Holiday

The holiday season is  ready to wind down, and there is a new year around the corner. These things are losing meaning for me for the time being, at least as they are recognized and expressed in our culture. But the natural season that "backgrounds" the holiday season never ceases to impress, and its movements take up some emotional space in the vacuum that has grown over time. Here are some older North American winter shots in Wyoming I dug up to express the "holiday" cheer I have in mind.

Writing Is Hard

I write both when I see something and then actually have the energy to articulate it. Sometimes I make notes on something I see and then wait to put it all together when I'm not so busy and/or tired. On top of that, when I'm not writing as much, the faculty weakens and I have to do work to bring it back on when I need it. As usual, it has been a bit quiet here because a variety of conditions are not being met, but I still have the intention to write. So on we go, and as usual, more to come, probably next year.

Winterscape

The snow shimmers atop the rolling hills, which appear as frozen waves on the landscape. The snow itself betrays its gradual motion as it is moved by wind; it swirls past obstructions like rock and weed. Every patch of land is dazzlingly complex, whether one looks at the soil and sparkling snow, or the bush that reproduces itself as it is pushed across the land by wind and settled into open soil, stretching on for miles in tessellations in every direction. And every patch of dazzling complexity is repeated in every direction endlessly, and so it is too upwards into the sky and downwards into the earth.

With such awe and reverence, the fence, which attempts to circumvent this landscape and impose itself into the consciousness as all that matters, becomes a hilarious sheen on the surface of it all.

Crimp It Together

Alcohol and rock bands and holiday celebrations...what they all seem to have in common is a sort of artificial crimping together of those loose threads of belonging and ecstacy, across lines of biochemistry, culture, and tradition. We've discovered the power to evoke the feeling of harmony and belonging with the will and the intention to do so, at the cost of accelerating dissolution and discord over time as these projects mature, both on the personal and social level. And so the result is that these artificial crimpings need to be repeated again and again at an accelerating pace, until there is no longer the energy available to sustain the repetitions.

Derelict?

It's Broken

There is a great amount of suffering, which largely escapes articulation, that is involved in the consequences of careless, thoughtless, and incompetent labor. Broken pipes and leaks, and dysfunctional appliances cause much consternation and aggravation which is inescapable as it occurs daily in one's own home.

In large and complex living habitations, where maintenance people of numerous specializations are coming and going, evoked and whisked away by unseen administrative bodies, there is no true recourse for people with disrupted homes and lives, but to vent anger at individuals closest to their reach. The systems that place all of these suffering people in direct conflict with each other remain elusive and out of reach, and as such, hum along.

When a given problem in the infrastructure is actually fixed, and the problem truly goes away, and there is no longer a danger of being ripped off or tricked - which is all too present in unscrupulous specialists that camouflage themselves in the complexity and obscurity of their activities - the pain relief is quite palpable.

Hand in Glove

Over time those operators of technologies like vehicles and heavy machinery become increasingly integrated into the equipment itself. (NOTE: fixed a pretty bad typo here that significantly changed the meaning of the sentence: from "operative technologies" to "operators of technologies.")

After a process of learning and habituation, the massive and lumbering tractor - an intimidating and alienating object at first glance - takes on the movements and intentions of the operator, and the operator identifies with it, feeding it fuel and caring for it with lubrication, and becoming despondent when it breaks down. The massive blades and hydraulic arms become extended appendages, taking on the character and quirks of the operator, which are more richly articulated over time with the increase of skill.

And in the same way, individuals become integrated and fit into classes of laborers, understanding the instincts and desires of those classes ever more.

Lattice

This one turned out a little obscure and rant-ey, but I'm tired and it is what I got at the moment.

In this late and socially/technologically advanced stage of civilization, it is crucial to not only maintain countless tiers of complex technical and intellectual economic activity in perpetuity, but to also reinforce the body politic against the effects of its own intensifying exploitation and domination.

So it becomes necessary to instill authoritarian thought at a very young age, both through educational and political/social institutions and through instinctual relations in the home. There are only a few right answers, dependent on a centralized authority, and many many wrong answers, which must be programmed and disciplined out.

The powers of surveillance have increased alongside collective desires for control and anticipation, and domestic security has increasingly militarized in response to an increased perception of universal hostility, a hostility directed both inwards and outwards. As the bond between the organization of collective social ends and social labor is broken, it becomes ever more necessary to direct and force that social labor, force which is organized by a distant power that retains a monopoly on the imagination and realization of ends. And of course this process further severs the collective bond between ends and labor.

Now that we've brought everyone up to be sympathetic to authoritarian thought, we've provided ourselves with an interlocking and self-reinforcing lattice that amplifies and advances the ongoing waves of dysfunction. This lattice that we compose is necessary for holding in place the vast and tottering infrastructure of the world economy, but through this rigidity it loses its social dynamism and spontaneity; it must by necessity become increasingly brittle.

It must move as one great and rigid mass, or it mustn't move it all. Of course at the micro level the whole of it is always in motion, but much of the dynamic energy which threatens to disorder the market apparatus is either atomized and individualized, or crushed and dispersed through state violence and through starvation and the holding back of resources, which tends to be spontaneously arranged through private activity.

For some time - we should say it is a staple of the "modern era" - it has been the case that the body politic is viewed with great suspicion, as some dangerous, unstable, and explosive force which must be carefully contained and worked around for its own good. And through this belief it has become so. All of the violent transformational energy that the system itself produces through its operation, is stored throughout the body politic in various forms such as resent, latent violence, and all the like.

Universally, that transformative energy is repressed, and universally the destruction wrought from this fans out, spreading exponentially and reinforcing itself as the lattice seeks to reconstitute itself, producing fires that burn everywhere at once, and so on.

Thistle

Fulfilling Ends

There is a deep human need to fulfill various ends and aims as they come up in one's life. Where there is energy, resources, and social power available to achieve an end - whether it is a house, a car, a feast, or a national or international empire - and there is enough power in that socially or culturally inculcated aim, it will be marshalled for that cause. Otherwise it will be sought out in an intention as the aim temporarily goes dormant, which can outlast all kinds of calamity and disruption.

It is how an empire can take so long and tortuous a path to unwind itself. For that matter, it is how the seeds of empire can scatter after a collapse and produce new fledgling empires in due time. Or consider the bafflement of neoliberal anti-insurgency administrators as they watch the incentive seed funds pumped into their colonies produce runaway sectarian conflicts.

Empires initially tend to think throwing around their abundant resources and energy will unconditionally spread more copies of themselves, when what really happens is that old and long-running societies - which may have been torn asunder by various traumas or the empire itself - are reanimated with their own interests, aims, and ends, and then use the resources to attempt to rebind themselves in their own images, antagonistic to their benefactors. 

This long-suffering human need can produce great beauty, and great suffering, and everything in between, depending on the aim and the circumstances surrounding it.

Shredded Labor

The work can really suck you in, simply as a paper shredder seizes upon paper and pulls it through its razor rollers. An old and large building can continuously pull labor into it, as the trauma caused by tearing through walls, ceilings, and floors, and sawing old pipe and soldering new pipe in, and draining plumbing systems and then recharging them, can finally rupture long-running weaknesses and vulnerabilities in aging infrastructure, and the building, full of paying occupants, seemingly cries out for attention itself.

Juxtapose such a state of affairs with a creaky and unstable economy, with its extremely loose and exploited labor markets, and its pathological drive for total efficiency and slashed labor, and you get a pattern in which daily labor is intensive, frenetic, and mind numbing, and then suddenly slacks off for given periods, which with fewer and larger operating businesses and the dearth of job opportunity, produces a climate of white knuckled desperation and the chasing of work wherever it appears, work that is everywhere forced into necessity for its own sake, at least wherever there is energy and resources available to produce it.

For obvious reasons, this culture has fixed a limited idea of labor and then elevated it to sublime and sacred heights in the moral imagination. No doubt, it takes hard work in many forms to produce most of what is worthwhile in this world. But as Thoreau pointed out in an oft-ignored throwaway comment, it is very true that hard work leads to hard eating, and for that matter it leads to hard resting as well.

Amid the frenzied pace of daily work, it is all too easy to spring for high calorie fast food or ready made food, and consume a constant supply of meat and carbs, which in its lower quality forms come chock full of various preservatives, toxins, and engineering. It is all very satisfying in the midst of a hard day - especially as one's stomach fills up with a bacterial ecosystem that, in the interest of perpetuating itself, sends signals of hunger and craving for more of its kind, signals that are irresistible upon being layered over the body's necessary cravings as it undergoes intensive workout.

Where there is not simply an abundance of fresh food by necessity and cultural custom, it takes willpower to eat well, especially as one must focus and discriminate, and most importantly, pay premium prices and take the time to prepare it.

When one rests, the mind wants to shut off completely and hibernate, indulging in sustained streams of media and sinking deeper into sinks of time and attention. This regime is hard on the body and mind, and of course the hard labor that necessitates it produces more of it and it becomes the cultural and economic standard. 

Slow Movement

Quality or Quantity?

Much quality is swallowed up by the simple force of volume. When there is so much work to be done, sometimes there is simply not enough time to make sure a job is properly carried out from start to end, with all of the necessary details in place. It takes time, care, and effort to ensure that all pipes are properly installed, that all electrical is properly connected, that all materials are properly bonded and joined together and that the aesthetics are pleasing as well. For things to be nice, and to work well for some time, it is sometimes necessary to slow down, and not do so much. Small wonder then, that we have this deep social need to continuously accelerate, and then expect everything underneath to hold into eternity.

Underneath

To replace a faulty sewer line, we had to first remove the topmost layer of sidewalk, which was done by picking up the sectioned slabs at their seams with the claw of an excavator, and then letting them drop down and shatter under their own weight; otherwise the slabs needed to be struck with a sledgehammer, which is admittedly exhilarating but very hard on the body. The pieces could then be picked up by a Bobcat and hauled out. 

After the sidewalk was removed, it was then necessary to dig a trench for a couple hundred of feet, which was 6 feet down at the deepest point, where sewer mains continued to the public sewer. One of the more striking aspects of this dig was the condition of the soil itself, underneath the removed walkway. Other than a few scurrying spiders on the surface, and some worms and larvae nestled against the various tree roots, there was no sign of any insects whatsoever. 

The soil was dead. There was no need for any bombs to go off, or poisons to be spread, and there was no natural desertification present. However this was a sort of desertification in the end, a desertification achieved by the spreading of a dominant form of life as a self contained and delineated layer over another lower layer, smothering the latter in turn. 

Because in the soil were all kinds of water pipes and humming electrical wires carrying electricity and media data. And of course on the surface was a vibrant community full of playing children and music and barbecues, among other things.  

But what does it take for those topmost layers to be periodically renewed? Of course, it requires a living soil that is in this case completely displaced and separated from the topmost layer, where it is maintained at a distance, and where its products are trucked in and spread about. But this space and this separation itself is contributing to a great strain, and all of the strata of living things are exhausting each other. 

Sky and Earth

For the Moment

Just finished a 17 day stint of intense work, and there is probably more to come. I've put together some of the posts I've been working on when I had the chance tonight, and I expect it to be like this in the near future. I'll just keep getting notes down and then putting them together when I can.

Flare

As yet another episode in the public spectacle of selective grief reveals, the hand-wringing over Saudi brutality happens to flare up over a single elite journalist, blotting out the starved Yemenis for starters. One can see very visibly the proportions of energy going to those subsets of society resting atop of and exploiting the vast expanse of those underneath. 

California Fire

The fall winds came in to clean Los Angeles, and briefly in the morning light the city was clear and vibrant until the smoke came up in a towering column to the north. Soon there was ash floating down and when the wind changed, the smoky haze covered the city and you could smell it.

It will be curious to see how the fires in Malibu effect world affairs, it being a prominent cultural center and home to countless wealthy celebrities, exerting influence on a local government which itself has been tugging against the central government for some time.

And the neglected and abandoned regions below the Malibu hills rose up to sap away some of their resources back, looting the burning mansions, themselves booty acquired from legalized hand-over-fist looting of the body politic. 

Ressentiment

Resentment tends to fix one into place what one currently is, halting growth, learning, and a general progression towards harmony. It is how people can manage to fuse themselves with preposterous worldviews and opinions. How and why that happens is another matter for another time.

Welcome to The Machine

Infrastructure and resource conditions have a propensity to reflect on the individual. After all, infrastructure and resources are mediums through which individuals are mutually and simultaneously renewed over time.

What I mean is this: if someone hits a pothole, or there is a mechanical failure and they lose control of the vehicle, hitting someone else, or cause a number of other chain reactions that result in harm, it doesn't matter what conditions are on the ground, the individuals involved are going to feel not a small measure of guilt, and such an experience is going to profoundly alter their images of themselves and their worldviews.

The host that serves guests poisonous foods is going to preside over the suffering of loved ones, and feel like a disgusting failure regardless of personal culpability. The farmer can look over a drought-strangled crop and feel personally useless. The laid-off worker who can no longer afford house payments and is turned to the street along with family feels instinctually responsible, no matter the cognizance of the injustice. And so on.

The physical violence done to the individual through decaying infrastructure and dwindling resources is at the same time a profound personal and spiritual violence, and that devastation leads to further destruction of infrastructure and resource, through mismanagement and interpersonal conflict and carelessness and all the like, and on it goes.

It is as if people are being placed on the rack to be stretched out and tortured by the very bones and sinews which they are supposed to be compose, and which serve to connect them to each other and nurture them in turn.

In fact, the currently running TV comedy "The Good Place" imagines a hellish afterlife in which demons torture people by consciously subjecting them to carefully designed material and spiritual chaos, discord, and confusion, much of it environmental and relational, leading to hilarious results. As a fictional device it is entertaining, but its less interesting to imagine it as a real possible metaphysical construct, than as a fictional compression of a vast and terrible process, peculiar to modernity, that proceeds as a matter of course.

So a society is very much a general commitment to the flourishing or at least the wellbeing of the individual. Standing alone as a statement, this is noncontroversial and at the root of many a theory of society. But it gets much more complicated on the ground and in motion.

Where did The Machine come from, if not through the actions of multitudes within cascading generations, metabolizing together for the sake of flourishing and wellbeing. But it has all extended too far, recklessly expanding and contracting, pulverizing those caught under its blooms, and rending its own children to break them down into constituent parts when it has to contract and reshape upon meeting its limits.

A social body must beware of the multitude of powers that it unfolds to perpetuate itself, as these powers must be maintained over time for the sake of all. Power for the sake of itself is a commitment to nothing, and soon enough its impressive energy flows become the implements of torture for its wielders.

Trails

My Method

I've been sort of asleep at the wheel the last couple of weeks on the writing front. But there is reason for it.

I can tumble down a flight of stairs and call that "my method." In a similar manner, I try to improve, strengthen, and systematize what is really a chaotic and tumultuous life path. The writing is good when I have the energy to write, and the fire is burning just enough to "see."

Careers and financial obligations in the forms of book deals are a good way to weld oneself into a disciplined writing pattern, so to speak, but I don't currently have any of those things going.

No ground is entirely sound. I can attempt to "control" the fall and that is about it.

Learning and Development

The development of higher brain functions eventually fixes the lower functions into a more stable and persistent state, which still retains some flexibility and dynamism, but which eventually "sets" and grows stubborn.

This is most apparent in the contrast between child learning and adult learning, and accounts for why children are so much better at learning "intuitive" skills like new languages and artistic modes of expression like music.

The child, without full development of the executive functions, has recourse to an instinctual and intimate connection to a given skill; the fundamentals of the skill become largely automatic and natural, and as the child ages and advances the skill, begins to think more reflexively in refining it.

Learning advanced skills as an adult is a very different process, and requires much more reflexive thought.

I can reach for a water bottle and instantly open the threaded cap without thinking about it, as I learned to do so at an early age. However upon recently learning to put together various pipes, and work with various tools, which feature threads that allow twisting and tightening in the exact same direction as the bottle, I have to momentarily reflect on what I am doing logically and then proceed.

Difficult Terrain

One curious thing about mountain communities and communities occupying sheer-faced canyons is the limit to their localized economic development. The simple logistics of sheer surfaces and the constant pull of gravity puts hard constraints on patterns of development that usually run away on wide open spaces, patterns that develop with an intensity that is all the more extreme the closer these spaces are to bodies of water, rivers and other conduits for resource extraction and commercial transportation. As production clusters and minimizes friction and maximizes economy, growth, and complexity, development accelerates.

Yes, we can still truck up various construction materials and supply the basic modern amenities like housing and commercial structures, but you simply don't see the industrial parks, large scale power generation and waste management, refineries, malls, and dense housing in mountain and canyon communities that you see in urban environments.

The underdeveloped character of a given mountain or canyon neighborhood also lends the space a unique and "unspoiled" character that makes it easier to justify that community's fierce protection of that character, and strengthens the resistance to further development in those regions.

I Won

Our primary mode of transportation, the mode of the automobile, is - in keeping with its nature - completely overrun with, or largely driven by - no pun intended - private motive. What I mean is that for any given traffic-filled street, to do anything at all, or to get anywhere or go in any direction, you must compete with many others that have private motives of their own, which often conflict with yours.

The very form of the infrastructure itself allows for the forceful assertion of private interest, or the will of the individual who controls an independent and self-contained vehicle for transport.

The functional need to traverse space and close distance is necessarily coupled with prevailing social instincts, which themselves gave rise and sustenance to the automobile as the dominant form of transportation.

A majority of the drivers on the road in an American urban environment are not only concerned about traversing a distance, but doing it as quickly as possible. Further, under cursory observation, what many drivers are interested in from moment to moment is not an absolute minimization of travel time, but a relative accomplishment of traveling faster than and being in front of their closest peers, which gives rise to a variety of traffic patterns and occurrence of accidents, given the constraints of road and signal infrastructure and traffic law.

The simple act of traversing space becomes a tense psychodrama in which a majority of the drivers on the road must best each other in the skill of driving. Granted, there are all sorts of motivations spanning the wide open road, but especially in the city where the heat and pressure of private gain begets more of itself, more drivers find themselves pulled into a consciousness where the others around them need to be surmounted or at least defended against, and it produces a social environment of its own.

Here Here

I've got a good couple of pieces to write; just a bit sucked in working various construction jobs at the moment, getting banged up, and coming home too exhausted to write anything substantive.

More to come, and for now, another cactus.

Build

Suing Our Way to Prosperity

In contracting everyone is worried about being sued. This is because contracting is usually carried out with large sums of money. Labor - which is organized by construction entities that exist to accumulate money - is solicited from organizations that exist to accumulate money by providing habitations and services. So there is a constant tension between necessity and the various negotiations that occur between the limited cooperation of organizations looking to divide the spoils of exploited labor.

The law is supposed to regulate these processes and keep them running smoothly and legitimately. So when something fails, say a roof liner leaks, the managers of the building may go after the manufacturer legally for damages. The manufacturer may in turn point the finger at the contractors working with the liner, or perhaps the occupants of the building who may have damaged the liner in some way.

So there is no real collective management of resources, but a struggle between organizations of limited cooperation and accumulation to assume the least liability for damages and take away the most money - or social resources - out of the negotiation. Over time, the very mechanisms for facilitating this process have been taken over by the organizations under suspicion in the negotiations. That itself is a very complicated process, but there you have it in a nutshell.

Pay It Forward

The problem with these built structures is that they do not renew themselves. They are formed through processes of the tearing out of living things from their contexts, where they are then repurposed and reorganized together dead. Otherwise inert materials like rock, iron, soil, and glass are manipulated into forms far outside of their natural state, using intense concentrations of energy which is itself marshaled by limited beings with limited intentions.

Buildings do not renew or maintain themselves, they only proceed towards chaos and dissolution undisturbed. This results in a situation in which the built objects in question must be maintained with competence and care. Over time we have watched the competence diminish, and the care more or less evaporate, and these structures are left to sit, as if they were to maintain themselves, when really they sink further into states of rot and disrepair.

And it takes some burst water pipe or crumbling of infrastructure to light up the whole state of affairs. The contractor, upon opening up the shielding we've become accustomed to in the form of walls and ceilings - to shut out the superfluous and unappealing realities of built environments from our daily lives - is made to witness the dissolution, and either ignores the problem outside of the immediate specialization or aim, or else punts it to management, who is more often than not all too happy to conceal the issue and focus on short term, cheap repairs, while extracting the value from the inhabitants actually in danger and in misery.

Heaven and Hell

The billionaire's patch of heaven in the gated palace is indeed a fleeting one. More and more one hears reports of billionaires and millionaires living in an abject state of fear, with surges in sales for sophisticated alarm systems, panic rooms, bulletproof glass, and even escape islands, bunkers, and air strips.

They wring their hands at Davos over problems of economy and governance, pore over sophisticated plans of neurological rewiring and genetic engineering, and engage in sweaty conversations over managing food supplies and controlling private security forces.

As David Graeber has pointed out about the Chicago industrialists living down the street from the local military base - whether factually or figuratively - those riding the crest of the wave have always been aware of its dynamics, living as if those sublime highs could come to an end at any moment.

And perhaps the image of a wave is not quite kinetic enough. They've collectively grabbed hold of the bare and hot wire; their muscles have seized up around it; they can't do much else but ride the lightning, while the rest of us burn.

Quite a juxtaposition of the heaven and hell images. Corporate bank accounts soar and the stock market swoons and then slurps back and swoons again. We're independent oil producers. We're going to space again. We'll have vast automated networks of self-driving cars and living smart houses in a decade or so. But wait, we're also tottering on the edge of ruin.

Extension

Clean

Funny enough, there is not only a physical sensation, but a general feeling of wellbeing that comes from showering or swimming. There is certainly something there that is very old, which is usually the case with such deep and inscrutable feelings. Worth bringing up, but that's for another time.

Construction as Sacrifice

In a field like construction, it can be pretty staggering entering it anew to find a vast array of lingering threats. Because people who have entered into the industry at an early age have largely become habituated to its dangers, and people who otherwise never have to enter it don't usually find cause to witness or perceive these dangers, except through statistics or brief newsreels of workplace disaster.

There are so many ways to be catastrophically injured, whether through being crushed, falling, putting high velocity and sharp objects through one's skin or body, poisoned, burned, exposed to carcinogen, or anything else. I've mentioned before that this is all because what we build tends to be very heavy, and needs to be highly continuous and insulated from the external world, so everything that manipulates that built environment itself, such as tools and vehicles, need to be heavy and able to manipulate objects at high velocity, high heat, high pressure, and etc, so as to bring that reality about.

So when objects of the built environment themselves are not a danger, the vehicles and the smallest hand tools are. Add to this the necessity for speed and volume in construction heightens the risk of accident. There are so many environmental and procedural threats involved, and such a high volume of labor, that one has to assume that there will be regular accidents, and there are. The built environment as it exists requires a steady sacrifice of limb, organ, sense, and even life.

Legitimacy and Optics

There are murmurings of a possible legitimacy crisis if a highly partisan and/or constitutionally intemperate individual like Kavanaugh gets into the Supreme Court.

However, the Supreme Court has been highly suspect of compromise for some time, and carries with it a dubious legacy of a large number of questionable decisions. The problem is that it takes some knowledge and argument to cut through the ideological fog and political propaganda that papers over decisions like Citizen United and Bush v. Gore and a plethora of others.

Knowledge and argument take energy, which is limited to a given proportion of capable witnesses, so issues of legitimacy that require more of this type of thing are far easier to conceal.

Someone like Clarance Thomas is just as compromised as Kavanaugh, and has just as much of a troubled past, as Anita Hill made clear. But he also has more self-control over his own external persona, and he keeps his mouth shut, so he passes under notice of most, and the establishment media allows this as well.

But for someone like Kavanaugh, there is an open and visible defiance of those traditional mores that govern an institution like a judge's seat. This is more difficult to hide. And this is coupled with an ever-growing interest in political affairs in the body politic, as the large viewership of the hearings - which are protracted and procedural, and which have been ignored by many in the past few decades - has made clear.  And humans being what they are tend to take the visible and perceivable behaviors and procedures of the powerful as signals for conducting their regular affairs, at least as far as they aren't threatened by double standard laws and enforcement.

So a legitimacy crisis does grow as it becomes more visible to a greater mass. And this crisis is further intensified by lost trust, intensifying public interest in their own immiseration, and a long history of delegitimation and escalation on the part of the political right as well, which all add to a volatility which feeds the crises themselves.

Telescoping Cause and Effect

As a body of knowledge progresses, there is a constant opening up of the chain of causation. Something can always be found between a cause and effect. Something which acts on something else to produce an effect is actually acting on something in between, which then acts in turn to produce that latter effect, and so on.

Pictures

I used to post a nice picture here and there. It tends to take off the cognitive load, at least for a few seconds, relaxing incessant thought by switching over to the visual system for a bit. There is much more to say about it of course.

I might try dropping a few images without comment, or with a word or two, or perhaps juxtapose them with other conceptual illustrations. We'll see how it goes.

Here is a nice cactus.

With, as you can see, a greater concentration of pricks at the very top. Heh.

Building Music

In the beginning, musicians typically play off of and mimic the musical forms and sounds that they are drawn to, and what resonates with them, which through repetition, forms the basis of further creative works.

Patterns hold which are constantly repeated. Notes juxtaposed together, as in chords and bass notes structured over beats, establishes an emotional base and a rhythm which excites or calms, or which can establish a number of other moods. From here, improvisation is structured, without which it just tends to whirl off into space.

Together

Cocreation is embodied in the human body itself. You can see it in the visceral distaste that arises upon eating the same exact thing again and again, which is apparently signal for the malnutrition that follows after it. We've flourished in variety. Everything grows together.

Kavanaugh's Bellow

This is an all too banal register in the world of the privileged. Those delicate and tender souls, painfully bursting forth like flower petals shoving their way up, must necessarily occupy the spaces reserved for them. One no longer struggles for a seat in the highest court, but is whisked there, as a simple matter of the logical conclusion of one's own lineage.

And every last marginalized cry must be smothered. Every last obstacle to accumulation - and to the validation of those privileged to be in the crest of the wave - must be removed, lest they serve as unbearable reminders of the nature and the origin of those terrible powers of accumulation.

As the closer one comes to such truths, the closer one comes to the breaking of the spell.

Bridges for Sale

Trump as an individual doesn't seem to have quite what it takes to bring his terrifying worldview into full coherence, and to bring it into full fruition. To attempt to read his central desires, it appears that he still does have an admiration for that old establishment; he genuinely does want to be accepted and respected in this faltering modernist and internationalist order.

And at the same time, he surrounds himself with true believers and zealots, and knee jerk reactionaries who are less able to contain their intentions to burn everything down, partially because it is the way forward to political power, and it is compatible with his own nature. This leads to a confused, sporadic, and spurious quality to his actions. Trump wants to burn just enough down to be accepted into a preserved and continuous establishment.

For that reason he is a terribly effective bridge. This society's immune system - in its own feeble way - can still fight off a proportion of the fringe reactionaries if they come at too steep of a transitional gradient; that is, if they reveal their hand too quickly to a society not yet completely terrorized, or acclimated to unapologetic and unconcealed brutality.

But the immune system is powerless to fight off those reactionaries that are steadily pulled in by the society's own collective desires. There are less resources - less energy - available to build up internal resistance to the drives which have motivated the system in its current form from the beginning. In particular, that whole galaxy of material desires and ambitions which continuously evokes and calls forth capital, which, with its owns desires of endless accumulation, furthers the dispossession and destruction of those large swathes of excluded humanity, while assimilating those peoples of utility into its specialized branches governed by a softened but hardening patriarchal and class-based system.

It is this set of desires, which appears diffuse at first glance, but which coheres enough to suppress those leftist alternatives and then which takes up those reactionary elements required to sustain the system and protect capital, and which quietly and steadily take root underneath the bluster of perpetual scandal.

Keep It Going

Great works - like paid specializations - do more than reveal or create; they act as teachers, training the mind within a given state of being. They do this through repetition: if you think about something once, or do something just once, more than likely the effects of that thing are to fade away and dissolve without too much efficacy. With much sustained repetition, their effects become greater and more permanent, until there is enough momentum that they perpetuate themselves, and it takes more work to simply get rid of them.

If one obsesses over a given work and goes over it again and again, thinking about it and thinking about things through its lens, eventually one sees everything through that lens, and one cannot unsee it. It has been fixed into consciousness, and so that thought and that way to think can even be perpetuated institutionally, say through social or economic pressure on the part of its adherents in an academic establishment.

Further, what wage labor and class and caste systems have in common is that they serve as mechanisms - often very complicated ones - to guarantee the perpetuation of a given state of affairs. For example, crops, cupboards, circuit boards, and engines all imply extremely intricate fabrication disciplines that have to be rigorously repeated in the individual, and then reproduced in subsequent individuals.

The higher up the chain of specialization, and the more a given technology requires the unconditional perpetuation of all of those constituent parts, the more is at stake, the more a society needs to take care to ensure that its constituents are reproducing all those many repetitions in concert. This growth of idea and discipline, and the carrying out of repetition to sustain it, can be a very powerful tool, utilized for the good of human beings. But then it can also be the case that this growth does not turn off.

There then arises a condition in which there are so many ideas and projects vying for attention in the human organism, all of which demand to be reproduced in perpetuity, even when there is not enough energy to sustain them all, that it becomes impossible for everything to continue together in its present state.

It is here that crises and failures become teachers in their own right. 

I Just Know It

Throughout history, there are indeed "bad times" or periods of widespread suffering or "endings," so to speak. But these bad periods can emerge out of periods of plenty - if given enough time - or stagnant periods for that matter, and then the bad times themselves do eventually dissolve into the air from whence they came.

That bad period has a certain character that coheres into an image in the perception as an apocalypse so to speak, and the opposite is true for good times. It is tempting for us finite beings, with our need to anticipate or orient ourselves to a given state of affairs, to assume a character of optimism or pessimism that is large part of our identity, which can be in accordance with - or completely discordant with - a given state of affairs.

That need to anticipate intensifies with power and the potential for loss, which is largely a state of consciousness, as demonstrated by mystics "living in the present" with their given practices. One suffers when one attaches to an image that contradicts a given state of affairs, especially when met with disbelief from one's peers, and when one's actions in the present don't accord with the surrounding reality, though this can eventually be validated in something like a written work which outlives one's own life.

And by the same coin, one can be viewed as a prophet in one's own life, or have one's actions accord with the surrounding state of affairs, and then have writings or records survive one's life and then one is labeled a fool in a different era that follows. And so on.

These aren't all just parlor games. After all, for the person being stabbed in a time of "good and plenty" there is certainly a small apocalypse being experienced. In the same way, a billionaire may perceive the gated palace in the midst of calamity as a small patch of heaven.

Give It a Chance

Past traumas projected forward into the future through one's own sense of - or lack of - trust and one's anticipations interact with others' projections, producing a present of its own. This present, which as it exists now, consists of a mutually reinforcing and interlocking web of bad faith, bad intentions, and bad anticipation; it obscures any sort of good faith or good will, which may hang in the air between peoples, as if in escrow, waiting for a mutual exchange of good to be restored.

Just Do It

A civilization is largely built on "doing something," the repeated applications of which eventually serve to unravel it.

Social Trust

One thing the opioid crisis made visible was how precious of a resource social trust is. It did this in a negative way, by demonstrating very dramatically what happens when that trust is lost.

The crisis itself emerged from a confluence of destructive trends and developments. The regions hit the hardest tended to be regions suffering from economic neglect and/or a history of extraction and abandonment.

What's more, these regions were deliberately targeted by organizations like Purdue whose cultivated instincts were to seek out regions of economic opportunity to be exploited and exhausted for limited gain, instincts that have developed culturally and economically for centuries and more.

The economic opportunity in this case was a despair and a cultural malaise lingering as residue after earlier "economic opportunities" had run their course, which coupled with the more immediate necessities of pain relief, among other things, served as the perfect environment for dependency and addiction.

But the initial crisis, in which staggering numbers of patients became addicted and then accidentally overdosed, was only the beginning. The initial crisis itself primed the steady destruction of a powerful medical tool. Fear and alarm elevated the crisis to an epidemic-level event, and those hit the hardest by the convulsions of blame and reaction were the chronic pain sufferers themselves.

Now, just because a dodgy corporation produces something doesn't necessarily disqualify it as useless and/or destructive. But the nature of an organization does tend to be expressed in its products: products that don't work as advertised, and products that draw its customers in through extractive intent, reflect the intentions, activities, and care of its creators.

That said, the dominant form of production - and the dominant productive entities who owe their characters to the dynamics of that form - has thoroughly monopolized the field of medical procurement, and those in need of things like pain relief have to take what they can get. And opioids do work quite well for this sort of thing given average conditions. 

But the crisis itself - along with a slew of other crises of varying natures but of common roots - has done profound violence to social trust. This leaves us with a medical establishment that doesn't trust its patients with powerful pain killers, and a greater society that doesn't trust the medical establishment to have their interests at heart, when those interests don't coincide with a healthy profit. This results in disruptions and dampenings in the distribution of opioids and the relief of those suffering from chronic pain who need them most.

And then you have the prized and upstanding members of high society like the Sackler family, who in comical-evil-capitalist-caricature fashion (like as in Milo from Catch 22 fashion) profit from both encouragement of the crisis and addressing the crisis with addiction treatments. This type of behavior, which must necessarily take place within the social body, induces mass paranoia in that body; it signals that with enough power, anything goes.

Further, no one can expect to be protected from such abuses, as the state will not go the distance to punish such offenders in any meaningful way. With mass paranoia at its peak, nothing can be done really without triggering some destructive impulse. If everyone already expects everyone else to behave in the worst way, then any sort of behavior that arises, whether benevolent or not, can only be interpreted as such. 

It is one thing to lose trust; it is entirely another to have something like paranoia grow in its stead. And as we well know by now, woe to the society with a fully developed and self-reinforcing collective sense of paranoia.

Fatigued

Something is still very wrong; I'm just tired of doing the intellectual equivalent of shouting. When one stands and simply shouts (such as in an insulated space or an unpopulated wilderness), in a sustained manner, and nothing changes, and no one comes running with urgent concern, the attention drifts to one's irritated throat, and one's tiring lungs. The shouting becomes tiring.

Anyway, I figure I can keep steadily whispering "danger, danger," so long as the lights are still on.

Simplicity and Complexity: Caveats

Of course the language of "simplicity" and "complexity" is fraught with misunderstanding and baggage, and I've worked in the past to get some of it untangled, and remain dissatisfied and troubled by various conceptual problems, implications of egocentricity and ethnocentricity, and self-contradictions within the project still.

But there is one takeaway: in the absolute, reality is infinitely complex everywhere. And relative complexity, or observer-dependent complexity, necessarily implies simplification. It arises out of the building up of numerous prior simplifications, or conceptual building blocks which were stripped from their contexts and compressed in the first place. Relative complexity requires more organized energy, so to speak.

More generally, simplicity arises from constant repetition and the elimination of error and discord towards harmony, and it also arises from dissolution and catastrophe, whereas complexity arises out of turbulence and dissonance, but it also occurs in movements towards harmony and continuity as well. Again, no clear way forward.

Further Movement Towards Simplification

Another pressure towards simplification can be found in the concentration of power - a dynamic that has been discussed here previously. When power concentrates among a complex social system, more of the motive impulses are diverted away from the regions of governance that need them most.

This is because complexity by its nature requires a self governance in those deeper tiers, as concentrated power only has so much energy to attend to governance in a given tier or specialization.

Where one has motive, one must have power to set that motive into motion. When power concentrates, that intersection of motive and power is also concentrated, so that those most able to affect change haven't the slightest clue of how that change actually came about in the past.

It is a problem of the ineffectual movement and concentration of energy in time and space.

So power proceeds by its own necessities, and diverts its energy to those regions most sympathetic to it, simplifying its own operation. However to increase its effectiveness power must in turn develop those regions further after reorganizing and proceed again to a complexity with its appropriate delegations of power and motive.

I Forget

Living systems undergoing volatile progression - with progress in this case merely referring to movement in a given direction - can typically do one of two things. They can rapidly emerge and then rapidly unravel, resulting in an otherwise dazzling fireworks show before they return to the ether to eventually become something else.

If they are to persist however, there is a growing and changing complexity of those modes of self maintenance required to perpetuate that living system, which eventually has to result in a forgetting and a more gradual unraveling.

One good example here can be seen in the baffling, upsetting, and I suppose dazzling spectacle of modern mass politics. On the individual level, yes politics is still in part art and performance, but there is a systemwide process of manufacture that mirrors our modes of production in every other sphere.

Much of the most frequently utilized political language turns up nationwide at least, and with the globalization of capital and the proliferation of international trade and financial institutions, much of this language has been exported as well. The politics of economic liberalization, of austerity, of free trade, social democracy and etc. all feature regularly utilized language that is preformed and prefabricated.

Language like "austerity, free trade, capitalism, socialism, liberal, conservative, tax, tariff," and so on and so forth comes ready-made for the vast majority of participants, included as implements of political offense and defense, pre-loaded with the appropriate set of values when one puts on one's red or blue shirt to step into the arena with. Which to be sure, is partially situational based on cultural and geographical differences and smaller moment to moment practicalities and improvisations, but which largely holds on national and oftentimes even international arenas.

For a minority of participants, much of these concepts are carefully worked through and either reified or agitated against in their respective parties or organizations, and then for the majority the usual long chain of reactions, of affirmations and negations are worked through using the current language and concepts, in accordance with one's values and beliefs.

Upon coevolving with our many other forms of production, it has worked just fine for some time. The problem is being on the cusp of a massive paradigm shift, which tends to reveal the extent of the forgetting of the political machinery itself, and how it is supposed to work.

Once all of the political machinery has been built up, it has to be used over and over in accordance with existing necessities and practicalities, which in the face of political conflict and competition becomes more complex and specialized as political operatives and specialists take the machinery up and improve upon them with existing infrastructure and disciplines like mass communications, PR, marketing, data analysis, and etc.

This leads to an institutional dependence on the ready-made language and concepts themselves, the machinery, so to speak, and it results in a forgetting of the fundamentals that produced the machinery, and made the machinery necessary in the first place. So it is a desperate dependence on the machinery that continues the usage of the machinery, even when that machinery is digging deeper and deeper ruts.

What this progression eventually results in is a recourse to practical and conceptual simplicity, not through any sort of engineering principle, intellectual ideal, or artifact of wisdom, but through the mere necessity of addressing the inevitable crises that crop up when the machinery no longer works.

This happens because the ruling elite does everything in its power to shut out radical alternative (largely on the left) and then drag its feet as much as possible when working with those radicals (again on the leftward end of the spectrum) to craft policy and administrate reform.

The establishment is more than willing to humor the right on many fronts, due to shared conservative impulses, but then demures when it comes to adopting the more radical reactionary stances, which tend to lay bare the fundamental principles that underpin the baroque machinery that the establishment has come to rely on, machinery with a complexity that developed precisely to address some of the more problematic aspects of those underpinnings, such as careful focus group-tested euphemisms and framings that hide underlying realities like class domination, historical and contemporary racism and misogyny, and etc.

In short, there will come a time when the rightward-drifting establishment discovers that using technical curmudgeons like tariffs, sanctions, law, and propaganda tends to be more expensive than the effects are worth, and that they don't even work as well as they used to, because they aren't even that well understood anymore, and that it is much simpler and more effective to simply aggress militarily, further militarize and imprison domestically, and openly threaten, and these means will increase in sophistication until the next crisis.

Capital and State

For analytical purposes - and less savory propagandistic purposes for that matter - capital is often posited as an entity entirely distinct from the state. But for all intents and purposes, those analytically or rhetorically separated entities are one and the same. The one in its current form would not exist without the other, and the two perpetuate each other.

The odd part of it is the way in which this perpetuation is carried out.  We see an unsteady continuity miraculously held firm by the clashing actions of classes positioned against each other, lurching from crisis to crisis. It could be that this antagonism partially accounts for the analytical and rhetorical separation of the sectors, but conceptually, this juncture has a complicated cultural and intellectual history, and I digress.

Capital, left to itself, continues to expand indefinitely, all the while exhausting the resources and living systems that it relies on. Upon some sector of society threatening to blow up, or the whole of society itself growing unsteady, capital finally relents to a set of regulations and controls set forth by the state, to save capital from itself, and which also serves, of course, to temporarily free the state from the hateful gaze of its constituents.

This all happens after the state has been plenty busy cultivating the environment that capital needs to flourish: markets must develop after societies have been thoroughly separated from the land, and law must be crafted and contracts and private property must be enforced and held in place through violence, for starters.

On the other side of the coin, the state, with its multi-tiered local, statewide, national, and international ambitions of governance, requires infrastructure. It requires lines of communication, transportation, data management, procurement of resources for its stewards and constituents, instruments of violence, and etc.

And so the state is very much interested in keeping capital inflated and running properly. That beast - or perhaps, that god - has an appetite and a set of desires of its own. Sometimes it fears the waves of destruction it sets forth and shrinks back, and sometimes it proceeds confidently and arrogantly, resenting any sort of outside interference.

These distinctions account for the unique dynamics of such a human system over time, but the system is still a unitary whole, no matter its pretensions to minimize a given part of itself at an expedient point in time.

Proper Behavior in the Body of Capital

The loose cohering of interests which characterize a capitalist society also accounts for the strange autocratic purgatory we find ourselves in.

Right-behavior has been snapped into place through a mixture of legal codification, cultural internalization, and informal pressures exerted by multiple sectors of society cohering together and influencing each other.

Every sector of society is set against each other in interest, while at the same time they are bound together to make each other work, or capital descends like a ghost, attracted to the disturbance, to correct it.

What is meant by this? No there is no dictator (yet) leering through the two-way monitor. But make a very minor ruckus in the suburbs and see how free you are. How strange it is, to sit in the still air, listening to the neighborhood and contemplating free possibility and free movement, yet at the same time aware that simply turning up an amplifier and opening the window could lead to descending clubs!

The more noise and "disorder" you beget - and the more predetermined you are to be under suspicion in the first place - the more quickly the state shows up to your door to quiet you down and set you back in place, and that is after the household or neighborhood attempts to do it itself through social pressure and sanction.

That sudden fire that breaks out in the belly, that howling anxiety that bears witness to a growing chaos, must be put out at any cost. And so the family preemptively puts out its fires, and when that fails, the police, who anxiously cruise the streets searching for disorder, put out the fires in their own bellies and make the disorder orderly again.

And fires that break out in the police are quickly put out within the department, or else some internal affairs department or government regulator descends to put out the fires in their own bellies. And when the fires of the regulators break out, some financial institution or committee descends to put out the fire in their own bellies, and enforce fiscal responsibility, and so on.

And much like in the forests of the west, all those fires being constantly put out contributes to the development of choking undergrowth, ready to go up in flame en masse when conditions allow.

It isn't fire and chaos that is categorically snuffed out. There is always chaos, and there is always fire, but these things are marshalled in a single direction: consumption and dissolution for the powerless, and energy and constitution for the powerful.

The burning always has consequences, but those consequences become distributed in unique patterns of their own, patterns which tighten all the more that controls on the burn tighten.

I'm getting more vague and obscure as the post goes on, I know. The rest is ground I'll have to cover and flesh out at another time.

Playsets

The separation and sterilization of the landscape, itself a product of economic development, generates ever new demands that serve to fuel further development. For example, the child's playset emerges to serve children having been cut off from a realm of surprise, wonder, and creativity. Felled trees, burnt oil, and poured chemicals combine to form hulking playsets that serve as entertainment for a couple of years and then are left to rot.

Skilled Tools

Highly skilled tools are one visible form of social cleavage that emerges out of specialization. There is only so much time and energy available to master a given advanced tool, for the utility it provides and the regard that it brings. Slight fault lines develop in the life experiences and social regard that accompanies individuals developing in this way.

Social Wounds in the Industrial Core

Today, within the cores of those powerful developed nations and their allies, much physical, spiritual, and psychological damage occurs socially. That is, much suffering occurs as a result of a given advanced society's regular contact with its own self, much like an engine whose violent vibrations steadily loosen bolts and wear down metal.

Before individuals are pushed into poverty and misfortune, at least when they are not already marked for such a fate via class/race/gender/sexuality/ideology/etc., their person and constitution is worn down by repeated social stress.

Indeed, part of this is life, which is already pain, in which difference crashes against itself as different plays of energy in people, other living things, places, and things follow their own courses of development, influencing each other and correcting each other.

But an advanced economy - which is at least capitalistic in nature - can only absorb so many "winners," driving competition and cultivating a hostility for challengers and "others." Conformity intensifies partially out of the fear of failure, a fear that grows as chances for successful absorption shrink, as fearful competitors monopolize more of the social arena to prevent backsliding.

So mere difference presents a constant antagonism; there are fewer chances to heal and bind, amidst a backdrop of increasing environmental and social stress.

A single slight to someone beat up enough can trigger a small depression, or a panic, leading to damaged brain cells, damage from cortisol, bad eating, further slights, and worse. In such an environment, the self appears as a shell which must protect against constant outer blows, which steadily weakens under repeated stress.

Hey Easy There

It really is pretty strange watching the United States act on the world stage - and having knowledge of that history for that matter. There is a basic hostility towards anyone who refuses to be in general alignment with the hegemon's range of interests, but right at the point where that hostility is most veiled, one glimpses a telling tension between symbolic act and intent.

Take for example the decades-long history of the use and abuse of economic sanctions, tariffs, payment systems, reserve currency, and the like, much of which betrays a profound hostility and disregard for the economic and political wellbeing of the target nations, but which at the same time assumes some sort of veneer of fairness and justice to present the hostile actions as "tit-for-tat" responses that are wholly justified.

The range of this behavior does change across racial, ethnic, and class lines for starters. Typically, the more developed a country is, and the closer to a useful economic peer that country is perceived as, the more veiled and obscured the imperial aggression. The more of an existential threat that country is considered, and the more economically developed it is in turn, the more work is put in towards employing legalistic, economic, and political propaganda to pull public opinion in a direction that warrants more direct and naked aggression, which is work that implies a considered wellspring of aggression in the first place.

A large part of this has to do with the way in which modern liberal ideology works. If you are perceived as a relative equal - largely economically at least - then you are bound under the same general global legal and economic framework which has been carefully built up over the last century. This is a framework that, through its universality, binds together all those participating under it, so that any overtly hostile and capricious attack on an adherent to this system tends to damage the credibility of the entire system as a whole.

That legal and economic framework - however rational its underpinnings - functions on a faith in continuity: that the system can be predictably navigated, and that the laws behind it are not capricious, but fairly arrived at over the course of practical experience, precedent, and good faith. By many, this is no longer earnestly believed, but however much damage such a collective conviction has undergone, there is still a mass belief in it, or at least a dependence on its functionality, however desperate.

Because in a way law is manufactured to carry out a purpose. Modern law is built onto an endlessly complex array of practicalities, theories, and time-worn customs which are put together as a society's development progresses, and which are gradually scaled up to account for higher and higher levels of legal governance depending on the case.

Over time trust in law has become habituated precisely because it is so baroque: as with every large scale social project, the practice has been taken over with armies of specialists whose life training and labor goes towards understanding and administrating the law as it pertains to various spheres of life. We simply have to trust (or otherwise accede to) them, because it is so huge and so omnipresent; what else is there to be done? And of course this too is rapidly changing along with the changing political compositions of developed nations around the world.

As we now know, large scale wars are incredibly costly in many ways. With instant communication and various forms of rapid transportation, modern war has scaled up enormously, to say the least of the instruments of destruction themselves. They lead to mass destruction, social upheaval, and oftentimes profound rearrangements of global power. They're messy and chaotic; bad news especially for top-heavy and sclerotic great powers at the tops of pyramids.

Historically, the revving up of the great wars has entailed states of affairs that have spiraled far out of anyone's control, where they were experienced as a sort of overwhelming pull, not unlike that of a black hole. Even the aggressors themselves were responding to the chaotic forces of their collapsing societies, just as one may lurch forward to compensate for tripping backward. Which is not a justification by any means, but some attempt at an explanation.

Save a quickly unraveling global emergency, nations - including, usually, the hegemon - work to exercise hostility through these legal and economic channels while they are still functional and legitimate. They save on time and energy, as they have already been built up, and they atomize and individualize conflict, keeping most of the body politic intact, as opposed to a great war, which rends it every which way.

Much like the neoliberal who pooh-poohs the state ideologically, and then turns around and makes extensive use of it as the powerful tool that plays a huge part in maintaining that project from the beginning.

But of course, using economic and legal systems in this way tend to corrupt them anyway. It just makes these things happen a little more slowly.

Better Get That Looked At

Almost always when reading the news - if one isn't simply skimming a headline or quickly digesting a sound bite - the longer one sits and analyzes world affairs, the more one sees a particularly alarming pattern worth getting into.

I suppose there are no shortage of alarming patterns to pick up on these days, so by golly, which one am I referring to?

Here I mean to highlight that pattern in which some blatant wrong or dysfunction flashes upon the surface of the collective consciousness, and is momentarily held in view. But as it is held in view, and as one analytically penetrates the circumstances and context of the wrong, one finds many other connected wrongs, so many in fact that the original wrong begins to appear inevitable and irreversible as a result. 

One immediate example I can think of is the ongoing set of scandals surrounding the current administration in the US. Take just one: the paying off of porn stars with hush money. These revelations on their own are already troubling in terms of gendered power differentials, relationships between sex and power, a host of social and political attitudes, legal issues surrounding campaign finance, and the like, but it does seem a stretch to make the claim that they should be seen as existential threats to an advanced civilization.

But once one starts tracing all of the threads connected to this state of affairs, the emerging patterns become more ominous. Where is the hush money coming from, when and how is it being utilized, and what are the legal implications of this? What of the immunity granted to the National Enquirer CEO, and the endless threads of influence and hush money sloshing around in that sphere, the buying of social preservation and the selling of social ruin? And who can afford such luxuries and why?

Why are prosecutors focusing so intently on these limited issues, and why are the prosecutors given so much credence and deference as a formative social force, and as an element of collective governance? Why is the media so focused on such things to the detriment of others, and how did the media become so concentrated in the first place? Well, I could go on. The one implies the all.

This level of functionality must also be referenced against what must happen: what is it that our social systems have to accomplish to perpetuate themselves, and is this happening? The familiar interconnected problems of climate change, environmental destruction, social inequality and disintegration, global conflict, and etc. appear to progress further and relatively unopposed  - things outside the scope of this post - and so is this society functioning at the level required to deal with these issues? My short answer is no.

As cliche as it has become to draw the comparison, various forms of rot are the most readily comparable phenomena that I can think of. The weakness or dysfunction of wood that is structurally intended to support, or the visual tell of rusted or corroded metal are the immediately recognizable surface flaws, which upon further investigation - and to the dismay of the investigator - peel away to reveal whole landscapes of multi-level decay.

In the same way, the smell of rotting flesh or the appearance of a few maggots serve to draw one in, revealing some horrific panorama of catastrophic decay. Left alone, living processes antagonistic to the living systems they feed off of necessarily follow a path of development of their own, drawing vitality from the openings in potentiality set off by the disintegration that they further.

This is part of what makes the appearance of rot so frightful. Instinctively, it is not experienced as some sort of error or flaw to be repaired with one's existing faculties, but an invading force with a will of its own, a will set counter to everything implied by what's threatened. Rot in wood and metal threaten the entire integrity of the structure, and they imply the ongoing growth of things destructive to not only that structure, but destructive to the things making use of those structures.

Wood rot often accompanies moisture and the growth of mold, which can be harmful to living things. Metal rot implies rust, which can be harmful to living things as well. Rot in organic matter is fairly self-explanatory, and things like infectious disease are even worse: the rot jumps organic vessels, and at greater scales, affects continuous social structures and arrangements.

When one peers into the latest public scandal, which has suddenly flashed into public consciousness like a burning flake of magnesium, one sees a social order which is already corrupt and corrupting, in which individuals are regularly buying and trading the social powers to self-servingly smash the very laws and taboos that they've been benefiting from.

That flashing, that instant recognition and resonance, is the response of a public already intimately acquainted with those processes for some time, and who believe, that upon exercising the most blatant and visible manifestations of the process, can banish and purge some sort of corporeal evil and be done with it.

Which isn't always an inappropriate measure to take. Medical professionals can isolate all sorts of rotting and degenerating materials, treat the causes at their sources, and cut away the damaged tissue to save the rest of the body. But what happens when the hand and the scalpel themselves are rotting as well?

If horror at its base addresses the fear of total disintegration and/or destruction, then this is closer to the true spirit of that stuff that makes up horror. This isn't just broken bones, hurt feelings, temporarily dysfunctional infrastructure, or in general, temporary trauma that heals. This is something that signals the end of something else.

But what these revelations do indeed lead to, when they don't lead to complete devastation at least, is an enlarged consciousness of the whole, and an amplified sensitization to possibility and alternative.

When one thing goes wrong, it takes less energy to stick with what works and make the necessary piecemeal adjustments to keep things running, which is all too appropriate in many situations. But when everything goes wrong?

Another "Still Kickin" Post

Had this thing on hiatus for a good month now. For good reason too. It has been a busy month, traveling with my companion and helping her move, meeting people, deepening existing relationships, setting the foundations for a new life, and etc.

I've held off on setting up a new platform for the writings. The reality of it is that setting up a more independent site takes a fair amount of work, and requires a certain amount of technical knowledge that I don't quite have the energy to brush up on.

A free blogging platform like this one is convenient, I have established inertia on it, and the work for having the virtual infrastructure needed to keep this thing going is being done for me, which as it happens comes with a data-collecting megacorporation presiding over it. Which is to say that at this particular point in time, with the energy and resources I have, it is what it is. This blog will have to do for now.

Plenty of notes to extrapolate, and plenty of writing to get down. Plenty more to come. 

Metaphor as Tool

All tools have their uses - and misuses. As a tool, the metaphor has only limited application for describing empirical reality, with its differentiation and specificity. No two things can take the same space, and so a metaphorical juxtaposition only goes so far to illuminate something not fully understood, using a comparison with something well understood.

But metaphor, properly put into use, can reveal something more about both objects of comparison simultaneously. Metaphor can bring about comprehension by revealing the inner logic which governs two different things, using the contrast of those two things to render the similarity visible.

To reconcile the similarity of two different things - which the convention of metaphor imposes - it is necessary to abstract away the way in which both objects move, subsist, emerge, or pass away in a given period of time, ultimately revealing a common logic with which energy and matter are governed.   

Attainment Going Bad

Various forms of attainment are virtuous in that they inspire sympathetic motions towards a similar attainment in the witnessing individuals. This process can also go bad however, where a form of attainment consists of bearing unnecessary suffering, which in turn causes more suffering for those connected and witnessing individuals that expect the same of themselves.

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy exists as a constant pressure everywhere, at all times.  Where someone takes space, there is hypocrisy, because in many cases when one makes a normative or even moral statement, barring extreme cases, it is impossible for one to avoid violating that statement oneself at all times. When one looks out and makes judgment, one cannot perfectly turn one's gaze inside out, no matter the effort put into self-reflection.

Further, the movement from reality towards ideal always implies a friction, and what amounts to thermodynamic loss. Reality does not simply jump to ideal, it must move towards ideal, and always imperfectly. That gap - whether through imperfection or through the movement process towards ideal - could be construed as hypocrisy, or else it could be forgiven as human flaw or as learning and growth.

So the anti-plastic crusader may have some hidden piece of plastic in her clothing, or she may use some sort of disposable plastic in her daily food products, but she can still be forgiven for a lapse of awareness, or trusted to improve her lifestyle, or simply be pardoned for her vulnerability in the face of an intractable social, economic, political, and environmental problem, and still nevertheless manage to command respect and trust in organizing efforts towards combating the problem, at least as far as possible.

The perception of hypocrisy often arises in a social context, in relation to a specific end that requires social power and hence social respect and permission in order to marshal social resources towards that end.

Social power itself arises out of a trust and respect that confers authority on whoever is attempting to marshal it. If an individual can't be expected to do their share of the work being asked to move towards some end, that trust and respect begins to dissolve.

Any sort of social movement towards a given ideal requires a lot of work - work that comes in many forms, but which is work nevertheless. No one wants to do unnecessary work, or work that is inordinately burdensome. For someone claiming authority to help move towards a given end, much of that trust and respect derives from the expectation that they are doing the work too, or can deliver certain goods or progress with their own contribution.

The accusation of hypocrisy is a social failure. What the tarring of the label "hypocrite" achieves is a bid to a remove a given individual from a position of power, and the accompanying privilege to achieve some measure of social efficacy in a given pursuit.

It is the difference between a pin placing pressure upon skin without producing a wound, and a pin breaking the skin and drawing blood. If the hypocrisy is too blatant, unapologetic, or sustained, then it corrupts the individual's standing. The exercise of social power no longer has a base of respect or authority to leverage itself off of.

Hypocrisy can be hidden with lies, diversions, and redirections for some time, no doubt. But like most hollow things, that concealed void is sure to spell trouble when it is finally revealed, especially when it is being pressed upon by things mistaking it for a solid and a substance.

Iron Age

Iron ore is manipulated through energy intensive separation processes and smelting to produce various iron and steel products. The material that emerges as a result is highly continuous, with strong bonds that need even more intense energy to alter them.

Compare this to the individuation process that has been underway for thousands of years, a process that waxes and wanes as organized societies rise and fall. It is a process that by necessity produces rigid individuals required for the rigid, complex, and energy intensive assembly of continuous social structures, which in turn take great energy to radically alter.

Capital Cultures

Capital behaves differently depending on what culture it is flowing through. However all capital must constantly beget itself at a constantly extending scale, so the cultures that it flows through tend to bend towards that necessity.

Antagonistic Thoughts

Thoughts are almost always unfinished, unless you cap them and take possession over them with a value judgment, which evokes the ego and the eventual clashes against the ego. Capping something as good tends to stop thought around that thing for the time being, at least until the next evaluation, or else it deepens the progression of that thought, driven by instincts of love and reverence.

But capping something as good invites another to cap it as bad, and so back and forth it goes, with the progression of the thought being driven by love or hate, depending on the observer.

And this produces a social momentum - in the thinkers, speakers, and listeners alike - to anticipate a constant capping and a constant struggle over those caps, which continues on even over ideas in process, which are constantly torn asunder and never given a chance to fully develop in the public consciousness.

All of this has important social consequences, as value judgments over given thoughts can be socially cemented, and more quickly evoked in the mass consciousness, which is important for the direction of how thoughts develop, and what actions, behaviors, and material formations flow forth from them in the public sphere.

Late Empire

The waterfall gazes back wistfully, wishing it was back to being the river that it punctuates.

Dead Ends

A goal - or destination - requires time and effort to reach. To this end, a single dead end - which terminates before one's goal is reached - is straightforward enough: one must turn around and take another path. However, with enough dead ends, it is possible to become lost. One only has so much time and energy to correct one's course in a given direction.

Cost

So for the time being let's just assume cost to be a certain amount of energy or resource required to keep a living arrangement sustained.

Social costs often mount up in hidden and unexpected ways. Take the costs that are incurred through the interaction of long and short term thinking. At the moment we'll have to skip how long and short term thinking arise, and what elements influence their interplay; for now I want to focus on a brief analysis of costs.

It takes a whole collection of expansionary projects, furthered by short term thinking and minuscule private actions which reduce cost and increase efficiency, which then contribute to a sort of economic and political amassing of infrastructure and population, which then contains a vast array of constituents and dependents, and which must now be maintained at high cost.

The maintenance of any kind of large and complex material mass must be managed with intricate long term thinking which accounts for and minimizes costs, so as to sustain that mass into the vague future without those costs overrunning the energy it takes to maintain it. And this abundant and powerful mass provides all the means needed for something like short term business thinking to burn up the surplus and transfer costs, such as by providing an inferior product at greater cost.

This sort of process increases costs overall. It takes a sort of baseline cost to maintain a complex social system as it is, with careful maintenance and economy. But as known most explicitly in the medical and construction industries, failures tend to incur greater cost to repair than regular maintenance. Upon finding a vast social system producing abundance and profit, short term business has found that it can harness that abundance without giving back in return, passing the costs to someone else, and ultimately increasing those costs by encouraging failures and ruptures in the continuity of planning and management, as most commonly found in the neoliberalization process. 

Another dynamic to consider is the proliferation of myriad increased costs opened up by processes of privatization and political austerity. With privatization, there are the familiar phenomena of looting and monopoly pricing that occur which drive up these costs, and with austerity, the flow of currency emanating from the state is strangled off, and so private banking must pick up the slack with costly credit in its various forms - really another form of looting and monopoly pricing.

But there are other less visible costs that take place with changes in the interconnecting social relations, and the changing behaviors that those changes encourage. Austerity and privatization reduce economic security, and they disintegrate the social floor which is to hold up the whole of society.

When something like this happens, there is a fear and insecurity that spreads throughout the whole body politic, and what little trust remained over the violent course of civilization is smothered into ember once again. With an environment that is ruled by fear and distrust, the predominating business instinct is not to deliver products and services at cost, but to take as many resources as one can get away with to compensate for that loss in security, or in other words, to provide a buffer and cushion with which to maintain oneself and one's community. And this behavior universalized is a mass driver of costs.

This cost then, lies in a universal proliferation of the desire for a sort of security cushion, an amassing of resources far above what it takes to subsist, a desire which is only satisfied with the power to amass such resources, leaving less and less for a growing pool of powerless. Of course, such a process has been going on since at least the dawn of capitalism, and really well before that milestone as well, and it is a process that oscillates in intensity and concentration across time.