AI Worship

Now that AI is really starting to take off, there are a lot of breathless words being written about its implications, words that can be anywhere from glowing and fawning to foreboding and stricken. There is also a lot of really great and insightful things being observed about it coming from various corners. 

For now I just wanted to point out that to make this technology work and be functional on a collective level, it has to ultimately be worshipped in various ways, much like our other collective central technologies like money and the multitude of commodities and resources we consume. 

The central conceit of AI is that it is like human intelligence, and one has to treat it as such in interactions with it, as an article of faith. Never mind all of the strange and proprietary ways that it is developed and how it actually emerges and ultimately functions. 

How it is designed and called into motion on a substrata of manipulated electrical impulses for instance, taking place within a built infrastructure, which is then subsumed into the category of built environment which must be ultimately collectively directed. 

And which, in our present moment, consists of a gargantuan and voracious process of material wealth accumulation and energy usage, which is so powerful and irresistible a force that no one individual, nation, or even empire can unilaterally change its course, even though that we all know that it is killing us. 

This is fetishization par excellence: one's very individual self and corresponding theory of mind for the other is located within what is an incredibly complex and broad social and cultural process that is dependent on an entire galaxy of individuals producing it. 

Not a phenomenon that is ultimately limited to AI or even material built resources by any means. In a way fetishization affects individuals and nations on different levels too. But I do want to resist that collective and relentless tendency to isolate and decontextualize objects of power, placing them on pedestals to be worshipped uncritically.  

The Changing Nature of Violence Pt. 1

As we've talked about before, the nature of violence in human civilization has changed dramatically over the last couple of thousand years, and perhaps most dramatically in the last couple of centuries, alongside material technological development and energy utilization. 

There is always a gap between realities on the ground and professed ideals, which does indeed create some very interesting tensions and effects as we'll discuss, and one thing that those tensions do is drive historical development - if not directly into the arms of the professed ideals - in the general direction of those desired ideals. As ubiquitous and commonplace hypocrisy is as a moral and social phenomenon, no one actually wants to be a hypocrite. And if one settles into regular and blatant hypocrisy via convenience and the trappings of power, the loyalty and devotion of one's subordinates can get squishy in a hurry given those conditions. Generally speaking, hypocrisy tends to encourage agitation in various directions. 

At least in terms of ideals, one need only compare a sentiment that was more common in the Bronze Age empires that it was perfectly OK to violently smash and dominate one's enemies with common sentiments today in which "civilized" societies abhor violence for the sake of violence, requiring elaborate moral, political, and legal justifications and powerful professional and categorical quarantines for engaging in it, and the stark contrast, bridged by the passage of thousands of years, becomes more than apparent. 

This was a process that began in the European context well back into the ancient Christian era, in which the invading pagan Germanic warlords struggled to assimilate their warrior ethic and way of life with a Christian ethic of peace as they settled into "civilized" societies within the remnants of the disintegrating Western Roman Empire. We could see that it wasn't a problem for the powerful to adopt what they (and the populations they ruled) viewed as the most spiritually compelling aspects of Christian mythology while casting aside all of the other qualities troublesome to the exercise of power. 

But we could also make out the difficulties and tensions that this cherry-picking could encourage, perhaps most famously in the case of Joan of Arc who was captured by the Burgundians in the course of the Hundred Years' War, who along with the English, for all intents and purposes wanted to inflict the worst tortures on her and then burn her up good for all to see, satisfying their need for revenge and making an example out of her. 

And they eventually carried out this underlying intent, but they did so through a highly elaborate series of rituals and a ridiculous show trial, going through preposterous motions to cast her as guilty within a world governed by Christian ideology, so as to dehumanize or better yet, demonize her, and so mark her for violent destruction.

The Christians sure could flip the switch: their societies in the medieval era devised some of the most horrific and diabolical tortures known to human history. But there was the fact of the development of that switch in the first place, which was placing ever more resistance on the impulse to violently dominate. This is roughly what Nietzsche was talking about in terms of the transition from master to slave morality.  

For the most part, most of us can agree that this is a good development, setting Nietzsche's conflicting opinion aside. But I want to play devil's advocate for the moment and point out some of the problems with our modern forms of soft power, cold war, and slow violence as well, especially in light of the tensions and distortions brought about by the growing gap between ideal and reality. Because after all, the violent impulse and drive to continuously expand and dominate is still alive and well, despite all the talk of human rights and rule of law and democracy and so on. 

Before we embark down that crumbly path, a couple of disclaimers to get ahead of myself and preempt this discussion. I'm not here to extol the virtues of up-front violence and harken back to some golden era of simple and honest force. One can hit up the fascists for that anyway. If one really thinks it is a good idea to return to simpler violent relations, one can take up a sword and engage in mass butchery by hand - which is one way they did things in simpler violenter times - and see how it feels after that. Some minority of people now can and do take part in that, but things are different now and most can't. 

On the other hand, this isn't to shit on the ancients either, adopting that Pinkeresque notion that things are just getting better and we're actually doing it right this time around. We're going to poke holes in that too. For that matter, the decreasing levels of kinetic violence we see is only a narrative that lies in an arc of a few thousand years. It is easier to plumb the depths of recent written history, but we're only slowly learning more about deep history day by day, and there is a whole lot of time and geography within that titanic stretch, with its share of many possible narratives buried within. 

No, we'll attempt to stay rooted in the present with the reality that we've got, and in the next part, I'll outline some of the issues with the modern relationship to violence and where things could go in the coming decades.      

Forest Lab

As I've alluded to before, my cabin is fairly porous. And all manner of spiders, beetles, mosquitos, flies, moths, and caterpillars regularly make their way through as a result. Many of them move on when they find their way out, or I usher them out if I can, and others like the spiders simply stay. The better solution would be to have everything firmly sealed up, but I have what I have, so the next best solution is to simply keep out as much as I can, let out what I can, and for the rest, let them do what they will. The spiders take up residence in the various corners, windows, and overhangs, and they get a steady diet of straggler flies, mosquitos, and moths in return for keeping things tidy. 

It is a crude permaculture solution, but I think it beats razing the place and killing off all of the poor buggers that make their way in, none of whom are at fault for doing so, especially given the porousness of the place. It is their forest too. 

I get the occasional mouse too, which unfortunately gets the snap trap. I hate it, but until I find a better solution, that's what happens. I used to try leaving them alone, but usually they'd just keep coming back, eventually setting up nests in bedding and soiling and ruining everything. You'll also end up with them crawling across your head as you sleep. This is without any trace of food source or any other reason to come in; all you need is shelter. 

Stumbled upon a permaculture solution for that one too. The dead mice ended up on a sacrificial log just up the trail, which I discovered was helping feed the owl family that took up residence in the trees above me. Now that their clan got going, I haven't had a mouse problem.

.22

The following is loose speculation based on a dimly understood anecdote, so make of that what you will. 

I do have a hunch - as plenty of others do - that we may be in the midst of a new silent Covid wave, which is likely made up of one or multiple of the new Omicron variants. Part of this has to do with the talk of spiking Covid levels in the wastewater in multiple cities, which is really the only decent data collection we have anymore in the US in particular - though this happening elsewhere - which has abdicated its responsibility for public health in light of the pandemic. Couple this with anecdotal accounts of hearing about all sorts of people catching Covid (including myself) in our communities here and elsewhere, and I personally noticed last weekend here in Washington that the cold and flu shelves were totally cleared off of product. 

Now, the latest wave of variants have been described as particularly "immune evasive." Reinfections have certainly been a problem for a while, but I personally experienced two distinct onsets a week apart, which could certainly be two different bugs or a single "reactivation" or any other number of scenarios. Which got me thinking. 

That's a hell of an evolutionary path: a virus that's this contagious and on top of it immune evasive, bouncing off of previous hosts like echoes, in what is already a virus-permissive or even virus-encouraging society full of densely packed hosts with rapid and large scale transportation. 

We don't even have to be talking about reinfection. Just given the current rate of variants being produced and then bouncing around and competing at these levels of contagion, combined with the society's permissiveness producing wave after wave, the viruses transforming themselves after departing from their high water marks of propagation, there is more than enough steam to keep things moving. In light of this, a particular image comes to my mind. 

It is an image that has haunted me since sitting in on a cow slaughter a couple years ago; not necessarily the slaughter itself, which was more fascinating and eye-opening than anything, but something specific to it. It was curious that the butcher was using a little .22 rifle to kill the cows. There were plenty of ways to do it of course, but he preferred that particular method. I wondered: .22? Why not a larger caliber like a .45 or .44 magnum and just be done with it? 

The answer I got was this: what the .22 bullet tends to do is that after it enters the skull it tumbles around, inflicting the damage it needs to without exiting, dropping the animal nearly instantly, which was the intent anyway, which appeared to be the case from what I saw. The caliber is much more precise due to the low kickback, and it manages to do the job that a larger caliber would do anyway, and probably more neatly. 

And I can't help but think of Covid, with its particular mix of contagiousness and virulence, perpetually bouncing around and doing the damage it can while maintaining its momentum and its generative capacity. 

Making Lemonade

Usually during the week, the intensity of physical work makes it difficult to even think about writing, though now that I've caught yet another case of Covid, I feel too crummy to work but I can at least think enough to write, so let's make some lemonade out of those bitter lemons. 

To go off on a brief tangent, the whole "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" saying is kind of funny. I mean, it is a highly subjective and contingent statement: lemons are actually pretty great, and though you might not necessarily want to eat one straight, they're wonderful for cooking, brewing, flavoring, cleaning, and all sorts of other things. On the other hand, lemonade can be a nice refreshment, but a little more limited in its culinary and brewing applications, to name a few things. 

However, the juxtaposition of two contrasting moments in a process of transformation given a specific intention - lemons into lemonade through the desire for a sweet refreshment - turns a subjective statement into a functional one that works across many different situations that have the general "making the best of things" condition to them. Everyone knows what the saying means and how it is supposed to be used and doesn't question it in terms of preference. 

Writing with History in Mind

Ever since I really got into the deep dives in historical material, the writing got tougher. A lot tougher. Which in the scheme of things is a good thing. But trained in philosophy, the idea is to gaze into disparate phenomena and penetrate deeply into them, abstracting from them their common elements so as to make them more manageable in the analysis. The pristine, crystalline structures that arise from such analyses are nice to look at, but then apply those to a long historical stretch and see what happens: they get bent and twisted every which way, and soon enough a principle you thought you had down in the 20th century is inverted in the 10th, and then inverted yet again shifting the lens of analysis to a different geographic location in the same time period, and then repeat those inversions throughout the rest of history across the various regions, and then add to that relative analyses of the evolution of language and the effects of propaganda and intentions of power and the changing history of thought itself. Oof, I sit down with a little idea jotted down in a note and hours later here I am, still bewildered. But hey, good stuff. 

A Theory of Jankyness Pt. 2

Let's turn to another historical example a little more recent. And we've talked through this subject before, but it is certainly a fruitful one, and I wanted to approach it from another angle. To begin with, our wise pundits love to exclaim with wide eyes that the World Wars changed everything and that the modern world was built upon the aftermath of those earth-shattering events. This is the point at which you raise a salty eyebrow and say, "Mmhmm yes very interesting, but do please go on."

The claim is quite true in a basic sense. But many commentators like to dance about on the surface phenomena, to wring some interest from them and some entertainment, before quickly moving on to another surface topic without addressing the underlying movements that gave rise to those surface phenomena, and which, as it happens, continue to give rise to the phenomena we experience today, and more pointedly, are things we are still collectively responsible for and should be more directly concerned about and addressing. 

We've talked here of the utter desperation of geopolitical relations in the course of WW1. Here I want to talk more about that desperation, what it led to, and the ensuing consequences, particularly in light of the destruction of the three major empires in that calamity: the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. I'll also touch on the economic destruction of Germany and some of those consequences, bleeding over into WWII. 

In terms of the scope of this post, I'll focus less on conditions that led to the World Wars: in simplified brief, we had the usual extreme tensions built up by rapidly expanding imperial empires coming up against each others' boundaries and interests, coupled with the grinding abuse and destruction of their own respective populations and the populations they preyed upon, which made for a powder keg that was set off by the assassination of the Arch Duke, that explosion vastly amplified by the self-reinforcing entangling alliance system, which brought all of the manifold tensions and explosive dislocations in direct contact with each other and sustained against each other. 

We've previously got into the desperate and apocalyptic process set in motion by that complex of catastrophes, so this time I want to get into the aftermath and the consequences of that process. 

So much good work has been done on the origins of the post-war geopolitical structures of modernity, so I'll just summarize some of that here. We're well-acquainted with the carving up of the Ottoman Empire after WW1, and we have witnessed the consequences of drawing up artificial state lines over the agglomerations of the many ethnic and tribal groups in the region, consequences which have been crashing onto nightly news headlines for decades now, though the intensity of these conflicts have shifted to Eastern Europe for now, which we'll get to in a moment. 

As ruling hegemon, Britain made all kinds of promises - many of them contradicting each other - to its various allies about future spoils from dismembering the weakened Ottoman Empire, which everyone knew was troubled, in order to hold together that fragile coalition during the desperate years of the war and drive wedges into the Ottoman Empire itself. For example, they made various conflicting promises to Arab nationalists, the French, and the Zionists about claims within that region. 

And these were promises addressing the many harms inflicted by the colonial system: the French were promised fresh colonial spoils in the Levant after being taken through the ringer in the war. And then the Arab nationalists and Zionists were all clamoring for states of their own to protect themselves from the depredations wrought on minority and disfavored ethnic groups within their respective empires.  

The free trade internationalists love to bellyache about the evils of a contagious and spreading nationalist fervor - which does pose very serious problems - while all the while exploiting to oblivion through arbitrage the many societies they straddle, bringing about the clamor for national representation in the first place. Like nuclear weaponry, nationalistic fervor can really take off after that first atom is split, especially when socio-political conditions are right. 

All those different ethnic groups under duress: who is to be given the state and the power, given its tendency in localized concentration in the dominant ethnic groups of imperial powers? Well through horse-trading apparently, with the spoils going to whomever is invited to the table through the machinations of the reigning powers. Almost as bad as monarchical succession probably! But ah, democracy. 

So what of the Russian Empire? The stress of the first World War stretched that nation to its breaking point, and reacting to that same stress, the Germans were all too willing to tip it right past that point, regardless of what consequences may transpire. Now, this is a vast oversimplification, but an all too delicious historical instance to point out to a contemporary German leadership who are willing to oversee their own industrial destruction to hold back the evil encroaching Russian hordes, who are still falsely believed by Germany and the rest of the West to be faithfully retrieving the torch of the fallen Soviet Union and soldiering on with it, ostensibly to roll right over and enslave them, achieving their revenge. 

What historical instance am I referring to? None other than the desperate Germans' enthusiastic delivery of Lenin by train back to Russia so that he could foment revolution there and destabilize their enemy, resulting eventually in the rise of the eternal bogeyman of the collective West: the Soviet Union, a complex of antagonisms (both real and imagined) that is now driving the global crisis of realignment we witness today.  

Finally we have the Austro Hungarian Empire, whose dismantling seeded the Balkan conflicts of recent history, and which continue to fester. In hopes of wrapping up the post, I'll have to give that particular dissolution short shrift and move on to Germany. 

We know all too well that Germany was saddled heavily with war debt, destroying it economically and humiliating it politically, eventually leading to the rise of Hitler and commencement of round 2; a cautionary tale. Though the popular telling of the story was that much of this punishment was attributable to the spiteful French. To an extent, the French did have an axe to grind after their heavy losses on the Western Front, but there was more going on here of course.  

Less covered territory has to do with the fact that part of Germany's destruction could be attributed to the global financial realignment taking place in favor of a rising US economic hegemony. The US had refused to the customary writing down of its allies' war debts during the war, and so the natural thing for the allies to do was to launder those debts through Germany, turning the loser of the war into the whipping boy to carry the water for them so to speak. At the same time, they sought to punish Germany further - and protect their own industrial recoveries alongside the protectionist US - by raising tariffs and engaging in protectionist policy, so that Germany was unable to properly repay the debts through trade, and so it was forced to print, leading to that hyperinflationary nightmare we are warned every 3 seconds about by the economic establishment, hopefully to stave off those thoughtcrimes that we harbor that perhaps...we could just print money for social spending and stimulate demand? 

Here I can insert another instance of that monetary superstition we have talked about, the treatment of debt as sacred and the refusal of its negotiation, and the deep religious (or quasi-religious anyway) relationship to money that drives those arrangements, even in the face of the total destruction of a nation. And then the West, after having created its Frankenstein monster, could put it back in the ground and pat itself on the back for nearly a century afterward. 

We can also tie back in that bleeding ulcer that continues to bedevil the modern world today: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yes, Hitler was a monster and deserves his toxic reputation as eternal archetypal Villain, and he and the Nazis were going to do what they were going to do given Nazi ideology, but it isn't much talked about that his Final Solution was named as such for good reason (as an aside, there was similar language of a "Final Solution" to the "Indian question" in the US after a series of catastrophic military failures and diplomatic relations with the indigenous people at the time). 

Extreme hostility to the Jews was embedded in the Nazi DNA, but despite their harsh rhetoric from the beginning, a series of less extreme measures to expel the Jews from Europe was attempted, which was steadily ratcheted up as the war became more desperate, until plans for the Final Solution were drawn up alongside the plans for Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Before the war, there were attempts carried out to emigrate large amounts of Jews to places like the United States, which refused a lot of them due to the harsh conditions of the Great Depression and the accompanying desperation and xenophobia there.

Things gradually escalated, with a particularly bizarre and cruel plan by the Nazis to expel the Jews to Madagascar where they would live under a police state run by the SS. That plan too fell through, and measures continued to escalate as WWII dragged on. Part of Operation Barbarossa was meant to establish the conquered Soviet Union as a place to relocate the Jews, and as that horrific invasion grinded on, mass exterminations were carried out by the marauding Nazis. The Final Solution culminated with a resort to the extermination camps within Nazi territory after the fighting with the Russians bogged down and grew ever more uncertain, foreclosing on the possibility of getting Jewish populations out of Nazi controlled regions.  

Which consequently vastly intensified the desperation of the Zionists as they carried out their scorched earth campaigns to raze the Palestinian lands to the ground in order to reclaim them, which goes on today, as we are well aware of. 

But ah, "never again," and "never forget." Stern words indeed. That image of the "greatest generation" rising to meet the unprecedented challenges of their time makes for good TV and cinema - and certainly some of it had some basis to it - only if the less attractive elements of that totality are left out, which isn't the best habit to go by at the moment, seeing as how we're still struggling within that very state of affairs. 

Faces of Accountability

The modern state thrives where there is a preponderance of resources that can also be concentrated. To manage the complexity of this growing mass, a bureaucracy emerges and grows to govern it, all of which produce a growing complexity of activity and resource that provides a camouflage for individual malfeasance, and so the rule of law is administered by complementary monitoring and enforcement institutions, all of which require resources. And accounting for and keeping track of all of this requires accounting systems: ethics and research, surveillance, record-keeping, public media organs and public engagement, and so on. The strength of this system must continually augment to keep up with itself, and this requires resources. And as the state weakens and shrinks back, accountability retreats to individual interrelations, as is found in the hinterlands, where individuals have to interface with each other to govern. 

Oligarchy in Time and Space

For the moment I wanted to put out snapshots of two very different sets of political and governing ethos. 

The Byzantine Empire had a very strong centralized state. Part of the reason for this at the time was that it existed in a severe, austere post-collapse environment in which it had sharply limited resources and was surrounded by powerful rivals, and much of the empire's remaining power came from its persisting ability to organize and supply itself within the protective shell of Constantinople itself within a more sharply delimited geographical space. 

After the expansion of the Arab Caliphates cooled, and their relations with the Persians and the rest of Western Rome normalized, the Byzantines were able to spread out a bit again and regain some breathing room, but it did have to pander to oligarchs to do so, who were regional military powers doing the work of cultivating and fortifying their own regions with their own military forces and holding those regions outside of Constantinople. But the empire was able to keep a pretty tight leash on them, and was very wary of them as political rivals, who depended on the empire to survive in the conditions they found themselves in. 

On the other hand, it is very rare that you see the United States even reigning in its oligarchs; on the contrary, it is often led along by them and governs through them and them through it. Historically the US has enjoyed an abundance of defendable land and resources to expand to, and exists in the modern era itself which is typified by an explosion in material wealth, technological advancement, and energy utilization. 

The US itself has derived great power from letting the oligarchs run amok: engaging in adventurism first in the frontiers of its own virgin land and then eventually throughout its colonial holdings, and then benefiting from the vast material bounties afforded by them letting loose, and they benefitting in turn from US encouragement and protection. 

We've come quite a ways from the initial period when its founders were wary of such things, sentiments which went away pretty quickly anyway, and in our contemporary political culture the power of the oligarchs is a thing to be trusted and celebrated - though this is quickly going away - and that their temporary leashing in the course of the New Deal was somewhat regrettable and mistaken, though of course the liberals will express just the opposite in their pronouncements while engaging wholeheartedly in free trade policy in practice. 

Character of Money

I mentioned previously that in the West, the money-relation arose out of the wealth accumulation taking place in the medieval Christian world, which is true in a limited sense but also imprecise, and needs to be qualified. 

Money relations tend to exist persistently in different forms and levels of complexity throughout the lifespan of any given civilization, but it is not until later stages of maturity that the relation becomes a dominant driving force of a given society's development. 

Money implies wealth, and wealth implies accumulated work, which implies time and energy, and it has to take some time for enough wealth to become available that it approaches the threshold required to serve as the dominant driving logic of a whole society. To use wealth to beget wealth, you have to have a lot of it, and not be constantly concerned with staying fed and safe from attack. 

This dominance occurs cyclically, both over the course of larger periods and then cyclically within those very periods: in terms of the limited information we have about the semi-mythical origins of Rome, the Romans were a military society (and to an extent remained one in character) driven by the necessity of military conquest of rivals, complete with a driving ethic of practical virtues and an obsession with honor and glory. 

It wasn't until after the Punic Wars (and the trauma of their near destruction) and the sudden influx of massive amounts of wealth in the form of booty and land that the money relation really started to take over and guide the development of their Republic, and you had lamentation after lamentation from the conservative statesmen about the collective loss of virtue and military discipline as a result. 

After the Republic was eaten from the inside out by the money relation running its course, it took a re-constitution of the society as a military dictatorship, going back to its roots literally by necessity as the society went up in flames. 

The military relations then ran out their course through the collapse of Western Rome, and then it was the Christian thought and the "wagging finger" that became dominant, and over a long and bloody period of time we would approach our moment in which the money relation arose in the course of the wealth accumulation taking place in the Christian world, and today it is breaking down once again. 

And underneath these qualifications is a deeper complexity we could only hint at, and so it goes. But a more general point remains: the money relation comes and goes as a dominant driver of human affairs in history, and with every unique period of time that it emerges, it emerges with a unique character particular to that given period. 

Over time we may witness linear innovations which appear and then persist, such as the emergence of interest and the evolution of accounting, economic concepts and laws, representative technologies of coinage, fiat, electronic accounting, and so on, and modalities of credit, but then a given society in the course of history may have a very different relationship to these things, and so the character of the money relation changes with each society's relationship to it, and it even changes in the course of a given society's development. 

The Bronze Age empires had a very different relationship to credit and interest than we do today, namely that they were much more comfortable treating debt as negotiable, whereas we treat it as sacred and inviolable. And it was only a couple of hundred years ago that the Catholic church was twisting itself into pretzels in order to harness the financial power of interest while officially hewing to the traditional Christian doctrine of any sort of interest as "usurious." 

History and Thought

I've been using a lot of structural and technological metaphors to describe various historical processes, and for the most part this is fine. In a way, structures and technologies are simplifications of the infinite complexity of the cosmos to suit our own aims (living or dead is simplification in the greater scheme of things), and the application of these things as teachable concepts is no different.

History is very much an organic thing. You can talk about causes and effects, but what we actually tend to see is a fractal emergence of a whole multitude of events and phenomena that take on a certain pattern of what we could call similar "causes," and that these patterns gradually coalesce and intensify and give way to what we could call similar "effects," and so in turn we could discern a certain flow of phenomena in time and space, but that it is never simply the one thing that leads to the other, which is more or less an artifact of our own thought and our need to simplify things to manipulate them in service of our aims. 

In my writing I attempt to honor this organic conception, but this has to be done by juxtaposing an array of artifice in mimicry of that organic reality. It's still just a slightly more sophisticated and artful form of simplification and conceptualization. That's what I'm doing, and again and again I like to remind myself of this. 

For whatever reason, we are deadly serious about the misuse of power tools, yet with something like the mind - which has an arguably far greater power to consume more and more available energy and run away with its instantiations, which have real world effects - we encourage people at a very young age to go hog wild with the thing and simply put as much resources as one can into it and sally forth with it to god knows where.

Western Capital

There is a geographical basis to the movement of, accumulation of, and control of capital, yes, which is part of why we talk about Western capital. But we also have to remember that this capital is flowing to every corner of the globe, and just as it transforms the places that it sets down in, those places influence and transform those capital flows too, and their effects reach back outward onto the global stage. For example, Russia is often considered apart from the West, but the history of the Russian empire plays a huge part in the development of Western civilization. And to move further east, the profound influence of the history of Chinese civilization on the rest of the world is undeniable. 

Of course, these effects intensify as global trade and interconnection advances and deepens. There was a time in which there were large geographical regions that were pretty effectively isolated for long periods of time, and we have accounts of independent cultural and technological developments in various times and places, as far as our knowledge allows anyway. 

All this is to say that "Western capital" and other such terms are heavily loaded and we should treat them as such. 

I Can't Get Up

In the US, the ruling class continues to dream of strength and perpetual hegemony, but then in their daily cycles of reproduction, they can only repeat a perpetual process of collective weakening and self-destruction. They are constituted the way that they are. There is only enough time and energy available in the day, and sometimes the only way out is down. 

Money and Roots of Evil

I'm not a huge fan of the whole "money is the root of all evil" saying, at least in terms of constructive discourse. Though tossing it out to get a quick lick in, such as in Pink Floyd's "Money," especially within the context of a greater work, works just fine. 

For one thing, saying something is "the root" suggests that it is the causal end of the line, so to speak, which can be quite useful rhetorically to draw attention to something, but then shuts down discussion past that thing. And money is just too interesting and strange to stop the discussion there. Secondly, the notion of "evil;" well, another potentially useful rhetorical tool, and another symbol that covers up quite the rabbit hole. Somewhere the ghost of Nietzsche is stroking his huge moustache and wagging his finger. 

Nevertheless, there is a unique set of dynamics involved in money relations, which often have the tendency of complicating the course of historical traumas and deepening them, along with other unfortunate and destructive tendencies. Thus we get the "root of all evil" refrain.  

Take the long series of depressions and financial panics that characterize the history of the West, which oftentimes get steadily worse and larger and precipitate other catastrophes like wars. There are too many instances in history to count in which some tentative and fragile socio-political healing process is taking place, or else multiple well-intentioned parties are attempting to navigate some particularly tense and fraught state of affairs, and then the next big depression hits and then the most violent and aggressive elements of a given conflict rise to the top and gain dominance in growing cycles of violence which don't tend to abate until they burn themselves out. 

Within the rise and fall of these manias and depressions, there is a particularly brutal logic at play in the exchange of money, and its accumulation and then its draining out: give me what I want and you can get what you want, and if I don't get what I want, you can go to hell. 

You see in times of manic expansion and development the rapid circulation of money and its augmentation within the regions of development, where it seeks outward and intermingles with other money forms in trade, whispering its manifold promises disconnected to everything except its own augmentation and expansion, and which, after its inevitable overshoot, violently contracts, denying it ever promised anything at all, whispering to its carriers: "you're all on your own now." 

Indeed, the intense desire of money and even addiction to money can be seen as, in a way, an addiction to faithlessness in the nurturing body of the earth and a forsaking of trust in people as people. 

There is a trust in money, but that trust is buttressed by the awareness that the money is unconditionally good: that anyone anywhere can accept it in most circumstances for most things, and so the many and prickly trials and tribulations of engendering and maintaining trust amongst disparate individuals can be bypassed altogether, which is a large part of what makes money so irresistible. That money-trust implies a trust in the institutions that back it, which implies a trust in the state monopoly of violence which obliterates any sort of possibility of human-scale trust (and its betrayal, we should be clear) through sheer brute force. 

Money then is the approximate symbol or cipher for a greater and more general set of complex social relations, for how individuals in a complex civilization relate to one another, which, as a multitude, are melted down and fused into a currency: to trace it is to make out a rough outline of how the societies that it passes through relate to each other, and also how these societies relate to each other through individuals. But then at the scale and complexity of modern civilization, is anything else possible? Maybe so, but not in our current timeline as things are constituted. 

The movement and shape of these people relations could really only be held by deep, widely held, and enduring religious sensibilities, which ultimately can be seen as experiences on the individual level as movements of a greater social body which is organizing itself to achieve coherence and persist. In the West, the money relation seems to have arisen out of the wealth accumulation taking place amongst the old Christian currencies of religious thought and practice, which eventually eclipsed and supplanted them, and which now drive the logic of Western development. 

We look back and puzzle over the waves upon waves of cyclic slaughter in the religious wars of the Middle Ages, or we wrinkle our brows and wring our hands over the ritual sacrifice of the Aztecs, and then at the same time throw our hands up in the course of a depression, as scores upon scores of people are thrown out of work and made destitute, and then crushed under starvation, disease, and deaths of despair, and then mumble something about this being the way the world works, letting these waves of social devastation happen while clear and completely possible alternatives exist. And this happens to this day.

In the United States, we struggle with cascades of crises, the money accumulating and sloshing from one catastrophe to the next, those movements growing larger and more destructive. Take the current terminal dysfunction of the American political system, which choked with flows of donor money, is unable to actually govern, save for continuing the momentum of accumulation of those flows to their sources, and the vetoing of any sort of redirection of those flows, draining the rest of the body politic of the resources it needs to govern itself, so that the huge unwieldy flows are to do a bulk of the governing, leaving further trails of destruction in their wake. 

A large portion of this dynamic is attributable to a complex of fervent, religious convictions on the individual level, emanating from those in power but internalized still in much of the populace: of what money is, how it is created, how it is to flow and who and where it should flow to for what reason. 

To repeat, this worship of money - a disembodied entity which unconditionally bestows its blessings on whoever can seek it out and accumulate it - has gone on for quite some time. 

We could use an outsider perspective, which through its contrast, could shed some additional light on the phenomenon. Where throughout the frontiers of the early United States, settlers were vigorously seeking out gold veins and digging them up, the Lakota were just as vigorously seeking to keep them buried. In the Black Hills, the Lakota guarded their fatal secret by threatening execution to their own members if anyone revealed the location of the gold to the settlers. They knew what the settlers were after, and they knew they wouldn't stop, and at the same time, they had no use for the gold within the context of their own society. 

Even the Aztecs, who were quite enamored with gold themselves, but for very different reasons, were surprised at the voraciousness and the bottomlessness of the conquistadors' desire for gold. Little did they know that giving Cortez and his crew some gold - in the hopes of appeasement - was like casting chum in shark-infested waters, which would bring down a divine-like wrath on their entire civilization for the sake of that substance.  

If only they had known that the howling, existential anxiety in their hearts about the tenuousness of their place on the earth - which partially gave rise to their practice of ritual sacrifice, which steadily grew in pitch with the advancement of their destruction - was a similar anxiety animating the European scramble for gold, seeking it out to shovel into their treasuries like one shovels coal into a fire against the encroaching cold. Well, they might have been a little more circumspect, though I'm not sure that it would have altered the outcome much.