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Awareness of plasma behavior changes everything.
I've outlined in the previous episodes of this story arc how it expands explanatory opportunities into domains
of greater size and power and intricacy than is possible with ideas of gas and gravity.
More and bigger events can happen faster and with discontinuous changes and
emergent properties not present in individual elements. It changes how we think along with what we think.
The change in thinking will affect not only the underlying metaphysical assumptions of the physical sciences, but
also those of other areas of thought such as history. It affects not only past thinking, but
also modern thinking. In this episode we'll be playing with the recent centuries’ thinking.
One implication of faster is a shortening of history. Ancient history, which is stories we tell in the present,
is based largely on our present interpretations of texts, which were written by and for the rulers.
It's no secret that their purpose was not to produce an objective and dispassionate account of events,
but to justify and to glorify the king. It's more accurate to call them propaganda than records. It's not
surprising that they contain many paradoxes. Those paradoxes may be partly resolved
with stratigraphy-based and cataclysm benchmark revisions. For example, the history -
I should say histories, because there are several conflicting ones - of the roman empire seems to describe
three episodes that are largely repeats of each other. Emperors with similar
names, but in different locations, and assigned to different times, engaged in
similar activities and succeeded each other in similar sequences. The stratigraphy of the ruins has always
been confusing; it's as if strata also repeated themselves after an unknown dark age, the historian's equivalent of
the astronomer’s dark matter. And the end of each episode was marked by catastrophic destruction and tales of
comets, bloody auroras, plagues and earthquakes. Each episode was located in a different region.
The Early Empire in the East collapsed in the 3rd century CE. The Middle Empire in Europe collapsed in the
6th century CE, and the Late Empire, around Italy, collapsed in the 10th century CE.
One revision, to be found at Q-mag.org, proposes that the three episodes occurred simultaneously in the three
regions and were recorded with the regional characteristics and customs.
Afterward, historians stitched them together diachronically in a sequence.
The benchmarks are collapses, which were a single, regional if not global, cataclysm.
Suggestively, tree ring and other physical anomalies have been associated with those dates, indicating that the
collapse was environmental, as well as civilizational. The revisionist proposal is that the
first millennium of the common era actually had a duration of only three to four centuries.
Other revisionists contend that something similar happened with the first three centuries of the second
millennium. If all these revisions hold up, the duration of the common era would be cut in half.
Furthermore, other stratigraphic investigations with similar catastrophic benchmarks in mind,
suggest the necessity of revising BCE history. There are many instances of similar
events, and similar names, in different regions and assigned to different times.
Many civilizations collapsed suddenly in all-consuming devastations of fire and
earthquake and they left similar strata. Again, if all revisions hold up, the three
millennia or so of that era would collapse into something on the order of one millennium.
In total, the conventional five millennia of western history actually would have lasted only
two millennia. Again, my point is not to argue for these shockingly extreme revisions, but to
suggest the more extensive possibilities of the wider sensibilities implied by
plasma behavior and a larger and faster world- view. If the energy distribution of space
plasma phenomena follows a power law, lower-energy events would be more common
than higher-energy ones, and the catastrophic episodes would be
interspersed with more moderate disruptive events. For example, the Carrington event of 1859
has been attributed to a solar flare. The flare caused a magnetic storm that,
among other effects, induced anomalous currents in the recently erected telegraph network.
Sparks flew between the wires and supports; operators were shocked and some
were able to send messages after disconnecting from the power sources.
In 2012 a flare of similar magnitude missed the earth by nine days. If it had hit with the same intensity as
the Carrington event, it would have knocked out power grids and distribution
stations and perhaps have damaged many electronics. That would have been disruptive, but not
empire-ending catastrophic. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, if neglected reports are anywhere close
to accurate, occurred at the same time to the hour as the Peshtigo Fire, farther to the north.
Stories of widespread prairie fires at about the same time trickled back from
trappers and homesteaders on the plains. Altogether, the reports suggest the
occurrence of a conflagration that covered the northern plains from Wisconsin to the Rockies.
A few reports of strange fires came from San Francisco. Some eyewitnesses claimed that tornadoes
of fire descended from the sky, and that wood and stone buildings alike were consumed.
Some victims fell dead in unburned fields. And some bodies were unmarked, but
had coins in their pockets that were melted. How much of this might be fire-induced
fantasy, and how much might be the previously unrecognized effects of a
region-wide plasma discharge from space? Setting willful belief and disbelief aside,
how might these stories be tested? In 1871 such reports were entertainment, except in Chicago.
Today, when much of the country has become Chicago, such an event would be catastrophic.
A global catastrophic event would cause everyone to respond with typical
trauma-induced behavior such as denial, amnesia and compulsive repetition or acting out.
The psychological knot of fixation from the trauma would be unconscious and long- lasting.
It would produce similar images and folklore around the globe, transmitted by
traditions and culture. Perhaps also by some genetic mechanism. Carl Jung, among many psychologists,
discovered that some of his patients reproduced images from antiquity or myth
that they would not likely have seen in their daily lives. The neurotic behavioral emergence of
repressed global trauma from the age of myth would be masked by amnesia and
denial, as well as by the absence of contrasting behavior. Everybody does it.
But it would result in imitating the old gripping stories about a war of the gods.
One should ask, why do they grip? Much of humanity's present behavior that strikes us as crazy -
wars, much of politics, much of religion, even much of science - may be the neurotic consequences of
traumatic global catastrophes in a not so distant past. One example may be the ubiquity of a
mythic theme of centralization and hierarchy. The heavenly city of the gods, with power radiating from the center.
The mythic compulsion is, ‘as above, so below’. We must imitate the gods. So people build centrally arranged
cities with city centers dominated by towers and ringed with suburbs. They organize societies into centrally
commanded states with a ruler - king, president, or even bureaucracy - at the top.
They regiment themselves into military chains- of-command. Their family structures follow the
pattern of patriarchy, father rule. The compulsion is contained in the suffix archy, rule, exerting power over
others as the gods did over our ancestors, as distinguished from intrinsic development or mutual
cooperation or symbiosis. People say that's just natural; that other animal species do those things too.
But that would be the meaning of global trauma. All species would be traumatized.
Outside of hierarchy, strictly speaking, most organization in life is networking.
Someone must be in charge, people say, but who commands the flowers to bloom?
We want to attribute such events, if we even recognize them, to far-away places or to long-ago times.
We want to believe that our world is stable, and that such cataclysms are impossible.
But in a plasma universe they impinge on us. The traumatic events are more recent and more likely to repeat.
Our PTSD is stronger and more pervasive than we would like to admit. The terror is closer to hand.
The repressed memories leak out in anxieties of a looming doomsday. Climate
change, pandemic, nuclear war, famine, civilizational collapse. At the same time, the shift from a gas-
and gravity cosmology, unsettles our mistaken certainty in that understanding.
The novel and bigger understanding in the makings of a plasma and electricity
cosmology, is flooded with uncertainty. We're at the beginning, and what we think
we know about plasma is surely little more than a glimpse at this time.
Our world no longer makes as much sense as it did. Having said that, that humanity may be
neurotic, I must remind myself of what Thomas Szasz, a controversial psychiatrist wrote,
”To the psychiatrist the neurosis is the problem, but to the patient the neurosis is the solution.”
A neurosis is a coping or adapting mechanism, however sub-optimal, that aids survival.
You have to dig a lot deeper than superficial similarities to understand what humanity's problem is.
In view of the global trauma that may have happened, we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves.
We're doing pretty well. We crave answers, but at this time what we need are questions.
What we need is to expand opportunity of thinking as we've expanded our observational ability.
For example, the Palomar telescope, which accompanied Big Bang thinking, has been
expanded into the James Webb Telescope. But its images are still
being interpreted with Big Bang thinking. We crave certainty, which can only be had
with an act of will, and a leap into belief, with the consequent restriction of opportunity of thinking.
What we need is doubt, especially with regard to the belief-fortified dogmas of modern science.
What we need is not to take any of this too seriously. We need to be playing with thinking.
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