Musings from the Megalopolis

By Thomas Hoffman

The book is a collection of essays covering a range of subjects from science to history and social commentary as well as personal revelations.

The author was born in Baltimore, MD in 1950. He graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1972. He has authored one other book;

"Cultural Morphology". He is the president and founder (19

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Regency Publishers
• Release date: Apr 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781962313971

Book preview

Author Biography

The author was born in Baltimore, MD in 1950. He graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1972. He has authored one other book; Cultural Morphology.

He is the president and founder (1993) of Compton Trading, Inc.; a scrap metal marketing company. He currently resides in Rancho Palos Verdes with his wife, Suzanne.

Musings from the Megalopolis:

An Introduction

T. S. Eliot’s famous poem The Hollow Men is the last gasp of a spent culture, a groan of pain from the triumph of decadence. All the so-called art of the megalopolis is decadent and obsessed with filth and ugliness. We live in the midst of a broken dream, the end game of a once truly noble culture.

It is not to be lamented; merely observed and understood. We all are born into a culture at some stage in its organic development. We look backward proudly to the triumphs of our forefathers: the art, the architecture, the science, and the technical mastery of nature. The social fabric that made all these triumphs possible, the shared values and beliefs of a collectively conscious enterprise, all lay shredded at our feet. We have utterly lost the spirit of creativity and are left with anger, envy, and resentment.

This, though, is to be understood as inevitable. The birth and death of cultures is the record of human history. The Chinese, the Romans, and the Egyptians are all witnesses to the endless repetition of organic life and death. We moderns are merely inheritors of a dead ideal. The fact that we can know this without doubt proves that the creative spirit itself is dead. At the height of Western civilization, the animating spirit of a truly collective enterprise was unconscious and accepted without doubt. Newton’s mathematics, Leonardo’s painting and science and the music of Bach flowed freely out of a sense of necessity.

The spirit behind that belief and the yearning for that ideal are dead. The blood does not animate it any longer. It is merely a subject of dry analysis in the classrooms of the hollow men. We megalopolitan are too tense and anxious to do much more than analyze and criticize. We live inside our heads, and our heads are full of sterile reactions to the bombardment of information from periodicals and electronic media.

The attention spans necessary to produce truly great literature, art, or science that pervaded the 17th and 18th centuries is unavailable to the modern day. Still, our duty is to make the most of what we do and live a life as pleasing to our Creator as we can muster. In that spirit, I put together this collection of essays designed to distract one from the avalanche of unwanted information we are all subject to, whether we like it or not. Please, my dear reader, accept these musings in the spirit they are presented. We are all blessed as creatures of a divine creator with a choice about how we live each day, indeed, each moment. It is with cheerfulness and thanksgiving that we count ourselves among the living.

The First-Person Singular

From infancy to the first moments of self-consciousness, all children are autonomous individuals like animals. Although dependent on the mother for nourishment and protection, the infant child is consumed with its own experience. The infant cries for attention when it is not happy. There is no thought for anything or anyone but itself. Mama, look at me are the often-repeated words of the child. The first-person singular is the grammar we all learn first.

Once we are old enough to learn the world is not all about us and that we are members of two distinct groups, family and greater society, our language begins to focus on the second-person singular and the third-person plural. This world is not of our choosing but is imposed on us as the social reality (social gravity) we inherit. The first-person plural is reserved for family and friends and is akin to the first-person singular. In any event, our personal desires are now subject to those of the family and society. It is no longer a question of what I want but what they want.

In a healthy society, the requirements of the church install themselves above all others. In that order, God, family, and country are the they in everyone’s life. This allegiance to the Creator far outweighs that to family and country. In a healthy society, we praise virtues such as modesty and humility. The inordinate use of the pronoun I is discouraged. The first instinct of a healthy social member is to give thanks to God and family before accepting any praise for himself.

However, when a society begins to decay from over-ripeness and success, the very institutions that were responsible for the society’s vigorous growth are the first things to go. Plants wither when the roots lose contact with the soil. So, too, does a society decay when the members lose allegiance to the soil-based values that had nourished the culture into existence. Religion is the first of the foundational principles to be attacked and undermined by enlightened reason. Once this foundational pillar is undermined, the rest cannot stand. God, family, and country are the battle cry of a vigorous society. The decadent society first finds God a useless encumbrance restricting the freedom of the rational man. The family is next followed closely by allegiance to the country. Why should autonomous reasoning and outdated rules constrain individuals, and what is deemed superstition?

And so, the lessons taught the selfish child about obligations above and beyond his own desires learned first in the family, then in church, and finally in school are marginalized and become a matter of personal taste once again. The individual is free of obligations in the name of a utopian society where everyone gets what he needs. Me, me, me is perfectly acceptable in a decadent society that glorifies narcissism. Once deviant behavior is encouraged in the name of free self-expression. The first-person singular (the world of the infant) reigns supreme over the final destruction of a healthy society. Anything goes. If it feels good, do it. These phrases are a mantra for the final stage of a decadent society based on hedonism and narcissism. I, me, and we are glorified without restraint. Anyone who dares to restrain the deviance is labeled an oppressor and vilified as a hater. How dare THEY impose any restrictions on ME. They are evil unless they are part of us (we). The once vibrant and vigorous social fabric has been ripped apart in the name of tribalism. Everything is us versus them. The culture that was is gone, and society has sunk to the lowest common denominator of dog eat dog; jungle primitivism is the only rule.

Simple Duality and the Origen

of the Universe

Consider for a moment what the basis of all organic life, water, tells us about life itself. Take the case of the dew droplet on the morning leaf. It is a bundle of activity as it rests upon the leaf surface and glistens in the dawn. The recently condensed air vapor is now solid with a spherical surface containing water molecules in compact motion. Motion is the key to all life, and water in motion is the basis of all organisms. Ask yourself, what is the motive force behind this constant movement? The concept of motion has perplexed philosophers for millennia. The idea of motion is impossible to quantify empirically or adequately understand philosophically because it is the essence of creation itself. The biblical description of divine creation can do no better than, say, from a preexisting dark, watery stillness, God said, Let there be light. We can equate light with motion and begin grasping all of nature’s beauty and harmony. Equating light with motion (radiation) upon a field (gravity) is as basic a formula for existence as can be imagined. Imagination here is key to all that builds upon this formula.

The water droplet is a stage in the motion sequence that all water undergoes endlessly. Ambient water vapor itself is in motion, and as it cools, the molecules slow down and begin to condense around each other to form the liquid dew drop or drop of rain. The temperature dictates the stage that water will enter in the sequence: gas, liquid, solid, liquid, gas…. Heat and motion are synonymous with each other. Absolute zero is a concept akin to infinity or death, ceasing all motion. Like the square root of minus one, absolute zero is an imaginary concept without demonstrable reality. Let’s go back to the dew drop.

As the drop rests on the leaf, the molecules that make up the droplet are in motion. Inside the molecules themselves, there is frenzied motion at the sub-atomic level. All matter is reducible to electrically charged particles in constant orbital motion. We can understand the role of heat in molecular motion, but what about the motion of sub-atomic charged particles? Their motion is driven by a force more basic than light and heat.

I call that force gravity, which is one of two primal forces. Gravity is both a force and a field. Light and heat are products of gravity but, at the same time, represent a force that is the opposite of gravity, a force that defies gravity. It is the force of all life. All cosmic existence can be boiled down to the interplay of gravity and life. Matter and gravity produce light, which itself fuels life in all forms. Darkness and light are two sides of the same coin: gravity and life. Life is light, and gravity is dark. Life is expansive, as are all electromagnetic waves, and gravity is contractive, as demonstrated by the spherical nature of all cosmic phenomena. The compressive nature of gravity is the subject of a larger explanation, but the central thesis is that gravity is a counterpoint to life. They are symbiotically connected to each other.

Let’s step back for a moment. As human beings, we are severely limited in what we can truly know. Plato’s vision of our being witness to but chimeras or shadows of reality is one of many efforts to explain the conditional nature of all-knowing. The notion of duality has always been a feature of our ability to understand. We explain one thing by its opposite; nothing can be understood by itself. As basic a force as gravity must have an opposite; anti-gravity is the force of life itself. This life force is thoroughly bound up with light and heat. Light and heat are two sides of the same coin: darkness and cold. We can understand this in ways that illuminate the simplicity of these most basic dualities. The Chinese yin-yang symbol is an illustrative metaphor for this duality. The black and white, circle, and wavelike forms will all be explained as we develop gravity and life as equal and opposite forces.

Strip away all the scientific theory and mathematical structure we have been taught and rely only upon your senses to begin to understand the basic duality of existence as we experience it. Sit still and feel the force of gravity pressing you down into the chair. It certainly doesn’t feel like you are being attracted to the chair, as the Newtonian description of gravity would explain. Fall off a ladder and feel the force that plasters you into the ground; you might say you were violently compressed onto the surface. An object in free fall continues to accelerate until it goes so fast that it disintegrates in flames or smashes with an impact that increases with the distance traveled. As a physicist would explain, calling this phenomenon a weak attractive force misses the point in real life.

Now, let’s look at gravity as it relates to the physical universe. We are all told that the universe around us results from what is termed The Big Bang. Not only does the name lack some subtlety, but so does the theory itself. The idea of an infinitely dense object’ that pre-existed the universe requires a leap of faith inconsistent with scientific observation. It brings in a totally unscientific idea to provide a starting point to describe the empirical evidence as we know it. It doesn’t work. We will never surmount the something from nothing" postulate without reliance on religion or faith. We can leave it aside and deal only with what we know about nature. We have used highly sophisticated measuring tools to establish a solid basis for the empirical description of the processes and motion at work.

First, there is a consensus that the universe is expanding and growing in size. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to the theory of gravity, where contraction and compression are the ruling forces. Everywhere we look in space, we see spheres in orbit. The stars and the planets are spheres, and their orbital motions are spherical. The explanation is simple if we look at gravity as a compressive force, and it is clearly evident by observing the workings of the observable