Meta Shutdown

Yes, the shutdown is alarming in many ways. It hummed along for some time, because after all it was just government workers that were largely harmed, a few inconveniences for people here and there, and a few national parks getting trashed, though the effects of these things were amplified somewhat thanks to social media and the like.

But now more people are wringing their hands as the food inspections grind to a halt, and the latest tech IPOs get held up, and - gasp - the bean counters are getting antsy because the shutdown is having "real" effects on the "economy," that vengeful god that upon being denied its unlimited growth, takes a break from consuming the exploited blood and sweat of its constituents and shifts to simply crushing them as it grumpily contracts.

And anyway, the optics aren't good, which is always a big deal in this country.

The intractability and dysfunction of the government is scary enough, but then you get to thinking about the nature of the impasse and the shutdown itself.

Let's see, a lot of the argument surrounding the shutdown is based on premises that are complete abstractions and established conventions, which collectively arrived at, allow for the coordinated operation of the U.S. government. They're fabricated metaphors and stories which, if adhered to, happen to most benefit bankers, investors, and CEOs when they are working normally, let alone when they are pawns in conflicts of governance between various rival economic factions at loggerheads.

Yes the wall is racist, mean and preposterous, and a mere symbol in a debate that purposefully obscures the international structures of capital, worldwide divisions of labor, past and present migration, and the like. But the premises surrounding budgets, spending, and taxation, which undergird the conflict and which have sparked other shutdowns, are just as self-defeating, at least if you want a prosperous society and not one sucked dry by financial parasites and oligarchs, and they are widely agreed upon by both parties and virtually all of the establishment news media, including the "liberal" side.

Even if these "deals" and "compromises" are actually worked out within the confines of our collectively agreed-upon governing logic, the vast majority of society still gets screwed. We still agree to match spending with taxes, and constrict government spending and administer austerity, and leave the majority of economic stimulation to private monopoly, which comes attached with interest rates.

What's more, the ruling class continues to rule with no real conception of the seriousness of the problems we face. In the larger scheme of things, it is a struggle over nothing, taking place in a fantasy land that was built to sustain continued exploitation and extraction of the wealth generated by the body politic.

This is a nothing-struggle that takes place with real energy and resources, energy and resources that are now "borrowed" because they should have been put into renewables and clean energy decades ago. We can't even call it a losing struggle! The struggle itself is lost, and lost at a time when any struggle in itself is generating energy that needs to be carefully spent.

Yosemite

Ah yes, because I look upon this land and want to say, "yes this is a good place to totally trash."

Environmental Alienation

A good example of this can be seen in the case of a family whose apartment unit we visited. For two months the family heard a loose pipe banging around in the wall. A plumber was called in to check it out, and he took advantage of his specialization, lied about fixing it, ignored and minimized the family's complaints of still hearing it, and got paid handsomely for doing so and washed his hands of it, leaving the family to suffer through their nights listening to the banging pipe in aggravation.

Now part of the reason that this family was so helpless, was that there was asbestos in the ceiling and walls, and they couldn't touch anything if they wanted to deal with the problem. To make any alteration in the wall a specialized abatement team must come out and professionally deal with the asbestos, at the behest of management.

This particular construction decision has robbed the family of its faculty of self-determination in caring for and maintaining its living environment. Now in fact there are many structural processes that effectively do this as well, but this is a very direct and apparent one.

Granted, the harmful effects of asbestos products were gradually discovered as they were being mass produced. But keeping with the history of the U.S. government, and Western capital in general, these harmful effects were downplayed and lied about, and there was plenty of feet-dragging to actually address the problem and ban the stuff and compensate consumers for the harm done. And of course it continues today.

Echoes Producing Echoes

Bad energy and cultures of cruelty become solidified through identity and persist. For example, cruelty emerges within constant turmoil that cannot be readily solved by the individual, such as being in an institutional setting in which people are being harmed and nothing can be done about it.

Witnesses in such situations can transform in many different ways, some of them very positive, which is more rare. What tends to happen though is that the witness is put in an impossible position, and unable to do anything about it, shrugs, and remarks, "that's just the way it is."

Now that individual is bound by ego to be cruel, because that is what one must do to get by, and such an attitude outlasts the actual point of cruelty and persists, producing more cruelty in turn.

Keeping Balance

What is rarely acknowledged in the mainstream culture is that the explosive dynamic forces of this society itself are responsible for the increasingly authoritarian and paranoid methods of social control, and those methods tend to ratchet up the potential and eventually kinetic energy.

That is because the greater social dynamic of capitalist society is internal to itself, but its constituents, its moving parts which make up that dynamic, are experienced as separate and autonomous phenomena.

So those breathless moralizers that bemoan the disintegrating conventional social mores and cohesion, and warn of the concomitant and rising tide of weirdos, deviants, refugees, and criminals, and then turn around and prescribe increased security and repression to combat such forces, do so on a social platform that produces and even necessitates such objects of fear, which are experienced as "foreign" invaders that seemingly materialize out of thin air, with pre-formed ill intentions that happen to perfectly coincide with the fears of those doing the fearing.

Whether these subjects are even legitimate objects of fear is an interesting question on its own, but I don't want to stray too far from the point I wanted to make: that there is a discernible constitutional principle of a modern capitalist society - more like one of many - which one can reckon with and hopefully reconcile with, in one's own way. 

The constitutive principle I'm thinking of here can readily be abstracted out of an analogy I have in mind, that is, the construction of the diesel engine. Diesel engines are well known for their durability, and that is because of the increased heat and pressure of diesel combustion, which necessitates a stronger engine structure. We depart here at the difference where diesel engines don't actually become continuously hotter, stronger, and tightly wound as time passes.

Capital itself, as it operates, unleashes myriad turbulent and chaotic social forces that it must double back and repress, which in turn forces them to come back even stronger somewhere else, doubly more powerful than before, which must be repressed with still more force.

This leads to a hellish and bewildering landscape for the individual, and communities of individuals not particularly interested in conquest and exploitation, the latter of which come easier in such chaotic places of turmoil. After all, we can't all be disaster capitalists; hell of a gig if you can get it.

One aspect of this dynamic that comes to mind for me is in the hard eating and hard leisure that come out of hard labor, which I mentioned a bit earlier. The effects of hard leisure and hard eating last and beget themselves, and are accelerated by the profitmaking instincts of capital itself.

One works all day, and is thrust into numbing and alienating processes of labor, domestic administration, social reproduction, and the like, and one only has the energy for convenient and alluring products of sustenance and leisure, which are made affordable to the individual who is squeezed and short-changed by the capital that maintains and reproduces them for subsequent exploitation.

Ready-made and manufactured junk food is cheap, readily accessible, and easy to administer, and provides floods of pleasure and satisfaction, while one pays dearly in body aches and disruptions of the mind 20 minutes down the line, but that can be compartmentalized away. And vibrant and exciting shows and video games are engineered to hook and seize the attention, and displace one's consciousness to another plane where other dreams - or exciting nightmares - are possible and things are getting done.

Hard-leisure and hard-eating change the body and the mind, and grind in ruts of habit which become more difficult to reverse as time goes on. Junk food contributes to gastric ecosystems that wish to beget themselves, and it rewires the brain, and media does the same to the brain as well.

At the same time that capital strips labor, it puts hooks into its products which are intended to draw its laboring consumers in and make them dependent, gradually accelerating some destructive tendency that it will have to eventually intervene on and repress.

At the extreme end of this dynamic, pharmaceuticals are developed to address the aches, pains, and traumas produced in the daily labor regimes in capital, and which are desirable to those looking for relief after being abandoned to an industrial or social wasteland. The energy required for this is the social resource necessary to afford the product, and the muscle required to lift the arm up and pop the pill in one's mouth, and then comes the relief and pleasure, until another is needed.

And after that pattern deepens for a time, and comes to a head, suddenly there is an alarm: "oh no we've gone too far!" and an opioid crisis is declared, and the products of relief are walled off and ripped from the hands of those traumatized peoples who need them.

On and on it goes. The individual is pulled into the teeth of capital, chewed up, and then fed various products which strengthen the same capital entity, in the hopes of reconstituting the individual just enough to further exploit, sculpting and molding the individual with powerful forces beyond any individual or even larger community's control, forces which are even beyond the control of capital and its ruling classes, who attempt to ride the lightning of the storms that they help spin into greater and greater masses.

The Hopi metaphor of the fast-flowing river seems apt here. In Hopi prophecy, a fast-flowing river is described to illustrate the subjective experience of a chaotic industrial world that has become out of balance. One is in the river tumbling about, trying to stay afloat but losing sense of what is up and down - and being sapped of the energy required to keep maintaining that sense.

How does one maintain one's life balance in such a turbulent place? The Hopi suggest orienting oneself with the river, gazing straight ahead, and riding the river's energy to its end. Good advice in such a situation, but there is still the matter of orienting oneself with this flow of energy.

Further, there are plenty of other metaphors to conceptualize this state of affairs with, whether one is lost in the wilderness or being tossed about in a great churning ocean. This isn't a new observation by any means, but I'd like to suggest knowing a process by its fruits, or at least its terminus, and judging such a fruit or terminus by its impact on one's own sense of balance and wellbeing.

Powerful experiences that are nourishing and anchoring and balancing like deep meditation, quality labor products, ecstatic artistic experiences, harmonious relationships, and etc. serve as luminous beacons within a constantly changing and shifting landscape of being. After one has experienced the sublime fruit of some sort of discipline or process, one can cherish the memory and location of such fruit, and seek it out even amidst a darkening wilderness or chaotic ocean. One can orient oneself in the river and proceed.

 Conversely, a catastrophic trauma can illuminate one's path like an exposed wire warns one of immanent danger. The wire may snake hundreds of feet, and intersect every which way and disappear into countless walls and voids, confusing one about where it is going, but after one has been shocked by the exposed end at its terminus, one can have no doubt as to its nature, and never forget it in turn.

Peacock

Action

The simple act of doing something in a crisis is enough to set in motion successful action, even if that thing is not necessarily the right thing at that exact moment. This is because human endeavor in action, like other things human, occurs socially. One action allows another action to proceed from that, as there is now an interaction between actors and environments which allows measurement and assessment, and further action.

One may act in an unskilled way, but it sets in motion a process that can be more easily picked up by someone with more skill, and that skill can be learned by mimicry in the group, generating more skill down the line.

Before there is action there is much possibility, and with that, much fear and apprehension, as the action could fail. This causes paralysis, which spreads.

Action could also lead to a chain of disaster, so there is, as the Buddhists say, right action. And right action comes with the appropriate practice.

Who Did It?

How to conceptualize people themselves as responsible agents for crisis? What is class, and what is capital, except conceptual question beggars that continue asking far into the past, out of reach of our own efficacy and even comprehension? Of course the questions stop when the fists start flying.

Homo Economicus

Working in crews and teams within physical and industrial processes tends to punch holes in the totalizing idea of the homo economicus through daily experience. There are plenty of ways to punch holes in this idea, but even in the economic and productive arena, where the idea originates and dominates, there are numerous problems.

Who is being paid to do what? A good crew with good chemistry may include a few individuals who work slower and are less competent, but their presence is needed for the good cheer, good conversation, or some other effect that they have on the group that is less quantifiable and thus goes unrecognized and unpaid by capital.

The resent of harder working peers is largely a myth, and where it appears it is usually just situational. People tend to be satisfied when the peers they care about are working alongside them and contributing alongside them, and where there is not some burdensome hardship arising in the workplace.

This all changes as individuals are put under greater amounts of stress and atomized, particularly when under processes of neoliberalization in which capital - as embodiment of the homo economicus - seeks to transform the living systems it claims into replicas of itself. Where atomization grows, fear and resent of a greater swathe of living things grows with it, including peer performance and all the rest, and the crew chemistry breaks down and the quality of product degrades with it.

This problem is temporarily fixed with production rationalization and mechanization, and is externalized in the form of environmental degradation and human alienation, and even the upstream products of mechanization and rationalization degrade over time as those vibrant creations eventually become colonized, instrumentalized, and atomized under capital.

New Year

Further Crimping

It is not that rock bands, alcohol, and holiday celebrations are necessarily destructive in themselves, any more than the intentionality to join things together is destructive. The destructiveness occurs in the modalities in which they are carried out, and in the relationships within which they take place.

The question is what is to be joined together? How will it be done? Does it want to be joined together?

Metals for example can be joined together in a variety of ways, but if there is to be a lasting bond, a very specific and appropriate process is required, which is typically done right the first time and then left alone. If one continuously heats and reheats a piece of metal for example, or bends it every which way and/or crimps it to make it fit, the metal will weaken, with every continuous attempt making it weaker until it breaks and/or becomes useless.

In the same way, the modern blockbuster rock band, with its need to please the greatest number and grow market share, must twist its members together in a configuration that befits such an aim, regardless of the nature of the individual. And this must be continuously done as the volatility of such a society necessitates constant adjustment.

If any given rock band biopic is any indication, the group  manages to produce temporary leaps into the stratosphere for its members, before setting them against each other and producing misery and personal and social dissolution.

And alcohol in small amounts lubricates all manner of joyous activity, but then with too much, it produces discord and instability, and leaves the individual with more anxiety and pain than they started with.

Or take the holiday celebration, with its intent to periodically renew familial bonds and focus the attention on a given array of cultural meaning, which for many in the modern world ends up pulling a bunch of people together who don't want to be together, and who quarrel and squabble and all come away mutually chaffed.

One can join together with intention, but it must be done with care, and with a wariness of the external pressures of a culture that uses these mechanisms to artificially join together whatever does not want to be together.

Cussedness of Class

It would be one thing if classes were more sharply delineated, and the leisurely rich could be swiped right off the top like an unwanted layer of beer foam, or for that matter, capital could be lifted right out of the heart of the body politic and replaced with a more stable engine.

But modern society's classes are much more complex and integrated. There is a vast amount of differentiation among blue and white collar laborers with hierarchies cutting across both categories, and within those hierarchies are identity hierarchies, and outside of those class hierarchies are identity hierarchies as well.

And the landholding and capital classes have manged to reach deep into the body politic and bind themselves with the lower classes, stitching their class in like a graft. Thanks to decades of sustained propaganda, you can have a middle class homeowner view rent control as a threat to their very existence, while failing to see such a mechanism as a flimsy yet necessary barrier to the scorched earth accumulation of a class that would see them and everyone else burn to earn a single more percent of return on their balance sheets.

As such, class interest is stitched and weaved throughout society, and the tugs of hostility meant for inherited wealth and capital reach all the way down into those whose exploitation and oppression serve as enrichment for the former. A failed class system then, leads to a society at war with itself. 

Our politics of constant grievance and permanent crisis reflects this well enough. One of the central experiences of our time is a universal and recurring exploitation and crushed expectation, as the integrated sections of society press against each other.