My Scattered Thoughts

The complexities are endless. Nobody agrees. There is no clarity in such theories. No useful light is shed. They reduce [him] to the status of robot or puppet, explaining his every action as the result of influence by other directed forces, giving him no free will at all. The arguments advanced by on faction (good-bad) can just as well be employed by another (bad-good). Nothing and anything at all can be suggested by such dualistic and nonrelative thinking, and I submit that the purpose of such speculation is not to discover anything valuable, but merely so that people can keep themselves happy by inventing something to believe in. Whatever is really going on, it is not to be understood by any fixed or conventional mode of thought. “Convictions make convicts”–we are imprisoned by whatever we believe, and it seems that many of us want to stay in jail. In a sense we are all battlegrounds of cosmic conflict (“As above, so below”) and I suspect there is indeed some truth, somewhere, somehow, in the “War in Heaven” theory. But dependence on such beliefs can lead to paranoia and irresponsibility: it is better to consider everything and believe nothing… for sure. The Unknown cannot contract to fit the Known. We have to expand.

–Stuart Gordon, 1981

…many of us have been educated to deny myth-thinking as part of the baggage of a nightmare past from which we are now struggling to awake. To pay heed to myth (as the Nazis did) can seem to mean a terrifying regression back to a superstitious sleep from which science and reason have but lately rescued us. However, the creative use of myth can guide us in self-discovery and lure us to wider understandings. It need not mean abandonment of reason and common sense; rather, it can lead to expansion and reorientation of the faculties. It is an obvious illusion to conisder this horrific era an Age of Reason: if we deny our mythic and intuitive faculties we will only plunge ourselves into worse confusion and disorder.

–Stuart Gordon, 1981

…how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and he message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

–William Gibson, 2007

Desire for goodness, Mister Reese, leads to earnestness. Earnestness in turn leads to sanctimonious self-righteousness, which breeds intolerance, upon which harsh judgement quickly follows, yielding dire punishment, inflicting general terror and paranoia, eventually culminating in revolt, leading to chaos, then dissolution, and thus, the end of civilisation.

or

Good living and health, as you say, yielding well being. But well-being is a contextual notion, a relative notion. Perceived benefits are measured by way of contrast. In any case, the result is smugness, and from that an overwhelming desire to deliver conformity among those perceived as less pure, less fortunate–the unenlightened, if you will. But conformity leads to ennui, and then indifference. From indifference, Mister Reese, dissolution follows as a natural course, and with it, once again, the end of civilisation.

or

The guise of reasonableness, Mister Reese, permits all manner of intolerance and indeed, pernicious attack. Once that illusion is torn away, however, the terror of oppression becomes a random act, perhaps indeed an all-encompassing one.

or

Do you think Lust thrives only in matters of sex and sordid indulgences? If so, my friends, you are wrong! Lust is born of obsession! Obsession begets zealotry! Zealotry breeds deadly intolerance! Intolerance leads to oppression, and oppression to tyranny. And tyrranny, citizens of Quaint, leads to–“

“The end of civilisation!” a thousand voices roared.

–Steven Erikson, 2004

I want to ask, you ever wonder why the dominant culture says certain stuff? I mean, really hammers on you that some stuff is absolutely, deadly impossible? For instance, what science calls the “Grandfather Paradox”? How it works out that you should never, ever even consider time travel, because you might go back in time and kill your own grandfather by accident, let’s say, and then–kah-poof–you’d not exist? I mean, if you trusted in the government experts, wouldn’t you be careful and never go back in time?

–Chuck Palahniuk, 2007

Beginning in 1963, officials at the Willowbrook State School, a residence for developmentally disabled children in Staten Island, New York, intentionally infected healthy children with hepatitis in order to test the effects of gamma globulin on the disease. For three years, school officials repeatedly injected the children with viral agents, until public outcry stopped the program in 1966.

–Chuck Palahniuk, 2007

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies.

The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.

–Chuck Palahniuk, 2007