Happy New Year

2015 in about two hours PST. Good riddance 2014. 2 intense 4 me. Plenty more to come I'm sure. Well, Happy New Year anyways.

Spheres of Control

As master of your own environment and means of living, you are required to exercise an active management of your own wants and needs. That means taking into account the relationships, environmental qualities, and behaviors of the greater system you are part of over a longer period of time. Neglect any of those parameters and you are essentially responsible for your own suffering, barring any extraneous events completely outside your control.

This is of course a limited way to understand control. Control is experienced differently in times of material abundance and scarcity, in times that are stable and unstable, and in varying degrees of approximation to the loci of control, the material and ideological levers of social power so to speak.

Perhaps a better way to speak of control is through the lens of participation. If one is allowed access to and modification of one's own means of living, and one has a selection of conscious choices to make as to how those means are carried out, one feels a sense of control, however illusory it is, because one is participating in the administration of one's own life.

What is important here is the area of awareness that is afforded through the means of control. If one has a large sphere through which to exercise control, one is aware of more elements within that sphere through necessity and repetition of contact. Similarly, the less in control of one's environment one is, the less cognizant one becomes of its elements. One becomes functionally self-interested and short-sighted.

This tendency has important consequences for the concentration of both economic and political power. If a growing amount of control is relegated to a shrinking class of political establishment or economic monopolist, then the rest of the population is denied participation and becomes apathetic to the maintenance of the political or economic sphere. There is great pleasure in successfully administrating one's life, so that the loss of this pleasure has to be reclaimed through other avenues, some productive, some intellectual, some creative, others hedonistic.

Needless to say, the loss of this large-scale participation results in fragmentation, causing all sorts of distortions which require all matter of contrivances to prevent a society from breaking down completely.

Life, if left to its own devices, knows how to attend to itself with itself. Kept from these devices, life seeks to attend to itself against itself, requiring evermore contrivance to at least simulate this harmony, delaying the inevitable dissolution.

Complexity and Power

Part of overcomplexity has to do with power and its effects on social systems. What may be a simple solution to a complex problem could be out of reach if powerful interests are threatened by the solution.

Just as finer and finer branches develop out of larger branches, which develop out of the trunk of a tree, finer and finer modes of problem solving develop around primary modes of functioning, regardless of whether they are useful any longer. A society must maintain a certain shape, within which exist the solutions a society must take to solve its myriad problems. Binary divisions seeking alternatives to failure continue on from avenues long since traveled, with those divisions growing ever finer and numerous as failures mount around a fundamental premise that won't be questioned.  

Complexity develops like capillaries around an intractable contradiction, which ultimately reproduces the contradiction within each division seeking a solution, but these divisions do temporarily delay the ramifications of contradiction with the passage of time.

To offer concrete examples, our insurance-based health care system, fractional reserve banking, and industrial agriculture systems are predicated on the core driving principle that moves this business society: the sacred right of businessmen to make a buck.

Ever more complex insurance schemes are required to make vast mechanisms of extraction continue to work, interspersed between a populace and its health care institutions. Fractional reserve banking essentially functions to create debt money, perpetually owed to a financial class in greater amounts, so that ever more complex credit systems and financial instruments are required to cushion the oscillations caused by this antagonism. Agriculture must be both expanded and adulterated with ever-finer methods of manipulations to feed a growing population, while at the same time maintaining favorable rates of profit.

All of these systems are plagued with spiraling problems of overcomplexity, which won't be solved unless the organizing principle of industrial capital is scrapped. The ever-growing and interrelated layers of contrivance that are required to cope with a capital class that grows in wealth and a productive/consuming class that shrinks only delays the effects of problems caused by this contradiction. This also ignores multiple loci of contradiction, which put greater pressures on each other.

On a more fundamental but related point, no amount of large-scale green energy or organic farming programs are going to solve the problems of sustainability that are posed by a society that requires unlimited economic growth to function. The endless, class-staggered process of exploitation requires constant growth: nothing less than a radical change in collective notions of ownership and social relation will do.

One has to keep digging deeper. What was it that produced these business-friendly principles in the first place? It seems as though self interest, hard materialism. and hard rationalism were all that would motivate a society that had grown exhausted from subsisting under the constant pressure of religious doctrines that were no longer living, so that this process of accumulation, started as a blind engine of emancipation, ran away from its creators and continues to shake itself apart.

And so, does it take complete disintegration and calamity for a large-scale society to solve its most pressing and fundamental contradictions?    

Bonds

A good question to ask of those that are close is the following: do you love me, or do you just love that I love you? Of course, the latter indicates a weaker bond that is more likely to break under strain, raising questions of just how much energy you are willing to put into such a bond.

Of course there may be instances of asymmetry in which one loves another, and that other person merely loves the love that is coming from the other. Love isn't simply a warm gooey feeling, or that self-indulgent bliss which popular culture posits is the end all, be all for concepts of love. Love can be much more complicated. If one cares about another, and seeks to preserve another against the forces of disintegration, regardless of what the other feels for oneself, is that not love?

And then of course there is the question of what should be preserved and what should be let go, what should be loved, and what should one turn away from? And sometimes favoring what one loves means letting go of commitments to preserve that thing, as sometimes preserving something essentially destroys it.

Give and Take

Given egalitarian power relations, there is insidiousness in giving too much, just as there is insidiousness in taking too much. A recipient of good deeds may be given to resent if those good deeds are impossible to repay.

There's an old story mentioned in Graeber's Debt which tells of a man who was given an elaborately carved shield or crest - can't remember exactly which at the moment - and in a fury, went off to kill his benefactor, who ended up escaping I believe. To this culture it sounds almost hilariously absurd, but in a culture where a gift economy is far more prominent, this can be a serious problem.

Contrary to standard economic doctrines, most people are reciprocal in nature, with only a minority solely self-interested. One has to be able to give and take. One must take to live, and another must give for another to take, but similarly, another must take for another to give.

In assymetrical power relations, it is true that one who has too much power should be giving far more than taking, but as those power relations even out, to continue to give is to invert the logic of uneven reciprocation.

Oddly enough, it is possible for two givers to enter into competition to see who is more giving; I've heard this referred to as the "selfless olympics" by spiritual practitioners, which is a pretty funny way to describe it.

There is a certain high social regard given to givers, which can be seen as a good, just as material goods or brute or economic power can be seen to be a good, so that someone who has taken on a prominent social role as a giver gains power that is different from the powers of violence or economics, but which is power nonetheless.

In a similar way, an abundance of love or accolades bestowed on a single person has an irradiating effect: it poisons the relationships around the person, as resent builds among the peers around the person, these peers feeling resentful for being deprived of that love, whether justly or unjustly. Of course this love and resent varies with the character and self-perceived security of the individuals doing the loving and resenting.

In the aggregate, these asymmetries of emotional/social power create the need for hierarchies and symbolic rationalizations, which can maintain these uneven topographies without causing greater social disturbances.

If one believes another is metaphysically superior, then that other can do much more taking, or giving, depending on the relationship. So indulging these uneven topographies - if we are holding egalitarian assumptions - puts us right back at square one. We are required to argue over what would make a better hierarchy, and that we should give up our egalitarian aspirations.

Of course, there will always be countless hierarchies existent in our social lives, at least weaker ones that are created and destroyed as social relations change. We aren't all born equal of course, and the very notion of equality depends on a society's dominant values.

The question then is whether to have a hierarchy that is stronger and more resilient through time, which creates its own set of problems, or simply to make do with that constant negotiation of giving and taking.

Preservation

To preserve something then is to hold something in place, in a sense. It is to at least temporarily slow its dispersion into ambient energy, which takes energy extracted from one's surroundings, subtracted as it were, to add to the preserved body in question. As something becomes preserved, it becomes an obstruction, around which life flows on. Which is just fine. One looks over the living landscape, and one finds matter in various states of flow, of transitions, of stable, preserved states and dispersing, breaking-apart states.

The tendency, at least for this closed solar system, is for concentrated energy to flow and disperse outward. The question arises as to where the concentrated energy comes from in the first place, and there are plenty of theories attempting to answer that question.

One way to consider it is in the form of memory. As energy concentrates, there are excited particles which transfer their "excitement," which tends to decay as it bleeds into space, but which also retains memory. Memory in this sense could be understood in the negative, for a transgression, or a concentration of energy that forces itself past the tensile forces of thermodynamic equilibrium, creates as a complement a region of energetic lack, with its own varying gradients of concentration, which sits at the ready to accept an incoming flood of energy at the closest opportunity. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that.

And so every transgression is repaid in some form, and everything that is preserved must eventually dissolve, that the more preserved something is, the higher potentials for its dissolution climb, so that something that seems as if should last forever grows ever more brittle with time, and inches ever closer to the brink of rapid dissolution.

More esoteric writing; a bit simplistic perhaps. But worth sketching out for later I think.

Industry Like Genitalia

One covers the organs of production and reproduction. Why? In the course of sexual relations we have this tendency to swing from sensations of extreme desire to extreme repulsion depending on the observer and the object of observation in question, sensations which are modulated and transformed through our social relations, and so we cover up various portions of the body to avoid these disruptive oscillations altogether.

This isn't to say everyone has this reaction, but that a vast majority of the population (as constituted culturally at this particular historical juncture) behaves this way, and so in the interest of a wide social stability we choose to keep certain areas covered, though we may allow skin to show here and there, to skillfully open the valves of desire so to speak - but not too much!

I began the discussion like this because of this odd analogous tendency in our industrial nature to commit a similar behavior repeatedly, a behavior which isn't always easy to pin down.

Built within the industrial nature of capital is a fundamental contradiction, perhaps grasped by many, but not always explicitly stated. The primary animating ethos, the primary motivation driving the head of capital and all of those who serve capital, is to expand and accumulate as an individual, unique and distinguished from the productive masses.

But through these powerful motivational forces of production, capital achieves its desired aim: expansion and amplification, a growing human body whose demands grow with its power. If one gazes over the architecture, the productive institutions, the political regulatory apparatus, mass distributed goods, one finds that everything is built to handle volume.

The shape that a good or service must take to be mass distributed reflects the dictates set by volume: goods and services must be stripped of all personalized idiosyncrasies, streamlined, standardized, to be accepted by the greatest mass possible. Like the classic popular student archetype: an object or individual must take on the traits required at the necessary times to appeal to as great a number as possible, so that the individual is obliterated. That is besides the fact that production at high volume requires this streamlining, for reasons of production cost and process.

A very strange thing happens: a great population explosion paradoxically shrinks from itself. Its constituents refuse to acknowledge themselves as numerous and interchangeable, as their motivational ideations posit themselves as unique and irreplaceable. Life in its abundance becomes cheap and disposable: whole swaths of life can be tossed aside if they fail to fulfill the narrow, selfish aims of the ruling class. Life can be picked through, like one searching for the better apples in a pile.

Whole cities rise through the dictates of production, and then are abandoned to languish.

This is a nature that induces great horror, so that it must conceal itself with relentless, vivid imagery. The productive body becomes compartmentalized, within which function fields of manipulation to conceal the productive regions of the body from itself, and even from its relations to the outer world. Fearing the loss of productive power when the body realizes it is but dust, the ruling class peppers the populace with propagandistic, individualistic imagery: one is unique, one is a self, one stands apart, powerful! Powerful as long as one consumes, and produces.

And what of the organs of production themselves? What of the transportation networks that feed and are fed by them? Where they are not concealed by simply living within them, breathing through them, they are to be sheathed and hidden away. One cannot see the systems of mass production, ever more so the more they bend towards organic life. Here we have that partial glimpse mentioned above: we are given brief views of the manufacturing apparatus as it produces widgets and other lifeless things. We see the machines working and we remark, "Ah! What a powerful industrial nature we have!"

But the closer the machines approach living systems, the more rigorously they are concealed. We must not see the industrial food systems, and to witness factory farming is to see horrific things. And we must not see the workers themselves and the way they live, or if we are one of them, we do our business and then retreat home, the workday a blur, and become immersed in images that celebrate our selves. One must believe one is living a unique and spectacular life with this speedy, shiny new car, and not simply another cell swimming down vast, vein-like transportation networks. One is to navigate traffic grids with personal skill: one is not sucked through as the grid valves open and move traffic streams. And so on. The engines of production must not falter!

How exactly does capital take this shape? One thinks of the tremendous social pressures associated with an expanding universal mass; one pictures a great thunderhead erupting into the sky, exploding, forced upwards, eventually to discharge itself through a physical transformation and fall back to the earth.

On Modern Protest

The founding fathers saw political protest as a necessary component of a healthy civic life, that it should kick into gear whenever some political grievance should crop up, like some recurring organic homeostatic function, whereas today the protest appears much more as some delineated, contained game which is loathed and held in contempt by the authorities and their sycophants.

This is not to diminish the efforts of the protesters. They are doing good and necessary work. But it is always interesting to see how political dissidence actually works in real world conditions, especially in a conservative society such as this one.

The founders could probably be referred to as radicals in their day, though the extent of the radicalism and revolutionary tendencies of each founder could be debated, which I'm not going to get into. And what radicals typically envision is a society in which their radical inclinations are made a regular occurrence in the operation of an ideal society.

What usually seems to happen instead (or better, what seems to happen in cycles in this mature stage of civilization) is that moments of political radicalism, if they are to be transformative on a system-wide scale, come and go in different eras. There are periods in which the energy emanating from below bursts open the rusted jaws of convention, forcing change, and then there are periods in which convention prevails, buttressing its preferred shape of society against the transformational powers of political movements, or at least compromising with the movements in return for a watered-down radicalism.

Perhaps in a healthy society with a strong sense of collective security, protests could be encouraged and even communicated with. But in a sick society such as this one - which fears constant disintegration at every turn, and which resists any kind of meaningful change - protest becomes a sort of game due to the opposing and irreconcilable aims of its participants, as well as the constrictive bounds of what's left of civic life. Competitive games take their tension from the opposing aims of the competing players, and modern protests, with their intricate games of psychological warfare, are similar in structure, though the stakes are certainly higher.

So. The object of protesters is to force a dialogue that political elites refuse to entertain, and this has to be done by disrupting the elites' precious system. It requires a dramatic and vivid impact, and a forcing of the dysfunction of business as usual, to jolt a society into a mode of self-reflection. Walking down the streets and shouting with signs is not enough, though it can raise some awareness at least. If you can be ignored, business can continue, and usually that is all that is required for a protest movement to become ineffectual.

Protesters rely on social media, limited communication encryption, theatrical tactics, and various methods of direct disruption, such as blocking roadways, chaining themselves to important buildings or objects, sitting in, making noise, and directing public attention at offending individuals, institutions, classes, or other objects. Some protesters believe in property destruction and other destructive acts, though this observation is complicated by the fact that there were actual undercover cops in Berkeley smashing windows and instigating looting. It isn't always clear how these movements unfold.

The object of police on the other hand is to maintain the shape of society. Police seek to minimize the protesters' impact in several ways, such as by neutralizing the power of protests with various tactics. Police rely on containment and inter-agency coordination, and legal monopoly on the instruments of violence. Police will carefully coordinate individuals and material resources to find and isolate accumulations of human mass, and then direct them through parts of the city which are removed from important commercial activity, taking care to use intimidating tactics which cause gradual dispersion.

Dispersion is the primary police aim. There are reports of the police now using drones to confuse protesters as to the location and direction of the protests (we checked Twitter feeds and searched for circling helicopters to find ours). The drones pose as helicopter decoys, confusing protesters as to the location of the march, further preventing accumulation.

The accumulation of human mass mentioned above is perhaps the most important parameter. The protesters want a large, vibrant, growing mass, the size and spectacle of which communicates a public will. The mass also changes properties of the protest movement itself; it amplifies expression. With the presence of social witnesses, numerous protesters are more likely to vigorously express some point of view, or they are more likely to commit a certain pointed, political action. The mass movement creates the conditions for finer, more vigorous public expression, with types of public expression varying as more varying individuals become attracted to the protest. And then a greater body of people is simply more capable of disrupting commercial or civic centers.

The police want more than anything to direct, contain, and eventually disperse this mass, through force if necessary. They are less interested in lone individuals breaking off of the protest; as soon as you leave the crowd, you are typically free to walk away, unless the police are breaking off and isolating individuals to arrest out of spite.

This protest activity continues in cycles - especially after particularly egregious violations of justice - and then abates as the energy disperses, with the most dedicated activists and organizers moving on to other projects if there is no more possibility of effective action. Of course there are plenty of future opportunities for the outpouring of public sentiment. There is no shortage of pressure to be released as useless heavy things continue to press upon the body politic.

Bipolar Bay

An acquaintance remarked that the Bay Area seems to attract bipolar people. Not sure how true this is statistically, but they're definitely around.

It seems to get passed around like the flu; there is a delay in effects. Suddenly a couple of people start exhibiting manic, irritatable, sometimes paranoid symptoms, and then soon enough as the manic people are crashing, some other people in social proximity start to go manic themselves.

People come out here for art, music, underground tech, radical politics. Where you have people trying to do exciting things, you usually have this condition, though the condition is certainly not limited geographically. Simply, there is more likely to be a preponderance of it.

The cycle often appears as so: one is crushed, so that to compensate one must do or make exciting things. One's ideation of what should happen is raised, increasing the chances of being disappointed again, and one is most likely crushed again, this time in a greater way. One develops greater ideas for compensation, and so the cycle continues, its peaks and troughs growing in height and intensity.

Sometimes the cycle produces wonderful things. Sometimes it just disrupts things. And then sometimes one has a psychotic break.

Well, if you're excited about something, you should keep doing your thing. It is what you live for. But don't forget to mellow out here and there.

Commitment

Yes, these are dark times. And they'll probably grow darker.

The news is full of horrors and stupidity. Up here in the north it has been pouring nonstop. In our circle we are all pretty decidedly broke. Dreams remain frustrated and unfulfilled. And then unfulfilled and broke people typically run on higher levels of stress, crashing against one another. The dog has run off. He is lost for now. Fine.

Here is a nice quote for dark times, thanks to a mention from a friend:

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

The last two lines are Goethe's. The rest is attributed to a W.H. Murray.

* As an additional note, commitment in the wrong direction can prove catastrophic. Always fruitful to locate these motivational quotes within broader regimes of life strategy.

Work Sucks

I don't have to deal with a physical office, or the discomfort of being in constant physical proximity to a crappy boss, but as a freelance writer I still have to deal with my share of nonsense.

Besides the fact that I work hours on end everyday doing something that I really couldn't care less about, to make money to pay rents and buy things that allow me to keep doing what I really couldn't care less about, there is the matter of having one's work appreciated by one's peers, and having one's work serving some use in the world, even if one doesn't care about it. 

A fairly-sized chunk of economic activity in the US especially is nonsense work, constant work to manipulate symbols of desire or power obfuscation, or mere accounting gimmicks which shift around fictional value, or support work which administrates and perfects this nonsense activity.  

SEO writing is essentially semantic and syntactic finagling to manipulate search engine algorithms, funneling unassuming web surfers into the virtual stores of whomever can afford to do more finagling than others, web stores that are themselves usually expressions of manipulative, intermediary economic power, which also usually rest on suppressed labor, either within our borders or outside of our borders in places that are made stable by our military or our economic clout. 

The search algorithms are always changing, and there are a bunch of tech writers out there whose jobs entail sitting around gabbing about these phantom algorithms and whether the latest techniques are working. No one really knows. When it comes down to it, the harder you sell, the better. As always. When people keep having bright shiny things waved in their face, they eventually buy the things to make the hawkers shut up. 

Then there's the matter of peer appreciation. A lot of this nonsense activity can't exist on its own; it depends on expanding economies and other factors far outside its scope. So of course you find yourself amidst these nonsense efficiency maximizing regimes which are designed to make more efficient the nonsense work, setting aside actual economic conditions, and your work is judged in accordance with these regimes. For example, keyword placement, paragraph structures, repetition, images, and etc. Funnel in the visitors better. If people don't have money to buy anything, then you're not funneling hard enough! 

Every new editor that is hired has a different idea of how this regime should work, and really no one knows how it should work anyways, so it usually amounts to lots of trial and error and dumb luck, which is always fleeting in the first place. So you're constantly getting work back, along with "this doesn't match our content standards, so we can't pay you full" and this and that. One could imagine these poor editors sitting in their homes or running around the office, tearing at their hair, pinching their brows, going mad from these endless contradictory signals. Most people think within the confines of their limited fiefdoms, running on the old hamster wheel twice as fast to keep things running as the greater system contracts. This is what drives some people mad. 

It is a lot of imaginary problem solving, and you just sort of go along with it to keep getting paid. Maybe someone should look at search engine monopolies, or better yet, start fixing the problems that are keeping people from buying the useless junk.  But that's just me.

To subsist, you just have to jump through the nonsense hoops, while doing what you think is important at the same time. It takes a little finesse, but it can be done. All of this is supposed to be dignifying of course. Stand tall, you rugged individual!

The more I think of this, the more absurd and hilarious it all seems. But these are people's lives. And mine I guess. And we're burning up a lot of precious energy, doing what exactly?

On Ferguson and More (Cont'd)

We joined the protests over police violence in downtown Oakland, and the experience has certainly added some nuance to my outlook, as getting closer to the action will often do without fail.

I have to set this discussion up, so please bear with me.

First, the nature of our neoliberal system has it so that many people are forced into the role of homo economicus whether they like it or not. Its ubiquitous power creates its own self-fulfilling prophecy: if you buy up all of the public property, slash all of the public services, and sharply limit the flow of currency so that everyone is forced into an artificially created economic sphere to survive, then most people will attempt to hold jobs at the remaining institutions where the money and resources are flowing.

This state of affairs is the case because of what we allow our most powerful members of society to get away with. When the power of wealth and the underlying business ethos is worshiped as an end, then you allow the most economically powerful businessmen to control wider and wider facets of society. Every individual wants to see his or her self reflected in his or her surroundings in some sense. So it only follows that the most powerful individuals will see to it that their self is instantiated and multiplied across the land, altering the composition of society so that ever more of their spawn can acquire ever more power, or consenting human - and by extension technological - energy.

This is what you see lurking beneath the sterile surface of neoliberal economic propaganda. It is less the case that its adherents believe neoliberalism actually works - though they certainly do - and more the case that they believe it must work because it reflects what they are: selfish, sociopathic individuals, who probably experience a tragic sense of emptiness when they relate to other human beings. And so mass robbery becomes a ruling ethos, which by necessity spreads its logic, so that everyone caught up in the system must survive by some form of exploitation, so that finally universal exploitation becomes the case, with varying tiers of economic power forming wherein chosen economic classes and cultural groups are given a portion of the spoils in return for consent. Needless to say, even communal, intellectual, spiritual, and artistic outlets become sucked into this sinkhole.

Enough abstraction! To keep on point, I first mentioned that individuals are forced to take work where they can, as an economy with a large pool of unemployed can only absorb so many individuals. Of course this doesn't account for the numerous motivations one has to join the police force, but one necessarily has to take this reality into account when evaluating the institution itself: the institution is bent over the will of the ruling class, with the individuals within the police bent around this shape in turn, regardless of their illusions of what it means to be an officer of the law.

And so the institution takes on a certain character, with the most brutal, authoritarian, and corrupt individuals ruling the roost, especially at higher proximal locations to power, while the honest, well-meaning individuals are silenced to remain in the tribe, or who are pushed out or driven mad. Happily there are exceptions that buck the trend, but they remain exceptions.

But what does all of this have to do with our experience in Oakland? Well, looking for the actual site of the protest we happened by a homeless man that wanted to play on the drums we brought. After talking to him for a bit, we turned around and were startled upon coming face to face with four or five riot cops, and realized that we were right across the street from the police station. We made eye contact with several of these men and women and on their faces where not expressions of aggression and pugnaciousness, but exhaustion and reluctance, human workers caught within the fatalistic confines of a charged national symbol.

Granted, not all of the police exhibited these momentary signs of frailty. When the police grew tired of the march downtown, they advanced on us rapidly with a row of heavy riot units, shouting threats through a megaphone and commanding us to disperse, which is a common tactic. And supposedly the jackasses in Berkeley met a peaceful crowd of protesters with batons and teargas in short order. So much for the first amendment.

Nevertheless, everywhere there were breaches in the homogeneous facade of symbol. Many businesses stationed private security forces outside of their doors in anticipation of the protests, with many of these employees people of color, looks of despair and vacant disassociation on their faces, forced away from their own long term interests by the dictates of bare economic survival. A black man in a business suit stood outside of the downtown Wells Fargo building with a confused grimace on his face as he surveyed the shattered glass of the entire front door, though as we walked further past I was amused to find that the Wells Fargo building was the most targeted building on the block: everywhere were boarded up windows from previous nights. Nevertheless, property damage usually only hurts ordinary people, as the owners of property shrug and pass on the costs as they always do. The protest crowd expresses itself in many ways, not all of them productive, though this can be difficult to alter anyways.

Which brings me to the lack of homogeneity of the protest crowd itself, though its difference was unified under its common cause in this case. Some black bloc (and this group isn't even homogeneous) types ran up with a black flag and dropped a large window, and the rest of the protesters chased them away shouting "we don't do that."

The crowd was a mix of fun loving thrill seekers, serious but polite individuals, hipsters, hostile individuals barking slogans like "fuck the police" and even outright vandals, though the latter were far more rare. It has been a common observation of protest movements like Occupy that these crowds become greater social expressions which fan out in every direction, much as what happens at a festival, which was certainly the case for this one. There is a great public catharsis, and a great joy which is immediately apparent in the faces of the crowd. Looking at the radiant faces of the crowd, and the despairing faces of those individuals administrating the institutions of suppression, one gains a strong sense of where the energy is flowing.

Through these social ruptures, suppressed and socially unabsorbed egos burst forth in every direction, expressing themselves, finally to be witnessed by an onlooking public. People ride bikes, walk their dogs (we walked ours), bang on drums and pots, play instruments, display signs, dress up, and yes, occasionally wreck things or get into fights.

The smart cops know to allow these explosive social expressions to burst forth and curl their way down the streets, containing this energy at the more extreme edges, almost as one loosens a release valve, while the idiots that go in clubs swinging end up having this explosive energy slapped back at them eventually, albeit in a different form. That is, until benevolent expression can no longer be contained, and the forces of desperation and violence are unleashed.

And so that is that.

Usually when I go about putting on the old doom hat, the qualifications hat is soon to follow. As I write and strain to capture the intricacies of this process, I can't help but chuckle to myself as the infinite complexities of reality gnaw away at the account that I attempted, as lapping waters erode a carefully constructed sand castle. In the end, I can't look at a limited written account (whether mine or another's) as something that is true in an absolute sense. I want to know whether it withstands the erosion of time and experience; it will most certainly lose some of its original shape.

As I attempted to express a post back, the system is taking on a certain character, and it will fall in accordance with the shape of that character, regardless of the numerous potentials whirling about underneath these institutions, classes, and symbols. This is what is worth understanding, to me anyways.

And then of course I scold myself for these recursive layers of self-reflection and self-indulgence. It is the people out there that are worth all of the attention, and of course, the world they are a part of.

Clusterfuck

Excuse the vulgar title, but it is probably a good description of the social realities that are found in a society experiencing cascading, interconnected problems it can't collectively solve.

There is a repetitive mechanic which makes things progressively worse, which is possible to spot if you stop for a minute. Our social tendencies, being closely coupled with our lingual/symbolic systems, tend to look for identifiable problems which can be immediately diagnosed, oftentimes in the immediately manipulable relationship with an individual or class.

As the increasing effects of a ubiquitous and intensifying strain are felt, we locate failures and dysfunctions in the closest proximal causes we can identify, blaming complex problems on the behaviors and actions of individuals that are often suspect to our own standards of behavior and action, standards which are usually formed by the outlook of our own personality, or the shared personality of conventional society.

And so to convention it is the deviant that causes problems, to the deviant it is convention, to the liberal it is the conservative, to the conservative it is the liberal, to the teetotaler it is the alcoholic, to the homophobe it is the homosexual, and so on. It is difference crashing into itself.

Which is not to say all causes are equally to blame - or equally innocent - after all, top-heavy things must fall, and the fall of the system will proceed in a certain direction. The better you apprehend that direction, the better you can fare.

On Ferguson and More

I haven't taken much time to write in the last couple of weeks, but it is definitely worth commenting on the situations in Ferguson and New York.

People keep making the mistake - partially because of the nature of the news cycle and concentrated media - of quibbling over infinitesimal details of the shootings, brutalizations, trials, and protests, as well as the relative merits of all the actors involved. Of course, most of the people making this mistake are typically conservative with remaining comforts and resources to spare, and of course, to lose.

This is all completely understandable, and is certainly going to continue, as we as social creatures tend to rally around magnetic popular symbols, displaying our binary opinions. The social energy is tending towards these points of extreme injury and insult, almost as pain responses tend toward pin pricks.

In moderation, this process is essential to human social life, but when it tends towards the extreme - that is, when you get to arguing over tiny details on a mass scale, as is happening in the media - it kicks up a vast cloud of obfuscating noise which obscures the avenues to effective action, and even effective thought.

These flashes of public outrage over a vivid or forceful event are the socially visible reactions that are generated from profound structural problems, which are of course the true causes of a multitude of traumatic events. Needless to say, these structural problems are where our attention should be focused.

To take the Ferguson case for example, it doesn't matter where Wilson was standing, where Brown was standing, who was reaching for what, how big Brown was, or what Brown did in the convenience store. All of these details were simply manipulated to produce a moral narrative for a show trial that was already rigged to acquit Wilson in the first place.

What does matter is the systematic pattern of violence, indignation, injustice, and exploitation that African Americans suffer under the American justice system, and the virtual immunity of the police while perpetuating this state of affairs. Or for that matter the extreme economic disparities that have characterized the American caste system for centuries - and let's not pretend that we don't have a caste system - which create the conditions for these gross distortions of the concept of justice. All of this is of course empirically verifiable and well-documented for those interested in understanding.

What matters just as much are the amplifications of these grievances wrought by increasingly dire social, economic, and political problems which contribute to and are amplified themselves by environmental antagonism and diminishing energy resources. These amplifications are in turn contributing to the production of increasingly hostile and militarized state security institutions, which exacerbate these problems and feed back into these amplifications.

We're caught in what amounts to a gigantic Chinese finger trap, and instead of trying to figure out how to get our collective finger out, we are busy pulling and thrashing, tightening the trap while chattering maniacally about it.

A show trial is not going to put a stop to any of this. On the contrary, it will make things worse. It will contribute to the evaporation of what's left of public confidence in the court system.

People know when they are getting screwed. That said, it is very strange to see these intricate, choreographed legal, political, and media machinations expending huge amounts of energy to attempt to halt this inevitable realization. This is more a rationalization for those not afflicted to continue operating as normal, without initiating traumatic structural changes. It also betrays the supreme importance of engineering public consent in a fundamentally unjust social system, as the forces of violence are impossible to control, and expend great amounts of energy, probably far more than the organs of propaganda.

This is a blind spot that has been embedded in the bourgeois spirit from the very beginning. When society is operated as a universal struggle for raw economic power, constitutional protections and the rule of law inevitably collapse, for the very conditions under which these principles operate make it impossible for them to be sustained. The poor and the politically marginalized simply lack the means to defend their own rights.

For these comfortable people sitting in their homes, offices, and courtrooms, it may be a temporary victory to see the courts - which may be still legitimate in their eyes - put forth carefully doctored arguments which side with the police. To see these angry shouting people in the streets, with a menacing air suggested by media accounts, it may just appear that the poor beleaguered police are doing their best to defend themselves from the hordes of barbarians that prowl the streets of US cities in decline.

But as the rule of law continues to deteriorate, and the state is able to routinely get away with murder, putting people down in the streets like animals, this tendency will generalize. If a man or a woman's death can be rationalized away with frail prejudiced opinions and legal processes, the expansion of further rationalizations for ever more injustice is all but guaranteed. If you can't protect your most vulnerable, the concept of the rule of law is eaten away by public perception of contradiction.

To paraphrase countless political observers and writers, soon enough the guns will be turned on you.

Double Take

When you experience or read something profound, it tends to create an emotional imprint that can change the way you experience - and even act - in the future, with effects that can be felt long after the memory, the data, has faded.

Sometimes you can experience these things all over again in a similar way, and it has the effect of reminding you why you are the way you are.

That's Not Like You

I love these issues that crop up when someone utters about someone else - who is usually misbehaving or tripping out: "that is not like him/her at all."

Well, if you are doing something or acting a certain way, then that is certainly you.

When you are drunk and raging and mean, that is still you, just infused with the merry spirit of beer. When you are in a highly stressed state and acting a certain way, that is still you.

But we just get so confused. We are so used to referring to people as these delineated particulars, when in fact we are really these bundles of potentialities, walking multitudes which do eventually reach a certain homeostasis - that which "defines" a person's character - but which is also subject to change, especially from extreme external events.

Yep. There exist certain stable bodies of characteristics that we can use to designate a given person, and at the same time those characteristics are subject to chemical, physical, biological, and psychological modulation at any time. But in an individualist culture, we just have no clear way to talk about things that way.

The Pure, the Profane, the Chaotic

What is dirt but the hodgepodge of elementary components of organic matter, the broken down chaos from which life emerges? And then that which is pure seems to be what is born and unified, or at least born a harmonized body. But neither never lasts! The emergence of a harmonic body in a field of chaos is bound to become interspersed with differentiated elements over time, eventually to dissolve, while life delights in its formations out of chaos.

These two need each other. Within the chaotic dirt, there is intoxicating freedom of potentiality. What will combine amidst the elementary components? What will emerge? The possibilities for creation are endless, though in the end they will be shaped by what already exists.

These types obsessed with the preservation of purity just crack me up. The undifferentiated pure loses all of its preciousness the more time passes that it exists. Growing in power and scope, the pure uses up all of the raw materials of creation to sustain itself; the undifferentiated and monolithic begins to appear as death, like the surfaces and colors of a funeral parlor. And that is even setting aside the fact that there are many possible patterns of formation of parallel undifferentiated pure bodies.

Preservation of the pure intensifies all the more its potentials for dissolution.

And for all its freedom, how horrible that endless procession of disintegration and consumption that accompanies the formation and existence of chaos, making all the more valuable the unities, the purities that eventually coalesce.

Muhney

This is great. The decoupling of the financial economy from the real economy is an important phenomenon, and important to understanding the nature of power in our political economy.

We see a similar problem cropping up with Modern Monetary Theory. I think the theory itself is just wonderful. It is a great way to view the monetary system, and as it happens, it correctly depicts how the modern monetary system actually works when you cut through all of the myth and propaganda.

It would also make for a powerful political-economic tool. When you want people to do something, just inject some money into the general system. You're basically squirting this catalyst into a network to activate all of the potentials along that network, or people who want to do things. And there are people everywhere that just want to do things. Doing things is a huge part of life. And everything is set up to do things; the infrastructure is already there. If things get too hot, you just suck it back up. You tax.

Money itself is a symbol that subconsciously communicates to you this: "do what you think is useful, and everyone else is going to do what they think is useful, and then trade in all of those things." It animates life. It promises that life continues.

It does away with this superstitious "hard-money" psychology whose undercurrents can probably be traced back to Christian moral thought, this nagging guilt that says you have to suffer and toil to get anything good, which is a great attitude for a certain period of time (a time of scarcity and material hardship), but transplanted on another age (an age of abundance, at least for certain classes), becomes a hindrance, a superstition.

But there are problems with MMT. Not in the theory itself, which seems airtight to me, but in the way that the theory relates to our current political economic system. First, as the linked post showed, the monetary system operates in accordance with the interests of those most powerful, and able to affect the behavior of the system.

There are a lot of people out there that want to do good things, and there are plenty more people out there that want to do bad things. And the channels themselves in which the money flows determine who gets what, and who gets to do what, and those channels are determined by people who manipulate them to get the most out of them, and essentially the people who do bad things. Squirt a neutral medium like money into this existing system and the system continues to behave as it did previously. There is no clear way to modulate the flow of this money without directly using force to change the behavior of the system.

The other problem is that yes, our system works a certain way, and we have the incredible resources and infrastructure that we do, but the way in which all of this behaves and is ultimately utilized correlates with the aggregate in human belief systems, and more importantly, the belief systems of the most powerful people in the system.

Rich people and powerful politicians simply don't think in the manner that is required for MMT to actually operate. They are purveyors of the hard-money superstition, which is why you see austerity being practiced in deflationary economies. They are all projecting their own guilt, they say: "we had too much, and now we have to compensate for that." Which for rich and powerful people means that everyone else has to compensate and they can continue to consume at escalating levels. Austerity for the poor, socialism for the rich. So it goes.

Even if there are some non-superstitious wealthy and powerful people that understand the nature of the system, and could understand the theoretical operation of MMT, they still wouldn't implement it. They are fine with controlling the wealth and power flows. More flows to the population mean less of a mountain of power, control, and wealth for them to sit atop.

Compound all of this with the fact that resource strains and environmental antagonisms are feeding into these system-wide pathologies. So, for MMT to function without resuscitating the doomsday machine that we have collectively built, accelerating our path to collective suicide, it would require political force to radically reshape the nature of the system itself. As has been repeated by climate activists, we would require a WWII-style command economy that would massively reduce superfluous consumption and force an economic build-out of renewable infrastructure. Energy-use would have to be systematically reduced substantially.

The environmentalists would essentially have to commandeer the guns to do this, because the entire power structure that currently operates doesn't want this; it is perhaps one of the greatest things they fear. And who exactly is it that wields the guns now? We all grew together; that includes the most hypersensitive progressive and the most bloodthirsty reactionary. We're all stuck together too. Whoops.

A dramatic restructuring has happened before. But it takes a lot of energy and violence. This was essentially what happened through the course of the world wars and the dramatic political changes that changed the shape of the global power structure during and after. Even then, the locus of global empire shifted but the overall composition of the system retained its character. What is it really going to take this time?

Strange Days

We've been working on this barn-style door for the garage and upon looking over and reflecting on the tools we've been using, I've been struck with an odd sensation: many of our modern tools, implements, and general technologies are really just remarkable. The layers and layers of ingenuity and rigor of thought and practice, the sediments of complexity built over one another, they're just baffling. When you go back to the basics and begin building things yourself and seeing how things actually work, and what you are capable of without more advanced tools and industrial processes, a stark contrast is drawn between simpler implements and contemporary technologies. I was just looking at a simple crowbar and marveling at its contours, and the precision and deliberation of its design. All the more so for the table saw, and the endlessly complex manufacturing processes behind these tools.

Which is all the more strange of a sensation considering the dumb, mean, and cruel culture that continues to gestate atop it all. Dumb, mean, and cruel advertisements plaster these towering, gorgeous structures downtown. Dumb, mean and cruel television is piped into beautiful homes on beautiful electronic screens, broadcasted miles and miles away from towers on electromagnetic waves, or broadcasted from space. Dumb, mean, and cruel radio shows and adverts play to impatient and insensitive drivers in these incredible automobiles driving over these breathtaking bridges, engineering marvels spanning oceans, hanging there in the sun like glistening steel spider webs.

Of course, now come the qualifications. Yes, on one hand, I know all of the culture has not turned: there is a still a diverse range of opinions and expressions. Good media is still to be found. And there is always independent activity to consider. Good things are happening in certain places, even in the public sphere. And on the other hand there are various stupid technologies or manufactured objects that are rapidly declining in quality. Our powers of manipulation are awe-inspiring but one has to raise questions about the scope of this manipulation, the energy it consumes, and the indirect effects it has on the greater systems that sustain it. There is no apparent on/off switch. The process of manipulation takes off in all directions and won't stop until it burns itself out.

I'm just trying to deal in aggregates right now. Painting a limited picture so to speak. Yeah, it is all just a bit strange: this great machine sitting and cooling after a violent expansion, inside of which persists a continuous rot.

How to Live?

A lot of spiritual writings and philosophy of living writings have in common this earnest need to share advice on how to live in a given age or time. It is one thing to struggle through trial and error all your life, but it helps to have someone place their hand on your shoulder and point out to the horizon and give you the long view, so that you can situate your practical efforts within that framework. It cuts down on a lot of frustration and desperation.

What exactly is happening today? I suppose plenty has already been said about this subject. Collectively we're like that 6 foot tall dude in that old action movie trope, standing erect atop a moving train, with someone suddenly yelling "duck" because there was a tunnel, or low bridge, or a similar overhanging obstruction rapidly approaching in the distance.

I'm sure there are plenty of other better metaphors. That one just comes to mind at the moment.

Love of Shiny Things

There is a hidden cost built into the operation of capital, that very naturally goes unsaid because of its superfluous nature.

The executives of the world's largest corporations make astronomical sums, and the staggered tiers of managers have to make tidy sums as well to keep those vehicles of extraction squeezing what production and profit they can.

The upper earners of these classes set the standard which all of the rest of the participants in a given class aspire to, the sums of which are required to provide motivation for the job. There is no other reason to participate in these awful structures; there is no joy in it. The primary animating principle to operating a corporation or state institution in which all of the joys of living have died is the promise of wealth and the status that comes with it.

So if you let your top earners get away with obscenely high sums of wealth, then all of the other high earners in your other economic structures are going to want the same thing, and many of the politicians in the highest positions of power are going to want the same thing as well.

This is what you have to keep in mind when you see rising commodity and real estate prices. And rising taxes because more is being extracted out of the public coffers as well. All of those dickheads at the top have to maintain their multiple vacation homes, palatial mansions, fine dining and shopping habits, top tier vehicle stables, yachts, servants, drivers, private jets, and all the rest.

If you have a class which enjoys these incredible concentrations of wealth, then all of the people that are motivated to join that class will require those sorts of spoils, or else they'll go through other channels to get them. If all of your essential societal functions are operated by this class, then that is where a large proportion of the energy is going to go.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

To a city, a fleet of street sweepers is a sound investment. It is a guaranteed income stream, with bonus points if the sweeping times are staggered and confusing. It becomes a form of taxation.

We've also seen the city boot and tow cars for various arbitrary and absurd reasons. Not sure what the dividing line between public and private is in this case, and who gets exactly what, but those towing fines smart.

A more extreme phenomenon is with civil forfeiture laws, which has been going on for quite a while, the details of which are really pretty shocking, and alarming. With the federal, state, and local revenues drying up due to corporate greed and global economic deflation and resource stripping, there's a stronger impetus to make up the balance through other less legitimate methods.

All of that bureaucratic and institutional build-up that accompanied and facilitated economic expansion is costly to maintain, and of course, it isn't going away without a fight!

Thursday Night Ant Kingdom Pt. 2

So it was possible to remove the ants peacefully from the house, albeit with an unconventional and ad-hoc method. I'm going to try to expand on this in the abstract.

Without some intervening pressure, it is difficult to resist convention. You absorb from family, media, and the education system at a very young age many of the dominant modes of living, spans of attention, and emotional imprints that will serve you throughout your life. Convention is subject to modification over time, but carries itself with a heavy inertia, so that it takes intense psychological, physical, or environmental pressures to be dislodged from it.

The subjective experience of becoming dislodged is first the understanding of a socioeconomic system and culture from the outside; it becomes an object of study instead of simply the subjective experience of daily living, to be taken for granted, invisible like the air one breathes. It is no longer natural to participate without some mediating layer of analysis and corresponding action.

Another consequence of this is that one's attention begins to drift to other areas of perception previously ignored by convention, all the more so the more distasteful the modes of convention become to one's mind.

So the wisdom of spraying a pesticide all over one's kitchen comes into question, as well as the denial of agency of other creatures that this solution implies, which has become generalized really to everything we don't consider a pet. Convention comes to appear much as a great creeping flow of toxic sludge which settles over the land, death radiating from it in all directions.

So one's attention turns to nature and its many agents. Ants are actually pretty remarkable creatures. They're everywhere, and they're very sophisticated.You can work with them if you want to. And they work for you too. They are excellent at aerating soil and compost for one.

This event also brings attention to the dividing line between external nature and the modern human habitat, the latter of which illustrates how far out modern humankind has gotten. This swept and sterile composition of rearranged matter, a landscape of utility, of objects extracted and abstracted away from living things and formations of earth and rock, a sterile floating compartment removed (perhaps not permanently) from the perpetual processes of nature.

How discomforting it is to spot creatures that account for 15 - 25% of the earth's biomass trickling up and down the pristine surfaces of one's abode! Ah but this sterility protects us from all the poisonous insects, parasites, bacteria, diseases, and other creepy crawlies which threaten us. Of course this comes with a cost as well: the compression and displacement of one's threats into some outer sphere beyond one's living space, with all of it to come rushing back in as soon as the opportunity presents itself. After all, nature still exists there, undergoing change, with or without us, if one can sustain the distinction at least.

It takes a lot of energy, a lot of effort, to maintain that sterile sphere. And you could be contributing to the selection of species which are resistant to the sphere, or which, upon evolving to survive in that outer sphere, could pose a shock to vulnerable bodies in the future. Maybe getting to know the processes of nature little by little again - that is, up close and personal, out of the vacuum of the cleanroom - couldn't hurt.

Qualifying Domestics

Thinking back, I suppose my post on dogs was a bit one-sided. Of course there are exploitative relationships everywhere, but there are also loving relationships, and relationships in which an owner may be sensitive to every desire of the animal at the expense of their own. There is a mutuality in the exchanges between humans and domestic pets. Anyways, we're all stuck on this rock together, vibrating in a key that history imposed. Might as well make the best of it.

Collective Living and Institutions

There is always a degree of chaos in a collective living space, it seems.

That is because spontaneous order is oftentimes one-sided: it is a repetition of a given individual's living preferences, which is stabilized over a period of time barring the interference of the living patterns of other individuals.

Add another person and you now have what are probably two different modes of living which must be harmonized through constant negotiation.

A domestic governing system arises when there is a need to balance more than two or three closely bonded individuals. On a smaller scale, this system can be collectively decided upon, but it is still subject to potential change. If you have other individuals coming in and out of the space that don't live there, it complicates things further. Add animals, and you have more complications, and etc.

This system is under constant stress. It requires constant maintenance. Imbalance can arise as a given personality seeks a greater space than the rest.

Chaos is tolerable to a degree, but it introduces a constant source of irritation the more chronic uncertainty is introduced. If you can't find the resources you are looking for, or the appearance or noises inside the space bother you, then it slowly saps and weakens your mental state, leaving you open for more serious shocks.

Shocks come in the form of various traumas, life problems, interpersonal dramas, financial issues, and other things.You can watch as a shock ripples through the household, and each member under stress reacts to that shock, producing further ripples in turn as interactions continue, weakening the states of all, which exposes everyone to further shocks.

And of course when the going is good, the house just buzzes. Up and down it goes.

This is what makes establishing a monolithic power a fool's errand. When a system arises, it is always in danger of being captured by a limited personality, a personality that seeks to systematize its own image, suffocating all of the other personalities, which introduces further internal instabilities that react with external shocks. You can't possibly capture all of the different living forms under one administrative system. It just can't be done. The more you expand your power, the more the entire system's integrity is threatened, and threatened ever more so the more resistance you encounter as you attempt to subsume greater difference.

Better to allow individuals to free associate into collectives, which can be disbanded if overly stressed. Sometimes it is important to be able to put down roots and maintain a space for a long period of time so that something has time to gestate within, but it is just as important that no person should be trapped within a failing collective.

And a collective may change shape over a period of time, but still retain its character. Individuals may come and go, it may break apart and reconfigure again. Members and contexts can change abruptly or gradually, so why not leave it open?

Dogs and Other Domestics

Living with a small dog, you aren't usually slapped about the face with the reality of human-animal power relations. Maybe you have to wince a bit when you are potty training or teaching manners or administrating some such disciplinary activity, but generally, when the dog misbehaves or fails to listen you can just scoop it up and transport it to another environment or situation, and you don't have to worry about the dog losing its shit.

With larger dogs, this can be a very different reality, all the more so the stronger the dog is. Our roommate saw it fit to adopt a very large and strong young Pit Bull - though he probably didn't have much of a choice seeing as how it was being chased down the street by yelling, scared people, and the poor thing scooted right up the front stairs - so I've had a chance to feel the bare reality of human-animal power relations in a raw way.

What I mean is that you have to exert your dominance in a prominent way or else the dog can easily overtake you. It seems as though power relations become much more clear the higher the stakes. In less threatening conditions, you tend to see more of the world through your own projections, while the other makes its presence felt in struggle.

I'm sort of exaggerating here, because the dog is just the sweetest thing and has shown no aggression whatsoever towards human beings or even other dogs, so I've never really felt threatened. But there was a night I was playing with the dog, and he got his jaws around my sweater sleeve. Thinking he was playing tug of war, he wouldn't let go, and was pulling pretty hard, so I ended up having to take off the sweater and let him have it, then try to fish it away from him afterwards.

See, this dog is incredibly strong and it is still going to get stronger and larger. It is true about Pits' jaws: they lock up pretty well. So if something goes wrong and you don't have mastery over the dog, you're going to have a problem. It is like maintaining a respectful protocol around heavy machinery. If you lack the power to reverse or escape a bad process, you're going through that process whether you like it or not, to come out on the other side in whatever form of disrepair the situation warrants.

It is a case study which lays bare the human-animal relationship. A domestic animal, brought into the human world - a world that in the end has power over it, even if it is a powerful animal that can take on individual human beings - must necessarily take on the traits required of it to coexist in the domestic realm.

It ends up being a symbiotic relationship that we initiated. We incorporate various species for various exploitative uses, and they come to adopt a lifestyle that makes them dependent on humans for sustenance.

And that is sort of the predicament isn't it? For someone with strict egalitarian sensibilities, it would have been easier if everyone was simply doing their own thing from the beginning, animals included. But we have this domestic animal population, which has found itself deposited into a certain niche after centuries of co-evolution. Let's free all of these creatures and see how that works out!

It isn't easy moving in the world, especially when one's head is full of charged ideas.

I'd venture that this is a microcosm for our current snafu as well. Capital has produced a certain human being after its 200 or so years of operation - scale this number back if you want to bring in greater historical causal chains - and this human being is tied to capital due to his and her nature: to passively consume. To decouple from capital means to radically change one's nature. Not easy. Usually it takes a little jolt, hate to say.

Creation's Cold Tail

Creation takes energy. For one to create an intellectual or artistic work, or to make a certain scientific discovery, or invent some new technology, it takes a great amount of energy: both vital energy and sustained discipline (which requires constant mechanical energy) are required. These requirements are much higher in a mature civilization. One is competing with a certain degree of quality and variation of innovations, as well as a less robust energy input if one is relating one's efforts to an existing framework. You could always go off and do something radically new, but then you run the risk of being misunderstood or ignored, at least for the duration of your life, which is generally what radical innovators are up against anyways. Newness requires mass, or a certain threshold of activated bodies that assent to or agree with the thrust of the new object in question.

An expenditure of creative energy attracts sympathetic energies; part of the point of creating is communicating, or sharing energy. This energy bursts forth and decays, or else various points of energetic expression form positive feedback loops with each other and new artifacts are generated rapidly and in abundance (possibly with new institutions to administrate the distribution of those artifacts), which then proceed to decay over a greater timespan and scope.

This decay is expressed socially in the strictures of convention. We don't entirely know why, but not everyone is hypersensitive and creative. What happens is a functional equivalent of a cargo cult forms around the object of creation in question, attempting to emulate its creator's existence by discussing said objects, following various sets of instructions relating to the object, or attempting to negotiate socially for the highest proximal location to the object.

The vital energy mentioned above is certainly an esoteric term, but important to creation. Creatives seem to have the tendency of becoming decoupled from existing social circuits, perhaps through personal constitution or associated life traumas or both, who lose the ability to communicate effortlessly through conventional networks, but who, being human, must communicate nevertheless and be understood, which necessitates a vehicle, a creative work. This diversion of energy occurs on its own, with passionate expression finding an outlet out of necessity, oftentimes concentrating and intensifying in the process. However, what else is required is a strong character with the discipline to apply repetitive acts to perfect a given vehicle of creation (which requires willpower and of course mechanical energy, or simply nutrition and other related resources).

Those that lack the ability but still wish to share the expressive energy of creation may do so through others, either socially or through instrumentalization - that is, manipulating others of ability into organized arrangements which produce a certain effect that can be effectively converted into a proprietary format, so that the manipulator can derive enjoyment from creation without creating. There are also those that are more ambitious, but lack ability, so they become social climbers or tyrants. A tyrant is a probably a failed creative. A tyrant will share his or her being through force.

Now, I'm tempted to place values on these phenomena, and really I already have, since our language contains such potent emotional baggage. But in the end I'd rather state that these phenomena simply occur, and that is all there is to it.

Maybe You Should Get That Looked At

Even NASA and the WWF are having their "oh shit" moments. No one seems to be talking about this much though. Well, not on the TV at least.

What a Bargain

Yes!

I've written about this unacknowledged reality and what might be done about it - at least in a limited way in one's daily life. The linked account is much more rigorous a picture than what I've attempted, and important to understand if one is interested in the power relations and moral dimensions of the economic system, which are often airbrushed away in official accounts and propaganda.

Banal Evil

Excellent! Apologies in advance, but this post won't read well unless you dive into the arguments. Anyways:

One thing that strikes me about the ongoing Eichmann debate is the underlying array of sensibilities that form the backdrop for the arguments themselves. For Arendt's critics, it is better if the Holocaust is understood as a sort of distinct, historical horror with clearly delineated villains and victims, almost like a well-developed theatrical play, which occupies a safe distance in time and space from one's own contemporary society. Eichmann was an evil, evil monstrous monster, and don't you dare suggest otherwise!

I don't wish to be misunderstood: the Holocaust was a historically distinct event with horrific dimensions, and there certainly was a perpetrator and a victim. Eichmann was definitely a monster, as the assorted facts seem to imply. However the driving impulse to reify in one's mind this historical set of relationships as a distant storm to be safely studied betrays a certain psychological disposition, to me anyways.

Arendt's critics wish to say: Eichmann and the Nazis were evil, and don't you dare criticize the victim Jews - even if they were collaborators - for if you doubt the cartoon Nazi evil just a smidge, and question the absolute innocence of the Jewish victim archetype, then perhaps you are abetting this very evil hmm? If you begin to muddy the actors in this particular delineated historical event, it begins to dissolve the illusion of historical isolation, unleashing those ghastly logical inquisitions to other events and social structures. What sorts of shadows begin to rise from our own social mechanisms and institutions when we look too closely?

Better that the Holocaust remains hermetically sealed and studied from afar. Perhaps we shouldn't be speaking so ill of these social climbers and careerists, these Eichmanns, or better, the very nature of the social ladder itself. After all, I have a ladder to climb of my own! From the top of which I can safely study history of course.

What Arendts' defenders seem to be getting at - and the greater scuffle over the concept of the "banality of evil" suggests this as well - is that this great monstrous evil was perpetrated through startlingly banal social mechanisms, banal social mechanisms that can be observed in...say...a polite society such as ours. There is an impulse that says: "woah woah, now there was something happening there that concerns us now, and maybe we should address it."

There is an energetic desire to dive into the historical account, to get the hands dirty and attempt to understand it in relation to one's own time; there is an awareness that this cycle could very well repeat itself in some shape or form, and that we need to be a bit more rigorous when it comes to evaluating the underpinnings and foundations of modern society.

I'm aware that all of this isn't entirely fair. I don't personally know any of these people and can't claim to understand all of the competing motivations. However, I can't help but scratch the old chin.

Thursday Night Ant Kingdom Pt. 1

Something curious happened the other night. Well curious things usually happen anyways when you're on acid. Acid is a great method to occasionally give the old blinders a good wipe down, so to speak. You sort of temporarily wipe out those conceptual heuristics and compression valves that characterize the human experience, and you see things as they are through your visual systems very vividly.

Of course taking acid feels a bit like cheating. You're supposed to use spiritual discipline to eventually get to this point, which produces a more stable mode of observation, and for many the psychedelic experience is a bit overwhelming and you don't get to learn as much as you should, or you just have fun with all the pretty colors and want to take more and more the next time and it can actually alter your brain chemistry permanently if you blow yourself out, so I've heard.

But anyways, this psychedelic session happened to coincide with a particularly nasty infestation of ants. There were a lot of people coming in and out of the house and someone kept cooking with honey, and essentially leaving the jar a dripping mess when it was put back up in the pantry.

Of course I was beginning to peak and I had to use the restroom, and was struck with horror as I surveyed the state of the kitchen. The ants were literally everywhere (this wasn't exaggerated by the psychedelics); they had taken over many surfaces of the kitchen, and a vast majority of them were entering through a crack in the bathroom, where they would congregate on the bathroom floor before streaming up the side of the pantry. Someone had placed a rug next to their main trail so people could step over it and just use the restroom and leave, perhaps in the hope that the ants would just leave.

It turns out that ants love honey. Well, of course. The central attraction was a pool of spilled honey in the pantry that they were swarming, proceeding to surround it and lap at its edges. They'd go back and forth to drink honey and then congregate down on the bathroom floor with what looked like a party, before returning to the bathroom crack.

This was a learning event that took a contrast of extremes. Usually we have to deal with the occasional break-out of these common brown ants - oftentimes in the summer - and we are taught to, you know, swipe em into the sink with a sponge or spray a bunch of Raid or whatnot.

All of these things horrified me, but there was always someone else who wanted to take care of it. No I guess you can't just let the ants do their thing and leave, so the story goes, or they will slowly take over and be a constant presence. The common middle class suburbanite sensibility is that of biophobia and the constant fear of any sort of expression of nature within the house without a human genesis, and the creeping suspicion that an unauthorized expression of nature will soon become total and all-consuming without an intervention.

Here I was living in a house in which the biophobia was less pronounced, and of course no one wanted to kill all these ants, but someone had to do something, as the infestation was extreme. It was too painful for me to simply wipe the ants away, so I had to try a few things first.

Immediately noticeable was the fact that the ants seemed primarily interested in the honey. The major point of congregation was the puddle in the pantry, while there were a few parties around various drips on the floor, and then scattered groups scouring the kitchen, and scouts in the furthest areas. However the ants didn't seem to be interested in much else.

Well I eventually found that if you blew air on the ants congregating around the honey puddle, they would sense something was wrong, and they would turn away from the honey and run wildly around the pantry shelf. If you kept blowing, you could literally see the great mass of them continue back down their pheromone trail, and you could see the signal pass: a wave would move down the line and the ants coming up the shelf would turn with the rest coming down and the entire direction of the flow would reverse in an orderly line.

This was the majority of the population. There was a minority which actually stuck around the honey puddle, braving whatever threat there was to continue to get intoxicated or what have you. And there was something else: the ant flow would oscillate. It would flee from the sudden wind kicking up, and then after a few seconds, the flow would move back up the line and the ants would return to see whether the threat remained, and whether the honey puddle was still viable. I had to keep blowing to keep the flow on the wane, and I would clean the puddle of honey little by little as the ants cleared out until there was nothing left. I also used this method to clean the drops across the floor.

Over time, miraculously, the ant infestation thinned out substantially. There was no honey left, and the ants had better places to be and better things to do with their time. Turns out that they weren't a relentless menace that sought conquest of the house. The next morning there would be virtually no ants left in the house, save a few stragglers, and a few junkies making sure there wasn't any honey left. Now different ants facing different conditions in different regions may have behaved very differently, and then considerations have to be made for dangerous species.

It also depends on what the ants are after. They are known for destroying certain food supplies, but if you remove the supply quick enough and have the rest thoroughly sealed, it seems you can get rid of them without violence.

There are some things to take away from this episode, which I will get to next.

Peaked

There was this amusing episode of Rick and Morty in which the inhabitants of Pluto were over-mining their planet and the planet was actually shrinking, so the task of the ruling elite was to find a figurehead "expert" to reassure everyone that everything was fine and that the planet wasn't actually shrinking. Certainly a simplification, but a simplification that turned out to be more prescient than at first glance.

On Political Fear

There is a guy out here that is basically flipping out and having these complex paranoid delusions about secret agents that are out to get him. Don't want to get too involved in it, but it is unsettling to say the least. Paranoid delusions can be pretty scary, because they seem very real to the person suffering them, and in the right contexts they can be difficult to separate from reality, even from the perspective of an outsider, since oftentimes they are based off of interrelated nuggets of truth in the first place. I can run through a quick scenario to show what I mean.

Let's say you have a community of activists, and you introduce the specter of government agent infiltration. These activists are doing something the government doesn't like, and there is a real fear that the government will try to scuttle these efforts. Now you get to thinking: well, there is a history of infiltration in which various government agencies have used downright heinous and diabolical methods of psychological warfare, political fear and terror, and violence to disrupt activist networks, and this is all empirically verifiable.

Today you can point to a variety of cases in which whisteblowers have been prosecuted, activists (even peaceful and passive ones) have been put on terror lists, and there have even been charismatic individuals who have been chased to the ends of the earth and destroyed - Edward Snowden got away for now but Chelsea Manning is in prison and Aaron Swartz killed himself from the pressure. Plus there is at least one case I know of where people simply expressing political opinions and agitating had their house stormed by SWAT or some such company of storm trooper.

Now of course all of this is always happening, but activists still have to do their thing. So they do their thing with this fear in the back of their minds that there could be agents among them, or that the hammer could come down at any minute. These agent provocateurs know cutting edge techniques in psychological warfare, and there are things that can be done to manipulate this fear and infiltrate and fragment activist networks and the activists know this.

So what if you have one of these activist people who is susceptible to paranoid delusion? This can cause very serious problems. Who is genuine and who is an agent? Can agents blur these lines between the genuine and false? How far can this conspiracy expand? How sophisticated are governments now? What if governments can build entire activist ecosystems to suck activists in and disrupt their activities? What if everyone you meet is a potential agent? How do you neutralize a delusion that has a basis in reality without drawing slippery arbitrary lines?

And so the paranoid mind starts from the premise that there is a threat present, and builds its arguments off of that premise. With such a premise, a paranoiac can tell him or herself pretty much anything, so long as the interrelated facts strung together are coherent and provide a plausible explanation for the threat. The more agitation, the more baroque and malevolent the paranoid delusion.

It is fear that is the common denominator in all of this. Fear transforms the mind into a police state in miniature, putting the brain's powerful logical and symbolic systems to task to build a profile of the threat and develop means of neutralization. Every new source of information could be connected to the threat. No unknown could be too suspicious. As the paranoiac seeks to preserve his or her security, he or she generalizes protocols of threat neutralization, provoking and agitating those whom neutralization is attempted on, which thereby feeds the fear even more; the police state makes replicas of itself, which situate themselves into each other and interface. This can cause endless divisions if it is allowed to run away. Social networks bifurcate along those sympathetic and antipathic to the paranoiac, generating new paranoiacs, who inspire further bifurcations.

The fear creates its own reality. It alters the social landscape on which one interacts, or the social logic with which one proceeds to interact with others. What is so convenient for the police state and its little miniatures is the fact that fear, when directed towards its object, can induce sympathetic behavior in the object itself. If one is feared, one fears the source of fear in turn, as the corollary to fear is the elimination of the object of fear. Fear produces interlocking relationships which amplify each other.

The only way to solve this problem is really quite simple and very demanding at the same time: the fear has to be ignored. Activists have to live with constant threat, with the possibility that there are agents present. There are of course precautions that many activist practitioners have learned, some of them very sophisticated and well-worn over old traditions of political dissidence, but a certain amount of risk has to be accepted as well. Easier said than done of course. The more you fear disintegration or fragmentation, prison or death, and the more you do to attempt to prevent those outcomes, past a certain point of practicality and effective action, the further you tend to advance towards just those ends.

Of course, the paranoid types have trouble with just this sort of thing and I guess that's the point. Social ostracization and isolation can produce unstable modes of thought in which the brain is always on alert. It really isn't clear what comes first: the fearful modes of thought and abnormal functioning and behaviors, or the isolation and discord which feed them and are fed by them, though of course the answer is usually that they grow together. And then if the mind is already in this fearful state, it tends to respond more faithfully to the logic of fear, spreading the logic in turn.

This could be part of the reason that totalitarian governments only form amidst atomized populations, or why they seek to create them as they consolidate power, as Hannah Arendt observed. Totalitarian governments practically run on fear and terror, to put it crudely.

Admittedly, the more something is in danger of disintegrating, the more it fears. Our security state apparatus is gradually transforming into a totalitarian entity because it is protecting something that is in danger of disintegration, because that something is essentially an abomination. The towering and obscene concentration of material power that is global capital is highly unstable and it knows it. Further, down to the individual paranoiac, the loss of social support is comparable to a form of death in a complex society in which the division of labor has become so essential.

Things continue to come apart, and if you wish to preserve what once was but will never be again, well fine. Have fun. Preservation is still possible, but it isn't going to look like anything we're used to. So ah, go with the flow. One gazes on and blinks. Interesting times, needless to say.

Power Works This Way Too

If you take without giving back, you'll soon have nothing to take from.

Get That Ego Outta Here (?)

When doing philosophy, I do try very hard to keep my ego out of the final analysis. This is very hard to do; in the end you just have to be mindful of your own projection, and sort of extrapolate a world around that projection as if you hadn't existed.

Just talking about many concepts, systems of thought, and modes of administration can provoke a reaction without you thinking about it. I and many others have been excluded from a nominally "capitalist" system (and even this isn't entirely true) so the first reaction is a sort of "ew gross" or even a "youch," as if you've been zapped and can't help but resent that bare wire just a little bit.

So the ideology that forms from this experience is going to have this sort of "youch" affectation built into it. I happen to think that these provincial modes of thought, though gratifying to a wounded ego, are not necessarily productive or useful unless you are trying to gratify tons of egos, which is always a dangerous proposition, though you can sure get some quick and powerful results! Though these results will most likely be perishable. So I'm going to try to counteract that by saying to myself, well OK so this system formed out of processes thousands of years old and has developed in a direction that is pretty difficult for any one person, organization, or even state or nation to control. However there remains the fact that something is going wrong, and that we should collectively be doing something to fix it.

Which is still a response that is peculiar to the way that I think. And maybe that is OK. The mere fact that one is writing and thinking necessitates that one lives amongst human relations and interests. One necessarily has the desire to help, to do good, however daunting the task seems as a whole. So you have it that that an ego looks out upon the world and sees other egos in pain and says to itself: how to reverse this state of affairs? Or at least assuage the myriad problems?

We can complicate this problem by acknowledging that there are many ideas of what the ego actually is: there is a simpler conception that sees the ego as simply the continuous and somewhat circumscribed entity that experiences, or the psychoanalytic conception that sees the ego as a distinct mechanism in a causal relationship with other mechanisms like the superego and the id, or the conception of the ego or self as a distinct object that can be held in conscious attention - who you think you are, or finally, the ego or self as this distinct, lasting entity, this sort of distinct presence.

And then perhaps each conception can tell us something independently. But for our purposes let's just say the ego is whatever is thinking and experiencing as a distinct subject.

Anyways, at the risk of contradicting what I wrote a little earlier, perhaps it is better to let go of the idea that one can be completely free of one's own subjectivity. We have this curious cultural tendency to shrink from taking a position of any kind, perhaps attributable to being steeped in an individualist culture for so long; one gets in the habit of tucking in one's elbows, so to speak, or attempting to brandish the shield of "objectivity" in as prominent a position as possible to ward off all of those nasty attacks that are often directed at those that think differently, or better yet, are of a different opinion.

Of course the attempt at objectivity can be useful in some disciplines (I'm thinking of the hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics, and there is even some fuziness within those; good) and it tends to make much more rigorous a given body of thought, but we do also have to acknowledge that we are a certain species at a certain historical position which sees the world in a certain way. There are some basic fundamentals we can get down, such as "water is wet" and whatnot if we can all agree on certain definitions and semantic relations, but many of our other conjectures oscillate through various stages of stability and instability, but I've gone way off the path now.

I'm going to twist this mobius strip a little further and suggest that maybe I'm not contradicting myself after all. It isn't a terrible idea to try one's level best to account for as many facts as possible, across a variety of perspectives, and to attempt to smother one's ego to understand as clearly as possible this greater reality. However one necessarily exists in relation to a given historical period, and by implication, to one's own ego. The impulse to smother one's ego is an act of ego; one is still altering one's extension in space, is one not? Besides, more and more people hear the word "capitalism" and get a little "yick" feeling in the stomach, and perhaps that is a good thing.

Shit smells bad and we don't like how it looks. Living long enough with the fact that it is probably dangerous to-reconsume or even live in proximity to has taught us instinctually to stay away from it.

Capitalism requires unlimited growth to function correctly (yes, yes perfect free markets establish equilibria and blah, but we are human beings remember) and perhaps we should be doing away with unlimited growth. Good then! Let capitalism "stink" to our egos and let's be done with it. It had a great run.

A good reaction, but to get my previous point home, the "yick," the "yuck," the "ew gross" and the "youch" are useful sentiments but let's not get too hung up on them. The communists hated the guts of the capitalist pigs and then it got them in an existential game of antagonism - and I know this isn't entirely fair, the US empire was going to hurumph-against and eventually try to squash whatever it didn't like.

But for all practical purposes, establishing oneself in opposition to something ideological necessarily transforms oneself into the mirror image of that ideological object of hate; one beckons the forces of mimesis and antagonism. A truly revolutionary ideology turns away from the object of hate - perhaps with a little pity - as if it is an old beached ship sinking into the mud. A revolutionary ideology seeks to live above all else, and on its own terms.