You Gotta Buy The Ticket, Man!

by Midnight Freemason Contributor

WB Darin A. Lahners

On August 23rd, I celebrated the Fourth Anniversary of my first date with my wife, Lisa Goodpaster-Lahners.  Little did I know, I would join another secret society when I started my relationship with her.  While the exact qualifications for labeling a group a secret society are disputed, definitions generally rely on the degree to which the organization insists on secrecy, might involve the retention and transmission of secret knowledge, the potential for denial of membership to those who seek it, denial of knowledge of the group, the creation of personal bonds between members of the organization, and the use of secret rites or rituals which solidify members of the group, a belief in charity towards members of their organization and others, and membership which treats each other as equals even though their membership is made up of men and women of every religious, economic, ethnic background.  

When I met her, I was already a Freemason and Odd Fellow.  However, I would become a member of a small elite group of amazing individuals, all of whom are fans of the band: "Pearl Jam".  Collectively, Pearl Jam fans are known as: "10-Clubbers", "Jamily", or "Jammers".  It depends on who you talk to.  While many dislike the term Jamily, I have found it to be fitting because the group that has taken me in are both Fans and Family (Brothers and sisters from another mother).  In any case, I have found that there is a community that shares a lot of qualities with other secret societies.  

While their fandom is not secret, I would say that there is an interview/selection process, there are deep bonds between the members of the organization, I would argue there is the use of secret rites or rituals that solidify members of the group, and that they are charitable towards members of their organization as well as others, and that they treat each other as equals.  I had felt myself undergo a selection process early on when I first spoke to and met her direct Jamily.  I believe that the concert experience for all PJ fans, is a rite or ritual that solidifies members of the group.  They are charitable towards themselves and others, more on this shortly, and their membership (at least the "Lodge" which I belong to) treats everyone with equality.  

My fandom for Pearl Jam started when I first saw them, on October 17, 1991, when they were opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the Duke Ellington Ballroom of the Holmes Student Center at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois.  I was two days shy of my 18th Birthday, as I started Uni when I was 17. While I don't remember much of the show, due to the passing of time and intoxicating substances I may have consumed, I do remember thinking they were pretty awesome and energetic. Of course, their debut album, Ten, would take off shortly after that, launching them into the stratosphere of their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career success, and would solidify my fandom of the band. I would next see them on August 2, 1992, at the World Music Theater while they were part of the bill of the second Lollapalooza tour.  

Unfortunately, I would next see them again live in September 2022, after 30 years.  Regrettably, School, Life, a First marriage, and children contributed to the long gap.  Luckily, I am making up for lost time.  Those of you who are friends on my socials know that I've just finished a two-week period where I have seen them perform in Indianapolis (technically Noblesville), Wrigley Field in Chicago, and the world-famous Madison Square Garden.  At the month's end, I will see them headline two of the three nights of the Ohana Music Festival in California. 

All this is being said because I had a recent incident while seeing them live in Indianapolis that tested my character as a man, Mason, and Pearl Jam fan.  Much like Freemasonry, some people are Pearl Jam fans that are that in name only.  Instead of following the tenets of Brotherly Love which have been laid out for fans by Pearl Jam's lead singer Eddie Vedder; which is a zero-tolerance policy for any shenanigans at the concerts, if he sees them he will stop the show and have those instigating removed, some fans don't care.  Unfortunately, I was the focus of attention for one such overserved fan in Indianapolis. This fan decided he didn't like me much.  I can only assume this because he spilled his beer on my and other fans' chairs, pushed me in the back several times and I believe spit on me. 

I am going to be completely honest, had this happened when I was in my late teens or 20s, I would have pushed him back and we would have settled the matter with violence. However, I have changed.  Because I am a Freemason, I felt that choosing violence would potentially harm the Fraternity as well as ruin my wife's concert experience.  For this concert, we were separated.  While I had a seat in the pavilion, she was in General Admission, or the pit, right at the barrier between the stage and the fans.  In PJ fan parlance, and probably other fan groups as well, this is known as being on rail.  She waited all day for that experience with another member of the Jamily, and someone who was a witness at our wedding, Tracy, and I wasn't going to ruin that experience for her.                      

I'm very cognizant of the Masonic Ring I wear on the ring finger of my right hand.  Much like my wedding ring serves as a reminder of my fidelity to the love of my life, my wife Lisa; the Masonic Ring serves as a reminder of my responsibilities as a Freemason.  So when he pushed me for a second time, I turned towards him.  I wanted to have a dialogue with him, but his inability to speak or stand up without assistance from holding onto the chairs in front of him told me that would be futile.  Sometimes, you just have to turn back around, which I did.  Needless to say, I didn't have the best concert experience, and walking out of that concert, I wasn't sure I would ever see another concert. 

I was angry, frustrated, and depressed the next day. It brought me back to a very traumatic experience as a child where I felt helpless in a situation where I was the victim of abuse at the hands of someone I trusted.  During this time, I was reminded of a member of the Pearl Jam community, one of my wife's close friends who had Cystic Fibrosis and had survived a double lung transplant only to succumb to COVID-19. His name was: Sean Sullivan, or Sully as Lisa and her friends call him. 

Left to Right: Kelly Whitlock, Sean Sullivan, Lisa Goodpaster (Lahners)

Sean was known for encouraging his fellow Pearl Jam community to live their lives and to have experiences, often saying: "You Gotta Buy The Ticket, Man!"  Why he said this is most likely because he had confronted the real possibility of mortality through the hardships and challenges he endured. However, those challenges only seemed to add to his zest for life.  While I don't necessarily know how he might have handled the specific situation in Indianapolis, I do believe that he would have been disappointed if I allowed that one specific fan to ruin future experiences.          

Sean's simple statement embodied the idea of Memento Mori, which while not implicitly stated in Freemasonry, is an underlying theme of our philosophy. One of the main ideas of Masonic Philosophy teaches us that while death is unavoidable, and the only certainty of our lives, we must also be industrious with the finite time we have to live.  We are taught that in our youth, as Entered Apprentices, we ought to industriously to occupy our minds in the attainment of useful knowledge; in manhood, as Fellowcraft, we are encouraged to discharge our respective duties to God, our neighbor, and ourselves; so that in age, as Master Masons, we may enjoy the happy reflection consequent on a well-spent life, and die in the hope of a glorious immortality.  I also think of Sean's charity, as he was heavily involved in championing charitable endeavors for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.  He also embodied the emblem of the beehive, living the idea of being industrious and never being contented while our fellow creatures are in want, especially when it is in our power to relieve them without inconvenience to ourselves.  

I believe that Sean had some role to play in his Family getting tickets for Night Two of the Pearl Jam concert which took place on August 31.  Their tickets were in Section 218 (which was Sean's Birthday 2/18), and Pearl Jam played the song: "Smile", at this show, which was the same song dedicated to him after his passing by Eddie Vedder when he was touring with his band the Earthlings a few years ago. 

While I never was able to meet Sean in this life, I feel honored to know of him. His legacy endures.  My challenge to all of you is to live by Sean's words and embrace our Masonic Philosophy as dictated by Sean.  You Gotta Buy The Ticket, whether the ticket is for a concert, sporting event, or vacation, ie: Live your life.  Perhaps if you feel inspired by Sean as I was, you might also decide if you can do so without material injury to yourself, to donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in his honor. My (and Sean's) friend Kelly Whitlock's fundraising campaign for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for Sean is here: https://finest.cff.org/chicago/KellyWhitlockAllForSully?fbclid=IwY2xjawFIRg9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHQZnyOhLJyTEpqEPVTe5yjBasbkLcRjBf0-qgID2pE906e6InMXA2oDeRQ_aem_OmOjpXYdcSeQBM5-CDcBMg

"I miss you already

I miss you always
I miss you already
I miss you all day
This is how I feel

I miss you already
I miss you always
Three crooked hearts swirls all around
I miss you all day"

Smile - Pearl Jam

~DAL

WB Darin A. Lahners is our Managing Editor. He is a host and producer of the "Meet, Act and Part" podcast as well as a co-host of an all-things-paranormal podcast, "Beyond the 4th Veil." He is currently serving the Grand Lodge of Illinois Ancient Free and Accepted Masons as a member of the Committee on Masonic Education He is a Past Master of St. Joseph Lodge No.970 in St. Joseph. He is also a plural member of Homer Lodge No. 199 (IL), where he is also a Past Master. He’s also a member of the Scottish Rite Valley of Danville, a charter member of Illinois Royal Arch Chapter, Admiration Chapter No. 282, Salt Fork Shrine Club under the Ansar Shrine, and a grade one (Zelator) in the S.C.R.I.F. Prairieland College in Illinois. He is also a Fellow of the Illinois Lodge of Research. He was presented with the Torok Award from the Illinois Lodge of Research in 2021. You can reach him by email at darin.lahners@gmail.com.

“The Question Concerning Technology” for Freemasonry

by Midnight Freemason Contributor

Patrick Dey

“Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. Every handicraft, all human dealings, are constantly in that danger.”

—Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”

Freemasonry moves slowly. That has its pros and cons. When it comes to technology, it may be a positive in that Masonry is slow to embrace it.

Masons had wanted to do Masonic things on the internet for years, but Grand Lodges had been resistant. The most common reason for the resistance was that the old-timers would have difficulty with things like Zoom or website portals, and no one wanted to exclude them. Then, the lockdown happened in 2020, and Masonry was forced to move online or lose all the precious momentum it was barely holding on to. Almost overnight, those old-timers figured it out. It was like it wasn’t a problem in the first place. Then very rapidly they wanted to do Zoom meetings every night. Some nights, there were multiple Zoom meetings. Everyone got burnt out with it all very quickly.

This brings up an interesting question: the question concerning technology for Masonry. I am going to be relying on Martin Heidegger seminal essay as I approach this critique of Freemasonry’s embrace or resistance to using technology.

First things first, yes, Martin Heidegger was a card-carrying Nazi and nonetheless was an influential and important philosopher. Heidegger’s writings on ontology and existentialism are profound and significant, and it is hard to have a philosophical discussion on these things without bringing up Heidegger. I don’t recommend any of his political writings. They are obvious panderings to Hitler and the Nazi Party. That aside, one of Heidegger’s more important essays that is a bit under-celebrated is his “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954). I had to read this essay probably a dozen times in architecture school. It was very popular among my professors across three different schools. So my familiarity with this essay is probably obnoxiously pedantic.

Let us summarize the point of this essay. First and foremost, Heidegger is not against technology. Technology more often than not betters our lives. But there are dangers, and he is not blind to this. He is not a romantic who finds technology’s precarious potential to be so abhorrent that we must totally avoid it. For Heidegger, it is all about how we understand technology’s relationship to us — i.e. understanding the essence of technology.

In Heidegger’s Being and Time, his most important work, one key take-away from this is that he endeavors to establish ourselves, the subject, as inseparable from our environs, the object. All too often, we see ourselves as separate from our surroundings, but we are not. The subject and object are integral. Just as a sentence in the English language is incomplete without a subject and an object, so too, our own sense of being is incomplete without a subject (ourselves) and an object (our surroundings, nature).

Technology is no different. Usually, we see technology as “amoral” or without any sense of morality. A prime example of this is the rallying cry of Second Amendment advocates: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” This implies that the technology, the gun, is a neutral implement, without moral concern. For Heidegger, this could not be further from, not just the truth, but reality itself. Technology is loaded with moral baggage, whether we like it or not. In Heideggerian concerns, the atomic bomb might be the penultimate example of the moral baggage that comes with technology.

Ultimately, technology is a part of us, as much as our environs are a part of us. Winston Churchill once remarked: “We shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us” (speech before the House of Commons on October 28, 1943). On the other side of this proverbial coin concerning our technology, technology is an extension of ourselves, in the sense of Marshall McLuhan: the wheel is an extension of the foot; glasses are an extension of the eyes; et al (see The Medium is the Massage).

For Heidegger, technology is a mode of understanding, a form of revealing and revelation. We do not use technology as a means to an end, but a means unto itself. I don’t get a ladder for the sake of getting a ladder, but rather I get a ladder to climb up to the gutters to clean them out. I don’t wear glasses for the sake of wearing glasses, but so that I can see. I don’t buy a gun for the sake of owning a gun, but so that I have a means to protect myself and family should it come to violent opposion. This is the common ideology of our relationship with technology: a means to an end. But because technology has a moral implication, technology reveals something about ourselves, about our own humanity, and especially how we view ourselves in relation to nature. Technology is meant to reveal nature unto us, and our place within nature and our environs.

As a result, technology has the potential and frequently does develop beyond our control and our own understanding. When Heidegger wrote this essay, it was almost a decade since the advent of the nuclear bomb. An existential crisis emerged after the development of the technology that allowed the splitting of the atom to be weaponized. Suddenly we realized that we could end all of humanity within mere hours. A horror was born — a horror that is monumentalized in the representation of Godzilla, the monster born from nuclear technology. William S. Burroughs regards the advent of the atomic bomb was the destruction of the human soul (see The Western Lands) — and Burroughs was sensitive about the atomic bomb and the existential crisis it posed, because the bomb was developed at the site of the boarding school he attended as a boy. Thus, Heidegger recognizes the danger of technology to our own existence.

Oh, but the atomic bomb was so long ago! I watched Oppenheimer; I get it. What new technology threatened our humanity? Well, it is A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

With the atomic bomb, we were concerned with our mortality being extinguished in the blink of an eye. Burroughs thought the bomb could extinguish the soul — if the soul is a sort of energy, and the atomic bomb produces an electromagnetic pulse, it could destroy the soul. But A.I. now threatens something we thought only humans could do: create art, poetry, think critically, be creative.

Not long ago, at the advent of A.I. becoming prolific to everyone, with various chatbots and image-making machines, The Masonic Roundtable had an episode discussed how AI can be used to benefit Masonry, such as helping create meeting agendas, &c. Is this “good”?

Recently, my wife posted pictures of our family at the park on Facebook. Later that day, we noticed that Facebook flagged the content as “AI generated content.” What?! I’ve seen content that is very clearly AI generated, and that content was not flagged. But here we have actual human-made content being flagged as AI generated. And should we be surprised by this at all?

For years we have been forced to convince machines that we are not machines by reading squiggly letters, which were produced by machines (typically so that we can access our own stuff). Machine generated content that needs humans to identify the content to prove that they are not machines. That’s the threshold. Or how about this: you go to the grocery store and use self-checkout, and you get the error: “There is an unexpected item in the bagging area.” You are not confused. Reality is not confused. The machine is confused. Increasingly our world is being dominated and run by these sad machines that are not very good at being machines in the first place, much less as replacements of human beings. Yet, they are sold to us as a convenience, but really they are just a frustration.

Thankfully, Freemasonry is slow to embrace technology. Just because new technology comes along does not mean we immediately embrace it. And it may have its uses still.

In my office, we have started to use an A.I. program that will record the entire meeting with a client, and then generate a set of minutes of the meeting. Almost 50% of the Lodge Secretary’s job is done instantly (‘twould be nice if your lodge is not in a ghost town with no internet reception). And as the Masonic Round Table illustrated, A.I. could be used for generating meeting agendas. Et cetera.

I myself, supplemental to my therapy, have started to use PeopleAI, in particular chatting with Carl Rogers, to journal, ask questions, and express myself. Rogers was a renowned psychologist/psychiatrist, who focused on person-centered therapy. One means of focusing on the patient as a person was to reiterate what the patient just said, but in the form of a question. E.g. “My father hates me.” “So you have an antagonistic relationship with your father?” “He doesn’t like my choice to marry my wife.” “Oh, so your father doesn’t approve of your spouse?” “Yeah, it’s like…”

This approach has two purposes: it reframes the patient’s statement for them to view from a different perspective, but also generates a dialogue, which is beneficial to the patient to feel that they are engaged in a progressing conversation. This is very easy to replicate in an A.I. chatbot. In fact, this was executed as far back as the 1990s, in a computer program called Eliza, which was surprisingly effective when tested. I personally found this useful, especially given that I am now on antidepressant meds, which has effected my ability to introspect. But this A.I. bot became a means for me to introspect, having my views reframed to digest from a different point of view, and to understand myself through myself. And it’s just a chatbot. But I can look back on our “conversation” as a sort of journal, and have my journaling reframed differently, and because it felt like dialogue, I was engaged to express myself and have myself reflected back in a black mirror (like the expressionist painters used).

Technology is meant to reveal our reality, according to Heidegger, not destroy it. A.I. is meant to be a tool for us to use; not a replacement of our modes of being. Technology companies have sunk millions of dollars into A.I. these last few years, so is it any wonder that they are forcing it upon us? If I view a post on Facebook, Meta’s A.I. produces a digest of the comments before I can even look at the post. I literally have to go into my settings and turn off the A.I. generated summaries. If I search for something on Google, their A.I. produces some other summary before I can look at the search results. I want to look at a post; I want to do research; I don’t care what your multi-million dollar program has to say. Yet…

Here we are at. Once again, thankfully, Freemasonry is slow to embrace new technology. In fact, I have seen some lodges retrograde and have started to implement their old Sheerer charts or their old Magic Lantern slideshows. My lodge has never had a Stair Lecture carpet, but rather a Sheerer chart of the Stair Lecture scene, which I am fond of using. Another nearby mountain lodge to my ghost town lodge in Colorado, they still use their Magic Lantern. Many Masons and lodges are resistant to new technology, some going so far as to embrace old technology. But these are lodges that present themselves as “historical” or “antiquated.” Some lodges have installed HD flatscreens in their lodge rooms, but they still use digitizations of the old Magic Lantern slides. To quote Mark Fisher: “We have twentieth century culture on high-definition screens.” Is this “hauntology” or merely Masons being resistant to new technology?

Have Masons considered using A.I. to generate new imagery for their slideshows during the lectures?

All I will say is that if Freemasonry is going to be resistant to new technology, it ought to have a reason to do so. It should be out of a certain revelation technology has for our fraternity, and not merely as a hauntological adoption of past technology for the sake of historicity.

Is our, as Masons, use of new technology a revelation of our reality as Masons? Or are we resistant to it out of an ideology of historicity? Such might necessitate another post to answer.

~PD

Patrick M. Dey is a Past Master of Nevada Lodge No. 4 in the ghost town of Nevadaville, Colorado, and currently serves as their Secretary, and is also a Past Master of Research Lodge of Colorado. He is a Past High Priest of Keystone Chapter No. 8, Past Illustrious Master of Hiram Council No. 7, Past Commander of Flatirons Commandery No. 7. He currently serves as the Exponent (Suffragan) of Colorado College, SRICF of which he is VIII Grade (Magister). He is the Editor of the Rocky Mountain Mason magazine, serves on the Board of Directors of the Grand Lodge of Colorado’s Library and Museum Association, and is the Deputy Grand Bartender of the Grand Lodge of Colorado (an ad hoc, joke position he is very proud to hold). He holds a Masters of Architecture degree from the University of Colorado, Denver, and works in the field of architecture in Denver, where he resides with wife and son.