Human Inside

So I do feel the need to apologize again. I had much more planned to get out in writing after this weekend, but it was just not happening. There is a lot going on in my social world that I have to attend to, and then my work world is constantly beckoning with a force of its own, and then the wacky weather up here has been sort of nice, but also playing complete havoc with my Long Covid. 

There is a lot of change happening up here that is difficult enough to keep up with in person, and I'm constantly trying to get a hold of this Long Covid problem. I spent a good part of the day just sitting in a chair with my eyes closed and doing breathing exercises. Plenty of times I tried to write, and plenty of times I had to stop, my head spinning, my heart pounding. 4 years in, 4 years more or less sick much of the time, and in moments my heart burns with hatred, while grieving for what I lost to the fucking hedge fund managers and private equity funds who are running everything around watching numbers go up, content to shove Covid down our throats while they convene under germicidal UV lights in well-ventilated rooms. Fuck You. And then I have to let it all go. They win if you die choking on your own bile. 

There may be some things to report down the line, but for now let's say that it is "an overly dynamic situation." Also there are some downright mystical things happening in the forest, which involve deer, owls, a cougar, and a bear cub. All very tantalizing but too much to get into at the moment. 

I am aware that some of the writing as of late has come across as unhinged. I see it, I acknowledge it, and nevertheless I still must continue to write when I can. So why even read me at this point? Well, some of the unhinged-ness may accord with the zeitgeist, for one thing, and it may be quite entertaining to read besides, I don't know. Not to make a direct comparison, but I had a ball reading H.S. Thompson, a lot of which was pretty nuts. 

But in keeping with a continuing theme here, I do like to see the human in the work, and I'll try to live up to that here, messy results and all, as long as the product is not so diffuse as to lack discernable value. 

I'm a mess, the writing is a mess, and so it goes. But then the messes tell us a little something about organization, and vice versa. 

For example, let's contrast all this to Marx's three volumes of Capital, which I am very slowly making my way through. These volumes make up a tome, a monumental and singular work. But there's a problem with the tome. Its gigantic size and deep consistent complexity requires dedication and talent and sensitivity in the individual to extract meaning from the tome, meaning which takes on a certain correctness and usefulness depending on how much is gleaned out of the material, which is not only a product of the author's intentions, but also the underlying intellectual traditions that refract that author's work as well. 

The results can be gatekept, to be sure. The utility of the work can diminish as the tradition dies and the emanating signal wanes, and/or the gatekept material is siphoned off and strangled. 

At the same time there is a strength to this approach, if the tradition can survive and the gatekeeping can be maintained and done well, much wisdom can be produced and preserved. 

Whether the utility of the work diminishes or not is related to the overall social maintenance of the work, which reflects the socially produced nature of the work. The tome is a particular form of cultural work that reflects a certain form of cultural development: a singular work is instantiated and refined to the point at which it can be introduced into the public as a finished product, where the actual process of development is hidden from view, and the finished work emerges ready for public consumption. 

But take a glance at the multiple forewords in Capital Volume 2 for example, and you see something else going on. You see Engels writing about Marx's cycles of productive writing and then his down times when he was just too sick to produce and would retreat and read, and then Engels would have to go through all of his messy notes - even after he died - and try to piece everything together and make sense of it all. 

You could just about see Engels rolling his eyes, putting up with Marx's fits, and then editing everything down and welding it all together to produce a comprehensible work. He was quite self-deprecating and constantly wrote himself out of the process, but in essence we wouldn't have Capital as a tome if it wasn't for his incredible editing work, an achievement in its own right. And then we know the hours and hours Marx spent in the library synthesizing all of the many other authors that went into the thought of Capital. This was part of the cultural context in which Capital was produced and then eventually maintained socially as a source of knowledge, translated and distributed and processed globally, its message constantly altering and transforming through its many gatekeepers. 

These were many human beings laboring over so much accumulated materials over great periods of time and distances, all working to reproduce the continuity of the tome and the consistent body of work. 

There are problems here with the blogosphere and the podcast ecosystem too, as well as a whole set of advantages. Which is how things typically work. The Internet is a terribly tragic entity at this point in time at our particular stage of development (can't get into it now), but it does do some really wonderful things as well. 

What I really like about the current structure and functioning of the blogosphere and the podcast worlds is due in part to the structure and functioning of the Internet that makes them possible. There is a constant feedback between writers and storytellers, as well as between them and their readers and listeners and then between the readers and listeners themselves, producing and reproducing a constantly evolving web of meaning, and so the work departs again from a tome and back to an ever-changing, almost oral tradition, which is at the same time constantly documented and etched in as writing or recording, becoming something else entirely.

It is much easier to make out a human being in the work. It is a much more intimate process in some ways, if you find the right eddies and flows of course. There is plenty of corporate manipulation being done on the Internet, and there are other problems to address with Internet ecosystems. But I do really like finding the "real ones" out there, taking in the various details of their personal lives, in addition to their works themselves, perpetually co-creating this shared meaning. 

Cognitive Dissonance

Earlier on in the course of the war in Ukraine, we heard a lot of braying in the Western media about Russian war crimes, which would come packaged with the rallying cry to stand up to Putin by urging the global community to sanction Russia and put an end to all of this madness, among other things. 

And sure, war crimes are bad wherever they crop up. Ideally we don't want those. It is good to do something about them. 

But then the braying quieted down, especially as the Israeli war crimes really started to ramp up. And then the Western media would report some of these crimes - usually with less braying involved - without the complementary packaging of the rallying cry to put an end to the crimes. No, what we must do in fact is stand by Israel no matter what. 

This did a couple of things. First you got the "oh a double standard I see, you're just a hypocrite!" And then the mood darkened even more: "oh no, I see you don't actually care about war crimes, other than making rhetorical instruments out of them."

This sort of thing has been going on for quite a long time of course. In the United States for example, there was always an underlying tension between its instantiation as a new delimited "nation" and its revolutionary universalist and democratic conceits. Competing and conflicting beliefs could be selectively emphasized and sculpted to harmonize with the underlying realities as they shifted: the nation could go isolationist and protectionist and nurse its domestic industry as it gained strength, yammering about protecting the weak and the vulnerable while shitting on those very demographics, and then it would eventually burst out onto the international scene, taking an increasingly dominant role in shaping international law and trade, yammering all the while about the sanctity of international law, free trade, and democratic freedom, while endangering all of those things as it swiped what it could with both hands open. And in each moment, each distinct conception - whether global community or nation - could be pointed at to naturalize the direction that the ruling class wanted to go.  

And this is the nature of cognitive dissonance besides. A certain amount of low level cognitive dissonance can be tolerated for quite a long time. Partly because it has to be tolerated, because that is how reality works. Realities change, and then beliefs have to change in response, and then you have somewhat of a reverse, in which beliefs change, which can alter the realities in turn. 

Why not mix and match? In music you throw in a little dissonance and add some slight discomfort, and then it makes the consonant movement even sweeter, and so on. 

But oftentimes there is a reason that the dissonance is continually growing without relief. Beliefs can be mixed and matched, and purposefully counterpoised against reality to achieve certain effects, and then that particular trick can get stuck. How long can an increasingly loud and obnoxious dissonance go on? How long can it be tolerated before things need to start shifting again? 

The US is rapidly wearing out its current "sanctity of international law and free trade" outfit. Or maybe it has torn straight through and is wearing the tattered shreds. It is going to have to get mean and provincial, explicitly looking out for its own narrow interests in an environment of increasingly muscular rivals. And that's basically where the right wing politics have been going in the global West for decades now. But even that particular pose is going to be more and more difficult to strike given global economic and political conditions, which we'll have to explore in another post.  

Breathe Post

I just belted out a fairly sizable, intense, and exhausting post that took a while to write, and it took a lot of energy too. And now I can share all of that distress! Sorry about that. 

But after finishing up, just a regular reminder -  as much to myself as to whoever might manage their way through this stuff with me - to take a deep breath or two. Always plenty of ground to cover; might as well try to enjoy the trip. 

Got a number of drafts I'm working at the moment; plenty of interesting stuff to turn out. Annoying myself plenty when more and more of my pieces are ballooning out way beyond my initial notes, my initial spurts of inspiration taking me for arduous rides. So it goes. 

In the meantime, just sitting and listening to the rain. It is really greening up out there. The forest is devouring these cycles of heat and heavy rain and exploding forth, verdant and bustling. Another deep breath for the road. Till next time. 

Losing Temper

As we talked about previously, collective feeling is an important component of collective endeavor and the directions that endeavor takes and the way that it is organized. Collective human organization, as complex and gargantuan as it has become in the modern world, can be planned and guided to an extent, but that planning and guiding takes place within deep historical spiritual and emotional complexes that are carved out as human societies collectively experience various traumas, crises, and triumphs - not to mention the daily living cycles within - which alter how individuals in those societies relate to each other and ultimately how they remain "seated" in the world, encouraging the various worldviews that take shape as a result. 

A slow enough and massive enough process which is difficult enough to influence on the whole, and when change is rapid and pointed and dramatic, it often takes an enormous amount of energy suddenly freed up, which is even less predictable or controllable. So societies tend to organize around where the excitement and the belief is going - or the desperation for that matter - and attempt to manage that tiger whose tail they've grabbed as best as they can. 

Needless to say, this doesn't categorically lead to good things. Modern human societies do go somewhere, oftentimes re-organizing in the aftermath of some blowout, and then out of that we get a variety of organizations, ideologies, traditions, and technologies that can be good or bad depending on their nature and the context that they are exercised in.  

And for that matter, this same massive confluence of uncontrollable powerful forces can proceed to take a society apart as it proceeds through its ongoing cycles of reproduction, to the chagrin of its hapless ruling class. 

For example, Adam Smith's famous formulation of capitalism as a coordination and harnessing of self-interest was really part of an ongoing rationalization by societies emerging from the aftermath of the breakdown of European feudalism, which were subsequently attempting to make use of the turbulent social and economic forces unleashed through that wreckage. And to roughly paraphrase Hannah Arendt's observations on the era of imperialism leading up to the World Wars in The Origins of Totalitarianism: "That original act of robbery had to be continuously repeated lest the entire process break down."     

And this is the elaboration I wanted to get into for this post.  

But before we get into that, I want to make use of a metaphor to drive in the point. I really like the colloquial phrase "I lost my temper" because of its metallurgical association, which is quite interesting in itself. 

For example, how steel is worked can affect its physical properties: if you heat it past a certain critical temperature and then cool it rapidly, it hardens the metal, which is traditionally known as "hardening." You can also let the metal cool over a longer period of time and it can soften. Hardening and softening the metal can have various applications at different times, based on what you are trying to do with the material: harder and firmer metal is good for keeping shape, but it can also be more brittle, while softer metal deforms more readily, but may be more flexible under strain or sudden shock. 

Tempering then consists of utilizing these varying properties in conjunction to improve the "toughness" of the metal, by heating to a point below the critical temperature and then letting the metal cool longer, removing some of its hardness - which makes the metal a little more flexible and less brittle - without compromising that basic hardness. And these techniques can be combined to varying degrees to produce a preferred product. Advanced sword designs for example are known for having more flexible centers and harder cutting edges. 

So when people apply a bench grinder to sharpen the edge of a blade, there is a worry that the heat generated from the friction of the grinding could heat the blade to a high enough temperature to change the metal's properties again, thereby "losing its temper." Getting the whole blade hot enough to ruin the temper of the whole piece is questionable, but the actual edge of the blade consists of a thin strip of metal that really can get hot enough to pass the critical temperature, and the temper on the edge can certainly be ruined, which is a problem for the functionality of the blade as a whole. 

I tried to get a straight answer on the actual origin of the "losing temper" idiom we use for anger and couldn't find one, but the idiom is probably based on the metallurgical phenomenon. When someone loses their temper, usually the pressure and anger is building up to a critical point, in which there is a state change where the person loses their normal social composure and acts in accordance with a new logic operating in the realm of anger. 

As you can see, this metaphor is getting complicated really quick, and much of this we don't need to make the point. But teasing out some of this complexity a little bit has its uses, as it lends a deeper functionality to the metaphor's application and makes it quite useful for illuminating an equally complicated social phenomenon: the evolution of collective feeling as it acts on collective endeavor and is transformed by that endeavor in turn.   

Because for the post war period capital has thrived on low levels of persistent trauma and perpetual pillage and exploitation. A little desperation, a little fear, a little learned helplessness...these are useful traits for maintaining a compliant and disciplined workforce of people laboring globally on a galaxy of goods and services that are completely alienated from them. And a little applied heat and pressure makes things continue to go; it keeps things moving.  

See, the hard work of forging and hardening and tempering all tends to get carried out in those eras of war and revolution, or else in those eras of social tumult and dramatic change. But then after the forging, there is maintenance. The knife's edge, the tip of the spear, need to be quite hard sure, and the rest can be a little softer and more flexible. Yeah, the cutting edge needs to be touched up here and there; just be careful and go slow. Grind it sharp and back off when it gets too hot. Let it cool and go for another pass when its ready. 

But what happens when you have a ruling class that no longer knows how to properly maintain its blades? Or is simply incapable?  Or to work in another metaphor, the engine is making some weird noises, and an alienated ruling class lacks the presence of mind to shut it down for basic maintenance, and just runs it into the ground, letting it tear itself apart as its explosive energy finds other outlets. 

Another thing that this metaphor communicates is the nature of collective endeavor and feeling in the modern age: the combination of this extreme complexity and the concentration of power implies an increasing distancing and alienation of the ruling class from the ruled, and so the best we can hope for is a competent management of the ruled as instrument and tool, which of course is no longer happening as a bare minimum. 

This stuff is hard to talk about, and to repeat, extremely complex, so I've tried to organize and frame it loosely with visuals. But it's all still pretty abstract. To finish up here, let's just turn to some basic examples and some possible consequences. I want to emphasize: we're still talking about the same thing from a different angle. 

There are some broad and important trends that a lot of people in the industrial world have experienced, which informs the way that they feel about their peers and their activity and their world, but in particular there were a series of large scale catastrophic events in the US that we could point to, that led to visible and lasting changes in our various institutions and then the general population as a result. Each event could easily be taken apart and analyzed, revealing threads going back decades or centuries. 

But to simplify we could just say these events were highly visual and spectacular blowouts, resulting from and indicating serious underlying collective and institutional dysfunction, emerging out of previous moments in which a temper was lost, so to speak, with runaway chaotic energy seeking outlet, heating other components past their critical temperatures, causing more lost tempers, more blowouts, and so on. And now, the heat continues to build, the failures continue to move as the energy migrates, seeking new channels. 

You had the Bush Jr. era wars on terror and the shocking flailing, destruction, and incompetence: Katrina emblematic of within and Iraq emblematic of without. And then following on the heels of that, the global financial crisis. Obama gave us some slick smiles and some stirring speeches, and promised to put out those global and domestic fires. And then just as slickly and a little more quietly, advanced and deepened those fires, letting the bankers off the hook and giving them free-reign to steal housing on an industrial scale. We had to keep doing our industrial shit somehow, after gutting it all out domestically to spite the unions and the cushiness of the American worker's perch, among a complex of other reasons. 

That did let a little pressure and heat off of capital: you give the starved global proletariat a couple of crumbs and they'll work hard for it, while at the same time you immiserate the domestic proletariat and break their footholds and confidence. It wasn't all constant acceleration. But fixes like that create deeper problems: you break the trust of a given constituency, well, you better be prepared to say goodbye to them, at least for a while. 

There are deeper problems with American homeownership and the creeping sprawl of suburbia and the high-energy, industrial American lifestyle to be sure; a parallel war against the earth that implies other tracks of overheating and lost tempers further down the line. But even indulging the insulated logic of the American Empire, running a prison state where a majority of the population is steadily immiserated on the one hand, and then letting a bunch of spoiled punk bankers steal everyone's remaining scraps and then get off free for it on the other was probably a bad idea. 

That was a profound insult that cut deep, which instilled a lasting contempt and sullenness that wasn't about to be scrubbed out by empty smiles and speeches. So we ended up in the Trump era: a consequence of lost temper that itself overheated its share of material, ruining tempers further down the line.  

Covid in particular really laid bare the capacity and functionality of our public institutions, and more importantly, the underlying intentions and priorities of those who controlled those institutions. A vast workforce was cynically patronized and then lied to and gaslighted, and grinded down, to be subsequently fed to the virus and then thrown to rot in the elements and to be disposed of, and so people dropped out of the workforce in droves. 

It is hard to get a clear picture because the data collection and the representation of that data has deteriorated so much, but I've seen figures that suggest that labor participation hasn't been this low since sometime in the 1950's, when views on women labor roles relegated them largely to the home. 

I want to finish by glancing at an ongoing moment - hopefully I don't turn into a pillar of salt - that prompted the start of this discussion in the first place, and that concerns the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by Israel. 

This catastrophe was largely the result of a Western colonial construct, with brutalized and desperate surplus Jewish populations injected into the heart of the Arab world like fracking fluid injected into a fault line, partly to crack open the Middle East and get at and control that oil and the surrounding trade networks, though there was a whole complex of interests and causes bound up in that process. And now it is in the process of blowing up in just about the most cruel and monstrous way imaginable, with accompanying tremors and quakes to boot. 

The spectacular cruelty of the genocide is quite plain and out in the open, forcing those committed to the colonial project to double down on genocide and repression, and to at last cast aside any remaining appeals to the rule of law, ripping off the mask so to speak, while at the same time galvanizing multitudes of those perpetually kicked around by said colonial project, tracing out all of the financial and political influences on the U.S. political system and its institutions, attempting to claw them out one by one. And those influences and their backing mythologies are so deeply embedded into the U.S. system and its culture, that the result is a society ever more deeply set against itself, intractably so.  

A broad social trend you can see coming out of this - I started seeing more and more language like this on the eve of the pandemic, but which has only intensified and accelerated under the genocide - is exemplified by increasingly prominent activist language concerning negotiations with the establishment, such as: "No, don't trust a word they say, they have nothing to give us, and we can only help ourselves now. We are on our own." 

That erosion of existing collective endeavor, and the vanishing of collective feeling and activity deeper into the crevices of the underground, which we talked about in a previous post, will only accelerate and intensify. It will get more and more difficult for co-optation to occur, and for the system to re-situate itself around a re-constituted body politic. All of that hard work put into propaganda and marketing and messaging will go up in flames. To put it another way, it will get more and more difficult to get in front of the mob and call it a parade. It will become more and more necessary to use blunter modes of repression and force, which takes more energy, and causes more instability. 

The danger of all this relates back to that whole "changing horses mid-race" problem. Modern industrial society is enormously complex, and we have some very big, very serious problems that can only be solved collectively. All of these people dropping out and going their own ways, or otherwise being forced out and sloughed off, leaving these hulking shells of rotting industrial institutions unmanned...sorry, mass AI-guided mechanization and automation ain't gonna work out the way they want it to. Unfortunately for you, I have another monster piece planned for that problem too. 

But then again, in every instance of a thing "losing its temper" is the possibility of that thing becoming something else entirely. Well keep working through this stuff. 

Correction

For the most part I'm fine with minor typos - and even find them endearing much of the time - so long as they don't crop up in excess. That little hammer dent that shows where the carpenter missed the nail with the hammer: "Oops! You're getting the next round of beers," as per some woodworking traditions. It reveals a more complicated human behind the craft. 

But there are plenty of other errors that are serious enough, which change the meaning of the piece or the function of the crafted object, that require one's attention and correction. 

I happened to catch one in a previous piece (already corrected), in which I typed "Baltic provinces" instead of "Balkan provinces," as part of the Roman Empire. No, the Baltics were too far north for Rome. It was the Balkan region that bred some of the really tough ruling stock.