I was hanging out with my very cool stepmother, Stella, tonight in Jackson Tennesse tonight. I went to Blockbusters and rented In the Name of the Rose.It reminded me how right Brian is and how important it is to keep our eye of the eight boxcars of drugs.The Name of the Rose is about power, money and the manipulation of knowledge to deny access to knowledge that will alter the power and money formula. It is monks and the Pope in the medieval ages but the metaphor is clear.The monks keep all the books hidden because the accumulated wealth of knowlege does not sort with church doctrine. Meantime, they keep the peasants in a state of starvation, highly dependant and not in a position to access knowlege, capital, or to build alternative systems. The peasants fall into the trap by competing with each other instead or organizing and collaborating.Meantime, murders start to occur as the younger monks try to access the knowledge. Access is provided in exchange for sexual favors, etc. To cover up the murders, the Inquisition prosecutors tee up a soup full of witchhunting and devil worship that off course has nothing to do with anything, but offers all the entertainment and mystery and ritual that folks are otherwise denied. Meantime, the inquisition folks gain power and status until the failure to address the real problem results in the library buring up and being destroyed.The inquisition gets stopped and the prosecutors run out of town, but now until total disaster.Driving the long drive back to Hickory Valley with my dog Forest leaning way out the the car trying to smell all the cows and skunks, I am trying to estimate how much I could increase the equity value of a prostitution ring if I had a 100% reliable vacinne against AIDS. But I was also thinking about how much time it takes to research some of the giant steps forward that technology has made possible for those whose purpose is making the rich richer, and how important it is for me to not let that time investment deter me from seeing a framework that is very much controlled and driven by the cash cows of essential services....air, water, roads, food, drugs, sex, electricity, gas, sewer...
It is all about energy and creating a critical edge. In a world where all the players are sure that winning requires winning at war and that war is inevitable and that the way to survive is to help the rich get richer, the power of this technology can sure cause send Planet Earth off course.The question is can we learn to collaborate and to provide the sacred and the mysterious and the pleasing to ourselves? . If we lead, the leaders will follow. They have to if we can prove we can build alternative systems without them.
