Cataclysmic Changes (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 10 April 2014.

Carlton Farthington, as we've been developing him lately, has no content of his own.

He is an emblem of the reposting/retweeting/embedding phenomenon.  Interested fans of the project will go digging for that kernel of actual content but will come up empty handed.  The joke with him is that he is a guru who has absolutely no message!  So siphoning the message off Arthur White would make total sense.

As for the "cataclysmic changes," I'm beginning to like the option that they may have been about to happen, but that the volcano settled down and nothing happened.

That is, if you eliminate the possibility of a "many-worlds interpretation" from the Schrödinger's cat paradox (which I personally do not).  Here's the March 24 email:

So, for example, Farthington's emergence on the campus of Cape Fear Community College could have taken place in 1984 or 2014 or both or neither.  He may or may not be the person in the mascot suit or with the Google account.  The catastrophe in Iceland could have happened in 1976, never happened, or is about to happen now.  Strict timelines can be introduced, but they become less trustworthy as other alternate realities are considered.  Essentially, this opens the door to our competing narratives and creates a frame in which we never have to get it right, never have to put all our eggs in one basket, never have to sell ourselves out to a single storyline.

Why is this happening?

Two possible reasons that I can give:

1. It's the fulfillment of Farthington's prophesy about the "turbulent reversals" 
2. It's all happening in Arthur's mind, which is now "unstuck"

Again, what happens is either nothing, something, or the "turbulent reversals."  You made a convincing claim about what the turbulent reversals might look like when you wrote,

The Principles of Theory is nothing until the technology exists to suck it out of his followers...Essentially, Farthington's power rises as digital culture rises, and the more the culture moves from the pagan, analog, portable village model of rock stardom that the sixties gave us and that faded in the seventies and toward the more sophisticated obliteration of time and space (since digital culture puts us in all times and all places at once and becomes an age of recycling and mosaic instead of innovation)...

What I like about that is that Carlton actually is creating a counterfeit Christianity, a "He must increase, I must decrease" dialectic.

Interestingly, this is the very idea Nietzsche warred against in his master/slave morality diatribe: that the Judeo-Christian worldview was/ is just a gambit to wrest control of this world from the Übermensch (cf. my email on Ibsen's "O for a Viking Spirit").

Without going into that at all, Carlton's counterfeit is actually the type that leads one directly to the nothingness of Hell, not toward the humility that is a precondition for Heaven. I've really been starting to parse out this very fine line between the humility described in the Gospel and the nothingness we approach as we near Hell.

And as for Arthur's mental state, I don't think he needs to be a vegetable.  We can nuance that.  My main idea is that his powers were paradoxically released by this sort of outsider meddling.