Prometheus Rising (32 page)

doing ill to many: and if they mean us ill, as Dr. Vallee

thinks, they are accidentally doing well to some of us. But this is

true of all brain-change technology.

Prometheus Rising 251

It seems that Vallee's monistic conspiracy theory is inadequate,

as monistic conspiracy theories are inadequate in politics.

It is more likely that the UFO experience, like the other brainchange

experiences we have studied, are sometimes spontaneous

and sometimes programmed; and that
there are rival gangs of

programmers with radically different goals in mind for

humanity.

When Dr. Leary and I first published a neurological analysis

of the Patty Hearst case in
OUI
magazine, the editors introduced

it with a dramatic headline:

The fight for Patty Hearst's mind is the overture to a world
wide

battle for the control of consciousness.

Not quite. The Hearst case would more appropriately be considered

a bar near the end of the second movement of the Mind

War symphony. The
first movement
was the primitive neuroscience

of ancient and medieval tyrants who acquired a great

deal of pragmatic know-how about the effects of isolation, terror

and intimidation; and of shamans and occultists who learned how

neuro-chemicals can alter perceived reality-tunnels. The
second

movement
began with modern psychology, with Freud, Pavlov,

Jung, Skinner etc., climaxing with the LSD revolution and the

discovery by millions that reality-tunnels could be radically

mutated—temporarily and sometimes permanently—by neurochemistry.

The
third movement is
the growingly obvious warfare

between those who would program all of us, and those of us who

wish to become our own Metaprogrammers.

EXERCIZES

1. Start collecting evidence that your phone is bugged.

2. Everybody gets a letter occasionally that is slightly damaged.

Assume that somebody is opening your mail and clumsily

resealing it.

3. Look around for evidence that your co-workers or neighbors

think you're a bit queer and are planning to have you

committed to a mental hospital.

4. Try living a whole week with the program, "Everybody

likes me and tries to help me achieve all of my goals."

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Prometheus Rising

5. Try living a whole month with the program, "I have chosen

to be aware of this particular reality."

6. Try living a day with the program "I am God playing at

being a human being. I created every reality I notice." Assume

that "GOD" is the answer to Da Free John's question, "Who is

the one who is living you now?"

7. Try living forever with the metaprogram, "Everything

works out more perfectly than I plan it."

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

QUANTUM EVOLUTION

What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman—a

bridge over an abyss.

— F.W. Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra

253

Another perspective on domesticated primate evolution is provided

by Alvin Toffler's
The Third Wave.

For convenience
Toffler reduces the muddle of human history

into a model of three waves. It would be more accurate to refer

to these "waves" as quantum jumps in energy-coherence level.

The First Wave, Toffler says, took
millennia
to occur, but it

finally transformed the larger part of humanity from the tribal

stage (simple hunting-gathering primates) to the stage of largescale

agricultural-feudal civilizations.

The Second Wave came much faster and, in a few
centuries,

transformed almost all of humanity from feudal-agricultural

cottage economy to industrial-urban-market economy.

The Third Wave, Toffler says, continues the trend toward

acceleration and will happen in only a few
decades.
We call it

"the information explosion," "the post industrial economy," etc.

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,

changes them more completely, and in the process transforms

our concept of human nature and human society.

Each wave that Toffler describes can be considered a new

quantum state, with energy levels and reality-dimensions lacking

in the previous state and totally unpredictable from the previous

state.

The First Wave mutated tribal men and women into serfs (or

into Lords and Ladies). It created a whole new social manifold

that is so subtle and pervasive that anthropologists and sociologists

can spend years studying its invisible aspects. And yet this

transformation is so enormous that it is also visible to the most

untrained eyes: you can't confuse a tribal human with a feudal

human anymore than you can confuse a dog with a donkey.

So, too, the Second Wave created what Toffler wittily calls

"indust-reality," manifesting as industrial men and women who

are visibly, tangibly, as different from feudal or tribal humans as

dolphins are from rose bushes or armadillos.

The Third Wave, which began when Shannon and Wiener

defined
information
and Von Neumann designed the first programmable

computer, is well under way already. Home computers

became as common as TV sets by the mid-1980s. Now the

Net—computers "talking to" computers—is doubling every four

months. This transformation, again, will be
total:
it will create a

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whole new "man," a new "woman," a new "child," a new "self,"

new "society," a new concept of "work" and "energy" and

"reality," etc.

The average Man or Woman of 1997 will be as obsolete in

2007 as the medieval serf is now.
What we consider normal jobs,

normal social roles; normal "humanity" will be as archaic as a

horde of alchemists, smithies, Town Criers, courtiers and barbersurgeons

arriving in our midst today.

Of course, 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. Our schools are mini-factories or models of

factories because their main job was, when they were founded, to

prepare people for factory work. The schools, in fact, were

necessary because, while feudalism does not require literacy of

the masses, industrialism does. Similarly, offices were modeled

on factories, and kept factory-hours, even when this had little or

nothing to do with how ,.the offices could most efficiently be

managed. And in general, "indust-reality," the reality of the

industrial age, moved everybody into the robot lockstep of the

factory system.
l

"Indust-reality" is still so pervasive that it is, as McLuhan

noted, 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

A free-lance writer can obviously work
any
hours, but the very

successful (and very excellent) John D. MacDonald said in a recent

interview that he always writes from nine to five, because it seems

"natural" to him. The factory time-clock has gotten into Mac-

Donald's neurons. The present author, after 20 years in factory-like

offices works any hours of the day or night when "the spirit" moves

him, but
never
starts at nine or stops at five, to avoid relapsing into

the habits of his past.

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257

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. The aristocrat could not

afford, and/or could not conceive, keeping more than the very

few musicians necessary for chamber music.)

Beethoven's "cosmic optimism" not only expresses the Age

of Reason out of which indust-reality emerged; the very

orchestras he wrote for were paradigms of industrial styles of

organization.

Of course, industrialism (the Second Wave) produced much

illth along with its new wealth; and most of the wealth was extor

appropriated by a minority. However much this may pain

socialists, it was inevitable in a domesticated primate species. A

few alpha males can always see their own advantage more

clearly than the majority can see their collective interest.

Nonetheless, as indust-reality has spread, socialism has

followed in its wake. Whether the reader likes this or not (and

the author, being up-front about his prejudices, admits that he

does not like it), this also is inevitable. When huge wealth is

palpably being created in vaster accumulations than ever before

in history, there is sure to be increased grumbling against the

alpha males, and more attempts to seize what they have selfishly

ap- (or expropriated. Even among baboons this pattern has

been observed: the alpha male who is too obnoxious gets beaten

up by a coalition of younger males and thrown out of the pack to

forage alone.

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. In looking at capitalism vs.

socialism, we are always confronted with a dilemma, not a

choice.

The Third Wave can, and will, transcend this problem within

industrialism.
The Third Wave will be neither capitalist nor

socialist, nor some milkwater blend of the two. It will demand a

whole new economy, just as feudalism created an economy

unknown to tribal humanity and industrialism created the two

competing economies of capitalism and socialism, both

Prometheus Rising

unguessed and unpredictable from the perspective of the feudal

stage.

In 1977, Dr. Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel prize in physical

chemistry.

Perhaps he should have won a Nobel prize for intelligent

optimism.

Dr. Prigogine 's work deals with the processes we have been

discussing — the emergence of negative entropy (coherent order)

out of stochastic processes — but he has taken a giant leap beyond

the pioneering insights of Schrodinger, Weiner, Shannon and

Bateson.

Any organized system, according to Prigogine, exists in

dynamic tension between entropy and negentropy, between

chaos and information. The more complex the system, the

greater is its
instability.
Prigogine demonstrated this mathematically,

but in everyday terms, what he means is that, for instance,

it is easier to lead two children through a department store than

twenty children. Or: A toothpick "house" of 101 pieces is less

stable than a smaller toothpick "house" of 10 pieces.

Instability is not always bad: in fact, it is absolutely necessary

for evolution to occur. Inse'ct societies are highly stable and have

not evolved at all in several million years. Human societies are

highly unstable and are in continuous evolution.

Prigogine demonstrates the evolutionary value of instability

by his concept of the "
dissipative structure. "

A dissipative structure is highly complex and therefore highly

unstable. The more complex it is, the more unstable it is, mathematically,

certain/v; and the more unstable, the more likely it is

to change
—
to evolve.

All dissipative structures are teetering, perpetually, between

self-destruction and re-organization
on a higher level of information

(coherence).

If that sounds grim, it isn't really. Prigogine's math is highly

optimistic, He shows that the more complex structures — such as

our world-round human society today, midway between Second

Wave indust-reality and the emerging Third Wave — are mathematically