Morning Spray

 

I've Got The Fear

To simply fear an external object or circumstance is very different from the all-encompassing spiritual dread and fear that Hunter S. Thompson liked to describe using the lens of a drug trip going bad. 

The Fear, correctly capitalized and formalized, was something permeating and overpowering one's basic experience. It was no longer the temporary attack or avoidance of a given limited threat, but the imminent quality of the entire landscape, experienced as rising up within one's own self, inescapable, experienced itself as a sort of End - however drug-induced that end might be. 

One can glimpse signs of such a thing in the political and cultural landscape of the United States, the failed and failing state, lurching with a great shadow cast downward and downslope like a great doomed tree, its back cracking against growing winds. 

There are many totalizing experiences and perceptions here, whether you want to describe them with a capital Fear, Anger, Dread, Rage, Anguish, or what have you, and you see them in the daily discourse. And the mundane daily administrative cycles stop and start, stricken with existential questions of life and death, with the many classes and identities cracking and folding under each other as they seize up together under the failing machinery. 

But it doesn't matter how huge the capital Distress may be, it must still be localized and navigable, at least if one cares to continue to persist in this world.  

Pain Signal

It isn't until one directly buys - or better yet, crafts - a tool, and then uses that tool regularly to maintain one's well-being, when the bond is fully formed and one feels the pain of any sort of damage to that tool. To artificially strike up this type of bond for someone who has not claimed a direct spiritual ownership or at least stewardship of the tool - or more broadly resource - it is usually the case that some sort of social sanction or application of force is required, to forcefully stimulate the pain and fear of damage and degradation.  

Scaling this out, the way we've chosen to structure ownership and localized control, with all of the class and ownership fragmentation that that entails, is at the same time a means for fragmenting the movement of perception and pain itself. A class rests atop the other, and directs its activity for its own benefit, while feeling nothing of its pain. 

Getting Stuck

In specificity is a powerful tool for focusing energy and discerning local energy flows, so that one can harmonize one's efforts with them. But without a mechanism to release and relinquish focus, and concentrate somewhere else, a paralysis and a fading of vision can happen. 

Anecdotally, I would never have thought to look for worms in compacted and hard soil, in the course of breaking up that hard soil by hand for future planting and drainage. And sure enough there they were, nestled in the rock-like clods. And of course they were! They were taking refuge there. 

Ideology and Perception

At a certain point of development, where you are seeing administrative states and money systems, which point to an indication of a certain amount of distance, diversity, and complexity and integration of system organization, ideology becomes more important to the global governance of such connected systems.   

Local conditions like ecosystem behaviors, day and night and weather cycles, and the many cultural practices across varying geographies could overwhelm a large enough and integrated enough state of social organization. 

So you see much more energy going into the production and maintenance of constitutive ideologies, which are to compress local and granular motivations and operations into a unity which nevertheless allows for autonomous governance of its lower systems which are to interface with localities. 

The production and maintenance of ideology then is both a fraught and precious thing, requiring immense responsibility to coordinate systems, systems that must be directly involved in the coding of their own functions in relation to the whole. Witness the calcification of ideology today: where its boundaries are cynically and artificially maintained to divert resources around the constitutive elements it is to govern. 

Beyond the sheer tomb-like walls of frozen ideology, further collective analysis drops away into the mysterious abyss, as desperate negotiations are carried out within the desiccated fields behind its walls. 

Substance Abuse

Like political and economic systems, the sacred and profane sorting pile - especially if one can afford to contrast that sorting pile with other sorting piles across societies - can tell quite a bit about the underlying social structures and their function.  

Presently I'm thinking of mind altering substances, which as plenty of subcultures and indigenous communities have discovered across time, can offer experiential gifts and glimpses into altered consciousness, which have lasting and beneficial effects.

Whole spiritual traditions and cultures have sprung up around substances such as cannabis, peyote, mushrooms, ayahuasca, and all the rest, while authorities like the U.S. government pen those things into a spiteful "controlled" substance list and throw people into jail or kill them over the circulation of those things.

The whole consciousness of prohibition, with its self-righteous assurance that it is clearing the ground for moral correctness, fails to detect that it is rooted in a reaction to a historically and culturally specific social artifice which has been built up around the substance, and whose structure is shaped by its own distinct interactions with that substance and the practices and meanings that form as a result. Further, the reaction mirrors such structures in its character. As such, this consciousness is imperial; it posits its own historical and limited formation as absolute and timeless.

Even the substance of alcohol, with its nationwide legality and limited restrictions, betrays a troubled social structure, which in accordance with its nature, takes the alcohol up into itself and generates practices specific to the nature of that structure.

Today alcohol is mass produced for instant, convenient, and entertaining consumption. In the modern world, alcohol can be a welcome lubricant for social and cultural activity. Like one guns it on ice, or in deep snow or sand, alcohol can give that push to engage in certain activities with a required threshold of confidence or passion, such as social interaction or music and dance, smoothing over various frictions and obstacles. 

Without a doubt, alcohol can bestow great pleasures and gifts in certain circumstances. And just as one guns it on ice, or deep snow, or sand, one can either escape those barriers or one can, under prolonged and sustained spinning, lose traction or dig deeper ruts and lose control. Prolonged and intensified usage of alcohol converts from vehicle into trap.

This narrative has a tendency of positing the individual as skilled or unskilled user or abuser of a substance, whereas the environmental circumstances and social and cultural location of the individual can have just as much or greater of an influence on the outcome. Say, overworked, underpaid, and stressed individuals turning to alcohol as self-medication, and in their social alienation and daily encounters with crude commodification, experience such solutions bereft of social support and moderation, with their social afflictions deepening as the oscillating cycles of addiction and withdrawal deepen. The kind and benevolent authorities then look tenderly upon these lost souls, and think, ah we must set them right! 

Much as the farmer gazes upon his crumbling and desiccated soils whose living systems are nuked with herbicides and pesticides, which are blowing away in the wind, and thinks, "this is terrible!" and decides that better herbicides and pesticides are needed, and that the eroded slopes must be buttressed with tractor work, or else the land holdings are to be expanded or sold to another sucker. 

To put it more generally, the tendency of the modern industrial method is to exert energy to search out avenues of progression, and then increase energy to exploit those avenues more intensely at an ever-increasing scale, until those avenues are exhausted, and then other avenues are sought out. The whole phenomenon of substance abuse bears this pattern out.

Contrast this forceful proliferation and manufacture of alcohol products and the deepening of "substance abuse" ruts - and the concomitant prohibition backlashes - with indigenous forms of alcohol production, in which yeast spirits are carefully sought out in brewing rituals, and brews are revered and sung to, and the experiences with the brews are carefully administered and surrounded with care and awe. 

Not that it is the case that systems such as these can't go bad themselves, but certainly, there are other ways. 

Good Crisis Bad Crisis

It is curious that the word "crisis" comes from ancient Greek discussions of disease, in which an important and decisive turning point is signified, and conditions change either for the better or for the worse. A judgment comes about, and beyond that, there is recovery or ruin. 

Today the connotation of the word- at least publicly - is mostly bad, and we have before us a procession of so-called crises which subsequently weaken our collective constitution, with each successive crisis leading to a quality of life perceived as headed for the worse for most people. And systems are altered in crises - or weakened in this case - and various processes of destruction are set into motion, all of which precipitate future crises. 

But then of course there are people speaking of opportunity surreptitiously, and then the billionaires are waiting on the wing, looking to exert leverage on the opening spaces, and reshape what has become hot and malleable, and expand their power. Here in the United States crisis appears as a stairway down into hell, tilted downward so that our collective muscles weaken and burn away as we struggle to climb back upward.  

But what is in the character of a crisis that leads to either a recovery or a ruin? 

I confess to being ignorant of the particulars of the drama in which a disease develops and then resolves in a biological system, or causes it to collapse altogether. But looking at all kinds of crises, their natures, and their courses, we could abstract a certain pattern and try to make sense of that. 

A crisis seems to occur when a given system loses its homeostatic balance, such as in the case of a virus-caused disease when the virus is hijacking various production centers towards its own ends, draining power from the maintenance of the body's continuity, and the body turns to fighting off the virus, possibly damaging itself, and which reverts to homeostasis after the virus is banished and the body undergoes what repairs it requires. 

The systems charged with restoring homeostasis must be robust enough, and the conditions must be right for those systems to acquire the energy and resources needed to both reverse the bad direction and replace what energy and resources were lost in the process. 

More simply, if you trip while walking, you have to have the muscle power available to compensate for that bad acceleration, and hopefully the acceleration is not severe enough, or the subsequent compensations are not enough to prevent the body falling altogether and changing its state. Sometimes you go right down, and sometimes you lurch one way, only to lose more balance on the first compensation and the falling motion increases and the second compensation is not enough to right the previous wrong, and then you go down. And so on. 

That last illustration consisted of a short chain of crises in which the homeostasis of a body in balance was strained further and further with each subsequent crisis, until no more compensation was possible and the fall became inevitable. 

So it is with a living thing that dies. All of the elements of that thing's organization weaken over time, and eventually conditions continue to deteriorate until something like a major organ seizes up, and motion within the body ceases, and there is not enough power available to take the given maintenance and replace what was lost, and the body surrenders to gravity and entropy and its constitutive elements return to the earth, to furnish materials for the next growing state of organization. 

One way to compensate for a loss of balance is to further integrate into the environment, mastering its flows so as to maximize, or at least harmonize one's collection of energy in it, which requires a constricting focus of energy in one direction. Another way is to alter or transform the systems that are to be integrated into the environment, which could consist of a broader application of focused energy across systems. 

In the case of the US empire, constant and aggressive expansion is the natural homeostatic state, so that each of its constituents, as they further specialize and integrate, drive towards efficiency and acceleration to constantly direct resources into accumulation. 

The problem with this pattern is that the homeostasis itself is a sort of crisis, in which an organism, to avoid collapsing upon itself, is driven to expand ever outward, in constant motion to stave off its collapse inwards, until it comes up against natural and mathematical limits. 

The whole thing must transform to avert an ultimately terminal crisis, but currently all of its constituents are in a state of separation, struggling against each other, competing for concentrating resources to focus energy to further integrate and navigate the environment within their own pathways, starving the higher level governing systems of the energy needed to make large scale changes. 

You're either the crisis, or you're living amongst systems in crisis, or you're living within a crisis. And well, really its a little bit of everything. And depending on the power you have, and the power your organizations have, you can navigate those crises in certain ways. Until you can't. 

Glacier

 

Here

Not a whole lot of time and - more importantly - energy to write. That hole is still there, yet there is much that is slowly and vaguely coalescing, which eventually needs to be articulated, or else my head very well may burst. All in good time. 

Stump

But Economies of Scale!

Consolidation and concentration as social and economic phenomena can have wildly diverging effects, depending on where those phenomena emanate from. As a form of collective rationalization, the aim is to systematize and centralize resources, and thus cut down on the time and energy expended on dispersed utilities. For example, a group of laborers establishing a central location of communal tools, so that members can quickly and easily locate the tools and not travel so far, or waste so much time to pick out and find them. And such a project can be undertaken with consent of the group, and a vigor and enthusiasm for the labor remains. 

However, take a number of aggressive consolidating and concentrating economic powers, which are engaging in hostile takeovers of smaller units and competing entities, and imposing their own systems of rationalization and automation on the conquered parties. In this activity there develops a growing resistance to the conquering party's "way of being" and a deadening of vigor and enthusiasm for the work. 

Difficult forces to quantify with modern economics, certainly, but they are forces that have real and powerful accumulating effects. 

Centrifuge

It could be read into the history of late Roman decline that there was a centrifugal process of delamination, in which the body politic split into multiple hostile factions, each successively deploying an accumulation of military elements to violently seize power and hold the center, which continued on in waves as the body politic thinned and weakened. The ambitious looked to embody the ruler, and so each faction moved forth to temporarily hold that embodiment. 

Today, we can look at the gaudy opulence of demagogues and dictators and see reflected in them a desire to mimic the wealthy. Yes they are looking to impose a sort of order in an increasingly unstable regime,  but also simultaneously they are looking to lord over the collective proceeds of a thinning and disintegrating society and live with opulence and extravagance, mimicking their "betters," as their betters did with each successive generation of topping the others' wealth.  

Levers of Power

Say you are to go out hunting. The modern rifle is a powerful tool taken for granted by those fortunate to be able to acquire one. From a far distance, one can take down even large and powerful animals in large groups, and the sudden thunderclap and inexplicably dropped animal causes the others to flee in terror, leaving the kill to be safely processed. The prospects for self-reliance here are obvious: with some skill and patience, one can go out alone and be quite successful at low risk. 

But now to go out with a spear, or even a bow, and the difficulty and risks go up pretty quickly. One has to get much closer to large, powerful animals, and risk massive or fatal physical injury. One's frailty is cast in stark relief. The more one relies on oneself in this context, the more dangerous and fraught the situation becomes. 

The rifle then exhudes incredible power, but that power comes from a whole world of coordinated production. Say, the raw materials, the lumber, the steel, the oil, the gunpowder, the lead, and all of the worlds of extraction, refining, and manufacturing implied by those materials, and then the supply chains and circuits of distribution delivering them into one's hands, all of which are powered by a vast, sprawling, and constant stream of human labor. 

Further there is the sprawling history of invention and design, which ensures that that incredible emission of energy proceeds forward towards one's target, and not backwards and into one's face. 

One's self-reliance and security hinges upon the steady flow of the industrial world. 

The self-contained and ready-made rifle springs magically out of the packaging box, ready to do one's bidding. Perhaps after one has worked hard to earn the money to buy it, or perhaps not. But this alienable property of the rifle commodity conceals a vast separation from the original points of extraction and assembly. 

With a simple wooden tool on the other hand, one splits it off of the fallen tree, witnessing all of the tragedy of a felled great organism, and the destruction of a home: birds spring from their nests and colonies of ants and beetles scurry from the hollows within the split wood. The lumber is literally pried and wrenched from the earth, but this terrible tragedy ultimately nourishes oneself and one's community. 

Such a connection still exists in the genesis of the rifle, but to the perception and the individual consciousness, the connection has exploded to points far beyond possible detection in one's waking life, out to faraway lands and processes one will never visit or witness, and so all the terribleness and preciousness of such a tragedy disappears from view, and its spiritual effects wane. 

Amidst the stream of a well-advanced society, this magical power appears suddenly to those privileged its access, free of those binding fibers in which it was torn from the earth and from human labor. To the curious and the conscientious, gratefulness for such power may still exist, but to many others, they may go on with their own personal endeavors with not a thought to the origin of such power, and further ascend on the phantom backs of raw material and cheap coordinated labor.  

This is one way in which the elite becomes separated from the earth. 

Evil Elites Incompetent Elites

The concepts of evil and incompetence are both ways to compress linguistically what are probably both sprawling branches of the same complex social phenomena, that is if we are talking about the role of ruling elites in a complex industrial society. 

The elites are a class, or a gradient of interlocking classes with differentials of disposable power, which support each other and share the same interests, and within that combined class are certainly individuals with a chillingly impoverished moral code and an equally chilling competence to put that impoverishment to work, and then individuals who may mean well but who are stunningly hapless and bumbling, and who were bequeathed with far too much power without justification, and then everything in between.

We could talk about the corrupting effects of unearned and inherited power, in which individuals are born with silver spoon in mouth, and who go through life commanding and expecting those commands to follow through, and who never learn to put anything in motion themselves, and then those ambitious ones who in their desire to mimic the master, climb their way up the ranks with deft skills. Or say those individuals who inherit various skills passed down in families or who are taken under the wing of powerful individuals and who are quite talented and capable despite being given the leg up. And so on. 

And there is the matter of making use of evil to navigate social systems and mechanisms in tatters after decades of mismanagement and misuse, and then a basic incompetence and failure of care and attention that arises in a climate of spiritual desolation after the systematic exercising of evil in collective affairs, and then these forces beget each other and reproduce each other. 

There is also the movement of energy to take stock of. If we conceptualize evil as a sort of process of selfish, harmful, and morally reprehensible living, which necessarily takes place amidst a backdrop of social disintegration, we may very well be seeing an incredible competence concentrated in selfish and antisocial elite actions, a narrow competence which nevertheless sucks the oxygen out of the room, living little time or energy left for maintaining everything else, which manifests and is perceived as incompetence, and yes it all gets very complicated very fast. 

What we do see is that evil and incompetent governance may persist outwards, so long as there are estranged, alienated, and dehumanized foreign populations to exploit, whether abroad or domestically, but then these circles of destruction necessarily proceed inwards as the resources in the periphery are depleted or become too unstable, or release forces of destruction larger or more penetrating than can be kept away and insulated from the imperial core. And such a mode of governance, welded into place as a matter of course, cannot easily be reversed. 

In other words, the series of political and economic shocks which have been spraying forth in the COVID era are less about the absolute reprehensibility of elite conduct. They've been behaving this way for a long time. The real shock consists in their willingness to saw away at their own bases, their own foundations, as the cycles of destruction reach home in the imperial core. 

There have been people disappearing in vans and scurrying under the leering eyes of aerial drones for quite some time. It's just been happening under peripheral dictators, and out far away in the deserts of the Middle East and the borderlands. And there have been all sorts of security portfolios and surveilling profiles on disliked members of  the social order. Activists are the latest subgroup in a procession of targets, labeled and coded in terms that were the products of political labor to achieve public acquiescence, such as "terrorist," "criminal," "thug," "gangmember," etc. 

Pharmaceutical businesses have been profiting off of abject misery and desperation for ages, and high finance has worked to break down, exploit, and then re-consolidate sectors of society in its own image, sectors disintegrating from its own actions. I could go on. 

But amazingly, the ruling elite are now hacking away at that intricate infrastructure of complicity it has struck up with lower classes for centuries, a complicity that even the slaveholders knew to shore up to buttress off those massive forces of social erosion set forth by their brutality and inhumanity, such as with poor whites and racist ideology. Or similarly, the minor concessions given to the working class by capital to stave off communism. Don't get me wrong, those techniques are still well in effect, but the classes that they extend to are narrowing rapidly, as more and more swathes of the middle and lower classes are thrown to the wood chipper. 

Soon enough, the ruling elite will run out of even that inner core insulating material too. Long ago they found that building prisons, coding "criminals," and then locking them up served to wipe out all of that complicated human relationality and answer those hard questions of historical harm, justice, and distribution of human equity. It took all of the work and energy out of seeing and recognizing others, so that they could get back to their hard work of exploiting in new and exciting ways. For their narrow and selfish purposes, this process worked quite well. 

It may be that the nature of the elite class, and questions of their evil and competence in the context of a disintegrating society are very complex subjects. But as the circles of destruction reach further into the imperial core, and eat into the heart of the imperium itself, why shouldn't the simplifying principle of imprisonment and or/destruction be turned to them?