Percy:  Yep.  Only inverted, or like a dry dock for ships.  We erect the scaffolding to construct the space inside it.  The tent floor sits on the Object, Planet Earth and its resources.  The tent walls are erected by the three poles of the Superstructure, which represent Boyd scientific principles from Destruction and Creation.  Those walls form a surface around our proposed closed system: the Abstract Space created by Western Civilization.   Imagine our Capability Circuit spinning around the spacetime of this tent's interior.   We build toruses inside the circuit, which plot the system’s coordinates with a Frame that adheres to the Superstructure’s scientific principles.  If we violate one of the principles -- that is, a pole in the Dome -- the buzzer sounds...

Red:  Coloring inside the lines?  Are you regressing us via physics to pre-school Percy?

Percy:  Gotta tap that pre-literate brain, Red!  But the goal of this art project is to uncover more lines – or structural poles.  If the alphabetic illusion does follow scientific principles, then I’m betting our simple camping tent turns into a complex geodesic dome with fractal surface...

Red:  Fractal? 

Percy:  A geometric pattern that repeats itself.  Like the Mandelbrot Set, or a fern's leave...

Red:  Oh right.  What you see on magic mush...um…I mean… what I heard that people say that they see on mushrooms.

Percy:  Yeah.  I’ve heard the same.  To match this hypothetical outcome the decoding tools are recursive.  Just like my brief, intense views inside the fabric of Abstract Space.  Smaller versions of the bigger picture...and in that recursive spirit think of our three-pole tent as the Ur-Dome of the Illusion.  The Perception Perimeter Torus plots coordinates in here, while our other capability torus -- the Tessera --  maps within its offspring.  

Red:  More Domes?

Percy:  Same tent, different components. 

Red:  Watch out...Beware the Mother of Domes...

Percy:  Yep.  She has birthed thousands of smaller versions, or what we call states.  Let me change this tent's labels to reveal the Dome of Domestication.  The floor sits on the Object -- the state’s territory.  The walls are erected by the state’s legal Superstructure, divided into three broad categories: civil/criminal for the population; business/financial for wealth creation; and administrative for the governing class.  The tent walls are the surface that enclose the state’s Abstract Space.  Unlike the Mother of Domes these walls are filled with images.  This colorful tapestry, visible to everyone, is called propaganda -- abstractions that propagate faith in the state…

Red:  Wait a second...that’s not the definition of propaganda.  Propaganda is political disinformation.  Manipulation and lies, not the facts.  I read a ton about it after 2016’s Trump/Brexit fiascos.  Got my ex-hack hackles all up...In fact, my obsession with propaganda brought me to your site.  Where lo and behold I learned it was written by my long-lost friend.  Now you are saying propaganda is something else!?

Percy:  We can discuss this at length in The Tessera Torus, so I will be brief.  Your concept of propaganda is the mass mediated spectacle layered on top of a much older practice.  One created for the state by 20th Century publicists, marketers and advertisers.  Such propaganda seeks out fast-moving, black-and-white public debates over the cause of events.  Did the Jews stab Germany in the back?  Did Clinton have sex with the intern?  Does Iraq have WMD?  But recall writing narrows causality to the sentence grammar of subject-verb-object.  It can’t reflect complex reality.  So any propagandist can stitch together a linear sequence of factors that appears to show the direct causality of an event -- and then provoke a debate over its merits.  That debate, not its specific messages, is the objective of the campaign.  It keeps public attention focused on the propagandist's agenda.  Attempts to debunk deceptive messages just reinforce and magnify the false dichotomy of the debate -- a trap American liberals habitually walk into. 

Red:  O.K.  That was a lot to take in.  But, and no joke, what you just said makes a hell of a lot of sense.  Especially about the dopey Democrats.  They sleep walk into traps.  See Sidebar: Truth Activists

Percy:  It really is sad.  Truth activists who claim to represent reality, yet trapped in the Screen's illusory dichotomies -- wrong vs right, us vs them, good vs evil.  Which are, of course...

Red:  I know...structured by writing. 

Percy:  Actually, I wasn't going to say that.  But since you did, how about a little exercise in inversion.  You could also say this situation is the consequence of writing's structure.

Red:  Um....consequence? 

Percy:  Yeah.  Is it not possible that our view of the world is created by the structure of writing?  A place of dramatic and linear stories fronted by human actors.  Framed by simplistic dichotomies that force you to choose a side.  Which leads to a self-conscious and self-centered filter of reality.  Not just an illusion.  But a mirrored illusion.  A mirrored illusion that reflects your self-image back at you. 

Red:  That's some heavy shit there, Percy...maybe you should use a different word than propaganda?  Spare us the dissonance.  Just invent one.  You’re good at that. 

Percy:  Propaganda really is the best concept, at least my interpretation of the original 17th Century definition: mass communications that propagates faith in a ruling system.  The word comes comes from the Vatican’s Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for Propaganda of the Faith, which was tasked with countering Protestantism in the vast swathes of Asia, Africa and the Americas opened by transoceanic navigation.  It is the heart of the literate state’s Illusion, which demands obedience to the grid of laws that manage its human and natural resources.  Yet who obeys, let alone bonds with, strings of technical words?  Just like computer software, the Superstructure's codes need a graphic interface.  So each Dome’s walls contain colorful symbols and simplistic phrases linked to the history of its location on the farm.  The Stars and Strips, the Union Jack.  Queen and Country, Freedom and Democracy.  You get the picture.  Easy to get. 

Red:  O.K.  I will back off.  But why use propaganda to decode the so-called Illusion?  Can't we use something else?

Percy:  Propaganda is, arguably, the only abstract energy a state's population perceive collectively.  Think of it this way.  My time as a combat reporter and info war operator opened portals that allowed my Outside Mind to peer into the networked power grid behind the literate Illusion.  Will you accept this as plausible?

Red:  Sure.  Why not?

Percy:  Now imagine you were stuck in that maze I showed you at the beginning of Room 1.  And every so often you elevated up and saw a sector within it.  After a couple dozen views you realize each view had the same pattern.  So how do you construct a map of the entire maze in order to locate the exit?

Red:  By roping your friend into a frustrating dialogue about it?

Percy:  Wow.  Touche.  And you tell this friend the maze problem must be approached just like the visual system approaches a new Setting.  Scan the horizon.  Establish the outer perimeter.  Compare and contrast between what you see and what you know...in other words: build a dialectic.   Most importantly, build it from objective  structures that other Outside Minds can see, irrespective of their location within the fabric (or maze) of today's (or tomorrow's) Abstract Space.  Then we may be able to collectively decode the Illusion.  I don't think it will take many of us, but it is impossible to do alone.  

Red:  Why impossible?

Percy:  My dialectical model must be placed in a dialectic with someone else's dialectical model.  Compare, contrast, refine, expand.  Plus, it's mentally exhausting and at times precarious.  For you must sit outside the state's structures in order to decode its symbols.  But I do hope that one day my tools will allow people sitting inside these structures to also decode...

Red:  Um...I still don't see how you decode a symbol.

Percy:  A static symbol is lifeless.  We are interested when and where these symbols come to life as stories.  Stories with human actors seeking to change – or protect -- something within the machinery of state, meaning its superstructure of laws.  These are propaganda campaigns, our portals through the Screen.  Let's get out of the tent...and look back at the Big Screen.  If you studied Einstein’s relativity the left graphic of pink cones may appear familiar.

Red:  I didn’t.

Percy:  Neither did I.  So I was surprised to find that my visualization of abstract energy was like the Minkowski light cone diagram.  The upper cone captures the possible directions -- and impacts -- for a flash of light spiraling through spacetime.  The lower cone displays the possible factors that led to that flash -- which is identified at a point on the plane between the cones.  That plane is called the Hypersurface of the Present.

Red:  Hypersurface?  I think I see where you are taking this...so why is the light cone vertical?

Percy:  Apparently just convention.  But it’s a useful foil for our graphic to the right, which I call an Event Cone.  Do you recognize that final graphic from the last room that made you go "whoa" -- only minus the circles and expanded into 3D.  You can swipe the tablet to see that graphic.

Red:  Yeah. O.K.  I see the 2D outline now and how it's expanded on our Screen...

Percy:  So...with the Event Cones, we aren't measuring a reflection of light particles projected directly from their source.  You know, like the sun.  We are measuring a reflection of a propaganda abstraction created by humans to explain shifts in the equally-abstract machine that is exploiting the resources of our home.  And that requires a different orientation.  So our version of a Minkowski diagram is horizontal.  Its bottom edges touch the objects on Planet Earth that propel abstract energy through the Screen.

Red:  Right!  The infrastructure of commodity trade...

Percy:  Correct.  The cones represent the spirals of past and future event chains linked to an information event.  We call the possible paths that connect these events contour lines, which reveal the geographical features of Abstract Space.  The target event is a propaganda campaign located at a specific point on the plane between the two cones, which we call the HyperScreen of the Present. 

Red:  Ah-hah!  The Screen.  Honestly, I still don’t see how you measure energy from it

Percy:  Recall physics tells us that energy – and therefore reality – comes from entropy, or event chains in an unbalanced system searching for equilibrium.  A state’s legal Superstructure concentrates and harnesses energy for wealth creation.  According to entropy, a new law should -- paradoxically -- destabilize the system of energy it manages.  Humans who benefit from the law will protect, reinforce and repair this linear energy concentrator until the inevitable systemic imbalance breaks it.  Other humans ride new waves of wealth-creation energy through this transition.  They take over, write new laws, the cycle begins anew. 

Red:  What exactly are you saying?  That laws actually control the elites who created them?

Percy:  Maybe not the first generation.  They ride the new system through its low-entropy phase, where there's more capacity for human action.  If you can see the impact of your new laws, I suspect you would think you are really clever.  Out of luck comes hubris, passed to the second generation, who really reap the rewards as the system cycles through its peak.  It's the third generation that are left holding the bag as the system enters high entropy, with lots of confusion and limited capacity for action.  How a state emerges from that generation is the test.  Well, that's my three-generation hypothesis anyway -- which isn't very original.  

Red:  Yeah.  I've heard of that in family businesses.  The grandfather creates.  The father expands.  The son destroys. 

Percy:  Yep...the bottom line -- so to speak -- is laws are frozen word thoughts that can't adapt to the entropy they exploit.  Those who believe in them are swept into the inevitable cycle of destruction and creation.  And it is there, at the transition point, that we take our initial reading of abstract energy. 

Red:  You mean at the moment a law changes? 

Percy:  Yeah.  And this is big picture mapping, so the big picture laws.  Those that manage the resources of wealth creation.  Crucially, legal changes are indisputable public events.  The subjectivity comes in causality -- why the law changed, and its impact.  And that, quite often, is explained via propaganda.

Red:  O.K.  Maybe I'm a little off track with this question.  But if we are focusing on laws for commodity trade, can't we just measure abstract energy from the physical energy released by the sectors they manage? 

Percy:  If writing was an accurate reflection of reality, yes.  But that's impossible.  Just look at the entire history of economics. 

Red:  Yeah...right?  How can one academic field be so influential yet so wrong? 

Percy:  I don't know what's more absurd.  The invention of the rational actor, or the debunking of it.  So dismal...anyway, this is why we must view all written documents as ciphers -- and seek out the predictable propaganda structures within them.  The next room introduces the first tools for doing this...