Newton and Paths

[degringolade]

De Stijl (Neoplasticism) / Piet Mondrian/ At Work / On the Land

Whew.

There is an old saw out there where a King asks himself “I know that I am paranoid,, but am I paranoid enough?”  It always gets a chuckle. Lately it doesn’t seem to be that funny to me.

I think that folks are coming to the conclusion that the folks in charge during the current millennium have fucked things up in a big way.  That includes all of them, the retard Bushie, the smooth talking con-man Obama, the small time hustler trump, and now the senile Joey.  They have presided over the worst degradation of life for the average American in history.  I wonder where we go from here?

On a different note, I have been going into weirdo land and looking into things that were discarded when we took off into the “enlightenment” and the “scientific revolution”.  I kinda blame JMG for these thoughts, but it goes deeper than than and from a long time ago.  

First, one has to remember where I grew up, Utah is Mormonism for the most part and if you think that Mormon culture isn’t completely steeped in the occult, you don’t really know shit about Mormonism.  They have done a marvellous job of disguising and downplaying the way that the occult is layered through their teachings.  This isn’t a judgement, this is an observation.  Their ability to pass themselves off as a vanilla subunit American protestant religion is a masterpiece of media management.

I started pondering the idea of the occult years ago (not seriously) when I found out that Newton spent most of his time on alchemy instead of the more appropriate study of physics.[1]  Since I was fully into the lifestyle and arrogance of being a “scientist” I merely considered the idea of who I considered the “smartest dude ever” as playing around with a discredited pathology to be merely amusing.  

Went along smugly for a decade or so, and then picked up Neal Stephenson’s “Mount Stephenson” [2] and read it.  It is still one of my favorite reads by a long shot.  When Stephenson was in his prime, he was hard to match.  There are a lot of folks out there on the net that will cheerfully berate his skill, but fuck them.  When you start thinking about the way that folks thought and believed in the past, and douse your pre-judgement of them and their worldview, you start thinking that they might have had just as real a grasp of reality as we pretend to have today.  

Cruised along for a decade or so with progressive accretions of disbelief in the current system, the next step was finding out about peak oil and the degradation of the environment.  Now, I knew about this from a long time ago as one of my Prof’s back at Utah prior to my tour in the Army assigned us “The Limits of Growth [3]”, but I kinda was young and fatuous and figured that we would work it out.   Peak oil and the climate change made me realize that we didn’t bother and one foot was on the banana peel.  

The last piece of the puzzle happened in the last couple of years and especially during the “crisis” we had shoved down our throats recently.  I came to the conclusion that the way that we worship what is currently “science” might be a huge mistake that has been centuries in the making.

Where this ramble is going is that I am trying to go back to where we started to go wrong and figure out just what the hell happened.  I think that the rot is deeper than just what happened in my lifetime.  I think that the place we are now was dictated by a series of subtle errors in direction accrued over centuries.  I am thinking that I want to look into ways of thinking that were discarded before my family came to the new world and find out what truths and what falsehoods led us to walk away from them.

In other words, we are on the wrong track and we need to backtrack until we can find a place where we can get back onto a true path.  

It is going to take a bit of time.  I won’t see the end of it myself.

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[1]  B. J. T. Dobbs. "Newton's Alchemy and His Theory of Matter." Isis 73, no. 4 (1982): 511-28. Accessed June 12, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/232144.

[2]  The Baroque Cycle (Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World)

[3]  Donella H. Meadows [and others]. The Limits to Growth; a Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York :Universe Books, 1972.