Tomorrow's Alternatives

by Roger Elwood

  This postulate says any group seeking to defend its own reality (frame of reference) at the expense of another group’s reality will be led into a circular argument and inevitably will try to prove its own rightness in terms of faith expressed as propositions whose most basic assumption can be translated this way: “I believe this because I want to believe it (or because it is so beautiful, or so simple, or so obvious, etc.)."

  In this light, the advocacy principle behind western law/jurisprudence, insofar as it ignores the wild vibrations it may set up in larger systems, appears to suffer from a basic flaw.

  From within the boundaries of any specialized viewpoint, these are outrageous statements. I can say to you they are based in part on mathematics (we inevitably are led to prove any proposition in terms of unproven propositions) or upon physics (no absolute frame of reference can be demonstrated). Neither statement subtracts from that first flush of outrage. Indeed, Postulate I leads inexorably to an even more outrageous postulate.

  Postulate II: Logic that is sound for a finite system is not necessarily sound for an infinite system.

  This asserts that no matter how tightly you construct a system of arguments and close up all of the holes in your globe of reality, an infinite universe predicts a larger system outside of yours which can negate everything you say.

  There are no impenetrable boxes in an infinite universe.

  I am saying to you that a Futurist, as the role is presently recognized, who functions on this planet in this universe, must act within the rigors of these postulates unless he can produce another frame of reference which demonstrates greater operational reliability.

  At this point, I can involve myself blindly in the circular definition game. I can assemble arguments from philosophy (no man is an island), from psychology (all organisms are primarily motivated to control and modify their environment), from physics and mathematics (see above), etc. to defend my assumed wide-angle assault on accepted limiting frameworks. It should be obvious, however, that my assumptions and postulates already possess circular characteristics, are based on existing systems, and eventually go back to an unproven proposition which says: “I believe this because I want to believe it.”

  What is it I believe?

  I believe we are well into a period when technological developments exert greater and greater influence on the individual human life, often with shockingly destructive consequences.

  I believe we are engaged in a crisis of the human species which is shared by all and that it is pointless to discuss Futurism or Utopian dreams without recognizing the nature of this crisis.

  I believe the explosive core of this crisis involves an energy-release cycle which is running wild. I see the fate of the species inextricably tangled with the fate of the individual, if for no other reason than that the individual is becoming a releaser of greater and greater energy bundles.

  Any number of my fellow humans have pointed to this energy focus—the amount of energy one individual can release—and how this is increasing on an exponential curve which is climbing at a wild-growth rate.

  When you consider the destructive energy represented in this curve, it gives you such comparisons as this: The murderers of Mary Stuart’s husband, Darnley, had to fill a basement with explosives to assassinate the royal consort. Today, they could carry the equivalent energy in a rather small satchel. Furthermore, explosive materials are more readily available in our age. If I were insane enough to wish to destroy a building, murdering a head of state, I could do it with a device incorporating materials purchased from a corner drugstore.

  The amount of energy available for misuse is increasing beyond the point where one person is able to wreck the planet we all share. We have no guarantees that such energy will remain in the hands of individuals who will not do this.

  With human defined as “like me,” I believe we suffer from a world sickness whose most destructive symptom is a denial of that likeness. This is an absurd sickness. It represents taking up arms against yourself in the name of taking up arms against others.

  In the face of all this, I believe that humankind need not come to a cataclysmic end, that we can engage ourselves, as a species, with infinity. I am aware of the growth-cycle arguments against this viewpoint. (“All organisms, including societies and civilizations, go through a process of birth, maturation and death.”) I hear the chorus of cynical “cannots.” I am also aware that the statement “I cannot” often is an unconscious substitute for “I will not.” I am saying to all such doomscriers: The man who turns against himself or against his fellowman —either singly or as part of a massive effort—is running, away from life, is admitting a defeat which his own actions help create.

  A kind of moral cowardice can be sensed in wanting to believe only what comforts us. Thus, I give you no absolute assurances behind any of these beliefs. Indeed, in the universe I am describing, we are destined forever to find ourselves shocked to wakefulness on paths we do not recognize, in places where we do not want to be, in a universe which does not care about our distress, which has no anthropomorphic center from which even to notice us.

  A basic distress shared by all of humankind and against which we have raised so many fragile defenses—that death may cancel us out—comes with the original package and remains with it. Despite all of our efforts to project anthropomorphic images onto this universe, it continually presents us with a view of chaos. In this view, we breast a grey void which conceals our uncertain future, uncertain except for one thing: That which we perceive here disappears into the void, and we interpret that disappearance as an ending.

  To much of humankind, this represents a vision of ultimate despair. In this desperate moment of our species, with extinction real and imminent, there grows a suspicion that we may occupy the only island of life which has ever occurred. Indeed, the statistical arguments for extraterrestrial life remain unproven and smell of ad hoc constructions, a kind of collective whistling past the cemetery. We want to believe these arguments because they comfort us in our moment of despair. (In this light, science fiction appears more akin to religion than to escapist entertainment.) In the typical dichotomous trap, we are offered the alternatives of belief (one of the old "tried and true” beliefs or any of the new ones which proliferate around us) or participation in profound despair.

  But why should any human (any life) remain confined in the arena of "either/or” when an infinite universe offers us its boundless playground? Who says we have only two choices? Another perception of Infinity says: "No cages or boxes—ever.” What a joyful vision unfolds in this perception. Here appears a concept of freedom beyond any other dream.

  How do we sensitize ourselves to such a free universe?

  How do you examine a system of which you are a part? What unconscious blinders narrow the vision of our questions?

  Try these for a multi-dimensional leverage:

  Postulate III: Any dichotomy confronts us ultimately with contradictions. (Unless we are prepared to be taught by and then abandon contradictions, the “yes-or-no” arena represents a trap.) Postulate IV: All answers represent mirror images of the questions which produced them. (If we ask a question from a “go/no-go” assumption, we get both “go” and “no go” answers. Both are inherent in the question and thus are inherent in the answers.) Our questions tend to ignite awareness and to limit the kinds of answers we get. The mirror reflects a state of consciousness as well as the direction in which our attention is aimed.

  These postulates indicate that a small bite may best be savored in terms of a whole meal. If I say to you that I am a transient visitor at an endless banquet, this can mean that I have heard an invitation and have accepted it. (The suggestions that more and more of humankind is hearing the invitation, but is unable to respond, has been advanced several times as a major element of the crisis in which the species finds itself.) If we must be prepared to abandon answers to any question how do we rebuild our Reality factory and set it to producing operational frames of r
eference? Our aim could be defined this way: to develop ways of dealing with an infinite universe, ways which allow for non-lethal emergency changes of direction. The framework we’re dealing with is the one upon which we hang our sense of reality. Remember that one of our preliminary requirements is that we not become explosively disoriented.

  Here are a few questions just to begin our exercise in a multi-dimensional infinite universe. Try your own answers, being prepared to abandon any assumption (all answers provisional), noting limits and aims of any new questions which may be ignited in you by my questions and suggestions.

  1) - When frames of reference come into conflict, how do we compare and relate them while keeping survival avenues open for our species? (If we are mediating with methods which have always led to disasters in the past, why do we continue employing such methods?) 2) - How do we distinguish between our technology, the world which influences it (and is influenced by it) and the universe outside this framework?

  3) - Do determinist concepts such as “progress” hide us from the terrors of an uncertain future while beguiling us with sugarplum visions which can visit us with bloody disasters?

  4) - How can we deal with lag times for out-of-date information, especially when such information represents power and identity to entrenched blocs of our fellow humans?

  5) - Does identifying a larger spectrum of influences upon myself and my fellows necessarily lead to a dampening of deadly resonances in our mutual system?

  6) - Isn’t it odd that we’ve never mounted a full-scale investigation into whether pheromones (external hormones) interact between members of our species the way they interact within other animal species? (That $52 million spent last year in the United States for the purchase of vaginal deodorants does more than disturb my sense of reality.) 7) - Is it enough to say “I am human and you are human,” or is it closer to the mark to say “I am animal and you are animal”? (How about “I am alive and you are alive”?) 8) - Is it possible to demand absolute answers from an infinite universe?

  9) - If we are to be suspicious of even the processes by which we create our images of reality, where do we look for a stable horizon by which to keep our balance?

  10) - Is it sufficient to have each other, to be a world-band of humans in motion through a moving universe?

  Enough of this question game.

  The surfer, the swimmer and the skier should have a body-sense of what I am suggesting we require as a species-sense. Oddly enough, it also may help if you recall the last time you sat in a movie theater with your attention focused on the screen and its attendant sounds.

  Jean Piaget, the famed co-director of the Institute of Educational Science in Geneva, Switzerland, sets the stage. Piaget, in The Construction of Reality in the Child, begins his discourse by stating flatly that “the budding intelligence constructs the external world.” He says we not only furnish this composition with permanent objects in a spatial universe, but also construct “a world obeying the principle of causality,” and that this stable external universe remains “distinct from the internal world.”

  He notes from his long observation and experimentation that the human develops an “object concept” which, “far from being innate or given ready-made in experience, is constructed little by little.” Further, he observes that recognition of objects is “extended into belief in the permanence of the object itself.”

  Thank you, Doctor. But out of what does the budding intelligence construct its external world of causal relationships and permanent objects?

  Somewhere between my twentieth and thirtieth years, I began to suspect I was on a railway trip, and instead of a conductor and engineer, my journey was under the direction of a movie projectionist. This projectionist with his little machine situated somewhere in my consciousness carried major influence over what I perceived as reality. If something disagreed with projection-reality, a filter dropped into place and I did not sense that disagreement. Nothing came through. But if something agreed with projection-reality, the spotlights came on, the music, the drama, the amplifiers. I became engrossed and all too willing to suspend my critical sense of disbelief.

  Motion and illusion, th&t’s all it was.

  With this thought came a gigantic suspicion: Perhaps even the motion was unreal. Who needs motion when he has a projectionist as talented as this? There was no trip at all, no way-stops, no terminals—just that projectionist throwing his illusions upon the colossal screen which was my sense of reality.

  “We are such stuff as dreams are made on. . . .”

  There can be only a jury-rigged ad hoc response to this solipsist giggling in all philosophers’ nightmares. Instead of throwing up our hands in rage and fear, however, let us ask what this bit of solipsism tells us. What can we learn from the inevitable store of illusion always beyond our transient reality?

  Postulate V: There are questions which can never be answered. (The mathematician demonstrates that there are problems which can never be solved.) Watch out for the play of the verb to be in my words, in the work of mathematicians, of physicists and other scientists. Every now and then, a bit of something extraordinary shows through the illusory screen. The causal absolutes don’t quite filter out everything which might disturb our fixed sense of reality. There are shadows, hombres chinoises, figures out of context. It’s like an audience arriving late for the show, stepping on our toes and casting their shadows on our screen in spite of the busy projectionist.

  When I said nothing came through the filtering system, I should have added most of the time.

  To be carries a heavy load of Piaget’s objective, fixed, causal absolutism into the “budding intelligence.” That little indefinite article, the, aids mightily in this reality-building.

  “The answer is. . . .” (Supply your own ending.) I am not suggesting you immediately discard all forms of to be and that you substitute a for the from this point onward. Filters can be useful when you understand how they operate. No movie cameraman has to wait for moonlight to produce a moonlight effect. He can use a blue filter. Most audiences understand this. It’s one of the conventions we accept in this art form.

  You ask yourself now: Is he suggesting that the building of our consensus reality may be an art form? If so, what have we been experiencing, a theater of the macabre?

  A look at the scenario for 1971 suggests something even worse than the macabre.

  Ten Million Refugees Flee Pakistan U.S.

  Escalates Air War in Southeast Asia

  New Bomb Kills Every Living Thing Within 3,000 Feet Belfast Bomb Kills Child

  Napalm Survivors: A Legacy of the Maimed

  Three Policemen Murdered

  Palestinian Guerrillas Raid Village—10 Dead

  Bangladesh Death Toll May Top Million

  Israelis Level Arab Village

  Prisoners Tortured to Death in Dacca

  Starvation: Way of Life on American Indian Reservation

  Who wrote this scenario?

  You did. I did. Others among the 3.5 billion of our fellow humans on this ball of dirt did. Our ancestors contributed many of the lines. Some of the bits came from chaotic influences. Many oscillations can be identified as resonating through our species. We have influenced and been influenced. We have acted and been acted upon.

  A physicist sees our universe as quantum-mechanical with energy locked in various frequency phenomena (and with energy available through manipulation of such phenomena). Human relationships can be seen as frequency phenomena. We have a wave nature.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men.

  We respond to wave-form influences; we perform strange dances to strange music. We occupy (and are occupied by) a multi-wave, multilevel system whose dynamics we do not understand. We interrelate with our system in transient ways, and the interlocked weight of transient influences can be variable.

  Recognition of wave-type influences upon us, of the element of art form available to our reality, of the limiting impositions within language-gen
etic accident-social environment—this recognition brings with it a new freedom and independence.

  Once I have recognized bad drama, lethal interrelationships, lines that don’t play—once I am aware of these things as specific influences—I no longer am responsible for any of the scenarios produced by my ancestors or even for the scenarios I wrote yesterday. However, I remain responsible for putting new scenarios on the boards which don't repeat old mistakes.

  The objective description of our universe rooted in .the dogma of classic religions and political theories has broken down. We have been misled by stellar performances from fellow humans—from Solomon to Machiavelli to Nixon, from Hammurabi to St. Paul to Martin Luther to Paul VI, from Confucius to Aristotle to Descartes to Hegel to Freud to Skinner—by stellar performers remembered and unremembered and by a host of satellite performers within their influence.

  We have been misled, with accent on led.

  Leaders require followers, teachers require students, knowers require the ignorant and vice versa ad infinitum. Every dichotomy needs actors (dolls?) who play their parts without question.

  We play out the dichotomies to their inevitable contradictions, having chosen and accepted our parts, and when the condition of conjugate variables becomes inescapable, when the paired things interfere with each other, we scream ‘paradox” or give up to despair.

  Like the good dolls of Probable, we play our parts just as we were designed to do within the orderly confines of Reality.

  But those fleeing refugees and the forces from which they fled, the pilots and the targets in the air war, the maimed survivors of napalm and the makers of napalm, the bombardiers and the living things killed by the new concussion bomb, the Belfast bombers and the dead child, the murdered policemen and the murderers, the guerrillas and the 10 dead in the village, the tortured prisoners and the torturers, the starving American Indians and the officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs— all are humans, not dolls. They are a form of animal life indigenous to this planet, to the best of our knowledge. They are highly susceptible to geocentric influences, profoundly dichotomized and polarized.