On May 28, WBUR’s program “Here and Now” aired a segment about Wagner’s opera “The Ring” and its influence on comic books. (I’d embed it here, but they don’t let you download the MP3. You can listen at the link. Just scroll down the page when you get there.) Apparently many characters from graphic novels of the 20th century were shaped by Wagner’s four-part work.

This seemed relevant to me for a variety of reasons. I’m currently obsessed with Wonder Showzen, a heady spoof of Sesame Street that came from the Brooklyn group PFFR before they made Xavier: Renegade Angel. In one episode of Wonder Showzen, a child journalist goes around asking people, “What’s a hero?” The goal was to point out that we may be tricked (by movies, news and other media) into thinking that Superman or Iron Man or 9/11 firefighters are going to “save us.”

I’ll try not to wander too much here. It’ll suffice to say that I’ve become very interested in the topic of “heroes.” I wanted to write about this “Here and Now” show because I just finished the book Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson first published the revised version of his psychology PhD dissertation in 1983. Chapter 17 in the book — entitled “Quantum Evolution — contains a discussion about the modern symphony orchestra interpreted through the book The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.

The coincidence of the radio show and my reading the book seemed to be a synchronicity (also mentioned in Wilson’s book), a Jungian concept meaning “an acausal and/or holistic principle in nature that acts outside the linear past-present-future of Newtonian time” (p. 152). But I’m straying again…

Wilson brings up Toffler to explain the quickening pace of “domesticated primate evolution” — that is, the ongoing development of human beings. According to Toffler’s model, the “First Wave” was a shift from tribal to “feudal-agricultural” societies. The Second Wave came in the mid to late 19th century, and was a shift from a feudal-agricultural system to an “industrial-urban-market economy.” That can also be described as the “Age of Reason” or the “Industrial Age.”

Now we’re in a sort of transitional period as the Third Wave passes through and creates the Information Age (many other potential titles have been proposed). As Wilson explains, “Each wave is faster, by a factor of 10, than the previous wave. And each wave is more total in that it changes more people…and in the process transforms our concept of human nature and human society” (p. 255).

This section turns out to be highly prophetic in what it says about the effect of computers on society.

Toffler does not claim that the computer is the whole of the Third Wave, but merely that it is the synecdoche or paradigm of what is happening. In this sense, the factory was the synecdoche of the Second Wave. It was not merely the agent by which ‘indust-reality’ spread across the world and multiplied our collective wealth (and illth); it also became the model for everything else (p. 256).

You might be wondering about Toffler’s term “indust-reality.” Essentially it means the mass reality tunnel that has been prevalent during the Industrial Age. In effect, “…’indust-reailty,’ the reality of the industrial age, moved everybody into the robot lockstep of the factory system” (p. 256).

This brings us back to the idea of the symphony orchestra:

‘Indust-reality’ is still so pervasive that it is…mostly invisible. For instance, the feudal age never progressed beyond chamber music—trios, quartets, etc. The modern symphony, with its huge orchestra, its Promethean themes, its god-like conductor (‘capitalist’), its concert-master (foreman), its string section moving in harmony with its brass section, etc. is a beautiful artistic expression of modes of mass human organization appearing usually in less beautiful forms in the factory assembly-line. (The factory also demanded cities—massive concentrations of labor in one place—which made the symphony economically possible…) (pp. 256-257).

Now to synthesize this information. The music of Wagner is wholly representative of the Second Wave, the Industrial Age, the Age of Reason — the military-industrial-capitalist complex that has dominated our civilization for the last 150 years. This point needs no further proof than the scene in Apocalypse Now when Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) blasts Wagner as his fleet of helicopters takes a Vietnamese town by storm.

As I said before, Wagner’s music also contributed to superhero characters and their stories. And we are likely duped into thinking that the problems facing mankind will be resolved by some benevolent source of power. But the most powerful role in “indust-reality” is the capitalist — i.e., whoever has the most money. Wilson recognized this as well, and he thought “it was inevitable in a domesticated primate species”:

Neither capitalist indust-reality nor socialist indust-reality have been able to give humanity what most of us really want: liberty and justice, freedom and the abolition of poverty, continued growth and continued security. [...] The Third Wave can, and will, transcend this problem within industrialism. [...] It will demand a whole new economy… (p. 257).

So as you can see, I think it’s a little humorous that “Here and Now” is celebrating the performance of Wagner’s opera. “Indust-reality” is becoming more irrelevant by the day, as computers and related technology help us bridge into the next phase of our evolution.

Back in February when Kaliptus was planning the Tryptophantasia event, his friend Salma posted an interview with him on the site Evolver.net, a new social network with the slogan “It’s our world to change.” Naturally, I signed up for the site right away (here’s my profile).

I quickly learned that Evolver is connected with an online magazine called Reality Sandwich. Now the team behind the two websites are working on starting up the Evolver Social Movement, which is essentially their attempt to make the ventures financially sustainable (their primary investors bailed). Membership does require a monthly payment, but you get to choose the dollar amount (they’re asking for $10 per month, but it’s wide open).

At the end of March, Evolver/RS editorial director Daniel Pinchbeck published an essay explaining how these projects came to be and why they were now asking for money. Daniel has some very interesting views about the world in which we live (he has also authored three books), and some of his opinions on topics like literary hipsters are very close to my own (I posted a comment on his essay to let him know). With that said, I thought I would excerpt some parts of his essay that really grabbed me.

On what he did before Evolver/RS:

While my pool game improved, my life was stagnating. I was working on fiction but experiencing little success with it, while I wrote freelance magazine articles to make a sort of living. For various reasons I began to feel increasingly alienated and depressed – as I discuss in my books. Eventually I began to spiral deeper and deepr into a massive spiritual crisis and depression, often feeling I was on the verge of going crazy.

I simply couldn’t understand what the point of any of it was as it seemed we lived in a nihilistic universe, a secular materialist prison. In my social set at that time, to open up big philosophical questions about the nature of reality and the soul was only to invite sarcasm and hipster dismissal. My friends conceived literature as a way of seeking the proper pose or stance in relationship to a world that had no meaning outside of one’s personal style and ability to see through it with a perfectly jaundiced eye and finely-turned phrases pitched just right.

On straying from the world of hip lit:

I increasingly felt that literature as well as much contemporary art had become distraction mechanisms, ways of contemplating the degraded and fragmented state of our world from a safe distance instead of making active efforts to change anything in it.

On the immediate positive reaction to Reality Sandwich:

It was clear that there was something important happening here – some nexus between psychedelic and mainstream political and ecological thought that needed to happen. We also noticed that some articles got hundreds of comments, and that the commentators often wanted to find others in their area.

On our present moment and the role he sees RS playing:

My research for my last book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl convinced me that this is indeed a time of intense transition – that humanity has to either evolve its consciousness and take individual and eventually species-wide responsibility for its effects on the planet, or we won’t have a future here. Evolver – and now the Evolver Social Movement – are the best way I have been able to conceive to contribute to this transformative process, by helping to build a viable alternative culture in local communities, and by producing media that spreads the word.

In New York City, where I live, I find that most people are not able, at this point, to understand that the way of life to which they and the multitudes have become accustomed is soon going to end. This will come about through some combination of possibilities that include a much deeper crash of the economic system, shortages of fossil fuels and other necessities, an intensifying series of disasters like the earthquakes that recently wracked Haiti and Chile, or civil unrest and tax rebellion. I am pretty sure this will be the case at any rate – although, admittedly, I am not a fan of our current civilization, and look forward to seeing it give way, though I hope this happens through some process that doesn’t cause too much death or misery. People are so locked into the matrix, its narrow rewards system, that they are incapable of looking beyond it.

More on urban hipsters:

There is a tendency toward fatalism and almost a romanticization of our current society’s horrible state. I believe that this is due to a cultural indoctrination by a media that makes people feel passive, cynical, and alienated. The media has a large role in producing and framing the type of consciousness that can be expressed at the time. Therefore, I believe we have a real need for “interdependent media” that expresses a different viewpoint, recognizing that the fall we are already experiencing is necessary to bring about a shift into a different form of society.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, consider having a look at their operation.