Some Housekeeping

I'm trying to get to this backlog of ideas and notes, tidying them up and just putting them up. Many of these posts would benefit from elaboration and refining, but for now I've got to get some of it up and keep moving when I have the energy to do it. Experimenting with truncated forms in the interest of working with what I got. Some of it might be a bit cryptic or terse, but it is what it is. Some of the subject material is less appetizing after it has been out of the oven and cooling for too long, so there's that too. 

Money Problems

Money, as a highly general substance, becomes less useful the more concentrated and unstable the general mass becomes. Having too little of it is bad, but so is having too much. It sloshes around and spills over and makes a mess. 

Spears

Much damage arises merely from eternalization and essentialization in thought. The idea that one's idea is the objective absolute, and that such an idea must be followed to its very end. It manifests in the physical world like the tip of a spear. 

Ethical Eschatology

The problem with thinking about the end of something while existing within that something is the temptation to posit that end as the absolute focal point of reality, which all things are ultimately bending towards. This comes with a certain way of living life. 

Things (like empires or contiguous societies) do actually end throughout history, and those endings have consequences for those living within those things. It is worth understanding the trajectory and the nature of those ends, as one must live with them and within them. 

But then the contemplation of these things brings about ideas and feelings of ends, of fear and terror and anger that can overwhelm one's life and the lives of others if not managed well. You get apocalyptic cults and despair and that sort of thing.

OK, everything eventually comes to an end. How to live despite this, or even in reverence to it? 

Neoliberal West

A good marker both illuminates and obscures. The term "neoliberal," with its temporal specificity and historical contingence, is very good at pinning down the culprit. It is is a clear and specific political and economic marker, so we can mark something as neoliberal and that's clearly what it is, we've got the offender. 

Less apparent however is its existence as a universal phenomenon: it is the state in which an organized living system begins its cycle of disintegration, in which its many finely tuned moving parts begin to get up and walk away from each other. And then as they reach the limits of their mutual attachments, they begin to fight each other. 

The free-for-all that is the free market is simply a universalization of predation, in which a multitude of economic entities compete to exploit the dwindling whole, and even the constituents of those economic entities are competing to exploit the spoils accumulating within the larger economic units, and then this predation reaches down into individual relations and the self. 

It is not that the whole contains only predation, but that the activity of predation has reached a certain critical threshold, and the movement of the greater system itself moves in that irreversible direction and the system's character itself can be said to be predation, no matter the well-meaning efforts of individuals and institutions looking to stem the tide. Transformation comes through extreme measures at this point. 

Transferrence

One of the popular apologetic images composed by the ruling elite and its admirers and enablers is that of the shrugging dope, who rolls his shoulders in exasperation, asking: "what did I do? It's just because I was naturally talented and meritorious, and perhaps had a little bit of extra luck, that you are now all enviously and spitefully clambering to tear my wealth down," as the angry mob swarms the wealthy in hard times. 

But the basis of that wealth is a constant and perpetual pushing down and tamping together of the less-privileged classes, holding them in the desired shape to maintain the power and form of the wealthy in question, whose very existence is predicated upon the toil and exploitation of those lower classes, and the necessary maintenance of that very specific and contingent state of affairs.  This is a constant soft - and hard - violence with effects that accumulate and eventually seek to rush back to their sources as soon as the opportunity presents itself. 

There is a multitude of possible social forms that could and do emerge in spatially and temporally limited forms, of which are constantly carved off and pummeled away by the forces of reaction and empire. Even the negative forces of contraction - of people attempting to simplify and get by with less - are bitterly fought back in favor of maintaining the hamster-wheels and treadmills that feed the processes of stark accumulation. I'm not talking of poverty - which in its nature is bound to the other side of the coin of vast opulence - but of modest and ethical cycles of production and consumption. Indeed, having nice things does not have to be inherently destructive. 

The so-called "violent mob" is only a transmutation of those social forces of sculpture and hold-fasting, blowing back, just as one slips off of a cutting surface with a dull knife and strikes one's own hand with all of the power and pressure meant for the hard material. 

At a more specific and smaller-scale level of organization, one sees the viciousness with which Trump's continuing claims are dismissed after the election, a viciousness mirroring the viciousness of his own administration and supporters, itself a viciousness that rushed outward into the political sphere to meet the better-concealed viciousness and contempt of the betters it was meant to unseat. And now the seesaw continues to bounce. 

At a still smaller and more intimate scale of organization, one can imagine that the only possible reaction to an angry shove - that is, for someone attuned to conventional and horizontal social signals and in the position to respond - is an angry shove back. And so the process pingpongs in escalation until it disperses, or one of the sources of energy is extinguished.

Happy New Year

Hope everyone had a good one. All is well here, and life for the most part is good, even if the body politic isn't. The sun is shining, though possibly a little too warmly for mid winter, even in SoCal. Fire season here bounded all of the way into December this year; not too far from wrapping around into a year-round burn. 

Here in southern California, the new epicenter, people are turning up positive every which way. Every sniffle, cough, and itch in the throat is the Virus, and soon everyone surrounding you will be DEAD. 

Just a little good old-fashioned chronic stress. Nothing to worry too much about. 

Didn't make it to midnight over here; my swiss-cheesed brain shuts down early. But I think some of the holes are starting to fill in. Got a whole crop of ideas working over, so more soon, when I can get myself together again.