Faces of Death

There is a more graceful and dignified process of dying that can be set against the ticking timebomb image of death as some impending disaster to be avoided with the violent and desperate uptake of energy and resources, which on the contrary, holds the image of death as a natural and necessary aspect of existence. In this alternate conception, the dying being mellows and smoothly winks out, accepting the end, growing peaceful and reverent even to the surrounding earth being returned to, addressing benevolently past harms and releases one's energy and resources into the greater world that made one what one is. 

This relationship tracks with a more intimate and accepting participation in the surrounding world, as opposed to viewing that world as an alien object to be conquered, a tendency seen in aristocratic persuasions in particular. Here the life-refusing translates also into a death refusal: witness the shiny and sterile CEOs suspended high above the earth and the teeming masses, refusing then to accept death and engaging in all sorts of creepy bids for immortality substances and technologies for example. 

There are many ways to live, and death too is multifaceted. 

On Economic-Industrial Warfare

I keep returning to the Ukraine war and the connected tensions between hegemon and challenger because I think there is something very important happening here, something which is not yet readily understood or easily anticipated, but which is nevertheless taking shape as a matter of consequence, and one would be well-served to take stock of it. 

Much of the day to day coverage on the war has focused on the ebbs and flows of the conventional warfare side of it, with many commentators trying to make sense of what each side is trying to do in that light, and tallying up the corresponding ups and downs of each side. Fortunately there are more astute analyses coming out from various corners of the Internet that offer more nuanced observations, particularly on the economic side of the conflict. 

In terms of what Russia has been doing, there does seem to be an assortment of head-scratching failures in intelligence and leadership and tactics...as far as conventional standards are concerned. But they're also up to something that is quite different if one is looking at both the conventional warfare and the economic warfare as an integrated unit, especially if one is comparing the Ukraine invasion with the Iraq invasion for example. 

Let's keep in mind that economic warfare has been around for as long as conventional warfare; we just don't talk about it as vividly as the conventional side. Siege warfare in the ancient world for example had a far greater proportion of economic dimensionality to it: forming blockades and cutting off access to water and farmland and starving out holdouts and the like, which is often what it took to crack an early urban military power. 

Further, since the World Wars, we haven't had a number of great powers to compare in terms of war-making tendencies; the US as hegemon has been the only game in town, with the other substantial powers possibly engaging in smaller brushfire wars of their own, keeping the lid on in the course of those conflicts. 

As an aside, we should also keep in mind that a combination of industrial wealth and available potential energy for modern weapons - read nukes - has helped to put a lid on kinetic total war for now, though the perpetual process of imperial domination has been sublimated to the economic realm, and continues apace there just fine. You get better at what you do repeatedly, and the greater powers have been less active in large scale warfare and more active in economic maneuvering for the last century. 

And so what is Russia up to given the conventional and economic intersection of war making? The attacks on electrical infrastructure have been especially striking. Destruction of electrical infrastructure is nothing new: modern militaries are well versed in the importance of electrical infrastructure as a critical military target for a modern nation. You take out the electricity, and you cause serious havoc on many levels. 

What is notable is how this is actually being done in Ukraine. As we can recall, the US went after the electrical infrastructure in Iraq, but they did it indiscriminately, and ended up with a completely dysfunctional nation to rebuild. This was a pattern repeated on a fractal level: the general instinct was to pulverize everything with overwhelming power, including the Iraqi military and civil service, and then attempt to substitute your own shitty and equally dysfunctional market facades into the vacuum. That does destroy your enemy's ability to resist, but then if you are in the business of nation building and exploiting that conquered nation, you have to deal with a smoldering pile of rubble that is dysfunctional for those that live there, and so the government and economy collapse and the people turn on you as a result. 

This of course mirrors the financialized economic nature of hegemon, and the sprawling wasteful nature of its infrastructure, and the vast expanse of abused allies and subjects. The hegemon had too much surplus to play with, and so its economic regime is about laying waste to the surplus, which turns into cannibalization when the hegemon is done skimming off the cream. And then all of that energy wasted in daily operation - read vast suburban sprawls, supply chains, and industrial agriculture relying on cheap oil inputs - begins to bite when energy sources contract, and it is too late to retool the infrastructure to respond. And then all of the memory of that abused trust in foreign relations begins to translate to increasing distrust, breaking bonds, and shifting alliances. It is the generalized result of possessing too much energy and too much power for too long. 

What Russia is doing with the electrical infrastructure is quite different and worth observing, and let's repeat here that it doesn't have to necessarily succeed in order to have a profound effect on the future shape of geopolitical struggle. Russia has been more discriminating in its targets, going for the connecting infrastructure between systems that are providing generating capacity, such as the transformers and balancing stations, leaving the generating bulk of it intact, but also making the system dysfunctional and unusable as a whole without completely destroying it. 

What this tactic would eventually achieve - let's say theoretically; we've developed the argument by now that wars, and especially wars on this scale, are quite messy and get chaotic quick - is to serve as a source of leverage: you agree to satisfy our military and geopolitical goals, we help you rebuild your electrical infrastructure, which is wholly necessary for modern industry, heating and water, communication, and etc. The way in which the modern industrial world has developed - which forces that development onto participants globally due to the totalizing land, energy, and resource usage requirements - requires electricity as part of its engine and also part of its Achilles heel.  

In a greater geopolitical sense, this tactic only really makes sense because of the Soviet-era nature of Ukrainian electrical infrastructure, with their electrical equipment configured for Russian-made systems, which was quite a long time in the making. This chokes off the supply side of the infrastructure repair, and it would take years and years to completely reconfigure the system to favor Western-aligned manufacturing capacity, which itself is already showing serious problems, as infrastructure experts have long been talking about the precarity of sectors like transformer manufacturing, which is threatened with concentrated and distant supply chains. 

As others have observed, this not only puts serious pressure on Ukraine - legitimacy conferred by a warm, secure, fed, hydrated, and generally functional citizenry - but also on neighboring European allies as well, and their economic partners, to absorb the refugees and the multitude of economic costs incurred by the advancing conflict. As the world system bifurcates into separate power blocs, one of the overriding questions for each bloc will be: can you provide that sprawling suite of modern powers, abilities, and comforts that contemporary developed nations have come to expect and even require? And how to deprive one's rivals from doing so, in order to weaken their legitimacy, and by extension, their strength and geopolitical threat? 

That Russian leadership has now shown a fuller hand in prosecuting this war - as opposed to staying quiet and biding their time as was the usual in the last two decades or more - speaks to the weakness and stability of the Western-led industrial world. Another industrial personality is taking form, and it is only a matter of time before China begins to supercharge that expression when it is forced to show its own hand more fully, as it is drawn in to the greater conflict. 

The system is turning on itself, which is further eating into the incredibly complex, interconnected, and energy intensive fabric of modern industrial reproduction, and this at a time when it was already starting to be crushed soda can-like by the turning climate and general resource and ecological crisis. These global transformations would take centuries to fully express themselves, if centuries were left for the extravagance of unfettered industrial development.  

Restricting Structure

After the naive question is asked - in order to tease out more nuanced answers from a set of bedrock analytical positions - a more structural analysis is useful to set out the parameters within which we can reason from our basic assumptions. 

And so related to the naive impression of Western individuation is the less naive analysis of the overarching structure within which individuals develop, and within which their ideas and guiding ideals are actualized, which both guides and constrains their paths of development and realization. 

We've talked before about the strangeness of complex social organization. In a modern nation you have the uneasy relationship between a regulative state and business and capital, the latter of which ascended to dominance in the Western world, and whose "markets" have created a world that structures and constrains economic, political, and social activity. 

So you had the bizarre spectacle of the Truss administration in the UK attempting to solve its economic problems with a holographic set of solutions instantiated through decades of economic propaganda, which given the inappropriateness of the solutions, caused the bond markets to go haywire, with investors ready to pound down the doors of the administration, forcing them to retract their harebrained plans before the plans were even out of the gate, with the professional politicians responsible banished in turn. Local governance is helplessly dependent on a global economic system that itself has become hopelessly unstable. 

So who is in control? As the conspiracy theorists like to ask anyway. What it increasingly looks like is a complex system of jostling factions held together with barely aligning interests, which is going supercritical, in which any given attempt at governance by a given faction sets off a cascade of crises, causes the rest of the system to respond in kind, until it settles back into an equilibrium of a resting critical state, weakening with every convulsion. 

The strange and pathological contemporary formation of the individual makes more sense in this context. It is difficult for one to sit back and put up one's feet on the coffee table, much less go about one's daily affairs to live in dignity, when the house is on fire. But for many the burning house is all there is. One tries to be oneself despite the expectation that one is to go up in flames. 

No Country for Old Men

There is something striking happening in the individuation and actualization process in the Western industrial world that I wanted to get at. This has been noticeable for quite some time, but for much of the time I've personally observed it, I've been quite puzzled by it, though now it is starting to make a little more sense. 

This is another tough and complex subject to broach, but it might be made a little easier by simply pointing to a comparable allegory in a familiar literary work. In particular, I'm referring to what I think is the more interesting of Hemingway's novels: The Old Man and the Sea. 

In that novel - or novella - there is a progression that is faintly visible in his previous novels, but which becomes fully crystallized in the story of the old man. What we see throughout Hemingway's work is a relentlessly austere descriptive style, a "just the facts, ma'am" which posits a harsh "man of action" ideal of masculinity that seeks to cope with an equally harsh but frankly rendered modern world, eschewing internality and reflection in favor of a stripped down bare action and power of observation, which posits itself as pared down to the essentials, a contention which is highly suspect, and which has been thoroughly criticized and picked apart over the last century. 

However in the frank descriptions of the protagonists' dour moods, alcoholic lapses, and the deterioration of the protagonists'  personal lives and surrounding circumstances - which often culminates in a personal tragedy - and in the details of Hemingway's life itself, just as much work as the reacting criticism is done to deconstruct such a stance.

In the Old Man and the Sea in particular, we see this tendency bloom fully into the overarching plotline itself, mirroring the progression of deterioration and resultant degraded fruit of the greater individuation process in the West, which we'll get into shortly. 

An old fisherman takes to the sea in pursuit of a big catch, and eventually hooks what is probably a legendary marlin. In the ensuing struggle, both man and fish engage in the fight of their lives, with the old man going through a trial of mythic dimensions, fighting to the edge of his life to take home his prized fish which he eventually bests.

But then the fish is too big and has to be lashed to the boat, leaving a trail of blood that attracts sharks on the way back home, which then have to be fought in turn. By the time the old man returns to his home town, the prized marlin is but a skeleton that has been completely stripped away and destroyed by the sharks, leaving nothing but an empty husk as trophy. 

This is a very curious plotline to be celebrated in those factories of productive individuation: American high schools, which in my experience have overwhelmingly turned to Old Man and the Sea as the emblematic literary work of Hemingway's to be studied, though of course interpretations of that work will vary, and a work's message can always undergo some sort of spin. 

So now I'd like to turn to one of the more visible and universal of the West's individuals, the American President. I've personally found the last two decade procession - and of course you can always go back further - of American Presidents very odd to watch: they are welcomed up to the governance pedestal with both great fanfare and derision, and then proceed to self-destruct, dragged apart by the sharks of American big business, the state, and the body politic itself. 

With highly varying but familiar narratives, they become embroiled in personal scandal, disastrous foreign venture, failed domestic policy, and so on. Of course depending on the perception and location of the observer, all sorts of manner of image construction and rehabilitation can be employed to alter the direct subjective experience of said individuals' legacies, but one can survey the facts and watch the deterioration in real time and glean what one can. 

From a deliberately cultivated standpoint of naivety - because there are so many ways to rationalize and account for this phenomenon - I'd look at these presidents and think, "Why do it? How could someone want something like that?" It was appearing more to me like some sort of ritual sacrifice, to be elevated to some high vision of honor before being dismembered and set alight. This was nothing new of course, one could observe the same process in Roman emperors which culminated in incredibly short and violent lifespans in the periods of state turbulence and civil war. 

One could make the same case with the never ending procession of Western celebrity and creative talents, enjoying varying lengths of brilliant output and regard before their predations - or the predations of the surrounding management and audience consuming their images and expressions - catch up with them and they flame out, with the fall itself becoming the spectacle to be consumed. 

Similarly with the "captains of industry," or just simply the billionaires in a financialized economy: the individual emerges as a conqueror on a wave of economic myth, which then proceeds to evaporate as the product is shown to be noxious and/or a public nuisance, and more and more scandals of economic malfeasance are laid bare. 

To mirror the never ending stream of planned obsolescent material waste, what we see more generally is an accelerating decay of the old and aged, and the corresponding necessity of an accelerating instantiation and replacement with the new. 

Of course this is a highly subjective and fanciful analysis. The naive "why do it?" question can be easily set aside in favor of the parsimonious acknowledgement of the familiar and faithful human pursuit of ever growing power, wealth, and fame, which although in the longer run may appear increasingly fraught, absurd, and even dangerous, is in the shorter run all too irresistible for the ambitious and unscrupulous, naturally barred off from any hindsight at the time. The same was the case for that procession of Roman emperors living through the civil war periods, stepping up to the throne to be cut down, almost as if they were waiting in line for the chopping block. Each one had to be thinking, "but I can do it better, I will survive." What else was there to do? 

The point about indulging in such a subjective and fanciful analysis is to attempt to instantiate a narrative and a pattern and abstract it away for later use further into the analysis, aware and wary of what it really is. And gazing through this lens, I do think there is something there in this light: an accelerating degradation of the process of individuation. 

Tick Tock

Behaviors do vary, but the average person when pressed with starvation and dehydration will go to certain lengths to acquire resources and avoid death. And these lengths tend to increase when available energy increases. So the energy usage starts to spike at a certain point when it is waning, before that tipping point in which there is not enough energy available to acquire more energy. 

So you figure an individual starting to freak out and thrash about when the hunger starts setting in. Going after animals, tearing up the local flora, etc. to meet that deficit. You start grouping individuals, organizing divisions of labor and compounding and streamlining that labor, and resource exploitation goes up, and you may also have warfare starting to break out if limited resources are to be had between competing groups. 

Past a certain threshold of energy usage and technological development, you start getting firearms and explosives and rapid transportation. The utilization of energy correlates with potential energy: the more you are using structurally enables more and more energy to be let loose at once. Indeed, through our collective relations, individually we become a bit like these walking timebombs that can go off past a certain point of decay. 

To compound this, mind-body interactions are such that you can start feeling the bite of hunger - and all of the associated psychological and physical turbulence that represents - long before starvation sets in. Especially on a modern grain and starch and sugar diet, with the types of bacteria we are putting in our gut, which begin to antagonize and agitate and send hunger pangs with headaches and foul moods and the like, which have real world consequences. The popular observation of the hungry judge handing down harsher sentences before lunch is one of many examples that comes to mind.  

Reflecting this, it is impressive to consider how difficult and complex it really is to smoothly run a modern industrial nation. Modern leaders have to contend with a massive and dynamic population that is constantly expanding and decaying, setting higher and higher benchmarks of living standard and resource usage along its paths of development. As such, governance departs from a simple furnishing of a designated community with the necessary resources to survive, and proceeds to a more intricate and complex balance of interest groups with needs ranging from bare and material to abstract and completely unnecessary. The rich and powerful must be kept happy with preposterous needs, standards, wants, and interests that span the globe. 

A single human being can go quite a long time without food. Less time without water, but still a few days. Even less time for exposure, but it doesn't take much for a crude shelter to suffice. But when you start adding these complex social relations, all of that goes out the window. Available shelter changes along profoundly uneven contours: amidst the amazing abundance of an urban environment say, the sheer density sharply limits the creativity of shelter construction for the individual. To be situated higher in the social hierarchy is to be blessed with all manner of modern material comfort, but to be homeless in such an environment is to be in hell with little protection. Social violence and its causes become more complex and chaotic. More far reaching and porous harms such as pollution and mass transportation accelerated pestilence become more salient. 

Such uneven development and turbulence reaches all of the way up into the highest economic and political leadership structures of a nation. One can go to war over mere abstractions such as long term financial designs, international treaties and alliances, and speculative access to resource corridors on the other side of the world. And the threat of warfare itself becomes ever more materially and literally explosive as development advances and energy utilization increases, as the potential energy level continues upward. Time marches on, and expansion and decay and the oscillation of those things accelerates and their amplitude deepens. 

Typos

Phew that last one and the typos. Reminder: don't do a bunch of physical work, and then drink beer, and then try to write. But there's also something there. 

This is besides the fact that typos don't bother me as much anymore, for reasons I've elaborated on previously. But also, I continue to find the experience of the typo quite odd. You are typing away, and in your head, everything is sounding just fine. The typo interrupts later on as a surprise: oh I didn't mean to type that. But you did, and it is there. 

There was something happening in your head that starts to drift away from what is happening in your body, in your muscle memory and the movement of your fingers. The mental experience was enclosed in a bubble with its own internal logic, and the muscle movements influenced by that experience were operating on a plane of their own. In this case, the state of fatigue and inebriation caused a distortion in that process. 

And of course this happens all the time: we mean to walk down the sidewalk to go from point A to point B; we certainly don't mean to trip on the seam of that slab that has slightly and slyly been raised by tree roots, which is not a normal occurrence of what is supposed to be a level and seamless sidewalk. And then that seamlessness reinforces itself, establishing standards and expectations, and so the seamlessness must be reproduced.  

For that matter, the West glides along drunk on its mythology, increasingly annoyed with all of the misaligned slabs, many of them perturbed by its own activities, rising as stumbling blocks and frustrations to its smooth movement.  

The mind does guide and drive in a powerful way, but then the material world it interacts with persists for longer, and can be influenced and shaped by the mind, but only so far: it operates on its own plane with its own logic, and the mind in turn has to adapt to those realities it cannot easily and readily transform.