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!
