Full Moon Edition January 2024

I’ve been thinking a lot about mythology, because of a class I’m teaching called Mythologies of the Modern West, and about mythomania, because of our current socio-political situation and this book my daughter, Kate, gifted me at Christmas about a liar of some relevance to the issues at hand in our world today. We are, lord have mercy, in another election year for the most powerful political office on earth and all the wheels of disinformation are whirling madly for our entrancement.

Do you think about these things, too, in terms of what we bring to the contemplation and how much of that may be illusion? Do we have any access to the big picture of what the hell is going on? Is the core of our political machinations essentially the same as always and for much the same purpose: power and control. Is only the delivery system newly crafted? Is it just technology now that has us in its sway?

Myth-making is and always has been about the stories we tell ourselves that we want to believe – what Joseph Campbell says are myths that point NOT to the fact but to something beyond the fact that informs the fact. So, we might wonder what exactly is the story we are trying to tell ourselves about today’s world with all the technological might we can muster to excite the senses and lessen the load on the brainpan? Is the medium itself now truly and finally the message?

Perception is reality, right? What you see is what you get. What then do we get in this age of creative disinformation? “A liar’s dividend,” as UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid termed it in a recent article in the Washington Post (HERE). Nothing is true but neither is anything false, at least not discernibly. There is always deniability because we can claim artificial intelligence created it, whether or not it actually did, and how would we know? Since we can’t tell the difference, is there one? Has the netherworld taken hold, perhaps, where we are doomed to wander aimlessly, vibrating on key.

The very real possibility that everything you see and hear in whatever source(s) of information you rely on may well be false “…destabilizes the concept of truth itself,” says Graphika analyst Libby Lange in the same article, “… there’s really no sense of ground truth.” That seems accurate, although I no longer have any assurance of whether it’s true of false. Veracity is so yesterday.

It should be no surprise that duplicity continues to evolve its techniques as long as we reward its outcomes. We get better at piling it higher and deeper because it pays so well. It delivers. The con won and continues to win. This is a skillset that rewards the shameless and there are so many to be rewarded.

Perhaps we’ve become addicted to sensory dissonance, a receptivity to mere feeling exclusive of thinking about what we feel and why, simply because we’re going to lose and we know it. Consonance no longer is comforting but rather an intolerable stillness that is frightening for the lack of distraction.

So, the question if we care to ask is who then will you vote for? And why? The lesser of two bad choices is the traditional answer. In a political system that is the worst – except for all the others. So slickly the Gordian knot is tied and how resilient, too, supported as it is by the abundance of bullshit we manufacture to distract us from simply cutting it.

There are societies we can reference that welcomed the truth as a source of strength instead of a force to be undone. Places where the purpose of profit was to support the social contract, where individual wealth and plenty conferred pleasure on the owner perhaps but no power over others who were less fortunate. In fact, it implied a responsibility to care for them as a way of strengthening the tribe. They, rich and poor alike were products of enlightened thinking rather than artificial intelligence. Maybe we should vote for that system and send these chthonic deities of ours packing.