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3-9-08 The Black Iron Prison
Posted by gavortnik on March 9, 2008
I join my fellow blog brother Shanoah in my bemusement about Daylight Savings Time – a time of year when everyone sets their clocks forward one hour because, well, because they were told to set their clocks forward an hour.
Logic!
And the best thing is that Benjamin Franklin – the man generally credited with thinking up DST – did it as a joke. Really. Check this page out, as well as some of Franklin’s methods to get people out of bed:
First. Let a tax be laid of a louis per window, on every window that is provided with shutters to keep out the light of the sun.
Second. Let the same salutary operation of police be made use of, to prevent our burning candles, that inclined us last winter to be more economical in burning wood; that is, let guards be placed in the shops of the wax and tallow chandlers, and no family be permitted to be supplied with more than one pound of candles per week.
Third. Let guards also be posted to stop all the coaches, &c. that would pass the streets after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons, and midwives.
Fourth. Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient?, let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest.
So yeah, I think we can all agree that Franklin was talking with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Now, granted, someone came up with a pretty good rationale for DST… in 1907. But I think we can all agree that artificial lighting has made at least a few strides since then. Too dark? Turn on an electric lamp or one of those newfangled gizmos whaddyacallem flashlights! That’s it!
But we still jump forward and then jump back, and for reasons that no one really understands. It’s almost Pavlovian.
Your neat thing today is a companion piece to the Principia Discordia, called The Black Iron Prison. “Black iron prison” is a concept from Phillip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy - a concept of imprisonment so subtle that the prisoner doesn’t know it exists. It’s mental imprisonment. In my humble opinion, one of its manifestations is people turing their clocks backwards and forward for reasons they don’t understand.
As Tim Boucher says:
Gnosticism generally asserts that the archons (which means literally “authorities”) are the masters and architects of this prison, and that their goal is to control us completely. But in a way, I think we decide to let them.
The Black Iron Prison
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php
And just so you won’t feel deprived, here’s a song that I think sums up Daylight Savings Time best: New Order’s True Faith, from that wondrous time in the 1980s when every music video looked like Cirque du Soleil on the cheap.
Mike Harmon said
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Mike Harmon
Felix Nothus said
Ok, I originally read this due to the review on the black iron prison project, but after reading your thoughts on daylight savings and a friend of mine also reading it, and him being a major historical buff and knows what he’s talking about, he’s actually convinced me that Benjamin Franklin was dead serious about what he was saying, and I don’t see why anything that was said could be taken as tongue in cheek, I won’t bother elaborating on what exactly was said unless you ask, but I will say that while I don’t normally agree with my friend on many things, this is something I do happen to pretty much completely agree with, Benjamin Franklin was being for real about his suggestions. This is no “A Modest proposal” here from what I can see
silasginn said
I agreewith the last comment. Franklin was a prick. As for daylight savings time, well I would guess you live a good deal closer to the equator than I do. Many of the folks who had the power to push daylight savings time lived more northernly than others. That is to say, they weren’t in the third world, if things were truly democratic there’d be no daylight savings, and people in sub saharan africa wouldn’t die like flies. It’s the tyranny of us poor vitamin D deprived northeners that was of concern. And if you’ve ever lived in northern alberta and gone entire weeks without seeing the sun simply because you were at work or even in school, before the sun rose and after it set, you’d get the point of it. Now, I agree it would be simpler if we all got up later, opened businesses later, waited for sunrise and the day to perform our daily ablutions, or we could simply send our kids to school in pitch dark half of the time, things would be simpler for you and your clock. But imagine reading the “hours of operations” signs on the doors of places of business, not merely “closed early sundays and holidays” it would be “starting an hour or two earlier in the months november through march north of the thirtieth parallel….” and instead of messing with your clocks you’d spend the same amount of time squinting at signs from your double parked car. As for firing up a UV light to chase away the winter doldrums as opposed to standing in the full light of the morning sun, if you think that a suitable alternative I suppose you also feel this little exchange to be a reasonable alternative to speaking to people face to face. In which case I wish you the best of luck with “cyber” romance.
=Sigh.