"If you want to regulate your life or judge history, you should at least know how God spends his day s. He has set aside a place, four cubits by four, and there he studies Talmud for the first three hours. From the fourth to the sevventh hour, God sits and judges the world, but since he sees the world is guilty, he rises from the seat of Judgement and goes to sit on the throne of Mercy. During the third part of the day he sits there and feeds all the creatures of the world from the rhinocerous to the flea. During the fourth part of the day God plays with the Leviathan."
"As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories, that they should form a recognizable pattern, than that they should be happy or tragic. The men and women who are withered by their fates, who go down to death reluctantly but without noticeable regret for life, are not those who have lost their mates prematurely or by perfidy, or who have lost battles or fallen from early promise in circumstances of public shame, but those who have been jilted or were the victims of impotent lovers, who have never been summoned to command or been given any opportunity for success or failure.
"Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured, lifted to the lips and tasted. If one's own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book. We can all of us judge the truth of this, for hardly any of us manage to avoid some periods where the main theme of our lives is obscured by details, when we involve ourselves with persons who are insufficiently characterized; and it is possibly true not only of individuals, but of nations."
When advertising drives communication what happens is that the standards of accuracy which prevail in the upstream controlling economic medium (advertising/marketing) are adopted by the dependent, carrier media.
Newspapers, TV the internet are all advertising dependent. "Standards and practices" in our entertainment industry where I work, are the standards of advertisers. Advertising is persuasion, and its standards of objectivity are extremely flexible. It's considered acceptable to omit vital information if it is contrary to the purpose of selling a product.
The standards of truth and the selective enhancements of marketing advocacy become the standards of communication adopted by the all media and set the course of our public discussions and interactions with each other. In the end what results is a distorted collective world view.
It doesn't have to be that way, but it is that way.
If we understand what circulates between us, what binds us together and pushes us apart, is information, we can begin to think about about ourselves as having two identities. One is as individuals with varying capacities and diverse cultural operating systems, the second our primary identity, which is collective.
It is not possible for a single human being to invent or create anything of value without the work of others. Everything we do, or use, or eat, or say, depends on the contributions or rests on the achievements of thousands others from Sumer to Palo Alto who have contributed new knowledge to the trans-generational store house of scientific knowledge, the collective memory which permits and defines civilization.
When we do look from the mirror to the intersection of biological networking, genetics and information theory, we will encounter a better idea of ourselves and the satanic political/advertising/marketing calamities which periodically engulf us in wars will disappear.
Gilgamesh: I am sorry for Enkindu that he died,
he was my brother.
And I am sorrier still that I lost Enkindu
Whom I least of all wanted to lose
and with whom I was friends.
But I am doubly sorry
that I, who have until now never lost anything
Should be stolen from in this manner,
For while I have made selections
Which are a kind of loss,
I have never before been denied.
And I am sorriest of all
And the reason I am crying is
That the death of my brother Enkindu
Has suggested to me that I'll die too
Someday
And I'm scared.
The Old Man: And so King Gilgamesh
the great King Gilgamesh
was bested by a little thing
an unheroic snake
and he broke down altogether
and he wept the tears of a furious child
for he knew himself to be a failure
and he held himself cheap
and there wasn't a thing which he cared to do
and there wasn't a thing for which he cared
and he knew the frustration
of one who cannot have
what he thinks he wants
and he knew the shame
of one who knows that at least in part
he was himself the author
of his own undoing
and he knew the rage
the hideous rage
the helpless, hopeless rage
of somebody who's been stolen from
who knows he will always be stolen from
because he's here
because he's human
and because he must be off his guard
from time to time.
But as bad as these things were -
and they were very bad-
they did not trouble him so much as did the cold and awful
certainty
that he had not truly wished for
this bauble he had been denied.
That it would not and could not have made him happy.
That the only joy it promised wasn't joy at all
But tremulous relief
at being spared the pain of its loss.
And it was this ironic knowledge of
his own, his inconsolable vanity,
Which made him hate his life and everything he had.
And it was this self-same knowledge
Which later gave him the strength, the presence of mind,
And the imagination to act out the rest of his life
As decent and productive man.
So it was with Gilgamesh.
So it has always been.
boom,boom,DOOM
indeed. it goes way back. To the Nam Shub of Enki.
Daaark to LIGHT
love you Boss.
All are welcome.
LIVE FOREVER