Solo Synchronic

The Tyranny of Harold Hill

2009-10-13T23:41:00.002-04:00

The Hegelian Dialectic.

What is it?

It's an old term.
A cryptic reference with a definition like a rubic's cube.
Don't worry you can skip over this part. (I already know what it means and I still quit reading it half-way through.)

"Dialectic ....the Hegelian process of change in which a concept or its realization passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite... development through the stages of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in accordance with the laws of dialectical materialism ....any systematic reasoning, exposition, or argument that juxtaposes opposed or contradictory ideas and usually seeks to resolve their conflict .......the dialectical tension or opposition between two interacting forces or elements."

"Dialectical Materialism ... 1 : the Marxist theory that maintains the material basis of a reality constantly changing in a dialectical process and the priority of matter over mind."

So yeah, once again.

What is it?

Well the term may be older than most things you and I are familiar with and the definition is a mess, but the idea itself and it's practical applications are older than written history. It is THE ANSWER, to THE QUESTION. And that question is? Of course. How do I get everybody else to do what I want them to do? Let's be honest here, isn't that what we all really want? Of course it is. Believe it or not there's actually a formula for it. And that formula is called the Hegelian Dialectic. A better way to put it would be....

How to rule the world in 3 easy steps.

1. Find an unsuspecting populace.
2. Manufacture an urgent and pressing need or threat to said populace.
(and here's the tricky one)
3. Provide solution(s) for said problem(s) that requires said populace to take whatever action is desired by you in order to resolve said problem(s) previously created by you.

Simple right? Okay so say you own a cranberry farm and you want to increase sales. Easy. All you've got to do is inform everyone (for the good of the public safety you understand) that the dangerously high amount of minerals in their drinking water is causing a rash of kidney stones. (A very painful affliction by the way) You then kindly inform them (only as a public service you understand) that cranberry juice has been shown in many cases to help break up and even prevent the formation of kidney stones (which is true) and then faster than you can say yellow journalism you're cranberries are selling like crack.....berries. If for some reason this doesn't work and there are some skeptics out there Then secretly or even better "accidently" pump the drinking water full of minerals for a month and when slightly more people than usual wind up with kidney stones you point to the statistics and say "See, look at these statistics! Numbers don't lie. We tried to warn you but did you listen? Nooooo. You had better get down to your local grocer and pick up a can of juice right away before it's too late and this terrible affliction has struck you or someone you love." You are now a Cranberry Mogul and you are set for life. Now you can focus your attention and resources elsewhere. Like buying up stock in Brita water filters for example.

The most simple model of how it's done comes from the least likely of places. Musical Theater. If you've ever seen the musical "Music Man" then you know that it's a terrible show. You also know that the most well known song in the show is called "Trouble." This scene is all about how the main character Professor Harold Hill who's real name is Gregory (he's a fake and he doesn't know the territory) tricks a bunch of yokels into believing that the new pool hall in town is the root of all evil and is the first step onto a slippery slope down the road to degradation and the moral decay of their children. "Oh ya got trouble my friends. Right here in River City! With a capitol T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool!" The solution to this terrible terrible trouble is the formation of a boy's band, and you can't believe their luck but Professor Hill just so happens to be a band leader and he has plenty of instruments and uniforms for sale at reasonable prices. You see in Music Man Harold Hill uses fear and sensationalism as motivators to get the people of River City to do exactly what he wants. He knows exactly what he's doing and it works like a charm because he's done it in town after town after town. This is human nature. Fear is the greatest motivator in our lives. You may not realize it or not want to think of yourself as simple a creature as all that, but almost everything we do is an effort to avoid something that we don't want to happen. Don't believe me? Let's see a show of hands from all the people who just love getting up everyday and going to their job. Yeah, that's what I thought. So why don't you just quit? Because where would your money come from? What would your family think of you? Would my spouse leave me if I quit my job? What if I never find anything else? What if we lose the house? How will little Jimmy ever go to college???? You get the idea.
Once you understand this simple rule about human nature, and once you understand what it is that really frightens people, well now you've really got something.

Just wave your hands, sing your song and watch em dance.

That is the Hegelian Dialectic.

We'll discuss real world examples of this in our culture and everyday life at another time.

Castles Made of Sand

2009-06-22T11:16:00.000-04:00

Ever heard of the Coral Castle? Well take a look. http://www.crystalinks.com/coralcastle.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle

The Coral Castle is a marvel of engineering. Not only that, but it's creation is fairly unexplainable by conventional methods. One man, working with hand tools that he made himself from scrap parts out of a junkyard worked for 30 years to create this monlithic masterpiece. It's been regarded for years as a modern miracle, a mystery, and a great source of potential knowledge. Ed Leedskalnin claimed that the modern theories of how the universe is structured on a molecular level are flawed. Actually downright wrong. He claimed that all electricity was comprised of two opposing magnetic currents swirling around a neutral center in a right hand turning motion(clockwise). Think of a DNA double helix or even that symbol you see used in the medical field that has the two snakes wrapped around a pole and you've got a good mental picture of what he means. Beyond that he proposed that not just electricity but all matter is constructed and affected by this. One could easily dismiss this as the buffoonery of a quack but for the amazing things that he built and accomplished. He obviously was doing something out of the ordinary. Furthermore, when tested some of his theories seem to hold true.
http://www.leedskalnin.com/ - Some filmed experiments based on the theories of Leedskalnin. Pretty interesting stuff.

In The Beginning...

2009-06-02T10:44:00.007-04:00

A 1,000 mile journey begins with the first step. In the beginning, so sayeth the Bible, there was God and Light and Heaven and Earth. Everything else kind of filled itself in on the go. But before there were things like sporks and free form Jazz there was Adam and Eve. The story of the Garden, the Serpent and the descent of man out of Paradise is perhaps the most well known story of the Old Testament. In my opinion it is also the most misunderstood. I believe that the details of the story, and even the characters themselves are secondary. The underlying principal is the matter of "original sin". The generally accepted interpretation of the story is that original sin stains our souls as newborns as a direct result of Eve's first act of divine insubordination. We all know how it went. It is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that causes her to become self aware. She tells Adam, he eats it too, they go mingle in the bushes for a while and then they are ashamed of their nudity and try to hide from God behind a bush or in a hole or any other convenient hiding place. God is, of course, angry (even though he really isn't because somehow it's all part of a larger plan to frustrate the hell out of Lucifer) and he banishes them from the Garden and forever curses women with the pain of childbirth, and forces man to work the Earth for food. Also women and snakes hate each other forever. The End. The moral of the story is that it's always a woman's fault, always listen to God, and never listen to talking snakes..........Except that's not the moral. That's a cheap and misleading moral. It's a saturday morning cartoon where knowing is half the battle and only you can prevent forest fires. It's hallow. It doesn't really mean anything. The sections of the story that really hold the lessons, the most brilliant sections, are the interactions between Eve and the Serpent. Everyone knows Eve eats the Apple, but nobody remembers why. I do. The Serpent tells her that God only forbids this tree because he wants to keep her ignorant, because he is afraid of what she could become with the knowledge. That God greedily wants no others to share what He has and that because of His ego He wants no equals to contend with. "What right does he have to deny you this?" asks the snake. She wants to be God. That is original sin. The person who wrote this is trying to explain to us our fundamental flaw as a species. Our innate desire to shape and mould the world around us. To create in our own image, and in our hubris, to destroy with our attempts to become what we are not. We cannot create. All we can hope to do is move and shift the wonders of the natural world around us, but we cannot create. Hence the analogy of losing paradise. The Garden is the natural world that once provided everything we, as animals, needed to survive and thrive and live and be happy. Through the slow progression of our evolution from animals to man those who were most like God and who seemed to have the largest share of his knowledge were chosen as mates. Through time we created a situation where the natural world no longer sustained us, as a home for animals surely could not sustain a god. The Garden of Paradise along with it's ignorance and innocence, lost to us forever. The real lesson is that we must hesitate before applying our hand. Most often our lack of understanding the entire scope of a situation causes us to muddle things up. We end up with more expansive problems then we began with. Examples of this are all around us. The internal combustion engine, the emergence of "superbugs" do to our use of antiseptics, the Atom bomb, Clear Pepsi and X-Men 3. The most difficult aspect to the Bible for most modern Americans is the fact that is was so obviously cobbled together from many old stories and arranged in a way that seems to contradict itself over and over. The reason this is hard to swallow is because there exists the small but loud group of literalists who's faith is absolute in every word of the Bible no questions asked and dissenting views are the path to Hell and ruination. These people suck. The consensus opinion on them seems to be they are pushy, opinionated and a general drag to have around. Now most people have become disinterested in the Bible as a book of lessons simply because they do not want to lend credence to the lunatic world views of sad literalists. A Pavlovian association is formed in our mind between religious philosophy and religious nuttery. We tune it out. They're just a bunch of fairy tales. The Tower of Babel, Jack and the Beanstalk, they're the same in our mind. Except they aren't the same. There are real and profound understandings of human nature in the Bible. Once you take out the fairy tales and add ons you begin to the see the brilliant metaphors and philosophy. The fact that someone understood man's fatal flaw at the time the story of Adam and Eve was written is staggering. It really shatters our pre-conceptions of what people of ancient cultures were like and what they understood. People weren't smarter back then but they didn't have a head overflowing like we do today. Their lack of stimulation allowed for a clarity of vision that we do not enjoy. An interesting side note to all this is that there is another version of the creation story. There is some Jewish lore that maintains Eve was in fact NOT the first woman and was not even Adam's first wife. In fact she wasn't even the second. She was the third.....Bet you didn't know that. Adam's first wife was a woman named Lilith. Lilith and Adam didn't get along very well because when they laid together he liked to be "on top" and she wanted to be "on top" (yes that's right....and people think religion is boring) which is of course a microcosm of their relationship. Adam thought Lilith should be submissive to him, and she claimed that since both she and Adam were made from the same clay that they were equals. So eventually she flies (Why can she fly?) away and after a spat with three angels God sent to try and convince her to stay she decides to take her vengeance by strangling newborn babies and humping (in their sleep) any unsuspecting man she could wrap her legs around. She becomes the source of all Succubi, Witches and Vampires and because she never ate of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, she is also immortal. Other versions claim it was actually Lilith herself and not Lucifer who appeared as the Serpent in the Garden to seduce Eve. Also, that she married with Samael, the angel of death, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samael) and what we call "Satan" was the essence of their collective malevolence towards man. Anyways Adam needed a new girlfriend so God offered to make him one while he watched. Adam was so horrified by the process that even though she was beautiful when finished he wouldn't go anywhere near her. As we all know 3rd times a charm and God finally figured it out. He put Adam into a deep sleep and removed one of his ribs to create Eve, therefore eliminating the argument of equality that Lilith had made. It's funny to note that the part about the rib made it into the Bible but the back story about Lilith did not. Anyways Adam and Eve got on swimmingly and the rest is uhh.....history.