About the song "The Stars, Already Faded"

Song: The Stars, Already Faded

Album: Global Parasitic Leviathan

Artist: Mother Of All

So time for a bit of a personal explanation... But maybe not personal in the way you normally expect it.

It’s about a song on the album. “The Stars, Already Faded”. It deals with many subjects and different layers and perspectives all at once.

The song is about knowledge and paradoxically it is also the least “objective” and “matter of fact” in its form and presentation.

A huge conundrum in my life has been the subject of objectivity and the pursuit of knowledge. I have had dealings with manipulative characters, narcissists and charlatans: in the realms of the personal, work, society and sciene. And of course the greatest nemesis: my own self-deception. None of these characters see any value in truth for its own sake.

In this way the song relates very well to the rest of the album. For how are the proclamations laid out so bluntly and assertively on “Global Parasitic Leviathan” to be arrived at? Is it not true that the religion of self-interest will take hold of the sense-making apparatus, through its incentive structure? Meaning in turn that their main purpose is to serve the interests on which they depend. How can I then proclaim my opinions so forcefully? You are right. I really can't. I'm never really sure.

I had a brief stint with academic philosophy at a university in Copenhagen. Here, much of the field seems to have devolved into an academic ponzi scheme. When a philosophical line of inquiry matures, it turns into a science (like physics or where linguistics is going), academic philosophy is often left with the scraps. In epistemology (shorthand: “how we come to know things”), there is a made up distinction, in some academic circles, between something called “internalism” and “externalism” introduced by philosophers confusing terms and using outdated thinking from the philosophy of language. “Internalism” is to be thought of as subjective, “externalist” approaches as being “objective”. But really the “externalists” just use the field to make up endless thought-experiments of “ways people can be wrong” and fill up endless (overpriced) textbooks, with long complicated logical formulas to mask their initial axiomatic flaw (that there is an externalist-internalist dichotomy). It's an academic ponzi scheme and feels like an insult to philosophy and honest inquiry. Another type called, naturalized epistemology, which tries to just refer to scientific fields on all matters, turning philosophy into an auxiliary field (why not just do biology or physics then?). Long story short – that route, felt like a dead end too (regarding theories of knowledge), with its bad institutional incentive structures.

So then I had to depend on myself and a couple of core tenets. Herein lies the crux of the problem. We all do. The Global Parasitic Leviathan and its financial parasitism, relies on dividing and isolating everyone and making us ignorant. Then it kills off the few inquisitive souls and principled media, through inertia and what Steve Bannon -Trump's initial political strategist and later an organizer of right wing populism in Europe - called “flooding the zone with shit”.

Systemically the game is lost. Taking a cue from the way light travels, we can say that even though we might see the light from a star, the star might already be dead. In physics, dark matter is said to make up most of the universe, dark energy is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Both these theoretical and observational conclusions are unknown quantities (and changing al the time). This made me think. What if one day some galaxies will have expanded so far away that not even the light will reach us?... or maybe the expansion will accelerate to the point where the speed of light can't keep up (apparently that is not how it works technically, I read recently)... Well then we will be stuck with not even the light from a dead star as evidence. Assuming we are still alive as a species, there will not be evidence of other galaxies. Only a record of observations. The scientist will be turned into the “flat-earther” and the deniers of reality will be the “sound moderate voices”.

You dear reader see where I'm going. This is us already. When the information landscape is totally destroyed or controlled. Like in Orwell's 1984, the ministry of truth understands that: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”.

Orwell's character, the Inner Party member O'Brien, said: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Now look to Greece (It’s what the song “Debt Crush” is about). The country has been crushed by debt, austerity, turned into a debt-colony and locally been overthrown by a neoliberal oligarchy, controlling their media. A man who fought against the onslaught was Yanis Varoufakis, while he still leads a fight, one experience cements itself in my mind. He was recently attacked. By whom? By young angry men, who were so angry at politicians, that when they saw Yanis they assaulted him. This is the present moment, there is so little light, such bad information and understanding, that there is no way for anyone to distinguish anything. Friend from foe. Knowledge from disinformation.

When I saw Yanis' smashed up face it depressed me, because it all made sense. This is where we are now. O'Brien's description of the future rhymes well with reality.

The name of the first song on the album is “Cosmic Darkness”. The Global Parasitic Leviathan will engulf us all in an epistemological darkness. There is not much left. The light you think you see in the night sky is from a star that has already faded. There are periods and pockets of understanding and light.

As you can see it's all a flood of things to me and they are connected. I try not to make random associations, but to connect them into at least a semblance of meaning. Like how, during the birth of stars, gases are pulled together, so too the mind of an infant evolves over time, suddenly memories form and they change, until adulthood. They gravitate towards each other, combine, some core memories have more weight than others, some metastasize into trauma, others take on the role of healing us and comforting us.

But we can never be sure of what our thoughts and experiences represent or how well they actually convey what happened in our lives.

It's a losing struggle in the end. Inertia will overcome us. We will be wrong often.

It seems like most people do not care. On a societal level the structures entrusted with knowledge, have long since failed. Pursuit of knowledge and upholding it is not just “work”, it's not just a “method” as some autistic unreflective academics or idiot savants of the neoliberal economic orthodoxy believe... Or something to be hidden as the narcissist tells herself or used to control people as the psychopathic leaders do. It seems more like it's a moral imperative. It is for me.

As I sing in the song Monuments, “Objective means disregarding ideals, for careers. Funding is the determining axiom of the fields”.

I experience the aggressive pushback one gets if you question or attack institutions and narratives. Being called a “Russian spy”, a “communist” or a “conspiracy theorist”, if you point out what you see is happening is puzzling. For example uttering that the idea of “all income being earned” is a hoax, to mask the extractive sector, rentier sectors (finance, real estate, insurance) and patent extractors 'profit' as being 'productive'. While in reality they are a parasitic drain on society (the productive sector 'making things', healthcare, infastructure etc), indebting the rest of society to themselves and accumulating wealth in their sleep (while inflating asset prices forcing you to make a choice between homelessness or being a debt-serf). Or just delineating the idea and usage of the word 'market' from concepts like 'monopoly', 'internal monopoly of a networked company', 'finite public goods' is not within acceptable orthodoxy.

Not even offering a falsifiable and predictive analysis is good enough nowadays.

I think it doesn't matter anymore and the worst part of me is starting to understand, the people joining the neoliberal forces that are ushering in the destruction of prosperity in Europe, while making a short-term profit of it... also called “the center”. “The center has held” as the unelected leader of the EU commission (which helped turn Greece into a debt colony), Von Der Leyen recently said after the EU-election. This is the woman who cheered on Israel, as the genocide was unfolding a couple of kilometers from were she was standing: a fitting representative of Europe, I guess. This extreme misuse of her mandate, for personal gain, was perfectly acceptable to the EU. That’s the center and “the left”. It’s either joining that camp or joining right wing nationalism: closing borders for humans, while still keeping them open for neoliberal internationalists and their extractive transactions.

Lyrics

Pulled together by gravity

Fading, changing, dying, reborn, changed

Clouds form in violent confusion

Formless from birth

My memories as planets

Pulled together by gravity

Fading, changing, dying

Is knowing so simple?

Childhoods form in violent confusion

Formless from birth

Our Memories as planets

Stardust given form

Surveys its distant cousin

The universe observes

How the stars we are made from already faded

A brief network of light

Improbable folly

Held together by slaves of the passions raging against the night

...Although

The stars have already faded

My life's form is violent confusion

I was formless from birth

My memories as planets

Slaves of the passions

Serve and obey

Slaves of the passions

From the night - Until the stars fade away