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"The very basis of the precautionary principle is to imagine the worst without supporting evidence...those with the darkest imaginations become the most influential.”
Adam Curtis, “The Power of Nightmares” Part 3
On line conversations can spin around, going nowhere, at an incredible speed (and with a peculiar sort of ferocity). They can also lead you to strange, quiet places.
Last week – on line – I was discussing the possible meanings of a very old Egyptian statue: a representation of Khafra and Horus. Horus – depicted as a stylized falcon – cradles the back of the Pharaoh's head with his outstretched wings, perhaps whispering celestial mysteries into his ear.
No doubt, egyptologists can offer a more scholarly, evidence supported interpretation.
Beyond the precise political and religious uses to which the statue was put during Khafra's reign, and after, we were (we are) fascinated by the waking dream-state the statue presents.
That is, the after-life and eternity fixated Egyptians carried with them, it seems, a dream of life's purpose that linked the mundane to the supra-mundane. This dream inspired them, during that ancient civilization's most fertile period, to embark on a sort of stone-based space program, an effort to build eternal structures and create a universe of imagery that kept the dream-state alive in people's minds everyday.
I can't know with certainty, but I believe the old civilization, the culture that built immense monuments to cosmic concerns, faded as a dream-world first and then, due to various social/political pressures and time's irresistible damage, crumbled into what came next.
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Needless to say, America, during the (both on the ground and mind-formed) empire building decades that followed World War Two's end, cannot be compared, at least not flawlessly, to ancient Egypt; still, it (the U.S.) nurtured its own dream-state, one so seductive the world seemed compelled to fall deeply in love with it even as the real U.S. - or at least its strategists in Washington, committed all the old crimes using all the old excuses.
The dream was of a technologically advanced, politically fair-minded, future-oriented civilization, the burning chrome heart of shining modernity, the creator of actual stairways to heaven.
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In recent years, gathering greater and greater speed with each moment, this dream, this promise actually, has been dying. It's being replaced, as Adam Curtis states, with a nightmare of endlessly increased security, eternal war against shadowy foes (which, Curtis points out, don't exist in the hyperventilating form our governments present to justify their draconian flights of dark fancy).
When your dreams are supplanted by nightmares, is disintegration far behind?
The New Meme:
Throughout those millennia, nearly every civilization we know of had a belief system based upon what might be called a Look Backward world view. In other words, people shared a common belief that their tribe, people, nation once had a golden age, a better time when humans were more virtuous, stronger, closer to heaven. An era when sages worked wonders and were wiser than more recent folk. From Sumeria to China, to the legends of Native Americans, this thread of lost glory runs through almost every mythic tradition.
Except ours. Our worldwide, cosmopolitan, modern culture is arguably the first to take a radically divergent orientation, not necessarily better, but profoundly different. A philosophy that might be called Look Forward.
Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday.The internet homogenises all knowledge.
"We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the internet," Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting of International Association of the Chiefs of Police. "They can train themselves over the internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination," Chertoff said. "Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites."
Chertoff pointed to the July 7, 2005 attacks on London's transit system, which killed 56 people, as an example a home-grown threat. To help gather intelligence on possible home-grown attackers, Chertoff said Homeland Security would deploy 20 field agents this fiscal year into "intelligence fusion centers," where they would work with local police agencies. - link
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