More Cargo Culture

JOURNAL OF POSSIBLE PARADIGMS
Issue 3, Summer '95

more CARGO CULTure Toynbee Ideas in Kubrick's 2001 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter

So claim several engraved messages in the streets of Baltimore, Washington, and New York. Is it art, is it propaganda, or just the battle cry of some lone psycho? No one has answered that question satisfactorily in the year since the message’s discovery. The roads in Baltimore where the words appear haven’t been paved since before the film’s release in 1968. The engravings appear worn, so they may be as old as 2001. But what do they mean? And why are they on the road?

Toynbee was a famous social historian who saw society’s driving factors in the metaphysical realm. This means that psychic, emotional factors determine our timeline’s direction more than anything else. Religion is the great motivator of history. Toynbee never said this was bad.

Toynbee used the term Voelkerwanderung to describe the "swirling movement and migration of individuals, peoples, and cultures in pursuit of a different or better life,"
that we see across the world today.

What happens in 2001? Man goes to Jupiter because a presumably extra-terrestrial signal is discovered emanating from there. He becomes old and dies there, and is then reborn. It turns out aliens guided our evolution. The signal from Jupiter is a calling card to another dimension, left until we were advanced enough to find it and recognize it. To answer it entailed the death of humanity as we know it, but was followed by a rebirth on the cosmic level.

Resurrection of the dead, however, is not something that occurs in the movie or the book, not in any sense. Does Planet Jupiter refer to the god Jupiter? I’d like to hear from any readers who have any ideas on this matter before offering my solution. Write me c/o this publication. The best answers will be reviewed next issue.