Rhyd Wildermuth: People — many of them friends I’ve known to be otherwise reasonable — have become so polluted by feeding on algorithmic despair that they’ve lost any sense of what is real. In such a state, you lose your mind, which is to really say you lose your body. You feed on and then feed into the despair, spread it, becoming vectors for imaginal viruses which plague your unconscious bodily dreaming.
A proverb is one man’s wit and all men’s wisdom.
Lord John Russell, as quoted by Jackson Crawford in this (as always) excellent video “Odin and Wisdom.”
Josh Radnor: Give up on your war against reality
When I fight reality, when I wail and moan that things should be going ‘some other way,’ I suffer. When I begin with acceptance and surrender – “Okay this is what is happening right now and where we are” – I don’t suffer. Or at least I suffer far less. And the next right actions are much much clearer than when I’m giving equal weight to each voice in my head.
This, from Alan Jacobs, is one of the most clarifying things I’ve read in a while.
- In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed?
- Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community?
- What organizations serve and seek to protect those people?
- How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations?
Once I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action.
Charles Eisenstein: “Economic growth is finding something people used to do for themselves, taking it away and selling it back to them.”
Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine:
In 1589, William Lee of Calverton developed one of history’s most quietly revolutionary technologies. The legend goes that Lee was upset that his wife spent more time knitting than with him, so he devised the stocking frame to speed up the process. Lee’s machine, about the size of a large desk, allowed its operator to use pedals and bars to automatically mimic the movements of a hand knitter, making it much easier, and faster, to produce stock-ings, socks, tights, and other knit garments. (At the time, men wore tights, not pants.)
The machine worked so well that he tried to commercialize it. But Queen Elizabeth refused to grant Lee a patent, and left him with a foreboding rebuttal: “You aim high, Master Lee,” she said, before expressing concern for the hand knitters his device would affect. “Consider… what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” Lee died broke, oblivious that he’d sowed some of the earliest seeds of the Industrial Revolution. His brother James Lee pressed on with his invention, however, and it later became a key tool in England’s booming textile industry.
At our point in the timeline it’s virtually inconceivable that someone in authority would stop some new automation because of the harm it would do workers. We all look on helplessly because we know our tech overlords are unleashing destructive forces and we know no one in power will stop them because the economy must grow at all costs.
So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband. This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is “he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being.”
They are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not. Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity.
I’m glad to have encountered Lewis Mumford’s phrase “life cannot be delegated.” I’m also glad for the way L.M. Sacasas invokes Illich to relativize an idea that could become overly rigid–because, of course, a great deal of our work is delegated:
The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost. It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.
I may not agree with everything Charles Eisenstein says in this column, but I totally agree with his conclusion:
The mindset that demonizes one’s political opponent is the same one that demonizes a foreign enemy to make war, or that demonizes a population to facilitate ethnic cleansing. Left unchecked, it will erupt into civil unrest, violence, and then tyranny. It may even lead to World War Three. I speak here as an American, but the same dynamics are rampant across the West. My country is not exempt from what it has sown in the world. The fate of Libya, of Iraq, of Venezuela, of Ukraine, of Syria, of Yugoslavia, of Lebanon, of Gaza could easily become our own.
What allows political authorities to commit heinous crimes against humanity? They are not, after all, superhuman. They don’t have special powers like Magneto or Darth Vader. So they must turn the population into willing accomplices in their own oppression. They instigate wave after wave of fear and hate, and ride each to new heights of power. As the Nazi Hermann Goering put it, “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
There’s always a bogeyman. The insane escalation in Ukraine requires the bogeyman of Vladimir Putin leading the resurrected corpse of the Evil Empire (the Soviet Union). The wave of surveillance and censorship and persecution of dissidents in the West requires the bogeyman of “MAGA extremists” or “Russian agents” or “domestic terrorists” or “spreaders of dangerous anti-vax misinformation.” The razing of Gaza and slaughter of its people requires the bogeyman of implacable hate-crazed enemies of Israel thirsty for the blood of Jews.
Every hateful word, every dehumanizing smear, every note of mockery and contempt, every denunciation and condemnation that we put into the public square feeds the powers that would manipulate us into war, genocide, and fascism. And so, politicians and media set the example of hate for us to follow. It isn’t even deliberate — that’s the thing. It is just the way things are done. I don’t mean here to set up politicians and media as the new evil. “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.” But that is what they do. They divide us. They teach us to hate each other.
Don’t fall for it. That’s my request. Don’t fall for it. Instead, enter the political sphere with the questions that come from compassion and lead to love. That is the only revolution worth having.
I cannot, of course, provide documentary proof for that claim. But as the Marxists used to say I believe it is no accident that the shaking of the foundations of the global economy and “the longest period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history” happened just as the iPhone was taking serious hold on the imagination of the developed world, and Facebook and Twitter were becoming key components of everyday life in that world. On your smartphones you can get (a) a stream of prompts for visceral wrath and fear and then (b) games and distractions that accomplish the suddenly-necessary self-soothing. Between the wrath and fear and the subsequent soothing, who can remember what happened last week, much less ten years ago? Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia. “What is it I was so concerned about?”