Social Tension

Social circumstances lead to our individual behaviors, putting our social compositions into “states.” For example, if multiple people engage in selfish behavior, then non adherents have to revert to that sort of behavior to survive, lest they fall behind and lose out on resources. But if the society as a whole is in a cooperative state, then it is the selfish actors that are censured and excluded from the social product. It takes a certain critical threshold from one state to snap to another. It is the social connection and the reciprocation between connections that provides the tension that keeps the state coherent and stable. If you take a few high energy individuals that project a certain amount of energy that is a certain quality to enough nodes, it spreads through the network in a sympathetic manner. 

Ideology in Time and Space

Each individual performs a function in accordance with what he or she believes is right. What he or she believes is right is in the end, something that he or she must simply do. This is what could be referred to as destiny: simply the overriding impulse above all other impulses to take a certain course of action, which has its roots in the individual’s conception and development, whose roots extend into environment and heredity and so on.

So as each individual performs a function, he or she proceeds to either build something, help build something else, challenge what is being built or even destroy something in the process. So we have ideologies, anti-ideologies, and all sorts of alliances in between. All of these activities end up producing various states of affairs that are based on ideologies, and these states of affairs hold up if the ideologies are strong or appropriate to the environment and represented by strong enough individuals and are not challenged by strong enough individuals. And there are multiple ideologies, all producing multiple states of affairs, with all of their adherents advocating their own views and combating those that they disagree with. Whatever holds up amid this tumult of human activity ends up being what is. This is aggregate human reality.

Is it that whatever survives persists because of blind luck? Did it happen to be the strongest ideology that led to the most resilient societies to subsist on the planet? Or is there something correct about these ideologies, something harmonious, given the current constitution of not only the planet but human social reality?

So what is to happen now? Well, all ideological systems produce societies that in turn change the constitution of the very citizens that are processed within their logic, so that in turn, a society is forced to implement incremental changes along the way to conform to the topography, until of course a major crisis forces the society to revise its very ideology, which can create significant pressures. 

Dialogue

When we enter a dialogue, we submit to each other a constructed, self-contained body of logic for each-other to operate within. We are encouraged to operate within a peer’s offered body of logic, and in a healthy reciprocal conversation, we construct a new body of logic in turn for the other person to consider and base their construction on, and so on. This can break down when one of the conversationalists insists on maintaining their own framework, though some frameworks can be better than others, and if both in the dialogue recognize this, the conversation can move forward.

But our pleasure out of a conversation, and our willingness to extend a conversation, depends on whether the participants not only allow each other space to advance their own opinion, but whether each interfaces with the submitted opinion. So we gain pleasure out of not only creating, but having others interact with our creations and experiencing others creations in turn. 

Breather

So I've just posted a succession of heady spurts. No I didn't actually smoke meth and spend the last couple of days marathon writing, I've just been dumping a number of the writings I've been sitting on for the past 2-4 years.

Even 2 years can make a difference. I feel like some of these writings are a bit manic and abstract, and that some of them are even a bit naive or confused. Many of my notes I've simply jettisoned because they were either unacceptable or they were stepping stones to some better writings I've already done. However I have been wanting to get this stuff up for some time. This blog was part of an ambitious project and I suppose I've dropped the ball on this one, but at least I can get a lot of this stuff posted and just let it sit and see what happens. And maybe provide some palliative for my raging OCD.

I do intend to continue with my project, but given my own standards and habits of sharp self-criticism, I feel that I have much more work to do, and growth to do as a writer, philosopher, and simple living being. Back at it then. Plenty more to come.

Progression of an Idea

So ideas can shape our environments and the way we interact with one another. Ideas seem to gain currency with not only logical consistency, but harmonization with the surrounding reality in accordance with the collective mental structures of those that support the idea, and this all when you have bottom-up generation. When power centralizes around a certain body of ideas, institutions form under it and it seems that a state arises along with law and security to maintain a logically consistent system.

This state of affairs progresses to a top-down administration of ideological realities, where the ideology is no longer necessarily prized on its consistency or harmonization, but because it is the dominant discourse and the “main game in town” so to speak.

The ideology, and the power structure that forms around it, becomes progressively calcified. Power, with more to lose, takes more extreme measures to protect its gains. Those who have more want more, those who have less get less. And so social problems increase and force is increased to account for that. 

Aperture of Awareness

As a new idea or worldview is being born (perhaps out of the ashes and the crisis of a dying one) the mind’s aperture is blown wide open and there is a vivid awareness of cosmic frameworks and long term causal chains. Perhaps with every new generation however, there is less of an urgency to improve, and the mind’s aperture closes further and further, focusing more on self-gratification, leading to short-term thinking. 

Thought and Emotion

We as thinkers are always attempting to harmonize with the reality around us. Though there will always be those of us content to reside in long-discredited, artificial worldviews because they conveniently explain everything in line with our preconceived prejudices.

Ideas themselves are a product of the intellectual/emotional environment at the place and time of their conception. Ideas can be mellow, observatory, or aggressive and radical and imperialistic, due to the emotional reactions of the individuals entertaining the ideas. The ideas then spread among those under the same emotional conditions across time.

Ideas could be conceived as emotional vectors, directions in force that are encased with logical symbols and semantics so that they can be communicated on our higher channels of thought. In this way perhaps, our higher level processes are less engines and more regulatory systems attempting to guide emotive engines for constructive purposes. 

From Inspired to Repressed

A society of repressed citizens can never survive. All their energy and intellect goes towards producing work that speaks to their being. If the societal infrastructure cannot absorb this product, it will be displaced, and the work that is put in place to sustain the society will be substandard.

A burst of power from a new idea, and then inferiors ride that power, fighting amongst themselves for a position at the top until the idea is hollowed out.

Yes, the goal now for individuals in all disciplines is to win. Not to understand. 

Complexity

Perhaps the heart of what Occam’s Razor is getting at is this: that there is a metaphysical truth in that as a simple explanatory idea is expanded upon to account for more and more complex phenomena, the apparatus that forms as a result becomes more complex, and as a result, unwieldy. So after a certain point, better results can be achieved if a completely new, simplified idea is proposed that can better handle the current state of affairs.

Let’s say that reality is an infinitely complex subject to understand. We can begin to understand it by proxy, and thus manipulate it, by constructing an ideological/methodological framework for understanding it. But as we come to know more about that reality, through the explanatory framework itself (and of course there are other parallel frameworks being developed in different fields that are competing to explain the same thing) the original framework has to be expanded upon to account for new knowledge. This results in a web of logical extensions that become increasingly convoluted and tangled as they become more complex, diminishing the explanatory power of the framework by virtue of complexity and high energy requirements for use.

So again, there comes a point when this framework simply becomes too unwieldy to use. Also consider that the framework itself is revised and updated by subsequent minds that might not understand the phenomena like the previous mind. As time goes on, more and more inferior minds become attached to the apparatus and insert their own provisions until the apparatus becomes laden with contradictions and errors.

More complexity could lead to more fragmentation and less consistency, as minds can only cooperate to an extent, and that one mind can only hold so much information, even great minds. This variable would depend on the balance between the ego and the collective, to be sure. 

Absolutism

Absolutism: It’s as if upon further advancing the development of the car, we discover foam, and say to ourselves, let’s make it so that foam covers all. We then proceed to build the car entirely out of foam.

Why Does Power Corrupt?

Because as power accumulates, it deprives its surroundings by necessity. Therefore, those occupying power's surroundings are forced to turn against power in order to take back what’s theirs, and those in the core of power itself are then turned against those in the surroundings. 

This dynamic transforms the minds and thoughts of all the actors in the entire field. Power divides against itself and the surroundings divide in turn. A process is started in which division becomes an end, so that the entire system proceeds towards disintegration, at least until a more stable power structure is formed. 

If the function of organized power is to manage the production and consumption of energy for the perpetuation of an organized body, then this gradual shift in which power turns inward and discharges itself to preserve itself can be construed as a slow process of death. 

Idea Drift

Is capitalism a lie? No. It was born pure and true. But it has aged after generation upon generation of men and women passed through it and encoded its premises in their own images. The lie exists in the myriad contradictions that have grown in time and space, dying structure that hangs raggedly off of the idealistic vectors.

Most people are on the earth to simply advance their own ends. They will do so within the confines of the social construct put before them. Slowly they will alter those confines to fit them. The construct begins fresh and pure, but as time passes, the human consensus itself ages, the entire system drifts apart, pulled in all directions by wayward human egos.

Rejuvenization is reorganization and the shift of semantic content, creating a new system to organize social relations. Power will collect again, but the game is reset. A new game is introduced whose honest processes will slowly decay over time. 

Utopia

 There is no utopia. We are stuck in an eternal cycle of birth, struggle, decline, and rebirth. Our organizational institutions change with technology and population needs, but each new iteration remains vulnerable to hijacking.

Utopia is a teleological image that precipitates change. It is an imagined endpoint that animates revolutionaries. But it is not real. It is a static image removed from a reality in constant flux. It will never be real. 

Atomization

How does atomization and alienation occur? Why the mistrust? The distance? How does a foreign totalitarian political repressor disintegrate an entire people as it clamps down?

Perhaps on the micro level, individuals begin using one another as instruments to achieve what is so impossible to achieve as an honest individual. Perhaps individuals begin clamoring atop one another to reach a certain level of prosperity, and in doing so, they must subscribe to the very totalitarian culture that is alienating the population as a whole. Depression and anxiety should be pervasive. Depression is something that happens when an individual’s real presence fails to match up to an internal, ideal presence. Anxiety possibly happens when a person’s perceived failure rate is high in attempting to make the internal image and external manifestation congruent. These ailments serve to divide individuals from each other; they retreat to themselves to nurse their wounds. Eventually, we resort to physical and psychological narcotics, which act as a sort of cohesive agent, but it is only enough to hold us together in misery; it is not enough to reconnect us.

We self determine and associate to express a greater collective character based on current circumstances we find ourselves in. A national character should be changing and regenerating as our living circumstances change. Applying a restrictive, top down authoritarian power on these processes serves to freeze them temporarily into a portrait of the tyrant’s preference, but soon cultural and economic forces will serve to break this portrait apart as changing individuals no longer see themselves reflected in this static character. Soon the portrait shatters, and more and more force is required to keep it together as it breaks further apart due to shearing repulsive and attractive forces. This force manifests itself in lies and propaganda, and eventually physical coercion when that psychological suggestion fails to assert itself on the individual psyche.

Revolution occurs when the ruling class is 1) a minority, a highly shrunken and shrinking entity, 2) perceived to be exploiting the ruled beyond any tolerable standard, and 3) alien in character to the present national consciousness. This class will need to cloak itself in themes and rationales central to the fading character of the nation itself, and shut off more and more means of communication between the ruled and the ruling, for fear of revealing its true character. These lies and obfuscations will slowly become more transparent with repetition and the proliferation of counter examples (intact specimens of an alternate, more honest reality). The host can remove the parasite at any time. It is simply a matter of consciousness.    

Preservation

There comes the point where the impulse to preserve negates its own purpose and begins to succeed at destruction. A preserved, static reality amidst a changing reality, if discordant enough with its changing environment, can alter the environment itself in negative ways by means of obstruction.  

Machines

In today’s society, we human beings, for some reason, think that we are in fact machines. Then we cry out in surprise when the machinations we put in place break our bones. 

Cyclic Philosophy

The appropriate mode of thought that characterizes the current philosophical system will be decided by the necessities of the present. Philosophical systems that stress action will find receptive audiences of the same frequency in times that require action, while contemplative and speculative philosophies will find respective audiences in times of contemplation and speculation. Philosophies that arise out of an era’s specific mood will find audience in the next era of the same specific mood, and will most likely be expanded upon at that time. And so different philosophies are elaborated on in cycles.

Cumulative science is furthered by grooming behavior. Thinkers take surveys of the topography of currently experienced reality, and attempt to groom a forming ideology to fit the mold as created by the newest batch of evidence. And so other lines of thought branch off of this core of ideology, forming other cores attached by common threads which seek to address issues in other fields through altered encodings. Previous ideologies that are no longer relevant become cast aside to serve as antiques to be marveled at and studied, no longer undergoing change. However, these ideologies produce newer, compressed components to be used in newer, developing ideologies. So we continue to build and sculpt, with each successive system bootstrapping off of the previous.  

Hermetic Philosophy

The funny thing about philosophy, is as it developed, philosophers would keep all their work to themselves (while trafficking in others’ work of course) and hide everything until it was finished, which they would spring upon the population, giving us this tangle of idiosyncratic reasoning with a learning curve. But we realize all of these philosophers are talking about the same things, just different angles of the same things, which of course, artificially juxtaposed conflict. Logical philosophers saw this, and tried to formalize the discourse and tried to make things more objective like the sciences. But logic systems ended up becoming tools of their own, isolated from the greater project of philosophy, gaining a learning curve of their own. Language remains a strong communicating tool which is better at expressing many things in many dimensions that logical signs can’t. Probably because it’s been evolving for so long. Anyways, we can still make philosophy more relate-able in practice. By increasing communication. By flattening the topographies of power. 

Cracked Housing

Our ongoing social disintegration has shattered our conceptions of individual agency. As the core fragments, so too do our micro-relations, and finally, our selves. We see that what animates us is not ourselves, but the invisible infrastructure holding us in place.   

Public Philosophy

Part of doing public philosophy is constructing a set of clear instructions that helps readers follow you down into your own caverns of thought; otherwise you may be pointing to a certain concept and shouting “You see? You see?” while they are completely in the dark and have no idea how you arrived at this concept, and thus cannot see it. That or they take the concept out of context and misinterpret it, failing to see the larger structure hidden beneath it, which in turn reaches the landscapes of reality, giving it a hopefully logically sound foundation.

Just as one could look at an engine for example, and if one understands it completely enough, one can follow its logic down into the understanding of the reality that produced it, where one can either reproduce it or ascertain whether it can be reproduced better. If one has a weak understanding of the engine, one may build a version of it that contains some unseen flaw that fails to deal with the realities that sustain it. 

Streamlining Language

Oftentimes we hold generalizations for the purpose of fluid conversation. Like Velcro, distinctions can lead to disagreement over smaller details, where each individual argues with varying force over quantities and details. This deliberation can be useful in the right contexts, but in conversation it can completely derail dialogue. It is friction. This is why we employ heuristics in order to group certain entities by their majorities and their dominating qualities. We can continue to do this as long as we are aware of these heuristics and can abide by the finer facts if someone chooses to dissect the issue.

For example, many times we refer to Congress with distaste, with visions of aggressive Republicans dismantling our society in our heads. But the constitution of Congress is always shifting, and there are probably several Progressive Democrats inside as well, so this disparagement blankets their existence. For that matter, the parties themselves, as well as more distinct labels we can use to classify individuals (such as progressive, liberal, centrist, conservative, far right) are always going to contain a variety of differing individuals of different behaviors even under the more specific labels and we should take note of that fact. We can argue over what sort of constitution Congress has and what sorts of qualities it embodies or we can skim over the matter with a heuristic that provides a basic constitution and quality for discussing Congress and move on to the rest of the topics. It all depends on what we want to accomplish in the discussion. As long as everyone understands this (and agrees on heuristic use that is at least reasonably accurate) we can do this. We can use these heuristics because groups of people often take on another quality altogether, and the behavior of most of the adherents are going to tend to conform to that of the most powerful in the group. But again the power can shift and the group’s constitution can change, so we must keep this in mind.

Perhaps we could look at the intellectual process itself as a division of labor. Those interested in deliberating over the finer distinctions could end up producing a relatively accurate heuristic for those to use in other purposes without getting bogged down. Of course, this process will be ever-changing, and good communication is absolutely essential. This is probably already the case to an extent, and has been for a while. It helps to explain what it is we are doing exactly, so that we can be more deliberate in our actions. 

Artifacts

Modern music composition (especially popular) could be seen as a closed model, derived from the organic workings of musicians communicating with one another and their instruments, just as a film can be seen as a model circumscribed around the organic daily processes that result in our lives. Both of these things are an attempt to sculpt an intelligible artifact out of the natural world so that we can share it with one another and communicate with one another with it. But we have to remember what we are doing. We have to remember that we are carving an artifact out of an ever-changing process and that eventually we will have to give it back. If one becomes too focused on the artifact itself, the artifact becomes the reality one was trying to model, and the artifact becomes an end, to the detriment of all the actors involved. It seems as though there comes a saturation point when a certain artifact form is reproduced to the point of oversaturation, and at the same time hangs far over reality in a temporal sense: it has become ossified. The artifact effectively becomes a lie: a static image that no longer bears any relation to the dynamic reality it was taken from. Our task now is to return our attention on those underlying processes and begin anew. 

Listen

When you talk to someone, or listen to someone with a different background, outside of the social and ideological networks that you frequent, you experience an alteration in mental mode (again, that is if you actually listen). For a brief period you can inhabit what might be an imitation of that person’s consciousness. You can understand more clearly, by virtue of difference of perspective. 

Be Nice to Idiots

Calling an individual an idiot because he could have acted so much more wisely is highly satisfying, but I think highly illusory. That individual is the idiot he is and is probably acting the only way he could according to the environment he grew in and the context and constraints he currently finds himself in. 

Consciousness-change is a gradual, agonizing process. It doesn’t just happen. One doesn’t just jump into another state of being. It happens over centuries. Only after an interval can one compare two points over time and declare there’s been change.

Our individualist consciousness produces authors and works of varying natures that in the end say very similar things, just in different language and built in different logic structures. There are often opposing arguments, put forth by opposing characters of varying constitutions, but these opposing arguments can often be collapsed into each other if given the right explanatory framework.