They offered sacrifices of their own blood, sometimes cutting themselves around in pieces and they left them in this way as a sign. Other times they pierced their cheeks, at others their lower lips. Sometimes they sacrified certain parts of their bodies, at others they pierced their tongues in a slanting direction from side to side and passed bits of straw though the holes with horrible suffering; others slit the superfluous part of their virile member leaving it as they did their ears.

A FORMAL PROCESS OF MORAL REASONING

If 'story is any clue, the succession of civilisations is accompanied by bloodshed, disasters and other tragedies. Our moral responsibility is not to stop the future, but to shape it, to channel our destiny in humane directions, and to try to ease the trauma of transition. We are still at the beginning of exploring our tiny little piece of the omniverse; we are still scientific, technological, and cyberspace primitives, and as we revolutionize science - wich is highly useful for building bridges or making automobiles - in its limited place. Alongside it we will develop multiple metaphors, alternative of evidence, new logics, catastrophe theories, and new tribal ways to seperate our useful fictions and archetypes from useless ones. The shapes of this civilization will be determinded by population and resource trends, by military factors, by value changes, by behavioural speculations in fields of consciousness, by changes in family structures, by global political shifts, by awakened individual utopian aspirations, by accelerated cultural paradigms and not by technologies alone. This will mean designing new institutions for controlling our technological leaps into a future. It will mean replacing obsolete political, economic, territorial, and ecological structures. It will mean evolving new micro-decision making systems that are both individually and tribally orientated synthesising participation and initiation and new macro-decision making systems that are digitally spiritual and revealingly autonomous. Small elites can no longer make major technological, ecological, or economical decisions. Clusters of individuals with integrated extended family structures must participate and calibrate what stetches out before them in a neo-pagan assimilation of all before, now and to be.

GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
"THROBBlNG GRISTLE" LONDON 1979