Now, there are multiple levels of necessity, which feature lower activation thresholds than total destruction. Necessity can be expressed in simulation exercised in the imagination for example, before the actual material necessity occurs. I'm thinking of a coffee mug placed in a precarious position - perhaps a little too close to the edge of a table - and one glances at it, and is suddenly struck with a pang of concern, coupled with a destructive vision of the mug toppling off of the table and shattering upon the ground. Visions such as these can be informed by knowledge and experience.
And that vision and the sudden pang of concern can move one to preventative action, using a small amount of energy to get up and slide the mug away from the edge, saving one the energy and distress involved with having the mug fall and shatter, which would bring about a sense of loss, or generate the need to replace it.
It could be that the mug can remain precariously perched, yet never actually fall off of the table. But going through life with a constant sense of uncertainty and precarity can be quite stressful, and so such distressing visions and their compensatory actions can actually smooth out the trajectory of one's life, simulating various states of destruction in the imagination while guiding one through various preventative and constructive processes in service to the vision, staving off the eventual material destruction and distress.
The higher the stakes involved, the more spectacular and urgent these visions, which can influence how powerful and totalizing they can be as motivating forces. There are also positive visions of desire and reward, which can contain powerful motivating impulses as well. One desires a dream house for example, and imagines the many blissful possibilities contained in its promise, and so one is fulfilled with the motivation to undertake its construction.
Questions arise though: what are the intentions and effects of these visions? The compensatory actions of these visions are only as good as the abilities and resources of those entertaining them and putting them to work. How to account for a society that is completely awash in visions of destruction and desire, which are produced in response to real cultural and political-economic phenomena, but which are promptly packaged up and sold back to its denizens, the matter concluded, with nothing of substance actually done to address the vision? What is a society to do that is choking on its own multiplying complexity, as its chaotic productive and destructive forces unfold unaddressed, however much is dreamt and spoken about them?
Sensational and spectacular disaster movies can circulate in the theaters, with incredible amounts of time and energy put into rendering their visions of destruction, down to the minutest graphical details such as beautifully simulated collapsing skyscrapers and titanic floods and raging infernos, creating positively sublime spectacles to behold. And look: if we don't get a handle on this climate issue, or this geopolitical issue, or whatever else, this little smooshed bug on the big-screen could be you!
This tendency even extends to real material destruction. The mainstream news media cozies up to you with images of real material distress: "Look...look at this stressful thing, pretty stressful right?" Mostly to get a rise out of you and to nudge you into some type of commercial action, without any kind of intention of addressing the underlying dynamic.
I'll admit though that this is a highly slanted account that isn't entirely fair; it is only a slice of an image born out of a particular nadir in Western history. There was a time when Western cultural products and news media effected a stronger feedback signal within the body politic itself, leading to broader changes (or edifications) in collective action, depending on the antagonistic (or supportive) nature of a particular message. But that faculty seems to have weakened over time, alongside everything else.
Though that doesn't necessarily mean a loss of feedback and action altogether; more appropriately, there seems to be a steady inversion of the signal-to-noise ratio, and a dispersal and incoherence of corrective action. Indeed, for every wave of collective listlessness and paralysis, you get accompanying spasms of thrashing and sound and fury in every direction, a complete discharging of the available batteries of conventional thought and action, which only accelerates and deepens the confusion and impotence. Much like one becoming bogged down in mud, spinning one's wheels in a panic, forming and deepening the ruts that were formed by the bogging down in turn.
So you get this preposterous situation in which fearful imagery is constantly circulating, with the assorted feverish apocalyptic visions continuously accumulating as everything continues to get worse at once, shorn of the collective faculty of mitigation. Within such a society, you get this strange admixture of a visceral and accelerating dynamism, and an excruciating sense of stasis and stagnation. A society increasingly cannibalizing itself and doing violence to itself, while in an increasing state of imaginative distress, feeding paranoia and conspiracy theory, the confusion and impotence of which feeds into the self-cannibalization and self-destruction.
A fearsome business! But I'll leave with a tantalizing message of possibility, that there are still eddies where those destructive visions give way to positive visions of hope and desire, where better living is still possible, which may very well seed tenacious shoots glimpsing light through the growing cracks.
