Star Wars – You Are What You Eat

In spite of what the critics have been saying, I enjoyed the new Star Wars. Quite a few commentators panned it for being "meaningless", but without the eye of love and nostalgia, the level of meaning they expected was never an intended or actual part of the original franchise.

This made me think about the reverence in which we hold A New Hope and Empire. I first experienced these films when I was about six, and thought they were the most fantastic, unbelievably earth-shaking things I had ever seen. But then, I was six, and the list of things to which I attached the same value also included a random naked woman in some manga, my neighbour's dog, and the dead lizard behind my cupboard. In later life, I discovered that having seen these films made me a member of some kind of culture club which seemed mainly concerned with casting those who had not into social outer darkness. This was in my teens - that era of insane crushes, obsessions, and psychological cruelty. We would watch these films over and over again, reassuring ourselves and each other that they were the apogee of human creation. This reassurance became shriller and more urgent, of course, as repeated viewings exposed the real, significant, and manifold flaws of both films. They drag. They're heavily derivative. The acting is, in places, ridiculously bad.

A fair bit of my time in particular was spent desperately trying to ignore what thematic messaging there was. The franchise as a whole has a starkly conservative and practically mindless world view. The magical 'Force', a kind of re-chewed and regurgitated compound of poorly understood Zen mysticism and Protestantism is actually kind of toxic. It's deism. Or animism. Or maybe panpsychism, or spiritualism - it's really too vague and changeable to be clear about exactly what it is, but in any event it is clearly the element of the divine. So, this story element panegyrises adherence to ancient religion. We have The Empire, and The Rebel Alliance, with The Empire being evil apparently because it's an empire and for no other discernable reason. And the rebellion is in support of a dying or dead republic. Hmmm... a republic struggling to overthrow an empire - sounds strangely familiar. It's almost as if some Americans were re-imagining their own revolution, interleaving it with the history of Rome and painting it all over with a thin veneer of science fiction. With magic. And god. So the idea is that it's important to be a republic and, if we look at the way the two forces are represented, the more uniform, organised, and well equipped you are, the more evil. And then there's the basically moronic binary imagining of morality represented by the dark side and the force. The dark side is all negative emotions, which must be defeated - repressed, basically - whereas the not dark side is all about floating rocks and pashing your sister. Okay, that was a cheap shot, but the silliness of the binarism is still real.

For me, the message is one of subservience to god and a near libertarian conception of how the world should be run. This is totally unacceptable to me on both counts, and yet I spent quite a lot of mental energy on convincing myself that it wasn't so, and that these two films were the best sci fi films ever made, despite the fact that they're not really sci fi, and nor are they really good enough to justify such an assessment. It's rather like my first girlfriend. She was a nice girl, I assume (I never really knew her that well), but she certainly wasn't the paragon of all girlhood I furiously persuaded myself that she was. If I'm completely honest, she's not the one I wanted, but rather just the one I happened to get. And because she was my first, she blew my head back by relative power alone, and I spent the rest of my time with her trying to convince myself she was the best female ever begotten. Until, that is, I grew up a little and was able to see her clearly.

And it's the same thing with Star Wars. When I look at it clearly, A New Hope is a very good film. It's got so much to like, it's still enjoyable decades later, and it was clearly made with real love and care. But what it's not is a film objectively worthy of the reverence in which it's held. And it's this clear-sightedness which I think is most important. We're not just made up of what we consume, but also of the way in which we consume it. The way we respond to and absorb things like films also ripples out into the way we process the rest of our lives. The way we convince ourselves that Star Wars is the kind of masterpiece it's clearly not is exactly the same way we convince ourselves we like our jobs, can live with our partners, like our foolish and mendacious selves, and have some hope of finding meaning in our lives. We can find jobs we like, partners we love, meaning, and all the rest, but not without shedding the kind of thinking that has us desperately trying to convince ourselves that Star Wars is more than it is. Because it's this exact same thinking which, if we don't consciously attack it, we use to negotiate ourselves into accepting our own mediocrity.

Australia Day, Race, And Arguments From Non-Existence

It's Australia Day tomorrow, and the usual arguments about nationalism, the plight of the First Nations, racism, multiculturalism, and so on, are starting to warm up. I think we're all too familiar with the arguments on all sides of this often toxic and rarely productive area of discourse. Don't get me wrong - I'm not one of the Barnaby/Abbott brigade. I think it's not only appropriate but desirable, on a day meant to celebrate nationhood, to think about and discuss exactly what it means to be Australian. And I think that no such conversation can possibly be complete without considering both the miraculous prosperity of our weird little colonial project in the middle of nowhere, the horrific cost to some at which this prosperity was purchased, and everything in between.

But it's in the area of 'Australian-hood' where I think some better and clearer thinking can and should be applied. I believe that one of the reasons so many of these discussions are either distasteful or uncontrollably acrimonious is because they start from the hazy starting point of a purely instinctive and unipolar idea of nationhood. While the exact constituent elements of the concept of nationhood are debatable, it's probably not too controversial to say that the most common understanding of the term includes elements of culture, political/legal constructs, geography, and identity. Where discussions of Australian nationhood tend to spin out of control is in the areas of culture and identity.

I would argue that the vast majority of people tend to conflate individual with national or cultural identity. This is both natural and (usually) benign, but where nationalism comes into play the effects can be decidedly toxic. When we fail to distinguish the broad national ethno-cultural picture from our own culture and ethnicity, then change, dominance/growth/attrition of one sub-group or another, or any questioning or assertion of the broader national culture is perceived as a personal, existential threat to identity. A prime example of this confused and confusing kind of thinking is Pauline Hanson's inability to understand changes in Australian demographics as a phenomenon distinct from the survival of her own individual identity. What this generally creates is a furious argument over the protection or destruction of a weird national/personal hybrid territory which does not actually exist in any meaningful way.

Added to this is the vexed question of cultural memory. Australia is still very much in its formative stages, and is therefore replete with aggressively propagated myths of origin and character. I personally find that the school of thought which suggests that inherited cultural values and memory are compelling because of the fact of their being inherited is one which resonates with my own individual experience. For both native and immigrant Australians, the embrace of shared cultural memories definitive of national identity is practically universal, and these memories end up forming a major pillar of both our private and corporate identities, and one which we will all fiercely and instinctively defend. Where many problems arise is when these inherited cultural memories are not shared by all. The cultural memories of many Indigenous Australians and, to a significantly lesser extent, recent immigrants, are still very much alien to the predominant pillars of Australian cultural memory. Invasion, The Stolen Generation, White Australia, and other less than edifying episodes in our past are often aggressively excluded by defenders of conservative views of our nation from celebrations or commemorations of our nationhood.

This isn't just a matter of national conscience, to be dismissed as self flagellating black armband thinking - it speaks to the actual fabric of the nation. I agree with Bernard Yak's assessment of nationalism, where he proposes that a major part of being a nation is the "territorialisation of memory". Mnemo-narratives like Gallipoli or The Gold Rush are cut off from their global context and annexed as the sovereign culturo-historical property of Australia. The result of this is that a particular set of inherited or shared cultural memories can then be taken to define who is and isn't Australian. Where serious problems arise is when any attempt is made to exclude valid cultural memories from this sovereign mnemo-territory - such an act is, in effect, an attempt to culturally deport those who hold and value those memories. A good but extreme example of this is Germany's decades long endeavour to excise fascism from the current identity matrix of what it is to be German.

For us, it seems that there is a tendency to attempt a similar act of deportation around issues of race and Colonialism. And upon examining the (usually conservative) arguments for doing so, it becomes apparent that there is no better justification for this than a desire to put a stop to the uncomfortable feelings this raises amongst those who, like Pauline Hanson, are either unable or unwilling to disambiguate the nexus of national culture and personal identity. I'd argue that in order to sustain and build on the unusually successful pluralism we have already built, we all need to establish more firmly in our minds what it means to be an Australian. Nuanced, non-binary, and most importantly, inclusive models for building shared and inherited memories and values need to be built at an individual as well as an institutional level.

Change the date, or don't - the issue isn't, in absolute terms, all that important. But as a young nation, still consciously in control of building our national identity, we have absolutely no excuse for weaving intellectually muddled, mendacious, and cowardly lies of omission into our DNA merely in order to spare some of our feelings.

Contemplations On The Turn Of The Year

In the course of my Mystic Meg style peregrinations through life, one of the things I was most often called upon to do was to contemplate upon the sword. This was basically one of those Zen-type exercises designed to purge and still the mind. In order to fulfil the same purpose, the sword could just as easily have been replaced with a candle, a slinky, or a sex toy.

But one of the things I never really thought much about, until recently, was what lessons might be learnt from such contemplation. What gain or advantage might be accrued from paying close attention to the process as well as to the goal.

What would tend to happen would be a mental dissection. The various components of the sword would be weighed and examined, and then the whole would be put back together, and what the contemplation mostly consisted of was purpose. What is a sword actually for? By which is meant, what is it made and designed to do? This is deceptively simple. A sword is made for cutting. It is first and foremost a cutting edge, shaped for leverage, and modified for defensive as well as offensive capability. But first and foremost, it is for cutting. And because it is a weapon, it is made for cutting people. So, in its simplest and most essential form, a sword is a hateful thing.

And what if we apply the same principle to the contemplation of a person? A person is admittedly a much more complex object than a sword, but it should still be possible to determine what a person was made and designed to do. Essentially, a person is designed to create other people, to keep itself alive, and to fulfil its needs and desires. In order to do this, it needs other people, so, just as a sword is weighted and guarded to serve for defence as well as offence, a person is equipped with various delusions and chemical reactions designed to help it bond with other people. So, in its simplest and most essential form, a person is a purposeless and contemptible thing.

But neither swords nor people are limited to their simplest or most essential functions. In both cases, careful and intelligent usage, application, and refinement, can help both swords and people to transcend their base purposes. A sword can become a means for the attainment of high and complex physical and spiritual goals. And so too, a person can become an agent for real and positive internal and external transformation. And it is this transcendence, above all, which can be taken as the highest, most worthy work of being or using either.

Which I think is worth thinking about, especially on the one night of the year when, to all intents and purposes, reduction to base function - eat, drink, fuck, fight - is considered not only permissible, but desirable.

Common Sense – Neither Common Nor Sensible

I once told someone that Chinese people are more receptive to ideas like communism because the language contains no pronouns, and Chinese culture is therefore less amenable to ideas of individual liberty. This is, of course, an egregiously stupid idea, which I came up with in order to shut down a conversation I've been sick to death of having since about 1987. Firstly, there is more than one Chinese language, secondly, a lack of pronouns is neither here nor there - individual and group identities can be indicated at least as effectively through conjugation and so on, and thirdly, there is no such thing as 'Chinese culture' in the sense of a single, uniform set of ethnic practices across all people in the national construct now known as China. In spite of all these inherent, gaping invalidities, my interlocutor found this proposition to be immediately and profoundly convincing.

Why?

It basically comes down to the inherent vulnerability of 'common sense thinking' to specious argument. The whole essence of what we commonly (ha!) call common sense is one of reduction and closure. Nuance and complexity are deliberately stripped away with the ultimate goal of arriving at a simple, determinate conclusion. It's fundamentally geared towards disposal rather than contemplation – a bid to force the round peg of understanding into the square hole of definite and immutable fact. Where we most frequently see this pattern of thought is in polemic, usually of the conservative variety, but reasonably frequently across all bands of the socio-political spectrum.

I've never been able to understand our perennial love affair with common sense. As a framework for analysis, understanding, or even just simple cognition, it's appallingly unreliable. The very basis of the modus requires the thinker to isolate and subjectify - to operate in a solipsistic and essentially idiosyncratic framework, blithely selecting and rejecting elements of the subject at will in accordance with deliberately subjective, usually emotionally driven, criteria. There is an actual requirement for the creation of false equivalencies, reliance on biases (such as frequency), and deliberate or inadvertent disregard of known cognitive glitches, in order to create the oversimplified, selectively supported narrativisation and personalisation of reality which common sense thinking almost always produces.

This is especially apparent when we examine its operation in conspiracy theories. Pretty well every conspiracy theory, be it Flat Earth, Ancient Aliens, or 9/11 Truther, to name just a few, has as its central platform an appeal to common sense. How could they have made those pyramids without alien help? They're so big – it's just common sense. Buildings don't collapse like that, so the whole thing must have been an elaborate hoax – common sense. The world looks flat from where I'm standing – you guessed it: common sense again.

And this isn't limited to the lunatic fringe of cognitive dysfunction. Mainstream ideas backed by common sense have included all of the ugliest aspects of racial theory (people who look different must be innately different and therefore rankable by race), sexism (these uneducated women are uneducated, therefore educating them would be a waste), and xenophobia (the Iranian revolutionaries are crazy, and must therefore be indicative of the sanity of all Iranians). Common sense thinking is arguably responsible for the manifold survivals of prejudice, junk science, and the blatant lies and misrepresentations we widely accept as political truth.

Of course, common sense is very useful in some regards. For the kind of thinking required to decide not to run naked into the middle of moving traffic, common sense patterns of thought are admirably well suited. But when it comes to the navigation of complex, non-binary situations, it is rarely or never either appropriate, adequate, or even remotely valid, by simple virtue of its extreme reductionism. And this is important because we, as citizens, have powers and responsibilities to fulfil in a world which is unquestionably complex and non-binary.

All of which makes it very difficult to see a future any less confused and stupid than the present without a major re-examination of the insane assumption that animate bags of meat and water designed for social aggregation on the basis of emotional bonding are capable of valid rational thought by default.

Stone Age Scorpions And Our Toxic Love Affair With Data Empiricism

Gobekli Tepe was one of those archaeological finds which drastically re-wrote the history of civilisation. Located in Turkey, it is an enormous set of monolithic stone constructions which could not possibly have been built by a small, disorganised group, dated definitively to a period which pre-dated conventional timeframes for the emergence of large, organised groups by thousands of years. Of course, it's impossible to upend age old assumptions about the birth of civilisation without attracting a fair grab bag of kooks and conspiracy nutters - that school of 'thought' which cannot accept any explanation which does not involve aliens - but at a more serious level, discoveries like this also reveal the current state of thought across a broad range of specialisations.

It's a truism that interpretations of history (including pre-history) are a sort of weathervane for the contemporary concerns of the historians in question. Just take a look at the weight given to climate change and complex systems based explanations in current thinking on issues such as the Bronze Age collapse, collapse of the Roman Empire, and the origins of the world wars. What's also interesting, though, is what these discourses reveal about contemporary methodologies of thought.

Archaeology and ancient history have become unlikely pioneers in the area of multi-disciplinary studies. Unlikely because these are traditionally such conservative fields, but easily comprehensible in hindsight given the nature of the undertaking. This means that there is an admirably collegiate culture, especially in archaeology, characterised by strong openness to discussion of finds and findings from pretty well any specialist in any field. A good example of this is the recent discussion of the Gobekli monoliths as an ancient astronomical observatory.

It all started, as most archaeological controversies start, with a stupid and poorly researched news article. A whole series of articles, more or less factually incorrect, ran with a paper put together by  engineers from Edinburgh University which purported to have used statistical data analysis to match symbols on the gigantic T-Pillars to astrological signs. Apart from variously mis-describing these engineers as 'archaeologists', or vaguely referring to them as 'scientists', every one of these articles described the findings of the paper as if they were incontrovertible fact. As it happens, the team at Gobekli Tepe run an excellent and very informative blog, possibly because they're sick of all the ancient alien morons taking all the oxygen. What can also be found on their blog is the discussion they had with the authors of the report.

Some of this is a little bit abstruse, so I'll provide a quick summary here for context. Basically, the engineers decided (for reasons which are unclear) that a particular scorpion symbol was a sign for the Zodiac constellation Scorpio. Using various data analytics tools, they then cross compared a selection of symbols on various pillars with the calculated positions of constellations in 10000 BCE. Finding that they were able to associate a number of animal symbols with current astrological designations, they then wrote their paper claiming that the site must be an observatory and, further to this, decided that one of the images must represent the still somewhat dubious Younger Dryas impact. So far, so depressingly standard for the use of data in academia. But what's really revealing here is the nature and content of the discussion which ended up happening between the archaeologists and the engineers.

The team at Gobekli Tepe, to whom I am admittedly partial, reacted fairly scornfully to this paper. They pointed out various flaws in the methodology and selection of evidence, and raised a huge question mark over the scorpion/Scorpio thing, making the very valid point that Zodiac signs as we know them aren't really attested prior to approximately 2000 BCE, and that those signs, which form the basis for current Zodiac iconography, are from a very great distance away from the site. Basically, they contended that the distance in time and space rendered the very first and basis assumption invalid, or at least highly dubious. They then went on to point out that the selection of pillars seemed random, was not in any way comprehensive, and had a distinct look of 'cherry picking' about it. And on top of all this, they raised the point that the monument had been altered and reconfigured over many generations, rendering a single purpose unlikely. This done, they pointed them to their own theories about the monuments being indicative of emerging social complexity for consideration.

The response from the engineers was revealing. The engineers airily dismissed the social complexity theory in a single truncated sentence which labelled it as 'opinion'. They then proceeded to blame the archaeologists' slow publication rate (it's actually really fast) for the incompleteness of their data. No coherent defence was made of the basis assumption beyond 'scorpions have always stood for Scorpio', which is ludicrous, and they also embarked on a long, inexpert, and rather sterile discourse on the survival and transmission of stories. All of this was capped off with the bland assertion that “… given the statistical basis [of their] interpretation, any interpretation inconsistent with [theirs] is very likely to be incorrect.”

And there's the kicker. It doesn't matter that the base assumptions for their data analysis are basically pants. The fact that archaeologists and ancient historians spend their lives studying ancient iconography and mythology is utterly insignificant. The fundamental flaws in their evidence selection are irrelevant. All that matters is that their analysis is 'statistical', which must mean it accesses the highest possible level of truth because 'science'. This is unbelievably moronic and, unfortunately, symptomatic of a lot of thinking today.

We can see evidence of this malaise shot through every aspect of our lives. From elaborate psychometric testing to bizarre, data driven theories of law enforcement, the absolute bane of poorly interpreted statistics and numbers in general in politics, and the bizarre and occasionally insane conclusions of data models in genetics, linguistics, and urban planning - data would appear to be the new god. Don't get me wrong - statistical analysis and sufficient data to do it with are vital components of any scientific or theoretical inquiry, but the fundamental component of all of this is humans. Data doesn't think. And if we try to make it do our thinking for us instead of using it as it should be used - to validate or check human thinking - we risk becoming as stupid as the machines we make and use. And that, if you actually think about the last time you asked a computer a question, is pretty damn stupid.

How We Know Things

Around the seventeenth century, a funny thing called 'The Enlightenment' was happening. One of the effects of this movement was that sundry gentry from all over Europe suddenly decided that a productive use of their time would be to dabble about collecting odds and ends from the deep past and either construct elaborate fantasies around them, or simply label them and shunt them into vast private collections. These people were called 'antiquarians', and one of them, Sir Robert Cotton, had what was possibly the biggest collection of Anglo Saxon documents extant at the time. This collection was eventually willed to the British nation, and was moved to the ironically named Ashburnham Manor for safekeeping. Ironic because the house burnt to the ground on the 23rd of October, 1731. The fire destroyed many of the the 563 manuscripts in the library, but one which was miraculously preserved was Beowulf, labelled as such, and bound, for some reason, within a collection of mediaeval bestiaries. Another antiquarian, Icelandic scholar G J Thorkelin, translated and copied Beowulf, then took it to Copenhagen. Unfortunately, Copenhagen was occupied by Napoleon's forces at the time and the translation, along with Thorkelin's house, was destroyed in a British bombardment in 1807. Luckily, Thorkelin himself was not destroyed, and he did a do-over, thus ensuring that the earliest full version of a British literary work was preserved, by the skin of its teeth.

Years later, a grand, crazy old widow called Edith Pretty, left alone in a big house in Suffolk, became interested in attempting to contact her dead husband through spiritualism - a movement that was big in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and one which couldn't be more different from The Enlightenment. Spiritualist 'thinking' prompted Mrs Pretty to decide that she'd had a bunch of prophetic dreams about the collection of artificial mounds on her property. So she toddled off to the local university, hired a self-taught archaeologist (the amusingly named Basil Brown), and told him to get digging. This was in 1938. Over the next few years, subject to minor interruptions owing to WWII, it was gradually determined that these mounds were dark age ship burials containing the richest hoard of Anglo Saxon treasure discovered then or since. Amongst the finds were two objects - a drinking horn and boar helmet - which exactly matched descriptions of objects found in Beowulf. The boar helmet is the only one of its kind that has ever been found, helmets from dark age Britain being about as common as honest parliamentarians, and is the best and most dramatic evidence that the world described in Beowulf has firm anchors in reality - is, in fact, a real world.

The survival of the Beowulf manuscript, and the attestation of its world in the Sutton Hoo burial, account for a worryingly large proportion of all that we know about Britain between 600 and 1000CE. If the folks fighting the fire at Ashburnham had been just a little less assiduous, or that random Icelander just a little less dogged, that old lady just a little less crazy; there would be a yawning gap in our knowledge of a period which is pretty dark to us as it is. Which is why we used to call it 'The Dark Ages'. Without these two random and tortuous narratives of exploration and discovery, the history of English literature and the Anglo Saxon period would be dramatically different. And wrong. And there's the thing. We know we're not as wrong as we might have been, thanks to all kinds of dumb luck, but what we don't and can't know is how wrong we still are. This isn't limited to obscure aspects of British history, either. If Schonky Schliemann had never met that spy, he'd never have dug that huge trench in Hissarlik and found the city variously known as 'Wilusa', 'Ilium', or 'Troy'. If Bedouin shepherd Mohammed Edh-Dhib hadn't fallen into that cave, our knowledge of the Hebrew Bible would be missing one thousand years of its history as a manuscript. If anonymous bad boys hadn't burnt down the palace at Hattusas, we would never, ever have been able to confirm the existence of an entire empire (Hittite), which vanished from the record in around 1200BCE, its memory surviving only in a handful of casual mentions in a bible story about someone else (Abraham).

Given, then, that what we know about ourselves is based in large part on what we know about our past, and that what we know about our past is governed in large part by random chance, it's difficult to see how anyone goes around being certain about anything. People who know this are of course aware of the very tenuous and probably wildly unreliable thread that connects us to the origins of the present, and thus are born those rather fatuous aphorisms about knowledgeable people being aware of their ignorance. There is a mad tendency to try to reduce the sum of our knowledge into what I like to call 'Dinner Party Facts'. All people came out of Africa. The Jews have always lived in Israel. The Bible forbids [insert thing here]. None of these things, taken as hardened, absolute information, is entirely true. Simple narratives and certain facts are the playthings of the ignorant and the stupid. The acquisition and application of knowledge is not and cannot be the philatelogical process of collecting 'facts', as there really is no such thing. 'Knowing' things consists of the much harder, much less comfortable endeavour to understand and synthesise what little we have, and above all, to maintain an awareness of the dark immensities of ignorance which form the shifting basis of all our knowledge.

The Kardashian Gap

There are many arguments for and against the legitimacy of the fame of the Kardashians. Most of the arguments for have to do either with a perception of their positive influence on someone or other, or their existence as a kind of fait accomplis. They're famous now, so are therefore important to know about. The arguments against are pretty obvious, and are mostly put in the form of questions about why they exist, what, at the end of the day, they actually do, and so on and so forth.

What these arguments ignore is that there really isn't any legitimate basis for fame of this kind, and nor does there need to be. The Kardashians and others of their ilk are not rational products of a rational system, and it's a little bit foolish to try and explain them as such. Just like Rockefeller, Beau Brummell, Trump in his pre-presidential phase, or Alcibiades, the Kardashians are clearly manifestations of the cult of celebrity. So far, so obvious. But what I wonder is how clearly we see the implications of the very existence of this cult.

The last half century or so has seen a massive acceleration in attempts to systematise and formalise social and political mechanisms. The recently revolutionary notion of 'bureaucracy' has become ubiquitous, standard rhetoric for the nations of the west always includes talk about being 'a nation of laws', and most people in western democracies, if you really push them, will admit that their particular societies are at least supposed to be based on equity, fairness, and egalitarianism. Given this, why aren't we all currently living in our own various utopias of freedom and whatnot?

There's a lot of potential answers to this question. Many people will argue quite cogently that the gap between ideology and practice is created by corruption, greed, institutionalised unfairness, popular apathy, and a host of other factors. I don't disagree, but I think that there's probably something deeper at play. In a world where everybody is shouting about fairness and compassion, the fact that so little of these things seem to exist in our systems must surely be down to something lurking beneath our conscious impulses. Something that we're not entirely aware of.

And the Kardashians are my proof of its existence. In short, the Kardashians and other celebrity cults speak to the insane human compulsion to create gods and aristocrats. As far back as we can see in time, humans have always set up shrines or images to some sort of divine or semi-divine personification of a perfect or ideal other. It doesn't matter how many systems you put in place, how much you try to scrub out the influence of church or tribe or nobility - all this does is create a gap into which something like the Kardashians can spring fully formed as objects of trivial worship. Huge sections of our informal systems of culture are built solely around the elevation and emulation of these people, and built in such a way as to leave absolutely no doubt that the veneration of these images is very much an aspect of the popular will. As in, nobody is being compelled to slavishly admire these idiots - they're actually paying to do it. And this teaches us an important lesson about the current limits of the human animal when it comes to the acceptance and judicious use of freedom.

It would seem that our social development has outstripped our collective cognitive evolution. Still today, unchanged for thousands of years, it's all too possible to observe the inability of people en masse to understand anything if it is not cast in the form of a story containing at least one hero and one villain. And it would seem that it is collectively impossible for us to understand even ourselves without recourse to some more or less artificially constructed ideal. The impulse to quarantine our aspirations into some inaccessible, otherworldly realm is a recurring theme in the story of humanity's constant falling short of its ideals. The horrible familiarity of our current problems is a symptom of the fundamentally unchanging patterning of our minds.