Listen To Our Lives/The Wind Will Whisper The Way

I feel as if I did not do enough justice to the subject matter in my previous post. For several years I have been navigating a web woven by people my parent's age and the internet is making it both easier and more complex. I will discontinue referring to how this vindicates my pattern recognition since I am just an explorer reporting back on my findings trying to be as patient as is necessary to wake the word up as it stumbles over this blog. That being said, no good story is complete without an understanding of the heroes involved. But I am not the storyteller, I am only the messenger.

The film depicted here tells the story of how, at the birth of the information age, two diametrically opposite worldviews regarding technology erupted from the psychedelic sixties. One, embodied by Ted Kaczynski, saw where technology could go and saw Hell, while the other, embodied by Stewart Brand, saw where it could go and saw Heaven.

Kacynski was a brilliant, paranoid, Ludditesque mathematician willing to resort to violence while Brand was a brilliant, sane, geeky artist who devoted himself to the non-violent ideals of the counterculture. Brand fed his head, Kacysnki was afraid of his head. Brand compiled the Whole Earth Catalog and Kacysnki used it to learn how to live off-the-grid.

This is a mythic and ironic tale about the psychological repercussions of the neurotic American obsession with (and inability to obtain) freedom and equality and how their outer limits were forged and tested by two different, but very similar people after their first encounter with LSD; Kaczynski as a university professor, Brand as a hapless hippie, and both through the research establishment.

The film begins by quoting Kurt Godel, but I will resort to the Buddha today.

"Never think that I believe I should set out a "system of teaching" to help people understand the way. Never cherish such a thought. What I proclaim is the truth as I have discovered it and "a system of teaching" has no meaning because the truth can’t be cut up into pieces and arranged in a system."
-Diamond Sutra