We can understand quite a bit, but to truly understand something and act on it, it usually takes subjectively interfacing with it and experiencing it.
So you take a social state, and how difficult it can be to change directions when it is set in a certain motion, especially if that motion implies consequences for the participants. Let's say a friend is depressed or angry or fearful. Sure the group can sympathize or reverse this course as uninterested observers, but once the circumstances for this subjectivity bear down on them, the emotions must harmonize.The course this takes depends on the participants and the environment certainly.
So a friend comes by, upset that someone else has slighted them, and the group seeks to console the friend and reassure this person, which can re-establish homeostasis in relation to the group.
This is very different from a group sitting around a fire, and someone becomes incredibly frightened of a bear that has come on the scene. A new homeostasis will have to be established around the fear.
And we see now the tremendous difficulty of changing the course of a society in crisis. A collapse in trust is difficult to reverse, and the consequences of that collapse are difficult to prevent, when a genuine lie has been uncovered, and when a society's resources are being gutted from the inside out.
When the lower-level danger is clear for a greater proportion of the body politic, the effects of the propaganda wear off, vaporizing off of the top.
So to feel something will reveal something to be a certain way. Various emotions reveal different states of affars in accordance with their nature.
They can also be construed as a form of movement.
To experience the joy of one's expansion is to take part in expansion, while to contract in fear is to take part in contraction. Both modalities require that subjective partaking to fully understand their respective natures. And authentic reasoning that is to take place within a given modality must flow forth from a premise that is grounded in the modality.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Work
In a fit of depression, one is much less driven to engage in productive work.
Or let's reframe this: perhaps one is depressed partially because one is driven to work intellectually, and at the same time lacks the will to work, or one is deprived of the ability to work, which contributes to a diminished self concept and a general state of dissatisfaction with one's output and the world itself.
This state has structural origins. One is in a position in which one's self and one's environment are working together to sustain the depression: the opportunities to climb out are not there, or are not apparent, and besides, there is no energy available for climbing out. The state reinforces itself until it exhausts itself.
With this in mind, consider the analogous structure of an economic depression. Why do depressions happen? Why aren't they simply stimulated away and into another boom-state? We know that theoretically this is more than possible, though not without its own complications, especially further down the road.
But knowing and willing are different things, and in this case will is tied up with a conservative structure which accounts for the persistent accumulation of capital itself, which is in turn partially regulated by a moral logic of its own.
This moral logic contains strains of what is often called the Protestant work ethic, an overhanging religious sensibility that posits hard work as an unqualified good. This divergent outgrowth of religious sensibility was probably in part a reaction to the attempted Catholic monopoly on all spiritual activity. One is moral if one is constantly working to better one's self and society, a type of working that incidentally has its basis in specific social, political, and material conceptions of "better."
So capitalists, having outsized access to the levers of power, have nothing but contempt for the notion that a depression should be stimulated away with social spending and public works, that the common workers had to "pay" in sweat and blood for the depression, and work themselves out of their holes or die trying, and the capitalists were just the class to provide this opportunity.
This pseudo-morality was used in rationalizations for removing peasants off of the land throughout the birth of capitalism, and in later imperialist ventures as well. The peasants and "savages" were lazy and indolent, making them morally corrupt, and it was a moral act to forcibly remove them and work the land as it should be worked. This notion was ever-present in conceptions of progress.
The growing mercantilist nation-state was the vehicle for this productive accumulation and growth, and then slowly the private actor pulled away in power. Like fire leaping ravenously across grains of sawdust, disintegration paradoxically produced explosive capitalist growth.
Consider one of the characteristic symptoms of an overblown work ethic: the irresistible urge to be doing something, preferably something constructive which is geared toward some end. What is constructive? What is to be the end? A political decision.
But what happens when one is simply doing nothing? In a milieu of theoretical plenty, is this so catastrophic? One sleeps, giving the relaxed brain an opportunity for house cleaning. One fasts, and a relaxed metabolism reverts to toxin removal. And etc.
So modern work is not in fact bound up with necessity or the persistence of our species, but an overflowing and an overabundance which necessarily overshoots its mark, and crashes, constantly antagonizing its surroundings and reproducing turbulence.
Capital concentrates, and sheds, and destroys whatever it couples with, necessitating a restructuring that reabsorbs the antagonistic detritus and the cycle begins again. The moral logic compels one to work on; it must not stop. GDP-coupled emissions must be generated. E waste must be shipped to Africa. Torrents of food must be produced and then tossed away. Plastic, phosphorous, and nitrates must flow out into the ocean. A gasp of toxins and the system panics; we must work harder!
Or let's reframe this: perhaps one is depressed partially because one is driven to work intellectually, and at the same time lacks the will to work, or one is deprived of the ability to work, which contributes to a diminished self concept and a general state of dissatisfaction with one's output and the world itself.
This state has structural origins. One is in a position in which one's self and one's environment are working together to sustain the depression: the opportunities to climb out are not there, or are not apparent, and besides, there is no energy available for climbing out. The state reinforces itself until it exhausts itself.
With this in mind, consider the analogous structure of an economic depression. Why do depressions happen? Why aren't they simply stimulated away and into another boom-state? We know that theoretically this is more than possible, though not without its own complications, especially further down the road.
But knowing and willing are different things, and in this case will is tied up with a conservative structure which accounts for the persistent accumulation of capital itself, which is in turn partially regulated by a moral logic of its own.
This moral logic contains strains of what is often called the Protestant work ethic, an overhanging religious sensibility that posits hard work as an unqualified good. This divergent outgrowth of religious sensibility was probably in part a reaction to the attempted Catholic monopoly on all spiritual activity. One is moral if one is constantly working to better one's self and society, a type of working that incidentally has its basis in specific social, political, and material conceptions of "better."
So capitalists, having outsized access to the levers of power, have nothing but contempt for the notion that a depression should be stimulated away with social spending and public works, that the common workers had to "pay" in sweat and blood for the depression, and work themselves out of their holes or die trying, and the capitalists were just the class to provide this opportunity.
This pseudo-morality was used in rationalizations for removing peasants off of the land throughout the birth of capitalism, and in later imperialist ventures as well. The peasants and "savages" were lazy and indolent, making them morally corrupt, and it was a moral act to forcibly remove them and work the land as it should be worked. This notion was ever-present in conceptions of progress.
The growing mercantilist nation-state was the vehicle for this productive accumulation and growth, and then slowly the private actor pulled away in power. Like fire leaping ravenously across grains of sawdust, disintegration paradoxically produced explosive capitalist growth.
Consider one of the characteristic symptoms of an overblown work ethic: the irresistible urge to be doing something, preferably something constructive which is geared toward some end. What is constructive? What is to be the end? A political decision.
But what happens when one is simply doing nothing? In a milieu of theoretical plenty, is this so catastrophic? One sleeps, giving the relaxed brain an opportunity for house cleaning. One fasts, and a relaxed metabolism reverts to toxin removal. And etc.
So modern work is not in fact bound up with necessity or the persistence of our species, but an overflowing and an overabundance which necessarily overshoots its mark, and crashes, constantly antagonizing its surroundings and reproducing turbulence.
Capital concentrates, and sheds, and destroys whatever it couples with, necessitating a restructuring that reabsorbs the antagonistic detritus and the cycle begins again. The moral logic compels one to work on; it must not stop. GDP-coupled emissions must be generated. E waste must be shipped to Africa. Torrents of food must be produced and then tossed away. Plastic, phosphorous, and nitrates must flow out into the ocean. A gasp of toxins and the system panics; we must work harder!
Wednesday, May 04, 2016
Grace
Moving with grace implies a certain tempered global state. It would be impossible to concentrate on being graceful, though it does sometimes take concentration to temper the state.
Truth and Action
To perceive the total truth - at least to the greatest extent one can in one's time, in accordance with what one is - is a staggering event in itself; it is the necessary prerequisite for moving with what grace is still possible in this world. One can't surmount or even cope with what one can't see (here we don't speak of physical vision, but general perception).
But once one sees, one can't un-see it. When one sees, one is bestowed with the unenviable but necessary task of coming to terms with that truth and acting in accordance with it. It affixes a constraint on one's actions, while at the same time illuminating a potential path to some sort of actualization if pursued to its logical end.
But once one sees, one can't un-see it. When one sees, one is bestowed with the unenviable but necessary task of coming to terms with that truth and acting in accordance with it. It affixes a constraint on one's actions, while at the same time illuminating a potential path to some sort of actualization if pursued to its logical end.
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