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The Black Iron Prison is an all-pervasive system of social control otherwise referred to as Empire. It stems from an evolutionary glitch in the triune brain—a glitch that, lacking proper recognition and medical treatment, has lead to the codification of personal character pathologies of a generally narcissistic and megalomaniacal nature in closed systems of political ideology and religious orthodoxy. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
The Triune Brain is a hypothesis proposed by Paul MacLean about the traces of evolution existing in the structure of the human brain. ...
In law, codification is the process of collecting and restating the law of a jurisdiction in certain areas, usually by subject, forming the legal code. ...
Narcissism is the pattern of traits and behaviors which involve infatuation and obsession with ones self to the exclusion of others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of ones gratification, dominance and ambition. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Narcissistic personality disorder. ...
An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ...
The word orthodoxy, from the Greek ortho (right, correct) and doxa (thought, teaching , Glorification), is typically used to refer to the correct theological or doctrinal observance of religion, as determined by some overseeing body. ...
Based on transcendent moralities of an absolutist and dualist nature, closed ideological and orthodox systems feed back into the megalomaniacal character pathologies from which they stem, thus creating a kind of feedback process in which every aspect of human perception is colonised and brought under the sway of the class interests in whose name political ideology and religious orthodoxy speak. The term absolutism can mean: A belief in absolute truth moral absolutism, the belief that there is some absolute standard of right and wrong political absolutism, a political system where one person holds absolute power, also called apolytarchy from Gr. ...
The term dualism is the state of being dual, or having a twofold division. ...
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Colonialism. ...
Colonisation of human consciousness via the Black Iron Prison is carried out through the construction of amnesia, for the purpose of subverting memory and the lessons of authentic experience. Because memory is the basis of identity and the authentic experience of life, the effect of wiping out individual memories and replacing them with collective ones has the effect of wiping out individual identity and replacing it with what can essentially be considered a herd mentality. The individual is seduced into giving up her or his individuality through a mixture of the carrot and stick: appeals to vanity via constructed myths of collective (usually national) glory, and compulsion via the manipulative power of fear, effected through such phenomena as Othering and moral panics over Communism or terrorists. Amnesia (or amnaesia in Commonwealth English) is a condition in which memory is disturbed. ...
Herd behaviour is the term used to describe situations in which the individuals of any particular group react coherently. ...
For the movie, see The Other. ...
A moral panic is a mass movement based on the perception that some individual or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. ...
This article is about communism as a form of society and as a political movement. ...
Terrorism refers to the use of violence for the purpose of achieving a political, religious, or ideological goal. ...
As Jean Baudrillard has noted, the subversion of the meaningful relationships between archetypal symbols and the subjects they point to by the power dynamics upon which the Black Iron Prison is based leads to the creation of ‘hyper-universes’ in which the colonised mind drifts along oblivious to the fact that it is under the complete domination of an exterior force. Where the mind is unfree, the body must surely follow. The purpose of the Black Iron Prison is clear—to make us fall in love with our chains and fight to the death against anyone who attempts to deprive us of them. Jean Baudrillard (born July 29, 1929) is a cultural theorist, philosopher, and sociologist. ...
Archetype is defined as the first original model of which all other similar persons, objects, or concepts are merely derivative, copied, patterned, or emulated. ...
Domination is a supreme or preeminate control, rule, or governing; plural dominion. ...
A variety of artefacts of postmodernist culture, such as the Matrix trilogy, V for Vendetta, Fight Club, Brazil, Dune, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, Banksy, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, the Dead Kennedys, Negativland, many of the novels of Philip K. Dick and of course Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (amongst an increasing array of others) seek to alert us to this disturbing phenomenon. Look up matrix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
V for Vendetta is a comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated mostly by David Lloyd, set in a dystopian future United Kingdom. ...
Fight Club (1996) is the first published novel by American author Chuck Palahniuk. ...
Dune is a science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert and published in 1965 . ...
Guy Debord (born December 28, 1931; died November 30, 1994) was a writer, film maker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International (SI). ...
The Situationist International (SI), an international political and artistic movement, originated in the Italian village of Cosio dArroscia on 28 July 1957 with the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies: the Lettrist International, the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association. ...
Banksys anarchist rat Banksy (born 1974)[citation needed] is a graffiti artist from Bristol, UK, whose artwork has appeared throughout London and other locations around the world. ...
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening. ...
South Park is an American animated television series created, written and voiced by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. ...
Family Guy is an American animated sitcom created by Seth MacFarlane for FOX in 1999. ...
The Dead Kennedys are a punk rock band from San Francisco, California. ...
Negativland is an experimental music and sound collage band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. ...
Philip K. Dick Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982), often known by his initials PKD, was an American science fiction writer. ...
Orwell (or Orwellian) can refer to: The writer Eric Blairs pen name, George Orwell and his books The River Orwell in Suffolk, England The village of Orwell in Cambridgeshire, England A number of places in the United States: Orwell Township, Minnesota Orwell, New York Orwell, Ohio Orwell Township, Pennsylvania...
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a political novel which George Orwell wrote in opposition to totalitarianism. ...
The Evolutionary Glitch
The Black Iron Prison is made possible as a result of the structure of the Triune brain, and the fact that we have not one brain, but three: very roughly speaking, the amygdala, the limbic system and the cortex. The first and lowest mind is the reptillian, which governs fight or flight responses. The second and middle brain, the animal, governs emotions. The third, and highest, is the mamillian, which is an abstracting mind, a symbol factory through which we are able to formulate language, amonst other things. Each of the brains operates independently of the other. The Triune Brain is a hypothesis proposed by Paul MacLean about the traces of evolution existing in the structure of the human brain. ...
Location of the amygdala in the human brain The amygdala (Latin, corpus amygdaloideum) is an almond-shaped set of neurons located deep in the brains medial temporal lobe. ...
The limbic system within the brain. ...
Look up cortex in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
This article or section should include material from Fight-or-flight The flight or fight response, also called the acute stress response, was first described by Walter Cannon in the 1920s as a theory that animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system. ...
The basis of the evolutionary glitch at the heart of the Black Iron Prison is the speed with which the cortex evolved, which generated a disparity in human sociobiology between our intellectual potential and our still-primitive cultural development and thus the basic conflict in human consciousness between emotion and reason, superstition and knowledge, faith and credulity.
In The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler discusses the evolutionary glitch in terms of a schism in our minds and (particularly in Western) culture between emotion and reason, and the fact that even though we have a supercomputer in our heads we haven’t learnt how to use it. Our generally disordered consciousnesses make us unusually vulnerable to manipulation via the politics of fear. The legacy of the Black Iron Prison is that, by and large, we think and act on the basis of our emotions rather than our intellect and end up looking a lot like articulate herd animals who act more on the basis of common identifiers and fear than our ability to think and act for ourselves. Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905, Budapest – March 3, 1983, London) was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. ...
For other uses, see Fear (disambiguation). ...
Identifiers (IDs) are used in computer science, data processing, and general telecommunications; the concept is analogous to that of a name. Computer Science In computer science, an identifier is a string of bits (or characters) which name an entity, such as a program, device, or system; in order that other...
History The Black Iron Prison was first clearly identified as such by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick in his Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, a summary of an unpublished Gnostic exegesis he included in his very darkly humorous 1981 novel VALIS. VALIS tells the story of Horselover Fat, a schizophrenic anti-hero based on Dick himself, who seeks in vain to recover from his illness by going on a wild goose chase for the returned Jesus who he believes has returned to Earth, or is about to do so. Fat, the ultimate anti-hero and a representation of Everyman under the Black Iron Prison, develops this belief as a result of receiving (or so he imagines) a coded message via his TV set from an alien probe called VALIS, or Vast Active Living Intelligence System, sent to fire information into the minds of human beings via a mysterious pink light, thus inspiring episodes of acute rationality and insight. Gnosticism is a blanket term for various religions and sects most prominent in the first few centuries A.D. General characteristics The word gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis (γνῶσις), referring to the idea that there is special, hidden mysticism (esoteric knowledge) that only a few possess. ...
VALIS is a 1981 science fiction book by Philip K. Dick. ...
VALIS is a 1981 science fiction book by Philip K. Dick. ...
Schizophrenia is a psychiatric diagnosis denoting a persistent, often chronic, mental illness variously affecting behavior, thinking, and emotion. ...
In literature and film, an anti-hero is a central or supporting character that has some of the personality flaws and ultimate fortune traditionally assigned to villains but nonetheless also have enough heroic qualities or intentions to gain the sympathy of readers or viewers. ...
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- Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it. [London; Gollancz, 2001, pp. 54-55]
Fat’s problem, however, as Dick freely admits, is that he will never find this returned Jesus, nor the inner peace the Saviour figure represents for him, because his primary problem is that he habitually looks outward for the solution to his problems. This also appears to explain why his elaborately constructed mysticisms are inevitably bound to collapse. As it happens, he possesses the solution to his problems within himself, and projects his own inner strength onto objects of idol worship as a way of sidestepping his fear of freedom and of escaping the demands of personal responsibility. Idolatry is a term used by many religions to describe the worship of a false deity, which is an affront to their understanding of divinity. ...
In VALIS, as Fat comes to realise this ontological truism, he experiences a mystical revelation in which the walls of the Black Iron Prison come crashing down and he sees himself stuck within what Arthur Koestler has referred to as a ‘blind alleyway of evolution’. For Dick, and thus for Fat, his blind alleyway begins with the Roman Empire, its cooption and corruption of Christianity and the persecution of Gnostics who believed with Jesus that ‘the kingdom of heaven us within you’. This being the case, so say the Tractates, ‘the Empire Never Ended,’ but is in fact being experienced over and over again in a single moment of arrested development in which the dynamics of colonisation play themselves out over and over again in a multitude of different situation, and as far as human progress in terms of the development of organic culture is concerned, time stands still. In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek , genitive : of being (part. ...
Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905, Budapest – March 3, 1983, London) was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. ...
For other senses of this name, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ...
Gnosticism is a blanket term for various religions and sects most prominent in the first few centuries A.D. General characteristics The word gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis (γνῶσις), referring to the idea that there is special, hidden mysticism (esoteric knowledge) that only a few possess. ...
Arrested Development is a character-driven comedy television series about a formerly wealthy, habitually dysfunctional family. ...
Time Dick’s notion that 'The Empire Never Ended' suggests the Black Iron Prison has a uniquely psychohistorical aspect; to the extent that the linear narrative of time prevents the falsification of the past through the dynamic of symbolic death and rebirth inherent to circular narratives of time, and condemns the human race to an eternal prison in which the moment our neurobiological dysfunction became the basis for our entire way of life is lived over and over, like a needle skipping on a record. The archonic overlords of the human race maintain this linear narrative of time, epitomised by the capitalist narrative of infinite progress, through fear. Means utilised in order to effect this goal include (but are not necessarily limited to) maintaining a heightened sense of danger and engineering semi-regular moral panics over such bogeymen as communists or terrorists in order to rehabilitate the past, reassert the false dichotomy of good and evil which gives rise to the moral absolutisms upon which colonisation of the human psyche is made possible, and to thus to maintain the interpretations of past events which present them in a favourable light and rationalise the indefensible. Look up Archon in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
The phenomenon of the Black Iron Prison has been identified by a number of other writers, most notable amongst whom being Arthur Koestler, who in his 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine also identified the evolutionary glitch in the triune brain and the codification of psychopathology into political ideology and religious orthodoxy, culminating in what he described as 'blind alleyways of evolution.' The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm made similar observations in his study into The Fear of Freedom, as does Jean Baudrillard, who in his work Simulacra and Simulation examines the subversion of symbolic relationships by Empire. Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905, Budapest – March 3, 1983, London) was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. ...
Disambiguation: please visit Ghost in the Machine (disambiguation) for other uses of this term The Ghost in the Machine (1967) is a non-fiction work by Arthur Koestler. ...
This article is about biological evolution. ...
Glitch City, a Pokémon programming error that creates a jumble of pixels. ...
The Triune Brain is a hypothesis proposed by Paul MacLean about the traces of evolution existing in the structure of the human brain. ...
In law, codification is the process of collecting and restating the law of a jurisdiction in certain areas, usually by subject, forming the legal code. ...
Psychopathology is a term which refers to either the study of mental illness or mental distress the manifestation of behaviours and experiences which may be indicative of mental illness or psychological impairment. ...
An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. ...
The word orthodoxy, from the Greek ortho (right, correct) and doxa (thought, teaching , Glorification), is typically used to refer to the correct theological or doctrinal observance of religion, as determined by some overseeing body. ...
Erich Fromm Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was an internationally renowned German-American psychologist and humanistic philosopher. ...
Jean Baudrillard (born July 29, 1929) is a cultural theorist, philosopher, and sociologist. ...
Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et Simulation in French) is a philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard. ...
Subversion (also known as svn, for that is the name of its command-line tool) is a version control system designed specifically to replace CVS, which is considered to have many deficiencies. ...
Symbolism is the systematic or creative use of arbitrary symbols as abstracted representations of concepts or objects and the distinct relationships in between, as they define both context and the narrower definition of terms. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
See also Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German political theorist. ...
Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology originally coined by Carl Jung. ...
Nada Rizkallah is a person who has an obsessive need to control other people or situations. ...
The global brain is the name given to the emerging intelligent network formed by all people on Earth, together with the computers and communication links that connect them together. ...
Guy Debord (born December 28, 1931; died November 30, 1994) was a writer, film maker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International (SI). ...
Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982), often known by his initials PKD, or by the pen name Richard Phillips, was an American science fiction writer and novelist who changed the genre profoundly. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwells novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. ...
Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950), much better known by the pen name George Orwell, was a British author and journalist. ...
It has been suggested that Propaganda in the United States be merged into this article or section. ...
In George Orwells dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four the government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labeling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime or, in Newspeak, crimethink. In the book, Winston Smith, the main character, writes in his diary...
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