Thursday, February 20, 2020
High Stakes Hubris
The title is a little redundant, but that was also the point.
First of all, a lot of small mistakes on their own won't kill you. Indeed regularly making mistakes that are minor and survivable are a good way to learn and become more resilient.
But then the higher the stakes involved, or perhaps generally the more energy involved, then the more it can be the case that a mistake has more serious consequences.
Hubris is a special kind of mistake or error with its own set of underlying conditions, which are significant conditions, achieving a category of their own. We can clarify these conditions by way of contrast.
One can slip while hand-sawing a log and get a pretty nasty cut, a cut that may even go to the bone, or sever a major artery, spelling trouble, but which is probably manageable if managed skillfully. But then if one slips with a chainsaw, that tool with its gas powered blades whirling at high velocity, and exposed on all sides of the instrument, one is more likely to incur a very serious injury, such as loss of limb or worse.
Instruments like chainsaws and power saws hold a special kind of respect, and a special kind of fear, and wariness, for those who use them to work with wood and similar materials.
Similarly, the act of felling a small tree, while still dangerous, is not nearly as dangerous as felling a very large tree. Many people don't think about it, but what kills so many loggers are not necessarily failed retreats from falling trees, or the notorious "widow maker" branches which fall off from above - which are all plenty dangerous scenarios too - but the explosive force of the full weight of the tree kicking back at the bottom when the tree falls. They call this a "barber chair," in which the tree kicks backward, or splits and rolls to the side, or even shoots spears out from the cracking stump, all of which can be quite fatal. And this can happen to the skilled and experienced just the same.
Similarly, logging large trees holds its own special kind of respect, and fear, and wariness.
If we take these illustrations and really scale them out, and apply their inner principles to something like wealth accumulation, we see something far more explosive than whirling blades or a loaded tree.
The hubris of the rich is a special problem of its own, which unfortunately and unsurprisingly has not been solved for thousands of years. Wealth accumulation is a special sort of process that requires a very adept and aggressive body of knowledge and impulse to action on the part of those seeking the wealth.
It generally requires intensifying levels of force and violence, and tightening controls in order to continuously direct that wealth to a central location (at least in general) especially when up against competition in accumulation.
It also takes centuries of accumulated knowledge and power in order to suppress that force and violence in the other, who is being controlled and done violence to, as these things desire reciprocity.
That knowledge and power that we loosely refer to as noblesse oblige also has a tendency to evaporate off over the course of generations, as each successive generation, finding itself greater ensconced in aristocracy and inherited wealth - thanks in large part to accumulated knowledge, experience, and power - tends to insulate itself and ultimately sever itself from the body it governs, and thus lose touch with it and its maintenance.
And of course all of this happens concurrently with the perpetual building up of resent and murderous rage on the part of those being intensively exploited by this system of wealth accumulation.
If you're very wealthy, really the last thing you want to do is pursue that wealth to excess, as it is the legitimacy of the system itself which secures your place. The legitimacy of that system may as well be the food and drink that nourishes you, and the clothing and shelter that protect you. Part of being wealthy is being good at manipulating that system - or at least inheriting the proceeds from that manipulation - so you're probably not going to be as good at lots of other things, like feeding, clothing, sheltering, and protecting yourself.
But to watch many of the rich today in action, and to survey the results of their reign: boy, it is like watching some jackass hack away willy nilly at the bottom of a massive tree. The hubris!
First of all, a lot of small mistakes on their own won't kill you. Indeed regularly making mistakes that are minor and survivable are a good way to learn and become more resilient.
But then the higher the stakes involved, or perhaps generally the more energy involved, then the more it can be the case that a mistake has more serious consequences.
Hubris is a special kind of mistake or error with its own set of underlying conditions, which are significant conditions, achieving a category of their own. We can clarify these conditions by way of contrast.
One can slip while hand-sawing a log and get a pretty nasty cut, a cut that may even go to the bone, or sever a major artery, spelling trouble, but which is probably manageable if managed skillfully. But then if one slips with a chainsaw, that tool with its gas powered blades whirling at high velocity, and exposed on all sides of the instrument, one is more likely to incur a very serious injury, such as loss of limb or worse.
Instruments like chainsaws and power saws hold a special kind of respect, and a special kind of fear, and wariness, for those who use them to work with wood and similar materials.
Similarly, the act of felling a small tree, while still dangerous, is not nearly as dangerous as felling a very large tree. Many people don't think about it, but what kills so many loggers are not necessarily failed retreats from falling trees, or the notorious "widow maker" branches which fall off from above - which are all plenty dangerous scenarios too - but the explosive force of the full weight of the tree kicking back at the bottom when the tree falls. They call this a "barber chair," in which the tree kicks backward, or splits and rolls to the side, or even shoots spears out from the cracking stump, all of which can be quite fatal. And this can happen to the skilled and experienced just the same.
Similarly, logging large trees holds its own special kind of respect, and fear, and wariness.
If we take these illustrations and really scale them out, and apply their inner principles to something like wealth accumulation, we see something far more explosive than whirling blades or a loaded tree.
The hubris of the rich is a special problem of its own, which unfortunately and unsurprisingly has not been solved for thousands of years. Wealth accumulation is a special sort of process that requires a very adept and aggressive body of knowledge and impulse to action on the part of those seeking the wealth.
It generally requires intensifying levels of force and violence, and tightening controls in order to continuously direct that wealth to a central location (at least in general) especially when up against competition in accumulation.
It also takes centuries of accumulated knowledge and power in order to suppress that force and violence in the other, who is being controlled and done violence to, as these things desire reciprocity.
That knowledge and power that we loosely refer to as noblesse oblige also has a tendency to evaporate off over the course of generations, as each successive generation, finding itself greater ensconced in aristocracy and inherited wealth - thanks in large part to accumulated knowledge, experience, and power - tends to insulate itself and ultimately sever itself from the body it governs, and thus lose touch with it and its maintenance.
And of course all of this happens concurrently with the perpetual building up of resent and murderous rage on the part of those being intensively exploited by this system of wealth accumulation.
If you're very wealthy, really the last thing you want to do is pursue that wealth to excess, as it is the legitimacy of the system itself which secures your place. The legitimacy of that system may as well be the food and drink that nourishes you, and the clothing and shelter that protect you. Part of being wealthy is being good at manipulating that system - or at least inheriting the proceeds from that manipulation - so you're probably not going to be as good at lots of other things, like feeding, clothing, sheltering, and protecting yourself.
But to watch many of the rich today in action, and to survey the results of their reign: boy, it is like watching some jackass hack away willy nilly at the bottom of a massive tree. The hubris!
Centralization
One of the impetuses for centralization is the cutting down on costs associated with energy losses caused by the constant traversal and navigation of open space. The process undergoing centralization is made more efficient, and at the same time it speeds up.
Now we see here the simultaneous large scale dispersal and atomization of the body politic itself, which exists in an oppositional unity with the highly centralized political and economic organizational entities themselves.
Because whatever has the power to centralize can accumulate more power, and all the while use that power to suppress whoever or whatever else would take it back, which has the tendency to atomize and disperse it across space.
Now we see here the simultaneous large scale dispersal and atomization of the body politic itself, which exists in an oppositional unity with the highly centralized political and economic organizational entities themselves.
Because whatever has the power to centralize can accumulate more power, and all the while use that power to suppress whoever or whatever else would take it back, which has the tendency to atomize and disperse it across space.
Space and Separation
It has been well-documented that that prototypical symbol of the American industrial individual, the suburb, is the public engineering equivalent of a ponzi scheme. In local politics and economics, there is a relentless drive to build and develop, which benefits temporarily both the FIRE sector and the local government, which are often closely intertwined.
The developers get to pump out cookie-cutter housing units with poor building materials and designs - which are often concealed by chic surface textures, design elements, and aesthetics - and then make a killing selling their junk housing amidst an artificially inflated real estate market that is propped up on junk debt, land speculation, and the perpetual development and gentrification process itself.
It takes a constellation of ponzi schemes in other sectors to fuel this process: credit and tech bubbles to fuel demand, and actual over-exploited, over-utilized, and wasted energy such as cheap oil to constantly heat and cool garbage housing, or to propel inhabitants across the artificially expanded living environments to fuel the fossil fuel industry itself.
The local government on the other hand is incentivized to constantly expand its tax base, part of which is eaten into by the underestimated long term maintenance and energy costs of an artificially spread out human environment, which rapidly catches up with the less robust expansion of the tax-base: yes, a ponzi scheme.
And all of this constant ponzi-fueled expansion requires the actual expansion of material activity in space. Which has to constantly steamroll what has existed before it. And within this constant violent expansion and dispersal is an acute spiritual strain and wound, which is constantly reproduced at an ever-extending scale.
The developers get to pump out cookie-cutter housing units with poor building materials and designs - which are often concealed by chic surface textures, design elements, and aesthetics - and then make a killing selling their junk housing amidst an artificially inflated real estate market that is propped up on junk debt, land speculation, and the perpetual development and gentrification process itself.
It takes a constellation of ponzi schemes in other sectors to fuel this process: credit and tech bubbles to fuel demand, and actual over-exploited, over-utilized, and wasted energy such as cheap oil to constantly heat and cool garbage housing, or to propel inhabitants across the artificially expanded living environments to fuel the fossil fuel industry itself.
The local government on the other hand is incentivized to constantly expand its tax base, part of which is eaten into by the underestimated long term maintenance and energy costs of an artificially spread out human environment, which rapidly catches up with the less robust expansion of the tax-base: yes, a ponzi scheme.
And all of this constant ponzi-fueled expansion requires the actual expansion of material activity in space. Which has to constantly steamroll what has existed before it. And within this constant violent expansion and dispersal is an acute spiritual strain and wound, which is constantly reproduced at an ever-extending scale.
Sense and Thought
The historical phenomenological and ideological oscillations, characterized as a retreat from the senses into the abstract and ideal and then back again, is not just a reaction to a corrupting external world, but an ever-encroaching necessity. It is the equivalent of matter and energy rushing into a vacuum.
Our global dominance is predicated on cognition, and so material and environmental failures tend to encourage the proportional buildup of abstract and ideological structures to account for those failings and formulate responses.
The problem with this is that once stabilization is achieved, all of that energy wants to keep moving, and so the idea and the abstraction becomes the deity, and then the material world burns. And a new idea must be formulated, as escape vessel.
Like whirling bolas traveling through the air, angling downward.
Our global dominance is predicated on cognition, and so material and environmental failures tend to encourage the proportional buildup of abstract and ideological structures to account for those failings and formulate responses.
The problem with this is that once stabilization is achieved, all of that energy wants to keep moving, and so the idea and the abstraction becomes the deity, and then the material world burns. And a new idea must be formulated, as escape vessel.
Like whirling bolas traveling through the air, angling downward.
Sunday, February 09, 2020
Snap In
The processing of data is rarely a neutral operation. One seizes upon data, and inserts it into some sort of organizational framework in order to confirm or reject some existing inclination. It could be the case that the data itself alters the framework, or builds whole new ones.
In a crude example, what one witnesses with one's own senses may change one's beliefs.
But a lot of the times one's own abstractions are surveying the data and incorporating that data into themselves to perpetuate or strengthen themselves.
These are powerful tools, sometimes doggedly adhered to out of resentful desperation: "leave me alone, I can do it." Or one is loathe to abandon the abstractions that have taken so much time and work to put together. Here what is commonly referred to as "ideological" is better thought of as "dogmatic."
But then sometimes these abstractions are just "right," or they represent "the way." Say, through long experience and trial and error, one has discovered that a hammer is best for this, a knife is best for that, and a saw is better for that other thing altogether.
And sometimes it is dark and the way forward is not clear, and one can but clutch the instrument of choice and take it as far as one can possibly go, reaching for that light at the end of the tunnel.
In a crude example, what one witnesses with one's own senses may change one's beliefs.
But a lot of the times one's own abstractions are surveying the data and incorporating that data into themselves to perpetuate or strengthen themselves.
These are powerful tools, sometimes doggedly adhered to out of resentful desperation: "leave me alone, I can do it." Or one is loathe to abandon the abstractions that have taken so much time and work to put together. Here what is commonly referred to as "ideological" is better thought of as "dogmatic."
But then sometimes these abstractions are just "right," or they represent "the way." Say, through long experience and trial and error, one has discovered that a hammer is best for this, a knife is best for that, and a saw is better for that other thing altogether.
And sometimes it is dark and the way forward is not clear, and one can but clutch the instrument of choice and take it as far as one can possibly go, reaching for that light at the end of the tunnel.
Looking Behind Your Shoulder
I say, intellectual labor can be more emotionally exhausting than digging and moving hundreds of pounds of dirt to set a foundation, or hand-removing a tree stump.
It is hard to turn around, glance over your shoulder, and survey in all directions. Wherever you look, the rest is concealed.
And so you put seemingly endless hours into building up a robust intellectual framework, only to discover, crap, I see so much, but now what about all that other stuff that has passed out of my view?
And then you turn to that other stuff, and sure enough, patiently, sneakily, everything built deteriorates and shrinks back.
It is hard to turn around, glance over your shoulder, and survey in all directions. Wherever you look, the rest is concealed.
And so you put seemingly endless hours into building up a robust intellectual framework, only to discover, crap, I see so much, but now what about all that other stuff that has passed out of my view?
And then you turn to that other stuff, and sure enough, patiently, sneakily, everything built deteriorates and shrinks back.
Stick Together
As frustrating as they have been, the string of fiascos which characterize the chronic dysfunction of the Democratic Party are also very interesting. There have been all sorts of investigations and analyses, and poking, and prodding, and soul-searching, all of which have provided countless illuminations to work with, which in turn raise all sorts of interesting questions.
One of those questions is this: how does all of that incompetence and haplessness stick together so coherently? Amidst the dazzling complexity and the constant chaos of our troubled political system, there is a striking coherence and predictability of failure and botchery among the party elite.
They've had two decades - at the very least - to work all of this out, and that is two decades full of very clear and apparent crises with clear and apparent causes and clear and apparent solutions, and still it goes on. The system's dysfunction is ignored and the incompetent give a leg-up to the incompetent and everyone manages to stick to the club together and keep the whole charade running.
I mean, these people are sitting atop perhaps the greatest concentration of material wealth in human history, and a vast reserve of actionable and digestible knowledge, and the labor reserves to put all of it into motion, yet they quarrel among themselves for greatest title of ruiner, while beating back all attempts of well-meaning people to actually do something.
There is plenty to be said about the nature of the genesis and dissolution, the rise and fall, of the myriad movements that make up the dynamism of our social systems. There are lessons here in the nature of our economic systems, of how they are behaving and changing, of power and ego, of social dynamics and networks, and all the rest, lots of which I've had a ball writing about previously.
I had a more general point though.
One curious aspect of reality - as illustrated by Plato's advice to "carve nature at the joints" - is the tendency of things to grow into being together in distinct couplings, and then to pass out of being together. "Joints" imply joinery and the binding together of distinct and coherent things, say of muscle and bone whose hardness and compactness allows for continuous and distinct activity, that is, of the existence of a distinct living thing.
And it seems these things come into the world together, and they do indeed become interpenetrated by the outer world, say in the form of energy, food, water, waste, and daily maintenance and reproduction, but then not past a certain point, and then they depart together.
One of those questions is this: how does all of that incompetence and haplessness stick together so coherently? Amidst the dazzling complexity and the constant chaos of our troubled political system, there is a striking coherence and predictability of failure and botchery among the party elite.
They've had two decades - at the very least - to work all of this out, and that is two decades full of very clear and apparent crises with clear and apparent causes and clear and apparent solutions, and still it goes on. The system's dysfunction is ignored and the incompetent give a leg-up to the incompetent and everyone manages to stick to the club together and keep the whole charade running.
I mean, these people are sitting atop perhaps the greatest concentration of material wealth in human history, and a vast reserve of actionable and digestible knowledge, and the labor reserves to put all of it into motion, yet they quarrel among themselves for greatest title of ruiner, while beating back all attempts of well-meaning people to actually do something.
There is plenty to be said about the nature of the genesis and dissolution, the rise and fall, of the myriad movements that make up the dynamism of our social systems. There are lessons here in the nature of our economic systems, of how they are behaving and changing, of power and ego, of social dynamics and networks, and all the rest, lots of which I've had a ball writing about previously.
I had a more general point though.
One curious aspect of reality - as illustrated by Plato's advice to "carve nature at the joints" - is the tendency of things to grow into being together in distinct couplings, and then to pass out of being together. "Joints" imply joinery and the binding together of distinct and coherent things, say of muscle and bone whose hardness and compactness allows for continuous and distinct activity, that is, of the existence of a distinct living thing.
And it seems these things come into the world together, and they do indeed become interpenetrated by the outer world, say in the form of energy, food, water, waste, and daily maintenance and reproduction, but then not past a certain point, and then they depart together.
Friday, February 07, 2020
Intellectual Defense
The military tank concentrates within it an enormous amount of offensive energy, designed to affect destructive force, which due to its nature as a vehicle of combat, also necessitates a corresponding buildup of a concentrated outer shield.
Similarly, one sets out to present a far-reaching intellectual work, drawing together abstractions and conclusions built up out of one's own provincial existence. And a large body of that work is built up out of real and imagined responses to external attacks upon that work.
Snapshot on Growth
One drive behind manufacturing is the imperative to produce an incredible volume of goods to attend to problems peculiar to a very large population mass, a mass that is enabled and encouraged by industrial buildout in the first place. And the drives to attend to those problems tend to have the corresponding effect of encouraging growth and accumulation, of reproducing the labor necessary and producing the means necessary to pull in greater and greater amounts of materials to satisfy its ends. And now that augmented mass, being a living thing, has a necessity to perpetuate itself, and so it adds its own urgent demands to the original mass that it bloomed into existence to serve. And so on. There is a chicken or egg question in there too.
Beyond the Supply Chain
There has been a lot of talk about the fragility of the global supply chain, and a lot of this talk is making its way into the mainstream and up into the halls of power. Part of this is that the crises have become so big and disruptive that they have begun to eat into power, and so they are getting more difficult to ignore and gaslight everyone else about through targeted propaganda.
Some of the recent flashpoints have had to do with the medical industry and concerns about things like the manufacture of saline bags (re: the hurricane disaster in Puerto Rico) and now most recently the shortage of face masks, with concerns about Chinese monopolization on these and the attendant shortages of them as that society reacts to the coronavirus.
Typical to these concerns is an acknowledgement of the real dangers of a concentrated and foreign-owned supply chain - and the diminishing labor power that problem implies - which simultaneously comes packaged with a systematic concealment of the nature of the world industrial system.
It was the Chinese after all who with their troublesome authoritarianism and centralized communist government pulled the world system out of cardiac arrest after the great 2008 crash, setting into motion its siphoned-off manufacturing and construction base, pulling in unprecedented amounts of concrete, steel, oil, copper, and everything else to engage in an unprecedented industrial buildout, stabbing a metaphorical shot of adrenaline right into the heart of global demand.
Demand, let's remember, that was in freefall after US and European bankers blew up the global financial system, after having contributed to that massive offshoring bleed, and having squeezed societies abroad and their own societies of almost every last drop of exchangeable human labor.
So it took a political system with a very different composition than the American and European banker-led neoliberal system to gather the political and economic will to build a bridge to nowhere so that we can continue this massive and absurd charade for another couple of decades.
We can grumble about shady foreign powers all we want, but we have still all been intimately connected in the global system as global history has shown, and the global system has been headed by rapacious financial oligarchs with a deathwish over the long arc of human history, though their influence has waxed and waned over certain intervals. So this is going to keep happening.
And we've been talking about financial oligarchs for thousands of years. A picture emerges of a historical human organism whose Achilles heel (perhaps one of several) has steadily grown larger, more powerful, and more prominent over the last couple of thousand years. What a hell of a story and myth: a great expanding war god with a raging addiction to its own perpetual growth, which has gaslighted its constituents and its own self about this reality since the beginning of recorded time, and which now teeters on the prospect of total self-annihilation.
Some of the recent flashpoints have had to do with the medical industry and concerns about things like the manufacture of saline bags (re: the hurricane disaster in Puerto Rico) and now most recently the shortage of face masks, with concerns about Chinese monopolization on these and the attendant shortages of them as that society reacts to the coronavirus.
Typical to these concerns is an acknowledgement of the real dangers of a concentrated and foreign-owned supply chain - and the diminishing labor power that problem implies - which simultaneously comes packaged with a systematic concealment of the nature of the world industrial system.
It was the Chinese after all who with their troublesome authoritarianism and centralized communist government pulled the world system out of cardiac arrest after the great 2008 crash, setting into motion its siphoned-off manufacturing and construction base, pulling in unprecedented amounts of concrete, steel, oil, copper, and everything else to engage in an unprecedented industrial buildout, stabbing a metaphorical shot of adrenaline right into the heart of global demand.
Demand, let's remember, that was in freefall after US and European bankers blew up the global financial system, after having contributed to that massive offshoring bleed, and having squeezed societies abroad and their own societies of almost every last drop of exchangeable human labor.
So it took a political system with a very different composition than the American and European banker-led neoliberal system to gather the political and economic will to build a bridge to nowhere so that we can continue this massive and absurd charade for another couple of decades.
We can grumble about shady foreign powers all we want, but we have still all been intimately connected in the global system as global history has shown, and the global system has been headed by rapacious financial oligarchs with a deathwish over the long arc of human history, though their influence has waxed and waned over certain intervals. So this is going to keep happening.
And we've been talking about financial oligarchs for thousands of years. A picture emerges of a historical human organism whose Achilles heel (perhaps one of several) has steadily grown larger, more powerful, and more prominent over the last couple of thousand years. What a hell of a story and myth: a great expanding war god with a raging addiction to its own perpetual growth, which has gaslighted its constituents and its own self about this reality since the beginning of recorded time, and which now teeters on the prospect of total self-annihilation.
Tuesday, February 04, 2020
I'm Right
Yes it can be pretty satisfying "being proved right," all the more satisfying if one is proved right in a tricky and obscure realm that is difficult to pin down. Like making a tough basketball shot, one lets go and watches the ball arc, and all one has is faith in the skill, in the talent, and then in the ball goes. So good. And then one scores some points, but what then after that?
Ideology of Non-Ideology
Now how many times do we have to endure a centrist commentator wringing their hands and complaining that so and so is "ideological" before we stagger through the next presidential election? It's just about as silly and tautological as complaining that homo sapiens has a brain.
Because what is really particular to the center - or the prevailing establishment for that matter - is a consciousness in which one's provincial - however far-reaching that province might be - beliefs and ideas are in fact elevated to an objective eternity, outside of which lie simple mistakes of opinion, error, lies, and even, god-forbid, mouth-foaming ideology which inspires an emotionally intense devotion that somehow lies outside the realm of cognition and comprehension, and is instead some sort of strange and separate element that acts with its own foreign and external logic and aims.
I say beware of the nose-wrinkling around "ideology," because it is the "non-ideological" that are the most fervent dogmatists of all. When one no longer sees one's own set of values - and the cognition based on those values - one can no longer be wrong or even entertain a merely different opinion. And thus everyone else must be "corrected."
And eternal, infallible truth bears all of the markers of imperial power, which is probably dangerous to anyone not in the business of licking boots.
Show Your Work
Showing your work - especially as people like math teachers like to admonish - is a pain in the ass, but a good exercise. One can put in all sorts of work, say into crafting a hammer, and then one has the hammer as a simplified object to make much less work of doing more advanced tasks, like hammering together pieces of wood to make a structure. The work goes much faster if you can just have access to a hammer whenever you need one, cause after all, we already know how to make them, why not just hand it over?
But then once you forget how to craft a hammer - upon spending all of that time hammering - then what exactly do you do when you start receiving hammers that don't work right, or you stop receiving hammers at all?
But then once you forget how to craft a hammer - upon spending all of that time hammering - then what exactly do you do when you start receiving hammers that don't work right, or you stop receiving hammers at all?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)