On the Horizon

Setting aside all that intense shit I just dumped on you, I do have a new writing project in the works. I've been writing like a madman to get out a bunch of these pieces I've been working on, so I can clear the workspace and the mental space and make some room, and I've got some more of that to do before I'm feeling good enough. But there is a confluence of forces coming together which have led me to this point, which I'll get into more sometime. I've still got a lot of ground to cover before I can launch, and I'll be writing more about what I'm up to later on as it comes into focus. Till then. 

Vaporware

One thing you hear constantly in daily conversation in the US is: "Oh, you just can't plan for anything, it is hard to tell what is going to happen next." This is an attitude and phenomenon that isn't limited to the volatility and capriciousness of the Trump administration either, though certainly the administration is accelerating that tendency. This is something that is occurring on many different levels and scales of daily experience here. 

You're having these huge stock market swings that are just not smart, and are not based on the fundamentals. And the ruling class is responding to these swings and basing substantial decisions on these swings. 

A lot of people are cynical enough now that they just ignore a lot of news and ephemeral events, and just trust that life is going to get a little worse. Gotta feel for those really plugged-in types though, who have to base their lives on the movement of large sums of money. Watching the good stuff slosh to-and-fro, swirling about the drain. 

And then us plebes toiling in the fields, stopping to gaze up vacantly at the death ray as it hits and poofs prominent social supports, arcing its way towards the load-bearing stuff like Social Security.  

And Trump with his doomsday tariffs, and you hear all of these reports of shipping just shutting down, and these huge logistics and supply operations profoundly revising their long term plans, and then Trump blinks and whoop, lowers some of the China tariffs and sprinkles in some delays for good measure. But all of those dislocations are still making their way through the system. 

I mean, dang, I was rubbing my sore neck the other day and realized that I had suffered whiplash from trying to make sense of any kind of structured set of principles in the West. First they wanted to represent the Holocaust as the supreme evil, and it certainly was evil. And now we're supposed to look the other way as the Gaza genocide continues on? I'm sorry, but our necks don't bend that way that fast. 

And what happened to Q Anon? Their whole reason to exist seemed to be based on smashing that secret pedo ring. But now their savior is whole hog for Israel? What do they think Israeli intelligence baits its honey traps with? 

Ah anyway. In general, it is getting more difficult to make any kind of long term plan, but long term planning and predictability and stability are exactly what you need to keep this world running. 

Eventually you do just have to shrug and get on with your day, and plan for poor planning. Living in California, and now living in Washington, I've been exposed to a fair amount of disaster preparedness literature and messaging. There is that massive subduction zone right off of the coast, that sleeping giant that could wake at any time and send a gigantic earthquake and tsunami our way. And then we live right next to an active volcano. 

Picture a colossal earthquake in a region like the Pacific Northwest, that hasn't had a huge quake in centuries, that isn't built out for that sort of thing, which largely runs on hydropower, and is spiderwebbed with a vast network of increasingly fragile bridges, and that's just off the top of my head. The definition of unpredictability there. A switch could be flipped, who knows when, and you're who knows where doing who knows what, and who knows what that we depend on every day is in ruin, altogether at once. 

What all of that disaster preparedness literature recommends is just having some basic supplies and planning ready. Having some clean water, some dried goods, some lights and charging stations and shovels and other appropriate tools, a bug-out bag, some blankets and toiletries, a clear meeting area and a clear escape or safe zone, some cash. Having some of that going on doesn't hurt a thing, and you can just live your life as you would, knowing the very basics are there. 

All Aboard!

So how do you bail from a runaway train? Ideally the train should be stopped or at least moving very slowly, and the faster it gets going without the benefit of brakes, the tougher this problem gets. 

Even worse, what if that train is all there is and that you need to fix it, or even rebuild it as it is moving and now running away? 

This is one way to read the preposterous flailing of the ruling class in the US during the Covid pandemic. There was an initial attempt to half-heartedly and half-assedly fix the thing, but the complexity of the problem - given the corner the ruling class had painted themselves into - produced a complex wreckage that was set in motion during the closures and stoppages, which caught up with them and they had to re-orient and renege on their half-ass platform, opting for reckless and careless neglect instead, and eventually much more damage was done down the line. 

This simplified case study is another instance of one of the driving aspects of modernity: the energy-intensive need for things to move with perpetual and even accelerating rapidity to bridge indescribably massive and complex entities across vast spaces, and those bridges must be sustained without fail. As once a bridge has been built, it must support a constant stream of life flowing over it - the purpose of which necessitated such a huge expenditure of energy in the first place - which must be maintained lest that stream of life be disrupted, which could have serious consequences indeed for whatever is building the bridges. 

If you smoosh the opening train metaphor and this bridge metaphor together, you get something resembling our predicament. To quote Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap."

This is a predicament I've covered plenty of times before, and will describe in plenty more ways in the future. Predicaments may not have nice solutions like their kin, the problem, but like problems, predicaments do add a whole lot of interest and meaning. 

Don't Look Down

So I don't typically do this, but I want to draw attention to another interview with Nathan Tankus, this time conducted by Beatrice Adler-Bolton of Death Panel ("Nathan Tanks the Economy" in the episode list). This particular interview is much longer (two and a half hours) than the one I previously linked to on Trash Future, and though both interviews are worth listening to, this longer and meatier interview is chock-full of some really incredible information in the form of what I would describe as "tells" that come up in the narrative. I'll get into what I mean by this. Funny enough, like the last post, I'm also going to pair this discussion with a different Radio War Nerd discussion to make a greater point, which will be separate but dependent on points made in that previous linked post. Given the current pace of world events, all of this is a little dated now, but the underlying dynamics and stakes covered here are going to continue to be central to world events for some time. 

So here we go, starting with Tankus' narrative. First of all, Tankus is pretty funny. He describes his previous work as kind of dry and boring and nerdy, and then he was suddenly catapulted into a central, high stakes reporting role, and was getting all of this attention all of a sudden. In regard to his previous work being dry and boring, well, yes and no, and it depended on the reader to be sure. I remember when Tankus would make the rounds at places like Naked Capitalism, and his work was often pretty dry and technical to be sure, but also brilliant and highly illuminating, if you knew what you were looking for anyway. 

But he definitely had certain niche concerns in economics and finance, and would really get into the weeds when it came to money and payments. He talks about becoming really interested in the more obscure technical systems involved in the operation of the interacting payment systems of the Treasury and the Fed, and goes into how old and fragile and layered they are, and how they are stewarded by aging civil servants and programmers who are some of the last of those who can really understand the entirety of those systems' idiosyncratic operations, and thus continue successfully to ensure their functionality. 

When Musk and his team came in and started rooting around the Treasury payment system, and information started to come out about what exactly they were doing, Tankus was one of the few people on the outside who really understood the ins and outs of these systems and how they worked, and how potentially dangerous Musk's tinkering with those systems was, and various gravely concerned officials on the inside became aware of this and started to involve Tankus, who was giving off the proper affect given the gravity of the situation, in the hopes that he would gradually leak to the outside this information and spark some sort of organized response, which the officials were unable or unwilling to do. 

And here we approach the first big "tell" I wanted to get at, which is a certain state of affairs implied in the narrative that one can piece together with a combination of the given information and then additional prior knowledge. Here we get a glimpse of the social nature of this underlying payment system, embedded in the larger institutional context. This is a real, material, technical system, which hums steadily away in the background, which the vast majority of the people in the US don't think about or even know exists, but which backstops every aspect of our political economy. The people who are running the actual machinery of the system, and who know how to do it properly, are not the political animals that can fight off attacks from entities like the DOGE team, and due to the changing nature of the greater political economic system itself, their kind is a dying breed, at least as this pertains internally to the reproduction of the institutions that house them, with subsequent waves of newcomers more tooled for social climbing and politicking, and now demagoguing, which now includes the reckless and poorly understood tinkering with the technical systems.

Which brings us to another of the related "tells." I suspect that we're going to be seeing more of this phenomenon, where power suddenly and violently shifts to talented and capable individuals or groups outside of existing power structures - for reasons of political exclusion due to political views, disposition, integrity, etc. - who can come in and help the ruling class actually maintain their failing machinery as their blustering and flailing produces underwhelming results, and then these outsiders might be put in the position of actually making their own interested reforms. And of course, power could suddenly and violently shift to less capable individuals and groups for plenty of other reasons, resulting in many other possible outcomes, as we saw with the sudden public involvement and then exit of Musk and his team. 

I'm going to have to revisit this in a separate post, but I want to emphasize the growing unpredictability and chaotic dynamism of the greater system we are all part of: the Machine begins to oscillate and wobble in weird, new, unsettling ways, and with growing concern and trepidation, we start to watch as it throws off some weird sprocket in one direction, or flares unexpectedly in another. "What the hell was that?" we might ask. And the first person to raise their hand gets ushered up to the hot seat. But the fact remains that the Machine will continue to unwind in newly strange and unpredictable ways as the entropy grows and it gets more difficult to put it back together in the way it was initially instantiated. 

Tankus' affect was another of the "tells." You could pick up right away how pressurized and stressful his new reality was, which he communicated in no uncertain terms. Due to the dynamics of the rapid emergence of this crisis, Tankus was catapulted into the hot seat in playing an integral part in organizing the proper political response in shutting down the DOGE attacks on the payment systems and shoring up those existing systems, due to a combination of his timely expertise and the concern he had for some sort of resolution, without having been previously initiated into the inner workings of these institutions through the course of his life. 

Part of why I'm seizing on this interview - and the emotional valence of it - is because I have had a taste of what pressure like this feels like - albeit at a much smaller scale and with much lower stakes - and what it all means. A couple of years ago I was working with an uncle of mine - may he rest in peace - who was a particularly talented contractor. I would go with him on jobs to these problem buildings, which served as lucrative - if not highly stressful - gigs that would provide recurring work. 

A building can really take on a life of its own, and really suck you in if you are a contractor and develop a relationship with it. We would develop relationships with these high rises in particular, which were built by unscrupulous developers with faulty infrastructure such as thin-walled copper plumbing to save money, which in a short amount of time would develop a constant stream of leaks due to the fragility of the pipe walls, to the chagrin of management and the buildings' many occupants. 

To fix these leaks, you would typically have to drain the entire system, as the water is usually pumped straight to the roof, where it then falls back down through the building via gravity, and the pipes would have to be cleared to refit new pipes and conduct the soldering to seal the fittings and make a lasting repair, placing isolation valves as you go to make future repairs easier (no goddamn isolation valves! because valves are expensive), itself taking a good deal of skill and proper judgement, after which the entire system would be recharged and tested. And draining these systems and then fixing the leaks, and then recharging the systems inevitably serves as a trauma to the system, which can spring more leaks immediately, or cause strains that can lead to later subsequent leaks. 

But this was my uncle's preferred method for fixing leaks like these, which would fix them for good, as opposed to doing half-assed patch jobs that would only temporarily fix the leaks, bringing him more work and money, but more misery for everyone else as the leaks came back. He cared about the buildings and their proper management and quality of life of the occupants, which was why the management of these problem buildings would kick out unscrupulous contractor after contractor, before settling on his services, and then insisting on his work from then on. He would become friends with these people, and eventually go hurtling across multiple states to come out and fix their leaks as they refused to have anyone else touch their buildings, and I suspect it was part of this care that eventually killed him, but that is a story for another time. 

To get to the point, there was one very long night we had at a posh high rise in Hollywood. We were draining the system, fixing leaks, and then recharging the system, finding more leaks, and so on, and we were doing this for 10 hours or so, exhausted, getting ready to go home, when the building manager came to us, white as a sheet, and ushered us down to the basement level. 

Down in the basement, the manager showed us what may as well have been the building's beating heart: the massive piping of the building's water main. Just above the main, on a small pipe junction, was a small pinhole leak, which due to the water pressure and the location, would in a few hours widen into a constant gush.

Now, we had the equipment and spare pipe to fix this particular leak, but due to the connection of the junction to the main, it was entirely possible that our activities would rupture the main. The main itself was a huge and fabulously expensive section of pipe which continued beneath a layer of concrete in the floor. Sourcing a replacement for that pipe could take days or even weeks or more, and would mean tearing up that entire room to get at everything, and the entire building's water system would have to be down that entire time: it was the goddamn main; there was no isolating that thing. 

So we had to once again drain the entire system, and then got to fixing that pipe junction. There was a coupling on that junction that was giving us fits, and so my uncle had to grab the coupling with a pair of channellocks while heating it, and I had to hammer on it while he was heating it. Hit it too soft and it wouldn't budge, and hit it too hard and it could rupture the main. We eventually got the coupling off and fixed the junction, recharged the system, and went home. 

Now that was a lot of pressure. That single point of failure at the base of that high rise, and caring about all of those people. If that procedure had gone wrong, you would have had a lot of people who would have been screwed, without running water in a high rise, at least temporarily. And they really had no idea, apart from the inconvenience of having the system shut down for 20 minutes or so. But those stakes and lead times go up as those materials and the labor to properly affect those materials grow more scarce in time. 

My point here is that these things are real: these basic, backstopping systems that we all rely on, and some of them are very fragile and are probably at the brink of failure, and there are only so many people that can work on them. And it is very stressful to work on them, because typically to be pretty good at it you really have to care, and you have to have the integrity and character to steward that particular bottleneck so that everyone downstream of that crucial infrastructure is not taken advantage of. So not only is the skill and talent in short supply, but will people want to keep working on them, and increasingly be treated like shit by an ignorant, entitled ruling class?  

At smaller scales, we can see these systems fail and we can see the real consequences unfold from them. In the canyon I live, they have permanently closed the only bridge into the region, as it is on the brink of collapse. Deferring maintenance in the 90's might not have felt that acute. That paint on the supports that was peeling off and that rust that was setting in, that could take a while to take its course right? And every time they ran an inspection, sure it looked bad, but it could be a while longer before the bridge really started to fail. But then eventually that support column would buckle, signifying a major and irreversible problem, and then they would have to close the bridge for good, and there we were, cut off from the world on the other side, save for an old logging road that snaked back up through the foothills behind us, which remains locked to the public. That closure and that isolation has resulted in real and lasting consequences that I'll have to get into at another time. 

And what about those really large scale systems? How about the ones that only a small minority are really aware of, and that an even smaller and disappearing minority can properly manipulate and steward?

There is that old cliche that it is impossible to imagine the end of capital. But those dark shadows of doubt we sometimes have, those fleeting leviathans we see passing beneath the rolling waves below: they are real. 

This is part of the "miracle" I've referred to as well. The people working these backstopping systems are well-aware of the stakes, and the people that know what they are doing tend to really care. These apocalyptic scenarios, which may be possible in theory, also elicit a lot of care and attention in response, and the real apocalypse never comes, and life goes on. But there are always limits.  

I want to get to one last "tell" before moving on, which is less of a tell and more an explicitly stated point. Tankus gets to discussing the opposition and the nature of the executive relation to Congress and the "impound," and all of the implications of those things as they relate to the seizure of the payment systems, as well as the other related fits of domestic political turbulence we've had, and then the implications of all of that.

To summarize what comes out of that discussion, fascists want to take over the delicate machine by force to make it do what they want. The crown of the monarch is coming up through the choking tangle of an increasingly dysfunctional mass of legacy systems. But that also risks moving too fast and breaking things which can't easily be fixed.  

We saw this in a way with Hitler, seizing the reins and doing weird and alarming things, and then monstrous and even more alarming things with an increasingly complex, interconnected, and powerful world system that was seizing up, and the Allied powers had to dogpile him and the other fascist leaders and knock them down, along with much of the rest of the developed world in the process. 

Now, I regret blurting all of this out at the end without a proper treatment, as the post is getting a bit long and here we have another can of worms that has just been opened. I've hit two tripwires: talking about "fascism" and contemporary affairs fairly loosely and then mentioning Hitler's regime, and now I'm going to go disappear after my hit and run. This is a subject I intend to handle at greater length in a separate post though. 

I want to close with brief comments on another incredible discussion, this time in the foreign policy realm. On War Nerd Radio, co-hosts John Dolan and Mark Ames interview the brilliant journalist Jeff Stein, making use of Stein's economic reporting on Trump's tariff war to spark a broader discussion on the course and context of that war. 

That interview is also well-worth listening to, but in the course of that discussion, we get several key points. For one thing, the evolution of the US' international sanctions regime and the US' manipulation of the reserve currency and the international payment systems have served as a covert way to continue its ongoing wars, quietly strangling its enemies economically after the spectacular failures (and ensuing blowback) of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. 

Stein gets into how catastrophic the collapse of the Venezuelan economy was, partly as a result of the first Trump term sanctions. And the waves of immigration from that disaster probably helped to re-elect Trump as well. 

But at the same time, Washington is discovering that a tougher target like Russia has not buckled, with those sanctions actually backfiring and harming Europe especially. And China is an even tougher target than that. What's more, the subsequent tariff war and reshoring efforts have been completely incoherent, partially because the US has painted itself into a corner, and partially because the efforts themselves are not coherent and not fully understood. 

There is more going on here than this, but briefly and simply: with tariffs actually harming the US and slowing down global commerce, US treasuries are getting dumped, weakening the dollar, and prompting a walking back of the tariffs. 

Why walk back though? A weak dollar encourages reshoring manufacturing. But weak also sounds bad? And it was the strong dollar that allowed for cheap consumer goods, which some of the administration wants to see continue and some of it wants to see end? And for some in the administration, a strong dollar was preferable as it backstopped financial domination of the world system, among other things.  

And wait, we want to see manufacturing come back but we are tariffing critical inputs and resources? And it is hitting consumers and business owners we wanted to help? 

Again, there is much more to it, but with these brief examples, we can see that we are coming back to these old, iterated legacy systems, this time in the operation and circulation of world trade and world finance, and no one - at least those in the West - seems to understand the entirety of how they work anymore, and they are being recklessly fooled with by people hopelessly steeped in competing propaganda put out by competing interests, resulting in the proliferation of a briar patch of contradictory material action in the practical realm. This is a fractal problem spreading within and without. 

Now, we can take these growing internal and domestic pressures together with the growing external pressures facing a failing hegemon. The United States has been a cruel master and has deceived and kicked around a lot of people in its day, and seems to be attempting to outdo its own cruelty in clutching the remnants of its hegemonic status as it grows ever weaker internally, feeling it, knowing it, but refusing to believe it, as its dragged down by that bad blood turning to stone. Now that is a hell of a lot of pressure. 

But I don't want to end on full apprehension though. Yeah, a lot of this is pretty worrisome, and with growing chaos you don't really know what you are going to get. But as alluded to earlier, all kinds of opportunities can also open up, depending on who and where you are and what you are doing. A great tree going down can act as a bridge of sorts, and open up the skies around it. 

Holistic Medicine

Here is another way to put things in terms of holistic thinking and practice. In Susun Weed's excellent and weird book on herbal medicine, Healing Wise, she describes herbal medicine as affecting a broader sphere of action, in contrast to Western medicine's focused, laser-like action of its interventions.  

Part of this is due to the nature of plant healing itself: though much herbal medicine is still processed - in a minimal way - such as with infusion, decoction, or tincture, you are drawing from a plant's complex biological makeup which contains many different nutrients and elements which tend to work together in the body, affecting multiple systems together, whereas with pharmacology for example you are more often isolating active ingredients and delivering them in a more focused way, which of course have their own complex spheres of action to be sure. 

But to give a quick example, targeted diuretics often require coupling with some sort of rehydration regimen, as they deplete the body's potassium supply. Dandelion leaves on the other hand are known to have diuretic properties, while at the same time containing the potassium to replace what is being lost. You can find all sorts of properties such as this in the various medicinal plants.  

Not only that, but herbal medicine itself has deep holistic tendencies, carrying strong affinities with other related disciplines such as nutrition and physical movement, spiritual practice, indigenous knowledge and practices, scientific knowledge, and so on.

But of course, Western medicine has within it competing strains of holistic thought of its own. For that matter, we loosely refer to the medical industry as Western medicine, while there have been powerful strains of holistic and even herbal medicine existing within and interacting with industrialized medicine throughout Western history, and the latter regularly influences the former in this context as well. For a better understanding of what holistic scientific thought can really accomplish, I'd recommend the brilliant writings of KLG, who regularly covers these issues far better than I. 

The dichotomy we are setting up here though bears more of a relation to the concentration of power than it does to any kind of competing modalities, and the resulting imbalances that result from that concentration. As industrial power continues to concentrate and dominate in modern life, the interests and prerogatives of that power become ever more central to daily life, which increasingly becomes conflated with the notion of "Western" as a result. 

The industrial interests and prerogatives are bound up with a way of being in which living systems are separated from their contexts and broken down, their constituent elements separated out and isolated and then re-inserted into artificial useable and tradeable assemblages to produce value. And you constantly hear Western clinicians and researchers complaining that their work is often being shunted within one set of constraints or another, due to outside financial and political pressures, where "following the science" actually means branching steadily out into the areas of inquiry that the facts actually take them, which requires time and energy and resources that various grant constraints, institutions, private actors, and other interests might be gatekeeping. 

The sciences are often conflated with industry, as the scale and reach of their advances often make use of the products and advantages of industrial power (and vice versa), but it is industrial power that ultimately threatens the sciences and folk traditions alike (and everything in between) due to its relentless drive to convert everything into value at an ever-increasing and intensifying scale. Alas, I digress, but this is a digression that is increasingly unavoidable. 

To go back to herbal and holistic medicine, this is the modality that you find people increasingly seeking out for a regular maintenance of a higher quality of living at lower cost, given the current prerogatives of Western society. You keep ahead on diet, exercise, spiritual practice, and etc. and then hopefully have a high quality source - and the skills and knowledge to field those sources - of targeted herbal intervention for the various aches and pains and bodily dysfunctions and hang-ups that come about in daily life.

I have heard of incredible healings with certain herbal formulations which conventional medicine was unable to address, in the stories of incredible herbalists like Rosemary Gladstar and her peers, for example, but then this is often more esoteric and less mainstream knowledge which though highly regulated in certain surprising ways, is less well-regulated in others, and so there is plenty of grift in this field as well, and folks really need to know what they are doing there to avoid the many pitfalls associated with avoiding conventional industrial medicine altogether. And as a counterpoint, there are plenty of pitfalls lurking in the conventional realm as well.  

To build on this point, part of seeking out care in the modern world includes the traversal of a meta-dynamic that is destructive in its own right. You have the world of herbal medicine, typically ignored and disparaged by Western industrial medicine, persist as a collection of practices carried on with descended knowledge and skill, which can produce notions and ideas that can become increasingly vague and obtuse in the wrong hands, and so the grifters descend to mislead and provide inadequate interventions that inevitably harm, and there is a positivist reaction to this harm, and a descending scientism in which the entire herbal enterprise is dismissed wholesale, and then as countless productive avenues are ignored and the positivists strangulate the wide range of avenues for inquiry, people grow dissatisfied and migrate back to the herbal modalities. Rinse and repeat.  

It is no accident though that what "Western" medicine does very well is handle emergencies, as Western civilization itself has been typified as a rhythmic lurch from crisis to crisis throughout its history. If you detect cancer for example - hopefully early through regular medical intervention - it is a much more common attitude to say, "OK I'll look at dietary, herbal, and lifestyle options, but first cut this shit out of me, or nuke it, I don't care, get it out of here NOW." You don't mess around with that stuff. And for the most part, that type of intervention has been pretty successful (and has gotten very good), if a little expensive, at least in the US. 

The same is the case for various sudden accidents and ruptures such as fractures, impacts, and deep wounds. They can really patch you up in ways that your typical folk practice just can't do. For goodness sake, they can revive people from the brink of death in certain cases. 

Western medicine as is it is currently constituted is less strong on addressing chronic illness however, and that is even counting the big issues like cancers and heart disease. I remember an oncologist talking about contemporary cancer research, noting what stunning advances have been made in the field, while at the same time acknowledging that a lion's share of the intervention that commands the most funding is the reactive kind (coupled with advances in early detection), addressing the crisis when it occurs, whereas the prophylactic types of interventions garnered less interest and resources, and then systemic, social and environmental factors were pushed even further back in the queue. 

If you go in with complaints about Long Covid, and you don't have any immediately identifiable biomarkers or malfunctioning organs, you're probably just going to get puzzled looks and mumblings about anxiety and sent on your way. This has happened to me personally, and there are countless other anecdotes such as these that are depressingly common in that community.

Indeed, the widespread and destructive consequences of Covid have encouraged a profound shift in certain sectors of Western medicine towards holistic and multi-disciplinary practice - which draw from parallel tracks of holistic, multi-disciplinary thought in the sciences to be sure - for this very reason: that focused, emergency intervention does not work well for complex autoimmune diseases like Long Covid and the like, and there are clinics and practices that specialize in multi-disciplinary and holistic medicine that are popping up everywhere to address this particular weakness. 

Part of the problem though is that holistic and multi-disciplinary practice in a resource-intensive (and extractive) field like capital-backed industrialized medicine takes a good helping of social resources that are no longer evenly or justly distributed, so these types of interventions are either more expensive or exclusive, as people find out about these clinics and their patient loads start to back up. You're not going to get services like this through Medicaid, Medicare, or even many conventional insurance plans either. 

As I've mentioned about my personal experiences before, it does really help to have conventional medical intervention for those emergencies when something really weird and scary is happening, such as with heart or breathing trouble, which helps to troubleshoot and further isolate the prevailing issue. And then I use these interventions to backstop the more holistic personal practices such as maintaining good diet, exercising, sleeping well, engaging in spiritual practice, pursuing various herb and supplement interventions, and so on. 

Left without a whole lot of resources or good options though, personally my instinct is to seek out lower centers of gravity and older, less capital-intensive interventions and lifestyle choices, though those are not without their risks either, to be fair.    

Holistic Thought

I understand that the word "holistic" has seen increasing circulation as a popular hollowed out buzzword, but there are often good reasons for useful words becoming popular and then steadily hollowed out, whether many of those words' users understand those reasons or not. Setting aside the tacked-on buzzword quality though, I do like the concept of holism and find it useful to think about. Seeing as how my thinking and writing seek to make responsible use of a form of holism, I was thinking it might be a good idea to tease out what that might mean. 

Once one dispenses with the simplifications of the buzzword itself, it can actually be quite difficult to properly describe holistic thought which is done well. So I'm going to work around it with a meandering discussion and some metaphors. 

Now, this is a pretty coarse simplification, but in the Western tradition - and you could say this is a tendency over time in an aging civilization in general - there is a tendency towards empiricism and materialism in which knowledge and inquiry, and general productive and cultural activity, become ever more specific, detailed, and specialized, with a direct anchoring to verification of the senses, in service to the senses, which must be written down or recorded in turn.

Collectively we've been through enough crises of knowledge and action in which instantiated abstractions that were for the most part descriptive and functional were increasingly exploited by powerful actors to obstruct reality and manipulate large swathes of the population for various ends. You can take the classic example of Enlightenment era market states seizing the reigns from the feudal theocracies, though of course it is always much more complicated than that. 

Part of this dynamic is a gradual anchoring into the material and verifiable as a greater organic trust breaks down, and simultaneously civilizations tend to become more and more focused on doing things materially, and their growth and success produces and accompanies a growth in material mass and complexity that a given civilization is responsible for sustaining and maintaining, which necessitates an increasing emphasis on that material mastery and doing. 

And if you want to do specific things, you tend to have to focus on those things, penetrating down further and further into their inner workings, detecting ever finer distinctions and contrasts which can be leveraged to manipulate those things materially. The problem with this is that the more you do this as an individual, the more time and energy you spend focusing, and you have to ignore more and more of the surrounding reality connected to that thing you are focusing on. 

This works just fine if you are supported by large communities of people who are working on all of the various branches of labor division together and mutually supporting each other through their separate but connected efforts, and the greater system itself can be trusted to maintain those branches individually, and then harmonize those branches collectively, in the interest of some greater organic whole and its overall health and stability. In fact, I think this is one of the key components that can achieve the soaring heights of what a given civilization can do materially, and makes up the underlying tissue and function underneath those myths of legend in which great societies achieve astounding feats of material power and efficacy, which in turn sustains great feats of cultural and political power and efficacy, and vice versa.  

But then what happens when all of that starts to come apart - which we've covered here aplenty - as it seems to inevitably do throughout history? Like the inattentive sniper that is snuck up on, people that are in the middle of hyper-focusing on a given branch of labor suddenly become aware that there are others around them, creeping up, looking to step on them and eat their lunch. And you do need lunch to do intensive specialized labor. 

I remember fairly late into the Bush Jr. era, there were still a lot of professionals that just didn't want to think about those lousy, lying politicians, and the government was good for nothing anyway, and it was better to just keep one's head down and trust the private sector. These sentiments still remain to be sure, but there has been a steady expansion and intensification of political consciousness, especially in the last decade. 

Underneath this steady expansion were various countervailing and contradictory cycles, to be sure. In the US, the Left was particularly vibrant in the Bush years, and seems to quiet down a bit more in the course of Democratic administrations, with the Right steadily getting louder about encroaching socialism during those Democratic administrations, and so on. A lot of people were genuinely concerned about politically manipulated conceptions of terrorism for example, but a lot of that was compartmentalized as well, in favor of getting on with the day and tending to one's immediate family in the confines of one's single family home. 

After the financial crisis there was a growing and widening politicization and hatred of economists and financiers, And the Obama era saw an upsurge in broad hopes for reform and rejuvenation, which quickly gave way to disappointment and then bitter cynicism. And then the Covid pandemic really sunk in the notion of systemic dysfunction and widespread abandonment. Now in the 2nd Trump era, it seems one can't get away from the political dimension, that constant interrogation of the nature of our interrelations and their structure and function. You see politics emerge in just about every conversation, with professionals everywhere struck by the uncertainty and the paralysis and the growing instability. 

It is in the deepest advancement of our atomization and alienation that the issue of our relations and their nature has become most compelling, which mirrors the general nature of contemporary action in this country: we don't do reflection and maintenance, just constant outward expansion and indulgence until hard limits are met and there is a crash, and then we react ad hoc to that crash, learning little, patching wounds to facilitate the resumption of further expansion and further crashes until we more completely exhaust ourselves and arrive finally at rock bottom, where immediate expansion is no longer possible. 

When everything is working together well, the more fundamental processes underwriting that wellbeing tend to disappear in the background. This is the nature of stability: when we begin to trust a thing, it becomes taken for granted by its very nature. This is a good and desirable thing for the most part. It allows one to focus one's attention and energy on increasingly complex pursuits that build upon those stable fundamentals, strengthening and augmenting their power. But when that stability is won with ceaseless exploitation without reciprocation, then you are steadily eating away at those very fundamentals that have begun to disappear from conscious awareness, by a matter of course. Even further, you are gradually wedging apart from the bottom all of those many branches of labor division that are themselves in a steady, meandering process of separation by their own nature. What's more, this is a process that tends to worsen unaddressed due to its emergent invisibility, and the damage reveals itself through failure and crisis. 

This is a process that seems to bedevil that evolving form of human organization we loosely call "civilization," which through time tumbles its way from breathtaking expansion and achievement to terminal decline and crash, after which it picks itself up and dusts itself off somewhere else in a different form, and over time, a certain tendency and way of being is engendered and edified and strengthened. 

So what happens when things start to go wrong? As Marx put it, "every separation is separation of a unity." And those dysfunctional separations tend to be separations of an increasingly dysfunctional unity, which is malfunctioning together and thus the whole is jeopardized. 

To repeat a previous point, all of those underlying obscured fundamental processes become more visible by virtue of their increasing dysfunction. And as time goes on, there is simultaneously an isolating and separating-out and focusing-in of the more simple and fundamental elements going wrong and then a grouping together of those reconstituted and rectified elements together into a new working complex unity, after having collapsed and scrapped the previous dysfunctional complex unity, as far as the rot goes anyway, with as much as possible salvaged for convenience, as the tendency goes. 

Let's run through a quick material metaphor to illustrate and personalize this process and drive this point home. And then I'll relate all this to my own position on holistic thought and writing, and then we'll wrap this up. 

Take modern central heating. You press a button, or you have the thermostat set to a certain desired temperature, and upon being triggered, the entire system hums to life, sending heated air into an enclosed space until it is the desired temperature. If your enclosed space is well-sealed and insulated, the energy you use to heat the space goes to more efficient use, as it takes less energy to get the indoor heat up, and the indoor heat is maintained for longer periods of time with the same amount of energy. 

For someone who likes to read and think and write, this is a wonderful thing. You alter some settings, the space heats to the temperature you want, and you can focus time and energy on the things you like to do best. But for this set of conditions to hold up, you need to have a couple of things going for you. Modern heating systems tend to be either heating elements powered by electricity, gas-fired heaters, or oil heaters, all of which are typically assisted by electrical fans that move the hot air through venting to the desired locations, and these systems are generally coordinated and controlled by some sort of electrical analog or digital console. 

Much of this prefigures electrical wiring, various combinations of aluminum and steel, steel piping and various types of gaskets and threading and joinery for gas applications, an entire complex of gas or heating oil extraction and distribution, productive industry for the infrastructure and the actual hardware, various associated extractive industries for materials, electrical infrastructure for the electricity, plastics and computer chip production, and the entire body of specialized and skilled labor to produce and run all of those industries, distribute all of those products, install and maintain all of those products, and so on. And we're just talking about the dang hardware and the energy that makes the hardware go. You have to have enclosed space too to store and implement the hardware, and that enclosed space implies an entire constellation of construction trades and materials. And the entirety of all of this is capitalized and distributed on the open market. In other words, it all costs money, all of which is constantly negotiated by a multitude of people, and you have to have social permission to get some of that. 

When it is all working together, this is a wonderful and powerful arrangement. But what happens when any little part or resource is held up in that web, such as through trade disruptions like the kind caused by an imposition of tariffs (a goddamned can of worms we'll have to open another time) or resource depletion? Or what if one can no longer acquire the money required to maintain the constellation of requirements, such as maintaining the hardware or paying for gas or electricity? Or what if one lacks the means to hold the space required to contain the heating elements and the climate control, such as when one can no longer pay rent, because a small minority of humans have subverted the political economic means of distribution? 

So in order to enjoy a certain type of lifestyle, I've moved away from conventional housing and heating and the commercial relationships that support all of that, for a whole constellation of reasons, such as a growing personal and environmental instability, a dislike of the dynamics of financial obligation and commercial pursuit, and so on. But this also means forgoing all of the advantages that those things provide.  

It it is hard to do all of the other things you want to do when you're cold. Temperatures in the 50's Fahrenheit are doable, and can even be pleasurable if you bundle up a little bit. In the 40's, it starts to get uncomfortable, and you have to pile up the layers and blankets and your basic functionality starts dropping. In the 30's, it starts to hurt, and you have to basically bury yourself in a cold weather sleeping bag and just not do much of anything, let alone read, think, and write. 

One way around this vulnerability is to collapse down to a simpler and cheaper suite of technologies, which may also require a spatial readjustment as well. In denser and more polluted areas for example, wood-burning may be restricted or even prohibited, and wood has to be sourced from somewhere further besides. 

For the sake of argument, let's simplify the scenario and say that you collapse your heating dependency from an entire complex of central heating technologies and housing and the vast array of human beings and resources required to maintain them, and jump straight down to building fires as an individual to keep warm. If you're cold, you can make some heat yourself with wood, an ignition source, and some air. But what exactly would this require? 

First you have to understand the basic elements of fire. You have to relearn how fire is created through a spark to a certain fuel source, a source which is suitably arranged to facilitate airflow while at the same time maintaining the combustion. You have to also pay attention to the state of the fuel: how dry it is and in what state of decay it is, what the species of wood is, how finely it is split, and so on. You have to pay attention to where the cold air is coming from and whether it is getting to the fire, and whether the hot air has somewhere to go.  

So, without all of the many people working to produce all of the many elements that sustain the fire that you want, you have to isolate and rediscover all of the elements to produce the fire yourself, and then correctly implement them to achieve the results you want. 

This collapsing process of simplification works partly because you are relegating more effort and energy to simpler elements that are governing themselves, as opposed to relying on huge, complicated relations of elements that have to be deliberately arranged in the proper order. So, trees produce and reproduce themselves, pulling energy from their environments to do so. Once they are fully grown, you can cut them down and harvest from them, or otherwise harvest them when they have fallen such as in a storm. The tree itself has done a greater portion of the work for you. Contrast this to the vast chains of human-manipulated elements set in the proper relation to each other, forming central heating infrastructure. 

Anyway, once you have the basics down, you can steadily work your way back up the many relations that are working together. Your fire is working, great. Where is that fire going to burn? You've got to burn it somewhere where the fire doesn't catch everything else around you on fire, while at the same time the fire is sustained without going out. So you're learning about different types of stone and what can take the heat and what can't, and then how those things are arranged. There are also ways to arrange vessels for the fire which help it to burn more efficiently, and which direct that heat in more productive ways, such as the iron casing and piping of a wood stove. 

Once you get a good fire going, you will feel that radiant heat, and eventually that fire will go out, so you will notice that heat going away to various places unless the heat is trapped within a shelter, so you start paying attention to what type of shelter holds that heat in best, and how the joinery of that shelter can be more tightly bound, and how the sides and roofing of the shelter can be more insulated, and so on. 

And then those spheres of mastery keep growing and expanding. Eventually the generalist approach begins to break down, as there is only so much you can accomplish with the time and energy you have, and so you associate with others working on other problems, sharing the products of those others' efforts, and then you are back to forming a division of labor and branching specializations again, which are hopefully all working sustainably together in good synergy to produce a good life. 

What's good about this collapse into a simpler suite of technology though? Notice there is a movement here: a whole moving of the sphere of perception and action that fundamentally alters one's circumstances and daily experiences. When there is a holistic movement like this, you get a corresponding holistic change in the entire attached state of affairs, which contains within it a new set of values and effects. 

So you move back to wood fire? It takes a lot more work and it makes a mess. You could be breathing in some of that smoke if it isn't managed well. The activity of producing and sustaining it pulls more time and energy from other things you could be doing, such as reading and writing. But it is also quite rewarding to produce your own fire. 

You can watch the fire and it is mesmerizing. You can listen to it and it is calming. The light it gives off is pleasant. The smells are wonderful. The actual radiant heat has a different quality to it and feels really good. Producing the firewood takes a whole other set of skills that are satisfying to implement, and carrying, bucking, and splitting the wood takes much more physical exertion that can be pretty satisfying and feel good too. And all of these feelings and experiences get much more complicated with their own synergistic effects when you are optimizing the fire and shelter that the fire heats, especially if you are working with other people to make it happen. 

So, how does all of this translate to the writing and thinking here? 

What I'm trying to illustrate is that any given thing necessarily implies everything else, and changing your relation to that thing changes your relation to everything else that thing relates to as well. Your thought is necessarily reliant on your surroundings and your activity, and by the same coin, your surroundings and activity can be arrived at through thought, and a movement towards holistic thought requires a recognition of and a reckoning with that state of affairs. But when you start to mess with the whole of it as you become more conscious of the whole - especially as the whole of it becomes more unstable - then you have to pay attention and work with the whole of it to make sure that everything is working right, together. What that entails though is a little more complicated than it sounds. 

As we saw with the question of heating, the whole is not necessarily stable until the most basic and pressing elements of that whole are isolated and brought into the proper relation to each other, which means bringing them into the realm of your control, or which otherwise can be safely trusted to govern themselves in synergy with your circumstances. This distinction is actually quite important, and there is a real art to making the proper judgements in this vein. 

Where I'm going with this can be illustrated with another naturalistic metaphor. I think of the synergy of this thinking and acting, and how one handles it, much like one handles a transplant in the garden. One handles the entirety of it like one handles the entirety of a transplant. 

One uses discrimination and isolation and precision like one uses the sharp, delimited trowel to make the proper cuts around the living sphere of the transplant, so as to move it into the proper relation desired, while preserving the integrity of its living system as much as possible. It is impossible to reproduce through discrimination the actual living soil and the living system of the plant itself, and it is better to let that sphere be and encourage it to govern itself. One can attempt to move it all whole - while discerning the boundaries of what the whole should be, so that the whole of that constituent could be set in proper relation to the greater whole that constituent is part of. 

One thinks, and makes distinctions and decisions, yes, reorienting one's thought and one's self in the desired direction. But that is only part of the process. The rest consists of letting that reoriented whole breathe and live and grow in the directions it will, as one can't discriminate and govern all of it. One thinks, and re-orients one's life, and then that re-oriented life produces all sorts of unforeseen effects and consequences that feed back into one's thought, and so one thinks more and re-orients again, and so on, in the hopes of augmenting the multitude of good effects, while diminishing the bad. 

We're drawing attention to personal intentionality and action here, but also in play is the nature of what one is taking in. I've mentioned food before: what one eats affects how one feels and functions and ultimately how one thinks, and the same is the case for one's surroundings, as well as one's daily activity and the experiences that activity produces. 

Just as important is the form and content of other thoughts that are coming in too. Reading other forms of expansive and holistic thought feeds those expansive and holistic thoughts that are continually developed within one's own self. I'm thinking here of writers like John Michael Greer, who masterfully weaves together history, science, occult thought, myth, and much more, making sometimes far-flung and disparate connections, and you take in that form of thought whole and then process the whole of its relations, synthesizing those diverse relations with your own. 

To summarize everything here, thinking is just a small part of the equation if you are dedicated to holistic thinking. You think alongside your daily activity, your life circumstances, your environment, the resources and influences you take up into yourself, your historical position, and so on. You think with the acknowledgement that any given thing necessarily implies everything else.  

I could go on describing the many aspects and considerations of holistic thought, but I think I'll stop there. Like I said, difficult to describe. But as always, we'll keep describing it in different ways.