Collective Error
Robert Anton Wilson reminds us, playfully and humorously... and with great compassion, that we have elevated mediocrity and robot idiocy to a standard of education. Solving problems through a continual concentration of power is a cure worse than the disease. At this point in time government run education seeks to fashion social changers instead of critical thinkers. Today identity politics gains momentum due to it's contentious nature and not for any intrinsic merit. However despite this collective error we have in each moment the ability to confront the primate programming within ourselves. RAWs books serve as a gateway allowing the individual to overcome these human constraints through a process of growth. You are, of course, a master the moment you engage as one.
Bio-Survival
In Prometheus Rising, RAW discusses a critical advancement in civilization when an individuals bio-survival security shifted away from the family gene pool to money. Bio-survival is the comfort/safety seeking DNA program inherent in all organisms. We all imprint a "mother" figure and then as we grow up we explore further out into the environment. At some point the family and tribe as a whole becomes the new safe space that maximizes survival. Today, it's the government. The question we have to ask is how effective is the state in regards to alleviating survival anxiety?
Robert writes....
As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed "anomie" or "alienation" or "existential anguish" about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call "money". Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn't look for bio-survival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets.
In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security; exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society, having the tickets (money) is bio-security; having the tickets withdrawn is terror. Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts, in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool.
On the other hand, the State is not a gene-pool or a tribe, and cannot really play the bio-survival unit convincingly. Everybody on Welfare becomes paranoid, because they are continually worrying that they are going to get cut off ("exiled") for some minor infraction of the increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic rules. And in real totalitarianism, in which the bogus identification of the State with the tribe is carried to the point of a new mysticism, the paranoia becomes total.
Real bonding can only occur in face-to-face groups of reasonable size. Hence, the perpetual attempt (however implausible in industrial circumstances) to decentralize, to go back to the tribal ethos, to replace the State with syndicates (as in anarchism) or affinity-groups (Reich's "Consciousness III"). Recall the hippie crash-pad of the sixties, which lives on in many rural communes.
Wilson continues to discuss various ideological attempts to remedy the situation but ultimately concluded with:
Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where, without totalitarianism, everyone has enough tickets.
Is this where cryptocurrencies come in? Maybe. World-wide wealth by leveraging the world wide web? Distribution through a distributed ledger? Having enough tickets through a variety of tickets? Maybe. We will have to see if there is widespread adoption of the blockchain. In the right applications I hope so. Right now unfortunately there is too much lambo psychosis and cash grabs. Too much moon talk. It's a bit of a shit show. People need to come back to reality.
The Why, How And What?
I do think RAW is correct in his overall analysis as he thoroughly uncovered the 'why'. The 'why' is where to start. I think of this chapter in Prometheus Rising often especially as a reminder when surfing the cryptocurrency space. Milton Friedman, as seen in the video below, zeroes-in on the 'how' by recognizing the decentralized nature of the internet. He saw an opportunity not for political globalism but economic globalism. A natural unfolding and next step in the evolution of currency. Fast forward to today, I believe the 'what' to be blockchain technology. Cryptocurrencies, due to their technical aspects and philosophical principles is our best shot bringing us full circle back to why all this matters in the first place.
