In The Embrace Of The Ledger: Art On The Blockchain

We've been hearing that the future of music is streaming. This may be so, it certainly looks that way. A future in which music is streamed and not owned looks to be here, but its current mode of delivery through central services that operate with heavy costs, from licensing to data storage to bandwidth is an animal that feeds off venture capital and music creators with a voracious appetite and has yet to prove profitable. Anyone who doesn't limit their listening habits to the Disney assembly line of future nervous breakdowns has been witness to much hand-wringing, rending of teeth and gnashing of garments or sommat over the economics of culture creation dissipating like a fog in the mid-day sun.

Observing the tense negotiations between indie labels and aggregators with Youtube, Pandora and Spotify many issues were brought up like a bad breakfast and chewed like a bitter, ever-repeating cud that couldn't be spat out. Politicians were lobbied, Youtube has yet to unveil their music subscription service and labels joined the streaming bandwagon, withdrew their releases from streaming and few of us would be surprised to see our finest artists show up as our roofer's apprentice or begging change downtown.

In the current mode of business there is no way artists could ever get a fair share of revenues created through music unless they have a proportionate ownership in all the companies involved. I had thoughts that perhaps what little cash we artists bring in should go directly into stock in Apple and Amazon, or establishing funds that invest in not-yet-public streaming startups to get a cut of the middle man's always disproportionate share of the still enormous amount of capital flow generated by music. Maybe one thing that prevents this is what music careers and startup tech companies have in common: the high early mortality rate of music careers and tech startups. You're taking the small gains from one high-risk endeavor and placing a bet on an uncertain proposition in another. But from the point of view of the middle men, maybe giving artists an equity stake would be a better position to negotiate lower rates. This would be a reversal of capitalist practice, though, for the hands that got dirty making the widgets have always gotten the smallest share of the value generated. And one may ask if what could happen to a successful cabal of small to mid-sized labels with ownership in delivery infrastructure be but another hegemonic gatekeeper.

The Hyperloop is Elon Musk's Ticket to Olympus

    Okay, so, full disclosure: I really, really wish I was Elon Musk. I wish I was Elon Musk because the thing I spend the most time wondering about, out of all the things I spend time wondering about, is what the mass of ordinary human beings must look like to a person who is operating on a greater-than-global scale. I wonder about the kinds of questions you start asking yourself when you no longer have to ask "how am I going to pay all these bills?" I wonder what qualities a person has to possess to get to that rarefied zone. When Elon Musk crawls out of his diamond pit in the morning and hops aboard his private robo-pegasus to glide to work, do the blurry little dots scurrying along the streets below him look like people?

    Why am I asking these questions? Because Elon Musk just issued a challenge to the entire State of California, and I'm trying to fathom the endgame.

Lollapalooza is God, And God Is Blackout Drunk

Sup guys. I'm new here, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cory O'Brien, and this is what most of my days are like:

     Lollapalooza was hardly an hour old, and a gangly boy in a muddy yellow t-shirt had already become an object lesson in collision physics. In the midst of the mob he was safe enough, bobbing as he was in a sea of people animated by a tsunami of bass, but take the crowd away and he became a newborn wildebeest with half the requisite number of legs. I could tell you what music we were listening to when this happened, but you've got the whole rest of the internet for that. Instead I am going to tell you about the crowd, because the crowd is where I found the agents of the gods.

     More accurately, they found me. My friend and I were a little sick of having all the hollows of our anatomy vibrated in four-four time while strangers cheerfully attempted to feed us their elbows, so we retreated to the relative safety of the port-a-potties, where the only danger was hepatitis. I wasn't too jazzed about locking myself in a closet full of other people's shit, so I opted to wait outside. I found a few square inches of lightly-trampled grass to call my own, and began juggling to pass the time. This was my first mistake...

Nothing New

In 1973 Chris Burden conceives the work Through the Night Softly, to be inserted during 10 seconds amongst the regular Tv advertisements, "4 times a week for 4 weeks".
In the original video, longer than the tv ad, he held his hands behind his back and crawled through about 50 feet of glass in Los Angeles pavement at nigh time.

We got to live during the time of corporations. We're told we should feel blessed. No other time has been like this one. Just think: a century ago, the first cars were coming off the assembly line. The planet still had the feel of an untamed frontier, at least for those lucky enough to be born rich, white, male, and willing to take on that post-Enlightenment ideal of Manifest Destiny. Just a century later, we see what the myth of privileged vantage points has delivered: a white hot moment of high petrol fuel, a moment in geological time like nothing more than a hit of crack rock. The addict knows only ash will remain, that it was their rent money- that they can't keep going like this. Yet they do, like a cockroach dragging its broken body across the floor, its abdomen an empty husk, most of its legs floundering as if in severe palsy. We all knew. So this should be neither confession nor surprise. We burned through the fuel like addicts. Like addicts, we used each day to leverage the future, and soon started hocking the future as well. Next months paycheck. Next years. Our children. Our children's children. We used one another, as we always have, like users and pushers. The analogy is so sound that it's facile. Governments wage false wars on drugs because the psychology of user and abuser is one they're familiar with. Like I said, none of this should be any surprise. And yet the shock in our voice was genuine, when all our accounts ran dry, when our friends were no longer assets we could drain. Then comes denial, bargaining. Then comes the mad power scramble. A few things are different on a global scale. But for the most part, if we want to know the future, just imagine a man dragging himself across broken glass in the brief, eternal silence between commercial breaks, and you've got a pretty good idea.

Enjoy your latte.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Human Demonology: Occupy Daath, or The Missing Protagonist

Satan Inc.

We may have reached a point where no choice or action can lead anywhere but mayhem, genocide and ecological apocalypse.

Why not buy from a big-box, low-rent retailer and fund human trafficking and forced labor? To get billions from point A to point B without resorting to walking or biking requires accepting environmental devastation, endless war and propping up dictatorial regimes. Mountains of Appalachia are leveled to provide the energy I'm using to power the laptop on which I write this. You are able to get online and read this because legal and moral crimes were committed. At the same time, behind all these things that make the way we live possible are the best efforts and innovations of millions of good people who do much to make life on earth better. Everyone drinks deeply from the same pool of atrocities. The picture all this makes varies with every map drawn of the territory. What the individual sees of their own self depends on which map they locate the “you are here” point. There is no master patter that can be laid over the landscape that can capture every aspect of the territory.

Bottom line, it is all myth in both the pejorative and philosophical sense.

Oftentimes, when trying to uncover the mythological underpinnings of our culture, the emphasis is on narrative and where character comes in. Attention can often concern itself on the question of from what protagonists and villains are made and how to make the greatest number identify with the one intended to represent the desirable behavior and thoughts. Entertainment "news", which has adapted so well to the web holds up the people in the creative industries behind whom the most cash has been spent. Reality shows and talent competitions perpetuate that hoary old Hollywood trope of the person in the street being discovered and plucked from obscurity. Cop shows with their tortured and earnest protagonists, the characters sketched out in most detail. The criminals get the most compelling and dramatic interactions with the intrepid heroes. The officials from higher up the law enforcement may be foils to "lone wolf" officers a la Dirty Harry, or the entire system could be represented as an occasionally squabbling, but unified family united against the criminals and the press, as in the original Law & Order and its myriad spinoffs. Generally, the victims, who represent neither law breakers nor law enforcement are props to kick off the plot so the real drama can proceed. This last group is where we find most of the population, helpless, at the mercy to the fates but for the authorities and their weapons and surveillance capabilities.

...the Cop Show has only three characters--victim, criminal, and policeperson--but the first two fail to be fully human--only the pig is real. Oddly enough, human society in the eighties (as seen in the other media) sometimes appeared to consist of the same three cliche/archetypes. First the victims, the whining minorities bitching about "rights"--and who pray tell did not belong to a "minority" in the eighties? Shit, even cops complained about their "rights" being abused. Then the criminals: largely non-white (despite the obligatory & hallucinatory "integration" of the media), largely poor (or else obscenely rich, hence even more alien), largely perverse (i.e. the forbidden mirrors of "our" desires). - Hakim Bey – Boycott Cop Culture 

Human Demonology: The Megapocalypse of Kim DotCom

By P. Emerson Williams
An operation planned by a large international team of law enforcement working over the course of years and carried out with helicopters and machine guns in a military style raid. Taking refuge in a safe room, reportedly found "near a semi-automatic shotgun", a larger than life villain is dragged out and taken into custody. No, the target is not a drug kingpin, nor a deposed dictator (hence the safe room - sewage drains are reserved final hiding places for deposed dictators and jihadist masterminds), not a banker responsible for tearing the world economy apart, nor a corrupt Western politician on the leash of said bankers.

Much hay has been made of Kim Dotcom's expansive mansion, expensive toys and cheesy movie villain antics. For those wondering why Megaupload was the target this fact alone should make it clear. They needed someone who would not invoke sympathy, and in this respect, they chose well. A huge congratulations to our owners for selecting and directing a story in a manner that would qualify them to take the raw footage shot for a reality TV show and create a narrative. If spying on citizens and enforcing laws not yet passed loses its luster, they should have no problem getting a job with Wife Swap or Deadliest Catch. (I had to resort to google for show titles...)

Here's a nice, concise way to weave a yarn:

• One Maserati
• One Rolls-Royce
• One Lamborghini
• Three Samsung 83" Tvs
• Two Sharp 108" Tvs
• One "Predator statue" 
• 60 Dell servers

An unspecified number of:

• Motor bikes
• Jet skis
• Artwork 

The takedown of megaupload is framed in the mold of major drug busts to which we have become used when presented with such a laundry list. More ingeniusly, in a fresh new year following the annum of the birth of the Occupy movement, the preceding list brings to mind the lists of bonuses, net worth and ostentatious belongings of hedge fund managers and bank executives. Our master's meme-schemers had all of us in their thoughts in the planning stages. If this is all a coincidence, why would the presence of a full-size inflatable replica of a Russian T-72 tank on Goldfinger's, uh, I mean Mr. DotCom's property be relevant to the story? What does the widespread discussion of his license plates with "POLICE," "MAFIA," "V," "STONED," "CEO," "HACKER," GOOD," "EVIL," and "GUILTY" tell us about what the law enforcement side of the story wants us to think? Like Joseph Kennedy, DotCom amassed what to the great majority of us is a vast fortune (a $200 million company isn't enough to impress our owners) through insider trading, shady schemes and outright fraud before founding the "Mega Conspiracy".

Aspects of the American Salesman Mythos

By P. Emerson Williams

Following the threads of any far-reaching narrative can be a treacherous task. If one is so inclined, one can find oneself tumbling down strange rabbit holes. These rabbit holes may reveal actual events and connections, or they may be created by the human mind's tendency to impose patterns over random sets of facts. The trick is to discern between an understanding of a set of facts and narratives that allows one to understand a simpler overarching order to the complexity or if prejudices and blind spots distort this understanding of the facts.

Central to the how the American mythos of success and power relates to the individual is through narratives of salemanship. The ability to sell supercedes the ability to produce goods and services. The reason the government and businesses put so much energy into controlling media is so narratives that contradict their sales pitch are not heard by a critical mass of the populace. Just as a dude at a bar who is trying to score doesn't want his rap spoiled by someone who knows him telling a story that runs counter to his tale of aggrandizement. (Or sensitivity, or erudition, or wealth – whatever narrative that works best with the hearer.)

After troops were deployed to Iraq and Afganistan one arrow in the quivver of the domestic and diplomatic effort was that we were bringing "Democracy" and "Freedom" to these countries. "Ah", said some citizens, breathing easier. "We're there to sell these unfortunates on our most precious commodity!"

Contesting "Human Nature": The Psychology of Power

By James Curcio art by Eugenio Rucuenco.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has taken aim at “the 1%,” but so far there has not been a great deal of consideration given to the culture or psychology of power.

Countering the charged, idealistic cry of the protesters comes the more cynical stance that “there will always be a 1%.” That, perhaps, it is human nature to claw our way to the "top of the pile," to slay the sitting King and take the throne. Certainly, that is a model we see mirrored in the heroic myths of antiquity.

As a result of our nature, are we forever cursed to live out a narrative of master / slave, of fascist dictator, of oppressor and oppressed? Should we resign ourselves to the "grim meathook future" that seems the inevitable outcome of the myth of the Leviathan, supposing no agents of chaos destabilize the true obsession of fascism? Not control as an end in itself, but rather control as the means to order and homogenization. This is the true face of the New American Century: one of peace secured through violence, possibly tooled atop a myth of racial purity.

Hot Catgirls and Cold Dead Philosophers R Us

By Mr. VI

OK, so it's confession time – who finds cat-girls hot? The fusion of animal and human, the exaggerated feline attitudes? Of course, here at Modern Mythology we don't really give a fig about gender, sex or species – except as interesting things to examine and play with, so please feel free to mentally ascribe your felinoid paramour any characteristics you damn well like, yes?

Perhaps in the spirit of overkill, we'd like to bring a dead Greek guy into the sexual equation – because let's be honest, a little necrophilia always spices things up. After all, copulating with corpses seems to sell well – just look at the amount of vampire-based Pornonormal Romance in your local bookshop.

Our ancient nec(e)rotic newcomer goes by the name of Xenophanes (Ξενοφάνης) which, roughly translated, means 'Of Foreign Appearance'. He's a playwright, philosopher and general interesting fellow known only by fragments.

Now, we don't know about you, but a guy with a name like that seems to us to be ripe for engaging in some heretical thought. It's like his mum named him 'X. The Edgy' on purpose, and he spent a great deal of time living up to it.

After all, he has a go at Homer and Hesiod, plus criticising the notion of a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods – sort of the equivalent of knocking Shakespeare, Keats, and the theory of General Relativity all at once.

Occupy Wall Street: Civil War or Smokescreen?

By James Curcio

Wishful thinking

As many of you know by now, #occupywallstreet is going strong. Or, at least, a couple hundred more people are living on the NYC streets for the time being.


An Ampedstatus headline reports, "Full-Blown Civil War Erupts On Wall Street: As Reality Finally Hits The Financial Elite, They Start Turning On Each Other",

"Finally, after trillions in fraudulent activity, trillions in bailouts, trillions in printed money, billions in political bribing and billions in bonuses, the criminal cartel members on Wall Street are beginning to get what they deserve. As the Eurozone is coming apart at the seams and as the US economy grinds to a halt, the financial elite are starting to turn on each other. The lawsuits are piling up fast. Here’s an extensive roundup:
As I reported last week:"Goliath On The Ropes, Big Banks Getting Hit Hard, It’s A “Bloodbath” As Wall Street’s Crimes Blow Up In Their Face"

Time to put your Big Bank shorts on! Get ready for a run… The chickens are coming home to roost… The Global Banking Cartel’s crimes are being exposed left & right… Prepare for Shock & Awe…"

Full blown civil war? Really. How about full blown posturing? Some of the content in that post is interesting, but aside from the link-baiting in the title, little of it seems to have to do with the protests themselves, let alone any sort of civil war, between the banks or anyone else. That is not a phrase to use lightly. Let's take a look at a reasonable opinion from the other side of the revolutionary think-tank...

Anarchists and radical organizers have a bit of collective amnesia with regards to the “Battle of Seattle.” The kids in black bandanas were only a very small part of the coalition that shut down the city in October, 1999. Their acts of childish violence against a Starbucks may have become the lasting public image of the event, but they were hardly representative. The bulk of that anti-globalization protest was composed of labor unions, environmentalists, and other organized progressives. All of those groups have deep traditions based in the community organizing traditions of Saul Alinsky and Cesar Chavez. The real work of organizing bears little resemblance to the attention-grabbing “culture jammers.” The real work involves “talking to one person, then talking to another person, then talking to another.” Organizing is slow, difficult, often thankless, but deeply meaningful work. There are “rules,” you see, even for radicals.

Some of these points should be well taken, both by the enthusiastic, fresh-faced youth and by the older jaded activists that lived through the high-water mark of the 60s that Hunter S Thompson refers to in Fear and Loathing:

Rather than seeing one event, we are seeing our own wishes and fears projected on top of whatever this event may be. This, of course, is the frame of reference regarding the ubiquity of our narrative which is our bread and butter here on Modern Mythology. So let me propose the idea that our reaction to the 'non'-event of the Wall Street protest is a function of ourselves, a mirror. It is ideology itself that seems to drive the almost performance-art aspect of protests. Here's a clip from earlier today, showing a throng of cops and protesters, and the actions leading up to an arrest-

Echo-gnomicks: Financial Meltdown and the Sound of the Underground

By Mr. VI

Okay, who did it? Who went and angered the Gnomes of Zurich? Who screwed the dwarves out of their rightful tribute? Who went and annoyed the boys at Gringotts? I know somebody did, because otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess.

No, really we wouldn't. Of course, it always happens this way – humans get greedy for gold and it all goes downhill from there. All you have to do is keep your head down and don't go near them. Instead, like magpies in their black and charcoal plumage, the suits decided to plunder the shiny realm, help themselves to the pots of gold.

Look where that has got us – another financial meltdown. Stocks plummeting, doom upon the horizon. Some part of me wouldn't be surprised if Ragnarok was around the corner, except of course it always is – just at the corner of your eye, but that's another story.

Economics – or as Terry Pratchett puts it 'reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits' a.k.a. Echo-gnome-ics – purports to be the art of dealing with such things. But as anybody who understands the myth of Echo will tell you, there's a bit of a problem.

Echo was doomed to repeat the words of others, her voice taken away by Hera in revenge for consorting with Zeus. Essentially, her communication was reduced to that of a cargo cult – mimicking and repeating sound with little hope of understanding.

Now, notwithstanding the fact that all communication is a bit like this, economics is about appearance. Those bankers and stockbrokers are doing the equivalent of listening to the voices of the gnomes and other chthonic spirits, echoing down mining tunnels and fissures in the Earth. They interpret echoes and make decisions based upon them – an entirely virtual construction based off second or third order perceptions.

It's no wonder really, considering that Paracelsus states that gnomes are capable of passing through solid rock as easily as humans pass through air, so for those of you who enjoy Harry Potter it might help to envisage them as being masters of the Apparate spell.

As apparitions, their substance is by nature more loosely bound than those humans – their outline lest fixed and form more fluid. It makes sense then, that they are masters of the physical, because their ability to modulate matter is a massive engineering boon. This is why in Norse myth, the dwarves are the creatures that create the weapons and tools of the very gods themselves.

This excerpt from Neil Gaiman's award-winning novella The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, which is available in full here, illustrates this really quite well:

The Myth of Work vs The Reality of Abuse

How surprised would you be if Cthulu awoke tomorrow?
I'm not sure I'd be very surprised, at this point.

By James Curcio

In the wake of yet another collosal political and social disappointment, I'd like to touch on an issue which, frankly, could be the topic of a book. And it's a book that, if it hasn't been written already, should be written. It needs to be written, and more importantly, it needs to be talked about.

Every culture has myths about work. What is acceptable for an employee or employer, what the nature of that relationship should be. It is in the benefit of the employer to have myths throughout the workforce that tie their very identity and sense of self worth into how well they meet that employers demands, and if there aren't forces in place, either enforced through government oversight or the unionization of the workers in some configuration, these myths can run rampant. There is, after all, a word in Japanese for working one's self to death. (They also apparently have a word for eating one's self to ruin. But that's another story.) 

Elements of our religions provide the infrastructure for these myths. They are further re-enforced by our social institutions, our education in many cases being little more than a tool for shaping people into effective workers as defined by the mandates of society.

This process is not inherently good or bad. As I said in the chapter on initiation in The Immanence of Myth, the prescriptive nature of indoctrination may sound ominous, but many of us know what humans become when left to be feral creatures. They can hardly be called human, at all. 

However, this process can still break down in any number of ways. And I believe many of you will agree, it has broken down in a fundamental way in the United States, and it is getting worse.

There was an article in Mother Jones entitled "All Work And No Pay" that I suggest you read immediately, before continuing with this piece. 

Goodbye Space Shuttle

By James Curcio
I know this may already be an issue past its sell-by date, as the shelf-life for ideas seems to be decreasing on a daily basis. But I think it is an important point to make, so I'm going to make it.

Many of you know by now that the US space program, though not ended in its entirety, has been demonstrably downgraded, and now faces an uncertain privatized future. This isn't new, the dismantling of the shuttle program is just the external proof of something that has long been in the works: the continued ideology of privitization at work.

I was saddened by this news, but not so much because of the mothballing of a program that is admittedly mired in many ways in an abandoned past. No. It further shows that our government either doesn't understand the nature of the scientific endeavor, or more likely, simply doesn't care. Short term profit has completely overtaken American mythology in the past few decades, and it is leading us into a death spiral from which there may be no escape until we reach the other side of the vortex.

I'll admit my bias in this upfront: I have a lot of shall we say misgivings about the idea that everything does better when privatized. Certain systems become inherently unhealthy for the people within them when privatized, while other systems perform better based on a profit motive. For instance, medicine and prisons should never, ever, be purely profit based. It's insane. We are seeing the results of that. Fuck the cost benefit ratio, if a patient's leg is going to fall off, you save the patient. Doctors took an oath, didn't they? We should make the pharmeceutical industry take the same oath, and hold them to it. And it should never be a financial incentive to anyone to lock more people up.

It's a tougher issue with something like the space program. I can see ways that there will be improvements from privatizing the program, actually. NASA has ostensibly long languishes as a result of government bureaucracy.

But in terms of pure science, it seems likely that it'll be a long term loss. Discovery doesn't occur as a result of the question "how is this going to make money?" Discovery occurs as a result of people following their curiosity.

It is after that point that people - often other people - go back and say, "now we know that xx element behaves yy way in zz environment - hey, I think I know how we can make better engines as a result of this!"

I have dedicated thousands of hours of my life to this site because issues relating to mythology are interesting to me. That should be the only reason we need. Practical benefit does factor into the equation, but we never know where from. There need to be methods of supporting and sustaining this kind of inquiry, because beginning the inquiry with the question "how is this profitable?" never leads to the best results.

Let's put faith in ingenuity. And let's support it, both in our thoughts and beliefs, as well as with our pocketbooks. I have faith that if you put a hundred passionate scientists into an environment that supports that passionate curiosity, they will wind up discovering incredibly beneficial things. It may take a long time. That isn't the point.

And if you don't know how this short post relates to mythology, you need to be paying better attention.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Murdoch, Media & Mythology: A Hermetic Tale?

By Mr. VI

When you get down to it, the news is Chinese whispers. Despite claims to be fair and balanced, or that they do things in the public interest, the news media have placed their own spin on every event you have read about, seen, heard, or experienced indirectly.

By definition that's what media does, it mediates experience. Marshall McLuhan famously wrote:

"The medium is the message."

Irrevocably, the information becomes part of the medium – events become part of the output of a given signal. The recent events in the UK regarding Rupert Murdoch and so-called 'phone hacking' are the property of those who disseminate them. For example, the BBC coverage of the event is just that – it becomes part of the BBC message. It's exactly the same with Fox, MSNBC or any of the rest of the outlets.

Unless you are directly experiencing the events yourself right now, then you are reliant on media. Even if you are directly experiencing events right now, they are mediated themselves through your senses. Of course we don't like to think about that, because if that's the case then the media could be altered – our senses are equally open to bias, just as a newspaper or television show.

Our culture places great primacy on the phenomenon of the eyewitness, yet recent research suggests that even eyewitnesses may not recall actual events, but in fact recall their own arrangement of events which are influenced by many factors, some internal and some external.

There is a level at which you may think that this is irrelevant, but consider this:

If in fact we cannot say for certain that what we perceive is some kind of truth, then by definition the whole duality of truth versus lie is called into question. The current coverage of the Murdoch scandal has provoked public outrage – employees of his corporation have allegedly committed criminal acts, conspiring to bribe police officers, obtain information illegally and intruded upon the privacy of the families of murder victims and war dead, not just politicians and celebrities.

It's not just Rupert Murdoch and News International which engage in dodgy dealings, because certain forms of journalism operate in grey areas – their acceptability is often backdated once their claim of "public interest" is validated by the audience. In fact, such things are pretty endemic within almost every form of communication, from the white lies you tell yourself and others, to the work of speechwriters and spin doctors.

I've previously referred to Murdoch as a "lizardly Methuselah", and indeed my inaugural post on Modern Mythology made a metaphorical reference to the reptilian agenda, an indirect nod to the wildly strange fears of David Icke and others. Consider this to be if you like, a statement of my credentials – I think Murdoch is a leathery old bastard with billions at his command, and exceedingly cunning ability to get what he wants at almost any cost.

But right now, in this place and time, he is widely regarded by some to be almost as bad as the devil himself. This makes an interesting to us because in actuality, Murdoch and his ilk have a long, long mythic pedigree…

Sacred Economics With Charles Eisenstein

I was introduced to Charles Eisenstein through Daniel Pinchbeck, to talk about his book Sacred Economics which is published by Evolver Editions. I suggest you check it out.


As we talked, it became apparent to me that we’ve both worked on projects with many similar intentions, and so there seems to be an element of serendipity involved here. I offered the opportunity to post here on Modern Mythology, so you will likely be hearing more from him in the future. 


I hope you enjoy the conversation we had about myth, post-economics, and the apocalyptic, evolutionary challenges facing our species. 

James Curcio: It seems to me that you're taking a lot of the issues now facing us as a species – economically and environmentally – and posing them as challenges.

It has long seemed to me that there is a sort of “evolve or die” challenge posed to us as a direct result of our own actions, and it's best to face those challenges with optimism rather than pessimism. Much of that challenge arises from the myth of the individual and our unwillingness to bring that back to actions for the greater collective good. It can be hard to remain optimistic in light of that.

Charles Eisenstein: It isn't so much that I see the crises we face as challenges, but as the drivers of a transformational process. I guess you could call them challenges – but only in the sense that they challenge the basic mythology of our civilization. They are not bumps in the road that we can overcome and continue our trajectory. As you mention, one of the primary, defining myths of our civilization is the “myth of the individual,” or what I would call our “story of self” – that we are discrete, separate beings living in an objective universe, bubbles of psychology isolated in genetically-determined flesh robots, seeking to maximize self-interest. I think that the crises converging upon us are making this story of self untenable, as we become most painfully aware that what we do unto the other, we do unto ourselves.

Into the Hyper-real 3 - Modern Soul

(Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

“Gypsies, tramps and thieves,

You hear it from the people of the town, they call us

Gypsies, tramps and thieves…

But every night, the men would come around,

And lay their money down.”

-Sonny and Cher.

"I'm a little bit wooah, a little bit waayy, a bit dodgy, a bit tasty…. I'm a geezer! I will nick anything!"

-Chris the Crafty Cockney, The Fast Show

The question I left with last time was;

If, as the work of Adam Possamai suggests, modern culture (and pop-culture especially) is essentially a product of the machinations of late-capitalism, is just product, merely cargo… what can we, supposedly nothing more than mere consumers, do to find a relevant personal spirituality?

The answer to that lays somewhere in the nature of power, ownership and control.

It’s clear that the modern industrial West is a place where the definition of ownership and property is getting… blurry. Corporations benefit on the one hand from immense political influence which they use to redefine the concept of property (through swapping actual ownership of sold goods to a model where the consumer merely rents them from ‘the cloud’, to suing anyone who infringes ‘their’ copyright while plundering other cultures and counter-cultures for their next Big Idea) and, on the other, from the trillions given to them to bail out economies fractured by the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history… from which they also profited to the sum of trillions of dollars. Numbers and power like that have a crushing weight to them, a force of gravity like supermassive black holes in culture.

So perhaps the best way to deal with them is to turn that gravity against them, to slingshot past their aims and, gaining speed from their mass, plunge ever deeper into imaginal space.

And, as we pass, steal anything that isn’t nailed down.

Capitalism Five Ways

I'm not normally inclined to use this site just to point people's attention to something without providing some extensive unique commentary. However, I think this content stands on its own and is worth checking out:

(Capitalism Five Ways) 
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Living Your Myth 1: Mishima And Dying For Your Convictions

By James Curcio
Living Your Myth series.

To die for an idea is stupid, people say. Ideas aren't real.

Nowadays, the posture of choice is disengagement. Sure, we'll discuss ideas. Especially if it has any hope of getting us laid. But commitment to an idea or an ideal is so... passe. That was something that died with the 20th century, along with a lot of things that we can happily say we've left to rot in the past. Intellectual is a synonym with ineffectual. Art is a pretense by definition. The highest art now is art that makes fun of itself, or so says the co-creator of just such a piece.

Well, I've talked a great deal on this site about the ways that ideas-as-myths are living as much as we are. The ways that they enter into the world, enter into "reality," especially through our actions. The ways they real-ize ideas, and how we re-ify the world through them.

Sounds like a lot of bullshit ideas to me.

A writer deals in words. Words symbolize ideas. They can evoke emotions. But what's in a word, really? When is it time for action, and what is that action?

What is the greatest act a person can make? Is it the greatest sacrifice? And how many of you think your ideas are worth dying for? Certainly the suicide bomber has been convinced of this. We look away in discomfort or snub our noses at such fanatics. Mostly, I'd say, rightly so. They've been duped. They've been sold a unicorn and paid for it with flesh blood and mortar, and not all of it was theirs to sacrifice.

But there's another side to this posture of disengagement and apathy. It turns us to good cattle, good consumers. Good slaves who do our master's bidding because it is easier that way, easier than challenging and possibly facing death as the repercussion of our actions. Maybe this was the future that Yukio Mishima saw for his dying Empire; a future so bereft of honor and dignity that the only thing he could do in response was shove a blade through his innards. The death of a warrior, not a writer. His suicide could then be seen as a final transformation: writer into warrior. Thinker into actor. But this transformation is only complete when it resonates with a culture. When those ripples reach outwards across the years, transform entire civilizations. We all know the power of a martyr.

This was not Mishima's fate. He was a man in so many ways out of step with his time, a relic. To mix metaphors, if a man can become a metaphor, he was the final gasp of a dying mythology. The modern narrative on suicide, even in Japan, is not what it was. To the West, his was the death of a coward. We even sigh sadly at the thought of Hunter S Thompson blowing his brains out, a sound not unlike a book dropping heavily to the floor, or so said his son Juan. What poetry, the final sound for a writer to make. A book falling to the floor. Or perhaps Juan was doing a little myth-making of his own.

The Theory of Everything and Quandry of Light Speed

A little known secret: since I was a child, I've been obsessed with science. I was equally obsessed with fantasy, and later, philosophy and art, but my interest in science came about through the fact that it was the only one of these with any hope of creating a demonstrable model of how things work. Would I have used those words at the age of 13? Probably not, but it was still I believe what drew me to it. I had a bad teacher in middle school, and she forced me onto a far "lower" track of math and science than I should have been on, and at that point I consciously parted with the idea of ever becoming a scientist with a background in philosophy, focusing instead on art and philosophy. Though in my spare time, and in studying philosophy, I've done plenty of "layman" reading on Einstein, Neils Bohr, relativity, string theory, quantum mechanics, and all the bullshit pseudo-science that other layman have written about the subject.

I've avoided talking about it mostly because I know I don't speak the language, I have to fall back on the facile metaphors that real scientists attempt to make to explain these things to us, and in the process we can make egregious errors. I promised myself I wouldn't write about it, and yet here I am. So please, pardon my ignorance.

I have never been interested in lab science, in a fixation on detail and structure. I like science because it allows us to take philosophical ideas a step further. Many scientists are uncomfortable with this relationship, saying that science has nothing at all to do with philosophy except in their far distance past. Not so. But this is a topic that I simply couldn't fit into a blog post. It is the worthwhile subject of an entire book. I touch on it in the essays I've written so far for the Immanence of Myth but even there the topic is restricted to how science relates to myth, rather than philosophy.

Instead I'll cut to the chase. I recently read an article in Scientific American called "The Elusive Theory of Everything," written by Stephan Hawking (yes, that Stephan Hawking), and Leonard Mlodinow. The headline: "Physicists have long sought to find one final theory that would unify all of physics. Instead they may have to settle for several."

This cuts to the chase of a long running history, from relativity to quantum mechanics, and the fact that they can't be reconciled, to string theory, which at first was thought to be a means of solving this incongruity. For instance:

"In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Even the universe as a whole has no single past or history. So quantum physics implies a different reality than that of classical physics- even though the latter is consistent with our intuition and still serves us well when we design things such as buildings and bridges."

But then more variants of that theory were needed. And on, and on. And - finally! - it seems physicists are starting to realize something that philosophers have been saying for decades.

Let me quote again from the article:

"These examples bring us to a conclusion that proivdes an important framework with which to interpret modern science. In our view, there is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If two models agree with observation, neither one can be considered more reality an the other. A person can use whicher model is more convenient in the situation under consideration."

This is precisely the point I've been reiterating in the context of mythology, within my work for the Immanence of Myth. I recognize that, in an interdisciplinary sense, it is a point that shouldn't need to be made. But it seems that some diciplines have come to this conclusion before others, and it is about time that all disciplines - psychiatry most of all! - accepts this idea. There is no way I know of to drive it home with more force, and yet it doesn't manage to sink in. All models, all explanations, all beliefs that we form are contextual in every sense. Contextually derived, contextually dependent, and contextually useful, irrelevant, or even dangerous.

There is one point that seems, to a certain extent, to defy this fact, and it is this defiance that had me in an almost manic state most of yesterday until I realized I simply am not equipped with the knowledge or tools to solve the quandry. That is this: the constancy of light in a vacuum appears to somehow have a "higher" priority than all other constants. Space itself will bend to accomodate the constancy of this speed. When light passes through objects, of course, it is forced to slow. But time slows, we may imagine, to 0 as an object approaches light speed, and mass increases exponentially (making it seem likely that any object with any mass at all could never truly attain it.) Why is any of this relevant to what I've already said? After all, the behavior of light is one of the first places where the power of models became evident - is it a particle or a wave? It is because it seems peculiar to me that in a universe so recursively and emergently produced from any center-point that perception chooses to originate from should insist on one particular constant over and above others.

So .Why this insistence, and what does that mean in terms of our lives, and the nature of consciousness and being?

But this is where I hit a wall. I don't have the training to work this out. If I talk to scientists about it, I have to take their word for it. I have to approach the issue from another vantage point, that of personal experience. There are comments in the previous post where I talk about the nature of time. This relates to this as well. It would seem that the experience we have of time is very much based on our relative velocity to the speed of light. In other words, its behavior and seeming constancy is a condition of our relationship to that constant. How does that relate to the real experiences of our lives? Or of how we are all in a sense trapped in time, trapped to live on moment that appears to have some n-dimensional movement from a beginning to an end.

Tricking death would seem to me to not so much be a means of extending our experience of linear time indefinitely so much as changing the very nature of the rules of the game.

The Dual Definition of Myth (cont)

The fact that the word "myth" has become synonomous with an untrue belief belies an underlying shift in our epistemological focus over the past several thousand years. To generalize: we have become, as a culture, a great deal more concerned with verifiable facts and less concerned with the existential truths which have a different relation to fact. This progression ties not only into the Enlightenment focus on rationality and the scientific method, but, perhaps more pervasively and certainly more recently, we can see this following from the needs of industrialization. Fundamental business principles rely on actions that are easy to reproduce, and which produce similar if not identical results with each reptition. This promotes an economy of scale that is absolutely necessary for so-called big business.

The dual meaning of myth comes almost as a by-product of this worldview, and provides a certain cultural insight that we will be exploring throughout the Immanence of Myth. In its proper sense, myth has no necessary relation to fact because it relates to our interior and psychological rather than external, physical selves. This is not to say that the former has no bearing on the latter. Far from it. That the inner and outer life appear as mirror images of one another, separated by what appears to be a vast divide, is another issue that we must contend with. (in Deconstructing Our Myths.)