(This is for a childhood friend )

Remember the movie ‘Blast From the Past‘? The title of this blog post is the tagline from that movie. Described by IMDB.com “about a naive man who comes out into the world after being in a nuclear fallout shelter for 35 years”. On the surface a cheesy romantic comedy with a farcical premise. Yet there are undercurrents of existentialist themes addressed.

Which brings me to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. (Yes … via Plato of all people.) It is a fictional dialogue between Socrates (Plato’s teacher) and Plato’s brother. It is about a group of people chained to a wall in a cave, and the only reality they know is the shadows that reflect off the wall from passersby to the entrance of the cave. The only sounds they hear are echoes as they bounce off the cave walls. Their entire reality is based on reflections and reverberations.

Sometimes I can totally identify. Even several years removed from the cave.

Wikipedia sums up the story nicely:

“Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of the cave entrance, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

“Socrates asks Plato’s brother if it isn’t reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen? Wouldn’t they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn’t the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?”

But then one man is dragged from the cave. The story doesn’t mention how this “dragging” takes place. Nevertheless, at first he is disoriented. He sees the sun for the first time and almost feels blind. For a brief moment he panics. But the sight of the sun and the disorientation is real, and questions begin to form. Instead of a hasty retreat to the cave where things are familiar, he tries to make sense of it all. Slowly he begins to acclimate. He begins to notice more things around him. He begins to understand seasons, and days, and things in nature that no one in his group had ever even bothered to question – mainly because they had never been dragged out of the cave like he had.

For someone like myself that tends to nauseate when forced to return to stale social norms – and my background being raised in a cult, this allegory touched me deeply.

After this guy is released from his chains, dragged out of the cave, discovers new truths and reality, he starts to feel pity for his poor friends trapped in the cave. Their lives are relegated to doling out awards and “privileges” for whomever can predict or identify the next shadow projected onto the cave wall. He tries to convince others to come join him and see what he has seen. They resist. Perhaps reasoning, “Why would someone who is a master at describing the shadows and echoes of voices against the cave walls want to leave his place of comfort and stature?” The cave dweller has respect among his peers. He has “a gift” if you will, of interpreting the shadows and sounds.

For example, the Wikipedia summary continues:

“Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. Wouldn’t he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and they, pitiable? And wouldn’t he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn’t he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? “Wouldn’t it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it’s not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn’t they kill him?”"

Yes. The people in the cave he wants to help eventually begin to resent the guy who escaped! He is trying to tell them everything they believe is not reality, instead a projected reality. In many ways similar to what I have written about regarding The Matrix blue pill/red pill scene. Not only do they resent him for challenging the status quo, they actively seek to do him harm. (Coincidentally, “Clubbed To Death” by Rob D. just started playing here at the coffee shop. It was used in the Matrix movies. Weird.)

Plato didn’t have my situation in mind per se. He was actually attempting to explain the difficulty of being a philosopher in a world where the collective conscious didn’t really care to know. It also explains why large groups of people with certain belief systems like to label these sort of people as snobs, arrogant, elitist, and so forth.

The question is the beginning. Certain questions – once asked – cannot be unasked. Just ask Joseph K..

Notions of Progress
I’m not where I was
But not where I could be
Limbo is fun
When it’s only a dance
And we’re drunk
So lower the bar
And let the music play

From Seth Godin’s new marketing book – Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us.

A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.

As opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not he wants to accept the ramifications.

Hmmmm.

It’s hard to believe I have been in North Carolina for over two years! There have certainly been a lot of changes – for sure.

After a long period of reflection and examination, we made some deliberate decisions a a few years ago that have changed our family’s direction in large, unimaginable and almost all good, ways.

My experience these last 3 years reminded me of a very poignant scene in the movie, The Matrix. (Minus the cool martial arts, large guns, and sexy skintight leather outfits of course. Yes I am talking to you Carrie-Anne Moss.)

For those who never saw it, the fictional plot of The Matrix is that humans live in vats many years in the future, being fed false sensory information by a giant virtual reality computer (the Matrix). The Matrix was constructed and is run by machines of the future who use humans as a source of power. Humans are literally farmed. The false reality information they are fed makes them feel like they are living in the real world, with real jobs and families and purpose – but it’s all an illusion created by the supercomputers.

This obviously fictional plot is really a vehicle for the larger questions about life and existence and stuff like that. (As most sci-fi movies tend to do …)

The Choosing Scene

There is a scene where Neo (the main character played by Keanu Reeves) is presented with a choice to know the Truth about his reality – or to choose not to know. If he took the blue pill, he could get an idea of what life is like outside the Matrix, but he would end up back in his bed like it was a dream and not remember any of it. However, if he took the red pill he would be forever removed (literally unplugged) from the comfortable illusion of the Matrix and would have to deal with real life – a life that he doesn’t even know if he will like.

What would you do?

In retrospect, I could liken some of our choices over the past couple years to a similar analogy – whether we wanted to take the blue pill or red pill.

When I typed “red pill blue pill” into Google, I found a really cool article on the Matrix Philosophy and how it borrows from religious and philosophical symbolism (existentialism,etc) in ways many viewers probably never realized.

Their examination of the “Choosing Scene” pretty much sums up a lot of my feelings:

The film as a whole and especially the choosing scene is deeply compelling. Why is the choice between what you believe you know and an unknown ‘real’ truth so fascinating? How could a choice possibly be made? On the one hand [you have] everyone you love and everything that you have built your life upon. One the other [you have] the promise only of truth.

The question then is not about pills, but what they stand for in these circumstances. The question is asking us whether reality, truth, is worth pursuing. The blue pill will leave us as we are, in a life consisting of habit, of things we believe we know. We are comfortable, we do not need truth to live. The blue pill symbolises commuting to work every day, or brushing your teeth.

The red pill is an unknown quantity. We are told that it can help us to find the truth. We don’t know what that truth is, or even that the pill will help us to find it. The red pill symbolises risk, doubt and questioning. In order to answer the question, you can gamble your whole life and world on a reality you have never experienced.

I really enjoy their descriptions of what the advantages of each pill is.

First, the blue pill:

So what are the advantages of taking the blue pill? As one of the characters in the film says, “ignorance is bliss” Essentially, if the truth is unknown, or you believe that you know the truth, what is there to question or worry about?

By accepting what we are told and experience life can be easier. There is the social pressure to ‘fit in’, which is immensely strong in most cultures. Questioning the status quo carries the danger of ostracism, possibly persecution. This aspect has a strong link with politics. People doing well under the current system are not inclined to look favourably on those who question the system. Morpheus (the leader of the resistance outside the Matrix) says to Neo “You have to understand that many people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.” (Amen to that!)

The system also has a place for you, an expected path to follow. This removes much of the doubt and discomfort experienced by a trailblazer.

Another argument on the side of the blue pill is how does anyone know that the status quo is not in fact the truth? (Good question!) The act of simply questioning does not infer a lack of validity on the questioned. Why not assume that your experience is innocent until proven guilty? Just accept everything?

And the red pill?

To justify taking the red pill we might ask what is the purpose of an ignorant existence? Further still, what is there in merely existing? Simply existing brings humans down to the level of objects; they might have utility or even purpose, but where is the meaning? Existence without meaning is surely not living your life, but just experiencing it. As Trinity says to Neo, “The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.”

Given the potential disadvantages of choosing the red pill, the motivation for discovering the truth must then be very strong. The film makes much of this point. Trinity (Neo’s friend outside the Matrix) says to Neo “It’s the question that drives us, Neo.” and Morpheus compares the motivation for Neo’s search to “a splinter in your mind – driving you mad.” The motivation for answering the question is obviously strong as the answer will help us to find the meaning in our lives.

What we are looking at here is the drive to answer a question, but the key to this is what drove the question in the first place. The asking of questions about our environment our experience and ourselves is fundamental to the human condition. Children ask a seemingly never-ending stream of questions from an early age. It is only with education and socialisation that some people stop asking these questions. However, we remain, as it were, hard-wired to enquire.

This is an inevitable consequence of consciousness. A being with a mind, conscious of itself and its existence, experiencing a reality, needs to organise the data that it receives from its senses. Simply observing and recording does not allow for consciousness. It is what we do with that information that allows us to think. In order to process and store the vast amount of information received, the human brain attempts to identify patterns in the data; looking for the patterns behind what is experienced. This is asking questions of the sensory information, and requires reasoning. By definition a conscious mind seeks to know. Knowing something requires more than just data, but intelligence or reasoning applied to that data. To attempt to obtain knowledge we must therefore question the data our mind receives; thus, consciousness questions.

I’m sure most readers stopped about halfway through and relegated all this to their process of cognitive dissonance.

For those of you that did stick with it. Let it be known that I certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers or absolute Truth. That attitude is neither faithful nor discreet.

However, today I can say I do know what the Truth is not, and for that I am more grateful than I ever imagined I could be.

Like the article above mentioned, “Questioning the status quo carries the danger of ostracism, possibly persecution.” As a family, we experienced that firsthand. But we knew it would happen going in, and that people treat other humans in such a vile way does nothing but help reinforce our decision was the correct one. But to those precious few of you that have remained in touch and continue to share your lives, I would like you to know I value and cherish that relationship greatly.

I recognize many people would prefer the illusion. In the movie, there was another guy that was unplugged from the Matrix – named Cipher. He took the red pill too – initially thinking he wanted to get out of the fake reality. Real life was a little TOO REAL for him and he asked to be put back in the Matrix – a comfortable life of existence based on an illusion.

I know more than a few people could identify with wanting to be ‘made comfortable’ to live out the rest of their existence. So I don’t condemn those people. I don’t hate them. I don’t even think I am better than them. It’s simply not the choice for me.

What our family chose to leave was not the only Matrix in this world we live in. There are plenty of other fictional realities out there. Though I was never Mormon, I found a really great example of a fictional reality (Mormonism) trying to protect themselves from the free-flow of information as I read this letter from an ex-Mormon. Thankfully though, as we get further and further into the ‘Information Age’ it is harder and harder for these fictional realities to exist. Many of the leaders of these fictional realities even go so far as to ban people from reading material that questions their belief system, and slap labels on people who dare to question their authority.

A few quotes I have kept close to me lately:

“When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.”
– Orison Swett Marden

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”
– Ambrose Redmoon

Related Blog Post: She was a woman of the world. He had never been around the block.

Jamming at Ben’s

Sitting here thinking about how insanely awesome computers are nowadays from when I first started programming back in 1997.

Right now my computer is doing the following:

• Streaming KEXP.ORG College Radio station at 128kbps
• Downloading my songwriting blog via FTP.
• Reading the morning news in Google Reader.
• Downloaded the latest version of Wordpress and am extracting.
• Downloaded a Wordpress plugin and extracting.
• Editing a contact form in Dreamweaver.
• Writing this blog post!

Geez. 10 years ago doing all this would have been impossible, but my processor is humming along at 8% and I’m not even close to touching my 2GBs of RAM on the laptop.

Wonderful stuff.

Here are three things that are true:

1. Digital technology, especially computers and cell phones, can dramatically increase productivity.

2. More and more users of digital technology are small firms or individuals.

3. The vast majority of users of digital technology are totally lame in getting the most out of the investment of their time and money.

“Oh, I didn’t know I could do that.”

“You mean I don’t have to manually type my address book in by hand?”

“There are graphs in Excel?”

“Gmail is free?”

Here’s what I haven’t found: people who charge $100 a hour to hear what you do and how you do it and then show you how to do it better. People who organize data and put it in the right place. People who overhaul the way small groups use technology so they can use it dramatically better.

People who use copilot to take over a PC and actually rearrange it so that it works better.

I bet you’re out there. I bet there are people looking for you. Show yourselves!

(via Seth Godin)

Here are some examples:

Their funny grammatically incorrect quotes are pleasantly amusing.

Which brings me to yesterday. . .

According to this article on Reuters:

Offering a grammar lesson guaranteed to make any English teacher cringe, President George W. Bush told a group of New York school kids on Wednesday: “Childrens do learn.”

The article continues:

During his first presidential campaign, Bush — who promised to be the “education president” — once asked: “Is our children learning?”

Now I know being the President is a hard job. I also know that Presidents have to speak at and attend functions they really could give a rats ass about. But c’mon. A little effort in the grammar department could certainly do some good.

For crying out loud, Abraham Lincoln only had about 18 months of schooling and he came off as quite fluent.

Kellie sums it up nicely:

oh dear god. they laugh, the world laughs

With all due respect, his elocution is lackluster to say the least. My Republican friends swear we are all just “misunderestimating” him.

After the secret multi-million dollar lawsuit and court papers made public, you would think they learned their lesson by now. Still, no apologies and no admission of wrongdoing.

Now this dude (it seems like there’s a new one every week):

Michael Porter, 38, used his trusted position as a ministerial servant in the Jehovah’s Witnesses to prey on young children in Clevedon, Somerset, over a 14-year period. One of his victims was an 18-month-old baby.
Full article at The Telegraph

And BBC News:

He was a respected member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Portishead and Clevedon.

Parents trusted him to look after their children, and he regularly babysat for youngsters, took them away on holidays and invited them for sleepovers at his home.

He finally admitted what he had done after one of his victims threatened to go the police. Full article at BBC News

And then there’s this book their human leaders supposedly follow:

Matthew 23:27-28:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you resemble whitewashed graves, which outwardly indeed appear beautiful but inside are full of dead men’s bones and of every sort of uncleaness. In that way you also, outwardly indeed, appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”

National news headline today:

CAPE CORAL, Florida (Reuters) - Phone books that were delivered but never opened rot away next to empty driveways and overgrown lawns, telltale signs that once-booming southwest Florida is now the center of the U.S. housing storm.

Until two years ago, middle-class retirees vied with property speculators for houses and apartments in Cape Coral, a town near Fort Myers on Florida’s sun-drenched Gulf Coast. Now almost every other house on some of its streets has a for-sale sign outside.

With a bloated inventory of unsold homes and a growing number of homeowners forced by mortgage delinquencies to sell — thanks to the subprime crisis and ensuing credit crunch — southwest Florida’s once warm clime for property has turned stone-cold.
(Full article)

Man … we got out of there in the nick of time. Must have been Jehovah’s spirit!

I hate to hear this group is in that town, Spindale – as it is the home of one of my two favorite radio stations on the planet, WNCW (the other is KEXP in Seattle).

And isn’t “Spindale” a great name for a town with a cool radio station?

Of course, as I read through the inner workings of these groups, there are many things that sound eerily familiar to me. In this article about his case with the wackos in North Carolina it talks about a very expensive lawyer named Dick Anthony that specializes in defending cults (like Scientologists, Moonies, Branch Davidians, and the previously-mentioned Word of Faith Church).

Of course, as I read the article I stumble across another one of Dick’s clients. He’s not cheap either. Which is too bad because he apparently lost the case for them.

No wonder the Internet is strongly discouraged by so many of these groups. Not sure how I would have found that otherwise.

It’s tough being a cult in the information age.

“Information about the group’s history, purposes, doctrines, financial disclosures, methods of dealing with problems, counseling, training, and discipline for offenses are kept as confidential as possible.” -Steve Hassan ex-Unification Church Member