Deprivation by Tier

The electrical suite of technologies presents a good illustration of the tiered nature of human material reality, especially when that tier is temporarily lost, such as in a power outage that lasts long enough for the effects of deprivation to set in. 

Technologies support each other and allow for higher levels of integration and expression. What is widely available and economical to use? What of the human mass that is producing it and rendering it available? The production of electricity itself is coordinated and supported by electrical infrastructures and tools and information technologies. 

That loop starts to want to close itself, and the convenience and power and joy that are afforded make one never want to go back. Besides, there are a constellation of powerful interests perpetually pushing to keep those technologies and relations in use and in place. 

And one discovers the consequences of that when the base electricity itself is cut off. At that point, one can't hear, or see. Or communicate. Or express oneself. The food begins to spoil. The air begins to revert to what is outside.

Lose it and for a moment there is panic and aggravation, jonesing and that sort of thing, but then one acclimates to a new baseline and finds other ways to fulfill one's needs. All one needs is a full belly and a little warmth and darkness to enjoy the company of one's own thoughts, which grow more vivid and sustained. 

But then the lights come back on, and the music starts up again, and oh the joy comes rushing back. 

What Endures

Contrary to the illusions put forth by the extreme energy surplus - a surplus quickly burning up alongside its illusions - of the modern area, which presents the natural world as a blank canvas to be seized upon, limited only by the imagination, the manipulation of the landscape and the built environment still resembles the flow of energy in the natural world, in that the greater, denser masses take much more energy to move and transfer, and otherwise stay put for longer intervals of time. 

A large unwieldy sentence no? But I put too much work into it, and don't have the energy to fool with it at the moment. Ha! It'll soon help illustrate my point. 

The big heavy things, especially the more difficult to manipulate - and the more rare - tend to mold and sculpt the work that takes place around them, and define what is possible, and this can introduce a vivid element of human drama itself, beyond the bare constraints it imposes. Let's take for instance a massive wooden beam that makes up a major structural element of a large building. 

A huge unbroken piece of wood, with the integrity to provide structural support, implies a very large tree that must be both handled by heavy equipment and milled by a large capable lumber mill. This takes time and a lot of effort, energy, and equipment, and there is a good chance that the entire tree is absorbed into the piece, a tree that took more time to grow and required more resources and better conditions to produce, necessarily a form of rarity, at least eventually. 

There are not just so many costs absorbed into this thing, but also a sort of awe and respect, and apprehension, that goes into the work. This thing arrives onsite, and it becomes an ordeal of its own as it is finally settled into place. A certain desperation begins to descend if there are complications with its fitting and settling: what if the size isn't right, what if it is slightly warped, or what if the joining parts of the structure aren't quite right? This isn't like botching a minor piece of lumber and going back to the stock to cut another. There aren't many substitutes or second tries, this thing must fit, and it must work well and be in good condition. 

Builders will resort to a stunning grab bag of techniques and measures to torture these pivotal elements into place: banging on them every which way, drilling, cutting, shaving, filing, compressing, what have you. They think to themselves: no way in hell are we going to get this beam back out from where it was placed. The struggle itself begins to resemble a simple struggle for survival, everything hinging on its success. 

This can come as a revelation for those newly entering a given specialized mode of labor. A system saturated with energy tends to mask the economy of labor, at least for those standing outside of the actual process itself. With more energy available, there are greater possibilities for substitution, or else there are more tools available to manipulate or transform a given state of affairs. Otherwise, for those standing outside of a given labor process - and as a consequence more distant to it - it appears as though all sorts of spectacular things come into being out of thin air, but there are still human beings bringing those things about with harrowing struggles of their own, using energies and powers ultimately finite and mutable. 

Guns

The firearm may be a good example of the usurped nature of our collective labors. For the one fortunate enough to wield the firearm out there in the wilderness, one is as a god. Any potential threat is met with terrible claps of thunder and flying objects of extreme velocity, with little to no warning. 

But the existence of even that single firearm requires an entire galaxy of mining, forging, manufacturing, research, collective labor, and historical accumulation and circumstance. 

Take away the firearm, through dysfunction, depleted ammo, loss, what have you, and one becomes like a child again, subject to the overwhelming natural forces. That is, without the appropriate skills, experience, knowledge, etc. to fall back on, and those of course require other galaxies of collective labors, accumulations, and circumstances.   

Macho

Assuming the simplistic schema of the masculine and the feminine, and the historical hand-wringing about the character of societies (usually imperial) becoming "soft" and "effeminate" and as a narrow result, weakening into a process of decline, there is something else to point out in the so-called "masculine" impulse, insofar as it is situated within a larger relation of a bounded society and its internal development. 

The macho man disavows the feminine nurturing and “babying” which is believed to soften and weaken the individual, whereas through the aggressive provocations of showing the other strength and the “right way” to do things, the virtual same effect is achieved, only on the other side of the coin. Even setting aside the forces unleashed upon the straightforward provocation of an opposing power, and simply taking into account the allied forces of the imperial man themselves, the more one becomes afraid of the macho man's sanction and disapproval, the more one’s will and drive is “weakened” and one is driven to actions which are intended to please the father figure, not actions which are “strong” or “successful” in their own right.

The key dynamic here is dependency, in which actions of a greater power produce the conditions of its own necessity, lending to the illusion that the way of the greater power is needed and essential in some absolute sense. Just as in bad gardening: one punches down the seed of some unsuitable plant merely because one wants to propagate that plant, and then to "nurture" that plant one is driven to pummel and terrorize the soil, and drive away competitors and predators and pests with herbicides and pesticides, and throw all manner of strengthening fertilizing resources at the plant to ensure that it prevails, after which one demands that the plant grow up "strong" of its own accord. 

The relationship that arises now requires constant attention and work and inputs, as the plant in question will become bitten up or wilted or diseased as soon as one turns one's back and denies it one's external energies, after the soil itself is destroyed through cycles of shock and too much nutrient. And then it doesn't take long for conditions to change and attentions to drift, or for that greater power to become absent, and then one finds one's carefully constructed environment reverted to pioneer species with their own agendas, which we so generously call "weeds." The imperial principle at work. 

Going strong for some time! As Tacitus quoted the Caledonian Calgacus on the Romans - though who knows the true origins - "where they make a desert, they call it peace."

A Form of Meditation

There is another way to conceptualize what goes on here, in this case, using the framework of Vipassana meditation. With all apologies to meditation - there are so many forms of it and it is doing so many different things, embedded of course in different traditions - there is something interesting going on worth commenting on, at least in terms of the Vipassana variety. 

I'm talking about the scanning: first, you spend time developing sensitivity in one local place, say right there at the edges of the nostrils, and when you have that, you start to detect more and more sensations, flickers here, flickers there, something like a shooting star that passes across the cheek, maybe sensations of pain in varying intensities and sizes. And then you begin to scan the whole body, watching the movement of these sensations, and soon enough, you discover that there is a constant movement and flow, which you can follow every which way. Life is going on all across the body; it is doing its thing. 

Following that flow, you come across blockages, masses of tightness and pain, and as you meditate on those masses, they begin to dissolve, and the flow is once again restored. Over time, you find that body pains are shrinking back. You're becoming calmer. More centered. 

It is not just the scanning. The activity itself is transformative: it relates with breathing and pulse and regulates them. It brings about visions and emotions and whole states of mind, which themselves feed into the scanning process. And all of this relates with a given tradition, a way of looking at the world and a way of life. 

Here, the writing is a form of scanning. And in a way many writers are doing this all the time. One starts somewhere, some point of interest, some compelling idea, and then one meditates on it, developing sensitivity for what is going on, and then following that idea and tracing its path as it is elaborated in the world. One begins to discover a continuous flow, and of course blockages, contradictions, points of pain which themselves may be growing and taking on a life of their own. 

Concerning its outer nature, one cant simply meditate enough on the writing and then see transformations in the world itself, but it is a starting point. Meditation too has its limits: one has to sit right, if one has one's leg bent back in some odd direction, or something in the real world is irritating or even piercing the skin, no amount of scanning will dissolve it, though of course a proper discipline built up can certainly change one's perception of such things, and experience of them, and ultimately how one addresses those things. 

This discipline ultimately fits into a larger framework: one has to see to one's environment, one's diet, one's habits, one's company, and etc. so that the discipline itself can work, and then the discipline in turn works on those outer things. And what one sees and experiences has to then be reconciled with how one lives and moves in the world. 

The writing does show you things, both as reader and as one is doing the writing itself. A certain kind of truth is revealed, in accordance with one's nature and one's efforts, and that truth then has to be reconciled with the outer world. Say, one meditates again and again on the nature of our world industrial society, and its relation to the earth, and then, oh shit, something must be done! Something has to change, beginning locally with oneself, hopefully. 

It is of course possible to become lost. It is possible to entertain bad ideas and then be swept away by those bad ideas, just as it is possible to engage in bad meditation practice with a misunderstanding of its nature and its relation to the world. 

An orienteering compass may have all sorts of useful markings, and it may point reliably north, but without an understanding of that tool and its relation to maps and its use in the world itself, without the skill to make use of it to the best of its ability, one can simply reliably walk north further away from where one needs to be. One can always indefinitely walk north and eventually get to the north pole (and even this is a simplification as the magnetic pole moves), but there is only so much time and energy; one has to live in the world as one is. 

Long Violence

Common to immediate violence is the disassembly or disorganization of a lesser organized power by a competing organized power. It is a sort of displacement in which something takes more space and energy from something else different from it. 

There is a longer violence though which situates these instances of more immediate and kinetic forms of violence and gives shape to them. 

Modern violence - at least at greater scales - is of a certain nature, it is such that there is a constant grinding and threshing of the structural elements of the system itself, so that in our case individuals are constantly rended apart as they are forced away amidst violent expansions, contractions, and the ensuing directional movements of capital and labor, where they resettle and re-develop deeper connections over time, after which they are rended apart again, and with each rending these relations scar and eventually begin to break down, not only in the course of a life, but over the course of successive generations as communities develop new rhythms to cope with external conditions.

These processes are geographically and temporally uneven, and so there are eventual immediate displacements by those powers which are the first to develop the means to navigate and benefit from the surrounding conditions conducive to them, which shaped as they are by the forces of long violence, come up against difference in development and form, and so they overcome and disorganize those differences into more common basic elements and incorporate those elements into themselves.  

The vanquishing of a foe, as spectacular an event as that may be, is one of many ultimately fatal distractions, as the opening up of space for a given organized body to expand allows that body to burst forth, no longer benefiting from external stimulation and constraint, at which point the violence it had been doing to itself to expand in the first place becomes more dominant. 

Death by Virus

This extended disaster in peacetime - at least, a peacetime relative to the total war period of the 20th century world wars - resembles less the massive grinding collision of multiple great powers, and more the cascading shutdown of a single body failing. We can talk about the virus, in some cases as a spectacular event in itself, and in other cases as a trigger to others such as the long derailing train that is the supply chain crisis.

There are still parts of the world - one could say the edges of the periphery - in which people are accustomed to the rhythmic retributive cycles of violence which indeed have been going on for quite some time, very old forms of violence, like the grinding together of ancient tectonic plates of difference in motion (thanks to Gary Brecher for that image). 

In the imperial core, save for some truly desolate and desperate quarters where violence like this can occur sporadically on a more localized level, or else where the violence is professionalized and sanitized as some sort of form of maintenance, it takes larger-scale, impersonal processes that can be hand-waved and gaslighted away as they cull through steady corrosion, like the spread of the virus, hunger, exposure, opioid, extreme poverty and stress, and so on. 

We do seem to be moving back into an era of more conventional warfare. But the modern doctor can keep the patient alive for quite a while.