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CHAPTER 3

 

News 235

The Advertiser, Sept 17, 02

 

Machining Minds

through Snipping Words,

Deleting Dimensions

and Cartoon-Style  Frippery

 

The article in The Advertiser, concerning new ways of curtailing speech via upbeat technology,  is not particularly original in thought; but it is revelatory in substance of even further machining. The dream of the roving heart of man is being machined into conformity to littleness, language crimped, the terse and the truncated grinning, increasingly witless in their ways.

 

There was always Newspeak, a tidied up language, deprived of many abstract terms, of signification of the invisible but manifest power of God and such things, from Orwell, author of 1984. Indeed, he tells us in his Appendix, it was a language DESIGNED to make other than party speech impossible!   Dying of TB and using some small attic, Orwell was himself crimped; and it was indicative of things to come: for he saw with some clarity the disposition to SUPPRESS expression, the thought police being at hand. Huxley in his Brave New World had other methods of imagined futuristic control, while with Solzhenitsyn in his First Circle, it is no longer so imaginary!

 

Now in France one learns that someone is being put on trial for referring to the Moslem religion in terms not pleasing to some in it. Where is this so famous democracy going ? Is it to be so survival- conscious, surveillance maximising and world-weary that it gasps out outrage, and grasps virtual villains with actual force, to ensure that no one needs ‘soma’, to continue in the Brave New vein, that psychological crutch to enable quiet acquiescence in whatever is necessary in order that the world continue its civilisation, whatever that is.

 

So the dream is machined, the desire is conformed, the permissible is announced, and society beats its drum to the marching feet of the spiritually expropriated. Or that, it is the system of the thing.

 

The sale of the soul is taken for granted. Neither truth nor reality matters very much in the new model; convenience, custom and comfort make demands like a teething baby, yet their teeth are already sharp.

 

 

PERSONALITY, DEPERSONALISING AND

SEIZING THE HEAVENS WITH VELVET GLOVES ON

 

However in the article noted above we find some technical facilitation of the wayward commerce of the soul.

 

 We come alive to what bears the name “SMS”, short message systems. This is an “e-messaging craze which avoids any face-to-face or verbal contact.” That is, one does not communicate with any thought of communing with the other person, so much as connecting thought-receptors. You might say that this is the nature of email in any case; but here it is accentuated. Shortened forms of words do service (as ‘comm8’ for communicate), and the scope for RSI improves as more and more lavish latitude and longitude feelers go out to touch from afar, typing the quick symbols, each the recipient of compressed verbiage in shortened format, to make the very playground of partisans.

 

But of what are they becoming partisan ? In Flinders University, there is cited a Dr Rahamathulla Mubarak Ali. He plans  a study of school-age children to determine effects of SMS text messaging and other remote means of communication, upon the general communication skills of the children. Further, he is cited as stating that studies in South Korea, the US and Japan have shown significant  deterioration in the physical skills associated with communication … “Social skills and socialisation can be very affected by this phenomenon,” proceeds the report of his thought. Moreover, “this sort of short-form communication can also affect  language skills.” A US university analysis of text messages shows the content conveyed less rich, and the comprehension of those using this means, less.

 

All this is scarcely surprising. There is not only the medium  and its constraints, but there is the ground for the medium, or rather there are some of the grounds which relate to the result; for social constraints of what is ACCEPTABLE in email arise, and inter-personal and even professional results may accrue if you break the breaking convention, which shows its strength like the sun arising at dawn, but forgetting the day, thinking it was night, and rising black, in error. 

 

There are the obsessive compulsions associated with the LUST (often rather unconscious) for DEPERSONALISATION, which come into play according to their day, the stimuli and the situation. There is the thought of unisex, pepper-salt in protest against such  long restraints, by mixture, whatever this may be thought to produce, other than lack of variety, individuality and expressiveness in the dull mental conformity to the latest of the humanistic (but not at all humanitarian) creeds. Again, hair must be tossed, not pleasantly as if simulating wind-swept nature, but in spiky protests against anything smooth or meaningful.  Man must play the unmeaning, the martyr who INJECTS meaning by meaning nothing,  so subsiding into the slime of psychic irresponsibility: this is the play. This at least appears to be the aspiration, or muted thought, which again, is an increasingly popular … invention ? no, not that, pre-occupation!

 

You MUST not think. That is de rigueur!

 

The TV will help you avoid thought; and thus endless music, with jerky little beats, or space age expansive nothingness must align your psyche to the suffering and the discomposure of things. Then, however sinful you may be, you may at least congratulate yourself on DOING something, by doing NOTHING, and so registering your meaning.

 

How on earth, however, or out of it, you may address meaning by first resolving that it is absent and then inserting it from yourself as meaning-meter, grand assessor, creator of meaning, when you are yourself a mere creation; or in denying meaning even while you are asserting absolute truth and your own infallible access to it, so that you do not surge in psyche, but comment on fact: this is one of the great mysteries of iniquity.

 

Man WILL not have, by a sort of bravado and bluster, increasingly, any meaning EXCEPT what he chooses to assert, and increasingly, in the end, this is that he is a great old soul, a find contender,  a wonder amender of life,  and will PUT from his infinite resources of knowledge and skill, into this life a meaning it will bear from HIS CREATION OF IT. Playing God, however, is hard work, and the results are not playful. To give an opinion of the meaning of all things is not meaningful unless the soul itself has meaning, which it then manages to impart, in conformity to reality. At once that abandons the concept of the meaningless. HE or SHE makes sense, and because this makes sense, the thoughts of this sense-making and so eminently meaningful person makes sense, so that here is the very height of sense, its depth, its stay.

 

Further, to give something its TRUE meaning, you need truth which, without God, is simply not available, for the destruction of the absolute by the whim of caprice does two things: it removes appeal to it for truth and prevents its impartation to you in truth. What is not there, is not admissible as a model ploy, for action! Thus, in such parameters, the concept is meaningless by being a contradiction in terms. (Cf. Preface above.) Even hoping it might be true, is no different, for the same reality of God is a necessary preliminary even for the admission of the possibility, for a relativistic world admits no absolutes, and impressions of flitting imagination are not to the point, but the truth, the question at issue alone here relevant.  Knowing what is not there to be known may be classed a miracle, but it is certainly a self-contradiction, and without God, miracles are the same!

 

If a man, however, is simply to declare it, then that man is deploying what God only knows, and is not merely acting as God, but equally denying Him, making himself, his own little self,  into an apotheosis, a fine outcome for the majesty of man, but unimpressive when you are born without consent, die without consultation and are equipped with DNA without giving your advice first about its composition. Fairy tales are always best left for children.

 

That is only one of the payments for this mental machining, this savage machining of the soul, to elevate it above the heavens,  while it devastatingly shows its own infantility by such delusions and departure from logic, even while USING IT!

 

If, after all, meaning does not exist, YOU cannot create it, for if you could, you as a meaning maker do exist, and hence your own meaningfulness is a priori, which insufferably is at cross-purposes with your chosen martyrdom – to have no meaning,  and your own creation; for if meaning precedes you, how can you assign it ? And if it is what it is, how can you invent it ? If however meaning is so fluent from the thought of man, then its absence is not possible. If it is present, then the pretence of its absence is not logically possible. Imaginatively calibrated by an articulate reality denied existence, this dream of man which therefore denies access to such a deleted Being for such a purpose, becomes the delusion of the Age reaching its fore-ordained conclusion: like terminal cancer in the last stages of morphia inducing dream-like state, but not health!

 

It is an exquisite caricature of logic, writhing and tormented like the gates of hell.

 

WHEN you resolve the crusade into anomaly and antilogism, you find just this, that this psychic movement of martyrdom, this twenty-first century blues seeing red, is merely a symptom of the spiritual syndrome.

 

Which ?

 

It is this. It is the desire to dispense with God within the soul, just as brigands have sought to do in the past, with the body and its background, but in vain. So is this new movement in vain.

 

Ø    All you do is dispense with the truth in making idiotic blarings of blind misfitting style,

Ø    into what is not the void,

Ø    but the avoided presence,

Ø    that of God who made you meaningful, 

Ø    made you to love meaning, and to insist on meaning,

 

Ø    even when in the wildest anomaly,

Ø    man ‘makes’ by psychic and delusive invention,

Ø    machined souls that CANNOT have meaning.

 

 

How does he attempt this ? It is by applying his meaningful powers of creation, and ignoring the creation of those very powers with an assiduity which does nothing to validate his saga, or make it logically operable (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7).

 

Such nightmares are syndromatic (what a delightful word, add it to the list if you have not heard of it): they reek as a drunk does with whisky perhaps, while clutching at the street light.

 

Of what are they the evidence ?  Of what combination of pathological causes do they represent witness ? AWAY from God (as normal in man’s abnormality which is the calibre-supplier to history), man grows ‘wise’. Oh it is nothing new in type, since alien wisdom for the alienated is as old as the record of Genesis 3 (esp. vv.2-5). THEN YOU WILL BE WISE AS GOD IS, knowing good and evil. This was the thrust of the devil’s propagandizing to Eve, touching her thought of venturing into rebellion  against her Creator. Bucking the Maker of your system in order to get beyond Him is rather an anomalous thought, like a car trying climbing the no-no lamp-post in a sudden dramatic surge of automotive autonomy, and expecting some new access of power, to be on par with the manufacturer. Actually, it comes rather nearer to be on a par with the (automotive) morgue.

 

It is the lust to be what you CANNOT be, since not only were you you were too late  to be God, but by being born at all in your existence as such, you fail to have the requisite eternity, being a mere derivative, in fact by creation (cf. TMR Ch. 1). Bypassing that fact slitheringly, it is this which was the thought of the serpent-formatted devil from the first.

 

Growing so very wise now technically, and  constantly looking with amusing and predictable frustrations into matter as if it had mind and spirit and power to  make the man who looks into it*1, and finding alas no mirror at all, but merely a handle for one, man is in his frustration and bombast seeking to devise some way … some aspect, some avenue to become GOD.

 

It is so easy really, when you are deluded. All you have to do, is this: bring God down to cultural clichés, and bring man up to idealist seeking of the beauty which is denied him with the soul which is not and refuses to be spiritual, and then they will meet. Precisely what will meet ? It will a meeting of the denigrated deity on the way down, with the aspirant for eternity, on the way up, somewhere in space.

 

Actually, as in these things in general, it does come back to earth. As we see the prediction from millennia ago, concerning the “man of sin” who is likewise deeply endowed  and involved in the “little horn” person at the end (II Thessalonians 2, Daniel 7, Revelation 13, 17 cf. Biblical Blessings Ch. 2, Highway of Holiness Ch. 5, The Other News Ch. 5, Beauty of Holiness Ch. 4), the delusion comes to the point that he actually in sheer grandeur of self-importance, SHOWS HIMSELF THAT HE IS GOD. It is some show, like the consummate of the magicians!

 

What a spiritual mannequin parade is this! Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me, who is fairest of them all ? When he is in power, of course, he feels it is himself, and perhaps as a representative of mankind (look  at what Stalin and Mao got away with – or  do you prefer, managed to impose of themselves and their personas), he takes the accolade (IIThess. 2:4). As some even now say when greatly praised, “I am deeply humbled by this reception” and so on. WHAT is so humbling about praise ? is it the thought that you receive it from someone else, so that after all, you are merely a part of the procedure ? Even that is hard to  regard as having a humbling effect, except perhaps on a paranoid! Alas, praise rarely has such an effect, though it may help the godly who love God, to receive it at His hand; and while this is not an argument to dismiss it from the data  bank of man on man, it is a warning and it is a predictive reality when sin arises like a fuming boil, surfacing with suitable inflammation on the body politic.

 

 

GAWKY-TALKY

 

Let us however return from that brinkmanship to come (with God of course! man is becoming so humble that God is to be seen as beneath Him, when you are in the mode – and the capital letter here is  NOT here an error, but a temperature reading of this fever!), and so consider further the effects on communication  of movements at the present time; and indeed, move from the genesis of the crushed communication craze – or some of its social genetic elements – to its direct  effects.

 

“We have,” says Dr Such,  “people finding romance on the Internet but people on trains and buses who don’t feel  comfortable talking to each other. We have people who won’t  talk to their neighbours, but can talk to people on the other side of the world.” So goes the report being cited.

 

Doubtless this is the trend, and as such,  it is broadening; and we have considered some of its basis, but now turn to its deplorable effects. In short, it is very much more than a technical offshoot of inventions; but it is not without aid from that source.

 

Brevity has long been regarded as essential in the modern age especially, and taking science as a measure, many have made it – yes, explicitly so,in teaching “English” -  a form of utter elegance and necessity. It is like having steel and glass architecture. Now there is perhaps some place for this; but it is neither first nor only place. Gothic castles and the odd brilliant cathedral, perhaps with numerous styles combined, or in some synthesis of grace and loveliness, are not hard to appreciate, if not placed everywhere, but rather seen with inspiration as a stimulus to what can be done in the expression of vision via matter.

 

The vision moulds; the material holds.

 

Each does its part. It is long past time to consider the redundant  reductionisms which like to ignore this or that, for philosophical penchant reasons, and spiritual obsessive causes, perhaps. It is, to the contrary,  always necessary to consider  ALL the facts, for otherwise you become  an intellectual orphan, and so could join Darwin, Marx,  Freud and the rest (cf. SMR pp. 611ff., and indexes), who have hopped about, or rather their disciples and spirit, like the frogs of Revelation 16:13ff..

 

Brevity can be beautiful,  and so can, in a way, the elegant steel  set of drawers in the office, the clear-cut window line, set in steel, while the sun shines in, with its morning glimmer. It is different of course at 3 p.m.; but there, it has its points. A whistled tune  from the butcher’s boy (when there were such) is perhaps joyful,  though one would not dismiss the Adelaide Symphony orchestra at once, on hearing it. Brevity and simplicity have points, decidedly; but so does grace and prolongation (like the idle gloaming, carrying the finished day, to a sort of after-dinner conversation mode, with great gentility).

 

Straightforward discussion of essential matters can be refreshing; but so can loving meditation on beauty and truth, and communing along with communication with the source of communication, when “your message of April 14” is not the criterion, but merely an event among many of varied character.

 

In  fact, it is CHARACTER which appears to be going on vacation. Spiritual lust is one of the driving dynamics, but depersonalised MORALS and NATURE is one of the defects which seeks to capitalise on the new vacuities. After all, if there is nothing to give, why give it ? and why take time about it ? If the soul is small  and parched, where is the need for luxuriance ?

 

If the Simpsons sort of mentality – the cartoon denudation of life into a prolonged cynicism perhaps, in some sort of reductionist morgue for man – if this is to become increasingly a picture of the exhausted psyche of soured man, then why take time about its representation. If you are touring, why linger on many snapshots of a steel mill, especially if it be one like those the author once passed through (without delay) in Gary, Indiana (from memory) which stays as a sort of (physical) haze in the mind, with much dimness and a sense of pity. It WAS a pitiful sight because a piteous site.

 

As the life of the rat becomes even  more popular  among the survivalists, for whom  it is supreme to BE and to be RICH or SUCCESSFUL (= plenty of money and  very accepted … but by whom!), and as the pretensions become the substitute for the heart in the domain of the moral, brevity can even be merciful! There is no delight in gazing on the broken limbs of an accident victim. The need is their binding up.

 

The change that is coming like a new season seems here to be this: that no longer is it the Christian morality which is spewed forth from the lavish tongue of the artificial, as well as spilled down from the vertical falls with gleaming purity attested by the saint; but rather is it the humanist variety, which shows its pearl-white teeth in fast-set smile. It is this which is rich in tone and empty in understanding, doing its ‘bit’ without comprehension of one bit of the expected result, let alone with any just expectation from it all.

 

The actual Christian morality remains at all times, but requires a heart, and a willingness for personal surrender to God, daily and for ever, and there are those who would displace rather than please Him, for reasons forever obscure, in the spiritual steel works of the ways of man. The DISPLACEMENT SYNDROME is becoming like a mosquito-borne fever, infectious and weakening. What it secures is man’s displacement from the destiny of the children of God: on God its displacement effect is zero. The ‘steel’ was merely the ingredient of sand. Its last stand is to fall.

 

 

COMMUNION IS NOT JUST A SACRAMENT

BUT A REALITY ADORNED WITH WORDS

 

WHO, however, is like Christ ? Who is near it ? (cf. Psalm 73:25, 89:6, 45, John 1:1-14). None is within an infinitude of distance of His power, perception, spirit, and deed, His programmed place and His personal  treatment of it, His resurrection and His predictions! (cf.SMR Chs.  6,   8, Biblical Blessings Ch. 15,   *2, A Spiritual Potpourri 15, esp. *1). How could they be ? History is dumb, except for one. As God is one, so that witness is ONE, and science is merely ONE of the many ways in which Christianity attests its truth,  for whereas science varies with fashion, and changes with perception, the Bible changes not at all; and though science grows old like man, in 50 years, to an astonishing degree, the Bible is young at 3400 years of age, yes and more!

 

Thus crimped souls and abbreviated diction unite in a common crusade, or parade ? What they show is what Eve showed, what the man of sin will show, and what threadbare suits show: the underlying weakness of being worn out. The peacock for a prodigy of shimmering, colour-changing beauty, the rose for purity of expression in delicate crispness, suffused with quiet joy, but worn-out man ? It is not here that one should look, in whatever compressed brevity or levity, but to the source of all  these things, with quiet inter-personal communication which is filled with grace, indicative of the place of the race, and the need for the restoration to source, and the removal of the worm which eats the heart.

 

For that, there is necessity for return to the faith, for turning in faith to the One whose face was so marred more than that of any man (Isaiah 52 predicted it so, the priestly faction made it so, thus serving God by fighting Him, for GOD! He is deep) and finding in One the answer to ALL THINGS (cf. SMR Ch. 5). But all things ?  what is this compared with their Maker... It is to the Maker man must return, and to His redemption, that far greater work than creation, that he must hasten his feet. Already, they come near to slipping off the cliff of sharp edges into the sea a confusion that swallows, like a shark, distressing, absorbing and treating as garbage, its unwitting recipients.

 

 

 

END-NOTE

 

*1 Cf. Earth Spasm… Chs.  1,   7 , Wake up World! … Chs.   5,  6,   7, Spiritual  Refreshings Chs. 13,  16, Divine Agenda Ch. 4, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 9, Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy  Ch. 3, The Frantic Millenium and the Peace of Faith Ch.  2 ). These show the factitious community of disunity, the actual diversity of creation and the necessity of realism in seeking the basis, background and meaning of all things.