One sign of a major societal shift in these past two years is the large swath of the population that’s grown so enamored of masks, you’d think they were Greek thespians. The global mask fetish has mutated from early efforts to take reasonable precautions, to mass hysteria, to something darker.
A possible explanation for why millions continue aping Salome–even in the car and on Zoom calls–appears in this post unearthed from my Retro-Spective cohost ArtAnon.
… I am still thoughtful about why the masks have the power that they do, more particularly, why they have the power that they do under our current circumstances—when the people most willingly wearing masks have spent almost two years locked up and disconnected from normal human contact, while at the same time glued to their phones.
The phones are the key.
To put it even more cryptically, the phones are the formal cause of what I call the Rainbow Effect—the overwhelming desire to change our faces and hair and clothes to blend in with the rainbow, almost as if we wanted to become one with the Light.
Sounds mystical? Try electric.
This piece had my curiosity. The nod to Aristotelian causality caught my attention.
“The electric light is pure information,” as Marshall McLuhan famously said. More to the point: it is quite literally Luciferian—light-bearing. In McLuhan’s words:
There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the “Prince of this World” is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electrical engineer, and a great master of the media. It is His master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environment is invincibly persuasive when ignored.
As McLuhan realized even before the invention of the Internet, we live in an electric environment of communication and have since the invention of the telegraph. This environment is characterized above all by its speed. Communication at the speed of light is instantaneous, global, and overwhelming, so much so that people are generally terrified, even as they are unaware of this environment. Even when your internet is slow, you are affected by the speed at which information travels—thus the frustration at not being able to connect.
And the inclusion of McLuhan pretty much seals the deal.
In this electric world, we eat, drink, and breathe the speed of light—like angels, or demons. Again, in McLuhan’s words:
When you are on the air you are, in a way, everywhere at once. Electric man is a “super angel.” When you are on the telephone you have no body. And, while your voice is there, you and the people you speak to are here, at the same time. Electric man has no bodily being. He is literally dis-carnate.
If you’re getting gnostic vibes, you’re not alone.
Here’s my theory. McLuhan talks about the way in which our media are extensions of our physical and nervous systems, making our electric media quite literally extensions of our brains. As contrasted with print, this electric world is “more oral and acoustic,” inviting its participants into “total immersion.” This “surround of information that we now experience is an extension of consciousness itself.” Under conditions of electric media (telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, movies, the Internet), people feel themselves a part not just of a single global village, but of a single global consciousness, touched at every moment by the waves of information traveling along the electric currents of the air.
As ArtAnon remarked, “Prince of the Air, indeed.”
The high priests of scidolatry have admitted that masking is ineffective at preventing Covid transmission, as they’ve done from the start, between bouts of self-serving lies.
More likely, the lies serve their master, the father thereof.
The fashion snot rags are the Death Cult’s liturgical headgear, no more; no less. They have no practical use and hide the Divine Image imprinted on Man.
Which calls to mind the first time that the first ones to bear the Imago Dei hid from God.
Christian pastors who still encourage masking should take note that the practice is a gnostic devotion of a hostile parallel religion and change course accordingly. We are commanded to worship Christ, not the powers of this world, and we are given a spirit of hope, not fear.
“Interesting take on mecha”
A picture of rainbow face-diapers was not how I expected to greet the new year.
Loop in the skinsuit properties, Potter, and Star War to modulate the carrier-wave thrum of the electric background that the online crowd hears. This common communication circuit that draws in the Pop Cult and feeds the Death Cult might explain a few things we were discussing last night on stream.
Like you said on-stream, the Cult has hijacked Star Wars as their moral myth.
I regret missing that stream–based on what we know about Lucas, I don’t know if the Cult hijacked Star Wars, or if the Spirit snuck things into the Original Trilogy despite Lucas.
There’s a video of Lucas sitting down with his production team and and explaining Jedi vs Sith morality. It makes way more sense when he just reads it from his outline.
In a nut shell, it’s Christian-Buddhist syncretism.
I’ve seen the video–it’s good, but it actually reminded me of some of the best stuff from the EU (specifically, Stackpole’s I, Jedi and Zahn’s Vision of the Future). Since much has been made of Lucas being relatively hands-off in the EU, that surprised me. Did he consult on those works, or did they possibly influence his own thinking? Lucas can be inconsistent on details, and has gone back and forth on the ‘Balance of the Force,’ whether the Dark Side itself is the imbalance or whether Light and Dark need to be held in balance by something ‘higher.’ The Mortis Trilogy from The Clone Wars, which was much hyped as being managed by Lucas, suggested a swing to the latter.
The main thing I was hinting around in my original post, though, was Lucas’ involvement in plotting the original Indy/Marion relationship in Raiders of the Lost Ark. From https://www.polygon.com/2015/8/3/9089181/indiana-jones-abusive-creep
George Lucas: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
Kasdan: And he was forty-two.
Lucas: He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two.
Lucas: He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.
Lucas: It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.
Lucas: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…
Spielberg: She has pictures of him.
This doesn’t suggest someone who’s got the foundations to resist the Death Cult when it comes for his material.