Flying Wing for each other...

From the "Life at My House" series... No. 42

A magic man and a major muse

Went out to lunch one day

And over the tea and strumpets

One heard the other say

"Sweetheart we've a lot of power

In how these children think,

They who live within the walls

Their shamans twist and shrink

Until the little darlings crouch so low

In misery and drink

Crying for the faith they lost

Before they learned to think...

So lover shall we take a hand

In helping them to see

That all the things they're pining for

Are generally quite free?

Should we put it on the street

And dare the merchant man

To try and claim a copyright

On verse pen’d God’s own hand?"

*chuckle*  If I were to allow vanity more than 50 milliamp to work with I might come to the conclusion this poem was a tiny bit precognitive... and no, I'm not going to explain.

Concerning Steers, Queers, and the Catholic Clergy...

For more than a few years the debate has raged:  is it nature or nurture sets the most basic attitudes and orientations of humanity?  Is it genetics or upbringing that ultimately defines who we are, what we become?  I’ve never officially taken a side in the debate, I’m in the same position as the combat correspondent who gets close enough to the action to hear things flying by his head, but no, the pistol riding in my camera case is strictly for looters.  I’m just documenting the battle, not really taking part in it.  There was an interesting little firefight crossed my perception the other day, and it resulted in a small but potent tidbit of a thought I’d like to share with you.

IF (huge little word that one is!) there is some degree of validity to the nature side of the argument THEN there are some interesting commonalities created between rather unlikely components of society.  Consider what the three groups named in the title have in common.  What do the Steers (voluntarily childless hetero) and the Queers (homosexual) and the Catholic Clergy (celibate) all have in common?  They do indeed have something in common, as a matter of fact what they have in common is an error that could have destroyed an entire timeline, an error I first heard of concerning the awesome Ambassador Spock back in his youth when he served as science officer aboard a Federation starship.

Spock was there the first time a human vessel ever successfully emerged intact from a time warp.  Well, to be more precise he was there the first time a human vessel ever successfully emerged intact into its’ own time returning from such an adventure, there are always the legends concerning Leonardo DaVinci.  In the episode a twentieth century human ends up spending a few days aboard the twenty third century Enterprise.  He was a prime specimen of his vintage, he was the fighter pilot who had gotten entirely to good a look at the massive Enterprise fighting her way back into orbit from a dangerously low dip into the atmosphere, they had to beam him out of his cockpit or let him return to base and report what he’d seen.

Intelligent, well educated, physically and psychologically fit, orphan and unmarried, few  connections to his time beyond those he served with in a calling where it is known that sometimes someone doesn’t make it home and no one ever really knows what happened to them... if ever there was a candidate to make a successful jump three centuries into his future he would have been your man.  They almost made the mistake of taking him with them as they attempted what most would have called suicidal, a deliberate attempt to drive a starship though such a torture folded form of space as to emerge three centuries into the future.  But then Commander Spock realized their almost fatal error in time to avert it, he realized why he had to plot a trajectory where they could return the pilot to his own time a split second before he’d first laid eyes on them, closing the potential that could have resulted in there being no future of their own for the Enterprise to return to, leaving the great starship and her crew orphans of the universes.  Did you see the episode?  Have you figured out what the three groups have in common with that fine work of fiction from four decades ago?

Of course.  The issue at stake is in genetics, the unique pattern of DNA that results in more than any one individual human, it equally defines every potential human timeline that might ever come of that pattern blended with another equally unique pattern.

Steers, queers, and the Catholic clergy... what do they share in common?  What they share is that they are all voluntarily sterile, they choose not to reproduce.  With their choice they are essentially casting their vote in the nature/nurture debate.  If they believed that nature had any  major influence on what a person turns out to be they’d never choose sterility of their own volition, it would be counterproductive to their prime agendas.

All three of the groups in question are, in point of fact, genetic black holes consuming for all the eternities the patterns of those who comprise the groups.  Regardless of how you might feel about the relative ethical and moral status of these people the fact remains: they are each and every one of them the utter end and destruction of who can say how many possible futures based not on their actions but on the potential deeds of those who might have come into existence from their contribution to the human genome. 

Seriously.  She was a nun in the seventeen hundreds, a beautiful woman who retreated from the psycho-sexual-social manipulations of her world to hide her beauty beneath a habit in a cloistered convent.  But had she not retreated, had she stood up to her father and married the man of her choice from her loins would have come the line from whence came the man who touched the heart of Adolph Hitler’s grandmother in her youth before the bitterness and the cruelty became a matter of her habit.  How different might our world be?

Anyway, like I said in the beginning of this post, I’m just a combat correspondent and I think it is time for me to move.  I’ve got a serious hunch where I’m sitting on this issue is right about where a serious skirmish is likely to go down since there’s a counter attack due any old time now.  Frankly I really don’t want to be this close to the action when that goes down, once a bullet is in flight it doesn’t give a damn how many possible futures might be decided by where it happens to hit.

The Third Reality of Man Chapter Three: Tools, Bartered and Borrowed...

If you ask a stranger “who are you?” several times in a row you're likely to notice a strange pattern.  Try it sometime.  Ask someone “Who are you,” and take note of where they find their answers.  For example, who are you?

“I’m John Doe.”

“No, that’s just the name your parents hung on you.  Who are you?”

“I’m a design engineer for an aircraft company.”

“No, that’s how you earn your money.  Who are you?”

“I’m an American.”

“No, that’s the nation you live in.  Who are you?”

“I’m a Conservative Christian Republican!”

“Sorry, but those are all political groups supporting your vision of society.  Who are you?”

“I’m me!”

“Of course you are,  but who is that?”

The length of the list will vary, person to person, but the majority will offer quite a list before they’ll offer something defined from within their own self, something they created of their own thought.  If you watch their eyes you’ll likely see them get angrier with each repetition of the question, and a quick hot anger at that. 

What is provoking their anger?  The usual reason for anger of course, which is fear of one form or another.  They're  frightened of the nakedness you're compelling on them.  Their anger is in response to being stripped of the symbols they've always used to define their self  within the context of their society, and even more critically in the context of defining their self… to themselves.  As each component of their self definition shifts domains from being part of their self  to being part of their social environment they feel the foundations of their identity becoming weaker and more vulnerable, less complete, less secure... of course they’ll be angry. 

Consider the more subtle implications of what you’ve just seen.  You asking such a question is perhaps a bit rude, but still essentially harmless, and yet you frightened them.  In point of fact you are most likely totally powerless within their life, have no potential to do them any harm at all, and yet you still frightened them into anger, a deep anger.  Why?  What fear has such a secret grip on them?

What they fear is an entity who does have power in their life asking that question.  Consider what might happen if that entity not only asked that question but demanded a correct answer?  What if the consequence of a wrong answer meant being denied the right to continue to claim that part of their self identity? I'll assert to you that is exactly what they fear, even though they don't recognize their fear for what it is. 

I will assert to you that each and any element of society John or Jane Doe uses as any portion of their self definition is in fact a collective entity, a discrete and separate  entity whose life is hosted on a set of individuals defined by a common thought or activity, some common element of belief in their lives.  Should such an entity as that ask them a such question it could have impact on their life, for they are dependent on that collective for a portion of the definition used in the cause of self definition, the  critical ability to recognize the self from among the multitude in the perspectives mandated by abstract intelligence.

Each of the individuals included in such a group who incorporates some collective  definition (grammatically expressed as “we”)  as a part of their own self  definition  (grammatically expressed as “I”) is in fact a node within that collective entity participating in a symbiotic relationship where the collective provides a critical component of self definition to the individual, the individual in return providing  continuance and cohesion to the collective in the form of compliance and loyalty to the common definition in preference to the other collectives offering common value.  Just as the lives of the collective entities are hosted on many individuals any given individual will host several if not many such collective entities in their self definition, an interwoven structure of balance and compromise between the components defining the personalities of both individual and collective. 

To understand the human dynamic in full is to integrate an understanding of the structures and interactions of these collective entities in parallel with an understanding of the individuals, for while they are totally interlinked and interdependent they are in fact each a unique life form struggling for survival within their respective environments.

In that the collective entities are derived from, and composed of, individual humans many of their life functions are in fact analogous with each other, for both must meet the same three primal demands of life.  Since both are living entities both must procure sustenance, both must provide security, and both must arrange for procreation since both are mortal life forms that suffer attrition to biology.  There are many comparisons between the individual human and the collective entities created by the humans' answer to the challenges of hosting both imagination and an abstract intelligence.

In point of fact they are constantly trading with each other, borrowing or bartering to acquire the resources required for their respective survival.  Even a short contemplation of the thought will give a bewildering surplus of events to stand as examples.  In fact, even a short examination of the modern world can be confusing to the point of traumatic for the rate of exchange between the two life forms has been accelerating exponentially for approximately the last quarter of a century, which will be the focus in Chapter Four of this series, "Awakenings in Utero…"

…to be continued…

for convenience all essays in this series are collected on the page titled

"The Third Reality of Man"