It is funny, you notice some people with interesting things going on in their backyards, and of course inside their houses, but on the outside all of their houses look fairly the same, with standardized streets and all that, and then standardized strip malls surrounding the houses. Typical American suburban structure, you know.
We have these monoculture colonies, with monoculture people that dress and act a certain way in public and go to monoculture jobs and everyone discusses the same monoculture things. But then writhing within these monoculture vessels are all sorts of freaky things. Oh, I've seen it. I know you have too. These freaky things find their expression through all sorts of avenues, but for now they are all carefully contained.
It is a modern way of doing things that is probably not a great way to go about it, but hey. You fly your freak flag when you can I guess.
This isn't the same thing, but I think the underlying impulse holds some continuity, but you had these popular avant garde bands like Sonic Youth who developed these interesting song structures, and these structures became a very popular expression in indie music in particular. But you'd have this standard song structure, you know, this repeating pattern which was catchy and easy to grasp, serve as a departure point for this meandering, unraveling jam that pulls far away from any sense of normalcy.
That's how you do it I guess. Everyone has to do it to an extent. You wear clothes and you act a certain way to subsist in public. You do what is necessary to make at least the average observer in any crowd comfortable. It binds everyone together. Then inside you have all this freaky stuff going on, that sometimes manages to meander out of the inner bounds of your self.
This observation applies more closely to suburban design and psychology, as the cities tend to demonstrate much more diversity and general freakiness, though it depends on the city. But even in the cities there is a limit to public expression. There are much crazier things going on in private lives in general. I guess a lot of it depends on environmental comfort and trust conferred to the people around you that get to witness this bare nature.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Context
I'd like to add that the thoughts we have are in close relation to the activities we engage in and the environments in which we find ourselves in.
What we do and what we see activates certain parts of our brains, and these activations have a potent effect on the thoughts that arise.
What we do and what we see activates certain parts of our brains, and these activations have a potent effect on the thoughts that arise.
Greatness
I suspect greatness is closely related to a feeling, a feeling of deepness that one gets when whatever is experienced or felt resonates within those deeper, more ancient brain structures.
But it also has a social dimension. I could personally think something is great that no one else really talks about, and it very well could be, but it is a different feeling than when a large body of individuals each has the same feeling and agrees about its source. So our concept of greatness seems to do with activation, when a great many connections are activated across a large scale of activated individuals. Our feeling of greatness is influenced both by the feeling within us, and the apprehension of that feeling being spread out across the land.
There is something else about greatness, akin to the dancing surface of a deep ocean whose beauty is made great by the presence of a deep dark void dropping away underneath. That which is illuminated and perceivable is amplified by that which is inscrutable underneath. In the same way, our experience of some symbolic truth such as in literature or film, or a sensuous truth such as within a work of art or a musical composition, has underneath it some vast expanse which we will never understand.
But it also has a social dimension. I could personally think something is great that no one else really talks about, and it very well could be, but it is a different feeling than when a large body of individuals each has the same feeling and agrees about its source. So our concept of greatness seems to do with activation, when a great many connections are activated across a large scale of activated individuals. Our feeling of greatness is influenced both by the feeling within us, and the apprehension of that feeling being spread out across the land.
There is something else about greatness, akin to the dancing surface of a deep ocean whose beauty is made great by the presence of a deep dark void dropping away underneath. That which is illuminated and perceivable is amplified by that which is inscrutable underneath. In the same way, our experience of some symbolic truth such as in literature or film, or a sensuous truth such as within a work of art or a musical composition, has underneath it some vast expanse which we will never understand.
Human Laws
Yeah so I almost got hit - or I should say bumped; the car wasn't going very fast - crossing an intersection.
The guy didn't see me until the very last second, which was strange because the crossing sign was on, a bright glowing symbol straight ahead. I was just to the right of him. All he had to do was check. But he was focused on a very limited space directly ahead of him. He wasn't even aware of the greater space.
That's sort of the kind of thing we devise laws for. It seems as though total cosmic awareness itself is something that is temporary: a burst of expanding energy that then proceeds to contract. What I mean is that the glowing awareness of the total, of all interconnecting things fades as a delimited system continues its operation. You have a multitude of interested actors within a certain system, individual human interests, which base their actions increasingly on their own limited locus of interest. Of course, we are talking about the paradigm of Western Civilization, and really the last 5,000 years of human civilization. Not sure how this applies to completely different states of affairs in other times, but anyways...
With community feeling, or even ecological feeling, one is aware of the interconnectedness of interests outside of oneself, so that in one's own interest, one bases ones actions within these limitations so as to sustain the total aggregate that benefits everyone. If everyone does this, everyone is benefited. It is the sort of thing illustrated by the tragedy of the commons and the prisoner's dilemma thought experiments.
But over time that sense of community fades. One increasingly bases one's actions not on the aggregate but on one's own ego, which naturally holds contradictory interests to other egos. So we put up laws to attempt to shape and direct these contradictions. One person has an immediate interest to cross the street by bike, the other has an immediate interest to intersect that path by car. You can't count on both interests taking stock of each other all the time, so you have laws - and the manifesting traffic lights - to separate those intersecting interests by time: one individual gets to go now, the other gets to go later, and everyone agrees by that. Otherwise you pay a ticket. If you don't pay the ticket, you get thrown in a cage and/or beat about the head by a club. Or you just have people crashing into each other all the time.
The problem with laws is that laws themselves are attempting to stand in for this loss of community feeling. The laws themselves require a mutual agreement on a greater regulatory system. Over time even the respect for laws fades away from consciousness. Who can blame this process? Terrible laws, discriminatory laws, unnecessary laws, laws as product of political corruption...these laws erode the faith in a greater regulatory body. The asymmetrical concentration of power distorts this process of community self-determination as greater swathes of the population are excluded from self-determination, apathy reigns and self interest takes over as a survival mechanism.
Bad and unjust laws are disrespected, which unfortunately generalizes over time to include the useful regulatory laws themselves. This process seems to happen of its own accord as power concentrates. Well, we shouldn't have power concentration, but then power concentration tends to develop within a dense mass; there are too many of us. And who is to say who else has the right to live and who doesn't? There are ideas, such as steady state economics and population control, but then there will be segments of the population with religious objections and other superstitions...ultimately a projection of the ego that is the problem in the first place. Or you have the poor who simply don't have the resources to effectively regulate their population, which is a problem closely related to the global concentration of power. It may be that nature takes care of this problem unfortunately, but who knows.
So as I crossed the street I thought to myself, "Blah this myopic man almost hit me, did he not see the crossing signal? " But then I realized that at that moment he wasn't even thinking about it, and there was a brief moment of hesitation where I was watching him and had doubts. I could have stopped and just let him go, but I felt I needed to cross. At the same time, perhaps he was thinking, "Blah stupid guy with headphones in his ears, not paying attention." And then perhaps he looks up to see the crossing symbol and realizes he wasn't paying attention himself, or perhaps he didn't notice at all. This is just a possibility.
Anyways, we engage in these rationalizations all the time, either using social conventions and laws to locate our own positions and to judge the justness of our interests and actions, or by simply projecting our ego with brute force. These things break down eventually, of course. Then you just let go and start fresh I guess. Easier said than done, but what else is there?
The guy didn't see me until the very last second, which was strange because the crossing sign was on, a bright glowing symbol straight ahead. I was just to the right of him. All he had to do was check. But he was focused on a very limited space directly ahead of him. He wasn't even aware of the greater space.
That's sort of the kind of thing we devise laws for. It seems as though total cosmic awareness itself is something that is temporary: a burst of expanding energy that then proceeds to contract. What I mean is that the glowing awareness of the total, of all interconnecting things fades as a delimited system continues its operation. You have a multitude of interested actors within a certain system, individual human interests, which base their actions increasingly on their own limited locus of interest. Of course, we are talking about the paradigm of Western Civilization, and really the last 5,000 years of human civilization. Not sure how this applies to completely different states of affairs in other times, but anyways...
With community feeling, or even ecological feeling, one is aware of the interconnectedness of interests outside of oneself, so that in one's own interest, one bases ones actions within these limitations so as to sustain the total aggregate that benefits everyone. If everyone does this, everyone is benefited. It is the sort of thing illustrated by the tragedy of the commons and the prisoner's dilemma thought experiments.
But over time that sense of community fades. One increasingly bases one's actions not on the aggregate but on one's own ego, which naturally holds contradictory interests to other egos. So we put up laws to attempt to shape and direct these contradictions. One person has an immediate interest to cross the street by bike, the other has an immediate interest to intersect that path by car. You can't count on both interests taking stock of each other all the time, so you have laws - and the manifesting traffic lights - to separate those intersecting interests by time: one individual gets to go now, the other gets to go later, and everyone agrees by that. Otherwise you pay a ticket. If you don't pay the ticket, you get thrown in a cage and/or beat about the head by a club. Or you just have people crashing into each other all the time.
The problem with laws is that laws themselves are attempting to stand in for this loss of community feeling. The laws themselves require a mutual agreement on a greater regulatory system. Over time even the respect for laws fades away from consciousness. Who can blame this process? Terrible laws, discriminatory laws, unnecessary laws, laws as product of political corruption...these laws erode the faith in a greater regulatory body. The asymmetrical concentration of power distorts this process of community self-determination as greater swathes of the population are excluded from self-determination, apathy reigns and self interest takes over as a survival mechanism.
Bad and unjust laws are disrespected, which unfortunately generalizes over time to include the useful regulatory laws themselves. This process seems to happen of its own accord as power concentrates. Well, we shouldn't have power concentration, but then power concentration tends to develop within a dense mass; there are too many of us. And who is to say who else has the right to live and who doesn't? There are ideas, such as steady state economics and population control, but then there will be segments of the population with religious objections and other superstitions...ultimately a projection of the ego that is the problem in the first place. Or you have the poor who simply don't have the resources to effectively regulate their population, which is a problem closely related to the global concentration of power. It may be that nature takes care of this problem unfortunately, but who knows.
So as I crossed the street I thought to myself, "Blah this myopic man almost hit me, did he not see the crossing signal? " But then I realized that at that moment he wasn't even thinking about it, and there was a brief moment of hesitation where I was watching him and had doubts. I could have stopped and just let him go, but I felt I needed to cross. At the same time, perhaps he was thinking, "Blah stupid guy with headphones in his ears, not paying attention." And then perhaps he looks up to see the crossing symbol and realizes he wasn't paying attention himself, or perhaps he didn't notice at all. This is just a possibility.
Anyways, we engage in these rationalizations all the time, either using social conventions and laws to locate our own positions and to judge the justness of our interests and actions, or by simply projecting our ego with brute force. These things break down eventually, of course. Then you just let go and start fresh I guess. Easier said than done, but what else is there?
Friday, March 28, 2014
Understanding and Certainty
It is true, it is so difficult to be sure of anything of a cultural, political, or economic nature in this charged age because of the sheer amount of work that is put into preventing understanding.
To approach certainty, it takes understanding the entire system, and perhaps even the surrounding systems outside of our system, in addition to our system, and then the way all of those things change over a long period of time, as well as the data that comes with it. Then of course it helps to understand important works, like Piketty's Capital, and Marx's Kapital for that matter.
Granted, if you are harmed by this general state of affairs, you are more likely to understand it as something to be deconstructed. And this is the rub: if you are benefited by this state of affairs, you are more likely to persist in sustaining it, and rationalize your reasons for doing so. Even further, some that are harmed persist in defending it, while some that are benefited still manage to turn against it.
The legend of the Buddha illustrates this last possibility very starkly. Though it can be difficult to separate truth from legend, there is this general narration agreed-upon by scholars that as the son of a powerful oligarch, the Buddha was visited by prophets that predicted he would become either a great king or drop away from the whole program altogether. Turned out he did the latter.
I'm not sure it takes everyone becoming Buddha-like figures. There is an endless assortment of ideas of what is to be done. The pruning of such wild brush will certainly take place along the strictures of necessity. Doubtless, it is a very interesting time.
To approach certainty, it takes understanding the entire system, and perhaps even the surrounding systems outside of our system, in addition to our system, and then the way all of those things change over a long period of time, as well as the data that comes with it. Then of course it helps to understand important works, like Piketty's Capital, and Marx's Kapital for that matter.
Granted, if you are harmed by this general state of affairs, you are more likely to understand it as something to be deconstructed. And this is the rub: if you are benefited by this state of affairs, you are more likely to persist in sustaining it, and rationalize your reasons for doing so. Even further, some that are harmed persist in defending it, while some that are benefited still manage to turn against it.
The legend of the Buddha illustrates this last possibility very starkly. Though it can be difficult to separate truth from legend, there is this general narration agreed-upon by scholars that as the son of a powerful oligarch, the Buddha was visited by prophets that predicted he would become either a great king or drop away from the whole program altogether. Turned out he did the latter.
I'm not sure it takes everyone becoming Buddha-like figures. There is an endless assortment of ideas of what is to be done. The pruning of such wild brush will certainly take place along the strictures of necessity. Doubtless, it is a very interesting time.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Americans and Hustling
It took two goes with American Hustle for me to finally understand what the little thread that ran through it was that just kept tickling, yet eluding.
I remember reading an article about the movie before I saw it, with the writer making the case that the movie, like David O. Russell's other movies, just has stuff happen but none of it really goes anywhere, or something to that effect.
The writer wasn't knocking the work entirely; most of the article was praise. But I think this characterization was misguided and a bit unfair. It might be superficially true, but things don't necessarily have to happen a certain way for something profound to be expressed in them.
American Hustle was very good, and that little thread within it was something very subversive - well maybe not today - which gave the movie its honesty. It was something that 19th century writers were very concerned about, something they called "decadence."
Of course decadence isn't some evil thing that happens which should be fought with all force, as 19th century moralists thought they were doing, and eventually the Nazis when they sought to destroy what they called "decadent art." It is something that happens all the time. Although, some terrible things do go on in such a process and if you are affected by it, naturally you must react to it. More matter-of-factly, it is the end of an era, when an old guiding mythology begins to show its fault lines, beginning its disintegration. More simply, it is something that happens.
See the thing about American Hustle - and really this isn't something peculiar to American Hustle; avant garde film has been doing this since at least the 60's, or really, probably the beginning of fine film - is that it doesn't just muddy the waters of good and evil, it completely scrambles them.
This is a film with all of its characters constantly manipulating each other and the world around them, arranging language, clothes, resources, and affections in order to generate the means for projecting their egos into the world, for surviving. Even the cops do it. The lead FBI agent goes behind people's backs and spins elaborate lies, engaging in crimes against humanity to ostensibly prevent the crimes against society, or more accurately, against symbol.
This is a tale that distills the American essence into caricature, and it does it very well.
So then we find ourselves rooting for the conman and the conwoman, and feel somewhat warm and fuzzy as everything falls together. The mean 'ol FBI agent loses (though we are still inclined to feel sorry for him) and the mafia guy fills the vacuum in the ex-wife's heart with his love. A strange state of affairs no? But not that strange.
FBI agents entrap and destroy the lives of relatively innocent people all the time. Prosecutors ruin often innocent people's lives to get big busts. Cops frame, hurt, and kill often innocent people (often people of color) in the name of protecting society. Business leaders raze forests and flatten communities to bring people products and resources. And then conversely criminals sometimes act real and genuine to their communities when they aren't trying to survive and so on.
It is something that has always been going on, only today the contradictions are so glaring and so frequent that we can't help but notice them. The cracks forming throughout community and throughout society rise up into the mythology itself, and we begin to wake up. Black and white becomes grey, as it always was.
Suddenly we begin to realize that our own perceptions of the essence, the vitality, the love and power of life we've always been chasing by projecting our ego - and this is what each character is after in the movie if you look closely - has slowly been shifted away from their true location: life and experience itself, and over to the structures we've erected to reach them: in wealth, or money, beauty, any object really, which should be products of, or means to get to the essence of things, but which have become transformed into ends themselves, and the further we seek to extract this essence from the structure, the means, the further it degrades. Instead of expanding, a society feeds on itself.
But then, as the movie shows, this is survival, it is something that happens. Some see it; many more simply play the game to its logical end. But you do see the lead characters in the movie struggling to reconnect with that essence, that vitality, becoming confused and exhausted along the way, but ultimately reconnecting with it through each other.
Here you could stop me and say, well look here, this was based on a true story so how is the movie reflecting our cultural zeitgeist? Well, a movie like this takes a lot of time and resources to make. The director gets one shot every year or so if he or she is especially productive, and these are the lucky ones. So he had to choose the story. Secondly, the facts had to be arranged and embellished in accordance with a central vision to be entertaining, and so...this is what we get.
And then, we all read into art what we want to. It is what makes art so wonderful. I'm taking a piece from it too, taking it and doing something else with it. This too is something that happens all the time.
I remember reading an article about the movie before I saw it, with the writer making the case that the movie, like David O. Russell's other movies, just has stuff happen but none of it really goes anywhere, or something to that effect.
The writer wasn't knocking the work entirely; most of the article was praise. But I think this characterization was misguided and a bit unfair. It might be superficially true, but things don't necessarily have to happen a certain way for something profound to be expressed in them.
American Hustle was very good, and that little thread within it was something very subversive - well maybe not today - which gave the movie its honesty. It was something that 19th century writers were very concerned about, something they called "decadence."
Of course decadence isn't some evil thing that happens which should be fought with all force, as 19th century moralists thought they were doing, and eventually the Nazis when they sought to destroy what they called "decadent art." It is something that happens all the time. Although, some terrible things do go on in such a process and if you are affected by it, naturally you must react to it. More matter-of-factly, it is the end of an era, when an old guiding mythology begins to show its fault lines, beginning its disintegration. More simply, it is something that happens.
See the thing about American Hustle - and really this isn't something peculiar to American Hustle; avant garde film has been doing this since at least the 60's, or really, probably the beginning of fine film - is that it doesn't just muddy the waters of good and evil, it completely scrambles them.
This is a film with all of its characters constantly manipulating each other and the world around them, arranging language, clothes, resources, and affections in order to generate the means for projecting their egos into the world, for surviving. Even the cops do it. The lead FBI agent goes behind people's backs and spins elaborate lies, engaging in crimes against humanity to ostensibly prevent the crimes against society, or more accurately, against symbol.
This is a tale that distills the American essence into caricature, and it does it very well.
So then we find ourselves rooting for the conman and the conwoman, and feel somewhat warm and fuzzy as everything falls together. The mean 'ol FBI agent loses (though we are still inclined to feel sorry for him) and the mafia guy fills the vacuum in the ex-wife's heart with his love. A strange state of affairs no? But not that strange.
FBI agents entrap and destroy the lives of relatively innocent people all the time. Prosecutors ruin often innocent people's lives to get big busts. Cops frame, hurt, and kill often innocent people (often people of color) in the name of protecting society. Business leaders raze forests and flatten communities to bring people products and resources. And then conversely criminals sometimes act real and genuine to their communities when they aren't trying to survive and so on.
It is something that has always been going on, only today the contradictions are so glaring and so frequent that we can't help but notice them. The cracks forming throughout community and throughout society rise up into the mythology itself, and we begin to wake up. Black and white becomes grey, as it always was.
Suddenly we begin to realize that our own perceptions of the essence, the vitality, the love and power of life we've always been chasing by projecting our ego - and this is what each character is after in the movie if you look closely - has slowly been shifted away from their true location: life and experience itself, and over to the structures we've erected to reach them: in wealth, or money, beauty, any object really, which should be products of, or means to get to the essence of things, but which have become transformed into ends themselves, and the further we seek to extract this essence from the structure, the means, the further it degrades. Instead of expanding, a society feeds on itself.
But then, as the movie shows, this is survival, it is something that happens. Some see it; many more simply play the game to its logical end. But you do see the lead characters in the movie struggling to reconnect with that essence, that vitality, becoming confused and exhausted along the way, but ultimately reconnecting with it through each other.
Here you could stop me and say, well look here, this was based on a true story so how is the movie reflecting our cultural zeitgeist? Well, a movie like this takes a lot of time and resources to make. The director gets one shot every year or so if he or she is especially productive, and these are the lucky ones. So he had to choose the story. Secondly, the facts had to be arranged and embellished in accordance with a central vision to be entertaining, and so...this is what we get.
And then, we all read into art what we want to. It is what makes art so wonderful. I'm taking a piece from it too, taking it and doing something else with it. This too is something that happens all the time.
We Take Space
I've never liked conflict. I avoid it as much as possible.
But I also know that I take space, that my personality is projected out into the world and in the presence of others it impresses itself on others, often times without me even knowing it, and the same occurs as others project themselves.
Sometimes it projects too far; it attempts to eclipse the other. It is that conflict, that flash of a contradiction that can flare up very suddenly, that helps me to see again.
And further, I think a lot of personal (and I guess cultural and political) animosity comes from the anticipation of an aggrieved party that some offending personality is seeking to eclipse their own personality, and that this intrusion is set to expand indefinitely, ultimately to crush them.
Sometimes it is true, and sometimes it isn't. You just have to let them know that you are there.
But I also know that I take space, that my personality is projected out into the world and in the presence of others it impresses itself on others, often times without me even knowing it, and the same occurs as others project themselves.
Sometimes it projects too far; it attempts to eclipse the other. It is that conflict, that flash of a contradiction that can flare up very suddenly, that helps me to see again.
And further, I think a lot of personal (and I guess cultural and political) animosity comes from the anticipation of an aggrieved party that some offending personality is seeking to eclipse their own personality, and that this intrusion is set to expand indefinitely, ultimately to crush them.
Sometimes it is true, and sometimes it isn't. You just have to let them know that you are there.
Monday, March 24, 2014
On Simplification and Complexity
If you really wanted to capture everything, without caveats or leaving anything important out, it would take an unlimited number of lines of text to account for the baffling complexity of the real world. The way our language and our reason work is that they take in information in a linear, line by line manner, and our understanding is limited to the capacity of memory, which is combined with heuristics and working conceptual thought and visualization to organize things. Computers can help augment these capabilities, but we still have to interface with the computers.
Therefore we simplify things with abstract general principles, archetypes, images, metaphors, and other symbols and symbolic structures to group nested complexities - of a fractal quality - into simpler, more general shapes which then can serve as building blocks to be manipulated to generate higher level complexities.
Much simplicity in our rational experience seems to be generated from collapsing complexities down into the general principles distilled from our experience of recurring patterns and structures. Sometimes these general principles and shapes can serve as constants, and last a very long time, and sometimes they are very volatile and are always changing as new data comes in. It depends on what you are studying and what you are trying to do.
With too much complexity comes blindness and confusion, and with too much simplicity comes false positives and false negatives. Of course simply experiencing cuts down on a lot of complexity, but then one is subjected to whatever happens in the world, as opposed to understanding it and anticipating it. Experience and rationality are worthwhile for different contexts at different times.
Navigating this world as a human being is a tricky thing.
Therefore we simplify things with abstract general principles, archetypes, images, metaphors, and other symbols and symbolic structures to group nested complexities - of a fractal quality - into simpler, more general shapes which then can serve as building blocks to be manipulated to generate higher level complexities.
Much simplicity in our rational experience seems to be generated from collapsing complexities down into the general principles distilled from our experience of recurring patterns and structures. Sometimes these general principles and shapes can serve as constants, and last a very long time, and sometimes they are very volatile and are always changing as new data comes in. It depends on what you are studying and what you are trying to do.
With too much complexity comes blindness and confusion, and with too much simplicity comes false positives and false negatives. Of course simply experiencing cuts down on a lot of complexity, but then one is subjected to whatever happens in the world, as opposed to understanding it and anticipating it. Experience and rationality are worthwhile for different contexts at different times.
Navigating this world as a human being is a tricky thing.
Pathology Pt. 3 (A Detour on the Subject of Balance)
I suppose I've let this one sit for a while, but let's have a go at it.
It seems previously I left off yammering about balance. You have to be careful with this concept. It is a vague, malleable concept that is a favorite sawhorse of charlatans and other goof balls, thanks to its vagueness and the ease with which you can twist it into all sorts of pretzel shapes to satisfy your aims. Establishment politicians and pundits in the political center will be the first to talk about the virtues of moderation and careful balanced thought, while completely unaware that their intellectual position occupies a distinct space which certainly amounts to taking a biased position. That is, the center left and center right political factions both have an unspoken commitment in the maintenance of empire, a position that I find to be batshit insane considering the historical context we find ourselves in.
Now we can watch as the political champions of balance and reasoned opinion lead us over the precipice.
Further, to talk about restoring balance in a time of imbalance necessarily implies thrust. It means taking a biased position, but a position that one has to commit to as right, a position whose logical implications mean an eventual return to balance. To wield the concept "balance" responsibly, one has to take into account not just a limited, circumscribed system that one is a part of, but the entire ecosystem of connected, nested systems that one lives in.
One of the major themes of the cult film Koyaanisqatsi is this cosmic conception of balance. The Hopi word "koyaanisqatsi" itself means roughly a chaotic existence, or a life in turmoil, or as the film's subtext states, a life out of balance. And boy does this theme resonate. The entire film is really a remarkable work and highly recommended.
You see the theme of balance come up in countless philosophies in many different cultures across time. This is pretty much the essence of Taoism, the yin and yang. Buddhism emphasizes this concept as well in its Middle Way doctrine. And countless others.
Why balance? There really is a lot to this concept. It implies just about everything.
So with life, we have this deeply entangled interdependency of all things. We know all about the food chain and how every ecosystem sustains itself: every living thing on Earth is basically self-organizing matter seeking to sustain itself by capturing energy radiated out by the Sun, or capturing energy indirectly which is ultimately derived from solar energy (well, as far as I understand the science), energy itself which can ultimately traced back to the mysterious expansionary force that Inflation theory attempts to understand. And to perpetuate themselves, living things grow in complexity to further manipulate the environment towards their ends, and as they grow in complexity they begin to consume less complex things to derive their energy, so that at the end of this great chain, we have this living industrial system far beyond byzantine complexity, which powers itself with what is essentially sun energy captured in ancient dead plant matter.
But then zoom on down to the simplest single-celled organisms and even these living things depend on a dizzying array of conditions, which happen to all be in a breathtaking coincidence: a hardened sphere of earth which serves as a surface of dependable regularity, which itself orbits at a perfect distance from the sun, which also generates a magnetic field, which keeps things together, and which also generates an atmosphere which shields from cosmic rays and allows a living climate to form, with the right temperatures to support liquid water and etc.
And of course all of these things generally have to hold for the party to keep going. Every complex organization of matter owes its existence to these basic foundations, and every subsequent complex tier of matter owes its existence to the lower tiers. For any given living being to exist, it is necessary that every other living being and environmental characteristic that it depends on is sustained over the course of its life. Of course due to the diversity of life forms, there are always several substitutes for any given organism if one of its sources of energy is suddenly wiped out. Living things are highly resilient and adaptable. But if several of those substitutes are wiped out at once, well, you've got trouble.
So balance then is multidimensional. For any given complex organized bit of matter, the life forms it absorbs for energy should be able to replenish themselves, and for these life forms to replenish themselves, they should have access to their own replenishable stores of life forms to absorb and so on down the food chain. And if any given life form becomes dominant and overconsumes its energy sources, it will essentially destroy itself unless there is another life form or environmental characteristic which can keep its dominance in check. Life forms may also evolve protective internal mechanisms that keep them from over-expansion.
Now all of this is very interesting, but still a little boring and static. The universe is actually pretty dynamic. As the saying goes, the only real constant is change. History on a geologic timescale is littered with triumphs, domination, mass die offs, and extreme environmental fluctuations. Ecosystems do exist in stable patches, but then species populations do experience run away growth or dominance from time to time and then unfit populations die off while other populations fill the vacuum. Or some environmental calamity alters the entire landscape, which completely rearranges the patterns of resident ecosystems until they settle back into homeostasis. This volatility can be seen to be responsible for the vibrant diversity of life forms in fact, which itself is an essential characteristic of the flourishing of life.
As Alan Watts likes to say, life has this tendency of seeing how far out it can get, to keep things exciting. If any living thing manages to achieve dominance, it has to go further. It must discharge its living energy, it possesses the cosmic need to expand, as noted in Schopenhauer's will to life and Nietzsche's will to power. And so we find ourselves at one of the most far-out extensions of the will to power in human history: the extreme imperialism of business ideology, or the extreme growth and dominance of global capitalist society.
The human species itself, and the advanced civilization it spawns, could be considered an ecosystem. Within such an ecosystem is a wide array of different personalities that all contribute certain sets of skills, expertise, and functions, contributing to its genius, its mastery. It isn't just mankind that has come to dominate its environment, but a certain character set, best symbolized by the archetypal businessman. The businessman has undoubtedly been helped along by the efforts of the other personalities - the spiritual, the artistic, the technical, the warlike, and what have you - but in its mass accumulation of power it ultimately seeks to shackle them in its pursuit of absolute power. We have to give the bourgeoisie this: their project has been massively successful; it certainly helped to stumble upon one of the most powerful, disposable stores of energy in human history. I'm talking about oil of course.
As the business class reaches near absolute power, it must spread an ideology to facilitate its conquests won by both militaristic imperialism and market imperialism. This business ideology seeks to plunge every facet of human experience into the language of the market. One's claim to greatness is the accumulation of wealth, underneath of which lies the subtext of power, as in a market society the exercise of wealth is equivalent to the exercise of power. This results in an ethos that emphasizes competition and self-interest. The logic of the market has percolated down into our most intimate social relations. The world's largest corporations engage in mass surveillance, relentless PR and propaganda, and the valuation of every aspect of living from human defects to every last natural resource there is. Society responds in kind by using market logic to modulate relationships, dating rituals, leisure pursuits, self-creation, perceptions of art and other media, education, labor itself, child rearing, and so on. The landscape itself takes on the aesthetics of the business ideology: that is, featureless buildings, landmarks, and transportation circuits built to be as inexpensive as possible, following the principle of least economic resistance, and to exercise the bare functions needed to turn profit.
The nature of the business ethos is such that it transforms a mere medium - wealth and the accumulation of power - into an end. Businessmen are in essence middlemen. It is in their personality to spread ideas, technologies, and objects of desire, and to profit from those transactions. To business, such an activity is enthralling and serves as explanation for the meaning of life. To other personalities, it is empty and meaningless.
Unenlightened self-interest results in short-termism, an overarching tendency whose logical conclusion is chaos. Traditionally this impulse is balanced by the countervailing impulses of other personalities, but as the business personality pulls away, short term self-interest increasingly becomes emphasized. Our tribal psychology elevates a closed system of logic to a pedestal, while ignoring the existence of other personalities. Thus you have the ruling class droning on about how markets are perfect, and that unobstructed markets will necessarily bring about peace and prosperity. This translates to the following: the uncontested rule of businessmen will bring about our utopia.
This self-consistent ideological construct works just fine in an intellectual vacuum, but in the real world, other personalities exist in the world that see the world in a different way. Though this business ideology was birthed in the emerging minds of the bourgeoisie, the energy of the rising bourgeois class carried the ideology to prominence and it worked as an alternative to traditional monarchical/religious ideology. The business ideology derived its power from the willingness of other personalities to play along and modulate its principles to fit their own lives, giving it life. By co-opting and piggy backing on Enlightenment principles such as equality, natural human rights, the rule of law, and the exercising of human reason, such an ideology proved irresistible to a global population increasingly crushed under the weight of superstitious and rapacious monarchies at the height of their power.
But as the business class pulls away in power today, and other personalities are pushed into subjugation, the balancing influence of other personalities is repressed. They are absorbed by business; their lives are forced to adopt to the strictures of business. This results in an antagonism, as no personality can be totally absorbed by another. It as if you attempt to force twice as much mass into a space that lacks the capacity. As a result of this antagonism, the world must be brought by force into the shape defined by business ideology.
What is the natural result of domination by a single class? The act of domination by necessity plants the seeds for a return to equilibrium, as each living organism seeks to exist autonomously with love from its peers. Domination necessarily leads to trauma, and further domination is begotten from the effects of sustained historical trauma. A universal coarsening of a population results in daily cruelties, of meanness and naked short term self-interest, an auto-reinforcing process which compresses the dominating structure further into a hypercritical and unstable state.
As within a creaking building, the state of the housing structure around us influences how we experience our lives and how we ultimately carry out our actions. Structure acts on us, and we act on it, changing it in turn.
And so now we find ourselves within this great creaking, towering world imbalance. We finally reach the crux of this post, the nature of pathology itself, which...I will have to save for the next post as this one has become too long. Hah!
It seems previously I left off yammering about balance. You have to be careful with this concept. It is a vague, malleable concept that is a favorite sawhorse of charlatans and other goof balls, thanks to its vagueness and the ease with which you can twist it into all sorts of pretzel shapes to satisfy your aims. Establishment politicians and pundits in the political center will be the first to talk about the virtues of moderation and careful balanced thought, while completely unaware that their intellectual position occupies a distinct space which certainly amounts to taking a biased position. That is, the center left and center right political factions both have an unspoken commitment in the maintenance of empire, a position that I find to be batshit insane considering the historical context we find ourselves in.
Now we can watch as the political champions of balance and reasoned opinion lead us over the precipice.
Further, to talk about restoring balance in a time of imbalance necessarily implies thrust. It means taking a biased position, but a position that one has to commit to as right, a position whose logical implications mean an eventual return to balance. To wield the concept "balance" responsibly, one has to take into account not just a limited, circumscribed system that one is a part of, but the entire ecosystem of connected, nested systems that one lives in.
One of the major themes of the cult film Koyaanisqatsi is this cosmic conception of balance. The Hopi word "koyaanisqatsi" itself means roughly a chaotic existence, or a life in turmoil, or as the film's subtext states, a life out of balance. And boy does this theme resonate. The entire film is really a remarkable work and highly recommended.
You see the theme of balance come up in countless philosophies in many different cultures across time. This is pretty much the essence of Taoism, the yin and yang. Buddhism emphasizes this concept as well in its Middle Way doctrine. And countless others.
Why balance? There really is a lot to this concept. It implies just about everything.
So with life, we have this deeply entangled interdependency of all things. We know all about the food chain and how every ecosystem sustains itself: every living thing on Earth is basically self-organizing matter seeking to sustain itself by capturing energy radiated out by the Sun, or capturing energy indirectly which is ultimately derived from solar energy (well, as far as I understand the science), energy itself which can ultimately traced back to the mysterious expansionary force that Inflation theory attempts to understand. And to perpetuate themselves, living things grow in complexity to further manipulate the environment towards their ends, and as they grow in complexity they begin to consume less complex things to derive their energy, so that at the end of this great chain, we have this living industrial system far beyond byzantine complexity, which powers itself with what is essentially sun energy captured in ancient dead plant matter.
But then zoom on down to the simplest single-celled organisms and even these living things depend on a dizzying array of conditions, which happen to all be in a breathtaking coincidence: a hardened sphere of earth which serves as a surface of dependable regularity, which itself orbits at a perfect distance from the sun, which also generates a magnetic field, which keeps things together, and which also generates an atmosphere which shields from cosmic rays and allows a living climate to form, with the right temperatures to support liquid water and etc.
And of course all of these things generally have to hold for the party to keep going. Every complex organization of matter owes its existence to these basic foundations, and every subsequent complex tier of matter owes its existence to the lower tiers. For any given living being to exist, it is necessary that every other living being and environmental characteristic that it depends on is sustained over the course of its life. Of course due to the diversity of life forms, there are always several substitutes for any given organism if one of its sources of energy is suddenly wiped out. Living things are highly resilient and adaptable. But if several of those substitutes are wiped out at once, well, you've got trouble.
So balance then is multidimensional. For any given complex organized bit of matter, the life forms it absorbs for energy should be able to replenish themselves, and for these life forms to replenish themselves, they should have access to their own replenishable stores of life forms to absorb and so on down the food chain. And if any given life form becomes dominant and overconsumes its energy sources, it will essentially destroy itself unless there is another life form or environmental characteristic which can keep its dominance in check. Life forms may also evolve protective internal mechanisms that keep them from over-expansion.
Now all of this is very interesting, but still a little boring and static. The universe is actually pretty dynamic. As the saying goes, the only real constant is change. History on a geologic timescale is littered with triumphs, domination, mass die offs, and extreme environmental fluctuations. Ecosystems do exist in stable patches, but then species populations do experience run away growth or dominance from time to time and then unfit populations die off while other populations fill the vacuum. Or some environmental calamity alters the entire landscape, which completely rearranges the patterns of resident ecosystems until they settle back into homeostasis. This volatility can be seen to be responsible for the vibrant diversity of life forms in fact, which itself is an essential characteristic of the flourishing of life.
As Alan Watts likes to say, life has this tendency of seeing how far out it can get, to keep things exciting. If any living thing manages to achieve dominance, it has to go further. It must discharge its living energy, it possesses the cosmic need to expand, as noted in Schopenhauer's will to life and Nietzsche's will to power. And so we find ourselves at one of the most far-out extensions of the will to power in human history: the extreme imperialism of business ideology, or the extreme growth and dominance of global capitalist society.
The human species itself, and the advanced civilization it spawns, could be considered an ecosystem. Within such an ecosystem is a wide array of different personalities that all contribute certain sets of skills, expertise, and functions, contributing to its genius, its mastery. It isn't just mankind that has come to dominate its environment, but a certain character set, best symbolized by the archetypal businessman. The businessman has undoubtedly been helped along by the efforts of the other personalities - the spiritual, the artistic, the technical, the warlike, and what have you - but in its mass accumulation of power it ultimately seeks to shackle them in its pursuit of absolute power. We have to give the bourgeoisie this: their project has been massively successful; it certainly helped to stumble upon one of the most powerful, disposable stores of energy in human history. I'm talking about oil of course.
As the business class reaches near absolute power, it must spread an ideology to facilitate its conquests won by both militaristic imperialism and market imperialism. This business ideology seeks to plunge every facet of human experience into the language of the market. One's claim to greatness is the accumulation of wealth, underneath of which lies the subtext of power, as in a market society the exercise of wealth is equivalent to the exercise of power. This results in an ethos that emphasizes competition and self-interest. The logic of the market has percolated down into our most intimate social relations. The world's largest corporations engage in mass surveillance, relentless PR and propaganda, and the valuation of every aspect of living from human defects to every last natural resource there is. Society responds in kind by using market logic to modulate relationships, dating rituals, leisure pursuits, self-creation, perceptions of art and other media, education, labor itself, child rearing, and so on. The landscape itself takes on the aesthetics of the business ideology: that is, featureless buildings, landmarks, and transportation circuits built to be as inexpensive as possible, following the principle of least economic resistance, and to exercise the bare functions needed to turn profit.
The nature of the business ethos is such that it transforms a mere medium - wealth and the accumulation of power - into an end. Businessmen are in essence middlemen. It is in their personality to spread ideas, technologies, and objects of desire, and to profit from those transactions. To business, such an activity is enthralling and serves as explanation for the meaning of life. To other personalities, it is empty and meaningless.
Unenlightened self-interest results in short-termism, an overarching tendency whose logical conclusion is chaos. Traditionally this impulse is balanced by the countervailing impulses of other personalities, but as the business personality pulls away, short term self-interest increasingly becomes emphasized. Our tribal psychology elevates a closed system of logic to a pedestal, while ignoring the existence of other personalities. Thus you have the ruling class droning on about how markets are perfect, and that unobstructed markets will necessarily bring about peace and prosperity. This translates to the following: the uncontested rule of businessmen will bring about our utopia.
This self-consistent ideological construct works just fine in an intellectual vacuum, but in the real world, other personalities exist in the world that see the world in a different way. Though this business ideology was birthed in the emerging minds of the bourgeoisie, the energy of the rising bourgeois class carried the ideology to prominence and it worked as an alternative to traditional monarchical/religious ideology. The business ideology derived its power from the willingness of other personalities to play along and modulate its principles to fit their own lives, giving it life. By co-opting and piggy backing on Enlightenment principles such as equality, natural human rights, the rule of law, and the exercising of human reason, such an ideology proved irresistible to a global population increasingly crushed under the weight of superstitious and rapacious monarchies at the height of their power.
But as the business class pulls away in power today, and other personalities are pushed into subjugation, the balancing influence of other personalities is repressed. They are absorbed by business; their lives are forced to adopt to the strictures of business. This results in an antagonism, as no personality can be totally absorbed by another. It as if you attempt to force twice as much mass into a space that lacks the capacity. As a result of this antagonism, the world must be brought by force into the shape defined by business ideology.
What is the natural result of domination by a single class? The act of domination by necessity plants the seeds for a return to equilibrium, as each living organism seeks to exist autonomously with love from its peers. Domination necessarily leads to trauma, and further domination is begotten from the effects of sustained historical trauma. A universal coarsening of a population results in daily cruelties, of meanness and naked short term self-interest, an auto-reinforcing process which compresses the dominating structure further into a hypercritical and unstable state.
As within a creaking building, the state of the housing structure around us influences how we experience our lives and how we ultimately carry out our actions. Structure acts on us, and we act on it, changing it in turn.
And so now we find ourselves within this great creaking, towering world imbalance. We finally reach the crux of this post, the nature of pathology itself, which...I will have to save for the next post as this one has become too long. Hah!
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Music and Repetition
It seems the nature of music is inseparable with the way in which the brain perceives music.
One aspect of this thesis that sticks out the most to me is that most people don't want to get lost. They like things that repeat in an organized manner. It is comforting for one thing, but there is something far more fundamental to it.
Most popular music is simple and highly repetitious. It is comforting to hear that familiar pattern again and again. What you expect to be there is always reliably there. It also brings everyone together. Everyone hears basically the same pattern and have a similar experience as everyone else listening, and thus are able to move together. And there is this fulfilled need to participate in the music, as opposed to simply listen to it.
Then you have these cerebral artists that wish to challenge these elementary patterns, and veer off into the outer limits of human understanding. What is remarkable is that these types of artists can also attract a lot of people, but for different reasons. Sometimes listeners want to be challenged. It is pleasurable to become lost for a while.
But all the most popular forms of this music always manage to make it back to something familiar. Most people aren't comfortable with a temporary madness that doesn't resolve.
One aspect of this thesis that sticks out the most to me is that most people don't want to get lost. They like things that repeat in an organized manner. It is comforting for one thing, but there is something far more fundamental to it.
Most popular music is simple and highly repetitious. It is comforting to hear that familiar pattern again and again. What you expect to be there is always reliably there. It also brings everyone together. Everyone hears basically the same pattern and have a similar experience as everyone else listening, and thus are able to move together. And there is this fulfilled need to participate in the music, as opposed to simply listen to it.
Then you have these cerebral artists that wish to challenge these elementary patterns, and veer off into the outer limits of human understanding. What is remarkable is that these types of artists can also attract a lot of people, but for different reasons. Sometimes listeners want to be challenged. It is pleasurable to become lost for a while.
But all the most popular forms of this music always manage to make it back to something familiar. Most people aren't comfortable with a temporary madness that doesn't resolve.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Outside Again
I finally took a chance to explore part of North Long Beach on bike. The power came back on as it always does, but I was very much out of shape. Too much indolence and comfort food; so it goes.
The drivers in the suburbs seem much more uncomfortable with bike riders, which seems obvious the more you think about it; there are simply less riders than in the denser areas.
It is always difficult to grasp an area until you find yourself out of it, whether by rising above it on an overlook, or sluicing through it in its bowels. I took the latter in this case, riding out into the wash - I've heard it colloquially called a riverbed, which is a sort of funny usage of the word, considering the fact that really it is just an enormous concrete trough with water flowing through it occasionally.
When you come out of the street and into the wash it is as if you are transported onto an alien surface. The moon hung above faintly in the darkening blue sky and the sun was passing behind a cluster of clouds on its way down. The concrete expanse is painful to look at, but carries a strange fleeting beauty as well, which is helped with the ribbon of dirty water that runs through it, whose surface catches the sun and shimmers. The city takes on an entirely different feel. The major streets cross over the wash and cars pass over, disembodied. You pass all of the connecting backyards, which are usually hidden from view.
There is so much land, and so much promise, and it has all been parceled out and disconnected and we've been taught that we should not share it. It is all very strange. The suburbs are incredibly strange: their general design took shape in the war economy when it was necessary to build a great amount of temporary shelters for workers, but then the style caught on.
The design itself is focused entirely on consumption and isolation. The entire environment takes its shape from the concept of both the isolated single family house - out here some of which literally resemble small castles with fenced courtyards flooded with security lights - and the personal automobile. This is opposed to starting with an environment and establishing oneself in harmony with the environment.
It is good to see plants growing everywhere, but nowhere are there edible plants. It is all ornamental. This part of the city is designed solely for consumption.
It does seem like more and more people are gardening. I see many more raised beds, sheds, greenhouses, and coops than I remember seeing maybe 5 years ago or so.
The nature of the American suburb encourages isolation. It is designed for it and so there is an overwhelming pressure to cloister oneself. It took me some time to get out again, because I looked out and felt alienated. All one wants to do is jump out, grab one's goodies, and return home as soon as possible, like jumping out of a jacuzzi into the cold to grab a drink. You see it in others, in their startled looks, though some people do manage just fine.
But if you do manage to jump out and get going, you can see some interesting things. Again, especially if you find your way outside of its structure, such as going out into a wash. You see some interesting characters. And the alien landscape itself short-circuits your sense of habituation and complacency, which is all too easy to settle into in a monotonous and colorless landscape.
Thursday, March 06, 2014
Blindness (And of Course, Sight)
This is sort of a vague metaphor and I'm not entirely sure what I even mean, but bear with me; it might be somewhat useful in trying to explain this.
Each of us seems to vibrate at a slightly different frequency. One occupies a place in a vast, multi-dimensional spectrum in which one's physical attributes contribute very much to one's own general state. One is wired to be more cerebral, or one is wired to be more emotional, more rigid, more open, more expansive, more focused, and so on. These attributes aren't all collected in two poles. They tend towards two poles, but they overlap endlessly, and they can be expressed differently when an individual is in different states of mind. Nevertheless, these attributes have a dramatic effect on what activities one engages in, the nature of one's social presence, what information or sensations one pays attention to, and ultimately how one lives.
One is blind to one's own frequency. It is very difficult to see what one is, but one can see very viscerally the frequencies of others, which does create a sort of negative conception of what one is. One above all seeks the eyes of others to see what one is. But in this culture, what with a great, central, antagonizing power, we are brought up to evaluate each difference and locate it within this schema of strong or weak, favorable or unfavorable, better or lesser, more advantageous or whatever else you may, so as to situate ourselves in relation to this power.
The nature of this power is such that it takes a limited range of frequencies and enthrones them as great and just, so that when one seeks the nature of one's own self, in relation to this power, one is told what one is in terms of one's constitutional amenability for fitting into the multiple schema set by power. All of the rest of the frequencies disappear into the background, or smolder under ash weakly.
What is this mysterious power? We look over the world and we see a multitude of nations, powers, which themselves collapse into a multitude of egos vying to be represented in those powers. What is this central power?
It seems to reside in a constellation of values that individuals and nations can aspire to - to be clear, I am using "nation" loosely so as to reference both political entities and these slippery economic ones that have risen in the last century: corporations. Relationally, this set of values is forced when a great power rises in possession of these values, antagonizing everything else. Everyone looks up, saying to themselves, golly that looks pretty high, I wonder how I get up there. Or something like that.
The values themselves are generated at a historic period, usually as a response to some sort of crisis, and they are inseparable from a set of social relations that are formed in part from various technologies, techniques, and accompanying social formations which allow a society to prosper with an acceptable level of stability.
What is easy to forget is that this is merely a historical formation that has risen, and will fall as surely as it has risen, kicking up a great cloud of dust within which are fertile grounds for other formations to rise.
When you exist within this reality, it is very difficult to see yourself. You ask others for their opinion of your self, but they come up with all sorts relational indicators like you're pretty nice (you get along in institutions) or you're very book smart (you get along well in academic institutions), or you have a big heart (you sustain well your existing social relations), and then so on into even more pointed indicators such as you're aggressive enough to survive (you're masculine), or you're too passive and you'll be crushed (you're feminine), or you're not good-looking enough for this or that (to be liked by both influential men and women), or you're not smart enough to handle this (smart almost always referring to the capacity to handle large amounts of data), or you're not physically fit enough (to appeal to hegemonic body image), or patient enough (to keep the required amount of attention for repetitive mechanical tasks), or conversely, you are all these things and that you will go far.
Which is not to say that having attributes favorable to power is a bad thing, or that having attributes unfavorable to power is a good thing, but it is also important to understand which standard it is that you are being judged by.
Maybe if you had a great job and could secure for yourself all sorts of great shiny things and become respected by your community, you will be just fine. And to an extent this is true, psychologically anyways. As adults we have this deep psychological need for autonomy, to be able to stand on our own two feet and be respected by the community for it, so that we can belong and contribute. With most of us landless, and without access to the means of reproduction, and without the ability to substantially alter the environment in a creative way, this cultural avenue allows us to recreate some of these conditions.
We exist within this formation. We are all judged in accordance with this formation. How do you see yourself (and others) outside of this formation? As they really exist?
The practical person will exclaim that this is a big ripoff. All life takes place within formations like these, and you are what this environment has produced. You can't escape your self, for your self is the very basis for your experience of this reality. You can crawl down into a dark, dingy cave, and upon trying to comfort yourself, imagine that the sky is blue and the sun is shining on all the wonderful green trees outside, but it won't change the fact that you're down in a cave and it is dark and scary. You're there, and the cave acts on you, as you act on the cave.
To put it another way, I've personally had flashes (along with plenty of others) of a vague sort of cosmic awareness, and with those flashes come the realization that the practical world often takes on the characteristics of a game at best, a sham at worst. But it is difficult to escape the practical world. For example, my moods proceed on a bipolar pattern. There is a biological (and neurochemical) basis for entire experiences I have that are very difficult to escape. I'm writing right now on a sort of manic wave, that was probably triggered by caffeine and the random occurrence of some obsessive thought. I may feel completely different later in the day, or even in an hour or less, and sometimes it is difficult to escape.
But it can be done. It seems as though it takes something as potent as total alienation from a cultural state of affairs to escape it and to see it from the outside, or sustained exposure to intellectual works that allow this, or sudden revelations that can have roots in various factors, or take part in certain meditative activities, or you can be predisposed to it from birth, or go under some type of psychological or physical trauma, whatever.
Once you get into that state, you can go about your work investigating the basis of everything. This I think, is one of the closest states that approaches this concept of freedom that has been so corrupted in recent times.
This freedom to understand what you are does change what you are. Not fundamentally, but it does expand the array of actions you can choose from, and how you choose to move in the world and relate to others. Of course the ultimate truth behind finding what you are is realizing what you aren't. You are not this self that people have been telling you endlessly that you are. Though a useful practical function, the self is not some irreducible fixture of natural law.
You realize that you are connected to everything else, and therefore inseparable, and that everything is connected to you. This lifts tremendous weight off your shoulders because you stop trying to control things as a self, and you stop feeling guilty for the multitudinous actions that happen every day, that might or might not be in your control.
These views are echoed in Buddhist philosophy and countless other philosophies. The idea is to stop struggling for a second and learn to let go. Sit back and experience. It makes life a little easier. There is still life to live, work to be done, but maybe these things are best done with a clear conscience and opened senses?
The process of letting go itself is often the hardest part. But it gets easier as continuing on in a crumbling framework becomes harder.
Each of us seems to vibrate at a slightly different frequency. One occupies a place in a vast, multi-dimensional spectrum in which one's physical attributes contribute very much to one's own general state. One is wired to be more cerebral, or one is wired to be more emotional, more rigid, more open, more expansive, more focused, and so on. These attributes aren't all collected in two poles. They tend towards two poles, but they overlap endlessly, and they can be expressed differently when an individual is in different states of mind. Nevertheless, these attributes have a dramatic effect on what activities one engages in, the nature of one's social presence, what information or sensations one pays attention to, and ultimately how one lives.
One is blind to one's own frequency. It is very difficult to see what one is, but one can see very viscerally the frequencies of others, which does create a sort of negative conception of what one is. One above all seeks the eyes of others to see what one is. But in this culture, what with a great, central, antagonizing power, we are brought up to evaluate each difference and locate it within this schema of strong or weak, favorable or unfavorable, better or lesser, more advantageous or whatever else you may, so as to situate ourselves in relation to this power.
The nature of this power is such that it takes a limited range of frequencies and enthrones them as great and just, so that when one seeks the nature of one's own self, in relation to this power, one is told what one is in terms of one's constitutional amenability for fitting into the multiple schema set by power. All of the rest of the frequencies disappear into the background, or smolder under ash weakly.
What is this mysterious power? We look over the world and we see a multitude of nations, powers, which themselves collapse into a multitude of egos vying to be represented in those powers. What is this central power?
It seems to reside in a constellation of values that individuals and nations can aspire to - to be clear, I am using "nation" loosely so as to reference both political entities and these slippery economic ones that have risen in the last century: corporations. Relationally, this set of values is forced when a great power rises in possession of these values, antagonizing everything else. Everyone looks up, saying to themselves, golly that looks pretty high, I wonder how I get up there. Or something like that.
The values themselves are generated at a historic period, usually as a response to some sort of crisis, and they are inseparable from a set of social relations that are formed in part from various technologies, techniques, and accompanying social formations which allow a society to prosper with an acceptable level of stability.
What is easy to forget is that this is merely a historical formation that has risen, and will fall as surely as it has risen, kicking up a great cloud of dust within which are fertile grounds for other formations to rise.
When you exist within this reality, it is very difficult to see yourself. You ask others for their opinion of your self, but they come up with all sorts relational indicators like you're pretty nice (you get along in institutions) or you're very book smart (you get along well in academic institutions), or you have a big heart (you sustain well your existing social relations), and then so on into even more pointed indicators such as you're aggressive enough to survive (you're masculine), or you're too passive and you'll be crushed (you're feminine), or you're not good-looking enough for this or that (to be liked by both influential men and women), or you're not smart enough to handle this (smart almost always referring to the capacity to handle large amounts of data), or you're not physically fit enough (to appeal to hegemonic body image), or patient enough (to keep the required amount of attention for repetitive mechanical tasks), or conversely, you are all these things and that you will go far.
Which is not to say that having attributes favorable to power is a bad thing, or that having attributes unfavorable to power is a good thing, but it is also important to understand which standard it is that you are being judged by.
Maybe if you had a great job and could secure for yourself all sorts of great shiny things and become respected by your community, you will be just fine. And to an extent this is true, psychologically anyways. As adults we have this deep psychological need for autonomy, to be able to stand on our own two feet and be respected by the community for it, so that we can belong and contribute. With most of us landless, and without access to the means of reproduction, and without the ability to substantially alter the environment in a creative way, this cultural avenue allows us to recreate some of these conditions.
We exist within this formation. We are all judged in accordance with this formation. How do you see yourself (and others) outside of this formation? As they really exist?
The practical person will exclaim that this is a big ripoff. All life takes place within formations like these, and you are what this environment has produced. You can't escape your self, for your self is the very basis for your experience of this reality. You can crawl down into a dark, dingy cave, and upon trying to comfort yourself, imagine that the sky is blue and the sun is shining on all the wonderful green trees outside, but it won't change the fact that you're down in a cave and it is dark and scary. You're there, and the cave acts on you, as you act on the cave.
To put it another way, I've personally had flashes (along with plenty of others) of a vague sort of cosmic awareness, and with those flashes come the realization that the practical world often takes on the characteristics of a game at best, a sham at worst. But it is difficult to escape the practical world. For example, my moods proceed on a bipolar pattern. There is a biological (and neurochemical) basis for entire experiences I have that are very difficult to escape. I'm writing right now on a sort of manic wave, that was probably triggered by caffeine and the random occurrence of some obsessive thought. I may feel completely different later in the day, or even in an hour or less, and sometimes it is difficult to escape.
But it can be done. It seems as though it takes something as potent as total alienation from a cultural state of affairs to escape it and to see it from the outside, or sustained exposure to intellectual works that allow this, or sudden revelations that can have roots in various factors, or take part in certain meditative activities, or you can be predisposed to it from birth, or go under some type of psychological or physical trauma, whatever.
Once you get into that state, you can go about your work investigating the basis of everything. This I think, is one of the closest states that approaches this concept of freedom that has been so corrupted in recent times.
This freedom to understand what you are does change what you are. Not fundamentally, but it does expand the array of actions you can choose from, and how you choose to move in the world and relate to others. Of course the ultimate truth behind finding what you are is realizing what you aren't. You are not this self that people have been telling you endlessly that you are. Though a useful practical function, the self is not some irreducible fixture of natural law.
You realize that you are connected to everything else, and therefore inseparable, and that everything is connected to you. This lifts tremendous weight off your shoulders because you stop trying to control things as a self, and you stop feeling guilty for the multitudinous actions that happen every day, that might or might not be in your control.
These views are echoed in Buddhist philosophy and countless other philosophies. The idea is to stop struggling for a second and learn to let go. Sit back and experience. It makes life a little easier. There is still life to live, work to be done, but maybe these things are best done with a clear conscience and opened senses?
The process of letting go itself is often the hardest part. But it gets easier as continuing on in a crumbling framework becomes harder.
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