"Is America the best country in the world?"

"Spam is 50 cents off today."

An Interview in Stone, Or, A Rock Tells All:

Billions of years ago, things here used to be real quiet. Sure there were the volcanoes blowing up, but those lightweights never could hold their magma. The thunderstorms were always my favorite. They made some noise, but they left you all clean and fresh afterwards. It was a simpler time, quieter... a time when you just felt the sun on your surface layers and were glad to be not alive.
? Quarry Quibble, From "Interview with a Rockpile", coming soon from Aborigirati Publications *
* Horsehockey.

Imagine being a rock, like this chap above, 3 billion years ago. The planet is in constant upheaval; there are storms and eruptions and earthquakes, but otherwise it's just you and some water and, well, a lot of other rocks. That's it. No salmon or chickens, no trees or carrots, not even a poet or Dick Clark.

But it doesn't stay that way.

Then one day something... crawled... over me. At first I tried not to think about it. But it happened again. I thought it'd go away, but it didn't. Suddenly there were more of them. They were everywhere, creeping and crawling. And the noise! All this sliding and skittering and munching... It was something new. Something that wasn't still, wasn't quiet... and it didn't just exist ? it was alive. And it wasn't alone. Suddenly, the world got loud. Really damn loud. And I knew that it was all headed to ruin from there.

Evolution is for the Uppity
I have absolutely no evidence, scholarship or research to back up the following. Oh well.

An argument for aboriginal culture and against the continued existence of civilization: we lived just fine without it. In other words, the status quo was sufficient; who are we to think that something else might be better?

The first ones were bad enough, but then more kept coming. And they all kept changing. They got heavier, faster. They stamped us without thought, kicked us into the air without giving a damn that we'd been lying where we were since before they crawled out of the sea. Sometimes I just wanted to throw myself at them, stupid loud whippersnappers. Some of them grew through us, or on us ? they'd latch on, grip us and just eat us to bits. I had one myself; for centuries I was slowly digested. Hurt like hell. Damn thing probably would've dissolved me, had the Big Rock not crashed down and wiped up damn near everything, bless its fragmented soul.

The millenia that have seen the life and death of generations of aboriginal societies are hardly a moment in geological or biological time. Like those organic and non-organic entities before us, we did just fine as we were. Why change?

Yet.

We also did just fine as pre-humans. Why deviate from that ancient lineage? When did we become too good to be Australopithecus, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon?

Or turn the clock back even further, from these uppity evolutionary upstarts. Humans and pre-humans evolved from a rather prestigious line of lifeforms, who certainly had gotten on just fine for millions of years. It must've taken some extreme spunk and arrogance to decide that being a primate wasn't good enough. There had better have been some perceived high benefit, after all, to justify the end result of losing a highly useful and damn cute tree-swinging tail.

Yet. What's so special about being bipedal, anyway? At some point primates decided that where they came from didn't cut it. Each and every creature has just bloody well kept changing, those uppity tossers. Why a spine?? Why an endoskeleton instead of an exoskeleton? What's wrong with being insectile? What the hell are we doing on land, anyway?? Life evolved in the sea ? what, we too good to swim??? When did life decide that it had to live in the first place? Something wrong with being a rock or just a bunch of atoms?

You get the point.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

'Course, the meteor didn't do everything in. This life stuff, whatever it is, is nothing if not resilient. Eventually I felt the creepy-crawlers again, and eventually there were more. Now there are a lot of them with loud things that dig us deep, that cut us and melt us. I just wish another Big Rock would come. This whole life thing is overrated. All it does is get in a big damn hurry, always eating and shagging or trying to do one or the other. It's not all it's cracked up to be. I don't know when being inanimate stopped being good enough, but the sooner these creepycrawlers get quieted down for good, the better. I'm tired of all the bustle and racket; I just want things peaceful again, so I can go back to being a simple rock in a simple world.

Humans, like life in general, don't particularly care about the whining and whinging of a rock though. They're too busy changing to whatever is around at the time, or dying and making way for something that adapted better. It ain't gonna get quiet. The party of life, chaotic and in flux, is here to stay, regardless of form, regardless of complexity, regardless, even, if we dafty humans seem able to wipe out a good deal of life itself. Life changes, because the world in which it exists is always changing. The cause might be the stars, the cars or too many executives brainstorming ideas in the bars, but life doesn't care. It deals with what is put in front of it, and goes on. If it makes a change that works well under the current circumstances, that bit of life continues. If not, then it doesn't.

Civilization developed because in the course of existence, humans try different things to adapt to what is around them. Humans are not static, because life and the world are not static. Wipe out every organism on this planet, and things would be different. Though they won't stay that way. Earth's been there before, after all. There were billions of years where there were no lifeforms, not even bacteria or Dick Clark. Then, suddenly, there were trilobytes and American Bandstand. And probably a bunch of rocks causing landslides, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in a minerological attempt to tell their new noisy neighbors to keep it down and shut up.

I just realized that I made a stupid error in my last post. I said I would lay out only two ground rules, and proceeded to lay out three. Ironically, the third rule is "no deletion or editing". Whoops.

And now we are all here, and it is time to let the games begin. Also, it is time for me to shed more insight as to why I have invited you to join this project. To begin, welcome. You are here, primarily, to share your opinions, and to duke out the particulars of where this civilization may be heading (as well as what might be done to aim us in a desirable direction).

You are also here to keep me honest. I have realized that some of the ideas which I have expressed in writing these entries may not have been entirely clear, and could have used quite a lot more fleshing out in the details. I have done a poor job of taking into account that there are innumerable perspectives other than my own. I have left certain basic assumptions unquestioned. In short, I have been allowing myself to rant. By changing the format of this site, and building dialogue rather than diatribe, I hope to be challenged to express my ideas in a broader and more accessible way. I also hope that through dialogue, all of our ideas and actions will have the nurturing and care which they need to grow more robust.

I will lay out only two ground rules for this debate (which, I hope, will go on for some time);

1) If you believe it, don?t give up. I don?t care whose mind isn?t going to be changed or whose is. This is not about changing minds; it?s about expanding them.

2) There will be no shame in conceding a point, ever. If the idea of a dialogue is to fertilize ideas, we should allow them to grow, and not stifle them with concepts of ?winning? and ?losing?. This is a debate, not an argument. Despite the position of a thousand high school and college forensics clubs, no one wins or loses a debate. We are not our ideas, and if we all walk away from an issue with better ideas than we had before, we all win. No boasting, no whining.

3) No deletion or editing. Once it?s there, it?s there, regardless of how drunk you are. Proofread before you post.

Any further ground rules, if we feel we need them, will be consented upon before going into effect.

So, we?re here. And we already have a topic up for debate.

What is the value of an idea? Can an idea change the nature of reality? Does an idea have power of it?s own, beyond the power to spur action?

Personally, from where I sit (on my back porch, smoking cigarettes in the cold) ideas seem to have some intrinsic value (or else, why would I be writing this?). On the other hand, an idea?s value seems to be multiplied by a large factor when it becomes action.

Also, some ideas have negative value. Take fascism, for example. This is a bad idea.

As I?m writing this, I begin to think about the subjective nature of value, especially in the realm of ideas. We talk about fascism and Nazism as bad ideas now that they have been played out as realities, but before the National Socialists, Franco?s Spain, Mussolini?s Italy, and other such fascist and Nazi regimes, there were a number of people who thought of fascism and Nazism as pretty good ideas. The value of the idea, then, is altered by the value of the action. Suppose fascism had been all it promised to be. We would think of it as a good idea, rather than a bad one.

An idea, as a solitary entity inspiring no action, may be value neutral from an objective stance. Only when an idea spawns action does it gain value (in the positive or the negative, as the case may be). However, where are we to find the seed of our actions if not in ideas?

It should be noted that by value neutral, I don't mean that it is without value. An idea which is not acted upon exists in the realm of potential. Once stated publicly, an idea can lie dormant for centuries before becoming a reality. I look to the example of Marxist communism, which has never existed in the world as we know it. There have been nations whose structures were similar in form to those which Marx described as socialism, but communism is still in the idea stage. Perhaps one day in the future there will be a real communist state, and only then will we be able to determine the real value of Marx's ideas.

All of this, of course, leads back to my central argument regarding Civilization. To become Civilized was the seed idea which led to all these other ideas we all have. All modern ideas, from French Toast to Congress, assume on a fundamental level that people were meant to become Civilized, and that there is no alternative. When we examine history, we do so from a linear perspective, and assume that an idea from before would be untenable now. To live as our ancestors do would be at best an anachronism, and at worst a disaster, our ideas tell us. But what if this is a fallacy? What if, as I propose, the seed idea, the dawn of civilization, was an idea built on falsehood. This would put everything we know, at it's core, into question. That's what I would like to do.

I guess I bring this triad to completion. Dig is the mastermind behind this, Ant's the pragmatist, and I'm the dreamer. Every group needs one.

tangible thoughts
One could say that i've been in the business of meme propagation for going on five years now. For me, ideas are not vague, ethereal things floating disconnected from human affairs. Ideas are the most real things we have, the foundation of every action taken. It's my view that rather than trying some form of band-aid reform to fix the problem (as it has been laid out by dig) we have to attack the root of the issue, the philosophy that allows such actions to continue. As Ant has pointed out, if civilization is brought to it's knees, what is to stop people from building it again? Merely the desire to avoid such a cataclysm again. I don't view civilization itself as the problem, though in it's current manifestation it behaves like a malignant cancer. I would like to believe that there is a way to have my cake and eat it too. That there is a way for human advancement to continue without devouring everything in it's path. I think this solution lies in the mind.

Most of us have read Stephenson's Snowcrash and are familiar with the concept of thought virii. The meme of crass consumption is a particularly rampant virus, etching itself so deeply into our minds that we barely even notice it's there. We're exposed to it from birth and from the start it's the core philosophy of all our surroundings. It's so deeply ingrained in us that most will never even recognize it, let alone question it. So, instead, we go ahead with our lives, building upon this crumbling foundation, and then wondering why, when we get everything we think we wanted, we are still miserable. This is more and more evident daily, as the numbers of depression rise, concurrent with the number of anti-depressants on the market. Like some Huxlian dystopia, we pop a pill and everything is supposed to be fine. And it is, for a little while.

I like to visualize myself acting as an immune system for the human race. Fighting the thought cancers that plague us. Civilization triumphs by building walls, seperating, causing division and distrust- between nations, races, and individuals. It conquers by refusing to recognize anything else as a thinking, feeling, individual. It builds walls of otherness and alienation, making people look to their differences rather than to their similarities. It is this lack of connection that is driving us down. Humanity is, on the whole, a herd species. There is no point in history when we have existed singularly. The Steppenwolf is the oddity, driven to nihilistic destruction by his own loneliness. We group together and rely on one another to survive. I see it as part of my job to make people see this, that we need each other, and not just the people that we like, but we need that obnoxious person in the pub, that self-centered person in front of us in line. And they need us, our presence and our compassion. Maybe not understanding, that takes more time, but we need to recognize them as individuals like us, rather than some dehumanized mechanism to be used for some end.

It's like i'm being tied to the hood of a yellow rental truck, being packed in with fertilizer and fuel oil, pushed over a cliff by a suicidal mickey mouse!

We are on a collision course with calamity. I hope the three of us can agree on that. Without some form of change, we will be faced with a cataclysm on par with another ice age. Maybe we need such a cataclysm to make people realize the need for change. I hope not, because it won't be the affluent who suffer, but rather those who are already dealing with the fall-out of industry, those in the Third World who don't have our first class medical care, who don't have our access to potentially life-saving technology. One need only look to the decimation that is racing through Africa as they feel the after-effects of colonialism in renewed ethnic conflicts, the devastating toll of AIDS, as well as the environmental effects of a burgeoning industrial system. This scene will replay itself from the cradle of civilization to the New World, unless we collectively realize the damage we are doing and act swiftly to change it. I hope this site can spark some new ideas as to the change we need.