Prometheus Rising (13 page)

for more readers, because it is less predictable. Another leap in

information-content occurs in Steve Alien's:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

You think this will rhyme

But it ain't gonna

H2 Prometheus Rising

The humorous unpredictability of this poem gives it, mathematically,

a higher information level than the predictable Valentine

poem we started with. If this is still obscure, try it in terms

of Bateson's elegant simplification: "Information is difference

that makes a difference."

Information is also known mathematically as negative entropy

or, in a widely used abbreviation, negentropy.

Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy

or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.

Evolution is always a matter of
at least
two stochastic processes,

each one acting as "selector" of the other(s). That is, in

non-living systems, where no such "selection" is involved,

entropy (lack of coherence) steadily increases, as stated in the

famous Second Law of Thermodynamics. In living systems, due

to stochastic co-selection, negentropy (information) steadily

increases. In Schrodinger's phrase,
"Life feeds
on negative entropy."

Life
is
an ordering, selecting, coherence-making process.

Without getting embroiled in metaphysics, life (evolution)

behaves
as if
it were always aiming at higher coherence, i.e.,

higher intelligence.

This process accelerates because it is, as Shannon demonstrated

mathematically, logarithmic. Logarithmic processes are

such that if you put them on graph paper, the curve rises more

and more all the time.

Hence, the accelerations noted by Adams and Korzybski are

human increments in a process that has been innate in evolution

all along.

The human increment accelerates faster than pre-human evolution

because
through the third, semantic circuit
and its symbols

(words, maps, equations etc.) we are able to pass information

(negative entropy: coherence) from generation to generation.

World-wide wealth in terms of "Real Capital" (plants in

operation, actual known resources etc.) has been
doubling every

generation
since economists started collecting statistics in the

18th Century.

Where does this wealth come from'? According to orthodox

economists it comes from land, labor, and capital. According to

Marxists, it comes from land and labor alone, and the capitalist is

a thief who has inserted an artificial bookkeeping system into the

Prometheus Rising
7/3

process.
Both are wrong.
Land and labor alone, and land, labor

and capital together, can't produce new wealth if they are all

organized by a fallacious idea, such as searching for oil where oil

is not. The real source of wealth is correct ideas: workable ideas:

that is, negative entropy—Information.

The origin of these coherent (workable) ideas is the human

nervous system. All
wealth is created by human beings using

their neurons intelligently.

A neurotic young man once went to a Zen Master and asked

how he could find peace of mind.

"How can you lack anything," the
Roshi
asked "when you

own the greatest treasure in the universe?"

"How do I own the greatest treasure in the universe?" asked

the young man, baffled.

"The place that question comes from is the greatest treasure in

the universe," said the Master, being more explicit than is

common for a Zen teacher.

Of course, as a Buddhist, the Master had taken a vow of

poverty and did not mean exactly what we mean here. But he

knew that the brain produces all that we experience—all our pain

and worry, all our bliss states and ecstasies, all our higher evolutionary

vistas and trans-time Peak Experiences, etc. It is also "the

greatest treasure in the universe" in the most materialistic economic

sense: it creates all the
ideas
which, socially employed,

become wealth: roads, scientific laws, calendars, factories, computers,

life-saving drugs, medicines, ox-carts, autos, jet planes,

spaceships...

If you are not alone in the wilderness, lift your eyes from the

page and look about. All that you see, whoever theoretically

"owns" it, is the time-binding product of the materialized or

manifested ideas of creative men and women. It is all negative

entropy. Coherent order.

And it is moving toward higher and more coherent order at a

faster rate-of-change all the time.

Of course, if you
are
alone in the wilderness, you will also see

coherent order, but in this case, the rate-of-change toward higher

order is much slower. That is, those stochastic processes which

we call genetic drift, evolution etc. are co-selecting higher order

at a different time rate than those stochastic processes which we

114 Prometheus Rising

call human thought, invention, culture etc. (This is why it is so

hard to reach agreement about whether the natural processes are

intelligent or not. As Bateson points out, if we accept any ordering

process as intelligent, then the biosphere is indeed intelligent;

but if we save the word "intelligence" only for those ordering

processes that move at the same speed as our brains, then Nature

is merely mechanical, not intelligent. To an extra-terrestrial with

a different time-sense than ours,
this question would not arise at

all.)

Most of what we perceive in the human environment is made

up of concretized ideas, in the above sense. Look again at a

human community; you are seeing the historical human mind

manifesting itself.

All ideas are not equally good, of course.

All manifested ideas (human creations in the biosphere) are,

therefore, not equally good.

This is why John Ruskin, a century ago, tried to introduce a

distinction between
wealth
and
illth.
This distinction did not

become accepted and incorporated into our language because

people, at that time, were not ready for it.

Wealth, in Ruskin's sense, consists of all those artifacts

(concretized ideas) which enhance human life, or life generally.

Illth consists of those artifacts which destroy, demean or degrade

life. A factory that pollutes the air or water is illth in this sense;

so is a bomb, a sword, a pistol, a tank of nerve-gas.

The Westward migration of Capital noted by Brooks Adams

was a migration of both wealth and illth.

Obviously, under primitive planetary conditions—finite space

and finite resources—the illth was perceived as necessary to

protect the wealth. Territorial politics are much the same among

domesticated primates as among other mammals; the primates

are just smarter at building more omni-lethal weapons faster.

This was originally a survival trait, an Evolutionary Relative

Success, because primates are born without the physiological,

inbuilt weaponry (lethal teeth, claws, horns etc.) of other

mammals.

Since the Age of Reason in the 18th Century, the exponential

increase in wealth (life-enhancing ideas manifesting) has led to

more and more Utopian yearnings. At the same time, the equal

Prometheus Rising

and opposite increase in illth has led to more and more dystopian

and apocalyptical fears.

CAPITAL HAS MOVED STEADILY WESTWARD BECAUSE

NEW IDEAS ALWAYS APPEAR ON THE EXPANDING WAVE

One's expectations about the future—Utopia or dystopia—are

always based on what one thinks is the dominant force in evolution.

This whole book, not just the present chapter, is based on

the belief that an overview of evolution shows beyond all doubt

that wealth-producing faculty (the search for higher coherence)

is the deciding factor. The illth-producing faculty is an archaic

mammalian survival system rapidly becoming obsolete.

The highest historical concentration of wealth (real capital,

and ideas generating new capital) now co-exists with the highest

concentration of evolutionarily advanced nervous systems.

Il6 Prometheus Rising

In California, Oregon, Alaska, British Columbia. Arizona,

Texas, the Hawaiian Islands, Japan and all around the Pacific,

where East meets West, the world of 2000 and 2010 and 2050 is

being created by persons who are veterans of a gigantic Neurological

Revolution—the psychedelic pioneers of the 1960s, the

graduates of the Consciousness Movement of the 1950s-70s, the

synthesizers of modern psychology and ancient Oriental mindsciences.

These persons are called the Aquarian Conspiracy by

Marilyn Ferguson, one of their spokespersons. They are

denounced as the Me Generation by Tom Wolfe, a time-traveler

from New York, i.e., from
the neurological past,
from a culture

crystallized before 1950.

This "Me Generation" is the
temporary
high water mark of

the time-binding function. Moving steadily Westward—away

from Tradition, away from Dogma—they are the products, as

Edmund Burke said of the first Americans, of "the dissidence of

dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestants." Every heresy

that left Europe produced newer, wilder heresies in the Eastern

Seaboard, 1600-1800. Those that were "too far out" had to move

further West and produced the 1000 Utopian communities

(anarchist, evangelical, free-love, etc.) that were attempted in the

mid-West during the 19th Century. Those who were even further

"out"—out of the traditional mode—moved further Westward in

the last 30-70 years.

All of the fallout of this migration seems weird to the Eastern

states, and even weirder to Europeans.

It all became much weirder still when it hit the Pacific and

began to interact with Oriental neuro-sciences and brain-change

arts, like yoga and Taoism and Zen.

It swallowed the Oriental lessons whole, without
becoming

Oriental
entirely.
It remained Western—the dissidence of dissent

etc.—and it has been gaining momentum and direction for two or

three decades now.

It aims at Higher Coherence and Higher Intelligence.

This is the new Power Elite.

As youngsters, these Aquarian Conspirators made the Youth

Revolution of the 1960s, which—whatever its excesses and

blunders—permanently changed and improved student-administrator-

teacher feedback in our universities; liberated our Puritan

Prometheus Rising ilj

culture for some healthy hedonism; imported a dozen varieties of

Oriental neuro-science (and two dozen varieties of Oriental

humbug, alas); launched the ecology movement (the first planetwide

perception of the difference between
wealth
and
illth);

recreated a true love of the wilderness and of wild creatures:

pioneered flex-time and other liberations from economic robothood;

1
launched Women's Lib, Gay Lib, Child Lib and generously

supported Black Lib; ended the Vietnam War; spread

holistic medicine throughout our culture; etc.

The same group is now leading the computer revolution;

spearheading the drive toward Space Migration; supporting the

Hunger Project, which will abolish starvation in our lifetimes;

leading the Longevity revolution and the search for immortality;

etc.

And they are all very conscious of being part of the Intelligence

Intensification explosion which is the major topic of this

book.

This type of "Western progressivism" (or Utopianism) came

out of the mid-East and is the distinct contribution of the Jews,

which is why all reactionaries are intuitively anti-Semitic. As

William Blake wrote of this tradition:

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked

them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to

them; and whether they did not think at the time that they

would be misunderstood & so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answer'd: 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite

organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in

everything, and as I was then persuaded & remain confirmed

that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared

not for consequences, but wrote.'

This vision of the infinite in everything is common to East

and West; what is distinctly Western, out of the Jews, is the

voice of honest indignation against every institution which

would deny or demean the infinity within each human soul. The

release of our full human potential—to let the light of Prometheus