Accountability

There is a history of observation that posits that the US is "agreement incapable," such as in its long trail of broken treaties and promises, and even in terms of its modern geopolitical agreements and maneuverings. 

Part of this is due to the modern construction and machinery of the state, and the fact that "the US" is an abstraction, that though believed in with a measure of stability and continuity - the dollar continuing on as reserve currency for example, though that is quickly coming to an end - doesn't properly convey its messy and chaotic nature as a geographic location of a vast diversity of and oftentimes explosively violent convergence of global historical forces. 

The ever-shifting machinery of the US State - though meant in part to deal with this violent convergence and absorb some of its shocks - ensures an ever-shifting balance of factional struggles as well, with an oscillating expression of domestic and foreign policies, which like an electrical current, can prove generally useful, but also quite dangerous if disrupted. 

This doesn't fully account for the US' unique set of geopolitical behaviors among its constellation of modern state brethren; the position of hegemon better accounts for this of course, both with the behaviors required for hegemonic control and maintenance, and then with the corruptions that that power affords. 

Nevertheless, accountability in the usual sense given this state of affairs is an elusive and slippery thing. 

A Theory of Jankyness Pt. 1

A little tongue-in-cheek, yes, but we'll attempt to structure the discussion with the assumed veracity of this basic claim: that the explosive and expansive instability of Western capital - its overall "janky" quality as a governing platform - has played a large part in the perpetually unfolding catastrophes that have shaped and characterized our history, carving those deep, glacial grooves whose surfaces we still skate upon in the modern age. 

No doubt about it, once you start to talk about the multitude of historical phenomena in such a broad and sprawling scheme, the scheme itself threatens to melt into some greater pattern in turn: the explosive and dynamic character of Western capital is a product of the many millennia of the rising and falling motions of empires, a greater pattern which could melt into far more profound movements on a geological scale. Though in want of an intelligible discussion within a reasonable amount of space, we'll maintain our focus on the limits of "The West," which besides is where I currently reside and have a participatory interest in criticizing. 

The historical example I wanted to start with - and we should be able to fit in a couple more in the course of the discussion - is the US' battle for the Black Hills in the course of the Great Sioux War of 1876, which culminated in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and that related famed incident, Custer's Last Stand. 

An incredible story in its own right, especially concerning the conduct of the Lakota and Cheyenne, but I'd like to focus on the background circumstances which helped to structure that sequence of events which is just as interesting, and as it happens, quite pertinent to our discussion. This will involve somewhat of a circuitous narrative pathway, but we'll eventually get there.  

A decade before, the US Civil War had been wrapping up, itself the result of a titanic and catastrophic collision of two competing economic systems and their respective loci of geography and culture. This was a collision born out of the dramatic branching transformations undergone both in wage labor-based industrial capitalism and the slavery-based plantation system, with the latter playing a large part in the former's own development, whose rapid and global transformations altered sensibilities and global economics to an extent that was making the latter obsolete. 

That collision produced its own series of catastrophic effects which punched huge craters in the body politic, some of which continue well into the present as bleeding ulcers, the perpetually brutal legacies of slavery among them. But to get back on track, the US government emerged from that conflict with a gaping hole in the national treasury, and a vast swathe of destroyed national resources like labor and infrastructure. 

That didn't necessarily slow down the manic explosion of railroad investment and construction and settlement westward, especially on the part of the victors of the war, which was putting more and more pressure on an already beleaguered constellation of native tribes along those pathways, with settlers steadily eating into their natural resources, spaces, and corridors of migration, pushing tribes like the Lakota and Cheyenne further westward and into other tribes' territories like the Crow, who would ally with the US as a result.  

The economic and financial Panic of 1873 would derail that wave of economic ebullience, which was also happening throughout Europe in a similar way: Germany and Austria-Hungary would also embark in a similar process of rapid and unsustainable industrialization after their victory and receipt of war reparations from France after the Franco-Prussian war, which would add to the general global contagion, all of which was disrupted through a series of financial scandals, massive urban fires, market dislocations caused by rapid industrialization (newly online Northern wheat production trashed global wheat prices for example, and the construction of the Suez canal caused maritime trade chaos in Britain as another example), Germany and the US' demonetization of silver, and so on. 

The demonetization of silver was one of the salient points here, as everyone shifted to the gold standard, which in turn produced a voracious appetite for gold among the legions of desperate people trying to survive this long depression, which would be considered "the great depression," were it not for the actual Great Depression to unseat it. Are we seeing those growing oscillations in the pattern recognition yet? 

At any rate, that huge hole in the national treasury persuaded a weakened US government to sympathize more with the waves of desperate settlers fighting their way through the depression, who were busy sniffing out rumors of gold in the Black Hills. After all, the US was bound by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 to leave the Black Hills for exclusive use by the Lakota and Cheyenne, which for them was not only a sacred region, but increasingly a lifeline of game, plantlife, and timber in the face of shrinking territory. 

There was still some public and factional support for native sovereignty and dignity, but for certain more aggressive factions, it might be easier to break the treaty and enter the Black Hills for the gold if there was a steady trickle of settlers going in - who were more difficult to control - and who would cause confrontations with the local tribes, justifying heavier-handed efforts.

Which was exactly what happened. There was a survey expedition led by Custer, which officially was rationalized as route-finding and scouting out fort locations, while simultaneously and surreptitiously scouting for gold. Gold was found, and increasing settlers were coming in, which led to a series of military escalations and then full blown warfare. 

Now, the Lakota and Cheyenne produced incredible and talented warriors through their culture, and through the course of the war achieved a series of spectacular victories, culminating in the defeat of Custer and the US Army in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, which coming on the heels of reunification after the drawing-down of the civil war, was registered among the US body politic as an intolerable humiliation. 

Up to this point, the Grant Administration had resisted devoting too many resources to this war, partially because of the energy tied up in carrying out the Reconstruction in the South. The spectacular defeats of the US Army however threw into overdrive that latent racism coursing through the US body politic, mainstreaming genocidal calls for extermination and zero tolerance of the indigenous peoples, and so the US government devoted ever more resources to the conflict, while also shifting to an attritional mode of warfare in which strictly delimited reservations were more sharply enforced, and the rest of the free native peoples driven to flight and famine, much of them wiped out. Simultaneously too, Reconstruction efforts would falter and land redistribution and reparation would falter and the political economic state of affairs would regress to state-led segregation in the south and rentier exploitation and economic predation and ghettoizing in the north.

And so these catastrophic failures - their trajectories perhaps baked in, but then driven more forcefully towards and fulfilled more completely through this structural instability and its ensuing social, economic, and political accelerations - would tear massive scars into the socio-economic and political landscapes of the Western world, scars which persist and now fester to this day. 

Snacks for Thought

I've got some heavier things cooking. Just thought I'd get down a couple of miscellaneous and scattered thoughts to serve as placeholders for now. There are always plenty of little things to think about here and there, and hopefully these continuous little exercises build upon each other and establish deeper understandings. 

Intoxication and Connection

When you are intoxicated, it is usually the case that you are engaged in some other activity, say art or music or social interaction or ritual or what have you. And there is oftentimes a good external reason to be intoxicated, and there are modalities for getting intoxicated* and certain substances to pursue for such purposes. Intoxication - like other cultural phenomena - is always connected to numerous other things. 

*There was a typo here that was bad enough that it changed the meaning of the piece, and I modified the rest of the sentence for clarity, or at least better clarity, as clear as one can be in such an instance. Attributed to an intoxication of fatigue, so to speak. 

Tool Usage

The tools themselves have to be culturally inculcated. Power tools for example tend to move at high speeds with a lot of energy, and if something goes wrong it goes much more wrong much quicker, despite all of the time and labor that those tools save. So their usage and their operation is taught through higher levels of stress and care: mistakes are more costly, both for the operator and the tool. For that matter, as supply chain issues and inflation persist, an injury or a broken tool - the more physical damage or the more higher up the value chain the tool is, the higher the stakes - can create quite the stir. Whoever may break a given tool, or suffer a given accident - even if the tools have inferior designs or materials - may very well embody the cause of that accident or loss as the reason for misfortune. 

Living Ideas

Concepts could be seen as living things. And the harder they are hammered in, the harder they are to dislodge. So that an idea and the way one is supposed to live could become part of that person, who is threatened by the simple suggested contradiction of that idea, or even a modification of that idea, in many cases. Any suggestion that you are threatening that living thing, whether with sledgehammer or scalpel, and you can see individuals positively bristle, as if you are brandishing the actual material counterpart at their person. Loss of concept could be experienced as a small death. 

Wax and Wane

The dance between economic liberalism and nationalistic protectionism is an old pattern as far as Western capital is concerned. In times of expansion and perceived security and stability - which as an exaggerated perception is anything but; it takes a steep and rapid ascent to present the accompanying fall and crash - you get a laxity of trade and interconnection, deepening those interdependencies that are to amplify and accelerate the growing instability of the greater system when that period of ebullience comes screeching to a halt. And then when things do go bad, and times are perceived as uncertain and tense, you get the inward-turning protectionism. And the oscillating patterns of moving back and forth between those poles produce unique patterns of their own as they are sustained over time. 

On Method

I wanted to give a regular update on method, as much for processing these things and representing these things to myself as for anyone reading.  I'll start with a simpler construction metaphor, which as always is an attempt to isolate a few fundamental principles, but which will quickly get complicated. Hopefully before losing the thread we can apply that to the notion of constructing ideology and living by such things, which involves reading, thinking, writing, communicating, and acting. 

Let's just consider a simple picnic table. For complex evolutionary and historical reasons, we have a certain anatomy and physics: we have a way of existing and moving in the material world. Generally we like to be upright for activities like eating and socializing and so on. Our head itself likes to be relatively level and also upright. There is a symmetry and distribution to our bodies that allow for a state of rest against gravity, where pressure is exerted on our frame and joints and muscles, hopefully relatively evenly and proportional to the regions built for holding that weight. 

Sitting against a solid object, it helps to have that object level, with gravity acting equally on its surfaces, so that when it is sat upon one's body is evenly distributed against gravity in turn. If the object has a slope for example, we might be sitting at an angle, our head uncomfortably slanted, and the body and muscles are shifted upon to compensate. Over time that uneven pressure gets more and more uncomfortable, and the body protests, and we get tired and have to move. 

So a good picnic table should be relatively level and even. For another set of complex cultural and historical reasons, there are specific ways to do this in the modern age. By counting and measuring and using tools that make straight cuts and lines, timber can be cut with flat planes at precise lengths, thicknesses, and proportions in relation to each other, and then these are set at the right compound degrees to achieve the total right angles necessary to square up flat sitting planes and the vertical planes of support which are to reach the ground. 

This level of precision in the construct itself informs the way in which it is to sit upon the earth: that is, its feet must be flat and level, and the earth underneath it flat and level, so as to keep consistent that level quality. The ground can be checked by placing a straightedge upon it, which is embedded with vials of liquid with air bubbles floating in them - a level - which amazingly, indicates the degree of slope on the plane it is put against. 

This is a long-winded way of saying that our constructs have to be built upon the earth and exist with the earth - that mass of soil and rock held together by gravity, lending to a continuity that allows for sustained life and subjective experience - and as such, they must communicate with the earth and harmonize with it and with us in turn. And this building must occur within a historic time and place: its form is culturally determined and it is carried out in a specific way and appears in a particular manner in accordance with what came before. Everything that exists is built upon itself and in relation to itself, and in constant transformation with itself in specific configurations over time. 

To build anything is to use energy to arrange matter in a way that improves the human relation to the earth, or to preserve the energy differentials that allow for the perpetuation of humans. Even such a fundamental statement is quite contentious, as to perpetuate oneself too well can mean perpetuation at the expense of the earth and one's relations that one rests upon and within. For that matter, things can be built well, or they can be built mediocre, or they can be built badly. And things built persist, and change in quality as they act on the earth and the earth acts on them. 

To build ideology is no different: it is the process of creating mental structures that are to rest upon the earth in a way, or structure ways in which we act and interact with each other and the world, which are in accordance with how we are and what we find the world to be. 

But what happens when something goes wrong with those structures, and they fail to harmonize with the earth, and increasingly harm and set against those caught up in them? How to isolate the problem? Today there is a widespread sense that there is something wrong, but we live in a state of degradation that is not easy to articulate, as there is so much historically accumulated material, technologies, practices, and information that we rest upon. There is such a mass of material to reflect upon and act on and judge that it has become difficult to isolate the problems. 

We are awash in language that is regularly used with confidence and without reflection on its meaning and origins. Much of this is naive and earnest, and then much more of it is cynical and manipulative: words are twisted, information is manipulated and cherrypicked, statistics are willfully misinterpreted, and so a collectively experienced reality gravitates to this growing wilderness of contention with a background of rising unease and panic, all the while with real and objective material problems intensifying and complicating underneath as they continue to go collectively unaddressed. What to do? 

I'd suggest that there are many ways to address this greater problem, but here I only have the one life, and only so much time and energy, and here I address the problems I'm interested in with a particular way that I've come to find more and more useful over the past couple of years. 

To go back to physical construction, whether you are talking about a picnic table or a house, the consistency of the relations in the structure itself depend on its proper relation to the earth. An unsound foundation introduces flaws which become progressively worse as they travel up through the frame and then into the roof: flaws which endanger the innerworkings of the plumbing and heating and electrical and fixtures and everything that makes the structure live and breathe. A building can be propped up and banged together in all sorts of ways to maintain its consistency upon a crumbling foundation, but eventually when that foundation becomes unsound enough, it endangers everything above it. Past this point, one can go mad in the structure itself attempting to prop up all of the many doomed relations. 

Anyway, here it is about going as low as possible, getting at the earth where one can and taking a look. I still have to use and live in many of these structures, and trust these tools and techniques, and love the richness and power of the many material and ideological and spiritual accumulations of the modern experience, while at the same time casting a suspicious eye at them and moving lower and trying to get to a lower point of rest in turn; one shouldn't make enemies with gravity so to speak. 

Ideologically that means not only focusing on the constructs themselves, but also surveying how these constructs communicate with the earth in a way, by feeling them and living them and meditating on acting with them as well. This shit ain't level, but in the past I'd risk going mad spending too much time thinking about the constructs themselves. One also has to live, and see if any of this is even working. 

If this still sounds abstract and obscure, yeah maybe so. I'll continue to address these issues in time, and work along the lines of this given method. It's an ongoing process. 

Push and Pull

It should be added to recent thoughts on propaganda that there are aspirational and therefore active aspects of the propaganda itself that bear thinking about. It doesn't do to just state that propaganda describes a certain suggested reality in a manipulative way. In a real way it also contributes to the construction of that reality by making something so in its very action. What I mean is that to engage in any sort of collective action in a given direction, you have to have an agreed upon worldview and theory of action which inspires the participants to put in the effort to move in that direction. Past a certain scale, complexity, and amount of time - and even in simpler shorter intervals - knowing the future is very difficult if not impossible without first acting on the present and receiving that feedback. The aspirational aspect of propaganda is such that it seeks to push and pull whole states of affairs in the desired direction of those that produce and control it, and oftentimes it does work, including the bad and despicable variety of it. The total reality is the accumulation of the activities of those moving in concert with a given regime and its propaganda, and those of everyone else, including those moving against it, possessed by the "true reality" so to speak.