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Once upon a time, when disks
used to flip-flop and writing was on a star, the Blue Giant made the Pea Sea
for the world. But he needed a soft creature to navigate the waters with the
support of a few rams. So the keeper of Gates, who had both Micro and soft
in his mom's garage, made a DOSfish for Big Blue. Sound familiar ? Of course!
It's a modern creation myth knit by a nerd, for the nerds of the world.
Years pass and the workware
of the Keeper of Gates and of Big Blue at Ar-monk has been overrun with
bugs. but the people have gotten used to DOSfish and are unwilling to
change, even when it becomes confused from time to time and crashes. To the
Blue Giant's dismay, users still keep on patching it up, even if they barely
manage to stay afloat on the Pea Sea. The cautionary tale ends up in present
times, with the Keeper of Gates becoming the richest person on the planet.
That's when he goes on to display a dramatically different side: he starts
throwing his well-stocked billions at all sorts of seemingly lost causes
such as trying to rid the world of an ancient scourge borne by stinging
insects, and a modern one carried by a retrovirus.
Overnight, the Keeper of
Gates has become the world's biggest giver of charities, confounding all
those geeks who hated or envied his success. Many of them still had their
suspicions and their rant, echoing a Dead White Male philosopher called
Emmanuel Kant, was: "out of the crooked wood from which the Gate was made,
nothing straight could result." They are prejudiced, of course. Having made
his billions the Keeper of Gates wants to make a difference, to leave an
even deeper mark on history.
In the science of man
following Otto Rank, this is his immortality motive, symbolising what Jung
would call self-fertilisation. In the framework developed by the late
anthropologist Ernest Becker, the Keeper of Gates is our newest hero, a
scientific and productive titan, who's still hankering for cultural
transcendence, seeking better health and social justice in a profoundly
iniquitous world by giving up his dollars/ gold. It would be churlish to
sniff at this Neo rishi's sacrifice. For as the Satapatha Brahmana said long
ago. "this gold plate is the same as the truth. Yonder Sun is the same as
truth. It is made of gold: for gold is light, and he (the sun) is light;
gold is immortality, and the Sun is immortal; It is round, for he is
round..... In-deed, this gold plate is the sun." |
