Trogholm: The Blog Complete list of contents
Older essays
3/12/01	The Net as Universal Metaphor	How the Internet is becoming coterminous with human society.
6/19/04	The Horizons of Prehistory	What if the past was really a realm of wonder?
6/29/04	The Invention of the Neolithic	Agriculture was invented by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
7/9/04	The Ancient Alchemists	The creators of the Neolithic were subtle gardeners, master chefs, and daring experimental scientists.
7/19/04	The First Urbanites	Urban life began before agriculture and may have been a deliberate attempt to further creativity rather than an outcome of subsistence needs.
9/18/07	Of Seas and Skies	How the seafarers of the Neolithic produced the first great scientific cosmology.
12/13/07	On Conspiracy Theory	Are certain blank spots in history merely unknown -- or literally unknowable?
2/13/08	Piercing the Veil	Devising new metaphors of transcendence.
3/3/08	How We Got So Pretty	A 20,000 year experiment in selectively breeding for the brave and the beautiful.
2/24/09	Conspiracy Theories and the Motivation Game	The most prominent conspiracy theories often follow the same plotline as drawing-room murder mysteries.
Initial blog entries
5/16/09	The first alchemists were masters of -- glue	The earliest experiments in chemical transformation of materials go back to the dawn of modern humanity -- and may even be what made us human.
5/20/09	Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider	Certain kinds of science stories get instantly transformed into myth.
6/12/09	Searching for Once Upon a Time	Fairy tales may reflect the actual societies and beliefs of c. 3500-2500 BC.
6/20/09	Civilization beyond Civilization	Civilization arose within a widespread network of vibrant local cultures and was not the exclusive product of a few superpowers.
6/22/09	Civilization beyond Civilization	Until very recently, elites with plenty of excess wealth and leisure were the chief drivers of cultural innovation.
6/22/09	Of Hollow Bone Flutes and the Imperative to “Be That Empty”	The mystical underpinnings of the most ancient art and music.
6/29/09	Geeks at Work	Evidence suggests that the geek tendency to create elaborate intellectual systems must be as old as humanity.
7/4/09	Along the Via Negativa with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1: Seeing Nobody on the Road	Alice perceives a reality beyond all attributes.
7/11/09	Along the Via Negativa with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 2: Meeting the Buddha on the Road	Alice finds herself in a garden that is not the true garden.
7/17/09	The Efflux of Osiris	Parallels between ancient Egyptian myth and Indonesian practices of secondary burial.
Visions of History - the earliest human culture
7/22/09	The Algorithms of String	Human culture as a series of successive visions of the structure of existence -- the first of which involved a recognition that physical reality is mutable.
7/29/09	Female Magic	Women's magic, childbirth, and knotted strings as components of the most ancient vision.
8/8/09	The Invention of Society	The development of formal social roles and relationships was the hallmark of the second vision.
8/13/09	Yet Another Example of Ancient Tech	Sophisticated use of fire in tool-making as far back as 164,000 years ago.
8/15/09	Mind on the Edge of Chaos	The third ancient vision, involving shamans, trickster stories, and a possible leap in brain organization.
8/23/09	The Bottleneck and the Great Migration	How it may have come about when we first left Africa.
The Dance of the Visions - science-and-democracy and the chaos vision
9/5/09	The Dance of the Visions	Human history has been shaped by a recurring sequence of scientifically-based, socially-based, and inner experience-based visions.
9/6/09	On the Antiquity of Fairy Tales	A new study confirms that fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood must be thousands of years old.
9/11/09	The Era of Science and Democracy	From the 1930's to the middle 60's, our society was dominated by a partnership between the scientific materialism vision and the democracy vision.
9/17/09	How Surrealism Makes You Smarter	Research shows that exposure to things that don't make sense kicks your brain into working better.
9/21/09	The Death of Reason	The replacement after 1915 of "reason" by "chaos" as the primary interpretation of inner experience.
10/1/09	The Screwballs	The evolution of the chaos vision in the 1930's and 40's.
10/8/09	The Democratization of Higher Knowledge	The symbiotic interaction of technology, democratic populism, and the chaos vision in the early 40's.
10/15/09	The End of an Era	The coming collapse of the democracy-and-chaos partnership will parallel the collapse of the reason-and-science partnership in 1915.
10/21/09	An Age of Chaos	The chaos vision became a center of opposition to the partnership of science and democracy starting in the 1940's.
10/29/09	The Times They Are A-Changin’	The collapse of the science-and-democracy partnership and the emergence of the chaos-based counterculture and the anti-war movement in 1964-65.
The Dance of the Visions - chaos, holism, and the 60's counterculture
11/7/09	From Hipsters to Hippies	As chaos escaped from the influence of the failing science vision, the laid-back cool of the hipsters gave way to the passionate enthusiasm of the hippies
11/15/09	The Search for Meaning	The Kennedy assassination, the Sixties search for higher understanding, and the emergence of the holism vision.
11/25/09	The Proto-History of Holism	The early development of holism, from the late 1800's to 1962.
12/5/09	The Rube Goldberg Principle	The influence of science, democracy, and chaos on each other and on holism in the 1920's and 30's.
12/11/09	Moral Agents	The moral imperatives that prompted the appearance of successors to the democracy and chaos visions.
12/25/09	The True Voice of Chaos	The roots of the chaos vision in the disillusionment with reason in the 1700's and its emergence under the impact of science in the 1860's.
12/27/09	A Basic Timeline	A timeline of the recent visions and a list of all the visions
1/3/10	Nothing But a Pack of Cards	Alice in Wonderland as an epitomal early expression of the chaos vision.
1/8/10	We’re All Mad Here	The Cheshire Cat and the higher potentials of chaos.
1/13/10	The Wood Where Things Have No Names	For Lewis Carroll, Nothingness was the still center at the heart of chaos.
1/20/10	In All This Shit, There Must Be a Counterculture	The genesis of the 60's counterculture and its lessons for the present moment.
1/26/10	The Alchemical Marriage of Chaos and Holism	The 60's counterculture came out of a realignment of chaos towards holism that began in the 50's with Rachel Carson and flowed through surf music.
2/1/10	When the Vertical World Turns Horizontal	The currently ongoing realignment of holism away from democracy and towards multiculturalism will be what kickstarts the next counterculture.
2/12/10	Everything Changes	The 60's counterculture had two stages, the first focused on chaos and the rejection of the science vision and the second on holism, multiculturalism, and creative imagination.
The Dance of the Visions - the emergence of multiculturalism and creative imagination
2/17/10	“Alice–Mutton. Mutton–Alice.”	The concept of personhood was already central to the chaos vision by 1870.
2/20/10	Unalienable Rights and Universal Consciousness	Democracy crystallized in the 1760's thanks to the first intimations of chaos, and chaos in the 1860's thanks to the first intimations of holism.
3/1/10	You’re Doing It Wrong	Holism crystallized in the 1930's thanks to the first intimations of multiculturalism.
3/4/10	Russian Nesting Dolls	In the late 60's, the need for a successor to chaos that could accommodate magic, morality, and wisdom was becoming apparent.
3/11/10	The World Beyond the Hill	The first definite intimations of creative imagination appeared around 1970 in association with multiculturalism.
3/17/10	On the Mungly Planet	But in the 1970's, the development of creative imagination was still restricted by the assumptions of holism.
3/22/10	Living in the Material World	Creative imagination will not fully crystallize until it can draw upon the first intimations of a successor to holism, which are just starting to appear.
4/6/10	Coming Unglued	Multiculturalism was emerging rapidly in the late 60's but needed creative imagination to develop further.
4/20/10	Chaos Tamed	When chaos was domesticated in the 1970's, not only did it lose its mojo, but it became harder to believe in the possibility of creative change.
4/25/10	Mirror, Mirror	The epitomal 1967 Star Trek episode offers a glimpse of what lies beyond chaos.
4/30/10	Holistic Utopianism	Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog brought the holism vision to a critical stage of self-awareness and offered early hints of creative imagination.
5/5/10	Why Don’t You Build a Spaceship?	For the chaos vision, higher knowledge and purpose resided in the subconscious.  For the creative imagination vision, they reside in the "cloud."
5/12/10	The Time My Mother Did Magic	One of the stranger incidents of my childhood.
The Dance of the Visions - dominant partnerships and romantic breaks
5/16/10	Democracy Inverted	Ronald Reagan turned the democracy vision inside out by subordinating it to individualism in the democracy-and-chaos partnership.
5/23/10	Theories of Everything	Each dominant partnership at its most profound gives rise to a universal philosophy that outlasts the partnership itself.
6/7/10	He Who Tastes, Knows	The catalytic influence of holism reconfigured first chaos and then democracy between 1965 and 1975.
6/19/10	The Romantic Break	As each dominant partnership passes from idealism to cynicism, it unleashes a long-lasting romantic offshoot, such as the occultism of the late 19th century.
6//26/10	You’ve Got the Look	Changes in clothing styles keep pace with the cycle of visions and suggest a deep, underlying instinctual element.
7/4/10	The Revolutionary Mode	The "romantic break" of the 1790's sparked the French Revolution and 150 years of revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) radicalism.
7/22/10	A Multiplicity of Worlds	Each romantic break involves a yearning for wider horizons, which results in a rejection of the two dominant visions and a flowering of the three emergent visions.
7/30/10	Tech Toys	The post-World War II technological revolution of television, transistor radios, and computers has been both global in scope and personally empowering.
The Dance of the Visions - the visions shaping recent events
8/7/10	The Coming of Multiculturalism	Electoral democracy is a top-down system which is less equipped to handle a diverse and fast-paced world than the flexible networks of multiculturalism.
8/10/10	Followup: “Brain’s Wiring: More Like the Internet Than a Pyramid?”	New research suggests the brain is not organized hierarchally, but rather as a distributed network.
8/10/10	Follow-up #2: And Then There’s 4chan	The notoriously anarchic message board 4chan offers a demonstration of the surprisingly effective nature of unregulated self-organization.
8/14/10	PThe Soul of Multiculturalism Expands	In the 1970's, multiculturalism began to shed the limitations of chaos and move towards creative imagination.
8/21/10	Make It Work!	The creative imagination vision crystallized about 1979-81 in close association with a pragmatic approach towards mysticism and magic.
8/29/10	The Improvisational Universe	The improvisational philosophy of democracy-and-chaos has deeply influenced the development of multiculturalism and creative imagination since 1980.
9/2/10	The Land-Pirats	The romantic break of the 80's: the Hacker Ethic, the free software movement, and the underground stream of the "shadow visions."
9/11/10	Heretics of the 1980′s	The breakdown of the democracy-and-chaos partnership c. 1984-87 pushed holism, multiculturalism, and the hacker subculture into a position of resistance.
9/16/10	What Is To Be Done?	With democracy-and-chaos now in collapse and holism gone flabby, we must look to multiculturalism, creative imagination, the do-it-yourself-ism of maker culture, and the Hacker Ethic for a way forward.
9/22/10	Eggs Before Chickens	The underground stream of "shadow visions" may be a powerful relic of the time before the appearance of modern humans
Visions of History - finding ourselves, in the depths of time and in the present moment
10/3/10	The Great Migration Revisited	After leaving Africa 125,000 years ago, modern humans spent 50,000 years in the Middle East, just getting accustomed to the wider world.
10/10/10	A Little Housecleaning	Notice of the creation of this list
10/15/10	The Art of Transgression	Of the dissolution of boundaries, sacred sex, and the reconciliation of opposites.
10/19/10	A Matter of Depth	Why having a deeper and broader picture of human history matters.
10/22/10	Killer Apes -- or Not?	And why what we imagine ourselves to be affects how we judge our own behavior.
10/27/10	Conscious Control	On evolution as internalization and why all humans are geeks.
11/3/10	The Mysterious East	Even before modern humans settled in the Middle East, there may have been an earlier migration to India and Southeast Asia.
11/8/10	The Old Ones	On the extraordinary shamans of 100,000 years ago who set the Dance of the Visions in motion.
11/16/10	The Wall that Jon Stewart Builds Around Himself	On participatory knowledge, participatory comedy, and moving towards a participatory society.
11/23/10	Spiritual Energy	Concerning paleolithic shamans, chi, Richard Stallman, and the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi.
11/30/10	The Great Disillusionment	The trauma of the last ice age, and how our expectation of meaningful pattern in the world, combined with the inadequacy of our attempts to adequately express that pattern, helps propel the dance of the visions.
12/5/10	And So It Begins	With the Wikileaks uproar, we are now fully launched into a countercultural phase of cascading breakdowns and transformations.
12/9/10	Cosmic Order and Cosmic Insecurity	The ice age fostered a cosmic order vision that combatted dire expectations of decline and disaster with hopes for the return of a lost Golden Age.
12/16/10	Among the Spirits	The ordinary visions, the "shadow visions," and what it means to be human.
12/23/10	Getting Mythic	Of WikiLeaks, the question of whether we invent the visions or the visions invent us, and what happens when the imaginary spills over into reality.
12/25/10	The Denisovans	Update to "The Mysterious East" -- a new species of archaic humans has been discovered which interbred with moderns humans in Southeast Asia.
Visions of History - who are we? and what is our place in the universe?
12/27/10	We Are All Wholes, We Are All Parts	Every one of us is a "holobiont" -- not a single being but a community of organisms that is intimately connected with every other such community.
1/8/11	The Hivemind	The concept of the hivemind has been developing along with the holism vision for 85 years, but it is only now becoming a positive aspiration.
1/16/11	A Lost World	There was a great fall and a forgetting at the end of the ice age, and we are still trying to recover what was lost.
1/21/11	Food Forests	The end of the ice age also brought a profound new image of possibility, involving the reshaping of nature to meet human desires.
2/4/11	Times of Great Fear	But that complex tangle of hopes and fears also led to a scapegoating of the spirit vision and an attempt to rein in rogue shamans by casting them as evil sorcerers.
2/6/11	Horizontalism	What the Egyptian protests have in common with jumping gene clusters.
2/13/11	Hacking, Making, and Sharing	The moral identity of the next counterculture.
2/15/11	A Something That is Nothing	Of creative imagination and the commerce between the non-existent and the existent.
2/20/11	The First Global Civilization	Around 50,000 years ago, there was a great coming-together of human communities, made possible by the development of a common symbolic vocabulary in art, music, story, and language.
3/1/11	The Spectre of the Past	For almost two centuries, we have been haunted by a sense of something enormous and ancient and unexplained lying just underneath our feet.
3/3/11	For the Lulz	What Anonymous and our earliest trickster-loving ancestors have in common.
Onward into Myth Time
3/8/11	Solidarity Forever	Of the Wisconsin protests, working-class chic, and what foodies know that hipsters don't.
3/12/11	Mario Savio Lives	Summoning people to civil disobedience is a good way to launch a counterculture, so Anonymous gives a call back to Mario Savio, as Savio did to Thoreau.
3/15/11	One Big Soul	Tom Joad as the original face of holism-touched-by-multiculturalism.
3/20/11	Myth Space	We humans simultaneously inhabit both ordinary reality and mythic reality, a space of the imagination whose rules are those of ritual and magic.
3/25/11	Radical Fun	The connections between fun, higher knowledge, and mythic reality.  Or, Why the Wobblies were right.
4/4/11	A Clash of Moralities	Do we have any chance of creating a free and open society that meets basic needs without coercion or explotation?  Higher knowledge suggests we do.
4/14/11	Alignments	In AD&D terms, the newest forces on the political scene are the chaotic-neutral libertarians and the chaotic-good anarchists.  But the anarchists seem to be having more fun.
4/30/11	The Limits of Compassion	Our society is still taking its moral guidance from 2000-year-old notions of compassion which have become outworn and counterproductive.  We need to set our sights higher.
5/15/11	Transcendent Evolution	The acknowledgement of altruism may force evolutionary theory to give up its outdated attachment to mechanism and reductionism and become a far broader philosophy of cosmic unfolding.
5/25/11	The Visions Revisited	The force propelling the visions may be as simple as the need to reconcile ordinary knowledge and higher knowledge, and the results of that attempt are both powerful and inevitably flawed.
6/1/11	Creative Materiality	As holism gains cultural dominance, it will increasingly reveal its weaknesses and limitations.  Even now, the seeds of its successor can already be seen in a new appreciation for the physical world.
The History of Chaos
6/18/11	Prelude to Chaos	Meanwhile, the chaos vision is still with us, but to understand its significance it is necessary to look back at the inner experience visions that came before it.
6/28/11	Thrice Great Hermes	The reason vision which preceded chaos was based on the unlikely but alluring belief that cosmic truths could be grasped through philosophical introspection.
7/13/11	Wild Talents	How chaos got its weird on, and why Charles Fort believed that everyone's a wizard.
7/22/11	Weird Science	Put Fort and Lovecraft together, and you get a view of the cosmos as a place of chaotic mystery to be known through its anomalies.
8/2/11	Chaos and Science Fiction	The classic science fiction of the 30's and 40's thought of itself as rational and scientific, but there was always a bit of chaos at its heart.
8/15/11	All in His Mind	Of Bishop Berkeley, Lewis Carroll, Fredric Brown, and how believing in one another holds the world together.
9/4/11	Curioser and Curioser	Even further down the rabbit hole -- is there an element of intentionality built into the structure of reality itself?
9/18/11	Chaos Mark I and Chaos Mark II	Some SF writers in the 40's embraced chaos while others were more ambivalent, but together they loosed magic upon the world.
9/29/11	Chaos is King!	Chaos linked to scientific materialism has afflicted us with high-handedness and lack of moral balance.  Can chaos linked to holism set us free?
Higher Knowledge Examined
10/15/11	The Parameters of Higher Knowledge	Of mysticism, magic, and morality -- as well as the shamanistic workings at Zuccotti Square.
10/31/11	Higher Knowledge and Elite Control	Higher knowledge can be misused, as when the rulers manage to pass themselves off as divine beings
11/9/11	Higher Knowledge and Popular Culture	The early 20th century brought about a great liberation and dissemination of higher knowledge, and American popular culture was its primary vehicle.
11/26/11	Keeping the Peasants in Line	Heinlein's stories of the 1940's prefigure our current self-appointed meritocracy, but Henry Kuttner's lay the foundations for today's anti-authority hackers.
The Birth of New Visions
12/30/11	Democratic Chaos	How the association between the democracy and chaos visions brought forth civil rights, civil liberties, and civil disobedience.
1/10/12	The Birth of a Vision	A new visions is born out of every counterculture and finds its first mentor in the vision just senior to it.
1/24/12	Multiculturalism vs. the Hacker Ethic	Social visions in association with scientific visions yield utopian dreams.  Social visions in association with inner experience visions produce images of the ideal citizen.
2/12/12	Dualism, Monism, and Holism	But the creations of associations between scientific and inner experience visions requires  great philosophical flights of the imagination
2/28/12	A Resonance of Visions	The association between chaos and holism that developed in the 1800's was energized by the failing transcendence of reason-and-scientific-materialism.
3/18/12	The Mechanical Philosophy and the System of Nature	The holism vision itself can be traced to certain visionary ideas that scientific materialism generated in the 18th century but rejected in the 19th.
3/29/12	The Birth of a Vision, Reconsidered	In which I dig deeper into the orign of new visions and make some surprising discoveries about the inner dynamics of a counterculture.
4/5/12	Of Gaps and Gears	In which it appears that the system of visions works like a well-oiled machine -- but one full of holes through which higher knowledge can enter.
4/23/12	Materialists and Vitalists	There was a revolution in consciousness between about 1886 and 1926, as the way people related to the cosmos came to be defined by chaos-plus-holism.
5/3/12	Clearing the Field	The full emergence of the holism vision in the 1910's can be understood only in terms of the final over-reach of scientific materialism.

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