paul pykewater challenge

Out of the Blue, Into the Black

by Paul Lebedev Visions of new possibilities, of new ways for man to grow and dominate, and great expanses and exciting horizons; this is what is evoked when the word “frontier” is used. Out of the blue and into the black, that yawning abyss bespeckled with the dreary light of far off stars, and with that outward expansion man becomes hopeful once more. Hopeful that he may overcome himself. Hopeful that he may have finally been able to shatter that cage which by this point had engorged itself so as to overtake the entire Earth. Yes, man is looking into the eternal night of outer space with the feverish dream of “getting things right” this time. Perhaps it is only natural that he dreams of these celestial pastures greener than those past and envisions a superior man wandering among them. Why else would he have left if not to recover from some past mistake or otherwise to secure his own future rather than his certain demise? This hope should come with no small amount of foreboding, however. Modernity’s ills are not so easily cured by a mere change of scenery, and should the antinomian seeds of our decaying world stow away on our gleaming metal ships, then they will sprout again to overtake us, and space is much less hospitable than Earth ever was.

Man becomes himself when he acts upon his environment. An inactive thing is a dead thing, an unknowable thing. An inactive man, an inert man, would be one which one could know nothing about, as outside of ourselves we have no access to the minds of others and may only evaluate them based on what they do in the world. The essence of man, his soul, is that which plays upon the environment which he is born into. That is to say that his nature, immutable, is that which shapes the mutable world around him. The material and metaphysical aspects of his environment play off of this essence as he interacts with it as well, and understanding arises out of this holistic testing of one’s abilities and storage of data as memories both conscious and unconscious. Man as an acting being is constantly comparing and contrasting; the tools by which we systematize the infinite complexity of reality into understandable chunks. This comes at a price, however, because the understanding of man is both imperfect and limited, and if reality is infinitely complicated, and man cannot understand its totality, then any systematization is by necessity a reduction. This may be seen when we examine the nature of words. The construction of a sentence will be used as an example, and may be compared in any form to the performance of any action as follows: When a word is selected, already the previously dizzying amount of words available to us is reduced. This myriad of possibilities, will be referred to as multiplicities. As these multiplicities narrow in range, the sentence draws further and further to completion, as each word serves to further encapsulate the thing expressed by the sentence itself until the sentence arrives at its conclusion. Further, the sentence is an interval in what may be described as a linguistic regression. Sound designated by later makes word makes a word-pair makes a phrase makes a clause makes a sentence makes a paragraph makes a page makes a text. Each of these regressions may be considered static, but do not necessarily have to be understood as such. A sentence may be a larger part of a whole, as any of the individual components listed contribute to the other interchangeably.

As previously stated this contrast allows for categorization. This categorization facilitates acquiring knowledge. Complexity of thought cannot exist without language. Language enables us to maintain an ordered awareness of the world around us. What we learn we learn by action and passive experience, but we may only be completely aware of this process when it is encoded in the form of language. Each and every conscious thought, every spoken word, and every written concept is a condensed version of reality. This condensation is not a lossless process. There is much that lies outside the realm of language, and much that lies outside the realm of mere human conception.

Each linguistic representation of something is less of a true reflection and more akin to a cheap copy. No matter how well an apple is described, or how eloquently it is written about, it will only ever remain a description of the thing itself. When this apple is read of, it flies into and through the mind of

the reader, but not in the same manner between two people; There is only the spectral image that their mind is able to conjure based on what they know about the fruit. This apple of the mind is necessarily a relative construct. Even the real thing is only an apple relative to every thing that is not an apple. No two apples are even the same, but one may be contrasted from everything else and designated as such a fruit because it contains the essential characteristics of an apple.

And indeed it must be assumed that some of these categorizations exist a priori. No apple is exactly the same as another apple. The differences between the two, regardless of both essentially being apples, are functionally infinite. That is, there is an infinite regression from any one difference isolated and expressed or thought of in regards to the apples. These infinities may be larger or smaller depending on the condition of the apple(s) at any given moment as well as what the apple(s) is/are being compared to. But, they remain infinities nonetheless, and so quite impractical, if not impossible, for us to engage with. Then, the apple must simply be an apple. If ripe and decent on the tongue little thought is given otherwise. This type of categorical isolation may be seen everywhere that language is used. It is part and parcel for how we are able to make sense of the world around us. However, what we take for granted, as may be seen, molds our worldview. The process by which we view and gain knowledge of our reality lies in the language that we use. Because of this, what the layman knows as himself could not be were he born into a different set of circumstances. Yet, he is not a self born of chance; his essence, his soul, still exists no matter the vessel which the soul animates. Rather, the introspective and powerful mind is able to discover the commonalities across mankind and in groups of men as well as what differentiates them and, by the same token, what constitutes himself as himself rather than a mere designation; a name, an age, a height, a weight. Thus, man’s understanding is limited. Like the rings of a tree, the gaps in our understanding grow the further the concentric circle is from the center. We are able to be acutely aware of that which is closest to us, namely ourselves, then our families, then our closest friends, until, eventually, the world is large and our understanding falters.

We have not transcended our natures, and material means and technologies will fail to do that despite our abortive attempts to combat such a reality. Man will be man; finite in ability and, in his current state, distorted and weak in his love for the material and all of the suffering and confusion that it brings. The technologies which have brought us to this point have done little but shrink man as the subject, his pride of place having been taken over by the shadow of industrialized consumerism, until he is left as little more than a quivering blob of reflexes whose sole function if to consume. The disorder, the chaos, of modernity is one of a confused suffering for those living in it, and space does not offer us salvation unless we are able to diagnose these ills and excise such cancers. Otherwise, they will follow us. What then are we left with for all of our technological achievement? More of the same, it would seem. A progress oriented society, one focused on growth and expansion on an infinite scale limited by the finite means of its environment, has enlarged man’s natural inclination to warfare to a nuclear level. Ecological disaster has poisoned the air and greyed the waters about us. The forests fade and the ground is leveled as the dry dirt supports an ever expanding suburban hell of mindless repetitive activity unto nothingness. No longer does man find beauty. No longer does man believe in anything. Dissociated and lost he is told to work ever harder with no hope of family, soon no hope of companionship, and no hope of escape. But, at least we have plastics and metals and screens. Man is weakened, seeking and never finding salvation from all that he now knows: the system that produced him and those that run it. Man has become a stranger to himself and to all others. The family is corroded and rotted. The West is burning. The natural brutality of man previously limited has entered into an unimaginably infernal playground of depravity and abomination.

What once empowered man, the struggle of living, the reward of the family, the love of the understandable, was that which enable him to grow metaphysically tall rather than wide; to strive towards the Heavens rather than stretch out over the Earth and sink into it, lead spikes and all. Thin, stretched, this is the state of modern man. We have traded the intestinal parasite for the cancer, the sacrificial offering for child trafficking and pornography, the scalping for chemical warfare. Growth is

off the table, now it is only a matter of satisfaction. Incomparable evils have come from the smokestacks of our factories, the journeys of our ships, the long wounds of our roads, and these gifts come with no receipts by which we may return them.

Space, then, is no political frontier, because it cannot exist, to us, beyond the human reference point. That is to say that the cosmos will be no less soaked in humanity than Earth is at present. What we have built here we will build elsewhere, unless there is some great change in the minds of the builders. Indeed, there is a great and chilling opportunity for the limitlessness of space to further fetter the smallest among us; for those that have taken power on Earth to reach out to the stars from our backs as their slaves. The harsh reality of space as an environment and the acidic effects of technocapitalism will likely bring to a head the emerging devil of tech-based authoritarianism. On one side, the survival of mankind in such a setting would depend upon intelligent and pragmatic leadership, which does not and has never come from any regime type resembling a direct democracy. The herd is unintelligent, and nature favors strict hierarchies with aggressive and intelligent men at the top. The majority of people, by nature, are unable to lead and instead excel at being led. Most people are not leaders. Most people are not thinkers. If this were so, man as a pack animal would not exist. Yet, technology has robbed man of the meaning he usually found in the world around him. Instead, he has to be sedated with worthless substitutes that are stand ins for his struggle, his life. He must play with symbols until he dies. He must reflexively seek out the most abundant source of dopamine. Present man is a bored and thoroughly domesticated animal, and a slavish man is one that must necessarily be guided more harshly. The only way that mankind will escape into space is in chains; cuffed by those few at the top of the ivory tower.

Any chance of rebellion is dashed by the hyper-individualist dogma burned into the psyches of each one of them. Man is a threat to his brother and sister, and nothing more. Man is isolated. The atomized individual is a mechanical element in the elite’s passage to the stars, wherein he will continue to suffer and not know why, while the elite, aware of the limitations of man, will continue to exploit them for his own gain. The great tragedy of all of this is that this hell was made with good intentions. A great prison built by its prisoners, man sought to improve his material conditions ignorant of the Pandora’s Box he had opened. Wholesale slaughter, diseases of every kind, sickness and psychotic maladies and all sorts of other evils have been unleashed by man’s will to dominate.

Yes, and just as man failed in his Utopian visions for Earth, so too will he fail should he try and escape into space. The political frontier of space is a misnomer. Unless change is brought about that corrects the horrific course of modernity, then space will offer little more than an eternal recurrence, from planet to planet, of the building of our Earth-prison. That is assuming that we survive each trip.

Anywhere that man goes he will bring himself with him. The nature of mankind is not a choice, and the mistakes that man has made on Earth will only be corrected by acknowledgment of enough people to do something about it. The rockets burst aflame and scorch the now moon-like Earth and propel our ships up and away. The great vision of our hope emerges where our regret falls beneath us, a pale blue dot swallowed up, a flicker, into the crushing expanse of space. Just as the sun fell each day on our designs, so too will the light of many stars shroud them in celestial radiance. Just as on Earth, these designs rest on the unspeakable mountains of blood and bones of man. Each and every one. The forces beyond our control have followed us between the stars and we do not see them, but we feel them. We rot, weep, and die as before; the metal hulks of our ships serving less as testaments to our alleged greatness and more as minute coffins crushed and splintered under God’s boot.