The inspiration for this post lies partly in celebrating the spirit of the Olympics!
A courageous female ex Olympic luge athlete has compared the Olympics to the Hunger Games. Interesting!
The curious thing about that article is that when I searched for it to link to in the post, a few other outlets came up first with articles of their own bearing similar headlines: ABC News, E! News, MSNBC News, etc. All very crass, corporate outlets. Of course it was no surprise these subsequent articles carried none of the substance or the menacing air of the original article, but chose instead to focus on various frivolities such as surface impressions of the ceremony and athlete uniform and appearance and things like that.
There could of course be several reasons for this, perhaps not mutually exclusive reasons either. The editors could be taking advantage of the sudden spate of interest in the underlying nature of the Olympics. The comparison itself happened to be very timely: both the Olympics and The Hunger Games are wildly popular in the cultural mainstream, and would surely attract readers. Maybe the owners of these outlets - who all have a stake in the cultural power of the Olympics, seeing as how the event itself has become the epicenter of a particularly vigorous marketing storm - worried about the deflationary nature of the original article and its critical position on the Olympics. Maybe it was a chance to get a nice little jab in at Russia - who is actually a destructive world power as well, but who is perceived as competing (however weakly) with the US for global economic power.
Finally, it could just be that the structural nature of the real and fictional events really do resemble each other: the opening ceremonies happened to look aesthetically similar, and there is a similar, though unacknowledged social hierarchy involved. One of the outlets wrote it up and the editors saw the article as an opportunity so the rest just picked up the story.
As a professional SEO writer, and having worked briefly for a startup online media outlet, I can see several of these possibilities being plausible. Maybe even several of them are working together. These people know what they are doing.
But the combination of the negative article linked, and the bubbly frivolous articles discussed has reminded me of how much energy and resources go into maintaining the ideological mythology of US empire and the global capitalist project in general.
There is an article out every week or so that exposes the corrupting effects of global capital - behind which is the driving influence of US power - on literally every social pursuit held sacred by the populace. Capital needs such sacred events; their vitality draws people in and converts ever more into paying customers. But the closer capital embraces the sacred, the more total the ultimate corruption of the sacred, which is due in large part to the defining logical drive of capital: to beget more of itself. It is a drive that results not just in the corruption of the sacred, but the disintegration and degradation of communities and life support systems themselves. That is, everything from quality of living, quality of tools, food, water, human happiness, dignity, honor - everything - is subordinated to the profit imperative, so that we are left with a society in which the vast spectrum of human interaction is reduced to a never-ending process of exploitation.
Through the corrupting effects of endless exploitation, any sort of communal or even national center is dissolved. The resulting dissolution leaves a society of atomized individuals forced to compete among themselves for power that is steadily redistributed upwards, so that the whole sum of social relations bends in the direction of the desires of the economic elite, or the corporations that are controlled by them, which grow steadily more powerful.
Such a process has been going on for a very long time. And such a process produces its share of discontents, which necessitates a vigorous project of ideological maintenance, of the careful preservation of the myth of US empire as a great, benevolent, just force.
The power of this myth-building project is evident in my own daily experience. My mind is blown repeatedly throughout the week. Each new revelation about US empire, both past and present, leaves me in shock. Everything I learned in elementary school, high school, even college, did not prepare me for the things I have learned in the last couple of years. And I continue to be surprised! The link above is especially remarkable. A collection of remarkable documents and observations.
Of course, the US empire is a great civilization. One of the greatest in history. But then, this statement hinges on what is meant by great. What I mean by great is simply powerful. Over the course of history, there have been courageous detractors and dissidents, even people within the system that were nauseated by the raw exercise of power, and fought against it. And there is a nearly endless procession of innovations and artistic and intellectual works that were produced within empire's bounds. But the general arc, the general direction of material progress, especially today, has been towards more power, control or domination, and wealth.
Such a concentration of material and ideological power necessarily implies its opposite: chaos and powerlessness. For every vacuum nature detests, there is an overextended structure, or mass of organized matter, that nature detests equally. Where does that leave us?
I am left with a minor problem. Coupled with a finer spiritual understanding, thanks to my recent delving into Buddhist and Taoist thought (once again), this obsession surrounding the negative, or bad positive, to be terminologically precise, starts to look absurd. If everything that is happening now is happening exactly as it should, and that everything in the future will proceed exactly as it should, and that the best thing one can do for oneself is to accept everything as it is and live in the current moment, which is essentially eternity, why pay any attention to the bad positive at all?
Well because the bad positive is inseparable from this eternity one can revel in. Because the bad positive by necessity implies the good negative, and all the energy that goes with it. As one gazes into the eye of the bad positive, the towering, multiplying, destabilizing cruelty that is the capitalist process, one confronts it in all its horror, experiencing a deep existential terror.
But this terror presents something to be overcome. One wants above all to live, not to curl up into a ball trembling and shrinking from life. So what is to be done? Well, again, implied within this bad positive - this defined structure extended out into reality that has become corrupt - is a good negative, or a constellation of values that stands in contrast to old values that have gone bad. We are faced with radical egotism and individualism, so we answer back wtih collectivism. We are faced with atomization, so we answer back with community. We are faced with the profit motive, so we answer back with generosity and charity. And so on. All of the pain one feels upon the apprehension of the state of things is eventually transformed into the sublime, and so the ideological good negative (in apprehension to the bad positive) in one's mind stands as a potential to be transformed into the kinetic. Suffering is sublimated into vigor and from the good negative is birthed a new good positive, an erupting energy, a will to life.
But one has to take care not to become too attached to this good negative (and the subsequent good positive) for two reasons, one short term and one long term. In the short term, if one becomes too attached to this good negative, one can fall into despair upon being surrounded by the bad positive, diminishing one's ability to bring about the good positive (yes all of these polarized terms are awful and confusing I know). Secondly, if one attaches too much to the subsequent good positive, one runs the risk of it becoming a bad positive when the ideology itself has outlasted the reality it is trying to actualize, which is happening with capitalism today. Combining various insights of Eastern philosophies with whatever other philosophies and practices one utilizes can help with this.
A common misconception about Buddhism is that its doctrine of ontological emptiness collapses into nihilism. If ego and material struggle are an illusion and the ideology surrounding them is a fabrication, why do anything at all? Or why not do everything one wants? But Buddhism logically proceeds to the opposite of nihilism: it is a doctrine for living.
The beauty of Eastern spiritual philosophy in general is that you can decouple it from its origin and combine it with whatever discipline you wish. You can do this with the Abrahamic religions too, but it takes a little more digging and decoding. The doctrines of disciplines like Buddhism and Taoism are very abstract and not as judgmental. More relational and less particular. More relative and less absolute. So you have these monk figures with their practices in their monasteries that sort of represent a distilled form of this philosophy, but you can apply the doctrine itself to everything you do, because of how flexible and dynamic it is. This is why you sometimes hear Buddhism referred to as a religion of no religion.
So with a cosmic understanding, you can continue on as a scientist, philosopher, artist, political activist, whatever, with a more nuanced understanding of the way the universe works. Human symbolic navigation systems, or ideologies, are very useful for navigating the practical world. But over time, ideologies reference themselves to make themselves more efficient and effective. This is useful to an extent, until they become so self-referential that they are no longer in communication with reality, where the whole point of them is to understand reality. And so spiritual practice frees up this bottleneck, clearing the ideological board, so that one can observe and commune with reality with clarity.
