The Blackberry Walk

There is a list on my phone of titles for blog articles, a list which has been growing for the past few years and now numbers over a hundred strong. One such title reads '5g towers and fears of instrumentality'. I reckon this has sat there for at least a couple years, maybe more. And lo and behold, this anime season a producer for a studio must've found my phone, found the title, and funded an anime on the topic! That anime, airing this season, is Shuumatsu no Train. Given it's topical, I reckon I ought to explicate this old thought, and give it some life. First, we'll explain instrumentality - a favourite occupation of mine. Despite many an Eva-fan misunderstanding the show, repeating "I wuz so depressed afterwards", Evangelion is a show of hope. The word evangelion - the Greek for the gospels of the bible - was previously used in classical Rome as heralds of victory before the general returned home; indeed, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a herald that we too can overcome instrumentality both in the world and in oneself. The 'in oneself' aspect of instrumentality we can park for today, since it doesn't apply to our discussion. The instrumentality 'in the world' is pictured vividly in End of Eva: we see the world melt into psychic marmalade, the boundaries giving structure, sense, and order to things are broken down, and the barriers which separate people also dissolve, making you me, and me you. In other words, 'all returns to nothing' and 'it all comes tumbling down'. There are patterns in this world which we take for granted. That humans pop out of the womb white, brown, yellow, or black isn't a given; who's to say a child can't be born blue or green? One may well argue that we are constrained by our genetics, by our inherited traits; but those very heritable traits, those iron laws that a child resembles the parents, are a pattern in the world we take for granted. What would the world be like if trees ceased to fruit, or worms began to burrow through concrete, or dogs re-wilded themselves and formed wolf packs terrorising pedestrians. Such speculation is the fuel for so many of the fantastical stories which thrill us, and they thrill us because they show us a world different to our own. Whilst a splash of novelty, like secondary school wizarding institutions, can be novel; but once true instrumentality comes into existence, it is a terrifying existence. We would have no trust, or rather no faith, that even the ground beneath is solid, that's we'd hold the same shape one day to the next, let alone have stable jobs and stable lives. Is it a world of more freedom, or less? It's a question that's well worth considering, given that so much of the modern J. S. Mills/French Revolution/post-modern conception of freedom is predicated on breaking taboos and breaking rules. The logical ultimate of the exothermic taboo-breaking in vogue is chaos, instrumentality, and anarchy, in my opinion. True freedom is based on law and order. As Moldbug points out, if mafia men run your streets, there is certainly no freedom: law and order is the garden that let's freedom grow. The overgrown weeds of anarchy are mere tyranny. Shuumatsu no Train currently has three episodes out this season, and in my opinion is the best new anime since Bocchi the Rock. Similar to Bocchi, Train has complex themes, extending the power of the best formula there is, the four girls anime. The beginning of the anime witnesses Tokyo morphed and distorted by the power of 7G utilising some techno-babble to connect all of man. This connection of all mankind goes horrifically wrong, bending and twisting reality into a Paprika-esque dreamscape. Our protagonists in the story are travelling on a train in a Divine Comedy/Made in Abyss journey to the epicentre of the chaos, Ikebukuro, where they believe they can find their lost friend. Shuumatsu no Train won't be the first anime to alloy the ideas of technology and instrumentality. Serial Experiments Lain was at the time described by some particularly cynical anime fans as a Eva knock-off, since it depicts Lain losing her self identity and boundary of self by plugging into the internet. The internet leads Lain on a downward trajectory of psychosis and a megalomania of godhood, leaving her everywhere and nowhere all at once. The aforementioned Paprika also has themes of tech-based Instrumentality, told through the plot device of a contraption which allows a psychotherapist to enter dreams and interact with the subconscious, leading to the subconscious of the world gushing out into reality. In Paprika, the dreams of all of man are connected, stewing all of man unconscious thoughts together into one endless parade of insanity. Indeed, dreams are the fenced-off pen for instrumentality and chaos. And in Shuumatsu no Train, 7G dissolves the order and structure of the world, leaving a chaotic tyranny in its wake. But the casus belli of this article revolves around the link between 5G and instrumentality. Wat dis mean? Fear of 5G towers looms large in the minds of conspiratorial folk distrusting of the elite. As an issue, it seems a rather arbitrary target to pick on; and to someone outside of those circles, the ailments its meant to cause are bizarre. Why should 5G give autism and cancer whilst 4G is benign? The isolation of pandemic made a lot of people insane - I can personally attest to that. But in equal measure, owing to a reduced interaction with reality, many minds spun off into a more poetical mode of thought. To explain this, I'll briefly diagram the model of the mind I subscribe to: below our logical, rational, verbal mind, exists our poetical and imaginative mind. Simply, at root we experience images, vague feelings, and archetypal narrative structures; whilst on a higher level of the mind - a more conscious, yet less influential strata - we have verbal thoughts, and reason through our problems. The poetical level of consciousness is that lower level, where the confidence and lyricality of a rousing speech matters more than its contents. That poetical level of consciousness believes that metaphors are real. To favour the higher mind over the lower mind too much makes you an annoying materialist who always has an inane comment to make, and usually a clean freak; whilst to favour the lower mind over the higher mind too much makes you into a hopeless Romanticist, losing touch with reality, who'll eventually hear Pan's call run into the forest to become one with the soil. Whilst the claim that 5G towers are a proximate cause autism is boneheadedly retarded on a verbal and logical level, the claim makes sense on the level of poetic consciousness. Many think Alex Jones is a madman - and in many a way he is mad - but people latch on to his ideas because he too is operating on the level of poetical consciousness. The elites aren't literally inter-dimensional psychic vampires; but taken metaphorically, the statement holds some water. The image is true, even if the logic and words are not. Similarly, 5G doesn't literally cause illness, but the interconnectedness of all man via their phones certainly confers an imagistic, metaphorical illness. Again, it's the connection of all man by technology into a barrier-breaking psychic network. The fear of 5G towers is a presentiment of Human Instrumentality. It's now the time to wrap up the article by quoting G. K. Chesterton. In his essay 'The Maniac', Chesterton writes, "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do no go mad; but chess-players do." After all, as Chesterton goes on to argue, the mad man can argue with pin-point precision his case for why the Earth is flat, ironing out an answer for every question that can be thrown at him. A YouTuber who I used to watch was a Jungian analyst who did work in mental asylums. One sobering anecdote he recounted was of a long conversation he had about Jung and the I Ching at the asylum with who he thought was a fellow psychiatrist. Only after one of the nurses who worked there came to retrieve his conversation partner did he discover the person he was talking to was in fact a patient. Using too much 'facts & logic' is the quickest path to becoming a madman, for the fear of the coming of 5G towers is evidently a mad thing to think. Believing what is imagistically true to be rationally true can either be a folly or a great discovery. It is, after all, far easier to disbelieve than to believe. Therefore, it takes our greatest wits, and the wisdom of society from past to present, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and point our force of reason at the bulls-eye. Or, as the ancient Persians said, "Shoot straight, and tell the truth."