Archdruid John Michael Greer has a theory about the collapse of civilizations, a theory he calls “catabolic collapse”. The gist is that civilizations don’t drop from a great height immediately to the bottom of a chasm. Instead, they tend to tumble in stages, like a drunk falling down a stairway. They fall a little bit, catch themselves, then fall some more, and so forth. The fall, he says, is interrupted because civilizations are able to redirect their dwindling resources to slow their decline.
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As I described in this previous post, one of the requirements of the Magic Spiral in the candidate year in the AODA is to learn about magic through reading and meditation. The books I selected to start with were three on “neurolinguistic programming” by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. I started with Bandler’s book, Use Your Brain for a Change, which is an edited set of lectures from the 1980s, and The Structure of Magic I & II, which were written in the 1970s. Use Your Brain for a Change especially comes highly recommended. As a linguist, I was very interested to see how linguistics would play into these techniques. I’ll lay out some of my thoughts below.
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Television is Plato’s cave.
Plato described the following thought experiment. Suppose some children were taken from their families at birth and set in chains inside a cave. They were bound head and foot, so that they could barely move, and were all set facing the same wall. Behind them, someone lit a fire, so that light was cast on the wall. Insidious conspirators, for unknown nefarious purposes, made a shadow play up on the wall, and the children believed that the shadows they saw on the were was the whole of reality. Their voices echoed off the wall, so they identified themselves with certain shadows, and interacted with the shadows as if they were real.
Now, Plato was trying to make a point similar to the one that Steve Pavlina makes in his series on subjective reality. Some will say that the thought experiment just proves that Plato was the sadistic wacko who got his kicks thinking about torturing little children. But of course, he only thought about it. We actually do it.
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