Reflection

One thing I notice about my writing habits given the mechanics of blog writing - and this could be substituted for earlier iterations of journaling and notetaking and sketching and the like - is that upon abstracting from a given set of relations, or state of affairs, you are left with a workable concept. Once you get the concept down, it then starts to change, as you start using what you've iterated to start focusing on the incoming data and experience, organizing them and then comparing them, and you start to see things in a new light, which at the same time feeds back into comparisons with the concept, changing it by either altering it to better fit the facts, or adding additional caveats or even compounds to better capture things. Rinse and repeat. 

Desiring Denial

The modern corporations, the modern financiers, are funny things. They are in a constant drive to compete to out-exploit and out-accumulate each other, which steadily immiserates their respective societies, driving simultaneously the drive to war universally as economic activity saturates globally and then draws down the surplus upon reaching its expansionary limits. Besides the branches of the military industrial complex and its ancillary industries - which admittedly are gargantuan - much of the corporate and financial world would very much like the process of accumulation to go on indefinitely, albeit with minimal jostling and disruption and precarity. 

The captains of industry and financiers whine and stomp their feet about being denied access to their increasingly hostile foreign markets, and go behind the state's back to subvert sanctions and other hostile forms of economic activity, and so on, while their brethren in military contracting lick their chops, encouraging an ever more assertive and aggressive national security state as conditions deteriorate.

There is of course an adventurism at play here: oligarchies are always behind the warships, licking their chops at the prospects of financing the wars and then getting their hands on the spoils of war, which in the modern era translates to privatization and economic dispossession. But historically, it can get hot enough to where a given set of oligarchs can lose everything, who were doubtless thinking it couldn't possibly happen to them beforehand. 

Easy Does It

There is an important psychic dimension to the concentration of wealth that has profound consequences for our current predicament that I wanted to get at. Here is where you start to see the differences of quality with additions in quantity cropping up. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

First a logging analogy: picking up a couple of branches in your arm is one thing. Even picking up a heavier log: yeah you're using more muscle power, but for the most part it can be done safely with the right amount of effort. Something changes when you start to manipulate things heavier than yourself. When we set about to fell a large tree, or move around an 800 pound log to get it onto the mill, this process is very different from simply manipulating tools with muscle power to achieve the desired result. 

Because you know that when heavy things get to moving, it becomes more and more difficult for the interested individual to affect their trajectory. So you really have to think about what you are doing, and plan on where the heavy things are going, and take special care in that process, and move very slowly and deliberately. The quality of the work changes dramatically with the increased mass involved: you shift over to an abundance of caution and technique and longer term planning. 

Take manipulating an 800 pound log. A whole host of considerations comes into play that didn't before: what is the slope its on like? How much force to exert before it gets moving and how much should it move? Where do you stand? Where are you going? What is downslope? Upslope? And so on. 

And then of course it should be added that when all that mass is moving too much and too fast, the set of considerations shifts in the other direction. There is no time to think and very little that you do is going to change the situation. Instincts take over and the objective is simply to not be crushed. 

With that in mind, let's talk about money. Say you lend someone a couple of bucks to go grab themselves a sandwich or something. You're not going to sweat that transaction too much. Depending on the nature of the relationship, the repayment of that amount may have a certain meaning, but you're not gonna spend the energy worrying over that amount. But then say you lend someone a thousand? A couple thousand? Or you invest 10, or 100 thousand? And then beyond that? The amount goes up and the very quality of the stakes goes up. 

The same is the case with commodities: say you literally spill a glass of milk. There's a reason for the common admonition to not cry over such things. Of course with environment that calculus changes: a cup of spilt milk has a different meaning in a depression, but nevertheless. The kid going out and wrapping the family Jaguar around a tree has a very different set of considerations, and a house lost in a fire even more so, and so on. 

When you get at a certain scale, the movement of millions and billions say, you have the integrity of countless lives and institutions and possibly even nations connected to such things. The fewer people in ever greater control of these movements could be anywhere from completely oblivious to such stakes or excruciatingly aware, or anywhere in between, but the effect of the success and failure of such movements is universal enough and readily perceivable. 

There's a reason for that supposed paradox of thrift you see in so many really wealthy people, who have everything and are so much more personally stingy with the dispensation of their resources. A lifetime of hoarding and manipulating wealth happens for a reason, and of course changes you; not so easy to reverse either. Given certain quantities and stakes, the very culture changes.

Which is what you see in cultures in the construction industry and in agriculture and in logging. Where people are working with much more dangerous conditions, such as being closest to the manipulation of heavy materials and high energy processes, you get the accompanying high stress and hair trigger stress responses and strict cultures of skill and competency and the accompanying regard and trust that comes with such things (not to mention the contempt and derision in the face of the lack these things). 

In the case of extreme wealth inequality, the changes are universal: a severe stress and desperation in those who have nothing, and a rapacious need for more and profound fear of loss in those who have everything, which makes for a very brittle and supercritical social structure, needless to say. Though of course it took a terrible rupture in trust and social consciousness to provide the momentum for such extreme wealth accumulation. The changes in quantity follow the changes in quality, and vice versa. 

Demystification

It's a funny concept that is often used in a curious way. We talk about demystification when something is particularly fuzzy or vague, especially when foul play is suspected. But there is a mysticism in everything, even in the cold rationalist impulse, with its awestruck reverence for "fact" and "truth" and the "objective." Of course fuzzy and sloppy and superstitious thinking on the other hand is more often than not weaponized in the service of malign intent and grift. "Demystifying" something should be more about establishing harmony with what exists, and of course the nature of the cosmos. 

Demystifying Inflation

I've remarked before that the more you study money and finance, the stranger it all gets. It is a complex phenomenon that eludes understanding, and of course the ruling class takes advantage of this fact. It is easier to plaster over our social and power relations with an obscure layer of money talk: tokens constantly changing hands, changing forms, augmenting and diminishing, circulating and transforming. Keep your eye on the birdie! 

But we need to be clear here: at a certain intensity, inflation amounts to rationing. With the general rise in prices, those many goods that require a proportional increase in social resources to attain become more and more out of reach for more and more people. For me personally, there is a vivid subjective experience of the process: struggling to pay simply for food and gas, I look at something like larger medical expenses, or even a used car, or lord help me, housing, and for me it simply can't be done. The resources aren't there for it. Even consumer goods like clothing and electronics begin to appear more and more out of reach: I look at the prices and think, impossible! How does anyone do it? Well, make do and make it last or go without; that is increasingly the mantra for more and more people. A good consumer ethic on a finite planet to be sure! But at the moment beside the point. 

Bellyaching aside, I want to look simply at what is happening here. There is a distinct temporal and psychic quality to this contraction, and this rationing. Because if you look at the existing resource base, yes energy supplies and a whole host of other resources are contracting, but the standing reserve of labor and capital is enormous: the unemployed and underemployed, the homeless, the vast stretches of empty or emptying housing stock, the rusting wastes of idled factories and machine, the vast fields of rotting produce and butchered livestock, and so on. We are also talking about a collapse of the political imagination and of a long term sense of any sort of time horizon. The ruling class is out of ideas, but also refuses to cede power and wealth, and so the decision to eat its children and its golden egg laying geese. 

With the fear setting in, the last of the trust evaporating, the rest of the social resources, the money, is becoming increasingly concentrated and carefully controlled by limited intelligence. There is a generalized feeding frenzy, in which it becomes more and more universally acceptable to retract previous social contracts, and take with both hands as much as you can grab individually. The contracting resources, the derailing supply chains, the ongoing circulation of damage of the pandemic, those are certainly contributing to the inflation, but what is intensifying all of that and amplifying all of that is the social concentration of resources in the form of monopolies and the relentless driving up of monopoly pricing and asset inflation. 

There is a vast and systemic financial engineering taking place, in which the accounting symbols of social resource are manipulated away from the general population, pooling and concentrating among raiders and pirates, in so many words. Yes, all of this sounds quite dismal and dire, but let's take some deep breaths here: there is much more to come. 

Brief Thoughts on Ecological Indeterminacy

There is a steady stream of studies or projects that is constantly highlighting in new and fascinating ways the complex intricacies of interconnected global ecological systems. Though the incredible complexity of these dynamics all lead to a very simple conclusion: the sheer complexity and interrelatedness of these systems gives rise to an ultimate indeterminacy that defies anticipation or mastery. 

For example, one of those ongoing projects is the study of the relationship between the dusts of the Sahara Desert and the Amazon. To briefly sketch it out, the Sahara Desert is a substantial source of phosphorus, due to its history as once home to a massive ancient lake bed teeming with life. That phosphorus travels across the Atlantic as dust, which eventually reaches the Amazon and is deposited by rain down into the soil, the same rains which steadily deplete the Amazon's phosphorus supply through flooding and erosion, supply which is not locked up by existing plant life anyway. 

There's concern about both changing transatlantic wind currents and changing rain patterns in the Sahara itself, as part of climate change, which is attributed to a decline in the transportation of Saharan dust, which poses a problem for the stocks and flows circulation of phosphorous to be sure. A larger problem for a rainforest that is already under increasing threat locally from a changing climate and intensifying deforestation, not to mention global threats. Though the rainforest's contribution of oxygen to the atmosphere was exaggerated (lungs of the earth figuration) the region still plays a huge part as a carbon sink, and of course the carbon set free by the forest's demise, and the loss of biodiversity besides, would be catastrophic. And there are doubtless other equally intricate and fascinating ecological relationships to tease out there. 

Again, all of this complexity leads us to a much simpler conclusion. We are living in an infinitely complex (as far as the available energy of our perceiving faculties is concerned) relation of ecological systems, local and global, which took millions of years (and more) to come into being in its present form in countless interconnected processes of succession. There is no putting back together what we have taken apart, or reversing the forces we've set in motion. It appears we can concentrate just enough energy and develop just enough mastery to better gawk at what we're busy taking part in unraveling, however worthwhile attempts at mitigation are, for at the very least we can try to soothe our bereaved souls. 

Humpty Dumpty comes to mind. And putting back together egg shell is hopeless enough, but this? 

Time and the Shell

There was a temporality to the formation of that hard shell, the ancient city of Constantinople. An important detail that needs to be added to the analysis. What the inhabitants were finding in their growing desperation after the dramatic collapse of the Byzantine empire's holdings in the 7th century, and then the subsequent Arab sieges of Constantinople, was that they were literally standing upon the shoulders of giants: given the dramatically contracted state of the Byzantine empire, it would have been impossible to construct the Theodosian walls - among other things - with the available labor, talent, and resources at the time. The empire's citizens had to hold on tight to a possession forged over centuries of technological development and the concentration of resources, maintaining the fortifications and defensive technologies that existed prior to the sieges. Like a diamond formed under all that heat and pressure, it also took a good deal of time, and a broader spread of the circulation of resources, to concentrate all of that energy into one place. That fortress city and its clutched wealth was highly sought after by the empire's enemies, coming in waves to crack that oyster for the pearl inside.