Is it magic when we sit behind the wheel, or is it just that we rarely think about driving as a way to assert our sovereignty and defeat Severed Conscience?
How Do You Get To Here?
Wind
In my hair
Shifting and drifting
Mechanical music
Adrenaline surge
Well-weathered leather
Hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome
The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware
Embrace The Open Road
Embracing the open road is an essential component to liberty and self determination, and while conformity is a value component for producing consistent results in engineering, the end goal is not conformity, it is to provide a machine for you to wield. That means amplifying your ability to move.
Spatial memory is a component that is at risk with the interconnected world. Succumb to Severed Conscience and give in to that virtual world and you limit yourself to visual, and perhaps audio if you take the time to watch a video. For the most part you are inert, light plays on your eyes, and you scroll. As children, once we start to crawl we develop spatial awareness, our mind begins to order our world so we can replay it for ourselves. If you’re a parent you know what I mean when you see your kid dart around the corner of a couch in search of a toy. They have a goal, no one has set that for them, they have decided they need to get from here to there.
Jon, whose real name has not been made public to protect his privacy, has been the subject of research papers since the 1990s. His medical case illustrates the extraordinary function that the hippocampus plays in human life. It not only enables us to build cognitive maps of space so we can remember places and navigate, but shows that these cognitive maps are the locus of our memories of the past, what’s called episodic memory.
Spatial cognition and memory have deeper importance to humans beyond daily survival: They inform our sense of self. Memories of the past are like pillars of our identity; we use them to build narratives about our lives. These stories inform our actions and choices, and create a framework for imagining our possible futures.
In other words, moving about enables us to author the chapters in the book of our lives.
We are born without the ability to balance and walk, we acquire it through trial and error, and build upon that foundation to become a sovereign being. Tripping, falling out of a tree – yes my daughter did that we were talking about that at a Red Wings game, not only does she remember being knocked unconscious, her cousin and Uncle remember that too – all forms you.
If you have trained in a martial art, you learn that your ears, your back, your neck, your feet take in intel that tells you when someone is near. The movement of air that you feel behind you activates your reflexes, perhaps some muscle memory when you weren’t so aware and collided with someone. Traditionally you slap the mat twice because that sound is distinct from the fall of a body and a limb striking the mat. The vibration and sound warns your partner not to crank that should any harder, it tells the duo next to you that someone may be on the mat and to tread carefully. All these experiences build up an awareness and comprise muscle memory. You learn with your body in the real world, you get hurt in the real world. You learn to navigate.
The same thing applies to other contact sports, situational awareness is key, you can locate others around you by instinct and sound. Just watch the NBA and you can witness amazing feats of situational awareness.
The ultimate form of navigation and actualization is jumping the car and heading out. To a lesser degree driving in traffic is an expression of that, but nonetheless it is an achievement to have lane awareness, get to work in rush hour in one piece without a mishap. As humans we are so good that we go on automatic pilot, but can also snap back to active control rapidly in an emergency. If we have prepared for it, and sometimes we surprise ourselves how good our reflexes can be. That is a miracle of the senses too.
Driving needs to be an active event – to survive you can’t be scrolling, you need to be “in the driver’s seat” and vigilant. It’s an analogy for your life. Without movement, there is atrophy. Stay put in a daily routine, there is no discovery.
Growing up in the Catskill mountains in the 80s I lived those lyrics listed above. The song Red Barchetta was about a future society that had outlawed cars, had outlawed movement outside of designated cities. A young blood sneaks out to his uncle’s farm to do the unthinkable: to drive and chart his own course of adventure.
Instruments In Hand, That's How You Do It
This represents actively ordering your life, setting your own priorities. You are the arbiter of your own movement. That stands as an anathema to Severed Conscience. It stands as an anathema to collectivism, communism, fascism, socialism, scientific management, Fordism and top down technocratic control. And of course they want to end that practice. To the point where they worry that bullying warrants the end of physical exercise outdoors on, heaven forbid, a swing set. What would the mothers of today make of a young Mighty Humanzee who would jump from the second story of a hay loft with his buddies. Climb the ladder, jump. For hours. Our how about skiing, swimming in a lake, kayaking? The list of activities that they wish to end because it fuels your independence is limitless. Recall that during COVID they told runners to mask up, people would pass out.
They do this for many reasons, the control freaks want you to resemble benign blobs like the rollie-pollies on Wall-E. That’s a future we are nearly in.
What does driving have to do with it? Everything. Driving is an expression of your skill, your free will. Pick a destination to hike or visit, and you are not offline. Or are you?
In his book Why We Drive, Matthew Crawford, mechanic and motorcycle enthusiast makes the point that Google has been on a campaign since it’s inception to keep you tethered and captured. He raises the point that during medieval times, villages and towns were laid out in ways that benefitted the locals – alleys and walkways represented your relationship to your neighbors and surroundings, and when the tax collector came from the imperial ruler from afar, the lack of local knowledge was a barrier to intrusion and maintained a degree of freedom. If they could find all the assets or people, they couldn’t tax them. This lack of knowledge aided many rebellions, including the American Revolution.
Google Maps changed that, and the justification seemed benign, these type of excuses always are. John Hanke, Google VP for maps said in the wake of protests of losing privacy to the cameras on the cars “I tend to think that societies like ours come down on the side of information being good for the economy and good for us as individuals”.
See how that is set up? If you are against providing tourists with information on how to get around, you are against THE GREATER GOOD. Too bad that it was revealed that the Google vans with the cameras swept up WiFi information with addresses, email addresses, names, credit card information, photos and whatever else was unprotected as the trucks drove by. Google lied when confronted: the first excuse that it was one rogue engineer proved a shallow lie after FCC investigation. This was part of the plan all along, and Google ignored subpoenas, and civil litigation.
This is not only a loss of privacy, this enables observations by the govt, for this data is available for purchase. What if this data was used to determine how much you travel so a carbon tax – something which Elon Musk promotes – could be levied from afar? What is an unauthorized garden were suddenly discovered, and you were taxed for the nitrates that you used?
Soon the mantra “people are actually the worst equipped to drive became the daily cry as the driver-less car concept was initiated. Google stands to gain the most, as you are transported in your driver-less vehicle, they will show you ads, track your reactions, help you make use of your time while you use GMail, search and other tools.