena whereof Aeon has never confirmed an observation, and probably not many people will ever experience the ones we have observed. Thus, they're not especially relevant, just worth mentioning.
Then again, maybe I'm missing her real point. Certainly, I wouldn't argue with the view that reality isn't necessarily what we think it is. A lot of people don't even understand the difference between questioning their own reality-tunnel and questioning reality itself. The so-called "true history" movement that's getting started on our college campuses is a good example of this. Toren Cargill, Lynne Cheney and other true-historicists say that what they're presenting is "a view of reality as actually real." If they can't tell the difference between the majority of postmodernists who question the specific received small-t truths of white heterosexual male Anglo-Saxon Protestant capitalist civilization and the fringe that questions the very existence of any such thing as objective capital-T Truth, I say that's their problem, not an excuse to make the rest of us suffer. Not to say, of course, that post-modernism is free of excesses, but those excesses are a lot less widespread than you might think from all the noise made by those with axes to grind against pomo. They point out that Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstructionism, was a collaborator in the German-occupied Netherlands, implying that he developed his philosophy solely as a justification for his actions and that it's thus as inherently immoral as the "aviation medicine" experiments of Hubertus Strughold. If it's possible to have negative sympathy for a person, that's what I have for these well-poisoners.
On the other hand, I don't have much room to complain about people trying to rewrite the past. My job is with Aeon's Triton division (Motto: "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it"). That motto is ironic as hell, because a lot of our work involves making sure that certain elements of history are not so much ignored by Joe Sixpack as never made known to him in the first place. (And where we fail at that, Proteus division takes up the slack.)
It wasn't always like this. My study of Aeon's early history revealed to me that, for the first two decades or so of the Society's existence, anyone who walked into the Chicago clubhouse and asked to see the files would be allowed to. That changed in 1950, when new management took over Aeon in the wake of Max Mercer's disappearance.
I don't know why they felt the need to change it, but they did. They make noises implying a correlation with Mercer's buddy Michael Donighal quitting the Society in '43, and a few other things, but it's obvious (to me, anyway) that those are just excuses. For some private reason they refuse to reveal, it was vitally important to these people that all the strangeness the world had known since the Hammersmith Incident be forgotten, and that nobody know it was still going on. Even now, they want it believed that novas began with the Galatea, and want the world arranged so that only we who guard the mystery shall know any better. The frightening part is, they have their wish.
Aeon's unofficial motto, since before I was on their payroll, has been what Agent K said to James Edwards: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it." The people who say that are usually the people who have made them so ignorant, and who have a vested interest in keeping them asleep.
In his J'accuse (I accuse), Emile Zola repeated, vis-a-vis the Dreyfus affair, what he had said elsewhere: "if the truth is buried underground, it swells and grows and becomes so explosive that the day it bursts, it blows everything wide open along with it." I have that quote printed out and stuck on the wall of my cubicle in the Harrisburg chapterhouse. Next to it is a quote from Robert A. Heinlein's "If This Goes On—": "...of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious. [...] When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives."
The people of the world deserve to know what's really going on. Sad to say, those who do know have ways of making sure that nobody finds out what's really going on until he's been a long time complicit in the cover-up. That's what happened to me the day I finally quit merely applying my eye for patterns to the news and decided to find out what else was being done with the stories I analyzed for signs of the paranormal. (The ones in reputable newspapers were being made to disappear into the Babel Dossier. The ones in the hot sheets were being discredited in direct proportion to the amount of truth they contained.)
But they can't keep the secrets forever. Besides the Zola and Heinlein quotes, there's another that seems relevant, from the biography of Y'shua ben Yusuf attributed to the apostle Luke. Twelfth chapter, second verse: "For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known." Eventually, the truth will come out. But as Zola implied, the longer it's kept hidden, the more disastrous will be the consequences, when it does, for those who've kept it.
And I think people can handle the truth. People are starting to notice that no nova has successfully reproduced for as long as the Nova Age has been going on. Sooner or later, they'll put two and two together. I think if other novas knew the hazards of having a baby with an active Mazarin-Rashoud node, they could restrain themselves. Hell, the most dangerous second-generation nova out there is the Weekly World News Bat Boy, and he can't do much more than keep running. Why shouldn't the world know?
A while back, a chap calling himself Waves Forest wrote: "The world situation has reached the point where learning what is really going on is far more important than maintaining confidence in governments, corporations, schools, and established media. Or perhaps nations of sheep deserve to be fleeced, and then...? Come on! It's time to stop pretending we don't know any better."
