Perceived Harms

If you look at a lot of the hatred that is building up, especially hatred that is in direct relation to the corruption of existing institutions, you can see elements of a sort of tragic persuasion. In these large, complex social structures, a lot of the visible effects of the harm being done in relation to a given privilege is spatially and temporally distanced further and further from where the real power is, and so on down the hierarchies of power. 

Changes to the system pass through the system and then intensify as they circulate. So to take the inflation for instance, you have existing wealth concentrating simultaneously with deepening processes of resource depletion and the associated contractions, alongside growing disruptions caused by those contractions (resource-based territorial disputes) and the destruction and constriction of resources via ongoing pollution flows (climate change, etc.). 

Economic actors, across a broad range of industries have become aware that they can take more, as given suites of resources and value chains claim higher prices, and most of them are doing so, contributing to a general atmosphere of hiking prices and intensified expropriation and exploitation, and that ethic generalizes to all interconnected economic actors: everyone perceives they are getting less, so simultaneously they are all trying to take more, putting more and more pressure on those most vulnerable at the bottom of these so-called pyramids.

The harm itself runs away and intensifies the further it gets away from its source: the activity of elite decision makers benefitting from these runaway processes. Though less concentrated and visible as an actual individual-on-individual murder, these results are similar: it is a sort of rolling murder by institution.   

In a large, complex society such as this one, the hatred and anger itself is difficult to channel to immediate threats. If someone shows up at your house and starts taking your shit, well fine you could figure out what to do quickly enough. But then what if that someone is connected to warrants and papers, those connected to courts, those connected to corrupt officials, connected to real estate developers and various magnates and possibly organized crime, those connected to the greater local and then state and federal governments and wider economic entities and so on. It gets to so that properly expressing your anger involves years of intensive political, economic, and historical research, and then who has the time for all that? 

The function of scapegoating and random mob violence - however contemptible it may be - becomes more understandable in this respect. One power the ruling elite still manage to wield is a sort of veto power that fights back visible and comprehensible challenges to their power, such as those emanating from revolutionary and even reformist elements within society. With the power still available to beat back those challenges, the harms nevertheless continue to accumulate through the pathways of least resistance, piling up on those least able to defend themselves, and so blowouts occur in the direction of various targeted and marginalized groups. 

Simple Wealth Complicates

There's another problem that arises when you have too much wealth accumulate under the aegis of a single concentrated power, a power which is to properly dispose of that wealth to maintain its propensity to accumulate. This is less some sort of decadence theory or an account for the transformations wrought by the inflow of what finance today would call "hot money," and those are phenomena that themselves are worth looking into. No, for now I just want to comment on a simpler logistical and organizational question of how wealth is actually distributed and put to use. 

Just think of a massive hoard of gold: what exactly can be done with it? The larger it becomes, the heavier it gets, and the more space it takes up, making it more and more difficult to store, and moving it and distributing it becomes ever more labor and energy intensive. One imagines the treasurer standing there, overwhelmed: "what are we going to do with all this shit?" 

Back in the ancient world, the best time for clever defenders to attack raiding foreign forces was when they were fully encumbered with all of the loot they had amassed, weighed down and distracted. The Byzantine forces - much more cautious after their huge 7th century tumble - were known for doing this to the Arab raiders, among other forces. 

All that wealth! You can pick up all sorts of heaps of treasure and load them up on your beasts of burden; I bet it looked pretty good gleaming in the sun too, but it wasn't going to do anyone any good until that loot had landed and was plugged into existing power structures of the raiders themselves, giving the loot the chance to be distributed in service to various flows of human labor and endeavor. 

The form of wealth matters, and how that wealth is operating in a given context. Gold needs to be run through human labor, furnishing food and drink and shelter say, by the guarantees of an overseeing sovereign, and then that furnished labor is ultimately combined with raw materials to be transformed into swords and spears and axes, to be of any use on the battlefield anyway. Not so easy fighting them back brandishing a chunk of bullion. And all of that takes time, and coordination, and knowledge, and talent. 

These are slightly more complicated wealth metaphors for understanding something happening in the modern world, but here is an even simpler one: you can easily choke out a fire by piling too much wood fuel on it. A good fire needs the circulation of air to get the heat and the chemical reactions to the wood fuel. Piling on too much fuel is a good way to smother that hot core, isolating its radiating energy, and eventually it weakens and burns out and dies long before it reaches more fuel sources. The wealth lies not in just the hoard of wood fuel, which only represents potential fire, but the entire process in which the fuel is set in a proper relation to the heat and air which allows for all of the elements to react together to produce more heat and light. 

So on to the modern world then. The United States has been described as the most powerful nation in history, with the greatest known hoard of material wealth to show for it. But something has been happening for decades that is incredibly baffling and distressing to watch for anyone not enclosed in the shrinking and concentrating bubble of the ruling classes. 

The US has been squandering its wealth and goodwill - both within and abroad - for some time now. The strip-mining of the developing and undeveloped world, reflected inwards as a stripping away of domestic wealth also, has only intensified and accelerated, moving ever outwards to groups previously thought of as somewhat protected, such as allies in foreign policy and higher classes domestically. 

Domestic infrastructure and global good will advances in a sort of desiccation as financial power especially concentrates in towering and preposterous pyramid schemes which eventually flame out, taking out the fictional wealth and attached collective trust with it. 

Take the F35 program - or similarly the aircraft carriers - which is emblematic of military wealth and power, and yes the technology represents a massive concentration of wealth over space and time. The technologies themselves are incredibly sophisticated and are produced through sprawling interconnections of technical suites and material flows, built up upon generations and generations of knowledge and cumulative technological progress. These weapon systems in isolation are quite dazzling and impressive in a limited technical sense, but they can't do much of anything on the battlefield and are plagued with functionality and maintenance issues. The wealth itself is piling up and setting up, standing forth in a useless form in its targeted context to then be destroyed in a real fight, just as all of the nations real wealth is being squeezed out of the greater body politic - now like juice from stone - to be taken up into high finance and then evaporated off as the disconnecting and insulating ruling core is sectioned off and dies, separated from the rest of the wood fuel. 

Ditto if you look at the greater tech platforms, including the increasingly dysfunctional and obnoxious social media - systems descending into a sort of bewilderment as they are iterated by their bewildered technicians and programmers, who become ever more bewildered and lost as they partake in the bewildering systems themselves, systems that in their cyclical iterations become more and more lost with the garbage coming in and then going out. Echoes of Tainter's complexity theory perhaps, but one aspect of these greater processes to be mindful of. 

Ghosts in Machines Pt. 1

Here is the first part of an admittedly unwieldy analysis, but hey that's sort of what we do here. And I assure you, it does build from there. 

I want to turn towards the concept of "god" or "gods," which could prove to yield a conception that is a little unusual in regards to common understandings. In that respect, sometimes it takes putting in some distance, or moving far enough away from something to glimpse its greater outline. "Far enough" is the operative qualifier here of course. 

To illustrate, the conceit of conventional post-Enlightenment discourse is that we've moved away from the superstition of worshipping a god or gods ("god is dead," etc. etc.), but in our hurry to distance ourselves from such beliefs, and without collectively taking the proper care, and not seeing the forest for the trees, we've reproduced the superstitions in a modernized form. "Collectively" and "we" are words doing heavy lifting here, as I'll try to address.  

By taking concepts that are ostensibly very different from each other (god/s vs. no god/s), and then putting them together, in historical relation to each other, and discerning their continuity, it becomes apparent that there is something "organic" and "living" in their connection and progression. Not a new thought by any means, but worthwhile to state. Further, it took the turbulent history and the resulting stark contrast between successive and connecting belief systems and the accompanying hindsight to produce the conception we are turning to now. 

To better set this up, let's first look at the deeper history - or at least a deeper history provincial to classical Mediterranean and then Western civilization - where we can see a gradual transition from classical antiquity to the modern era, in which a distributed pagan worship of multiple gods, whose personalities are derived from various phenomena pertinent to the human experience, say knowledge, communication, weather, land and ocean, war, intoxication, and so on, which concentrates into the worship of a single "jealous" god of a monarchical quality, and which disperses yet again to a distributed, machinelike "market," which we can confidently argue is still very much worshiped today, albeit with increasing cynicism and desperation. 

We could gaze at the evolution of the so-called "market" and the changing political economy of such an evolution, and then analyzing the character of that political economy, it becomes possible to discern what could be described as a personality of something like a god. You see it even in the bloodless and soulless discussions of mainstream economists, those closest to power: the objective pronouncements of what the market "is" and what it "wants" and how it stays "healthy" and so on, an entity that is a strange accumulation of collective activity, including the very activity of the proselytizing mainstream economists themselves, which must be interpreted by a priestly class and then interfaced with by a political class, the totality of which has undergone hundreds of years of change. 

We can see mechanically how a given god touches down into material reality: it is first born into the material realm wide-eyed and revolutionary, full of possibility, until it is taken up into an ascendant and transforming ruling class, concentrating power and gradually constricting possibility and dynamism, applying and manipulating its image into the world to be ruled, and then as the world changes in part as a result of these actions, the nature of the ruling class changes to remain astride of it in a series of lesser reformist revolutions, before power is gradually and terminally concentrated into fewer and fewer handlers, as the body politic dies, precipitating the next major revolution. 

So for example you have the revolutionary birth of the bourgeoisie which was then taken up into the state and then concentrated and calcified into a capital class, a process that involved endless struggles between capital and labor, before eventually stabilizing into an uneasy social contract, which broke down in the World Wars, passing through several experimental fascist and socialist iterations which were distributed geographically, before reaching for an ephemeral social democratic compromise, which then broke down in turn, passing into today's neoliberal death spiral. 

The material expression of such so-called gods can be found to be concentrated in a given power bloc, where a given set of theological interpretations concentrates, and which goes through a series of iterative transformations, going through as many successive revolutions of reform as possible to stave off the loss of concentrated power and total transformation before exhausting its possibilities and entering its own death spiral, paving the way for the new potentialities arising in a distributed body politic. 

This pattern could also be observed in the evolution of Christianity, which began with a revolutionary fervor in ancient Rome before eventually being taken up into the state, a process which involved endless theological debate and the culling off and killing off of rival interpretations which correlated with various class and factional interests. Witness the era of iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire, in which the nature of their god and how that nature was expressed was fiercely debated, with the iconoclasts in the state benefitting from an erasure of icons and the iconophiles in the dispersed but growing power of local churches arguing for the maintenance of icons, who had an interest in maintaining the power of such icons. Or consider the Reformation era and the bloody conflicts between the calcifying Catholic church and the emerging Protestant church, and so on. 

Contrast this succession of titanic movements and transformations - each touched off with and ended by catastrophe and revolution, with gods that concentrate and then catapult into the sky before crashing down - with many indigenous cultures, which independently emerge with a common pattern: an oftentimes stable worldview which can last thousands of years, built upon a collection of creation myths which establish a distributed and integrated ecological spirituality. 

In this light, to look at the progression of social, political, and spiritual forms making up what we call Western civilization, we can make out what appears to be some sort of self-hatred, meant in a very specific sense in this case, much like the self-hatred of a tsunami that takes everything up in its path, and then smashes it all together as it acts upon itself as a progression of shifting forms of debris and surging water. Its overarching nature is found unified in the wave itself, the surging energy that violently animates everything it moves with in a certain direction. 

The young hate the old and the old hate the young, and subcultures spin off endlessly which are then set against each other, and change is arrived at with urgent necessity and spectacular violence as a given order calcifies and corrupts and refuses accommodation with a broad swathe of the population that supports it. Doesn't this greater relation itself have something like a personality? Doesn't it look like something we could call a god? 

If a god can make up a huge set of relations, say the multitude of relations found in weather phenomena or warfare, or for that matter, all relations as implicated in the Christian god, then why can't there be a deity composed out of the relations of deities, or even a historical progression of god-forms? What is the nature of the relation of Greek gods and their Mt. Olympus, for example, or what about the relation of the historical progression from gods to god to machine, and so on? 

Admittedly, this conception we are working with dilutes the nature of what a god is or can be, but then there are so many different interpretations and conceptions historically that this has already largely happened. There is utility to sharply contrasting the nature of various deities and systems, and that contrasting comes with lessons of its own, just as putting them all in relation to each other and collapsing down their differences yields a whole other set of lessons. We'll continue with the latter. 

The discussion has gotten long, so I'll continue it in the next post. 

Over-Wintering

And there goes another month. Phew! I've got a good-sized logjam to clear: a couple of big pieces to finish up and some other assorted sketches to put out. One of the really frustrating things about Long Covid - there are many - is that a flareup could hit during a creative spurt - it don't care - and then the work in progress sits while you drift downstream in a funk, and then when you finally re-emerge from the soup you're a different person, looking at the work fresh. How to wrap it up and stay true? 

That and the cold: some brisk, fresh, cool air is good for thinking, but too cold and you're more focused on getting that wood chopped and that fire lit and just getting comfortable again. Spending the tail end of the winter in the Pacific Northwest, watching the birds start to file in again as the snow melts. Oh well, it's all good. 

I've got more material to put out when I'm capable. Till then, I can do some pictures at least. Watching the winter go.