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.
