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+\chapter{}
+
+Let's backtrack to wherever it is that
+the Origins of Western Civilization are reinvented and then go forward to try a little
+progressive meta-history of this most modern of organisms. Greece, a tiny time-slice
+inserted far down, towards the beginning of
+the ascent-trajectory of western Man. Our
+art, philosophy, logic are said to begin here.
+What if all memory of Greece were erased?
+
+All countries, cultures and religions secrete, value and store up selective histories
+and mythologies to legitimate themselves.
+What do Europe and America consider themselves to be without this passing nod to Greek
+origins? Even Hitler's and Mussolini's regimes featured Greek-derived iconography.
+To make these histories, an amalgam of
+events, myths, legends, folk tales, sagas,
+religious deeds, epics (to say nothing of vast
+storehouses of paper, as well as appropriate
+mnemonic architecture and monuments)
+were collated. Thus a quasi-arbitrary sequence is created, one linking events into
+causal chains in order to create the feel of
+mystical inevitability, celebrating the everconstant triumph of the present. Mistakes or
+horrors are leached out or are considered to
+be the price one pays for progress. Continuity, progress, history is a smoothing out
+of the sudden, the disruptive, the violent, the
+random and unaccounted-for. Even the most
+rationalistic sequences must include the cultural, for logic too is a \emph{culture}.
+
+The building up of Western Civilization is
+a story of grand strides toward unity, yet
+requiring breakdowns and fragmentation of
+old formations: that is to say, re-feudalization before new reorganization (note the
+re-feudalization of AT\&T). This totalizing
+sequence constitutes a grand myth --- given
+an ascendant trajectory which will avoid
+breakdowns --- called progress or sometimes
+evolution --- beginning in the past few hundred years when some percieved that the
+industrial revolution had to rewrite the old
+myths into new ones, forever ending circles
+and cycles and introducing exponential
+curves reaching into the empyrean (sometimes called space). To question this accretion at any point is to disrupt the spell the Grand Ascent has over us.
+
+It may be argued that certain events were
+chosen arbitrarily; an association of ideas
+about event sequences, which happen to
+have --- we have not accounted for pure invention --- operated in a certain temporal sequence, not nescessarily in a cause-effect
+line. A politico-mythico-Lockian mnemonic.
+Ultimately G\"{o}del makes the point that the
+linking of all logical steps depends on an act
+of faith, just as the assignment of meaning to
+a pool of securities is an act of faith.
+
+We can follow some of the many arbitrary
+feeder streams that empty into this ocean of
+Western Culture. Oedipus, for example, is
+not merely a Greek play about a hubris-ridden, stubborn figure, one prototypical
+individual, blinded and suffering. It is the
+story of the restoration of balanced ethical
+and divine budgets. The tale is also about a
+power struggle, a plot in the face of an
+environmental disaster: medical (plague),
+economic
+(starvation), genetic (dynastic legitimation: though it is not specifically mentioned as such, genetic information as fate --- 
+as explained by the retroactive prophecy
+delivered by Delphi --- are intertwined), and
+demographic catastrophe (sterility in women
+and potential population decline). The tale
+is also about an information-search (among
+other things for genetic origins). Who passed
+ownership and title on to whom and how,
+based on breeding lines of descent, a story of
+false and contaminated claimants. It is about
+the relationship of genetic purity to rulership, property, the laws that define those
+relationships, the rules of mating. The health
+of the nation is at stake.
+
+Usually this play is interpreted for us as a
+moral, psychological and sexual tragedy (incest). Freud led us in the wrong direction,
+positing the erotic rather than the reproductive consequence, falling into a trap set by
+the old Hebrews and Christians. Lust, especially incest, leads to death. But then, we
+may ask, what did Freud know about life?
+What little he did know, he lied about.
+
+Genes, contaminated by \emph{deeds} (acquired
+characteristics, or fate?), the inadvertant sin
+of Oedipus and Jocasta have brought together
+the wrong genes, illegitimately. The sins of
+the rulers, or putative founders of this kingdom of Thebes (the information) contaminates the body politic, its well being, its
+health, and affects all nature. Did the Greeks
+know about genetics? No, but they were
+obsessed with plant and animal breeding
+and dynastic breeding strategies. The forced
+comparison between human activity and
+nature's response is interpreted in a magical
+way and skews human behavior. (That the
+play is also Athenian propaganda against
+Thebes and Delphi is another story in itself.)
+If the thought of the pre-Socratics, Socrates,
+Plato and Aristotle go into modern rational
+thought, why not these tales, which are
+\emph{logical} constructs disguised as dreamlike
+tales of scandals.
+
+Another take: Helen of Troy gives birth to
+the Hellenes. We can now understand one of
+the reasons for the furor over Troy. Only
+Helen can give birth to the Hellenes and
+she---or the symbolic and real reproductive
+apparatus inside her beautiful body---has
+been stolen. Helen, mythic figure, like a
+queen ant or bee, is a collective emanation.
+As a carrier of a certain nation or race-spawning mechanism,
+she is, from an information-perspective, also collective. \booktitle{The
+Iliad} concerns a conflict of ethnicities, a
+polarity called Asia vs. Europe, an East-West
+struggle for the control of trading routes to
+the profitable Scythian hinterland. The war
+is used as a means of uniting diverse tribes
+into one mega-ethnicity. The first Grand
+Alliance, the first NATO-like Allies. These
+themes are summoned up again during the
+East-West war against the Persians. The Iliad
+includes a brilliant, albeit indirect, essay on
+set-theory disguised as a list of tribes. The
+Hellenes are the set of all Hellenic sets: a
+genome of a corporate body called a race.
+
+The Old Testament can be seen as a set of
+linked stories and myths about the Hebraic
+relationship to God's Design (covenant, contract, law ... rules of the game, more honored in the breach than the observation), a
+history of dynastic continuities; rules for the
+preservation of the Hebrew genepool and its
+royal subsets: the living propagation of
+God's word, or perhaps the Word made into
+code...God provides the operating system;
+the Hebrews write the software). The Design
+has rules for mating, accretion of power, and
+how to transmit \emph{informational} treasure (\emph{The
+Talmud}). The Old Testament is also a meditation on the rules of economic behavior,
+negotiation of conflicts, law, contracts, politics, nations.
+
+These notions of a nation encompasses a
+genetic mystique. An ethnicity contains the
+idea of birth from a set of primal founders, all
+of whose descendants have shares in a commonality of genes and are related.
+
+Implicit in the Old Testament and Judaic
+law (and fulfilled in Kaballa) is a sort of
+evolutionary trajectory along a linear path.
+The history of Jews, unlike the history of
+\enquote{primitives} is not cyclical except in the
+longest sense. Gratification and fulfillment
+are deferred. The Hebrews introduce the
+notion of the long-range trajectory, completed
+by the coming of the Grand Recombinatorial
+and debt-redeeming wizard, The Messiah.
+This Messiah will reunite the scattered
+Hebrews (for how can they mate if they are
+far apart?). And \emph{this} Messiah is only for the
+Jews, only for \emph{one} genepool, no one else.
+Kaballistic lore, a heretical meditation
+on the same long-range cycle, is a wave with
+only one fall and rise, spread throughout the
+universe. The Messiah becomes a way of
+reuniting, reconcentrating the power that
+the disaspora fragmented, a kind of ultimate
+meta-history of mergers.
+
+Still another event: What strategy did
+Joseph use to monopolize Egypt's grain production for the Pharoah? Prophecy, dream
+interpretation, fear, land-reform, expropriation of commodities, rationalization of production (a kind of early, political, state-run
+agribusiness), storage facilities, new gathering techniques. Clearly Joseph must have
+used some form of accounting and econometric projection to affect a grand, structural
+and political change. His interpretation of
+Pharoah's dream is risk-analysis. Not only
+did Joseph change the environment around
+him, but his thought radiates down through
+the ages and affects agribusiness today. The
+short-range, forced march collectivization in
+the Soviet Union, the long range \enquote{collectivization} and concentration into agribusiness
+in the U.S. (using genetic cropping strategies), use the same pattern. Maybe we should
+call Jung's idea the collectivized memory.
+
+Up to the New Testament, the Hebrews are
+heterosexual. The Jews \enquote{give birth} to the
+Christians, or that's the way we tell the story.
+God uses Mary as a child-producing\slash nurturing vehicle (expropriating variant tales out
+of the past). Here is a departure into androgeny: self-replication, an ancient, sinful
+theme, for this is what Lucifer did too. Incest? Autocest? Autogamy? Or is God a
+wierd insect? New rules for sexual mating
+enter the picture and implicitly alters the relationship of dynasty to property. By proslytyzing \emph{all}, not only Jews, the nation, the
+ethnicity dissolves and becomes a sort of
+corporation: shares in redemption are open
+to all. The Messiah will redeem \emph{all} debt. The
+Old Testament is endogamic: the New Testament is exogamic.
+
+Historiography is expressed as reproduction, human continuity with attendant \enquote{qualities}; genetics as myth. But does the myth enter into the genetics of the present,
+as many scientists turn back to what was religion and magic in the past? (One may pour
+enormous resources into a project and use
+scientific techniques in pursuit of magical
+aims.) The Christian God's experiment enthralls the moderns and they try to replicate
+it, using the Holy Spirit to fertilize a laboratory vagina.
+
+Genetics and the right to rule, to own
+property, come for the Romans at a time
+when both myth and documentation exist
+side by side inside the dynasty-obsessed
+empire. The Empire funds the history of its
+own origins, a vast, dynastic myth called
+\booktitle{The Aeniad}, which traces the ancestry of the
+Romans to the Trojans, not the Greeks.
+
+For the Christians and the Romans, these
+tales explain discontinuity while maintaining continuity. The new birth stories insure
+discontinuity between the Romans and the
+Greeks. In the same sense, Jesus is not only
+divine, but a Jew and not a Jew. Aeneas is a
+Greek, but not a Greek.
+
+At time's end, the Christians promise -- 
+theme and variation -- Resurrection and redemption of all believers (investors). They
+will bring to material life the dead and
+dissolved who remain as memories. But how
+is this Ressurection to be accomplished?
+Will there be an information-search for the
+dissolved and scattered, the transformed,
+decayed human material of the world, and
+then a sort of reconstruction, a retro-combination? Clearly, the parts, the very atoms,
+have memory addresses. Or are the \emph{memory}
+elements to be reinfused into dust, and that
+dust brought to life, as the Kaballists claimed
+to be able to do? Or are the memory elements
+inserted in machines? No matter. The point
+is that the \emph{thinking} behind these tales descends to us. (Of another transubstantiation
+myth which has to do with capital itself, more later.)
+
+These political and social materials, this
+kind of thought, woven back into the whole
+traditional memory-corpus of dramatic, fictional, religious works, permits us to see that
+a trans-disciplinary
+whole operated even
+in the ancient past, albeit using coded languages. These were preserved, by some, with
+consequences for the present. On the other
+hand, what was selectively forgotten and
+buried? We never get to hear the peasant's
+side of the story in the Joseph tale. The
+oppressed have no dynastic history. The
+concreteness, the mundanity of the past, has
+been generalized, its particularity eroded,
+just like the start-up equity put into a corpoation. The information of the past shapes
+the information processing of the present.
+
+The econometric predictions of this present (think of the Russian-American wheat
+deal of 1972-73, the decision to corner the
+grain market, extensive planning) uses, with
+minor variation, the Josephian scenario. In
+fact, to tell the story again, the disaster
+Joseph predicted was not a disaster of underproduction, but too many years of overproduction, with attendant deressed prices, requiring either a famine to be manufactured,
+or at least an \emph{informational} famine created
+by cornering the market, leading to real
+hunger. Prices? Is this really in \booktitle{The Bible}?
+Joseph, after all, as Pharoah's agent, sold the
+surplus grain on the world market during a
+world famine. New discourses inserted back
+into past events disrupt the holiness of the
+memory time-series, and question the legitimacy of modern thought-buildup, indeed,
+the legitimacy of all present-based\slash obsessed-with-past, the soft cause-effect linkages built
+into history.
+