Frogman

He lumbers about the building, gazing over his workers with watery bug eyes. He's an actual mouth breather, he'll stop in the middle of the room and you can hear the watery slurping of his breath passing in and out of his mouth as he thinks. He speaks with a nasally drawl, pouring condescension over his subordinates, standing slack jawed over their chairs as if everyone is a fool and he is constantly exasperated that no one can carry the vast stores of knowledge that only he can.

In reality all he has are street smarts, a collection of miscellaneous bits of procedural knowledge, and several half baked stacks of business self-help tidbits. He makes many mistakes but never owns up to them, passing over them impatiently and reasserting his arrogance on the next subject. He has managed to build a company over the last twenty years, loosely following emerging trends and emulating entrepreneurs around him, and this is something, at least to him. He has the gall to bully people into subordinate positions and manipulate them to suit his ends, which has worked out for him. At least he can buy his iPads and watch his favorite reality TV shows and vote Republican to preserve the empire he has built all by himself, no thanks to the multitudes of morons and incompetents that have worked for him.

He is classically American. And he has no idea how small his world is.

Sure, We Get Old

The dog has a tumor growing somewhere deep inside his nasal cavity. He can't lie down and breathe through his nose, it blocks his flow of air, so he has to pant and gasp as he's fighting sleep, exhausted but unable to dose off.

I'm disgusted by this, that a group of cells can decide to replicate and grow an ugly mass right in the middle of the creature's airway, contributing nothing to his wellbeing, feeding off of his energy, eventually compromising this incredible organism.

That a group of cells can simply form a mass and consume an entire functioning being, completely disregarding it as a living breathing thing...and when he dies after his deterioration is accelerated, the tumor dies. Absurd!

Consciousness. It elucidates the phenomena of daily life and then recoils from them in horror. How did we get to a point of awareness where life, consisting of things that simply happen, can seem so brutish?

Oh but we all have built in expiration dates. Organizations do as well, and whole civilizations. This is the whole ebb and flow of order and disorder. Work is applied to create a singular functioning organism, whose constituents in time begin to meander and separate, until there is a critical point in which the central intelligence or animating principle loses control of its subordinate parts, and the organs become just matter to be recycled. Rinse and repeat.

That's life! But why is death so ghoulish? Well, some cultures don't see it that way I suppose.

Today I spent a couple of hours figuring out what sort of content I should write on a website to sell dressing rooms for retail stores. These are not the kind of problems I wish to be solving. Boring.

Empire

Juxtaposed side by side, the two Charles Ferguson documentaries paint a disturbing picture: our civilization is a tower of wealth that has derived its height from the misery of surrounding kingdoms. Our riches have been accumulated after repressing other peoples to the point of madness, and here our tower sways as it grows topheavy...possessed with a madness of its own.

I find it frightening to be stuck inside this system as it deteriorates. But I can't imagine what a perceptive soldier overseas must feel as he or she watches the news, seeing his or her country unravel, pondering the complete obliviousness of his or her military leaders while surrounded by widespread suffering and insanity, feeling progressively more alone in an alien desert, away from a home that is slowly disintegrating somewhere beyond the darkening mountains.

But despite the horrors of this point in history, I can't understand some of the Christians in this country, referring to their Revelations, beginning to accept from the writings of people who were probably around for the fall of some ancient empire that we are in fact experiencing the end times. I say with some reservation, since I do find it disturbing as well, that I am excited for whatever the next age brings. Plenty of ideas to be explored, and this calcified culture is stifling any hope of a new idea coming to fruition. It is time for something else.

Suspension

As I stared into the eyes of the human animal, a dark realization began to take hold: our logic, our language, our ideals, all of the tenets of our higher intelligence form a delicate latticework which cradles us precariously over the pre-intelligence abyss, a black labyrinth wherein life fights viciously to perpetuate itself.

Just Some Clarification

Freedom is not a metaphysical reality, but a psychological one. Freedom is experienced when an individual can successfully carry out an action within their own array of perceived choices without fear of constraint.

This is how freedom means different things to different people.

This is how authoritarians can value freedom. It is not a contradiction. They themselves are free to do as they please.

When Closed Loops Repeat

Postmodernism is a name for something that is produced when snaking ideas eventually crash into the walls of their own pathways after having run their logical courses for too long; the ideas then become trapped in a sort of stasis, a closed loop wherein old images and concepts are recycled until they become a mulch of meaninglessness.

The academic sphere has long since discredited this trend. It is useful for generating models of macro cognition, giving us new insight into how we produce ideas themselves, since we are given a glimpse of our very ideas being born, but taken to an extreme it becomes a weakness, a nausea that mounts as if we have been churning about in the washing machine for too long.

But our popular culture still seems to be in this phase. Why would it leave the phase otherwise? Just look at the entertainment being produced. Ironically self-referential works of art, sequel after sequel, remake after remake, all insincere products rubbed out by cynical people looking to hit that next pocket of wealth. Look at our political discourse: people referring back to historical statements and ideas for guidance, not even knowing what these things mean! These things in themselves aren't pure postmodernism, they are symptoms. Postmodernism is the intellectual framework behind these phenomena.

For those wealthy and comfortable, recycled ideas keep them in power. Wealth has become an end in itself, and ideas mere means to those ends. Their mistake is in thinking that old ideas can be milked again and again indefinitely. They can't.

Because there are always people who either believe in the old ideas themselves, and become enraged at their debasement, or there are people that have new ideas and want to see them realized.

The fundamentalists, the regressives, cling on to the old ideas and live by them without understanding their essence, like an inverted cargo cult. Instead of latching on to new ideas in a primitive context, they latch on to old ideas in a modern context. They will do damage if they are given control. They are already doing so to an extent. Witness the Tea Party.

New ideas are produced by the only people who are truly free. The birth of these ideas produces huge surges of energy. Civilizations are created and then harden, becoming frail over time as old ideas dissolve in a changing world. And so we repeat.

It feels good to articulate these thoughts, though they are still only partially formed. And then tomorrow its back to work, where my silent hostility makes others uncomfortable. I can't help it. It is hard hiding the physical effects of knowingly living a lie within those walls.