Disclaimer: I suppose I flew off the handle in the previous post. Of course the entire array of behavior that a civilization engages in doesn't have to necessarily be traced to the mere twin impulses of material progress and conservative calcification. Such a picture is incredibly simplistic. But then posts on this blog are going to be highly stylized...I wish to work out certain ideas while having a bit of fun and literary flexibility so to speak. Hopefully sometime soon I'll get off my lazy ass and systematize these ideas into a cohesive body and make a book of it or something like that. I'll just keep telling myself that anyways. Meanwhile I can have my cake and eat it too. Good then!
So I asked before, whence comes this inner turmoil? Life systems are pretty resilient. They can undergo quite a bit of abuse and continue to function relatively well. Industrial civilization has seen its share of environmental degradation, worker abuse and outright war and yet it still manages to hobble along, and even reinvent itself at times.
The Roman Empire was pretty resilient: it went through a series of crises and civil wars, reinventing itself with the rise of reformers and innovative strongmen at critical junctures. There must have been several key moments along the way when members of the population thought, "Oh here it goes, this is the end," only to have the republic reconstitute itself and shamble on. It finally did collapse though.
Among various circles there's a sense today that we've reached a sort of a dead end. At least that's what I've seen. Granted, our imaginations are still blown wide open and there's plenty of information out there; lots of innovative ideas circulating at the moment. There's still a sense of material exhaustion however. There's a frustration that there is so much we can be doing, but then so little our leaders actually do. It is remarkable how those with so much power can be so myopic and self-interested. You know what they say about power.
The almost universal distaste of work is telling as well. What's happening there exactly? Why are so many people dissatisfied with the daily tasks that go towards sustaining a society? Possibly because of how badly many workers are treated? How the shopkeeper's ideology of capitalism no longer holds the sway it used to? How divorced workers are from the fruits of their labor?
Why are there so many renters now? Why so much debt? Where's the ownership? The instruments of debt have been turned into weapons to assault an entire population, but one wouldn't know it just abiding by the surface symbols. One is told one owes a certain amount of money and that seems fair enough, but upon greater scrutiny, the justification for amounts owed breaks down. Money is manipulated every day. Financial institutions cause great social instability and then pay themselves incredible amounts for it. Governments cover for said institutions.
It seems many of us have become increasingly unmoored from the collective purpose. It increasingly takes bad education, propaganda and the propagation of the national security and police state to hold everything together. There is a widespread distrust of institutions in the populace now, for good reason. Economic institutions further consolidate and become more monolithic and opaque everyday, while simultaneously attempting to extract more value from the working and consuming population. State institutions increasingly view their populations as threats.
It is hard to tell whether these effects are due to a declining rate of profit caused in part by monopolization and economic stagnation, or the increasing strain between perpetually climbing resource demands and resource stores. Perhaps it is both; whatever the case, such effects cause unfavorable changes in the population. Shit rolls downhill as they say, and the most rich and powerful are least likely to give up their lifestyles if they can help it.
Now at this point to say that the lower and middle classes are being reduced to slaves might be a little bit of an exaggeration, and a distortion of the meaning of the actual institution and all of the horrors that it entailed. But it isn't much of a stretch to say that we are seeing a new geopolitical phase in which industrial first world societies are beginning to treat most of their population like the vulnerable third world populations they have been exploiting since the colonial ages. The really curious thing is that this is happening everywhere. Consider that as the Roman Empire declined, the middle classes and other groups lower in the power ladder that weren't slaves became increasingly indebted to the moneyed classes, losing properties, becoming eviscerated by taxes and eventually becoming tied to the land they could previously migrate from to search for a better life.
Again, because of the rise of global oligarchy, financial institutions and the related monopolies? Shared global elite ideology? Or because of the increasingly fragile environment and energy loss that entails? Or both? Yes, the rise and fall of civilizations is a strange and complex thing.
It is important to remember that these phenomena are all tied together within a great historical event that is really beyond anyone's control. But we attempt to control our environment anyways, which isn't entirely irrational, since each of us does have a limited locus of control in the immediate environment, and the aggregate of those loci amount to what eventually manifests as the shape of our society. However, asshole bosses running around trying to bully their subordinates into being productive are only contributing to a more rapid rate of social disintegration in the long run, though their behavior is scoring short term spikes in productivity and profit for their masters. Such microcosms express truths throughout deflating empire. Such behavior multiplied and repeated throughout modern society accounts for the vast gulfs in communication, distrust and meanness present in the population, which is often directly and indirectly expressed in mainstream media and in the behavior of celebrities and the powerful. It would be nice if we were mature enough as a collective to step away for a moment and examine our trajectory, perhaps considering the changing of paths at some point down the road.
We as a species have these incredibly powerful computing machines in our heads, but we are constantly victim to the relentless valuation of world phenomena and the ensuing hierarchies and schisms this creates. Our valuations become part of our identities and we attach to them out of pride, oftentimes riding them even to our destruction. We ignore value-less organic cyclic change and the cosmic phenomena we are part of. Unfortunately valuation is a highly useful application, but it must be done right to be effective. Done wrong and it can be catastrophic.
For example, fundamentalist conservatives, in their tangible material suffering, look to the wrong valuations to affix themselves too. They mistake the various victories for LGBT and women's rights as particular causes of societal disintegration, specifically causing the breakdown of the family unit, a constitutive building block to their stable society, while in essence these changes are due in large part to the disintegration of a larger cultural hegemony, which can no longer suppress the interests of such groups. This is actually one of the good things about fragmentation. There will necessarily be the weakening of certain mechanisms of oppression, along with the strengthening of others.
Efforts to curtail disintegration by restoring a former archaic order by force may seem rather brutish and absurd, but it sounds pretty damn good to the regressives. And try changing their minds! So much of the rending forces that our society is experiencing right now are due in part to a multitude of competing fragmented ideologies; everyone is becoming increasingly desperate to fix things and everyone has a different idea how to do so. Hell I'm not even sure what I'm doing.
It is very easy to become confused about the nature of causation. Perhaps it is better to come to terms with the fact that we only know how it works approximately. We can trace out limited causal chains, with the proximal effects to one's locus of control easier to understand than distant ones. David Hume understood this centuries ago.
Ah but now I'm getting ahead of myself. So we have a crude outline of the cosmic nature of our current state of affairs, as well as a rough sketch of some of the subjective and political problems that arise in the winter phase of a civilization's lifespan, or the coalescing and eventual deflation of empire, including the material process of a majority population becoming virtual slaves to a minority population.
Next we shall brush some of this negativity aside and contemplate the virtues of constructing a new positive ideology and talk about the mechanics and implications of a greater project of inner and outer emancipation.
