Monthly Archives: December 2011

Spiritual fantasy

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Angelic schoolgirl from Japanese anime

In Japan, this genre is fairly common. Not so much in rural Norway.

I realize that the random visitor may think all the world’s religions are “spiritual fantasies”, but that is not what I am talking about here. Rather, I mean a literary genre that perhaps does not yet exist.  I see it as distinct from “supernatural fantasy”, which is quite common and has seen an explosion in popularity after years of vampire stories on TV. Spiritual fantasy, on the other hand, would be more like the animated movies of Ryuho Okawa (Happy Science), blending religious concept and general fiction. Several angel-centered TV series probably would fall in the same category, but I have trouble finding books in this genre.

That said, I am dabbling in it myself, so it may be for my own good that I don’t have any obvious forerunners. Or just don’t notice them. (C.S. Lewis could qualify, actually, but his well-loved works are more a spiritual message in a fantasy setting, I think.)

This week I am rebooting my Blue Light story, and it is a full reboot. It is not even blue anymore! Also, this time I write my first draft in New Norwegian, my mother tongue. It is something I do very rarely: It is at least a couple years since last time, if I remember correctly, and only the second time in  a decade or more.

I find it strangely liberating to write in my native language. Today my vocabulary is actually larger in English, and especially in topics such as those I am writing about. But I was not really trilingual until my late teens, so thinking in English is an adult thing for me. I wonder if I can draw on my childhood creativity better by using my childhood language. On the other hand, my childhood creativity was… extreme. I think my surviving family members can attest to that.

***

The basic concept of “Tone frÃ¥ Himmelen” (Melody from Heaven) is very similar to Blue Light: Boy meets girl; boy notices that girl is glowing; girl protects her secret by inducting boy into her spiritual world.

The “world of the mind” concept is largely unchanged. It is a real world that exists in parallel with the physical world, and which spiritually advanced souls can enter while leaving their bodies behind. In the World of the Mind, you can do whatever you can imagine yourself doing, within the constraints of your Brightness.  Each soul has a particular Brightness or amount of Light that determines its power in the World of the Mind, and it is immediately obvious to everyone who meets another there. A bright soul can easily cause objects to come into existence for all to see, in the World of the Mind. Obviously they cannot take these objects with them back into the bodily world.

In Blue Light, as the name implies, both of the characters were pure blue, the color of human thought. In this reboot, however, the girl is Red (the color of Justice and miracles) and the boy is probably Silver (the color of Science and progress). This makes for a different character dynamic.

Also in Blue Light, the boy and the girl were Soul Mates and learned that they had been married in their previous life, having promised at the end of their life together that they would be husband and wife again in their next life. But that was 400 years ago, and they did not really feel that way in this life. The girl found him immature and perverted, and he found her snobbish and overly critical. The conflict between their current feelings and their ancient soul bond was a big part of the plot (such plot as there was).

In Tone, there is no such bond. Being of different color, the two of them are not Soul Mates. They just happen to be spiritually advanced souls in young and inexperienced bodies and minds, discovering by accident this time that together they can enter the World of the Mind, something neither of them can do alone.  And while the high school boy still has some problems with chastity, it is not that big stone wall between them that it was in Blue Light. And of course, being Just Friends is a lot easier than being Soul Mates.

***

The name of the new story is taken from a line of a beautiful Christmas song that I have enjoyed recently. In my native New Norwegian it goes like this:
Tider skal koma,
tider bort skal kverva,
ætt skal fylgja ætt på rad.
Aldri skal tagna
tonen frå himlen.

(Times shall come, times shall vanish, generation shall follow generation. Never shall fall silent the melody from Heaven.)

For those who have Spotify, I actually linked to a similar version of this song a few days ago. Let me link it again: “Fager er Jorda” on Spotify.

In Norwegian, “tone” literally means a musical note, but poetically tune or melody, also metaphorically the way something is said, such as jokingly or seriously, which can sometimes lend a completely different meaning to the same words. Tone also happens to be a fairly common Norwegian woman’s name. It may or may not be a coincidence that Melody is a female name in English – the naming tradition in the two languages is very different, and the name Tone has been common in Norway well before we aligned with the English-speaking world and started learning their language.

I used to have a friend named Tone for a while, and while the “never shall fall silent” part may have been more noticeable than the “from Heaven” part for those who lived with her, I rather liked her. So hearing the song again, I suddenly thought “That would be a great name for a girl from the six-dimensional Realm of Light.”

I also want to thank my color-changing LED light bulb. It is an amazing invention. Not very useful, compared to other light bulbs, but inherently awesome. I mean, it is a light bulb that can change its colors constantly or only when asked to. It’s like living in the 21th century! Wait, we are living in the 21th century, although I lived most of my life elsewhen. So I enjoy it. Also when it slowly cycles through its hundreds of colors, I like to watch it an think: “This is the color of Justice, this is the color of the Law, this is the color of Harmony, this is the color of Thought, this is the color of Reverence”.

Growing in wisdom?

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"I don't really understand love yet..."

I don’t really understand love yet… and probably none of us do, to its fullest extent. But we can live and learn.

It is obvious that small children understand less than older children, and these less than adults. But at some time in their life, many people stop growing in their understanding, or at least their growth slows down to a snail’s pace. This does not need to be so. It is possible to keep growing for as long as the brain remains healthy, possibly a little longer.

Let me first mention the difference between knowledge and understanding. It is true that we need to first know. We cannot understand simply out of thin air. We need to know the various things involved in what we try to understand.  But just knowing lists of facts is not enough. We also need to know how they relate to other things.

You may say that bare facts are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. If we have too few of them, we are unlikely to get any of them to fit together. But even if we have gathered a large heap of puzzle pieces, we still don’t have the picture until we put them together.

I used to play with jigsaw puzzles when I was small, and I recognize that feeling of excitement when the pieces began to come together, and a new piece suddenly made a bunch of them connect. It is a feeling I have met again later in life, in other situations.

This understanding or insight of how things fit together is wonderful and a great step toward wisdom, but it is not yet the real thing. We first have to test it in real life. It is possible to have insight in many things, but they do not become very useful until we have tested them. It is at this point that we flesh out our understanding. It goes from a two-dimensional picture to a three-dimensional sculpture, so to speak. This takes its time. But if we have got the picture right the first time, time and practice will bring the finished work into being.

You can say that if you build a house and the blueprint is completely wrong, there will be no house at all in the end, just a jumble of materials. So to have the right picture is important. But the picture is no place to stop.

I speak in comparison here, of course. I don’t mean that insight is literally an image. There are other ways to say this too. But I like this comparison, it goes a long way to make these words understandable. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom. You have to start in the correct corner.

We can learn details and we can learn the big picture. Both of these are necessary. We need a big overview, an idea of what the world is and how it fits together. But no matter how long we live, we can always find more pieces that show details inside the picture, and pieces that extend it at the edges. It is a puzzle that is not complete in a lifetime. But we can see many great things in our puzzle picture even so. And continuing to grow is so worth it! A lot of problems become much smaller when we understand their place.

***

For instance, most of my fellow Norwegians have more money than I, and live in a slightly higher degree of luxury:  A bigger home, a car, usually a vacation home, or otherwise going on vacations far abroad. These things cost money, and so they worry a lot. If they lived within their means, they would have other worries, but they would not have the added worry of sinking into debt even though they work overtime. So they complain. Can I tell them that they will be less worried if they live a simpler life and buy less unnecessary things?  I suppose I could, but it would have no effect. This is not a knew piece of knowledge that I can add to their heap of puzzle pieces. They already have it, but they cannot see it.

It is like that with many things. There are things I don’t know yet, and there are things I know but have not put into the picture, and there are things I have seen but not yet shaped into life. The picture has not become flesh, so to speak. So I can continue to grow in wisdom for the rest of my life, or until the brain starts unraveling, whichever comes first.

 

Asocial games?

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"To make friends, you need games!"

“To make friends, you need games!” Sorry, Yozora, but it is not quite that simple.

For some months now I have been playing browser games, sometimes called “Facebook games” since that is where these got their breakthrough. (I play them on Google+ though, since it has a separate games stream so people don’t need to see them if they don’t participate in such games.) Another name for these I have seen is “social games”. I would contest that.

Admittedly my experience is only with two of these games, City of Wonder and Cityville. These two fall into the “builder” genre and should in theory appeal to the more constructive player, although CoW does have a tiny element of combat (which is optional, not animated, and causes no permanent damage to the loser). The interaction with Google+ friends is entirely positive, consisting in giving gifts and helping out. So far, so good.

The first thing I notice is that most players only stay a few days. This could simply be because the games are not that exciting. But there may also be another reason why the appeal fades quickly: The other players. With extremely few exceptions, everyone is focused only on receiving, not on giving. In that regard it is a reflection of the real world, I guess. But the result is that the games stream is a long row of requests which are largely ignored, since people only check on their own posts. There are at any time a small proportion that are reciprocal.

I am mildly amused that people really think this will work. You’d think most had grown up in a family of more than one person (at least most people have a mother or someone who fulfills that role) and would have learned that you are likely to achieve more by cooperating than by begging from people whom you otherwise ignore. (For the sake of the discussion, I will assume that the players are more than 10 years old. I guess before that, you may actually get away with that kind of behavior at home, if nowhere else.)

It may be that this is different if your fellow players are people you hang out with in real life. One would seriously hope so. But in that case, I am not sure what the social aspect is, since you could be more social with the same people elsewhere…

By the way, here’s a website for Google+ City of Wonder players where you can help random people with their wonders 30 times a day (the maximum the game allows) even if you have no friends in the game. All you need is the free Google+ account and a free CoW account, and you can make 30 random self-absorbed clueless people slightly happier at the cost of a few minutes of your precious lifetime. Just make sure you don’t get sucked into the game and become like them. ^_^

 

Christmas songs again

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Chris from the anime Daa Daa Daa throwing a large Christmas tree

I used to pretty actively avoid anything related to Christmas. But…

Last year in December something strange happened: I began wanting to hear Christmas songs. I have never had a strong dislike for them, except the “holiday” songs that are so obviously genericked there is no meaning left, just feel-good words added to feel-good tunes. But I have not in my memory craved Christmas songs before, even in my childhood. Last year at this time I did. And this year it happened again.

What I crave is specifically the good old Christmas songs that my parents and grandparents knew, back when no one was worried that Christmas might offend the various other religions and degrees of lack thereof. Not that they necessarily are all “Hail Jesus”, although that is good too, but some of them are actually only tangentially related to Christmas as such.

There is just something heavenly about a good Christmas song. They feel similar to me as those pious Catholic books I mentioned yesterday. In a world where everything changes all the time, there are some things that deserve to be actively brought along from the past into the future.

This is what real conservatism is, of course, to conserve good things from the great procession of generations that have passed through this life ahead of us. I understand that in the USA, the word “conservative” has gotten a rather different meaning. Well, with the USA holding less than 5% of the world’s population, I’m afraid they can’t be allowed to define my words for me, especially now in the waning years of that once great nation.

So yeah, I guess my enjoyment of Christmas songs far older than I am means I have turned into a kind of conservative. But I am not a full-fledged Christmas conservative. I have no plans to buy a tree and decorate my home and bake cookies and arrange parties. And I may still spend Christmas Day in Skyrim, although it is not absolutely certain. At least Skyrim is sure to have snow! Perhaps I should replace the game’s music files with Christmas songs… Nah. I think some things are better separately.

Now that you have Spotify in America, you can perhaps hear some of my Christmas favorites! I am pretty sure all of these are older than my parents, probably much older. Obviously then, they are in Norwegian. You should still be able to get the feeling from them.

Det Hev Ei Rose Sprunge

Høy og Strå

Fager er Jorda

Catholic books?!

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Screenshot anime Boku wa Tomodachi

“Catastrophe shall befall you if you continue your association with the minions of the church.” I suspect a good portion of my acquaintances would come to a similar conclusion. Or for that matter my relatives. I better explain myself!

Intriguingly, the books of wisdom and piety that manage to capture my attention these last few months are Catholic. That may not surprise everyone, but it sure surprises me.

I grew up in a Norway that was recently started to become post-Christian (I think my generation was the first that never even pretended to be religious except for the minority who actually were). But before that, Lutheran Protestantism had been almost alone and universal in the land. And it did not think highly of Catholicism. In Norwegian  there is no separate word for “venerate”, so we were told that Catholics worshiped saints. They had specific saints for specific careers or situations; I am not sure whether we were pointed out that this was similar to the pagan pantheons, or whether I found that out by myself. But it was kind of obvious.

Then there was the whole inquisition thing and the massive burning of witches and heretics. Like most young people I thought the witch burnings happened in the Middle Ages (the vast majority of the cases were much later, and Protestant countries were not exactly better). I may even for a few years have believed the ridiculous claims of millions of witches being killed. (There were a few thousand, each of them meticulously documented. While more women than men were accused, the percentage of death sentences was higher for male witches. But enough about that – the fact that it was popular in Protestant countries shows that it was not a Catholic thing as such. I did not know that until recent years though.)

Then there is the whole thing about bribing God with coin to free relatives from Purgatory. According to what church history was still taught, this was what caused Luther to break with the Pope and form a purer branch of Christianity. The absurdity of priestly celibacy was also pretty damning here in Scandinavia, I suspect.

Even after I found that some of what I believed was caricature, that does not mean I automatically agree with the Catholic Church. The fact remains that it has been and to some degree still remains a political and economic force to reckon with, something that is utterly opposite of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. And there is still some doctrine that is very hard to align with the Bible. For instance, the Bible makes no mention of Purgatory as such. And to prohibit people from marrying or bidding them to refrain from food are labeled as “demonic teachings” in the Bible. There better be better reasons for this than I have seen so far.

The reason why I came to even look at Catholic books is that they were mentioned and quoted at the One Cosmos blog, a curious place but one that caters to the religious intellectual. That is not something you see often, but the again I suspect it is not a large audience either. Not many wise in this world were called, after all. That said, you’d think some would become wise later, under the influence of religion. It certainly has helped me in that regard, as I am sure anyone will confirm who knew me when I was much younger.

Be that as it may, I came across quotes by intellectual authors like A.G. Sertillanges and soon after James V. Schall, who are very much non-preachy and excellent writers of universal wisdom. But evidently both Catholic, somewhat to my surprise. I ended up buying books by them both, and rather enjoying them (although the writing is not exactly beach literature). Hans Urs von Balthasar also seems interesting, although I have yet to buy any of his massive tomes. Perhaps if I suddenly stop aging. It might well take a lifetime to get through all his lifetomes, if one were to give them due consideration.

And now there’s Meditation on the Tarot by our would-be Unknown Friend. A bit heterodox in places, I would say, but the basics seem to be sound and very inspiring. It is rare for religious literature to be outright exciting, I think, but this can be, at least to some of us. It does require some time to immerse oneself in, though.

And then there’s Fire Within, the Kindle version of which I read on my commute. It is a treatise on the life and teachings of St Teresa of Avila (who is certified awesome, as I have said before) and St John of the Cross (who is kind of scary, what with the Dark Night of the Soul and all). The two of them evidently have a lot in common, including knowing each other, St Teresa being the first of them. Anyway, fascinating stuff. I recognize myself in the beginning of it, even though no one had told me any of it. That’s kind of disturbing, when you realize that the only person who has spoken to you of this before is God. Or whoever the voice in my heart is, I am pretty sure it at the very least channels God if it is not the Most High himself. This was how I learned meditation (or “contemplation” as it is evidently still called in Catholic tradition). It also throws light on the great difference I perceive between neo-Buddhist (technical) and Christian (devotional) meditation.

I may have just dumped into these particular writers by the luck of the draw. Perhaps there are just as excellent Protestant or Methodist books that I simply have not been exposed to. But given that even the current Pope has written a couple likable books, I can see how Amazon is now offering me a long list of Catholic classics when I visit them. I think I’ll take it slow though – the books I already have are such as deserve to be read slowly, and then, I believe, be read slowly again. We’ll see how that pans out – I am not exactly a monk, although my female friends may never know the difference. Unless they read my journal.

Back from Skyrim, sort of

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"If only I could live in a game world!"

If only I could live in a game world… With Skyrim, you get pretty close to that. But I assume you still need to eat in the real world occasionally.

My vacation in Skyrim amounted to about 300 hours, although some of these were pretty passive, my avatar chopping wood or being target practice for bandits while I was doing other things.

In Skyrim I’ve picked flowers and caught butterflies, chopped wood and mined ore, skinned wolves and bears and tanned their hides, made weapons and armor and jewelry,  climbed the 7000 steps to a mountain monastery, and of course slain a fair number of dragons. And much, much more.

I am not anywhere near bored of it, and I am not sure I would ever be. As I said about Daggerfall, I could play it for a thousand years. I actually played that for about five years, I think, probably a little more.

But the thing is, I have other interests as well now. For reasons that I myself don’t quite understand, I start to miss the books of timeless wisdom and piety. I’m not that pious a person really, but I kind of miss it when I spend too much things doing shallow things. And by that standard, Skyrim counts as shallow, although it is certainly one of the “deepest” games around.

It is not like the Light is absent when I play computer games, or whatever else I do. But obviously there are limits to what level of spiritual contemplation  I will find while trying to defend myself and my imaginary companion against a dragon as big as a house and much angrier.

And of course, it is good to be back to work, even though I am still not very useful there. It is better than getting money for nothing, at least!

I’ll still continue to play Skyrim for a while, I guess, but there are other things that also lay claim to my time and my attention. And that’s a good thing, I’d say.

The changes are a-changin’

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Screenshot anime Nichijou

In the near future, we will have to run like a flash just to stand still. Or so it seems.

We should have acted. It was already here. But nobody wanted to believe, believe it even existed.

The technological singularity has begun to pull us in. Like a whirlpool, spinning faster and faster, gradually it becomes unavoidable. The speed at which changes change is changing faster. As Einstein said, compound interest is the strongest force in the universe. Meaning, when you keep adding to something and then keep adding to the addition to the addition, there is no limit to how far you can go, and it can only go faster and faster. And it goes faster and faster at an ever faster rate.

In the year 2000, I wrote the entry “Datapad 2010“, predicting that in 2010, it would be common to have handheld devices doing many of the things we in 2000 did with computers, but anywhere, at any time. In reality, 2010 was indeed the year of the iPad, but the iPhone (2007) was at least as close to what I had predicted. TV and movie on the datapad I predicted would happen  “perhaps 2020”. It is already here. Not quite impressive yet, a bit of a “because we can” really. But we can. I can rent movies on my Samsung Galaxy (also from 2010). And I can easily afford the wireless bandwidth to do so, at least in moderation.

I was 3 years wrong with the datapad, 10 years with the movie streaming. Admittedly these were more like first mainstream appearance, and it takes a bit for them to spread to most of the populace. Still, iPads and Tablets are pretty mainstream now in the old developed world. Not just for geeks or the rich. Still, look at these numbers again. What I predicted for 2010 came in 2007, but what I predicted for 2020 came in 2010. I am not the only one who make these mistakes. The acceleration of the accelerating change is accelerating. Time is compressed, more the further ahead we look.

In the year 2000, most of you did not even know what I was talking about with the “datapad”, or why anyone other than sci-fi geeks would have any interest in them. Today, there are also many things you don’t even think about, that I think about but don’t grasp fully.

This also affects the world economy, which I used to write about in great detail. Now, I cannot write fast enough – by the time someone stumbles on my website, it will likely have happened already.

The crisis in the Euro zone. The collapse of the dollar. Will they happen in a year, or in a week? I cannot say. The future is becoming hazy. Probably not because of tachyons from Antarctica. Probably because a middle-aged man like me has a hard time believing the speed at which things happen, now in the waning years of mankind as we have known it.

The boss of a large multinational oil company recently mentions that the world is expected to need two-thirds more energy by 2050, or the equivalent of another OPEC in addition to the one we have. Again, my first reaction is “That’s after the singularity, so not something humans should worry about”. More importantly, it is far after Peak Oil, which is now, more or less. New oil is being found here and there, but it is generally more expensive to extract than before. Despite the economic stagnation in the rich world, oil prices have risen again. You cannot simply put the ruler on the current development and say “in 2050 we will be… there!”

I’ve mentioned before that around 2040 we are expected to know millions, probably billions of times more than we know today, and the knowledge will double every day or so. Perhaps most of that knowledge will be the equivalent of  teenager Twitter messages, but it would surprise me if somewhere in those millions of times our current knowledge there isn’t something that will make our current oil companies seem obsolete, our current railroads, our current schools even.

The obvious problem is, we don’t know WHAT. It may already be there, buried in some data file in one of Google’s big computer halls. Something that changes our energy economy as much as the bow changed hunting in the Stone Age, perhaps. But how would we know? When will we find it, if ever, and how? All we know is that we know less and less of what there is to know, because knowledge is covering our world now like water is covering the bottom of the sea. And it is only the beginning. Soon everything will change. Even we.

But for now, we shall have to live with being shortsighted. Because beyond that short sight, everything becomes a blur of movement.

Rain and hydropower

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Small waterfall in the computer game Skyrim

This picture is actually from the computer game Skyrim, which is based on Norwegian nature. There’s a lot of water here in real life too, I assure you, but if I were to try to photograph it, my camera would become wet.

It’s been raining… well, I am not sure it is two days out of three, this fall, but I would be very surprised if it was less than one out of two. That is quite rare, even in fall, here on the south coast of Norway. It also rained copiously during summer, more so than in a long time. Nor is this the only part of the country that has received plenty of rainfall this year.

The last couple winters, the hydropower magazines have been near empty, and the price of electricity has been abnormally high here in Norway. Well, abnormal for Norway. Other European countries are used to paying more for their electricity than we are. Hydropower is a quite affordable energy source, once the dams and turbines are in place. And usually rain is plentiful here in Norway. So we have gotten used to even heating with electricity – some modern houses were literally built without chimneys. And then we had several years with very little rainfall, and at the same time Swedish nuclear reactors were down for repairs much longer than expected, so we could not import electricity from there during the winter either.

Now it has rained and rained for months. It hadn’t rained many weeks when people started getting suspicious: Norwegian power companies were exporting large amounts of hydropower to Europe. The prevailing theory on this was that they were worried the dams might not be empty this winter, and then they would not be able to charge extremely high prices as they had done the last couple years. So they had to hurry to get rid of that water during the summer.

The power companies tried to explain that this was not how it worked: The empty lakes were the huge reservoirs up in the mountains, which took many years to refill and many years to empty. The power they now generated were from smaller dams in the lower valleys, which would otherwise overflow and the energy be wasted. This is generally consistent with the structure of Norwegian water reservoirs. But a lot of people still hold on to the conspiracy theory.

This just goes to show that Norwegian too are stupid and ridden by mind parasites, much like our cousins around the world. Well, not quite as badly as some places, where your life is in danger if you are not insane. But still pretty bad.

Of course, power companies are not saints; they seek to maximize their profit. But the best way to do that in northern Europe is to produce as much as possible of your power in winter. Remember, Norway is about as far north as Alaska. That means the neighboring countries we may export to are roughly comparable to Canada. Air conditioning in summer is a luxury, but heating in winter is a matter of life or death in all these countries. There are several countries between here and Spain or Italy, the “south states” of Europe.

Over the last couple decades, new large-capacity power cables have been laid from Norway to neighboring countries, not just Sweden which we border on directly, but also under the sea to the south: the Netherlands, and at least indirectly, Denmark and Germany. But all of these countries also have icy cold winters, so there is a lot more money to gain from producing all of your power in winter, if possible.

But yeah, the ability to export large quantities of hydropower means we will never again have the comfortably low prices on electricity that we had when I was young. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore. Luckily we also have a lot more money than we did back then. And generally better insulated houses.

It will still take many years of rain before the large hydropower reservoirs are filled, if it ever happens. But nature is certainly doing its best on our behalf. And I, for one, am not complaining.

 

Insane terrorists and others

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Photo: Jon-Are Berg-Jacobsen/Aftenposten/REUTERS/SCANPIX

This picture is all most Norwegians have seen of our worst terrorist since WW2. Not a lot to base a judgment on. But since when has that stopped any of us?

Norwegian public debate ran into an ice berg a couple days ago, when a psychiatric report concluded that Anders Behring Breivik, the supposedly right-wing terrorist who blew up government buildings and massacred teenagers at a political camp this summer, was actually insane. “Paranoid schizophrenia.”

Very few had expected this. Certainly not Behring Breivik.

The public reacts generally with disbelief and anger. The general opinion is that these experts don’t know what they are talking about. Their scientific report should be overruled by people who have never met Behring Breivik, much less actually talked with him for hours and hours on end, and who have not even begun to read his own “manifesto” even though it is freely available on the Net. After all, they have seen the news on TV. That is all you need to know everything in the world, and have absolutely infallible judgment.

Yes, I’m putting the irony on here. My respect for actual humans is, generally, extremely low. This may not be obvious because my respect for the human potential is enormous. We have the capacity to become, fairly precisely put, godlike. In practice however we pay little attention to the soul and so we live and die as a writhing mass of mind parasites, largely unaware of reality beyond what is necessary to survive and procreate. Sometimes we may also fall short of this.

Thus, public opinion about terrorists in Norway and bankers in the USA only matters because we have some degree of democracy. Luckily it is mostly “opiate of the masses”, giving people an illusion of having real power. Long may this last. When the masses awaken, mass murder is sure to follow, since approximately 5% of the population are utterly devoid of conscience, and the remaining 95% generally have no idea how to constrain this minority without the rule of law. That’s, you know, why we have the rule of law in the first place.

So chances are that despite the loud wailing, the court of law will listen to the extremely tiny minority who actually know what they are talking about, and ignore the overwhelming majority who don’t. This is as good as it gets. One day perhaps we will in great numbers realize our human potential. But until then, most live and die only a few steps from insanity, and some will fall off the edge.