Okay, let’s talk economics. A quarter of a trillion dollars per disaster, year after year, is not sustainable for an economy driven by a dubious infinite-growth paradigm that is itself built upon fossil fuel use, the very cause of the disasters themselves. Global collapse comes.
A much better showing, this session. Things are coming together. Some good fights to be found in here.
Hope really is the worst poison of them all. I know it for truth, partner. Best drink what you can lay hands on, while you can, because that’s all there is.
Speech-speaking,
blah-blah-bombast.
Rally-the-ruble,
family-car-fine to
mobile-the-zation
as the
cold-winter-comes.
○
– achrilock
Dear dairy. Tonight was taco night and I gibbled many nutriment for my metabolisis. Also in entreprenurealative news, I have schema to deflect foundatial hardship in this economics: to become a salvage dealer in expired 2fa tumblr codes on the dark webs (dark web = when you log on to ebay in browser with dark mode). I am also might write a story have not in a while but must not think it too much or too anxietous to compost. Finally I will join The Old Religion for tax obligation. Dear Lord thank thee for the taco feast, included: cheese, faux chick’n, leafs, red ooze, corn husk, and the feelings of the heart. End entry.
Two questions I see a lot, in fiction and on the internet. Do you want to live forever? And, why are rich and powerful people so cartoonishly evil? I think the two might be related (and this is by no means an original conclusion, I’ve seen it sprinkled throughout so many movies, books, TV shows, songs, and works of literature, just articulated in different ways). What I think is worthy of relaying is the way the two are related, as I see it.
What if complexity of thought, the process of weighing relative abstract inputs into a cognitive model, sentience, for lack of a better term, of dogs or of people, was an accident? Science tells us this is probably so, an outgrowth of the imperative of survival expressed through additive iteration. Evolution. But what if, as is the case with the copying of cells and the transfer of genetic material to offspring, our minds also suffer a kind of inherent defect, a disease that is the logical outcome of the weight of awareness of cognitive or emotive networks of sufficient complexity?
I’m not talking specifically about unhappiness, although that is part of it. The oft-cited ‘rat park’ you can find on any internet forum talking about addiction or socioeconomics, whereby a mind either subjected to sufficient stimuli or deprived of it, or the less well-known ‘pit of despair’ experiment where a mind is subjected to torture until it breaks, effectively ceding decision making control over the body and accepting any subsequent torture. These, I think, are both pieces of the same puzzle of when a complex abstract modeling capability becomes a liability rather than an advantage for an organism, for a mind.
We all know that minds have a ‘breaking point,’ a point in the curve of awareness and efficacy beyond which cognition and awareness and modelling themselves see diminishing returns, a point at which simply being aware is dangerous to the mind itself. People lose their minds. People overdose. People drink themselves to death and commit suicide. Why? Because the perceived weight of the abstract model, and whatever their position inside of it, becomes too great and they want to turn off the model. Animals generally do it through catatonia resulting in thirst or starvation (yes, it is possible to do this to an animal, in a lab setting or in the case of my dog by the previous owners beating the hell out of it and playing games with its food). People do it through self-destructive behavior (lighting their own lives on fire to feel the warmth, any warmth, before the end, basically).
But I don’t believe the breaking point in people has necessarily to do with material comfort, or with proximity to other humans, or any of the other planks in the platform of psychological stability offered to us in fiction or in academic literature. I think the breaking point is, as previously noted, the point at which the cognitive matrix of modelling, both input stimuli and abstractions like emotions or perceived relationships between people and things or other models, becomes a burden to the internal viewer rather than a tool they can use or a vantage from which they can enjoy reality.
Now, most people don’t reach this point until very late in life, at which point they generally just wither to the point where they can’t perceive their own internal model with sufficient complexity to cause a cascade failure in their own ‘will,’ for lack of a better word. Some distract themselves for decades. Some just aren’t capable of hitting the wall in the curve because, frankly, they lack the complexity to find it on their own (without, as previously mentioned, being experimented on or actually tortured). ‘Living in the moment’ or ‘being down to Earth’ would actually be defense mechanisms against the problem, if my reasoning is correct, which is why animals and kids, or particularly mundane adults, bounce back quickly from adversity.
But this leads us to the question ‘if someone’s world is largely without adversity, materially, socially, sexually, and transcendently (being able to ‘actualize’) why would anyone not want to go on forever, or why would they spend their time and resources being a son (or daughter) of a bitch to everyone?’ And, I think, dear and patient friends who are still reading, the answer to this question covers the other two.
I think there are two factors to the ‘collapse’ of a mind, or at least to the start of the downward slide in the curve. First, there is the complexity of the mind itself. How much ‘relative information’ can it hold? Too little and the mind is basically immune from this disease of advanced cognition. It can go on forever without, as previously mentioned, willful torture. Too much inherent complexity and, well, you’re in savant territory and you’re a glass cannon of cognitive power and you’ll solve incredible math problems or write symphonies until you hit the first rock in the road and then that’s that (unless you’ve got a trust fund and some very nice people around you who want to exploit your gifts for as long as possible).
Anyway, the second factor is more concerned with the middle ground between these two mind types. The mind that can hold a great deal of ‘relative information’ in its model, but not so much that it can’t function in normal life. With a little luck in life, or with a great deal of determination, these are your rich and powerful people, your well-known types. Particularly if their model has been tuned to prioritize social relationships right alongside what we’ll call ‘ascending necessity’ (doing things with the goal of making your position better). I’m not saying all rich and powerful people are smart. They are not. But their minds are within this channel of capacity for large cognitive / emotive models and ability to process this data in a useful way consistently over the long term (not too much, not too little, just right, for decades).
So, if they’re so fucking capable and well-adjusted, why are they such shits? Ah, that is the question, isn’t it, dear readers? And it also leads us to an answer to another. I believe it is possible to experience sufficient complexity in modelling (how you perceive or imagine circumstances, not only of yourself but of the other systems and models with which you interact) that fundamental, almost childlike or animal-like ideas about the world, things like beauty and love and goodness and justice and destiny, even the basic enjoyment of things like eating or sleeping or interacting with others… all the things that art and science tell us make us human, essentially, can become background noise. As the realization dawns on the internal nexus of the complex model (you, sitting inside of your head thinking about the world) that these points of reference, these rocks in the roiling seas of life, are merely abstractions that mean very little, nothing, really, in the grand scheme of things, it is possible to become somehow the opposite of the previously discussed catatonic animal in the pit of despair.
Instead of shutting down, one is inclined to pursue minutia to an almost pathological degree. All of these facets of human life become fixations or playthings as all of the warmth seeps out of the light of the world and only cold illumination remains. There is no longer a prism to refract that light into rainbows, because you don’t believe in rainbows anymore and you don’t believe there’s a prism that could refract them anyway, because they aren’t worth refracting. It is possible to become a kind of robot, a dead thing walking, capable of modelling, analyzing stimuli and concepts but no longer placing them in any real hierarchy that isn’t transient or subservient to a momentary inclination. Ever-chasing, the same way the supposedly less-sophisticated addict does, any immediate comfort to warm the soul. And so nothing is enough and nothing matters, because you’ve discovered that all of your struggles and hardships and triumphs and loves and hatreds, and those of everyone else, were meaningless, and will always be so. The model is detached from meaning, and thus what we would think of as the ‘soul’ departs the cognitive matrix. You’re just a machine. You consume, you kill, you die. Your monstrous offspring, feeding on your corpse, repeat this process in their own descents.
And we cannot and must not ignore the role that our kind of society, that hyper-immersion in information and data and goings on, that alienation and capitalism and the noise of it all, plays in these transformations. And, with this, I believe that we have also answered the question about living forever. Absolutely not, not if you have any sense at all. As I see it, death is the one kindness granted by a dark universe. It is the one salvation we are given against what would otherwise be the most perfect hell conceivable for any sentient life, to become so aware as to notice the inadequacies of the universe itself, and yet to live on. To walk through wastelands in our own minds for years or decades, without warmth or the hope of warmth. Never to know happiness or fulfillment again, and to know that any we had known was always false. Hell no I don’t wanna live forever, fam. My soul’s pretty much used up. I don’t even wanna know what the ones the billionaires and politicians are carrying around are like, and I certainly don’t want to spend eternity, even an eternity measured in bonus decades or centuries, with them.
Anyway, I couldn’t sleep and there’s no booze left in the house. Happy Friday! 🙂
I mean the very definition of hegemony is rule without challenge. The left, in its quest for basic rights and fairness, is so often told of the importance of ‘plurality’ and ‘freedom,’ usually to withhold these basic protections from certain groups. And told by the same (small d) democratic voices who are all too willing to rally ‘round a monarch. Why is it that authoritarian sentiment is never, ever used to liberate, only to shackle, mind and body, to either a flag or a class system built, since the start of history, upon violence? Freedom for mine and not for thine. So long as me and mine are in the in-group, the winning group, the ruling group, then a ruling class is just perfect. It’s sweet in fact. Very traditional and comforting.
The answer is, of course, that there is no such thing as freedom. At least not as a political concept. Freedom is a practical matter. The freedom to say, do, give, take, help, or harm as one sees fit without constraint. Freedom is better thought of as agency, both positive and negative. And monarchs, or most heads of state, really, even in so-called democracies, explicitly have the ultimate agency, whether overtly as a function of absolutism or implicitly as a grandparent figure who presides over the spiritual component of secular nationalism. All tsars, by any title, are the fathers or mothers of their people.
The answer is that there is always a hierarchy, because humans desire a father / mother figure, to tell them it’s alright, to make them braver than they are, to make them feel safer than they are, to make them feel better than they are. To settle their disputes as a parent would and to tell them who is right and who is wrong. To sort them into haves and have-nots. To take from them. To hurt them when they need hurting. To punish them. To help them punish. The best among these does so with little challenge, a hegemonic head of a national or imperial household. Most humans crave someone to tell them what to do, especially in crisis. This explains the current global mass hysteria over one old dead woman. The vitriolic reaction to it is the out-group expressing its dissatisfaction with how this hegemony has been wielded historically and in contemporary political economy (to steal, to colonize, to brutalize, and to destroy the Earth).
I’m one of those lefties who has gone ‘wrong,’ by the definition of my own as well as those of outsiders. I don’t want to see anyone’s agency curtailed, but there are two cases in which I tolerate it. One is when those fundamental rights of life I spoke of earlier are threatened, which is a huge tract of ideological and practical land. The other is when someone else tells me they’re gonna rule me or someone or something I care about, and when they’re doing this without the courtesy of ensuring those aforementioned fundamentals of agency. In either of these cases, there sure as hell should be a monarch and it sure as hell isn’t going to be anyone else who doesn’t understand the situation as well as I do. In my opinion, all organized force exists to make the world the way I want the world to be. There’s no point in sugarcoating that or trying to attribute it to anything greater, because there isn’t anything greater. There is only the experience of living things and the sustainability of the biosphere, and those people or things which would threaten the integrity of these.
If you all want something to revere and worship, I’ve got one hanging in my pants. If not, get your intellectual and moral priorities sorted and start thinking about ideas and values rather than arbitrary hierarchies. Start including everyone in this idea of ‘freedom’ you go on about, or stop pretending it means anything other than enrichment, power, and safety for your in-group. There is NO benign transfer of power or authority, even within your own heart and mind. And if you are going to surrender such power, even within yourself, to another you had better be damned sure that you’re doing so to a worthy person or institution or class of people, because once you give it away it is very difficult to retrieve.
I mean, let’s look at this rationally. Let’s be ‘self-interested agents’ and ‘rational actors,’ shall we?
The left is pulling its old trick of just telling kids that all they need to do is believe hard enough and solidarity hard enough and mutual aid hard enough and that it doesn’t matter what strategy they use or whether they’re even making gains, only that they struggle. This is a very useful position for an internet lefty demagogue who relies on daily notes to broaden their reach, right? But it doesn’t pay the bills of progress. It’s the same grift as the right but instead of money we collect clout.
The political establishment, the center, is telling kids that they should just keep voting blue no matter what because that is their only salvation. Democracy being dismantled from beneath their feet? Never getting anything they actually need or want? Fake empty people lying to them on corporate media every day while taking money from the very people they pretend to fight? Financial and legal noose tightening daily around the necks of entire generations? Voting grants a civic participation buff for about five minutes, and keeps you out of the eye of the security state if you rep it hard enough, but it’s the taker’s world and you’re just living in it, until, that is, you are no longer useful to this group. Then you become the enemy and you find yourself in group one, surveilled and repressed and marginalized until the system can process you out of relevance, or indeed out of life itself as the political is most assuredly practical here.
The right is pushing forward with its fascist initiatives, at the local and national levels, and collaborating through business and political connections to individuals and groups abroad, to press that agenda internationally. But this is not, as they tell their supporters, about creating a Christian-fascist utopia where ‘the other’ is suppressed and ‘the good’ are elevated and rewarded by society. It’s about money. It’s about an oligarchy finally seizing all of the machinery of society and economy and of state to permanently solidify its power to use people up until they’re dead and then to throw them away without consequences, and to easily replace them through the various pipelines that turn a child into a commodity of economic and political utility. If you are not as wealthy as they, they see you as a farm animal for extraction and slaughter, regardless of your politics.
It’s an honest intellectual and practical question. If we are all brave enough to admit that what we have been trying is not working, that, in fact, we are actually losing to the oligarchy, globally, and that our legal and economic and political systems are THEIR tools, not ours, and that this will always be so as long as we play by their rules, what avenue of action is open to us other than to adopt an accelerationist theory and practice that facilitates the system’s destruction so that there might be space to create something better in its place?
Somebody speak up and answer, because, right now, outside, the planet is dying around you, and this will soon become a question of your own practical survival as well as a moral and intellectual discussion. The oligarchy is only interested in dealing with that to the extent that its effects do not touch their interests. And they’re failing even at that. And even if that situation was not as pressing and dangerous as it is, their program of turning human beings, all life for that matter, into nothing more than economic tokens traded at their leisure began long ago, and that in and of itself is cause for the destruction of the systems they have made.
Tell me, what do I need to put in my social media bio to solve these fundamental problems of civilization? Because I think you’re all in denial, and if you don’t wake up soon you’re going to find that it’s too late for you to do anything at all that will make a difference.