You travel a path through a story, your life, which is intertwined with a variety of other stories at different levels, all of them coming together in that story which is this world, the growth and development of the Body of Christ in this mortal realm.
The path you might prefer to follow will often threaten to curve away from you. Maintain a high state of awareness. There is evidence from a variety of scientific studies that warn of the dangers which arise when you don’t explicitly take care of your movement through Creation, the growth process of your own self and your children, a growth process of an organism with moral and intellectual and spiritual aspects.
False memories can be implanted in your minds so that you can’t even remember truly where you’ve been, even so mundane a false memory as that of holding a glass bottle of Coca-cola in a stadium which bans glass containers: Ads Implant False Memories. This is a frightening possibility in a world where governments and corporations and other powerful entities have plenty of reasons for you to accept their false histories of important historical events and of the very ways in which wealth is distributed and power is structured. They have reasons for you to live a life profitable to them.
There are a variety of studies in which the scientists ‘read’ minds in one way or another, for example, to predict which songs will be popular with teenagers by scanning the brains of test subjects as they hear new, unreleased music. There are others which are showing an ability to predict our actions in the near-term future by scanning brains. The scanning of brains is a powerful technology and a dangerous technology. It can help us a lot and lead to medical miracles, but it can most certainly be misused. In general, the more powerful a technology is, the greater the harm it can cause. And we should remember that prediction can lead to causal or correlative models that can then lead to control mechanisms. As it is, sophisticated marketers, such as those at Coca-cola, have found weak but effective steering mechanisms.
The philosopher Ian Hacking wrote an important book, Rewriting the Soul in which he concludes that the multiple personality syndrome was the result of the creation of barriers between different blocks of memories, some of which were false memories and some of those may have been implanted by therapists who were trying to help troubled human beings. Some of the so-called “recovered memories” which tore apart families and tortured human beings who needed help were implanted by incompetent therapists. Some of the spectacular claims of child-abuse in institutional settings turned out to be the result of memories implanted by incompetent investigators. I remember reading of a case of alleged large-scale child-abuse where competent investigators came in later and said they thought something bad had occurred but they couldn’t get at the truth because of the false memories in the minds of some of the children. By that time, they were group memories. The children were remembering together what had never happened.
If you can control someone’s memory, you can control, or at least influence, many of the thoughts and actions of that human being. Stalin knew that but wasn’t so good at rewriting memories as the American politicians, marketers, and entertainers.
Are we the targets of campaigns to shape our memories of important events, murders of national leaders or entire wars? Are we the targets of campaigns to shape our memories towards someone else’s desired understandings of the economy, of actual and possible ways to make livings?
We Americans, and some other peoples as well, have remained remarkably complacent during a period when vast amounts of wealth were destroyed by needless, criminal wars and by a profitable sort of incompetence on the part of Wall St. So far as I can tell, a large percentage of the remaining wealth was transferred from productive members of society to politicians and bankers. Was our complacency partly a result of these campaigns in which false memories were implanted, memories intended to lead us to see the scoundrels of our power-elites as serving our interest and as being good men and women? At least we consider as good the ones on our side of the football spectacular being played between the Donkeys and the Elephants. If we’re Elephants, the Donkeys are evil though they all seem to have trunks instead of snouts. If we’re Donkeys, the Elephants are evil though they seem to have long floppy ears sticking up from the tops of their heads.
How many Americans could think straight enough to realize that our wars to “defend ourselves” after 9/11 have killed at least 100 innocent civilians for every one innocent victim in those towers? How many Americans remember we were — quite systematically — killing or seriously injuring thousands of Vietnamese civilians each month? Yet, when someone carries out a nasty large-scale crime against us, we declare them to be agents of evil and we wage wars across the globe.
I’m going to end with a link to an article about a study showing researchers can predict some future actions by scanning our brains: Researchers Can Predict Future Actions from Human Brain Activity. There is much potential good in this technology, as they note at the end of the article, but it’s dangerous technology in a morally disordered society in which nearly all human beings, including many in the power-elites, take on the passive role of clay to be shaped by external forces.
A true human person is a human animal who tries to shape himself by intelligent responses over time to external reality. Those intelligent responses begin when we’re young with firm guidance from parents and other adults with a concrete relationship to us. As we mature, those intelligent responses should increasingly be the result of our own understandings and voluntary actions towards a state of human being we’d like to occupy.
A human animal which allows itself to be shaped by whatever external forces grab hold of him is nothing like a moral person.