Friday 30 June 2023

Radical implications of the "Mandela Effect"

I have written before about what I think is really going-on in the discussions of The Mandela Effect. Another way of thinking about it; is that it is to do with concepts of Time. 

Some twenty years ago; I wrote an essay about the contrast between Ceremonial Time and Technological Time. Ceremonial Time could be called subjective time, based on human memory as it works in an oral and illiterate culture; whereas Technological Time is the, now dominant, modern idea of time as objective, consensual; and where the bottom line is in written history, and scientific concepts and measures. 

My feeling is that much discussion of The Mandela Effect is rooted in a spontaneous (to young children, and ancestral men), unconscious, and instinctive desire to reassert the primacy of Ceremonial Time; rooted in spontaneous, emotionally-inflected, and human-centred, memory. 


But this is (exactly because rooted in the unconscious and instinctive - hence opaque to analysis) confused by trying to hold-onto various aspects of Technological Time.

For instance the reality of the Mandela Effect is asserted by referencing books and other written material; or movie films, TV, computers, and other technologies that have significant roots outside of the mind; in memory cues that are materialized in symbolic, encoded, linguistic, and visual representations.

The debate focuses on asserts about differences between past and present artifacts. And it focuses on trying to convince other people about the validity of our own memories compared with current public information.  


I find this contradictory. 

This is moving back and forth between the official and external, now and then; and back and forth between our own subjective memories and the attempt to make others regard our assertions about these memories as externally-valid truths. 

But if we desire to assert the primacy of the subjective, directly-known and human; then we should not use the objective, symbolic and technological as evidence. 


Discussion of the Mandela Effects seems to arise from a profound dissatisfaction at the destructive violence that our bureaucratic-mass media and totalitarian world is doing to both our basic humanity and freedom, and furthermore our spiritual nature and destiny. 

As such, I think it points at a much more extreme and radically-different way of thinking and being, then such discourse currently attains.

I think the concern over would-be Mandela Effects should be addressed by making the choice to root our primary assumptions concerning reality in that which is not just our own memories and reasoning (which are, after all, subject to change, including distortions); but to root them in a vision of life as - ultimately - a matter of living Beings who are in relationships. Therefore, altogether separate from (and immune to!) the domination of external, institutional and codified forms of knowing.  


We each need to develop a separate interior discourse from that which imposes upon us from externally: from the public, officialdom, the media...

This interior discourse needs to be Christian, by which I mean our inner discourse needs to be aligned-with, in harmony with, the purposes and nature of divine creation - insofar as we can know this.  

If such an inner and God-orientated discourse includes significant knowledge that contradicts what we are being told by public institutions that we know to be corrupt (at best) and (increasingly) demonic in overall-control...

Well, then we know what we ought to believe in our hearts - don't we? 


In which case, trying to convince others that 1. their understanding of 2. our reports of 3. what we currently remember.. is pretty irrelevant - both to us, and even more to them. They ought to be doing the inner work for themselves - otherwise, their discourse will simply be a different variant of passively accepting external data; which is (both cognitively and spiritually) much like soaking-up official-media propaganda.  


3 comments:

Avro G said...

“Discussion of the Mandela Effects seems to arise from a profound dissatisfaction at the destructive violence that our bureaucratic-mass media and totalitarian world is doing to both our basic humanity and freedom, and furthermore our spiritual nature and destiny.”

You discussed in the linked piece on the ME how k*ndle books are altered without your consent. It was this kind of possibility that freaked me out back when m****soft began informing me that my magick chip box had been “updated” overnight without so much as a by your leave. You mean they can get into my house via the inter net and rearrange my stuff? And really they don’t even have to tell me.

And now the plan is to periodically “update” US.

“But I have a soul!”

“No, no - that’s” (as y.n. h*rari might put it) “fake news.”

No need for a memory hole in our new demoni-topia. We’ll have a regularly and remotely “updated” mandela effect.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Avro - Good points - and they are reasons why I feel that we each need a conscious and deliberate strategy of inner reflection which is rooted-in (but not restricted-to) 'sources' independent of all external communications.

In other words we need to become aware of our innate intuitive faculty, the divine within, and our direct relationship with the Holy Ghost.

Since these are what God has equipped us with in the created-world as it actually-is and despite whatever specific situation we find ourselves in; we can all be confident that they are enough to keep us on the right path - so long as our motivations are genuine.

Mia said...

It's I believe an atheist film, but Dark City comes to mind as the ultimate example of ME: an evil or at least indifferent to good alien race erases and replaces human memories in an attempt to erase and replace the human soul/will/core identity/beingness and fails because ultimately we are more than the sum of our memories, whether those are real or fake. Is a benevolent form of this happening? Is widespread mental decline meant to remove the false god of Enlightenment-style "reason" and make room again for the spiritual?