The Passion

Where there is passion, there is a greater multitude of connection. A creative work for example that is passionately put together shows a creator who is passionate about and interested in the subject and everything that subject connects to, and is largely possessed by it, and who sees at a higher fidelity of connection and at higher and greater scales, and faithfully transmits this vision to the work and represents this sweeping, connected vision in the work. And people tend to instinctively like this sort of thing, even if they don't fully comprehend or absorb it. Popular enduring works tend to bear this signature. 

Lackluster and mediocre works on the other hand often display a knee-jerk adherence to waning conventions and the recycling of stale and decaying tropes. The life is literally draining from the work, both as a piece and as a socio-economic phenomenon. Exposed to it, one instinctually feels boxed in, dim, and dead. 

Inverted Steppe

The idea of the steppe - and the human powers within - as a source of danger has largely gone away in the modern era, at least from the perspective of settled societies. For our purposes, we'll expand the idea of the steppe from a land and plains-based concept to a more general concept of an unsettled wilderness hosting nomadic peoples. 

In the ancient world you had this fear of the mysterious Sea Peoples in the Bronze Age, who would eventually inundate Eastern Mediterranean settlements in the Bronze Age collapse, possibly due to number of factors including climate change, and then a similar Roman fear of the Germanic tribes. And eventually the Germanic peoples would be pushed in deeper and deeper conflict with the ailing Roman Empire as the Huns put pressure on them from the East, possibly due in part to climate change as well. 

The Arab conquerors would emerge out of the deserts of the Middle East to shake the Byzantine and Persian empires at their foundations. And in the Middle Ages you had the conquest of raider societies like the Vikings who were emerging from island colonies and the seas, and then the rise of the Mongol Empire out of the Asian steppes in the East. 

Curiously though, in the 15th century as European colonization really took off, you saw the rolling human displacements flip from a steppe phenomenon to a settled society phenomenon. European colonies were not only seen as outposts of wealth extraction, but also outlets to expel underclass peoples and redirect social problems and surplus population and capital outward. There was a constant rolling domino effect in North America for example, as more and more settlers landed on the East coast and fanned out to the West, pushing successive Native American tribes west in turn. 

In the era of imperialism and through the modern era itself, much of the pressure was coming from the grinding wars of the constantly expanding empires themselves, steamrolling the nomadic peoples and filling ever more corners of the earth with settled society, with immigrant populations crashing into each other after successive waves of migration. And now the displacements may come back around, as the heating climate pushes the climate refuges to and fro, to temporary regions of lesser destruction. 

Global Competence

Ok this is going to take longer form, so please bear with me. This could have been a multi-part series, and as usual a single post blew up on me, but in this case I tried to power through and get everything out in one continuous piece. Let's get at it then.  

There is an elusive level of competence you can observe that acts globally in an empire, a competence that is so wide-ranging and complex that it is probably impossible to produce deliberately, but which must necessarily emerge in a long and brutal evolutionary process of rising and falling powers. It is a competence that paradoxically becomes ever more visible as it disappears, as an empire’s vitality wanes and it becomes more and more difficult carrying out what was largely taken for granted in its peak. And there may be a series of increasingly frequent high profile catastrophes that really drive the existence of that incompetence home in those who, half asleep, failed to pick up on the slower incremental changes. Legitimacy is further eroded or even destroyed with these events, all the more so with the greater visibility of events to a greater number, producing a new broad consensus, leading to the probability of greater antagonisms and catastrophes, and so on.

There has been a lot of thoughtful writing – and for good reason – on the institutional and individual effects of this loss of global competence. I’ve written a good deal myself before on ruling class hubris, creation and destruction of legitimacy, rise in priority of propaganda, and so on. There is a whole lot there and all sorts of interesting avenues to take in pursuit of useful insights. This time, I don’t have a whole lot to add to that suite, but I did want to do a brief comparative analysis of two great military catastrophes: one in the distant past and one unraveling today. Both catastrophes, it could be said, were more visible indications of a relation of imperial health, which like individual human health, is an elusive quality that nevertheless becomes more tangible and apparent with failure, to repeat the opening observation about global competence in empire.

Global competence or imperial health is naturally a difficult quality to describe, especially because the quality itself changes the conditions that it is acting in, and eventually its operation can bring about its own disintegration. And boy, as has probably become apparent, I do like difficult things, chewing on them over and over and seeing what more can be wrung out from them. And then perhaps biting off too much, and then seeing about how to get out of that in turn. Anyway, we’ll use some of the comparative details of these catastrophes I have in mind to attempt to pin the tail on this moving donkey and see about drawing some conclusions.

Both catastrophes I’ve written about before. To address the first: that spectacular Gothic uprising in the Roman Empire in the 300's AD. The basic details are as follows: a very large Goth tribe reached the Empire’s walls after being pushed west by the invading Hun tribes, and pleaded for refuge within the Empire’s bounds. The Romans let the Gothic tribe in, botched their settling and their accommodation, exploited them to hell and made them ever more miserable and desperate, and they finally revolted and rampaged through the Empire’s lands for some 6 years. 

Now, to say the Romans "botched" the thing is a vast oversimplification, just as to call an empire "competent" is as well, and we can dispel some of that by digging in further. There were doubtless numerous conflicting interests from different authorities in letting the Goths in, but one of those interests was simply manpower: the Empire was spread thin and committed to conflict with the Sasanian Empire, and after protracted conflict and a series of other degradations, soldiers were badly needed, especially "cheap" ones. It had long been the practice of drawing low-cost and effective soldier power from the German tribes, as they were hardened by their lifestyle and accepted lower standards of living. 

At play here too is space and socioeconomic organization: the Roman Empire covered a massive reach of land and within that Empire was a coherent polity wielding an ethnocentrism of its own, that was undergoing its own path of socioeconomic evolution consistently across its subjects. There was limited space and opportunity for the Goths to settle, and extreme prejudice in a polity that itself was in a state of desperation and disintegration. This prejudice and antagonism was centuries in the making, with one culmination all the way back in 9 AD with the disastrous (for the Romans) Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in which a group of Roman legions was destroyed by an alliance of Gothic tribes carrying out a coordinated rebellion in response to Roman domination.  

Back to 376 AD, the huge asylum-seeking Gothic group was not settled properly - they were not broken up and assimilated - and there was not enough manpower available to vet all of the different weapons and separate out the potential soldiers for absorption, and all along the journey their food was stolen and sold by officers, and in their desperation they were exploited by enterprising Romans themselves in desperate and selfish struggle for resources, given the general state of the Empire in that historical period. 

The Goths rebelled, and their rebellion continuously grew as additional Gothic tribes joined, as well as Gothic Roman soldiers who were on the fence but were regarded with suspicion and even attacked, and who were forced to join. Not only Goths, but slaves, prisoners, and miners would join as well, picking up weapons and supplies as the rebellion picked up steam, and their military threat was not able to be directly addressed for years. And this disaster would have a profound effect on the course of the Empire from that point on. 

So fast forward to today. The contemporaneous catastrophe I have in mind to compare is none other than the Ukraine war. The more the Ukraine conflict goes on and the more we learn about the conflict as more events unfold that we can observe, and the more I think about the modern history of the Russian empire, the more this comparison seems apt. 

The roots of the conflict go deep and are quite complex, but the superficial (and I think largely correct) structural factors that led to the conflict had to do with the disastrous set of diplomatic and economic maneuvers that helped usher the Soviet Union from its catastrophic collapse to a cornered and humiliated power, which the West and the US in particular have a lot to answer for.  

The collapse of the Soviet Union was essentially a gift to the hegemonic US on a silver platter: the downed rival was ready to completely restructure its political and economic systems (relatively bloodlessly) and was seeking to integrate economically within the Western capitalist system. The US could have done what it had successfully done in the past with rival and/or allied powers such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea and extended aid, technology transfers, and capital investment in the interest of integration and assimilation. 

Instead an increasingly senile and disconnected US foreign policy saw fit to continue on the Cold War indefinitely, breaking and humiliating the already prostrate Russia, and with the help of favored Russian oligarchs and the West's own financiers and economic fundamentalist policy advisors, ventriloquize the Russian state through Yeltsin, effectively dismembering and privatizing the public sphere and plunging the Russian people into desperate poverty, while at the same time perpetually expanding a newly obsolete NATO, which far from a serious military alliance, had transformed into an engine of economic accumulation for its defense contractor controllers, which in effect surrounded Russia with military threats. 

The expansion of NATO and the economic integration of many previous Soviet satellite countries was not simply a neutral process of conversion either. Increasingly during and after the formal Cold War era, the US had a tendency to exploit ever more intensely its conquered subjects and its own allies, leading to a trail of broken states and an increasingly unstable world order, so that when it did come time for Russia to finally openly revolt - culminating in the invasion of Ukraine - the countervailing Western world order was too unstable and weakened to properly contain the conflict. As Russia fought ferociously for its own national survival - a survival which, let's be clear, involves the right to exploit and dominate others in concert with its allies so as to match Western power - the conflict and the greater realignment of the world order itself spiraled away from US and the greater West's control, and which now is a serious threat to Western power, and which continues to unfold now. 

I'd like to quickly get out of the way some possible objections to this overall framing. Much of the conventional discourse around the conflict is highly contentious and contradictory, and much of it a product of highly motivated reasoning, so I won't bother addressing it here. But the best possible objection I can think of is that to prioritize the actions of the US in shaping and directing the conflict is ethnocentric and patronizing, among other things, and that Russia has interests, motivations, and responsibilities of its own - as well as the rest of Eastern Europe - and positing the United States at the center driving the conflict is a serious distortion. 

I am sympathetic of the argument and largely agree, but I also think there is (or was) a clear power imbalance between the powers - an imbalance that is gradually shifting as global power realigns and which is important to the overall analysis - and that this imbalance has to be accounted for in terms of our current purposes, and which will affect the conclusions we have to draw at the end. 

And also that comparing Russia with the Goths is a category error, and that these are very different societies with different histories and trajectories in different distinct periods, which is also true. But then it is not my aim to achieve a precise comparative analysis of the parties involved, but to draw comparisons between human social systems at work and in a similar relation to each other, so as to abstract away a set of principles in common to reason further from. 

Further, I think I've stressed this before but I want to reiterate: comparisons like these are not part of an attempt to locate a precise temporal or qualitative assessment of the state of decline of our own society, in relation to where Rome was at with the benefit of hindsight. Doing this is difficult if not impossible, ever more so when we consider the radical difference (albeit with striking similarities as well) of the internal composition of our society with the Roman Empire, as well as the difference in global composition of multiple societies interacting with each other in these distinct historical moments we're describing. 

We would also have to talk about what makes up civilization and empire within it. For example, Rome proper would last 1000 years or so, before breaking in half with the Byzantine Empire - which thought of itself as Roman - going on for another 1000 years (what counts as Rome then?), whereas you had the young Arab caliphates explode onto the scene with astonishing rapidity and vigor, conducting a conquest with unprecedented expansion - much of it through black plague ravaged lands - and then cycling through and burning out within a consistently shorter timeframe. 

But then what of that process made up empire, and further out, civilization? And each process occurs on a specific and contingent historical plane. And then you had a historian like Spengler who felt that the development of the Aztecs was cut short by the European conquests, and so on. Today, we have the lifespan of Western civilization set against real constraints of the mounting climate crisis, a set of conditions themselves thousands of years in the making. Perhaps you could come up with an average and a general tendency, but that wasn't the aim of this post, and I don't really want to get into that at this time. 

What I did want to do is draw some very general conclusions on the comparison and by extension, offer some thoughts on thinking about the global competence of empire and what it effects as it unfolds. 

So then what do we have here? In both catastrophes we have at their center a relentless process of exploitation, in which a "decadent" power takes advantage of a vulnerable rival power or at least a military threat, a threat which was initially much less pronounced, but which was quickly amplified as the exploited power became roused by necessity to fight for its life, eventually becoming more than the dominant power can handle. 

This is really oversimplifying things, but we have what is typically called a "decadent" power - and I want to get into the idea of decadence sometime in more detail; there is a lot to unpack there - which is usually a hegemonic power which partially by virtue of its having too much power, is far too used to full spectrum dominance and the resulting deference, and which has grown accustomed to picking and winning fights, and the concomitant unidirectional flow of wealth from those victories in various forms of exploitation and appropriation. 

And what comes with an extended period of unearned wealth and deference is a gradual atrophy of discipline and skill and general competence. The incompetent hegemonic power then is wrecked at a rate accelerated from its baseline process of hegemonic dissipation, as it draws in weaker powers to its voracious maw, weaker powers that do actually have to work and fight for their survival, and who eventually become strong enough to do serious damage out of necessity to their existential foes. 

We are starting to have something here. But as alluded to in the Roman example, competence itself has a seriously complicating effect on our landscape. The competent imperial power has a tendency to continuously expand, transforming the landscape at greater and greater scales in service to its own localized aims, extending out the domain of its control, denying ever more space to rivals and other autonomous societies. It is often the point at which its power and reach are highest that its mastery peaks, and steadily its hold slips as its presence and its responsibility are seemingly at their most omniscient. 

At a smaller scale, this is very similar to the problem of economic monopoly. An economic power like a corporate conglomerate might be very good at what it does initially, earning a seemingly deserved dominant economic position, but it also has a constant tendency to expand and diversify beyond its natural boundaries. When you control a certain expanse in strict accordance with your own central aims, there is a tendency of that expanse to drift from its own autonomous operation and regeneration, and towards a requirement of constant attention and control. Its own internal life processes have been subverted from the outside, and cut off from its own organic initiative and subject to outside sanction by a greater power, it grows apathetic, awaiting direction and signal from the outside, and its fortunes rise and fall with the strength of the outer directing power. 

As a monopoly grows too large and unwieldy, it begins to fail in its manifold duties, and is universally hated by its subjects due to its simultaneously requiring its unconditional governance across the entire landscape, while at the same time increasingly becoming dysfunctional and unable to effectively govern, so that its domain falls into ruin and perpetual instability, which threatened and exploited rivals and powers are all too willing to exploit, both taking advantage of growing vulnerability and the sympathies and support of internally exploited subjects of the monopoly or empire. 

A global competence of this scale and complexity then is, unsurprisingly, not cut and dry. The genesis of competence and incompetence bleed into each other and are difficult to disentangle. Plenty more directions and avenues to take from this analysis. But that is more than enough for now. 

Get There

Ecstatic music is one of those curious pursuits – and there are plenty of others – in which it takes a good deal of effort and discipline to achieve what is effortless and simply good. A lot of practice and some natural talent has to be put into achieving the level of skill required, which in conditions that are just right, facilitated by interpersonal chemistries that are well-matched, and sounds that are carefully put together to be pleasing and enthralling, all line up together perfectly to produce what is otherwise effortless and natural-feeling. When you get there, it is almost too easy, and difficult to mess up. It is just right.

Hot Heat

Living in the forest on the West coast of the United States, daily life presents an immediacy of exposure to hotter and drier conditions, which means a more intimate and urgent relationship with climate change. Being poor and in the wrong place at the wrong time and lacking the right resources can certainly do this too, or watching a fire destroy your community. There are numerous ways to become radicalized, to be sure, and of course the amount and intensity of these ways are growing as well.

There is a real and persistent fear especially in the summer, living within a tinderbox which is perpetually drying out each year, and drying out more completely in cycles as time passes. Trees are dying at growing rates, and you walk among the vegetation that is burnt from the sun, and the soil drying out and then lifting up as dust as it is tread upon or blown. You can feel the strain of the forest under the sun as you walk through it: the thirsty trees drink up earlier and earlier in the season; the streams dry up. And the snowcap disappears in greater amounts off of the top of the mountain every year.

We don’t have air conditioning here, and the temperature gradients in the shaded regions and in the insulated buildings becomes ever more noticeable, and if you stand in the sun in a cleared area, you can feel the anger and intensity in its rays and in the irradiated and desiccated landscape surrounding you.

And on a socio-economic level, you wonder about those rows of power lines, swaying haphazardly on their leaning poles, and the clear-cuts opening up like wounds on the valley walls, leaving behind their own heat islands and oceans of monocropped conifers, standing like matchsticks. And the desperate and or/careless weekenders fanning out in the canyon, setting up campfires to be responsibly or carelessly tended.

Every heat wave, every period of elevated temperatures grates on the nerves: will it all hold?

Structural Wealth

In a recent post elaborating on the movement and persistence of wealth, I kind of just did a “throw everything at the wall and see what will stick” kind of bit, sketching out the many and sometimes-contradictory effects of wealth circulation and accumulation, both spatially and over time. There are times when you just have to tip over that tool bin and scatter everything on the floor so you can get a look at everything and think about what you’re going to do next.

This time, I’d like to pull back to a structural analysis and put some of these odds and ends together. So, in so many words, the processes of the accumulation and circulation of wealth are very much a social phenomenon: it takes associations of people working together to produce wealth at larger and larger scales. 

There is the more immediate fact that when you have multiple people working together, you get all sorts of added effects, such as a more efficient usage of space and repetition, combined strength, simultaneous coordination, competitive vigor, social enjoyment, and so on. More important though are the divisions of labor that develop, where having a certain amount of people allows for certain techniques, traditions, and knowledge sets to be built up more thoroughly and then preserved through a given branch of laborer. 

There is only so much time in a day, and so branching specializations allow for the deepening and perfection of a given branch of discipline which can be split off into ever-finer designations as population grows and a culture advances. The sum total of all of this activity - which results in something greater than its parts - is an economic culture which has a distinct and effective structure. 

This structure forms the basis of a body with a certain character, which is at once a great power and a dangerous trap. Let's first imagine this dichotomy in a single resource and work up from there. Let's say that your culture persists in a heavily forested landscape, and that you make heavy use of timber to produce a lot of your wealth. Processing a single tree - even a small one - is a hell of a lot of work: you fell the tree, and then you have to de-limb it, and then figure out what you're going to do with all of those limbs. Then you've got to move the actual log or logs around and process those, and then store and refine and process those worked-over materials further. 

If you're watching your resources and you have a limited labor force, you're making use of as much of that tree and as much of that process as is possible. And then your infrastructure is made up of those trees, and your economic culture is made up of the knowledge of those processes as they are passed down generations. Your buildings and furniture and tools and your energy and so on are made up of those trees, and as they break down they need to be repaired or replaced by those trees, and so on. These trees in a sizeable part make up your material lifeblood. 

In our society that lifeblood is oil, and to a lesser extent materials like steel and concrete, which involve fossil fuels in their production anyway. Oil is an incredible substance: all those millions of years of sunlight and decomposed living things, and we can do just about everything with it. Energy, transportation, feedstocks, plastics, and that's just scratching the surface. At this stage we need it to function; we use it every day. And at the same time it is a substance and power that is regarded with the utmost fear and hatred. 

Because as wealth is concentrating, forming structure and body, that body becomes delimited by the energy differentials it is made up of, and as that body is augmented and maintained, it acts on its environment at greater levels of intensity as it is scaled ever further. This is part of what makes up the trap. For example when everything is built upon steel and concrete, you have all of that infrastructure constantly wearing out and needing replacement. You have to produce more of it to reproduce what it makes up, and all of your economic activity takes the shape that that infrastructure allows, and so requires it in turn. Repeatedly using that power to gain power welds you to that power, even as that power begins to turn against you as energy sources dry up and pollution grows. 

And as more energy is burned everything is constantly speeding up, and so you also have to keep up with that socially-bound speed. Part of the difficulty of administrating a homestead for example are the property taxes, and the supplementary foods and materials and tools and other resources that have to be purchased with money, and embedded in that money are all of the economic relations that are implied in that social resource, and all of the speed and scale of mass production and commerce. If you intentionally try to slow down, you start to find that you are falling behind: the money is drying up because you aren't producing fast enough, and so the money itself speeds you back up. There are plenty of ways around this, and ways to achieve the lifestyle you want through effort, but I'm just outlining a rough example of this that is always in the background and which acts as a real constraint. The short of it is that it is very hard to get off this moving train. 

What's more is that the powerful are made powerful in part by the repeated operation of such a structure, and their position in it as a stable and persistent thing, which they have the knowledge and conferred legitimacy - however tenuous that might be - of navigating it and exploiting its riches, and so they are extremely motivated in maintaining its given shape as indefinitely as possible. 

It is one thing for a single economic body to act in this way, but as the dominant and hegemonic body its form has been spread to all of the reaches of the earth, and so the alternative powers challenging the hegemon have to partake in the general project of industrial civilization, and so it becomes a global and totalizing phenomenon, changing the calculus of partaking in a given wealth form as history unfolds. 

Much of what we have previously discussed can be folded into the dynamics of this totality, and the structures which take shape as a result have shapes and boundaries whose natures can account for the contradictory effects and considerations of wealth in general. 

Hopefully that ties some of the loose ends together at least, though I'm not sure I've succeeded in making things any clearer. Not to worry: this is an incredibly complex subject and difficult to get a handle on, and we'll be returning to this issue from different perspectives, again and again. 

Info Dump

Been a while! Yet again. And the reasons? Ah the reasons, and too much to get into. But I've dumped a couple of pieces that I've managed to cobbled together through the chaos of the last couple of weeks. Much more is coming together, and as always, I'll put out what I can when I can. 

Flowing Gravel

For a moment I wanted to present an image to meditate on: the comparison of modern civilization to gravel, which I know, sounds like a weird non-sequitur, but bear with me. 

We have this paradox in which modern civilization, with its basis in settled agricultural society and its historical fierce antipathy toward any kind of nomadic culture, manages at the same time to fling itself to every corner of the globe, in constant movement and undergoing constant and rapid change. 

Consider that gravel, when piled too deep, especially on an incline, can get to flowing like a fluid under the right conditions, such as with gravity being exerted on it, especially through the mass of a vehicle or some other heavy object pressing upon it. 

The gravel, as a multitude of the typically stationary and inert hard rock, which relates loosely to itself, and which through its hardness and non-porousness fails to achieve a bond with the soil beneath, grows ever looser in the upper layers which are furthest from the ground, and which gets to moving free as it is set against itself, flowing like a fluid, which is weird and interesting to watch, and even weirder to feel sitting right on top of it. 

And then you have civilization, with its occupants growing weary of moving across the earth and as a part of the earth, settling down, walling themselves off from the earth and gradually encasing themselves in finer enclosures, watching the earth disappear, the whole mass of it piling up, going further and further out to exploit ever more far-flung resources necessary to rise ever more off the ground, and then the whole thing begins to move and shift with ever more liquidity, going from a rooted thing to more of a fluid, like a great mudslide or a lahar. 

And this doesn't have to be how civilization actually exists, but it is how ours at this historical moment exists. 

Dark Sight

They’re talking about “spiking” levels of the new XBB variants in the wastewater analysis, and lamenting that hospitalization rates are as high as they were in December, but then take great care to assure us that absolute rates are staying down and that really there’s nothing to worry about. No need to mention that dread-word “wave” at any rate.

They say this at the same time that limited data coming out on the new variants suggest they are immensely contagious – even more so than the original extremely contagious Omicron strain they branched from, which is saying a lot – and that experts are throwing up their hands in the resignation that most of the country is just going to catch this thing.

Given that a lot of the visible real time data has completely evaporated due to the public abandonment of testing and tracking – which, we should remember, was already inadequate enough in terms of its actual practice and disposal and distribution of resources – it has become much more difficult to gain a clear idea of what exactly is going on.

However there are a couple of salient bits of information that we already have, that like a bat using echolocation, we could put together ad-hoc to form some sort of alternative picture. As mentioned, we know how contagious the new variants are, and we know how quickly they are achieving dominance, which could be coupled with the understanding of how rapid people move around in the modern world, and how any initial resistance to that movement has been aggressively removed, so that we can continue to feed the economy of course.

We have the wastewater data too. And we know that the state of public health policy has, if anything, deteriorated from its already sorry state, and that the populace on the whole have thrown caution to the wind and given up completely on masking, though it is not like a lot of people had a choice in the matter, given overwhelming public pressure to do so. Remember, economies need to eat too.

We also know that repeated infections happen, and can increase the odds of Long Covid and the cropping up of other problems, and that these particular strains are even better at evading previous immunities from infections and vaccinations.  Slap on that data from the not-so-distant past, in which the previous Omicron wave was the deadliest, not because the strain itself was particularly virulent, but because of how easily it was spread, reaching the greatest number of people.

Despite the obvious problems with this thinking – this sort of thing classically leading to conspiracy theory for instance – it is certainly better than nothing. Not to trash the bats too; they seem to do just fine. And anyway, this thinking could be undertaken with skill, just as the gathering of empirical data can be botched and abused.

Not a pretty picture all in all, but a workable one at least.

The point of all of this? You don’t have to be as fixated on Covid as I am, or to believe it is as destructive as it is as I do, to still be a little unnerved at the growing disconnection of our society’s relation to observable reality, a growing disconnection that comes with the growing willingness to ignore or spin away problems both small and large. And even the smaller problems tend to get larger over time if they aren’t dealt with.

Thoughts on Wealth

Previously I talked about wealth having certain effects on the concentration and disposal of power: namely that growing wealth raises living standards and thus the bar for maintaining legitimacy, as well as the ability of the populace to fight back and take power. Yes, given certain conditions, these things remain to be true, but the augmentation and movement of wealth has some very complicated and interesting effects, effects that can be contradictory, so we should go into this in more detail. 

The historical record has shown that wealth accumulation - especially imperial wealth accumulation - can be just as traumatic in the long term as it is beneficial in the short term, and in certain cases, vice versa. What comes immediately to mind is the surge in wealth that the Roman Republic experienced after the Punic Wars: the opening up of new swathes of conquered land and resources, much of which were gobbled up by the wealthy actors left standing after so much of the fighting population was wiped out, accelerating that fatal dynamic in which the large estates absorbed more and more of the smallholder farms, which played a prominent role in the destruction of the Republic. 

This internal process also gradually produced gradated generations of ruling elite accustomed to greater and greater levels of unearned wealth. Embedded within those generations were the fretting public intellectuals, concerned that traditional measures of virtue and "grit" were being eroded in the process. Every empire, after having become engorged on the spoils of its power, eventually enters what we often loosely call a "decadent" phase, with its intellectual critics complaining of a growing "softness" and "complacency. 

Or what of external processes of wealth transfer? The Chinese would speak of the nomadic steppe peoples living closer to the trappings of settled society as "cooked" in contrast to the "uncooked" tribes further out and living deeper in the steppe wilds, less influenced by the effects of civilization. Dynamics within the steppe regions themselves would bear this out, with the stronger tribes emerging within the harshest cauldrons of the wilds and putting pressure on the settling tribes on the periphery, living closer to the settled societies, who were themselves fretting about their growing softness in being exposed to the effects of that settling, sending their youth back into the deeper wilds to renew those old faculties of self-sufficiency and war-making. Very similar dynamics were at play in the Germanic tribes interacting with the Roman Empire and with each other. 

In general, no one actually enjoys living the harshest and most austere lifestyles which produce the hardiest warrior conquerors, and humanity tends to move away from the pain and towards the wealth and resources, while fretting about becoming "soft" all the while. But this rule doesn't just refer to a movement towards settling and civilizing and engaging in agriculture: many nomadic peoples, such as the Native American plains tribes, often reported back as some of the happiest cultures, and fought ferociously to maintain their lifestyles when they were threatened. Anyway, it always gets much more complicated the closer you look, and I'm veering off topic besides. 

There is a temporal quality to the movement of wealth and the effects of that movement on culture and collective psychology as well. For example, these effects could be seen in the contrast between generations during the radical movements in the US in the 60's and 70's. You had the older generations of radicals who were formed in the cauldron of the World Wars, and who, exhausted after the sheer intensity and desperation of that historical period, were ready to rest upon the accumulated wealth that those massive efforts brought about, who in turn butted heads with the younger generation of radicals coming of age, who, fed on stories of the pursuit of the global pursuit of collective justice, were at the same time demoralized by the tide of accumulated wealth and the fear of softness that that tide entailed, and wanted to urgently do something about the injustices that remained, and then who eventually in turn wished to rest on their own accumulated wealth after the intensity of their own efforts.  

These are broad generalizations, but you do see themes like this crop up in the accounts of activists trying to understand themselves and their own movements. 

Perhaps one aspect that can be given more weight is the concurrent concentration of power, and how that power extracts and dispenses of the stores of wealth at its disposal. More recently, we can observe the effects of "hot money" in which advanced and mobile finance capital touches down in a developing country, effectively destroying its local economy under camouflage of a temporary boom, and then when that sugar rush inevitably crashes, the capital is withdrawn and the country with its trashed economy is abandoned to its fate. 

Which raises the question of what modern financial wealth even is? That money can be so good and useful in global trade, and which at the same time can be used by the powerful to destroy and plunder the assets of weaker powers. Wealth is a multifaceted phenomenon after all: a siege engine takes a lot of time, effort, and resources for a human army to put together, and then that mobile "wealth" is rolled forth to take apart another army's urban stronghold brick by brick. For that matter, you can brain someone to death with that brick of bullion that could feed and clothe you, if you really wanted to. 

To further complicate on the macro level, the modern global reach of capital, the closing of geographical frontiers, the fuller contemporary domination of settled society and the "Anthropocene" filling up of free land with productive enterprise or human habitation, all represent an epochal shift in how wealth concentrates and circulates historically, which makes up yet another dimension of the analysis to account for. 

All of this is to say that there are very broad historical trends that can be traced out, and the effects and nature of accumulated and circulating wealth can be very generally understood in a certain way. But how that wealth moves over time, and how those effects are born out, can vary wildly in terms of the passage of time, geographical concentration, velocity, collective purpose, machinations of the powerful, transfers of power, and so on. 

Mundane Religiosity

I've been throwing around the "religious" signifier fairly loosely, so perhaps we can clear that one up a bit. This is partially a response to our society's own loose and vague designations of what constitutes religious experience, practices, and institutions. So...it is what it is. 

To be fair, the realm of religion is indeed expansive and contains a whole world of different landscapes, textures, and subjectivities. For the moment, I just want to distinguish two of the more clearly contrasting religious qualities, hopefully to gain some clarity on previous and future discussions. 

The first is a form of religious experience in which individuals have incredibly vivid and profound visions, experiences, or revelations, often in relation to aspects of life that are profound in scope, such as in how to live or structure a society, or how one is to relate to the cosmos and the unseen beings or phenomena within, and with these you can group together the actions and examples of these individuals as they move in the world and act on others. 

This kind of thing is plenty interesting in itself, but currently I want to turn to and favor the second quality, largely because it is so often overlooked: the daily, oftentimes mundane experience of collective conventions and practices as eternal and natural and just, which can have great power in their own right. 

When I suggest that people are worshipping money with a very specific nature in mind, which prescribes how it appears, how it moves, where it ends up, and all the rest of it, I'm not saying that people are literally getting on their knees in front of an altar and praying to a money deity. I'm trying to describe a quality of thought and practice that can be illuminated in a certain and useful way with the language of religion. 

People have a certain complex of feelings when they relate to the money symbol. This complex of feelings could theoretically take all sorts of shapes, but the specific and particular shape that has been hammered into them, when they all carry it out together, results in very particular shared experiences and social outcomes. And when that shape is interrogated the mind naturally surveys everything connected to it, which can lead to profound visions and experiences of their own. Many shrink away from the consequences of this, preferring to leave the convention in place and left alone. Sometimes this attitude is warranted; sometimes not. 

Indeed, for the most part these daily practices and conventions can be traced back to those grander, more dramatic visions and experiences that influenced them in the first place, giving rise to their cyclical and regular expression, like echoes, which at the same time reproduce the body that gave rise to them. 

So, money is hard and non-negotiable. That dollar is a dollar. A debt is a debt, and needs to be repaid. A household needs to carefully manage its stocks and flows, and the government is the same way. And you don't typically get your money from the government, but from the bank and your job. And when you tinker with any of these links, it can disrupt the whole system, in that it threatens to divert the many flows to all of the different interests and productive systems, effects which can cascade. 

All of these relations, and the considerations of these relations, can transport the mind and the sensibility far away from the daily and mundane concerns that they arise from, and outward to a far-reaching survey of total social and cultural life, and possibly everything that exists, which is a quality common to various religious experiences. 

Which is what you see in what people are actually calling organized religion, with its collective prescriptions for family structure, family relations, family life, daily and weekly individual and collective rituals, collective morals and systems of ethics, and so on. 

Even what we call superstitions can often have a specific social function. We can be quite superstitious about superstition, believing that it just arises from backwards people or some such, seemingly ex nihilo, when it very often arises connected to specific phenomena specific to a social body, which through its very falseness and unreasonableness maintains a specific shape as it is continuously reproduced. 

Let's take monetary superstition for example, or the fundamentalist insistence on free markets and economic liberalism, which accompanies government privatization and austerity. To survey the effects of these systems, they appear glaringly self-destructive, and they are. And this in direct and readily-apparent contradiction to the luminary rationalizations of economic prosperity that seek to justify them. But they are emerging from a distinct set of interests and they benefit that set of interests greatly, by virtue of the distortions and asymmetries created by that contradiction, and they are existing in a historical moment that allowed them to take root and live. 

And to threaten with transformation any of the many premises and conventions that undergirds such a system, is to threaten the system itself, as kicking any number of small transformations in motion can require the entire systems they are connected to to change, toppling the minority of interest groups poised at the top and benefitting the most. 

And while many individuals are quite comfortable with the transformations and changes and remain quite flexible, others would not be and would fight the changes, especially the most powerful who stand to lose the most, eventually bringing about cascading transformations that change the nature of the problem and the solutions that accompany it.

The mundane at first glance appears rather boring and unremarkable, but being what it is, it is everywhere and touches everything, and when you start to group it together at greater and greater scales and move it in certain directions and it picks up energy and speed, well it becomes a lot less boring.