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.
