I continue to enjoy the odd fortune of entertaining readers who are not only writers on occasion, but in general smarter than I am.

OrangeFrog commented on

‘What about Our Library of Alexandria?’

Nov-19-2020 5:09 AM UTC

Mr LaFond,

I am of the opinion that we have indeed already surpassed the age of 'the greatest number of literate laymen'. Last year I visited a huge underground warehouse of old books and upon picking up random ones, on any subject, was pleased to see how well written they were. The texts demanded something of their readers whether the subject be hand to hand combat, botany, history or electronics. Many of them also appeared to be labours of love not of money.

I agree that there will be no book burning. Those in power know that it is probably more effective to simply convince people reading and thinking is a waste of time. This is the thing that is most galling: the knowledge is there. All of it. If a man wishes to master mathematics, he can do so. Physics, he can do so. Woodwork, he can do so. We have so much available now yet so few interested that even if it *did* come to book burning, hardly any would care.

Maskism and the shamdemic also illustrate the general ignorance of the populace. As a drone, I am surrounded by the buzzing conversations of vaϲϲines, masks and lockdowns as people who have never had anything to talk about parrot the government mandated talking points. This Greatest of Chinese Viruses has also awoken me to a phrase that used to bug the hell out of me and now I know why: 'I am not an expert in X, but ...'. As soon as a man says such a thing, I know he has not made a serious attempt to understand anything. One need not be an expert in virology to know that a virus can be used as a political weapon.

I continue to enjoy your musings.

James responded on Nov-19-2020 at 7:28 PM:

I must use this as an article starter... be a few minutes.

Every Civilization has a center of gravity it is ever trying to achieve, an internal balance that mindlessly seeks an eternal state within the inhospitable field of Time. So must every civilization die as it seeks permanence in the turbulence of time. A nation state, a military unit, even an economic system, instinctively, as a living structure with needs, hungers, desires and fears. It seeks, terribly. This seeking is usually blind in the collective, but illuminated, fueled, steered and even foiled by visionary seekers of the individual type. Between these two forces, the tiny flicker of occasional reason and curiosity and the massive slothful will of the mewing multitude, dwell the cultists, the architects, the engineers and alchemists of Thought.

Every ideology, religion, faith, esoteric system and secret society, is a cult within, outside, above and even beneath the multitude. These manipulative bodies assign themselves the task of using the rare illuminated individual as an element—perhaps with such as Jesus an entire rudder and wheel and with such a scholar as Jorjani, Aristotle or Durant, to serve as informative adjuncts, thinking devices utilized to mute, amplify, even guide the Social Steerage Cults who control the multitude through means required to be ever more subtle as the multitude grows to monstrous depths. A multitude does not achieve heights, despite our conditioning to believe the opposite. A multitude achieves delirious depths without qualitative depth.

Alchemists once searched for the Philosopher's stone as well as the means to turn base material into gold—gold being a store of wealth. Moderns often marvel at how alchemists discovered such other useful facts in search of such folly. That is the double-blind folly of the modern mind, to be blind to ancient reason and current reality at once. My friend Steven Michael Sechi, an excellent writer, once wrote a book on alchemy for roleplaying games, in which he named the year and the date at which scientists in a lab finally manufactured gold. Even today, I am told, that diamonds can be made.

But what of the manufacture of true world-rending power from such base material as man?

The atom has been split and used to roast humans in service to ideology and economy, energy fields extracted from man's mewing mass.

And today, an ever more submissive leviathan—the mass of unthinking gaslit humanity—mews in its information [input-for-thought-formation] feed pens. The beauty of this is not simply the resources that mass submission make available to the Social Steerage Cults. But also is the fact that submission is a prime precondition for hysteria, fanaticism and the ignition of the mob mind. A medieval religion did this very well, and now stands currently a beleaguered second place to the scions of medieval alchemy, the currency manipulators and the architects of Postmodernity, who have gone the alchemist one better. Where the ancient researcher sought to change lead into gold, his inheritor has drawn from the very ether:

-more buying power than all the gold on earth;

-the elevation of crass lies to Unassailable Truth;

...and has convinced the sons of the men who conquered this world and sent men into space, that the moon, the planets and the infinite stars are not for us, but rather that Fearful Sloth is our Holy Ordained Destiny, penance for our Original Sin.

Imagine a mystic seeker or even grisly conqueror of antiquity, Alexander perhaps, and wonder if he would say yes to the prospect that:

Your conquering hand will be succeeded by your inheritor's coward brand.

Your seeking for illumination will bring only hateful rumination.

Your will to explore will give way to a mania to distort and ignore.

Your dedication to contemplate will dissolve into a haze of self-hate.

Would they still strive so hard and suffer so much if they knew that everything that they achieved would be inverted by the gravity of civilization into it's most base opposite?

It is the genius of civilization and its Social Steerage Cults to conduct a reverse alchemy, a ruination and reduction—and the key to its success, that those who detect this, see not the purpose of the Thing, as an agent of corruption, rather that they detect a flaw in this monstrous mechanism, that if only its keepers could remove it's hunger that it would do good rather than evil, just as, as we all know, lions truly thirst for yams and squash, not meat.

And another dreamer feeds the monster birthed to feast on his very hopes, and this fool wonders about the day he gets to release it from its current master to serve his just cause. Such a zoo-goer deserves the inevitability of his consumption.

Heroes and seekers of yore looked to the heavens for guidance or as destination.

We look up and see only miasmic air wafting down to deliver our doom.

Can we truthfully say it is undeserved?