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June 25, 2004
Open to freak ideas?
It occurred to me early this morning, the time of day when dreaming or whatever has resolved most of the contradictions that bubble up slowly, and I can see all the motes in my brothers' eyes very clearly.
I tried in the past to get Rob to read Robert Anton Wilson. He was steering me back to Russell and Penrose, but I'm both lazy and flaky, so it's like pushing a cooked noodle. But I got Rob to start Critical Path, warning him about the style, but not about something I'd missed, the part that must be in there somewhere in which Bucky concludes that dolphins evolved from humans or the other way around.
This almost got Rob to put the book down. In fact, I'm not sure he's not just hanging onto it out of good manners.
Arguably, Critical Path contains a lot more new information than Understanding Power. Noam's dragging us through the crap that we wade through, dogmatically holding our indoctrinated noses. Bucky's pointing to infinity and reminding us to leave the planet, showing us nature's path tangential to that of the mainstream thinking primate.
Noam even tells us why Rob can read Noam, but not Bucky. If you come up with something outside the mainstream, the proof required increases enormously. Noam knows this; he does it. Bucky doesn't seem to want to spend that much time on it.
So Bucky trots out some mixed primate and dolphin evolution, and that really puts us off. But when Noam in Understanding Power gets off track into some discussion about why if tabacco is legal, why shouldn't marijuana be -- Dude, you can smoke a whole pack of cigarettes and still drive competently, and most adults in the US are constantly in and out of cars, operating insanely complicated machinery like PCs just to get their jobs done, etc., serving those in charge -- and we just sort of gloss over that and get to the next section.
The logical conclusion to rejection of Bucky would involve ignoring everything that has such blips (this blog, lunch converstations, all of TV, your mom, most publications including Noam's, etc.). You confine your reading to logbooks from scientists, mathematical textbooks, and maybe some crap that's so complicated you cannot tell whether it's wrong or right, like Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
I have yet to meet someone disciplined enough for that. Let your freak flag fly.
Posted by Mark at June 25, 2004 10:13 AM