Downhill Struggle

I really love it when scientists weigh in on the little issue of our impending doom. Perhaps my pleasure in this arises from the fact that the dispassionate language that they use almost always seems like they really don't give a flying fuck personally, but they are obligated to say something from some sort of humanist sympathy for the unscientific masses. A recently published study funded by NASA gave me some seriously dark chuckles indeed (here is the article). 

It pretty much says what everyone not actively ignoring reality is already aware of, the only difference being that scientists are all about specifics. The primary conclusion of the research said that most historical collapses are the result of rapacious elites wanting to consume absurd amounts of resources. This multi-disciplinary grouping observed that this is certainly true of our current situation, with elites in developed countries being the most responsible for our imminent demise.

What they failed to mention is that people emulate elites as much as they can manage in our Capitalist system. Consumption is equated with status, status with quality of life and the power to control it. I think it is from this fact that the arrogance and careless abandon of the wealthy has been transmitted down through the classes to the point that as a whole, we are not concerned with any number of scenarios the study listed resulting in an 'irreversible societal collapse'. 

This state of apathy has rather brilliantly been achieved by the elites allotting only enough of the world's wealth to the masses to keep them servile, while telling them that any downturn in the economy will destroy their lives, and that taking comprehensive action to avert the disasters the scientists promise would invariably be economic suicide. Given our value system, who can be surprised that people seem to believe that half measures and a faith in technology (which has so far only increased per capita consumption) will save us in the 11th hour. 

People are selfish and myopic, or at least the society that they have formed is. How to change that is a tough nut to crack. The old anarchist dream that when this massive modern edifice collapses that we will close ranks and work voluntarily towards our collective survival is the best possible scenario I can imagine. Hell, I'm even down for the far more popular belief that Jesus will show up in the final act and fix it all up in a jiffy.

"The only hope is that our Civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance." -Pierre Schaeffer

Regurgitated thoughts half digested

So once again I sit down to my strange machine and try to regurgitate my mind onto this surreal space we call the internet. Why, might you ask. Because the unfathomable depths of absurdity that is this world we live in is something that I feel is worth contemplating.

For example, I read several articles glorifying the people who managed to overthrow their government in Ukraine, much of it saying that this was 'fulfilling the democratic aspirations of the people'. First of all, say what you will of Yanukovych, the man was elected, and overthrowing an elected leader because he is doing what those who voted for him desire is about as undemocratic as you can get. Add that to the fact that the oppositions goal of joining the EU is illogical considering the economic block has no interest in the Ukraine joining, that the only way their entire economy is even viable is with Russian help and you got yourself some people protesting reality as much as anything. Not that that isn't heroic in and of itself; and basically the premise of virtually all revolutions. Having said that, loyalty to democracy for democracy's sake is idiotic anyway. Hitler and Bush were both elected, and their respective citizens supported those two maniacs, so why not Yanukovych? I just can't get over the fact that people are so quick to sympathize with protesters even if they haven't got the foggiest idea why they are doing it.   

Now lets get to something a bit more important, the economic rise of China. People all over the place are getting all sorts of worked up about this, none more so than Americans. Lets consider for a moment that every country that industrialized to become a mover and shaker in the world did so through organized pillaging on a massive scale. This was inevitably done through the barrel of a gun and was the reason for a lot of the murder over the past 150 years. Now look at China, they did it without having to take anything from anyone; except maybe their own people's ability to see the sun or have political opinions. Now one would think that the other economically powerful countries that achieved that status by rather ruthlessly murdering, robbing and raping every damn corner of the globe for generations would have the cognizance to tip their hats to China's remarkable accomplishment. But NOOOOO, they have contracted a case of convenient historical amnesia and thus can go on about 'human rights issues' and not following trade rules. Pretty sure the millions of people (past, present and future) who had to die and suffer for Europe and North America to become developed would have something to say about human rights. 

Somehow its fanaticism when someone wants to enact Sharia law, but its totally different when we impose our made up ideals/hypocrisies upon other societies, often through the use of explosives that fly through the air and kill with the greatest of ease. We accuse China of censorship and then seek to imprison or kill those who dare publish the raw facts of how the American Empire is run. The public loves 'reality tv' but isn't interested in anything resembling fact based reporting on actual events. 

I wonder if the day will ever come when the world has the courage to look in the mirror and realize that all our societies, culture, religion, ideals and the rest is nothing but a bunch of clutter and that anyone who is willing to get excited over it is a hoarder of the most pernicious kind of crap. We are all people, the hour is late, we might be doomed already, can't we just accept that we need to stop judging each other as if we had a leg to stand on. If this hellacious clutter cluster fuck ever stops I suspect we all look around and within us, and realize that the whole shithouse need never have been built, and deep as the shit may be, we would be better off without it.

Age of Oblivion

What sort of era are we entering into?

Let us consider a few stories that will hopefully paint some pictures that might help us answer that question. 

During the midst of a massive demonstration in Kiev, Ukraine thousands of protesters received texts at the same moment from their government saying- "Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.". 

The Pentagon decided not issue a new medal to honor drone pilots  and cyber warriors after uproar over the decision to rank this decoration above some medals given to troops wounded or killed in battle.

Our planets newest country, South Sudan, descended into civil war when its two largest ethnic groups started attacking one another, making an already uncertain future look grim.

A member of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria blew himself and 21 of his comrades up when he mistakenly used real explosives during a training session at a training camp north of Baghdad. 

Regular Mexicans in Michoacan formed self defense groups and started waging war against the local drug cartel because it had been terrorizing the local population, the government responded by sending in federal forces to try and control these groups and prevent them from succeeding where the government has systematically failed. 

Members of the American media have citing an exceptionally cold winter as evidence that climate change isn't occurring because the phrase 'global warming' was used in the past by those raising the issue.

We live in odd times folks. An era so chock full of hypocrisy, contradiction and people that the earth, our mighty living home in vastness of space, seems to be revolting against our behavior. It's hard to imagine where things will go from here, and for that reason most people seem determined not to think about it. The Age of Oblivion, where you must focus entirely upon the present because the past is too full of horrifying warnings and the future is shrouded in too many terrible possibilities to consider. 

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." -H.P. Lovecraft 1926

It would seem to me that rather than choosing one we have opted for going completely insane and plunging ourselves into a darker age than any of us can fathom. I think the saddest part is that the only positive answer I hear from anyone is that science and technology will save us... why not just believe in God if you are going to go that route?

Trust and Truth

"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." -JFK
It seems a tragic truth that the lie, or perhaps myth, has become more prevalent than the truth. This most recent revelation that the NSA is monitoring every human on earth that they feasibly can has hardly made a ripple in the placid sea of complacency that is the American psyche. I'm not sure if people still buy into the whole terrorism argument as a justification for spying on our own people to a level that makes Hitler and Stalin's governments look like amateurs, or if they are just too busy consuming to read or care. Part of me has to wonder if it isn't all just for marketing purposes that the people in charge have decided to abolish privacy.
Of course it is the machines that do almost all of the actual snooping, just as the they have started to do a good deal of the governments killing. Richard Brautigan once wrote:
"I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace."
I would claim that his vision of the future has proven to be the exact opposite of what is taking place. The environment is more fucked than ever, and fixing to get even more so at a compound rate. Our labors have not ended and set us free; in fact more people are enslaved than ever before. And worst of all, instead of machines of loving grace we have ones of omnipresent authority that watch and kill all according to the dictates of the Oligarchy.
Although it is a very small comfort that at least a few people are willing to ruin the rest of their lives in order to leak the truth about the workings of the Empire, the fact that perhaps a million people were in a position to do so and have remained silent is far more telling. Not only does our modern era breed alienation, it has spawned a dependence on government and technology that will lead us deeper and deeper into the horrifying darkness of Corporate Fascism. I don't think we were tricked, nor were we forced. It came solely from our preference for safety and comfort over all else. All we had to do was ask the question that Juvenile did almost 2,000 years ago-  QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES - Who will guard the guards themselves? The answer in our era is apparently no one. And the creepiest part is that the guards are now robots created to control the servile masses.

"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor"

-Marx

Society of the Spectacle

This summer I have had the pleasure of becoming unplugged to a large extent. Working for extended periods in areas where electricity does not flow and cell phone towers do no reach has become an odd luxury in my life. Up in the mountains the screaming spectacle of modernity seems far below and beyond understanding. It is in this setting that I find myself reading a book that has helped answer many questions concerning this strange society that spawned me.

The book is Society of the Spectacle and was written by Guy Debord in 1967. Despite being almost 50 years old, the book is prescient and prophetic. Written more in the style of Tao Te Ching, it presents of theory of modern capitalism that I find more convincing and articulate than any other I've read or heard. I really recommend it to anyone who is genuinely seeking a better understanding of this world of ours. Here are the opening lines-

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."

Nothing too revolutionary yet, just an update of Marx's observations about alienation and the fetishization of products. This next section was the one that really started to get me pondering-

"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images."

This line blew my mind. All my childhood people had been staring at televisions, preoccupied by their next purchase, lost in a wilderness of desire of semi-conscious consumerism. It dawned on me that a lot of the people I had grown up around had substituted the spectacle for a life of actual experience. It was the realization of the old religion dream- be able to transcend the painful suffering for a better existence without pain and loss. The muted mindless madness of this society of the spectacle does seem to dull the pain, and the people seem to be standing in line for the opportunity join the show.

I think its safe to say that in the years since computers started conquering human consciousness this has become even more true. The internet is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the spectacle. An entire reality conjured up to replace the harsh and savage truth of what sort of a civilization we got going here. By using images on a machine's screen for communication and information we have entered a world in which the majority of people we interact with exist not as living breathing hominids, but rather a series of spectacles. Even our military has enthusiastically used this advance to rain death and destruction without even needing to send some fate-fucked proles to do the deed. Now it can be a middle class consumer in Nevada who commutes to work, plops down at a computer and proceeds to carry out the Empires prerogatives whilst siting in a cubicle within a air conditioned room in the desert. If that isn't the incarnation of everything this society is working towards I don't know what is. 

Time to face the strange changes

"It's a little lonely in the desert..."
"It is a little lonely when you're around people too", said the snake
-Antoine Saint-Exupery The Little Prince

   There is a timeless serenity to the desert. Although a forest and mountain dweller my heart always feels especially clear when looking out over the starkly stoic landscape of the South West. It is a place that seems like it can swallow humanity whole and not even have any indigestion.
  As climate change is set to increase the desertification process substantially in the immediate future, I think it serves as a fitting reminder of how nature responds to mankind. So often it has been portrayed as 'environmental collapse' or the 'end of the world', but in a less dramatically anthropocentric view, its really just the living organism called Earth trying to find a solution to an invasive species. We rely on grain to survive, and we have used up almost all the space we can to produce food, eaten the oceans and killed off all the great herds, so when climate change results in chronic food shortages the problem will essentially be solved from a planetary perspective. Famine will sweep the globe, wars will certainly erupt in never before seen dimensions, disease will probably do its part as societies collapse and then ecosystems will slowly recover.
  The desolation we are all working towards will see much of the worlds farmland turn into a desert, which will no doubt seem like a tragedy to us humans, but other lifeforms will surely take it with less theatrics. The desert has always sustained an impressive amount of life for an arid area, and it also seems to make humans a bit more thoughtful and sustainable (Hopi, Kalahari Bushmen, Himba etc.).
  Speaking of the Hopi, they have a wonderful creation story. It is much like the others in that the world is created and destroyed multiple times until we got to the current era. The first time it was destroyed because a birdlike creature called the talker convinced people that there was differences between them, which caused conflict among the humans and led to the animals no longer trusting or associating with us. The second time it was a love of goods that resulted in trade that became more important than living in harmony with nature, and so this too was brought to oblivion. The third go round saw the rise of civilization with its swarms of people, who built flying machines and used them to wage war upon each other. This too was laid waste and those who had not lost their way were once again saved to make another attempt at life. They were told that this 4th world would not be as easy and beautiful as the others, and that they would have to live in a harsh landscape if they wanted to avoid the decadence and oblivion of the previous worlds, and so it is that the Hopi today live in the most desolate desert in the South West, keeping their traditions, waiting for the day that once again this world is destroyed and they are allowed to live because they have not lost their way.
   The Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur records the fable of a powerful king who asks assembled wise men to create a ring that will make him happy when he is sad, and vice versa. After deliberation the sages hand him a simple ring with the words "This too shall pass" etched on it, which has the desired effect. As we travel deeper into the desert of our own making, I think we would do well to remember these wise words, least we get too caught up in our madness.

Apathetic Apologetic Anesthetic

"He has strangled his language in tears" -Shakespeare Henry VIII
As the years of my life pass a feeling of acceptance settles into my consciousness. I never thought that one day it would be possible for me to acquiesce to such absurdities as this world consists of, but it seems to be happening. More than once people would respond to my diatribes and discourse with a far off look in their eyes, followed by some paraphrasing of 'you will grow out of it'. It never once occurred to me that they might be right, that my passion too would be subsumed by acceptance. There was a point where the more I learned about human behavior and history the more I felt certain that there was no way for me to live passively in such a situation, yet here I am, almost 30 and becoming benumbed.

Such seems to be a common occurrence among us moderns. If anything is killing humanity it is surely apathy. Not exactly a new development, really been just amplified by there being more people on the planet. Positioned by fate as I am, the view from these eyes has witnessed a level of abject indifference that seemingly has no limit. I used to think this was something refered to as doublethink (see this entry) but have now concluded it comes from a lack of precision diction. People can't express themselves, so they can't think clearly, so no ones says anything and shit just rambles on like a drunk hobo looking for a train. You can't question without a quest, so I think this one shall be mine for a time. Language is the coolest thing we have going for us, regardless of which you use. Yet it seems all too common in my ears to hear people trudge painfully through a sentence with words that fail to satisfy. Orwell commented on English being in a bad way over half a century ago, and this tongue has only gotten more tongue tied (ankyloglossia amnesia I shall call it). The lingo isn't fit for a dingo, and yet this shit spreads over the world and the seven seas like a damn disease. Maybe we tried to build the tower of babel and comedian Creator had to have the last joke, so in our brains he blew a shitload of smoke.
To be fair, I must concede that if you look over the my 230 posts you'll find I'm writing a pretty gargantuan amount of bullshit, but at least I expressed myself. It is incomprehensible to me that some people these days probably go their whole lives without ever being able to properly portray what they thought on any given day. What a fucking temporal tragedy to me. But in this world of starvation, drones, shopping malls, strip mines, wind chimes and crazy rhymes I suppose that's just the way she goes...

Nomads

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." -Nietzsche 
For the past few months I've been reading an epic historical work called 'Empire of the Steppes' which covers several thousand years of nomadic migrations. I'll spare you the pages of notes I've taken documenting the rise and fall of innumerable empires and even more incalculable wars; I fully recognize that such things interest few people. What I thought would be interesting to most people is the authors defense of nomadic barbarity towards sedentary people. After recounting the staggeringly violent life of Ghengis Khan she says he did none of it out of cruelty or anger. It was the result of a fundamentally different point of view. One that saw cities and agriculture as an opposing way of life, one that bred weakness, decadence and slavery.
 City after city, empire after empire, fell to the horde of the great Khan, and all were burned and slaughtered if they resisted, which most did. If not for the intervention of one of his advisers it is probable that he would have had his troops kill the entire population of Northern China, burn the cities, destroy the irrigation system, and let the whole area revert to its natural state; which is exactly what he had done to Eastern Iran. This foreign policy seems ruthless beyond understanding but we must remember that virtually every empire he conquered started the war, he just finished it with a decisiveness no one was ready for. Often they would ride away from a ravaged area long enough for those who had hidden to come out, only to have a rear guard return to finish the rest off.
 While reading about these tumultuous times I found my mind wondering if this seemingly irresistible human tendency towards killing on a large scale was all motivated by the same thing- ignorance of the other.
The nomadic hordes of Temujin were more cunning and effective than brave. Their tactics and weapons almost always ensured they suffered very few casualties relative to what they inflicted. Through discipline and experience they were able to trick enemies into doing exactly what they wanted and when the moment was right they would destroy the opposing army in its entirety.  When America sends our soldiers, pilots and robots to kill in the exact same areas that the Mongol horsemen once rode we do it in a similar way. Our weapons and tactics make us largely invulnerable to our foes and our strategy seems to our enemies to not go beyond death and domination. Also like the hordes of the great Khan, we travel far from our homes to wage war upon people whose way of life we are incapable of understanding. As complex, populated and technologically advanced our way of life is, at our core we seem to have not changed at all.