Life Affirmation 2

When one constructs a position, an argument, it most definitely takes on the vulnerability of an erected structure standing in free space, and what structure there is necessarily entails weakness and points of vulnerability. Much safer to prostrate oneself in the primordial mud and refuse to take a position at all.

But of course even the refusal to make a stand is itself a stand, just as resigning oneself to a contemptuous state of cynicism and refusing to believe in anything figures as taking a stand.

The very condition of being human involves taking a stand, however involuntarily. Here we are, expanding out desperately as life, spiraling out from the Big Bang, one great continuous explosion, twisting, multiplying and evolving inexorably outward. There is no going back, and there is no giving up. One is plunged into the universe and one is compelled by the will to live to keep moving forward, which necessarily means taking up space as a human being, and thus taking a stand as one.

Most people are perfectly comfortable with being what they are and assembling their ideology (or receiving a preassembled one) which reflects that state of being, and then asserting their own being without giving anything a second thought, even when they come up against limits to their own personal expansion, whether conflict is experienced or not. Others still are blown outside the circuits of convention, and both upon apprehending the nature and shape of the conventional circuit from the outside, and wishing to rejoin the humanity they are severed from, fashion ideologies that rearrange the interaction and dynamics of society.

Everyone is necessarily what one is, and that is fine.

But there is a certain freedom that comes with rational and abstract thought (even to choose to give up on some of the complexity, and pay more attention to one's emotions and the surrounding universe is a  rational choice). One can, in a limited way, alter the conditions for one's own behavior and part of the trajectory of one's life by exercising carefully one's rational faculties, and choose not just the blueprints for one's behavior but the blueprints that sympathetic others can collectively agree on to be guided by. And so, one's self-reflective decision as to the nature of what one is and the person one should be is very much a part of what one ultimately is.

I'd like to suggest that today, life affirmation - or the ability to say yes to one's own existence and embrace it enthusiastically - is important as ever, even in the individual sense. However, equally important, and culturally ignored to our own detriment, is the affirmation of the greater fabric of existence that one is necessarily bound to, and which is inseparable from one's own individuality. One is bound to one's land, people, culture, nation, class, etc, by virtue of being shaped and molded by those relations, and all of those others are shaped and molded in turn by their relations to you and their relations to the greater aggregate.

One can choose separation or love, riches or poverty, domination or submission, or any other state within the continuum of those concepts, or even alternate between states yearly, monthly, daily, or hourly. But when one chooses separation, one's environment and relations separate back in return; when one chooses riches, there is someone or something else which is impoverished in return; when one chooses domination, another has to necessarily submit in return, and so on. When one chooses one's own individual arrangement, one is essentially choosing the corresponding arrangements in one's relations as well.

In an era of imbalance - I'll get to that later - this principle is essential.

Life and Death

Yes, it is true, the proper emphasis should be on "life."

There is a common conceptual confusion regarding life and death, due in large part to the way in which we conceptualize life and death as opposite abstract poles, without taking into account that the two concepts are intimately intertwined over the passage of time.

Our current way of life, that is, the daily administration of industrial civilization in the form we currently have, with its attendant phenomena such as radical egotism, oil addiction, short-termism, and many others, is in fact the daily practice of death. It is a way of life that contains in its daily processes the seeds of our eventual destruction.

To truly embrace life, in respecting the full meaning of the word, is to acknowledge, mourn, and part ways with an old way of life, in other words, to embrace death, so that the limited space in which we conduct our collective affairs can be cleared to make way for the actual pursuit of life.

A Splendid Evening in Pictures

She can be very expressive after storms. The sunset was brilliant. The entire cloudcover blazed and it bathed everything in an amber glow. To the east, with a shadowset behind it, arched a great rainbow. 

Appreciating Things as They Are

There are occasional revelatory moments when you suddenly apprehend an object or a living thing vividly for what it is, or at least, in a vivid manner without executive filters.

It takes the right circumstances. This being a highly objective-based and action-based culture whose dominant locus of attention rests on a towering constellation of abstraction (which does grow ever more wobbly), many of us often don't often take the time to simply sit around and just look at things passively, partially because one's very brain structure is conditioned by the culture and its dominant modes of living.

But there are times when one's attention relaxes and wanders passively, and one catches a glimpse of that pre-industrial, or even pre-rational world, so to speak.

This happened to me the other morning when I happened to look down at my tea. My attention was beginning to wander, and the light was just right and it caught the liquid, and an entire universe was revealed within the mug. Tea that is almost boiling does some really remarkable things. On the surface there was a layer of tiny bubbles that had arisen rapidly to the surface; the layer hovered on the surface with a tension between the bubbles. Every couple of seconds or so, the surface would become divided as several bubbles separated, and a linear tear would would form that made its way down the entire length of the layer. Then more bubbles emanating from the bottom would refill the gash and the process would begin again. This happened every couple of seconds. Above the surface, steam rose away in coils, dancing over the energy given off by the heat and catching in the room's air currents.

Underneath the surface, several shades of a brilliant color that changed with the light, with a spectrum of shades that grew darker with depth. Within the tea itself, tiny particles swirled past rising bubbles.

Or take an easier phenomenon to experience. A full moon is a timeless symbol and one can quickly spot it in the sky. Less apparent though is the ghostly blue glow that a full moon can bathe the land in, which is quite beautiful.

Then there are actual people and animals. Much of the brain activity that goes on when you interact with strangers on a daily basis is in tandem with our categorization and planning systems. We have these clusters of thoughts based on people due to their looks and their perceived social function, which often obscures true personalities and all the attendant quirks that you begin to see when you get to know someone.

Many of these things you can experience by just focusing on objects and living things and simply take them in. It is possible that this is what Buddhists refer to as "mindfulness." There are other more detailed observations that have to happen when your executive functions are relaxed.

The curious thing about the psychedelic experience is that this effect is dramatically amplified. Aldous Huxley famously wrote about this phenomenon in The Doors of Perception when he took mescaline and suddenly became aware of a transformed world right before him, and within him. He and others theorized that psychedelics opened the doors of perception so to speak, or dampened the categorizing filter of our brains which allowed all of that rich sense data to flood in. Turns out he was right too. Recent neurological research on psychedelic use has found that activity in the frontal lobe, the location of executive function, dies down as blood is diverted to other, older parts of the brain.

The universe is an incredible place of unlimited depth and complexity. We try to capture it as best as we can with our abstraction and symbolic systems, but we can only process so much information. As the abstractions grow more complex, it takes more to process, which takes away awareness and thus perception of the raw experience they are derived from.

There is a fascinating relationship between our symbolic systems and the real world. Many great discoveries and paradigm shifts are predicated on the sudden revelation of some aspect of the raw universe we had been hitherto ignoring, but to make sense of and organize these revelations requires these built rational structures which inform our senses, which are in turn formed and informed by the senses themselves.

It seems our modern culture is situated to pursue these rational lines of thought as far as they can possibly go, which then often curve back on themselves into self-reflection until symbolic inquiry is pulled back in some way, and the aperture of awareness is opened and some section of raw experience is apprehended. This can be caused by a variety of things:  the diversion of activity from the frontal lobe as seen in relaxed passivity, meditation, psychedelic use, and physical trauma. This also happens in the case of psychological trauma. One positive aspect of trauma in fact (if one can call it positive) is that it sometimes results in accidental discovery.

These facts are part of what make up the corrective systems built into a culture's direction of ideology. If an ideological system becomes increasingly closed, ignoring aspects of reality that might eventually harm the culture holding the ideology, this often results in trauma that forces open the aperture of awareness once again, possibly allowing for cosmic insight and subsequent corrective action.

This is part of the reason the ruling class is so allergic to psychedelics like LSD. It short-circuits the symbolic system and artificially pulls back the aperture of awareness, directly shining revelatory light on any absurdities and contradictions in conventional ideology.

The Veil Lifts

When you lie to someone on a systematic basis, such as with mass political propaganda, you are actually inflicting violence on them, the trauma of which exists as a potential that lies in the psyche, to be unleashed at the time of revelation.

This is because the superego attacks the mind and eventually the entire body when it perceives that the individual is not living in accordance with his or her ideals. This event is painful, and continues to be painful if the individual cannot immediately escape his or her reality. The tension (theorized as cognitive dissonance) is eventually resolved after the person either alters his or her reality (which often takes power) or revises his or her ideals, or at least expectations, to match the new perceived reality. The continued occurrence of this latter possibility results in the exhaustion of the will, a state that is often referred to as "cynicism."

So if you deliberately instill in someone an artificial ideal that is constructed to obscure the underlying reality, there may come a time when that person will correctly apprehend that reality, causing the superego to lash that person, often resulting in internal self-lashings, or an external lashing out at objects, and so the act can only be considered an act of violence.

This act is not always deliberate however, and it is entirely possible that violence is simply inflicted as a reality drifts away from an ideal simply of its own accord.

What Is It

One of the left's accusations is that our economically imposed habituation patterns, labor structures, as well as the pervasive consumerism that comes with aggressive advertising and PR, is largely responsible for the ongoing social fragmentation of our times. I think this is true to an extent, but there is more.

For example, advertising is ultimately an appeal to the consumer, it is an act of communication (however asymmetrical and perverse that act is) to attempt to get the consumer to complete an action, that is to buy so and so's product or service. The act presupposes a social state that is already present, though it does aggravate and extend that state.

Our suburbs, cars, workspaces, and our advertising are an appeal to the atomized individual, the ego of the individual, alone in the world to take what the individual can get. It is an appeal that has sociopathic underpinnings, but it is an appeal that speaks to many people. There is something far greater, subterranean, that these appeals are attempting to speak to, to attempt to harness and control, but which eventually will lose control of.

Up until now a majority of our society supported and even condoned the filthy rich and their solipsistic world view, because many of us wanted to be one of them. Even today, I was listening to a radio program where callers were talking about what they would do with vast riches - and these were grown adults, not just children goofing around - and virtually all of the callers enlisted the power of their imaginations to conceive of scenarios of vast material waste, of lavish expenditures of useless amusements which only benefited them and perhaps their close family. One sole caller came out with a touching and hilarious idea: he would throw all the money in his dad's face to see whether his dad wanted to fight him, or be glad there was money flying all over him. However all of these scenarios betray a stunning absence of social consciousness. Then you look at the way many people drive: they pilot a large mass that can easily kill another human being with incredible recklessness, as if they are the only intelligences that exist.

These attitudes reflect the attitudes of the super rich certainly, and these attitudes are transmitted through much of the mainstream media like cable TV, because this class has access to and control over the infrastructure and modes of production of such entertainment, though exceptions always make it through. And the indie and avant garde sector can always relieve us with antidotes.

But no class can ever achieve absolute control. Civilized society is much too complex. This is why many conspiracy theories tend to be false at their face. Ruling elites do know how to manipulate and control the masses, keeping them atomized and ignorant, but it also takes the active participation of said masses to sustain the illusion.

What is this subterranean social state? How do we go from social solidarity and communal feeling to the vast atomization of today? Social entropy? Deliberate aggravation? The traumatic effects of war and economic depression? Perhaps all of this. There is no clear answer, except to construct a limited narrative that decently captures bare reality. The narrative will survive if it helps a population move forward.

Far

Black clouds hang in plumes behind the high-rise condominiums that tower over the city, looking like dead monoliths of yellowed bone from the beach, as they rise to catch the weak morning light. 

Military men on leisure stand talking under the palm trees, standing erect and rigid like camouflaged storks or herons. 

Some people I pass smile, either courageously or naively depending on what they know, their faces lighted by the silver-grey November light, while others gaze into space or at the ground, acts of communication lost and unreceived. 

I pass a smell of rotting ocean, then a smell of lemon freshener, and finally the salty, oily smell of the Long Beach harbor. 

Feral cats comb the hills for food, while the homeless remain wrapped in their sleeping bags on the grass or behind concrete barriers. High above, a group of seagulls chases away a large hawk. 

Men fish on the piers, chasing off hungry seagulls. A bundled up man with white headphones sits with a flock of pigeons, feeding them bread or seed. A lone paramedic walks the harbor on his break, looking out at the ships and the sea cranes towering out over the flat silver waters. 

Bulldozers trawl, scrape, and groom the beach sands, leaving neat smooth lines of pressed sand behind them. 

Far out, looking over the city nestled in black clouds, I feel no connection. It is alien, menacing, and dead, but this is ok. Like looking over a carrion, one is filled with revulsion and then a sadness, which melts into a resigned respect for the nature of things. I find myself orbiting the alien city with a cold detachment, bound by a thin thread of memory which connects me to my home, a small community of warmth connected by other thin threads to other communities of warmth, all of them embedded in an increasingly cold, atomizing human expanse suspended in space. 

I've thought about it for some time without fully grasping it, but now I think this is what what makes the recent film Gravity so resonant and pertinent. The film expresses beyond any sort of narrative or ideology a pervasive existential feeling of terror. Upon the lead character finding her constructed life supports disintegrating - which lie suspended high above this cold, indifferent abyss - she experiences a horror of radical separation, of parting from and drifting from the familiar warmth of her peers, a horror which animates her desperate struggle to climb her way back up the thin threads that keep her from spiraling out into dead space, ultimately to disintegration. 

Her journey is a devolution of sorts, as she rides the old machines to safety while ultimately discarding them as she fights to rejoin the earth, eventually to begin anew.

It is an exaggerated sense of emergency certainly, but it captures this general pervasive existential feeling quite nicely, I think, at least in terms of how I experience it, and presumably many others, including the creators of said film.I certainly don't feel terror or a sense of emergency, more like a spacey sense of peace, but then these are simply different varieties of moods that can arise in response to this greater process. 

Neo-Luddites

Sometimes the term "Neo-Luddite" gets tossed around to describe that nebulous group of people that protest and resist ostensibly "beneficial" technological advances like nuclear power, genetically modified foods, and the proliferation of social media.  The Luddites as a historical group are typically looked down on as enemies of progress and mindless primitivists. But just as there is another layer of interacting factors to consider today, there were also other factors to consider at the time of the Luddites in the 19th century as well.

From the 18th century to the 19th century the first Industrial Revolution was underway, transforming the society it was a part of. You had these Luddite characters that were famous for destroying these labor-saving textile machines, which were one of the symbols of industrial progress at the time, and for the Luddites, symbols of displacement and disenfranchisement. These machines were replacing skilled textile workers, aggravating already-rising unemployment rates.

Now one could look upon these characters with disdain and say they were selfishly setting back progress and that they just could have taken up other trades or done something more productive than smash up industrial equipment, but there was more to it than that. Around the time of the Industrial Revolution, you also had a series of increasingly restrictive laws drawn up that were essentially designed to remove the support systems of peasants in rural areas in order to create a labor force for the expanding factories in the cities and industrial centers.

You had these wealthy landowners and this emerging class of capitalists looking to invest their wealth in production capital, and they were looking to populate their factories with cheap labor so that they could see handsome returns on their investments. Of course, all of these rural peasants had relatively robust systems of self-sustainment in the rural areas: they could hunt and farm and all of these things provided them more benefits and more leisure time than if they were to toil away every hour of every day in some dingy factory in the city. These capitalists were getting quite upset; there are actual documented writings of these characters complaining about the indolence of peasants and suggested they be made even more poor to force them into wage labor. And well, part of having cheap labor is a steadily replenished pool of unemployed with no means to support themselves, who will gladly take up a position as a poorly paid and treated wage laborer.

So you see the passing of laws restricting peasant hunting, and then the Enclosure Acts which basically allowed wealthy land owners to fence off the commons. These laws effectively destroyed the peasants' means of subsistence, forcing many of them to move to the cities to become wage laborers in the factories. Now I don't know enough about the Luddites to know if they were literally this group of peasants, but you do have to consider these things that were happening in the region that they lived; this is the historical context to take note of.

Now you have to consider the economic conditions and the cultural milieu we find ourselves in today. We have a large population of people that have virtually no say in the direction our society goes, with an equally significant discrepancy in the distribution of material wealth. Most people are usually obedient and trusting of an effective authority, that is an authority that has demonstrated that it can keep a people safe and improve their lives. But when an authority fails to do that, you get mass social fragmentation and dissent, and consequently a fragmenting direction of progress.

Nuclear power is great when it works. It provides excellent output with very little pollution other than heat dumping (of course if the actual radioactive material is properly contained). Nuclear waste is another problem, but in a time when petroleum based energy is literally killing us as we use it, the technology looks more and more attractive. But there is a vast populist anti-nuclear lobby which resists nuclear power wherever it shows up, and that is because our nuclear power is almost exclusively handled by heavily subsidized private companies, companies whose ethical actions are constrained by the profit motive. These companies make more profit when they form monopolies, charge high prices for energy utilities, and neglect their infrastructure. Unfortunately when you neglect nuclear infrastructure, it is incredibly dangerous and results in catastrophic events. Fukushima was entirely preventable, but the owning company Tepco ignored the reactor's problems until it was too late, the results of which are quite horrific and ongoing. It is not that anti-nuclear activists are anti-progress or prosperity or what have you, they simply don't trust our social modes of organization that handle this technology, and for good reason. The privatization of public utilities like energy, currency creation, and health care in general has been an absolute disaster.

Now take genetically modified foods. Sure it would be great if we can simply tinker with our crops to increase yields and nutrition, but you have to consider the motivations behind such manipulation. One of the largest purveyors of genetic modification is Monsanto. Now Monsanto is one of the closest things we can get to true evil, and the horrors that company has perpetuated on global populations are too many to list here. But the motivations behind that company's GMO program are worth considering. Monsanto started out as a chemical company and they are chiefly remembered for their Agent Orange product, a scourge that was waged on East Asian populations in the Vietnam war. Eventually there was enough pushback against Agent Orange and they couldn't manufacture it anymore, so Monsanto had to figure out what to do with their productive capital to continue to be profitable. Well, they switched to becoming an agriculture company, manufacturing chemicals like the popular Round Up to be used as herbicides. A large part of their GMO program is making crops resistant to these herbicides, so they can patent them and sell them alongside their outputs of their herbicide lines. It is hard to tell how much actual effort they devote to engineering their crops for yield, as claimed by their PR. The company's actions demonstrate that they don't give a shit about feeding populations though: they've actually engineered their patented seeds to be sterile, so that farmers can't continue planting new generations. Plus they've suppressed many studies on their GMO crops and manipulate results to their scientific research, so there's reason to doubt the desirability of their GMO product. Plus there have been reports of animal health problems with their GMO products. Their behavior has resulted in vigorous pushback around the world: they've been kicked out of many countries. So people have reason to be skeptical about their wondrous GMO inventions.

Finally, you have the proliferation of social media. Theoretically, these can be wonderful tools of communication and connection, which they have actually demonstrated in many instances. But there is tremendous pushback in this sector as well. Among the larger tech companies like Facebook and Google is a push for greater transparency and public connection, as if this is some vast cathartic merging of public consciousness and technological utility, but again, the motivations behind these changes are very different from their stated purpose. Everything you do on sites like Facebook and its similars is cataloged away in vast databases, which serves as a sort of raw material these companies can sell to marketers in bulk. What's more, the growing partnership between these tech companies and the government allows the mass sharing of data on the entire population, to aid with surveillance and social control. So its not that people are afraid of the raptures of deep technology and a radical transparency that is to bring everyone together, it is that wherever there is technological innovation, especially in communication, it is colonized by commercial entitities seeking to commodify a population's deepest, most private social relations, and a government seeking to control and suppress the population in turn. Resistance to this "progress" is actually well-informed and carefully considered, though some of it will always be knee-jerk. People understandably don't wish to take part in their own commodification and supression, especially when they are prevented from sharing in any of the benefits.

This problem of uneven growth has plagued humanity for thousands of years. The creation of an owning class with interests directly in conflict with the rest of the population results in bouts of uneven progress in which some innovations are incredibly useful and spread while others actually create more problems. This fatal flaw is central to the terminal state of late capitalism and its impending fall. Taking energy stored in oil over billions of years by burning the oil and releasing it into the air is a powerful process for driving technological process, but the negative externalities caused by such a process (the re-releasing of stored carbon into the air) is proving detrimental to the entire global ecology, yet because of our class structure a minority of the population is addicted to such a process and there are no working mechanisms for turning the process off, in large part because of the calcification of our habitation patterns and the resulting urban sprawl which necessitates the ongoing consumption of petroleum products. This is a choice a minority of our society has made without consulting the rest of the global populace, which ultimately results in spiraling, intensifying conflicts around the world.

This is a problem that must be solved, for the sake of bare survival. Its solution lies in a tricky region amidst the tension between the conservative conception and the progressive conception of life forms: for conservatives, a class system must exist because it forms naturally; for progressives, the universal dignity of humankind is a natural principle behind the formation of societies. Both conceptions lead to social formations that happen by necessity: wealth concentrates and remains sticky and calcified through fear, while the powerless and disenfranchised remain in an eternal struggle to retake what is theirs. Reality is a strange volatile place that will forever defy the numerous abstract utopias we construct in our minds to compensate for the dystopias we always seem to wind up with. But for the sake of survival, it is a problem worth tackling.

It could be that the birth and death of a large organizational entity like a civilization necessitates such calamities, as something so large and complex is impossible to control or direct, but there must be a collective effort to encourage more even development, sharing of power and resources, and the collective addressing of existential problems. Or, well, poof?

The Stickiness of Power (But Brittle Things are Fragile)

In terms of the psychological experience of it, and the subsequent stratified social structures that arise because of it, acquiring, holding, and losing power is much like ascending and descending a tree: it is usually pretty easy to acquire power if it is in reach, just as climbing a nice big tree is relatively easy enough, provided all the right branches are in reach, but when it comes to losing power, and descending the tree, things become much more difficult.

The subjective experience is telling enough. When you are gaining power, you are feeling nice about yourself. Others are saying nice things about you. You're getting these nice pats on the back while you're still on your way to the top. But coming down is not easy; the average person does every thing he or she can to avoid it in fact (however much power the average person can acquire): you are lamenting your shadow of your former self, others are asking themselves and you what happened, you are deprived of attention and reverence. You're talking about cascades of pleasure versus cascades of pain.

And so many of us behave accordingly. Concerning day-to-day experiences that many people have, one finds a possible rival approaching in perceived ability and attractiveness and we bristle; that competitive terror finds its expression and we struggle desperately to avoid becoming unseated.

The funny thing about power is that not only does it have to do with pleasure, autonomy, the ability to manipulate the environment and society in one's image, and what have you, but it also has a lot to do with fear. With fear we have this natural tendency to want to dominate the object we are afraid of. We want to control it and manipulate and guide the trajectory of its energy so that it is not a threat to us. Power allows one to do such things.

One of the central theories of one of my favorite political scientists, Corey Robin, is that one of the predominant animating drives of theoretical - and largely dispositional - conservatism is the pervasive fear of the ascendancy of the lower classes, and the subsequent loss of power. When one has status and important possessions and one identifies emotionally and ideologically with those things, one is loathe to give those things up, even if it means the suffering of others. You see many conservative theoreticians absolutely terrified of true democracy, which is somewhat amusing considering all of the bluster you hear about liberty and freedom coming from that camp these days. Even the founding fathers were terrified of democracy: they had status and wealth and of course they wanted the freedom to exercise those things free from the shackles of British control, but they wanted all that without ceding their power to workers, property-less individuals, and of course, slaves. The structure of the Constitution and our electoral system reflects that fear, but you won't read that in any mainstream history books.

Not coincidentally, people who are politically conservative have been found to have pronounced fear and disgust reflexes, a function of an overactive amygdala.

The problem with all of this can be seen in the stark concentration of power in today's modern world. With an increasingly dwindling number of individuals in possession of a measure of power that approaches absolute, and a growing mass of powerless that live in daily agony, it is not an exaggeration to declare that we are experiencing a global socioeconomic crisis, among countless other things.

But with an over-saturation in power comes an overwhelming sensation of vertigo: those with great power are surrounded by a surging sea of hostile populations. How to climb down? The problem with taking someone's power (or if one is heroic enough, surrendering power) is that his or her peers still possess it. That's where most of the pain comes from. One wishes to be comfortable with one's peers, in addition to being physically comfortable. How to remove everyone's power at once?  Well of course a mass catastrophe that simply unseats everyone from power by force is always enough to do the trick, but is such an event necessary?

There is of course the collective will to share power. Another great paradox of human beings is that as desirable power is to all of us, having too much of it is a terrible and undesirable thing. What about voluntarily conceding power? If an entire ideology advocated a relinquishing and eventual sharing of power, would it not make it easier for the powerful to follow suit? It is not easy to get past the fear and make oneself vulnerable to the usurpation of one's rivals, but if everyone does it, there becomes a great mass of surplus power to share. Of course history has shown human beings incapable of such things. We aren't that exceptional either. It is how all life behaves in many contexts. But there still exists astonishing altruism in some quarters.

When You Listen

Despite its sweetness and its lush texture, The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles Pink Robots is largely a meditation on overcoming the fear of madness and death, and other related perils of living in the modern world. The sweetness comes from that merciful serenity that comes from successfully enduring psychological torments that can put some people in the ground; it is a serenity that is arrived at after reaching the deepest darkest depths, and upon immersion in the silence and the darkness, one glimpses a view of the cosmos within, and without. One is filled with joy and a vigor for life upon finding the way out.

The album is an incredible gift; it bears some resemblance to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, another tenderly humanistic work that shows another consciousness attempting to work through the horrors of industrialization, modern madness, the relentless passage of time, death, and commercialism, while reaching out to the listener with earnest reassurance. Coyne, Waters, and company seem to occupy a tradition of humanistic artists who all found a way out of their inner torments through their art and their personal journeys, and perhaps wished to touch others with similar torments and help them to escape as well.

It works. But it is not something that is some sort of epic event that comes and passes. It is something that has to happen constantly. If that sounds like the concept of the Eternal Return - or the endless repetition of life's burdens into infinity, a possibility that horrified Nietzsche, Camus, Haitian folk culture (from which zombies came), and countless others - it is because it is. Life is hard, but not too hard. Art like this makes it a little easier. It loosens one's shoulders like a touch on the back. It reminds one that there are ways out.

BB 2

Embedded in the horrifically inevitable rise and fall of Walter White is a central thread which also finds its expression in the collective late-American consciousness: the desperate craving of personal autonomy at any cost.

In an authoritarian culture when one finds one's own personal choices increasingly truncated, one can't but crave personal autonomy - or the ability to create and/or alter one's own immediate environment in one's image - like someone who is dehydrated craves water.

Domesticity

Due to my work which can be fulfilled remotely, I've spent a lot of time in a domestic environment. Coupled with my limited experience trying to live in a denser cooperative living environment - which failed miserably, though it was my first try - I learned a thing or two about the way people interact in a domestic environment. To say the least, it is very different from public or professional environments.

One of the long-running feminist insights is that capitalism - with its patriarchal cultural structure - refuses to compensate women (and men) for their domestic work, work that is actually critical to the proper functioning of capitalist production. Children have to be raised properly to be good students, and relations in the family and in the immediate neighborhood have to be kept stable while the students go on to high school and college and eventually start their careers, or you get unproductive workers. It is well documented that many students having trouble in school and eventually finding jobs are those who have grown up in broken homes. Domestic labor is partially paid from measly maternity leave packages (which had to be fought for tooth and nail) but overall none of the work is considered to be within the sphere of the market.

This injustice is built into the ideology itself. This is a system that rewards self-interested market actors and their labor, not altruism (biological or social) and non-economic relationship cultivation, though there are exceptions. This is partially remedied by giving a living wage to the breadwinner which is high enough to provide for a whole family, though pretty much everyone has to work now due to squeezed wages and benefits. Besides, choosing not to recognize and reward domestic labor alienates a large portion of the population.

You can also say that the very process of grooming individuals for capitalist production warps them as human beings, but that's an argument I can't get into right now, because the whole thing would go in another direction.

Anyways, culturally we are simply not equipped for dealing with each other on an intimate basis. If you choose not to recognize and reward domestic labor, that labor will eventually suffer, less of it will get done, and people won't think about it or discuss it very much. A lot of our daily activity is relegated to a 9-5, where our social relations are decided for us, we are told what to do, and if we deviate (though of course personalities can clash and people can fight for power within this regime) we don't get to work, which is bad.

This pattern can be seen in other areas as well. In public places, people follow certain guidelines for interacting with each other: usually they are carrying out the roles of buyer and seller or other such roles. Different behaviors can arise in different cultural and political contexts of course.

 At school, students are not supposed to bring up emotional issues: they must sit and be quiet, learn, and do what they are told. In the schoolyard, children separate into cliques which follow their respective social codes, and they behave as they should behave and are ridiculed and ostracized if they fall outside the lines.

With the limited time adults and children spend time with each other at length, it is usually mediated by games, TV, movies, or what have you. If people become upset with each other, they avoid the problems, blow up at each other, isolate themselves, or just part ways altogether. Everything but deal internally with one's feelings and attempt to connect with the Other.

Of course some mediation and separation is always alright and probably a natural human inclination, but problems do arise when we ignore our emotions and relations completely. Couples do have to get to know each other more intimately to sustain their relationship. Also, some families do communicate with each other more thoroughly and express their feelings, but these are usually fringe occurrences that are regularly denounced by the mainstream as "hippie shit" and "weird" and "touchie feelie crap." There is this great fear among many Americans of their own natural feelings. Me included. It is hard to tell which came first: the fear or the institutions that reproduce the fear, though of course these things usually grow together.

All this worked out okay when everyone had their own space and their things and their relative independence, but with this economic contraction and increasing exploitation, more and more people are finding themselves together under one roof: people are moving back in with their families, or moving in together, etc. More and more people are also depending on each other for more things: sharing possessions, asking favors, helping each other with work, sharing food, and other resources. So now those relational skills that were so neglected are beginning to rise in importance.

Within the domestic environment, there are a lot of different fascinating things happening. Human beings are wonderfully complex and diverse in their private daily social interactions. Different personalities fit into each other in different ways, and due to their differing natures, clash in different ways too. People tend to view all of their conflicts through the lens of their own projected personality, which oftentimes leads to a prolonging of the conflict until the two frustrated parties begin to communicate.

It takes a whole lot of work and experience to get people living in harmony without the narcotic effects of mediation. The larger cooperatives have devised entire systems of guidelines and even governing procedures to facilitate these harmonies. Even animals have their different personalities: they develop rivalries and bonds, they respond to human interactions and social states, and they all have to be held together in a certain way for it to all work.

You have to figure in external factors as well: the state of the surrounding environment, availability of resources, work to be done, required rent, etc. It determines how much people have to do, the moods they are in, what kind of money they have to bring in, and more. Many cooperatives simply collapse after a short period of time because the relationships can no longer be managed and some sort of fatal rupture occurs. It is a lost art that will have to be attended to again.

An Indirect Reference to Hope

To perform an action in accordance with a set of beliefs, the action has to take root within a general psychological state of affirmation, the buoyancy of which provides the necessary system-wide thrust to initiate an action.

This psychological state is produced through a confluence of factors: the agent expects that a certain objective can be realistically met (whether the very expectation is realistic or not), the agent expects that his or her abilities satisfies the requirements for initiating and following through with the action, the agent assents to the direction this action will take his or her energies, and the agent is receptive neurochemically to the psychological state in the first place (he or she is not hopelessly depressed or suffering from some other debilitating mental condition), among other factors.

The threshold required for reaching this state varies in accordance with the action required. If the action is going to the kitchen to grab a bite to eat because one is hungry, the threshold is very low. If the action has to do with the attempt to make a sweeping change to one's own society or even immediate environment, the threshold is very high. We aren't talking just about the movement of energy - which of course is also important - but the relative strength of external resistance, as well as the capacities, dispositions, and tendencies of the acting agents, as well as a host of complex interacting conditions such as historical trajectory and the movement of energies across networks that take their shape from historical processes.

We rely on others (as well as certain environmental indicators) to signal to us whether a certain course of action is possible, or even desirable. And then there are some of those others that are quite naive to external indicators when it comes to a certain subject they are confident about (or which consumes them) and so they agitate and carry out actions towards whatever that end might be; additionally these actors are in states forged by other relationships and sets of circumstances that indirectly fuel their endeavors. This behavior is contagious, and soon enough even actors in a seeming state of despair (though internally they must still possess some kindling of hope) are ignited and so the energy spreads.

This contagion of activity pulls in a greater body of sympathetic potentials, transforming the potential energy into kinetic energy. Just before the Occupy movements, there was an electric buzzing of those activist and intellectual networks on the Internet - networks that were constantly cultivated and fed over decades - that then erupted into the physical gathering of people, which then spread all over the world. The vitality of these eruptions was amplified by the energy released by the prior Arab Spring, an explosion of said energy in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria, this explosion itself triggered by an immense rupture of the social contract held by oppressed peoples in the Middle East, who were increasingly finding not only horrific foreign and state repression but massive unemployment and high food prices.

And so paradoxically, as external resistance grows on a body of actors, the potential energy set to erupt grows as well. You cannot deny an entire population its autonomy, and if you threaten your population's very means of survival you are in even more trouble. The energy can dissipate in politically harmless ways, such as  in riots or acts of crime which can be repressed in a politically acceptable manner (for most of the observing population anyways). But the political radicals are those that record in memory the transgressions of the powerful, and build quietly the networks that are to sustain revolutionary activity.

Unfortunately the Arab Spring in many countries has degenerated into power struggles and violence, due in large part to the violent reactionary actions on the part of governments in power.

The Occupy movements in turn came up against certain irreconcilable constraints: despite the media blackouts it is well known in the underground that the movement was brutally crushed by a conglomeration of cooperating federal, state, and local institutions, represented by surveillance and heavily geared riot units.

And so the wave of this brilliant energy loses its thrust and falls back to where it erupted from. But the memory always remains. The high watermark of these events is inevitably seared into the collective political consciousness of the population. The remaining energy diverts to various avenues: you still hear of local chapters working within their communities to do what they can, and the political transformation that occurs within such a progression of events stays with people. People begin to see that there is something else possible.

You see these patterns come up everywhere, even on the individual level. Bipolar disorder exhibits these patterns especially: one's volition comes up against a briar patch of anxiety, terror, and personal restraint, which results in a crash, and a despair, which itself paves the way for a compensatory surge in manic energy, a burst of energy that can result in transformative events that can change one's conception of what is possible. Again, it is in the energy, this ineffable movement of mind and matter: it is never created or destroyed, it only moves, disperses, recollects, and erupts again. The more repression, the more a state seeks to emaciate and control its populace, the greater the eruption of energy in response.

The catch is, with an eruption of energy from the powerless masses, the institutions in turn compensate with counterrevolutionary force, and their networks contain a memory of their own: their fear of the populace grows, and their tools of repression become increasingly forceful. Such oscillations of energy betray deep instabilities within the old system, which must eventually disintegrate, hopefully leading to a constructive transformation in turn.

I say all this because I've got this strange feeling that all of that energy amidst the populace is coming back. These aren't prophetic words of course: it has to come back.

Thorn in the Bum

I'm taking a brief break from writing about electronic cigarettes (also a brief ironic chuckle directed towards myself) because there is something irritating me. I fear I may have misused the term "statistically significant," in terms of its technical meaning, which I was reminded of due to its occurrence in a study on electronic cigarettes as it happens.

The thought occurred to me as I was researching the term after I happened upon some philosopher or political writer using it, but I didn't follow up on it out of laziness, which is a bit embarrassing. Usually learning a word through its contextual use is fairly safe, but technical words like that are misused and circulated all the time, so it is easy to pick up on others' mistakes.

But I also have to shrink away from a purist interpretation of semantics. Language is not necessarily full of static symbols, but a constantly evolving set of relations. Some words do retain their stickiness and hold a fairly constant meaning over time, but many more words are picked out of their context, or creatively misused within a different context, which can create new meaning even for words that are attached to them. Over time language drifts in accordance with a culture's worldview and fixations. Some words fall out of use while others dip away somewhere and pop back up somewhere else. Other words can change meaning drastically. This is why it is so difficult reading original classic texts.

I can't agree that misuse necessarily constitutes abuse. Sometimes misuse is a good thing. A technical word created for a certain use is borrowed by another for some other use, which could help elucidate some problem of expression. I seized on the phrase "statistically significant" because for me it described something that I always felt but couldn't find the words to express.

To abuse a word, I think some sort of intentional, malevolent end is needed. For example, the Obama Administration calls itself the most transparent administration in history, despite the fact that it is probably one of the most secretive in history. This is one of the major things George Orwell was concerned about: the intentional corruption of language to shut down thinking.

I do like to see the creative "misuse" of words. A little creativity in language is a good thing. We can handle a little change in our semantics I think, so long as the words don't drift too far past functionality by consensus. Some technical words are useful for properly conveying a concept however. And we don't want too radical a drift. It would be very tragic for example if the word "poop" was confused with "candy." Someone would end up very disappointed somewhere, or pleasantly surprised, depending on which word was reversed.

Yep, back to work.

Deep Communication, Too

I suppose it is difficult to overemphasize how important communication is, and how strikingly absent it is in American culture.

We are creating increasingly insulated subcultures, and even economic classes, whose modes of living and ideologizing of reality are radically separated from each other.

Class is especially important, and the effects of class conflict are beginning to outweigh many traditional lines of division and cultural separation. Some would argue that this has always been the case, and it is true to an extent. One of Marx's central arguments was that the processes of capitalism necessarily created separate classes of entirely different interests, and that these interests were irreconcilable and even at a fatal tension, whose antagonisms would eventually destroy the system they were a part of. Owners want to own, and often own more, among other motivations, while the proletariat want to mainly live and consume, among other motivations.

And by golly, it looks like the man was right as rain! To put it simply anyways. Now we are left with these various social strata in a state of catastrophic failure of communication, gnashing against one another as the panic spreads.

But where there's separation, there is always the potential for reconciliation. You can see glimpses of unity embedded within the myriad symbols constructed across cultures and even subcultures. You can study religions, philosophies, rationalist toolsets, art movements and whatever else from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Africa, etc.. So long as you take into consideration the surrounding context, whether cultural, historical, environmental, etc., you can translate all of these expressions and understand them within the context of a shared human condition.

One key task is to get past the "I can do it on my own" mindset that characterized so much of the political and philosophical movements of the modern era. A brand new ideology that proposes to solve everything may look shiny and compelling in the mind's eye, especially when the situation is dire, but then there is always the case that not everyone will see the world in the same way, though they share the same basic experiences. It is a difficult thing to remember to do, as simple as it is, but it helps to try to listen as much as one orates.

Deep, Like an Ocean, But Deeper, Man

Deep ecology is an interesting philosophy. Not necessarily because it is new - no, the underlying sensibility seems to be part of an ancient pattern: the visceral widening out of ideological awareness that occurs when a culture becomes too self-referential and fragmented - but because of its timeliness and appropriateness, nicely reconstituted in contemporary scientific, ecological, systems, metaphysical, and even spiritual language.

Of course, there are problems with the philosophy, like there is with every pure idea whose physical manifestation becomes large enough to be strongly magnetic. It pulls in the misanthropic type, you know, the kind that think that the entire concept of civilization itself is to blame, and that humanity is some failed species that has become a cancerous entity in relation to the planet. Of course, this could very well be an accurate conclusion, but perhaps it is not quite the right time to throw in the towel? I mean, until the Great Ball of Fire arises that is to devour us all, and we must find a way to ideologically come to terms with such an outcome, why promote an ideology that implicates oneself as some form of cancer?

If you really think your species is a cancer, why not simply kill yourself? How does cancer, upon self and cosmic awareness, reconcile itself and its ongoing existence? I don't ask this to be cruel. I'm genuinely curious about the answer to such a question. Perhaps the contention is that our mode of organization and production is what gives rise to these cancerous effects, and that it is completely logical for individual humans themselves to promote such an ideology without implicating themselves as some sort of metaphysically monstrous entity.

It is still a dangerous ideology to promote. Who then becomes designated as the cancer? The purveyors and participants in this global capitalist system? What then, do you propose to do at that point? Structurally it seems dangerously close to a form of fascism: a mode of ideological thought that posits some sort of impurity that must be jettisoned.

However I digress. This is simply an extreme outlying faction of the deep ecology movement, and maybe I don't even fully understand the arguments. The greater movement is indeed a timely and appropriate phenomenon.

Its principles raise other less grand questions. For example, the flies outside my house are somewhat annoying and trigger a mild disgust response. They land in the cat food to eat and I wonder, should I shoo them? Or let them eat? Will they lay maggots?  Will it hurt the cat? Or maybe she will lose her appetite herself anyways.

The discomfort becomes even more pronounced when they are inside the house. By god! Foreign creature in the living zone! But where most people pick up a fly swatter or a can of Raid, I just let them fly around and hope that left to their own devices, they carry out whatever purpose they will: they'll leave because they need food or they'll die off at some point, which upon thinking about, I sometimes try to shoo them towards an open door or window, or catch them in a box or container to take outside.

Moreover, it is ill-advised to simply destroy or displace every little thing that seems out of place.What purpose do these flies serve, given the context? Maybe it is nice that they are around, gobbling up excess wastes and doing their ecological...things. Perhaps spiders eat them, which helps them survive and eat other pests like fleas or ticks which are carrying pathogens. There's much more that goes on that you become aware of when you study the science.

There is still a tension between human beings and the environment. Or rather, there is a strange tension between the sharing of all living things of energy, seeing as how some evolve to employ methodologies that are in conflict with the methodologies of others. For example, carnivores and even herbivores have evolved to devour entire living systems and absorb their energy. Or pathogens like viruses and certain bacteria have evolved to actually live off of energies that are taken away from the hosts that they infect.

So, one can't simply go outside and sit in filth, and throw feces about and live with flies and maggots and say, "Yes it is all good! Rejoice in the world!" One should expect to die promptly in a week or so, however long it takes. There is a reason for many of our instinctual responses and disgust reflexes, or even our higher-developed cultural standards: our treatment of wastes, whether artificial or biological, ward off many types of disease and dysfunction for example.

But this is made more complicated by the fact that some of it is artificial too. Our culture, at its advanced stages, seeks to radically separate itself from the rest of the living tissue. We recoil from much of life itself: landscapes of concrete and metal and glass, sealed off, air-conditioned compartments full of fabrics and leathers and paints and wood, all materials amputated from living systems, their original meaning abstracted away by the labyrinthine industrial processes they went through to become something else.

This doesn't just encourage certain system-wide biological changes in ourselves, but the daily psychological way in which we interact with the world, and the way in which we are aware of vast, interconnected processes that sustain us daily.

So then what would a deep ecologist say about not just Raiding or swatting flies, but the very structure of the house I'm in, and the corresponding dynamics that arise in the interactions between such a structure and the surrounding environment, or better, the structure and corresponding environmental dynamics of the greater pattern of human habitation that characterizes the modern world?

Awareness is constricted within increasingly baroque abstractions that become separate from the environment that they emanate from, by virtue of the fact that there is just simply too much information to take in, given the complexity of how everything interacts. Mainstream scientists trying to work within the industrial paradigm will say: well the data doesn't provide a definite conclusion, while completely ignoring that all of the data is coming from a closed system that they are trying to study on its own, whereas scientists with deep ecology sensibilities are becoming aware of a greater set of interconnecting systems that expands out far beyond what we have been collectively aware of for centuries, turning to these greater systems for the data.

Well, and the data, the good data anyways, as far as I'm concerned, is saying that we need to change radically. Communication is especially important in this regard. To change, you have to know what direction you should change towards. You have to be informed. It takes scientific and philosophical literacy for such things. But it also takes philosophical and even spiritual literacy on the part of the scientists themselves. It is a transformation that has to take place with an incredible presence of mutuality, an unconditional respect for the other, a respect that should then wash back onto you.