An off-coast storm and reports of waves washing up and over the pier and into neighborhoods brought out crowds looking to see large waves and possible destruction. It ended up being a lovely evening.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Pathology Pt. 5 - Conclusion
I left off asking: so what could mitigate this coming catastrophe, and produce means of development which could alter this destructive course?
Certainly we require a restoration of ecological balance, or at least an approximation of ecological balance, but given our historical oscillations, it isn't clear how this is to be done. For a massive, complex global society to come into balance with its ecology necessarily implies a corresponding balance in the society's human ecology, so as to coordinate population growth (or in this case degrowth) and resource-use to harmonize with the surrounding regeneration needs of surrounding ecological systems.
It requires the restoration in trust around a unifying idea, which could very well be impossible in the immediate run, due to ongoing fragmentation and the repulsive social forces associated with it. If anything, collective trust has yet to bottom out, as the legitimacy of established institutions continues on the wane. Of course it is worth pointing out the myriad trusting communities coming together around similar ideas all across the globe, but which are isolated communities embedded in a deteriorating global system whose potential powers of destruction increase as systems break down. My secret interest is in making long-term preparations whose effects would outlast these violent forces of destruction, to be taken up again in the subsequent dark age with its allowance for coalescing social alternatives. One can't know for sure what will happen of course, but history is filled with cold, hard lessons.
Since we operate in accordance with ever-changing ideological systems, we require the emergence of a new ideology which both accounts for the internal organizational state of human society, as well as the external state of the surrounding environment, as well as the changes that both undergo through their relations in time. Here we can propose a greater emphasis in 4 dimensional thought. The modern human being swings from one pendulum to the next: one ideology grows in time and space to unbearable proportions, in which there is a reaction and an opposing ideology grows in power until there is a confrontation, and a synthesis emerges, which was a historical process famously suggested by Hegel among others.
Perhaps there is another way to go about things? Perhaps we can acknowledge that ideologies are historical formations that simply happen in accordance with the state and configuration of the populations that generate them. To put it another way: in the natural world, we have matter in the form of solids, liquids, gases, and all of the attendant behaviors associated with those states and the bonds that form and break, and the way each of these forms interact within and without. Well, our species largely functions now with the distinctive faculty of higher brain activity, and it seems as though higher brain phenomena themselves display similar dynamics, at least in a relational sense. We have differing ideologies that have different effects on people, given their personal constitution.
Being completely free takes extreme measures. And as one frees oneself from a dying order, one finds in oneself the desire to be bound once again, but bound this time to something which is living.
Certainly we require a restoration of ecological balance, or at least an approximation of ecological balance, but given our historical oscillations, it isn't clear how this is to be done. For a massive, complex global society to come into balance with its ecology necessarily implies a corresponding balance in the society's human ecology, so as to coordinate population growth (or in this case degrowth) and resource-use to harmonize with the surrounding regeneration needs of surrounding ecological systems.
It requires the restoration in trust around a unifying idea, which could very well be impossible in the immediate run, due to ongoing fragmentation and the repulsive social forces associated with it. If anything, collective trust has yet to bottom out, as the legitimacy of established institutions continues on the wane. Of course it is worth pointing out the myriad trusting communities coming together around similar ideas all across the globe, but which are isolated communities embedded in a deteriorating global system whose potential powers of destruction increase as systems break down. My secret interest is in making long-term preparations whose effects would outlast these violent forces of destruction, to be taken up again in the subsequent dark age with its allowance for coalescing social alternatives. One can't know for sure what will happen of course, but history is filled with cold, hard lessons.
Since we operate in accordance with ever-changing ideological systems, we require the emergence of a new ideology which both accounts for the internal organizational state of human society, as well as the external state of the surrounding environment, as well as the changes that both undergo through their relations in time. Here we can propose a greater emphasis in 4 dimensional thought. The modern human being swings from one pendulum to the next: one ideology grows in time and space to unbearable proportions, in which there is a reaction and an opposing ideology grows in power until there is a confrontation, and a synthesis emerges, which was a historical process famously suggested by Hegel among others.
Perhaps there is another way to go about things? Perhaps we can acknowledge that ideologies are historical formations that simply happen in accordance with the state and configuration of the populations that generate them. To put it another way: in the natural world, we have matter in the form of solids, liquids, gases, and all of the attendant behaviors associated with those states and the bonds that form and break, and the way each of these forms interact within and without. Well, our species largely functions now with the distinctive faculty of higher brain activity, and it seems as though higher brain phenomena themselves display similar dynamics, at least in a relational sense. We have differing ideologies that have different effects on people, given their personal constitution.
Some ideologies hold very strongly: their adherents bond tightly around the ideology and the bonds are difficult to break. It seems over history, the most resilient ideologies are formed through social equivalents to heat and pressure. This can be seen in all the great religions: Judaism formed through centuries of slavery and hardship, Christianity followed a particularly tumultuous civilizational collapse and went through its transformations during the course of seemingly endless feudal wars. Then you have secular ideologies like capitalism and classical economics emerging after the suffocating domination of absolute monarchies of divine right, and then Marxism, birthed under the cruel oscillations of unfettered capitalism.
The question arises as to whether we want to craft ideologies which last so long. Our objective has been to craft things that last far outside of ourselves, but is this what we want? Well, it seems this sensibility to create lasting ideology is an emotional-historical affair, which isn’t entirely within our control, and so we have world events and the calamities of clashing or collapsing formations producing the attitudes which drive ideological genesis. If we can’t control these things, we should at least see what to do about mitigation, and evening out these vast oscillations in power.
The problem we currently face is the vast separation between major ideological formations. By the time we’ve learned a valuable lesson of an age, we produce a resilient ideology that though proves useful through the age that proceeds from it, refuses to change fundamentally as conditions require, save a few minor reforms needed to keep the ideology intact. And so these ideological formations are separated from each other, both in time and space, due to the tendency of living formations to sustain themselves for the sake of perpetuation. We fail to see the connectedness in their progression. If we could establish these links, perhaps there would be a way to even out these great oscillations in power.
On a similar note, one personality type becomes dominant in a given age to the extent that the rest of us become disgusted with anything to do with the material formations encouraged by that personality. So the church ossifies after the spiritual person, the state ossifies after the regulatory, the corporation ossifies after the businessman, etc. So ideology develops to amputate the bad institutions. Well, these personalities aren’t going away; they’ll always be with us. How to keep an ideological system open?
These institutions will always reformulate, as each personality will seek to manifest itself in the material world. We need a process of constant regeneration and disintegration, back to back, smoothing out these great peaks and troughs.
Perhaps in the end it means endorsing an ideology with a built-in propensity for disintegration, with the reluctant admission that no one can truly know the answers to everything, and that as soon as time passes after one's provisional answers, one's provisional answers may themselves be on their way to disintegration. Life itself will always know how to sustain itself - after it is done being battered about by the chaotic forces of the universe of course, so perhaps one should learn to step away. We like to treat fascism as a dirty word, but at the time, fascist governments sounded tenable to many people who desired stability and protection from the chaotic forces of destruction befalling their societies, not knowing that attempts to artificially generate stability lead to these sort of hyper-compressed governments which instigated ever-greater instabilities in the world around them, and which internally were ready to unravel at the slightest manifestation of structural weakness.
On a similar note, one personality type becomes dominant in a given age to the extent that the rest of us become disgusted with anything to do with the material formations encouraged by that personality. So the church ossifies after the spiritual person, the state ossifies after the regulatory, the corporation ossifies after the businessman, etc. So ideology develops to amputate the bad institutions. Well, these personalities aren’t going away; they’ll always be with us. How to keep an ideological system open?
These institutions will always reformulate, as each personality will seek to manifest itself in the material world. We need a process of constant regeneration and disintegration, back to back, smoothing out these great peaks and troughs.
Perhaps in the end it means endorsing an ideology with a built-in propensity for disintegration, with the reluctant admission that no one can truly know the answers to everything, and that as soon as time passes after one's provisional answers, one's provisional answers may themselves be on their way to disintegration. Life itself will always know how to sustain itself - after it is done being battered about by the chaotic forces of the universe of course, so perhaps one should learn to step away. We like to treat fascism as a dirty word, but at the time, fascist governments sounded tenable to many people who desired stability and protection from the chaotic forces of destruction befalling their societies, not knowing that attempts to artificially generate stability lead to these sort of hyper-compressed governments which instigated ever-greater instabilities in the world around them, and which internally were ready to unravel at the slightest manifestation of structural weakness.
Well, I should slow down now that the discussion is growing more convoluted and abstract. Plenty of time to explain these things yet. For now, I think a good practical suggestion is to conserve energy, to be put towards more practical ends. Give up portions and commitments to dying empire - easier said than done of course. One can't help natural fears and pains, but one can free up valuable processing space and physical energy by simply letting go of unnecessary wants and concerns, and by engaging in exercises and activities that diminish the frontal lobe's capacity for micromanaging - only when necessary of course! One shouldn't unnecessarily demonize such a wonderful tool. Localize, cultivate community, jettison unnecessary energy use. Work with the earth and one's hands. All of these projects are interrelated in their healing effects.
These aren't new suggestions by any means.
One shouldn't drive oneself to despair upon finding it difficult to escape empire. One is a part of empire. One's comforts and life arrangements are owed in part to the relentless reproduction of empire. Re-orientation is a long and painstaking process that will most likely require catastrophe to initiate the most difficult changes. Learn to surf the chop; it will be a bumpy ride.
These aren't new suggestions by any means.
One shouldn't drive oneself to despair upon finding it difficult to escape empire. One is a part of empire. One's comforts and life arrangements are owed in part to the relentless reproduction of empire. Re-orientation is a long and painstaking process that will most likely require catastrophe to initiate the most difficult changes. Learn to surf the chop; it will be a bumpy ride.
Being completely free takes extreme measures. And as one frees oneself from a dying order, one finds in oneself the desire to be bound once again, but bound this time to something which is living.
Monday, August 25, 2014
Pathology Pt. 4
In the course of the series, I started with a discussion of the pathological styles such as OCD, paranoia, hysteria, and impulsiveness and then related them to society. I then discussed barriers to immediate solutions, which transitioned into an extended examination of the concept of balance. With this post and the next I intend to tie all of these themes together and propose what might not necessarily be a definite solution, but an array of possible actions to ameliorate things.
How to account for the daily effects of social pathology on a mechanical level? First, I think we have to consider the widening discrepancies between our ideological systems and observable reality. For centuries, we've been operating off of both an Enlightenment-era social contract in which everyone is guaranteed equal rights and basic human dignity, and the idea that we can master the world with our rational and productive faculties.
What is in fact happening is that as the business class pulls away in power, and we see the emergence of a global oligarchy which essentially carries out a majority of our collective decisions, whole swathes of the global population are losing the ability to participate in their societies or even maintain a basic dignity, as the raison de etre of an oligarchy is to expand and accumulate wealth, at the expense of everyone else. What also happens in this case is that real social inequalities result in these neofeudal arrangements in which majorities are subject to the economic whims of a powerful aristocracy, and individual life experiences in the modern world drift far past the Enlightenment ideological underpinnings which have manged to keep modern societies stable for so long.
And the thing about humans is that everyone runs on at least some sort of elementary ideological system, and we can handle shocks here and there, but as a system diverges too far from reality, you start to get psychological effects that gradually become more severe. Combine that with the accumulative effects of trauma, both individual and collective, and you start to get the mass development of serious pathologies, which take their shape in accordance with the individual's personality. It is possible all of this is being intensified by various electromagnetic and biochemical disturbances as well. For example, one of the most plentiful pesticides in current usage, which is regularly found in drinking water and our own tissue, contains components which function as endocrine disruptors, which have myriad documented effects on development, health, mental states, etc.
Another phenomenon to consider, which has dramatic effects on the mechanical level, is the double bind, which was first described by Gregory Bateson during the course of his study of schizophrenia. The presence of the double bind betrays growing gaps between ideology and human/emotional economy. Logically, the double bind functions as a contradiction, but indicates a divergence of overlapping systems, in which emotive indications in body language and speech intonation (among numerous things) diverge from actual stated speech. Or a given speech act or direction directly contradicts a set of surrounding circumstances.
A double bind could be thought of as a point in which the emotional/political reality of a given set of relations has diverged from the stated symbolic reality that seeks to make bare reality a little more palatable. Everyone desires numerous ends all of the time, which upon being made understandable to everyone, could very well make living unbearable, so that our rational systems construct stories and abstract codes which allow us to manage our conflicting desires. But when these rational constructs can no longer hold due to political and emotive pressures...
It was theorized by Bateson and his colleagues that it was the presence of multiple sustained double binds that accounted for the development of more severe psychological pathologies like schizophrenia. The preponderance of double binds means the breakdown in one's ability to consistently read social cues and communications. One catches on double binds all one's life. It is no wonder one enters a state of perpetual anxiety.
And of course, this pathology builds a structure of its own that takes on new life, which seeks to sustain itself in contexts far outside its origin. The production of pathology is itself a production of new life: pathological life seeks to grow and subsist as a living system.
So! One's personality and make-up breaks in a certain direction. If a people are crushed under forces of domination, pathology is simply what you get, as a bi-product of this compression. Pathology seems to mount from increasing emotional instabilities which are not conducive to daily living within the conventional architecture of a living system. Pathology is the state of being for an individual that is failing to be absorbed into a social system, an overarching community, or who is at least fitted into an artificial social arrangement by force, for the purposes of extracting that person's energy.
Why do we say this? We tend to only say someone's behavior is pathological when they seek help, or profess that they are unhappy, a sentiment that is almost always manifested in social relations. At the extreme end of this qualification, a person could be said to be pathological if they are attacking or even destroying surrounding social relations and structures. A person's pathological style is pathological in the sense that their mode of neurological functioning begins to work against their daily social interactions; their mode of functioning frustrates their desires and ends, or the desires and ends of others.
But we should also qualify this term "pathological." It is important to remember that "pathology" itself is a relative term. Something is pathological in relation to what? A part is pathological in relation to what whole? A disease is a pathological agent as far as a living organism is concerned, but you can bet that that virus or bacteria instigating the disease is having a blast.
In the same way, the powerful, the guardians of convention, and all of their sympathizers regard these growing masses of the mentally ill as "pathological." And in a sense it is true, as far as the capitalist system is concerned. But just as well, for the "pathological" it seems that this society they are a part of is itself the problem, the disease, and herein lies a deeper truth.
The sense I've been using the term "pathological" thus far is taken from a position of power: to be pathological in the sense that you no longer fit into a given social system is a questionable proposition if that social system itself could be construed to be pathological. And to further complicate things, to be pathological in one way could be revolutionary in another - perhaps you fail to fit into a traditional paradigm, but your creative tendencies could benefit a wholly new one. Another type of pathology is reactionary and destructive in other contexts: to be a purveyor of violence, deceit, and aggression is harmful to any would-be alternate society, at least if that society plans on being peaceful and functional. And so a pathological system produces both creative and destructive pathological individuals through its operation.
You can imagine that in a fairly neutral setting, what the average human being is looking for, besides subsisting on the land, is relating to his or her fellows, living among community, living autonomously, yet connected to and appreciated by peers, which is all the result of our nature as political animals. That is until you introduce power: concentrated power, deficits in power, and the spectacular violence and instability that is a result of this.
It would be lovely if we could call the concentration of power an anomalous event, but really as far as human history is concerned, it has been the normal progression of our affairs. Because really, human beings have been a smashing success, and there is nothing as self-destructive as total success; any great military theorist will tell you this, or for that matter, any chronicler of the rise and fall of civilizations. And one bi-product to this success, due to the fact that we have no natural predators or mitigating environmental pressures, is the mass concentration of power that we began to see with the first agricultural societies.
There is a disturbing school of thought rising that makes this case with astonishing force, and really I can't find fault with it so far. But as even the reluctant purveyors of this school suggest, it isn't time to throw in the towel until that is the only possible outcome.
We are left with a seemingly intractable problem: that the concentration of power and the destruction it encourages produces further concentrations of power, in the attempt to acquire stability, which from the perspective of the powerless is madness, for the concentration of power - in the quest for system-wide stability - is itself a producer of instability. Given oncoming hard resource limits and anthropogenic climate change, it is in the interest of every human society (and most currently-existing animal and plant species) that this cycle is broken.
And so what could mitigate this coming catastrophe, and produce means of development which could alter this destructive course?
How to account for the daily effects of social pathology on a mechanical level? First, I think we have to consider the widening discrepancies between our ideological systems and observable reality. For centuries, we've been operating off of both an Enlightenment-era social contract in which everyone is guaranteed equal rights and basic human dignity, and the idea that we can master the world with our rational and productive faculties.
What is in fact happening is that as the business class pulls away in power, and we see the emergence of a global oligarchy which essentially carries out a majority of our collective decisions, whole swathes of the global population are losing the ability to participate in their societies or even maintain a basic dignity, as the raison de etre of an oligarchy is to expand and accumulate wealth, at the expense of everyone else. What also happens in this case is that real social inequalities result in these neofeudal arrangements in which majorities are subject to the economic whims of a powerful aristocracy, and individual life experiences in the modern world drift far past the Enlightenment ideological underpinnings which have manged to keep modern societies stable for so long.
And the thing about humans is that everyone runs on at least some sort of elementary ideological system, and we can handle shocks here and there, but as a system diverges too far from reality, you start to get psychological effects that gradually become more severe. Combine that with the accumulative effects of trauma, both individual and collective, and you start to get the mass development of serious pathologies, which take their shape in accordance with the individual's personality. It is possible all of this is being intensified by various electromagnetic and biochemical disturbances as well. For example, one of the most plentiful pesticides in current usage, which is regularly found in drinking water and our own tissue, contains components which function as endocrine disruptors, which have myriad documented effects on development, health, mental states, etc.
Another phenomenon to consider, which has dramatic effects on the mechanical level, is the double bind, which was first described by Gregory Bateson during the course of his study of schizophrenia. The presence of the double bind betrays growing gaps between ideology and human/emotional economy. Logically, the double bind functions as a contradiction, but indicates a divergence of overlapping systems, in which emotive indications in body language and speech intonation (among numerous things) diverge from actual stated speech. Or a given speech act or direction directly contradicts a set of surrounding circumstances.
A double bind could be thought of as a point in which the emotional/political reality of a given set of relations has diverged from the stated symbolic reality that seeks to make bare reality a little more palatable. Everyone desires numerous ends all of the time, which upon being made understandable to everyone, could very well make living unbearable, so that our rational systems construct stories and abstract codes which allow us to manage our conflicting desires. But when these rational constructs can no longer hold due to political and emotive pressures...
It was theorized by Bateson and his colleagues that it was the presence of multiple sustained double binds that accounted for the development of more severe psychological pathologies like schizophrenia. The preponderance of double binds means the breakdown in one's ability to consistently read social cues and communications. One catches on double binds all one's life. It is no wonder one enters a state of perpetual anxiety.
And of course, this pathology builds a structure of its own that takes on new life, which seeks to sustain itself in contexts far outside its origin. The production of pathology is itself a production of new life: pathological life seeks to grow and subsist as a living system.
So! One's personality and make-up breaks in a certain direction. If a people are crushed under forces of domination, pathology is simply what you get, as a bi-product of this compression. Pathology seems to mount from increasing emotional instabilities which are not conducive to daily living within the conventional architecture of a living system. Pathology is the state of being for an individual that is failing to be absorbed into a social system, an overarching community, or who is at least fitted into an artificial social arrangement by force, for the purposes of extracting that person's energy.
Why do we say this? We tend to only say someone's behavior is pathological when they seek help, or profess that they are unhappy, a sentiment that is almost always manifested in social relations. At the extreme end of this qualification, a person could be said to be pathological if they are attacking or even destroying surrounding social relations and structures. A person's pathological style is pathological in the sense that their mode of neurological functioning begins to work against their daily social interactions; their mode of functioning frustrates their desires and ends, or the desires and ends of others.
But we should also qualify this term "pathological." It is important to remember that "pathology" itself is a relative term. Something is pathological in relation to what? A part is pathological in relation to what whole? A disease is a pathological agent as far as a living organism is concerned, but you can bet that that virus or bacteria instigating the disease is having a blast.
In the same way, the powerful, the guardians of convention, and all of their sympathizers regard these growing masses of the mentally ill as "pathological." And in a sense it is true, as far as the capitalist system is concerned. But just as well, for the "pathological" it seems that this society they are a part of is itself the problem, the disease, and herein lies a deeper truth.
The sense I've been using the term "pathological" thus far is taken from a position of power: to be pathological in the sense that you no longer fit into a given social system is a questionable proposition if that social system itself could be construed to be pathological. And to further complicate things, to be pathological in one way could be revolutionary in another - perhaps you fail to fit into a traditional paradigm, but your creative tendencies could benefit a wholly new one. Another type of pathology is reactionary and destructive in other contexts: to be a purveyor of violence, deceit, and aggression is harmful to any would-be alternate society, at least if that society plans on being peaceful and functional. And so a pathological system produces both creative and destructive pathological individuals through its operation.
You can imagine that in a fairly neutral setting, what the average human being is looking for, besides subsisting on the land, is relating to his or her fellows, living among community, living autonomously, yet connected to and appreciated by peers, which is all the result of our nature as political animals. That is until you introduce power: concentrated power, deficits in power, and the spectacular violence and instability that is a result of this.
It would be lovely if we could call the concentration of power an anomalous event, but really as far as human history is concerned, it has been the normal progression of our affairs. Because really, human beings have been a smashing success, and there is nothing as self-destructive as total success; any great military theorist will tell you this, or for that matter, any chronicler of the rise and fall of civilizations. And one bi-product to this success, due to the fact that we have no natural predators or mitigating environmental pressures, is the mass concentration of power that we began to see with the first agricultural societies.
There is a disturbing school of thought rising that makes this case with astonishing force, and really I can't find fault with it so far. But as even the reluctant purveyors of this school suggest, it isn't time to throw in the towel until that is the only possible outcome.
We are left with a seemingly intractable problem: that the concentration of power and the destruction it encourages produces further concentrations of power, in the attempt to acquire stability, which from the perspective of the powerless is madness, for the concentration of power - in the quest for system-wide stability - is itself a producer of instability. Given oncoming hard resource limits and anthropogenic climate change, it is in the interest of every human society (and most currently-existing animal and plant species) that this cycle is broken.
And so what could mitigate this coming catastrophe, and produce means of development which could alter this destructive course?
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
The Ecstatic State
The ecstatic state is all well and good when you experience it. We're all striving to experience it all the time, through bits and pieces in food, sex, drugs, exercise, honest work, religious ceremony and ritual, musical performance, literary and philosophical works, works of art, and through business conquest and warmaking (yes even these two). I'm not sure exactly what this state is, beyond this metaphorical white hot center located between life and death. Yes, this is a state one experiences as one pursues life, and as one pursues life one defies death; the birth of something implies the death of another, as nothing is created or destroyed.
Experiencing this ecstasy is a wonderful thing, but in an interconnected social world, it isn't much use if you are the only one experiencing it. You can try to explain it to others and get people excited, but in the end they won't understand you, because understanding requires a subjective experience of something like it. On the contrary, the further out you go, the higher you soar into this ecstasy, the further advanced your alienation from your community becomes, with communication eventually breaking down, which is a very lonely affair. So in conjunction to pursuing intellectual and physical pleasure, you must have it so that others can pursue the same thing, so that it can be shared, and this too is a part of life.
What you have to do, if you get it, is find out how to share it. This involves generating symbols, artifacts, physical rituals and behaviors which point to and conjure up these states of ecstasy to be shared, which requires discipline to ensure that all of these things are effective. But all of this itself has to be carried out in the midst of a social movement which proceeds towards some aim for the purpose of living. The symbols, artifacts, and behaviors are all biproducts generated from this state, for the purpose of sharing and sustaining the state, but they are not the state itself. This distinction accounts for the way in which all great states, all collective experiences, ideas, and movements die.
The original subjective experience is but a moment in time, but all of the symbols, rituals, artifacts, and ideologies that are generated from that experience remain, so that subsequent traditions continue to circulate and exercise those things in increasingly closed circuits, its adherents climbing over each other in a vast game of leapfrog to possess the remaining symbols of power and wealth, its limited shape further carving out deeper ruts to become trapped in.
Not that I have a problem with these closed, traditional circuits. If they are sustainable, if their energy is evenly shared and preserved, they make a fine engine for living, and of course, building ever more complex circuits upon them. But as a given circuit becomes unstable from energy oscillations, or hemorrhages the last of its energy, well, then it is time to break free and see about generating a new one.
Experiencing this ecstasy is a wonderful thing, but in an interconnected social world, it isn't much use if you are the only one experiencing it. You can try to explain it to others and get people excited, but in the end they won't understand you, because understanding requires a subjective experience of something like it. On the contrary, the further out you go, the higher you soar into this ecstasy, the further advanced your alienation from your community becomes, with communication eventually breaking down, which is a very lonely affair. So in conjunction to pursuing intellectual and physical pleasure, you must have it so that others can pursue the same thing, so that it can be shared, and this too is a part of life.
What you have to do, if you get it, is find out how to share it. This involves generating symbols, artifacts, physical rituals and behaviors which point to and conjure up these states of ecstasy to be shared, which requires discipline to ensure that all of these things are effective. But all of this itself has to be carried out in the midst of a social movement which proceeds towards some aim for the purpose of living. The symbols, artifacts, and behaviors are all biproducts generated from this state, for the purpose of sharing and sustaining the state, but they are not the state itself. This distinction accounts for the way in which all great states, all collective experiences, ideas, and movements die.
The original subjective experience is but a moment in time, but all of the symbols, rituals, artifacts, and ideologies that are generated from that experience remain, so that subsequent traditions continue to circulate and exercise those things in increasingly closed circuits, its adherents climbing over each other in a vast game of leapfrog to possess the remaining symbols of power and wealth, its limited shape further carving out deeper ruts to become trapped in.
Not that I have a problem with these closed, traditional circuits. If they are sustainable, if their energy is evenly shared and preserved, they make a fine engine for living, and of course, building ever more complex circuits upon them. But as a given circuit becomes unstable from energy oscillations, or hemorrhages the last of its energy, well, then it is time to break free and see about generating a new one.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Business and Personality Styles
Our dominant business class is best fitted to the impulsive style, but I should qualify this.
There was a time when the dominant businessmen were much more far-sighted. They planned their approach. They built their businesses and products to last. They were still pretty damned ruthless, but they at least had a rational interest and were aware of the need to preserve the economic structures they operated in, and the greater society those structures grew out of.
Now it is well-understood that today's industrialists have become shackled to finance. It isn't only finance that has become dominant, but that the industrial structures themselves have become financialized. This results in an economic milieu where the impulsive and short-sighted thrive. The objective is to accumulate power and wealth as quickly as possible, which is apparent in the behaviors of the most powerful businessmen, the most powerful politicians, as well as the characteristics of mass-produced goods, services, and cultural artifacts, economic policy in general, and foreign policy in general. Corporate assets that haven't yet been outsourced are cannibalized to generate returns. Employees are shed. Old ideas are recycled again and again.
But just because you're impulsive doesn't mean you survive easier in this society. Beyond a given personality gaining ascendancy in a society, closed, fraternal/familial networks are able to capture more and more gains in power, so that plenty of people of all personality styles are left out in the cold, though if you have that impulsive business personality, you're more likely to rise a little higher than your struggling peers. There is a reason that a majority of the most powerful people in the world are white males, though that balance is set to change as well.
Of course, the various personalities are represented in the power structure governing this society, but the personalities most close in frequency to that of the business class - as well as a certain ethnic tribe - are usually the closest to power. To visualize this, think of a plane that contains the spectrum of personalities, and there is a mountain of runaway power towering out of the business/impulsive personality. Or don't! Different modes of thought work for different people.
The most powerful people in the world are functionally sociopaths: they traffic in power and influence, but they don't actually represent anything of lasting substance. They are empty vessels which take on the surrounding personality of the powerful community they are part of. Impulsivity is a perfect trait for this environment. You produce a bright shiny object and get everyone's attention, and then when time passes, and there is opportunity for scrutiny, you pull away and move on to something else before anyone realizes what is going on.
In this environment, a group think arises, with activity centered around the most insistent, urgent, and somewhat talented individuals eagerly pursuing their own narrow aims.
It is important to stress that it isn't impulsivity or business that is absolutely evil; they both have their place in human ecosystems. It is the vast asymmetry in power that they currently enjoy. It is the imbalance.
There was a time when the dominant businessmen were much more far-sighted. They planned their approach. They built their businesses and products to last. They were still pretty damned ruthless, but they at least had a rational interest and were aware of the need to preserve the economic structures they operated in, and the greater society those structures grew out of.
Now it is well-understood that today's industrialists have become shackled to finance. It isn't only finance that has become dominant, but that the industrial structures themselves have become financialized. This results in an economic milieu where the impulsive and short-sighted thrive. The objective is to accumulate power and wealth as quickly as possible, which is apparent in the behaviors of the most powerful businessmen, the most powerful politicians, as well as the characteristics of mass-produced goods, services, and cultural artifacts, economic policy in general, and foreign policy in general. Corporate assets that haven't yet been outsourced are cannibalized to generate returns. Employees are shed. Old ideas are recycled again and again.
But just because you're impulsive doesn't mean you survive easier in this society. Beyond a given personality gaining ascendancy in a society, closed, fraternal/familial networks are able to capture more and more gains in power, so that plenty of people of all personality styles are left out in the cold, though if you have that impulsive business personality, you're more likely to rise a little higher than your struggling peers. There is a reason that a majority of the most powerful people in the world are white males, though that balance is set to change as well.
Of course, the various personalities are represented in the power structure governing this society, but the personalities most close in frequency to that of the business class - as well as a certain ethnic tribe - are usually the closest to power. To visualize this, think of a plane that contains the spectrum of personalities, and there is a mountain of runaway power towering out of the business/impulsive personality. Or don't! Different modes of thought work for different people.
The most powerful people in the world are functionally sociopaths: they traffic in power and influence, but they don't actually represent anything of lasting substance. They are empty vessels which take on the surrounding personality of the powerful community they are part of. Impulsivity is a perfect trait for this environment. You produce a bright shiny object and get everyone's attention, and then when time passes, and there is opportunity for scrutiny, you pull away and move on to something else before anyone realizes what is going on.
In this environment, a group think arises, with activity centered around the most insistent, urgent, and somewhat talented individuals eagerly pursuing their own narrow aims.
It is important to stress that it isn't impulsivity or business that is absolutely evil; they both have their place in human ecosystems. It is the vast asymmetry in power that they currently enjoy. It is the imbalance.
My Rights
I'm not sure that there exists this set of natural rights that Enlightenment philosophers claimed to have found existing prior to our "discovering" them, though it could be I'm misunderstanding their arguments. This is because human rights tend to be guaranteed only when there is a state that is strong and stable enough to guarantee them. Hannah Arendt noted in her discussions on imperialism that as the nation state system broke down on the eve of World War I (bah or was it after?), the unclassified masses, or ethnic groups that failed to be absorbed in a national government were treated worse than nationalized criminals.
It seems the concept of human rights grew out of this modern emergence of mass human comfort and freedom, which was simultaneously tramped on by absolutist monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries. The concept of rights emerged out of the need to address recurring abuse.
So a declaration of a right is this sort of expression of an informal socio-political economy. A right says: well you just crushed me, so you owe me a debt. You are going to promise me the right not to be crushed in the future, and since you screwed up so bad, you're going to guarantee that to everyone else too.
So we have another lesson: if you crush a person and they survive, they're going to come back with demands that compensate doubly for the original injury, as they should. You can't break a man's legs and then say: OK I won't do it again. You have to fix him. And of course promise him that it won't happen again, and maybe his friends if he's socially-minded. Or he'll seek to break YOUR legs, or at least avoid you in the future. That's a simplistic picture of how human morality works. Simplistic, but probably true generally.
It seems the concept of human rights grew out of this modern emergence of mass human comfort and freedom, which was simultaneously tramped on by absolutist monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries. The concept of rights emerged out of the need to address recurring abuse.
So a declaration of a right is this sort of expression of an informal socio-political economy. A right says: well you just crushed me, so you owe me a debt. You are going to promise me the right not to be crushed in the future, and since you screwed up so bad, you're going to guarantee that to everyone else too.
So we have another lesson: if you crush a person and they survive, they're going to come back with demands that compensate doubly for the original injury, as they should. You can't break a man's legs and then say: OK I won't do it again. You have to fix him. And of course promise him that it won't happen again, and maybe his friends if he's socially-minded. Or he'll seek to break YOUR legs, or at least avoid you in the future. That's a simplistic picture of how human morality works. Simplistic, but probably true generally.
Wednesday, August 06, 2014
Mind the Gaps
One of the deepest assumptions marbled within the canon of classical economic thought is best described as a sort of rationalist fantasy that posits that the material world is knowable and mappable, which produces working models and the attendant data which allow us to predict and manipulate the real world. Practical economics then would be an application of this data to craft an efficient and just system for distributing energy in a human system.
Now of course, theoretically, everything could be knowable on an empirical basis - well, maybe, ignoring inherent limitations in our rational systems, and assuming that these limitations can be overcome through finer working models and data sets - but there arises the practical question of whether this theoretical mastery is possible given available energy and an imperfect world in which a large portion of this usable energy is wasted.
Barring a sudden activation threshold in which the secrets of the universe suddenly come pouring forth into our skulls, we are left with precipitous gaps in our knowledge, which shift and expand or contract depending on our confidence and social harmonies. Rational systems do indeed illuminate portions of reality, tracing those deep dark contours with illuminating clusters of interrelating symbols, but there stubbornly remains those gaps, which upon greater scrutiny, drop far below into depths we could only begin to fathom.
The just woman, the just man has great respect for these gaps, and wields her or his rationality with cautious awe and humility. The well-intentioned yet foolhardy woman or man wields rationality with a passion and an intensity, plunging headlong into the abyss with an irreversible direction, to be great, yet to be swallowed by the relentless churn of history. The evil woman, the evil man wields rationality as a weapon, using it to buttress her or his selfish aims, obstructing the yawning gaps that threaten to make a mockery of her or his position.
In the way of the latter example, mainstream economics seeks to legitimate plunder and collective self-destruction through the veneer of a surface rationality. So for example, you see plastic cups, forks, spoons, bags, and whatever else you can imagine in plastic form just about everywhere. Lavish federal subsidies, collective values, economies of scale, human cooperation, and other factors make it so that plastics are incredibly cheap, and the resulting economic incentives make it inevitable that every self-interested business uses them to keep costs low.
Now the value of these plastic products are calculated using all of the familiar economic models, tools which are the product of an underlying set of rational assumptions. But what if we incorporated everything we actually knew about the true collective costs of plastic, and there are costs well beyond which we don't understand yet.
Plastics can persist for quite some time in oceans and even longer in landfills, and there are tons upon tons upon tons of plastics floating in the oceans, photodegrading and breaking down into polymers and other toxic components, which can act as sponges to soak up even more toxic chemicals in the ocean, making their way into the food chain through phytoplankton and other organisms. And then well, you have mass stretches of mysterious dead ocean, and of record species die-offs, phenomena which themselves can have complex causes behind them. And then of course we are eating the seafood, or we are eating land animals which eat the seafood.
So we would have to make the collective decision that we don't want toxic-covered polymers in our food chain, and we would have to calculate the collective medical costs, economic loss in food and even biodiversity, and the clean-up procedures that these effects would require - which is probably impossible, but there are always approximations and mitigations to be done. Calculating these externalities into the costs of plastic - mainstream economics is notoriously contemptuous of externalities - one could imagine the actual prices soaring, with every last business abandoning the material as a result.
The same can be said of fossil fuels. We still use them because they contain so much energy, and because our society is configured for them, they are cheaper than everything else - well, for now. Take into account externalities, and future costs associated with expelling carbon, and well, hah! I could imagine the price soaring to somewhere around infinity, as a joke anyways.
Now, we've slowly become more conscious of these things collectively for the last four decades, but the information and the implications of the information have been suppressed by powerful economic actors every step of the way.
The rational systems then are artificially truncated into limited representations that deliberately produce and legitimate a very selective state of affairs that benefits a small group of powerful people, while the gaps are completely ignored or even demonized. The whole thing is just absolutely incredible. Incomprehensible.
Fundamental behavior patterns seem the most difficult things to change.
Now of course, theoretically, everything could be knowable on an empirical basis - well, maybe, ignoring inherent limitations in our rational systems, and assuming that these limitations can be overcome through finer working models and data sets - but there arises the practical question of whether this theoretical mastery is possible given available energy and an imperfect world in which a large portion of this usable energy is wasted.
Barring a sudden activation threshold in which the secrets of the universe suddenly come pouring forth into our skulls, we are left with precipitous gaps in our knowledge, which shift and expand or contract depending on our confidence and social harmonies. Rational systems do indeed illuminate portions of reality, tracing those deep dark contours with illuminating clusters of interrelating symbols, but there stubbornly remains those gaps, which upon greater scrutiny, drop far below into depths we could only begin to fathom.
The just woman, the just man has great respect for these gaps, and wields her or his rationality with cautious awe and humility. The well-intentioned yet foolhardy woman or man wields rationality with a passion and an intensity, plunging headlong into the abyss with an irreversible direction, to be great, yet to be swallowed by the relentless churn of history. The evil woman, the evil man wields rationality as a weapon, using it to buttress her or his selfish aims, obstructing the yawning gaps that threaten to make a mockery of her or his position.
In the way of the latter example, mainstream economics seeks to legitimate plunder and collective self-destruction through the veneer of a surface rationality. So for example, you see plastic cups, forks, spoons, bags, and whatever else you can imagine in plastic form just about everywhere. Lavish federal subsidies, collective values, economies of scale, human cooperation, and other factors make it so that plastics are incredibly cheap, and the resulting economic incentives make it inevitable that every self-interested business uses them to keep costs low.
Now the value of these plastic products are calculated using all of the familiar economic models, tools which are the product of an underlying set of rational assumptions. But what if we incorporated everything we actually knew about the true collective costs of plastic, and there are costs well beyond which we don't understand yet.
Plastics can persist for quite some time in oceans and even longer in landfills, and there are tons upon tons upon tons of plastics floating in the oceans, photodegrading and breaking down into polymers and other toxic components, which can act as sponges to soak up even more toxic chemicals in the ocean, making their way into the food chain through phytoplankton and other organisms. And then well, you have mass stretches of mysterious dead ocean, and of record species die-offs, phenomena which themselves can have complex causes behind them. And then of course we are eating the seafood, or we are eating land animals which eat the seafood.
So we would have to make the collective decision that we don't want toxic-covered polymers in our food chain, and we would have to calculate the collective medical costs, economic loss in food and even biodiversity, and the clean-up procedures that these effects would require - which is probably impossible, but there are always approximations and mitigations to be done. Calculating these externalities into the costs of plastic - mainstream economics is notoriously contemptuous of externalities - one could imagine the actual prices soaring, with every last business abandoning the material as a result.
The same can be said of fossil fuels. We still use them because they contain so much energy, and because our society is configured for them, they are cheaper than everything else - well, for now. Take into account externalities, and future costs associated with expelling carbon, and well, hah! I could imagine the price soaring to somewhere around infinity, as a joke anyways.
Now, we've slowly become more conscious of these things collectively for the last four decades, but the information and the implications of the information have been suppressed by powerful economic actors every step of the way.
The rational systems then are artificially truncated into limited representations that deliberately produce and legitimate a very selective state of affairs that benefits a small group of powerful people, while the gaps are completely ignored or even demonized. The whole thing is just absolutely incredible. Incomprehensible.
Fundamental behavior patterns seem the most difficult things to change.
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