The Thanatos Party

Oh just having a little fun. But the Democratic Party really has no interest in re-inventing itself. It would rather continuously lose elections to dangerous people than hand over the party infrastructure to the dirty hippie progressive left. And we are talking about people who are really not that radical, at least as far as the spectrum is concerned, but who nevertheless have the gall to suggest trying something a little different than shoveling favors to various sectors of the oligarchy.

After the right wing counterrevolution that really got going in the 80's, the political left wing staged a counterrevolution of its own, so as to maintain the power required to win national elections. After the 30+ years of this re-invention, the party has ceased to grow, and now it continues to harden, its cold dead fingers gripped around the levers of power. The Iron Law of Institutions has found its most refined iteration.

And I'll go ahead and be a contrarian right now and say that the Democratic establishment actually really loves Trump. Here I don't mean "love" in the sense of warm feelings of regard; doubtless they do really "hate" Trump subjectively. But he is also the best thing that could have happened to them. He provides an impetus for their existence, and now they can point to the Republican party with rage, and to Russia and its allies with a touch of dark foreboding, without having to reckon with their own failures.

At the same time, Trump can refer to them as the corrupt, deceitful, and incompetent con artists they are, without irony I might add. They require each other. They love each other.

Swell

So the present administration is pursuing a surge in military spending, and cuts in non-defense spending, including to the EPA.

We do know that the Pentagon in particular is a leaky sieve. It has been declared as un-auditable, and it is likely that billions are disappearing into various holes, never to be seen again. The military is already the largest in the world, and completely riddled with corruption and ridiculous boondoggles, including jets, ocean cruisers, and targeting systems that don't work. And of course the U.S. is heavily reliant on these very boondoggles, as it has sought to reproduce the old maritime dominance that built the British Empire, adding air power to that equation of course.

Wars are indeed stimulative, but stimulative to what? What happens to a capital buildup that steadily destroys itself, and destroys its own supply chains, as it is marshaled? There is a good reason that the history of revolutions includes protracted wars as triggering points.

And there is the matter of small-scale nukes.

The surface of the moon is quite the look, and perhaps soon the earth can try this look for itself?

ICE

The activities of ICE, the changing structure and function of the agency, and most importantly, the individuals that make up the agency itself, are all things to watch. This is where some of the most dangerous people are finding their calling. People that can talk about having increased fun and boosted morale when hunting some of the earth's most vulnerable people are a people to watch.

It is this agency that is most intensely politicized under the new administration, and its size and flexibility to operate in the field is rapidly growing. It is also ICE that is going to be the most hated agency by the greatest number as it expands its reach and power, and it is already experiencing the pressures of increased interagency hostility, as it comes up against other enforcement mechanisms, such as within the sanctuary cities.

This is a hostility that has always existed within the structure of the decentralized US government, but now it is being brought to the surface and further pressurized, especially with the assistance of growing public awareness, an accelerating effect that was made apparent with the increased unrest around police killings.

The agency has been intensely criticized for its duplicitous behavior in the field. Its members actively lie and deceive other agencies, such as in Santa Cruz when they lied about conducting "anti-gang activities" whereas they were merely rounding up defenseless people in the early hours of the morning. And at least in Los Angeles, they have been asked to not call themselves police, for fear of alienating locals to the LAPD. The LAPD! We can sit for a minute and let that one sink in.

This hatred, this fear can have a disturbing and powerful effect on individuals. It is an amplified form of the resentment that is feeding the populist right. Even normal police officers in occupied neighborhoods are forged into powder kegs under these forces, ready to unravel in bizarre circumstances.

It was the vigilante minute men groups and the border patrol agencies that attracted all of the developing neo-fascists in the country, and those capacities provided intense incubation structures for those caught within their nexus. It reinforces and crystallizes the somewhat dormant and nebulous Manichean worldview, the perception of a clearly delineated hero, and an equally developed villain.

And now we have rumors of all manner of checkpoints and covert raids. They're snatching up people at an accelerating pace, a people who don't have the protections of a state, or at least the organized power of sympathetic members of the population. There are plenty of people doing good work, but the immigrants are many, and set to grow as the living debris of global communities that are disintegrating under the pressures of empire.

Horizon

"Staggering" is a word that comes up quite a bit in the article, and it seems appropriate.

There is something similar at work in the Central Valley of California, where thirsty farms are competing to drill down into underground reservoirs, which depresses the land and disrupts other water flows like aquifers, which operate by gravity, aggravating the problem.

Meanwhile the Oroville Dam, which maintains a great water reservoir that feeds much of California, is falling apart. We went from a severe drought to a complete deluge, which paradoxically could usher the drought right back in by overwhelming various regulative systems like the water reservoirs.

We do know that states - which can't print their own currency - were hit particularly hard by the financial crisis, and many were hit by failing derivatives and other financial instruments. Couple this with a destruction of the tax base due to collapsing demand and investment - a problem created by the depression and insistence on neoliberal reform - and accompanying social atomization and a collapse in trust, and the shocking spread of public negligence and recklessness becomes more understandable.

I'd like to briefly comment on the matter of climate change, which not only produces hotter temperatures and drier environments, but also sudden deluges and other surprises from chaotic weather, which overwhelms life systems that are predicated on anticipation of the environment. It is the oscillating pattern which is most traumatic, which further stresses other stressed social systems.

A meta pattern begins to emerge; compare this to various physiological disorders like blood sugar problems and alcoholism. When too much sugar enters the blood stream, the body compensates by releasing large amounts of insulin. All of the sugar is metabolized too quickly, and the blood sugar level drops, leading to fatigue and mood problems, among others. On top of this the body becomes resistant to insulin.

With alcoholism, the sudden presence of alcohol helps to stimulate the GABA receptors in the brain, providing a calm and euphoric state. However with greater amounts of alcohol over a long period of time, the GABA receptors become depressed. If the alcohol intake is suddenly stopped, all of that suppressed receptor activity bounces back, like a returning pendulum. Thus the subject is consumed with depression, anxiety, and other more serious symptoms, all opposites of the depressive effects of the alcohol.

These patterns can also be compared with other environmental patterns, such as the disruption of the nitrogen cycle. A common example is the process of eutrophication, in which the introduction of too much nitrogen (a nutrient) to a body of water causes the explosive growth of organisms most responsive to nitrogen, various algae blooms, which then consume all of the oxygen in the water and kill off all other life forms, which results in dead zones.

What all of these patterns have in common is an overabundance of manipulation: organized life has manipulated and concentrated certain substances which have a limited effect on limited bodies, and then introduced them into complex life systems which require balance and continuity to function, thus throwing the systems out of balance, essentially destroying them. This is certainly a significant pattern to explore further, but for now I want to turn back to the significance of Mexico City's drought conditions.

As the first linked article details, drought-stricken Mexico city has tapped deeper into its underground reservoirs, causing the city to steadily sink, which has the compound effect of stressing its gravity-based water systems.

Mexico City is one of the largest and most populous world cities on the earth. Its destruction will mean cascading crises on the local and global level. Globally, the city is an important financial and commercial city for the Americas. Locally, mass migration will be certain, as Mexico City has a population of over 21 million. Mexico is already in a state of extreme political strain, with rapidly rising gas prices and a collapse of political legitimacy. The country continues to receive deportations from an increasingly xenophobic United States that is ramping up its anti-immigrant efforts. Though immigration from Mexico is decreasing, where will all of these people go in the end?

This is but one sector of the world, where escalating crisis is rapidly becoming a new normal. Which raises another issue that will have to be addressed in time.

The chief spiritual task of our age is to not only come to grips with human mortality, and the mortality of civilizations, which has been a long-running task, but a reconciling to the loss of continuity in general. I mean here of the eventual sweeping away of all that one knows, and which is continuous to the perception.

Yes everyone is mortal and dies. This is an important fact that drives spiritual thought and practice. But many of our deepest drives have to do with maintaining continuity in a society. One works so as to advance the future interests of one's community and society. One labors with the hope that future generations will prosper.

One is left with a profound spiritual challenge: to continue working and to live a decent life in the face of the possibility that much of what now exists may be swept away in a shorter time horizon than what one is ideologically accustomed to.

I'll address this more thoroughly soon.

Brexit and Right Wing Populism in General

One of the issues that makes Brexit - and the populist/free trade dilemma in general -  so painful is the sheer amount of connections; highly clustered nerve endings essentially. In an advanced economy, there are so many wants, which are conditioned both by habituation and the constant driving interests of manufacturers and producers. The global economy is so highly interconnected, and many of these wants are delivered through networks that span many nations. The global supply chain is profoundly integrated at this point.

What is so painful about the Brexit break? What is so traumatic about the rise of right wing populism in general? The many economic connections, forged through force and deceit over the last couple of decades, must now be renegotiated and reimplemented by societies atomized by the very economic connections they have fostered, complex societies completely dependent on external inputs coming from all directions.

The populism would work - in a practical sense, there are so many other issues here - if everyone was able to simultaneously forego a large portion of resources, which would be initially traumatic, but could clear the way for the establishment of a new governing body. However this would require a more even distribution of resources within and without the dominant empires, all of which are locked in a mimetic struggle for resource control and border security, a dynamic which of course requires the diversion of resources into their bodies.

The issue is that the more active and politically efficacious strains of populism at the moment are tightly coupled with xenophobic nationalism, a recipe for disaster in an interconnected global market. The wealth has been unevenly graduated along various identity and class gradients, and those gradients seek to persist and sustain themselves along the lines of hierarchy and privilege, so that any change in the flow of resources must necessarily cause social distrust and political discord.

Of course many populists don't intend to forego these resources anyway. The right wing populists that are driving both the Brexit and Trump political movements desire the same amount of resources and social domination they were once accustomed to, and feel that they are in the process of losing objects of comfort and their general standing. Without a doubt, there are many impoverished individuals that are genuinely suffering and require relief, but they've yoked their salvation to a force that will further pulverize them in the end, as it always has.

Another dimension to right wing populism is that it can be seen as a simplifying mechanism. Our society is far too complex to administer sweeping changes in the face of crisis, with the hope that those changes will correctly and accurately fix the multitude of pathologies that make up the regular function of the global market. The time frame will not allow for a careful untangling of social and economic pathologies. What is required is decisive force and simplified decisions, which of course are resting in the hands of an arrogant and entitled tribe of imperial myth worshipers.

So you see Trump pushing both tariffs and market liberalization, a hybrid of ideologically simplified toolsets which symbolize strength and vitality in the classical and neoclassical liberal imagination. So we must go back to what we had before and protect national industries by imposing tariffs on foreign competing products, without restructuring the economic entities that the tariffs are applied to. So of course various mega corporations are actually hurt when the cost of their foreign-sourced raw materials and manufacturing inputs go up, and they must pass the costs on to their customers.

At the same time, industries like the Telecom industry are further liberalized, without additional measures to break up industry monopolies. We can watch as net neutrality begins to disappear, and the oligarchs that control the pipes are now freed to eat the lunch of competing oligarchs which use the pipes, and then individual Internet users themselves.

What we are left with is not a systematic restructuring and progression toward harmony, but a constant antagonism against all that already exists, which has been left in place.

Poisoned Chalice

Usually when someone mentions a poisoned chalice they are referring to something bad. Of course there is a good reason for this, usually poison is bad for whatever it enters into, by definition.

There is always an implied locality and relationship with poison however, and we can only understand its effects within a limited context. Poison has to be something particular, and it has to affect something particular, and then the way the poison and the particular vessel interact has to be particular.

In the most general sense, poisons "disrupt" the locality they occur in. What is to be disrupted depends on the poison and the vessel, which can have various effects. A disrupted body may suffer negative consequences to it, but it may also create new opportunities within itself, as disruption can stop booth good and bad processes, as far as the body is concerned.

Someone may tell you something you really don't want to hear, thus poisoning your psyche, leaving you writhing in a depression. But what if what you were told was some truth about your person, which steadily destroys some bad set of habits upon having it put into words for you? After recovering from such a blow, you may continue on in life changed. Perhaps some unsavory characteristic about yourself was revealed, which has now been broken off, leaving you to continue on in life stronger?

There are plenty of poisons and toxins that are undesirable any way you cut it. Cyanide halts ATP production, and potassium chloride stops the heart. You're not likely to gain much from a food poisoning episode, other than nausea and a desire for it to be over. And toxic relationships, or social phenomena like toxic masculinity tend to destroy the relations around them, oftentimes without building anything positive in their place, though even these things can have other indirect effects that aren't always well-understood.

And yet there are other poisons that have entirely different and unforeseen effects,

Cannabis for example is sometimes referred to as a neurotoxin, though there are numerous debates going on around this classification. Nevertheless if you do smoke too much of it, there is the possibility that it goes bad and you panic.

When you panic, you have to cope. Your ontological security has been temporarily shattered, and you have to go about putting it back together. You can stand to learn quite a bit from an experience like this. I've had a number of panics on various substances and learned a hell of a lot in the process, or else have developed strong spiritual bonds with things like water, incense, various plants or foods, or breathing which helped me through, bonds which proved lasting and functional outside of their generative context.

Various indigenous tribes have their peyote, or ayahuasca, or a number of other substances, and they use them for coming-of-age rituals and spiritual pursuits, which can sometimes resemble the practice of having youth disappear into the forest to go on survival trips. The individual, after having gone through some hellish-but-illuminating trial, now possesses the tempered character required for moving through the world with all of its hardships.

Humans do indeed bond together under extreme duress, sometimes in surprising ways. And this doesn't have to be an argument for war, there are plenty other forms of duress. We see this phenomenon crop up in unlikely places, such as in the surprisingly touching Hands on a Hard Body documentary, in which individuals bond over a seemingly mundane contest of keeping one's hands rested on a pick up truck.

Some of this may echo the Nietzschean "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" bit. You emerge stronger coming out of the war-like wilderness of the dueling wills. But even the disintegrative, social Darwinist environments can produce unities of their own: we now have the systematized movement of the individual interest, embodied in capital and the market, a toxic entity if there ever was one, which is essentially poisonous to all that surrounds it. So then would a toxin introduced into such an entity neutralize it? What is toxic to the toxic?

Admittedly this is a whole lot of wordplay. But words, when fixed in relation to each other to mirror certain realities, can reveal those realities in limited ways.

Resistance

This is meant to be a complement to the piece on feedback. An interpersonal side to the sociopolitical and macro side.

One thing I've noticed - at least provincially, though the state of national discourse does seem to confirm parts of this observation - is that there is a growing resistance in the avenues of communication. Or, as a medium, the field of communication has become less conductive in places; communicative signals - or feedback - are less likely to pass through, and communication discharge increases where it can pass.

Part of this is due to cycles of fear and trauma. The anticipation of hostility or pain leads to avoidance, procrastination, aggression, delayed communication, and even severed communication.

Of course the energy has to go somewhere, so it builds up, and discharges more violently where it is finally freed. That loss in feedback quality leads to both an increase in discharge and force from the outgoing, and an insulation and direction of force inward for the ingoing, and both of these dynamics mutually reinforce each other.

The outgoing are more anxious to assert themselves due to the loss of signals, and the ingoing are inclined to withdraw due to a basic distrust of signals and signaling.

As fear and hostility becomes a more regular occurrence, one is more likely to anticipate such interactions and act on those anticipations, revising one's global protocols for dealing with others, which results in all sorts of false positives and negatives.

In the public sphere, constant suspicious glances from behind veils becomes a regular currency. There is an atmosphere of distrust and contrivance. There is a background ambiance of paranoia. Futher, there is a sort of hoarding of thought, an "I can do it"attitude in which one's private thoughts take on an ever-greater significance as harbingers of objective truth.

The healing process consists of a mixture of clear communication, restoration of trust, which is often based on faith, a willingness to absorb and redirect bad energy, a drive to suppress fear and address trauma inwards, and a redirection of the drives away from the self and outward.

Feedback

Clear feedback is essential for stable relationships of all kinds, and thus for moving through the world with what grace is possible. Gradually increasing feedback signals, based on your actions, can inform you whether you should keep on, or stop what you are doing, and these are best. This way you can zero in on a given act or behavior and alter your next steps accordingly.

For example, in conversation, if you are accidentally saying the wrong thing or insulting someone, the other person can softly correct you. If you are acting in good faith, and receptive enough, you can change your behaviors for a return to harmony. If you refuse to alter your behaviors, the feedback can grow stronger and firmer until you get the message, or until relations break off. 

If in a conversation you slip up, and the first time this happens the person jumps all over you, it might be more difficult to maintain a relationship. If it is so easy to make a mistake in this way, the feedback isn't accomplishing anything other than a constant breaking of relations. Of course feedback is in a constant changing loop with how people behave in the first place, so things will get complicated pretty fast in this regard.  

The set of relations in feedback systems correspond to the structural conditions that they arise in. We can look at the type of feedback often found in densely populated areas. Some restaurant owner in the city has such a massive volume of people moving through the space, and a certain proportion of those individuals are going to be doing things like screwing up the bathroom. The owner experiences those horrors in an amplified manner, as they may be a small proportion of the events that happen in the restaurant, but they all happen to the particular owner. So the collapse in social trust is broadly applied and a lock is placed on the bathroom door for all cases, and you have to prove your worth to get in. 

The channel of communication collapses, and the feedback channel narrows from: "please don't do that and be respectful, whoever you are," to "no one gets in unless you're a customer and you can prove it."

Density is not the only input in this situation of course; there must be a density of bad actions, as opposed to good. Problems unaddressed by society on a structural level become amplified in this respect.

For example, the restroom discussion may sound strange to someone conditioned to suburban life, where populations tend to be more homogeneous and policed due to structural reasons. There one can wander into any public restroom one desires for the most part, but in an urban area that is situated next to major mass transit, where a large volume of homeless  and other socially sanctioned groups pass through regularly, the bathrooms are virtually impenetrable.

I bring this up because I once nearly crapped my pants trying to look for a restroom near one of the BART stations in downtown Oakland. I don't draw attention to this to be crude; it was a very strange situation in which a variety of facts conspired against me at that moment, which revealed a set of systematic problems as a result. What happened was this: I emerged inside a BART station in the midst of travel, and suddenly had an urgent need to use the restroom.

There weren't any restrooms anywhere. The BART administration had made the decision not to provide access to public restrooms anywhere in the facility, using fears of terrorism as an excuse, though the subtext points to cost-cutting, and as implied, class prejudices.

I desperately made my way to a cafe nearby. Despite my clear state of discomfort, the cashier lied to me and told me there was someone in the restroom. So I bought a green tea, and absurdly, was told that the bathroom was probably open and then...given a key. Without a doubt, this cashier's job was on the line, and under no circumstances should she let the rabble in. 

This principle can also be extended to poverty stricken areas, in which the architecture itself takes on the systematic shape of a fortress or warzone: all of the windows are barred and there is barbed wire everywhere, because a large enough volume of individuals moving through the area is considered dangerous to property owners. Numerous interconnected feedback loops finally produced an environment where not much cooperative feedback was possible at all.

This situation can be attributed to broad structural failings in society, on many levels, such as having to do with class, prejudices of all kinds, geographic segregation, private property regimes, market interest, wear patterns in capitalist society, and other factors.  

So as soon as you enter a specific geographic area, the feedback landscape changes completely. Wherever you go, you are treated differently, and you have to interact with your environment and peers differently, depending on the structural actions of various types of volume on the landscape. 

This state affairs is further complicated by the fact that feedback regimes are also modulated by the kind of person you are, and change along identity properties of class, race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, neurotype, and others.

What's more, a whole history of feedback progressions can be downloaded into a single individual within a very short space of time. Systematic change on this level can lead to entire quality changes, with a number of transformed individuals trading in feedback that leads to another quality of interaction altogether.

These principles crop up in vicious ways when it comes to draconian laws. A draconian law is a terrible mode of feedback; it exists only as a provocation, in contradiction to the intended effects of its authors. Here is a feedback pattern in which preservation of power is intended on one side, and the erosion and delegitimization of power come out on the other. Now, the erosion of power occurs over a long period of time, whereas the convenient preservation of power through fear and punishment happens instantaneously, which is partially why these laws happen. There are many other effects of course.

Draconian laws typically come from a centralized legislature that is far removed from its subjects, and thus has no real communication with them. If you combine this with the violent forces of capitalism and imperialism, and the attempts to stabilize the various sites of turbulence that are unleashed from these forces, you get a set of ham-handed laws indeed.     

Insulated, central authority has an impoverished feedback with its environment, and it therefore antagonizes it. But this is not something that has happened intentionally, or at least, out of direct intentionality. This is a state of affairs that is produced by certain patterns of development over long periods of time.

Let's say that I was homeless after a long chain of events, and I found myself at this same Oakland cafe, desperately having to go to the bathroom. I would surely be denied, and then would be in extreme pain. It would be impossible to communicate at this point. Feedback would become quite forceful. I may have an accident, and instantly become socially radioactive, or else I would have to find some place outside, which could cause all sorts of health problems.

Taken in one instance, this would be a small mishap that would elicit sympathy. However as a regular and voluminous occurrence, it would surely elicit movements on the part of some central authority to sanction that kind of behavior. Thus you have the steady criminalization of homelessness, which is occuring amidst a backdrop of a constellation of changing feedback patterns, perpetrated on the part of businesses and individuals throughout the land.

Many single instances in a given context contribute to the revision of law, which changes the context in which instances arise, and so new instances come forth. In a complex civilization, we can see that very serious and destructive feedback loops can arise rapidly and dramatically if unaddressed.

There are many other ways to explore this issue, and many other directions of analysis to take. In time.

Biter

The right populist propaganda that typifies Trump's toolset has a curious hybrid quality to it. In form it resembles a leftist critique, so as to capture the reality of national and global political and economic pathologies. There is talk of out of touch elites, bad trade policy, impotent foreign policy, de-industrialization, and all the like.

However in content, it twists into a right wing critique. The critique quickly becomes racist, misogynistic, and generally xenophobic and domineering, which allows Trump to come into possession of the levers of power that rely on these mechanisms .

This cobbled-together argument achieves the pressure levels required to give it thrust on a national field. The leftist form allows for an attack on the establishment that Trump resents because he is not respected by it, and the right wing content can mobilize sufficient sectors of the voting population, a voting population that is not too thoroughly hampered by poverty, voter discrimination, gerrymandering, or a number of other injustices. Or of course, general despair.

Much of the politically efficacious population - that is, the part of the population that still votes, is able to vote, and believes in voting in the first place - is closer to the right than the left. This is the population that serves as a lever at least; you still have the blue states, but you still have to win states in the electoral college. And even then, as a sign of the thorough domination of capital, an individualist and neoliberal ideology generally has to be adhered to in order to get anywhere in establishment politics, so that even the left is stuck playing the nicer capitalist in order to win seats. If money is driving an election, and money is concentrating, then you have to take on the qualities that will flatter whatever concentrated pocket of money you are seeking to power your campaign, though this paradigm is rapidly unraveling.

Much of the political messaging that penetrates deep enough into the populace tends to be backed by money and organized corporate power, and it has been the right that has had the most effective political and economic organization over the last couple of decades, and it is able to effectively capture these resources. Plus the right holds the ideological reserve currency so to speak. With the concentration of power in the capital class, it was also inevitable that the economic left would be snuffed out by the very actions of consolidating capital, which forced the restructuring of the political left as a consequence.

So Trump used the same old right wing propaganda that has been peddled for the last 30 years to advance money power, and which was also used to maintain the control of resources by a generally white-coded grouping of families and entrepreneurs. However this propaganda had to be modulated with a leftist critique so that the establishment right could be supplanted by the insurgent right. The Trump right bit the far left to gain a foothold in unclaimed political space. It is this slight modulation, the subtle wrinkle in the Mobius strip, that indicates the swinging of the pendulum in the other direction, or at least a dramatic transformation of the political arena.

It might be worth recalling that the National Socialists followed a similar shapeshifting path to power. We don't necessarily have to repeat that sequence of events, but neither is it certain that we can avoid producing a similar rhyme.

Frozen Stare Pt. 2

Much of the explanation in the previous post had to do with negative trends: things have grown worse due to the effects of 30 years of class warfare and neglect. These trends are largely economic, and certainly very significant.  All of this is true, but it is important not to leave out the positive trends: that for  30 years there has been intense labor and struggle in the cultural realm, all of which is not for nothing. 

The intense reaction to Trump and the Republican party could be in part explained by the results of this struggle. Our culture and our demographics are very different now. It is no coincidence that much of the political vitality and mobilization behind Trump came through the Breitbart media empire. Though Breitbart's paranoid musings on cultural Marxism seem very bizarre and overblown at a glance, they are definitely getting at something deeper. The sentries on the right correctly detected a major push on an unprotected flank: though the left was largely defeated in the economic realm, it continued on to become dominant in the shaping of culture, which the right is now trying to counteract. 

The problem that the right vaguely senses in its paranoid way has nothing to do with Marxism. It is that various identity groups on the left are gradually coalescing in their interests and coordination and are forming much more powerful blocs, which has been a project taking place largely in the cultural realm. 

It is true that the failure of the Hilary campaign, in which these blocs were cynically courted, resulted in a general shift of attention back to the economic realm, but it is a serious mistake to dismiss the realm of culture and identity as frivolous or divisive. Different people achieve political consciousness in different ways, depending on the pressures and traumas pertinent to their lives. However as each pursues their own political pathways, they gradually progress to the points of resistance that concern everyone. 

This is the real danger for the right. To maintain global capital, a general division has to be maintained. Capital thrives on numerous interconnected separations, compartmentalizations if you will, of various political phenomena. You start seeing the clubs and guns really come out when these divisions are threatened, when things start to come together outside the logic of capital. 

The cultural onslaught that the Breitbart media network is carrying out is preposterous and a pale shadow of the leftist cultural realm, and it is opening this new flank just as the right's economic platform is going up in flames. The left is now tasked with building bridges between economic and cultural struggles throughout the land. And the oligarchy sits frozen in place and stares on. 

It is no secret that there is a general terror passing through the ruling elite. One hears tales of escape planes, island landing strips, doom bunkers, buried grain silos, and a huge assortment of what we might call various panic buttons. 

This isn't necessarily a new development; I think here of the 19th century industrialists that built their homes just down the street from the local garrison, always cognizant that the end was nigh. So it has been for some time, and since then we continue to rebuild our homes along the fault lines and flood plains of capital, without a care that these fault lines and flood plains - which become more inflamed by the day - are largely socially determined, as opposed to their natural brethren. 

No doubt, there is a general unease passing through the lower classes as well. The fields of potentiality are opening up once again, within which exist both terror and hope. But the stakes are very high today, stakes which I'll be exploring further in time. 

Frozen Stare

Last night on CNN, the news channel spent almost the entire evening discussing at length and in detail the specifics of the claim that Trump was milling about the White House in his bathrobe, rolling out experts in this or that White House etiquette, taking care to usher in historical anecdotes for breadth and accuracy.

For me, this was a pretty amazing moment, surely one in a series of many sordid moments, because I hadn't actually taken the time to pay attention to commercial media coverage. Like reading in the car, I just can't do it for too long; it makes me too nauseous.

But there are millions of people watching this stuff, and undoubtedly sitting transfixed, becoming excited as a loud commercial flashes on the screen, depicting a spat between two Republican politicians as a sort of wrestling match.

I find myself sitting, scratching my head. What has changed? What is different now? It seems as though it is simply more of the same, only amplified.

Indeed, Trump is a culmination of the last 30 years of Republican party propaganda and nonsense. But part of the reason that propaganda like this could function - as in practice it is clearly against the interests of a vast majority of the global population - was that there was a simultaneous concealment and compartmentalization of the practical effects of the policies that this propaganda was pushing.

You could have these "presidential" figures strutting about in their tailored suits, flashing their winning smiles, and looking very composed, telling these lies. And the propaganda was quite believable for many people, namely middle-class white people who were bribed with cheap credit, cheap gas, and their very own mini-fortress in one of the outer-circle suburbs of their choosing. One could look away, and attend to something else; at least the fire was not yet under one's own two feet.

Communities of color were left to languish in the inner cities, or else they were stuffed into the prison system and silenced. Perhaps a lucky few, upon winning lotteries of their own, were admitted into the middle and upper classes. Working classes everywhere were gutted. Global communities were threatened, suppressed, or destroyed.

And now, the inner cities are aflame, and the prison system is bursting at the seams with tales of overcrowding, profiteering, cruelty, and torture. The working classes are also aflame, and make that triple for many other global communities. And the middle class now finds the fires creeping dangerously close to its own suburban borders. To top it off, the Republican party now has on its hands a cartoon caricature of all of the collected fables it was pushing to suppress those on a class, race, and gender basis.

Trump really does represent an externalization of these interests. They can no longer be concealed with his person, which are of course amplified with the migration of him and all of his cronies into the most visible public offices in the world. Right on cue with the simultaneous failings of 30+ years of bad public policy.

And what do the commercial media organs do, when confronted with the sudden eruption of flame, this physical manifestation of a deeper pathology? They stare at it with awe, horror, and fascination, as if it has suddenly materialized from a parallel dimension, or touched down from outer space. They are frozen in place, dazzled by it, ushering in their viewers to take part in the frightening spectacle as their profits rise once again.  

All of that mass, all of that energy, suddenly frozen in place, unable to confront the conditions of its own existence, fixating instead on all of that smoke and flame. They've been redirecting the attention of their audiences for so long, so as to maintain profit. It is what they have learned to do. And now with the stakes this high, it is natural that they choose to redirect the stare from their own conditions of survival, and the conditions of survival for humanity itself.

And how could such a machine behave otherwise? Here I am, rubbernecking. There is still much work to do.

American Crisis

There have recently been a series of insightful pieces from various writers on the subject of the current administration, pieces which taken together, present a pretty startling picture of our affairs, albeit from different perspectives. I'd like to take a moment to put some of this together and stabilize my own shifting state of understanding.

As a note of warning, this will be a fairly abstract and esoteric discussion, much like a fair amount of my pieces lately, as I'm still struggling to integrate various frameworks of thought into my own. The bewildering landscape of our collective affairs certainly doesn't help cultivate a stable sense of understanding.  

Now, I'm not sure that the administration really knows what it is doing, but I'm also not sure that the administration is entirely in chaos either. There seems to be a learning process going on here. There will most certainly be a lag time, and a whole galaxy of political chaos and confusion, because a very large political body is transforming its operative modalities of rule, modalities that are built on decades of rule in turn. We do also have a constitutional order that is over two centuries old, but it is an order that has buckled several times in the course of U.S. history.

There is much to say about political chaos and confusion - and the nature of chaos in general, for that matter - but for the time being I'll have to leave that aside and address it later on.

What I'm interested in at the moment is the growth and concentration of private power. For decades, this destructive force was managed in the private sector with market competition, and regulated through the balance of legal, legislative, and executive state power. But now this force has overtaken public office.

And let's be clear: there is quite a bit of attention focused on Trump for obvious reasons. He now embodies the worst characteristics of private power. However all of that attention obscures the reality that his embodiment represents the culmination of decades of encroachment on the part of private power, in the form of the neoliberal political and economic project. Excuses and even favorable comparisons of the previous administration are more than distasteful, however much we miss that last patch before the edge of the precipice. As for the current administration itself...

Whatever Trump's inner life is like, whatever his intentions are, we can't know. What we can know, or at least speculate after, is how he is likely to act when his ego is threatened. He will marshal all of the resources - and perhaps more importantly, privileges - at his disposal, to preserve the vastly inflated image that he carries of himself. In a pluralistic society, this must necessarily mean the development of a unique authoritarianism, which is to take hold of the levers and materials that it finds around itself.

Of course, the more resources that he drags into his orbit towards this end, the more people that he breaks to serve his distorted needs, the more powerful the illusion of his own power becomes. Naturally, the growing heft of this illusion will necessitate ever greater methods of repression to sustain it.

What is relatively certain is that he will fight to preserve his private world in the context of the American presidency, transforming that very public world to reflect his private world in turn. And many after him, all aspiring to the power and efficacy that he now embodies, will learn more about just what they have to do to have it and hold it, and they will get better at it.

But at the same time, now that power is concentrating into very private battles for control over vast public spaces, the loci of those battles are going to become immensely brittle and unstable regions. Because what pervades these conflicts is a toxic mixture of distrust and ambition towards domination. Private power, with its greedy ambition to surmount, must distrust its entire universe by necessity, and instrumentalize all that surround it as means and objects to aggrandize itself. And where one distrusts and surmounts the universe, one is likely to get the same back, which as it happens, amplifies one's distrust and desire for domination. The instability is reinforced.

Unstable regions must generalize to everything they are connected to, if they are to sustain themselves.The nation and the globe will become even more unstable places. And I don't envy those who aspire to the helm. Of course, I don't really envy any of us at that point.

This is a uniquely American crisis, and the cascading global and domestic crises that are begat will be unique to our time. One can only peruse history for analogues, to speculate about the course we will take in time. A general direction may be apparent, but the specifics of that direction are another thing entirely.

It is true that American power works very differently. It is closer to pure bourgeois power, whereas European power in the run-up to the great wars still bore the signature and residue of the old feudal kingdoms, especially in its hard nationalism. We haven't seen bare bourgeois power - its always reached to proxies to do its dirty work - and now we will see it gradually unfurl its grim pedals.

Gazing back over European history for example, one finds that the architecture and planning itself is structured very differently from our own, a difference which mirrors the changing state of our very social relations over time and space. Compared to a factory, the vectors of collapse may be radically different in a cathedral. However, the effects of collapse are similar enough to the occupants of both.