Prescient Art or Predictive Programming?

Can Artists See the Future? Or Are They Being Directed?

“The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality”

- Flannery O’Connor

I believe artists have a way of tapping into the collective unconscious that other people are only dimly aware of, or not aware at all.

An artist can portray something the the public is about to realize, or on the verge of realizing, but has not yet fully made conscious. Part of the experience of viewing great art is that moment where we realize someone has made evident a thing of which we were only dimly aware.

About fifteen years or so ago I finished writing a dark fantasy/sci-fi novel. (What the kids these days are calling “crossover”.)

It took place in a post-apocalyptic desert setting and concerned a man on the run from a cult of shrouded priests, who (for reasons revealed in the story) want to inject our poor, beleaguered protagonist with an concoction of poison that will rob him of his mind and memories and even the ability to control his actions.

The result of prior injections is that he is wracked with almost continual pain as Morgellons-like metallic fibers grow inside him. The way the cultists propose to entrap our hero is to move through society posing as doctors hunting down a dangerously insane mental patient…

Wait… where have I heard all this before?

Oh, right. The not-far-off FUTURE.

I don’t know if this was artistic prescience, or simply a younger me considering my worst nightmares.

I had no particular beef to pick with pharma or with a possible medical dystopia. In fact, I’m generally against people smuggling their views into fiction and using it to preach—it’s a great way to ruin some otherwise great art.

It just struck me that being injected and having one’s mind and actions and memories stolen was a really terrible thing to happen to someone, and the basis for a good sci-fi-ish thriller.

But jeez, the specifics.

And this wasn’t my first, or last, brush with artistic prescience.

The X-Files spinoff series The Lone Gunmen aired its pilot episode on March 4, 2001, and revolved around a false flag plot by dark actors within the U.S. Government to fly an airliner into the World Trade Center, blame it on a “terrorist attack”, and use the event to justify a (profitable) invasion of a foreign country.

There was also the case of 38-year-old artist Michael Richards, who made a larger-than-life-size sculpture of himself being penetrated by airplanes… and who subsequently perished in the WTC collapse.

And the one that really gives me the heebie-jeebies, given our current dystopia, is Fear Inoculum, a song released by the band Tool, in the summer of 2019.

Nearly every lyric of the song drips with the upcoming pandemicism:

     Immunity, long overdue.

                Contagion, I exhale you.

                Naïve, I opened up to you.

                Venom and mania.

                Deceiver says, “You belong to me”,

                “Fear the light, fear the breath”

                “Fear the others for eternity"

                “You don't wanna breathe the light of the others”

                Hear the venom, the venom in What you say

                Inoculated, Bless this immunity

                Enumerate all that I'm to do

                Calculating steps away from you

                Growing through division from mania

                Forfeit all control

                You poison, you spectacle

                Exorcise the spectacle, Exorcise the malady

                Exorcise the disparate

                Poison for eternity

                Purge me and evacuate the venom and the fear that binds me

I mean… “Fear the breath, fear the others for eternity”? “You don’t want to breath the light of the others”? “Calculating steps away from you”? “Forfeit all control”?

Is your skin crawling like mine is?

(Unfortunately, despite the seeming anti-pandemicist, inoculating oneself against fear message, the lyricist/singer Maynard James Keenan seemed to go all in on the masking/get vaxxed/fear the deadly contagion which will surely kill us all--undercutting his own message. Chalk it up to another heartbreaking disappointment by one of my former heroes.)

Oh, and by the way, bonus points if you noticed the band’s logo on the album cover, when chopped in half and folded, forms a syringe.

Fuck. Me.

And of course, there have been enough virus/pandemic/apocalypse/zombie outbreak films over the past twenty years to constitute an entire GENRE. Endless repeated programming on infection, outbreak, contagion, societal breakdown, isolation, quarantine, testing, miracle cure, inoculation, etc.—including a few that covered false outbreaks conducted by bad actors in order to get everyone vaxed and reduce the population.

Likely you’ve encountered your own examples—an old song lyric, or movie—that give you chills with their prescient specificity. An episode of the Simpsons, perhaps.

I’ve been considering this for a while now, and I’m curious about your thoughts.

Can artists, at least sometimes, peek into the future?

Does the process of creating art open one to a kind of prescience that we don’t experience in our ordinary, non-artistic endeavors?

Or, do artists inadvertently help create the future, including, regrettably, the bad parts?

Or, are artists the unwitting tool of higher forces who hint, nudge, whisper, and use the artistic folks as a mouthpiece to implant ideas in the public mind they want to see actualized?

Some of you, I know, will agree with this last and cry: “Predictive programming! All of it!”

And yes, we all know by now that intelligence agencies engage in propaganda/mind-control/infowar activities. It would be ludicrous to assume that their activities somehow give art, music, TV, and films a pass. If anything, possibly even more so than social media, these would be the best avenues to reach millions of unsuspecting minds, nudging them in the desired direction.

I don’t think it’s a great stretch to say predictive programming exists.

But I think it’s only part of the picture.

Let’s visualize the possibilities like this:

                1. The future is fixed,  (i.e., “already caused”) and artists, at least sometimes, can see it.

                2. Artists, in the act of speculating about the future, end up causing it.

                3. The future is planned, or caused, by deliberate actors, and artists are good at running the clock forward  to see what will happen.

                4. Deliberate actors use artists to cause the future.

All are plausible, I think.

But I’d like to suggest one further view:

                5. It’s complex. There are ideas at work in the culture which cause everyone involved, the artists, the bad actors, the existing institutions, and the populace at large, to bring about certain futures. Everyone is at work on the same ill-conceived project, whether they’re aware of it or not.

So the flow chart would look something like:

Basically, lines of causality in all directions.

Artists are capable of directing our attention anywhere on the flow chart. Art makes us consider ideas at work in the culture. It makes us consider the bad actors and institutions involved. And it runs the clock forward and has us consider what the horrible outcomes of all of this might be.

In other words, art is influenced by (and influences) it all.

And given that massive confluence of causality, sometimes art “gets it right”. Sometimes shockingly so.

Consider, someone writing seventy-five years ago might have considered the ideas and forces at work in their society…

·         the rise of machinery and technology and mass communication;

·         how that tech might one day be used to gain information about peoples’ motions and habits and acquaintances;

·         the use of government resources to eradicate any history or facts unfavorable to the regime;

·         the use of doublespeak language to obfuscate and invert truth;

·         the use of psychological programming and fear-based messaging to direct people’s attention on enemies and invisible threats;

…and come up with an astonishingly accurate depiction of what a future society might look like. So much so, down to the details, that the occupants of that future society might have skin-crawling sensations when reading that work.

Oh, right… someone did that.

But this same work of art might also act like an instructional manual. That future might have been coaxed into being by actors that wanted it so, given the proliferation of the ideas that gave rise to the novel in the first place.

It seems shocking in its accuracy because we don’t see ideas at work. We can’t see their subtle influence working away on people and institutions. So we are shocked when they actually result in some disastrous outcome.

If we could see causality—if we could have seen the ideas all along, and seen the way that people modify their lives to fit them, and subtly reinforce them over and over, and bury them deep in their subconscious using language tricks, and watch the ideas take hold of institutions, and see institutional behavior modifying over time—we would not be shocked.

We would say: “Yes. Of course Orwell (or whoever else) predicted it. Anyone could see it coming.”

Lines of causality running in all directions. And what we call “future” grows out of this.

And, like weeds out of a soil bed, left untended long enough, they overtake the garden, become a system of rewards and punishments, and eventually, institutions, with power to bring about shockingly bad outcomes for society.

Consider a bad idea and how might it proliferate through the culture.

Take “disasterism” for example—the belief that the world is a frightening hellscape filled with impending disasters.

There clearly are sometimes disasters, so this idea has the advantage of plausibility. If I believe this idea, and get others believing it, and we start to pass it forward through time, before long we will start to make small changes to the way our families and social gatherings function. Someone who dismisses disasters as occasional and insignificant does not receive much attention. Someone, on the other hand, who speaks at great length and detail about all the ways in which disasters can and probably will wipe us out will receive much attention and hold court. They are socially rewarded.

Then, as the disasterism message spreads through workplaces, we will start having meetings, and briefings, and preparedness memos for all the disasters that are surely in our future. Again, the managers that are most adamant about this will be socially, and perhaps even financially, rewarded.

Of course, the government, not wanting to miss the boat on all the accolades and rewards, will get on board with the disaster messaging and perhaps even ram some new legislation through in order to have the appearance of “doing something” about all the impending disaster.

Insurance companies will love the flood of new business and raise their premiums. Private contractors will become rich selling products and consulting for disaster preparedness. They will score government contracts and be set up for life. Careers will be abandoned in favor of careers in the new field of disaster-tech. Schools will devote new resources to teaching all about disasterism and training new generations of people who never question what is in their textbooks. Research grants will be lucrative in this new field of disaster study, and other avenues of research will dry up.

The military and intelligence agencies, of course, will have their fingers in every aspect of this: research, production, distribution, oh, and weaponizing. And the media will do as it is told and scream the disasterism message at the top of its lungs, and ridicule and silence anyone who questions it. International agencies, NGOs, and wealthy industrialists all want in on the disasterism project, too. Massive resources flood into funding the scientific and military and propaganda divisions of a great octopus called the Disaster-Industrial Complex.

Pretty soon, a massive chunk of society is devoted to making the disasterism story true. They decide what is to be researched and built, what people are employed in building it, and who is rewarded for all this effort, and who is punished for denying it.

What started as a simple idea in my head has become an unquestionable mythology that runs society and determines much of our daily activity.

And, of course, it will result in actual disaster.

It HAS to.

There is, after all, a system of rewards in place for this.

And the disaster will not only reward some wealthy folks, it will serve to reinforce the bedrock belief in the populace. And so the cycle will continue. A change in power won’t matter. The bedrock belief is installed and running.

Disasterism will prevail.

The ideas determine the story, which everyone sets about trying to prove, with their predictions and actions.

This is also why it seems like we’re stuck.

It doesn’t matter if change the actors, or prosecute, fine, imprison, or obliterate them.

The same seed ideas will result in the same plants and weeds growing, over and over. Another health scare disaster as a preamble to an election, for example.

Same ideas at work, same outcomes.

Art, because it is just a susceptible to bad ideas as everything else, is both influencing and influenced by this.

Like the combination of air, spark, and fuel, we are all participating in a massive causation engine, ideas influencing culture influencing actors influencing institutions influencing artists influencing ideas, etc.—a broiling chemical reaction whose product is a collective consciousness about what we call “the future”.

Artistic prescience then, is simply a peek into this causality engine, which is hard at work bringing about a future we can all “see” if only we direct the light of our awareness on it.

When we do so, we see the causality of ideas at work in our lives made evident, briefly, and often in shocking detail. The collective unconscious made briefly conscious.

There are probably even more influencing forces involved here too, that I haven’t even considered, or that we can’t see.

(In addition to “collective consciousness”, I would also add higher consciousness or spiritual enlightenment or Creator-awareness. I don’t mean to trivialize this point by parenthesizing it, but it is part of a MUCH larger discussion about art and artistic awareness and where it all comes from—and one fairly well-covered in The Artist’s Way.)

Humans are story-centered creatures. We need a mythology to motivate almost everything we do. Even if that mythology is a terrible one, we still all participate in the causality machine which exists to make it true. We are only dimly aware of this, though artists can occasionally raise our awareness of it, and bad actors can manipulate it, and out of this mess comes “the future”.

Anyway, that’s my stab at a theory of seeming artistic prescience.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

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