The growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement has given us an excellent opportunity to stop and think about where we are, and where we are going. A common statement right now is “end economic slavery” and yet it seems odd to expect the very people who created this situation, and continue to profit from it, to step up and correct it.
Reality tellingvision 'talent' shows, aside from being another hastily buffed facet of the bread and circus, alpha-wave inducing media triviosphere, also, I believe, serve to substantiate and maintain an ugly and inevitably destructive cultural and social paradigm.
A decade or so ago, I read Robert M. Pirsig’s - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the copy lifted and kindly lent, from the bookshelf of a friend’s parents, a book that might have lain long languished, as so many books have come to find themselves, if it were not for the keen and sensitive eye of my friend.
In complexity theory, it is observed that when a simplified and idealised population reaches a certain threshold of component complexity, a system of negentropic novelty emerges spontaneously and sustains itself at a higher frequency of order, auto-catalysing and self-organising.
It has always been tempting for thinkers and historical observationalists to overlay a narrative onto to what they have known of the world; humans have a long and colourful history in the denial of contingency, in the art of myth, and of fevered teleological dreams.
The majority of people who recognise the name of JG Ballard, I imagine will do so because of the Spielberg film ‘Empire Of the Sun’ which was adapted from his semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, or for the controversy that surrounded the film ‘
"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for." — Hopi elders
