-
- In 1930, amid the Great Depression, John
Maynard Keynes took a contrarian tack in Economic Possibilities for Our
Grandchildren. Considering how each generation adds new science and manufacturing
technologies, Keynes tried to calculate when this accelerating process
could make scarcity a thing of the past (at least in Britain). He concluded
that the time was coming faster than people imagined: another century would
increase productive wealth by a factor of more than seven.
-
- If the whole global house of cards doesn't
collapse, Keynes may be proven correct. Already, the United Nations reckons
that $40 billion a year could provide life's basic needs to everyone on
the planet: that's $151 annually from each American, or less than half
of Bill Gates's present wealth. Likewise, the economic meltdown outside
the United States doesn't result from scarce resources: it is the consequence
of a deluge of speculative Japanese investment in Asia followed by an increase
in manufacturing capacity. While overcapacity has always featured in capitalism's
cycles, the world can now produce 60 million cars per year, even though
there's demand for only 44 million.
-
- Keynes predicted: "For the first
time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent
problem -- how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to
occupy his leisure, which science and compound interest have won for him,
to live wisely and agreeably and well." Some folks, of course, have
already arrived at the permanent-problem stage. Joseph Firmage founded
his first company, Serius, at 18, and five years later, after <http://www.herring.com/mag/issue66/cgi-bin/get-company.pl?symbol=NOVL&url=www.n
ovell.com Novell had bought it for $24 million, became Novell's vice president
of networking. In 1995 he cofounded USWeb, which merged with the CKS Group
in 1998 to form a company worth $2.1 billion. At this year's start, Mr.
Firmage resigned from USWeb, rejected serial entrepreneurship, and chose...well,
the most lateral career move conceivable, provided you reckon that career
possibilities exist in propagandizing about the extraterrestrials that
have secretly guided human history.
-
- Mr. Firmage has summarized his beliefs
in a 600-page work. It's accessible at his Web site alongside documents
billed, for example, as President Truman's 1947 memorandum establishing
the "Majestic-12" committee in charge of U.S.-alien relations
or JFK's communiqué to the Central Intelligence Agency, "written
ten days before his Dallas assassination," about "UFO intelligence
files." The book's hardcover version will appear later this year.
Meanwhile, Mr. Firmage has arranged a downloadable condensed edition. Having
read it, I can tell Herring readers exactly what Mr. Firmage believes:
everything.
-
- THE SPACEMAN COMETH
-
- Mainly, he thinks that emissaries from
the cosmic civilizations have visited us throughout our history -- perhaps
even seeded Earth -- in vessels tapping the universal quantum electromagnetic
energy background so as to manipulate gravity and space-time. These visitors
have guided humankind technologically and spiritually, disseminating religious
memes (a meme is an idea that spreads in a viral fashion from person to
person within a culture) so that we'll grow up to be good galactic citizens.
Cue to Roswell, New Mexico, 1947: a crashed UFO and its dead occupants
are analyzed by government scientists; humans reverse-engineer technologies
like fiber optics and integrated circuits from alien fragments. Mr. Firmage
stirs in every possible fringe tenet -- Area 51, Gaia, crop circles, cattle
mutilations, alien abductions (even, I'm glad to see, one of my personal
favorites: UFOs travel from the future; their crews are our descendants)
-- as well as some standard New Age chestnuts.
-
- EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENTSIA
-
- But remember: Mr. Firmage is brighter
than most people. A basic summary of The Truth doesn't convey the flavor
of this strange porridge of a text. One chapter will be, say, a succinct
history of the U.S. intelligence industry that could have been written
by a professional journalist (since I recognized unattributed quotes from
other people's books, part of it probably was); then the next, a long litany
of biblical quotes with soggily earnest exegeses of how science and spirituality
are "One"; this in turn might be followed by conjectures about
vacuum and gravity engineering, which, though likely to resemble Star Trek
technobabble to lay readers, are within the speculative perimeter of cutting-edge
physics. Mr. Firmage asks us to take him seriously: he has, he reminds
us, more credibility to lose than most UFO cultists.
-
- OK, Joe. (1) If humans managed to figure
out general relativity or quantum mechanics' mathematical foundations,
why do we need alien assistance for relatively minor, obvious technologies
like integrated circuits? (2) The first generation of stars arose more
than 11 billion years ago: if intelligence was going to evolve and achieve
stable civilizations, it could have done so any time since then. Why don't
astronomers see signs? (3) People like yourself and Frank Drake at the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute apparently subscribe
to a Victorian fallacy--the idea of progressive evolution, which Darwin
himself rejected. Nature exhibits no inherent bias toward complexity --
that is, intelligence -- only toward variation. Even on Earth the vast
majority of successful life remains in the bacterial mode. It's plausible
that the machinery of life might emerge everywhere in the universe, yet
ours is the only world where intelligence has (briefly) developed.
-
- Finally, Joe, in answer to your question,
Why would so many people claim encounters with aliens if these hadn't really
happened? Because human beings are hardwired with what biologists call
epigenetic rules: genetically installed algorithms to invent, transmit,
and receive certain cultural traits. Our infantile language-learning abilities
and inclination to avoid copulation with people with whom we've shared
our first 30 months of life are two prominent examples among 67 items listed
by anthropologists as universal behaviors; others are cooking, cosmology,
residence rules, religious rituals, and propitiations of supernatural entities.
Our religious impulses derive from mammalian algorithms for dominance hierarchies
that the symbol-forming human mind, as the biologist Edward O. Wilson writes,
has extended into abstraction -- "hyperdominant if invisible members
of the human group."
-
- BRUISING MY RELIGION
-
- The idea that religion is an innate human
drive is provocative. Most people would tolerate historically established
religious imagery but mock Mr. Firmage's claim that an alien being robed
in light hovered above his bed; they'd politely bear with the convention
of Easter as the time when a man rose from the dead but ridicule Mr. Firmage's
beliefs as the self-delusion and poor taste of a faith fabricated from
sci-fi kitsch and trash culture. But every religion throughout history
has mixed universal principles with local peculiarities of the culture
of its genesis: people must use the world as they find it to imagine higher
beings and states. While burning bushes sufficed for a wandering desert
tribe, those immersed in the high-tech world might expect their angels
to arrive in starships.
-
- Mr. Firmage writes of his spiritual discontent
before conversion, "[I]t is impossible to satisfy religious needs
through material purchases." Indeed, as someone who could afford more
toys at an early age than most people even dream of, he's vehement: "[U]nbounded
consumerism is no longer a sustainable institution...I propose that consumers
assert control of the economy and rebuild our economic system to serve
non-profit organizations." As a catalyst, he plans a coöperative
electronic-commerce site where members will be able to purchase any good
or service and designate which leading nonprofit they wish to receive their
share of the site's earnings.
-
- It's interesting. Though Mr. Firmage
is slightly crazy -- with, maybe, a juvenile vanity in his craziness --
he's had the imagination to be something besides a serial entrepreneur.
If either his nonprofit e-commerce model or physics ideas generate anything
viable, he might have more impact than he ever would by founding another
company. Furthermore, let's consider Keynes's prediction that in a time
not so far from now, the markets may have done their work well enough that
we'll be free to face our "real problem." Is Joseph Firmage living
"wisely and agreeably and well"? By his lights, he's trying.
Perhaps we should start to think about what the world might be like when
there's such abundance that wealth provides not even the distraction of
keeping score, when nothing remains but the incessant, rising sound of
individual people attempting to assert their spiritual aspirations. _________
-
- Mark Williams<markred@ynn.com is the
second son of Darth Vader and lives in Oakland. www.herring.com/mag/issue66/The
Truth
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