Double Take

When you experience or read something profound, it tends to create an emotional imprint that can change the way you experience - and even act - in the future, with effects that can be felt long after the memory, the data, has faded.

Sometimes you can experience these things all over again in a similar way, and it has the effect of reminding you why you are the way you are.

That's Not Like You

I love these issues that crop up when someone utters about someone else - who is usually misbehaving or tripping out: "that is not like him/her at all."

Well, if you are doing something or acting a certain way, then that is certainly you.

When you are drunk and raging and mean, that is still you, just infused with the merry spirit of beer. When you are in a highly stressed state and acting a certain way, that is still you.

But we just get so confused. We are so used to referring to people as these delineated particulars, when in fact we are really these bundles of potentialities, walking multitudes which do eventually reach a certain homeostasis - that which "defines" a person's character - but which is also subject to change, especially from extreme external events.

Yep. There exist certain stable bodies of characteristics that we can use to designate a given person, and at the same time those characteristics are subject to chemical, physical, biological, and psychological modulation at any time. But in an individualist culture, we just have no clear way to talk about things that way.

The Pure, the Profane, the Chaotic

What is dirt but the hodgepodge of elementary components of organic matter, the broken down chaos from which life emerges? And then that which is pure seems to be what is born and unified, or at least born a harmonized body. But neither never lasts! The emergence of a harmonic body in a field of chaos is bound to become interspersed with differentiated elements over time, eventually to dissolve, while life delights in its formations out of chaos.

These two need each other. Within the chaotic dirt, there is intoxicating freedom of potentiality. What will combine amidst the elementary components? What will emerge? The possibilities for creation are endless, though in the end they will be shaped by what already exists.

These types obsessed with the preservation of purity just crack me up. The undifferentiated pure loses all of its preciousness the more time passes that it exists. Growing in power and scope, the pure uses up all of the raw materials of creation to sustain itself; the undifferentiated and monolithic begins to appear as death, like the surfaces and colors of a funeral parlor. And that is even setting aside the fact that there are many possible patterns of formation of parallel undifferentiated pure bodies.

Preservation of the pure intensifies all the more its potentials for dissolution.

And for all its freedom, how horrible that endless procession of disintegration and consumption that accompanies the formation and existence of chaos, making all the more valuable the unities, the purities that eventually coalesce.

Muhney

This is great. The decoupling of the financial economy from the real economy is an important phenomenon, and important to understanding the nature of power in our political economy.

We see a similar problem cropping up with Modern Monetary Theory. I think the theory itself is just wonderful. It is a great way to view the monetary system, and as it happens, it correctly depicts how the modern monetary system actually works when you cut through all of the myth and propaganda.

It would also make for a powerful political-economic tool. When you want people to do something, just inject some money into the general system. You're basically squirting this catalyst into a network to activate all of the potentials along that network, or people who want to do things. And there are people everywhere that just want to do things. Doing things is a huge part of life. And everything is set up to do things; the infrastructure is already there. If things get too hot, you just suck it back up. You tax.

Money itself is a symbol that subconsciously communicates to you this: "do what you think is useful, and everyone else is going to do what they think is useful, and then trade in all of those things." It animates life. It promises that life continues.

It does away with this superstitious "hard-money" psychology whose undercurrents can probably be traced back to Christian moral thought, this nagging guilt that says you have to suffer and toil to get anything good, which is a great attitude for a certain period of time (a time of scarcity and material hardship), but transplanted on another age (an age of abundance, at least for certain classes), becomes a hindrance, a superstition.

But there are problems with MMT. Not in the theory itself, which seems airtight to me, but in the way that the theory relates to our current political economic system. First, as the linked post showed, the monetary system operates in accordance with the interests of those most powerful, and able to affect the behavior of the system.

There are a lot of people out there that want to do good things, and there are plenty more people out there that want to do bad things. And the channels themselves in which the money flows determine who gets what, and who gets to do what, and those channels are determined by people who manipulate them to get the most out of them, and essentially the people who do bad things. Squirt a neutral medium like money into this existing system and the system continues to behave as it did previously. There is no clear way to modulate the flow of this money without directly using force to change the behavior of the system.

The other problem is that yes, our system works a certain way, and we have the incredible resources and infrastructure that we do, but the way in which all of this behaves and is ultimately utilized correlates with the aggregate in human belief systems, and more importantly, the belief systems of the most powerful people in the system.

Rich people and powerful politicians simply don't think in the manner that is required for MMT to actually operate. They are purveyors of the hard-money superstition, which is why you see austerity being practiced in deflationary economies. They are all projecting their own guilt, they say: "we had too much, and now we have to compensate for that." Which for rich and powerful people means that everyone else has to compensate and they can continue to consume at escalating levels. Austerity for the poor, socialism for the rich. So it goes.

Even if there are some non-superstitious wealthy and powerful people that understand the nature of the system, and could understand the theoretical operation of MMT, they still wouldn't implement it. They are fine with controlling the wealth and power flows. More flows to the population mean less of a mountain of power, control, and wealth for them to sit atop.

Compound all of this with the fact that resource strains and environmental antagonisms are feeding into these system-wide pathologies. So, for MMT to function without resuscitating the doomsday machine that we have collectively built, accelerating our path to collective suicide, it would require political force to radically reshape the nature of the system itself. As has been repeated by climate activists, we would require a WWII-style command economy that would massively reduce superfluous consumption and force an economic build-out of renewable infrastructure. Energy-use would have to be systematically reduced substantially.

The environmentalists would essentially have to commandeer the guns to do this, because the entire power structure that currently operates doesn't want this; it is perhaps one of the greatest things they fear. And who exactly is it that wields the guns now? We all grew together; that includes the most hypersensitive progressive and the most bloodthirsty reactionary. We're all stuck together too. Whoops.

A dramatic restructuring has happened before. But it takes a lot of energy and violence. This was essentially what happened through the course of the world wars and the dramatic political changes that changed the shape of the global power structure during and after. Even then, the locus of global empire shifted but the overall composition of the system retained its character. What is it really going to take this time?

Strange Days

We've been working on this barn-style door for the garage and upon looking over and reflecting on the tools we've been using, I've been struck with an odd sensation: many of our modern tools, implements, and general technologies are really just remarkable. The layers and layers of ingenuity and rigor of thought and practice, the sediments of complexity built over one another, they're just baffling. When you go back to the basics and begin building things yourself and seeing how things actually work, and what you are capable of without more advanced tools and industrial processes, a stark contrast is drawn between simpler implements and contemporary technologies. I was just looking at a simple crowbar and marveling at its contours, and the precision and deliberation of its design. All the more so for the table saw, and the endlessly complex manufacturing processes behind these tools.

Which is all the more strange of a sensation considering the dumb, mean, and cruel culture that continues to gestate atop it all. Dumb, mean, and cruel advertisements plaster these towering, gorgeous structures downtown. Dumb, mean and cruel television is piped into beautiful homes on beautiful electronic screens, broadcasted miles and miles away from towers on electromagnetic waves, or broadcasted from space. Dumb, mean, and cruel radio shows and adverts play to impatient and insensitive drivers in these incredible automobiles driving over these breathtaking bridges, engineering marvels spanning oceans, hanging there in the sun like glistening steel spider webs.

Of course, now come the qualifications. Yes, on one hand, I know all of the culture has not turned: there is a still a diverse range of opinions and expressions. Good media is still to be found. And there is always independent activity to consider. Good things are happening in certain places, even in the public sphere. And on the other hand there are various stupid technologies or manufactured objects that are rapidly declining in quality. Our powers of manipulation are awe-inspiring but one has to raise questions about the scope of this manipulation, the energy it consumes, and the indirect effects it has on the greater systems that sustain it. There is no apparent on/off switch. The process of manipulation takes off in all directions and won't stop until it burns itself out.

I'm just trying to deal in aggregates right now. Painting a limited picture so to speak. Yeah, it is all just a bit strange: this great machine sitting and cooling after a violent expansion, inside of which persists a continuous rot.

How to Live?

A lot of spiritual writings and philosophy of living writings have in common this earnest need to share advice on how to live in a given age or time. It is one thing to struggle through trial and error all your life, but it helps to have someone place their hand on your shoulder and point out to the horizon and give you the long view, so that you can situate your practical efforts within that framework. It cuts down on a lot of frustration and desperation.

What exactly is happening today? I suppose plenty has already been said about this subject. Collectively we're like that 6 foot tall dude in that old action movie trope, standing erect atop a moving train, with someone suddenly yelling "duck" because there was a tunnel, or low bridge, or a similar overhanging obstruction rapidly approaching in the distance.

I'm sure there are plenty of other better metaphors. That one just comes to mind at the moment.

Love of Shiny Things

There is a hidden cost built into the operation of capital, that very naturally goes unsaid because of its superfluous nature.

The executives of the world's largest corporations make astronomical sums, and the staggered tiers of managers have to make tidy sums as well to keep those vehicles of extraction squeezing what production and profit they can.

The upper earners of these classes set the standard which all of the rest of the participants in a given class aspire to, the sums of which are required to provide motivation for the job. There is no other reason to participate in these awful structures; there is no joy in it. The primary animating principle to operating a corporation or state institution in which all of the joys of living have died is the promise of wealth and the status that comes with it.

So if you let your top earners get away with obscenely high sums of wealth, then all of the other high earners in your other economic structures are going to want the same thing, and many of the politicians in the highest positions of power are going to want the same thing as well.

This is what you have to keep in mind when you see rising commodity and real estate prices. And rising taxes because more is being extracted out of the public coffers as well. All of those dickheads at the top have to maintain their multiple vacation homes, palatial mansions, fine dining and shopping habits, top tier vehicle stables, yachts, servants, drivers, private jets, and all the rest.

If you have a class which enjoys these incredible concentrations of wealth, then all of the people that are motivated to join that class will require those sorts of spoils, or else they'll go through other channels to get them. If all of your essential societal functions are operated by this class, then that is where a large proportion of the energy is going to go.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

To a city, a fleet of street sweepers is a sound investment. It is a guaranteed income stream, with bonus points if the sweeping times are staggered and confusing. It becomes a form of taxation.

We've also seen the city boot and tow cars for various arbitrary and absurd reasons. Not sure what the dividing line between public and private is in this case, and who gets exactly what, but those towing fines smart.

A more extreme phenomenon is with civil forfeiture laws, which has been going on for quite a while, the details of which are really pretty shocking, and alarming. With the federal, state, and local revenues drying up due to corporate greed and global economic deflation and resource stripping, there's a stronger impetus to make up the balance through other less legitimate methods.

All of that bureaucratic and institutional build-up that accompanied and facilitated economic expansion is costly to maintain, and of course, it isn't going away without a fight!

Thursday Night Ant Kingdom Pt. 2

So it was possible to remove the ants peacefully from the house, albeit with an unconventional and ad-hoc method. I'm going to try to expand on this in the abstract.

Without some intervening pressure, it is difficult to resist convention. You absorb from family, media, and the education system at a very young age many of the dominant modes of living, spans of attention, and emotional imprints that will serve you throughout your life. Convention is subject to modification over time, but carries itself with a heavy inertia, so that it takes intense psychological, physical, or environmental pressures to be dislodged from it.

The subjective experience of becoming dislodged is first the understanding of a socioeconomic system and culture from the outside; it becomes an object of study instead of simply the subjective experience of daily living, to be taken for granted, invisible like the air one breathes. It is no longer natural to participate without some mediating layer of analysis and corresponding action.

Another consequence of this is that one's attention begins to drift to other areas of perception previously ignored by convention, all the more so the more distasteful the modes of convention become to one's mind.

So the wisdom of spraying a pesticide all over one's kitchen comes into question, as well as the denial of agency of other creatures that this solution implies, which has become generalized really to everything we don't consider a pet. Convention comes to appear much as a great creeping flow of toxic sludge which settles over the land, death radiating from it in all directions.

So one's attention turns to nature and its many agents. Ants are actually pretty remarkable creatures. They're everywhere, and they're very sophisticated.You can work with them if you want to. And they work for you too. They are excellent at aerating soil and compost for one.

This event also brings attention to the dividing line between external nature and the modern human habitat, the latter of which illustrates how far out modern humankind has gotten. This swept and sterile composition of rearranged matter, a landscape of utility, of objects extracted and abstracted away from living things and formations of earth and rock, a sterile floating compartment removed (perhaps not permanently) from the perpetual processes of nature.

How discomforting it is to spot creatures that account for 15 - 25% of the earth's biomass trickling up and down the pristine surfaces of one's abode! Ah but this sterility protects us from all the poisonous insects, parasites, bacteria, diseases, and other creepy crawlies which threaten us. Of course this comes with a cost as well: the compression and displacement of one's threats into some outer sphere beyond one's living space, with all of it to come rushing back in as soon as the opportunity presents itself. After all, nature still exists there, undergoing change, with or without us, if one can sustain the distinction at least.

It takes a lot of energy, a lot of effort, to maintain that sterile sphere. And you could be contributing to the selection of species which are resistant to the sphere, or which, upon evolving to survive in that outer sphere, could pose a shock to vulnerable bodies in the future. Maybe getting to know the processes of nature little by little again - that is, up close and personal, out of the vacuum of the cleanroom - couldn't hurt.

Qualifying Domestics

Thinking back, I suppose my post on dogs was a bit one-sided. Of course there are exploitative relationships everywhere, but there are also loving relationships, and relationships in which an owner may be sensitive to every desire of the animal at the expense of their own. There is a mutuality in the exchanges between humans and domestic pets. Anyways, we're all stuck on this rock together, vibrating in a key that history imposed. Might as well make the best of it.

Collective Living and Institutions

There is always a degree of chaos in a collective living space, it seems.

That is because spontaneous order is oftentimes one-sided: it is a repetition of a given individual's living preferences, which is stabilized over a period of time barring the interference of the living patterns of other individuals.

Add another person and you now have what are probably two different modes of living which must be harmonized through constant negotiation.

A domestic governing system arises when there is a need to balance more than two or three closely bonded individuals. On a smaller scale, this system can be collectively decided upon, but it is still subject to potential change. If you have other individuals coming in and out of the space that don't live there, it complicates things further. Add animals, and you have more complications, and etc.

This system is under constant stress. It requires constant maintenance. Imbalance can arise as a given personality seeks a greater space than the rest.

Chaos is tolerable to a degree, but it introduces a constant source of irritation the more chronic uncertainty is introduced. If you can't find the resources you are looking for, or the appearance or noises inside the space bother you, then it slowly saps and weakens your mental state, leaving you open for more serious shocks.

Shocks come in the form of various traumas, life problems, interpersonal dramas, financial issues, and other things.You can watch as a shock ripples through the household, and each member under stress reacts to that shock, producing further ripples in turn as interactions continue, weakening the states of all, which exposes everyone to further shocks.

And of course when the going is good, the house just buzzes. Up and down it goes.

This is what makes establishing a monolithic power a fool's errand. When a system arises, it is always in danger of being captured by a limited personality, a personality that seeks to systematize its own image, suffocating all of the other personalities, which introduces further internal instabilities that react with external shocks. You can't possibly capture all of the different living forms under one administrative system. It just can't be done. The more you expand your power, the more the entire system's integrity is threatened, and threatened ever more so the more resistance you encounter as you attempt to subsume greater difference.

Better to allow individuals to free associate into collectives, which can be disbanded if overly stressed. Sometimes it is important to be able to put down roots and maintain a space for a long period of time so that something has time to gestate within, but it is just as important that no person should be trapped within a failing collective.

And a collective may change shape over a period of time, but still retain its character. Individuals may come and go, it may break apart and reconfigure again. Members and contexts can change abruptly or gradually, so why not leave it open?

Dogs and Other Domestics

Living with a small dog, you aren't usually slapped about the face with the reality of human-animal power relations. Maybe you have to wince a bit when you are potty training or teaching manners or administrating some such disciplinary activity, but generally, when the dog misbehaves or fails to listen you can just scoop it up and transport it to another environment or situation, and you don't have to worry about the dog losing its shit.

With larger dogs, this can be a very different reality, all the more so the stronger the dog is. Our roommate saw it fit to adopt a very large and strong young Pit Bull - though he probably didn't have much of a choice seeing as how it was being chased down the street by yelling, scared people, and the poor thing scooted right up the front stairs - so I've had a chance to feel the bare reality of human-animal power relations in a raw way.

What I mean is that you have to exert your dominance in a prominent way or else the dog can easily overtake you. It seems as though power relations become much more clear the higher the stakes. In less threatening conditions, you tend to see more of the world through your own projections, while the other makes its presence felt in struggle.

I'm sort of exaggerating here, because the dog is just the sweetest thing and has shown no aggression whatsoever towards human beings or even other dogs, so I've never really felt threatened. But there was a night I was playing with the dog, and he got his jaws around my sweater sleeve. Thinking he was playing tug of war, he wouldn't let go, and was pulling pretty hard, so I ended up having to take off the sweater and let him have it, then try to fish it away from him afterwards.

See, this dog is incredibly strong and it is still going to get stronger and larger. It is true about Pits' jaws: they lock up pretty well. So if something goes wrong and you don't have mastery over the dog, you're going to have a problem. It is like maintaining a respectful protocol around heavy machinery. If you lack the power to reverse or escape a bad process, you're going through that process whether you like it or not, to come out on the other side in whatever form of disrepair the situation warrants.

It is a case study which lays bare the human-animal relationship. A domestic animal, brought into the human world - a world that in the end has power over it, even if it is a powerful animal that can take on individual human beings - must necessarily take on the traits required of it to coexist in the domestic realm.

It ends up being a symbiotic relationship that we initiated. We incorporate various species for various exploitative uses, and they come to adopt a lifestyle that makes them dependent on humans for sustenance.

And that is sort of the predicament isn't it? For someone with strict egalitarian sensibilities, it would have been easier if everyone was simply doing their own thing from the beginning, animals included. But we have this domestic animal population, which has found itself deposited into a certain niche after centuries of co-evolution. Let's free all of these creatures and see how that works out!

It isn't easy moving in the world, especially when one's head is full of charged ideas.

I'd venture that this is a microcosm for our current snafu as well. Capital has produced a certain human being after its 200 or so years of operation - scale this number back if you want to bring in greater historical causal chains - and this human being is tied to capital due to his and her nature: to passively consume. To decouple from capital means to radically change one's nature. Not easy. Usually it takes a little jolt, hate to say.

Creation's Cold Tail

Creation takes energy. For one to create an intellectual or artistic work, or to make a certain scientific discovery, or invent some new technology, it takes a great amount of energy: both vital energy and sustained discipline (which requires constant mechanical energy) are required. These requirements are much higher in a mature civilization. One is competing with a certain degree of quality and variation of innovations, as well as a less robust energy input if one is relating one's efforts to an existing framework. You could always go off and do something radically new, but then you run the risk of being misunderstood or ignored, at least for the duration of your life, which is generally what radical innovators are up against anyways. Newness requires mass, or a certain threshold of activated bodies that assent to or agree with the thrust of the new object in question.

An expenditure of creative energy attracts sympathetic energies; part of the point of creating is communicating, or sharing energy. This energy bursts forth and decays, or else various points of energetic expression form positive feedback loops with each other and new artifacts are generated rapidly and in abundance (possibly with new institutions to administrate the distribution of those artifacts), which then proceed to decay over a greater timespan and scope.

This decay is expressed socially in the strictures of convention. We don't entirely know why, but not everyone is hypersensitive and creative. What happens is a functional equivalent of a cargo cult forms around the object of creation in question, attempting to emulate its creator's existence by discussing said objects, following various sets of instructions relating to the object, or attempting to negotiate socially for the highest proximal location to the object.

The vital energy mentioned above is certainly an esoteric term, but important to creation. Creatives seem to have the tendency of becoming decoupled from existing social circuits, perhaps through personal constitution or associated life traumas or both, who lose the ability to communicate effortlessly through conventional networks, but who, being human, must communicate nevertheless and be understood, which necessitates a vehicle, a creative work. This diversion of energy occurs on its own, with passionate expression finding an outlet out of necessity, oftentimes concentrating and intensifying in the process. However, what else is required is a strong character with the discipline to apply repetitive acts to perfect a given vehicle of creation (which requires willpower and of course mechanical energy, or simply nutrition and other related resources).

Those that lack the ability but still wish to share the expressive energy of creation may do so through others, either socially or through instrumentalization - that is, manipulating others of ability into organized arrangements which produce a certain effect that can be effectively converted into a proprietary format, so that the manipulator can derive enjoyment from creation without creating. There are also those that are more ambitious, but lack ability, so they become social climbers or tyrants. A tyrant is a probably a failed creative. A tyrant will share his or her being through force.

Now, I'm tempted to place values on these phenomena, and really I already have, since our language contains such potent emotional baggage. But in the end I'd rather state that these phenomena simply occur, and that is all there is to it.