Why magicalnet?

What is in a name anyway? Magicalnet is a name I’ve been using for awhile in various contexts. It has some Buddhist overtones, which I’m not going to go into. But in this context, there is a specific relevance I have in mind.

From A Force More Powerful by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall (pg 494):

Vaclav Havel … wrote a seminal essay, widely disseminated underground, called “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel argued that the confrontation between an authoritarian regime and its opposition took place first not on a material but on an existential level – and on that level, the power of the opposition was “the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society.” This potential did not rely on “soldiers of its own” but on “everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment… by the force of truth.” … Once the truth about the oppression is circulating in the public mind, it cannot be evaded.

Within America itself this oppression takes a number of forms. For those without money, legal residence, or education it can take obviously recognizable forms. For example America is number one in the world in the number of its citizens it jails. Public health is an oxymoron here, more like “You’re on your own”. But as egregious as this is, still the vast majority of Americans still have things pretty good as long as they don’t get sick, or get laid off, or something unexpected happens. Overt, actual oppression is still quite rare in most (or at least most “white”) neighborhoods.

Even so, although we speak and think as though we live in a democracy, we act as though we live in a dictatorship, and the cognitive dissonance takes its toll, arguably functioning as though it were a form of oppression. The people simply internalize their prison and attend to their own feeding and maintenance. Pretty slick, eh? Pinochet, eat your heart out! [For non-Americans, ignore that last sentence, it really doesn’t mean anything]

This magical net of mutual hallucination which we conjure around ourselves is never entirely true under the best of circumstances, but in this day and age and in this country, the illusion has drifted so far from any grounding in what is actually the case as to leave those caught with its web entirely in midair. People are starting to get airsick. We are all “living within the lie” and it has grown so fantastically terrible that vast numbers are apt to be “struck at any moment ... by the force of truth.”

For example, just this Saturday (and Saturday was such a busy day it seems), in Are We ‘Good Germans' Ed Ciaccio puts together a pretty good list of outrages that completely demolish any notion that America is a country that respects the rule of law, believes in freedom and justice, or has an even feeble grasp of the notion of basic human decency. But maybe folks missed that one. Be that as it may, nobody could have missed the propaganda promoting a strike on Iran which is at fever pitch and is entirely dependent upon transparent fabrications, gross exaggerations and outright lies. It seems this administration can’t even get their stories to line up with each other any more. There we are listening to a speech about how we are on the side of the angels, promoting peace, democracy and cheap tasty burgers, and in the next sentence our president is justifying torture or even threatening unprovoked nuclear war. You’d think people would notice something like that!

People pretend they don’t notice. They don’t WANT to notice. But they do notice. They can’t help it. And it tears holes in the prevailing web of conjured agreements about how things are.

This is what makes speaking the truth so powerful. Because, as Havel so astutely put it, “Once the truth about the oppression is circulating in the public mind, it cannot be evaded.” And seeing the net is the most powerful magic of all.

Once you see the illusion for what it is, you can never be the same, even if you try. I know. I tried. It didn’t work. I know other people who tried and it didn’t work for them either. Once you see what is going on, sooner or later you have to act. And that is also the truth.

But when will we act? That is the question that's keeping me up late tonight.

I can only pray we are not too late already.