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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Blackstrap Molasses
The epistemological and sociological imperative to offer and accept advice.
Tuesday, 2009-02-03 | Social Studies
| The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized. |
It occurs to me that contemporary and historical ubiquity of snake oil and the snake oil salesman is one of the direct consequences of the problem of Consciousness.
For the time-being, non-developmentally disabled humans like you and me are unique among the sentient creatures subsisting on Earth in the that we are simultaneously aware of our selves as a unique consciousness wrapped in a vulgar pile of meat (i.e. an infinite pig in a pitifully finite blanket) and as one infinitesimally small spec of cosmic dust among the many, nearly identical specs of cosmic dust that are subject to the continued fallout from the Big Bang (or Mbombo's sudden bout of intestinal duress or Yahweh's defeat of Rahab or Damballah's curling up into a ball or the assassination of Ymir or Brahma's cracking of the cosmic egg or the Sky Father throwing a shot up into the Earth Mother or whichever Creation story sounds most plausible at present).
And since we each of us possesses the same seemingly infinite internality--i.e. the ability to reflect on our perceptions infinitely in completely secret, if we so choose--as the next guy, we find ourselves in something of pickle: each of us is unique in a baffling, endlessly interesting and infinitely convoluted way and have to not only have to cope with that paradox (i.e. the paradox of being "really and truly unique, just like everybody else") on our own, but to accomodate the efforts of others to cope with it.
So we've got everybody working his existential problems out in real-time in both his mind and in meat space. We're all cursed to navigate our meat-bodies through the wine-dark chop of the midnight ocean of life like a little kid chipping the chrome spraypaint off of the brittle plastic knobs and levers of the remote control of a motorboat that's lost its rudder and, since we're all captains of fundamentally similar vessels, we sometimes trade tips and advice. Sometimes we do it altruistically and other times we do it maliciously, but each time we do it, we do it because of the utter certainty that each of us possesses about the other remote control boats and the other little kids with their sweaty fingers on the knobs: the boats might look different, but they're still subject to the physical rules governing boats and the kids at the controls might be wildly different from one another, but they're still facing the same task.
And since we're all in the same boat, or rather, since our boats are all in the same water, it is only natural for us to be interested in what techniques our fellow rentention pond hegemons have used to stay afloat.
And this is why fraud works.
No matter how circumspect, cynical or accomplished a remote control motorboat captain you become, there is quite literally nothing you can do (excluding a frontal lobectomy, of course) to disabuse yourself of the deep-abiding cognizance and existential certainty that someone else out there in the world might just possess some scrap of knowledge that you could somehow use to your benefit. And since, due to the fact that each of us suffers from consciousness, one cannot ever be totally certain that he is uniquely equipped to manage his own affairs. And since this is the case, there is nothing that can be done to turn a truly deaf ear to the council of one's fellow man. And it is therefore that we can never make a decision that is not, in some small way, motivated by self-doubt.
And since self-doubt motivates all decisions, all decisions are subject to influence from others and that is why fraud works.
Excluding, of course, those exceptional cases in which a disease or a physical trauma has rendered a person incapable of (even implicitly) accepting the subjectivity of others, there is not a thinking person out there who can fully banish the specter of self-doubt from his mind. And as this is the case, there will always be those who choose to exploit this direct consequence of consciousness for their own personal gain. And so we see that snake oil--potions, anti-oxidants, copper bracelets, perpetual motion machines etc.--came into existence and will never pass from existence because as long as there exist infinite pigs wrapped in finite blankets such as us, there will exist within each of us the thing that causes us to doubt our own perceptions and thus to doubt our own conclusions and thus to be succeptible to the influence of others.
Which is, of course, an extremely long-winded way of making the point that flim-flammery is the only industry that is truly recession-proof.
