Illusive Mind

 ”The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.”

Carl G. Jung

All knowledge is hypothetical in nature and hypotheses lend themselves far more readily to change upon receiving new evidence than the notion of belief .

The only arena in which belief should be applied is self-belief. This is because we are almost never objective in analyzing evidence about ourselves. We form beliefs, often negative, and seek evidence to concord with our conclusion.

However, if we form a postive belief about ourselves in spite of all the perceived evidence, that belief affects our actions, habits and thinking and hopefully becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

The only question that remains is how big dare you dream?

 
Señor Codo – Your Apathy Is Killing Me

I was at a John Butler Trio concert recently and he mentioned that a quote had stuck in his mind from a video he saw on YouTube of a speech given by Martin Luther King.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality

It was originally said by JFK paraphrasing Dante’s ‘Inferno’. It is sometimes quoted as being the ‘hottest fires’ but more apt would be ‘the darkest places in hell’ as incisively argued by one reader:

In Canto III of Inferno, Dante and Virgil just pass the gate of Hell when they see a horde swatting at wasps and flies, their faces streaming with the blood of stings. Virgil explains (in Longfellow’s translation) that these are the “sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise” — those who did not take a side in some great moral conflict. Some are people who stayed neutral or otherwise abdicated responsibility for choice (one may in fact be a pope who abdicated); some are angels who refused to take a side in the war in Heaven and have been cast out.It’s not a “hot” place; heat in Dante is about passion, and these folks exactly lack passion.

It could be argued that, though not hot, theirs is an especially ignoble situation in Hell. Virgil tells Dante that the damned long to cross the river, even though it leads to their torment, because they have just enough divinity left in them to long for divine justice. These cowardly neutrals don’t even get justice. They are barely inside Hell, and not allowed justice; their stings are like anticipation unanswered.

I don’t believe in hell, but I believe in the metaphor. The last thing that this world we live in should evoke from us is neutrality.

ses·qui·pe·da·li·an /ˌ
Pronunciation[ses-kwi-pi-dey-lee-uhn, -deyl-yuhn]

–adjective Also, ses·quip·e·dal Pronunciation[ses-kwip-i-dl]

1.	given to using long words.

2.	(of a word) containing many syllables.

–noun

3.	a sesquipedalian word.

 

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[Origin: 1605–15; < L sésquipedālis measuring a foot and a half (see sesqui-, pedal) + -an]

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)

Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Perhaps the ultimate ironic word, and their aren’t too many words that are ironic in of themselves. We wonder why words like onomatopoeia don’t sound like the thing they’re describing or why monosyllabic takes so long to say. Well sesquipedalian is a word that wears its meaning on its proverbial sleeve. Dating back to 1615, from Latin, meaning: “words a foot-and-a-half long”, use it in a joke who probably only you will get.

Image from haamu.com

I’d like to propose the following neologism if I may:

Wepple.

It is a portmanteau of ‘Web’ and ‘Kipple’.

Kipple was the word introduced by Phillip K. Dick in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ to signify:

useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
- I see.
- There’s the First Law of Kipple, “Kipple drives out nonkipple.” Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.
- So it has taken over completely. Now I understand.
- Your place, here, this apartment you’ve picked – it’s too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But -
- But what?
- We can’t win.
- Why not?
- No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Phillip K. Dick, 1968

Wepple is the useless junk that accumulates and reproduces itself on the web or on your computer. Old emails that should have been instantly deleted, shortcuts to files that no longer exists, backups of backups, abandoned registry entries, empty folders. As digitization of information and access to the internet increases, so does wepple, exponentially.

Spam, pointless flash movies, youtube videos of incredulous banality, abandoned webpages, useless flamefests, and all the inbox fillers you can imagine.

Wepple Wepple Everywhere,
How I weep were you rare.

-Wepple, Illusive Mind, 2007