Month: August 2002

Some strange thoughts on tie-up between anti-establishment / conspiracy theory views, the “freedom” of sixties popular culture, together with the “conspiracy of silence” Galbraith / DeLorean / Argyris / Emperors’s suit of clothes view of “rationalisation”, and Jorn’s choice of seeing and denial in the following quote from his “Thoughts on the sixties” ….. “Between 65 and 68, a huge transformation affected millions of people in the world, very deeply, allowing them to see problems that had been totally denied before.” The Kesey / Heller / Pirsig drivers cannot be independant of this. Jorn’s biographical music / culture / politics pages are an interesting starting point to follow-up some of this stuff. Strange that whilst I can find no explicit link between Jorn’s political / cultural viewpoints and his literature-based interest in “AI”, both aspects are independantly very strong in his published thoughts, whereas my thesis starts from the point that this link is in fact a key part of human knowledge. (See Jorn’s Biographical Page and follow the footnote musical and literary biography links via Richard Stone to Ken Kesey, Haight-Ashbury and the rest of the sixties drug-culture – Jorn is a couple of years ahead of me agewise, but there is a spooky parallel between his musical influences auto-biog and my own.)

Several philosophers, and writers of metaphysical bent, have made use of mind-altering drugs to see things as they “really are”. It seems clear that breaking with accepted norms “as rationalised” by the immediate society, however this is achieved, is part of the knowledge / enlightenment jigsaw puzzle. At some level this is almost trivial / obvious, but it seems a key mechanism to understand.