GLENN: What's more, this aspect of the MOQ leaves the door open to all kinds
of nonsense, such as the belief that Sasquatch is an objective phenomena if
only the culture weren't so set on denying it. And guess what? The next
inevitable step is the belief in institutionalized denial, whereby people
become convinced the culture tries to enforce the mythos for its own sake. We
already have the cult notion that the government is covering up
extraterrestial visitations. We'd have more of this under the MOQ. The belief
encouraged by the MOQ that parts of the real world are blocked from actual
view by cultural filters and enforced by cultural immune systems paves the way
for this kind of conspiratorial, cultish mindset.
ERIN: I think it is true that the MoQ leaves the door open but I think that is
why it is NOT paving the way for a cultish mindset, quite the opposite. For
example withe aliens, we don't know if they exist or not so if we want to try
and pretend we do then we are basically full of it in my opinion. In my
opinion MoQ does open the way for you to be uncertain about something but I
want you to explain to me how is the cult that aliens exist different from the
cult that aliens don't exist?
WILLIAM JAMES "Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science
there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of
occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves
more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who
will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed,
its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than
of what were supposed to be the rules."
R. WILSON:
"Do you believe in UFOs?" somebody asked.
"Yes, of course," I answered.
The questioner, who looked quite young, then burst into a long speech,
"proving" at least to his own satisfaction that all UFOs "really are" sun-dogs
or heat inversions. When he finally ran down I simply replied,
"Well, we both agree that UFOs exist. Our only difference is that you think
you know what they are and I'm still puzzled."
An elderly gentleman with blonde-white hair and a florid complexion cried out
in great enthusiasm, "By God, sir, you're right. I myself am still puzzled
about everything!"
And thus I met Timothy F.X. Finnegan, Dean of the Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen
Astro-Anomalistic Society, Dalkey, sometime lecturer at Trinity College,
Dublin, and founder of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of
the Normal.
In fact, Prof. Finnegan signed me up as a member of CSICON that very night, in
the Plough and Stars pub over our ninth or tenth pint of Ireland's most
glorious product, linn dubh, known as Guiness to the ungodly.
Now I hear that Prof. Finnegan has died, or at least they took the liberty of
burying him, and I feel that the world has lost a great man.
The Commitee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) ,
however, lives on and deserves more attention than it has received hitherto.
Prof. Finnegan always asserted that the idea for CSICON derived from a remark
passed by an old Dalkey character named Sean Murphy, in the Goat and Compasses
pub shortly before closing time on 23 July 1973.
Actually, it started with two old codgers named O'Brian and Nolan discussing
the weather. "Terrible rain and wind for this time of year," O'Brian ventured.
"Ah, faith," Nolan replied, "I do not believe it is this time of year at all,
at all."
At this, Murphy spoke up. "Ah, Jaysus," he said, "I've never seen a boogerin'
normal day." He paused to set down his pint, then added thoughtfully, "And I
never met a fookin' average man neither"
(About Sean Murphy nothing else appears in the record except a remark gleaned
by Prof. LaPuta from one Nora Dolan, a housewife of the vicinity: "Sure, that
Murphy lad never did any hard work except for getting up off the floor and
navigating himself back onto the bar-stool, after he fell off, and he only did
that twice a night.")
But Murphy's simple words lit a fire in the subtle and intricate brain of
Timothy F.X. Finnegan, who had just finished his own fourteenth pint (de Selby
says his fifteenth pint). The next day the aging Finnegan wrote the first
two-page outline of the new science he called patapsychology, a term coined in
salute to Alfred Jarry's invention of pataphysics.
Finnegan's paper began with the electrifying sentence, "The average Canadian
has one testicle, just like Adolph Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average
Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the
average Anything actually existed." He then went on to demonstrate that the
normal or average human lives in substandard housing in Asia, has 1.04
vaginas, cannot read or write, suffers from malnutrition and never heard of
Silken Thomas Fitzgerald or Brian Boru. "The normal," he concluded "consists
of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits."
Thus began the science of Patapsychology, Prof. Finnegan's most enduring,and
endearing, contribution to the world -- aside from the computer-enhanced
photos of the Face on Mars with which he endeavored to prove that the Face
depicted Moishe Horwitz, his lifelong mentor and idol. This, of course,
remains highly controversial, especially among disciples of Richard Hoagland,
who believe the Face looks more like the Sphinx, those who insist it looks
like Elvis to them, and the dullards who only see it as a bunch of rocks.
Nobody should confuse Patapsychology with parapsychology, although this
precise misunderstanding evidently inspired the long and venomous diatribes
against Finnegan by Prof. Sheissenhosen of Heidelberg. (We need not credit the
allegations of Herr Doktor Hamburger that Sheissenhosen also dispatched the
three separate letter-bombs sent to Finnegan in 1982, '83 and '87. Even in the
most heated academic debate some limits of decorem should remain, one would
hope.)
Sheissenhosen evidently believed that "parapsychology" represented an
unprovoked attack on his language and thought, and that Finnegan often leaped
from shadows; he even suspected the Dalkey sage of slinking and of hiding
behind a belly laugh, although the latter seems physiologically impossible. (I
tried it once and found it made me more visible, not less.) In fact,
Sheissenhosen never did correct his original error of misreading patapsycholgy
as parapsychology. You will find more about the
Sheissenhosen-Finnegan-LaPuta-Hamburger controversy in deSelby's Finnegan:
Enigma of the Occident, Tourneur's Finnegan: Homme ou Dieu? and/or
Sheissenhosen's own Finneganismus und Dummheit (6 volumes).
Patapsychology begins from Murphy's Law, as Finnegan called the First Axiom,
adopted from Sean Murphy. This says,and I quote,"The normal does not exist.
The average does not exist. We know only a very large but probably finite
phalanx of discrete space-time events encountered and endured." In less
technical language, the Board of the College of Patapsychology offers one
million Irish punds [around $700,000 American] to any "normalist" who can
exhibit "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of
the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal,
average or ordinary."
In a world where no two fingerprints appear identical, and no two brains
appear identical, and an electron does not even seem identical to itself from
one nanosecond to another, patapsychology seems on safe ground here.
No normalist has yet produced even a totally normal dog, an average cat, or
even an ordinary chickadee. Attempts to find an average Bird of Paradise, an
ordinary haiku or even a normal cardiologist have floundered pathetically. The
normal, the average, the ordinary, even the typical, exist only in statistics,
i.e. the human mathematical mindscape. They never appear in external
space-time, which consists only and always of nonnormal events in nonnormal
series.
Thus, unless you're an illiterate and malnourished Asian with exactly 1.04
vaginas and 0.96 testicles, living in substandard housing, you do not qualify
as normal but as abnormal, subnormal, supernormal, paranormal or some variety
of nonnormal.
The canny will detect here the usual Celtic impulse to make hash out of
everything that seems obvious and incontrovertable to Saxons, grocers and
other Fundamentalist Materialists. Patapsychology follows in the great
tradition of Swift, who once proved with a horoscope that an astrologer named
Partridge had died, even though Partridge continued to deny this in print;
Bishop Berkeley, who proved that the universe doesn't exist but God has a
persistent delusion that it does; William Rowan Hamilton, who invented the
noncommutative algebra in which p times q does not equal q times p; Wilde, who
asked if the academic commentators on Hamlet had really gone mad or only
pretended to have gone mad; John S.Bell, who proved mathematically that if any
universe corresponds to the equations of quantum mathematics that universe
must have nonlocal correlations similar to Jungian synchronicities; etc.
In the patapsychological model, the normal having vanished, most
generalizations, especially about nonmathematical groups, disappear along with
it. The monorchoid Mr. Hitler, for instance, could not generalize about "the
Jews" within the patapsychological model, because first he would have to find
a normal or average Jew, which appears as intracible to demonstration as
exhibitting the Ideal Platonic Jew (or the Ideal Platonic Chicken Farm
complete with Ideal Platonic Chickenshit.)
As Korzybski the semanticist said, all we can ever find in space-time consists
of Jew-1, Jew-2, Jew-3 etc. to Jew-n. (For the nonmathematical, that means a
list comprising Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Ruth, Jesus, Woody Allen, Richard
Bandler, Felix Mendelsohn, Sigmund Freud, Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable, Noam
Chomsky, Bernard Baruch, Paul Newman, the Virgin Mary, Albert Einstein,
Lillian Hellman, Baron Rothschild, Ayn Rand, Max Epstein, Emma Goldman, Saul
Bellow, etc. etc. etc. to the final enumeration of all Jews alive or dead.)
Each of these, on inspection, will have different fingerprints, different
brains, different neuro-immunological systems, different eyes, ears, noses
etc. different life histories, different conditioning and learning etc. and
different personalities, hobbies, passions etc... and none will serve as a
norm or Ideal Form for all the others.
To say it otherwise, world Jewish population stood at about 10 million when
Hitler formed his generalizations. He could not possibly have known more than
at maximum about 500 of them well enough to generalize about them; considering
his early prejudices, he probably knew a lot less than that. But taking 500 as
a high estimate, we find he generalized about 10 million individual persons on
the basis of knowledge limited to around 1/20,000 or 0.00005 % of them.
It seems, then, that Naziism could not have existed, if Hitler knew the
difference between norms or averages (internal estimates, subject to error due
to incomplete research or personal prejudice) and the phalanx of discrete
nonnormal events and things (including persons) that we find in the sensory
space-time continuum outside.
Similarly, the male human population currently stands at 3 billion 3 million
129 thousand, more or less (3, 004, 129, 976, the last time I checked the
World Game Website a while ago. ) Of these 3 billion+ discrete individuals,
Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin and other Radical Feminists probably have not
known more than about 500 to generalize from. This means that Rad Fem dogma
consists of propositions about 3 billion critters based on examination of less
than 0.00000001 per cent of them. This ammounts to a much more reckless use of
generalization than Hitler's thoughts on Judaism. You can no more find the
male norm from Gandhi, Gen George Custer, Buddha, Bill Clinton, Louis Pasteur,
Kung fu tzu, Bruno, Father Damien, Ted Bundy etc. than you can find the Jewish
norm from Emma Goldman, Harpo Marx, Felix Mendelsohn, Spinoza, Barbra
Streisand, Nathaniel Branden, Emma Lazarus, Jerry Seinfeld etc.
Now you know how the word "feminazi" got into the language. The two ideologies
have a strong isomorphism. They both confuse the theoretical norm with a vast
array of different individuals -- and they both have no idea how to create
even a tolerably scientific norm (which will still differ in many respects
from the actual series of individuals the norm allegedly covers.) .
CSICON applies the same Deconstructive logic all across the board.
For instance, to return to our starting point, whatever your idea of the
"normal" UFO -- whether you consider it a spaceship, a secret US government
weapon, a hoax, or a hallucination etc. -- such a general idea will render you
incapable of forming a truly objective view of the next UFO that comes along.
The only way to cancel such pre-judgement lies in patapsychology (and in
general semantics.) You must remember the difference between the individual
and unpredictible event that gets called a UFO and your past generalizations
about "the UFO" or the "normal" UFO."
Otherwise you will only note how this UFO fits your Ideal UFO and will
unconciously ignore how it differs therefrom. This mechanical reflex will
please your ego, if you like to feel you know more than most people, but it
will prove hazardous to your ability to observe and think carefully.
People who think they know all about Jews or males or UFOs never see a real
Jew or male or UFO. They see the generalized norm that exists only in their
own brains. We never know "all" -- we only know what I call sombunall,
some-but-not-all. This applies also to dogs ( the patapsychologist will not
say "I love them," "I hate them," "I fear them" etc. ), and to plumbers,
bosses, right-wingers, left-wingers, cats, lizards, sitcoms, houses, nails,
Senators, waterfalls and all other miscellaneous sets or groups.
Personally, I see two or three UFOs every week. This does not astonish me, or
convince me of the spaceship theory, because I also see about 2 or 3 UNFOs
every week --Unidentified Non-Flying Objects. These remain unidentified (by
me) because they go by too fast or look so weird that I never know whether to
classify them as hedgehogs, hobgoblins or helicopters-- or as stars or
satellites or spaceships -- or as pookahs or pizza-trucks or probability
waves. Of course, I also see things that I feel fairly safe in identifying as
hedgehogs or stars or pizza trucks, but the world contains more and more
events that I cannot identify fully and dogmatically with any norm or
generalization. I live in a spectrum of probabilities, uncertainties and
wonderments.
Perhaps I got this way by studying Finnegan's work. Or maybe I just drank too
much linn dubh during my years in Ireland.
O rare, Tim Finnegan!
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