What the advent of the printing press enabled for the upset of European society during the protestant reformation, the internet is affording for us today. We have not even seen the furthest culmination of this modern equivalent to the exponential increase in available (mis)information, but there is enough to detect the pattern that will determine future outcomes. In fact, the pattern is corresponding in form and relations to the same structure that unfolded in the wake of the tumult that characterized Europe during the protestant reformation. This is because the entire formation of structures, artificial or natural, are governed by an ultimate underlying pattern. This pattern is the blueprint and epitome of the cosmos, and is entirely non-physical.
We have demonstrated in the preceding articles that information is non-physical and precedes the imprinting of matter not so much temporally (before and after) so much as hierarchically. All of this is the physics of information, which could be taken to be removed from the structures of human society. But in fact, all knowledge is representational, which is proven by the fact that human perception is mediated (mediated, therefore indirect) by the organs of the perception, in sum the body.
Therefore, all the knowledge we possess is symbolic and effectual by way of resemblance and analogy. Humans think analogically, and the instrumental capacity of the mind is one of mirroring. This is HOW WE THINK. It is the very foundation and principle of the power of thought, PERIOD. As such, it is as much intrinsic to our way of thinking about human interactions as much as it is ingredient to our knowledge of the celestial bodies and mineral micro-processes.
We can point out this underlying pattern, or rather its result when known, by assessing the various grades of increased knowledge throughout human history. We can even see it on the individual level, it always follows the same procedure. We see it when the child comes of age and starts taking matters into his or her own hands, we see it when the layman started reading the Bible in the common vernacular instead of the Bible being inaccessibly Latin. We see it economically when Napster disrupted the music industry, in just the same way the clergy’s religious role was adjusted during the reformation. We see it in how Amazon has affected retail, we are going to see it in the role of institutionalized education structures as information becomes accessible without their intervention. The professor is to the student what the priest is to the layman. They stand between you and the truth, be it academic truth or religious truth.
In fact, these are one and the same truth; just as the universe organizes into clusters of planets and stars, comets and black holes, all our concepts regarding nature, matter, humanity, biology, compute into analogies which physically connect to one another and form one whole.
The protestant reformation altered the landscape of Europe, not just religiously. It altered it socially, politically, was preceded by technological innovation and its role in the proliferation of the information via print, and paved the way for further social change. And the entire situation is part of a continuum, but is important because it is an excellent miniature of the underlying causes of change today, and highlight the role of information and the role of who or what mediates the information, and how that role can be uprooted, precipitating a radical upheaval. The major shift has yet to come into full swing, but it will be a copernican revolution, an entire shift in perspective. There will be Galileo’s and Bruno’s. It will not be a lovely little adjustment for many; there are livelihoods at stake; established institutions that enjoy exempted status and substantial influence are being called into question, and very real deep-rooted assumptions will collapse which no amount of psychological jugglery will be able to prop up.
Everyone cannot be an expert in everything. But then any parent can understand the responsibility they have in dealing with a child, born as we are naive and inexperienced, subjected to the decisions of adults who in fact can be wrong. Being an adult doesn’t make you exempt from error. In any case, children are almost totally helpless to the decisions of their parents, be they are right or wrong. This very relationship of the parent to the progeny is corresponding in form and relations to the preacher and the layman, the doctor and the patient, the teacher and the student. In fact, being taught in school, informed by media , and restored by medicine is also corresponding in form and relations to the salvation of Christianity; from ignorance to knowledge, from sickness to health, from sin to salvation. It’s all essentially the same, and yet I somehow suspect you still don’t see the underlying pattern. You want me to spell it out for you, step-by-step.
In each of these systems – medicine, education, government, etc – corruption is profuse, just as Catholicism was in the time of Martin Luther. What we are dealing with here is a general-systems situation, where each of these practices are branches on a tree. The change that is going to happen is going to be FUNDAMENTAL and affect EVERYTHING – hack at the root and the branches will whither. It is going to affect everything because it pertains to the mechanism of thinking itself, the very relationship between the knower, the known, and that which enables the two to be distinguished and interface. What is standing between you and the truth, whatever that is, is going to be revealed for what it is. We see through a mirror darkly, but soon we will see face-to-face.
Trump. Brexit. Cambridge Analytica. David Bohme. Administrative incompetence. Scientists whose explanation might as well be Latin, who dumb down and equivocate the nuances, whose explanations aren’t so simple cause the devil is in the details. But what do you care? Gotta pay those bills. Yeah, you know something’s wrong, everyone does. But then you got mouths to feed. It’s true, you have to focus on what is important to the exclusion of all else. But what is most important is what is most overlooked, that which escapes our sight is precisely that which makes us what we are.
Imagicination 