One Future Of MankindArticle 01:The Story Of The Hall Of Time

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[Please note that this is essentially a first draft, with further drafts in the future]
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When I was 13 years old, circa 1970 - 1971, I had experienced many thoughtful books and much of the wonderful television programming of WNET and PBS, the USA Public Broadcasting System. As I kid I gathered a remarkable amount of my culture from these sources. I'd had Jacob Bronowski, Joseph Campbell and Kenneth Clark teach me about humanity. I was also a fanatic of science fiction and social fiction, therefore much enamoured with the work of Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke and the early work of Kurt Vonnegut. I wanted to comprehend humanity as well as write about it creatively. This was the year of the birth of my mature creativity. The Hebrew faith has the bar mitzvah ceremony celebrating the arrival of manhood. My rite of passage was a dream.

Asleep, I was flying about amongst the stars. Ahead of me I saw floating a long rectangular hallway heading off into the distance. I wanted to go there. I arrived with the opening of elevator doors and stepped out onto the red carpet of its entrance way. I was standing in a wide area that telescoped ahead to the width of the long hallway. Before me were a few steps a pair of handrails dividing them into thirds. Beyond the steps, on each side of the hallway were doors and doors, leading onward down the hall as if to infinity. In contrast to the red carpeting, the walls were all papered in a deep indigo blue.

Wondering what this place was, I set out to explore. I chose a door a few yards down the hall, opened it and looked inside. I wasn't sure what I was seeing inside. Running or flying a distance down the hallway I checked a few more doors until I began to understand that I was looking at a sequence of developing life on what I assumed was Earth. Running back down to the very start of the corridor I opened what I believed was the first door and at last understood that I was looking at the very formation of the first form of life. I was fascinated! Traveling back up the corridor I checked a few more doors and decided to see what would happen if I stepped through into one of them. I didn't see anything in particular before me but a sort of dark haze. I stepped forward through the door and was immediately pulled backward again into the hallway. What was that about, I wondered? Presumably the doors could be used to actually go somewhere. Perhaps this was the response of the doors when one didn't know exactly where one wanted to go! Therefore, there was no point in my trying to enter any further doors. But I did continue my exploring.

On and on the corridor lead, to the point of monotony. I decided that I wanted to travel on down as far as the corridor would go to see if I found an end. And with that thought I was there. What I saw shocked and saddened me.

There was one last door in sequence to my left. Beyond that point it appeared as if a great hand had reached out and torn off the rest of the corridor. The end of the walls and floor were jagged with broken beams sticking out at the sides and corners, ragged pieces left behind sprawled at angles indicating a violent end. What was I seeing? What had caused this shattering finality?

Being my usual explorative self, I stepped to the edge of the chaotic precipice and looked down. Out of the murk I saw a strange sort of room hanging in limbo. There was a stairway down to it on the far left of the broken edge. Looking straight ahead I could see some yards ahead something that looked like elevator doors that opened to what could be an continuation of the hallway. But they were closed. In the expanse between these two places was the sunken floating room.

I took the stairway down to the floor of this in between place and looked around at what was there. All I found was a flat surfaced lectern, the sort of place a teacher would stand with table space before him for demonstrations. Is anyone here, I thought to myself?

Arriving from a lighted area on the left side of the room was a man in a classic sort of silken robe, the same indigo blue as the walls of the corridor but with reflecting star patterns all across its surface. He seemed like a young man, perhaps what we would perceive as 30 years old. He was entirely kind, friendly and helpful in demeanor. He was there to answer my questions! So ask I did.

He verified what I had surmised about the hall. He told me that it was a representation of the sequence of years of life on Earth, with each door representing one revolution around the Earth's sun. These door allowed one to travel to any one of those years.

What happened to the end, I asked? Why the twisted wreckage? He explained to me that life on Earth had entirely ended during that final year represented by the final door of the corridor. I didn't understand, so I asked if I could look through the last door and watch what had caused the end of life.

Looking back on my dream today, I recognize this request, asking for this choice, was an inevitable outcome of my innate caring about life on my planet. But more than that, it represented my deep need to inquire and understand life even to its deepest and darkest moment. When I opened that last door and looked inside, my childhood, my child spirit was itself at an end. Having to know, and not regretting knowing the worst of all horrors, was the profound step into my serious, maturing and growing spirit that would be with me forever thereafter. I had no idea of the significance of this moment at the time. It was just another curiosity for me to satisfy. And yet no further choice in my life would have such impact or importance.

Without fear, but with trepidation I opened that last door. I watched what transpired.

It appeared as a very simple scene. It was, I realized, the same room, the floating room, I had found beyond the edge of the corridor. There was the flat surfaced lectern and not much else. I vaguely sensed there was something like a television on the opposite wall were events were being visualized. On the lectern was a simple box with simple control switches, knobs and buttons. Two men stood in the room with robes on that were very much like that on the person I had met in the floating room, except with design patterns I interpreted to be Persian. The man to one side of the lectern had dark hair, eyes and beard. He had some sort of unusual hat on that I didn't recognize. Overall I had the sense that he was of Arabic culture. The other man stood directly behind the lectern with the switch box within reach. He dressed very much the same, except he was clearly a Westerner. Apart from the robe he looked exactly as if he had stepped out of an American business boardroom. Then he spoke to the other man and seemed to verify my assumption.

I could not understand anything they said. But they were commenting about what they were watching on the screen on the opposite wall. There I saw ensuing battle carnage. I could only interpret it as a battle between distinctly Asian soldiers and men from this apparently Arabic culture. The circumstances of what I was watcher were never clear, left entirely to interpretation. But it was clear from how the two men in the room were speaking that the Westerner was the leader of the two. The darker man was there as a collaborator, a lieutenant to his general.

This is how it all ended: The leader, a desperately maniacal look on his face, came to a decision and instructed the second man to push a button on the control box. The leader stood there, in front of the controls and watched while the second man reached across and did as he was asked. Then there was nothing more to see or hear but wind rushing across scorched earth. I could only interpret this to be the nuclear termination of the final world war. The Master and given the order. The Servant had carried it out. Between the two of them they had destroyed everything of value on my planet. They had wiped out all life for whatever cause they had considered worthy of the deed.

Whether what I saw was real, realistic, symbolic or just a dream, it's important to keep in mind that my generation was the one that grew up with the thread of nuclear annihilation in our minds every day of our childhood. We were the pathetic kids of the "Duck And Cover" culture. My parents had stocked our basement with supplies for surviving through the fallout of a nuclear attack. I was taught to run down there should anything happen. I was shown where everything was for when we were forced to stay down there. Everywhere I traveled as a kid there were stocked and ready fallout shelters, all over town. Every few months during elementary school we would not only have fire drills, but duck and cover drills when when we were taught how to properly hide beneath our desks, or we would all be marched into the gymnasium where we would all duck down along the edge of the room with our hands covering out heads. It was all taught to us as calmly as possible by our teachers. There was never a panic. But neither was it ever explained to us exactly what this utter nonsense was for. Everyone was oblivious in those days to the realities of what just one nuclear explosion would mean. It wasn't until many years later that films were presented in public depicting the actual aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

We were also the generation that was taught actual, factual modern science regarding how mankind was affecting both his own survival and the survival of the planet. By 13 I already understood that overpopulation was mankind's driving force toward extinction. I knew the first so-called 'Green Revolution' of agriculture was an unmitigated environmental disaster. I was aware of the free flow of pollutants onto our land, into our air and our water. My generation was the very first in history to be exposed to the facts of mankind's ongoing destruction of the Earth. We were also the first generation to experience just how desperately certain people are to deeply bury their heads in the sand all for the sake of short term gain and long term extinction. The ramifications of each nuance of what we were taught about the future came true before our eyes. My generation in school was known as the first sad and serious generation. It showed in our faces and in our behavior. Then toss on top of that the total insanity of the Vietnam War and I have to wonder how any of us escaped chronic depression. Maybe having reality shoved in our face explains the endless reels of anti-depressant ads in the media. We were the Future Shock generation.

Therefore, considering my dream, keep in mind how I am the product of my times.

Everything beyond the doorway now being dark, I closed the door and climbed down the stairs again to the floating room. You'd think I'd have awoken shaking and sweating in my bedsheets. But instead I continued the dream by asking my guide the most crucial of questions:

What is the worst enemy of mankind?

What is it that would drive mankind to be so insane that it would deliberately destroy itself and living thing with it?

I was given two words and an image. The two words were 'zunipus stargo'. Conjured as an image above the lectern I saw a face to go with the words. It was the face of a man with dark hair, eyes and beard.

Having been brought up a Christian, I had of course had plenty of exposure to the accompanying pagan mythology contamination known as 'The Fallen Angels", or Satan, or Demons. Looking at the dark image of that face above the lectern I immediately associated it with some evil spirit that was out to get us, that cultural paranoia regarding unseen and unseeable spirits that undermine our aspirations.

But just as quickly I saw that I was wrong. It was only the face of that flunky who had pushed the final button.

What about those two words? What did they mean? I didn't yet understand.

At that point I was ready to ask my guide: What is this Hall Of Time was for?

This is where the dream goes strangely abstract, possibly into the irrelevant. But here goes. My guide told me that the hall was there as a gift given to mankind after 'the end of the world.' It was a way to repair the path of mankind and thereby repair the end of all life. He explained the system to me very carefully. There were people whom, after death, had joined with those hoping to repair time, and volunteered to go back and live another life with the purpose of altering the timeline. There was no way to simply step into time and make a change here or there. The only way to make a change was to live an entire new life.

This concept threw my mind out of gear. Imagine the time it would take, one full lifetime at a time, to elicit change! Meanwhile, still being a romantic teeny kid, I immediately thought how cool it would be to step through one of those doors of time and affect someone I really liked back there in time. Just recently my mom had taken me to see a musical show about the life of Coco Chanel, staring Katherine Hepburn. It had been enchanting, beautifully done, lovely music, lovely acting, a wonderful illusion about the art of human appearance. I had a romantic thing going about Chanel. And like a little dweeb I asked if I could join up with this time repair crew, in another 50 years from then, and come back as Coco Chanel's male lover. (I know. Taunt me. I had just as much sexual incoherence as any other 13 year old kid). Instead of slapping me out of my dream, my guide very kindly agreed and thanked me for my offer. It was why I was there. It was what they had hoped I would ask. The deal was set.

So if I die at age 63, wouldn't that be amusing.

Then I awoke.

What I dream, I thought to myself. What to make of it! I had never, ever, had such a vivid, intelligent, directed dream. That's creativity at work, I realized! I can dream THAT?!

But the dream wasn't really over until I figured out those two strange baby talk sort of words I'd been given: Zunipus stargo. I considered them in reverse. Stargo was obvious. Think about the imagery in the dream. Stargo was the dream itself. Star go. (Yeah, kind of like 'Go Dog Go!' I said it was baby talk!) So, having figured that one out I thought about the context of the word zunipus applied to stargo, the events applied to my dream. Snap, I understood. Zunipus meant deceptive. Put them together and the phrase explained exactly what I had asked to know.

What is mankind's worst enemy: Deceptive Truth.

Mankind is his own worst enemy. The process is the assumption of knowing absolute 'TRUTH'. What is the fundamental cause of each and every 'evil' thing mankind has ever done and will ever do? His own deception. Mankind sets up TRUTH then acts in its cause. The examples are as long as the history of mankind, in every nook and cranny of destruction. Holy wars, unresolvable arguments, victimizing systems of one man versus others. Power. Greed. Vanity. Ignorance. Go down every deadly sin. Examine every divine commandment. What is that mankind consistently trips over and falls: Deceptive 'Truth', or what we all foolishly consider to be 'Truth'. What I can only these days call 'beliefs'.

Reconsidering the accompanying image that went with those words, the face of the man who pushed the final button; He was someone whom I would describe as 'The Sucker'. Both victim and violator. Believer and betrayer. The Lost Man.

Having had that dream, having understood what I asked to learn in that dream, I was immediately put in the position of being displaced from everyone I knew and from all my surroundings. I hadn't simply done the 13 year old adolescent rebellion thing. I'd separated myself in a fundamental way from all the rest of mankind as I perceived it. Now what? What do I do with this? What am I, that I am one of these deception driven animals myself? How am I supposed to live my life knowing that I am consistently wrong in some way or another? How does one live with the fact that, as I say, We Never Know Everything About Anything?

I actually didn't deal with it well at all. Being an adolescent is freaky enough as it is, having your sexual cortex, as I call it, turned on in a wallop. Not to mention the over-responsibility syndrome I was stuck with, being the eldest kid in a family of 4 sons. Not to mention my figuring out my bisexuality with not a soul to talk to about it. Not to mention my greatest skill set was for technology and philosophy that hadn't been invented at that point. Not to mention the shockingly prescient dreams and daydreams I was having after that point. I was one f*cked over kid!

The curse of Cassandra.

Is anyone reading this familiar with Clive Barker's story 'The Hellbound Heart' or the first two of his 'Hellraiser' films? Is it any surprise that my subconscious went into shock after seeing the first of those films? Open the box and get a surprise you weren't expecting? One that carves you up into something you no longer recognize? In a very real way that was the result of my Hall Of Time dream.

Some foolish people say 'Everything Happens For A Reason!' As a student of creativity, choice, entropy, patterns and systems I can only laugh. Nonetheless, I've accepted that there are events that happen for a reason, if and only if we can pay attention and put those events to work as tools in our lives. Chaos or creativity, I put my dream to work.

This thing was foundational to everything I've considered important hereafter in my life. It was my turning point, mile stone, touch stone, nexus, beginning, blossoming, starting gun.... It never stops informing me every step of the way in my further wishes, wants and choices in my quest for growing.
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© 2010, Derek Currie
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Festival of Deceit, The Series: Introduction

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Introduction

What does a child do when 'e (he or she) finds h'self (herself or himself) inside a new system, one that no parent ever taught them to expect, one of those places too obvious or too obscure for consideration? It is the realm of the 'unreal', as we perceive it. We don't understand this place. It is not integrated into our inner world, which is where we believe we 'live'.

The child explores, fumbles and bumbles, and creates concepts that reflect the foreign system. Sharing these concepts with others, which is what this blog is about, has that ever present quality of sharing ideas that are wrong in some way or another. Sharing concepts is therefore dangerous. How does one take responsibility for the results of sharing? Something is passed along to another perceiving mind, and how is one to know what will follow?

Therefore, it is ever useful to comprehend that the concepts we share with one another may well have been formed through the thought processes of a child. I also believe it is useful to think of each us as we age as ever children. We explore the unknown, no matter how we avoid it, like it or not, collecting our concepts as well as those of others. We get to the end of our life of conception, still children, inside our cellular suit system. We have our gathered understanding of what we have experienced, which has provided us with the benefits of maturity and wisdom. But the child is still us. Death? The next realm of the unreal.

This introduction is in part a presentation of one foundation, a base abstact process, that is part of human life. I explain myself as a human child amidst this process. I share my concepts because I believe sharing is part of the path toward human sanity. I am wrong in what I share. I know that. That we never know everything about anything is my personal foundational concept. Nonetheless, I persist because I know I have benefitted from the concepts of others and I know others have benefitted from aspects of my own concepts. I like myself; I like the gifts I have; I am a social animal; we humans are fundamentally sharing creatures; I enjoy fulfilling my genetic and intellectual manifesto of sharing. From this baseline, hoping you understand this baseline, I want to dive down from the abstract into specifics about the time and place in which I live within human society.

I wish we could stay in the world of the abstract. But we can't. We live the specific. It's not pretty down there right now, in that specific world. It's frightening to all of us what we humans do inside our self-made little inner worlds that make up our cooking pot of a shared perceived outer world. We are miracle creatures of the miracle planet that made us and sustains us. Oh, what a blessing to be alive, cognizant and coherent. Thank you creative spirit of the Earth. But oh how we do fumble and bumble as children, cruel and lethal in the choices we make.

Part of me rages in anger and cries in mourning every moment of this time in my life. Part of me has had enough and wants to leave, move on to something reliably sane and noble, somewhere past death. I've had to teach myself, through the kind sharing and support of many wonderful people, to find a place in myself where I can continue my exploring and learning, understanding each new realm of the unreal and growing in spirit. If I weren't living in this current human age, there is no doubt I'd have found a way to get out of 'here.' On the level of specifics, this age is so intolerable to me.

And yet this is 'now', and I found a comfortable 'place' for myself. It is a place where I can grow and enjoy being alive amidst the mess and the lost. I am ambitious, I push through my cynical with my positive. I repel the negative cast offs from my fellow humans and bombard back what concepts I have for the great human being. Sometimes I fall for the futile and whine about the mess and the lost. I'm very adept at judgement. It's a fundamental of my personality I've accepted as mandated. I fail, flaw and frustrate. But also mandated in me is persistence in my goal to grow. Nothing stops me. There is for me no life without growth. It is my obsession eternal. Cast off all the peripheral and that is the me inside. It is the motivation. It is the manifesto. It is the sharp arrow me that cuts through all resistance at the speed of thought. It is my spirit.

This spirit is the other baseline I need to share and that I hope you comprehend while I share my experiences, concepts and creative thoughts about the perceived specifics of my time. Return back here to the Introduction if I lose you along the way. It may help explain the inside story of why I share what I share. No doubt there is more I could or should put in this introduction in preparation as I write this series. These words will suffice, nonetheless, as a starting ground.

So why the title 'Festival of Deceit'? The concept is my insight into the theme of this next year of human thought, the spirit of the age through the year 2010. Here in the United States of America, where I currently live, we are in a thrashing and vicious political age. The motions of mankind in my country are going to become desperate. Beware desperation. It is a form of chaos. Anything can happen. It is mankind gone manic. Expect glaring euphoria and dim decay. The floor has fallen out of the building and everyone is left with desperate choices. What will we do? My concept is that the most lost among us will become so desperate to hide from this new realm of the unreal that they will turn to deceit, most of all within themselves, in order to foolishly deceive and delude. It is an act of self-destruction. It is a fox (in more ways than one) gnawing off its own leg to get out of a perceived trap. It is deliberate squinkification. It is the ignoring and crushing of what 'truth' we are able to comprehend for an delusional purpose. The method used is the creation and dissemination of zunipus: Deceptive imaginings retitled as 'truth' and 'fact'.

Of course I will be coloring my words with my own inner world methods of thinking. My weaknesses, missing skills and personal delusions will show. All is point of view. It will of course not be entirely yours, and that is how it must be. Diversity rules. I am motivated to share this work. Care it or beware it as you choose. Just know that I care it and I hope you find some of this voice useful and fun. The target is the joy of being alive. My arrow is not the sharpest. My aim will be off. But my arrow's energy is perpetual and I know there will be interesting things to perceive along the way.

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Footnotes:

I'm playing around with a way to discuss humans without reference to gender. Grammar experts tell me that using the plural form of people, they or them, is not acceptable. That's what I used to use. I don't actually care because plural communication methods work. But for fun, and out of my instinct for sarcastic obnoxiousness, I've been playing with other methods. No one else bothers, I'm a producer, obnoxiousness is an enjoyable motivator, therefore I experiment. I perceive that I am honest about it. Thus my experiments with 'e and h'self, etc.

Note, if you weren't already aware of it, that I like to play with words. I often invent words for my own purposes. Language is only a tool. Put it to work. Go back and read my first post in this blog if you don't understand my words 'zunipus' and 'squinky'.

Note that I agree my sort of blether comes off as pretentious. At least I am minimalist, specific, and kind in my intent. I write this way because it makes sense to me within my system. It is how I express myself best within the context of the time and environment I am writing. It is me being true to myself.

Note that I alter what I have written periodically. Today's form of anything I write may not be tomorrow's. Therefore, if you quote me, be sure to use the latest version of my work.

Note that everything I write is copyrighted. At the very least, give me my due attribution when you use my work. Otherwise I will skillfully introduce you to your next incarnation via the process of death. And that's not good. I'd rather that we all honor the wonderful process and benefits of sharing. That I like.

Therefore, note the Comment link under each article. There is no giving without receiving. Monocultures are inherently self-destructive. We all learn through interaction. Please share back your inner world, with kind intent.

:-Derek
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The Age Of Marketing - Truth Decay

I've been wrestling with myself for months about how to start off the guts of this blog. One subject kept pinning me to the floor: Marketing Abuse. So here goes.

What is marketing? It is an extension of the fundamental human behavior of sharing. Marketing is a sub-game, part of the overall game we call 'business.' It's goal is to sell shared items or services, trading them from the people who have them to those who want or need them. How this is done is a subject of ethical dispute.

I of course focus on the element of what I call 'Truth Decay.' This term came to my attention through T-Bone Burnett, a master musician, composer and recording producer. I've followed his work since 1976. Among other things, he won a Grammy Award for his soundtrack to the film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?", an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey by the Coen Brothers. Mr. Burnett looks and thinks remarkably like me. I believe he must be one of my long lost big cousins, so to speak. His 1980 solo album was entitled 'Truth Decay', an apt pun for the subject at hand.

We are living in The Age Of Marketing, or The Marketing Era, whichever you prefer. I use the phrases interchangably. The artifice of marketing is centuries old. But it became a subject of urgent study after corporations were erroneously given the status of 'personhood' at the end of the 19th century. This abomination was heralded into existence, I am told, but the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Odd much? I'll be covering this travesty of truth in a future post. Now that The Age Of Corporate Ascension had begun, so had The Age Of Marketing. One of the pinnacle achievements of this artifice was propaganda. To quote a quote from Wikipedia:

"Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial porposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion."
—Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996

An excellent example of current propaganda today in the USA is the network of pseudo-political pundits in the pseudo-news media. One of the most famous pseudo-conservative political pundits was Jerry Falwell, inventor of the divisive term "The Moral Majority". Taken at face value, this term can vaguely make sense regarding human ethical beliefs. But it was used as nothing more than a political tire iron by a group of pseudo-Christian politicians. Jerry Falwell was one of the most successful propagandists in US history, pulling the wool over indeed the majority of citizens. His political movement culminated in the successful election, twice, of pseudo-conservative George W. Bush, who brought along with him the pseudo-conservative dumdum tank known as the 'Project For The New American Century', aka PNAC, infamously lead by publisher and political analyst William Krystol. The ruination of the concept of 'truth' that followed is only now being realized and understood.

In the future I'll undoubtedly post a diatribe about the history of propaganda, as well as a rant regarding what I call the 'Neo-Con-Job' movement in the USA. Please note that I have no respect for either of the political parties in the USA. If I'm biased, it is toward making sense, and neither party qualifies. It just happens that the tribe, oops I mean party, that has done the most damage recently has been the Repubicans, or Repubicraps as I sarcastically call them, as opposed to the Democrats or Democraps. In the future I will also cover the use of humor and linguistic invention in the pursuit of satire, a form of truth exhumation and zunipus humiliation.

The Age Of Marketing has created a wide variety of concepts. The best of these is the phrase "The customer is always right." This is what marketing should be: A positive service to the customer. Provide to the customer what they need and want. I consider the aberration of convincing or persuading a customer to buy something to be an art of deception, aka zunipus. It brings into the natural human sharing system all the human vices. The business game becomes an act of harming people, of harming truth.

Over time I've been categorizing ways in which bad marketing abuses customers through zunipus. Ahead is a series of short articles describing some of my concepts. I enjoy writing with a sense of irony and satire, and these articles will be no exception. I've been reluctant to post them here because they have an emotional component. They are in response to my sense of repulsion and annoyance with the acts of people I call 'Marketing Morons', those who use abusive marketing, as opposed to 'Marketing Mavens', those who use supportive marketing. Clearing away my rage regarding bad marketing, this entire issue is one of truth decay, or perpetrating zunipus for the purpose of personal gain at the expense of the welfare of others.

Share and Enjoy,

:-Derek
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Who, what is zunipus?

I am zunipus. My given name is Derek.

You are zunipus, assuming you are human.

All of us are zunipus.

Zunipus is a baby-talk sort of word that came out of a dream I had at age 13. I'll tell the dream some other time. Zunipus is an adjective. It describes anything that is deceptive. It is a neutral word. It does not infer bad or good. It is simply descriptive.

So why are all of us zunipus? We are imperfect systems. We are never completely correct. We pretend to know absolutes but we can't. We are incapable of being certain about anything. Or as I like to put it: We never know everything about anything. Our system, our bodies, which house our senses, mind and spirit, does a remarkable, some would say miraculous, job perceiving and evaluating our environment. To say something is zunipus is not to denigrate it. I am not saying mankind is bad because its systems are faulty. To be zunipus is to be a person who believes they know 'reality' but do not. No matter how carefully we use science to perceive the 'real' we can never be certain. We, as systems, are simply not perfect. We make errors, our sensing abilities are limited, the information we collect requires interpretation which by definition requires abstraction from the initial stimulus, and so on.

I will go into depth into the details and ramifications of being zunipus in the future. For now that is hopefully enough to get you started with the concept of zunipus.

I might as well introduce you to a synonym of zunipus, except this word is not neutral. It is a satirical word, making fun of the thing it describes. The word is:

Squinky.

I invented the word zunipus, but not squinky. The word squinky has been around for years. But it has no definition that I am aware of. Every time I see it someone is using it in a different way. That is remarkable, to have a word that is merely a sound and not a symbol for something in the 'real' world. Well, I have harnessed and tamed squinky for my own purposes, and I think it may come in handy for other folks as well.

Something that is squinky is perceived to be incredibly kewl, wonderful, chic, rad, fab, great. But it is... not. You have been deceived. The squinky thing or person has a deceptive quality. Paris Hilton is squinky. Scienterrificology (as I call it) is squinky. John Travolta is squinky. Tom Cruise is squinky. Pet rocks are squinky. President George W. Bush was squinky, but the mask fell off.

Now you have a new tool with which to describe the world. People love judging things, and the word squinky is a very useful and even insightful way to do so. But keep in mind the root concept behind squinky, that is the word zunipus.

Share and Enjoy!

:-Derek