Easy Now

Ideology is shape. It is direction. But within it must be intelligent controls allowing for its disintegration if the ideology itself endangers the reality it crowns, just as medical research has allowed for disintegrating stitches and collapsing casts that take into account the dynamic nature of living tissue.

All historical social entities are birthed on new ideas, and then mature and age, running on those previous ideas until they diverge internally and die out due to energy loss. They become unable to adjust to the constantly changing environment.

The same thing is going to happen with the next iteration, whatever form it will take. And so we have a dual purpose, to design a system that is resilient in preserving its humanity, and a system that decays and dies in a humane way as well, making way for the birth of the next system.

In times of crisis, we must acknowledge that it is easy for our ideas to become radicalized and seek authoritarian power exercise, merely because the ideas themselves are tempered under authoritarian forces. It is too easy for a reactive force to push back in the opposite direction with the opposite force, until it aligns itself as the master in the power relationship, which leads to an endless cycle of oscillating exploitive power groups. These oscillating power shifts do seem to diminish until a new equilibrium is established. But at what cost? Don’t we have the choice to build machinery that doesn’t behave this way? If it is impossible to avoid fine, but let’s at least try something else to see if that is the case, rather than foolishly and fearfully stick to this ongoing hideous charade. 

Education

Education creates a knowledge base that can be anchored to reality. But each of us can only hold so much knowledge, so that the rest of our convictions move in the direction of whom we trust, and whom else we perceive to have a knowledge base that is anchored to reality. Without education, we are a malleable mass, ready to follow whoever has not only the strongest convictions, but the most powerful means to manipulate and create a false reality. Education creates a stable base in a given discipline. The educated can then trust those educated whose surface beliefs reach down to their most unshakable convictions, informed by values that they can all agree on.

The more people become lazy and resign themselves with relying on another knowledge source, the more that entire body of knowledge becomes weakened and unmoored from reality itself, which dangerously exposes it to hijacking from those who seek to manipulate the perception of reality. 

Nodes and Networks

Each individual is connected to many other individuals, so it is important for each individual to be sound in mind and spirit, as a matter of structural integrity. If one goes down, that degrades the rest, making it more probable that another goes down, and the problem grows exponentially. Mutual expectations sustain each other. A strong individual, when properly integrated into a community, makes for a strong community in turn. But it becomes important to clearly define what strong means. We want good self-esteem, but not egotism. We want self-confidence, but we don’t want unnecessary aggression. And etc.

Humans are to be ends and never means. I say this not as a philosophical speculation, but a declaration that this is how things actually work. If you treat a human being as a mean, they will be corrupted to the point of barely functioning as the original desired mean in the first place. Respecting an end will generate a means. 

Against Cruelty

You cannot leave the weak behind, nor can you justify with some obscure notion of predestination or social Darwinism or fatalism the decision to leave the weak to perish. Because the weak are part of you. Your destiny is coupled with the weak. If you destroy the weak, you weaken yourself, leaving you to be eventually destroyed by the dogmas that you so righteously perpetuate. 

Debate

We should take care to avoid overreliance on judgments based on conceptions of what should be. The ideal conception is a beauty to behold, but quickly becomes ugly when you attempt to place it onto reality, as it bends and contorts a reality that is far more complex than the simpler static ideal picture.

We have to be patient with people. In trying times, this seems to be an annoying suggestion, but I think a good one. No one has a perfect store of information. No one is a permanent fixture. People do in fact gain information, and they do in fact change as the world changes. If we issue judgment, it constrains our view of the judged and causes them to react to the constraint itself. Judgments and attacks insulate the recipient and shut them off to the world, alienate them, and further couple them with their initial causes, however misled those causes are. 

Sometimes this is for the better, sometimes not. It has become increasingly important to attack the foundations of an ideology that has grown malevolent and is guiding us towards ruin. However on an individual level, ideology becomes wrapped up with one's own ego, and thus one's projection into the social world. Ideology is not changed through force, but through learning and compassion. Maybe the best avenue is to patiently argue what you believe in, for as long as you believe in it, and keep up the pressure. 

Your Own Opium Den

The middle US is one vast suburban sprawl, wherein unfortunate, isolated persons sitting alone in dark rooms, their blank stares bathed in the flickering blue glow of television light, sit huddled over electronic fires. 

Why Ideology? What is it?

A case could be made that we do need ideology. That some distinct ideology structures everything we do. That ideology is as much a part of us as tool making and shelter building.

The following is a tentative metaphorical account trying to come to grips with what ideology is and why we need it.

What is Ideology?

So what is ideology? The dictionary definition is pretty good: “the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc. that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.” For reasons of flexibility, I wish to use the term in a bit of a looser manner.  It definitely consists of ideas. But it is more than simply a bundle of ideas. It is a framework for organizing information. It serves as an organizing principle for establishing institutions and the mechanisms for facilitating a society. It serves as a connecting point between our selves and bare reality. It determines what we make of social relations and how we distribute power and resources. Ideology is a framework that we use to understand the world and a schematic for interacting with that world. It is the process of higher, more complex brain processes working with the entity they are a party of, attempting to make sense of reality so that they can assist the entity they are a part of in perpetuating itself within that reality. Ideology exists in countless variations and changes over time, taking different shapes in accordance with how it is used, who is wielding it, what sorts of power structures are wielding it, and etc. We will investigate those conditions at a later time.

Ideology is not static; it is always changing. Different people interpret ideologies in different ways. The powerful distort ideologies to facilitate their interests, while the powerless interpret ideology in a way that gives them dignity or comfort. Ideologies are interpreted differently at different times, and they are interpreted in various degrees depending on the varying intelligence and awareness of their adherents. Ideologies arise in a simplistic form from emotional constellations of values and varying modes of living, and then take on complexity over time. Ideologies can be birthed in reaction to other ideologies, or from combining elements from other ideologies or whole ideologies themselves.

Another way of describing ideology is by detailing how it actually works. Let’s try constructing a metaphor to better understand what ideology is and why we need it.

How Does Ideology Work?

The nature of ideology is very complex, but we can simplify our approach by talking about physical tools and structures and show how the realization and maintenance of these objects parallels the utility of ideology and its application in the physical world.

Tools are essential to human survival. They played a large part in the survival of our ancestors and probably helped put more of an emphasis on ingenuity and the cultivation of the intellect. Behind every tool could be said to be an idea. An idea of how to manipulate physical reality: utensils help us eat, knives help us separate matter, buckets help us carry and manipulate liquid, etc.

Ideas for utility can be compounded into better tools to increase usefulness. Seemingly contradictory concepts can be combined into a single object to increase its effectiveness in a given task.

For example, a hammer is comprised of materials both hard and soft, a static logical contradiction, but hardly so in practical application. The hard metal body applies force where needed, the soft material around the handle absorbs force to benefit the human hand. These principles drive the increasing elaboration of the shape and constitution of the materials that make up this tool.

In the same way, ideologies are composed of disparate and sometimes seemingly contradictory principles that cohere, prescribing how we should live, how we should treat ourselves, how we should treat others, how we should relate to each other, how we should think, and etc.

Ideologies last longest when they produce favorable results for their adherents. They make for stable societies, powerful weapons, instruments for peace, sources of meaning for whole cultures, and more. To better see where I’m going with this, let’s go with the physical structure, say a building or a bridge.

Crossbeams, supports, arches, columns, all of these inventions seek to reinforce and build upon the nature of the physical structure, something that has an ancillary function to human beings. Stress comes from that structure’s relation to gravity, reality. These interconnecting reinforcements seek to increase communication within a building’s shared stress. The better the building communicates, the more the building harmonizes and distributes forces when placed against the earth, the more longevity and usefulness the building acquires.

So then a good ideology should allow us to interact with the world favorably, resulting in sound health, good relationships, functioning social systems, and more. We have a complex emotional relationship with ideology that is sustained when it works for us. Ideology quickly becomes complex over time. It reflects upon itself, improves upon itself, communicates with its surroundings and alters itself accordingly, and drifts in meaning as language becomes loaded or changes meaning.

And so ideology not only entails the prescriptive mental structures we construct to inform our actions and administration, but the reflexive act of evaluating the ideology itself and its construction. Just as a school of thought arises for proper building materials, building procedures, structural physics, aesthetics, and etc, there are numerous schools of thought regarding prescriptive ideology, proper construction of ideology, the nature and limit of knowledge, the binding principles behind ideology and its translation to practical action, and etc.  

Why Ideology?

The fact of the matter is we live in reality. We are subject to it. We must harmonize with it as physical, biological, chemical, sociological, political, economic, and ecological forces (to name a few) sculpt and change reality as we know it.

We exist in reality as distinct living systems with boundaries that function a certain way. Because of what we are, there are things that harm us, and there are things that help us. Our higher brain functions rest atop an older animal brain which has developed its own workings based on the traversing of the physical world of our ancestors, and so there is an emotional way we relate to things and others. Ideology is a set of instructions that ends up rewriting itself over time to improve the function of these numerous relations.

We need ideology to shape the systems in which we live. For as long as we rely on the higher brain to traverse the physical world, we rely on ideology.  

Ideologies Live and Die

A dam may be incredibly effective in powering our TV’s and our washing machines, but there lies the possibility that the earth may one day reject it, as the principles that make up the dam’s form are no longer compatible with the underlying principles of reality. A changing topography may put strains on the structure itself, or a surge of storm water may overload the dam, or the dam itself may deteriorate over time, weakening itself to the aforementioned threats.

In the same way, ideologies take on a life of their own when their logical form is applied in the real world, which is then imbued with an implicit expansion, peak, and deterioration. They produce effects that run far outside of their original scope, due to their finite form, so they must change in accordance with those effects. But over time ideologies grow old. They grow more complex, their language grows dated, they are understood by less people and some of the people that do still understand take advantage of that fact.

Since ideologies prescribe a set of actions for an entire group, institution, or society, there is a structural integrity and rigidity that arises as a result. Underneath such logical forms, power differentials form. Further, ideology can’t capture the infinite complexity of reality. It can only approximate its nature. Therefore actual contradictions will arise. Reality will behave differently than ideology. This can be tolerated so long as ideology is useful for a great enough amount of people. But when it is no longer, contradictions become glaring.

The presence of a contradiction between ideology and the real is the indication of a structural failing. When contradiction becomes the norm, you have an imminent collapse.

We can construct new ideological structures, works of art to be admired and inspired by, until they harden into prisons, when we must escape them. Even brilliant intellectuals can become encased in the confines of dogma. Their arguments zip through the air elegantly until they reach the walls of their self-imposed prisons, awkwardly bouncing off the bars. This is why even bright men can sometimes appear to be stupid. This can be explained by the nature of ideology, which is many things, things we will explore quite a bit.

How has the Meaning of Money Been Obliterated?

What does it mean to say the meaning of money has been all but obliterated? I’m not much of an economist so I enter this discussion with some hesitation, but there are a few simpler concepts that we can go over perhaps.

One of the important characteristics of money as a medium of exchange is that it should serve as a store of some sort of value when affixed to the objects to be exchanged. How is this value derived? Well that question usually leads back to the concept of supply and demand, which might be somewhat useful for explanatory purposes, as simplistic as that concept is.

So objects take on a value in accordance with how plentiful they are (supply) as well as how much people are willing to pay for those objects considering availability and desire for those objects (demand).

Problems do arise when we talk about supply and demand. We try to explain this with a model of individuals as rational participants in a free market possessing perfect information, but that’s going to run into problems of course. How much are people willing to pay for something? Are they forced to pay something, as is the case when there are monopolies or state coercion? Are they influenced to pay for certain things through social pressure and carefully tuned marketing tactics? How much of a choice do we have in what becomes widely produced and widely available considering the market forces generated by large economic entities such as a multinational corporation?

We can still agree, however tenuously, that our money holds some sort of agreed-upon value, though we will have to dispense of the notion that each of us is a free rational actor in a free market possessing perfect information. Insofar as our money circulates within a stable social system, however much force and manipulation is required to maintain that system, the money still manages to hold a universal value that is agreed upon, however passively, by market participants.

But the funny thing is now that very value, as asymmetrically contrived and artificially cultivated as it is, is itself under assault. And by the very participants that benefit from a stable monetary value no doubt! Short term gain always seems like a good idea until the long term effects begin to make themselves felt. That will happen soon enough I imagine.

Speculators manipulate currencies and energy and commodity prices in vast, carefully orchestrated abstractions in order to enrich themselves with values completely divorced from any physical production. Financial institutions generate huge unstable masses of fictional value by creating debt upon debt, manipulating each tier of debt to extract more and more fictional value from them, in turn destroying the productive classes that generate the value in the first place. Monetary value itself is bent and squeezed around the slow disintegration of the global working class and middle class.

So in effect, money is no longer some store of value that can be used as a medium for free exchange in a healthy economy, but a sort of tethering agent that ties us to an increasingly self-destructive economic system, the only purpose of which is to disproportionately enrich a parasitic oligarchic class.   

An Elaboration on Unconditional Giving

What do we mean when we talk about unconditional giving? One perhaps gets a flutter in the stomach when thinking about walking around and giving people 20 dollar bills or various possessions. It would be very nice to be able to do such things, and maybe sometimes it is even possible and should be done, but most of us don't possess those kinds of means, and there are neofeudal rents to pay after all. And more than ever we should doubt the efficacy of money itself, since its very meaning has been all but obliterated. Though we still know at least that we need some to live in a shelter and eat food and such.

But maybe I should be less vague and expand on these ideas of exchange objects and unconditional giving. I guess I'm going to make a mess of things for now, which I'll probably have to clean up later. But when I talk about exchange objects, pleasures and giving, I'm not just talking about material goods. Those figure in sure, but it would be a sad and boring world if all we could talk about was the exchange of material goods, though I'm sure the mainstream economists would be quite content with that. 

Besides, Peter Singer has already made the donation argument: that we should donate what we can so long as it doesn't harm ourselves, because it is our moral responsibility to help those in need. And Marx has philosophized pretty thoroughly about material exchange. Plenty of work has been done to advance arguments like that.

What I want to talk about is more along the lines of what David Foster Wallace was interested in. I quote: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day…” What a beautiful thing to say! I would suggest reading the whole talk.

But thinking about what Wallace talks about in his work, it becomes apparent that we don’t just live by material currencies and the exchange of material objects, our very culture takes its shape from the everyday social/relational exchanges we make with one another every day.

We operate in social currencies. We think certain things about each other, and much of the everyday pleasure we experience comes from experiencing not only what feels good to us materially, but what others think and feel about us socially. We operate on a complex social economy, the functions of which result in an environment that has a powerful effect on individuals.

There’s also great despair and pain in what we sometimes think and feel about each other, especially as the material avenues we use to display our social selves become progressively more constrained. Our culture encourages us to perpetually climb one another while becoming the best at any one skill so that we may be worshiped by as great a number as possible.

All of those perceived as inferiors we mock viciously. Each minor social revolution comes coupled with bitter satires of other failed social revolutions. The only comedy permitted on the increasingly concentrated media organs are those saturated with black irony, or if light-hearted, necessarily populated with weak contrivances. Each demographic attempting to express earnestness is cordoned off and labeled, perpetuated in the intellectual realm as stereotypes. The result is that no one gets to communicate with one another. Everyone is to supply greater visions of a good or just life and be worshiped for it, as opposed to living that good life itself.

Unconditional giving in this case consists of temporarily forgetting your self in your relation to others. Doing for others, and giving everyone the benefit of a doubt…this is the way out. To give unconditionally doesn't have to mean donating some large fund to a foundation. It can mean doing something for someone without expecting anything in return, or paying tribute to someone’s unique character and showing your appreciation for their presence within the dense interconnections of your life.

It can mean having compassion for another’s’ unique character and perhaps stepping aside when interests conflict, voluntarily giving someone power who is deemed to be deserving.

We talk about entering into more communal relations and casting aside exchange logic when it comes to material possessions, giving up conceptions of private property and market relations and adopting communal cooperation, but we should also be talking about what it means to interact socially on a communal level as well.

Much of our social interaction relies on the social self. Someone slights us, which could be seen to subtract power from the self, so to replace that lost power we either must slight the person back or else they should accommodate us in some way that is a fair repayment. The inverse goes for when someone gives to us. We feel the need to repay that gift. These are deeply ingrained psychological mechanisms and they can’t always be bypassed. Oftentimes they are even useful to ordering certain social relations.

However, there is something else to consider: the broken self. This society seems to have become quite adept at producing broken people that are suffering from some psychological pathology or another. For example, when someone is in pain, they may lash out at others, withdraw socially, fall into a depression, become paranoid or distrustful, become excessively clingy, or engage in any number of other socially disruptive behaviors. When such behaviors are a result of people in pain, which happens day to day for various reasons: people are overworked by other scared, miserable, lonely broken people, people are economically stressed, people have no higher institutions to trust or greater communities to be loved in, people are having numerous health problems and suffering from various addictions, etc.

So for many it is very easy to forget the cruelties one is inflicting on one’s own immediate social network. Whoever can become conscious of the need for unconditional giving has a moral obligation to find as much compassion as possible for these broken people, and do all they can to assuage the pain and insecurities of these individuals, even when a broken person’s social behaviors benefit others in no possible way. These people are undoubtedly locked into these patterns of behavior and have already alienated friends and family, and are quickly becoming ever more lonely and miserable, necessitating the development of new addictions and escapist tendencies to cope, leading to more suffering.

Unconditional giving means allowing one’s social consciousness to drift away from the self and towards others. True compassion is not just trying to imagine oneself in another’s shoes, but the entire subjective experience of others as different people from oneself, who may have different needs, sensitivities, thought processes, fixations, and etc. 

It's Cold. It's Time to Go

A question of practical application has been bugging me for some time: how to justify to someone lost in the domain of symbols - where the culture of individual egotism enjoys hegemonic control - the fundamental importance of unconditional giving at this particular point in history?

Well I would think by attempting to construct an argument, however ramshackle - with those very symbols the person is so comfortable with - in order to logically justify the act of unconditionally giving. Of course in order to truly grasp such a concept in the first place, someone would have to grasp it emotionally, which is something you can't make someone do. They have to reach that point themselves. But until then, you can at least argue by symbols, and at least try to alter the intellectual climate, perhaps in the hopes of making such an emotional event more likely. 

 Let's first consider the negative: what is wrong? And then we can work our way to the positive: why we should all be unconditionally giving in accordance with our ability. 

So what is wrong? Can we not all agree that something is seriously wrong with our culture? That its own climate generates an array of actions that are not only fundamentally antagonistic to the environment, but antagonistic to our own selves? 

Our institutions -  government, corporation, religious establishment - are all increasingly run by egos of increasingly concentrated power, with the resulting flow of goods increasing in proportion as they are restricted to a dwindling number of those egos. And these egos will oversee mass actions that rob, injure, maim and destroy any human beings, animals, and ecologies that stand in the way of their perceived fundamental right to indefinite accumulation. 

These institutions are structures that function in accordance with three major principles:

1. There are people that are willing to simply work* and take orders in order to receive rationed pleasures.

2. There are power-hungry people that are willing to climb tiers of these workers because being above someone else makes them feel secure. Being higher in a hierarchy also secures them greater material rewards**. 

3. The people at the top of the hierarchy, and even some rare people climbing their way up the hierarchy as well, desire a greater and greater accumulation of goods, which necessarily results in the diminishing of any adjacent egos whose resources can be taken. 

*Work in this case means anything from manual labor to politicking to spiritual administration. 

**We have this curious intuition to establish hierarchies and then distribute proportionally greater rewards further up the hierarchy we go. 

The dynamics of these three principles form a tension that holds institutions together. Power to secure rationed pleasures is divided proportionally to each tier. These hierarchies are animated by the expectations of each person within the structure that they will get a piece of the pie. 

Now this entire structure takes place nested in the greater structure of the human mass that makes up what is currently in the form of global empire, which itself rests on top of the total accumulated mass of the global population.

Most social relations within this totality take place in accordance with exchange logic. Everything takes place by exchange logic because no one trusts each other (you give me this for that and we are even, we are done). No one trusts each other because everyone wants to climb everyone else in order to secure greater reward. 

Now, in accordance with this logic, whoever happens to have more resources to exchange necessarily has more power. This aspect of exchange power is not to be questioned. To each power-climber, climbing is hard work, and that work is not to be surrendered in any circumstance. All power-climbers enter into this tacit agreement when they play the power game. 

The problem with this is that for any one person to gain the ability to enjoy a good, they must trade something for that good. If they have nothing to trade, they must supply their own body power. Their labor. What happens is that this process goes on and through chance, several individuals become more efficient at accumulation while others become more selfless and sacrifice goods in order to pick up that slack. But this asymmetry in power does not snap back. It stays. Because power, or accumulated exchange objects, is not to be questioned, as the most powerful write the laws and ultimately set the rest of the structure's morality. 

So you have an ever-increasing polarity between the powerful and the powerless, and an inherent tendency of the powerful to inflate in resources but dwindle in number, and the powerless to inflate in number but dwindle in resources. Life of the structure is sustained so long as each individual does his/her part. Each individual does his/her part so long as he or she can expect to increase in power enough to at least not be in pain, though many will always want more. Structure death begins to set in as more and more individuals decline to a point of perpetual pain, with no hope of ascension, save for natural or human intervention. This is calcification of structure. Stagnation. An end of motion. 

If you are powerful, great for you. You are frozen at a point of material bliss. However for the rest of the powerless this results in great material and psychic pain. And yet even the powerful are universally resented, so there must be pain and unhappiness on their end as well, even if it is not consciously acknowledged. 

Given this state of affairs, do you wish to perpetuate this material, psychic pain or alleviate it? Yes, this is a very serious question. 

Now we are back to unconditional giving. If you choose to give as much as you can give without unreasonably diminishing yourself, your goods can flow to those less powerful, those ultimately unable to secure those goods themselves. For the powerful to ask the powerless for something in exchange for what they give is a cruelty at this point. It requires that the powerless diminish themselves in compensation for what they don’t have, to give to the powerful what the powerful already have too much of.

The more powerful you are, the more responsibility you have to give until you and the powerless are no longer in pain. Otherwise we can simply thrash around at each other stuck in this inert structure and remain miserable. 

So we should say to this increasingly cold and inert capitalist structure: It is cold. It is time to go. 

Where’s the warmth?

One last thing: this entire argument itself is a construction. Built by symbol in time and space to offer justification for a moral action, which is in the end a vector that takes its direction from its relation to human power structures. This argument is a mere working model that should be dissolved after it is no longer useful or relevant. It is a limited set of symbols that are limited to this period in history that are being used to attempt to understand something that is essentially infinite and eternal in scope. At least as far as the human intellect is concerned.

Arguments like these form the germ-seed of living power structures themselves. Those who read and understand the arguments interpret them in accordance with their own ego-spatial arrangement. Religion forms when those grasping the spiritual truths wish to perpetuate them past their historical-emotional origin. And so they communicate with others judging the argument, forming their own consensus and a resulting power structure of its own character, which may eventually necessitate the breaking away of egos.