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.