“I really did not understand your affinity with the urban blight matrix that most of us believed was a social malfunction, until you convinced me through your writing that the crime that was given peak expression in the Baltimore Riots was an outcome of a desired social function. The chill that I felt when I finally realized that we are ruled by evil people, who mix and match violent idiots with peacefully productive people to enhance and maintain control, is one of the reasons why I began reading fiction again, your fiction. You were the only social commentator that was making accurate predictions and also lived those conditions. I suspected that this had to do with you writing fiction and nonfiction, so began reading Reverent Chandler when you were serializing it on the site. Since then I have noticed that my girls, who have read a large quantity of fiction appropriate to their age, and even have ongoing fictional story lines that they develop, complete with paper wardrobes for their characters, have a natural grasp of adult behavior where their peers seem to be clueless.
-Lynn, from an editorial call, in fact a writing assignment
…
Dear Lady, lets begin with a quote from an ancient man from an age when poetry and science coexisted in the same minds:
“To inquiry into the structure of the plot…”
“The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood…”
Aristotle defines poetry as various means of imitation, of men as they are, better than they are, worse than they are, and of their actions. Once dialogue had been brought into tragedy, Aristotle assures us that “nature herself,” took a hand in the process of imitative morality in representing the acts of characters of “a higher type.”
“It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen, to relate the possible… the poet and the historian differ, not by writing in prose or verse. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse and it would still be a species of history… The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry therefore is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history. Poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type will speak or act… he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions…”
-On Poetics
If we here take the greatest know scientist of Antiquity at his word in this serious work On Poetry, then we discard the poetic arts, known today as fiction, at great peril. After listening to this book many times, a few years ago, I finally understood the phenomenon of the impractical and naive person of high intelligence and elevated education. Having no sense for how people of various sorts act and interact is to put one’s self in a perilous social position.
I have noticed that the quality of fiction improved and gained greater currency in the 1800s and early 1900s and has declined steadily since the codification of propaganda doctrine in 1928, by Edward Bernays. I suspect that creative writing has increasingly found greater monetary rewards for advertising, for mind control, for the induction of the reader or listener or viewer into a state of artificial need and vulnerability, of a perceived peril or want. Once such a person has been reduced to need, hunger, thirst, sadness, want, or coaxed into hysteria, anger or belief, the influencing party may profit from fulfilling that need or desire. Today publishers no longer refer to what I do as a writer as writing. I am no longer a writer, but an “influencer;” a mere lesser species of the type, clinging to the old outmoded form of the word, once sacred to men of thought, now a lubricant used to intoxicate those minds to be bought. These processes might not be entirely designed, and may in part be convergent, such as enforced or cultivated loneliness increasing the opportunity for the sale of porn, drugs, hope and hate.
When I first began writing and sought a printer through the Small Business Administration, to publish a game, my mentor spent a half hour explaining why I should publish a book that would fall apart as early as possible, ideally after the first read, in order to assure the sale of future print runs. The entire role playing game business model was built on designed obsolescence and the need for more rules to fix poor rules to power sales.
I think that the current system agenda is to nullify our very instinct to seek the truth or to be waiting with lies positioned in those corners where a truth seeker is likely to go looking for answers to the lies he has been inundated with.
I have noted that increased desire for authentic fiction, to write it and read it, has come in bursts that follow massive propaganda:
American Civil War
1870s
Spanish American War
1900s
The Great War
1920s & 30s
The Greater War
1950s & 60s
Not so after the end of the Cold War, when poetic dearth deepened, or now after the commencement of the never ending War on Terror. There was been a system correction. State agencies and media [banking] agencies now employ the most talented writers to craft daily fiction for the masses and predict future social conditions.
The structured fabrication of American history as a web of lies supported by a pillar of omission in the late 1800s and early 1900s saw a great expansion of popular working class fiction. This was a subconscious instinct to counter the thought crimes of newspapers, which traffic in the lie daily, beaming perpetually renewed gaslight into our mind’s eye. I read this as an instinctive reaction of the hands-on person to the obvious fabrication of a false national foundation. Distrust of the upper class histories that told a descendant of a slave that his forefathers could not be slaves for a slave could not be the same race as his master, at the very time that the worker’s boss was doing everything in his power to enslave him, drove both escapist and speculative fiction.
After WWI propaganda and advertising took over the mass mind and the best speculative writers went to work largely in unpopular seclusion, to be discovered by later propagandized generations.
The mainstream of fictional refuge for the rational mind has been mined ahead of the seeker in the form of movie and TV, shaping the mass mind into an irrational yet notional beast, forever insecure and afraid. The burgeoning “Mental Health” mind control clinics and the booming “Public Safety” corporate goon barracks are named according to the lie, their very identity, such as the War Department being changed to the Department of Defense, a product of mass mind creation, to shape the public into the thing that perfectly fits the hand that wields it.
Currently, the speculative fiction field for this past generation, has been quite barren. I think this is due to those creative minds attuned to social futurism, to what was in a faith-based age described as prophecy, having been captured by the system to work internal to it. An example is Greg Bear, once the very best hard science fiction near future author, going to work for a federal law enforcement agency as their very own house novelist!
It is a curious aspect of our age that so few people understand how power works, that most people deny the existence of the basic method of social domination that has been the key to our oppression, suppression, inspection and deception: Conspiracy.
To even consider the notion of conspiracy, that one or more parties would cooperate for their own mutual benefit at the expense of one or more other parties, is tantamount to a confession of insanity.
I suggest here that one of the keys to this odd human devolution is the taking away of our story, to include our sense for a truthful story.
As an antidote try reading the fiction of:
Jack London
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Harold Lamb
C. S. Lewis
Robert E. Howard
J.R.R. Tolkien
Phillip K. Dick
Poul Anderson
Gene Wolfe
Then, look at the world anew and see it filled with ten lies for every truth.
