State of Play

There is a whole lot going on out there at the moment, and I expect it to continue to do so indefinitely. So many juicy and spicy observations to be had. But in the next couple of months I'm going to try really hard to focus on whittling down a backlog of planned posts and tidy up a mess of theoretical loose ends I've had going for some time. 

Hopefully this stuff will be handy to reference and build upon in the coming years. Besides, there are plenty of wonderful talents out there that are handling current affairs with the usual skill and grace, and are making many of the points I'd be making here anyway.  

Head Diet

The more dysfunctional one's bodily functions are, the more apparent the effects of a given diet, which is one form of feedback that can make a little more functional one's body in turn. One does this by gauging the myriad effects a given type of food encourages, which tend to be a little more distinct and vivid in an already weakened body, which has become hypersensitive to the numerous insults threatening its compromised integrity. Every bit of bad food can set in motion a wave of tiny rebellions in the form of stomach upset, joint and muscle pain, brain fog and irritability and depression, and so on, such as in the case of an immune disorder in which anything inflammatory or irritating activates a more generalized inflammation response. One tends toward the foods that are usually more nutritious and readily digestible and favorable to the metabolism anyway, as these are less likely to piss off one of those bodily components that is set in irritable and unhappy relation to the rest of the compromised whole. 

In the same way, I try to stick to a curated diet of nutritious intellectual works in the form of "meat and potatoes" books and analyses, as well as a wide and colorful range of veggies and spices in the form of blogs and newsletters, news analyses, podcasts, creative audio and visual works, and so on. One can judge the effects of these things not long after their consumption: were they produced by people concerned with nutrition, or the circulation and distribution of elemental facts and truths needed to properly reproduce one's vessels of navigation in a given environment and climate? Or were they produced in order to facilitate as rapid and far-reaching expansion as possible, regardless of substance? 

Does a given work attempt to reconcile as much as possible one's position in the real at a certain time and space? Does it accord with the other works in its relation, which though in their wide diversity all seek accordance as much as humanly possible with observable reality and experience? Or is it an empty vessel meant to excite and instrumentalize various pleasures and displeasures to achieve a short term end, after which it evaporates? 

All of the wonderful writers and artists I have the privilege of reading and seeing and hearing from can be trusted to deliver: I can read or see or hear a given nutritious work and be filled with luminous thoughts and passions which multiply and build upon each other, and in such an ecstatic state I can create something of my own which I can be proud of, edifying that base of confidence and competence drawn from to judge and anticipate and navigate the world. 

On the other hand, junk food and junk works have distinct effects of their own. A Reese's peanut butter cup has just about the same effect for me as reading some piece coming out of the "mainstream media": it might be quite tasty and maybe even thrilling for a couple of precious seconds, and then for the next half an hour or so I feel quite bad and can barely think. Do that again and again and choose that for your regular foundation and then you're really in trouble. 

Junk works are not meant to cohere - other than the common intention to excite your senses for a second or two in order to manipulate you in a certain direction - or even to accord with reality beyond a surface resemblance, and so the next one might contradict the previous, and you sit there, your mind empty, or worse, gunked up, unable to understand the world you move in, which repeated at a great enough sustain, can even be fatal. 

This is not to deprecate junk wholesale; the case can be made for consciously ingesting a bit of junk here and there to rest and shut down. To each their own. 

Then you have something like a typical article from the New York Times, which is made to resemble something nutritious, and may very well be loaded with a few vitamins and nutrients to boot, but which is covertly sprayed down with some sneaky pesticide to support its mass production and wide distribution. One can get by on articles such as these if taken sparingly, or taken with a bit of intellectual and emotional distance, knowing what it really is underneath, as oftentimes this is all the information in a certain context one can get. And I could go on. 

And all of this is related to each other and builds on each other. For me, a good diet keeps me feeling good, and I have the motivation and the strength to procure and consume the really good nutritious intellectual stuff, and then feel even better, and am further motivated through feedback to keep eating good nutritious food and so on. And it is good to have sources of strength like this to draw upon, because they're always trying to push the crap on you, right up to your face, waving it there, trying to bury your nose in it even.

Ideology and Anchoring

It is oftentimes in moments of extreme polarization and transformation that a given ideology's unique anchor points become most (or least) visible, depending on who is looking. Part of this has to do with the intense obsessive focus on the finer points of an originating ideology, so as to legitimate a given course of action. 

Contrary to the popular image of the otherworldly and doctrinaire zealot, clinging to a set of abstract ideals in a sort of detached fugue state, there are often good practical reasons for this. A successful society, as an organic collective, possesses a certain distinct character which was responsible for its particular success in a particular place and time. As it expands and grows increasingly complex in order to maintain its successful character throughout the course of this metamorphosis and expansion, attempts are made to abstract and systematize this character into an ideology which prescribes the replication and growth of this character in time and space, oftentimes specifying how the character is to adapt to varied conditions, and how that character is to be built on itself to form greater complexes, all the while retaining its original patterns of its success.  

This involves a simplification into symbol which compresses the endless complexity of observable reality into manipulable and navigable artifacts, which could be leveraged to guide individual and collective actions in certain directions, the reality of which is internal to a self-referencing technological-social construct.

A good parallel might be one using a ruler to build a house: one can collapse infinitely divisible space into numerical placeholders that are set in relation to each other (measuring something in inches say) to increase or decrease magnitude, which in turn can be used to produce consistently measured building pieces so as to enclose space with a tight fit. It is the coherence and consistency of the abstraction which in turn orders a consistent material reality, which can be controlled at finer and finer levels. 

Leaving construction to organic things that can either grow or remain inert and stable by their own properties results in building materials of wildly varying dimensions and properties, which can certainly be narrowed down and controlled for through traditional technique, but which ultimately leave tiny variations in place that allow for a permeability to remain between enclosed spaces. I have a sense this is an obscure point, so I want to repeat it: the more simple and clear one's abstractions and one's tools, the more consistency and coherence is allowed in material reality, which allows for tighter fits, and ultimately less permeability between spaces and more control over those spaces. 

Once more from a slightly different angle: the "inch" acts as an abstract fiction with real material effects that are compounded as the materials directed by that fiction are set against each other. Precisely measured foundations allow for the building up of precisely measured walls and roofs, each additional layer of strata corresponding to and depending on the previous, which in turn can sharply divide internal and external spaces. As a side note for another time, here simplicity and complexity are both sides of the same coin, which ultimately functions to make a thing more distinct from its environment and become ever more itself.  

But back to the construction of ideology. In many cases across the last couple thousand years of history, this was carried out through the maintenance of ideology in writing, which through its durability against the fragility of human memory, could be continuously returned to and then renewed, in order to verify and buttress the original character of a given guiding ideology. It was no coincidence that writing first tended to emerge in palatial economies which initially found the need to manage ever-growing material complexity and material mass with some sort of simplified accounting process, which then took off from there.

This tendency began with a more compartmental nature, remaining exclusive to a scribe class that maintained its privilege through the complexity and expense of writing itself, but which became ever more generalized and pervasive as writing both simplified (much of it through necessity in trade) and became less expensive through the generational accumulation of material wealth strata and technological evolution, which lowered the labor time and specialization required of traditional writing. And then through this steady evolution and increasing prominence of ideology, you begin to see an increased emphasis and importance placed upon ideological purity and function in the modern age.  

Ideology carries with it a fetishism of its own: a given ideology can be built out further and ever higher from its anchor point - as systems of reference and direction and construction, ideologies must begin somewhere - growing ever more dazzling and complex, inspiring awe and devotion to its towering and sprawling majesties, so that the structure itself is all anyone any longer sees. 

Of course, while everyone is dazzled, the entire set of foundations underneath are drifting and changing. And so a social organism, increasingly aspiring to a monolithic eternity, comes into conflict with an earthly reality in perpetual flux. In great times of stress, oftentimes the originating successful patterns have become dramatically obscured or transformed, and it becomes necessary to rediscover and renew them, which as we'll see, can make things much worse. Lost, one digs down as far as one can go, to the foundations, to see just where the ideology is coming from, using the cold, hard bedrock it is anchored to as an axiom to retrace one's steps with. 

The problem lies in the idiosyncratic and often provisional and iterative nature of the anchor points themselves, which are the subject of this post. And further, where these anchor points touch down and what they commit to are the product of countless individuals and their particular values, fixations, commitments, and interests. Through the struggle of countless individuals in competing factions, a greater guiding ideology is carved out through excruciating conflict over a long period of time. This problem is illustrated well in Daniele Bollelli's excellent History on Fire podcast series on John Brown and the run-up to the American Civil War. 

Given the lasting legacy of Christian ideology in the dawn of the modern era, the prevailing culture of the young United States was awash in Christian language, which was used to rationalize and legitimate one's actions and standing. In making ideological sense of the intractable conflict between pro-slavery and abolitionist interest, both sides went back to their respective roots, everyone siting differing Biblical passages to buttress their positions. And of course the pro-slavery ideologues were able to produce Old Testament passages that enthusiastically encouraged dominion and conquest, while the abolitionist ideologues were able to produce New Testament passages laying waste to the very notion of slavery.    

And unfortunately both sides were right in their respective argumentation, at least in terms of the textual merit. This was because the historical figure of Jesus - and the body of theological work attributed him, or attributed to his guidance - however revolutionary and iconoclastic his religious teachings were at the time, had to anchor those teachings upon a body of traditions and understandings that were already in currency, themselves anchored to an ancient culture and tradition. However contradictory his teachings were to the older canon, he wasn't recorded as all that critical of or dismissive of the old teachings, but seemed to have intended to build upon them with reverence and respect. 

Of course, this contradictory and confused ideological jumble only reflects the nature of the reality it is describing and attempting to navigate. However clean and elegant an ideological coherence can appear, it is always resting upon something older and stranger that it must reckon with, which is at the same time obscured as it is built upon. And to put the problem generally, human nature has been bequeathed with conditions that appear as some kind of cosmic joke: that as the human organism has become ever more successful, it has placed ever more transformational pressure upon the foundations for its success, and its cradle, the earth from which it came. And then the conditions for its continued success become an ever faster-moving target as its intensifying success places intensifying pressure on the conditions for its success. 

We see this in the emergence of Christianity, which took root in an ancient world bathed in blood, slavery, and genocide, which partially expressed horror at such a state of affairs, promoting messages of peace and love as an answer to it, while simultaneously coming to terms with its continued survival in such an environment. 

Moving forward, we saw the modern world emerge in a series of fits, as it first struggled to overcome the cruel brutality of the medieval torture execution spectacles in the domestic sphere, and then the extreme violence of conquest and then the later process of colonial domination, and then of course there was the bloody struggle over the elimination of slavery in the United States. But it could never quite banish those demons of the past; it could only build up and over them, transforming them into something else while retaining their essential character. 

The Christian revulsion of ritual sacrifice for example, or the bourgeois turn from colonialism, especially after the excesses of the World Wars, could be transposed into symbolic ritual and act in the former, and debt imperialism in the latter, while the living organisms administrating those cultural processes of reproduction could continue to grow in power while incorporating into themselves the vital energy of weaker powers all the while. 

Building upon something does not erase it for good, and indeed, the buried is gradually unearthed again as the higher constructs break down and open up. The old antagonisms intensify all the more as those old fault lines grind directly against each other as the insulating material falls away once again, like built up cartilage deteriorating around an arthritic joint.   

Mr. CEO

Couldn't have said it or demonstrated it better.

I'll just add a few cryptic words while this one is still fresh. Those who go seeking the abyss can oftentimes find it and its secret meanings hidden within, meanings which are never actually revealed and carry on to one's grave. But sometimes too the abyss can find those seeking out its ostensible opposite in the heavens. 

Further, this is the load-bearing shit that is getting hit now. We've had a lot of diffuse political and social violence breaking out over the years, oftentimes affecting the most vulnerable. But that stuff is now finding its way back to where it is actually coming from, closer to the foundations, to major political and economic figures. And this is as true domestically as it is internationally. I expect the pertinent changes to accelerate and become even more dramatic and visible now. 

The Many Colors of Grief

As much as there are different individuals, there are different forms of grief, and partly for this reason and many more, a death in the family sets loose a fearsome conflagration of contradictory forces and pressures. At the same time relations can tighten and strengthen in one way or at one place as people come together around a common tender loss, and then be rended apart at another as disagreements arise over shared meanings and resources. Given economic hardship and political trends in the US, things often tend toward the latter in many cases too. You see many a family torn asunder by fights over the estate. 

Open Road

There is a lot of old lore about the mystery and danger of the open ocean, a lot of which is mocked in contemporary media, where you see circulating tropes of the grizzled fisherman intensely prowling old creaky taverns on dark, stormy nights, portrayed as a crank of course, telling his harrowing tales of the open ocean to anyone who will stop and listen, but who is otherwise related to at a certain distance and remove: a relic of a bygone era.

Part of that mockery comes from the demystification that is afforded by modern navigational, topographic, and communication technologies and then of the general tendency of capital to seek out and achieve the annihilation of time and space. However these vast spaces - with their equally vast and strange weather phenomena which move through them - will never be completely tamed, as the serious dangers of the fishing trades illustrate.  

The concept of the open ocean's domesticated cousin, the open road, can further help illustrate this I think.

The open road - being a product of the built environment - is a very different beast, but it has some interesting dynamics of its own that are worth teasing out, which in my opinion become emblematic of the various dynamics underlying the modern world in general. 

Contrary to the open ocean, the open road is intensely and intentionally planned and managed, and with the right equipments and provisions, can be traveled at the height of comfort and convenience. In a climate-controlled car with media and company, one can pass through spectacular landscapes and watch it all slip by in silence beyond the windows, occasionally catching a troubling glimpse of another broken down vehicle or even a stranded person. One may have the fleeting thought that one's fate could be similar, but that the unfortunate traveler will surely find help of their own and be on their way, as you continue to be on yours.  

Due to the function of the road as bridging vast distance at great speed, there lurks underneath its smooth and elegant appearance a terrible menace and desolation. The road's slick and stylized mask especially comes down if your vessel is compromised in any way, and your relational motion to the environment and the surrounding traffic becomes inverted. That is, you stop passing the world by and re-enter the world as it exists at that particular place, in all its squalor bisected and crushed by the road, with roadkill and emaciated vegetation nearby, and road debris littered about. 

At the same time, the traffic around you continues to move at great speed and you are the one standing still as an obstacle, and you begin to perceive the moving traffic as land, plant, and animal perceive the traffic: as huge, terrifying chunks of metal, glass, and plastic moving at incredibly high speed. And this too is the modern world: to exist at slight remove from it, while still benefitting from its trappings, is a great privilege. But if you must move within the heart of it, you better damn well keep moving with the rest of it. 

Playing the Odds

After the dust settled with the car accident, the ensuing insurance payout, and the series of repairs making use of the insurance money, I came out of the affair feeling that I was still ahead with a little money still in the bank, and I couldn't help but think: "Jesus I feel like I've just come back from a long night at the casino." And then I got to thinking about that. 

The insurance company ended up giving me a little under $6K to salvage my car, which was more than my hillbilly ass expected from them. This fact in itself is kind of interesting. In hindsight, I know that the actual repair was way less than 6K. But what is an insurance company actually dealing with? Lots of different busted cars with very different extents of damage. This damage is not always visible or easy to suss out in a short amount of time, and these judgments have to be left to mechanics and garages with interests of their own. 

The insurance companies themselves are looking at the numbers and the averages of all of the cases that they see, and they are deciding that given the decline in value of older cars, it often makes more sense to just give a lump sum to the owner and either total the car and send it off to auction or have the owner salvage the car and give them a smaller lump sum calculated appropriately and be done with it. And they have their own models and greater layers of sophistication for making decisions that are going to benefit them.  

As stated before, I didn't want to total the car because I had no idea what else I could get in a short amount of time with the proceeds, and who knows what unforeseen problems the next car would have. If I salvaged my car, I knew what I had for the most part upon visual inspection. But what I didn't know was what would happen when I got it to a garage. What kind of equipment and labor would it take to perform all of the necessary fixes?  

So, a family member got wind of my predicament and offered to come out and help with the repair. When we popped off the body of the car and pulled out the damaged parts, we realized that I was in luck. All that was damaged was the radiator, the thermostat it was connected to, a lower hose, and the actual front of the car frame, all of which was easily repairable on the cheap. So I ordered a radiator and picked up a new thermostat, hose, and some coolant and transmission fluid, all of which amounted to $200 or so, plus another $300 for gas and lodging for the helping hand. 

After that, I took my car to a garage anyway because I was short on time and had to get the brakes checked out, and then double check the radiator because the engine was still running hot. Turns out the brakes were shot, and so were the tires, and with additional radiator diagnosing, everything came out to $3500 or so when all was said and done. Holey moley, as I said, still ahead. 

OK, so I'll still maintain that I don't intend this thing to be a straightforward diary, so where am I going with all of this? 

For one thing, the whole insurance claim affair just feels bad. Yeah I came out ahead, but how can you plan for any of that or count on any of that? Without access to any of that information, you just roll the dice and hope you are made whole, or close to it. Like I said at the beginning, it feels like getting back from the casino. 

And the casino as an institution is interesting in itself. I mean, what a weird place: a central location where social resources are pooled and then shuffled around behind probabilistic symbols, which by chance - and some skill - can end up in your hands, but as more time passes, is more likely to gradually - or quickly - pass from your hands to the house, as the institution is structured so that the house always wins. 

And given a series of failures and then a big win, our brain is wired to get flooded with those feel-good chemicals. Some brains take the win and back away in caution and relief, while others seek out bigger and bigger wins, the prospects of which seem ever more compelling with bigger failures. Some folks can get really addicted to this shit. 

You often hear the anguished refrain that the financial system - and by extension the greater economy - more and more resembles the workings of a casino. But if you look at it, the same underlying motivations of the seemingly quarantined casino system - regulated in isolation as a unique vice - is the same set of motivations that drives the movements of capital in general. 

Managing complexity and risk with various symbolic contrivances and calculations is part of the elemental building material of merchant capital and finance. But there is a whole set of dynamics behind that which is way too interesting and vital to waste on a sidenote, and it is something I'll have to return to later. For now I just want to get back to the car stuff and then I'll wrap this post up. 

A lot of car repairs could be done a lot cheaper if communities were a bit tighter and folks trusted each other a bit more. What we are paying for when we are paying for insurance is basically a massive gambling ring based on not only the management of incredible complexity and material risk, but a simultaneously collapsed trust and centralization of pooled resource in alienated and self-interested actors. You also get the individual garages acting in their capacity as self-interested businesses, who have to pay rents and fees and part prices to other self-interested businesses, with costs slowly (and sometimes very quickly) inflating over time. 

There are of course places where overhead costs such as these are just simply unaffordable and unworkable. The people of Cuba for example are known for making just about any kind of car run for an indefinite amount of time, and you hear about communities in Africa that can sift through electronics refuse and keep electronic products going for as long as physically possible. But what does this have to do with insurance?

To have a situation where an insurance company can just whisk away your car and give you a bunch of money for a new one implies a whole lot of wealth sloshing around. But that state of affairs is also coming to a profound turning point. I remember hearing stories about people getting their cars hit, and then insurance totaled the car and gave them a huge wad of cash, and gee whiz they just got a newer better car! Lemonade out of lemons and this and that. 

That's quite a bit tougher to do now. Now people back away from "total" offers in dread. Used car prices have roughly doubled since the beginning of the pandemic due to various supply chain issues and inflationary pressures. Sure you can get more for your totaled car, but you're also dealing with depreciation, and if you're looking for a newer car with less mileage on it, prices go up quick. And newer cars with all of their increased complexity could have mechanical and electrical problems that are more difficult to sniff out, and which could end up costing much more to address later on. 

Simpler and more reliable models are highly sought after and treasured, and which could theoretically be worked on by their owners or by a sympathetic family member who knows a thing or two. This issue is going to be regional too. You can find a bunch of cars older cars running around in Cuba, and then Western and Western-aligned car manufacturers are sliding into deeper crisis, while Chinese electric cars are getting ever-cheaper and ever more reliable, which will circulate to the places economically and politically aligned with them. This state of affairs will change over time. 

On the Western side, if this is what we can expect from our institutions and the changing environment they are clamoring to survive in, I'd certainly prefer the family and friend approach to infrastructure and tool maintenance myself. This whole insurance affair has been exhausting, and I didn't even get into the issue of getting the claim settled, which again was like pulling teeth because these organizations are huge and dysfunctional and full of alienated people who hate their jobs and resent you for putting a claim on their time and energy. 

And again, your daily intentional actions in the course of living life are temporarily sharply constrained and put on hold as you become pinned between larger economic interests, waiting for their decisions to be passed down as they determine what they owe you on an industrial scale, constrained not by conscience but by what is politically granted to them and what exactly they can get away with. 

And hey, every once in a while you can get lucky and get a little ahead, because playing the averages, sometimes you can get a little more than you expected to balance out all of the times you can get less than expected. But it also pays to remember that the house intends to win in the end. Also too, though, where there are jackpots to be had, there are also voids deposited in their wake, which as we know, can accumulate. 

Abyssal

My life seems to consist of an endless stream of "this weird bullshit just happened to me and now I've gotta deal with it." There are plenty of structural and endogenous - you could say they form a unity  -factors in play which work together to bring that state of affairs about, part of which I'll be getting to in this post. I didn't really intend for all of this to read like a crabby comedy-of-errors diary, but I guess that's what I've got right now and it is the format I'm going with. As usual here, I at least intend to produce some workable universals from these particulars; if you're going to sit and listen to someone crab at you all day, you might as well get something out of it. 

We've talked before about the commanding heights of a money-governed class system, and how the stocks and flows of that money - and by extension power - are maintained and governed. But what it is like at the opposite end of that polarity? More particularly, what is it like to be cash-poor and have subsistence rations of power in the United States? 

I say cash-poor to lower the hammer a little bit on a loaded concept like "poverty." I have a wealth of resources in the form of a constellation of support and contacts and various useful skills and knowledge, and I don't consider myself desperately poor. But I do skate on the knife edge of economic ruin as part of daily life, which is a result of how lean I have to live to do what I do. Of course, given the ongoing forces of economic concentration and polarization in the United States, most of the people living in this country are not too far from financial misfortune themselves, getting sucked under by the social rip currents generated by this dire economic milieu in the process. 

And besides, there is a case to be made for living lean and on the edge: it can be appropriate to tuck in what you can and cut the dead weight so you don't have more surfaces that are going to snag and drag you under. 

The precipitating event for this discussion is a minor little car accident, the details of which we could briefly sketch out to bring into relief some of the forces at play here. I was sitting at a junction in a parking garage and someone came right around a blind corner and ran right into me, smooshing the front of my car and busting the radiator. 

The accident itself was relatively uneventful: low speed, with minor damage that was significant enough that my car was no longer drivable, but relatively intact. The person who hit me immediately admitted fault and coordinated everything through her own insurance to ensure she took responsibility. Our interaction was cordial. It was when insurance got involved that things got interesting. 

I'm a little ignorant about such matters. Twice I had to file claims in two different events when my car windows were busted and things were stolen from my car. Both times I had such minimal insurance that there were all sorts of little technical catches that I had to navigate in order to get the claim filled out. Insurance can be quite expensive and add up fast, so you opt for what coverage you can get depending on what you afford, which for me was pretty skimpy. I ended up having my window replaced on the second event after eating the loss on the first window which was under-covered- eating the loss in both cases on all the stolen shit - which in itself was like pulling teeth trying to collect from the damn company. 

Talking about the impaired functionality of the engine itself, and damage to the frame of the car is a different matter entirely though. When I spoke to an insurance representative about the accident, they concluded that due to the age of the car I'd probably have to total the vehicle. I thought, well that's extreme, the repairs seem pretty minor, but OK. I then consulted with family about this decision and got, "nope nope nope don't do that!" 

Through persuasion and education, what I eventually realized would happen is that the company would give me the bare minimum for a vehicle that was basically fine, and then take it to auction, hopefully at a profit and coming out ahead of the claim and then I'd be screwed trying to scrape money together for a used car that was now likely to be more expensive now, possibly with further mechanical issues that were difficult to foresee. I could opt instead for an owner salvage, get paid less of a value, and hopefully be able to get the car fixed myself within the allotted return; a gamble to someone without deeper mechanical knowledge and the personal means to advance the repairs. I'd be at the mercy of a local garage, rates for labor cost, replacement part prices, and etc. Personally, one's consciousness shifts from that of intentional daily movement to that of being pinned down and trapped between more powerful conflicting economic interests. 

Note here that it was possible for me to wander naively into dramatically increased economic hardship, and through my ignorance I had to be pulled back from the brink by the scruff of my shirt by someone who knew a little more about the matter. Comparable to an ecological tourist being warned away from a dangerous plant or animal by an experienced local guide. The wilderness in this case involved economic movements in settled society, which require specialized information and experience of its own to navigate. We'll get more into that at another time.  

Let's step away from this now and survey things from a greater remove. Theoretically, a stable community is one that can respond to shocks and damages with the proper remediation. Things like severe damages, injuries, and deaths are a little more complicated, but all in all if a damage occurs to some part of the community, and that damaged thing can be made whole, or at least healed enough to a satisfactory degree, then it is done, in the interest of maintaining the integrity of that community and its ongoing connections. 

Due to our political economy - which we'll have to continue to explore in further posts - it is in the nature of the insurance company to minimize costs on its customers' claims as much as possible, while profiting as much as possible on the insurance obligations coming in, which are possible given an established monopoly privilege in which their business is ensured through political and legal enshrinement.

It's also in the nature of our political economy to have all of our social and economic needs - including that theoretical social and material process of remediation - handled by self-interested private businesses operating on their own specialized and technical knowledge and experience, and of individuals themselves to be cast as self-interested and clawing what they can out of any given interaction, which as such a state of affairs advances, results in the shredding of social trust and the progression of such a state of affairs into something ever more intensely resembling itself. 

Socially this produces a powerful downward pressure with individuals in association with each other constantly dragged down and into gradients of disintegration, requiring a constant maintenance and then accumulation of social and economic power to remain buoyant and above these gradients. This in turn requires individuals in association with each other to leverage their collective power, knowledge, and experience to capture what power they can from the greater collective economic surplus, which simultaneously shrinks that surplus, while producing cleavages of oppositional associations forced by necessity to do the same thing in response, to survive, accelerating the contraction, destroying ever more trust and increasing the pressures for exploitation and domination. Plenty more to address on that later too.

With that relentless social conveyor pulling oneself ever-closer to the abyss, one discovers a problem. It begins to appear inevitable that one proceeds ever downward, no matter how one angles or thrashes. Something curious happens though. The deeper one goes, the darker and quieter it gets, one begins to see and hear curious things, by virtue of the absence of the things one is normally seeing and hearing. Some of this is strange and unsettling, yes. But one learns things. Namely that there remains plenty of life where death presumes to be, and for that matter, vice versa. One learns much more about navigating both the depths and the heights and everything in between.   

Nevertheless it is dangerous down there. You don't want to lose so much power that you are thrust ever downward, especially not being built for such things, where you are eventually crushed by the extreme pressures at the terminus. Much like the Titan submersible, that small libertarian vessel whisking CEO and friends down for a voyeuristic peek at the abyss, to be crushed like an empty soda can in the process. An uncanny inversion of the Icarus myth, which upholds the myth's core lesson all the same. 

Back to the immediate problem though. What does having an intact car have to do with survival in the United States? It is not the end of the world to be without a car. There are plenty of places in the country where you can get by just fine without a car. But departing from the mainstream economic regime and car-dependency requires some consideration and preparation. All in all the infrastructure in the country is built for cars. 

The reasons for this are complex and deeply rooted. The individuality of the personal automobile, reflected in the individuality and self-interest at the core of our political economy itself, makes for a tight fit. And the material reality is a simple matter of an enormous influx of concentrated energy (in the form of oil) and the relentless material expansion afforded by that influx, a material expansion that was well underway before fossil fuel, but which was further enabled and even intensified and accelerated by it.     

This results in massive distances opened up in the relationality of economic ties. That is, the entire economic regime is built upon the ability to annihilate space, which through repeated application, establishes a dependency. You have massive tracts of land in which virtually no food or other types of natural resources can be found, which aren't trucked in. Because within a certain regime of cheap energy it might be more efficient to truck in various resources to centralized operations with mechanized logistics, which can then be further trucked out to the extremities. 

This is not just an application in transportation, but a general economic principle. Witness the social and economic destruction of older, slower, collective methods of communication and organization, in favor of a homogenization and standardization administrated through the central nervous system of the Internet, embodied in the stories floating around of libraries or bookstores in which the actual books disappear, with various forms of merchandise and computer screens remaining. This may afford a certain form of efficiency and convenience in the short run, but it can also represent a dangerous vulnerability if that system suddenly goes away, as demonstrated in the chaos and angst arising when electronic payment systems go down, with central banks slowly and quietly backing away from their endorsement of full cashless schemes. 

I'm getting further and further away from my initial point: due to the function of our political economy - namely constant material revolution and expansion - one must constantly reproduce and regenerate one's literal and metaphorical economic engines to be able to traverse that landscape, in an environment where those engines are progressively deteriorating with every iteration, through the combined effects of planned obsolescence, economic hysteresis, inflation, and so on. Yet all of this too we'll have to get into at another time. 

I talked about interesting things down in the depths. Old, redundant modes of economic production and material survival for example, old social and spiritual relations, and so on, which tend to be maintained and preserved especially by those "left out." 

Further, not all of the directionality of our collective sinking is downward. The down-going is more turbulent than all that, with various updrafts and other oppositional forces generated within the agitated waters. I might have even found an updraft of my own, particular to my immediate predicament that could be of some use. 

Cloud and Mountain

 

Zombie

I had planned on a slightly different priority list for the posts I was going to roll out, but here we are just passing election day and on somewhat of a precipice, so it seemed timely to get this one out instead, which will nibble around the edges of some of the issues at stake currently. I'm not necessarily going to comment on the immediate results of the election, in favor of a more gut-level read on a basic mood and zeitgeist. I'm not going to trot out the tired lamentation that Trump's victory spells the end of democracy - whatever that is - either. I guess we could just jump right into this. 

I don't think I need to get into too much background to establish that there has been a whole lot of apprehension surrounding the 2024 US election here and around the world - even more than the usual dread and lamentations for "democracy" that have come around every 4 years here - and there are so many fascinating and terrifying analyses on the subject floating around at the moment. And when you have this much apprehension and consternation, it is usually a sign that things are very tenuous and fragile, and had to become that way somehow, which could be traced back decades at this point, or centuries if you wanted to get ambitious. In particular, I wanted to get at the subjective dimensions to this moment that I want to explore briefly as we cross this particular threshold. 

To first point to a historical analogue, in the first half of the 20th century - amidst the destruction of the World Wars and the breakneck social change accompanying it - when the era of mass propaganda and advertising really went into full swing, there was an obsession among the ruling elite of gaining control of what was often described as the "unruly mob." And even though this was an ugly thing that lead to all sorts of deeper pathologies, it was also kind of understandable. There was a deep fear and distrust of peoples as masses in general, further instilled by spectacular outbursts of political instability, nationalist fervor and rising demagogues, mass runaway slaughter in the wars, and so on. Nevermind that generation after generation of elite activities and machinations produced much of this hated "mass" that they were insisting was quite dangerous and needed to be managed carefully. 

So why was this the case and what did this look like, and what does it have to do with our predicament today? We could tie in and explore all kinds of historical threads to account for this state of affairs, and a lot of really great work has been done on countless related subjects. We've done some of this surveying here over the years. At the moment though I just wanted to get at the subjective experience with the usual help of some colorful imagery. 

I've absorbed an endless amount of excellent analyses of the structural, political, and economic forces driving the imperial era and then the run-up to the World Wars, as well as the explosive unwinding of these forces in the prosecution of the wars themselves, and one can readily put together a convincing intellectual account of all of this which can be quite useful, but what continually re-emerges in my mind are the really vivid and colorful first-hand accounts, such as Hannah Arendt's subjective observations of a society full of bitter despair and resignation, and caustic hatred for everything that exists, and then of course the resonance in one's own heart that those observations evoke. There were powerful collective emotional and spiritual undercurrents that were leading up to the wars that could be really felt and apprehended, a feeling quite unmistakable and striking which is growing ever-thicker in the air today. 

Those feelings imply a kind of violent movement to be experienced, which was an experience of being a part of something that was happening and going to happen as history unfolded in the present. In the media space we've had a constant flood of navel-gazing and intellectualizing of that history, in which we've wondered how it was that people could behave in such ways, and how such terrible things could be done, and now we're experiencing in real time a sort of increasing and accelerating sense of chaos and dynamism. The deep apprehension and tension itself could be seen to be the subjective experience of a high amount of potential energy, because after all, one holds one's breath when one senses the possibility for sudden violent change or transformation, which carries effects that are difficult to predict in terms of their beneficial or detrimental (or both) downstream consequences.    

This stuff can take a long time to build up. To track some of this, it might be helpful to trace out some of the popular cultural production that uses this subjectivity as raw material for its storytelling. For instance, for decades there has been a cultural fascination with zombies as a mythological construct, which as imagery has evolved over time as it is revisited and reimagined through contemporary lenses as they progressively iterate. One of the major underlying anxieties in the zombie mythos is of a mass of humanity suddenly changed, and then set into motion as killer automata which trundle across the landscape, devouring any surviving "decent" and "unturned" individual caught in their wake. Though of course with recent popular re-imaginings like The Walking Dead, the surviving hold-outs are often some of the worst and most dangerous threats as they fight to survive in spite of themselves amidst the altered landscape. 

One of my personal favorite zombie motifs is the "hoard" and all of the associated dynamics and anxieties that accompany that concept. The presence of the hoard (basically a large mass of zombies) tends to change the story calculus from particulars and individuals and all of those associated dramas - which themselves are good and interesting no doubt - to a structural calculus of environmental forces that need to be navigated. 

The hoard, due in large part to its sheer size and momentum as the accumulation of numerous single zombies - which each on their own carries a potential danger of its own but which can be managed on an individual basis - carries with it so much destructive force as a sum that merely being caught in its general direction implies certain ruin. It is a problem of the destructive force of overwhelming number and movement. And so the solution to coping with it is not so much gaining mastery over it as it is learning what direction it is moving and at what velocity, and then managing to stay out of its way. 

The particulars of the zombie mythos are many, and so can be creatively applied in many other ways, but to repeat one common theme, it can be seen to express that old early modern fear of the crowd, echoed long after the World Wars, when masses of violent and chaotic runaway human energy were unleashed on an industrial scale with industrialized implements of destruction. 

To bring it back to our subjective analysis, what are the experiential underpinnings which build up such destructive forces and then set them into motion? As we've detailed in discussions previously, that growing instability and dynamism accompanying a mass loss of temper is coming back into full swing, which you can see and feel. Troublingly, a lot of what I've seen in people - and then heard about in various accounts - is that your average person is just not ready or equipped for such things, which is part of the point being made here. I don't want to put people down as "sheeple," it is just that most people don't have the time or resources to build up the spiritual and intellectual structures needed to individually absorb the incoming mass trauma that we're going to see, without of course producing additional cascades of reaction and trauma in turn. 

Part of this is capacity and then part of this is time and energy. For example, if you are slighted by someone but you are not immediately threatened, you might chew over what was said and done for a while. There are many ways to do this: with tools of communication, by meditating on the other person's subjective experience, by situating the slight within your own consciousness and making room for it, and so on, and you may be able to resolve the slight within yourself or even with the other person without continuously amplifying it and making it worse. 

However if you have less time, underdeveloped coping skills and resources, or the stakes are higher, or a combination of these things, you have to react to that slight or even threat with what you have at the moment. And even reactions are conditioned by training and knowledge previously built up. The man coming at you with a knife has to be reacted to whether you can sympathize with his history and motivations or not, but someone trained in self-defense is going to handle it differently than someone who is not. 

I think of the difference between water passing over concrete on the one hand and then settling into a wetlands on the other. Water needs all of those little recesses and passages and living systems to trickle into and then become absorbed in and made use of. With something like concrete, it only passes over it, accumulating in mass and speed. When you witness and absorb world events, all of that needs to percolate through all of the various knowledge structures that you've built up. Sitting with it, you can absorb it and situate it within ongoing world events. People who have not had the time to build up these structures however are hit with it all at once, and have to react with what they have, oftentimes with crude tools passed to them by those looking to gain something by the crudity and nature of those tools. 

Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda for example have talked about Jewish friends suddenly discovering Zionism after October 7. I've seen this too. I'm working off of memory of an insightful podcast they put on a while ago, but as Levine and Kovda put it, it tended to be people without previously built up political ideologies, skills, and experiences, who were suddenly confronted with an extremely traumatic event without the means to situate that event historically or politically, and who reacted to it in kind. What do you do with news of an act of directed violence? You situate that direction within ready-made - and cynically circulated - crude explanations such as a mainstream conception of antisemitism and the nature of Israel. 

The act of violence witnessed on October 7 - as a dialectical act connected to many other acts of violence over a long span of time - becomes amputated from that greater reality and focused upon as a singular event, and then grafted onto a simplified narrative of antisemitic violence, deployed as a shaped charge to provoke reactive violence in a specific direction, which in the end can be used to justify something like genocide. 

Domestically, you see this in the polarization surrounding the US dual party system and the media apparatus that amplifies and reproduces that system. You see people en masse latching onto the political squabbles of the legacy parties and then polarizing with them, snapping into that simple binary schema and eating up the simplistic political narratives that come down the pipe, narratives that are produced both to grease the wheels of an antiquated and dysfunctional political system and to turn a profit. 

The nature of both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump reflect how the greater political and cultural apparatus work, and how they produce people and for what purpose those people are produced. What they do and say in the course of their campaigns, and then in office, reflects a professional functionality and totality that is rapidly breaking down, and there are plenty of people who have commented on these things and/or who have voted anyway with this full knowledge. But there are plenty more who are latching onto these candidates as true believers, fully taking up their rhetoric and their communicated aspirations as a standalone reality, and will be set in motion in the direction prescribed by these things, which in a polarized dual party system means in direct and violent opposition to each other. 

How things are built is a contributing factor to how they become unbuilt. A falling high-rise is a terrible thing, and for that matter one that is bombed is an even more terrible thing. What goes up must come down, and what goes way up must come way down and with much force, and where there is concentrated energy, there is the potential for its concentrated dispersal as well. 

What I'm getting at here in general is that our industrial societies are built to go ever higher and ever faster, and to become ever more top-heavy, instrumentalizing the whole of creation to do so. People are produced and cyclically reproduced to administrate this system, and so it is no wonder that so many of them, atomized and strung out, their backs to the wall, latch on to the simple schema and manipulations at hand when increasingly unstable and concentrated forces begin peppering them from all sides, those forces increasingly set free by the ungainliness of the very system that their increasing chaotic velocity is degrading. 

It is difficult to say how significant the election will prove to be after we are afforded some hindsight, but it is certainly an important cyclical milestone and break-point which can be pointed at, making more visual and apparent a whole array of affairs connected to it, and which implies a certain flow of changes cascading from it in turn.  All of which is to say: good luck to all of us!

This was another difficult piece to produce, and I'm going to have to assume that it might be a bit difficult to read as well. But as usual, we're going to keep exploring many of these themes and continue to clarify them in time, especially as I get these rusty joints moving again. 

Getting Back to It

OK, well things are kind of starting to quiet down here, relatively speaking, and I'm getting ready to get going on here again. I've got to make up for my halved content output this year. My writing muscles are a little atrophied from the feel of it, so I'm easing in with another seasonal piece. I've got a series of diversionary pieces that came out of a recent backpacking trip that I'll warm up with as the fall starts to set in. And then I plan on addressing further the state of this batshit world we have to experience collectively, and continue work on a huge backlog of pieces that I was working on in the past couple of months, and even years. 

I've also got a treasure trove of pictures that came out of the said backpacking trip, which I plan to let out in a drip, as opposed to just dropping them all at once. More to come soon. 

Falling

In the Pacific Northwest, it is the cold rain that really starts to express the tough love of Fall’s onset: it is time for you to chill out and get your ass inside. Warm rain on the other hand may not be the most pleasant for working in, but it doesn’t quite diminish the bite of that old guilt emanating from the Protestant Work Ethic, that relentless spiritual echo of an era when Western humanity was relentlessly clawing back a social order that was being crushed in the cold grip of the Little Ice Age. 

In the warm rain, your layers get progressively soaked and the dirt turns to mud and you track the stuff everywhere. It can be quite miserable, but it also doesn’t quite extinguish that incessant nag that you should probably be out getting something done. Every available hour where it is physically possible to toil away is best seized and burned up. And lawd help you if those clouds break to reveal a clear day with a shining sun, and the labor-guilt burns through, hot like the emerging sun itself: "Time is money; let's get to it."

The cold rain on the other hand soaks through and your body temperature starts dipping, and in the ensuing chill you think, well to hell with this, and you go in to warm up and get dry by the fire. And the first frosts trigger the end of the growing season for most plants, and the insects vanish and go into their hibernation, and all of the birds and mammals that depend on all of this follow suit to downshift their own frenetic activity. Everything begins to disappear, and the earth begins to go quieter. That’s when the thoughts begin to turn inward: the recursive review of the working season kicks in. The energy goes to the head. The emotions wander those inner recesses and pick away at past experiences, and the imagination kicks in and one speculates about what’s next.  

There is a finality to a changing transition season, because as everything begins to go dormant at once, there is a broad-based quieting that changes the entire texture of the productive landscape. Productive activity shifts to preserving what harvests are left - and of course some of this starts in the Summer too - because there will be a long stretch of time in which nothing is producing, and so it is a time to stockpile and then begin to prepare for the dead of Winter.  

And yet! The coming of the cold and the rain was touched off from a belch of warm air from the south, from where Summer still hollers. I woke in the middle of the night to rigorous warm gusts, which roared with a sustain in which you could hear the waves of wind passing through the trees, but which then continued on roaring and shaking longer than expected, and I rolled onto the floor and against the bed after hearing cracks and crashes as distant trees and limbs fell, and then an even closer crash as the top of a nearby leaning alder-of-concern busted off and hit the ground nearby. 

Well, not all growing quiet and contemplation. The gears grind as we prepare for a changing-of-the-guard in the presidential election. And reports continue to pour in of a world bathed in rocket fire in the Middle East. Off we slouch into Winter. 

Getting There

I'm not quite at the point where I can fully clear my throat and start putting out all of those pieces that have backed up in my queue. But they are there. The notes are there. The ideas are there. Plenty to get written up. I just have a whole lot of work to do in the meantime, finishing things up here on the homestead as the fall starts to creep in. I thought I'd put out a seasonal-specific piece at least that was a little time sensitive. Plenty more to come when I can get to it. 

Endless Summer

I've been meaning to do a piece on summer - I kind of like the idea of sounding off a little something on each season, as they are at least fairly distinct here - and now that the summer here is on its way out - lingering a bit like a guest starting to wear out its welcome - it seemed like a good time to put out a sketch before it fades from immediate memory. 

In some renditions it is the fall in which the active, energetic events of the summer slow and come to a close, in which the summation of one's actions begins to be evaluated, and so on into the dead of winter, where there is plenty of quiet, fallow time to ruminate on the fading year, before cycling back to the clean open of the next spring, to try it all again. 

But I think that recursive reflection process stretches well back into the peak of summer itself, when one is cresting on the peak of one's energies, which are set against the peaking energies of the rest of the earth. And one begins to discover the limits of one's will and the stores of energy backing it, as it comes up against other wills exhausting their own energies. One's successes may mount up yes, but one's failures mount up in this time too. One may overpower and best others and be saddened by this, and one may be overpowered and bested by others and saddened by it all the same. By the end of the summer one is growing tired of the striving: "Enough! Let me rest!"

The sagging nettle tell the story well: they've towered as far as their stalks could hold their bursting flowers, and they peak and begin to surrender again to gravity, curving back towards the earth, an air of exhaustion overtaking them as their leaves burn and whither in the sun and are chewed through by insects. The same story is told by many other plants in the understory. And the trees above sigh and drop their seeds, leaves, needles, and cones. 

What's changing is the slow rolling smoothness of this process. Because with the augmenting heat cyclically put into successive summers, it gets more difficult to put the lid on and keep it there. The early fall cold fronts roll in with the clouds, and the cool air blows through, and the rains come in, but they are unable to extinguish the sun, which burns back through, still quite summer-hot, further and further into the fall season. 

So everything begins to wind down, and then summer flickers back on for a week or two, and the insects stumble back out to resume their chores, confused, and the fruiting plants go back to producing their fruit, which bears a consistency of confusion itself, some of it overripe, with others not quite ripe enough, and then some ripening wonderfully and late. 

The changing sound and texture of the forest itself bears the signature of changing distribution and accumulation of energy and heat. New plants, insects, and birds suddenly make their appearance and proliferate. And the growing heat and moisture leading to an explosion of tree frogs sounding off in the canopy above. Slug season is greatly extended this year and they are everywhere still. The energy moves through the forest in light and heat, and then new faces and voices follow. 

The past couple of years it was hotter and drier, and now it is hotter and wetter, the various associated dangers of each surplus shifting and oscillating throughout the season, and so the act of predicting itself becomes fraught. 

It of course depends on the region and the culture, but here in the West you would find a lot of mythical dread represented in the Winter, in which the precious little energy wanes, and dark forces emerge in the dead of night to take their pounds of flesh. But at least for me, where I am, it is the peak of summer that I dread, when the forest becomes a tinderbox, and there is much heat and energy setting everything into a kinetic overabundance: the ever-present danger of wildfire, the suffocating smoke of nearby wildfires, the nutballs kicked around at work and cranky in the heat, coming up into the canyon after they get off work to discharge their firearms and drop off piles of garbage that occasionally catch fire, the sudden heavy, explosive rains, and so on. 

Here we can contrast a winter evil (in which a dearth of energy sets vampiric life leeches into motion) with a summer evil in which an overabundance of surplus energy meets itself and crashes into itself. In some ways this is a privileged (and geographically localized) position, as I usually have something to eat and a warm place to land, but I am finding that for me the seasonal dread has shifted and inverted in some ways, and I have come to yearn for the deadening quiet of winter, to take refuge in, and to pause the frenetic pace of work (keeping up with the rapidly growing plant mass for one thing) to focus back on things I've missed, such as reading, writing, thinking, making music, and the like. 

To repeat this from a different and personal angle, the shift has occurred over the years in the following way: for me as a child the summer was supposed to be a time of carefree play and open-ended free time, with the fall cooling experienced as a dread of the coming sobriety and rigidity of the public school year. As an adult, and moving more towards traditional, seasonal labor, in a rapidly changing global climate, that feeling has gradually inverted.  

But also too, the world system and the global ecology are in a state of instability, and shifting to something else, which could take some time indeed, but then currently it is difficult to settle on a clear picture of the way things are. All we know is that they are changing, and on a very large scale. So I'll keep putting out various impressions of that process as it becomes appropriate. 

Letting the Vision Breathe

Given the complexity and long historical sweep of our navigable world, it takes a certain vision to cut through the noise of it and anticipate it and navigate it while living within it, while managing to avoid becoming lost. It might take letting that vision breathe a bit, letting the size and sweep of that vision take a little space of its own. Or in other words, it might mean taking the risk of being a bit of a crank. 

Landscape Affect

In the same day you can wander through a meadow kind of carefree and feel at ease, and then traverse a craggy ridge and just be completely on edge and carefully calculating and choreographing every step. The landscape and the necessities of that environment can play a significant part in ordering your conscious experience and resulting behaviors. 

And then we go and structure our society like that craggy ridge, with its mammoth rising and falling "competitive" enterprises, which themselves under the pressure claw together their "moats" and "retaining walls" to establish their monopolies and keep their shape, while between them exist yawning chasms where the billowing tatters of social safety nets sway in the breeze. If you squint you can make them out when they catch the light, like glinting spider webs. 

And so it is no small wonder that so many people, facing such an environment, live with a constant tension, some of them acting like complete maniacs and predators to traverse their splintered homes. 

Easing Up

I thought I'd take a break from the successive sketches of the character and movements of capital and do a little light posting here for a moment. Mostly because of how busy I've been and how physically tired I am. And I can always get back to elaborating on the heavy stuff later. 

I'm going to try to ease up on writing the apology pieces for dropping the ball. Mostly a lot of it was for my own edification anyway. I doubt that anyone coming across this was too worried about it. 

But also, there is just such a high volume of quality content steadily coming through everywhere else I frequent that I'm not sure it is even a big deal to have periods of silence here. And again in the meantime I'm usually soaking a bunch up and absorbing it to be integrated and worked in later. 

There is something else going on here that is related to that though. I've heard a number of creative people expressing that it has gotten more difficult to put a lot of work into a creative piece on the Internet and then to have it last and generate enough interest for enough time before the interest melts away and shifts to something else. There is a perceived continuous acceleration of change and happening that is increasingly difficult to keep up with. 

As the folks at the wonderful This Machine Kills podcast discussed in a recent episode, there was an assassination attempt on a major presidential figure, which has already largely dissolved back into the news cycle and vanished; something they found really strange. 

Which is not only an Internet and "Information Age" phenomenon of course. Just a week ago I was sitting in bed and starting hearing gunshots, and then the hail of bullets came, whizzing through the trees around me - I could hear them hitting nearby trees and ricocheting off of nearby rocks - because some blockhead wanted to fire off some rounds into the forest. Maybe dump some of that summer and social heat eh? And now that event has passed in the rearview. On to the next one. 

In general you could say the notable events are cropping up in greater frequency. Lenin's "weeks where decades happen" perhaps. This is certainly something meaty that I'll have to get deeper into at another time. 

Not that I'll discontinue my self-critical and reflective pieces - here's one of them now - just that if there is a lapse and I wash downstream, I'll just pop up somewhere else again (probably and hopefully) and try to resume where I left off. Out of necessity if anything; these things just keep coming. 

I'll Get To It

In regard to the standing deposits of unused or even used things, such as infrastructure and wastes - like China's ghost cities - for the most part you can eventually get to them and absorb them or use them or reincorporate them in some way, so long as you're not too excited and moving too fast. 

For example, we have these big limb piles all over the property. This is a biproduct of annual limbing and the processing of trees, with the logs used for timber or firewood. Felling trees, you're going to have all sorts of limbs to deal with. You can either use them or try to scatter them in the woods; of course it is good to put material back in the woods too, but the sitting limbs can add to ground fuel for a wildfire if they don't have time to rot and break down. 

The limb piles can be useful for all sorts of things, like building with them, or adding coarse woody debris to fill in with or mound things up with. We just got the chipper-shredder running again, which is a gnarly piece of machinery that just loudly chews them up and spits out wood chips, a valuable resource for fill, pathways, and mulching. 

Before you get to them, the limb piles make for eyesores, and besides they just take up space that you could be using for something else. Though on the other hand they will break down over time as they sit, and after a while the bugs get to them and enjoy them, and they can serve as habitat. 

Anyway, the piles can eventually be processed and used when you get to them, or they can just pile up and sit and take up room and look bad, especially if you keep processing trees without taking a minute. And certainly they make for marvelous fuel for a wildfire if one gets going. 

That's part of what sleep is for the individual. The brain and body have time to downshift and process all of that weird chaotic stuff you've been absorbing day in and day out. The brain gets rid of all that gunk building up in its inner recesses and so on. 

Capital, as manic and restless as it is, is fond of getting excited about one thing or another, and then transforming it into various forms of product and waste, and then moving on to the next exciting thing as the old processes peak and collapse, or grow too difficult and/or boring, before it all gets to be properly absorbed. All those shells of old coal towns in the US for example, which boomed in the early industrial period, with the mines spitting out tailings and the people spit out and used all the same, the towns drying up into ghost towns after they were no longer useful, especially as oil power came online. 

Or the nuke stations, humming away and producing wastes that have to be buried deep underground or otherwise stored, which sometimes re-emerge after geological changes or water infiltration and there's a spill, the consequences of which are usually hardest on the most vulnerable such as native peoples, poor people, and communities of color, whoever for whatever reason gets the least valued land containing these flaws, or whose least valued land becomes acceptable receptacles for wastes. 

How exciting are the products and wastes? How far are they taken and transformed from the normal rhythms of nature? And if they can be absorbed on a human timescale, then you do have to take the time and the care to actually incorporate them into what you are doing, or let them re-enter the regular circulations of the natural world. Otherwise it all starts to build up and take useable space, or otherwise conflict with the other forms of life it is incompatible with.  

This problem is made much more difficult when you have a world stage full of rival powers pursuing their own objectives, harnessing and developing the flows of global capital in their own ways, constantly juicing the pace and scale of change. 

It's Good To Be King

So I briefly compared the new capitalist to the king-figure in terms of the impulse to selfish control and the concentration of power. A couple more words on that. 

There are many forms of human organization and their accompanying distribution and varying concentrations of power, which denote different scales, and which have varying connotations and meanings as well. 

These forms arise appropriate to the geographies and environments that give rise to them, and they have unique histories of their own. And to further complicate things - at least as is apparent in the last couple of thousand years of the history of human civilization - these forms seem to evolve through cyclical processes of succession. 

These processes themselves are subjects of contention, debate, and competing theory. One of the more memorable and long-running theories is Polybius' theory of anacyclosis, which posits that societies move cyclically through phases of ochlocracy (mob rule), monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and then back to ochlocracy again. 

Implied in this succession is a gradual dispersion of power from points of concentration, a centrifugal process in which power is gradually pulled outward, seeking more broad and stable patterns, before settling into stable concentrations of their own, eventually corrupting further and dispersing further, until dispersal is so complete that it can be gathered up and concentrated more completely again, beginning the process anew. 

As fascinating as all this is, the point I wanted to make for now is that complicated processes such as these, as well as their vast temporal and spatial distributions, and their relative position to varying interests looking to label and qualify them, make possible all kinds of terms for the varying concentrations of power we see in human societies: we have kings, monarchs, emperors, tyrants, dictators, presidents, prime ministers, chiefs, CEOs, lords, warlords, generals, parliaments, senates and bodies of representatives, boards, communities, and so on across all kinds of concentrations of power across time and space. 

And to cut through what all of these terms mean, I think it is probably safe to say that what all of them have in common is that they are all ways of describing certain distinct patterns and concentrations of power, which are affected in order to organize groups of individuals on varying scales in order to achieve certain results collectively. 

Even in smaller scale egalitarian tribes, you're likely to have certain individuals that emerge as "leaders," in that they have accumulated a certain body of experience and knowledge of their respective domains, who are deferred to if one is to properly achieve what one sets out to do. You have elders and chiefs and shamans, who have reached a certain level of achievement in medicine, spirituality, building, hunting, diplomacy and interpersonal relations, and what have you. 

And there is power in a given title of designation, because it does suggest a certain level of attainment, though these things can certainly diverge, which is another matter entirely. Because anything worth doing can be done well or poorly. As Eric Hoffer put it, even switching from picking peas to string beans had in it an "element of fear" (he was a Depression-era migratory worker) because the two picking processes were different, and learning one didn't necessarily mean the mastery of the other, which you could still screw up, depending on how high the stakes were. 

Which is to say that if you've been doing something well for a long time, you should probably be listened to and deferred to, because this experience and knowledge tends to produce correctly the results you want, that in turn produces wealth and lets you do further things, which thusly affords power. Now, the really interesting thing  about this is when you start scaling this issue up and factoring in these longer cycles of power succession, as we see in the last couple thousand years of human history. 

I mentioned that mismatch between title and attainment: at larger scales and under certain amounts of stress and pressure, you might need to concentrate more power in less individuals and have that concentration much more durable, as much more is at stake. In a dangerous environment for example, where the risk of ruin is high, you might want to follow the person who at least claims to know what they are doing, which if there are competing claims, tend to be demonstrated through violence anyway. 

In regard to the king or warlord designation for example, there are accounts out there of societies that were relatively peaceful and egalitarian, getting by somewhere stable on perhaps farming or hunting and gathering, who had to migrate because of some sort of disaster like an erupting volcano, and who emerged transformed and much more warlike and hierarchical. For now I'm working off of memory and this should be treated as hearsay; I'll try to get more specific and nail this claim down when I come across more data.  

But anyway taking this pattern for granted, this creates new internal problems. You want a durability in power concentration so as to guide the collective through a dangerous time, and that durability may outlast its usefulness or appropriateness. For example you might have a succession of kings that have lived off of their ancestors' legacies, who become progressively more inept and corrupt, whose ineptness and corruptness becomes the threat that that institution was built to stave off, giving rise to that historical cycle of power dispersion we briefly touched on earlier. 

And over time, you have such a concentration and frequency of rising and falling powers that there is basically a constant social and political danger of relaxing that concentration of power, however destructive and self-defeating that concentration becomes. History is replete with broad and creative social movements, with their constituents seeking to keep power balanced and social trust high, only to have all of their creative energy siphoned off and cordoned off by concentrating king figures, and the kings end up winning again and again and again. 

You have the mellow hippies stomped in the coalescing of the Roman Republic, and then again in the history of Christianity, in the centralization and concentration of the Viking kingdoms, in the Renaissance, in the Protestant Reformation, in the colonization of North America and the formation of the United States, within political and cultural and economic movements within the history of the United States, and so on. 

As far back as classical antiquity, the Greeks viewed the processes of anacyclosis as largely destructive and undesirable, scheming up contrivances to get around the problem such as Plato's philosopher king and republic, among others, which in turn influenced founders of the US, who were largely in agreement, scheming to contrive their own mechanisms of republic to account for the problem. 

We talk about free enterprise and unrestricted entrepreneurial endeavor and all the like, but really upon examination you find that the organizations of capital - the corporations and financial institutions - are broadly autocratic, full of unhappy and alienated people, which act on the broader public, also making them unhappy and alienated. Institutions, that left to themselves and freed, continuously produce bondage and coercion where they grow and prosper. 

There is a broadly popular dislike and distrust of corporations, yet they continuously coalesce into the forms that they do in fairly reliable processes of succession, concentrating into monopolies that ever more intensely exploit their surroundings and then even themselves, oftentimes cannibalizing themselves in the process. 

And this repetitive production of undesirable results, which continues apace outside of our collective stated intentions, can be analyzed, and certain deep historical influences and causes can be pointed to which accounts for these results. And due in part to these historical influences and ongoing forces in motion, we've collectively set up our institutions and organizations to work this way and to get things done this way, though it doesn't have to be so. We've explored some of this, and will continue to explore this in time.  

On Capital

Capital is often personified as this simultaneously organic and mechanical demigod, a self-augmenting machine, sometimes with moods and appetites, which takes inputs and reliably and repetitively manufactures products and/or services, and in realizing that production, accrues award and resource, which it plows back into itself, and so then augments and grows, continuously taking in more input and producing more product, augmenting further, and so on. 

And this is sort of a rough way to imagine and conceptualize it. It captures part of its general character. But capital is also built and maintained by human beings, human beings that are responding to very deep and old historical traumas, and who through personal instinct and collectively produced custom and institutional structure have developed particular ways of imagining and organizing labor. 

One could do well to investigate the conditions of that crucible where modern capital emerged: the crisis of the late Middle Ages. The story I got in high school European history was that Middle Ages Europe was a violent and tumultuous place, which starting in the 14th century, experienced a series of religious wars, popular revolts, and civil wars, eventually leading to the Western schism in the Catholic Church, further weakening the hold of the Church, and sparking the Protestant Reformation. 

Further on down the line, modern nations were continuing to centralize and spread their wings as the Church's public roles disintegrated and localized, further shedding religious ideology and iconography in favor of newly emerging Enlightenment principles. Beyond the high school story, with further research one could make out early capital emerging in that process, becoming ever more private as the states conversely centralized. Indeed, capital developed first in England where the state was centralizing the quickest, which was poised to muscle out and destroy the commons on behalf of its budding oligarchs. 

All well and good. All of that did happen. But for me the more interesting question was why? What was it that was impelling all of that tumult? Where was all of that violent and explosive energy coming from? 

One thing that immediately becomes apparent upon investigation is how bad things got in the late Middle Ages. The formation of feudal Western Europe was a violent enough process, as we explored in the era of the Migration Period of the Germanic tribes and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the subsequent smashing together of classical antiquity and the nomadic tribes as they settled into the decaying shell of the Western Empire and propped back up those crumbling foundations, which happened in waves, such as when the Viking Era was set off, and so on. 

Eventually that process stabilized and Western Europe enjoyed several centuries of stability, in which a centralizing Catholic church oversaw a period of growth and prosperity, with that latent violence nevertheless lurking, at the ready. 

It was in the early 14th century when the Little Ice Age began - there were several cooling events before that, but nothing quite this dramatic - which was called "little" because it didn't resemble a proper global ice age, but a more regional one, with various speculated causes such as volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation, and changes in oceanic circulation and planetary orbit. And these changes could have been intensified and elongated by depopulation from Genghis Khan's campaigns, the Great Famine and Black Death, and then the conquest of the Americas some time after that. 

The Great Famine and Black Death largely resulted from the cooling, which fed back into that process. The Great Famine of 1315-1317 was bad enough for Western Europe: even the summers became cold and rainy, which resulted in widespread failed grain ripening and harvest, among other failing crops. This led not only to human hunger, but to livestock hunger as well, which weakened them and made them vulnerable to disease, killing more of them off. If that wasn't enough, even the brine couldn't be evaporated in the wet weather, cutting off salt production, a key ingredient for preserving what meat there could be had. 

So, you had a massive contraction in population, not only from hunger, but from various diseases like tuberculosis resulting from the hunger, and so the plummeting of the agricultural labor pool ensured that the food supply wouldn't recover for some time. And this was even before the Black Plague, which hit a famine-weakened population all the harder, further destroying the labor pool and stunting the food supply. 

Yes, the sharp contraction of the labor pool did eventually benefit labor, and the dramatic effects of the plague eventually completely upended existing hierarchies, but it would take centuries for the population to recover, especially considering the extended effects of depopulation and reforestation on the climate cooling. 

Given this grim process, the ensuing population revolts, civil wars, and religious wars (including the Hundred Years War) make a lot more sense, in which the unity of the Church was shattered, partially sparking the Renaissance and then the Protestant Reformation, among the many knock-on effects. 

It was in the tumult of this great contraction and its extended effects that you begin to see early capital gaining its legs. The population collapse and the steep resource cliff hit the regional feudal lords hard, making them more aggressive about military conquest and seizure of productive land, which squeezed what labor was left. And so there was a new kind of merchant/landholding class that split off, interested not only in arbitrage and global trade, as per its historical lane, but also in the land and production on the land itself, and improvement of the land and of production, which began opening up as the feudal kingdoms disintegrated. 

There was an existing level of human development and standard of living - especially as experienced by the aristocracy - that was suddenly rapidly degraded and cut off, and so there was a rapacious effort to claw back those gains. But suddenly those communally organized and church-directed bodies of organized labor were in steep contraction and fragmenting. 

Part of the solution to this could be seen in the intellectual output in the 17th and then the 18th centuries. There was a growing distrust of the fragmenting church to direct governance over an organic whole: the church and that enforced sense of piety didn't go away immediately - which you can make out in the odd contortions of Descartes' thought. However there was a growing emphasis on personal "autonomous reason" which then gave way to "technical reason," a solution to a profound and collective loss of religious feeling which gradually became more and more material, with a growing emphasis on material development. 

The organized laboring bodies of the Middle Ages were losing their temper, and so the individual was breaking away, guided by reason. But something had to pick up the slack for the collapse in organized labor and the loss of human resource. This was to be the machine, organized by the budding merchant and then capitalist, who was to midwife the birth of capital. 

Simultaneously as the necessity for intensified productivity was biting, a population was growing of landless laborers who had to sell their labor as enclosure set in, who would first be absorbed into the consolidating farms selling for a market that was also growing, and then into the factories as urbanization advanced. 

It was apparent that the laboring body of wage earners was what was first to be seen as the machine: a manipulable mass of depersonalized individuals, ideally interchangeable and bought and sold, placed together in a specific organization that is continuously refined so as to maximize efficiency and production. 

Eventually the machines gelled out of the mass of human technological development and were inserted into this process. Iron and then steel could brace and then bind together organized labor, maintaining its shape and function against the sloppiness of the individual. 

To circle back to our humans, capital could be seen as a profoundly selfish impulse, in which labor is sharply organized into a steep hierarchy, controlled at the top by a single individual or a couple of individuals, controlling a lion's share of the resources coming in from those efforts, who trusts neither the land that is seized upon nor the organized labor that transforms the products of that land, who is content to expropriate those products and sell them into an impersonal market, always hovering above the ground and above beastly labor, accumulating ever more wealth and power, getting as far away from the earth - that great betrayer - as possible. The emerging capitalist might have asked himself: "The king seemed to have it good, but how to get it for myself as I broke away?"

The average individual may have a poor intellectual grasp of this history, but the instinctual and spiritual sensibilities in a given age go long, and impress themselves in the individual whether welcomed or not. And besides, the interactions of a multitude over generations tends to pass on those sensibilities socially and culturally and snap them in for some time, producing model individuals to be emulated as well. Though now that sensibility is rapidly breaking down in the face of climate catastrophe, among other pressing issues. 

Here, Catch!

It can be somewhat amusing - if you can avoid those familiar incandescent feelings of frustration and rage that can well up in such circumstances - to read the steady stream of pearl-clutching Western economic analyses that wail on about how hopeless and irrational China's national economic policy is, and how it is all going to come toppling down any moment.  

I mean really, why did China build all of those ghost cities? Why are they pouring all of this money and all of these resources into profit-losing infrastructure domestically and internationally? What about all of their shadow banks and all of that overhanging debt? What's with all that unfair currency devaluation and mercantile behavior? Irrational Asiatic despots!

OK, barring the racist caricature at the end, there are some legitimate questions in there that can lead to legitimate analysis. There are serious analysts pointing to some of these problems, offering their own sobering concerns through thoughtful argument. And China does have some very serious and very difficult problems to deal with as a nation, even setting aside the intractable problems we collectively face as industrial societies. 

But also, China is a society that is structured very differently from the West's, where energy moves through it very differently as a result, and so collective action problems will emerge very differently and be solved very differently as a result. Ah, if only China could become a good neoliberal free-marketer and get behind the US' trade program, harmony could be restored. But I jest. Simple projection ain't gonna get it. There is more going on here than a simple misunderstanding of a rival power though.  

To go back to our Western economic pundits (I know, shooting fish in a barrel), it was as if their society existed completely removed from the rest of the world system, and for that matter, those very pundits could stroll outside and break into a hover, never actually touching the dirt below their feet. For one thing, the ostensibly "global" financial crisis was really just a disembodied hiccup, a cloud of "mistakes that were made" which dissipated into the nothing it mysteriously emerged from. And this is the bizarre solipsistic perception that pervades the Western ruling class, and which informs their equally bizarre decision-making process, which in the end threatens all of us, which I'll get to.  

No, no, the global financial crisis couldn't have been a traumatic cardiac event - as David Harvey more or less put it - for the whole world system, in which the global designated-consumer of the West seized up in a fit of delusion and self-dealing, blowing up the financial system, and then through economic superstition and panic, retreating into contractionary and senile fits of austerity, while all the while lashing out at the failing states most vulnerable to such policies as those states buckled, threatening to derail the global processes of resource extraction, production, and manufacturing, which feeds that consumption, along with the constant circulation of monies facilitating those flows. 

Why do they think China poured all of those record-breaking masses of concrete in record time, and built out those historic masses of infrastructure, jumpstarting the resource extraction economies around the globe, filling in the global demand for concrete and energy and steel and other materials, so as to stave off that circulating blood slowing and turning to stone? Who do they think kept that multitude of resource flows pumping? 

I think of that famous I Love Lucy episode, in which poor Lucy and Ethel get trapped on an assembly line on the factory floor of a chocolate producer, increasingly unable to cope with a working pace that is constantly accelerating, and so the wreckage of the backed up chocolates grows and grows in front of them, the results growing ever more chaotic and desperate, no matter how many surplus chocolates they absorbed by eating them and stuffing them down their shirts. 

Concerning the global financial crisis, it was as if in that moment of assembly line distress, a bowling ball was tossed into Lucy's arms as she frantically manipulated the assembly line, and then the Western pundit proceeded to concern-troll her for suddenly handling the bowling ball and letting all the  surplus chocolates continue to pile up somewhere else, while somehow maintaining the integrity of the assembly line. 

It would be one thing if this ignorance appeared intentional and malign, which would be contemptible and unfair, but also understandable. Which is something that you could call out. And sure, some of it certainly is. But I'm not so sure that a lot of mainstream Western commentators are even aware of the actual workings of the world system, beyond a pinpoint perception of a particular actor, in this case China as a circumscribed nation, a perception that wanders from subject to subject in accordance with whatever happens to be fashionable and expedient to comment on at the moment. Do they have a clue about what they don't know? Maybe some of them? That seems a little bit more difficult to address, which is all the more pressing as foreign policy makers continue to turn the economic screws while the sabers rattle.    

Therein lie some of the frightening consequences of a solipsistic hegemonic power as it wrestles with the growing wreckage of a global system intimately bound up with its own flailing activity. Which bears a macrocosmic relation to that of the monopolist, residing as a paradigmatic economic actor in its bosom: the monopolist fought and clawed to control every aspect of its domain and stamp out any sort of competitor. And then, having a wide open and desertified arena to act in, the monopolist was left with a complete lack of any sort of self-governing province internal to it to correct dysfunction, a problem which grew worse as the monopolist peaked, and then degraded and weakened, its faculties of governance degrading with it. 

Concerning this poverty of understanding, you can make out very real consequences of the decision-making processes connected to this understanding, which are more readily felt in the kinetic arenas of the Ukraine War and the Israeli destruction of Gaza. Even setting aside the human and moral horror of either conflict, and the serious complex of consequences stemming from that horror, it is clear to see growing economic dysfunction, which causes its share of problems downstream, connected to the progression of those conflicts. And you could certainly point to that dysfunction and address the moral fool: "Look, by your own abominable interests and metrics, this ain't workin'!"

The lighting on fire of inadequate military resources for one thing, and the destruction of Europe's industry, and then the failure of sanctions and the disruption of supply chains in the form of resources such as grain and energy on the one hand, and the intensifying strain put on the Arab world on the other, with the agitated Yemenis alone greatly disrupting shipping traffic in the Red Sea, forcing the rerouting of commercial shipping, doubling and tripling (and more) shipping costs in many cases, putting ever more inflationary pressure on the entire system, prompting senile Western institutions like the Fed to continue to put pressure of their own on interest rates, intensifying the debt strain and slowing economic activity, and so on. And all of this undisciplined destruction and its consequences only puts ever more pressure on an already over-strained world system. 

Which of course is something that usually motivates and accelerates the rise of rivals to edge out the failing monopolist and refill the vacuum left in its wake. 

It has been somewhat encouraging to see China surge ahead on various technological, infrastructural, economic, and governance questions. However inadequate these measures might be for the collective action problem concerning the climate, I'll take what encouragements I can get while living in the late neoliberal world, which more or less refuses to do anything other than cobble some disembodied images together and watch numbers go up as the world burns, largely by its own hand. But one thing I find very concerning is the underlying dynamic between the powers in relation to a greater system. 

You have a very old, vast, highly populated, and advanced nation like China - with the incredible geopolitical center of gravity all of that implies - acting the way it did when a global shock like the global financial crisis dropped, transforming that global cardiac event into great standing deposits of whole ghost cities and tottering shadow banking instruments loaded up with mind-numbing masses of debt, deep in the heart of that nation. And China had just emerged stronger out of its century of humiliation, discovering the necessity of rapidly industrializing and liberalizing to cope with the movements of global capital, unleashing Covid in the tumultuous processes of production, among other things. 

If that is what survival in the world system and its tightly coupled instruments of production and supply chains demanded of a giant like China, what about the rest of us? Of course, I suspect much of this is what has been motivating China and the rest of the world to decouple, to be sure. Time to unhitch from the bozos asleep at the wheel. But is there enough time to complete such a delicate, complex, and fraught process while avoiding systemic catastrophe? Is it even possible? 

Granted, we've seen this sort of thing occur throughout history, in which multiple great powers eventually become more and more economically and politically integrated, only to gradually and then rapidly pull out of those commitments and either re-align towards simpler and smaller alliances or pursue ever more autarky, or both simultaneously at varying rates and scales, based on what is working, as the existing larger scale political and economic agreements break down. 

What we've also seen however is an unprecedented level of global integration and the corresponding breadth and depth of global trade and division of labor in the modern age, which is in the process of breaking down. Nations like China and Russia do have more recent experience with rapid contraction and simplification, and a more direct experience of what approximates autarky, even in the face of such extensive global integration. As for the US and the rest of the West? There's quite a long way to fall still. And historically, it takes quite a long time - along with heaps of trauma - to get back up again. 

Oh, and that falling monster is pretty tightly coupled to everything else.