BE -- "death wish for the planet"

[Joseph Tracy]

This question  about a collective death-wish for the planet  runs like a cold shiver through all Pynchon’s writings. To see it in a Kennedy speech, a man who several times was pushed by the CIA and Generals to the brink of high stakes wars and in the one case a first strike nuclear war, brings the stark reality of this bizarre urge past the realm of fear or speculation.  Where the hell is it coming from? Why are such successful and powerful people on the vanguard of these mad crusades.  How is the internet reflecting this urge?

Interestingly McGilchrist’s thesis addresses the depressing and dispiriting consequences of living in the left brain. People with right brain injuries appear to themselves and see others as machine-like. They often feel aleinated, paranoid and depressed. These ideas of inhabiting a mechanized world take over their thought processes.  The world of the left brain, to the degree it is isolated and estranged from right brain oversight is a world of manipulable symbols, literal and pragmatic codes, win- lose paradigms. This mode is great for  organizing technical systems and has always been part of human development but as a world for social animals  to try to inhabit as the ultimate nature of reality it is profoundly problematic. McG offers research showing a correlation between the move to mechanized societies and depression, autism and schizophrenia.   The left brain is content to exchange experience and living communities with representatives,,smbols,avatars.  That is the essence of the internet.  From management point of view it is ideal, people track themselves, code themselves, market themselves.

Determinism is the philosophy of self annihilation and it is wrong. Google can find any information but their algorithms can’t figure out what you want today, only what you did yesterday. 




Kennedy was showing and appealing to empathy and even to a kind of live and let live humility with a clear sense that his was a persuasive and humane argument. He loved life with unabashed pleasure. The country relaxed.   His murder creepily cast the shadow of the now international shadow state.   

 



 
> On Feb 27, 2016, at 2:02 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> 
> Ernie on the internet in BE:
> 
> "'As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in his heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid.'"
> 
> BE, 420
> 
> John Kennedy on the search for peace:
> 
> "We must, therefore, preserve in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above all, while defending our vital interest, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy -- or of a collective death-wish for the world."
> 
> http://www1.american.edu/media/speeches/Kennedy.htm
> 
> 
> Kennedy also said:
> 
> "In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours -- and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.
> 
> So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
> 
> Quite impressive.
> 
> 
> 
> -
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