The Art of the Shill
Qart # 49
"Karen is a Jewish name "
Many people assume that technology is in some way artificial. It is as natural as a bird’s nest, and every individual and each species and nation has a unique developmental course. As with a seed, the full life of individuals, species and nations is inherent, contained in their beginnings.
A billion networked autonomous biological computational devices form an evolutionary inflection point: when the quality and speed of the connection between the nodes is optimized, it is no longer a network – it is an ‘’’evolved, parallel computational organism’’’ of unimaginable power.
If the data circulating among autonomous biological processors, chiefly news and entertainment, is error corrected at successive stages, as is done with other biological networks like our blood stream, and in silicon-based networks and computation; the performance of networked individuals and of the civilization in which they participate must be enhanced by orders of magnitude.
Human beings have two identities, the smaller, individual identity is personal, comprised of our life history, our thoughts and our sensory perceptual experience. The second, much greater identity, is collective. We all participate in this greater common identity because we participate in civilization. No single individual can create anything of value. Every work of imagination, every invention, scientific discovery or artistic innovation draws on the work of other human beings.
The words, numbers and images we share they are common property; they make of us what we are.
Everyone contributes to civilization and all are free to withdraw from the transgenerational repository of mankind’s accumulated knowledge. Or that’s the idea. The achievement of each benefits all without any Marxist management at all.
Now is the coming-to-consciousness of the whole, the greater self.
Odysseus said to Athena that it is “already becoming hard to recognize the gods,” when they embodied human form. At Troy when people were "possessed" or "inspired" by the gods they did things they were not otherwise capable of doing. Trojan and Greek heroes alike performed superhuman feats when in when in ‘god mode.’ At the battle before Troy, all the gods were recorded as present and they all took part in the fighting on either the Greek or Trojan side. What did Homer mean? What happens when a human being is possessed by a god?
In Homer's account men were said to look different, though, as Odysseus complained to Athena, gods were becoming harder to recognize in the material realm. Odysseus was particularly astute, recognizing Athena by her ox-eyes alone; Homer talks about a heroes’ "shining;" a glow or intensity like an aura which marked men or women displaced in their human body by a god.
Divine possession is necessarily brief, Homer suggested, because human physiology can't stand the strain of higher energies very long.
Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia for the promise of victory, before leaving Greece.
War is an environment where men connect more easily with the archetypes, and these are what men call gods, or hypostasis of God.
Consider the psychospiritual environment in which soldiers besieging Troy lived. Daily rituals, prayers and animal and human sacrifices, constant ceremonies invoking the gods’ assistance or beseeching their protection combined with strenuous daily combat create a hyper-charged psychic environment hospitable to the invocation of, and possession by, the gods. A collective state of mind where the line between the realm of the abstract, imaginary and the material world is indistinct, where the world becomes dreamlike and the gods whisper their secrets in men’s ears.
No race, no people has ever been free from slavery, either as slave or as master. Every race and every people ever enslaved became at every opportunity enslavers themselves:
Greek enslaved by Greek in the time of Aristotle, black enslaved by black since time immemorial in Africa and in the 19'th century, the American south. Slavery was never predicated on race except as circumstances rendered it. Many of the vast number of slaves of ancient Rome were fair skinned, fair haired Germans and Anglo Saxons.
The universal truth of slavery, that it has been throughout history one of the defining manifestations of human nature, has been suppressed both by history and by that nature.
The enduring myth that slavery was imposed on Africa by outside forces, that it was introduced by the Portuguese in 1444, is belied by the fact that slavery and the slave trade were ancient and commonplace within Africa long before the arrival of any white slaver. (The trans-Sahara slave trade route between West and North Africa likely had it's beginnings as early as 1000 B.C., hundreds of years before the Ethiopians, long enslaved by Egypt, conquered and gave to Egypt its Twenty-Fifth Dynasty; hundreds of years before Homer wrote in the Iliad that half the soul of man was lost when "the day of slavery" came upon him.")
"Slavery was widespread in Africa," writes Professor John Thornton in Africa and the Africans in 'The Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 - 1800,' "because slaves were the only form of private, revenue producing property recognized in African law."
To the 'odehye' - the freeborn - elite of West Africa, the outside forces of Europe, England and the Americas imposed no evil, but merely presented a new market, increased demand, and lucrative new export opportunities that the indigenous powers welcomed and readily exploited.