Overstatement
"Charleston is where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet to form the
Atlantic Ocean."
That's Dave Winer quoting the special
Charleston, South Carolina Point of View as explicated by Dan
Conover of the Charleston Post and
Courier.
Isn't that how all of us feel about the truths we represent and which we project
on the world? We all participate in the ultimate illusion: that the universe
somehow takes our personal interests into account and that if we can just stare
her down skillfully enough, Reality will bend to our demands. We constantly
seek allies in our quest for this affirmation and naturally there's a good business in
being such an ally.
I remember well the questionable but entertaining child car seats of three or more
decades ago. These flimsy, miniature lawn chairs often featured little steering
wheels that your child manipulated to ensure your safe passage through the
vagaries of suburban traffic. Your toddler co-pilot sat next to you in the front
seat, blissfully unthreatened by uninvented airbags and the uninvented, ubiquitous
knowledge of what tragedy might happen to him. His purpose was to navigate a safe passage
home among the vagaries of traffic and noise and distraction.
Aren't we all like those toddlers and the fans of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers?
We're universally equipped with a point of view and a mechanism for projecting
our egos upon the Great Reality which we can surely learn to steer once we decipher
its special code. Control is the universal need of our species, so vital that
we will sacrifice our present and obvious good for the uncertain promise
of control of our destiny.
Actually, it's not control we seek. It's the illusion of
control and certainty. Any tribe will pay any price for that illusion. Our tribe
is currently paying more
for that illusion, in absolute terms, than has any tribe in the history of mankind.
The Tribe That Knew All
In The Lucifer
Principle (but it could have been Global
Brain, pardon my sieve-like memory) Howard
Bloom (the mentor whom I exalt above all others) describes three tribes
on an obscure island. These three tribes each had a specific talent. One tribe
raised food – so skillfully that they, like America for much of our world,
could provide the needs of all the islanders. The second tribe grew no food
but they made implements. They provided the utensils and cooking pots and knives
and spear points and fasteners that any society depends upon.
The third tribe had no productive skills but they had developed the ability
to make unprovable statements. They "knew" how to cure the sick, forecast
the future, resolve domestic differences. The other two tribes had no choice,
as they saw it, but to bring abundant offerings of food and implements to the
tribe of soothsayers, to learn what? Well, to learn what the soothsayers said
was the sooth ("truth", in the old parlance).
Which of the three tribes, we materialists must ask, was the most prosperous?
The food producers or the implement makers or the people who guessed at the
future no one else could question?
The most prosperous tribe was the one whose only skill was to utter specious
predictions, conjectures and threats. Like our own politicians and priests and
journalists, those who added no real value to this island prospered the most.
They demanded gifts and sacrifices and, eventually, wound up with a disproportionate
share of the food and implements that the other tribes produced.
When the priests' predictions turned out to be true, they received the credit
they seemed to deserve. But when their predictions failed, they informed their
clients that their offerings had been found wanting. How could such inadequate
offerings appease the angry forces that nibbled at the edges of the tribes'
existence? Such condemnations inspired the victim's family to up the ante, bringing
more and better offerings to the priests whose skill was in describing what
might go wrong and what had gone wrong and how inadequate were the attempts
of the family in deflecting the inscrutable disapproval of those forces that
made disapproval matter so much.
After a while, most of the GDP of the islanders was held by those who had nothing
to add, but so much confidence to withhold.
An American Tale
In the not-so-old days, when America's political conservatives comprised a
reliable counterpoise to the silliness of academics and politicians and deficit
spenders and the fads of evangelists and charlatans, we could count on skeptical
conservative voices to question the ungrounded claims on our productivity by
those with no visible means of support and only a scam between them and disaster.
But one look at our current cultural milieu of threat and conjecture and deficit
spending on cosmetic security causes us to think that the unproductive priests
of those distant islands have somehow taken over our own land.
Without the good sense of traditional conservatives, do we have any hope of
waking up?
1:34:02 AM 
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