Caught Out in the Heat

Just about definitionally, living systems are the movement of energy, more or less in response to the perpetual circulation of energy in the universe. Where there is less available energy, living things can move to better preserve their internal energy levels, whereas where there is too much energy, living things can move to disperse that energy or avoid its spillover into their internals. 

This becomes more difficult the faster the energy moves. This principle is quite vivid in the movement of the slugs, especially this season, where with the sudden inundation of wet weather and rainfall, slug populations exploded and expanded outward. At a certain point they were everywhere, cruising merrily along the moist grasses and soil, nibbling on the preponderance of fresh vegetation. 

And then just as suddenly, an abnormal heat wave came on and the searing sun caught many of the slugs in their tracks: you could see their fresh slime trails leading to their desiccated corpses. They were caught out of cover as the heat came on too quick, drying out in the sun. Sheared by those gaps opened up by energy and matter moving too much too soon. 

And in the Pacific Northwest, where people are not as used to higher temperatures, they are caught out in infrastructure and hung up in local and cultural techniques deficient in dealing with higher heat. And then there are the drownings in the rivers swelling with the previous rains and melting glaciers and snowpack. 

Going to Market

Many forms of market activity have an intrinsic stimulation on the sense of self. To bring something to market for trade, it is necessary to separate that thing from its context and remove it some distance from its point of genesis. To do that effectively, especially scaling up and at greater intensity, it is necessary to have a well-developed sense of self and a propensity for localizing personal advantage. Market activity intensifies this particular state of consciousness, and through its ubiquitous existence, initiates the multitudes brought up into its activity. And then of course, it was the evolving cultures of the developing self that produced the market activity in the first place.   

Domestication

Part of the odd dilemma that domestication poses is that you have to be simultaneously close and not close to your resource animals. With hunting, you can drop into some distant habitat, pick out a target which is still somewhat anonymous, and then make your kill and the animal instantly becomes meat as it is taken apart. The animal makes the switch from a revered object at a distance to a closer and more intimate resource such as food, shelter, and clothing, which also can still be revered in its own way.  

What many farmers have to do with the animals that they live with and kill for food - and even taking resources like milk and eggs requires some degree of exploitation and accompanying mental distance - is avoid naming individuals and dwelling too much on the individuality and personality of any given animal, keeping the animals in the sort of mystery of the wilderness as is seen with the hunted, but up close, compartmentalized away as not-quite-living things which are more like simple walking resources.

With milk animals and egg-layers, one may spend too much time with the individual animals and it becomes harder to eventually butcher the animal, though it is certainly done all the time in many culturally determined ways.  

Transition Season

Up in the Pacific Northwest during Spring and early Summer the clouds break and the sun is hot against the face, though as soon as the cloud cover grows again it grows cold quickly, as there has not been enough accumulated heat poured into the region to affect lasting change on the ambient temperature. Summer as we know it then is the concentration of heat. 

Water and Slug

The slugs, being so sensitive to moisture and which quickly dry out in the sun, accordingly have populations expand and contract with the movement of water and the intensity of light and heat throughout the seasons. The rains come and go and suddenly they are everywhere, and then as it dries, they shrink back to the shadows and the fleeting pockets of moisture. They move almost in concert with the water. 

Refuge

This is true in many ways, but the temperate rainforest gives quite a vivid and immediate illustration of this issue because of the density of living systems there. "Living system" is quite a loaded concept here, I know, as everything is alive! But I'll try to build something nice-looking and interesting real quick before sweeping it all off of the table again. 

Enduring resource piles one accumulates outside will quickly fill up with various forms of wildlife seeking refuge. Say, a pile of rocks, or a stack of lumber, will soon be filled with all manner of insects, reptiles, rodents, snakes, and the like if they sit for any kind of time. And then when one goes to retrieve those resources, all of those creatures are evicted in turn, fleeing in fear. The creatures are born in population waves with the seasons and environmental change, born on the run and seeking out energy and fleeting comfort, only to be agitated forth by some new disturbance. Like us too, no doubt. 

For that matter, one has to make the habitation airtight, as every insect and rodent will eagerly seek out the warmth and food inside the enclosed space, which many of us moderns are loathe to share with said cohabitants. And anyway, they have different interests. Insulation, wiring, food stores, and all the like can quickly be destroyed. 

A terrible sense of responsibility begins to emerge.

Bad Connections

Mechanically, when we are talking in terms of people relations, failure is easier to own and learn from if that failure comes from the individual's own efforts. If someone is forced into failure by another, for instance, or one fails and then the effects of that failure are magnified by the mockery or suffering of others, it tends to build greater resent, frustration, and/or social pressure. 

It is often the difference between "how can I do it better" and "so and so thinks this of me" or "I failed so and so." Of course, frustration and social pressure aren't necessarily negative or bad things, as is the case in competition. But when we have whole dense populations of people perpetually on the "losing" end, at least to the collective perception, but also in material terms, then that pressure can only build with no internal relief or outlet, and then we have a problem. 

If you have a society as dense and interdependent as ours, it has to be the case that that multitude of connections is allowed to "breathe" and "move."

And to put it in a more vertical sense, if you are building towers that stretch high into the sky, you better make damn well sure those foundations are quite strong, especially if you plan on spending a lot of time at the top. 

Sounding the Alarm

It is easy enough to become absorbed in the mechanics of a specific sort of crisis, and then one starts to sound like a crank, making various foreboding predictions that may or may not come true, and then pow, something we weren't thinking about - well perhaps some were, whose voices were drowned out - comes in with its haymaker out of the blue. But hey, let's not forget that this haymaker did indeed emerge, and they seem to be emerging one after the other at a quickening pace. What is important to continuously pin down and then illustrate is the general dynamic underpinning the various crises. For example, one looks at the behavior of the political and economic establishments and thinks, well they're just lying, they're not to be trusted, and they have no interest in the wellbeing of their subjects. One doesn't have to write a doctorate thesis - though it can certainly be welcome and useful - on the fine mechanics of this state of affairs and describe exactly how it will play out to provide convincing and useful analysis of what to expect in general. After that work is done, then there is the issue of: welp, they're not going to come help, and they will probably actively make your life worse, so what can be done with the resources you have to act on the general knowledge that things are going to continue to get worse and what in the world can be done about it? 

I Don't Like This

The so-called labor shortage marks a fascinating collective change in consciousness in the body politic itself. The argument is that a large portion of labor is still living on the proceeds of pandemic aid - which lets be clear, was paltry in the US - and now there aren't enough people looking to return to low wage, higher risk jobs, as there is still consternation about whether the pandemic is over, and for good reasons of their own. This is a simplified version what's happening of course, but you do see various forms of the argument coming up frequently with much hand wringing. 

Here we have decades of attrition and processes of runaway economic warfare and disintegration, which helped produce the pandemic and its general effects in the first place, which, included within are the collective responses to that crisis, which produced subsequent crises of their own. And now, after this massive traumatic event, many are struck on the individual level with a deeply personal and emotional notion that all this is bullshit, something is terribly wrong. In so many words, "I don't want to do this anymore" about sums it up. The reactionaries once again seek out the whip of hunger: remove the unemployment bennies! And labor digs in its heels, and the wheels of commerce wobble and shudder under the building friction.  

Fraud Unleashed

The corollary to widespread fraud is the stacking up of conditions that make it possible for that fraud to run away on its own momentum. Regarding autopsies on the 2008 financial crisis for example, what was really fascinating was the accumulation of systemic changes whose effects all had a sort of harmony of dissonance, so to speak, which aligned perverse incentives which in turn allowed a general drive in a large portion of the population to sustain the fraud itself. We can take together the historic re-consolidation of capital and finance capital in particular, the rightward legal, economic, and PR shifts and the political fruit of those labors, the changes in corporate governance, the dearth of wage and the need for cheap credit and the accompanying vulnerability to scam, the concentration of wealth and the dynamics behind that, the very nature of the operation of the market and capital, with its growing and culminating ideological emphasis on being "free," and so on. And then the specific innovations in the finance sector itself, and innovations in the form and processes of the scams which made use of those innovations. And then of course all of these processes were connected to each other and influenced each other, affecting and being affected by changes in the culture and in the composition of the world system, to produce a perfect storm, an enormous bubble of fictional wealth which then proceeded to unravel, itself in accordance with a human nature built up over thousands upon thousands (and beyond) of years of evolution. And this spectacular and highly visible crisis itself set forces and changes in motion, through its own massive displacing momentum.  

Where Are We

There is light and sound in the answers, and it can be quite stimulating and comforting, and a good place for building. But a question is a movement, and if you keep asking, you keep moving, out further and further to where there is less activity, less is established, and it gets darker and quieter, and more fundamental questions must be posed, and more fundamental answers must be put in place to touch down and get grounded. Unsettling maybe, but a good place to go for creation. 

Fraud

Because I see it come up again and again and again in virtually every sphere, I want to keep an eye on this notion of fraud and attempt to generalize this as an overall decoupling of image from reality. An image is always an entity distinct from the object it is representing, but in a healthy relationship between the two there is an open pathway of communication in which the two influence each other and respond to each other, suggesting that some sort of end is coming when the two are separated far enough to be severed and made discontinuous from each other. Plato's curious notion that "nature is carved at the joints" comes to mind, and thus something is ultimately getting butchered.

Again and again and again we see it, with depressing regularity. The manufacturing of goods, for example, which more and more resembles a perpetual movement of trash, trash which may have some ephemeral utility, designed more to part consumers from their social resources in the form of value, money, than to fulfill a living function. Soon the good breaks or unravels, or otherwise poisons and harms on its way out to the trash heap or down the drain or toilet. The contracting value in the goods themselves is hidden through the complexity of number and opaque packaging, and the distance of the goods' manufacture from the general public. 

The manufacturing and distribution of capital and allocation of resources via the financial sphere is another sphere, in which the complex economic, accounting, and legal rationales for the flow of resources are weaponized in service to hoarding and swindle. Warmaking, conquest, and global trade are other spheres, in which the imperium and hegemonic powers live off of the accumulated spoils of past victory while the instruments themselves atrophy, which can be hidden so long as the strong continue to prey on the weak. 

Or what of energy, and the sad scraping of the bottom of the oil barrel as the barrel itself becomes molten, and the concealing of the scraping and a hand-waving away of the superheating air? And the attendant vaporizing of dreams of alternatives as they are tested out as they themselves emerge and then sublimate?

Justice. Political organization. Academia. And so on can all be broken down and analyzed in this manner. All ruled and dominated by fraud and predation, a simultaneous and widespread cannibalization and disintegration in which the parts cease to become a whole and are sectioned and then consumed and/or rot. 

The social process itself begins in the vulnerable sectors of the population, say in marginalized groups, lower classes, disfavored ideological and political sectors, and so on, which allow for both the individual and social leverage to inflict harm on sectors targeted for destruction. But the process then spreads and generalizes as the predatory element gains steam and requires more fuel. 

In the abstract, there is a general separation of a functioning unity in which the bifurcated parts are mutually destroyed in their separation. The image which guides and animates the entity navigating reality is eventually shattered and bitterly discarded, and the reality of the navigating entity itself falls to pieces, to be subsequently reconstituted.

Fraud then emerges in reality as the ending of something, an emergence that is not necessarily an alien invasion, but integral to that something, a paradoxically true expression of the nature of that something as it ends, as if that something was being turned inside out. 

Capital can be made to work again! If only the financial chicanery could be cut out! Just like they talked about 70+ years ago. But we're out of time.