Intelligence as Performance Art

or

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the CIA

"I am simply identifying modes of experience. We need new perceptions to cope. Our technologies are generations ahead of our thinking. If you begin to think about these new technologies you appear as a poet because you are dealing with the present as the future. That is my technique. . .Never predict anything that hasn't already happened." Marshall McLuhan, The Hot and Cool Interview; Memories of Now

"In wartime," Winston Churchill wrote, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

Sub Rosa

In secret; privately or confidentially: held the meeting sub rosa. A "black" (sub rosa) propaganda section.

[Latin sub rosā, under the rose (from the practice of hanging a rose over a meeting as a symbol of confidentiality) : sub, under + rosā, ablative of rosa, rose.]

The phrase Sub Rosa comes from the Latin and means ‘under the rose’ or confidentiality. The rose was the emblem of the god Horus in ancient Egypt. Later the Greeks and Romans regarded this as god of silence. This originates from a Greek/Roman misinterpretation of an Egyptian hieroglyphic adopting Horus along with Isis and Osiris as a God. The Greeks translated his Egyptian name Her - pa - khrad to Harpocrates. Cupid gave Harpocrates a rose as a token of gratitude for not betraying the mother of Cupid, Venus. Among the Freemasons the rose is the symbol of silence.

Looking at the scorecard or playerlist of a game isn’t the same as playing it.

Seeing the World in a Whole New Light; Tweaking the Timeline

In chaos theory, small perturbations can become pumped up into very large effects. The same can happen to the historical timeline with intelligence and espionage. Small changes in dynamics can make a huge difference in Real World outcomes.

One must carefully pick where to make one’s intervention. A mis-step can lead to the brink of a catastrophic Abyss.

In Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a 1964 black comedy film, director Stanley Kubrick satirizes the Cold War and the doctrine of MAD – mutual assured destruction. Hawkish military personnel and mad scientists push bomber planes beyond the Fail Safe position toward nuclear annihilation.

Global Architectronics

Hermann Hesse not only wrote the classic introspective novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, but won the Nobel prize in Literature (1946) for his final masterwork published under two titles in English: The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi. This work (set in the 23rd Century) describes a cadre of individuals and their headmaster -- the Magister Ludi -- engrossed in interdisciplinary play engineering cultural values from behind the scenes. Hesse never forthrightly explained just how the game is played, but gave many hints to its structure for future aspirants seeking solutions to the critical predicament of mankind through Global Architectronics.

The Glass Bead Game requires that its players synthesize aesthetics and philosophy. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. The Game's synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of virtual reality.

After each symbol conjured up by the director of a Game, each player was required to perform silent, formal meditation on the content, origin, and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind intensively and organically its full purport. The members of the Order and of the Game associations brought the technique and practice of contemplation with them from their elite schools, where the art of contemplation and meditation was nurtured with the greatest care.

The variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Thus, "realizing" was a favorite expression among the players. They considered their Games a path from Becoming to Being, from potentiality to reality...We would scarcely be exaggerating if we ventured to say that for the small circle of genuine Glass Bead Game players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship.

The name Castaglia, the place of knowledge, is the Italian form of the Latin Castalia, which was the Roman name for the spring on Mount Parnassus where dwelt the mythical Muses. Castalia was also the name for the abstract realm of the intelligentsia. Under the shifting hegemony of now this, now that science or art, the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another. Let the game begin?