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.
Monday, July 23, 2018
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.
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.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
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.
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.
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.
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.
Friday, July 13, 2018
Conceptual Thought
Part of the modern experience has to do with a highly consequential relationship with mental conceptions themselves. We've had several millenia to develop, archive, and reinforce concepts, and today they are highly compacted, continuous, and as a result, heavily freighted with emotion, and efficacious in producing emotion.
One feels greatly in accordance with one's conceptual framework that makes sense of the world, so that much phenomenological experience has to do with stable or shifting relationships with one's own conceptual understandings of a given state of affairs.
Change those conceptual frameworks, and you can change how you feel and behave in relation to the world. And when you feel and behave in the world differently, the series of concepts that may come up in the process may be altered in turn.
One feels greatly in accordance with one's conceptual framework that makes sense of the world, so that much phenomenological experience has to do with stable or shifting relationships with one's own conceptual understandings of a given state of affairs.
Change those conceptual frameworks, and you can change how you feel and behave in relation to the world. And when you feel and behave in the world differently, the series of concepts that may come up in the process may be altered in turn.
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