Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The World has become a Projection Screen

Conspiracy theories. Theories about shadow governments. Theories about who really pulls the strings. This stuff could be true. It could be total fabricated malarkey.

I think the Founders were wise to keep higher-level government small and light, and keep power close to the ground in localities.

It seems to me that with so much power concentration at the top, and with so very much complexity at the top, too, there is no way of knowing what the "real" relationships are that are controlling things.

Having a universal currency and universal banking system seems part of the problem. "Borders," such as the borders inherent where you have local units of power and local units of currency, are like skin, they are the surfaces/thresholds or transition-points where visibility happens; a thing that crosses a border creates a "spark" or "stimulus" at the transition.

Unity is the consolidation of small systems into one - the elimination of borders. Unity has been sold to the world in terms of the values of efficiency and power: unify all the little shoemakers into Nike Corporation, and you make your shoes so much more efficiently, at less cost (so the sales pitch goes). The trouble is, all that efficiency and power ends up in the hands of very few people, and covers ever larger domains of peoples and geographies -- peoples and geographies who, being remote from that center of concentrated power, are not taken much account of when that power is exercised.

Where there is too much unity, e.g. people at the top sharing a globalized power system - its globalized monetary, communication and transport mechanisms - nefarious things either go on in the dark, or are imagined to be going on in the dark. The lack of visibility creates a projection screen upon which the people cast images.

The mass media attempts to control the images on the screen, manufacturing messages of happiness and trust in the authorities.

The people divide relative to the messages being broadcast, some taking them at face value and defending them, others taking them ironically as mere masks of darker forces behind the screen.

The "real" is no longer accessible - not, at any rate, at the level where most of us believe our identities exist: at the level of general "society," the "nation," the "world."