It is not uncommon to be doing something seemingly innocuous when one is flooded with wild thoughts, musings that seem randomly meaningless, leading nowhere. Thoughts that think us. To dismiss them, however, is a mistake. For me, these unbidden guests usually visit me when I am out walking or lying in bed right before sleep.
Recently, as I was again walking across the meandering Housatonic River through the covered wooden bridge in Sheffield, Massachusetts, I found myself waylaid by the thought of the word “preposterous,” which is usually understood to mean absurd, very silly, or foolish. Being happily eccentric and language obsessed, I thought of its etymology, which from the Latin means before-behind or before-after, which makes preposterous an absurd, nonsense word itself, which seemed appropriate to thoughts that were approaching me from the other side as I walked ass-backwards (my behind behind me) toward them. I wanted to see ahead to make sure I wasn’t bushwacked by something more absurd than a word.
For when I exited the bridge, I passed a plaque commemorating a reported UFO sighting by forty people and an alleged abduction on September 1, 1969 by Thomas Reed, who claims that when he was nine years-old he and his family were taken briefly aboard a disk-shaped flying UFO as they were driving down the dirt road between the corn fields and the marshes that I was approaching. While this strange, fascinating story is not the focus of my reflections, if it interests you, you can read about it here.
I mention it because of what the plaque evoked in me and the seemingly preposterous nature of Reed’s claim and the weirdness of those of the many people who said they saw the same UFO. I am not passing judgment on them, for I believe those forty people saw something, but what they saw I do not know. I must admit I am glad I was not beamed up on my recent walk, for I wasn’t dressed appropriately for such an encounter.
What intrigues me about their stories is that they happened at a time very similar to today when the world seemed to be spinning out of control.
In 1969, secular black magic was in the air as the U.S. war against Vietnam raged on, led by the “peace candidate” in the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon.
There was the counterculture’s wide use of drugs (the CIA”s introduction of LSD, etc.), its turn to eastern religions and New Age esoterica, and the crisis of traditional religion as pagan practices were revived.
There was the murder of Sharon Tate and others by Charles Manson’s gang (deeply involved with satanism, Nazism, and occultism) in early August that was shortly followed by the Woodstock music mud festival, with both preceded by Apollo 11 to be followed by Seymour Hersh’s revelations about the My Lai massacre.
Throughout the year, and those preceding and following, the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the CIA’s operations CHAOS and MKULTRA were in full force, spying on Americans, creating chaos and mayhem in minds and on the streets, a part of a vast effort at political mind control and disassociation of the personality through the most evil means.
And “ironically,” in December 1969, the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book – its decades long investigation of UFOs – was officially ended with the conclusion that there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were extraterrestrial vehicles or were in any way beyond the range of modern technological science.
In October, as in before-after, the U.S. Department of Defense’s ARPANET program – Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (now DARPA) – the predecessor of the Internet, made it its first communication between two computers.
Then, as if to culminate a decade of assassinations and absurdity, despite a very vocal peace movement, in December, the Altamont music festival was riven by murder and mayhem, as if to imply, contrary to Don McLean’s 1971 “American Pie,” that this was the day the music died.
The list goes on and on. Let’s just say the times were psychedelic, as if society were on a non-stop bad acid trip and the CIA’s takeover of the country was nearly complete.
Jump ahead a half-century to today.
Now we have the long-planned Internet – ARPANET’s and the Pentagon’s baby – and digital madness with conflicting narratives that are akin to acid-trips. Mental dissociation at its finest.
Nixon is long gone but his successors have carried on his ruthless Vietnam war policies in grand traditional style with the U.S forever wars (El Salvador, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan¸ Libya, Syria, etc.) , with war against Russia via Ukraine, its backing of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and aggressive war against its neighbors, the push for war with China – all leading to the greatest chance of nuclear war since 1962.
The renewed media reports about UFOs (now called “unidentified anomalous phenomena”) and the Pentagon’s denials are kept alive by technologues like Elon Musk, among others, in his recent jocular exchange with Tucker Carlson. You know, there are a lot of satellites up there but let’s not discuss the Pentagon’s mind control, the games it has being playing for decades to create fear.
We have Artificial Intelligence (AI) and massive drug use far exceeding that of the 1960s that is officially promoted, as reality evaporates before and behind more and more people’s eyes.
For the massive growth of mental problems, LSD, that old bad-ass standby, is now advocated by the mainstream media as excellent therapy, while the weaponization of disease with Covid propaganda spins along as the world awaits the promulgation of the falling leaf virus and the call to cut down all trees.
Spying on Americans and censorship of free speech is the rule of the day, far deeper and wider than the most inflamed imagination could conjure.
There is an electoral system in shambles that has become a running joke, at least for those who get it.
MKULTRA mind control on a vast scale flourishes, despite all the denials, via the Internet and digital devices meant to confuse, promote doubt, and crazy speculation.
There is the leitmotif that has persisted for 60 years, the continued decline and mockery of traditional religious beliefs together with the promotion of New Age “spirituality” tied to consumerism. Shopping being the real religion now.
And lest I forget, we have the media and educational promotion of sexual and identity confusion under the guise of new definitions, such as the meaning of the word “gender.”
Finally, there is no mass peace movement as wars rage, except for those college students protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and a few scattered groups.
You can easily fill in what I have omitted because there is no doubt you feel this disturbing “reality” of living in a society of screen spectacles and scrambled brains.
In other words, social madness, the “after” to 1969’s “before” – absurdity repeating itself, is the rule of the day, or more accurately, has been continuing for the past 55 years.
A preposterous scene.
Weirdness and Chaos are today’s celebrity couple, as people are subjected to, and subject themselves to, smoke and mirrors and mind control through an addiction to cell phones, the perfect propaganda tool. Just put your hand in your pocket wherever you are and “they” are with you, in your hand, in your head, your constant companion, corrupting your mind and soul.
All this juxtaposed history did not occur to me in specifics as I walked down the beautiful dirt road past the UFO plaque; it came to me in more general terms. But in a flash. The particulars here recounted come from my having lived through the 1960s and my knowledge of history, the teaching of which has fallen into desuetude as universities have, in the words of the recently retired Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi, “For some time now, I have been both disgusted and horrified by the way higher education has developed into a cash register – essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum.”
In his book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary, sums it up nicely: “One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness. . . . programmed unintelligibility and duplicity.”
A close relative of mine, a brilliant man, highly skeptical, scientifically inclined, and very logical, a guy who scoffs at wild claims that he subjects to careful analyzes, was recently on a flight into LAX airport. He had a window seat, and as the plane was on its long descent, the plane at approximately 15,000 feet, he saw a quivering disk-shaped object about 150 feet beyond the plane’s wing. Startled beyond belief, he regretted not taking a photo of it before it was gone. As soon as he landed, however, he asked the pilot if he had seen it. The pilot said no, but it was probably a drone, which would make it a very high-flying drone indeed. My relative called me immediately to tell me. He said it was the size of a small car and it quivered like a quarter when dropped on a countertop. He said it looked like no drone he had ever seen, and though amazed, characteristically concluded that he didn’t know what it was.
I mention this because such sightings are not just the wild imaginings of people prone to believe anything. They are part of our current “reality,” seen by many people but shrouded in mystery. Government authorities dismiss these sightings as figments of people’s imagination or weather balloons, drones, etc. Any evidence to the contrary is dismissed, like so much else, as the conspiracy thinking of nutty people. In other words – preposterous, meaning absurd. This is part of the game of mind control that has been going on for decades, the effort to create social neurosis and confusion throughout society.
I offer these thoughts because I was waylaid by a word – preposterous – that went to my head. If I have not kept to the subject, whatever it might be or whatever you expected, it is because, as the psychologist Adam Philips puts it, “In this picture digression is secular revelation, keeping to the subject is the best way we have of keeping off the subject.” And so I will end with a few words from the great mystical and political poet, Czeslaw Milosz, a former Polish diplomat, who raises a question that cuts to the heart of our current dilemma.
Most people are ashamed, Milosz has written, to ask themselves certain questions that the seething infinity of modern relativity has bequeathed us. Such relativity is at the heart of our modern spiritual crisis, which is also the political one. Space and time have lost all dimensions; the experience of the collapse of hierarchical space and time is widespread. For those who still call themselves religious believers, “when they fold their hands and lift up their eyes, ‘up’ no longer exists,” Milosz rightly says. The map and the territory are one as all metaphysics are almost lost. And with its loss go our ability to see the advancing banner of the king of hell, to grasp the nature of the battle for the soul of the world that is now underway. Or if you prefer, the struggle for political control.
What is before is behind or what is before is after. It is preposterous but it is true.
Thank you, Edward. The Manson Family murders as well as Altamont were seized upon and amplified in the media in order to discredit and bring the curtain down on myriads of worthwhile explorations undertaken in the ’60s. The Manson murders were apparently something rather prosaic, concerned with a drug burn, though the dionysian excess surrounding their perpetration was catnip to the media. As for Altamont, it would be heretical to claim that some people there, especially if they were not in proximity to the stage, really enjoyed the show, yet that does seem to be the case. The Maysles Brothers edited their film Gimme Shelter in such a way as to suggest that everything staggered to a close immediately after the murder by the Hells Angels of the young man waving his gun, but in fact the Stones played 6 or 7 more songs, claimed by some to be among the best performances by that band. That material has never been released, if I’m not mistaken. A chapter in Peter Coyote’s memoir Sleeping Where I Fall describes his friendship with an ex-Angel who provided a persuasive account of how the Maysles Brothers kept badgering the Angels to ‘provide security’ for the show, though they’d not ever before entered into such a relationship; their presence at so many San Francisco concerts resulted from the fact that they liked the bands or were friends with them. The film needed an exciting denouement and so the Maysles Brothers proposed the novel arrangement. In the event, it worked out well for several parties with vested interests , especially those who wished to put an emphatic punctuation mark on the mischievous explorations that were then everywhere afoot.
Hello all, hello Edward, this is another great mind-opening revolutionary article. You are right about the excess of disinformation on the internet. There are these diet cults as well, like the carnivore diet, there must be an agenda behind that meat-only diet (and nothing else) maybe from the agroindustry of the beef lobby. I do believe in low-carbohydrates diet, I tried the carnivore diet and i felt so bad, and i had to quit it.
I also believe in the extraterrestrial phenomenon, because the universe is too big for humankind to be alone, humans should question every thing. Since like you said in your book we live in a country of lies and in a world of lies (Seeking truth in a country of lies) and since accoding to Nietzsche it is impossible to know any 100% truth in this world, and since we have been lied and betrayed by education institutions and by the ruling class, and since it is impossible to know any thing about any thing. maybe (this is not a fact) but maybe we were really made by the Anunnaki extraterrestrial race hundreds of thousands of years ago, with the anunnaki extraterrestrial’s intention of mining the earth for gold and precious minerals, and the global corporate plutocracy might not be our real oppressors. There are lots of hidden secrets and things that humans are not aware of.
Because most of the knowledge that most people get comes from education institutions and not by their own selves thru book-reading. And relying on education institutions for knowledge and wisdom is wrong. Even Foucault and Deleuze said that education institutions are literally prisons and not institutions to make people smarter and awake.
Most humans are so ignorant of what is really happening in this world, even in many countries with leftist governments, people think that their leftist government is really an authentic socialist government. People are so dumb and naive that they are not aware that socialism is really a dictatorship of the proletariat (the transitional phase between the overthrow of capitalism and the beginning of anarchist stateless communism. But to the majority of people that isn’t really important, they think that things can improve without a scientific revolutionary plan, they think that burocratic dictatorships like the government of Nicaragua, Maduro (Who betrayed Hugo Chavez) and other bourgeois fake-leftist dictatorships will sooner or later become authentically socialist.
The same happens in USA, many progressive reformists think that Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris or Jill Stein will overthrow the bourgeoise dictatorship we have in America, nothing could be further from the truth because only a true trotskist orthodox marxist party, backed by the organized working class can really lead to real changes.
But like you said in this article the great majority of US citizens are traumatized, confused, disinformed, uninformed. They don’t know, they are not aware that their real enemy is the dictatorship of the capitalist class (The US government, the upper capitalist classes, the Jewish Lobby, the military industrial complex, and about 20% of the US population who are part of the dictatorship of the bourgeoise class). And the solution to destroy the enemy of Americans is a patriotic board of salvation which would rise to state power an implement a dictatorship of the working class and poor peasants, repressing the overthrown bourgeoise class. (This would be like a sort of Second 4th of July,1776
Here is an article about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Notice that there are no dictatorships of the proletariat (real socialism) in any country of the world. Most countries who call themselves socialists right now are really state-capitalist countries, not socialists
The dictatorship of the proletariat, sometimes abbreviated as DotP, is a guiding principle applied in the transition to communism from capitalism. It facilitates economic development to a level at which communism can be implemented, and prevents counter revolution and sabotage from the international and domestic ruling classes.
As the state exists to assert the rule of one class over another, all class society is a dictatorship; the issue that generally drives the class struggle is who is the ruling class. As such, the DotP is not a dictatorship in the liberal, bourgeois sense of the term but a neutral qualifier as to the owner of state power.
Capitalism is usually referred to as a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, as the bourgeoisie controls such a system and asserts their rule over the proletariat, thereby oppressing them.
Since there is always an oppressor and oppressed in class society (see also social class) due to the contradictions pertaining to the means of production and, more broadly, to the mode of production, it is important for the proletariat to become the oppressing class over the bourgeoisie if communism is to be achieved.
Maybe when humans were more mentally and spiritually evolved we might see an objective revolutionary situation and people be willing (with a clear head, without any mental viruses and disinformation like people like Glenn Beck confusing them) people might be willing to support a marxist proletariat patriotic front of salvation
By the way, since people need to evolve in order to support an authentic anti-capitalist political option, here is a song I was listening by Tool which talks about the need of humans to change, grow toward the nest stage of human evolution. The song called 46 and 2, is about growing, changing, and moving towards the next level of human evolution and conciousness. It’s deeply rooted in Jungian theory and Nietzsche’s theory of the superman.
Basically, it’s believed that there are three levels of human evolution and each has it’s form of conciousness. There’s the 1st level with 44 chromosomes. These are primitive people’s like the Aboriginals in Australia who do not perceive anything outside of themselves. They only see one large consciousness with no distinguishment between organisms. Then there’s the second level with 46 chromosomes. That is us. We are a chaotic disharmonic consciousness that is basically used as a stepping stone between the first and third levels. The third level is 48 chromosomes. (Or 46 & 2, with 2 being the sex chromosomes x & y). This is the higher level of consciousness. Our destination.
But this is where the Jungian theory comes in. It is believed that you can not reach this third level of evolution without first delving into yourself and basically cleansing your conciousness for the next jump. That’s where the Shadow comes in. The shadow is basically everything about that is unseen that you are uncomfortable with or hate. This is also known as the Anima (hence the name of the CD).
Here’s the lyrics:
Forty-six & 2
My shadow’s
Shedding skin and
I’ve been picking
Scabs again
I’m down
Digging through
My old muscles
Looking for a clue
I’ve been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could’ve been
I’ve been wallowing in my own confused
And insecure delusions
For a piece to cross me over
Or a word to guide me in
I wanna feel the changes coming down
I wanna know what I’ve been hiding in
My shadow
Change is coming through my shadow
My shadow’s shedding skin
I’ve been picking
My scabs again
I’ve been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could’ve been
I’ve been wallowing in my own chaotic
And insecure delusions
I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing I’ve endured within
My shadow
Change is coming
Now is my time
Listen to my muscle memory
Contemplate what I’ve been clinging to
Forty six and two ahead of me
I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be paranoid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through
I choose to live and to
Lie, kill and give and to
Die, learn and love and to
Do what it takes to step through
See my shadow changing,
Stretching up and over me
Soften this old armor
Hoping I can clear the way
By stepping through my shadow,
Coming out the other side
Step into the shadow
Forty six and two are just ahead of me
.
Haha yeah Musk said he ‘saw the plans’ from the moon mission. Despite a 100000 FOIA requests for the same being denied on the basis of them having ‘destroyed the technology’. Hmmm. Somebody is lying. What else is new? Everywhere you find the topic of UFOs you find liars. That’s all I need to know.
Ah… Degenerate uman animals at our best.
After the behavior displayed during OPERATION COVIDIUS nothing else surprises me.
Personal Irresponsibility end result:
“One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness. . . . programmed unintelligibility and duplicity.”
I, too, came of age during this wild, preposterous ride, and give me a time machine and I’d be back there in a heartbeat. It was chaotic but it was alive, unlike the living death of neoliberalism that now surrounds this old man, pervades everything. Back then, we had a fighting chance and knew it…until we blew it.
Chaotic but alive … so true. There was an active anti war, pro peace movement then but where is it now as we have so many forever wars? It seems both sides have been co opted by the Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned about.
And still alive in an organic sense. Too much of “reality” today is a manufactured digital simulation, injected into the undeveloped and unprotected mind directly through the miracle of our now ubiquitous electronic prostheses. On which rides that ever-advancing king of hell.
Preposterous is too kind an adjective for the current zeitgeist.
Perhaps Ed, it’s a case of:
‘We see what we need (or crave) to see, and ignore all the rest’.
‘Seek truth from facts,’ Mao’s favorite Confucian aphorism, has stood the test of time quite well.
Thanks for the wild ride summary of recent history to present. Interesting about “preposterous”! and seems the definition belies a deeper sense of the etymology of past&future and once, as for example a tree in winter has roots (the past nourishing the present) and will put forth leaves in spring (the present nourishing the future), totally natural, yet the attitude of the definition of preposterous “contrary to nature, reason, or common sense” has to led to deforestation. Also, the etymology of “reality” is “property, goods, wealth” as in “realty.” So that layer of “reality” is responsible for many of the divisions between human beings and the pollutions affecting the natural world aka Mother Earth.