The curious thing about the modern iteration of our species is the way in which it relates to the national park system. The religious awe that arises out of the contact with sublime works of nature is limited to specific spatial instances in which those sublime works occur.
It takes the expenditure of a great amount of energy - whether fault lines and volcanoes push up mountains, glaciers cut through valleys, waters carve out canyons and caves, or whole rainforests rise and fall - to make enough of an impression on the individual - generally through the visual and limbic systems - to inspire a worship of nature, or at least a reverence great enough to drive towards its preservation.
With a flat and seemingly featureless stretch of land, who cares? Plaster it with parking lots and strip malls and be done with it. Never mind the soil underneath, and the surrounding communities and ecosystems.
In the same way, it is often the artifacts of marginalized and indigenous culture that are able to penetrate mainstream consciousness, when it is not the screaming and waving hands of marginalized activists themselves.
It may be the internal failures of the dominant culture itself that serve to further open that aperture of awareness, casting into relief the sacredness of a wider range of experience, that is, as long as those failures aren't making that same arena of experience the sworn enemy of said failing culture.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Language and Labor
If you take a look at Western language - or at least language that is idiosyncratic to the United States, you start to find that there are so many common expressions that make use of the disparagement of socially weaker peoples to provide their punch. I'm thinking here of expressions like crazy, dumb, stupid, insane, and etc. There are many more, and if you start digging further there are all sorts of sordid histories that can be unearthed.
Behind the language is a general pattern of antagonism and a need to rise to prominence while pushing others aside, a need which is not often misplaced, as the others that need to be pushed aside did the exact same thing prior, and then continue to hold their dominant position, stunting those around them.
It isn't just the language; many of our most central and well-worn technologies and institutions have their genesis in war and conquest, or otherwise general extraction, such as the multitudinous petroleum technologies we regularly make use of.
Because everything takes labor to produce, and then when it is produced, it is much easier to continue using it, as opposed to fashioning an alternative product out of scratch. What you use has a certain nature to it, which is taken from its process of production, and then what you use can transfer that nature to you as well. And production is always seeking to increase itself as it is.
It is very difficult to escape this kind of dynamic. It takes enormous amounts of work and time, for one thing.
Behind the language is a general pattern of antagonism and a need to rise to prominence while pushing others aside, a need which is not often misplaced, as the others that need to be pushed aside did the exact same thing prior, and then continue to hold their dominant position, stunting those around them.
It isn't just the language; many of our most central and well-worn technologies and institutions have their genesis in war and conquest, or otherwise general extraction, such as the multitudinous petroleum technologies we regularly make use of.
Because everything takes labor to produce, and then when it is produced, it is much easier to continue using it, as opposed to fashioning an alternative product out of scratch. What you use has a certain nature to it, which is taken from its process of production, and then what you use can transfer that nature to you as well. And production is always seeking to increase itself as it is.
It is very difficult to escape this kind of dynamic. It takes enormous amounts of work and time, for one thing.
Modernity is Radically New!
On the southern tip of Illinois is a Trail of Tears marker, which serves to at least "remind" passerby that they are traveling over stolen land, a fact that upon being contemplated, seems to serve some vague social function as a sort of repayment. Still, occupier settlements and stretches upon stretches of enclosed farmland sit silent in respectful observance of this ongoing fact.
And at the end of the trail marker, if one is traveling south, there looms a massive prison. Euphemistically titled a "Correctional Center," because those superfluous individuals who are unnecessary to accumulation, or those who are left behind when the swells of extraction abate, are "incorrect," and need to be "fixed."
And at the end of the trail marker, if one is traveling south, there looms a massive prison. Euphemistically titled a "Correctional Center," because those superfluous individuals who are unnecessary to accumulation, or those who are left behind when the swells of extraction abate, are "incorrect," and need to be "fixed."
Friday, February 23, 2018
High Finance
If you come to truly believe that something is steadily destroying you or your community, you may become very interested in it and fixated upon it.
The problems grow with that thing's complexity, or perhaps more accurately, your ability to further penetrate into a thing's bottomless complexity.
I've personally been studying finance for at least 7 or 8 years, and still every day I read about it I may discover some new level of understanding of it, and become all the more horrified at the intricacy of these processes of looting and accumulation.
It doesn't help that something like finance is constantly in a violent process of overdevelopment, that it is constantly transforming and progressing far past its own necessity.
But if I were to truly understand finance, I'd have to become closer in nature to a financial being, so as to appreciate the nature and mechanics of something that is directly acting upon me, and it is simply something I am not capable of. I wouldn't have the will or endurance to constantly engage in financial activity, and to situate within a financial community.
So what is to be achieved by diving deeper into an understanding of a thing like finance as an outsider?
If one is comfortable with one's existence as a financial being, then fine. But if not, it probably won't do to understand further the composition of the chips, the rules of the game - or in this case, the mechanics behind the ripping off and looting - or the motivations and relations of the actors involved. In certain cases it may become necessary to simply sweep the pieces off of the table, or simply walk away, in accordance with one's nature.
Truth and Fact
With the increasing power of the fact, and the reality of an objectivity which the existence of the fact so forcefully demands, there emerged the concept of the objective, which produces some very strange effects indeed.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with the notion of the objective: yes there is an objective reality that exists and which carries on with or without us. But the idea of the objective itself, as a provincial instantiation that minds with limited boundaries generate, necessarily freezes that objective reality into an image in stasis.
Human truth, as communicated, necessarily requires a living human being to perceive it, a living being that is whole and complete, which not only takes in facts and reasons with them, but which feels those facts and assents or dissents to them, as a precondition for having the privilege to continue intact, freely able to perceive and digest facts. So one generates values. And those values generate frameworks with which to situate facts, in order to act upon them.
So! The truth itself, however eternal and immutable it may be theoretically, is constantly in flux. When one is happy or content, one sees a truth that situates itself in accordance with that happiness or contentment. When one is sad, angry, anxious, afraid, or even bored, one sees a cascade of truth in relation to those things. One can even watch the truth itself undergo a process of alchemy, as all that exists becomes filtered through perpetual processes of grief, hope, stagnation, and etc. That is, if one cares to wait and watch - which sometimes comes as a luxury.
And what's more, these processes produce sympathetic effects as they act in the world. Realities coded in hope or sadness beget each other, as long as they have the energy to do so. What one is becomes the stable aggregate of all these processes, continuously acted on by the outside world. And so that elusive truth becomes a product of one's own continuous existence in that objective reality.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with the notion of the objective: yes there is an objective reality that exists and which carries on with or without us. But the idea of the objective itself, as a provincial instantiation that minds with limited boundaries generate, necessarily freezes that objective reality into an image in stasis.
Human truth, as communicated, necessarily requires a living human being to perceive it, a living being that is whole and complete, which not only takes in facts and reasons with them, but which feels those facts and assents or dissents to them, as a precondition for having the privilege to continue intact, freely able to perceive and digest facts. So one generates values. And those values generate frameworks with which to situate facts, in order to act upon them.
So! The truth itself, however eternal and immutable it may be theoretically, is constantly in flux. When one is happy or content, one sees a truth that situates itself in accordance with that happiness or contentment. When one is sad, angry, anxious, afraid, or even bored, one sees a cascade of truth in relation to those things. One can even watch the truth itself undergo a process of alchemy, as all that exists becomes filtered through perpetual processes of grief, hope, stagnation, and etc. That is, if one cares to wait and watch - which sometimes comes as a luxury.
And what's more, these processes produce sympathetic effects as they act in the world. Realities coded in hope or sadness beget each other, as long as they have the energy to do so. What one is becomes the stable aggregate of all these processes, continuously acted on by the outside world. And so that elusive truth becomes a product of one's own continuous existence in that objective reality.
Monday, February 12, 2018
Nice Workout Bro
One of the paltry rewards of freelance SEO writing is a brief - and sometimes fruitful and interesting - glimpse into worlds that I'd otherwise choose to look away from.
Modern workout culture implies such an intricate tangle of problems, which are incredibly interesting, but I simply don't have the time or energy to address them at the moment.
What I do have time and energy for is a brief discussion of the Crossfit phenomenon.
This workout regimen, which has spread like wildfire worldwide, has garnered a share of cultural antipathy that mirrors or surpasses the levels of devotion in its enthusiasts. But this polarization masks an important contrast in the workout world, that undoubtedly arises out of the passage of time.
What I mean is this: part of what makes the culture of Crossfit so irresistible to some is the passion that can be found in its adherents. New members often report a welcoming atmosphere in which members of the gym welcome them in and help motivate them during workouts. There is a sense of community then.
This is contrasted to the general atmosphere in other traditional commercial gyms, in which members work out together in parallel in isolation. Individuals come in with ear buds and music, work out, and then leave. There may be some pockets of familiarity and friendship, but overall the atmosphere is open to the individual yet closed to the formation of community.
Where I suspect the passion and openness comes from in Crossfit is a combination of the workout's novel training form and the glow of the enthusiasm of newcomers still benefiting from this novelty. The novelty in the workout consists in the way it is formulated for a modern fragmented consciousness: each workout is very short, very intense, and highly varied, so that boredom is not allowed to creep in, yet the practitioners are able to derive the physical progression and mental benefits from an intense workout.
But this progression of the workout form will only suffer from the same problem that plagued its precursors in the first place. One can rearrange one's life activity to cut down on boredom, but if one's workout is separated from one's other life processes, one is doomed to progress to some plateau or other and stagnate.
Combine this internal problem with several social problems, such as the increasing antipathy towards Crossfit, and the increasing popularity of the program which, like all growing activities in this society, come face to face with more problematic and opportunistic members, financial polarization, irreducible member conflicts, creeping competition, and so on and so forth.
How long before Crossfit comes to be known as a strange activity in which members separate into small cliques in a gym, or else cut themselves off entirely and practice their workout in isolation, growing more bored with even the highly varied workout patterns, before being saved by a new workout rearrangement fad?
Modern workout culture implies such an intricate tangle of problems, which are incredibly interesting, but I simply don't have the time or energy to address them at the moment.
What I do have time and energy for is a brief discussion of the Crossfit phenomenon.
This workout regimen, which has spread like wildfire worldwide, has garnered a share of cultural antipathy that mirrors or surpasses the levels of devotion in its enthusiasts. But this polarization masks an important contrast in the workout world, that undoubtedly arises out of the passage of time.
What I mean is this: part of what makes the culture of Crossfit so irresistible to some is the passion that can be found in its adherents. New members often report a welcoming atmosphere in which members of the gym welcome them in and help motivate them during workouts. There is a sense of community then.
This is contrasted to the general atmosphere in other traditional commercial gyms, in which members work out together in parallel in isolation. Individuals come in with ear buds and music, work out, and then leave. There may be some pockets of familiarity and friendship, but overall the atmosphere is open to the individual yet closed to the formation of community.
Where I suspect the passion and openness comes from in Crossfit is a combination of the workout's novel training form and the glow of the enthusiasm of newcomers still benefiting from this novelty. The novelty in the workout consists in the way it is formulated for a modern fragmented consciousness: each workout is very short, very intense, and highly varied, so that boredom is not allowed to creep in, yet the practitioners are able to derive the physical progression and mental benefits from an intense workout.
But this progression of the workout form will only suffer from the same problem that plagued its precursors in the first place. One can rearrange one's life activity to cut down on boredom, but if one's workout is separated from one's other life processes, one is doomed to progress to some plateau or other and stagnate.
Combine this internal problem with several social problems, such as the increasing antipathy towards Crossfit, and the increasing popularity of the program which, like all growing activities in this society, come face to face with more problematic and opportunistic members, financial polarization, irreducible member conflicts, creeping competition, and so on and so forth.
How long before Crossfit comes to be known as a strange activity in which members separate into small cliques in a gym, or else cut themselves off entirely and practice their workout in isolation, growing more bored with even the highly varied workout patterns, before being saved by a new workout rearrangement fad?
More Bad Feedback
Decaying infrastructure that releases toxins upon coming into contact with salty, alkaline water is one thing. Actually losing that water source to salts and chemicals is entirely another, in the face of a growing water crisis that is bad enough without the destruction of what fresh water sources still exist.
With rising sea levels, we'll have plenty of sea water at hand certainly, which will further contaminate the fresh water. Large-scale desalination operations are incredibly energy intensive, which on its own is enough to compound the problem, but these operations also generate truck loads of salt and mineral waste, which must go somewhere as well.
Part of the general pattern then, is a taking up of what currently exists into human societies, which separate what exist and take up their usable elements, and deposit the newly separated waste elsewhere, which in its concentrated form, causes some things to thrive and is toxic to many others.
Like the movement of fire and water, such patterns are an intrinsic part of all life systems. However, the more mass implicated in the movement, the more that is displaced and the more room is needed for that displaced mass to settle. We are in the midst of a constantly-occurring process of mass movement, and everywhere we are constantly engaged in moving and transforming that mass to keep it from reaching within us.
But the more widespread the activity, the greater the mass, the more it accelerates the process and amplifies its lethality to that which exists. Naturally, the obscure and abstract nature of this problem - which ironically is a problem that is omnipresent - requires more thorough and clarifying treatment in the future.
With rising sea levels, we'll have plenty of sea water at hand certainly, which will further contaminate the fresh water. Large-scale desalination operations are incredibly energy intensive, which on its own is enough to compound the problem, but these operations also generate truck loads of salt and mineral waste, which must go somewhere as well.
Part of the general pattern then, is a taking up of what currently exists into human societies, which separate what exist and take up their usable elements, and deposit the newly separated waste elsewhere, which in its concentrated form, causes some things to thrive and is toxic to many others.
Like the movement of fire and water, such patterns are an intrinsic part of all life systems. However, the more mass implicated in the movement, the more that is displaced and the more room is needed for that displaced mass to settle. We are in the midst of a constantly-occurring process of mass movement, and everywhere we are constantly engaged in moving and transforming that mass to keep it from reaching within us.
But the more widespread the activity, the greater the mass, the more it accelerates the process and amplifies its lethality to that which exists. Naturally, the obscure and abstract nature of this problem - which ironically is a problem that is omnipresent - requires more thorough and clarifying treatment in the future.
Saturday, February 10, 2018
More Questions
Are we all determined, or completely free? A regular reminder that what you are is related to what you do, and that what you do is dependent on what you are. Perhaps you can steer a bit as you are guided by sweet gravity?
Bad Feedback
In the Northeastern United States, the passage of heavy things - streams of automobiles - necessitates a constant stream of road salt to accompany them, in order to free them up from the heavy snowfall, itself augmented and set free by circulating moisture and changing climate patterns. And all of the salt washes out into the freshwater lakes and rivers, increasing their salinity and making them more basic, which as it happens, eats at the aging plumbing infrastructure that grows older the more east you go.
Beyond Karate
Early martial arts disciplines like karate grew in tandem with Eastern philosophies such as Buddhist thought, and served as excellent practical outgrowths of those ideas and practices, much like the meditation practices and rituals themselves. To karate practitioners, qualities like mindfulness, humility, and conscientiousness were essential to mastery of the discipline.
These qualities helped the practitioner to stay in tune with the body, and exist in the present moment with grace and fluidity. Beyond that, these religious ideas undergirded a way of life. One approached one's teachers with respect, and one treated combat as a grave matter to be reflected on with weight, and then turned to as a last resort.
Now if we turn to a common Western karate center and examine its advertising rhetoric, we see something very interesting. We see these qualities reproduced, but within a different ethos, a different way of life. The split becomes especially apparent when these karate centers appeal to parents that are looking to enroll their children.
The qualities of mindfulness, humility, and conscientiousness are still there, but they are touted as a way to "condition" the child to better follow directions and integrate into a regimented life. What was once an intrinsically rewarding set of values which extended to all spheres of life has become a truncated and instrumentalized mechanism, which is driven through external reward, or at least the withdrawal of external punishment.
Now, let's be clear: this split is a gross simplification for the sake of illustration. Surely the values of Eastern martial arts have been taken up as binding material for authoritarian structures in the East, just as they have contributed to holistic reawakenings in the West. Such is the nature of values when they are generated and then undergo decay and rebirth over time, in accordance with the landscapes that communicate them.
But then this simplification serves a purpose as well: to point a finger. The extractive, authoritarian human motivation and experience is one that has been common to the species across time and space, and the same is true for the generative and anti-authoritarian. The contrasts exist in where these tendencies are springing up, what kind of critical mass they enjoy, and where they are going. One only has to look upon geopolitical affairs and the flows of materials and cultures to see that capital is the premier driving force on the world stage, a force which inspires the extractive and authoritarian instinct most copiously, for various interrelated reasons, and which currently emanates from Western origins, at least as far as we can immediately identify, for all practical purposes.
The Western Babylon - however marbled with radical movement and ideology - is the extractor par excellence of our time, an extractor that inspires sympathetic and self-protective measures in all of those societies that surround it.
Anyway, to get back on track, the basic pattern of distorted value and its cycles of birth and death can be apprehended wherever the genesis of religious experience produces communicable artifacts, which besides having the ability to reproduce their own nature as they spread, also have the capacity to be separated from their cradle and instrumentalized to achieve a limited effect.
The old saw about religion being the opiate of the masses is incomplete. Religion begins as the poppy with a life of its own, taking root in a soil and growing with the soil. The narcotic nature of that poppy makes up the poppy itself, and is only fully essentiallized when it is finally extracted by an external power for the sake of a separated and specialized purpose: that of pacifying through violence.
These qualities helped the practitioner to stay in tune with the body, and exist in the present moment with grace and fluidity. Beyond that, these religious ideas undergirded a way of life. One approached one's teachers with respect, and one treated combat as a grave matter to be reflected on with weight, and then turned to as a last resort.
Now if we turn to a common Western karate center and examine its advertising rhetoric, we see something very interesting. We see these qualities reproduced, but within a different ethos, a different way of life. The split becomes especially apparent when these karate centers appeal to parents that are looking to enroll their children.
The qualities of mindfulness, humility, and conscientiousness are still there, but they are touted as a way to "condition" the child to better follow directions and integrate into a regimented life. What was once an intrinsically rewarding set of values which extended to all spheres of life has become a truncated and instrumentalized mechanism, which is driven through external reward, or at least the withdrawal of external punishment.
Now, let's be clear: this split is a gross simplification for the sake of illustration. Surely the values of Eastern martial arts have been taken up as binding material for authoritarian structures in the East, just as they have contributed to holistic reawakenings in the West. Such is the nature of values when they are generated and then undergo decay and rebirth over time, in accordance with the landscapes that communicate them.
But then this simplification serves a purpose as well: to point a finger. The extractive, authoritarian human motivation and experience is one that has been common to the species across time and space, and the same is true for the generative and anti-authoritarian. The contrasts exist in where these tendencies are springing up, what kind of critical mass they enjoy, and where they are going. One only has to look upon geopolitical affairs and the flows of materials and cultures to see that capital is the premier driving force on the world stage, a force which inspires the extractive and authoritarian instinct most copiously, for various interrelated reasons, and which currently emanates from Western origins, at least as far as we can immediately identify, for all practical purposes.
The Western Babylon - however marbled with radical movement and ideology - is the extractor par excellence of our time, an extractor that inspires sympathetic and self-protective measures in all of those societies that surround it.
Anyway, to get back on track, the basic pattern of distorted value and its cycles of birth and death can be apprehended wherever the genesis of religious experience produces communicable artifacts, which besides having the ability to reproduce their own nature as they spread, also have the capacity to be separated from their cradle and instrumentalized to achieve a limited effect.
The old saw about religion being the opiate of the masses is incomplete. Religion begins as the poppy with a life of its own, taking root in a soil and growing with the soil. The narcotic nature of that poppy makes up the poppy itself, and is only fully essentiallized when it is finally extracted by an external power for the sake of a separated and specialized purpose: that of pacifying through violence.
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