Books Are the New Newspaper

I have to wonder, after experiencing the push to sell books over the last few weeks, if the rise of massive numbers of books nexused with the rise of anti-intellectualism has led to denigrating books to the realm of newspapers of yesteryear. It's much like the paperboy standing on the corners of a city block in the 1950's with the boy having the best headlines and the fastest read winning all the nickels and the boy with the newspaper containing in-depth reporting going home glad that his parents feed him.

I can see that, as I cruise through the top sellers, style and the projection of style really matter. People are generally not looking for books that deviate from certain specific styles. It’s a sort of anti-thought where your mind has formed to a certain pattern and processing endless streams of data in that pattern is like a narcotic. After all, not processing changes in the data stream format is read by the human mind as safety---the established patterns of the mind can process the data from the environment with no chance of a negative outcome. You will get the same result as all the rest of the surviving beings around you and therefore, like the crowd, you will survive. Minor flavor changes in the style give the illusion that you have found the nugget to increased survival, and tickle those neurons put there to detect that, giving a kind of euphoria. I mean, if you really came across something that was difficult to understand, you would have to live with the uncertainty of its outcome---you might have to ask someone for a little help---and heaven help you if you have to ask for help. There doesn’t seem to be much of that nowadays with everyone, including those who profess the style of helping others, having an agenda which has a greater importance than your very life, let alone your mental well being.

It’s the style of the times---the nexus of terrorists hell-bent on destroying people’s dreams and politicians and current business success stories bent on harvesting the dreams of the masses for their own profiteering. And people, defending themselves from their trauma-induced paranoia, are just easy marks.

There is nothing more repugnant to the gifted I think, than the relying on style for judging the value of data. Bring me your mind---your data and your mental model of how things work. Let’s talk about the possibilities, the feasibility, and the correctness of it all. That’s where true pleasure and safety is---the asteroid doesn’t care about your style and neither does starvation and poverty. And so, in the genre of gifted fiction, I am trying to bring new patterns of thought and new condensations of human philosophy---the kind of things I think will bring pleasure to gifted readers.

It is a bit like an alien waving a flag on the street corner filled with screaming paperboys. People avoid the aliens and head for the newspaper of the most comforting style. With all of the noise, it becomes a bit difficult for aliens---especially for those dressed as humans---to communicate. And there are always thoughts about those asteroids, and how hard it would be to organize massive amounts labor to defend against them. It’s good for now, that I can head home to my haven.