Thursday, October 30, 2014
Maybe You Should Get That Looked At
Even NASA and the WWF are having their "oh shit" moments. No one seems to be talking about this much though. Well, not on the TV at least.
What a Bargain
Yes!
I've written about this unacknowledged reality and what might be done about it - at least in a limited way in one's daily life. The linked account is much more rigorous a picture than what I've attempted, and important to understand if one is interested in the power relations and moral dimensions of the economic system, which are often airbrushed away in official accounts and propaganda.
I've written about this unacknowledged reality and what might be done about it - at least in a limited way in one's daily life. The linked account is much more rigorous a picture than what I've attempted, and important to understand if one is interested in the power relations and moral dimensions of the economic system, which are often airbrushed away in official accounts and propaganda.
Banal Evil
Excellent! Apologies in advance, but this post won't read well unless you dive into the arguments. Anyways:
One thing that strikes me about the ongoing Eichmann debate is the underlying array of sensibilities that form the backdrop for the arguments themselves. For Arendt's critics, it is better if the Holocaust is understood as a sort of distinct, historical horror with clearly delineated villains and victims, almost like a well-developed theatrical play, which occupies a safe distance in time and space from one's own contemporary society. Eichmann was an evil, evil monstrous monster, and don't you dare suggest otherwise!
I don't wish to be misunderstood: the Holocaust was a historically distinct event with horrific dimensions, and there certainly was a perpetrator and a victim. Eichmann was definitely a monster, as the assorted facts seem to imply. However the driving impulse to reify in one's mind this historical set of relationships as a distant storm to be safely studied betrays a certain psychological disposition, to me anyways.
Arendt's critics wish to say: Eichmann and the Nazis were evil, and don't you dare criticize the victim Jews - even if they were collaborators - for if you doubt the cartoon Nazi evil just a smidge, and question the absolute innocence of the Jewish victim archetype, then perhaps you are abetting this very evil hmm? If you begin to muddy the actors in this particular delineated historical event, it begins to dissolve the illusion of historical isolation, unleashing those ghastly logical inquisitions to other events and social structures. What sorts of shadows begin to rise from our own social mechanisms and institutions when we look too closely?
Better that the Holocaust remains hermetically sealed and studied from afar. Perhaps we shouldn't be speaking so ill of these social climbers and careerists, these Eichmanns, or better, the very nature of the social ladder itself. After all, I have a ladder to climb of my own! From the top of which I can safely study history of course.
What Arendts' defenders seem to be getting at - and the greater scuffle over the concept of the "banality of evil" suggests this as well - is that this great monstrous evil was perpetrated through startlingly banal social mechanisms, banal social mechanisms that can be observed in...say...a polite society such as ours. There is an impulse that says: "woah woah, now there was something happening there that concerns us now, and maybe we should address it."
There is an energetic desire to dive into the historical account, to get the hands dirty and attempt to understand it in relation to one's own time; there is an awareness that this cycle could very well repeat itself in some shape or form, and that we need to be a bit more rigorous when it comes to evaluating the underpinnings and foundations of modern society.
I'm aware that all of this isn't entirely fair. I don't personally know any of these people and can't claim to understand all of the competing motivations. However, I can't help but scratch the old chin.
One thing that strikes me about the ongoing Eichmann debate is the underlying array of sensibilities that form the backdrop for the arguments themselves. For Arendt's critics, it is better if the Holocaust is understood as a sort of distinct, historical horror with clearly delineated villains and victims, almost like a well-developed theatrical play, which occupies a safe distance in time and space from one's own contemporary society. Eichmann was an evil, evil monstrous monster, and don't you dare suggest otherwise!
I don't wish to be misunderstood: the Holocaust was a historically distinct event with horrific dimensions, and there certainly was a perpetrator and a victim. Eichmann was definitely a monster, as the assorted facts seem to imply. However the driving impulse to reify in one's mind this historical set of relationships as a distant storm to be safely studied betrays a certain psychological disposition, to me anyways.
Arendt's critics wish to say: Eichmann and the Nazis were evil, and don't you dare criticize the victim Jews - even if they were collaborators - for if you doubt the cartoon Nazi evil just a smidge, and question the absolute innocence of the Jewish victim archetype, then perhaps you are abetting this very evil hmm? If you begin to muddy the actors in this particular delineated historical event, it begins to dissolve the illusion of historical isolation, unleashing those ghastly logical inquisitions to other events and social structures. What sorts of shadows begin to rise from our own social mechanisms and institutions when we look too closely?
Better that the Holocaust remains hermetically sealed and studied from afar. Perhaps we shouldn't be speaking so ill of these social climbers and careerists, these Eichmanns, or better, the very nature of the social ladder itself. After all, I have a ladder to climb of my own! From the top of which I can safely study history of course.
What Arendts' defenders seem to be getting at - and the greater scuffle over the concept of the "banality of evil" suggests this as well - is that this great monstrous evil was perpetrated through startlingly banal social mechanisms, banal social mechanisms that can be observed in...say...a polite society such as ours. There is an impulse that says: "woah woah, now there was something happening there that concerns us now, and maybe we should address it."
There is an energetic desire to dive into the historical account, to get the hands dirty and attempt to understand it in relation to one's own time; there is an awareness that this cycle could very well repeat itself in some shape or form, and that we need to be a bit more rigorous when it comes to evaluating the underpinnings and foundations of modern society.
I'm aware that all of this isn't entirely fair. I don't personally know any of these people and can't claim to understand all of the competing motivations. However, I can't help but scratch the old chin.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Thursday Night Ant Kingdom Pt. 1
Something curious happened the other night. Well curious things usually happen anyways when you're on acid. Acid is a great method to occasionally give the old blinders a good wipe down, so to speak. You sort of temporarily wipe out those conceptual heuristics and compression valves that characterize the human experience, and you see things as they are through your visual systems very vividly.
Of course taking acid feels a bit like cheating. You're supposed to use spiritual discipline to eventually get to this point, which produces a more stable mode of observation, and for many the psychedelic experience is a bit overwhelming and you don't get to learn as much as you should, or you just have fun with all the pretty colors and want to take more and more the next time and it can actually alter your brain chemistry permanently if you blow yourself out, so I've heard.
But anyways, this psychedelic session happened to coincide with a particularly nasty infestation of ants. There were a lot of people coming in and out of the house and someone kept cooking with honey, and essentially leaving the jar a dripping mess when it was put back up in the pantry.
Of course I was beginning to peak and I had to use the restroom, and was struck with horror as I surveyed the state of the kitchen. The ants were literally everywhere (this wasn't exaggerated by the psychedelics); they had taken over many surfaces of the kitchen, and a vast majority of them were entering through a crack in the bathroom, where they would congregate on the bathroom floor before streaming up the side of the pantry. Someone had placed a rug next to their main trail so people could step over it and just use the restroom and leave, perhaps in the hope that the ants would just leave.
It turns out that ants love honey. Well, of course. The central attraction was a pool of spilled honey in the pantry that they were swarming, proceeding to surround it and lap at its edges. They'd go back and forth to drink honey and then congregate down on the bathroom floor with what looked like a party, before returning to the bathroom crack.
This was a learning event that took a contrast of extremes. Usually we have to deal with the occasional break-out of these common brown ants - oftentimes in the summer - and we are taught to, you know, swipe em into the sink with a sponge or spray a bunch of Raid or whatnot.
All of these things horrified me, but there was always someone else who wanted to take care of it. No I guess you can't just let the ants do their thing and leave, so the story goes, or they will slowly take over and be a constant presence. The common middle class suburbanite sensibility is that of biophobia and the constant fear of any sort of expression of nature within the house without a human genesis, and the creeping suspicion that an unauthorized expression of nature will soon become total and all-consuming without an intervention.
Here I was living in a house in which the biophobia was less pronounced, and of course no one wanted to kill all these ants, but someone had to do something, as the infestation was extreme. It was too painful for me to simply wipe the ants away, so I had to try a few things first.
Immediately noticeable was the fact that the ants seemed primarily interested in the honey. The major point of congregation was the puddle in the pantry, while there were a few parties around various drips on the floor, and then scattered groups scouring the kitchen, and scouts in the furthest areas. However the ants didn't seem to be interested in much else.
Well I eventually found that if you blew air on the ants congregating around the honey puddle, they would sense something was wrong, and they would turn away from the honey and run wildly around the pantry shelf. If you kept blowing, you could literally see the great mass of them continue back down their pheromone trail, and you could see the signal pass: a wave would move down the line and the ants coming up the shelf would turn with the rest coming down and the entire direction of the flow would reverse in an orderly line.
This was the majority of the population. There was a minority which actually stuck around the honey puddle, braving whatever threat there was to continue to get intoxicated or what have you. And there was something else: the ant flow would oscillate. It would flee from the sudden wind kicking up, and then after a few seconds, the flow would move back up the line and the ants would return to see whether the threat remained, and whether the honey puddle was still viable. I had to keep blowing to keep the flow on the wane, and I would clean the puddle of honey little by little as the ants cleared out until there was nothing left. I also used this method to clean the drops across the floor.
Over time, miraculously, the ant infestation thinned out substantially. There was no honey left, and the ants had better places to be and better things to do with their time. Turns out that they weren't a relentless menace that sought conquest of the house. The next morning there would be virtually no ants left in the house, save a few stragglers, and a few junkies making sure there wasn't any honey left. Now different ants facing different conditions in different regions may have behaved very differently, and then considerations have to be made for dangerous species.
It also depends on what the ants are after. They are known for destroying certain food supplies, but if you remove the supply quick enough and have the rest thoroughly sealed, it seems you can get rid of them without violence.
There are some things to take away from this episode, which I will get to next.
Of course taking acid feels a bit like cheating. You're supposed to use spiritual discipline to eventually get to this point, which produces a more stable mode of observation, and for many the psychedelic experience is a bit overwhelming and you don't get to learn as much as you should, or you just have fun with all the pretty colors and want to take more and more the next time and it can actually alter your brain chemistry permanently if you blow yourself out, so I've heard.
But anyways, this psychedelic session happened to coincide with a particularly nasty infestation of ants. There were a lot of people coming in and out of the house and someone kept cooking with honey, and essentially leaving the jar a dripping mess when it was put back up in the pantry.
Of course I was beginning to peak and I had to use the restroom, and was struck with horror as I surveyed the state of the kitchen. The ants were literally everywhere (this wasn't exaggerated by the psychedelics); they had taken over many surfaces of the kitchen, and a vast majority of them were entering through a crack in the bathroom, where they would congregate on the bathroom floor before streaming up the side of the pantry. Someone had placed a rug next to their main trail so people could step over it and just use the restroom and leave, perhaps in the hope that the ants would just leave.
It turns out that ants love honey. Well, of course. The central attraction was a pool of spilled honey in the pantry that they were swarming, proceeding to surround it and lap at its edges. They'd go back and forth to drink honey and then congregate down on the bathroom floor with what looked like a party, before returning to the bathroom crack.
This was a learning event that took a contrast of extremes. Usually we have to deal with the occasional break-out of these common brown ants - oftentimes in the summer - and we are taught to, you know, swipe em into the sink with a sponge or spray a bunch of Raid or whatnot.
All of these things horrified me, but there was always someone else who wanted to take care of it. No I guess you can't just let the ants do their thing and leave, so the story goes, or they will slowly take over and be a constant presence. The common middle class suburbanite sensibility is that of biophobia and the constant fear of any sort of expression of nature within the house without a human genesis, and the creeping suspicion that an unauthorized expression of nature will soon become total and all-consuming without an intervention.
Here I was living in a house in which the biophobia was less pronounced, and of course no one wanted to kill all these ants, but someone had to do something, as the infestation was extreme. It was too painful for me to simply wipe the ants away, so I had to try a few things first.
Immediately noticeable was the fact that the ants seemed primarily interested in the honey. The major point of congregation was the puddle in the pantry, while there were a few parties around various drips on the floor, and then scattered groups scouring the kitchen, and scouts in the furthest areas. However the ants didn't seem to be interested in much else.
Well I eventually found that if you blew air on the ants congregating around the honey puddle, they would sense something was wrong, and they would turn away from the honey and run wildly around the pantry shelf. If you kept blowing, you could literally see the great mass of them continue back down their pheromone trail, and you could see the signal pass: a wave would move down the line and the ants coming up the shelf would turn with the rest coming down and the entire direction of the flow would reverse in an orderly line.
This was the majority of the population. There was a minority which actually stuck around the honey puddle, braving whatever threat there was to continue to get intoxicated or what have you. And there was something else: the ant flow would oscillate. It would flee from the sudden wind kicking up, and then after a few seconds, the flow would move back up the line and the ants would return to see whether the threat remained, and whether the honey puddle was still viable. I had to keep blowing to keep the flow on the wane, and I would clean the puddle of honey little by little as the ants cleared out until there was nothing left. I also used this method to clean the drops across the floor.
Over time, miraculously, the ant infestation thinned out substantially. There was no honey left, and the ants had better places to be and better things to do with their time. Turns out that they weren't a relentless menace that sought conquest of the house. The next morning there would be virtually no ants left in the house, save a few stragglers, and a few junkies making sure there wasn't any honey left. Now different ants facing different conditions in different regions may have behaved very differently, and then considerations have to be made for dangerous species.
It also depends on what the ants are after. They are known for destroying certain food supplies, but if you remove the supply quick enough and have the rest thoroughly sealed, it seems you can get rid of them without violence.
There are some things to take away from this episode, which I will get to next.
Peaked
There was this amusing episode of Rick and Morty in which the inhabitants of Pluto were over-mining their planet and the planet was actually shrinking, so the task of the ruling elite was to find a figurehead "expert" to reassure everyone that everything was fine and that the planet wasn't actually shrinking. Certainly a simplification, but a simplification that turned out to be more prescient than at first glance.
On Political Fear
There is a guy out here that is basically flipping out and having these complex paranoid delusions about secret agents that are out to get him. Don't want to get too involved in it, but it is unsettling to say the least. Paranoid delusions can be pretty scary, because they seem very real to the person suffering them, and in the right contexts they can be difficult to separate from reality, even from the perspective of an outsider, since oftentimes they are based off of interrelated nuggets of truth in the first place. I can run through a quick scenario to show what I mean.
Let's say you have a community of activists, and you introduce the specter of government agent infiltration. These activists are doing something the government doesn't like, and there is a real fear that the government will try to scuttle these efforts. Now you get to thinking: well, there is a history of infiltration in which various government agencies have used downright heinous and diabolical methods of psychological warfare, political fear and terror, and violence to disrupt activist networks, and this is all empirically verifiable.
Today you can point to a variety of cases in which whisteblowers have been prosecuted, activists (even peaceful and passive ones) have been put on terror lists, and there have even been charismatic individuals who have been chased to the ends of the earth and destroyed - Edward Snowden got away for now but Chelsea Manning is in prison and Aaron Swartz killed himself from the pressure. Plus there is at least one case I know of where people simply expressing political opinions and agitating had their house stormed by SWAT or some such company of storm trooper.
Now of course all of this is always happening, but activists still have to do their thing. So they do their thing with this fear in the back of their minds that there could be agents among them, or that the hammer could come down at any minute. These agent provocateurs know cutting edge techniques in psychological warfare, and there are things that can be done to manipulate this fear and infiltrate and fragment activist networks and the activists know this.
So what if you have one of these activist people who is susceptible to paranoid delusion? This can cause very serious problems. Who is genuine and who is an agent? Can agents blur these lines between the genuine and false? How far can this conspiracy expand? How sophisticated are governments now? What if governments can build entire activist ecosystems to suck activists in and disrupt their activities? What if everyone you meet is a potential agent? How do you neutralize a delusion that has a basis in reality without drawing slippery arbitrary lines?
And so the paranoid mind starts from the premise that there is a threat present, and builds its arguments off of that premise. With such a premise, a paranoiac can tell him or herself pretty much anything, so long as the interrelated facts strung together are coherent and provide a plausible explanation for the threat. The more agitation, the more baroque and malevolent the paranoid delusion.
It is fear that is the common denominator in all of this. Fear transforms the mind into a police state in miniature, putting the brain's powerful logical and symbolic systems to task to build a profile of the threat and develop means of neutralization. Every new source of information could be connected to the threat. No unknown could be too suspicious. As the paranoiac seeks to preserve his or her security, he or she generalizes protocols of threat neutralization, provoking and agitating those whom neutralization is attempted on, which thereby feeds the fear even more; the police state makes replicas of itself, which situate themselves into each other and interface. This can cause endless divisions if it is allowed to run away. Social networks bifurcate along those sympathetic and antipathic to the paranoiac, generating new paranoiacs, who inspire further bifurcations.
The fear creates its own reality. It alters the social landscape on which one interacts, or the social logic with which one proceeds to interact with others. What is so convenient for the police state and its little miniatures is the fact that fear, when directed towards its object, can induce sympathetic behavior in the object itself. If one is feared, one fears the source of fear in turn, as the corollary to fear is the elimination of the object of fear. Fear produces interlocking relationships which amplify each other.
The only way to solve this problem is really quite simple and very demanding at the same time: the fear has to be ignored. Activists have to live with constant threat, with the possibility that there are agents present. There are of course precautions that many activist practitioners have learned, some of them very sophisticated and well-worn over old traditions of political dissidence, but a certain amount of risk has to be accepted as well. Easier said than done of course. The more you fear disintegration or fragmentation, prison or death, and the more you do to attempt to prevent those outcomes, past a certain point of practicality and effective action, the further you tend to advance towards just those ends.
Of course, the paranoid types have trouble with just this sort of thing and I guess that's the point. Social ostracization and isolation can produce unstable modes of thought in which the brain is always on alert. It really isn't clear what comes first: the fearful modes of thought and abnormal functioning and behaviors, or the isolation and discord which feed them and are fed by them, though of course the answer is usually that they grow together. And then if the mind is already in this fearful state, it tends to respond more faithfully to the logic of fear, spreading the logic in turn.
This could be part of the reason that totalitarian governments only form amidst atomized populations, or why they seek to create them as they consolidate power, as Hannah Arendt observed. Totalitarian governments practically run on fear and terror, to put it crudely.
Admittedly, the more something is in danger of disintegrating, the more it fears. Our security state apparatus is gradually transforming into a totalitarian entity because it is protecting something that is in danger of disintegration, because that something is essentially an abomination. The towering and obscene concentration of material power that is global capital is highly unstable and it knows it. Further, down to the individual paranoiac, the loss of social support is comparable to a form of death in a complex society in which the division of labor has become so essential.
Things continue to come apart, and if you wish to preserve what once was but will never be again, well fine. Have fun. Preservation is still possible, but it isn't going to look like anything we're used to. So ah, go with the flow. One gazes on and blinks. Interesting times, needless to say.
Let's say you have a community of activists, and you introduce the specter of government agent infiltration. These activists are doing something the government doesn't like, and there is a real fear that the government will try to scuttle these efforts. Now you get to thinking: well, there is a history of infiltration in which various government agencies have used downright heinous and diabolical methods of psychological warfare, political fear and terror, and violence to disrupt activist networks, and this is all empirically verifiable.
Today you can point to a variety of cases in which whisteblowers have been prosecuted, activists (even peaceful and passive ones) have been put on terror lists, and there have even been charismatic individuals who have been chased to the ends of the earth and destroyed - Edward Snowden got away for now but Chelsea Manning is in prison and Aaron Swartz killed himself from the pressure. Plus there is at least one case I know of where people simply expressing political opinions and agitating had their house stormed by SWAT or some such company of storm trooper.
Now of course all of this is always happening, but activists still have to do their thing. So they do their thing with this fear in the back of their minds that there could be agents among them, or that the hammer could come down at any minute. These agent provocateurs know cutting edge techniques in psychological warfare, and there are things that can be done to manipulate this fear and infiltrate and fragment activist networks and the activists know this.
So what if you have one of these activist people who is susceptible to paranoid delusion? This can cause very serious problems. Who is genuine and who is an agent? Can agents blur these lines between the genuine and false? How far can this conspiracy expand? How sophisticated are governments now? What if governments can build entire activist ecosystems to suck activists in and disrupt their activities? What if everyone you meet is a potential agent? How do you neutralize a delusion that has a basis in reality without drawing slippery arbitrary lines?
And so the paranoid mind starts from the premise that there is a threat present, and builds its arguments off of that premise. With such a premise, a paranoiac can tell him or herself pretty much anything, so long as the interrelated facts strung together are coherent and provide a plausible explanation for the threat. The more agitation, the more baroque and malevolent the paranoid delusion.
It is fear that is the common denominator in all of this. Fear transforms the mind into a police state in miniature, putting the brain's powerful logical and symbolic systems to task to build a profile of the threat and develop means of neutralization. Every new source of information could be connected to the threat. No unknown could be too suspicious. As the paranoiac seeks to preserve his or her security, he or she generalizes protocols of threat neutralization, provoking and agitating those whom neutralization is attempted on, which thereby feeds the fear even more; the police state makes replicas of itself, which situate themselves into each other and interface. This can cause endless divisions if it is allowed to run away. Social networks bifurcate along those sympathetic and antipathic to the paranoiac, generating new paranoiacs, who inspire further bifurcations.
The fear creates its own reality. It alters the social landscape on which one interacts, or the social logic with which one proceeds to interact with others. What is so convenient for the police state and its little miniatures is the fact that fear, when directed towards its object, can induce sympathetic behavior in the object itself. If one is feared, one fears the source of fear in turn, as the corollary to fear is the elimination of the object of fear. Fear produces interlocking relationships which amplify each other.
The only way to solve this problem is really quite simple and very demanding at the same time: the fear has to be ignored. Activists have to live with constant threat, with the possibility that there are agents present. There are of course precautions that many activist practitioners have learned, some of them very sophisticated and well-worn over old traditions of political dissidence, but a certain amount of risk has to be accepted as well. Easier said than done of course. The more you fear disintegration or fragmentation, prison or death, and the more you do to attempt to prevent those outcomes, past a certain point of practicality and effective action, the further you tend to advance towards just those ends.
Of course, the paranoid types have trouble with just this sort of thing and I guess that's the point. Social ostracization and isolation can produce unstable modes of thought in which the brain is always on alert. It really isn't clear what comes first: the fearful modes of thought and abnormal functioning and behaviors, or the isolation and discord which feed them and are fed by them, though of course the answer is usually that they grow together. And then if the mind is already in this fearful state, it tends to respond more faithfully to the logic of fear, spreading the logic in turn.
This could be part of the reason that totalitarian governments only form amidst atomized populations, or why they seek to create them as they consolidate power, as Hannah Arendt observed. Totalitarian governments practically run on fear and terror, to put it crudely.
Admittedly, the more something is in danger of disintegrating, the more it fears. Our security state apparatus is gradually transforming into a totalitarian entity because it is protecting something that is in danger of disintegration, because that something is essentially an abomination. The towering and obscene concentration of material power that is global capital is highly unstable and it knows it. Further, down to the individual paranoiac, the loss of social support is comparable to a form of death in a complex society in which the division of labor has become so essential.
Things continue to come apart, and if you wish to preserve what once was but will never be again, well fine. Have fun. Preservation is still possible, but it isn't going to look like anything we're used to. So ah, go with the flow. One gazes on and blinks. Interesting times, needless to say.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Get That Ego Outta Here (?)
When doing philosophy, I do try very hard to keep my ego out of the final analysis. This is very hard to do; in the end you just have to be mindful of your own projection, and sort of extrapolate a world around that projection as if you hadn't existed.
Just talking about many concepts, systems of thought, and modes of administration can provoke a reaction without you thinking about it. I and many others have been excluded from a nominally "capitalist" system (and even this isn't entirely true) so the first reaction is a sort of "ew gross" or even a "youch," as if you've been zapped and can't help but resent that bare wire just a little bit.
So the ideology that forms from this experience is going to have this sort of "youch" affectation built into it. I happen to think that these provincial modes of thought, though gratifying to a wounded ego, are not necessarily productive or useful unless you are trying to gratify tons of egos, which is always a dangerous proposition, though you can sure get some quick and powerful results! Though these results will most likely be perishable. So I'm going to try to counteract that by saying to myself, well OK so this system formed out of processes thousands of years old and has developed in a direction that is pretty difficult for any one person, organization, or even state or nation to control. However there remains the fact that something is going wrong, and that we should collectively be doing something to fix it.
Which is still a response that is peculiar to the way that I think. And maybe that is OK. The mere fact that one is writing and thinking necessitates that one lives amongst human relations and interests. One necessarily has the desire to help, to do good, however daunting the task seems as a whole. So you have it that that an ego looks out upon the world and sees other egos in pain and says to itself: how to reverse this state of affairs? Or at least assuage the myriad problems?
We can complicate this problem by acknowledging that there are many ideas of what the ego actually is: there is a simpler conception that sees the ego as simply the continuous and somewhat circumscribed entity that experiences, or the psychoanalytic conception that sees the ego as a distinct mechanism in a causal relationship with other mechanisms like the superego and the id, or the conception of the ego or self as a distinct object that can be held in conscious attention - who you think you are, or finally, the ego or self as this distinct, lasting entity, this sort of distinct presence.
And then perhaps each conception can tell us something independently. But for our purposes let's just say the ego is whatever is thinking and experiencing as a distinct subject.
Anyways, at the risk of contradicting what I wrote a little earlier, perhaps it is better to let go of the idea that one can be completely free of one's own subjectivity. We have this curious cultural tendency to shrink from taking a position of any kind, perhaps attributable to being steeped in an individualist culture for so long; one gets in the habit of tucking in one's elbows, so to speak, or attempting to brandish the shield of "objectivity" in as prominent a position as possible to ward off all of those nasty attacks that are often directed at those that think differently, or better yet, are of a different opinion.
Of course the attempt at objectivity can be useful in some disciplines (I'm thinking of the hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics, and there is even some fuziness within those; good) and it tends to make much more rigorous a given body of thought, but we do also have to acknowledge that we are a certain species at a certain historical position which sees the world in a certain way. There are some basic fundamentals we can get down, such as "water is wet" and whatnot if we can all agree on certain definitions and semantic relations, but many of our other conjectures oscillate through various stages of stability and instability, but I've gone way off the path now.
I'm going to twist this mobius strip a little further and suggest that maybe I'm not contradicting myself after all. It isn't a terrible idea to try one's level best to account for as many facts as possible, across a variety of perspectives, and to attempt to smother one's ego to understand as clearly as possible this greater reality. However one necessarily exists in relation to a given historical period, and by implication, to one's own ego. The impulse to smother one's ego is an act of ego; one is still altering one's extension in space, is one not? Besides, more and more people hear the word "capitalism" and get a little "yick" feeling in the stomach, and perhaps that is a good thing.
Shit smells bad and we don't like how it looks. Living long enough with the fact that it is probably dangerous to-reconsume or even live in proximity to has taught us instinctually to stay away from it.
Capitalism requires unlimited growth to function correctly (yes, yes perfect free markets establish equilibria and blah, but we are human beings remember) and perhaps we should be doing away with unlimited growth. Good then! Let capitalism "stink" to our egos and let's be done with it. It had a great run.
A good reaction, but to get my previous point home, the "yick," the "yuck," the "ew gross" and the "youch" are useful sentiments but let's not get too hung up on them. The communists hated the guts of the capitalist pigs and then it got them in an existential game of antagonism - and I know this isn't entirely fair, the US empire was going to hurumph-against and eventually try to squash whatever it didn't like.
But for all practical purposes, establishing oneself in opposition to something ideological necessarily transforms oneself into the mirror image of that ideological object of hate; one beckons the forces of mimesis and antagonism. A truly revolutionary ideology turns away from the object of hate - perhaps with a little pity - as if it is an old beached ship sinking into the mud. A revolutionary ideology seeks to live above all else, and on its own terms.
Just talking about many concepts, systems of thought, and modes of administration can provoke a reaction without you thinking about it. I and many others have been excluded from a nominally "capitalist" system (and even this isn't entirely true) so the first reaction is a sort of "ew gross" or even a "youch," as if you've been zapped and can't help but resent that bare wire just a little bit.
So the ideology that forms from this experience is going to have this sort of "youch" affectation built into it. I happen to think that these provincial modes of thought, though gratifying to a wounded ego, are not necessarily productive or useful unless you are trying to gratify tons of egos, which is always a dangerous proposition, though you can sure get some quick and powerful results! Though these results will most likely be perishable. So I'm going to try to counteract that by saying to myself, well OK so this system formed out of processes thousands of years old and has developed in a direction that is pretty difficult for any one person, organization, or even state or nation to control. However there remains the fact that something is going wrong, and that we should collectively be doing something to fix it.
Which is still a response that is peculiar to the way that I think. And maybe that is OK. The mere fact that one is writing and thinking necessitates that one lives amongst human relations and interests. One necessarily has the desire to help, to do good, however daunting the task seems as a whole. So you have it that that an ego looks out upon the world and sees other egos in pain and says to itself: how to reverse this state of affairs? Or at least assuage the myriad problems?
We can complicate this problem by acknowledging that there are many ideas of what the ego actually is: there is a simpler conception that sees the ego as simply the continuous and somewhat circumscribed entity that experiences, or the psychoanalytic conception that sees the ego as a distinct mechanism in a causal relationship with other mechanisms like the superego and the id, or the conception of the ego or self as a distinct object that can be held in conscious attention - who you think you are, or finally, the ego or self as this distinct, lasting entity, this sort of distinct presence.
And then perhaps each conception can tell us something independently. But for our purposes let's just say the ego is whatever is thinking and experiencing as a distinct subject.
Anyways, at the risk of contradicting what I wrote a little earlier, perhaps it is better to let go of the idea that one can be completely free of one's own subjectivity. We have this curious cultural tendency to shrink from taking a position of any kind, perhaps attributable to being steeped in an individualist culture for so long; one gets in the habit of tucking in one's elbows, so to speak, or attempting to brandish the shield of "objectivity" in as prominent a position as possible to ward off all of those nasty attacks that are often directed at those that think differently, or better yet, are of a different opinion.
Of course the attempt at objectivity can be useful in some disciplines (I'm thinking of the hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics, and there is even some fuziness within those; good) and it tends to make much more rigorous a given body of thought, but we do also have to acknowledge that we are a certain species at a certain historical position which sees the world in a certain way. There are some basic fundamentals we can get down, such as "water is wet" and whatnot if we can all agree on certain definitions and semantic relations, but many of our other conjectures oscillate through various stages of stability and instability, but I've gone way off the path now.
I'm going to twist this mobius strip a little further and suggest that maybe I'm not contradicting myself after all. It isn't a terrible idea to try one's level best to account for as many facts as possible, across a variety of perspectives, and to attempt to smother one's ego to understand as clearly as possible this greater reality. However one necessarily exists in relation to a given historical period, and by implication, to one's own ego. The impulse to smother one's ego is an act of ego; one is still altering one's extension in space, is one not? Besides, more and more people hear the word "capitalism" and get a little "yick" feeling in the stomach, and perhaps that is a good thing.
Shit smells bad and we don't like how it looks. Living long enough with the fact that it is probably dangerous to-reconsume or even live in proximity to has taught us instinctually to stay away from it.
Capitalism requires unlimited growth to function correctly (yes, yes perfect free markets establish equilibria and blah, but we are human beings remember) and perhaps we should be doing away with unlimited growth. Good then! Let capitalism "stink" to our egos and let's be done with it. It had a great run.
A good reaction, but to get my previous point home, the "yick," the "yuck," the "ew gross" and the "youch" are useful sentiments but let's not get too hung up on them. The communists hated the guts of the capitalist pigs and then it got them in an existential game of antagonism - and I know this isn't entirely fair, the US empire was going to hurumph-against and eventually try to squash whatever it didn't like.
But for all practical purposes, establishing oneself in opposition to something ideological necessarily transforms oneself into the mirror image of that ideological object of hate; one beckons the forces of mimesis and antagonism. A truly revolutionary ideology turns away from the object of hate - perhaps with a little pity - as if it is an old beached ship sinking into the mud. A revolutionary ideology seeks to live above all else, and on its own terms.
Social Knowledge
Is social knowledge imparted, or learned? Well of course it is a little bit of both: in stable times it will more closely resemble that which is imparted, in unstable times it will more closely resemble what is learned, and so on across the spectrum. Imparted knowledge has the advantage of being tried and true over a variety of situations, though it certainly becomes less effective as the social milieu changes.
For me the imparted social knowledge of our era pretty much went right over my head. The social knowledge of our era says to be cruel and competitive, and considering certain narrow short-term goals, this is sensible advice if you are still committed to certain ideals and ambitions, as an old set of ideals and ambitions is quickly becoming whittled down through forces of social disintegration, and if you want wealth and power, or even a comfortable life, you must fight tooth and nail with the rest of the poor schmucks struggling over the remaining scraps.
This attitude is generally transmitted through the family, and absorbed through various forms of mainstream media. In media, the furthest out to the fringe, the less saturation of a given system of convention, though oftentimes what is unconventional on the fringe slowly makes its way to the core in time, if that is the way things are moving.
And so I have learned to be almost aggressively nice - yes this is a thing - as being cruel is almost unbearable to me. Being hypersensitive, any sort of social pain or discord is amplified, sometimes to unbearable proportions, which forces one to seek other paths.
But I've come to notice something. If you maintain a given course, and seek to master that course, you can come to see the virtues (or at least the utility) of that course. Follow the course of the bully, and use aggression and intimidation to get what you want, and it just could work half of the time, so long as you don't run into someone more aggressive than you, and more willing to go the distance to get what they want. If you are built for it, if you are wired for it, you can live by it.
Like falling down the height of a tree, you may just hit a branch flailing in a certain direction, and arrest your fall.
But in an overarching social milieu of cruelty, you don't have to be mean. You don't have to fight over scraps with the rest of the rats. It is about capturing wealth, underneath of which is consumable energy. As an individual against other individuals, you have to be more aggressive, but negotiating within a group, you capture a large aggregate of energy and it is up to you how to distribute it.
So as a case study in individual social relations versus group social relations, let's say you come across someone whom you perceive is disrespecting you. In this society the recommended course of action would be: well tell the person off and establish your dominance! Don't let anyone walk all over you. And sometimes this is an appropriate thing to do.
But then let's say we can't take this approach for dispositional reasons, or you're stuck orbiting in proximity to this person for some time. If you decide that you want to try something else socially, you can usually find a way to do it successfully. So let's say you are disrespected by this person, and you say, "well fack you guy!" Well that about does it. The both of you are going to be in a mutually antagonistic state, which should retain its memory, shaping the bounds with which you interact. Sometimes this state resolves itself, and sometimes it continues on indefinitely.
Alternatively, you give the disrespecting person the benefit of the doubt, and decide not to act, instead deflecting or absorbing the act. Maybe the person was having a bad day, or you misunderstood the person, or the person misunderstood you. Is it cowardly, or false to be kind to such a person? Do you really know people? Perhaps you sort through the misunderstanding, and upon waiting to act, find that the person is more amenable to communicating. You find that you were glad that you waited.
Of course this calculus changes dramatically when you know the person well or you are in some sort of abusive relationship. But I guess the point is that there are many ways to do things, and if you try venturing beyond conventional social knowledge you can find out some interesting things, which can work or not work at all given the situation.
Much of this becomes moot in more extreme social relations, such as when violence is involved, or there is extreme environmental antagonism. Then the instincts just take over and events will unfold as they will.
For me the imparted social knowledge of our era pretty much went right over my head. The social knowledge of our era says to be cruel and competitive, and considering certain narrow short-term goals, this is sensible advice if you are still committed to certain ideals and ambitions, as an old set of ideals and ambitions is quickly becoming whittled down through forces of social disintegration, and if you want wealth and power, or even a comfortable life, you must fight tooth and nail with the rest of the poor schmucks struggling over the remaining scraps.
This attitude is generally transmitted through the family, and absorbed through various forms of mainstream media. In media, the furthest out to the fringe, the less saturation of a given system of convention, though oftentimes what is unconventional on the fringe slowly makes its way to the core in time, if that is the way things are moving.
And so I have learned to be almost aggressively nice - yes this is a thing - as being cruel is almost unbearable to me. Being hypersensitive, any sort of social pain or discord is amplified, sometimes to unbearable proportions, which forces one to seek other paths.
But I've come to notice something. If you maintain a given course, and seek to master that course, you can come to see the virtues (or at least the utility) of that course. Follow the course of the bully, and use aggression and intimidation to get what you want, and it just could work half of the time, so long as you don't run into someone more aggressive than you, and more willing to go the distance to get what they want. If you are built for it, if you are wired for it, you can live by it.
Like falling down the height of a tree, you may just hit a branch flailing in a certain direction, and arrest your fall.
But in an overarching social milieu of cruelty, you don't have to be mean. You don't have to fight over scraps with the rest of the rats. It is about capturing wealth, underneath of which is consumable energy. As an individual against other individuals, you have to be more aggressive, but negotiating within a group, you capture a large aggregate of energy and it is up to you how to distribute it.
So as a case study in individual social relations versus group social relations, let's say you come across someone whom you perceive is disrespecting you. In this society the recommended course of action would be: well tell the person off and establish your dominance! Don't let anyone walk all over you. And sometimes this is an appropriate thing to do.
But then let's say we can't take this approach for dispositional reasons, or you're stuck orbiting in proximity to this person for some time. If you decide that you want to try something else socially, you can usually find a way to do it successfully. So let's say you are disrespected by this person, and you say, "well fack you guy!" Well that about does it. The both of you are going to be in a mutually antagonistic state, which should retain its memory, shaping the bounds with which you interact. Sometimes this state resolves itself, and sometimes it continues on indefinitely.
Alternatively, you give the disrespecting person the benefit of the doubt, and decide not to act, instead deflecting or absorbing the act. Maybe the person was having a bad day, or you misunderstood the person, or the person misunderstood you. Is it cowardly, or false to be kind to such a person? Do you really know people? Perhaps you sort through the misunderstanding, and upon waiting to act, find that the person is more amenable to communicating. You find that you were glad that you waited.
Of course this calculus changes dramatically when you know the person well or you are in some sort of abusive relationship. But I guess the point is that there are many ways to do things, and if you try venturing beyond conventional social knowledge you can find out some interesting things, which can work or not work at all given the situation.
Much of this becomes moot in more extreme social relations, such as when violence is involved, or there is extreme environmental antagonism. Then the instincts just take over and events will unfold as they will.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Thought Blooms
Usually if you're working off of some established framework, you can learn to think within that framework and implement revisions in accordance with your person and your accumulated experiences.
However if you set out to think something through from scratch (if a conventional body of knowledge fails, for example), something frustrating can happen: logical possibilities branch out every which way, and you can follow any given thread as far as you have the energy and attention span to do so.
Physical reality and intense life experiences tend to shape the boundaries of where these possibilities can go, but even then it can be difficult to establish a coherent conception of things. Fortunately there is a bed of accumulated human knowledge to help with that, but if you are starting from scratch, you also have to learn how to pick and choose from this bed without getting lost.
Accumulated life experience, in accordance with your own character, helps to further delineate the boundaries that keep those thoughts from running away. Also repetition; you are you to a certain extent, and experience the world as you over and over again, which eventually becomes more rigid over time as experience accumulates and fluid learning gives way to crystallized thought.
It also helps to live in a way that is conducive to intensive reading and writing. Right now, I haven't quite been living that way, which is OK. There's been more music and socializing and intoxication. I do always look forward to retreating to my cave and doing some reading and writing, but I don't get the same effects as when I spend much of my time in solitude with a regular schedule. No problem. Just trying different things and seeing what comes of it.
However if you set out to think something through from scratch (if a conventional body of knowledge fails, for example), something frustrating can happen: logical possibilities branch out every which way, and you can follow any given thread as far as you have the energy and attention span to do so.
Physical reality and intense life experiences tend to shape the boundaries of where these possibilities can go, but even then it can be difficult to establish a coherent conception of things. Fortunately there is a bed of accumulated human knowledge to help with that, but if you are starting from scratch, you also have to learn how to pick and choose from this bed without getting lost.
Accumulated life experience, in accordance with your own character, helps to further delineate the boundaries that keep those thoughts from running away. Also repetition; you are you to a certain extent, and experience the world as you over and over again, which eventually becomes more rigid over time as experience accumulates and fluid learning gives way to crystallized thought.
It also helps to live in a way that is conducive to intensive reading and writing. Right now, I haven't quite been living that way, which is OK. There's been more music and socializing and intoxication. I do always look forward to retreating to my cave and doing some reading and writing, but I don't get the same effects as when I spend much of my time in solitude with a regular schedule. No problem. Just trying different things and seeing what comes of it.
Pretty Troubled, At Least
I suppose it is important to remind myself of the consequences of writing about such a large and complex system as the global ecology. There is a certain direction that things are moving, and attempting to abstract away the nature of that direction and articulate it in writing is one thing, but you can never quite get a grip on all of it.
The previous piece on the global ecology was somewhat pessimistic, and considering all available indicators, and historical examples, I think there is reason to remain pessimistic about the general direction that our civilization is going to take, at least if one cares about the existing state of human society.
However there are plenty of things that have been happening for some time now that are somewhat encouraging. All of the biomimicry and systems-thinking that has been advancing in the sciences for the past couple of decades, the re-ascendant spiritual concern for the earth, the cultivation of communities of mutual aid or even self-sufficiency, the efforts to produce technologies that harmonize and even heal natural ecologies, and etc.
There are still some rough things that are going to happen, but it isn't all bad, of course.
The previous piece on the global ecology was somewhat pessimistic, and considering all available indicators, and historical examples, I think there is reason to remain pessimistic about the general direction that our civilization is going to take, at least if one cares about the existing state of human society.
However there are plenty of things that have been happening for some time now that are somewhat encouraging. All of the biomimicry and systems-thinking that has been advancing in the sciences for the past couple of decades, the re-ascendant spiritual concern for the earth, the cultivation of communities of mutual aid or even self-sufficiency, the efforts to produce technologies that harmonize and even heal natural ecologies, and etc.
There are still some rough things that are going to happen, but it isn't all bad, of course.
On Mimesis
When someone designates something as "good" or "desirable" it provokes a response in others, who proceed to evaluate the object - sometimes critically, most of the time uncritically - and either assent to it or dissent. To assent to a desirable object means to attempt to absorb, emulate, or enjoy it in some way, the degree of which depends on how close the individual gets to the object in question, which, if the object is scarce, causes a struggle for it with the more ambitious attempting to claim it and the less ambitious resigning themselves to a position in a hierarchy which offers proximity to the object at the very least, with a gradient of proximity correlating with a given individual's power to enjoy the object.
The object's original magnetism lends a magnetism to the mass that surrounds it, forming a greater magnetic field that draws in compatible individuals, with more and more incompatible individuals being drawn to the object as the magnetic power of the mass grows, with internal contradictions growing with it.
Conversely, to dissent is to align oneself against the object, developing a set of values that stands in opposition, which generates a new center of attraction in opposition to the original mass, whose character draws in similarly affected individuals. These masses crash until one or the other can take on enough traits of the other and subsume the other.
Which individuals are attracted to a given object or anti-object depends on the character and history of the individual, predispositions, prospects, relations, and other factors, as well as the sequence of events that alters all of those things.
This all goes somewhat past the actual concept of mimesis, which itself has since metamorphosed past its original meaning. What once was a way to describe how human beings imitated nature is now a way to explain the social dimensions of desire, and more. Mimesis is a way to describe the way in which we cohere as a body, as well as the way we relate to the natural world. There's much more to the concept, and it would be nice to elaborate on sometime.
Whatever force the concept is pointing at plays a huge part in our social experience, and ultimately the way in which we generate meaning and conduct our lives.
The object's original magnetism lends a magnetism to the mass that surrounds it, forming a greater magnetic field that draws in compatible individuals, with more and more incompatible individuals being drawn to the object as the magnetic power of the mass grows, with internal contradictions growing with it.
Conversely, to dissent is to align oneself against the object, developing a set of values that stands in opposition, which generates a new center of attraction in opposition to the original mass, whose character draws in similarly affected individuals. These masses crash until one or the other can take on enough traits of the other and subsume the other.
Which individuals are attracted to a given object or anti-object depends on the character and history of the individual, predispositions, prospects, relations, and other factors, as well as the sequence of events that alters all of those things.
This all goes somewhat past the actual concept of mimesis, which itself has since metamorphosed past its original meaning. What once was a way to describe how human beings imitated nature is now a way to explain the social dimensions of desire, and more. Mimesis is a way to describe the way in which we cohere as a body, as well as the way we relate to the natural world. There's much more to the concept, and it would be nice to elaborate on sometime.
Whatever force the concept is pointing at plays a huge part in our social experience, and ultimately the way in which we generate meaning and conduct our lives.
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