The end of organic man…

We’re an interesting lot, we mankind, with this ongoing fantasy of self-destruction. There’s a running theme in our scientific and philosophical discussions, and our science fiction. We seem to be just vain enough to be just dumb enough to believe we are just smart enough to create an entity smarter and more superior to ourselves. It plays out in our imagination of alien life also. We can’t conceive of an unknown that isn’t superior to us in most ways and bent our destruction.

Mankind has a massive, universal inferiority complex.

It’s not a surprising nor a radical thought. We see how it plays out in our race relations around the planet. Our fear goes so far as to believe that even those we deem inferior will eventually overwhelm us with their superior power and capacity to breed. Strength in numbers and all that. We feared that the Russians were technologically superior. We feared that the Chinese had technology and sheer numbers.

Fear for years. Fear for miles. We got fear on sale. Get yours today.

Still, for all that, the music here has some fair approximations of ancient cultures and organic sounds, if digitally recreated.

I’m a fan of the Cryo Chamber label and their releases, and particularly Atrium Carceri, who bring the somber tones. How do I describe this one? It’s as if the dark and silence of the night when you’re off all alone sounded like something. There are a lot of familiar sounds, but not quite so familiar that you might name them. That creates a phenomena of the mind, just short maybe of cognitive dissonance. You can start to latch onto something to identify what you’re hearing, but it never quite solidifies. Even the bits of conversation looped in just below the bed of sounds don’t quite register in. Sentences and sounds are incomplete. The result is that otherwise peaceful tones don’t bring any peace.

It’s all totally at odds with how I spent a good part of the weekend, in about the most organic settings a person can find in a city of… how many… 8 million? This is about as far from beach music as one could hope to find. Not even a beach at night that’s recently been stormed by commandos. It’s also different in that I’m usually listening to/exploring sounds like this while I’m breaking the surface of a deep meditation. It’s a totally different vibe. Still, it works.

I’ll take it.

But back to this end of organic man. I honestly can’t conceive of it, despite that I’ve followed the years of discussions closely and heard all the future theories. I know all about the nuclear disasters and bio-weapons and climate change and death comets and the whole lot. It’s not that it’s impossible. Species go extinct all the time with no manmade interference. It’s always been that way. We didn’t kill the dinosaurs. We didn’t create The Ice Age. Things just disappeared for one reason or another, and we could as well. That’s more the likely scenario for me. We certainly do have the capacity and probably will destroy life as we know it, but as far as destroying mankind altogether, I’m not feeling that theory at all and it’s not just denial. I just don’t think we’re all that smart.