There is a lot of language that has to do with "more and more this is the case" or "today this is happening more than ever" or "today it is much worse" and so on. You can go the other direction too if you wish, like "we just don't have as much of this today" or some such.
I do it all the time. A habit you could say, and sometimes a bad one. Really it is a mythological construction, which is useful for rhetorical purposes and illustrating things in a simple way.
This sort of qualification - or quantification depending on what's happening - is based on perspective and one's place in time. Yes there are broad trends in history which display a clear pattern of increasing or decreasing over a period of time. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is a readily calculable parameter that is easy enough to demonstrate, for example, or economic inequality, but say quality of workmanship or human cruelty is a little bit more difficult to trace, and much more observer dependent.
But even those well-documented trends can have larger historical cycles that can have a greater or lesser significance depending on who is paying attention. Just another set of caveats worth thinking about, perhaps even ritualistically.
Saturday, May 25, 2019
Relational Knowledge
Before written information and database there is a relational knowledge in which the land and life itself are sources of information, by their relations and their conjunctions which can be accessed via the senses, and then stored away via memory.
Land and life itself holds the information by continuously being. The relations are continuously changing in subtle ways of course, and those changes may be quite dramatic and violent if a given state of organization shifts profoundly enough. But general principles and ideas do emerge and become stable, so long as a given field is relatively stable too.
Land and life itself holds the information by continuously being. The relations are continuously changing in subtle ways of course, and those changes may be quite dramatic and violent if a given state of organization shifts profoundly enough. But general principles and ideas do emerge and become stable, so long as a given field is relatively stable too.
Afternoon Weeding
One thing that becomes quite noticeable when you weed and landscape in fertile environments is the brimming presence of all sorts of living things, that are then displaced and disrupted as you work. Worms squirm into view as the soil is broken, and then slither their way back into the earth, grub shelters are torn asunder and the poor things lie there curled up embryonically like infants, and various beetles, spiders, and other insects scramble for shelter as the roots, rocks, and plant clumps that house them are removed, broken up, and tossed aside.
If you think about it, on a smaller scale - in relation to the observer at least - entire landscapes for various living communities are being shattered and then rearranged, which is an experience distributed unevenly among the many lifeforms on the planet, including humans, as their lives orbit at progressively closer proximities to the imperial core, where the powers of manipulation and transformation are most concentrated. Life experiences are dramatically different depending on one's power and one's location in space.
One could drop a magnificent and towering tree in the forest, which makes a thundering crash that echoes throughout the land, and then carve it up as it lies shattered on the forest floor, and not be bothered by a soul. This is of course contingent upon how remote one's activities are, and who's land one is working in, and how thoroughly protected and patrolled that land is.
The same is the case if one takes down an elk deep in the forest. One can kill in cold blood - and not have it seen as murder - and then carve up one's kill without anyone raising a finger, and then the rest of the elk and other inhabitants of the forest dash away to secure their lives.
The elk on the other hand live in a state of constant tension, in which the instantaneous crack of a bullet could drop a herd member at any time. They eat in the herd carefully, each member watching the other, with the slightest snap of twig or rustle of bush alerting the one and then the all in quick succession.
One can imagine the effect on the lumber industry if there were some external guardian of the forests that would sweep in and interfere when a tree was felled. Whereas if you were to drop a skyscraper anywhere in the world- much less a storefront window - heaven itself would come crashing down and descend upon you and you'd be dead or at least in jail or fined, depending on your social standing.
One's relative state of power can dramatically change what one can do in terms of transforming the physical environment, or what one can be subject to in the face of a greater power, for that matter. This is a hierarchy that is not only reproduced along gradients of civilization and wilderness, but within the very bosom of the imperial core itself.
There are regions within the imperial core itself which have always been seen as resources to harvest, especially the more othered and marginalized the inhabitants of a given region are. And this window of otherness and marginalization grows in breadth and depth every day. The core's inhabitants begin to find that the landscapes they once dreamed of as secure and eternal are shifting and then disintegrating right under their feet, as outside powers rend their communities and homes to reincorporate that energy into disconnected and alien affairs.
If you think about it, on a smaller scale - in relation to the observer at least - entire landscapes for various living communities are being shattered and then rearranged, which is an experience distributed unevenly among the many lifeforms on the planet, including humans, as their lives orbit at progressively closer proximities to the imperial core, where the powers of manipulation and transformation are most concentrated. Life experiences are dramatically different depending on one's power and one's location in space.
One could drop a magnificent and towering tree in the forest, which makes a thundering crash that echoes throughout the land, and then carve it up as it lies shattered on the forest floor, and not be bothered by a soul. This is of course contingent upon how remote one's activities are, and who's land one is working in, and how thoroughly protected and patrolled that land is.
The same is the case if one takes down an elk deep in the forest. One can kill in cold blood - and not have it seen as murder - and then carve up one's kill without anyone raising a finger, and then the rest of the elk and other inhabitants of the forest dash away to secure their lives.
The elk on the other hand live in a state of constant tension, in which the instantaneous crack of a bullet could drop a herd member at any time. They eat in the herd carefully, each member watching the other, with the slightest snap of twig or rustle of bush alerting the one and then the all in quick succession.
One can imagine the effect on the lumber industry if there were some external guardian of the forests that would sweep in and interfere when a tree was felled. Whereas if you were to drop a skyscraper anywhere in the world- much less a storefront window - heaven itself would come crashing down and descend upon you and you'd be dead or at least in jail or fined, depending on your social standing.
One's relative state of power can dramatically change what one can do in terms of transforming the physical environment, or what one can be subject to in the face of a greater power, for that matter. This is a hierarchy that is not only reproduced along gradients of civilization and wilderness, but within the very bosom of the imperial core itself.
There are regions within the imperial core itself which have always been seen as resources to harvest, especially the more othered and marginalized the inhabitants of a given region are. And this window of otherness and marginalization grows in breadth and depth every day. The core's inhabitants begin to find that the landscapes they once dreamed of as secure and eternal are shifting and then disintegrating right under their feet, as outside powers rend their communities and homes to reincorporate that energy into disconnected and alien affairs.
Monday, May 20, 2019
I'm Full of Shit Pt. 2
It is worth remembering - and even reminding myself - that so much of this ideology and analysis is so self serving in the sense that I'm me and all of this is coming from me, and this is what I've got.
There are harmonies and parallels to what others are and have and want. Which is how collective ideologies and understandings eventually form. But again this is what is, which is in me. I live. And I'll die. So it goes.
There are harmonies and parallels to what others are and have and want. Which is how collective ideologies and understandings eventually form. But again this is what is, which is in me. I live. And I'll die. So it goes.
And the Abyss
It is disconcerting to not have your energy reflected back at you, to have it sent out into a void. Even a goat wants a rowdy and resisting opponent to headbutt. The target opponent comes to rest, unconcerned about the goats headbutts and aggressive advances, and the goat stops too, wondering: "what gives?"
Gifts of Communication
Analogous to the deterioration of the "gifts of nature," the gifts of public communication seem to deteriorate as well, at least in the current paradigm we find ourselves in. At least early on, with cultural language and speech in its infancy, the public articulations of an intelligence can be processed more readily. Values and motivations can be sussed out, and at least much of the energy can be put into materially combating those values opposed to one's own.
Today the transmission of communicable artifacts is so well understood - both as a practice and self-consciously in the actual act of communication - and the arena of communication is so thoroughly suffused with economic interest. The practice of motivated communication and the transmission of propaganda is a highly refined art and science. It takes such a high amount of psychic energy to elucidate the content of what's actually being said.
Needless to say if you naively enter the arena of news media and analysis, you are already lost. A theoretical and imaginative exercise to be sure, but there are plenty of people who only have the energy to latch on to whatever informational garbage flow is sympathetic to their unexamined prejudices, and are thereby whisked away by it. Small wonder then that to many this Gordian knot is becoming less worthy of sore fingers and tested patience. And the sword gleams seductively.
Today the transmission of communicable artifacts is so well understood - both as a practice and self-consciously in the actual act of communication - and the arena of communication is so thoroughly suffused with economic interest. The practice of motivated communication and the transmission of propaganda is a highly refined art and science. It takes such a high amount of psychic energy to elucidate the content of what's actually being said.
Needless to say if you naively enter the arena of news media and analysis, you are already lost. A theoretical and imaginative exercise to be sure, but there are plenty of people who only have the energy to latch on to whatever informational garbage flow is sympathetic to their unexamined prejudices, and are thereby whisked away by it. Small wonder then that to many this Gordian knot is becoming less worthy of sore fingers and tested patience. And the sword gleams seductively.
Right Wing "Populism"
If you push on a boulder that is resting on your chest - pinning you to the ground - that boulder will indeed push back.
Higher Mastery
You begin to master something if you do it over and over again. Neurons are arranging towards the various situations of successful action, and you are steadily weeding out errors and inefficiencies with every repetition. This process even has to occur with higher level and organizing skills, so that you have to actually advance into a position of power to continuously carry out these higher skills yourself, firsthand, in order to master them. The carpenter's apprentice may be able to measure and cut wood just fine, but then not have the first idea about how to go about building an entire house. And without access to that responsibility, the apprentice never will.
And again and again you see the elite complaining incessantly about the naivety and foolishness of the young, and that this and that radical political or economic plan will never work, because of the political and economic realities and such and such. Well yes, that state of affairs will likely be maintained so long as the set of resistances put up by the incumbent elite are maintained, and even increased with organizing and concentrating political and economic power, which buttress the elite against competition and challenges emanating from the bottom.
And again and again you see the elite complaining incessantly about the naivety and foolishness of the young, and that this and that radical political or economic plan will never work, because of the political and economic realities and such and such. Well yes, that state of affairs will likely be maintained so long as the set of resistances put up by the incumbent elite are maintained, and even increased with organizing and concentrating political and economic power, which buttress the elite against competition and challenges emanating from the bottom.
Saturday, May 18, 2019
Behave
Much of the collective modern project consists of making the wild "behave." And now so much is behaving so well, bound up in stasis, that its opposite, its misbehaving chaotic shadow grows in proportion to its past successes.
Scarcity of the Built
Typical organic life is soft and fluid, regenerating itself and re-organizing its forms to cope with change and the directionality of living energy flows, at least until a given system iteration slides into decline and dies as a whole, its constituents dissolving into chaos until they are picked up again by another ascendant living system. And this reorganization and regeneration can typically be achieved by drawing resources from the near ambient environment, freely, by the living systems with the will and ability to do so.
But the harder and more inert something gets, which can be applied self-consciously by a living system to better fix and perpetuate itself, the more organized energy is needed to reshape it.
Metals and buildings for instance- which persist for longer spans of time and allow for more further tiers of complexity - don't "heal" when they are left alone. They consist of definite shapes which instantly become dysfunctional when broken or misshapen past a certain point, and the methods for restoring these things are so scarce, specific, and concentrated within a given intelligence, that they can easily be taken dominion over and controlled in space and time.
But the harder and more inert something gets, which can be applied self-consciously by a living system to better fix and perpetuate itself, the more organized energy is needed to reshape it.
Metals and buildings for instance- which persist for longer spans of time and allow for more further tiers of complexity - don't "heal" when they are left alone. They consist of definite shapes which instantly become dysfunctional when broken or misshapen past a certain point, and the methods for restoring these things are so scarce, specific, and concentrated within a given intelligence, that they can easily be taken dominion over and controlled in space and time.
Move
Capital is still a living thing, and as such, requires constant circulation and movement to prosper and survive, even as it fixes and freezes the movement of its own constituents to organize its various functions. Like cells, businesses live and die all the time, and then are renewed by the fresh growth of upstarts, but disruptions of movement on a great enough scale and capital can just about go into cardiac arrest or something similar.
We don't see this so much today, but the general strike can bring whole logistical systems to a screeching halt, causing cascading crises down the line, such as in the political and financial systems. This is a crisis of production that is peculiar to the era in which industrial capital was dominant of course.
No, today we see many more crises arising in the financial sector, which is all too appropriate for a financialized era. These expanding and popping bubbles can do massive damage on their own, and raze whole industrial sectors and populations.
The crisis lies in the halting of circulating of commodities and currency. If businessmen stop doing business and warehouses close their doors and hoard money pools up, then workers aren't being paid and goods aren't going to market, and entire populations - being wage laborers - are deprived of essential resources to survive, at least peaceably.
We depart from the body metaphor though, as capital is peculiar in its movement in that it must constantly expand and consume more energy, or else it is becoming seriously unstable very quickly.
We don't see this so much today, but the general strike can bring whole logistical systems to a screeching halt, causing cascading crises down the line, such as in the political and financial systems. This is a crisis of production that is peculiar to the era in which industrial capital was dominant of course.
No, today we see many more crises arising in the financial sector, which is all too appropriate for a financialized era. These expanding and popping bubbles can do massive damage on their own, and raze whole industrial sectors and populations.
The crisis lies in the halting of circulating of commodities and currency. If businessmen stop doing business and warehouses close their doors and hoard money pools up, then workers aren't being paid and goods aren't going to market, and entire populations - being wage laborers - are deprived of essential resources to survive, at least peaceably.
We depart from the body metaphor though, as capital is peculiar in its movement in that it must constantly expand and consume more energy, or else it is becoming seriously unstable very quickly.
Resent as Wear
Much resent in the modern world can be traced to people becoming the permanent implements of others' ends, whether those others are individuals or compositions of generalized forces such as market competition or financial accumulation.
Circulation dies for the individual when an individual no longer has the possibility of asserting their own will in contribution to collective ends, but instead becomes a mere vessel for the will of another, carrying out instructions and fulfilling actions alien to their own vital heart.
Plenty are capable of carrying out orders of another into perpetuity, but the orders and the ends of those orders must still inspire a vitality in the workers' own hearts.
Further and further today this is not the case, for a variety of reasons, and a deepening resent develops as a result. This increasingly must become the case as a society's productive forces increase in complexity, and dedicated laborers are increasingly demanded to maintain the lower tranches of a given system's productive functions.
Soon enough, the resentful individual is carrying out orders half-heartedly, or accumulating private indulgences, or sublimating frustrations into other spheres, or becoming openly defiant and combative, and so on. Needless to say, the growing chaotic forces of this dysfunction are met with increased surveillance and discipline on the part of superiors.
This deepening of resent constitutes a sort of wear of the social machinery, a process that not only renders social processes of production increasingly dysfunctional, but harms the underlying relations that connect the individual to others, which then harms others in turn, and these effects amplify as they crash into each other when greater and greater swathes of individuals are subject to the same forces.
Order can be re-established by force to be sure, but there will be a general decline until the whole system itself is reconstituted in some way.
Circulation dies for the individual when an individual no longer has the possibility of asserting their own will in contribution to collective ends, but instead becomes a mere vessel for the will of another, carrying out instructions and fulfilling actions alien to their own vital heart.
Plenty are capable of carrying out orders of another into perpetuity, but the orders and the ends of those orders must still inspire a vitality in the workers' own hearts.
Further and further today this is not the case, for a variety of reasons, and a deepening resent develops as a result. This increasingly must become the case as a society's productive forces increase in complexity, and dedicated laborers are increasingly demanded to maintain the lower tranches of a given system's productive functions.
Soon enough, the resentful individual is carrying out orders half-heartedly, or accumulating private indulgences, or sublimating frustrations into other spheres, or becoming openly defiant and combative, and so on. Needless to say, the growing chaotic forces of this dysfunction are met with increased surveillance and discipline on the part of superiors.
This deepening of resent constitutes a sort of wear of the social machinery, a process that not only renders social processes of production increasingly dysfunctional, but harms the underlying relations that connect the individual to others, which then harms others in turn, and these effects amplify as they crash into each other when greater and greater swathes of individuals are subject to the same forces.
Order can be re-established by force to be sure, but there will be a general decline until the whole system itself is reconstituted in some way.
Monday, May 13, 2019
Gifts
After one has covered the landscape with concrete, steel, cow-filled pastures, rows of monocrop, and crawling lines of mechanized labor and transportation, it is very easy to forget the gifts of nature that have lent buoyancy to everything in the first place.
After the massive virgin reserves have dwindled, and diminishing marginal utility begins to bite, sapping at the many energy flows that keep society expanding and growing, it is already too late: the field of vision has been so thoroughly crowded with dazzling processes of production that it is difficult to make out the many dragging and flagging resource flows.
The clean water trickles away, the sweet crude oil is burned up, the vegetables become poisonous, and the soil is exhausted. Soon enough we are huffing and puffing without knowing why. And nervously we look at nature's gift horse in the mouth.
After the massive virgin reserves have dwindled, and diminishing marginal utility begins to bite, sapping at the many energy flows that keep society expanding and growing, it is already too late: the field of vision has been so thoroughly crowded with dazzling processes of production that it is difficult to make out the many dragging and flagging resource flows.
The clean water trickles away, the sweet crude oil is burned up, the vegetables become poisonous, and the soil is exhausted. Soon enough we are huffing and puffing without knowing why. And nervously we look at nature's gift horse in the mouth.
Exonerated! Pt. B
Though that post sat for some time, it was executed more or less by shooting from the hip. A little messy I admit, with various metaphorical images thrown together, which may or may not have provided flashes of insight. I don't have the time or the energy to do the deep dives into domestic and international politics (or economics) like I used to, but I do try to keep up with various news updates and do some reading here and there to get caught up, so there you have it. The writing is going to reflect that reality.
But perhaps a couple of quick caveats could lend a little more clarity to the mottled picture.
Perhaps it could be helpful to be a bit more clear on what is meant by a "rotten edifice" and all the like. What exactly is rotten, how advanced is this rot, how long before it gives, what can be anticipated due to this state of affairs, and so on?
Yes we do have the habit of focusing in on a given tier of activity in daily conversation and poetic play, to the exclusion of various backgrounds and foregrounds, but the truth is that there are many tiers of organized power in existence, some of them working next to each other, some of them nested inside each other, and so on.
A useful area of inquiry is this: what is the nature of a given structure of organized power, how does it interact with other structures, how is it derived, and how much force can it exert in the material world, to the end of manipulating, preserving, and/or transforming what is? What insights can be gleaned from this analysis?
For instance, it is clear that what is rotten is an existing political and economic regime, as there are now emerging countless new factions that seek to reverse or fundamentally alter decades-old trends, and the existing regime itself is very clearly producing its own failures and widening circles of destruction.
Within the existing regime itself are various factions in conflict with each other, and attempting to hold or take more power, and outside the regime are various forces which want to accelerate that regime's own methods of preservation, or disintegrate it altogether.
And all of these regimes take place on more general arenas of collective human action. What kind of collective labors are still possible, given the extent and depth of the resent and polarization of so-called "human capital?" How effective is labor when the natural levers of power are being rapidly disintegrated themselves? What is the status of those lower levers of power that make regenerating political and economic regimes possible, such as the basic availability of clean air, water, and useable energy, including food?
It may be that the given neoliberal global free trade regime is completely rotten, and then capable of being replaced with something freshly grown and more stable. But then how long is that state of affairs to hold within the greater rotting tier of spiritual and environmental devastation?
After this widening out of our area of focus, it becomes more clear that the original post was more or less an instinctual snapshot of the relative health of the political and economic establishment, which plainly is looking worse every day. But it is the consideration of those other tiers of power that can allow for more substantial contemplation on wider trajectories.
But perhaps a couple of quick caveats could lend a little more clarity to the mottled picture.
Perhaps it could be helpful to be a bit more clear on what is meant by a "rotten edifice" and all the like. What exactly is rotten, how advanced is this rot, how long before it gives, what can be anticipated due to this state of affairs, and so on?
Yes we do have the habit of focusing in on a given tier of activity in daily conversation and poetic play, to the exclusion of various backgrounds and foregrounds, but the truth is that there are many tiers of organized power in existence, some of them working next to each other, some of them nested inside each other, and so on.
A useful area of inquiry is this: what is the nature of a given structure of organized power, how does it interact with other structures, how is it derived, and how much force can it exert in the material world, to the end of manipulating, preserving, and/or transforming what is? What insights can be gleaned from this analysis?
For instance, it is clear that what is rotten is an existing political and economic regime, as there are now emerging countless new factions that seek to reverse or fundamentally alter decades-old trends, and the existing regime itself is very clearly producing its own failures and widening circles of destruction.
Within the existing regime itself are various factions in conflict with each other, and attempting to hold or take more power, and outside the regime are various forces which want to accelerate that regime's own methods of preservation, or disintegrate it altogether.
And all of these regimes take place on more general arenas of collective human action. What kind of collective labors are still possible, given the extent and depth of the resent and polarization of so-called "human capital?" How effective is labor when the natural levers of power are being rapidly disintegrated themselves? What is the status of those lower levers of power that make regenerating political and economic regimes possible, such as the basic availability of clean air, water, and useable energy, including food?
It may be that the given neoliberal global free trade regime is completely rotten, and then capable of being replaced with something freshly grown and more stable. But then how long is that state of affairs to hold within the greater rotting tier of spiritual and environmental devastation?
After this widening out of our area of focus, it becomes more clear that the original post was more or less an instinctual snapshot of the relative health of the political and economic establishment, which plainly is looking worse every day. But it is the consideration of those other tiers of power that can allow for more substantial contemplation on wider trajectories.
Saturday, May 11, 2019
Exonerated!
This one is way overdue, but the whole damn process is still dragging on loudly and obnoxiously, so why not?
There has been a suffocating amount of time and energy put into writing and articulating the various developments, reactions, and implications surrounding the Mueller investigation, but as always I'd just like to try to get my arms as far around the thing as I can at the moment.
The behaviors of the whole professional political and media establishments have been curious to follow and think about. Such as say, the white-knuckled relationship everyone has with words and their intended effects.
It's like when you learn how to mix a little water and vinegar together and soon enough you're spraying water and vinegar on every possible surface to clean everything, which probably does work most of the time.
But now they're just throwing a couple of choice words in a spraybottle and then spraying their mixture over every surface they can reach, in the hopes of those words doing their usual expected jobs. Which in the near past probably worked most of the time.
So you have the administration saying, "welp, exonerated then, all and good," and you have the investigators saying "no no there are problems here," and then you have everyone in between echoing and arguing over these respective claims.
And you have all sorts of individuals in the administration engaging in all sorts of corrupt and criminal activities - that is if you want those terms to have any meaning - without completely taking over and going full dictator, and then their supposed "check and balance" opposition just sort of letting everything happen while they engage in symbolic acts of concern and inquiry of their own.
You can almost see the investigators just doubled over with their magnifying glasses, searching the bare earth for clues where there is nothing really happening, deliberately restricting their searches to some contrived and constricted malfeasance, petrified to actually look up and face what is right in front of them. Why doesn't someone just do something?
Well, there is probably a good answer to that one. It is probably that a good portion of the elites know in their hearts that the edifice is rotten.
Elites know the edifice is rotten. They've heard the creaks, they've heard those stomach-turning cracks in the major foundational supports. Perhaps they sense that it is all ready to come down, and that it should be somebody else to make the wrong move.
After all, calling someone guilty of corruption and then actually acting on it when you and all of your peers are guilty of the same thing is kinda like playing with fire, except with dried old trees doing the playing. If you're a jerky little kid who accidentally starts the fire, you at least have the opportunity to make a run for it. If you're a tree and you're ready to go up in flames and you can't make a run for it, well.
And there appears to be so much precarity in the hotseat. The ends that Republicans are going to in order to stay in power, and the ends that Democrats are going to in order to get into power again, yikes. Whatever side comes into power will have to hold it with a deathgrip against the other side coming up against it, and so on oscillating until the process is exhausted, or at least until something really gives.
There has been a suffocating amount of time and energy put into writing and articulating the various developments, reactions, and implications surrounding the Mueller investigation, but as always I'd just like to try to get my arms as far around the thing as I can at the moment.
The behaviors of the whole professional political and media establishments have been curious to follow and think about. Such as say, the white-knuckled relationship everyone has with words and their intended effects.
It's like when you learn how to mix a little water and vinegar together and soon enough you're spraying water and vinegar on every possible surface to clean everything, which probably does work most of the time.
But now they're just throwing a couple of choice words in a spraybottle and then spraying their mixture over every surface they can reach, in the hopes of those words doing their usual expected jobs. Which in the near past probably worked most of the time.
So you have the administration saying, "welp, exonerated then, all and good," and you have the investigators saying "no no there are problems here," and then you have everyone in between echoing and arguing over these respective claims.
And you have all sorts of individuals in the administration engaging in all sorts of corrupt and criminal activities - that is if you want those terms to have any meaning - without completely taking over and going full dictator, and then their supposed "check and balance" opposition just sort of letting everything happen while they engage in symbolic acts of concern and inquiry of their own.
You can almost see the investigators just doubled over with their magnifying glasses, searching the bare earth for clues where there is nothing really happening, deliberately restricting their searches to some contrived and constricted malfeasance, petrified to actually look up and face what is right in front of them. Why doesn't someone just do something?
Well, there is probably a good answer to that one. It is probably that a good portion of the elites know in their hearts that the edifice is rotten.
Elites know the edifice is rotten. They've heard the creaks, they've heard those stomach-turning cracks in the major foundational supports. Perhaps they sense that it is all ready to come down, and that it should be somebody else to make the wrong move.
After all, calling someone guilty of corruption and then actually acting on it when you and all of your peers are guilty of the same thing is kinda like playing with fire, except with dried old trees doing the playing. If you're a jerky little kid who accidentally starts the fire, you at least have the opportunity to make a run for it. If you're a tree and you're ready to go up in flames and you can't make a run for it, well.
And there appears to be so much precarity in the hotseat. The ends that Republicans are going to in order to stay in power, and the ends that Democrats are going to in order to get into power again, yikes. Whatever side comes into power will have to hold it with a deathgrip against the other side coming up against it, and so on oscillating until the process is exhausted, or at least until something really gives.
Signs
There are many times in the exchange of language in which signs are thrown up, which for those receiving, only a portion of the meaning articulated is taken in. After some time has passed and one experiences further, those signs may acquire a greater portion of meaning, meaning which may even extend pass the original articulator's intent, and so on.
Overmanagement
The many labor processes in existence ultimately grow out of some sort of small joy; they take their shape out of the joy the worker gets upon being challenged by some task, a task which ultimately stems from some personal interest, and then the worker completes the task in their own way, and that whole unbroken sequence is immensely satisfying on a visceral level, and helps to develop greater notions of self-worth.
In the abstract, management is a way to further articulate and refine these processes, as outgrowths of that original joy. Or else workers have to coordinate their efforts in larger and heavier processes, which requires some sort of standardization which sacrifices individual idiosyncrasies for the sake of group harmony, greater efficiency, bypassing slower and unnecessary development paths, and achieving outcomes that do indeed benefit everyone materially in the end, at least theoretically.
But then with overmanagement - and a lot of management in this society is by default overmanagement - that labor process is refined away from the original joy, thereby crushing that joy, necessitating some kind of compulsion instead.
This is a phenomenon that grows with the concentration of economic and political power to be sure, but it is also a phenomenon that is internalized by individuals and which continues on past the point of exploitation.
But then with overmanagement - and a lot of management in this society is by default overmanagement - that labor process is refined away from the original joy, thereby crushing that joy, necessitating some kind of compulsion instead.
This is a phenomenon that grows with the concentration of economic and political power to be sure, but it is also a phenomenon that is internalized by individuals and which continues on past the point of exploitation.
Contextuality
A fire in the wild progresses very differently than a fire that one makes out of pre-cut and cured fire logs in camp. One's understanding of fire can be very different depending on the context, and whether one has multiple contexts to compare.
Wait Up
There are benefits to being too busy, exhausted, or even lazy to write. Hell, I can let some things sit for some time, and then they begin to make less sense, and have to be modified, or else they develop into more further refined ideas on their own and can be combined with other ideas that come up in turn, forming more interesting compounds. Or maybe they can just be tossed aside altogether and forgotten. Sometimes writing can be compulsive; it does feel good to get some thoughts processed and put together and then put up into objective form. But sometimes letting the magic of slow fermentation take its course is the thing to do.
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