Essential McLuhan 352 that plagues many as the specter of “pollution.” The etymology of this word (from Latin pro-luere: wash forth) reveals a hidden process that is entirely applicable to the present situation: pushed to extreme, dilution becomes pollution. It is like the rich Texan: whenever he cashed a check, the bank “bounced.” Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. This is the chiasmus pattern, perhaps first noted by ancient Chinese sages in I Ching: The Book of Changes.* EVITABLE FATE Since the satellite surround, beginning with Sputnik in 1957, there has come the sudden awareness that nature itself has dropped out. Old experience is no longer relevant, and man must now assume responsibility for the total programming of his planetary environment through new knowledge. “Experience,” said Erasmus, “is the schoolmaster of fools.” That is, the rates charged by this ruthless pedagogue are outrageous, and few have ever survived his instruction. As the criminal said on his way to execution: “This will teach me a lesson!” Today, effects and causes merge because they almost coincide in time and space in the new information environment. Change itself has become the main staple. The literate Greeks abstracted visual order out of preliterate oral chaos and called their artifact “Nature” (phusis). This “natural” order consciously relegated the ancient gods and magic to the irrational “unconscious” and “chaotic.” Magic played existence by ear. In today’s electric world, man becomes aware that this artificial “Nature” of the Greeks is an extension of himself, just as he is an extension of nature—all that exists. In this book there is no intent to endorse or condemn what has happened. Our concern is to explore and to reveal the process patterns of current happenings. Since it is no longer safe to wait for the harsh judgment of results, we must discover how to anticipate effects with their causes in order to avoid the “inevitable” by “programming Fate.” * * * The intent of our book is to discuss and illustrate the sudden change from the industrial world of assembly-line “hardware” and visual space into the electric world of orchestrated programming. Twenty-five hundred years of rational culture are in the process of dissolution. Age-old habits of conceptualization will not serve to train observation on the effects of the new man-made forms of energy. Since Plato, philosophers and scientists have attributed constant forms and patterns of action only to the world of “Nature.” Both Plato and Aristotle, *The laws and history of chiastic patterns of action are traced through the Old Testament and classical Greek literature by Nils W.Lund in Chiasmus in the New Testament.