Mind Jazz W.I. Thompson

William Irwin Thompson is a writer that practices mind jazz.  He is a cultural historian par excellence.  A book he wrote in the early seventies is entitled At the Edge of History has this line:  "one can say almost anything about human culture now and it will be true, for everything is going on at once."  I think because he is a cultural historian he understands that cultures are guided by a narrative.   These narratives inform and give answers to the basic question that humans ask.  There is a shadow to all these narratives usually hidden to the ones responsible.  One of his fascinating insights is the idea that right before a momentous change in consciousness, there is experienced the most evil.  Why?  Because there is major resistance to fundamental change. We see this phenomenon happening today.
He writes in Self and Society:
"Whatever ideological face this mental structure of simplification through emotional intensity takes on, the creature within is characterized by a revulsion to complexity and a messianic sense of self-empowerment that God or, science, or some deified historical process as giving the chosen ones the license to kill...in fact, they would rather have Armageddon than move through a cultural transformation into a new mathematical-artistic mentality of Planetization."

Here are one of his descriptions of our electronic-post literate culture.  "as one turns from newspaper to book to watch the evenings news, one feels as if the news were like Muzak...it's there to lie about the frightening reality of our situation.  Information has become our Second Nature, but in spite of our incredibly advanced electronic media, we can sense that television does not embody the truth, that it is a consensual delusion, a droning Muzak inside an electropop mediocracy.  The citizen, informed or otherwise, no longer exists: there is only the pageantry of celebrities and the media's loyal subject."
Thompson appreciates Marshall McLuhan for his insights. "The Medium is the message."   Thompson writes:  "At each stage in the cultural evolution of humanity, a new medium of communication comes forth, and that medium then effects a shift to a new form of polity.  We begin with origins of language in the African savanna, and we end up with the disintegration of literature on the Internet."
 He writes about the evolution of consciousness in many of his books, especially Coming Into Being and Imaginary Landscape -Making Worlds of Myth and Science.   His website http://www.williamirwinthompson.org/