Opinion/Editorial

ONLY THE SHADOW KNOWS

The great unknown is what causes more fear, paralysis, and downright terror than any potentially frightful coming or existent event.  It is also in considering the great unknown that causes human intellect to reach out for necessary stimulation and to work with it to build what we consider the success of rising technology within it.  A classic example of the two-edged sword.  The swipe of one metaphorical edge across the mind of one human stops everything bringing about abject failure but the counter-swipe of the other causes great advancement and success.

Societally and culturally in America today, the single elementary area where most attention is being paid, causing this consideration of the great unknown revolves around the rules laid out by differential cultures throughout humanity.  The ever-tightening, ever more complex written and verbalized rule-keeping occupy larger and larger portions of mankind’s time and attention.  For example, on television, and in the movies most plots and themes have come to revolve around the keeping of the social and physical rules laid out by other humans in leadership positions.  All crime shows westerns and most dramas are about the breaking and keeping of the rules.  The great unknown mysteries of science and the universe have taken a back seat to the attention being showered down upon rule keepers and breakers, and those deceptive in keeping and breaking them.

As any quantum theorist will tell you, it’s all about information.  The universe is purportedly held together, and in fact, made of, nothing more or less than information coming together and then splitting apart.  That’s been proven time and again in giant accelerators built for that task.  The micro world is all about information and how it is held together, or not.  The macro world, the big place we all live in is about information too.  The collection of it, the use of it, and of course, the misuse of it.  On the micro-level, there’s some duplicity going on as well.  Physicists cannot figure out how light can be both a particle and a wave.  They’ve proven it can be either one or the other even though all of their theoretical structures tell that such is not possible.

To explain this divergence in the observable data they blamed humans.   Humans are very good at interpreting information in a way that favors them most.  So, light is a particle when a human sees it and tests for it to be a particle.  When the human tests for it to be a wave then it’s a wave.  If a human does not test for it then it is presumed to be not there at all.  When you are up, reading under a light late at night try not to think about the fact that the rays (or whatever they are) that do not exist are illuminating your pages.  In reality, scientists are quite divided on the issue of what light is.  As many things that light is both a particle and a wave when not being studied as think that it does not exist as light at all.

What is the meaning of all this?  Information.  Humans work to gain information to survive in a harsh planetary environment that is composed of heavy oxygen content.  Oxygen is the most corrosive of the elements.

Humans have come to understand information about woods, metals, plants, and animals in order to build shelter against the weather, clothing for protection, energy to cook and control temperature, and much more.  Humans have not stopped there, in the sciences and using the results, however.  They use  information on one another.  And this is where duplicity comes into play creating words like integrity, honesty, truth, and honor.

Governments have gotten so good at collecting and using information that every one of them on earth is composed of some major branch that does nothing but collect information and broadcast it.  The governments of the world decide what happens in most catastrophe situations, for example.  Whether it’s the assassination of a major world leader, the blowing up of embassies, or even the twin towers. it is governments that decide who did what, who was responsible, and what the results have been from those decisions.

Mass media, called the news, has come to have similar power to supposedly collect and disseminate information.  Both groups have about the same track record when it comes to disseminating valid and truthful information.  And that’s for a very good reason.  By controlling the message these entities control life. They control decision-making and leadership selections.  They control economies and even the quality of life their people live in and among.  Why would they not deceive, both governmental officials and members of the press its deception improved their own situation over that of all other competing humans.

How this has come to pass, the deception when it comes to uncovering and disseminating information is what has caused so much angst and downright anger to rise in all cultures across the earth?  The rise of modern communications in cell phones, computer television, and internet technology has allowed most all humans to come to understand that they are being lied to about almost everything.  A president like Donald Trump does not rise in popularity to the extent he has out of nothing at all.  His idiotic buffoonery is being viewed as ‘at least telling the truth about what he thinks.’  Truth is becoming so uncommon today, and belief in the telling of the truth, that a man like Trump, who would have been easily vilified and sent packing in the first few days of his candidacy in the past, became the leader of the free world.  Is it scarier to consider his election or the fact that the truths most have held to be so self-evident are neither truths nor self-evident anymore?

Have humans been lying to each other to the extent seen today or is the word ‘seen’ merely the word describing the fact that prior to modern media’s rise, the lies were always there but not seen or known?  The old radio show called “The Shadow” described an early superhero who simply knew about criminals, their operations, and their movements, and could cloud their minds so they couldn’t even see him.  Mass media purports to give viewers the Shadow’s powers but falls so short it created only deep cultural disappointment and anger.  The media and governments collect information that they want to hold and tell what of it they want to tell.  Only the Shadow Knows for sure.  And everyone’s mad about it.