Boo Pessimist

Sustained pessimism can prove to be quite caustic. No one likes to be constantly showered with doom: it is stressful; it's hard on the joints. It is a tough sell in mixed company. But when pessimism is repeatedly born out in observation it becomes repeatedly called for. One must reconsider one's relationship to it: how to be kinder and gentler while embracing something so prickly? How to be realistic and at the same time humane? How to navigate and live well?

Beware The Stasis

Every decline and collapse has a unique character of its own, peculiar to the body doing the falling. As limited as the understanding of the Bronze Age collapse is for example, there is a general consensus that that collapse was particularly catastrophic with many societies collapsing at once or in quick succession, with whole cities destroyed all over the Mediterranean region and beyond, which can be compared to the Roman Empire splitting in half, with the western half disintegrating more completely and the eastern half clumping up into the Byzantine Empire, which would stand for another thousand years. Catastrophic in its own way, especially depending on whom you talked to. But a different kind of catastrophe that does indeed have consequences for all involved. 

What bothers me about the modern question is the incredible dynamic powers of social reproduction our societies posses. Strange way to begin a thought, certainly, but there's a point here. Because the secret behind that dynamism, that plethora of incredible material bounties and technical solutions which keeps a massive population growing, is enormous amounts of perpetual material growth.   

You have at the same time these incredible powers of food production, transportation, communication, research, medical administration, and more, which are constantly working to reconstitute very rapidly societies that are constantly coming apart at the seams, often due to that very explosive dynamism and growth, and then meanwhile, you have a growing and universal unyielding pressure being introduced onto those robust systems of reproduction by resource constraints, pollution, and climate change, all direct consequences of that perpetual growth.  

What we see on the ground now is what paradoxically looks like an excruciating stasis: all of this constant change and dynamism and yet nothing seems to change. Now it could be that we simply muscle our way into a long and gradual - albeit bumpy - decline through sheer brute force. 

But there is also the matter of Seneca's Cliff, lurking in this case within the immense division of labor, where the industrial world derives its great power. The current precarity of the state of extreme specialization is such that huge sections of the population are shunted into ever more narrow sets of technical professional roles, or else inserted lower into the value chain with menial, repetitive tasks. Over the generations, this gradually destroys those capabilities of self-sufficiency that are built up over hundreds or even thousands of years. What is to be done if something goes very wrong? You now have very large populations dependent on smaller minorities for food production, processing, transport, all the rest. 

The physical built environment mirrors this situation, with oceans of concrete and highways and parking lots, which are all tooled for the constant circulation of petroleum energy and manufactured products. With sustained disruption of this circulation, these regions could become resource deserts over longer time scales, and then even under shorter time scales, they imply sharp contractions as populations struggle for restricted resource flows.    

There is an image I have in my head, and it has to do with the hydraulic splitter I operate at times to split larger volumes or tougher pieces of firewood. Its basically a big hydraulic arm that pushes down a wedge and can deliver some 22 tons of downward pressure. The controls are pretty dead simple and most of the time the machine is pretty safe. The danger comes when a piece doesn't want to split. The hydraulic arm starts oscillating and shuddering as it is bearing down, and then you've got to start watching that log: all of the energy is getting stored up in that wood, and as soon as it finally cracks, those pieces tend to go flying wherever there is room to go.   

The image doesn't say much about the future: things can break apart in all sorts of ways. But then, where is all of that incoming energy going to go when that mass reaches its limits of growth? Standing armies with nukes is one way that sort of thing manifests. There are plenty of others.  

Neoliberal Consciousness and Covid

The question of where neoliberal thought comes from often brings to mind the chicken or the egg issue. Of course it is apparent that neoliberal ideas were developed by reactionary thinkers and pushed hard by resurgent capitalists through various public and private institutions. But then the way in which the ideas were formulated and transmitted did have a kind of mass appeal, suggesting that the general everyday consciousness of industrial populations was changing in a way that encouraged receptivity to those ideas.

Today this is all too apparent in the mass failure of systems thinking and public sentiment. Common contentions through the course of the pandemic involve whether one is personally safe in the face of the virus, say by masking up, getting one's vaccine, and so on, or whether one's individual civil liberties are being infringed on by being told what to do and etc. 

Early on there was some talk and practice around "flattening the curve," with the understanding that the hospital systems did actually have finite material capacities and that health care workers themselves are actually people with real and finite qualities of daily functionality and endurance, and that the cumulative effects of many individual choices could indeed influence the whole of those systems, but those considerations and practices quickly evaporated as time went on, and people were ready to be "back to normal" and such, and as businesses swung their doors wide open in deference to the "let 'er rip" approach.  

Understandable sentiments no doubt, but it doesn't seem apparent that a lot of Americans especially are aware that Bad Things can happen, and will happen on their very soil. There does seem to be a relationship with the profound suffusion of the virus within American society and the fading privilege of global imperial hegemon, as well as the benefit of several generations having not experienced their home turf as an actual war zone. The twin liberal "everything is fine let's move on" smiley face and the conservative "don't tread on me it's all a hoax" impulses achieve similar enough ends in this case.

Don't get me wrong. Yes, historically there are plenty of biological nasties that make this coronavirus look like something closer to the flu that many detractors wave it away as, at least relatively speaking. Though influenza itself was also a stone cold killer right out of the gates, and continues to be a killer too. Further, on the ground, covid is currently nothing like the common flu. It is far more dangerous and does much more damage, and is able to mangle a proportion of its survivors for the long term (like polio and smallpox), singlehandedly creating another class of people with a different life experience and set of medical needs, the consequences of which are still not well understood. 

But for example, historians have described whole towns and cities in the Black Death years as having been virtually hit by a neutron bomb. Fine. But with the incredible contagiousness, dynamism, rapid mutation, and thorough suffusion of this virus, it does plenty enough damage as it is, and it does this damage nearly everywhere simultaneously within a society already traumatically weakened across every social system simultaneously. 

One can point to the physical damage and make a strong enough case: the interpenetration of the virus throughout the economic sphere is knocking down enough workers that it has started to look like a perpetual moving general strike, just without the solidarity and directionality to back up its economic damages.  

But just as importantly, there is a profound psychic and social damage being incurred as well, which is proving to be systemic and institutional. To begin with, the immense strain on the medical systems is damaging both the outlooks of the medical professionals themselves and the public that interacts with them. But what's more, the Russian Roulette roll the dice and see what happens nature of the virus is enough to induce a sort of grim inverted Rawlsian social contract in which everyone worried about the virus must assume the worst about getting the thing, which is a heavy load on top of an already heavy load of financial, political, and environmental worries. 

Now, we talked before about the multitude of actual ideologies and perceptions. We have people who are still worried about the virus and neurotic enough to change their behaviors in relation to it, and people who were quite a bit worried but now want things to return to normal, and then all of the antagonisms and fears bound up with those conflicting stances coming right up against the antagonisms and fears of those who don't believe in the virus, or at least believe it is being blown out of proportion, and those antagonistic to any sort of mitigating action in light of the virus, and so all of these competing fears and irreducible conflicts themselves make up immense antagonistic forces, and so whatever one's perception of the virus itself, it is still proving to be an incredible vehicle of social, political, and economic displacement and disruption.       

With the shredding of that connective tissue in particular, namely in the logistics and medical industries, we are talking about putting a whole lot of pressure on a society that is deeply interconnected by its interdependent nature: indeed it is that interconnectedness that must necessarily make the whole thing work, with vast swathes of territory in which millions of human beings are daily regenerating themselves without the basic capability of producing food and procuring water, which has opened up enormous distances of virtual desert, which must be traversed mechanically with a lot of energy. I'm going to get more into the dynamics of that issue in a separate post. 

My point here is that though the neoliberal consciousness does seem to be on its way out in the US, it is probable that it is at a moment too late, and that consciousness is a stubborn one that continues to assert itself besides. One may have lived all of one's life only worrying about one's self and one's immediate family and social circles say, but those selves and families are connected to larger systems that have, as it happens, atrophied as a result of the truncated public perceptions. One can't constantly pound one's fist at the dashboard and demand that everything keep working as before if the thing really is starting to seize up, and no one is bothering to go under the hood to have a look-see.

For the time being, I also have to set aside the geopolitical implications of the sharp contrast between much of the Western government fumblings and the swift, effective measures of several of the Asian governments in particular, though the latter certainly have their own serious problems to deal with. And after all, that greater set of existential threats designated in the climate issue transcends geopolitical struggles and makes those points moot anyway. But geopolitical issues are still plenty interesting; just as interesting as maintaining gaze on internal social questions as they unfold, and of course the two are bound to each other and influence each other, and this forms an important part of the analysis. 

But to get back to the dashboard pounding and then to wrap things up, I don't actually think a return to public and civic responsibility is on the table, at least in its previous form. We may be returning to a collective awareness of public systems as those things finally begin to fail in a decisive fashion, but it doesn't necessarily mean assuming responsibility for those systems en masse. Indeed, the idea that "we are on our own" will proceed from the half-baked, ruling elite idea pushed around in the 70's and 80's to the fully baked necessity of daily survival, as those systems really do fail, with higher-minded civic and collective ideals returning to the backburner, though eventually they'll be acted on again. A balkanization is more likely, after which smaller broken up systems may be assumed and stewarded, hopefully with a little more care and a little less recklessness than what we are seeing now. 

Global Analysis

We've mostly been analyzing societies as isolated entities, and if it hasn't been obvious, I've been mostly referring to the United States in particular, apologies for the looseness of the language. But things get much more interesting on the global level, when these societies - with their subtle and not-so-subtle differences - interact with each other. 

Over greater timescales, it gets even more interesting. The question has been posed here before: what in the world is a civilization anyway? We tend to think of a civilization as geographically bounded and rooted, which can be true for all sorts of historical geopolitical developments. 

For example we talk about Western civilization, or Classical civilization, or Chinese civilization, and then even those designations melt down and we start to talk about empires and ages in the same breath: the Ottoman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Bronze Age civilizations, etc. Though depending on your source, you get better consistency of the language and concepts. 

And then these supposedly distinct entities profoundly influence each other, and fold into each other, and break apart and re-constitute within each others' bounds, and leave behind stores of knowledge, technologies, cultural interests and artifacts, and so on which influence and assist others in turn. And then there is the issue of the circulation of individuals and who constitutes what society or civilization and where are they going and what will they be?

There is a broader question about what a majority of the world population is doing, and doing together at a given time. Today we have all kinds of continuous cultures around the world, though global capital has so suffused international relations, it has transformed the societies it penetrates and then linked them tightly together through international supply chains and divisions of labor. 

Eventually those tightly bound links of international trade will sever and then everyone will become something else in their own ways. 

Wavering Gaslight

A corollary to the strange reality of society is the phenomenon of gaslighting, which as a term of usage has gained a popularity concurrent with the rise of its dominance as a social force. But as a factor in the formation of the shapes that society takes and maintains, it has been around for quite some time, always existing to differing extents.  Let's take a moment to set this up.   

As we've observed, a large complex society is made up of a massive array of moving parts, in the form of differentiated and segmented institutions and then more amorphous and shifting factions and interests. Contrary to the machine metaphor, in which a given contraption can be analyzed and then directly manipulated to achieve the desired results, you can't directly screw with society as a whole. You try that, and eventually it hardens around you into multiple hostile tinkerers and manipulators and you end up tinkering and manipulating each other, no longer to achieve a desired result, but to merely maintain power and survive. From then on, the rest is, dare I say, history.    

Instead what must be done, at least in the modern world (which is a whole other can of worms), is that all of these conjunctive human powers must seek out relations of synergy with each other and then influence and manipulate each other in turn. At some point one or multiple sectors of societies may pull away and become more influential than the others, and then it can instrumentalize the rest in the pursuit of narrower ends, all the more narrower in proportion to concentrated power.

The modern industrial power has gotten very good at this, because we've figured out how to tinker with various aspects of the individual and even the collective ego and eventually instrumentalize it, making use of self interest in the service of alien ends, thereby holding off the triggers set off by exposing oneself as a hostile and exploitative interest. Take a marketing or PR message whose function is clearly to make a sale or influence, but then contained in the message itself is all manner of flattery and wish fulfillment that is all too convincing for many. Gaslighting on a mass industrial scale.  

On a mechanical level, this works because of how human thought, communication, and identity works. These systems exist on separate layers of their own, which while possessing no shortage of interfaces with the emotions and material reality, have an internal logic of their own, where certain provincial realities local to thought and perception can be maintained and frozen for quite some time. Serial liars know what I'm talking about. 

It is hard not to notice that one can get quite pleasant feelings by simply communicating a certain reality to another, and have that other communicate that reality back. Similarly, one can make use of a potent form of sanction by seizing on some limited aspect of reality and then communicating some disapproving idea to another, and watch their behavior change quite quickly. 

Given that we are social animals, and that power is achieved through the coordinated efforts of others, much more can be acquired than simple pleasant feelings or changed behaviors if one communicates the right things to others. 

Much of this is simply the reality of human social relations. The complexity of the many conflicting inner wants and desires can be pared down by constructing masks and personas for use in a given social situation, and much of this is healthy given a complex society. It becomes gaslighting when these behaviors and mechanisms are turned toward outright exploitation and predation, 

The higher the class, the higher up the value chain, the better we are at smiles, tones, word choices, insinuations, projecting emotions, and all the rest. Further, the higher up in hierarchy, the more these machinations are backed up with material power. You listen to stories of social environments in the top corporate suites for example, and all you see are smiles in the front and daggers in the back. Observing the day to day social interactions of individuals, it becomes apparent what a powerful force this gaslighting can serve to be on greater scales. This deftness in communication has been perfected into a science and an art.  

Earlier on in this civilization's lifespan, that role was filled by organized religion and the mass manipulation of collective spiritual life, which then would reveal and sustain the power of those elites able to put themselves closer to the top of the great chain of being in the ideological perception, as it were. 

Now much of it is done through mass marketing and media consumption on an industrial scale, which itself rests on a perpetually self-renewing cultural production. For the time being though I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of the gaslighting itself, and highlight some of the consequences of these mechanisms. 

First, as systems that exist separately and with cycles and logics of their own, human communication systems generate a sort of resistance and then inertia to collective social action. It is not just action you are dealing with, but understandings of the actions and communications about the actions. One you have a society dominated by interest groups adept at manipulating these systems, you become awash in a multitude of conflicting ideologies and signals all pulling and tugging in different directions. 

This introduces a profound turbulence in collective social endeavor. The thing about a flat out lie, or even just softer manipulation, is that once the target discovers the nature of the signals, they are read as not only false but usually as betrayals, and so there is a recursive recoding of the signals as a hostile force. There is a reactive reversal. And then this hostility can generalize to possible truth signals as well. The whole apparatus of communication is thrown out. At larger scales, these effects can become quite profound indeed. 

A good sharp puff and the gaslight blows out. 

Centrifuge Redux

One striking aspect attributed to the fall of the Roman republic is the immense shearing forces put into effect when a hypercompetitive society turned in on itself. What was once the engine of growth and accumulation - that driving need to excel and top the achievements of one's ancestors and also peers - could not simply be turned off when those same drives turned inward to solve the republic's deeper structural problems, which then started to tear the republic apart. 

How this worked was that a given solution to the republic's troubles had to necessarily come from an individual as it worked its way through the political system, and that individual had to assemble supporters into an interested faction, and to everyone competing in that system, a given radical solution not only carried the threat of change, but then the individual carrying out the solution itself would be given all of the accolades and attention, provoking that old fear of the rising tyrant. 

And with each turn of the centrifuge, with each wave of crises, an increasingly fragmented body politic had to redouble its efforts to reconfigure the center, and those ambitious individuals cast out through the growing wreckage would double back with twice the ferocity to take back control, ratcheting up the mutual fears of tyranny and retribution, intensifying existing problems and fragmentation.  

One can see a similar dynamic - albeit with different characteristics - at play in our own societies today. The welding of large scale perceptions and solutions (ideologies) to identity makes for explosive confrontations that arise from conflicting accounts. 

One of the images of effective power we agree on today is that of the brilliant individual fusing right knowledge with right action to properly navigate the knowable world and amass support and wealth while doing so. Consider the constant flame wars across the Internet today, the jostling influencers, and the coalescing political and economic powers around various individuals coming out atop consensus in their given spheres of influence, often through well-connected organizations, foundations, universities, think tanks, and etc. 

To look on the micro side of things, political and economic ideology especially is hardening around the will: god forbid one's opinions and ideas are questioned. The specialized individual is stripped of the many-sided powers of conducting daily life, thrust into some niche in the marketplace to produce one interdependent component for the rest of society in return for the other interdependent components from others, and it is the products of the mind that differentiate the power and dignity of the individual. Daily disagreements and conflicts are elevated to existential moral questions and mutual hatred between different interests, which grows in intensity. 

On the macro side, a given course of action or solution for society is manifested through a large economic entity like a corporation and its controlling billionaire, the most direct route to the seat of power in the industrial world. And so global governance, energy transition, and public provision is iterated in solutions proposed by the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, who must concentrate ever more power to keep theirs, corrupting and destroying collective solutions as they are put forth. 

If violence really is ultimately the manifestation of disrespect, then it isn't wild speculation to suggest that violence is coming. One need only look to the increasing clamoring for dictator to see the direction that dynamic might go. 

Omicron Facemelt

So this is what, the 7th surge or so since the pandemic began? 8th? It is becoming more difficult to keep track of them all. The other thing that is becoming more difficult to keep track of is the coherence of virtually any establishment argument involved in navigating this morass. 

Well it is more mild this time, well luckily the vaccines and this and that, well the kids can go to school, we can't do anymore aid because inflation, and well the flights must go on, follow the science and shorten the quarantines, and yeah the hospitals are overwhelmed again but lockdowns aren't possible and unity and do your part and seize freedom liberties and so on. Watch out for those droplets. Let's not talk about the air or about vitamins. Don't worry about the many secondary health problems and long covid. Don't worry about the derailing supply chain. Don't worry about the foaming at the mouth political reactionaries and the steady drumbeat of shootings and deaths of despair. We will overcome through the shredded swiss cheesed ballot box. I could go on. 

The longer I look at these arguments, in search for some sort of coherence, the more I get the sense that my face is melting, along with my brain, trying to figure it all out, like a scoop of ice cream left out in the hot sun. Though this is the nature of the beast.   

To put it another way, I suppose part of what makes urban decay so unattractive is the breakdown of something that presents itself as fundamentally organized. Similarly a political economy that is coming apart at the seams is forbidden by its handlers to finally break down, and iteration after iteration of propagandistic image is applied to stave off that eventuality by convincing enough people that up is down and to go on one's merry own way as a good worker regardless of facts on the ground. The acute and worsening gap between reality and image is the thing that is so difficult to get one's mind around. 

I'm not sure which existence is worse: never learning and repeatedly heaving oneself headlong into one clusterfuck after the other, or understanding it all and watching it all happen again and again and being able to do absolutely nothing about it. 

It becomes a rigorous discipline itself to simply take a deep breath, focus on the pertinent tasks at hand, and then wait and watch. 

Happy New Year?

We still say Happy New Year as per tradition and it is the polite thing to do. Not much point in grumbling Miserable New Year in mixed company, what was one trying to achieve anyway? But the traditional phrase grows ever more alien with each passing year, the increasingly inscrutable relic of a passing age. 

It would be more accurate to say something like Tenuous New Year, or Transitory New Year, or even Downgoing New Year, as impossible and cumbersome as those phrases may be. There are still plenty of enjoyments to be had, and we're still able to manipulate the symbols in a way to still suggest some sort of tenuous collective efficacy and competency and prosperity, though those things are rapidly slipping away and everyone knows it. But the overall tendency is still, despite the solidifying knowledge, to force a smile and push it all down and maintain at least a social semblance of optimism. 

At least in this space the tendency is to explore the less dominant aspect of that dialectic, the minor to the major in that relationship, which grows everyday towards an eventual dominance of its own: the deterioration of the efficacy and power of the industrial world to perpetuate itself in its ideal form. This is the less polite and enjoyable subject for mixed company, though nevertheless titillating and exciting in its own way because it is where things are going and where they will be, and then that knowledge and eventual harmony will be important for successive generations in their own navigations across this increasingly unsteady landscape. 

Alas things are changing fast. The most popular holiday movie on Netflix at the moment - however controversial Don't Look Up is proving to be - is a movie about (spoilers) the abject failure of a powerful and wealthy society to head off catastrophe, where the Hollywood happy ending consists of a chosen family enjoying a quiet dinner before being wiped out, and shortly after that, the wealthy fools who ruined everything yet managed to escape the planet nevertheless getting their just deserts as they disembark onto a hostile land. Hmmm, something is in the air.  

I've already said much in just these couple of paragraphs that needs a whole lot of unpacking. A lot of the early writings for this year will consist of exploring some of these things. In the meantime, it is indeed another year. Let's enjoy what is still here. Over in California, it is a beautiful crisp clear and sunny day, uncharacteristically quiet. I think I'll grab some beer and snacks and sit in the sun.