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kult ov kaos Issue 3 Edited by saint natas kult ov kaos magazine Editor: saint natas Contents Nietzschean Nonlinear Economics? By Ben Goertzel The Walls of Heaven By Richard Stanley Mog Protocol By Frater Drench Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation Part III By Dave McGowan Interview with KatieJane Garside of Ruby Throat By Saint Natas i am at lukla airport By KatieJane Garside Calling Demons into a Glass of Water! By David Rankine ANARCHISM By Emma Goldman Go With the Flow – But Be Ready for Surprises on the Way by Jeff Atkins The Holy Guardian Angel: Exploring the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage By Aaron Leitch Interview with Shou Wang and Shenggy of White By Saint Natas Was Cagliostro A 'Charlatan'? By H. P. Blavatsky Wasted My Life (A letter from prison) By Joseph R. Gerken I Stellar Magic By Payam Nabarz ietzschean onlinear Economics? By Ben Goertzel I was thinking a little more about the current economic situation and why it seems so confusing to people, including experts. Part of the problem is just that the systems involved are so complex, of course -- the economy has complexified and the human brain has not kept up. Another part of the problem, though, is that none of the traditional economic theories (neither the mathematical ones or the qualitative ones) embrace this complexity in principle . I.e., the very fact of the increased complexity of the economy has direct implications, which seem to require introduction of new approaches for economic analysis. One way to look at this is in terms of what I semi-seriously call "Nietzschean economics," where a more abstract notion of economic power replaces the traditional notion of money. Put simply: it seems that the modern economy has somewhat obsoleted the concept of money , which has economists (and many others) confused... For instance, China has a lot of US dollars right now, in principle ... but they can't really spend most of it, because if they traded their dollars for goods on the open international market, then the dollar would collapse in the international currency markets, the US economy would tank, demand for Chinese goods would collapse, and China would risk massive internal unrest etc. It's not exactly that the Chinese government has money they can't use; but they have money that comes with severe restrictions on the ways it can be used. Having this money confers great economic power on them; but, this economic power can't necessarily be used in the traditional manner of buying stuff. In general: with the world so interconnected, the notion of a unit of currency as being something that can be exchanged for a certain amount of stuff, anywhere, doesn't really apply... More complexly, the same sorta phenomenon applies among and within investment banks and other financial institutions. E.g. a large bank holds some portfolio of financial instruments ... but if they sell a lot of one kind of instrument, this impacts the markets in a way that affects the value of the others, etc. So one can hardly assign each instrument they hold a value independently of the others.... The values of their various portfolio items are interdependent in the manner of a system of simultaneous nonlinear equations. What this growing, rampant interdependence means is that the traditional concepts and tools of economics don't closely apply to the international biz/finance world anymore... A lot of this was foreseen, on a qualitative level, in Galbraith's book "Economics and the Public Purpose" from the 1970s ... he talked about the "market economy" versus the "technostructure" and pointed out that the latter (being a complex of large corporations, governments and other institutions) follows quite different rules. Well, now the nonlinear dynamics of the technostructure is running rampant -- but economists are still mainly studying it with tools designed for studying markets. One step I think that needs to be taken, on the theory level, is to view actual buying power as Level 1 of a hierarchy of types of economic power. I'm thinking of: • Level 1 = power to buy goods or services [right now, or at some future point(s) in time] • Level 2 = power to influence others' Level 1 power • Level 3 = power to influence others' Level 2 power • .. etc. ... In principle, one could boil down Level k power into Level 1 power. But in practice, with the economy so complex, this involves calculations that are infeasible to do. So, economic agents are in effect seeking Level k power without a clear picture of how it will in the future boil down into Level 1 power. This might be thought of as Nietzschean economics (as Nietzsche viewed the "will to power" as the essential dynamic of the universe). The ultimate extreme of all this of course would be • Level infinity = power to influence others' Level infinity power which was basically Nietzsche's view of the driving force of the universe ... and I do think that international economics and politics boils down to this sometimes: power for it's own sake, rather than being tied to ultimately influencing the acquisition of goods and services. Traditional economics is based on the notion that everything boils down to buying power ... but in a world where no one is smart enough to calculate what their decisions will imply in terms of buying powe r, this sort of economics seems to have limited applicability... What we need is a nice, elegant, pragmatically applicable theory of the nonlinear dynamics of Level k economic power under conditions where • the computational complexity of recognizing important high-level patterns in an economy vastly exceeds • the computational capability of even the smartest individual participants in the economy This might be a fun thing to work on, but I've got a thinking machine to build, so hopefully somebody else will do it ... or we'll have to wait for the AI to solve the problem. (Of course, an appropriately constructed AI could also palliate the problem, due to having increased capability to recognize economic patterns, either due to possessing greater-than-human general intelligence, or due to combining human-level general intelligence with specialized capabilities for economic analysis.) The Walls of Heaven By Richard Stanley Mora (1963, 436-438) writes that tarantism and dance manias used rituals as psychotherapeutic attempts to cope with either individual or societal maladjustments which fostered mental disturbances. Henry Swinburne , who traveled to the 'country of the tarantula' in the 1770's, was one of the first and only foreign observers to hint at the true character of the phenomenon. He concluded that the tarantella was probably a form of pagan bacchanalia, a flight from the toils of agrarian life, that now operated 'under cover' of the Spider and devotion to St. Paul (Melechi, A. University of York, 2005). Sigerist held a similar view. An abnormal psychology text written by Robert Carson of Duke University and his colleagues (1998, 37) cites Sigerist to support the view that St. Vitus's dance and tarantism were similar to ancient Greek orgiastic rites which had been outlawed by Christian authorities, but were secretly practiced anyway. While still only a wild hypothesis, that anonymous text in the Benedictine library hinted at the existence of a pagan shrine on the mountain of Montserrat in southern Catalonia consecrated to Venus. The name of the route we took from the upper station, St. Michael's path (Rifa, M. Montserrat Official Guidetext, 1998) would tend to confirm this, suggesting aggressive Christianization. I was starting to seriously doubt the icon had simply been abandoned on the mountain by that 'fleeing gothic bishop' - conveniently fingered in the church's official account. She had been here all along, since before the Christian faith existed and despite the Roman Church's every attempt to bring her under the yoke of their patriarchal dogma, she was still here in the heart of a web spun over countless generations, at the heart of her holy mountain reigning in undisputed dominion over an invisible empire. Quite possibly the original icon rested in the locked chapel before us and the one on display in the basilica was the replica rather than it being the other way round as some would have it. Equally plausibly the sepulchral chamber, in which we now stood, might have the original site of her worship, rather than the somewhat shallower (barely an overhang!) grotto indicated by the guidebooks, indicating Her kinship with Kybele / Kubaba / Magna Mater / Meter Orie (mountain mother), the goddess of caves and caverns, who was worshipped on mountaintops and deep within the lightless hollows of the living earth long before there were words or language to tell of it. As with Baptists touched by the Holy Ghost, the devout Mexican Catholics in the presence of the Virgin of Guadelope, or the Haitian Voodooists at Saut d'Eau during the feast of the Virgin of Mount Carmel, it is not hard to imagine the primal state of ecstasy that might have gripped Her followers in the proximity of the original icon, in the 'Pla de les Tarantules' - 'the place of the dancers'... Modern historians assume that these "secret gatherings... probably led to considerable guilt and conflict", which triggered collective hysterical disorders. Dance frenzies appeared most often during periods of crop failures, drought and social upheaval, leading Rosen (1968) to conclude that this stress triggered the hysteria, prompting desperate attempts at divine intervention through ritualized dancing, and often producing trance and possession states. Many symptoms associated with tarantism are consistent with sleep deprivation, excessive alcohol consumption, emotional excitement and prolonged physical activity.

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