Universal Law, Unobserved by Modern Society

Kerry McCarpet
Jul 30, 2017 · 8 min read

“The Things You Make, Take” — the act of innovation draws on the human soul for sustenance — and creates a deficit in the individual, exactly equal to the volume of its creation. Understanding this is crucial to the long term survival of the species — and in some sense accounts for the necessary failure of technology. Nature moves as a single unified organism… and developments outside that symbiosis — don’t and can’t hold — not for good. The catalyst for such behaviour occurs when a species has their way of life threatened, but has evolved to be intelligent enough to innovate an individualistic workaround to the detriment of their environment. Before making new decisions for our societies, we need to observe and truly understand the dynamic of “progress” within nature on its terms…

Let’s look at the media as an obvious example. From the moment it was switched on — perhaps at the point of language, and certainly at the point of writing — it started destroying itself — because it acted as a parasite on human energy, which proceeded to systematically destroy its host’s ability to function.

With words, books and the radio and TV that have followed, humans have in effect hacked nature to create parallel realities… But just as a wormhole in space requires an enormous amount of matter and energy to operate, these alternate worlds are necessarily vampiric, surviving on human consciousness alone — that would ideally remain within the lives of the people.

This happens at a very basic level initially — with language, our consciousness migrated from the confines of the present into the lands of past and future — because words quantified these concepts much more clearly than had previously been possible. Without a need for forward planning, the future would historically have spoken to us from the subconscious alone — when it decided to — and the same with the past… But the sudden need for logic, when humanity was decanted from the rainforest onto the hostile savanna, the sudden need for teaching, for learning, for tradition and strategy and prediction and innovation… these factors made it necessary to linguistically construct and inhabit past and future — and this came at the expense of our concentrated presence. (A clue to our previous state here is the comfort one feels from meditation).

Then with the invention of writing, we built static, physical portals through which others could be drawn… And again, these false realities needed our lives as their sustenance… because to create the acres of markings carved into stone walls, human time, consciousness and experience was used, while the children of carvers were deprived of their fathers. Then came the readers who gave over their focus to power up and sustain the codified meaning… and as the messages grew larger and more ubiquitous — the children of readers also found themselves neglected. And in time babies started being born into an entire reality that was largely uninhabited.

These children learned fast that the human instinct to socialise could not now be fulfilled in three dimensions and had instead to be sought through the looking glass. Everyone Wants to be Famous for Nothing… Well, not nothing — everyone wants to socialise and they can’t in the derelict world-space — there’s no eye contact or engagement — not even from their parents. Neither can people rely on being seen in any meaningful way by potential lovers, because the portal has also claimed that attention that people previously gave to each other. The boyband album cover that emulates a lover’s affectionate gaze… is a style co-opted on instagram, that an orphan to modernity might curate another’s response to them in a favourable way… But the other’s never known what it is to gaze affectionately… industry has imposed a monetisable sexual template on his formative mind, and he’s become autoerotic — in an algorithmic unreality…

The same dynamic has also rendered all argument impotent — we can’t inform a reader’s opinion, through facts and reason alone… for the reader’s never known what it is to engage — the learning template imposed upon the young by commercialised society is based on strategic concurrence for social acceptance.

…And so the screens have started cracking… The media was made to convey the macro to the micro — if it had focused on politics and culture — it could allow a big and sprawling community to operate as a whole, the way a smaller one would naturally… It was thought, that the leaders of media, would be the same kinds of leaders who had previously emerged within regular societies — themselves problematic, no doubt, but in more tangible and understandable ways to the public… In the media space though, edited fiction passes as real…

But what the media makes, ALSO takes — what it conjours up in its mind and puts into our world, must be sustained by some of ITS resources… And so the false elevation of community leaders, made famous simply through commercial insistence alone… quickly damaged our relationship with The Truth and thus allowed for even more arbitrary thought leaders to invade media territory… until eventually — we all wanted to… “Because you’ve altered our social dynamic” — we roared — “because you’ve drained our reality of meaningful spaces for fulfilling interaction — we now have to use your space to fulfil our social instinct.” And in we marched — the digital immigrants.

First came the rise of social media… which lowered the heads of the corporate news to the vernacular of friendly engagement… To retrieve consumers from these new dopamine burrows — the news had to offer treats in the same way that gossip did… As the idea of objective value was thus further eroded — those who were even less qualified, even less expert, and even less inclined to fact check, but incredibly needy — were able to clamber up to the new platforms of social acceptance… The adaptive advantage in this spiritual desert had now become the intensity of one’s desperation for love.

…So I was reading The New Statesman the other month… and in this political paper… I came across an article about how a pop star from 20 years ago, wears different pairs of tights at different times of the year… I didn’t find this an odd piece… it was just the same as a lot of the others. But as time went on — for some reason, that one really preyed on my mind… and returned, when I later read an article from a journalist, relating another one of his dull family outings, in the Guardian… and then again when I saw a make-up blogger’s insistance on the way her readers should be casting their vote in the coming election… and I realised… they’re using our national media — the channel for crucial community information and cultural advancement — as their social media, and by extention — their coffee mornings… All we have now is a medium for chestbeating dominance…

This requires a more detailed conversation. Artists have always elevated the mundane to present it afresh to the less sensitive majority, and the beauty and insight they bring is a growing edge to our collective consciousness. An article about buying a pizza for example, might reveal a comic aspect of capitalism; a piece describing an evening walk on the beach, might convey something usually unobserved in the natural world… These people reside on the fringes of society — they’re odd. They see what the regulars don’t, and what they share through these stories are augmenting visions. Or rather, what they shared… because these people are dying — no one gets what they’re doing…

As the media’s stormed by those who’re not artists, and not academics, and not even very interesting… new writers who arrive at its gates… aren’t shown the difference between presenting the mundane in a new light and presenting it on a platter that’s more fucking dull than the humdrum reality. Instead we tell noobs that this is a platform for the needy, alone — so… how far are you willing to go, young man or young lady? I mean, yeah, there are requirements, but these are entirely profit driven so that what they give to the people is essentially that which they already have and already like. This stipulation in fact, precludes the artist or intellectual from even applying — for what they have — requires the phsyical space of open-mindedness to be seen or understood at all; being as it is -something that hasn’t been seen or thought of before.

But it meets with resistance — “We don’t need or want our minds broadened, there’s no social advantage to seeing clearly in amongst the myopic. We greet difficulty and originality with disdain — as to us, these concepts are completely irrelevant…” It’s not their fault — social success for oneself and one’s family is now so incredibly complex — only the more monastic are capable of independent thought…

And so the new “talent” — The Needers, don’t research their opinions and significantly now… don’t even pretend to be delivering news… they overtly use the national media to do no more than create an arbitrary social hierarchy that simply asserts — “My unqualified opinion is more significant than yours.” It’s all the more mournful when they’re arguing to consensus for equality of some kind… On rafts of populism they’ve tied together by reviewing eyebrow pencils or baking pies, they drearily crowd out the more obscure intellectuals who could actually help us in perilous times. And in doing so — they might be steering the electorate to send young men to their deaths in wars no one understands, whilst destroying our capacity for the clarity of thought required to even have a HOPE of understanding in the future.

Well that means the media can’t function at all then… The Media’s Dead. And it’s Dead by virtue of its origin — it was and always will be an anthropic nature-hack — a mere construction built on a debt of human energy. The Media robbed our territory for sustenance, forcing us to pillage for sustenance from its. As it dies, those parts of our soul that have migrated to the digital realm to find refuge from famine, also die — or perhaps they’ll come home — that remains to be seen. There’s only so much energy to go round — What We Make, Takes from us, and what’s made within our creation, takes from itself.

Nature created a full life’s worth of activity, when we found ourselves eating fruit and having sex and capering in the trees… That was a full life… that’s what our physiology’s been honed for — a baby ape needs full time attention to grow up, sound of mind… It doesn’t seem to me like it was our fault we had to change — it was a response to a natural disaster that drove us onto the savanna… but what we have to do now — is understand the trajectory of our technological advancement… That it didn’t start as a natural epiphenomenon of intelligence — the springboard for innovation was our original rejection of nature’s decision to evict us. It may have been an unconscious decision on its part, but our invention of tools was a bold assertion of our dominance over circumstances — so when the circumstance is peacetime… we’ve got to be careful not to carry on fighting. Every Tool We Create Denatures The Creator.

You can’t do things outside the symbiosis and expect them to last. You get away with that for a limited time, so it’s a useful bandaid in times of crisis — but unless you find your way back to living in sync with The Earth (and with The Cosmos, if we manage to leave the planet) — the adaptive advantage that’s created in the groove — of psychopathy, individualism and shortsighted pleasure seeking, will undoubtedly destroy the species… Because always — The Things You Make, Take.

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