One spokesman for the Chinese, when given the chance to comment to the west about the revelations published in Wikileaks, simply said that they were of no consequence. The politicians in the world understand that their diplomatic counterparts are all presenting a certain image to each other and an entirely different image to their trusted allies. It’s no big deal. Though it was an embarrassment to those who were outed, it should come as no shock to anyone.
Information control is an age-old pastime, older than the good book itself. For every embarrassing secret revealed on Wikileaks, there are a hundred thousand like it buried forever. Fortunately, lies make the truth stand out in higher relief. All attempts to obscure truth only help clarify it.
When leaders spy on people, they wish to know the truth. It slips from their grasp when they try to control it. Spying and truth control are futile. We need not invade each other’s privacy to find the truth because, thanks to the movies and storytelling, we already know each other’s deepest secrets.
No responsible person can be lied to. We lie to ourselves. Those lies are the most dangerous. I only believe the lies of others after I have told them to myself. If I’d stop telling myself lies, all others’ lies would stand out. The truth lives out in the open where anyone who desires to take personal responsibility for it can know it.
Lies do not stand for truth. They do not change the facts. Lies are like gas, invisible, but among the most obvious things in the world. The air we breathe contains a variety of gases but a body requires oxygen. Truth is everywhere mingled with lies, but our survival depends on truth. We can tell pretty quickly when we’re breathing something else.
Popular stories expose the common lies we all tell ourselves, precursors to the kind of lies our leaders feel it necessary to tell us. The enlightened storyteller gives away all secrets because he or she understands that there are none worth keeping. Popular stories contain endless examples of characters coming to terms with truth. Accounts of a hero’s triumph in a story counteract attacks of hopelessness brought on by revelations of cowardly maneuvers such as those exposed on Wikileaks.
Official lies are born of the same denials that we all must confront personally before we can ever expect to transform them collectively. News and gossip are constant reminders of the selfish, indulgent sides of our nature. Stories and movies contain compelling examples of the courage and conviction humans are capable of summoning to achieve their highest potential in service to the common good.
How did media incubated from a trickle of primitive symbols and signals to a close-knit network of drums and voices, through the enlightened fountainhead of the printed word to the digital pipeline of our present information age? What largely propelled this transformation is the struggle to gain control of “the official story”. The nightly news is a primary vendor of “the official story”. It’s a viewpoint, someone’s account of past events and a claim of authority to load the time capsule of history.
The official story proposes to make everyone’s point of view the same. However, just as no two camera’s can occupy the same spot at the same time, neither can two individuals see things exactly the same way. This accounts for all cultural ambiguities. The official story adopts a viewpoint, takes a stand, polarizes ambiguities embedded in our culture, converting them to prejudices. When we adopt these prejudices, it sets up an artificial need for affiliate groups.
Polarized individuals are powerless. The powerless are eager to merge with affiliate group. When we adopt the viewpoint of the leadership, we defend their opinions as our own. Relying on strength in numbers, we look to our party for the power to assert our prejudices over those of the opposing party. When the leadership betrays our trust and acts for its own selfish gain, it perversely appears as if we backed them.
Just as no photographic image can encompass the total picture, no official, or their story can claim to have done all the necessary listening and thinking for us. We must fill in the missing gaps with our own story and the stories of those around us, particularly those with whom we differ most. Good listening requires at least a momentary suspension of prejudice.
Good movies bridge the artificial gulfs that divide us by allowing cultural ambiguities to exist, unencumbered by prejudice. The best movies open our minds, coaxing from us a suspension of disbelief. The best stories condition us to genuinely listen and reward us with bona-fide insights that safeguard us from any need for an official story.
A new psychedelic movie I watched last week thrust me back to bardos I had not wandered since the 70’s. “Enter the Void” concerns the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”. The movie is shocking and heavy-handed. The acting isn’t really very good, but the film is relentless once it hooks you. You’re glad they’re not better actors or it might leave a deeper scar. At more than one point I had to take my eyes off the screen. It was too long. So is hell. I looked around at the audience. No one was breathing. The movie theater felt like a Petri dish. Images and sound suspended us in a synthesis of color/shadow, movement, noise/music, editing, “high” art and blood red drama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKRxDP–e-Y
For an entirely different example of psychedelic cinema, have a look at another recent popular film, “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.” This hilarious and prolonged derangement of the senses comes courtesy of the video game that is teenager Scott Pilgrim’s life. Hallucinogenic stories like these are able to sell their hyper-realities thanks to a firmly established psychedelic appetite in the modern audience. Like acid tests, the lens tracks themes of Pilgrim’s progress from random to ego shaking. Scott racks up more and more multidimensional payoffs as he learns new rules and adapts to shifting circumstances.
It is good to see the psychedelic experience imaginatively presented in popular movies because of how much that can help us think outside the box.
Drugs get all the credit for psychedelic culture but motion pictures have always probed those possibilities. As far back as the 1929 silent classic “Man With A Movie Camera,” pioneer filmmakers undertook experiments to alter perceptions. They ingeniously employed superimposition, speeding up or slowing down, bending, blending, splintering, splicing; wielding light and shadow to peck away surface appearance and reveal essence. The current reach toward perfecting 3D and digital FX are the continuation of that tradition.
Before film came along altered states were cataloged by anthropologists, but early hallucinogenic accounts turn up everywhere from the Book of Revelation to the Rig Veda. Who can say which visions were drug influenced and which were not? The “Tibetan Book of the Dead” catalogs elevator stops, or “bardo’s,” of a soul’s journey back to reincarnation after death without mention of drugs. Timothy Leary re-published the same text as a tripping manual.
Drug experimentation became a fad in the 1960’s. Hallucinogens inoculate culture with what medicine societies and shaman of many traditions have known for millennia. Plant medicines provided an alternative perspective, a glimpse outside the box. Sound familiar? The digital revolution carries this potential now.
These days “outside the box” is a commonplace term for innovative thinking and drugs are by no means the only way to achieve it. Movie makers keep on paving the way in popular culture. Whether or not you ever ingested hallucinogens, we all experience them through their influence in music, movies, fashion, advertising, games and so on. For half a century now, psychedelic culture has branched upward into mass consciousness.
The digital revolution, it was said by drug guru Timothy Leary shortly before his death, is the new LSD. It allows for an increase of information to pass between ourselves and the larger living, breathing organism of which we are all part. Psychedelics work to inhibit the brain filter that prevents overload. Take that filter off and senses, emotions, memories expand, awareness roots and blooms. With psychedelics then, and cyberspace now, heaven and hell are states of mind.
Social networking is not a new phenomenon. It has been studied for at least as far back as the late 1800’s. This rapidly expanding online industry is dependent on an imperative that developed in our brains long before our species took human form. The social network has been a dynamic artifact of evolution going back to our single cell origins.
At this current apex of social evolution, each of us is a channel or wave of information passing through the global mind. Our claim on this virtual reality is substantiated by photographs, videos, posts, friends networks, emails, texts, tweets, peeps, treats and how far out our contacts reach to meet. Social networking sites have already eclipsed pornography as the prime generators of traffic on the Web. The popularity of these sites is largely due to their efficiency in helping us conduct the mating ritual and they help us do so by getting our story out.
Every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view. A social networking website is a point of view in search of character and plot. We hear stories all the time. Stories are so important to us that everyone wants to be the main character in one. The point of view in social networking is that a person with an interesting story makes valuable contacts. We want that story to be told to as many people as possible so that we have the best chance of finding good contacts. Stories inspire us to want to be extraordinary, to raise the level of our game, to do something that everyone recognizes as worthwhile.
A social networking site is a place where a person puts their best foot forward and shows us the character that they want to be. It is also a place where we explore the characters and stories of others. We search for people with common values and complimentary needs to enrich our story and theirs, or to reconnect with people who enriched past chapter’s of our life’s story. In cyber-culture, the mating ritual has found a place to express many latent emotions. This is good. This is healthy. We keep a wary eye out for predators, but also trust in the benefits of widening our social circle.
For the corporate interests, consumer profiles are pieced together from demographic data gathered by the way we perform the ritual. How old we are, where we live, who we live with, what we like and what we buy make up the character and plot of that story but who supplies the point of view? If every story combines three essential elements, plot, character and point of view, we must realize that the creators of these social websites are are supplying the point of view to the story that we are supplying with our character and plot .
Facebook, for example, is a blank page upon which a person’s story is written. What and how we write about ourselves, our choice and use of language, our preferences in friends, music, television, movies and popular websites make up the character and plot of that story. The viewpoint of that story is imposed by the author of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the one unifying connection that runs through the entire Facebook demographic.
We may not all be Mark’s friend, but we are all actors on his stage and legally, he has a legitimate claim to authorship of the entire digital output of his enterprise including our profiles. However it is important for us members to keep in mind an online community is made up of individuals who are connected in ways more significant than a social networking site can encompass. The real social network exists whether or not Facebook or BoobTube take part in it. The social network was not invented by any one. You are the social network. They can take away all the computers, cameras, recruiters and programmers and the social network will still be alive and well, because no one can take away your story.
