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.