Into the Mystic: Capitalism and the Structuralization of Spirituality - https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2015/08/13/into-the-mystic-capitalism-and-the-structuralization-of-spirituality/

In his fantastic book The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Paul N. Edwards forwards a quasi-literary reading of the way power and subjectivity operate in the age of the computer, focusing primarily on the lineage running from the Vannevar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) to the birth of cybernetics and their proliferation during the Macy Conferences to the electronic battlefields of Vietnam, and, finally, to the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative – the “Star Wars” program that propelled the growth of Silicon Valley and its corollary Californian Ideology, as well as the globalization of information technology across the 1990s. For Edwards the collision of massive government subsidies and steering of computer research and the geopolitical imperatives of the Cold War – dressed in the rhetoric of “containment” – produced the metaphoric construct for which the book is titled: the “closed world”.

..It was Jean Baudrillard who was perhaps the quintessential philosopher of the Cold War discourse. In hyperbolic manner he charted the disappearance of the reality into hyppereality, the world of advanced statistical control and the governing of society according to the dictates of computer simulation. By the 1980s and 90s, as simulation went global and unleashed a torrent of cheaply-made consumer goods across the world, people had but disappeared into his discourse: all that was left was informatic capital, gobbling itself in a frenzied rush towards an ecstatic collapse. It wasn’t until after September 11th that the people, or even the specter of a world beyond simulation, began to trickle in again. ..

..We could also note that class interests maintain this continuity: the Rockefeller Foundation, once the major proponent of behavioral research, took to providing large funds for research into cybernetics both inside and outside the armed force’s laboratories and think-tanks. Warren Weaver, meanwhile, served as head of the National Defense Research Committee after holding the position of director at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Natural Sciences Division – a position he returned to after the war.

..or Paul Edwards, Miller’s cybernetic psychology was a closed world discourse par excellence, effectively serving as an internalization of the military’s command-and-control systems within the individual. It isn’t the only place where such a trajectory played out. In the RAND Corporation, cybernetics met with game theory and operations research (a sort of military interpretation of Taylorist factory techniques) to produce systems analysis, which relied on statistical research and computing modelling in decision-making and resource allocation processes.

...the need to prioritize multidimensional communication over one-way message transmission – was one the key motivators behind Gregory Bateson’s own interpretations of cybernetics. In 1940, along with Margaret Mead, psychologist Gordon Allport, and the Frankfurt School’s Kurt Lewin, he joined the Committee for National Morale (CNM), an organization that sought to define the conditions that led to the rise of fascism in Europe with the hopes of remedying them in America.

..Most likely under the influence of Watts, Bateson and his team discussed Zen Buddhism at length in their “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia”. While the schizophrenic experience offered a negative double bind, Zen offered a positive double-bind that led in the opposite direction, one that pointed towards Enlightenment. ..

These cross-pollinations between radical politics, mysticism, and cybernetics were not unique to Great Britain, and had long-since gained traction in America. On a literary level William Burroughs had appropriated the language of communication theory to build a quasi-political construction around the tape recorder, which he felt could explode the boundaries of the control system of the “Reality Studio”.

See: Burroughs, Scientology, CIA https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/2489702/12438554

In 1962 Price, along with Michael Murphy – yet another student of Bateson who had looked to the East, having taken to India in the 1950s to practice meditation at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram – set out to establish a space where alternative practices of living and being in the world. With consultation and assistance from Bateson, Watts, Aldous Huxley ...and Frederic Speigelberg ..., the two launched the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. ..

...Werner Erhard and his “Erhard Seminars Training” (EST),... attended the lectures of Alan Watts and became close friends with the philosopher, absorbing the principles of Zen Buddhism in the process. Later Erhard could be found dabbling in L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology[33], Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and the “Silva Method” propagated by Jose Silva, which deploys meditation and guided imagery to assist individuals in “re-wiring” themselves from the conditioning of past negative experience...

..Just as Esalen would become a retreat center for corporate leaders, many other post-countercultural spaces sprung up to educate the new managerial class. One such place was the Santa Fe Institute, where agent-based modelling simulations were being perfected in order to understand the evolution of complex systems, be they biological or economic in nature.

Though it is beyond the scope of our concerns here, the connections between the techniques and rather holistic theories emerging from the Sante Fe Institute is pivotal to fully understanding the growth of capitalism across the 1980s and 90s – the time of the so-called “New Economy” that rode the duel dot-com and financial bubbles until their respective bursts across the 2000s. We can give pause to mention, however, a series of events closely affiliated with the Sante Fe Institute: the Learning Conferences, organized by none other than Stewart Brand with help from Esalen. Modelled on the earlier Macy Conferences, these sessions brought together scientists and business leaders “with an eye to generating not formal products so much as intellectual insights and new rhetorics and new social networks to support them.”[43] These intellectual insights were both scientific and holistic in nature: how to learn from adaptability and flexibility, and put these into practices in our everyday business lives.

The Learning Conferences, in turn, produced the groundwork for the creation of the Global Business Network (GBN), an international consultancy group that works closely with Fortune 500 companies, advising them on actions through a combination of systems analysis and forecasting techniques – both of which can be traced back to the Cold War-era strategies developed at the RAND Corporation. Unlike those earlier conditions, these tools and their derivatives were put not to use to the enforcing of the closed world, but the opening of this world to the information networks of neoliberal capitalism..

The GBN’s primary founder was Jay Ogilvy, a veteran of the Stanford Research Institute – an important institution in the military-industrial complex nexus that was also a haven for countercultural sympathies. Ogilvy would go on to migrate to Esalen, where he helped set up the Center for Theory and Research (CTR) – a series of hundreds of sessions and conferences to aid in the promotion of an open-ended “new worldview”.

Related post : Are you ready for the BIG picture? Take a deep breath and brace yourselves, guys. This is it.

tag words: Jay Ogilvy; Esalen; Psychosynthesis; Teens and Toddlers; “Project Caress”; ARK; COUI was founded by Laura Huxley; human trafficking