BLOG PAGES

▼

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Time and Politics 21: Visits from the Dark-Haired Girl


The Dark Haired Girl by Philip K. Dick (published posthumously in 1989). In his Exegesis (published posthumously 2011), Dick admitted that the dark-haired girl who showed him the larger frame of spacetime and predicted totalitarian America was his dead twin sister. Image Source: Wiki.

This post follows on my post on Wuthering Heights, The Brontë Effect (16 September 2016), to explore the implications of inhabiting time as it really as, not as we perceive it. The 'Brontë Effect,' as I coined the term with reference to Dia Sobin's words, describes the 'reverberating Gestalt' one experiences after reading a work of powerful fiction such as Wuthering Heights, which makes one aware of compressed or overlapping time, temporal identities, and spacetime continua in different perceived realities.

To cross the boundaries, first of immediate, everyday perception, then of whole dimensions, then of multiverses, sounds far-fetched, but I have discussed what it means to live in reality while perceiving time in its whole dimensionality, and not as an arrow, here. From the 19th to the 20th centuries, the fourth dimension has been portrayed by writers elsewhere - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Robert Heinlein, among many others - and notably by Philip K. Dick in "A World of Talent" (1954), which I have described here. In that story, a precognitive boy is terrified by appearances of 'others.' At first, the reader assumes the boy is schizoid and hallucinating, but these are in fact other versions of himself at different ages. He can see all versions of himself, past, present and future.

A single event in time, perceived by an observer: "Subdivision of Minkowski spacetime with respect to an event in four disjoint sets. The light cone, the absolute future, the absolute past, and elsewhere. The terminology is from Sard (1970)." Image Source: Wiki.

Multiple events in time, perceived by an observer who is moving through spacetime. In the fourth dimension, an 'event' is an intersection between space and time, following a continuum, with each event causally relative to the next: "In modern physics, space and time are unified in a four-dimensional Minkowski continuum called spacetime, whose metric treats the time dimension differently from the three spatial dimensions." The above gif shows "[t]he momentarily co-moving inertial frames along the trajectory ('world line') of a rapidly accelerating observer (center). The vertical direction indicates time, while the horizontal indicates distance, the dashed line is the spacetime of the observer. The small dots are specific events in spacetime."

Our souls know a larger experience of space and time; and stories about souls raise perceptional and ethical questions about that larger experience. In an interview, one of Dick's ex-wives, Kleo Mini, stated that all of Dick's novels concerned the "internal workings of the soul .... He wrote about people's souls, not a word I use lightly."

Dick was fascinated by self-alienation and social alienation, the blind spot when you recognized neither your own soul, nor your place in the world. To survive that moral test, he considered how characters' souls might be externalized and projected back at them as different characters - exactly as Catherine and Heathcliff are projected upon one another in Wuthering Heights. In Dick's view, if your soul was personified outside you, you might fall in love with it, but you would not necessarily accept everything about it. You might hate it and not reconcile with it, which would be heart-breaking, torturous, and tragic.

Image Source: Frith Luton.

Image Source: Carl Jung.

Dick was influenced by unsolved soul puzzles with numinous qualities, which he first encountered in the work of science fiction writer, A. E. van Vogt, and later in the writings of Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, who thought that people were haunted by the shadow sides of their souls. Jung argued that for people to become psychologically and socially healthy, they must reconcile with their shadow. He further claimed that these shadows could embody an outer experience with the opposite gender in the anima or animus.

In Jung's hetero-assumed schema, when men and women went out into the world seeking love, they encountered opposite-gendered characterizations of their own souls. Jung theorized that men projected their soul's inner female back upon themselves; and women projected their inner male back upon themselves. Better love relationships depended on an ability to reconcile with one's opposite-gendered soul mirrors, such that one found increasingly sophisticated versions of one's mirror in the world. Men could progress through four anima soul shadow archetypes: Eve (the object of desire, who also reflects the security or insecurity around the man's mother); Helen (a woman who is externally able and beautiful, but internally lacking in virtue, faith, or imagination); Mary (a virtuous woman, who differentiates between lust and love); and Sophia (a woman of wisdom, who encompasses positive and negative qualities without being condemned). For women, the challenge was develop her inner masculine, so that she would externally find a man of physical power; then a capable man of action, a war hero or hunter; then a man of the mind, a professor, clergyman or orator; and finally, a man of hermetic enlightenment, one who could awaken in the woman a spiritual reconciliation between her soul's conscious and unconscious.

Image Source: Find a Grave.

In Jungian terms, the love relationship was a moral path in which a human being developed his or her own soul. Love was always self-referential, a struggle to improve and expand oneself spiritually, while other people became external reflections of, and catalysts in, the individual's internal process. All of this hinged on coping with the unseen, and interacting concretely or nebulously with elements of ourselves which exist beyond our linear experience of time. For Dick, the shadow anima was embodied not in a lover or wife, but in his twin sister, Jane Charlotte Dick, who died in infancy. Her presence haunted him all his life. She took form in characters in his work; he granted her far-seeing and Deus ex Machina roles. He further considered temporal aspects of the projected soul because Jane was dead. She was Philip's phantom agent, reporting from the other side. Because of Jane's influence on the famous author, she also inspired other writers. Perhaps this was why Dick considered the anima-animus not in terms of romance - as in Wuthering Heights - but in terms of society and politics.

In an interview with Charles Platt on 17 May 1979, Dick touched on Jung's themes in terms of love writ large in social and political relations; at the same time, van Vogt had made the writer think of spirituality and how to ensure that those who had been abused did not become totalitarian abusers when they faced their shadow selves:
Dick: "They did some awfully strange things in that book [van Vogt's The World of Null-A (1948)]. ... To me, it had a mysterious quality. It alluded to things unseen, metaphysical ... things. There were puzzles presented which were never adequately explained. ... I began to get an idea of a mysterious quality in the universe which could be dealt with in science fiction and which ... wasn't fantasy. I realize now that what I was sensing was a kind of metaphysical world, [an] invisible realm, of things half-seen, with supernatural powers. It was essentially what the medieval people sensed as the transcendent world ... the next world, the upper realm. And without knowing it, I was ... getting into ... what John W. Campbell called psionics and ... really for me ... was theology ... a dormant religious sense on my part.

In Berkeley ... there was no religious spirit at all ... I was mixed up in left wing politics and nobody even debated the existence of God. God was never discussed. ... I was feeling what I recognize now to be vague religious strivings and a ... sense of the numinous world. And resonating to van Vogt - I don't know if van Vogt would agree that he is essentially dealing with the supernatural. ... My real preoccupation is the difference between our perception of reality and reality itself. I was getting the sense that what we perceive was not what was actually there. ..."

[Platt: "So then ... [you pursued] the gradual development of this notion that there were other things than everyday reality as most people perceived it ...?"]

Dick: "I had read a lot of psychology. I had read a lot of Jung. And I was interested in Jung's idea of projection. That is, that a lot of what we experience as external to us is really projected from our unconscious. And that meant of course that each person's world had to be somewhat different from everybody else's because the contents of his unconscious would be to a certain extent unique. And I began a series of stories in which people experienced worlds which were projections of their own psyches ... . I call them ... interior projection stories and ... what I was trying to do ... was ... [show] each person with a different world and the contents of that world consisting to a large degree of material from his own mind, which came back at him from outside, and which he did not recognize. ... Now, this is ... an idea that has never left me, that a good deal of what each of us experiences is a projection of his unconscious and ... as I say, it was Jung's idea, not mine.

... I had to abandon eventually writing everything except science fiction and fantasy, because although I wrote eleven novels and many short stories which were not science fiction or fantasy, they all contained the element of the projected personal unconscious, or projected collective unconscious, and were simply incomprehensible ... to anyone who read them because ... it would require you to accept my premise, which essentially was that each of us lives in a unique world.

... I did get into print, in say, Martian Time-Slip [1964] and a number of books, the premise ... not just that we live each of us in a somewhat unique world of our own psychological contents, but that the subjective world of one rather powerful person can infringe on the world of another person. ... 
This ... is something I began to see ramifications of politically and psychologically, where people can exert a domineering power over others. I mean, if I can make you see the world the way I see it, then you will automatically think the way I think; you will come to the conclusions I come to, if I can control your perception. ... [T]he ... greatest power the human being can exert over others is to get control of their perceptions and reality, and essentially infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. 
This is done in politics ... [it was done in the Moscow show trials]. This is the incredible power of one or a group of human beings to dominate the personal world of another human being and actually to ... damage the contours of his psyche in such a way that the contents of their collective psyche invade his world and determine his image of himself, that he can actually believe their view of him. By definition, anyone who can impinge on your world, and deform it, and insert into it their value systems and their view of you is an authority figure ... and is a menace to your psychological, moral integrity.

... I am very conscious of the reader. I am saying to the reader: the greatest menace that faces the human being in the 20th century is the coming into existence in our times of a totalitarian state, which can take many forms. It doesn't have to take the form of right wing fascism. It can take the form of left wing fascism. It can take the form of psychological movements. It can take the form of religious movements. ... It can be in a relationship, where you're in a relationship with someone who is more powerful than you psychologically. ... And essentially, I am pleading the cause of people who are not strong ... a person who succumbs to authority and can only fight a rearguard defensive action against it.

... This is ... why all my protagonists are ... anti-heroes. They're ... almost losers, in a way ... and yet ... I try to equip them with certain qualities by which they can survive. ... But I'm equipping people to survive who are not in charge of the situation ... . They're people who are ... victims of the situation, and victims through weakness, not victims through the malice of other people, victims through their own weakness.

And a corollary around this is ... I don't want to see them develop counter-aggressive tactics, where they essentially become exploitative and manipulative. ... I took some assertion training ... these were just counter-fascist tactics. ... All you did was you learned techniques by which you bullied other people. And so you then sallied forth into the world as another bully. ... It became a jungle in which whoever possessed the most ruthless, the most selfish, the most cruel, the most heartless [attitude would win.] I mean, we were taught to turn off our feelings. We were taught to strike out, to be impervious to other people's needs. I object to that very strongly."
Multiverse hypothesis: "Depiction of a multiverse of seven 'bubble' universes, which are separate spacetime continua, each having different physical laws, physical constants, and perhaps even different numbers of dimensions or topologies." Image Source: Wiki.

Merged souls raise the question - whether through Brontë's love or Dick's politics - of the public realm beyond the private self, the reality beyond the individual soul, when souls interact and create merged publics. Dick acknowledged that this was his next theme, which he later discovered was a preoccupation of pre-Socratic philosophers, as with Heraclitus's idios kosmos (private world) and the koinos kosmos (shared world). For Dick, that shared world depended on overcoming a protean cosmos embroiled in disorder (irrationality, chaos, cruelty, pointlessness, evil) through a fitful progression into order (rationality, harmoniousness, beauty, life as negative entropy). Dick further associated the ordered world with sporadic appearances of the Jewish concept, the Shekinah, or divine presence.

Dick's passports to the non-Euclidean dimensions and time slips were drugs, madness, and meditation. His concern was the eternal soul, however, and he progressed to envision a multiverse, where different possible events, spacetimes and dimensional realities overlapped so closely as to sometimes become transparent to one another. In 1977, Dick made a statement that parallel spacetimes could exist, and he had had memories of living in different presents.

The writer later equated this insane possibility with mystical visions of layered realities. Yet how insane was it, when the same possibility was replicated by researchers in a lab at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2013: "Researchers exploit the strange properties of a liquid metamaterial to watch Minkowski spacetimes leap in out and of existence." The article, Experimental demonstration of metamaterial multiverse in a ferrofluid, is here.

Philip K. Dick on partially actualized, tangential realities and his visions under the influence of sodium pentothal (aka 'truth serum') of a dark-haired girl knocking at his door, warning him that his presentist memories of a future police state in America were real (1977; at a Science Fiction Convention in Metz, France). Dick described versions of totalitarian America in Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) and The Man in the High Castle (1963); the latter has been adapted into a television series (2015-). Video Source: Youtube.

These experiences prompted Dick to write the alternate history, The Man in the High Castle (1963), set in an America ruled by the Nazis and imperial Japanese. In that Hugo-Award-winning novel, the characters begin to remember or witness flashes of a different present (our present), in which World War II was won by the Allies. Although the subject matter could not be more different, the novel resembles Wuthering Heights in revolving around a supposedly fixed point in time, be it a beloved's death or a world war. The story challenges the human time frame's immutable event, and the drama hammers at that event until it reveals alternate time paths and courses of events. If the drama is powerful enough, it additionally jumps between the fictional reality and our non-fictional reality and back again. For Dick, the harbinger of overlapping temporal and dimensional landscapes was not Catherine Earnshaw, but another dark-haired girl, knocking at his door, rather than his window. He later admitted that that girl was his dead sister, Jane, or incarnated versions of her, impressed into service by the mysteries of the multiverse.

Dick spoke of inhabiting a synthetic or imagined reality while his fictions, based on hallucinations, dreams and genuine odd occurrences, were somehow more real. He took moral, spiritual, and political cues from these weird experiences, believing that all flowed from one's flawed perception of reality. Become alienated enough from society, or even from yourself, and one or both become synthetic. There is a desperate need in that case to find the 'real truth,' a quest almost certainly doomed to failure. Wiki cites the author's statement (as in the video above) from Metz, France in 1977:
"Outside of his writing, Dick spoke of a possible explanation for 'my preoccupation with these pluroform pseudo-worlds' stating 'now I think I understand; what I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one which the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on.'"
In a 2007 essay, "Simulacra and Science Fiction," Postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard described the layered reality that Dick portrayed, which we might see as living in a recognized, full reality of multi-dimensional spacetime:
"It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is something altogether different. And this is so not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has always done so, but it has always played upon the double, on artificial replication or imaginary duplication, whereas here the double has disappeared. There is no more double; one is always already in the other world, an other world which is not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as means for reflection. The simulation is impassable, unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority. We can no longer move 'through the mirror' to the other side, as we could during the golden age of transcendence."
The lesson of the Brontë Effect would ask why Ridley Scott would produce The Man in the High Castle now. The story resonates with contemporary fears of technological surveillance, which could evolve into police state control. It may chime with sentiments around the American election. But Dick warned more profoundly that his totalitarian drama was real, a record of visions he had had of another America - co-existing somewhere, somewhen. Our reality is their fiction and their reality is our fiction. Somehow, partaking of that fiction opens our eyes to the larger multidimensional timescape we inhabit, we plunge into the greater mysteries of the universe - and return back again to normal perception.

Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle is an alt-historical fiction in which the Nazis and Japanese won World War II; it also deals with overlapping potential realities and timespaces. Produced by Ridley Scott. Official trailer (2015). Video Source: Amazon via Youtube. You can watch it online on Amazon here; you can watch Season 1, Episode 1 for free, here.

The Man in the High Castle Season 2 trailer (August 2016). Season 2 begins 16 December 2016. Video Source: Amazon via Youtube.

In the purview of that so-called 'normal' perception lies politics today, where the dark-haired girl who knocks at the window or the back door is the online anima opposite the global animus, cast as a hacker or whistle-blower. On 18 August 2016, the anti-NWO alt-news channels The Corbett Report and Media Monarchy discussed hacks of George Soros and the Open Society; the hack of the NSA; and the (Russian?) hacks of American Democratic Party. Although they are independent, pro-open-source, anti-globalist, anti-MSM-liberal, and anti-conservative, James Corbett and James Evan Pilato did not automatically believe that the hackers told the truth. They took a low key paranoid view that Philip K. Dick would recognize, and puzzled over the credibility of hacks, leaks, dissidents, establishment groups - and rogue actors like Guccifer 2.0, who targeted the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (Twitter: #DCCC). You can read the Soros leaks here. The Shadow Brokers' announcement of the hack of the NSA is here, discussed here; and a report on how it occurred is here. Corbett and Pilato: "We're in the Twilight Zone." "There is no one to trust." "I think of Hitchcock." They implied that searching for higher truths would only cause more confusion and internal dissension, pitting neighbour against neighbour. They suggested further that the claims and counter-claims, the layers of propaganda and conspiracy theories, the miasma in which you can trust no source, all prepare the ground for totalitarianism.

The Corbett Report and Media Monarchy on mid-August hacks: establishment whistle-blowers and whistle-blower establishments. Video Source: Youtube.


There is a huge alt-right/lib-left 'escalation of conflict in the digital domain,' as hackers seek to influence American and European elections, while lobbyists, establishment media, the entertainment industry, and NGOs exercise counter-influence. Recent leaks reveal the battle between anarcho-libertarian, crypto-anarchic, and crypto-populist movements - and open society liberalism and globalization. Alt-right hackers claim that George Soros is marshaling European NGOs to manipulate European electoral campaigns and block undesired, far right, populist outcomes. The leaked list of Open-Society-supported NGOs purportedly engaging in these activities is here.

Image Source: Twitter via Risk Based Security.


Also, we see hacking and counter-hacking between governments. The NSA hack on 13 August 2016 took the battle one level deeper, exposed NSA tactics, and Russian counter-tactics and counter-tools to influence the American election. It is also possible that some hacks are made to look Russian-sourced when they are not. But if even some the hacks are Russian-based, then the Russians are interfering in American politics in a very serious way. This might account for the aura of Stalinist propagandistic weirdness, as the American MSM, and even the American alt-media on the Internet, prove unable to get a grip on what is happening. Business Insider:
"The 'Shadow Brokers' claimed in a post on blogging service Tumblr to have hacked Equation Group, and say they are holding an 'auction' to sell off the 'cyber weapons' they were able to steal. Shadow Brokers have also provided a sample of files, free to access, to 'prove' their legitimacy."
The Equation Group are believed to be part-authors of the Stuxnet virus, which sabotaged Iran's nuclear programme. Kaspersky has named Equation Group as one of the Web's dominant threat actors, and host of one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cyber-attack and espionage platforms. SecureList calls them "the apex predator of the APT world." Edward Snowden's leaks tie the Equation Group to the NSA. The hack of the Equation group and NSA exposed a serious vulnerability in Cisco devices, revealed powerful NSA hacking tools, and damaged other companies; all of this was revealed play by play on Twitter and is now being exploited in the wild.




As to the identity of the hackers and their aims, a Cisco spokesman stated: "How far does this rabbit hole go?" Motherboard reported that Kaspersky concluded that the hackers of the NSA were ex-NSA employees. But Edward Snowden argued that the NSA hack was Russian and related to Russian hacks of the American Democratic Party. Under the circumstances, we should remind ourselves that Edward Snowden is sitting in Russia, and Eugene Kaspersky and Vladimir Putin are friends, yet Kaspersky's anti-virus tools are trusted on personal computers across the west. The irony is that Putin's triumph in this sphere is capitalistic: Kaspersky makes the best mainstream anti-virus product. So who, exactly, hacked the NSA? Perhaps this is an "international conflict," perhaps "some Russian mind game."






Or perhaps the NSA hack was an American counter-attack to frame the Russians, to warn them off for hacking the Democratic Party, as Russian? hacker Guccifer 2.0 has been doing. Was the Shadow Brokers' broken English faked? In other words, was the NSA staging a fake hack of itself and telling the Russians: stay out of our election and the Democrats' address book, or we will make you look culpable and there will be consequences. This was Shadow Brokers' announcement of the hack auction, which did feature laughable Cold-War-style English:
"How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? Not malware you find in networks. Both sides, RAT + LP, full state sponsor tool set? We find cyber weapons made by creators of stuxnet, duqu, flame. Kaspersky calls Equation Group. We follow Equation Group traffic. We find Equation Group source range. We hack Equation Group. We find many many Equation Group cyber weapons. You see pictures. We give you some Equation Group files free, you see. This is good proof no? You enjoy!!! You break many things. You find many intrusions. You write many words. But not all, we are auction the best files. ...

We auction best files to highest bidder. Auction files better than stuxnet. Auction files better than free files we already give you. The party which sends most bitcoins to address: 19BY2XCgbDe6WtTVbTyzM9eR3LYr6VitWK before bidding stops is winner, we tell how to decrypt. Very important!!! When you send bitcoin you add additional output to transaction. You add OP_Return output. In Op_Return output you put your (bidder) contact info. We suggest use bitmessage or I2P-bote email address. No other information will be disclosed by us publicly. Do not believe unsigned messages. We will contact winner with decryption instructions. Winner can do with files as they please, we not release files to public."
You want info? You send Bitcoin. Everyone watching this story followed the auction on Bitcoin's blockchain and some followed the auction on Twitter (here). You can read more about crypto transactions that went to the Shadow Brokers here. The MSM coverage of the hack was more intriguing than the auction, with bids sitting on 19 September 2016 at a feeble 1.76 BTC. Incredibly, no one seemed to care. In the land of too much information, the value of information is low, no matter how exciting it is. Or perhaps hacktivists are too canny to send their Bitcoins into this smoke and mirrors mess.

Already dismayed by the slow auction on 28 August, the Shadow Brokers, whoever they are, ragequit the "pussified" mainstream Internet. They announced further NSA hack dumps and auctions on the Dark Web:
"Where this reave us? We just kicked the biggest burry on pranet in dick, took their shit, offed to serr it in pubric, and you varue at 1.5btc Fucking pussy ass cowards. We feer sorry for you. It must be hard riving with such tiny barrs. Is good proof why defenders arways roose. Too pussified to take risks. Is what hacker curture has become? Quiet rittre pussies brought to heer by decent paycheck at big business and big government? Sad!

We have more good shit. But, no more free stuff. We intend make money for our risk. We prefer serr in burk to more responsibre party. One more rikery to discrose than hurt peopres. We give pubric auction one more week. Maybe a government, security company, wearth individuar step up, do rite thing, get seen doing it. If not, we assume no one interested and we start serring on the underground. Rots of transparency and discrosure there."




As for the hacks of the Democratic Party, there were more leaks of a White House staffer's E-mails on 22 September 2016: "The emails may have been stolen during a previously reported cyberattack campaign that targeted ... the personal email accounts of at least 26 Clinton campaign staffers and volunteers." Tweets on the DNC hacks are here. And while the sources are dubious, they appear to reveal corruption in the Obama administration. In the confusion, no one could clarify if the Russians are swaying the American election, or if the Internet is the world's next "failed state."



On 23 September 2016, more drama erupted as the original Guccifer (1.0), the anti-political hacker, declared the "Guccifer Project" against the "Iluminati" and Hillary Clinton, "goddess of this ocult, satanic, shadow group," a failure. He described his aims in a letter to right-wing Fox News. Fox did not publish the whole letter. Their report on the letter is here. The false, possibly Russian-sourced July 2016 conspiracy theory that the Clintons had had Guccifer murdered in his prison cell is explained here. Guccifer is a hacker pseudonym for Marcel Lazăr Lehel, a 44-year-old Romanian about to be transferred from the USA to complete his prison term in Romania. Click to enlarge. Image Source: Fox News via Another Day in the Empire.

Philip K. Dick's journey was identical to that of many conspiracy theorists. His characters are an object lesson in trusting hackers and whistle-blowers today, who are the new Millennium's unreliable narrators. Dick's message on these truth-tellers would be: just because you have experienced alienation and challenged evident authorities does not mean you have found, expressed and embodied the truth. It only means that you have been cast out of normal society and your perception of the conformist reality is altered. To find the truth beyond that altered perception is a whole other saga, a different journey which involves questioning every easy answer you ever had and all the assumptions you personally take for granted. From there, you are in another dimension and you are on your own.

Are there any signposts to that larger truth? When Dick's San Rafael house was burgled and ransacked in 1971 and his files stolen, possibly by the FBI, possibly by political adversaries, possibly by people he knew in California's drug scene, possibly by (some thought) himself, the author was overjoyed by the concrete evidence his unseen persecutors had generated of their existence. His paranoia was justified! To paraphase his relief: "Thank God, I'm not crazy. I have real enemies." He never discovered who did it.

The new dark-haired girl. Cyberpunk Hacker: Angelina Jolie as a Future Lara Croft Computer Hacker. Image Source: ~ianllanas on deviantART via pinterest.


See all my posts on Time and Politics.
See all my posts related to Philip K. Dick.
at

No comments:

Post a Comment