From this interview, via Sarah Hendren An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land. An informed and conscientious submission to nature. The wish to have and to belong to a place of one’s own, as the only secure source of sustenance and independence. A persuasion in favor of economic democracy; a preference for enough over too much. Fear and contempt of waste of every kind, and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion.
If you need a cause, if you need a purpose, if you need a crusade that will do the most to produce the world you want, it is this: Class war. The same damn class war! Taking wealth away from the rich and giving that wealth to the less rich. Our democracy, such as it is, will never, ever be stabilized until that happens. Do not allow yourself to be hypnotized by the myriad results of the rich having too much money. Keep your mind instead on the problem itself. The rich are too rich.
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.