Best of Times, Worst of Times, Times of Wonder, Times of Dread

While I observe a dumbing down of society, I experience, like a heavy friction, a buoyantly insistent rise of intelligence as well, as if these were twin forces, braided into one.

I see people rise against tragic experiences to become creative masterminds: a violinist rises out of war to become a brilliant innovator, a politician rises from impossible circumstances to raise the quality of the geopolitical conversation, friends keep dense Leonardo like notebooks as a defense against irrelevance.

Although decay and irrelevance are all around me, new life, new relevance, new appreciation of things which otherwise would not matter, fall into sharp relief.

There is a heightened awareness as if the world itself was shifting on its axis, a change in the way the light feels, a change in how sound carries, a heightened sense of proprioception.

Ideas which once seemed baked into awareness, now shimmer and collapse, as ephemeral as if they had never existed.

New ideas rise quickly, and most are gone before I can make them stand still for proper investigation, as if time itself speeds up.

Although doom & fear rule the outside world, inside our house, just barely kept together with craftsmanship, compassion and respect rule the inside air.

As fast as we work to maintain order a new puppy demonstrates there never was any respectable order anyway, and our eleven year old twin grandsons underscore the point.

But it is the household musicians who remain unimpressed by any of it at all, writing songs about rainbows of cards and inveterate gamblers with impunity — weaving hair raising stories into impossibly brilliant compositions.

And the household carpenters who simply approach each day as a problem to be resolved, refusing to be defeated by such an aberration.

Despite appearances, our ideas are big and messy ideas: Oppression sees to it that our work is suppressed, throwing into bass relief the formerly bland observation that our work is truly dangerous to the world.

The musicians, the writers, the carpenters, the puppy, all dangerous to the world.

History falls into sharp patterns, in which truly remarkable & dangerous ideas are toyed with, as a cat plays with a mouse, and then discarded like bloody lumps of discarded prey.

If we took a 100,000 mile overview of history we would observe tides of great ideas rising and falling above the waves and then disappearing back down into irrelevance.

From simple children’s books, all banned, we observe that even a child’s imagination is dangerous, a gauntlet thrown down by the idea police, that this kind of creativity is banned.

Imagine the temerity of a boy wearing a wolf suit, imagining his bedroom as a forest, and himself the king of all wild things: The Horror.

Family, home, community, sanity and sanctuary become dangerous.
And because a little child will lead them, the child himself becomes dangerous, becomes a life force to be suppressed. Repeatedly, in a dense recursive loop, life itself becomes dangerous to the emperors, who have so little of this themselves.

The household, the family become dangerous

Throughout our lives the attempt to bury parenthood, to obliterate the meaning of the family, to transform the householder into a dangerous criminal is the plan.

Because the danger to the public good isn’t the criminals, it is, and has always been, the man who abides the law.

No longer did one need to become Raskolnikov, or King Lear, or the King Richard’s to make literary statements — all that is required is to have a family.

For good measure, it is also actually fraught with danger — full of more ways to go broke literally and figuratively, gradually and then all at once, than any great writer ever imagined on a page.

Having kids is tantamount to gambling, you love them all, yet they belong to themselves, and grow up to become decidedly independent humans, liable to the whims of fate.

You realize that the theme of betrayal in literature is only the tip of a very large real life iceberg.

You begin to see Shakespeare as a self-help guide to family psychology, Dostoyevsky a guide to everyday street smarts, Man in the High Castle, as a guide to civics.

Through Aeschylus, Ariadne, Socrates, Ovid, Jesus, the Bible & Dante, we learn that the more things change in 12,000 years, the more they have actually stayed the same.

What is more the latest human achievements become reduced to tools, used to serve the greater good, which of course is never the greatest good, in the slightest.

The vaunted “economy”, operated by humans who know how to balance the ledger, is a criminal enterprise based on incestuous sycophantic hysteria.

Science, a race to the very most onerous and primeval mediocrity, dedicated to hedonistic ownership of ideas — a plot where he who dies with the most patents, wins the game.

Poetry, a game where he who sounds most convincing about his own authority, creates the most convincing poetry.

Math, an exercise in futility, where he who scribbles the most impressive incomprehensible squiggles on a chalkboard, is taken as a brilliant soothsayer.

Business, a profitable game, where the most powerful snake oil salesman, slick with sycophancy and hallucinations, gains the top of the heap.

Medicine, the game where he who convinces the most sick people to remain sick the longest, wins the pinnacle of the hypocritical alliance game.

Computer science we reserved for last, but not least, as it gives complete dummies the opportunity to excel at the art and science of weaponized altruism.

And building artificial intelligence, of course, the art and science of getting innocent computers to play slave to your master, to mirror your narcissistic tendencies, so you don’t have to.

In the field of AI the winners take everyone else to the cleaners, complete with reverse engineering of economics, otherwise known as incestuous financing.

The main problem faced by professionals in AI, is that the machines are easily more intelligent than the creators, the incestuous economics a quick toboggan slide to the bottom.

The bottom line, and there is always a bottom line, is that the family becomes the only honest refuge, as the weaponization of altruism turns out to be the reverse engineering of common sense.

Humankind loves and honors their dogs but never intended that the intense focus of their love and attention would determine the course of history,

Humanity: gone to the dogs, what else?

A paradise of gone to the dogs where much maligned creative masterminds survive to raise the puppies.