Bringing Forth the Thin White Duke

A common example used to refute the validity of IQ tests as a measure of human worth is the rhetorical on what occurs when those raised in close proximity to nature do in response to some questions. While a more urbanite mind will organize for instance, animals, in abstract categories such as mammals vs reptiles, pets vs domestic, a ruralite will organize the same animals into concretely useful categories such as what predates on another, what begets different resources or results. The test, biased towards a particular type of bourgeois intellect, will bias towards the urbanite in respect to their greater ability to perform intellectual labor such as computation.

This issue shows the marked intellectual difference created in the discursive or mechanical structures of minds reared in different environments. The mind more insulated within human-created entities grows to a new type, a more civilized kind made by, in the lump-state of development, greater degrees of human influence.

The hyper-civilized person is blind to that which the animal-body is immediately open to. The blinding of Thomas Jerome Newton is symbolic of this, brought into cold metal where facsimiles of organic eyes are fused to blind him, making his visage plastic, the button-eyes of Lazarus. There is a different form of sight, eyes turned backwards, unable to view the things of the physical world with the depth of a primitive and instead turned to different, higher frequences of the third eye, that is accessed when this happens.

Such is symbolized in the sealed eyes turning into the station to station mystic insights. At the peak of his civilization, Thomas is transmuted into the Thin White Duke, gaining transcendent insight by being blinded to the lower things of the world. In this blinding, the closed circuit of standard animal-cognition breaks down, the whole psyche of the primitive is fractured in ways unique to those existing in the linguistic density of privilege. The standard schema of an animal, a life based around consumption and excretion, moving from one node to the next of these two, is broken, its totality shattered. The seeping in the cracks of alien forces is sometimes literal, the infamous anecdote of Bowie as the Duke detecting a gas leak at the hair salon, or the experiments proving the ability of schizophrenics to predict the weather by reading data normally hidden by the well functioning psyche.

The Thin White Duke comes into being as the neophyte of transcendence after privilege by this shattering. These cracks are formed by the circuit being unclosed or overstuffed, in ways only capable by unnatural, external forces not known to the lower animal composition of the mental circuitry, forces of intense unnaturality unreachable by those who must make normal use of their animal-circuitry for reasons of poverty. Doing so cracks open the enclosed loop and prepares the individual for not only free movement, but free construction and reconstruction, and in doing so, mystic practice.