Airport Chaos Pt. 3

To be perfectly clear, this series is intended not as a complaint, but a straight observation. Much of the service that is suffering the most is still privilege by world standards, privilege that I'm not altogether comfortable with considering the cost to peoples remote to my own sphere of experience.

But a large part of the social contract that capital makes with its lower class constituents is that in return for your own means of self-subsistence, your right to the land, and your ultimate autonomy, you get a vast array of material pleasures and experiences to choose from.

With your labor power you receive a wage, and with that wage you get to enter into a universal market that gives you the freedom to choose the kind of life you want to make, provided you accumulate the appropriate amount of wealth to do so. This allure of material freedom contributes in a substantial way to the overall legitimacy of the capitalist system.

Sell your soul, but you get to be comfortable and pursue a huge variety of pleasures, provided you don't think too much of the surrounding populations extracted from and eventually pulverized to provide a platform for such a market of pleasures. And then many people don't even get to choose. They are born into the system and the system is all they know. Or the system is the only way to survive, which is true to a large extent for many people.

But capital now fails regularly to uphold its end of the contract, leaving a global populace to struggle amongst themselves to simply subsist. You enter the market to simply survive, but what has flooded the market are inferior products and faulty services. This is especially the case for the poor, but the middle class has increasingly experienced this change in various ways.

As I've tried to articulate, this is due to many interacting forces of varying natures: economic, environmental, and political. However sometimes a little storytelling is more helpful.

The Tower of Babel myth is originally known as a sort of biblical morality tale and an etiology of multiple languages. The myth has it that a society with a unified language looked to build a tower that would reach the heavens so that they could become immortal as a monolithic culture, lest they be scattered to the corners of the earth. As religious morality, the myth teaches the lesson that if man seeks to become god, he is certain to fail. In response to man's hubris, god fragmented the language of this society so that they could not understand each other, and eventually they abandoned the tower and the city. Understood as etiology, the myth provides a primitive explanation for the birth of multiple languages. But there is another way to interpret it.

The myth was possibly birthed from the experience of slaves in Babylon, who experienced the towering ziggurats built by hubristic Babylonian rulers, and it has since passed through several phases of interpretation. Like all myths, the Tower of Babel myth has been re-interpreted throughout history to satisfy the sensibilities of whatever ideology is doing the interpreting. To interpreters, there is something in the myth which helps to explain the world they are experiencing.  Bruegel likened the tower to the Roman Colosseum in a wonderful work of art that demands a sustained gaze. Like Babylon before it, Rome experienced a similar trajectory of rise and fall, accompanied by a corresponding procession of ideologies justifying any given state within the trajectory.

These ancient thinkers were trying to make sense of something very complex and profound that was happening to their societies. It is reasonable to suspect that what they were experiencing was something that happens to every civilization across time, and that they were doing the best they could to conceptualize it in language and imagery, providing us with important information.

And so, with any monolithic concentration of power and the related material endeavors it engages in, there must be a corresponding decline in which energy is dispersed, communication is fragmented, and power is scattered.

Yeats noted beautifully in The Second Coming - which has permeated the collective imagination of the political underground yet again - the subjective quality of this experience, which arguably saw its birth in the two world wars:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


The imminent fall of global capital (or global empire) has both negative and positive implications. The system itself serves as life support for at least a billion people or more. However a vast proportion of the global populace lives a degraded life in order to sustain a system that mostly benefits only a minority of the population. It is more probable that a complete collapse would only increase violence and uncertainty, but how long can such a system continue to go on? How long should it go on?

A calcified regime of power suppresses creativity, so its disintegration would mean creative expansion in every direction imaginable. However the loss in material benefits and energy (since global capital maintains a monopoly on both) could mean the forgoing of many creative avenues. But it bears considering the consequences of an unfettered capitalist engine running its course to certain ecological devastation.

The exact trajectory we will take remains unclear, but there are several avenues that remain promising. Decentralization is going to be a necessity and it is already happening to a certain extent of its own accord. A return to self-sufficiency is also essential, considering the slow unraveling of a largely centralized food production system. Capital originally derived its power through the loss of human connection to the land. Freud would urge us to regress to the initial point of trauma, and he would be right.

Human power will be the primary engine of production, so it would follow that human beings will have to learn to co-exist and cooperate again, without suspending themselves within isolated housing, transportation, and media.

All these things will be very difficult. It is nearly impossible to acquire land today, especially if you are young and poor. It is also very difficult to escape the comfortable habits gained while living within capital's embrace. It will be a long, slow process, driven by the imperatives of necessity.