Freedom, Creation, and Wildfire...

...in the age of resurrection

S. Spalding Drive - 201 S. Lasky Drive 2

[50% of all profits generated by sales of any and all works from my S. Spalding Drive Suite will be donated to Red Cross relief efforts to help victims of the LA wildfires.]

Resolved: Freedom is prerequisite to the acts of creation and resurrection…

As the first mass medium, print promoted linear thought, reason, individual liberty, freedom, and democracy.

By contrast, electronic mass media promote distraction, limbic reaction, mass conformity (anti-freedom), and state-centric socioeconomic models like fascism, socialism, and communism.

That’s not to say that some people can’t find some measure of individual liberty and reason in digital media, or that digital media cannot serve the greater good. Merely that the inherent biases of all electronic media point us in certain anti-freedom directions and behaviors by default. In other words: the medium is the message — a lesson those who care to know have known for generations.

Of course, those in the best position to understand that the medium is the message and behave accordingly are pretty much like everyone else…

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

Whether they understand intuitively (like many artists and entrepreneurs) or via deliberate research and study (like many academicians), those in a position to understand know that the mass media-driven tendency of the digital age is to accelerate the consolidation of state power and the wholesale adoption of mass media-driven conformity at the expense of individual liberty and freedom. Hence the 21st-century rise and primacy of immensely powerful global governance, regulatory, and cultural institutions like the Democratic Party, American academia, the EU, WHO, and the WTO.

Like most knowledge among those who know or should know better throughout history, knowledge that the medium is the message has done little to enhance the prospects of liberty and freedom over the past generation. Indeed, many of those who once knew better — especially the former 1960s student radicals now ensconced as the senior class of tenured professors in academia, the powerbrokers in the entertainment industry old enough to know the difference between legend and celebrity, and the political elite — are among those whose salaries and privileged lifestyles inhibit or shield them from acting in accordance with the inconvenient truths embedded in their own knowledge and revealed by their own lying eyes.

And thus did the former defenders of individual freedom and liberty — now the most stridently illiberal champions of anti-freedom conformity (and endless war) — betray both themselves and society at large when they turned state’s witness in a deliberate and self-serving effort not to understand. Instead of acting in accordance with the message of the medium, in accordance with what they knew to be true from their own experience, they surrendered their autonomy as free agents to it. Instead of promoting freedom and liberty they chose to promote and enforce mass conformity — in no small measure because their power and wealth and tenure guarantees immunity not only from the social repercussions of their own behaviors, but from any corresponding need to understand. Power, like water, will always follow the course of least resistance.

Stating the obvious, the post-wildfire resurrection of Los Angeles will require far more visionary insight, self reflection, and outright competence than the current generation of local and state leaders can possibly deliver. That’s because the relationship of Californians to their leadership is now entirely dysfunctional, and very much like the relationship of the Palestinians in Gaza to Hamas: as enablers of pernicious and dangerous ideologists who promise utopia but deliver apocalypse — year after year — for generations.

The relationship of citizen to government cannot be otherwise as long as the primary characteristic between them is a toxic co-dependency in which government actors are always paid to take care of themselves first, and always rewarded for abject failure. More money and more support for the current leadership in California will only result in more fires and more heartbreak. Time to break the cycle.

Doing so requires a return to basics. Just as the true lesson of Easter is in the Resurrection, not the Crucifixion, the lesson of the disaster unfolding in Los Angeles is in the rebuilding of homes and the restoration of lives, not the fire. Time to turn our backs and walk away from leaders who value and finance ideology over competence, those whose only real imperative is to remain in power at all costs.

Ideology will not and cannot rebuild neighborhoods. It’s time to unleash the power of entrepreneurial builders and artists, time to reinvest in competence and vision. Both are critical in the coming days and months and years, and current state leadership can offer neither. So fuck them, and remember: resurrection, like creation, is an essential function and expression of freedom.

S. Spalding Drive - Reflections 6

[50% of all profits generated by sales of any and all works from my S. Spalding Drive Suite will be donated to Red Cross relief efforts to help victims of the LA wildfires.]