Paranoia in Montana

Within the small ravine, there was a preponderance of stories to be told. There was rock flowing like water down the middle of the ravine. On the ravine floor, there was a bleached bone which appeared to be a section of a vertebrae.

It was beautiful, so I picked it up. Upon inspection I found that a spider had made its home within the hollow center. I put the bone back. At this time it was meant to stay.

All is passing away and emerging somewhere else. Something died here in the canyon. A deer? An elk? But one of its bones became a home. Where does one begin? Where does one draw lines to signify what is? The ontological reality becomes an endlessly shifting process of expression, in which things, limited expressions, are transformed within their relations between each other.

There was the existence of something else that was beckoning consideration. I found myself sticking to the very bottom of the ravine, so as to remain hidden. The paranoia was growing.

There was a palpable fear out in the Montana hills. Nearby was a man living in a large house on the hill, who routinely scanned the landscape with his binoculars, looking for something that was out of place.

A couple of years ago he had moved out to the country to get away from the city. He was going to become more self-sufficient. He built himself a windmill to get off of the grid, and then was promptly hassled by the local power company - which had ingratiated itself to the local government, winning local zoning ordinances -  to deactivate it. Now the windmill stands high above his house, sitting idle, a reminder of what could have been.

Meanwhile, the man has become increasingly embittered, suspicious, and self-isolating, according to neighbors. A botched job on his house attributable to unscrupulous contractors, and a steady stream of invasive hunters crossing his easements has steadily worn away his composure.

Now he prowls the hills with an enormous grimace on his face, looking for the slightest sign of an invader, scaring off a van full of lost teenagers in one case.

There are all sorts of individuals such as these littering the countryside. Frowning at their windows with telescopes and binoculars, placing ever more threatening signs on the boundaries of their private property.

Here the earth is constantly scanned and mapped. The landowner is poring over the countryside, looking for anything out of place. To the landowner, even someone politically, socially, and temperamentally the same as them could be suspect if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. God forbid you are coded as out of place prior to being out of place in the countryside in the first place.

The hillside is a collection of increasingly atomizing patriarchies, the patriarchs presiding over their lone hills, suspicious even of each other.

A set of unknown headlights coming up the driveway is more often met with a cocked shotgun than a smile or even looks of curiosity or charity.

And to exist in such a climate of fear is to participate in it. One becomes fearful in turn, becoming suspicious of those finding oneself suspicious, strengthening the logic of fear.

A plane buzzes overhead. Afghanistan comes to mind, where to the paranoid US military, the locals are always out of place, and a buzzing plane could very well be readying its rockets. There we have created a fearscape on another order of magnitude altogether. Better to call it a hellscape.

One hears stories of the locals looking up and praising stormy skies and dreading blue skies, which give the drones better visibility.

The project then is to compress everything into its place. The other becomes an object to be situated in a hierarchy which intrinsically makes the position of the powerful more stable. This project happens both within and without.

Simultaneously engaged in crimes against the global South, the imperialists retreat to their fiefdoms, alienating their societies and even the relations between themselves in turn.

This is certainly a shame in Montana, where the beauty of the landscape is breathtaking, and the breadth and scale of the surroundings contributes to an air of expansiveness, which is quickly dashed away by the descending ceiling of paranoia.

One can take a deep breath, in appreciation for living, and the ceiling is raised temporarily. Yet...

Change and Fragility

It is a given that everything is constantly in motion, but perpetual motion tends to lend to the illusion of stillness. There are moments when one can experience the motion however.

There are points at which that movement lies temporarily in suspended animation, and we are given a glimpse into that motion. When a decision is to be made or a greater change is to occur, we can see things moving. This is more an artifact of reason and perception than anything else, but it still serves as a useful window into the flow of time and space.

Change is a curious notion!

Consider the design of the US Government. This structure resembles a machine, designed by its founders with a mix of good intentions and not-so-good intentions. In retrospect there was probably more of the latter, but moving on.

The building of the machine was an attempt to artificially generate change, so as to keep things the same. The design of the machine betrays a profound distrust of the concentration of power, a distrust perhaps taken from experiences of early traditional and monarchical abuses of power.

It would be fruitful to consider that the building of a machine in itself is an assertion of control by a private individual, or an association of private individuals, which has all sorts of interesting implications on its own. Unfortunately for now we must keep moving.

The tradition was bad! But then those monarchies had formed under pressures of violent change, those chains of causation reaching far back into the collapse of the Roman empire. So we see a constant violent movement, and buttressing forces which compress the movement and delay its inevitable bursting forth once again.

For the Hopis on the other hand, sticking to tradition was a radical act, and the last adherents to the traditional form wrapped their arms around it, as if they were bracing themselves against a violent wind.

The Hopi system is profoundly conservative, but it is a conservative adherence to an ideology of perpetual motion: one is to live in rhythm with the land, and let all living things around oneself govern themselves, perpetually in motion but united in stable rhythms.

Western conservatism, when compared to this system, appears as a temporarily frozen crest on the top of a tidal wave of change.

This machine with its cogs and levers and balanced compartments and engines and cooling chambers is made up of humans; it bears all the characteristics of an organic body. It is as if you were to design and build a machine and have all of its components begin to sprout appendages and other various growths, taking on a life of its own.

The elections are a great example of this. Consider the iron law of institutions and the ways in which both the RNC and the DNC were expressions of a buttressing concentration of power in the face of change.

The superdelegate system is a good illustration of the iron law of institutions at work, in this case revealing the Democratic Party as a living thing, seeking to concentrate power independent of the body politic it was built to serve. It does this so as to manage change.

But then its opponents, meant to balance themselves against this concentrated power, must do the same. And then the Republicans are hopeful that they can concentrate more power so as to better manage change themselves.

The fragility of a given system reveals itself plainly in these flashes of insight, which appear as change passes over it. Change in this case manifests as the power passing from organized bodies to other bodies, all of which are organizing to concentrate the most power in the face of this forced change. 

The more violent and explosive the change, the more strong and powerful something has to be, and the more strong and powerful something is, the more power is concentrated in that thing, which eventually provokes ever greater forces of change.

There is a death and suddenly someone with power must be replaced. Now watch as all of the interest groups, the pockets of organized power struggle to assert themselves. We saw this with Scalia for example.

Witness the pain of Brexit. A complex society suddenly decouples all of its economic and social flows, and finds itself struggling to reconnect them, which necessitates the renegotiation of these flows. To whom does the power now accrue? We see here to that an increased density of desire and necessity expands the pockets of organized power, seeking to assert itself in myriad directions.

We can also consider things more mundane, say an accident in the middle of the freeway or a cracked water pipe. Organized power struggles to assert itself around these wounds. Something in motion is suddenly stopped. Where is it going to go next? It is organized power which must determine this.

Who is to pay for the cracked pipe in other words? Who is to clear the accident? Or take blame for its occurrence?

Ableism on the Mountain

At the top of the mountain was a spectacular lodge and viewing platform, accessible by gondola. Curiously enough however, the full potential of the viewing platform was curtailed for people with disabilities.

Some sections of the platform were only available by stairway. There were ramps, but they were covered in snow, neglected by staff and effectively blocked. But this is only a small portion of the greater issue.

The truth of the matter is that the entire mountain could be friendly for disabled people. The technology exists to do it. The lifts could have disability supports built in; the built human landscape could do the same. There are specifically designed skis and chairs which disabled people could easily navigate with.

It isn't done because of the concentration of capital and the relation of that concentration to the concentric circles of families, lovers, friends, and racial, religious, and political tribes.

Yes capital expands in all directions, but at the same time its concentration remains sticky, under the control of largely xenophobic individuals; through this tendency it establishes gradients of inclusion and exclusion, lines which must be constantly fought, negotiated, and held.

The sensibility of that of the capital accumulator is that of a delight in separation, in the accumulation of personal power and a localized sense of control over the cosmos, which incidentally comes coupled with a distrust and fear of difference, and a retreat to sameness.

Businessmen interested in profit have made their decision concerning the available energy and resources, and the graduated classes beneath them have made their respective decisions in turn, given what they can hope to attain.

These decisions have to be negotiated by those left outside; more often they have to be fought.

What's more, in these strange times we have artificial constraint on our abundant resources. Less is made available, and more is wasted or standing idle, so as to preserve the class position of the businessman. Society must begin to freeze, to further preserve this position. Its energy modalities must persist as they are.

Which happens to introduce real constraints through a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlimited growth becomes impossible, all the more it is defined into a definite shape, which of course takes its shape partially in response to the antagonisms generated by explosive growth in the first place.

A hole is being drilled into the living fabric. And it will take more with it as it grows.