Brain elasticity, paradigms of power

Back to what I was saying about knowledge being power. Knowledge encompasses a lot of things, but in the special case of humans, it entails primarily the special kind of knowledge brought forth by language. Language allows humans to communicate and share ideas. Only a handful of humans believe that they know everything that's up, and most of these people can't even express a bit of it without sounding completely insane. There is a separation, though. The ones that can communicate, with evidence (Even if this evidence is not empirical), for what they've found, are deemed geniuses; the ones who see truths but can't communicate it into a convincing way to others are deemed messed up in the head.



Human power comes not from physical strength. If it were so, chimpanzees would be the dominant species, since they can crush us in that aspect pretty well, but they're not. Our strong suit over them is communication. Advanced communication is an abstraction of what's inside our heads. What's inside our heads is an amalgamation of our perceptions filtered through our brains which are a system that have evolved to survive and reproduce through such actions as eating and doing the rumpy-pumpy dance. Our perceptions are a collection of photons bouncing off of objects, differentiated by simple stuff like the wavelengths of the photons that get bounced off, otherwise known as the phenomenon of colour. Then there's distance as determined by how much we can make out of the object, vibrations of molecules that vibrate our eardrums, certain molecules that enter our noses triggering electrochemical reactions, pressure/heat/etc causing nerves to fire off giving the sense of touch, and some other things that you can think out for yourself. The interesting thing is that all of these things I just mentioned that lead up to the ability to communicate not only hold power over other species so we can chow down on them and make them work for us, but also to the same species.

One of the key points here is that our perceptions and everything that stems out of them aren't really the real world. They're just reflections off of it, or vibrations within it, or certain bits of it floating around, that we're able to take in account off the bat. What we know otherwise, such as how we figured out how our perceptions worked, for instance, come from communication. No human would know things without other humans to share it with, to perpetuate knowledge through the ages with, to knock down ideas and build new ones collaboratively. However, some of us are able to convince others that what we're perceiving and what we've rationalized out of those perceptions is more correct than what others have to say. This sort of event is where the most power that humans can muster comes from – Decision with authority. However, the aspect and definition of authority isn't limited only to the fact that it's supported by empirical evidence. In fact, most authority in human history wasn't supported by complete evidence, and this fact is supported by the fact that the idea of getting complete and empirical evidence wasn't even thought up completely until Newton came up with the scientific method.

Examples of commonly accepted paradigms, ideas that were accepted through the unreasonable and incomplete reasoning of the past include the following: When people believed for the longest time that illness was caused by an imbalance of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile (Humorism as defined by Hippocrates); When people decided that stepping into a home left foot first would fuck shit up luckwise; Or perhaps when you were a kid and maybe you believed that a lardas guy dressed in red and white who went hohoho gave you presents once a year on a “cosmic jewish zombie who was his own father and died for your sins because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a knowledge tree”'s birthday.



Lots of people think they have the power to sway people into their way of thinking by changing what knowledge they hold. It all depends on how well you can do it - Conspiracy theorists and cult leaders, for example, are only usually partly successful in completely changing paradigms, however, more subtle tactics such as the consumerism complex of people or the consolidation of news media by the government to show foreign conflicts the way they want their people to see them (Today's "Embedded journalism", or as a slightly more extreme example, Pravda [a word meaning 'truth' in Russian] during the soviet era as examples) are generally more successful; However, control of people can be more brutal as well - As an example, North Korea. The fact of the matter is, though, that it does not really matter if the paradigms dispensed to us to digest without looking at or thinking about, like the common hot dog composed of piggy's snouts and assholes, are good or bad for the continuation and advancement of the species - It just matters to the people dispensing these paradigms whether or not it benefits them.



So, how can we change things so we can benefit the species? The human brain is plastic - That is, it's adaptable to the environment. However, human thoughts are fairly rigid and whether or not the thoughts govern behavior is governed by whether or not the behaviour provides comfort. There are ways, however, to change how people think. One commonly known example of a massive, cultural paradigm shift has a very interesting story behind it. Believe this: The 1960's hippy counterculture, every schism of this counterculture including metal, punk, and rave, and the general paradigm shift amoung many people in the first world starting around this time was pretty much partly created by the CIA by accident. In 1959, a beatnik by the name of Ken Kesey was given LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, and DMT as a part of being a volunteer of the MKULTRA project. The CIA looks for ways to control people's minds, doing many terrible things to find out how to do this - Not only trying to find truth drugs, but other things such as funding Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron's experiments in 'Psychic Driving', a concept involving wiping a person's concept of reality and everything to go along with it and rebuilding them from scratch. Ken Kesey, after having his concept of reality radically altered with these drugs, went on to enlighten as many other people as he could to this by writing the novel "One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest" and making a psychedelic party bus, travelling america, giving out and popularizing LSD and psychedelic use, and throwing wild parties that he termed "Electric Kool-Aid Acid tests" with such people as the Grateful Dead.

However, tripping balls is not enough. While psychedelics do have the potential to spur more knowledge in certain individuals by filling their serotonin receptors full of an alien substance similar enough to 5-HT and subsequently bump their sense of reality to the far left, many others simply notice how wrong everything is and go bonkers. Additionally, knowledge isn't power by itself - Power is knowledge coupled with action. This kind of action isn't happening enough for the continuation of the species. We have a responsibility to fix things that are wrong where we see them, and we have a responsibility to make sure that what we're fixing is the right thing to do. If we want to advance as a species and transcend our frankly crappy state of being, the majority of people doing nothing will bring us nothing but pain and servitude to the minority plutocracy who are taking action for their own individual good. Ignorance is bliss until the informed take advantage of the ignorant.

Fri, Dec 28, 2007  Permanent link