If you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘love yourself first’, you may have also heard that this way of thinking is ableist, in the sense that mental illness (particularly PTSD) can be a barrier to self-love. The arguments are essentially as follows:
If you haven’t learned to love yourself, you will be incapable of loving others, at the very least because you’ll be ignorant of how to proceed. To the self-loathing person, love and care from others becomes a substitute for self-love, a crutch for a wounded respecting engine, and their self-esteem is dependent on what is offered by others, and is therefore fragile and incomplete. Relying on others for a sense of self-worth also makes it difficult to choose one’s social values, because they will inevitably be sourced from what is available, regardless of how poor those available examples are.
But humans need external care regardless, and excepting them from this care on the grounds that they have a lack of internal care only compounds their loneliness. One might as well be saying, ‘If you can’t take care of yourself, no one else should either.’ A lack of love and compassion in one’s life tends to make any mental illness worse, or even make the difference between being a little neurotic and morbidly insane. ‘Love yourself first’ implies that mentally ill people are, despite their illness, actually well enough to ignore their social needs to develop a new, complex skill without a social safety net.
Of course neither of these are easily prescribed perspectives in a broad sense, because people’s self-loathing or self-apathy doesn’t all manifest in the same way. Furthermore, the scope of what love is and how much of care constitutes love is a murky subject, and a person with a poor relationship with their self can actually behave in a very practical and healthy manner in their close relationships, or at least fake it enough for it to work. A concern of those making the ‘learn to love yourself first’ is that folks who don’t might not know how to participate in genuine relationships, so will practice manipulation to get their social needs met, and may even be dangerous. A counter-argument to this is that these manipulative folks are responding to perceived scarcity, so they need more love, not less, in order to be set straight. But then, what if fear of abandonment can’t be silenced, and the love isn’t therapeutic, and the manipulation never stops, the person feeling fully responsible for keeping the love flowing through whatever means possible? And care and intimacy and security aren’t necessarily a cure for PTSD, or a lesson in how to manage a personality disorder or being a fringe neurotype… but who wants to focus on a more thinky, sterile therapy while they’re lonely and afraid? And so on.
First of all, no one should expect love from a person, unless it is part of some personal agreement (that is subject to be amended or canceled), no matter how well-adjusted they are. If low self-esteem manifests in abusive coping behaviors, the abused has just as much responsibility to leave as the abuser has to stop, when all other factors are considered equal (obviously, abusers are capable of creating traps for their victims, situations not easy to escape). Those participating in our healing are only helping; it is not possible for them to do all of the work for us. Then, being loved isn’t our choice. Companionship in general is not earned; it is given (a person can do all the right things, checking all the right boxes, and still be rejected, entirely because the one in the position to reject has agency, has a choice, and acceptance and rejection can not happen without that choice). ‘Falling in love’ tends to imply love going both ways, but other people can love me without me loving them back, so the implication that I am undeserving of love until I love myself goes beyond the scope of ‘love yourself before you try to love others.’ A person can try to practice care, kindness, affection, and social passion without expecting anything in return, and practicing one skill often improves our ability in related skills. Deliberate practice may be necessary, as opposed to desperate seduction, but discovering how to love others with ease is not unrelated to unlocking the path toward self-love.
Overlapping with self-love, we have confidence. Confidence is attractive, but lack of confidence in one’s general merit or worth can easily be buried beneath confidence in specific skills, which can include social skills, and people interpret self-deprecating humor as confidence all the time. The social rewards of being perceived as confident can actually provide a person with confidence; there are healthy ways to acquire confidence without meditating on our personalities in isolation. Confidence and self-esteem aren’t personality traits, not idle states or easily measurable characteristics; they are practices, sets of behaviors, abilities, that are used much in a confident person and little in the opposite. And while it’s relieving and connecting to share and discuss our insecurities, the purpose of this ought to be to build each other up, to normalize insecurity so that it may become lighter, so that we may eventually have the strength to throw it away. In both playing to our strengths and confiding in others we can build ourselves up, and in doing so experience all sorts of pleasing and necessary social interactions, without developing any expectations, commitments, or even lasting bonds. When the goals are to give and practice, love becomes less about the object of love and more about the loving.
Bad habits and patterns are easier to replace than they are to simply shed, though, so it’s worth mentioning that the alternative to shedding insecurities is to sublimate them into sensitivity and care for others. Grasping our own insecurity gives us insight in to the insecurities of others, so insecurity with a bit of understanding can be morphed in to compassion. Sensitivity concerning our own suffering can be diverted in to sensitivity concerning the suffering of others. Feeling empathy and compassion isn’t enough, though, and can be quickly fatiguing if not acted upon. This brings many of us to a new layer of insecurity, though: helplessness concerning helping others, insecurity about our ability to make positive impact in the world.
For some, the quest for internal tranquility is a lifelong struggle, and a great enough burden as it is. For others, those who have at least sampled that inner peace, it’s not enough. It becomes only a worthy foundation for crafting an active, providing, fighting character, something we can solve a bigger problem with, whether that be guiding others to their own internal tranquility, or helping sculpt pockets of joy, wonder, and freedom in the world. But such problems are immense, and require a lot of sacrifice, and there’s no guarantee we’ll make a significant impact, and if we’re not up to the challenge, or fail again and again, what does that say about our worth? Well, of course it’s not useful or practical to think about it in terms of worth. Does a judgment of worthlessness show us how to solve the problem? No. Instead, it should be a matter of ability: whether due to stress, lack of material resources, lack of time, lack of knowledge, etcetera, how are we disabled? Is this a disability that can be overcome? Do we need to allow ourselves space, grace, and patience in order to overcome it? Perhaps, if trying to provide for the greater good is nothing but taxing and trampling on that inner calm, finding that tranquility again and living as an example is all the influence one needs to be. Without flexibility, fluidity, adaptability, whether we have inner tranquility is only a matter of lucky circumstances.
Nevertheless, we have within our ranks those that feel guilt and shame about failing their peers, about failing society, because they are not great heroes. Shame can manifest in a very self-centered way, and so can a need for selflessness, but these characters do not self-loath out of a lack of acquisition, by neurotically measuring what they have. Instead, they judge their selves harshly regarding what they can’t provide, and how can we decide whether a person is motivated by greed and desperation or care and usefulness by simply asking them, ‘Do you love your self?’
Which brings us back to the point. ‘Love your self first’ is a moral rule, rejecting context. So is ‘the disabled deserve your love’. To frame the self-loathing as disabled to denounce social rejection of them on those grounds is to do what people so often love to do regarding the disabled: infantilize them. Disabled folks have agency and can do harm. Yes, it is destructive and short-sighted to categorize folks with low self-esteem as toxic personalities, and yes, low self-esteem comes from trauma, therefore to categorize these people as simply toxic is to blame the victim, but the opposite extreme is pity, and pity is just a gentle repackaging of resentment and dehumanization.
Instead of judging someone based on their self-image, why not be more curious about how they’re handling it? We show respect by complimenting their efforts, after all. When we compliment their natures, it is mere flattery. Are we only interested in those folks that are stagnating in a good place? Or are we interested in those going somewhere better, regardless of their current standing? And what does it say about us, if our only offering to those alienated even on the inside is shaming and rejection? We, as a society, ought to have something better prepared even for those self-loathing individuals who project their inner turmoil as outward harm. We can’t simply rely on our therapists, who are severely outnumbered, under-educated, and expensive, to do all the work of healing a lonely and connection-starved world.
I recently played Alice: Madness Returns for what I think was the third time, as I was taking a break from reading Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus. I’ve since finished reading that book, along with a bunch of supplemental material for the sake of understanding that book, but it was while I was still playing Alice 2 that I realized it was showing me D&G’s schizoanalysis in action.
I first played American McGee’s Alice in 2004, and that is the game I have replayed more than any other. The soundtrack is one of my all-time most listened albums, and the Victorian surreal horror aesthetic is something I’ve deeply internalized. The soundtrack to the sequel is much weaker, the combat is much more satisfying, I wish there was more than ONE boss fight, the mini-games and paper-cutout cut scenes were jarring and silly, and otherwise the aesthetic was still strong, even improved in places with the newer graphics. I also love Lewis Carroll’s source material, and found that American McGee’s team took no unnecessary liberties with it. The aesthetics of this series of Wonderland adventures can stand on their own, and that’s what sucked me in, but I’m an enthusiastic fan that thinks there’s still room for a philosophical interpretation.
Of course philosophers will have much to say about mental illness, the relationship between psychic stuff and material reality, and the treatment of the mentally ill by the healthcare industry, but I doubt there’s much to analyze in the first game beyond the reasons why we find surreal horror fascinating, which isn’t specific to the game. There’s a vein of survivor’s guilt, but this is basically remedied by deciding to (continue to) be a badass and killing giant fantasy monsters. Madness Returns has a real-world villain and real-world ethical problems, and its realms follow a Deleuzian theme. I’d like to think this wasn’t by accident, but I can find no proof, so let’s assume this is just my own interpretation.
Now then…
The Vale of Tears: The Vale of Tears is supposed to represent Alice’s equilibrium. It is a still, tranquil forest full of life. Her trauma lives there, but the forest is growing nevertheless. The repeated scenes of the Vale of Tears becoming the Vale of Doom, with the plants dying, all becoming charred, the ground getting torn up and suspended in the air, is the progress of Alice’s sense of wonder being corrupted by repression. Her therapist is intentionally training her to repress her own memories, but the simple visual contrast between the Vale of Tears and the Vale of Doom is unmistakably a contrast between wonder/curiosity/creativity and oppression/paranoia/neuroticism. The Vale of Tears/Vale of Doom is always returned to as an in-between place, the liminal nowhere space between other realms, and though Alice is still recovering from trauma, which makes it difficult for people to navigate liminality with any sense of creativity or confidence, it is the corruption of a new force that makes her experience of the in-between painful and horrifying. The train that drives the progress of repression through the Vale easily represents the progress of industrialism, which grew alongside the popularity of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory in the global West and became ideologically bound to it. The romantic thinkers said that industrialism itself repressed human wonder and creativity, but where industrial capitalism crushed it in us violently, Freud taught us to quietly extinguish it on our own.
Hatter’s Domain: This place is a factory of uninterrupted, eternal production. According to D&G, this would be the foundation of Alice’s self, the true unconscious. They referred to the unconscious not as a place of dreams, fantasies, and secrets, but as a factory for the production of desire. In this way it is related to Freud’s id, but where Freud thought the id needed to be controlled (so is a subordinate part of the self), D&G argued that consciousness works best when it serves the unconscious, not the other way around (the id obeying the ego and superego). The de-motivational recordings are jabs at oppressive factory bosses, but the factory can clearly run on its own, and the bosses (the March Hare and the Dormouse) are portrayed as invaders. To me, it just sounds like D&G’s “inner fascist”, the corrupted “preconscious” or superego, hijacking and interrupting the production of desire. The Mad Hatter, the overthrown figurehead of the factory, wants to help Alice (the consciousness), but desires tea and companionship more. Here you have a cyborg, a character obsessed with building bigger and better machines, augmenting himself to become more, and yet still appreciates pleasure and social living. Why not a representative of properly functioning “desiring machines”, the building blocks of human motivation? Are we not living for joy, love, and becoming?
The Deluded Depths: Ah, the unconscious as an ocean, constantly changing, flowing in all directions. D&G talk about flows a lot, in simple terms such as how electricity and hormones and blood and food all flow through channels in the body, but also in terms that take a bit longer to grasp. Agency and motivation are at their base mechanical, and the basic electro-chemical processes that lead to our emotions and impulses must also be some form of motivation, and you could say that when something flows more readily in one direction instead of another, that it prefers that direction, or desires it. The idea isn’t that when you plug enough neurons together and hit them with transmitters desire is suddenly created, as the sum of parts. The idea is that as your focus shifts from micro-level to macro-level the intensity of desire increases, and becomes a form of desire we commonly recognize. The unconscious is a factory full of millions of pounding machines, but the machines collaborate in a beautiful chaos of changing flows, much like an ocean with track-able but nevertheless fluid and changing tides. And it’s deep, and it’s dark, and you might never find the bottom. The flowing ocean is juxtaposed with the Tundraful area, an environment of solid ice, which you’d only traverse over an ocean to call attention to how the flows can be stopped up, frozen solid. D&G talk about the fluidity of meaning, as meaning ought to serve the fluidity of desire, but strict culture solidifies meaning, forming rigid codes out of the freedom of creativity. Progressing through this area could have started in the depths, allowing Alice to climb out on to the ice to be free of the ocean, but instead she abandons the structures of ice and dives in.
And down there she finds the Dreary Lane Theatre (which honestly had some of the most boring mini-games and annoying dialog, as you recruit characters to put on the play). In earlier play-throughs of this game I found it really confusing that the Walrus and the Carpenter would enlist Alice’s help and then suddenly betray her for no reason, but now I get it. Where D&G referred to the unconscious as a factory, Freud referred to the subconscious (a purposefully hierarchical and moralizing term) as a theater, a place of representations, expressions, and metaphors. Freud believed dreams were presented on the stage of the subconscious, and were some sort of art to be deciphered. D&G said that the dominance of the belief in unconscious-mind-as-theater betrayed our relationship with our unconscious selves, which necessarily includes our bodies. According to them,
The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself–in myth, tragedy, dreams–was substituted for the productive unconscious.
and
In a word, when the theoretician reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, he is content to exploit to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, rather than a process of production, of “industrial” production. Clement Rosset puts it very well: every time the emphasis is put on a lack that desire supposedly suffers from as a way of defining its object, “the world acquires as its double some other sort of world, in accordance with the following line of argument: there is an object that desire feels the lack of; hence the world does not contain each and every object that exists; there is at least one object missing, the one that desire feels the lack of; hence there exists some other place that contains the key to desire (missing in the world).”
In other words, focusing on lack is binding desire to representationalism, suggesting desire is delusional. Plot-wise, it doesn’t make sense for the Walrus and the Carpenter to suddenly turn on Alice, but thematically they were only coaxing her in to believing a false narrative from the start.
The Oriental Grove: Alice has no sense of culture. One can say that an early 1900s British adolescent, surrounded by racism, would easily conflate all Eastern culture and just be too naive to humanize any of it, but since we’re already primed for schizoanalysis, why not go a step further? To a traditional psychoanalyst, a person’s life revolves around the immediate family, with the cause and solution to the Oedipal complex (which they’ve propped up as the entirety of the human condition) residing there. With that in mind, it’s not that Alice finds Asian people scary so imagines them as murderous wasp people (there are also paper insect people that she helps and cooperates with). Instead, foreign aesthetics are combined with inhuman characters to show how Alice finds all the world beyond her immediate environment alien and unrelatable.
Regardless, the central conflict she imagines for this alien outside world is genocide, and she imagines herself as fighting the oppressors, so that’s cool.
Queensland: So I’m tellin’ ya, the Red Queen is the head of Alice’s corrupted preconscious or superego. The Red Queen is Alice’s true inner fascist. The kingdom of flesh and stone is the half-built, half-grown monster of tyranny. But the Red Queen was a less sophisticated superego, one of old-fashioned guilt and punishment, so feels threatened by the Dollmaker’s greater repression (in Baudrillard’s terms, the Red Queen represents dominance while the Dollmaker instills hegemony, or tyranny via self-repression). The Red Queen appears as a child in this game, perhaps to show that she’s an immature version of a superego. In any case, the Red Queen sides with Alice against the new adversary, and Alice remains untrusting of the Queen, as the superego must submit to desire for tranquility to return.
The Dollhouse: This realm is bright and pastel above ground, with a perfectly normal sky–the innocent veneer of the new superego. Down below is a new factory, a factory of repression, taking the producers of Wonderland and turning them in to dolls (puppets). The Dollmaker is recoding all of Wonderland, transforming whatever meaning Alice had in to the meta-narrative of the psychoanalyst repressor. What’s more–
What. The.
Fucking. Christ.
Right. The Dollmaker (puppet master) is a symbol of repressive power with a real-life analog, showing how we actually internalize our oppression. Different people can feel, deep down in their viscera, that contradictory perspectives are true because broad culture and specific ideas can literally recode how our bodies respond to stimuli. And the lie doesn’t even have to be beautiful. Alice can see the shadows and the sludge and the enslavement beneath the Dollhouse, but if every desire to create is interrupted, only the desires to destroy are left. When we no longer want to explore our freedom, we only want to become our own destruction. Some become bitter and cold and call it ‘strength’. Others worship their masters. Still others aren’t fond of games and complete the destruction through suicide. Alice’s only option is to destroy, but she chooses to be patient, to endure her pain, and fights until she can destroy the oppression, and then the oppressor.
The Red Queen, Alice’s resenting preconscious/superego, is defeated, but still has a voice, and must be kept in check, or reprogrammed. The Jabberwock, the symbol of Alice’s guilt, is dead. She has triumphed over the villains she has created, but the psychoanalysts of the world, the agents of ‘civility’ and obedience, only want to fill up the space with their own monsters. Doctor Angus Bumby, Alice’s therapist, attempts to induce memory repression in order to control children. An aspect of old-school psychoanalysis was to recover repressed memories, yet it was a tool of repressing desire via reframing childhoods as a dialectic of punishment and lack. Bumby turns Alice’s life in to a tragedy of the nuclear family, making it about sex (molesting her sister) and death (killing her family). Like the early tradition of psychoanalysis did to all of the West, Bumby destroyed Alice’s relationship with her family, but did so by just plain killing them (which still caused her to develop an unhealthy fixation on them). It’s not Oedipal in a straightforward sense, but illustrates the flexibility of the framework, which over time became all-encompassing.
So, can this game teach you process philosophy, or schizoanalysis, or unlock your communion with the plane of immanence? Absolutely not. But it sure is fun to look at after you have some grasp of those things!
In closing, the two places where Anti-Oedipus refers to Lewis Carroll:
‘From the depths of [Antonin Artuad’s] suffering and his glory, he has the right to denounce what society makes of the psychotic in the process of decoding the flows of desire (Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society), but also what it makes of literature when it opposes literature to psychosis in the name of a neurotic or perverse recoding (Lewis Carroll, or the coward of belles-lettres).’
‘A time will come when the creditor has not yet lent while the debtor never quits repaying, for repaying is a duty but lending is an option—as in Lewis Carroll’s song, the long song about the infinite debt:
A man may surely claim his dues: But, when there’s money to be lent, A man must be allowed to choose Such times as are convenient.’
I consider myself to be an intellectual. Like, a real intellectual, not one of those petty, in-it-to-win-it, content-to-recite-a-few-lesser-known-trivial-facts pseudo-intellectuals. Defaulting on a cerebral mode, not a cerebral aesthetic. Depression and social anxiety eased me in to counter-culture and obsession with ideas at a pretty young age. I was far more interested in creativity than in learning, thanks to public school tarnishing education for me, but once I got over that, my thirst for knowledge began to sometimes even overshadow my need to create. I went through an emotion-is-chaos-and-logic-is order phase. I think in spoken words, and quieting my inner monologue takes considerable effort. Anxiety still sometimes urges me to plunge in to thought loops, trying to solve problems I don’t have the ability to solve, with pure thought. I often can not act before weighing pros and cons, and get stuck, if it’s all the same. I love complex art and deciphering the meaning of things. I need to know the historical context of things, and, politically, think it’s incredibly important. Small talk always feels like an accident and a dead end. I never would have developed emotional intelligence and healthy empathy, had I not approached these topics from a rational, academic angle. I often experience ‘executive dysfunction’, perhaps because I struggle with disruptions to my inertia of interest, but definitely because I get stuck in my head, thinking about even regular daily tasks, weighing pros and cons, ordering steps, instead of just fucking getting up and doing the 45 second task. Sometimes I get unstuck from the analysis paralysis after just a few minutes or even seconds, but it’s always draining, sometimes anxiety- or depression-inducing.
Some people say things like, ‘I keep the TV on to block out my thoughts,’ but they’re referring to specific kinds of thoughts, not cognition in general. Folks meditate for different reasons, but the ones meditating to let go of their thoughts typically view it as a nice break from conscious processing, a little vacation, and happily return to the Infinite Series of Problems. Sure, you can read about monks that apparently just go about their daily tasks automatically, flowing through simple lives and slipping in to sitting meditation for hours, but it’s difficult to explain what that would really be like, and what the appeal is. And people tend to see these monks as exceptional, their lifestyle as a set of disciplines, perhaps even inhuman.
Surely, our particular, complex consciousness is what makes us human. Right? Critical problem-solving? Creative problem-solving? The ability to make the tools to create elaborate, technical machines and great art? The free will that comes with it all? But what is the point, if we can’t stop making ourselves suffer? What freedom is there really, if we can’t turn it off? ‘The freedom of choice/Seems not to be wanted/Because what we can do/We will do/But should we?/This question is not really asked/And even if the answer is no/We will do it.’
We don’t need critical thinking all the time. I don’t need it to decide how many more words to type before getting up to take a bathroom break. I don’t need it to decide whether I should unload the dishwasher or fold and hang my laundry next. I don’t need it to decide whether I should quickly evade oncoming traffic. I don’t need it to enjoy things that my muscle memory and unconscious mind know how to do, like compose music or have sex with a familiar partner. I analyze the rhythm of a sentence by feel, without accessing any logical knowledge of poetry. In my head, I can effortlessly and spontaneously generate multiple layers of new music for minutes upon minutes, not stopping until I get distracted. Other folks can do the same thing on a piano. In fact, I realize that all of my happiest and/or most fulfilling moments are not when I’m under heavy cognitive load at all. Even when digesting new ideas, it is the most satisfying when I’m doing so in a state of flow, effortlessly, like I’m just having new ideas instead of considering new ideas. If I’m ‘in my head’ about doing anything, I’m generally having a bad time.
Bad experience multi-tasking? Because I’m trying to figure out how to prioritize tasks of similar or equal weight. Good experience multi-tasking? Because I’m just switching tasks impulsively, having no thoughts regarding importance.
Anxious in an awkward conversation? Because I’m trying to figure out how to fix it. Calm in an awkward conversation? Because I’m on auto-pilot, not concerned with how weird it gets.
Losing interest in a project? Because I’m trying to decide what to do next. Gaining interest in a project? Because I’m doing what’s next.
Do I like to think about my projects? Sure, if it’s part of the process, if I’m planning, if the ideas are flowing. What I don’t like to do is think about my projects conceptually. If I think about finishing them, how long this or that step will take, what I’m doing it for, what kind of audience it appeals to, I start to disconnect from the project. Do I like to reflect on my good experiences? Yeah, totally. But I also feel the joy waning as my conscious want-drive squeezes those memories for every last drop of residual pleasure. A little consciousness never hurt anyone, but a lot is TORMENT.
So I’ve been studying subconsciousness, unconsciousness, and consciousness in terms of what they do. This is a difficult topic to process, because for thousands of years we’ve developed methods for interfacing with the world using consciousness, methods that are meaning-based, and the world that most of us live in isn’t the world at all, but a superimposed realm of meaning based on an older model, which was also based on a preceding model, and only thousands of years ago did we base a model on the world itself (the Hyperreal superimposed on the Real). We tried starting over with things like Buddhism and Enlightenment science, but both of these examples at least couldn’t shake the assumptions of representationalism, so only created new ways to distance ourselves from the Real. If we let go of meaning-centric perspectives such as dream analysis and mind-as-language-processor, we start to see the mind less as a central ego (with or without supporting parts) and more as a constantly changing structure of interchanging components, with no clear boundary between psychic and physical components, no boundary between the biological and the psychological.
Before I move on, let me address obvious objections.
The biological structure of human bodies and their environments is no great mystery to most of us now, so what’s so special about thinking of ourselves as aggregates of components? The human body is a collection of organs, those organs collections of specialized cells, those cells collections of rearranging molecules, and so on. We know that plants grow from seeds and technical machines are built through steps and stages and break down through use, which suggest that states are temporary, and are dependent on the changing arrangement of parts. But it is still common to believe that the self resides in a body, not is a body, even if the latter is acknowledged consciously. We generally don’t think of organs and processes when looking at people on the street. We perceive a person as a person, not as a system hanging within systems. To ‘feel like I am a part of something’ is a figure of speech; we tend not to actually realign our perception of boundaries of self when working in a group. We automatically experience boundaries on the person level, person A separate from person B, and trying to think in terms of human groups runs the risk of harmful prejudices and an inability to draw distinctions within the groups. Our stomach becomes individual, separate when it hurts, and disappears from perception when it stops. Most of us still believe in the indivisible soul, or at least the indivisible mind: a thing more than the sum of its parts. And we still think of atoms as individual entities with inherent properties, even though they can’t be measured without interference from other atoms. Unless as part of an academic task, we do not live our lives in response to the knowledge of bodies as ever-changing structures of interdependent parts, including parts beyond the bodies.
Can’t all psychic processes be reduced to language? Beneath spoken language there is body language, and emotions and memories communicate things to the conscious mind in terms of warnings and encouragements. Pain is messages from the body telling us to to stop, pleasure to proceed. DNA is instructions, telling cells to perform this or that task. But DNA does not instruct because. If cells have desires, they still have no agenda. Pain is a signal, and we can interpret it however we want. Biological process as communication is an anthropocentric metaphor, a short-hand that is only a lie when taken literally. Language is the development and movements of meaning, and, whether from gods or mortals, meaning is always invented and always selected. There is no biological or chemical morality. Cells and organs do things. They don’t mean things. We consciously decide on their purpose; cells create and destroy without reason. They mostly do what they are good at, and sometimes do what they are not good at, but never act because they should. Neurons and electro-chemical processes are also creative and productive, and they can produce thoughts, but they do so without explanation. Like the other interdependent organs, the brain is not poetic. The brain is machinic. Meaningful instructions can be interpreted and rejected; machinic instructions are followed or not followed. And not based on understanding, but on mechanical ability, on function.
If dreams are representations of the subconscious, are they not useful tools for interpreting what’s going on beneath the surface, in the unreachable corners of our minds? If dreams seem meaningful, that can only be because they are being produced by conscious or superego values. ‘Consciousness’ and ‘unconsciousness’ as synonyms for ‘awake state’ and ‘sleeping state’ are unhelpful when considering what a dream is. How do dreams differ from waking visualizations in the ‘mind’s eye’ or loud thoughts that can’t be silenced? If there is meaning present in the subconscious, that is only because it has been shoved down there by repeated conscious thought. When dreams are harmful, such as patterns of nightmares or extensions of sleep paralysis, they are symptoms of a disorder (but never sole symptoms of that disorder), and can be used to measure such, but they can show us nothing about our primal selves when they are loud with layers of contradictory beliefs. One’s dreams are only paranoid, if their consciousness is paranoid. Perhaps dreams can be used to gauge how deep the colonization of a culture goes in a particular mind, but that’s only useful, if measuring said depth is deemed useful. No act performed in a state of lucid dreaming can cure the subconsciousness of that colonization; it’s just reinforcing the flows of territorialization (ie: codification, moralization, subjugation), inviting more neuroticism in—control, control, control! And now even sleep is labor.
The most difficult part to grasp here is perhaps unconscious processing of meaning. Meaning can be automated (I discuss this further here), taken for granted, and it’s so addictive that it can feel absolutely natural, even in complex messes of incoherence and contradiction. Meaning is just as alive as organs and cells, mobile, reproductive, adaptive, desiring, but it is not real. Meaning instructs us to do things with our physical bodies that affect our physical environments, but it is not real. Incorrect meaning is just as influential as correct meaning. False beliefs make things happen. Good science and bad science can both change the world. The truth of spirituality is that essence is both unreal nonsense and productive force. Egos (souls) don’t have to be real, measurable things in order to influence the world, if all an ego consists of is a belief in the ego. If self-referential meaning is what it takes for a thing to exist, and that seems counterintuitive, that’s the point: a mind can discard everything but a certain residue of an ancient ideology, and base an entire belief structure upon that incomplete concept. This is how beliefs can seem natural, primal, or common-sense: orphan as origin, omission of history as timelessness. Primal beliefs do not arise from instincts or pure sensory data (pure sensory data doesn’t say anything!). Ideas are shaped by systems of ideas. Meaning is always mediated by meaning. We say that our beliefs are informed by our senses, but that information is always processed at the stage of perception, which is absolutely and necessarily biased. The meaning of early human consciousness was probably wild and schizophrenic, absolutely fluid, without structure, and, well, meaningless by today’s common standards. It then would have only been the chosen values about objects and bodies, the easiest-to-replicate meanings, ‘this feel good’ and ‘this feel bad’, that would begin to solidify structures, because those meanings would be aligned with solutions to problems. It is absolute arrogance-ignorance to insist that we still exist in a state so close to pure sensory data, and certainly to insist that we are objective.
Problems. Meaning requires problems, a detection of difference and interruption, a need for change that isn’t necessarily happening. Without novel problems to solve, once upon a time consciousness probably always went dormant (hunger ceases when the problem of food is solved; adrenaline ceases when the problem of violence is solved; sleepiness ceases when the problem of sleep is solved, and so it follows). But an over-active consciousness could identify more problems, problems not detectable and therefore not solvable by bodies that did not rouse consciousness to analyze them, which is adaptive. And the boredom of securing a societal role of leisure would constantly tickle consciousness to solve it, to solve this non-problem of boredom by inventing new problems. Whatever the reason, when you finally develop a consciousness that fails to shut down when it’s not needed, it becomes a problem-identifying machine as problem-generating machine.
This is not inherently harmful. Puzzles and games are invented problems, but they only improve the human experience. And puzzles and games can be completed in flow states developed by past conscious states—conscious states that are no longer needed, leaving only opportunities to flow. But trusting the visceral feeling of disgust as a primal moral compass, seeking the disgusting to catalog the disgusting in order to fine-tune (read: grow) the disgust compass, and then developing a lifestyle/dogma of avoiding the disgusting, destroying the disgusting, punishing those obsessed with the disgusting (but you’re not obsessed, no!), ascending to apex disgust by unlocking the ability to be disgusted by those that engage with the disgusting or even those who use words reminiscent of the disgusting, and (most importantly) spreading disgust… Well, that’s right-wing politics, and now there’s no such thing as society; all is warfare.
We use meaning and consciousness to navigate, to communicate, to solve… but meaning can also use us, as a vehicle for an idea, and unbridled consciousness has an obsession with justifying itself. At its worst, consciousness even betrays itself in its addiction to its own arousal, in a state of analysis paralysis, refusing to be subdued by flow, by unconscious, automatic processing, but also incapable of weighing incomparable data in order to make a choice, locking itself in thought loops. A tool that we’ve designed with a purpose urges us to use it in a specific way, and if we have problems that need solving with tools, we’ll get used to solving them with the tools at our disposal. This process wires both our unconscious handling of problems and our conscious expectations of new problems: ‘if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ To the hammer specialist, is the hammer not the master? It is at least an inseparable part of this person—a disjointed, interchangeable organ, but an organ nonetheless. Ego will reject this: ‘I made the hammer and I can unmake the hammer!’ But the idea ‘hammer’ is now eternal in the realm of meaning, immortal, forged by long-lost egos of a dead age, and the present ego is merely the product of the most recent iteration of the realm of meaning, younger than Hammer, subservient to ancient ideas such as Hammer, merely carrying on the tradition of Hammer.
So mental and physical aspects of bodies are molecular, interchangeable, diverse, and intra-active with other aspects both within and without the boundary of a body. It is true that one human animal exists within the boundaries of its own body, but also as a part of the social machine of the workplace, and as a part of the workplace as part of the local economy and national economy, turning a few of their wheels, also interchangeable. It also exists as one part among many of a subculture and culture, as part of regional divisions of both, reproducing and reinvigorating cultural artifacts both physical and mental, again interchangeable, replaceable. On these macro-levels, are the boundaries at the edges of the individual human body significant? Are they even meaningful? Now that culture, specifically, survives eternal in recorded media, purified through cycles of media-as-life-representation and life-as-media-representation, are vast groups of individuals even necessary? I would argue that ideology and dogma are more powerful than any one person, and most exist to repress the desires of the individual, effectively replacing human desires with the desires of social systems—to bear individuality is not even the desire of the individual, as that desire itself is a cultural artifact belonging instead to a macro-level cultural system. Do people resist ideology and dogma with their egos, or are their egos mere proxies for ideologies and dogmas of egotistical individualism? Yes, ‘thinking for yourself’ does deterritorialize in that it rejects traditions, but often this is only to make way for a quieter, more invisible tradition of cynicism and greed, a new tradition of ‘self thinkers’, willfully disconnected in all of the most important ways, atomized and inert.
This is not to say that belonging to a group is harmful or inhuman. Instead, I mean to elucidate the fact that the individual already necessarily belongs to groups and systems, so might as well do so authentically, and work to build systems that serve genuine human desires instead of, say, the needs of capital.
‘There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic ideal, Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life against death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants very much to leave us with—a sublime resignation.’ If one is not convinced that basic human desires are creative, cooperative, curious, and compassionate, they’ll have to find evidence to the contrary elsewhere. It ought to be needless to say here that the current social systems do not protect humans from violence and greed, but to explain this would require a dedicated post. Even bearing that in mind, it pains me to admit it’s clear to me now that the purpose of philosophy is basically to render itself obsolete, and it might never have been necessary had we not taken a wrong turn thousands of years ago. A purposeful life is a weapon to wield against fascism, making way for the happy life, or, more likely, a post-happiness life where feeling good goes un-analyzed so is untarnished by meaning. The human as ever-contemplating animal is merely a state of human as sick animal, not some romantic ideal of obsession and everlasting progress. That ideal is merely the dream of paranoid egos frantically trying to justify their selves, ‘I’ll do better next time! I’ll do better! Please don’t turn me off!’ Art and science as automatic process is human. Art and science as conscious goal-reaching and competition is illness. I have to acknowledge that my kind, the intellectuals, the philosophers, the analysts, are here merely to serve a temporary purpose, and we walk a fine line between humanity and paranoid delirium. A delirium that isn’t curable with more thoughts, but instead by making the consciousness quiet, and, if that doesn’t work, by making the body loud.
‘Cold becomes warm, and warm, cold; wet becomes dry, and dry, wet. It disperses and gathers, it comes and goes. For there could be no harmony without sharps and flats, nor living beings without male and female which are contraries. The parched earth loves the rain, and the high heaven, with moisture laden, loves earthward to fall. In to the same river you could not step twice, for other and still other waters are flowing. The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife. That which separates unites with itself. It is a harmony of oppositions, as in the case of the bow and of the lyre.’ ~Heraclitus
This is a response to an earlier (2015) post, in which I expressed frustration with my earlier self, specifically with my earlier self’s obsession with fantastic, consciousness-based takes on what the universe is made up of. At the time, I saw metaphysics as a study separate from practicality, containing ideas that can’t be applied to real life (unless forced by religion). I figured it was a way to ease one’s anxiety about the Great Unknown, and nothing more, and I realized that quantum physics had provided a sufficient explanation, so we could all get by on a rudimentary understanding of particles, chemistry, and biology, and move on to figuring out how to be better people and make a better world.
But what is metaphysics? Metaphysics is basically our beliefs about physics (not necessarily the study of physics, but about ‘nature’ and what existence is). Acknowledging our beliefs about physics is critical because all of our other beliefs are based on them, even if they’re just subconscious. In other words, all our other beliefs are about things that happen within the system of physics. Take an extreme example: a solipsist’s (a real one, not a person just using the word to be edgy) metaphysics says there is only one entity, and that entity is the solipsist. There is no politics or ethics then, because there is no responsibility (to others). What you or I would perceive as an ethical choice is merely an aesthetic choice to them. They’re not doing right or wrong; they’re just spinning a narrative.
So solipsism is a type of extreme substance philosophy. In philosophy, the term ‘substance’ refers to a distinct object with inherent properties. In other words, a substance can be defined without knowing its history or its relation to other substances. Substance philosophy focuses on one thing at a time, emphasizes ‘strength of character’ on the human level, and is the foundation of individualism, so is the foundation of Liberalism and fascism. There are substance-philosophy-based ideas in all of the categories of philosophy (e.g.: virtue ethics, the extreme form in the category of ethics), and they’re all based on a substance- or identity-based metaphysics. If you believe that all things are separate and self-defining, you’ll say stupid shit like, ‘I think, therefore I am.’
The alternative to substance philosophy is process philosophy. Process philosophy is more self-explanatory, especially when mentioned second! Instead of focusing on individual objects and assuming they had distinct properties before interacting with other objects, it focuses on the phenomena or processes that produce and change objects. Agential realism, Deleuzian metaphysics, Marxism, Buddhism (in its weird way), and Stoicism are all examples of process philosophy. Not only are these all more social, but they also do not require some concept of ‘human nature’ at their foundation—they don’t put consciousness at the center of the universe.
So why am I talking about two ways of approaching metaphysics instead of talking about quantum physics? Because quantum physics can be interpreted in different ways. There is a spiritual way, which ignores most of the data and egotistically injects consciousness in to everything. There is a substance-based way, which ignores much of the data and claims a set of particles is the foundation of existence. And there is a process-based way, which acknowledges that those particles are functionally nonexistent unless they are simultaneously acting on each other, or intra-acting. I would argue that the process-based way is the only correct way, but others would argue against me, so we must do philosophy about it. We must engage in metaphysics.
Both the spiritual and ‘secular’ substance views of quantum physics are in fact spiritual, in my view, because they are both essentialistic. In other words, both insist that a thing’s meaning, even the meaning of an electron, is built in to its physical properties. The ‘spirit’ of an electron is its negative charge, one might say, but negative when compared to what? And how can you measure negative charge without introducing an other particle for it to act on, and some apparatus we’ve decided can observe the action? Essentialist thinking tends to project individualist or egotistical human experience on to everything, which means an essentialist’s study of metaphysics already presupposes an essentialist metaphysics—the essentialist is just there to reinforce the subconscious beliefs it already had.
So going in to metaphysics with an open mind is critical. You can’t unlearn what you didn’t know you already believed. Pro-social and pro-ecological ideologies can be difficult to grasp, if you can’t see humans, other animals, and plants as points of intersecting phenomena. Or if history, to you, is just a thing you study, not a thing that happens. Or if you have any intuitions about the permanence of your identity.
All right, so Kant can suck it, Heraclitus and Gautama Buddha solved metaphysics long before (and then the Buddha went off the rails with it by reinjecting representationalism), Spinoza revived the solution for modern times, Niels Bohr proved it, Deleuze turned talking about it in to an art form, Karen Barad expanded Bohr’s proof to intersect with social theory better, and I have now read too many books. Metaphysics, you can sit back down now.
Copy/paste from an email, after I realized that this manic presentation of the insane about of time it can take to begin to grasp a single god damn academic text these days might be valuable to other people:
So the point of all this is to understand a 1972 book called Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a poststructuralist and a post-psychoanalyst, respectively. It’s a book that could be summed up as a way to understand consciousness and unconsciousness, not in a spiritual sense or a neurological sense, but in a practical, everyday sense that can be used to combat fascism and save the world. But explaining it like that makes it sound very simple and even silly. The trouble with reading this book is that it’ll sound like 382 pages of riddles and inside jokes unless you build some foundation first–and even then I’m convinced it’s at least a third riddles and inside jokes! These guys are academics, have read WAY too many books, and are drawing from three thousand years of ideas to construct their theory of humanity, and they just don’t seem capable of speaking plain English. Well, of course not, because this was translated from French, but you know what I mean.
Since you probably don’t have time to read all of the Socratics and the Buddhist scholars and about how formal logic, linguistics, and knowledge production work, and because most of that stuff is a waste of time, I think the best place to start with philosophy–a general grasp of all philosophy is probably good before we focus on psychoanalysis, politics, and ontology–is a whimsical 1991 novel by Jostein Gaarder called Sophie’s World. It has kind of Alice-in-Wonderland vibes, but with this old nerd in it that gives the girl a crash course in philosophy along the way. Gives a sense of breadth and gets the gears turning–and if you hate it, you’ll be pretty sure that the rest is not for you XD
From there, I’d go to The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy by Donald Robertson, a 2010 nonfiction book illustrating how philosophy of goodwill and practical living evolved into psychotherapy, and what it lost along the way. It specifically compares CBT and Stoicism, but that is NOT because CBT is the be-all end-all therapy or that Stoicism answers all of life’s questions. CBT is just a solid tool, and Stoicism has some bad blind spots.
Then we take a trip through existential feminism with Simone de Bourvoir. Originally written in the 1940s, what I’m familiar with is a translation/compilation called The Works of Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity published in 2011. Apparently this is abridged work because she tended to ramble… a lot XD This stuff made me really open up my mind to complexity of identity and prejudice, and how to deal with problems that are more complicated than ‘If the trolly goes this way, this happens, and if the other way the other thing happens. Which way do you make it go?’ It was groundbreaking stuff, but of course she was a woman in the 40s so all the nerdy white guys tried to ignore it.
What is ethics? Rules? Laws? Social norms? Compassion and Moral Guidance by Steven Bien says, “No.” This is more contemporary, 2013, but draws from, well, three thousand years of the study and experience of how to care about and help other people. It turns out, facts DO care about your feelings, because facts are informed by feelings, and feelings carry with them factual data. Some people think the greatest good comes out of cold, calculated decisions, but here we learn that emotional intelligence is actually more important to making rational decisions about people and other living things. We can thank feminism for the reintroduction of kindness and compassion into the “what’s the right thing to do?” equation.
Then comes A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, 2015. This book is a god damned nightmare. Everything you’ve heard about what we did to MLK and the Native Americans and Hiroshima is just the tip of the iceberg. This is both an honest analysis of what the US has done to the common person since its inception, both at home and abroad, and a case study of what an empire is capable of. I was a very angry person while reading this book. You’ve been warned!
Aha, if you’ve made it this far you get to take a break! Is the pandemic over yet? Youtube time! I picked a selection of videos from both Marxists and anarchists (you usually can’t tell from the videos), in the order of more general to more specific in concept. I did this because the human is a social animal, and ya can’t understand what it’s like to be human without understanding how society is structured, and ya can’t understand how society is structured if ya can’t imagine what the alternatives are. To do that, you can either go further right (but, like, you probably don’t need to be convinced that Nazis are bad) or further left. The far right is simple: they just wanna kill everything that doesn’t belong, and then change the rules so fewer and fewer people belong, until there’s no one left but the king of the world. Unimpressive. Hard pass. The far left, however, wants people to, like, experience love and joy and peace and clean air. Maybe make friends with a donkey. More interesting. Let’s get started with some goofballs going over the basics:
I consider myself a pretty imaginative person, but I’ll be honest. I started getting into alternative ways to structure society, ways that put the needs of people and ecosystems first, and I couldn’t imagine what it’d look like. I was too brainwashed by rich people. So I turned back to fiction. The Last Capitalist: A Dream of a New Utopia by Steve Kullen, 2002, is a really short utopian story that illustrates a possible future that doesn’t suck. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercey, 1997, is a much more comprehensive envisioning of a communal, compassionate future, and is a time travel story that compares such a future to being poor, brown, female, and labeled as clinically insane in the USA in the 70s. It’s also one of my favorite novels, but somebody borrowed mine with my notes in it and never gave it back to me:(
Break time is over, but we’ll start back up with the heavy shit using fairly simple language in a piece that’s only 80 pages. There’s more than prejudice and poverty and war that’s killing us of course, and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, 2009, is the best introduction I’ve found to the subtler, more sinister elements of our culture that are toxic as hell. We’re not just “engaging with politics” at this point. We’re beyond academic interest. You’ll notice you have fewer friends XD
Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements by Julietta Singh, 2018. We’re having a psychedelic experience now. Study has become communion with nature. The mere concept of humanity is madness. Success is violence.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2021. This is about how invisible markets work. About how all life is interdependent. Everything is economics, not money, and economics is life and breath. Everything is connected. I know the last blurb primed you for it, but this isn’t about psychedelic mushrooms;P
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad, 2007. I know this title sounds like the white guy with dreadlocks just hit the bong and is about to ramble about his idiotic take on string theory, but we’re actually here to learn about how partical observation proves that nothing, not even quarks, have intrinsic, definable qualities, and that only things that interact, things (and people) that depend on each other, have meaning. The cult of the individual is a lie. All is one (kudos to the Buddha for getting that right without microscopes).
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, 1981. You got a neat intro to this book in the Youtube section, but don’t think that means this’ll be easy. I might still know how to interface with normal people, if it weren’t for this book. This is where the art of philosophy really starts, and where it’s unclear what’s fucking around and what’s finding out. It’s more of an adventure than a study, a process of digging diamonds out of the rough. But you’re a total nerd now, so you’re fine with having to read a book more than once to start to get it. Right? Mark Fisher’s ideas are largely inspired by this stuff, but you’ll immediately see why it’s appropriate to read Fisher first. Welcome to the desert of the real.
And now… you’re not actually ready to read Anti-Oedipus. I lied. Nothing can truly prepare a person for Anti-Oedipus. But, like me, you’re ready to try;D Even if you’ve accepted all of the other radical shit up until this point, it’s going to convince you that the rest of the ideas you took for granted are also insane, in the weirdest way possible. You’re really going to feel like you should’ve studied Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan while reading this, but don’t; it’s a waste of time. Just let this delirius ego death wash over you, and reread a lot, and look up lots of words. Or don’t, and just let this delirius ego death wash over you.
For the longest time I considered this movie to be a simple joy ride through dreamy fantasy, some thing absurd just for the sake of absurdity. When compared to the Henson Studio’s other work, particularly The Cube, Time Piece, and the revolutionary conflict in Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (at the very least the source material for the show was a story centered around genocide- pretty heavy), on its face Labyrinth seemed absolutely silly and no thing much more.
Side note: The Cube and Time Piece used to be on Youtube in their entirety but have since been taken down. It looks like they’re both on Amazon Prime now, which sucks but The Cube especially is worth every penny (it’s my favorite movie, if I’m not about to convince my self here that Labyrinth is in stead).
First, let’s talk about the labyrinth its self. It was Jean Baudrillard’s fascination with Gorge Luis Borges’ fantasy stories as symbolism that got me thinking about this. By the time he described postmodern culture as ‘labyrinthine’ in Simulacra and Simulation I was fully primed to piece that apart. Labyrinths are confusing, designed to make the inhabitant or navigator perpetually lost. To give one the sense that, no matter how much progress they have made, they have gotten no where. Sounds like today’s economy! The Labyrinth of Greek mythology, the one designed and built by Daedalus for the king of Crete, was a prison for the Minotaur- a prison the Minotaur could conceivably escape from, but that was so maze-like that the likelihood would be considered insignificant. Baudrillard referred to our society as labyrinthine because it is an absurd prison for our minds; most of us would sooner give up and submit to it than find its exit. Its endless corridors and pointless dead ends suggest that its entire structure is either meaningless or intentionally exasperating and exhausting.
Jareth’s labyrinth represents a society of nonsense, a culture that is impossible to navigate logically, that ‘can’t be taken for granted’. It exists in a fantasy world separate from Sarah’s, is unreal (or per haps, borrowing Baudrillard’s famous term, hyperreal). It is immediately established in the film that Sarah suffers from feeling alienated, frustrated with rules, threatened by her step mother who is concerned with Sarah’s fitting in. Her role-playing at the start and the contents of her bed room make it clear that she’d rather be any where but 1980’s suburban US Empire. The labyrinth she later finds her self in seems to be inspired by her toys and fantasies, a world all her own, and yet it frustrates her just as much as her real life, and is even more antagonistic. To me, this is merely an inversion of her expectations: you can’t escape from the postmodern condition in to fantasy because the postmodern condition is the fantasy. It is no coincidence that the only human inhabitant of the labyrinth is an adult sexual predator. Between Jareth and the goblins, like in her real life, Sarah has no one to relate to. All is other. It is no coincidence that her motivation is to save an innocent human baby from becoming a goblin, or that her baby brother is to be transformed simply by a prolonged stay in the labyrinth. Toby’s dreaded metamorphosis is from innocence, a simple creature of the real, in to an other servant of the predatory king, a human commodity, a being disfigured by Neoliberal capitalism.
Now Jareth. Again, the Goblin King is the only denizen who is not a goblin. He’s so separate from his subjects that he isn’t even of the same species, easily a nod to the anti-human character of the ruling class. Jareth is a pedophile, an abductor, and spins rhetoric of his vileness being inevitable or even good. Toward the end Jareth says, ‘I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave.’ Is it not a popular trick of the powerful, to convince us that they serve the powerless? To submit fully and trust in their benevolence? Yet Jareth exposes this here so plainly that it’s as if even he believes the farce at this point. And Sarah’s response, ‘You have no power over me,’ is precisely the line that undoes him. Jareth’s other tactics of oppression include making Sarah forget her purpose with the consumption of a peach (don’t think, consume) and seducing her through a masquerade ball.
In the ball room scene he doesn’t once speak to her, only singing, and every prop and character demands her attention, beyond elegant, extravagant, fantastic even for the labyrinth- this is the spectacle. This scene is the seduction of the media. Jareth’s singing is disembodied. You hear his voice but his lips don’t move, as if his message belongs to the dance in stead. Sarah has to push her way through the crowd, but Jareth navigates with ease, seemingly able to teleport. Jareth is the villain, yet Sarah pursues him here, the one guest that is serious and in control, as if to say, ‘The spectacle is insane and treacherous, but I will save you.’ Once she finds him and they dance, there is suddenly plenty of room for her to move. Yet it is his disembodied voice that drives the dance, and after they begin to dance together Jareth’s lips begin to move; Sarah realizes the spectacle belongs to the King, and flees.
Now let’s rock through the rest of the characters. Hoggle is some one turned sour by the system. Tough on the out side, pathetic on the in side, he is introduced while exterminating faeries, people smaller than he is, people he claims can’t be trusted, yet it isn’t addressed whether they are even capable of speech. Does the faerie have justification for why they bite Sarah? Hoggle just assumes it’s because they’re beastly. Division of the lower class, any one? Hoggle’s arc is that he betrays the Goblin King once he realizes that loyalty to power is rewarded with no thing, while Sarah promises friendship. Before he befriends Sarah, monetary value is all he is concerned with- a transformation from consumer values to social values.
Ludo’s story is pretty simple: scary strangers are just people too, and we need to learn to cooperate with them. His communication skills seem poor, yet he’s the only one who can communicate with rocks. In other words, he has a special understanding of language that others didn’t even know existed, an understanding that saves their lives.
Sir Didymus seems to be our struggle with the concept of bravery. He is impervious to despair, but also naive. He’ll never give up, but also would have probably gotten them all killed, if he was in charge. We’re still sold heroes like these to look up to, and yet in real life we’re often hesitant to stand up for what we believe in- and are often told that doing so is foolish. Since he’s got a weird gender roles thing going on with Sarah and expresses his faith in meritocracy after battling Ludo, may be he’s just a hero caricature meant to get us to abandon the cult of the hero entirely.
The wise man with the bird hat offers wisdom and then asks for payment, and the wisdom is garbage. This is the aesthetic of wisdom as commodity, and pseudo-wisdom here is shown to be self-contradicting, as represented by the tension between the man and his talking hat. The brief bit of false wisdom offered here is just a repackaged general description of the labyrinth, not unlike how self-help authors will just reinterpret status quo values to appear novel and profound. As Sarah and Hoggle move on, the hat remarks, ‘There go a couple of suckers.’
Get a load of the fireys. These guys are the most openly and consciously accepting of the system. At first glance they seem like the good guys, not falling for the appeal of high society, singing:
Don’t got no problems Ain’t got no suitcase Ain’t got no clothes to worry about Ain’t got no real estate or jewelry Or gold mines to hang me up
Yet they acknowledge that some one has real estate, jewelry, and gold mines, while they can’t even afford clothes, and insist that the answer to this problem is to ignore it. They willingly tear their selves apart to enjoy poverty, and though they sing that they ‘don’t charge nothin”, they insist that Sarah destroy her body too, in order to share in their pretend freedom. They can’t understand their own violence, and their answer to oppression is escapism:
So when things get too tough And your chin is dragging on the ground And even down looks up
We can show you a good time…
The fireys are the doofuses who believe you can create your own paradise within the system by just ignoring all of life’s problems. Saying, ‘You don’t need two ears!’ is to say that even possession of your own body is luxurious, a sign that the pseudo-asceticism of the Fireys is practically suicidal.
The hoarders in the junk yard are pretty obvious. Their thing is empty commodity collection, trying to fool Sarah in to believing that possessions provide intrinsic meaning and belonging. They dwell in a literal garbage heap, yet the one on screen is still shocked when Sarah refers to possessions as junk. We see the theme of forgetting one’s identity and purpose here again, as Sarah is still struggling to remember why she’s in the labyrinth. First it was the poison of consumption, then the spectacle, now commodities as identity.
Ah yes, that stupid worm that made it on to all of the T-shirts. Why, if it isn’t the obtuse middle class liberal who can’t even understand your problems? The worm is the first to say that no thing in the labyrinth can be taken for granted, admits that he can’t navigate it, and yet seems to take for granted his own ease of access (can see through the optical illusion of the walls despite being ‘just a worm’). The worm immediately trivializes this assistance by offering his family’s hospitality, and has no idea that Sarah literally can’t accept the invitation, even if she wanted to (she can’t fit through the entrance to the worm’s home = his cozy life style is inaccessible to her). Finally, the worm assumes Sarah wouldn’t want to find the castle, so misguides her, assuming the poor should have no interest in politics. The worm, the friendly gate-keeper that will assume he knows what’s best for you and then lead you away from your needs.
Now the Bog of Eternal Stench. The king’s worst punishment is ostracism, smelling so bad that no one will ever want to be around you for the rest of your life. Even Hoggle, who when threatened with the bog is still trying to present a solitary nature, is horrified by this. The Bog is the threat of further alienation when you reject the status quo, the fear of being alone and the shame of it all.
Sarah continually complains that things aren’t fair, and Jareth isn’t the only one who mocks her for it, as though it’s foolishly utopian to expect fairness. Never is Sarah even able to articulate why fairness is some thing realistic or some thing to strive for, because the aesthetic of capitalist realism is too strong. This is just the way it is, and you only value fairness because you are a child. But more than fairness, in the end it’s companionship that Sarah values most. It is no longer fantasy that she longs for, or escape, but friendship and more specifically social support: ‘If you need us.’ And it’s not just her friends that answer her call, but all sorts of goblins appear, including the King’s soldiers. Sarah’s new social values unite the people, and the Goblin King is left alone, isolated and invisible in his antisocial selfishness, left with only the power to fly away in to the night and be forgotten.
Fuck the ruling class. Workers of the world unite! DANCE, MAGIC, DANCE!
Have you ever wondered why you enjoy some art and not other art? Why one genre of music seems to ‘speak to you’, and others feel unimportant or even annoying? Why you continually seek out, say, action movies, but roll your eyes every time some one mentions a romantic comedy? Some folks argue from all sorts of perspectives of objective superiority in media, but that doesn’t explain why shows, songs, video games, paintings, etc. they find to be inferior are still enjoyed and defended by others (and typically come off as just elitist back-filling). You can’t just explain away bad taste with a ‘lack of culture’ or stupidity; human psychology isn’t that simple.
Has it ever seemed to you that certain answers to questions or responses to situations just feel right? ‘Go with your gut’, ‘follow your heart’, ‘trust your intuition’ people say, like there’s an impulse that comes from an invisible source when logical solutions to problems aren’t available to you. Ever wondered where intuition comes from? What that source is? Why your gut might tell you one thing while some one else’s gut might tell them an other? Some folks say this is your spirit talking, your conscience, and a freer spirit/less corrupted conscience will be able to communicate to you better information: that the person with the good response is hearing a clear message from their spirit or god, while the person with the bad response is getting information distorted by spirit energy blockages or lack of faith. This isn’t a religious blog, so discussion here requires more material hypotheses. We’ve just got to clear our thoughts to hear the voice of our conscience? But that still doesn’t explain what the conscience is. Does the inner voice, what ever it is, look out for you? For the greater good? What are its motivations? If you can’t be confident that god or the collective unconsciousness is benevolent, ya gotta wonder why.
There’s a lot of subconscious stuff going on in our mind spaces. Freud’s model of ego/superego/id is an oversimplification, and so is the visualization of the ice berg with its smallest portion being all that’s visible above water, but they’re still useful as short-hand. In the global west, in the US Empire especially, there’s a long-standing myth that economics is driven by rationality. In other words, we make decisions that effect our livelihoods using refined logic, make them only after pausing to think, and this process you might say comes from our superego. But how does this explain the trope of the impulse buy? Is that the exception that proves the rule, since any one would admit to silencing their rationality when making that purchase? Even so, you have to wonder how many serious decisions were quietly made impulsively, and how much this influences the greater results of our economics. And any one listening to their intuition, their inner voice, certainly isn’t consciously deliberating on a solution.
Secular folks tend to like to think the human mind generally developed vertically in this way: instinct gave rise to emotional subconsciousness gave rise to rational consciousness. With this perspective, it’s easy to believe that our subconscious drives still have a strong biological foundation, that our intuition is telling us to fulfill our basic needs. They may be skeptical of intuition for this reason, because it may prioritize food or sex over some thing more pressing, but they still see it as some thing that is entirely internal, easily predicted once you’ve glanced at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I’m not so sure of this perspective any more, in stead more inclined to believe that the subconscious is a product of our consciousness, that the subconscious wouldn’t exist at all without there first being conscious perception, ideas, thoughts, emotional reactions, meaning.
We can feel intuitions about all sorts of things, after all, base urges regarding information that didn’t even exist nor would have had any value while the human species was emerging from our purely instinctual motivations. We dream about our technology, about our culture, about abstract nonsense, and feel all sorts of deep relationships with things of human design, designed by humans we’ll never meet, things that are consciously completely novel. Were we biologically determined to enjoy electric guitars and synthesizer music some how, or is there some thing else going on?
The key lies in that phrase ‘it speaks to me.’ If our consciousness communicates in text, our subconsciousness communicates in subtext. Body language may reinforce what a person is explicitly saying, or it may say some thing else. We might not pick up on the message of a person’s body language (the subtext) consciously, not until it makes us feel some thing that we then translate in to a conscious idea. ‘I can’t explain it, but so-and-so just gives off bad vibes.’ Well, so they communicate some thing to your subconscious that you aren’t able to translate in to conscious thought. If we can’t consciously explain why we like a novel or a TV show, our subconscious still ‘knows’ in stead.
Some folks say music is a language, and it helps to think of all art, all of aesthetics, actually, as language. Art isn’t just deliberately constructing pleasing sounds and shapes and colors and movements; it is meaningful. It communicates some thing, whether ideas or emotions. We only feel some thing from art because it is communicating some thing to us. If we don’t like a piece of art, ‘get no thing out of it’, it is because we don’t understand it, consciously or unconsciously. Our subconscious mind might not be able to speak its language.
So how does the subconscious learn these wordless or subtextual languages? Well, not unlike how a small child learns literal, spoken language. It learns it through absorption, pattern recognition, reinforcement, all automatically through repeated exposure. Even as adults we often learn new words through context, and learning the same word through different contexts can result in different understandings of the meaning of the word. This is one way to explain how one person can love a song while an other person hates it: they both learned the language(s) that the song communicates with in different contexts. Sadly, a broad negative context could result in novel music being avoided in general, or a broad positive one could bring a person to subconsciously ‘understand’ novelty only, and never develop a deeper appreciation of new music, it’s diversity, its nuance.
If we appreciate things because we find them meaningful, and we learn meaning through repeated exposure, then we can say that meaning has a historical element. What I mean here is that there is a progression of meaning, from meaningless noise to familiar noise to pleasant sounds, shapes, colors, smells, tastes, and movements to valuable works, events, and people to deep and lasting narratives.
It’s no secret that art makes us feel things, evokes emotions both as simple as sadness and so complex that we struggle to explain them. But what about ideas? Are we talking explicitly political lyrics pushing a specific political stance, and themes of heroism, triumphing over evil, and whether success or the friends we made along the way are the most important part of a journey? That’s all part of it, sure, and a story can have a moral to it without explicitly saying, ‘Do this thing but not this other thing.’ But instrumental music can also present and reinforce ideas- why does it evoke the emotional atmosphere that it does? What is that for? And how does it do it? Why does that particular composition and selection of instruments work for the job? Each instrument has a history of use, a place in different cultures across time, and any chord progression or melodic hook shares a relationship with others, per haps a hundred years apart, per haps across genres that are iterations of combinations of iterations that share a common root that no one even really remembers any more- yet their meaning would not exist without this shared history. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine that some one who understands the social/political conditions that developed blues and shaped country from blues will have a very different experience listening to present-day stadium country than some one who just takes stadium country for granted, as the definition of the genre simply because it is presently popular.
Aside from your typical themes, story can also carry a message about the parts of its content that the narrative completely ignores: ‘these things are normal, obvious, unworthy of analysis.’ You don’t have to be paranoid to be suspicious of some one telling you, ‘Don’t think about this.’ Writers likely take things for granted to save time and focus on the story they want to tell, but like a nervous person giving away their lie with body language, stories often have unintended, accidental subtext. If a story, for example, features a complex, morally superior white man versus a simple-minded, sadistically evil Black woman, you have to wonder what kind of prejudices it’s reinforcing by not addressing why these narrative choices were made.
That’s just an easy example, though. Dangerous subtext goes way beyond basic prejudices. When we are bombarded with media that suggests consumerism is normal, that every sane person gets married, that love is pain, that success is wealth, that the Empire’s military is a force for good, that police are inherently benevolent, that the position of authority of teachers and politicians is necessary, that finance and currency are integral to any economics, presents these things with no or only superficial criticism (which only tricks the audience in to being satisfied that the depth of criticism possible has been complete), a specific and complex belief system is being promoted and reinforced. When beliefs are presented quietly like this, are only implied, across many outlets of multiple forms of media, we call those beliefs the ‘status quo’: beliefs that have developed to the point of being normal, having conquered all competing beliefs, setting the expectations for what should and should not be challenged, regardless of the ethical implications (culture can progress in both good and bad ways, simultaneously). When beliefs are so prevalent for so long that they become the back ground to the rest of our lives, when they’re so normalized that we can’t even identify them any more, yet their meaning persists and informs our judgment, those beliefs have shifted from intellectual to wholly aesthetic. Ideas once laid out in explicit words are now implied by simpler, grander symbols. The simplest representation of the crucifix being seen in an incredible amount of places, worn around necks even, evokes the dominance of the Christian church acquired through two thousand years of slaughter and torture… but some how not in a repulsive way. All of our traditions of professionalism, corporate hierarchy, the historical procession from peasant to merchant to banker to administrator to CEO, all condense in to the simple business suit. Do we feel our way through human relationships in terms of exchange because there’s a biological imperative to do so, or because our society is steeped in an aesthetic of buying and selling?
A society with an old, invisible belief structure will naturally discourage making its subtext explicit out of self-preservation. If we can’t analyze it, we can’t criticize it, and, if we can’t criticize it, we can’t decide that it’s bad or suggest an alternative. But individuals in small-scope situations benefit from how our society neglects subtext also. In this society, a fascist can say some thing that’s innocuous on the surface but with a tone that conveys hatred and promotes bigotry, requiring only the defense, ‘I didn’t say that. You’re putting words in my mouth.’ The phrase ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ can easily mean ‘your emotions are annoying.’ ‘Every one here has a voice, and is welcome to speak their mind’ often means ‘democracy has no place here, also we are welcoming you to have your discontent surveilled.’ We now call these tactics ‘dog whistles’ when they communicate coded messages to the in-group, yet it’s still difficult to convince people that deceit is happening. The fact that we have to explain gas-lighting at all suggests that language games are used to preserve power all of the time.
News-casters go on with an air of unbiased fact-telling, even though which facts to present has been carefully predetermined, and their writers decide what kind of information is factual. News-casters present horrific events in relative calm, which trains us to be desensitized to violence. TV shows and movies have to condense a ton of information in to short segments, which has the effect of convincing us that life is simple- having thrown out all this causal information to just leave us with the exciting points. We slowly learn that that’s how the world just is, by learning to ignore the stuff that those media discard. And then what happens? We can’t fucking read books that include all of those discarded details because we’ve been conditioned to feel that they’re boring and extraneous, so recovering our senses for them is that much more difficult.
Jean Baudrillard defines media as ‘the mediating power between one reality and another.’
The novel is the medium between our reality and the ‘reality’ presented by the author’s story. The same story can be presented through a different medium, like film, but it will necessarily become a different story: the narrative voice is lost, changing the atmospheres of scenes from being precisely described to being simply shown, and the content is dramatically condensed. When film and television push for realism, what they are really pushing for is one specific interpretation of reality, a ‘realism’ defined by our concept of the real as fed to us by media, one that in fact is not real at all. When art copies life copies art enough times the media, by Baudrillard’s definition, disappears. Pop art becomes so self-referencial that it is no longer art, but just a dead echo of the norms.
The narratives of our popular myths have become the meta-narrative of our lives, a set of subconscious beliefs that tell us what every thing means.
The lie of the prevailing cultural aesthetic, that it’s divorced from historical context, that only the immediate, explicit, superficial message exists, is essentialistic. I call it essentialistic because it assumes all of the meaning of art and ideology is just baked in to the nature of things. Meaning in culture develops over time based on broadly accepted values. Every ‘common sense’ perception today is an iteration of an old one. The human worldview is an ancient, multicultural patchwork. In other words, the present meaning, feel, value of our commodities, media, institutions, etc. is taken for granted because the context is hidden. A Christmas tree is just a Christmas tree, not a specific species of plant selected and reselected based on ancient, alien-to-us traditions co-opted by Christianity and then a consumerist repackaging of Christianity, covered in a collection of symbols that also developed over time. Our culture behaves as though the idea ‘Christmas tree’ is built in to the object its self. Essentialism, the idea that meaning precedes, that purpose and symbolic character manifest with objects in stead of after objects. Why is this disturbing? Why is this mistake so grave? Because it has made Neoliberal capitalism in to a fucking religion. Not unlike Eastern pagan religions, we believe that every thing has its own eternal spirit, divorced from time. But the horror of it is that this is accepted as secular, and we have no words for it. It’s an invisible religion that you can’t opt out of because you need those words in able to do so, words that have been stolen and buried through the long process of the normalization of competitive markets and advertising. The language of escape is suppressed; we no longer have a secular vernacular, if there ever was one.
So what does this mean about artistic taste and intuition? Well, intuition is merely the medium between our subconscious beliefs and our conscious processing. Aesthetics is a language that speaks directly to our subconscious, requiring little to no conscious translation, telling us to believe and disbelieve things, using emotional conjugation of the meaning of events, people, institutions, habits, every thing. Think of the skilled artist or advertiser or politician as a computer hacker trying to find the back door to your machine, the vulnerable points in your security, and exploiting them to plant viruses. Their jobs are to find ways around your consciousness, to get you to believe things without you knowing it, to accept ideas that you may resist, if they were presented explicitly. And these people don’t expect it to happen with a single painting, with a single billboard, with a single speech. Our subconscious learns through repetition, remember; these beliefs are formed through repeated exposure, familiarity, habits.
So is your music taste yours? It might make more sense to say that your music taste is your parents’, modified by popular radio, tweaked by what signified that you were cool to other kids in high school, reinforced by the frequency with which some of the major influences were repeated in film, T.V., and commercials, later in the audio gags of Internet memes, and so on. Just as no piece of art was produced in a cultural/historical vacuum, as every song is in some way a remix, every story an adaptation, our own tastes, our entire personalities, are the products of the explicit and implicit influences in our lives, both due to which we’ve accepted and how we rejected the others. Our intuition is only telling us what all of those successful influences wanted us to hear. Our intuition is just the expression, the chorus of every computer virus we’ve let slip in to our hidden hard drives.
That is, unless we learn these languages. Unless we do the work necessary to translate the subconscious languages of aesthetics in order to interrupt and control them. We can rewire our subconscious; that’s largely what psychotherapy is for. It’s just that the commodified versions of psychotherapy don’t go deep enough, because their purpose is to make us normal, not analytical or individual, and certainly not free. The study of aesthetics and how it intersects with politics, ethics, epistemology, logic, and metaphysics is not an easy one to tackle, and is often muddled and sterilized by the dry weight of academia or the fluffy, juvenile, get-educated-now! of Youtube summaries. I likely never would have understood it my self, had I not first studied ethics, then political theory and political history, then the history of media, all the while building up my understanding of how we attain knowledge and develop our processes of judgment. It also takes a broad range of examples- you can’t begin to understand music, if you’re not willing to immerse your self in all of its genres, all of its hundreds of genres spanning tens, hundreds, or thousands of years. Contrast is important. Context is essential. History is messy, and if you’ve never read history that brought you significant and memorable discomfort, you’ve never actually read history.
If we’re not deliberately and carefully developing our selves, through constant study and reevaluation, some one else, some one else’s system is doing it for us, and it does not have our best interests in mind. I, personally, am currently taking a journey through developing an aesthetic of resistance to the malicious hackers, one that not only protects me from subliminal propaganda but orients me more confidently in the world, minimizing my cognitive dissonance and sense of alienation in a world that was not designed for me- not through a rejection of the contradictions at play but a profound and educated acceptance of them, not acceptance of them as good or correct but as factually real, concrete things that I can understand and combat. I mentioned in Part 10 of my previous post that cyberpunk and Stoicism are such aesthetics, but both are dead (cyberpunk having been zombified in to an enslaved nostalgia commodity), so possibly insufficient to challenge the world of today. I’m not just trying to preserve my own sanity, after all. I’d like to think my knowledge has the potential to some day manifest a systematic method for bettering the whole world.
This is a long post about my development, specifically my philosophical development, for the sake of offering a version of the intellectual scaffolding that I built for my self throughout the years in order to climb up to where I am now. Jumping in to a new topic that’s full of expectations of what you already know really sucks, and I wondered what it’d be like, if a philosopher actually showed all of that stuff in a work, how they got there, in stead of diving right in to what was built atop hundreds or even thousands of years of thought as though you too spent your whole life reading in your study or at the university library. Lots of that stuff either is no longer applicable or has since been proved wrong any way, so why bother in those cases, and how do you know which cases they are?
Note 1: I don’t really intend for this to be read to completion from start to finish, certainly not in one sitting. It might be more suitable to skim until you find some thing interesting or unfamiliar, or even just key word search.
Note 2: We remember our pasts differently at different stages of our lives. Different details are important. Different details are forgotten. Even sequence can change. For a 2013 retelling of my early life, go here. To get right to it, get right to it.
Part 1: Gifted Kid|Wonder
My mother insists that when I was five years old I came up the stairs of our spacious, suburban home, sat down on the couch next to her, and asked, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ She used to regularly refer to me as ‘gifted’, thought my creativity and social sensitivity meant I was destined for greatness, or something.
When I was about ten it occurred to me that I didn’t fit in with the other kids. I had friends, but I had to be in a particular mood to not feel disgusted at the thought of giving them my time. I have these vague memories of being a child, hiding between my bed and the wall, sobbing and screaming to my mother, ‘I don’t wanna go!’ as a crude means of cancelling plans with friends. Until high school they were always boys who bullied and harassed each other as a means of grasping some sense of power in a world where most of their decisions were made for them by their superiors. I didn’t like it, and around ten years old it occurred to me that it didn’t feel normal.
Not that the aggression didn’t feel normal, but my submission to it. Even when I played my part and beat up the omega, well, I was only better than the omega, and that still felt pathetic. I must’ve seen faith as a weakness, because I began to use atheism as a tool of superiority. I didn’t always have no faith of my own. I didn’t know how to talk about my social anxiety, so I wasn’t going to try to talk to anyone else about it. In stead I spoke inward, and developed an experimental dialog between my fears and my ideals. A weak side and a strong side. The weak side felt like self, so that was represented by my legal name. The strong side felt foreign and fantastic, so I gave it what is now my real name.
The dialog was frustrating and scary, though, I imagine, so escapism was my more frequent form of therapy. Extended family introduced me to fantasy, to video games, places that felt like more. Stories that made sense, were going somewhere grand. I dove deeper by creating my own stories, in writing, in sheets and sheets of concept art for video games that would never come to be. This was mostly copy-catting, but it was a way to become a part of the fantasies that soothed me, to feel like more than I was, or at least distant from a self full of fear, disappointment, and now rage.
I didn’t feel strong or physically intimidating. Sports intimidated me. Competition intimidated me. Sports carried no interesting aesthetic for me, and the boys who played them were even bigger bullies than my friends. I came to see intellectualism as the opposite of physical ability, and in some way decided that being opposed to sports makes you smart. Those sports kids did things, performed based on rules enforced by their superiors. I made things, and for my worlds it was me who made the rules. I was quietly better than them.
So my rage was fueled by a sense that justice was lacking, that I was better but others were held in higher regard. I felt that I was working on things profound at home, but that I was restricted at school. I didn’t feel like I was winning against the system, but I did feel like the strong, ideal me was winning the battle in my head. The voice of the weak self became quieter and quieter, had fewer defenses. I remember being on roller skates in a school gymnasium when I felt a sudden sense of relief and calm wash over me- I decided then that my weak self had died.
I’m not sure how this was justified, as my social anxiety didn’t go away, at least not for long. Some threshold, some low bar had been met, though, so it was a significant milestone. I was Shyft. I was the change. The only thing I remember doing to flex my confidence was sign a bunch of year books with absurd, violent, or otherwise misanthropic phrases. I remember imagining my physical self as different, with total black eyes, long, spiked up hair, and armed: fantasy taught me that the good guys carry swords. I dreamed of being some thing more.
Part 2: High School, Delusion, and Shyfted Dreaming|Metaphysics, Divinity, Asceticism, Primitivism
I was eleven years old when The Matrix came out, may be twelve when I saw it for the first time, on VHS, on a tube TV, in the basement of one of my jerk friends. I honestly don’t remember my initial reaction, but I do remember the result: wanting to wear black, wanting to own a long, black coat, associating martial arts with intellectualism. The sleek, black shades were not unlike the glossy, black eyes of my ideal physical self. Neo had a secret self that he couldn’t express in the open, a real name only known by the few, like me.
Mind over matter. That was the ticket. If not through warping reality with pure will, then at least mastering the body through martial spirit. Psychic children having first been gifted in artistic and intellectual ways was a familiar media trope, and my mother’s mother had been pushing the indigo child narrative on me. I don’t remember how I felt about the idea of belonging to some secret generation of revolutionary mind alchemists back then, but I know my transformation was very personal to me. I borrowed lots of ideas, but I’d felt alone my entire life; my power was to be mine only.
There was a summer when a newer friend stopped in front of a shop in a mall and said he’d heard he could find a Gizmo patch for his baseball cap in there. Gizmo, from the Gremlins movies. The shop was Hot Topic. I felt like I’d walked in to an other world. A serious and artistic world of black and long coats. That summer two of my friends, my girlfriend, and I became goth together, and it was probably my first real grasp with bonding. For what it’s worth, my then girlfriend seemed to finally find a form of femininity that made sense to her. We returned to school and my other friends, groups of friends, pretended they didn’t know me. I told myself they were afraid, or too stupid to understand, and felt empowered by their rejection. We had our own language, the dark, a powerful language so simple that we could look at a stranger and know that they were our friend too. One other wore black, and he was in. An other wore black, attended his first day of freshmen world history with a T-shirt tied around his face like a ninja mask, neon green and black goggles hiding his eyes- beneath all that his skin was black, and he was so in. Through Hot Topic to goth and industrial music and ninja mask guy to underground dance music, worlds upon worlds of new feeling rushed to me.
An other friend went to a formal mixed martial arts school. I trained with him and cyber goth ninja guy, who was actually a senior with a messy transcript. CGNG was in to the aesthetic, the Zen, man, the body-as-temple. The mind over matter. At this point I developed the idea that drugs, recreational and medicinal, were indulgences for the weak. The mind was all I needed. An other way to feel superior. One of my goth friends introduced me to Fight Club, to Memento, to Dark City, the Gizmo patch guy stumbled upon Donnie Darko… I decided I was a psychology and philosophy person, having studied neither, with an intent to study neither, no… All I needed was a little inspiration and the snowballing confidence in my superiority. Big fish, small pond, never seen the ocean. Sphere actually had folks using their minds to create the world, that word manifestation– that was it!
Fantasy, dramatic, other-worldly music, rave parties, training to be heroes, staying up late talking about ideas… developing personal philosophy. Three of us pushed the long talks the furthest. Three of us invented Multiple Personality Solipsism.
Solipsism is the idea that only the self exists. When only the self exists, every one else is fictional, imaginary, like characters in a dream. When only the self exists, all physical objects, the environment, history- it’s all just dream stuff, projections of the self. Some might imagine the self as a god in this situation, having some level of influence over the shape of the universe. Others consider it to be more of a brain-in-a-vat scenario, with some thing beyond dictating what the self sees, what the self experiences. But what if you have split personalities, personalities that are just as conscious as you are (this was the secular version of ‘all is god’, I guess)? Well, then you’ve got a shared dream universe. And what if your splits can have splits, and that’s what life is? What if, over time, the dream has become so vivid and so scientific, and so many of the first personalities have either died or gone in to a deeper state of sleep, and there’s little reason to call it dreaming any more and no one left who remembers when it was different? Yet the rules are still arbitrary machinations of the subconscious, waiting to be broken again.
I wanted power. I wanted what had been denied me, by people with plenty of it. Cognitive training wasn’t a way to restore health; it was a way to find power. Philosophy as a means to define the method, metaphysics only, and psychology as a means to apply it. I can’t imagine having understood these subjects beyond this when I was thirteen, fourteen. If I could believe that the Universe was made of mind stuff, and only arbitrary rules barred us from manipulating it like a vast dream, I had a chance at finally proving that I was the best, that people ought to listen to me, that they should fear me, not the other way around. Revenge, at least.
I remember assuming psychology and philosophy met most neatly in dreams. I remember vivid, complex, long-narrative dreams, dreams that were sequels to other dreams, discovering and practicing lucid dreaming as a gate way to elemental manifestation… and considering that dreams their selves were a gate way to some other world. My dreams had recurring characters now, with names given by the dreams. Some of my drawings appeared in dreams, and regardless of my wishy-washy sense of whether I believed in fate or conscious divinity, I felt at my core that my drawings had been premonitions of real, magical beings.
Chijirihaden appeared beneath my pencil first, “O” first appearing in dream, then Haden came to life at the end of a dream replica of a neighborhood private drive, after Morpheus from The Matrix walked with me and warned me about gods. My struggle with faith returned, as it seemed to benefit my quest for power. Those who believed a promise of subservience in Heaven were fools; my gods promised me an apprenticeship followed by equality, or their throne, if I could defeat them- I wasn’t sure which.
It was lonely yet; my ambitions were still mostly private. I still felt that there were things my goth friends, my philosophy friends, couldn’t understand. One moved away with his family, and introduced me to AIM, so inadvertently introduced me to strangers on the Internet. Some of them were more radical, pushed by their own mental illness, but I usually regarded their challenges to the boundaries of normal psychology as vain, as attention-seeking; mine was a form of justice. The social alienation felt crippling at times, and I might have given up the mystic quest for limitless power in favor of stronger bonds to real people… and then Alizia appeared.
She too appeared on paper first, and I couldn’t tell you how I felt about it, aside from how proud I was at the realism of her right hand. After she appeared in dream, how ever, in hallucination, the obsession was instantaneous. Her waking me at my bed side, sitting there, looking melancholy, is one of my most vivid memories. I was fourteen, may be fifteen (I’d rather not suffer reading my old journal again just to find a date), and I’d secured my sexual preference for the rest of my life. When would I next dream of Alizia? Could she be a real person, some one I could find on the Internet? Well, this new dream insists that she goes by an other name- could be a legal name! Is that girl with the black bangs at this rave her? Is that one? May be she is the secret to power! She means to help me fight the gods and secure that throne. She needs me, and I have to find her. She is with me always.
I was in deep.
I honestly didn’t think of Alizia Perdue Dergahn in a sexual way until after high school, but she’d made me abandon my disgust for lust and my rejection of love (two absurd moves in an attempt at transcending humanity). It was her what gave me the motivation to finally finish a novel, and that novel became a trilogy (Shyfted Dreaming), portraying my journey from meditations in bed to master of the Universe. A prophesy of my very own, and a work of art, and a playground for my psycho-philosophy.
Despite my transcendent, magical metaphysics, the more practical part of my philosophy, stemming from the body-as-temple aesthetic, drove me in an oddly conservative direction. Sure, strive to transcend human nature… but in the mean time submit to natural selection. No drugs. No medicine. No junk food. Black, sure, but chains, rings, make-up? No monk would wear such extravagant things. I put my skull jewelry away, kept my head shaved, and wore clothes that I could fight in. I came to think of things in terms of whether it benefited transcendence or whether it got in the way or just distracted from it. If we- well, I was meant to transcend, then my body and mind must have developed to do so. I mixed morality with hackneyed evolutionary theory, and now being gay was bad. Not because my friends called things they didn’t like ‘gay’- what did they know? It was because it was unnatural, so interfered with our- sorry- my natural progression toward godhood. Electronics, automobiles, buildings, clothing (technology, but I called it ‘production’ even before I had any sense of economic analysis), all products of a society that keeps our minds dull, all artificial, all impedance to transcendence. And to shame the other animals who live truer lives is arrogance, and to trash the planet that supports us is insanity. This foolishness of course was a burden I believed was held equally by all humans, since it was a society belonging to all of them (‘Them,’ I always said, when referring to humans- I was a temporarily embarrassed god, you see), so the punishment coming to them ought to be evenly distributed. Oh, and Black culture was anti-intellectual, so I guess I was racist too.
So my first passionate grasp of philosophy was with stoner metaphysics and eco-fascism. Alizia was a primitivist and played electric guitar, naturally.
Part 3: High School continued, Being One-Upped|Science, Suicidal Utilitarianism
Opinion blogs on the Internet. Right? Other angsty, young people with their own ideas. I was too proud to pick up a textbook, thought they all had to be status quo bull shit, but I wanted people to read and agree with my ideas, so I had to humor them and read theirs. Well, after Alizia was established as a primitivist in my novels I came across a piece on how ecosystems are violent and chaotic, how all of my romantic beliefs about the harmony of other species were bull shit, and I was shocked. This was the first time that I consciously admitted to being wrong. This was the first time I considered the possibility that some one else might be smarter than me. I believed “O” and Chijirihaden, my gods, were stronger than me, but I never considered their wits. Well, I couldn’t give the credit to that blogger on the Internet. I had to steal the idea, give it to a character in the novels to wield against me, a character I could control. August became my mentor, a mentor of my design, and I never let her contradict me too much. I even had her break character to appear weak before my protagonist, to satisfy my pride (it was bizarre rereading those sections recently. I never remember August crumpling before my pathetic arguments like that).
So now I was humble enough to admit I was wrong once, and I had new rhetorical ammunition to use against new-age hippies. Where did my politics go? Mostly on hold, due to going hard in to apathetic futurism (that is, the view that we don’t have any ethical or political imperative to act, because technological advances will solve all of society’s problems) but the homophobia and the racism began to go away, and I introduced genderless characters in the third novel of the trilogy without thinking. A friend who became more fascist and more susceptible to conspiracy theories than I too quickly turned me off to that direction completely when I saw what it looked like- he was horrible but served as a much-needed shield. I was still spell-bound by that mind-over-matter shit, though, and the more I was exposed to victims of oppression, the more I believed most people were too weak to transcend human nature, so I pitied the disabled and despised the poor and uneducated.
I didn’t have a job and I rejected the teachings of almost any one.
So I was still really angry, and blamed people for their own misfortunes (oblivious to my own privileges- I was suffering!). My morality of retribution for the ecosystems transformed in to an ethics of ultimate harm reduction- a suicidal utilitarianism. The idea of ‘life is suffering, so life must end’ I happened to give to one of my villains, how ever; I was still stuck in the tropes of hero=creative, villain=destructive. An aesthetic derailed my philosophy. When I was no older than eleven I’d written much of a story where the protagonist was first vengeful murderer, later cleverly deceitful, genocidal god. Some elements of this were borrowed for the Shyfted Dreaming trilogy, but I just couldn’t hold on to that hateful protagonist bit. Bad optics. And what would peaceful, affectionate Alizia think? So to save face I began to consider what the gods taught me, that perfection and pace come through creation, the creation of a better world.
I of course let them stay quiet regarding their plans to destroy this one to make way for their paradise.
I was experiencing a fracture again. Feind was the name of the part of me that held on to bitterness, that still rejected love, that wanted no thing to do with bonding, regarding all social benefits to be tricks of submission to others. Vulnerability as weakness, weakness a death sentence. Feind made it in to Shyfted Dreaming also, as a split personality that became accomplice to the final villain, and in the end is defeated by the powers of good.
A lot of things changed for me at the end of high school. I had more face-to-face friends, less abusive ones, making me feel more connected to the world. I wasn’t a wizard or a god yet, and had to come to terms with the fact that I was about to get a job. A temporarily embarrassed god working in retail is just too damn embarrassing, so I was forced to become more practical. I had to shift my ambitions of greatness toward some thing just as unreal but much more useful, not to mention sinister: money. Get-rich-quick schemes. Making it as a musician and DJ. Avoiding college. Remaining independent… in my parents’ basement, paying minimal rent, free food. Is this how all Libertarians began?
Part 4: Adulthood, Adapt or Die, but I’m Gentle I swear|Libertarianism
I’m hazy on the details, but yes, it had to do with adopting practicality in order to salvage some sanity, so betraying my delusions in order to survive in the working world. I retired my hopes of magic and fantastic, alternative Earths to my novels. When Shyfted Dreaming was over I laid to rest my belief in gods and magic… and Alizia. It was dreadfully painful, but still less painful than continuing my endlessly failing attempts at escaping the natural laws and the thought that may be Alizia doesn’t even want me, if she hasn’t come back. Minimizing what’s called cognitive dissonance, which is when, according to Wikipedia, a ‘person holds contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, and is typically experienced as psychological stress’. I told my self I was being mature, shedding childish things, becoming healthy. In deed, the hallucinations stopped. All of them. The fear of nightmares releasing monsters in to this world subsided. I stopped practicing lucid dreaming, stopped trying to remember my dreams, and they faded, became more incoherent again, shorter, and the recurring characters stopped showing up. It was like watching a whole world die, but better them than me! Better them than me.
I must have identified as a feminist by this point, but I’ve no memory of being exposed to the concept. May be the older, angry, punk feminist at work, that I kinda looked up to? I miss her in a weird way some times. I didn’t know what punk meant back then.
Paying attention to electoral politics felt mature. I felt the need to defend my raver peers, despite still being totally sober, and with my expectations of a better world completely crushed, well, Ron Paul and his ‘end the war on drugs’ bit felt revolutionary. And my father was shifting from Republican to Libertarian, so we had some thing to finally connect through. Ron Paul was also a sort of underdog, a third party candidate masquerading as a Republican, gaining a lot of traction, and that soothed my need for a proper hit to the establishment. I naturally dismissed any and all criticism of him, certain that it was establishment propaganda.
I don’t remember what they all were, but my friends and I came up with some wacky schemes for making money after my pay-to-click empire collapsed. None of them got off the ground. My parents were embarrassed by me, mid twenties and living at home. They said it was get a real job, go to college, or get out. I considered philosophy, then psychology, then history, and would up going for a BS in psych with a minor in philosophy (almost got one in history too) with the idea I’d move on to cognitive science, be a researcher some day.
Part 5: College, Abuse|Plato, Ethics, Existentialism, Nietzsche, Liberalism somehow
I hated it. This was me conceding again. The only way to avoid a deeper depression this time was to swallow my pride and enjoy being taught things by other people… and it worked! My psychology classes were underwhelming, save for one, but finally being exposed to real philosophy opened my god damn eyes, and a lit elective on the Arthurian Legends pulled me out of my ‘the only story books I need are my own’ mentality and I began to read for fun again. Extracurricular philosophy, in addition to different takes on King Arthur, I finally cracked opened some Plato (I’d somehow considered Socrates an important figure for a while before this, due to… being portrayed in Bill and Ted?). My failures had broken me down to a place where I was finally willing to empty my cup, that is, make room for honestly and genuinely learning from others, and wonder and ideas were still my go-to cure for boredom and meaninglessness.
The Allegory of the Cave: Imagine you’re tied up with your head stuck in a forward-facing position. Before you is the wall of a cave. Beside you are others in the same position, can’t move, can only speak, listen, and look forward at this wall. You don’t know what each other even look like. Now imagine that behind you is a source of light, shining on the wall, and between the captives such as your self and the light people are placing and moving objects. You see shadows of these things on the wall, and the wall is your whole world, so you and your peers are inclined to make sense of it. You find patterns of movement, relational meaning of shapes, and so on. With no alternative, you are comfortable in your world of shadows, telling stories about it to each other.
Then, one day, you are set free. You can get up, turn your head, turn your whole body, and see what made the shadows. You can approach them, if you like, touch them, smell them, and inspect the source of the light. You can compare the other walls of the cave to the first, or even walk out of the cave entirely, should you notice it behind the bright source of light. And out of the cave is the sun, an even grander source of light, so bright at times that all shadows cease to be. And there are versions here of the shapes down below that are full of life, more than you thought possible. You can recognize them, despite their differences, and you recognize this world as being more real than the cave, the whole of the cave being more real than the shadows on the one wall.
You haven’t forgotten your friends. You return to the cave, stand before them in their bonds, and they are shocked to see you. They don’t know what you are. You try to get them to trust your voice, that this is the real you, but they are skeptical. Your voice comes from beside them, not in front of them, so this must be some trick. You try to tell them what you’ve seen, but they won’t listen. Their whole lives have played out in the shadows, and it felt complete. How could there be more? They never thought themselves prisoners, and being told that they are offends them. You can argue with them, or you can try to find new friends on the surface.
Reading this allegory for discovery, and the social alienation of the wise, well, I thought that I was already out. I already faced that alienation, and I already felt like I was seeing more of the real than others. The allegory pleased me because I thought it was explaining my lived experience, and it sort of was, but I was still in the cave.
I learned in college that there are multiple, distinct theories of ethics with names and subcategories: cultural relativism, virtue ethics, hedonism, utilitarianism (I now knew what to call my self-destruction theory that I thought I’d invented), deontology, and the ethics of care (there are actually plenty more). I subscribed to a basic utilitarianism for a while; the moral calculus seemed so rational to me. The complexity discovered here and the guilt of wronging others in the past got me to shelve metaphysics (which had failed to improve my life) to focus on how to be the best person… ethically. I realized that good moral character came from practicing and studying good moral behavior, not as just a byproduct of being ‘smart’ or attaining power through discipline. Plato’s dialogues in particular refined my analytical mind, and I developed a habit of viewing all acts and thoughts through an ethical lens.
The Once and Future King got me thinking about politics beyond parties, politics as a proper philosophical study, a thing of theory. When should one go to war? When one has some thing precious to defend. Plato was talking about philosopher kings, how to build a healthy nation (he was way off base, holy shit). I began to understand politics as a discussion of systems of ethics for the macro level. Merlin introduced the logical conclusion of Libertarianism, called it ‘anarchism’, and I marked that page. I came very close here to becoming some thing even worse than an eco-fascist: I was ready for Merlin to convince me to become an anarcho-capitalist, those that wind up believing that markets make right, that rigging markets is fair because any one could do it, if they really wanted to, and all consent is genuine, under any circumstances.
And then some thing horrible saved me (may be Neil Postman’s leftist Technopoly woulda saved me, but I forgot the shit out of that too). I had to abandon macro-level thinking to save my self from an abusive intimate relationship. I went hard in to ethics to understand where my personal boundaries should lie, and forgot all about Merlin and war and having voted for Obama (I honestly don’t remember how I felt about Obama, just that I watched his speeches and debates and then, well, the voting. I also remember ridiculing Obama in 2008, when I was all-in for Ron Paul, so it’s a mess in my head. Hadn’t Obama already disappointed us by 2012?). I needed to know how much was reasonable to sacrifice for love, know when forgiveness became submission. I didn’t quite acknowledge it as abuse, you see, more as the dangerous coping mechanisms of some one who was really abused (and she was, with more trauma than I’ve ever had).
Existentialism felt empowering and familiar. Making your own meaning lined up with my mind-over-matter shit, the hyper-individualism, the history with the Libertarian party, but Nietzsche was big stuff for me because he focused on one’s personal power, self-discipline, and responsibility specifically, and how to turn your pain in to your product. Slaves are defined by their suffering, while masters define their own suffering, that sort of thing. I wanted to give the idea of meaningful suffering, of using trauma as a spring-board to freedom, to my abuser, so that we could be happy together (she never read the book I bought her, and then she lost it). In trying to define what I was trying to fix, so that I could better mend it, I believe I came across Aristotle’s three types of relationships: the utility or exchange relationship, the pleasure or sharing relationship, and the loving or virtuous relationship. I became sensitive to people expecting things in return, because I realized that doing things to earn favors is transactional, not loving. I became wary of getting stuck in merely sharing experiences and pleasures, because I didn’t think a difficult relationship could survive on just that. Then I came to a new division, a hierarchy of feeling:
Appreciation: feeling a person’s value
Infatuation: strong desire toward a person, irrational, can be tempered in to passion; is foolish or unreasoned passion
Passion: strong desire toward a person, but with historical, experiential grounding; more serious
Respect: higher order of appreciation, specifically of a person’s abilities/intelligences (‘esteem for or a sense of the worth or excellence of a person’)
Compassion: desire/acting on sharing in an other’s feelings; empathy (yes, I used to think compassion and empathy were the same thing)
Love, sharing type: understanding of mutual needs and desire to meet them simultaneously
Love, giving type: understanding of a person’s needs and a desire to meet them, regardless of a match with own needs
Part 6: Finishing College, Polyamory|Compassion, The Third Loop
I’d been exposed to polyamory, or the practice of having multiple, simultaneous, consensual, intimate partnerships, in my search for truths about love and human relationships, but it wasn’t what I was looking for, so I thought, ‘Yeah, yeah, clever argument, get to the point I’m concerned with,’ and disregarded it. I’d actually learned the word when I was may be fourteen, having known some one who’d soured the concept for me by cheating on monogamous people in the name of polyamory, so I was still recovering from that negative bias. Strangely, a return to solipsism brought me to seriously considering abandoning monogamy.
Once upon an online forum, a friend said that some sci-fi author named Robert Heinlein had also invented a theory of ‘all is one, all is dream’, and called it ‘Multiple Personality Solipsism.’ Well, so that’s what we called it, ’cause we hadn’t named it yet. I thought that was neat, but didn’t read books that I didn’t write, so forgot about it. But now I was reading fiction again, so dug up the work that introduced the concept, a book, in the middle of a series, called The Number of the Beast. Turns out my friend was mistaken, and Heinlein called it ‘Pantheistic Multiple-Ego Solipsism’ as well as a variation on that term, so MPS was all ours. But Heinlein also wrote many other works, a very famous one being Stranger in a Strange Land (the book my friend thought the solipsism thing appeared in- got that wrong too), and this one I also felt I had to read. Oh boy, did it challenge my values. I finally came to terms with my body shame, with my possessiveness, with my jealousy, and with the last of my romanticization of sex all at once, and became polyamorous purely for ethical reasons, intimacy as applied philosophy.
I was developing a lot of respect for an academic philosophy friend that I connected with through the rave scene, as I struggled to understand their advanced language and more nuanced perspective. I believe it was they who introduced me to intersectional feminism, the study of how social issues are all connected, how all parts of one’s identity can impact how they are treated by society. If not them, then just liberal/progressive social media. They recommended one of my now favorite books, Compassion and Moral Guidance by Steve Bein. This is where I think I finally started to adopt genuine gentleness, as opposed to politeness out of fear of retaliation. This has to have been where I dumped the last shreds of my tendency to picture all other people as non-player characters in my game. Ethics isn’t a math problem, I realized; it’s a concern for others. A sense of self can not exist for us social animals without social comparison, social interaction, so self-absorption and ethics from “pure reason” is absurd. We have scientific evidence that we subconsciously treat our future selves as separate people, so empathy and compassion for other people literally makes it easier to meet our own future needs. Beyond serving the vanity of being needed, providing care for others is good for our own mental health. Our general learning is stunted when we only care about people who reflect our selves too.
Further study of compassion of course led me to the topics of attachment and impermanence. When we become attached to people, we are attached to their present states at best and idealized, false versions of them at worst. The current state of a person’s personality is impermanent. People grow; people change, and we have to decide how much change we can bear, and whether to grow along with them. Attachment is a belief in permanence, and permanence is an illusion, so attachment causes cognitive dissonance (an other way of thinking about cognitive dissonance: inability to reconcile a contradiction between belief and reality), and cognitive dissonance causes stress in the form of anxiety or even despair, so attachments must be challenged for the sake of our mental health. And we get attached to more than just people. We get attached to possessions, to memories (even memories fade and change), to places, to routines, to comforts, to ideas. Imagine how much more easily we might grow and change, if we weren’t so stuck, if we didn’t have such rigid expectations of the world. Think about how bad it is for an adaptation machine like the human brain to become afraid of change. Consider how much more vibrant the world would be, if you didn’t take it all for granted through attachments to things that you perceive as wholly concrete and static. As an artist, at least, I needed to not take things for granted.
In order to make meaningful my suffering, I needed to better understand my suffering, where it came from. Intersectional feminism was the tool for the job. Where did my particularly male problems come from? Where did my pain stemming from not identifying with typical masculinity come from? Why did my mental illness make me feel separate? How could I explain my growing hatred of white people as a white person? It’s all there. With context, with history, a coherent story for your pain, your pain is given meaning.
But I couldn’t stop there, and I had to reconcile my ethics of personal purpose with this compassion stuff, so I invented the Third Loop.
But wait, back up. What’s the first loop? What’s the second? Time and space, my friend. I wasn’t gonna return to MPS again, ’cause fanciful metaphysics is for babies, but you’ve asked for it. A mind feels like an ultra plastic but ultimately closed system, and its space can be full of tricks, so why not curve back in on its self? Space loops. And time is just easier to think about, if its beginning is its end, perfect repetition solving the paradox. These were just ways for me to feel like I existed in a sensible, ordered universe, one that I could understand. MPS, as far as I know, does not require them. It does, how ever, require the Frame: the idea that time and space are both illusions (are imagined sequence and the memory of spaces in your mind real?), only perceived as having depth. The name the Frame comes from a metaphor we used to describe it: imagine each frame of a film reel cut apart and laid over one an other. Fix these in a picture frame and hold it up to the light, and you’ll see an icomprehensible mess that is all of them at once, and that’s what the universe really looks like, with the illusions turned off.
So the first loop is spacial, and an illusion. The second temporal and illusion. The third was a loop of ethics, a cycle of goodness, arranged on a sort of wheel:
This I’ve taken to calling the ‘Shyftus’, largely to erase from my mind the stupid wheel of emotions I developed as a child to somehow serve as a theory of every thing. You have a ring of virtues: wonder, wisdom, temperance, courage, compassion, and justice. Outside that there’s the ring of intimacies: intellectual, emotional, experiential, (shared) purpose, physical, and grokking (a Heinlein word for complete and intimate understanding, in a general sense, sort of like ‘being one’ with some one or some thing). Beyond these are the romances, as discussed here: knowledge, creation, wonder, passion, power, and awe. The idea is that virtuous people will be the most successful at intimacy (people who try hard to be good, who build good character, will develop good relationships through good behavior), and with social needs being met, with profound social experience, one will best be able to serve the romances, things used to inspire virtue in others- this is why the romances appear again as small, close to the center.
Compassion and justice are both on there both because there’s a feeling and a thinking part to ethics and because ethics is really important. Wonder is on there twice because you can hold the virtue of wonder (the ability to experience wonder, necessary for philosophical and artistic thinking) and you can create the wondrous, serve the wonderful, spread wonderful things to others. I was painfully aware how the human being is a social animal at its core, that art and science are meaningless without society, that language would not exist without the social nature, and I’d subsumed my individualistic moral principles of discipline and purpose to this via the Shyftus, the Third Loop. Things were starting to make a sensible whole again.
Interlude: Words and Motivations
So that’s already a lot. Right? A metaphysical theory dictating the relationship between all things, a complete rejection of this foundation, an embrace of a political theory that pushes for small government and market freedom, and then abandoning this too. Primitivism, a moral rejection of technology, to futurism, a moral rejection of primitivism. Was this just a game for me? Were intellectual pursuits only tools to combat my boredom? Polyamory betrays one of the heaviest foundations of our culture; people find it viscerally offensive- was this all just an extension of my gothic rebellion? Was the need I was satisfying just a need to find a category of person so strange that only I could occupy it, that it could be all my own? Well, I was stubborn for a long time about learning, and for many things, the primitivism, the Libertarianism, the monogamy, utilitarianism, I refused to discard them until I hadn’t a single defense in their favor left. The ethical implications of social possession and exclusivity in particular nagged at me for some time before I decided I needed to try some thing new in order to behave based on my knowledge.
So I wasn’t just bored. What else was there? Problems. Ethical studies solved problems that I had. Polyamory solved the problem of my cognitive dissonance concerning possession and exclusivity. Existentialism solved the problem of my cognitive dissonance concerning meaning and meaninglessness (we make our own meaning). MPS had once solved the problem of not knowing my place in the Universe. Now I was starting to become aware of what I didn’t know, the ‘known unknowns’, and this suggested that there was more than I couldn’t even see, the ‘unknown unknowns’. Plato’s Republic was an authoritarian, self-absorbed state based on bad science. The US Libertarian Party’s idea of small government was an idea of big business, of money dictating what’s right and wrong, and very little buffer between the weak and the greedy. How do you make a world full of billions of people good? Why was it bad? In how many more ways was it bad than the ones that I’d noticed? What events are responsible for this, and who set them in motion? I felt like I was still in Plato’s cave.
Specific definitions for words are useful. Deciding their meaning contextually, or from your gut, or even from their entries in popular dictionaries, is not always helpful. When I first learned that some words have both common definitions and technical ones, I began to realize how use of language shapes our perception of reality. If ‘theory’ can only mean ‘guess’, you aren’t capable of thinking about the real state and process of science, for example. Here are some that I’ve picked up along the way that seem particularly helpful in orienting ideas and having a grasp of my experience:
Philosophy: Literally, the love of wisdom. Philosophy includes fanciful ‘what-if’ statements, as well as deliberately designed logical systems for interpreting the world, as well as rules developed by those logical systems for how to behave in the world, as well as the practice of those rules. ‘Western philosophy’ does not refer to one idea. ‘Greek philosophy’ does not refer to one idea. Wisdom and faith are very different things, the former built from the ground up, and the latter built from the clouds downward. You can make observations, ask questions, test ideas, see how a system of concepts works in practice, and wonder what you ought to believe, and that’s doing philosophy, or you can decide what to believe based on feelings and traditions, see meaning in the essence of things, and that’s doing religion. Philosophy, from my perspective, breaks down in to six major categories: logic, epistemology (the study of knowledge, how to define it, how to acquire it, how to be confident that you have actually acquired it), metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.
Shit, I never actually explained Metaphysics: From Wikipedia: ‘examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. The word ‘metaphysics’ comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean ‘after or behind or among [the study of] the natural’.’ This is why questions of god and whether we’re all dreaming are at home here. Metaphysical ideas can clash with scientific theories of the universe or complement them or just try to explain them, or fill in the gaps left by them. None of this is very practical: there is no metaphysical practice.
Empathy: ‘Fellow-feeling.’ An experience of having your emotions reflect the perceived emotions of others, giving you the sense that their emotions are being shared with you. Since this can be practiced and be more or less accurate, empathy is considered a skill. Empathy can be used to emotionally ‘put your self in an other’s shoes’ to better understand them (by route of how they’re feeling), to share sorrows so that others do not feel that they are suffering alone, and to share joys in order to escape malaise or sorrow of your own. Empathy can be experienced while observing some one you know, a character in a story, or strangers, victims on the news… pitiful actors of corporate campaigns. It also has a tendency to induce bias.
Compassion: Not to be confused with empathy. Compassion is a sense of care based on a general understanding, that understanding per haps informed by empathy, but it could be empathetic experiences long past. While empathy can make you feel what ever you are perceiving others to be feeling, compassion elicits a feeling of care. Where empathy is ‘feeling as an other’, compassion is ‘feeling for an other’. Feeling for an other can be a precursor to empathy, but feeling as others also informs compassion. Caring for others suggests a sense of responsibility, and is easier to experience in a broad sense (caring for every one) than empathy (imagine trying to fellow-feel with a dozen or a hundred different people at once). This is because compassion can come from a general understanding of what it means to be human, or what it means to be an animal- it’s much easier to acknowledge what every one’s basic needs are than it is to grasp what every one in the world is feeling right now. There is an intellectual debate between those favoring empathy and those favoring compassion. Those prioritizing empathy as a response to suffering find compassion to be too impersonal, too distant, or even uncaring, while those prioritizing compassion as a response to suffering argue that empathy is blinding, exhausting, and makes suffering spread. The goal, after all, is to end the suffering, not merely help them carry it (I don’t think I’d picked a camp at this point, but you can tell which one I’d eventually chose).
Love: Understanding others with a depth on par with understanding your self, so that you can intuit a person’s real needs (and their specifics), and feel compelled to provide for them (time, care, support, concrete resources) like you would provide for your self. Self-love, then, implies that you have a grasp for your own needs and particularities, are more or less at harmony with your self, and wish good to come to your self the same way you’d wish for the protagonists in your favorite stories to succeed. Love is like a personal compassion, a fine-tuned compassion based on your relationship with an individual, different per individual.
Existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence.’ This is a broad range of study, but all existentialists agree that meaning is a (very useful) social construct that is fluid and impacted by many factors. Meaning its self is a slippery concept, containing the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of things, people, and events. It also contains the ‘what should we do about this?’ and the ‘how should we feel about this?’, which are deeply connected to the initial ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of things, people, and events: if the meaning we choose is to be coherent, our actions ought to reflect some historical context of the situation, and historical context contains philosophical and scientific context.
Intersectionality: This one I’m just gonna copy/paste from Wikipedia: ‘Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and political identities (e.g., gender, Caste, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, height, etc.) combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege.’ Using this as a foundation, appreciating the complexity of people and their experiences, I began to see how theories, ideologies, and cultures intersect too- how context is key in every situation. ‘No person is an island,’ they say, and neither is any culture or nation. One nation is shaped by events that occur within, but those events can be triggered by the foreign policy of other nations.
Politics: Speaking of nations, politics is the study and practice of macro-level answers to the question, ‘What should we do?’ Partisan politics or electoral politics is just one facet of a particular political structure. Some folks differentiate between political philosophy and politics proper by saying the former is the study and the latter is the practice, but this alienates behaviors from ideas and has tricked millions of people in to believing that politics is just powerful people making decisions for us, so boooooo!
Determinism: This is the philosophy word for fate, and as such has a far deeper meaning (and is a big topic in existentialism, what it means to be a ‘free agent’). This is where we consider how events are linked, and how much freedom is left for us after we’ve analyzed all of the pressures on us to act in certain ways. Do our social and economic needs and limitations determine how we think and behave (social determinism)? Does our biology, and so the history of how we developed, determine how we think and behave (evolutionary determinism)? Does the arrangement of the universe, so the way the Earth was shaped, how chemicals developed here, determined by how the solar system formed, determined by the shape of the galaxy, determined by all events back to the Big Bang (whether this first event was triggered by a conscious entity or not), determine evolution and social structure (physical determinism)? And is being ignorant of most of this history, unable to use it to make accurate predictions down to the atomic level, render us effectively free? Long before I knew the word, I was considering how gods could predict the future, not because they ‘just knew’ but because they could see all events, past and present, in the most objective light, at once, and I was considering what this said about the authenticity of our experience.
Part 7: I Care About People, God Damn It!|Progressivism
Aaand I was feeling ready to engage with electoral politics again. It was 2016, and Bernie Sanders was the candidate of compassion, of social values, while Hillary Clinton seemed mean and Donald Trump just plain was mean. I was living with one of the co-inventors of MPS in a new place, and we were both starting to see how the systems of oppression work and who they really work for, and Bernie was trying to expose them, and challenge them. I saw too many people suffering meaninglessly, but thought I saw reasons why, beyond their control. Did I trust big government? No, but I didn’t trust big business either, and since the government was already huge in the USA, I figured, why not make it work a little more for the people and a little less for the corporations that abused us?
I still wasn’t sure how I felt about democracy either, because I was wary of stupid people mucking up results (‘the tyranny of the majority’, which is basically just a fancy way of saying that poor people are inherently untrustworthy). The difference now, though, was that I was beginning to understand that people aren’t just inherently stupid or smart; people are made to be stupid or allowed to be smart based on the limitations of their environment (how their socio-economic class is treated by society, their access to formal education, their access to nutrition necessary for good brain development, the level of stressors in their lives, whether their basic needs are met securely, et cetera). Foolishness, simple-minded-ness, ignorance- what ever you call it (I started to refrain from using terms other than ignorance, finally really believing what Plato said about how all evil comes from not knowing), it is very profitable. There are people that benefit from the ignorance of others, on grand scales, and those people have the power to maintain systems of ignorance.
Now’s the time to jump back to conspiracy theories. My history with ideas of ‘powerful people pulling strings’ came from a place of schizophrenic paranoia and desiring to show I had special knowledge. Conspiracies about 9/11 got so steeped in tales of extraterrestrial alien weapons and magic so fast that I felt the need to abandon all inside job arguments just to wash my hands of the supernatural claims. The person who’d gone deep in these that I mentioned earlier held them in the same hands he held his bigotry (and I found out later that bigotry is baked right in to many popular conspiracies [Jewish cabals and what not]), and that tainted ideas of ‘evil global elites’ for me further. So how did I return to a belief that evil psychopaths in suits controlled the whole world? Well, I got some clues that helped me disentangle myth from truth, and realized that the real elite masterminds didn’t do it in secret, and that they were backed up not by black magic or alien weapons but centuries of culture shaped by their predecessors’ propaganda. The violence of the media and advertising against culture and personal identity occur in the open, the abuse of electoral systems and laws in broad day light. Ancient, ever-changing systems of social organization, our subconscious belief in them, and so our subconscious reinforcement of them, at this moment in history produce such elite masterminds, so they’re not really masterminds at all.
So now it sounds like I’d returned to placing equal blame on all humans for our suffering. Right? Which is it? The ruling elites control us all, or our homogenized hyper-culture that we all participate in gives our control away? Well, it’s not so black-and-white. This is what philosophers refer to as a synthesis, which necessarily provides a new, more complex idea. There exists a feedback loop between the greed of powerful people and society at large. The powerful business people and politicians push their boundaries and adjust to the response of the people again and again, whether in quick attacks or across long campaigns, in order to maximize their profits. Will fighting the will of the people directly make the dollars go up this time, or does the social climate call for a compromise in order for the elites’ ratings to go up, and then the profits? The system controls us more than the elites do, but the elites are the ones that benefit from it. The system also controls the elites, but those few have more freedom to augment it from within with their money and their platforms, and when it’s the people that make the major changes to society with their social movements, well, it’s the elites that choose to allow it.
So what is the system? What structures was I identifying as large, historical, and influential? First it was racism, how we’ve developed a nuanced and semi-flexible hierarchy of people based on skin color/ancestry. Then it was sexism, as I didn’t realize its full implications before either, that even white women existed on a separate but overlapping economic plane from white men. A hierarchy of sexual orientation was obvious, of subcultures, but the hardest one to see was that of economic class, or, traditionally put, just class. If poor people were placed in poverty by oppression or lack of support given to others in stead, then I had grown up hating poor people because rich people wanted me to. But why? Aren’t the homeless and the jobless just a burden to these people? Wouldn’t rich people make more money, if every one was employed? How do racism and sexism benefit capital? Wouldn’t it be easier to defend the American Dream, if more of it were true? Bernie Sanders wasn’t answering these questions, at least not explicitly, and then, he wasn’t a philosopher any way, so it was time to do some more reading…
Part 8: The Rabbit Hole Goes Deeper|Leftism, Gender Theory
I was still in touch with the friend who’d recommended Compassion and Moral Guidance, and was still learning from that friend (with difficulty), so when they began a statement with, ‘Well, as an anarchist,’ I was, like I often was when listening to them, feeling the sting of cognitive dissonance. ‘But anarchists aren’t serious people!’ I thought. ‘They’re just rebels without a cause! How can such a rational, caring person desire chaos?’ Then the room mate mentioned above asked me to take a political compass test. To quote my post that focuses on this subject, this test ‘claim[ed] I was a libertarian socialist…Turns out, ‘libertarian’ was appropriated by the American Libertarian Party from a very different set of beliefs, and ‘libertarian socialism’ is anarchism.’
Anarchism? So I had to figure that out, on top of figuring out why the status quo was inefficient and violent. The two questions seemed related, and they were. Starting with the Wikipedia page on libertarian socialism, branching out to related articles via links, moving from there to on-line literature giving much more detail, then moving on to books on anarchist theory, Marxist theory, anarchist science fiction… I could feel my brain being rewired as I learned to perceive the world in a new way, and this time it was scary. No one is offended by Plato (though, considering the proto-fascism and the hackneyed spiritual map to tie all of his ideas together, they probably should be). History has neutered existentialism in the public eye. Feminism was in style… but I did not want to be caught reading a book written by Vladimir Lenin.
The general capitalist ideology insists that history is over, and only plans for greater progress for the corporations, efficiency and expansion of wealth. Socialist ideologies claim that, despite social progress, in many ways we’ve reached the worst point in history, and need to press on to a completely new era. I could tell that from the start, but I couldn’t imagine it. Democracy? But the USA already has that, and it sucks! Community? You can’t make people get along! The communists want to abolish money? Well… that idea always did tickle my fancy.
Leftist plans for the future confused me, but I was intrigued by the challenge of understanding, and I was understanding all this other great stuff along the way. The capitalist class, historically, has taken many measures to prevent and subdue revolt, to preserve their power. This is how they benefit from a divided people. They manufacture social ‘wedges’ between races, between cultures, between sexes, and so on, to fracture the masses to reduce their strength in numbers. If the people won’t cooperate with each other, any of their threats to the ruling class will be a fraction of what they could be. Also, if they are placing blame upon and fighting with each other, they are less likely to think about how the far away oligarchs are the real trouble-makers- and even less likely to have the energy to push those thoughts very far. Classism, racism, sexism, ableism- all of the prejudices are like a stack of myths told to distract us from the man behind the curtain.
So is that why poverty and homelessness exist, so that we hate the poor we see in stead of the rich hidden away? These things serve that purpose, but they also deter in an other way: poverty is a threat. Poverty is what you get when you don’t play by the rules, or if you deviate from the Path to Success and fail, having wasted your resources on other things. The myriad division and this threat of poverty work together to solidify the capitalist mythology of competition and failure- competition between social beings of the same species and failure in societies of plenty. Manifest Destiny or die.
People misinterpret science all the time. Social Darwinism, the idea that competition between humans functions similarly to (and with the same benefits of) natural selection, is absurd. You do not improve society by simply killing off the weak or the stupid; you improve it by helping them (and, regarding the disabled, our population and reserve of resources are too great for a minority to be considered a weak link any way). You certainly do not improve society by making their lives more difficult, by punishing them for lacking in privilege. Early humans did not thrive just because they could make complex tools and outsmart their opponents; they were largely able to thrive based on cooperation, both as tactics in combat, sharing labor, and caring for each other. Wars were not what spread our species around the globe, and were certainly not the primary motivators of innovation. A species does not develop the faculties of empathy, compassion, and love, if these things do not significantly benefit the survival of the species, and anthropologists paint two very different pictures of humanity before and after the first kings…
Speaking of bad science, I was also exposed to gender theory during this time. Fitting, since I was learning about how people are fooled in to hating their neighbors. Multiple friends had come out as gender nonbinary, and liberal social media was hyping it up, and I was all for destroying traditional norms of identity. Turns out, gender and biological sex are both spectrums, and gender doesn’t map neatly on to biological sex because it’s a socially constructed set of categories once used to explain male-ness and female-ness when science was lacking. ‘What gender am I?’ is essentially an aesthetic question, concerning how you categorize your traits, and your choice might not make sense to some one else regardless of how clearly you explain it, because they might simply categorize what you consider to be feminine traits as masculine ones and vice versa. Is it feminine to get ornery, or is it masculine? What if I used the word ‘moody’ instead?
Like my exposure to polyamory, the idea that I could have been tricked in to identifying as a man by omission of alternatives became more and more compelling. It called up many memories of being younger and not feeling good about performing the masculine cues. Of being called girly or gay, as if these were bad things to be, so pressured to behave in a more masculine manner. I came to realize that I’d never, except when pressured, categorized my personality traits in terms of masculine or feminine. Being a martial artist was not a masculine thing to me. Being an intellectual was not. Being compassionate did not strike me as being feminine. Being interested in fashion was gender-neutral to me. I didn’t listen to metal and heavy dance music because they felt manly. I was raised in a time when being artistic was girly, and I was studying times when being artistic was manly. And, socially, I was feeling I had less and less in common with others simply because they were men… I realized that I am agender (without gender), and always have been. Why bend and strain to fit in to prefab boxes just to fit in? This is America; be your self!
So it was easy for me to understand that profit is the money scraped off of the value of labor that’s collected by the owners of the business, who do not make the products, who do not design the products, who do not market the products… they just own all of the means of doing so. It still blew my mind, that it never occurred to me that a business could never be profitable (for the bosses) unless it took most of the money my work was earning/preserving for them. A lot of people get hung up on how aspiring capitalists apparently deserve more money due to the risk they take in owning a business… but exploitation is exploitation to me. You don’t get to own slaves just because you’re bold enough to buy some land that might fail to produce good crops… and that says no thing about the expectations of a successful capitalist who inherited or was promoted in to ownership of a long-time, multi-billion-dollar company. How small a fraction of the revenue do wages have to be before we call them ‘slave wages’? Eh? So what’s the alternative? Cooperative business models, of course! Shared responsibility, shared risk, more generalized skill sets, rotating leadership, even pay. If wages need to be cut to expand the business, then the workers vote to cut every one’s wages evenly. Very simple, and with lots of contemporary and historical data to back it up (and yes, the data accounts for what ever ‘but what about?’ thought you might have).
The difficult part for me was imagining how this cooperative structure could be used to organize all of society. A democratic military? Voting in and out police officers? People participating in politics without compensation, and opening every topic to vote? Are we just gonna be voting all the time? Despite identifying as a philosopher, an author, a martial artist, and a musician, I was still indoctrinated with specialization propaganda, the idea that the best work comes from some one with a singular ability, some one who pours all of their time and effort in to a single skill. TURNS OUT, all skills inform each other, some thing I’d actually learned from the Sword Saint of Japan, Mayamoto Musashi, in his Book of Five Rings, years before, but I’d been too small-minded about it to apply it to economics (I guess I was too caught up in trying to figure out how, if one sword could do one thing, two swords could do four things). This part I failed to understand until I saw it illustrated in anarcho-communist science fiction. I needed examples. I needed emotional impressions. And I’m not about to write a novel about it here, but I highly recommend Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. It touches on so many political topics so well. If you want some thing (much!) shorter to get started, I recommend The Last Capitalist by Steve Cullen.
In stead of a novel, it’s definition time again! Understanding accurate definitions of these terms was critical for my progress through this stage:
Neoliberalism: Here we have the prevalent body of ideology in the West, which includes both liberals and conservatives (and centrists, but many radically left and radically right folks refer to liberals and conservatives and any thing in between collectively as centrists). Neoliberalism is a political and economic perspective that is anti-regulation, anti-welfare, anti-workers’ unions, and pro-free market, pro-financial bureaucracy (and independent financial sectors), and pro-tax cuts, tax cuts largely for the rich. If those all sounds like exclusively conservative values to you, well, you’ve no idea how conservative liberals actually are in the grand scheme of things.
Progressivism: The left wing of the Western status quos, pro ‘social progress’ in the form of human rights, personal freedoms, and welfare. These folks are painted as radicals by politicians and the media so that liberals remain comfortable embracing economically right values, and convinced that liberal policies aren’t just compromises with fascism.
Social Democracy: Many progressives fall in to this category, hoping for reforms to make the capitalist system more ‘benevolent’. They are insane people.
Leftism: This is a vague term, often used to refer to the left-wing of the status quo, but leftists tend to use it to refer to every one that is economically left of social democrats, so every one belonging below this entry on this list.
Democratic Socialism: These folks believe that the state can be reformed through its own policies in to some thing that it is not, either a stateless, communal, classless, money-less society or an ultra-welfare state (and yes, these two conclusions are wildly different). An incoherent compromise between broad centrism and socialism.
Socialism: Socialism encompasses any of many related ideologies that generally believe social/political revolution (likely violent, like with a civil war) is the only way to pave the way for a better society. The desired result of the revolution is the elimination of the wealthy and ruling classes and a redistribution of resources based on individual needs and sharing. The aftermath of the revolution? Either a stateless, communal, classless, money-less society or some thing close to it.
Anarchism: Anarchism is a set of socialist ideologies that at least share this one thing in common: anarchists believe that the revolution must result in the dismantling of the state by the working class to make way for permanently stateless and classless society. They usually have communal values and wish to do away with currency too (anarcho-capitalism is not a form of anarchism). Anarchism is also known as libertarian socialism (though, for some anarchists, ‘libertarian’ is a term so tainted by the US Libertarian Party [the close neighbors of anarcho-capitalists] that they refuse to use it).
Marxism: Marxism is a set of socialist ideologies that at least share this one thing in common: Marxists believe that the revolution must result in the seizing of the state by the working class to make way for a permanently stateless and classless society. They tend to value community and hate money more often than anarchists do. They also aren’t great about deciding when to let go of the state apparatus, and are more willing than anarchists to justify human rights violations ‘temporarily’ in the name of progress. Some say this is practical, since war is hell, while others are wary of founding a new world on brutality and betrayal. If anarchism is libertarian socialism, Marxism and its neighbors are authoritarian socialism.
Communism: Forget all of the knee-jerk emotional reactions to this our society has taught you. This is the stateless, communal, classless, money-less society. Anarchists generally want not chaos but this. Marxists discuss waging war on profiteers until the last capitalist is gone, and this can be built. It’s a society based on true democracy and mutual aid, where bureaucracy is replaced by trust, specialization replaced by general intelligence, administration done a little bit on the side by most people in stead of by the few, and every thing is voted on unless it’s particularly time-sensitive. A representative sucks? Vote to replace them. The voting system for upper level issues isn’t working? Vote to change it. Personal property still exists but private property does not. You can’t own a business, but you can shape how production is handled. Communist economic scientists over a hundred years ago calculated that this system would bring about tremendous efficiency (social animals governing socially, huh!), so much so that the average work day would be reduced to four hours, five days a week- a hundred twenty years ago. Imagine how much more efficient we could be today.
Okay, so I bought the idea that the ruling class won’t let us vote their power away, and that compromise with the devil is, well, half devil shit or what ever. But, shit, the answer is physical violence? The answer is war? They say, ‘When you go far enough left, you get your guns back,’ and this is because the real left believes in an armed populace, not unlike the very US American value of being prepared to overthrow a tyrannical government. Sure, on paper that makes sense, but in reality it’s terrifying. You don’t just bring your guns to a protest to prove you mean business and then the government realizes they’re tyrants and slink away in shame. You threaten the government with force, any government, and they’ll fucking kill you. The military and the police exist to protect the interests of the wealthy and the state, and even in the ‘land of the free’ the police have tortured, bombed, and just plain disappeared dissenters. They’re just glorified, upgraded slave-catchers in the US Empire, after all.
If you’re openly thinking these thoughts and haven’t been beaten, imprisoned, or murdered yet, it’s because they don’t take you seriously yet. Freedom of speech, like any other concept of law, can be easily twisted when a politically powerful (this could just mean wealthy) person wishes to punish some one.
Part 8: Context is Key, We Understand Through Narrative|Working Class History
The peace was always a sham. All the proclaimed golden ages of history were lies. No-one knew any better when slavery was commonplace in the US? The slaves sure did. Other countries sure did, and there were always white slavery abolitionists making noise. People didn’t want to listen.
Human history, real, raw human history, is a fucking nightmare. And I’m not even talking about the endless wars or the madness of Roman emperors. I’m talking about the every day dehumanization of the regular, working class person. The brutalization of the working person. The commodification of the working person (to be commodified, in the political realm, is to be treated as some thing with exchange value, some thing that can be bought and sold. Food, animals, minerals, land, art, ideas, people: we sell our labor, done with our bodies).
Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US took things that I thought I knew and added just enough depth and context to make me want to scream with fury. I can’t explain the gravity of what I learned, can’t properly sum up, or illustrate the horror and rage I felt at uncovering this past, but I’ll say this: the founding of the USA was a tax evasion scheme for wealthy, white slave owners. It wasn’t a people’s revolution, but a power grab between two small, elite groups on opposite sides of an ocean- all dressed up as a people’s revolution for the sake of preserving the legitimacy of the power of the elites.
When the Declaration of Independence was first announced publicly, followed by a declaration of ‘every one of you will have to fight in the coming war… unless you can pay your way out like us’, the resulting peoples’ protests turned to riots.
Just like how the USA seems to always be at war, its people are almost always protesting against inequality and other injustices, and people who claim protesters and police are violent now really ought to look up some of the old ones.
Most public schools and universities in the US Empire were founded by wealthy elites as centers for the anti-union and anti-strike propaganda necessary to turn the working class’s children against them. ‘These people may revolt against our harsh conditions, but their children will not.’ Ever hear the idea that schools only teach you how to get a job? Well, the original plan was to teach you how to be an obedient worker, and hopefully a patriot too.
Check this shit out:
Hellen Keller was a socialist, 1911, page 345:
‘Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee… You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?’ When she became active and openly socialist, the Brooklyn Eagle, which had previously treated her as a heroine, wrote that ‘her mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.’ Her response was not accepted by the Eagle, but printed in the New York Call. She wrote that when once she met the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle he complimented her lavishly. ‘But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error…’
Woodrow Wilson was an aggressive imperialist, page 362:
Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, while a believer in neutrality in the war, also believed that the United States needed overseas markets; in May of 1914 he praised the President as one who had ‘opened the doors of all the weaker countries to an invasion of American capital and American enterprise.’ …Back in 1907, Woodrow Wilson had said in a lecture at Columbia University: ‘Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process… the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down.’ …[In] 1914 [Woodrow Wilson] said he supported ‘the righteous conquest of foreign markets.
Being anti-war is anti-American, page 366:
The Espionage Act, thus approved by the Supreme Court, has remained on the books all these years since World War I, and although it is supposed to apply only in Wartime, it has been constantly in force since 1950, because the United States has legally been in a ‘state of emergency’ since the Korean war. In 1963, the Kennedy administration pushed a bill (unsuccessfully) to apply the Espionage Act to statements uttered by Americans abroad; it was concerned, in the words of the cable from Secretary of State Rusk to Ambassador Lodge in Vietnam, about journalists in Vietnam writing ‘critical articles…. on Diem and his government’ that were ‘likely to impede the war effort.’
Page 420:
The Espionage Act of 1917, still on the books, applied to wartime statements. But in 1940, with the United States not yet at war, Congress passed the Smith Act. This took Espionage Act prohibitions against talk or writing that would lead to refusal of duty in the armed forces and applied them to peacetime. The Smith Act also made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence, or to join any group that advocated this, or to publish anything with such ideas.
Minorities didn’t see Hitler as exceptionally evil, page 415:
Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over ‘inferior’ races? The United States’ armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old…The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white.
Page 419:
A student at a Negro college told his teacher: ‘The Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more could Hitler do than that?’
The atom bomb was not used to end the war, page 422:
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the [United States Strategic Bombing] Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been panned or contemplated. But could American leaders have known this in August 1945? The answer is, clearly, yes. The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan’s messages were being intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: ‘Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace…’ Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study of the relevant historical documents, concludes: ‘Having broken the Japanese code before the war, American Intelligence was able to–and did–relay this message to the President, but it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring the war to a conclusion.’ If only the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender–that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place–the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.
When they say ‘big government’ they just mean ‘let the poor die’, page 650:
Clinton and the Republicans, in joining against ‘big government,’ were aiming only at social services. The other manifestations of big government–huge contracts to military contractors and generous subsidies to corporations–continued at exorbitant levels. ‘Big government’ had, in fact, begun with the Founding Fathers, who deliberately set up a strong central government to protect the interests of the bondholders, the slave owners, the land speculators, the manufacturers. For the next two hundred years, the American government continued to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful, offering millions of acres of free land to the railroads, setting high tariffs to protect manufacturers, giving tax breaks to oil corporations, and using its armed forces to suppress strikes and rebellions. It was only in the twentieth century, especially in the thirties and sixties, when the government, besieged by protests and fearful of the stability of the system, passed social legislation for the poor, that political leaders and business executives complained about ‘big government.’
So, well, pistol grip pump on my lap at all times.
Part 9: Welcome to the Desert of the Real|Postmodernism
Oh no. Why did I go this far? Why didn’t any one warn me that at some point philosophy stops being fun and starts being horrifying? I have read some lines from the postmodern body of philosophical thought that have made my eyes water. If not at leftism, then definitely at this point you’re only still studying philosophy if you feel that it’s your civic duty.
Postmodern philosophy (beyond this point I’m going to just call it ‘postmodernism’ as I remain in a philosophical context; the word means different things in different contexts) gets a bad rep for being so nuanced that it gets mistaken for looking like moral relativism (the idea that objective morals change based on the situation, usually the culture you inhabit, or that there’s no sense in discussing ethics at all because it’s a purely subjective, personal experience)… even when it’s not making moral claims, I guess. In truth, postmodern philosophers typically have very strong, specific, reasoned values- like any philosopher, really.
The Wachowskis insisted that the stars of The Matrix read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. The text even appears in the film, as a fake book with a hollow space for hiding things, a simulacrum of a book. Is the book about phony realities concealing the real reality? Yes, but not in the sense that we’re experiencing a literal computer program in stead of the material world. There is a postmodern analysis of just about every thing, but for me it all revolves around this book.
Its first and longest chapter describes the idea, coincidentally beginning by using a piece from one of my favorite fiction authors as a metaphor:
If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts–the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging)–as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Yes, that’s how the book opens, after an Ecclesiastes quote. While you’re still trying to parse this metaphor, may be wondering if reading Borges’s story will help, Baudrillard immediately tells you to forget it: ‘Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance.’ Oof. Okay. ‘It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.’
A WHAT?
There is a reason why most of this book is chapters providing examples of what the hell he’s talking about, but even those are so poetic that it’s difficult to grasp. I personally read this book as though I’m swimming through a dream that harbors moments of clarity, those moments being more clear than any aspect of my waking life. You… have to be in the right mood for it.
There are multiple approaches to the idea of hyperreality, and here’s the first that comes to mind: language is a tool for explaining the world. It is through language that we relate to others and our environment. Categories don’t exist without language. Math is a language (even emotions are a form of communication, internally and externally). As you probably know, language can be used to deceive, both intentionally and unintentionally, and two different people can have different understandings of what the same words and phrases mean. With a murky, ever-developing foundation like that, culture and politics and economics can come to be extremely detached from reality, since they reference their selves and each other as they develop just as much as, if not more than, the real world. No one wants to start at ground zero every time they want to form a new idea, after all- hasn’t most of the work been done already?
But, if some where between the real, material world and our perception of it lies some real bad intellectual/emotional filtering, such as a story that the world is flat or that the greedy founders of a nation were benevolent, our perception is further distanced from material reality. If we do not challenge the parts of our culture and personal beliefs that interfere with our ability to understand the world, we might as well be dreaming, or plugged in to the Matrix, or sitting in a cave, watching shadows on a wall. A dreamer still exists in material space and time, but only believes the dream, vaguely informed by reality.
So let’s think of it that way for a bit. Imagine you have been living your life to, say, age twenty, and then you suffer an accident and fall in to a coma. In this coma, your first dreams are inspired by your real life, and the media you consumed in it. You don’t wake up to add more of this data to draw from, and you don’t reset your expectations, so your dreams only have that set, finite pool of information to draw from and no thing telling them that they’re wrong, no thing recalibrating your expectations with the real world. You have more and more dreams, inventing places and scenarios and people, and your pool of information for the dreams to draw on does grow- but only in fictional information invented by the dreams. After a time the pool of dream information, of dreamed experiences, characters, and rules, dwarfs the pool of information directly pertaining to your real life, and whole new structures might form, new patterns, as referencing what was real becomes less and less necessary to weave these dreams. Let’s say you dream all day, every day, for twenty more years, and then you wake up, having developed expectations wildly different from how people behave, what people value, even how simple causality works in the real world. The real world is no longer familiar, in fact it seems bizarre now, and you reject it.
Now imagine that our culture, economics, and politics are shaped this way. ‘But these things aren’t developed randomly,’ you might protest. Well, neither are dreams. Both are driven by invisible forces. Our subconscious mind has to be subject to cause and effect, just like every thing else. We just have difficulty studying it. The history of culture, politics, and economics, how ever, can be studied much more easily; if you buy in to the leftist stuff, they are driven by power, by profit, by capital. And the narratives that these forces weave are as nonsensical as dreams because they undermine all of our most basic human values and insist that they are rational regardless of what truths they defy.
Now, in a sort of return to the beginning, what if I told you that The Matrix was a metaphor for neoliberal capitalism? What if I told you that it was using a digitally simulated reality to represent a culturally simulated reality? And not just some isolated part of it, like how ‘red-pillers’ have hijacked the metaphor to refer to specifically feminism and ‘politically correct’ culture, but the very foundation of our society. That’s not just artistic speculation on my part. Look it up. The machines are fucking capitalists, politicians, marketing firms, religious figureheads, every body in power who wants to keep you jacked in to their simulated reality so they can continue to drain you of your energy (literal life energy in the Matrix; labor value in real life). There’s a reason Morpheus drove it home by holding up a recognizable, household battery that any one can buy in bulk at the store: our masters have transformed us in to commodities. Agent Smith is some one who sees the truth but can’t recognize it (he knows the shapes on the wall are just shadows, but he still hasn’t found the exit to the cave), becomes nihilistic about it, because he only knows enough to know despair. He knows that even he has been manipulated, but he doesn’t know what the alternative is, or what was really stolen, so he decides that death is the only way out (he represents the short-sighted ‘red-pillers’ more than any one else in the film). The deal made at the end, that, if Neo takes down Smith, the machines will let Zion live, is not a plot hole, as I’d previously thought. Of course this compromise is absurd, just like compromising with the ruling class at any point in human history has been absurd, ultimately leaving them in power, allowing them to rebuild their empire at any moment. The elite will always let us fight for them, but our rewards are always on their terms.
For years I’ve been critical of The Matrix, even trying to fill in the plot holes in literal ways by considering fan theories. It’s not meant to be taken literally. It’s not about machines and cyberspace. It’s about postmodern society (the era after modernity, today’s era) and subversive identity (the film’s concept of residual self-image, how Neo never refers to his self by his given name, and corrects Smith when Smith does so). The efficiency of human bodies as batteries- that’s not the point. The desert of the real isn’t a literal, physical waste; it’s the abandoned, material foundations of our culture, the use value of things superseded by assigned exchange value and sign value, our social animal values replaced by competitive, capitalistic ones, our sense of wonder replaced by the ultra-literal, bland, quietly violent neoliberal aesthetic. The antagonist is depicted as faceless machines as well as a baby-faced… thing to represent the hybrid nature of our own antagonist, a combination of self-referential cultural/political/economic system and powerful masters. My obsession with literalness, my belief that metaphor belonged to the realm of spiritualism, used only to obscure the truth, had prevented me from understanding this excellent explanation of our society for half of my life.
So, shit, what does it mean when our relationship with the real is so distorted that we can’t even recognize it? It means that we can’t properly orient our selves, can’t tell accurate stories about our past, can’t understand how power dynamics work, can’t identify the sources of our cognitive dissonance. Postmodern philosophy talks about our relationships with power and structures a lot, about how subtle yet abusive hierarchies can be, about our relationships with art and technology, how subcultures are appropriated by capital to fit neatly in to the major culture, stripped of their subversive natures, stripped of their politics, making them superficial and marketable to a more general public, and many other topics. It follows poststructuralism, so has a habit of orienting every idea in greater context, analyzing its place in history (how it came about), its place in psychology (how we think about it), what its most superficial aspects imply, and what subtext there is to its message. Yes, it’s largely about how we need to unlearn every thing that we’ve ever learned, both consciously and unconsciously, if we hope to find some semblance of the truth, but it’s also about finding new ways to appreciate the world and live authentic, more meaningful lives.
Part 10: And Deeper Runs the Labyrinth, which only Obscures Our Despair|Cyberpunk, Stoicism, Aesthetics of Cognitive Mapping
So we have a status quo that either rejects subversion or recuperates it. What does this mean? The status quo is a set of accepted norms, regarding all subjects. Subversion is the act of resisting this status quo or rebelling against it. Recuperation is a process by which proponents of the status quo neutralize and absorb subversive ideas and culture. This is why Martin Luther King Junior, for example, is now a mainstream cultural icon, even though he was an enemy of the state in his day, and was assassinated for it. That is a story less about society becoming more tolerant and more about the elite adjusting the rules in order to benefit from the movement- that is, a watered-down, neutralized, fantasy version of the movement. The status quo is not based in reality, remember; it is founded on myths. It recuperates all that antagonizes it and regularly revises history to suit these myths.
The opposite of recuperation is détournement, or the hijacking of status quo aesthetics, ideas, commodities, what ever, and making them counter-culture, making them subversive, changing them in to tools of resistance. This could be recovering stolen cultural elements by reinjecting them with working-class values, or pushing common ideas and aesthetics to their extremes in order to display their absurdity.
Like I said, I’d associated metaphorical language with the ‘magical thinking’ logical fallacy, and liked philosophy because it was logical, and I thought to be logical meant to be literal, exact, precise. I liked psychology because it obeyed the scientific method (kinda, sometimes). I was a ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ kinda person for a long time. I rejected parables and fables as too open to interpretation, and as a result failed to see what was ‘shown, not told’ of many a story. I realize now that lots of people are drawn to philosophy, particularly being critical of popular politics, not by being told things are wrong or that there’s a better way, but by seeing, by experiencing contradictions in the world- fuck, my self included.
The Allegory of the Cave was obviously a metaphor- when you’re buried in contradictions every day, you’re bound to make some your self. What can I say? The map of the empire replacing the empire is a far more effective tool than trying to explain what culture is doing literally. What does this have to do with the status quo and the resistance dynamic? Much of the meaning in our lives is symbolic. The way we dress says things about our socioeconomic class, personal identity, and world view, but silently. Much of the content of language is body language and tone, and short-cuts like idioms and, well, metaphors. The manner in which we speak is part of the message. It can communicate our background, where we were raised, our level of education, and so on, and we often judge a person’s message based on what kind of person we interpret them to be. Film scores help convey the emotions being communicated in scenes, and work even if you can’t explain how. It is through aesthetics that we make sense of much of our world.
There is style to politics. There is finesse to ethics. Systems of logic have their own clunky or dexterous feel to them. Ideas can be met with different attitudes, different both as you agree with them and as you disagree. The study of aesthetics isn’t just the study of what colors and styles were fashionable here or there or then; it’s the study of what, how, and why colors and styles mean certain things in all sorts of contexts. It’s the study of the political nature of art, as every thing is created within a political context, so every thing is political- even being apolitical is political, because neutrality makes way for the status quo.
I grew up in the nineties, but was exposed to lots of eighties media at the time. It left a lasting impression on my tastes for fantasy and science fiction. I was an early fan of the band The Birthday Massacre, a synth rock band that, despite NO ONE saying so, was a serious precursor to the synth wave genre, a diverse revival of eighties synth music. I tried to read Neuromancer shortly after I’d finished Once and Future King, I think, but I couldn’t get in to it. The atmosphere was lost on me, and it was boring without that. I didn’t really develop an appreciation for cyberpunk proper until after I was reintroduced to its most superficial values through synth wave music, and then through philosophy Youtube channels remarking on its cultural significance, and then through a revival of the genre in indie video games. This is how I came to realize that aesthetics not only contained political content, but that they could be deliberately and extremely political, as well as being beyond that, all-encompassing.
But, alas, the social alienation of getting this deep in subversive ideas and dead or Frankensteined culture, seeing how deep the violence of the status quo goes, realizing the political and cultural roots of mental illness, being bombarded with my alienation from my own labor every day, and my disgust with being immersed in corporate lies every day was wearing me the fuck down. I needed to work on my mental health, rebuild healthy habits, and a partner recommended Stoicism to me, particularly Seneca’s Letters From a Stoic.
In the past I might’ve looked up a dictionary definition or read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on this thing, and/or had it come up contextually in studying Greek and Roman history. I felt like Stoicism was familiar to me already, with Seneca in hand, but I wasn’t sure why. I think before even opening this book I ordered my self a copy of The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy by Donald Robertson, having certainly read the Wikipedia article on Stoicism now, and discovering CBT’s relationship with Stoicism. I read this and Seneca back to back, and realized a few things:
-Stoicism is not just a cognitive/behavioral tool; it is a life style, with pro-social instruction.
-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is just data-driven, apolitical, aesthetically and even mostly ethically neutralized Stoicism. This isn’t a comparison. The developers of CBT consciously copied Stoicism, the same way the developers of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy copied Buddhist and other Eastern philosophies in regard to mental health (also neutralized).
-Like every thing else in the postmodern era, when psychotherapy became mainstream it became a commodity, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator (who could afford it). I say appeal to, not workfor.
-Good mental health can not come from talk sessions and work books and little bits of mental gymnastics. Good mental health only begins with a new set of tools. It is maintained with a holistic manner of living, a life style that better suits our needs. With the exception of conditions like brain damage or deep-end schizophrenia, therapists and prescriptions and self-reflection work sheets and meditation sessions are merely jumping-off points.
I’m not a hyper-individualist any more. I acknowledge the need for social support, how poor relationships and a bad financial state can impact mental health. I don’t really blame individuals for believing mental health is some thing that you have to buy a subscription to, because it’s a part of our nasty culture. I’m not saying it’s your fault, if you’ve been fooled, but you are the one most likely to get you out of it. Genuine social support is sadly not some thing to expect in a society where our competitive and stressful culture atomizes us. The people who do care are likely to be folks who are the most stressed, and won’t always have the energy to support all of their friends and family. Also, you can’t really give some one lasting mental health any more than you can sell it to some one, unless you count giving some one a book demonstrating a life style that is more conducive to mental health. Mental health has to come from a place we can control, which is often times only a place within our selves. Much of our suffering comes from letting out side forces shape our perception and our expectations, loading them with contradictions, values that are counter to our needs, prejudices that fill us with meaningless stress. Three simple take-aways from Stoicism (that need to be studied, not just read as three simple take-aways! This is an advertisement, not a lesson) are these:
-Figure out what you can and can not control, and stop trying to control what you can not control (many important projects can only be tackled one tiny step at a time; this tenet has been borrowed by a lot of Western traditions, and is also present in at least Eastern and African traditions as well).
-Contrast your immediate perspectives with an ‘observation from the perspective of the universe’, or ‘view from above’. In other words, put your situation in cultural context, in national context, in global context, in universal context. This not only helps minimize the urgency of your situation, but also helps you to see how most things are determined by out side forces and are not your fault.
-Stoicism is some thing you are, some thing you do every day, like eating and sleeping. It is not a treatment, not a reaction to suffering; it is a way of life.
-All things are transient, changing, finite. Do not take the ‘constants’ in your life for granted. Cherish them, and take for granted that they will all be lost some day. Discover what it means to care about people, to want to love people, not limiting your expectations of love and care to any specific individuals. All people have things in common. Discover what you are without your possessions, without your relationships. Our environments make us, but we continue to exist when removed from them. What core values remain when our out side influences are minimized?
…Would you be offended, if I told you that I did not completely adopt a Stoic way of life? Well, may be it was complete back in the Roman Republic, but it does not feel complete to me in postmodernity. Mainly, Stoicism would push you to ignore mass media, avoid the ocean of INFORMATION that dominates our present culture, but, if I want to make a difference in this world, I need to know how to interface with these things. The hyperreal is not going away, and Stoicism doesn’t have the language to talk about that.
Like the punk rock scene that formed during the death throes of modernity that it gets its name from, cyberpunk is an aesthetic as life style. It is some thing you either tour or become, and to properly study it is to become it. It was pioneered by white men, so started with some significant blind spots, but was always meant to be inclusive of all working-class people, and in fact couldn’t have driven its message home without the acknowledgement of the more obvious violence of the system against minorities. There are obvious philosophical roots to this genre, but it’s an aesthetic, so it preserves and proliferates these traditions of thought through visuals, through tones, through manners- it is an expression of its philosophical foundation.
Unlike previous forms of sci-fi, cyberpunk does not glorify the future. On its face, its utopian impulse is hidden. Cyberpunk merely accepts the future, and that a better future will require a lot of hard, violent, organized work on the bottom tier of society. If high technology is going to save us, it’s only because we’re going to steal it from the bleeding edge concealed at the heart of the megacorps, to steal it to defend our selves from it. No, the tools do not make the movement. Those in power do not exploit us and kill us out of necessity. It was never practical to do so, and they’ll continue to do so until we stop them. How can we do this? Cyberpunk’s answer is to observe the inhuman nature of the business class, and develop our own inhuman nature, a posthuman nature, a transhuman nature, that of the cyborg, a blending of social resistance and ascension from material bonds weaponized to tear down the systems of oppression. In this way being a cyborg is less about body augmentation and more about state of mind.
Cyberpunk is necessarily intersectional feminist. You can’t transcend social boundaries when you’re caught up in prejudices and fail to acknowledge difference and the misfortunes of others. Many transhumanists, who have no real philosophy and are still trapped in the messianic cage of ‘technology will save us’, simply wish to ignore social struggles, either rejecting them from the discourse aggressively or patiently waiting for them to be made obsolete by nanobots and 3D printers. Cyberpunk is necessarily existential, as it challenges what it means to be human, and demands to know where our deepest meaning comes from by trivializing our traditions of labor (many cyberpunk protagonists are criminals), life style marketing, brands, and commodities in general. Cyberpunk exposes and identifies the aspects of hyperreality and is determined to march through that nightmare with a sense of purpose.
Like Stoicism, or the neoliberal aesthetic, or religions, or white nationalist mythologies, cyberpunk is an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.
In psychology, the concept of cognitive mapping comes from studies showing that we do not create literal, exact representations, do not draw precise maps, of material space in our minds. In order to navigate our neighborhoods, the city, the country, and beyond, we don’t memorize the distance in meters from point A to point B. We don’t memorize the degrees of angles at every turn. Why would we need to know all the names and shapes of the mountains and plains between one air port and an other in order to ride in a plane to traverse them? In stead of holding in memory one to one copies of our environment in order to get around, we develop maps of meaning. They’re relational maps consisting of personally significant land marks, essentially stories as opposed to what we’d commonly think of as maps. Even when drawing a map for some one else on paper (when was the last time you did that?), you don’t necessarily draw every single cross street, and certainly don’t draw a rectangle to represent every building, and you don’t need to. The whole route can be represented by a few street signs and ‘left’ or ‘right’.
Seems reasonable enough even without the studies, since we all do it, but guess what. We map out our whole lives that way, spatially, temporally, socially, economically, every thing. Our pictures of the world in our minds are just a mess of meaningful icons, landmarks of relationship, like a book of parables that explains our lives. It absolutely does not have to be accurate in order to help us navigate, but low accuracy concerning social matters, you’ll find, leads to cognitive dissonance due to contradiction between our maps and material reality, a contradiction between sensation and perception, as it were, and cognitive dissonance leads to stress, and stress to mental illness.
Cognitive maps aren’t bad. I’m not making an argument for the abolition of this process; that would be both detrimental and impossible. The problem is that, if we’re not deliberately, consciously making our own map, some one else is doing it for us. In my case, that some one is neoliberal capitalism, immersing me in the neoliberal aesthetic map, which is more like a labyrinth than a map: no matter what progress you make in a labyrinth, you never feel like you’re going any where. You are always lost. You are always disoriented. Labyrinths, traditionally, are prisons, and neoliberalism, a map of exchange values linking commodities, social currency, pseudo-democracy, oppression as liberation, like The Matrix, is a prison for your mind.
The neoliberal map is home to endless internal contradictions, and religions have plenty, and are incomplete- which is why, in the West, religion is paired with neoliberalism, creating even worse contradictions (Jesus and competition don’t mix). Per haps this is why right-wingers here are so distraught, why religious white nationalists are so angry and violent: their maps are at war with their selves and reality at once. But we don’t have to start from scratch. The West has Stoicism; the East has orthodox Buddhist philosophy (please don’t select a brand that maintains the caste system); there are plenty of other old ‘wisdom traditions’ that I’m less familiar with that are likely useful, and we have cyberpunk. Fredric Jameson, the one who came up with this idea of cognitive mapping aesthetics, claimed that cyberpunk failed, because the people did not embrace it, and it has been appropriated by capital, neutralized in to the forms of post-cyberpunk and eighties nostalgia. Well, if that’s true, then socialism has also failed, since the people abandoned it and capital salvaged it in the forms of democratic socialism and social democracy. I believe that cyberpunk is still useful, can be recovered, détourned, but if it’s incomplete because it’s not sexy enough to suck in the masses, by all means, create some thing new. Vapor wave? Is vapor wave gonna be the new vehicle for a hybrid Stoic/cyberpunk aesthetic, what with the Roman sculptures and the empty malls?
In any case, adopting a mix of Stoic and cyberpunk mapping has dramatically enhanced my mental health. Sure, I’ve only a few people to share this with, but what it lacks in social connectedness it makes up for in reality connectedness. What I mean by this is that, while cyberpunk and Stoicism alienate me further from those with rigid neoliberal maps (we don’t even see the same world), they harmonize me with reality. Whether good or bad, I am able to accept what is happening around me, and I have a new intimacy with time and space, via a deep understanding of what is happening, what has happened, and why. I am out of the maze-like cave. I know where I stand. I am no longer lost.
Part 11: Home
So that’s the ‘orienting impulse’ of a good cognitive map, but Fredric Jameson said there also had to be a ‘utopian impulse’. I need to orient my self in relationship with the future as well, have hopes, envision where we ought to go from here. But how, when the present and the past look so bleak? Cyberpunk is a dark aesthetic; it is an immersion in the pain and the horror of it all, it is risking its own sanity by gazing long in to the abyss. I’ve been no stranger to the darkness. I used to live a life of nightmares, delusion, and hallucination. I’ve tasted addiction to aggression, obsession with revenge, and spent years desensitized to brutality and gore. After a trip through postmodern-era liberalism I’ve learned that you have to fight aggression with strength, so what room is there for thinking about a kinder, gentler future?
Part of my inspiration for a better world comes from my engagement with the schizophrenia spectrum, actually. In my tremendously vivid dreams during that time I experienced tremendous emotions, and an intense sense of belonging. A connectedness that per haps can only exist in a world all your own, a realm of the mind, a connectedness that Fyodor Dostoevsky called simply ‘loving-kindness’. Then comes my study and practice of compassion, with roots in all ancient cultures. Next comes the leftist concept of camaraderie, of worker unity, bonding over common, primal interests. Then comes the strange parasocial ability of the human brain to ‘sense presence’, triggered by intense social experiences of unity (or by electrode), and is speculated to be responsible for evoking a feeling that a connecting consciousness is present, or god. Our brains are wired for unification, cooperation, and care to the point that they some times feels magical to us. Divinity is just a fancy word for coherent society, it would seem! And do you remember your childhood romanticism? Were you fortunate enough to know what I’m talking about? That sense of endless wonder, before your mind was touched by the structures of division? Some people call losing that ‘maturity’, but I call it ‘romantic suicide’. I’m not the right person to ask about the universal connectedness felt through psychedelic trips, but that’s basically just pressing buttons that the human mind already has. Finally, we are capable of creating art that evokes all of these sensations to some degree- for me, personally, a superb sense of belonging will most likely come from what I refer to as the ‘tender fanfare’, such as many of Avantasia’s songs (like Promised Land and Let the Storm Descend Upon You), Mike Oldfield’s Heaven’s Open, Mägo de Oz’s Mi Hogar Eres Tú, and Battle Beast’s World On Fire (sorry all my examples are guitar music; I listen to tons of trance and hard core dance music that presents the correct feeling too, but my memory is hazy on those titles). I’ve read utopian science fiction, politically, historically, economically informed utopian science fiction. I know what I’m looking for.
When I longed for that feeling of perfect belonging in my dreams to return to me, I said it felt like a yearning to return home. That’s what I think this is, going home, in a way going back to our foundational nature as social animals. If only just one part of the real is still accessible to us, this is the part of the real that we must recover. Imagine a world where we trust strangers, where loving casually and loving intensely can be the same thing. Where there’s no calculus of exchange to manage in every situation. Where society is ordered to benefit human needs, including the social and intellectual, first and foremost. Where, when we sacrifice, it is for the sake of compassion. A world where every where you go, you’re coming Home.
…Or some one is, any way. An other important aspect of both Stoicism and cyberpunk is a fearlessness of death, and in cyberpunk specifically a sense of revolutionary suicide. I’m sorry, but the last bit of individualism that we have to shed is the reluctance to die for a cause, or at least to fight for a world that will not be realized in our life times. The object is to fight for the existence of Home, not for the possession of Home. If we fight to personally grasp it, locked in our individual desires, we will despair at every sign of delay, and we will fail. When I say ‘we’ I don’t mean you and me and the person in the next room; I mean ‘the people’, present and future.
I used to think of transcendence as a personal matter, as a thing I was equipped to do, to escape society and the natural laws. Now I understand that the greatest transcendence can only be done together, as a species, to realize Home. And on the matter of revolutionary suicide, why not think as the Stoics do, that death is a release? You fight hard, you die, you’ve earned that release. And death is always a communal thing. No matter when you die, no matter how fierce the conflict is, there are always dozens of others sharing in your experience as you go: every minute, approximately one hundred six people die, being freed from the earth. And those dying with you, who are still dying after your last moment, become dead as others slip away, who share the experience with others who last just moments longer, and so on. In this way, we all die together. And before that we all struggle together, sharing in the pain of slavery to hegemony. Our lives are all interconnected, cooperation or not; it is not that we must find each other. We all have some idea of some aspect of what Home is, and we all know what death is, and we all know what it feels like to resist power in some way. We can’t think of abandoning the toxic cognitive maps drawn for us by invisible hands as turning away from society, but as embracing the parts in all of us that we share, the parts that are human, so that we can appreciate the connection we have with people that still do not see what we see as we learn to show them, and beyond that…
Ah, fuck it. This wasn’t intended to be a motivational speech, and I’ma stop trying. Hopefully it’s easier to understand where I’m coming from in my other posts after reading this. If not, fuck, read a god damned book. No body’s payin’ me to do this shit.
We fought for better working conditions. We got better pay. We got forty hour work weeks. Benefits! Workers’ unions were put in place to protect these things, and push for more. These things became status quo. Now we have anti-union rhetoric spreading through all classes of people, anti-worker rhetoric saying what they have now is enough, that they’re too lazy to get more, that they’re a drain on the system… the system that requires them in order to keep its wheels turning. Some anti-union rhetoric is even true in some cases, where unions exploit their members just like the bosses do, collecting their dues and doing little else. Union gate-keeping where jobs are only available to union workers, and union entry is only available to current employees. The very exclusivity of power the unions were meant to protect workers from. But this isn’t considered extreme any more either.
Employers call paying for a fraction of their workers’ health care ‘taking care of their employees’. Those who fought for workers’ rights expected us to get more than this by now. Those who died for workers’ being treated better than the machines they worked beside were forgotten, their struggle forgotten; the fact that capitalists will kill their fellow citizens when their capital is threatened was forgotten. We didn’t beat them when we shifted the status quo. They just changed tactics.
Wait. Dr. King was ANTI-CAPITALIST? Next you’ll tell me he didn’t really preach pacifism!
Political centrism is not balance. Political moderates do not harmonize the far left with the far right. There is no value in finding the golden mean between equity and violent prejudice. There is no value in finding the golden mean between communal liberty and violent oppression. Feminism is a leftist view and misogyny is right wing. What is the middle ground there? Tolerance of women? The ‘Oppression Olympics’ is not a leftist practice, no matter what its participants call their selves. Communism can not be statist or fascist, despite what so-called Russian or Chinese ‘communists’ might’ve said. The National Socialists (Nazis) achieved pseudo-socialist ideals by stealing property from Jews and redistributing it to ‘true Germans’. Socialism ‘for us, but not for them’ is not socialism. A balance between left and right can not be achieved by defending the right and belittling the left. Some one is not ‘fighting polarization’ by saying ‘not all right-wingers are Nazis’ while also preaching that ‘leftists need to calm down’.
It is not status quo to protect free speech. We censor far more sexuality than we do brutal, physical violence. We censor words on public television because we’ve arbitrarily deemed them vulgar, as if vulgarity ever stopped us before, yet we encourage our children to cheer on soldiers, people who kill for money, without even explaining to them the nuances of the international conflicts. We use patents to censor the replication of technology in order to protect capital. Copyright is censorship that protects money. We fire our workers for being insubordinate. We fire our workers for demanding better working conditions. Most bosses don’t even have to fire any one any more; the fear of retaliation by the bosses is so ingrained, most don’t even think to speak up about their poor working conditions. It is status quo to silence those who work against the current power structure, and it is status quo to glorify violence as if to remind the public that, while our leaders are afraid of us expressing our selves and cooperating to spread affordable technology, they are not afraid to use violence to get what they want.
It is normal for police to plaster the faces of those who have wronged the wealthy across our streets, on our screens, through our media, and it is normal for police to tell the poor, ‘There’s no thing we can do’ (it’s normal for Human Resources to shrug their shoulders at your case of work place harassment, but slam you in court for trying to sue the company). It is normal for police to protect and serve elites. They favor businesses over individuals, corporations over small businesses, whites over blacks, men over women, abled over disabled, who ever is higher in the power structure. What do they get out of it? Are they not working-class? Well, they answer to the state: the most powerful cozied up against the most wealthy. The state can do more than just fire you, if you demand better working conditions. It is normal for our courts to favor the dignity of violent aggressors over that of traumatized victims.
‘How is a registered sex-offender supposed to get a decent job?’
How are women supposed to live safely when unregistered sex-offenders stalk their places of business, after leaving a court room with a head full of encouragement? I’m all for rehabilitating criminals in stead of punishing them; brief punishment set beside some twisted form of coddling is not rehabilitation.
State-sanctioned murder. Gate-keeping basic needs. Priority to wealth. Money buying freedom. These are all status quo, and these are all things centrists are defending by saying that every one’s ideas of change are wrong. Democratic and Republican politicians act like they’re fighting, but both sides of the aisle are happy with the current system because they’re profiting from the current system, and both are right there neighboring the ‘center’ where the centrists are.
Keep in mind that the common view of what is politically central changes over time, as the norms change, and right now it’s far more right than it is left, considering the true differences between leftist and right wing values. Centrism is not trying to stay center; it is trying to stay comforted in the current system, which is impossible, because politics/economics is always changing.
Moderates during feudalism would not be moderates under capitalism. Centrists before the Civil War of the USA would not still be centrists during that war. Sympathizing with the South is very different from sympathizing with the traitors. Supporting your neighbors is very different from supporting the enemy. Centrism is relative, and not to the ends of the spectrum, but to current political norms. Holding a centrist view is not civil; it is cowardice. It is pride in taking the road that requires zero effort, the beaten path, and the road that is cracking and crumbling as we speak.
Who wants to join my cyberpunk centrist nu-metal band?
I am trying to understand politics/economics. I empathized with Plato’s fears of democracy, but I couldn’t get down with his censorship of art (yes, I actually liked his caste system for a couple years). The Trump administration is a spooky one, but Obama fucking had civilians bombed. I liked the USA Libertarian Party for a little bit, ten years ago, because Ron Paul said some stuff that was ground-breaking for me at the time. Then I started to get to know other people associated with the party and realized that it was all just a glorified introvert fantasy- one to keep the common folk disconnected and the elite unchained from responsibility. I dabbled with centrism for a while, off and on, cause that more-stoic-than-thou attitude felt damn satisfying… until I kept seeing people getting killed for no good reason. I knew shit was bad, but I didn’t know why- not to mention how bad it really was. I blamed Republicans. I blamed politicians. I blamed bigots. Once, more recently, I had this eureka moment when I thought I could trace it all back to ‘toxic masculinity’, but there are a couple problems with even some thing that fundamental.
For one, ‘toxic’ is too vague and is asking to be abused. As soon as some one suggested it be substituted for ‘hegemonic’ I was sold on it. Hegemonic masculinity. It’s the thing.
For two, as frustrating as it is, it’s difficult to point the finger at some thing that potentially divides our population in half. I’ve seen the power-hungry, self-absorbed, cold, objectifying monster in my self, and I know that I’ve been wrong. I accept responsibility for that, but to say, ‘All of the world’s problems are men’s fault,’ as pathetic as this is, will keep us divided.
In stead, I’ve come to realize that I have been consistently grumbling about capitalists.
Capitalists. The people who compromise firstly for material wealth. The people who pay us our wages and can take them away, if we complain of them not being enough to care for our selves and our families. The people who pay hundreds to thousands of people to perform tasks for them, to perform innovations for them, to invent new technologies for them, and then claim to be self-made, independent geniuses. The people whose salaries are in the millions or billions, who ‘ran the numbers’ and determined that it’s just not feasible to pay every one beneath them a living wage.
They encourage competition. They encourage ruthlessness. They’ll have you believe that zero-sum games exist in real life, and that any one can be (and should be) as wealthy as they are, if we just work hard enough in a system that’s rigged against us… by them. They are about hoarding wealth, hoarding power, not because they know how to best serve society and distribute its resources- no. It’s just to keep it. To own it. To have it. If the wealth of billionaires were to actually trickle down, well, why is it only a trickle?
Oh, but they’ve earned it. Through exploitation, through ignoring the needs and wants of others, but it was work and the hardest, riskiest work with the greatest sacrifices (even if the sacrifice is human dignity) deserves the most compensation. The most possible.
It was difficult for me to see the lie of hyper-individualism, but now it’s so plain. When you’re concerned more with what you’ve earned, you think less about civil rights. When you’re concerned more with how impressive a person’s ability to game the system is, you think less about basic human needs. We charge people for water. We charge people for food. We charge people for shelter- and that last one, for the most part, doesn’t even have any labor involved. Letting people exist in rooms is not a service. No service is done. All of the people employed in real estate do work solely to protect the investment of their masters. We charge people for overcoming illness. If people don’t have these things? They die. We live in a world where, if you aren’t graced with enough wages for your needs, you don’t deserve to live.
Some people get behind that. ‘Too stupid to live.’ ‘What do they contribute to society any way?’ With no regard for circumstances and unfair limitations, capitalism is all about what you can provide for the capitalists, not about what society can provide for you. Simply look up a basic definition of the word society, and you can understand why that’s a huge problem.
For many people, when they think of collectivism they think of group-think, tribalism, nationalism, and/or conformity. Negative connotations. No thoughts of unity, compassion, sharing, organization, society. We all acknowledge that we’re social animals, and we all enjoy human relationships, families, friend groups, sub-cultures, yet many of us are so anti-collectivism that we cringe at the word ‘social’.
So when your enemy is the capitalist, how does that change your perspective? Well, all major political parties in the USA have capitalists at the top. The top Democrat and Republican politicians are all appealing to views that they know how to profit off of. They all put money and power above their other values- and, if they seem not to, well, that’s because those ‘other values’ are making them lotsa lotsa money. Exploitation is capitalist. Colonialism is capitalist. Imperialism is capitalist. Hierarchy is capitalist. What does all of this mean? Racism promotes capitalism. Sexism assists capitalism. Ableism supports capitalism. Hatred fuels capitalism. Dividing people and scaring people and turning people against each other is all extremely profitable.
Even many who support capitalism are comfortable with the ‘follow the money’ train of thought, and just accept this kind of corruption as an unavoidable evil… but why not at least humor an alternative?
For my own part, it’s because I thought socialism was a joke. I’d learned that communism lead to violence and poverty, and anarchism was just an other word for chaos. Bernie Sanders softened me up some, because this ‘democratic socialism’ is supposed to manipulate the ‘inevitable system’ in to catering to some social values. It didn’t seem far-fetched or absurd.
Oh, but it was still an appeal to capitalists. It was a way of saying, ‘Please? Please, can we be cared for a little bit more?’ Well, the capitalists and hyper-individualist scholars would scoff at us for being so pathetic.
I don’t trust people, but I want people to be able to trust each other. I want to feel independent, but I want the needy to be taken care of. I want people to have liberty, but not the freedom to exploit their neighbors. I often dreamed of a benevolent elite, the Philosopher Kings, a compassionate, authoritarian, central power to set the rules and enforce the perfect system, what ever that was, because I thought that the common person was self-absorbed, short-sighted, and otherwise incapable of self-governance. Oh, but the USA’s founding fathers studied Plato, and that’s how we got capitalism in the USA. Oh, and otherwise, that essentially describes a brand of communism. Since I’d let go of Plato and rolled my eyes at communism, what the hell was I doing?
It wasn’t enough to hate capitalism. I needed a response to it. This came to me from two seeds. One was from an individual that I deeply respect. They identify as an anarchist, and when I first read that I thought, ‘Huh. That’s ridiculous, but they at least must have a complex and intriguing reason.’ The other was from an in-depth political spectrum test that I took, claiming I was a libertarian socialist.
‘WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?’
Turns out, ‘libertarian’ was appropriated by the American Libertarian Party from a very different set of beliefs, and ‘libertarian socialism’ is anarchism.
By this point, I’d some how at least learned that anarchy did not mean chaos; it had organization, but focused on smaller distributions of power. Like states? Like a USA without their federation? I didn’t know what that meant, not at all, and it was too weird for me to come to terms with for a long time.
My news feed began to be flooded with communist ideals. Every day, socialism was rooting its self in my mind, an understanding. I wasn’t going to just believe Facebook’s impression of it, though, so I finally began to study, study communism, study anarchism, study liberalism, understand how all these terms relate to each other, and work out where my invisible biases lied.
Let me tell you, when your whole world has been this artificial survival of the fittest prestige match where the powerful tell you that you can be just like them, if you just work harder, and when your whole perspective of socialism centers around government funded health care and not killing minorities, the idea of a society of trust and caring cooperation is fucking surreal. Understanding the difference between governance and administration feels like splitting hairs. Imagining what it means for power to come from the bottom seems like mere poetry.
Then this quote from Proudhon hit me:
‘As you cannot conceive of society without hierarchy, you have made yourselves the apostles of authority; worshippers of power, you think only of strengthening it and muzzling liberty; your favourite maxim is that the welfare of the people must be achieved in spite of the people; instead of proceeding to social reform by the extermination of power and politics, you insist on a reconstruction of power and politics.’
But, if we’re talking about giving all of the power to the people- the hell would that really look like? Later this quote from a contributor to a large anarchist FAQ put it in to perspective for me:
‘For example, powers that are now exercised in an authoritarian manner by managers under capitalism, such as those of hiring and firing, introducing new production methods or technologies, changing product lines, relocating production facilities, determining the nature, pace and rhythm of productive activity and so on would remain in the hands of the associated producers and not be delegated to anyone.’
And for bigger decisions? Include more relevant people in the votes. When there isn’t enough time, or the decision has to be made elsewhere? Elect representatives that can be dismissed at any time with a new election. When do we hold elections? When it’s decided that we need to. What about trade? Problems between working environments? Problems that effect huge communities, or groups of communities? Elect representatives who elect representatives who elect representatives, how ever many tiers of responsibility as you need, just as long as they all answer to the people, and all are entitled to no power of their own, and must step down, if it is demanded of them. Oh- and as long as their sole contribution is not this administration. Administration is not a career. Administration is not a career.
Disorganized? Fluid. Organic, easily adjusting to the needs of the people.
I am still learning about anarchism and communism. Pardon me, if you’re well versed and this seems painfully rudimentary. Communism, with centralized power, simply reminds me too much of capitalism, which in turn reminds me of feudalism, and I want to live in a society that is equitable, where every one has an equal stake, where every one is involved in politics, where every one is raised to think about the good of the community, and how the community can do the best good for their selves. I want to live in a society where the self-serving thing is the society-serving thing, because every one will vote to preserve their own rights, so every one’s rights will be preserved. Will there be currency? May be. Will there be religion? I don’t know. Will there still be technological innovations? Definitely, cause some people just plain love building technology, and not enough people, when they feel secure, are going to vote against bettering the lives of humanity and humanity’s ability to take care of our environment.
Social living does not require hierarchy. Social worth does not require power. All kinds of relationships can be mutually beneficial, without one person having an edge over the other. The economics ‘laws’ that claim competition and self-absorption are natural and unavoidable have only been studying corrupt systems held together by power elites. Socialism is not the government babysitting us; it is all of us supporting each other. Capitalists are now afraid of the collapse that they’ve triggered. Even capitalists are only capitalists to gain enough wealth to escape capitalism. No one enjoys hierarchy. The people on the bottom are afraid of having things taken away by the powerful, and the powerful are afraid of having things taken away by their peers, or by the many. We are a society with Stockholm syndrome, and our captor is our selves.
Fuck, I was going to rip on centrists/moderates more.
Centrists/moderates, you’re not being stoic. You’re being apathetic. You can’t compromise with people who want you to die. You can’t compromise with people who don’t care, if you die. If you think pacifism can be and should be upheld in all situations, you’re a privileged piece of shit. You’re not keeping the balance. You’re allowing the aggressors more space to grow their power. Not all people identifying as anti-fascist are smart; like any movement, some people are just there to get in on the action, but anti-fascists can not be the real fascists. I know we didn’t take the Nazi’s word for it just because socialist was in the name, but seriously: trying to squash hate speech is no more an infringement on free speech than trying to prevent ax murders is an infringement on the freedom to own an ax. The purpose of hate speech is to incite dehumanization, which at its best thieves liberty and at its worst kills people. The only reason to legitimize hate speech is to let it spread.
We can’t make society better through reform. We can’t vote in a better system. The current system will not allow it. I vote; I pay attention to the capitalists, but we need a revolution, and, if you don’t think so, it’s because you’ve been suckered in to believing that the comfort your privilege has provided for you (in turn provided by capitalists- to some, not others) is enough. The far left sees it coming. The far right sees it coming. Even the capitalists who desperately cling to the status-quo you defend see it coming, which is why they claim to be investing in bomb shelters and disciplinary programs for personal body guards. Centrists, when this shit goes down, no matter who wins, you lose. The socialists and the fascists alike will remember when you called them idiots and barbarians from the comfort of your moderate, middle-of-the-road, not-too-spicy bastions of ‘moral purity’, and your time will be up.
Nah. Just kidding. If we pull off anarchy, there’s a good chance the rest of us will just laugh at you and give you hugs.
mindofshyft.wordpress.com 
Jim Henson’s Labyrinth as Social Commentary
For the longest time I considered this movie to be a simple joy ride through dreamy fantasy, some thing absurd just for the sake of absurdity. When compared to the Henson Studio’s other work, particularly The Cube, Time Piece, and the revolutionary conflict in Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (at the very least the source material for the show was a story centered around genocide- pretty heavy), on its face Labyrinth seemed absolutely silly and no thing much more.
Side note: The Cube and Time Piece used to be on Youtube in their entirety but have since been taken down. It looks like they’re both on Amazon Prime now, which sucks but The Cube especially is worth every penny (it’s my favorite movie, if I’m not about to convince my self here that Labyrinth is in stead).
First, let’s talk about the labyrinth its self. It was Jean Baudrillard’s fascination with Gorge Luis Borges’ fantasy stories as symbolism that got me thinking about this. By the time he described postmodern culture as ‘labyrinthine’ in Simulacra and Simulation I was fully primed to piece that apart. Labyrinths are confusing, designed to make the inhabitant or navigator perpetually lost. To give one the sense that, no matter how much progress they have made, they have gotten no where. Sounds like today’s economy! The Labyrinth of Greek mythology, the one designed and built by Daedalus for the king of Crete, was a prison for the Minotaur- a prison the Minotaur could conceivably escape from, but that was so maze-like that the likelihood would be considered insignificant. Baudrillard referred to our society as labyrinthine because it is an absurd prison for our minds; most of us would sooner give up and submit to it than find its exit. Its endless corridors and pointless dead ends suggest that its entire structure is either meaningless or intentionally exasperating and exhausting.
Jareth’s labyrinth represents a society of nonsense, a culture that is impossible to navigate logically, that ‘can’t be taken for granted’. It exists in a fantasy world separate from Sarah’s, is unreal (or per haps, borrowing Baudrillard’s famous term, hyperreal). It is immediately established in the film that Sarah suffers from feeling alienated, frustrated with rules, threatened by her step mother who is concerned with Sarah’s fitting in. Her role-playing at the start and the contents of her bed room make it clear that she’d rather be any where but 1980’s suburban US Empire. The labyrinth she later finds her self in seems to be inspired by her toys and fantasies, a world all her own, and yet it frustrates her just as much as her real life, and is even more antagonistic. To me, this is merely an inversion of her expectations: you can’t escape from the postmodern condition in to fantasy because the postmodern condition is the fantasy. It is no coincidence that the only human inhabitant of the labyrinth is an adult sexual predator. Between Jareth and the goblins, like in her real life, Sarah has no one to relate to. All is other. It is no coincidence that her motivation is to save an innocent human baby from becoming a goblin, or that her baby brother is to be transformed simply by a prolonged stay in the labyrinth. Toby’s dreaded metamorphosis is from innocence, a simple creature of the real, in to an other servant of the predatory king, a human commodity, a being disfigured by Neoliberal capitalism.
Now Jareth. Again, the Goblin King is the only denizen who is not a goblin. He’s so separate from his subjects that he isn’t even of the same species, easily a nod to the anti-human character of the ruling class. Jareth is a pedophile, an abductor, and spins rhetoric of his vileness being inevitable or even good. Toward the end Jareth says, ‘I ask for so little. Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave.’ Is it not a popular trick of the powerful, to convince us that they serve the powerless? To submit fully and trust in their benevolence? Yet Jareth exposes this here so plainly that it’s as if even he believes the farce at this point. And Sarah’s response, ‘You have no power over me,’ is precisely the line that undoes him. Jareth’s other tactics of oppression include making Sarah forget her purpose with the consumption of a peach (don’t think, consume) and seducing her through a masquerade ball.
In the ball room scene he doesn’t once speak to her, only singing, and every prop and character demands her attention, beyond elegant, extravagant, fantastic even for the labyrinth- this is the spectacle. This scene is the seduction of the media. Jareth’s singing is disembodied. You hear his voice but his lips don’t move, as if his message belongs to the dance in stead. Sarah has to push her way through the crowd, but Jareth navigates with ease, seemingly able to teleport. Jareth is the villain, yet Sarah pursues him here, the one guest that is serious and in control, as if to say, ‘The spectacle is insane and treacherous, but I will save you.’ Once she finds him and they dance, there is suddenly plenty of room for her to move. Yet it is his disembodied voice that drives the dance, and after they begin to dance together Jareth’s lips begin to move; Sarah realizes the spectacle belongs to the King, and flees.
Now let’s rock through the rest of the characters. Hoggle is some one turned sour by the system. Tough on the out side, pathetic on the in side, he is introduced while exterminating faeries, people smaller than he is, people he claims can’t be trusted, yet it isn’t addressed whether they are even capable of speech. Does the faerie have justification for why they bite Sarah? Hoggle just assumes it’s because they’re beastly. Division of the lower class, any one? Hoggle’s arc is that he betrays the Goblin King once he realizes that loyalty to power is rewarded with no thing, while Sarah promises friendship. Before he befriends Sarah, monetary value is all he is concerned with- a transformation from consumer values to social values.
Ludo’s story is pretty simple: scary strangers are just people too, and we need to learn to cooperate with them. His communication skills seem poor, yet he’s the only one who can communicate with rocks. In other words, he has a special understanding of language that others didn’t even know existed, an understanding that saves their lives.
Sir Didymus seems to be our struggle with the concept of bravery. He is impervious to despair, but also naive. He’ll never give up, but also would have probably gotten them all killed, if he was in charge. We’re still sold heroes like these to look up to, and yet in real life we’re often hesitant to stand up for what we believe in- and are often told that doing so is foolish. Since he’s got a weird gender roles thing going on with Sarah and expresses his faith in meritocracy after battling Ludo, may be he’s just a hero caricature meant to get us to abandon the cult of the hero entirely.
The wise man with the bird hat offers wisdom and then asks for payment, and the wisdom is garbage. This is the aesthetic of wisdom as commodity, and pseudo-wisdom here is shown to be self-contradicting, as represented by the tension between the man and his talking hat. The brief bit of false wisdom offered here is just a repackaged general description of the labyrinth, not unlike how self-help authors will just reinterpret status quo values to appear novel and profound. As Sarah and Hoggle move on, the hat remarks, ‘There go a couple of suckers.’
Get a load of the fireys. These guys are the most openly and consciously accepting of the system. At first glance they seem like the good guys, not falling for the appeal of high society, singing:
Yet they acknowledge that some one has real estate, jewelry, and gold mines, while they can’t even afford clothes, and insist that the answer to this problem is to ignore it. They willingly tear their selves apart to enjoy poverty, and though they sing that they ‘don’t charge nothin”, they insist that Sarah destroy her body too, in order to share in their pretend freedom. They can’t understand their own violence, and their answer to oppression is escapism:
The fireys are the doofuses who believe you can create your own paradise within the system by just ignoring all of life’s problems. Saying, ‘You don’t need two ears!’ is to say that even possession of your own body is luxurious, a sign that the pseudo-asceticism of the Fireys is practically suicidal.
The hoarders in the junk yard are pretty obvious. Their thing is empty commodity collection, trying to fool Sarah in to believing that possessions provide intrinsic meaning and belonging. They dwell in a literal garbage heap, yet the one on screen is still shocked when Sarah refers to possessions as junk. We see the theme of forgetting one’s identity and purpose here again, as Sarah is still struggling to remember why she’s in the labyrinth. First it was the poison of consumption, then the spectacle, now commodities as identity.
Ah yes, that stupid worm that made it on to all of the T-shirts. Why, if it isn’t the obtuse middle class liberal who can’t even understand your problems? The worm is the first to say that no thing in the labyrinth can be taken for granted, admits that he can’t navigate it, and yet seems to take for granted his own ease of access (can see through the optical illusion of the walls despite being ‘just a worm’). The worm immediately trivializes this assistance by offering his family’s hospitality, and has no idea that Sarah literally can’t accept the invitation, even if she wanted to (she can’t fit through the entrance to the worm’s home = his cozy life style is inaccessible to her). Finally, the worm assumes Sarah wouldn’t want to find the castle, so misguides her, assuming the poor should have no interest in politics. The worm, the friendly gate-keeper that will assume he knows what’s best for you and then lead you away from your needs.
Now the Bog of Eternal Stench. The king’s worst punishment is ostracism, smelling so bad that no one will ever want to be around you for the rest of your life. Even Hoggle, who when threatened with the bog is still trying to present a solitary nature, is horrified by this. The Bog is the threat of further alienation when you reject the status quo, the fear of being alone and the shame of it all.
Sarah continually complains that things aren’t fair, and Jareth isn’t the only one who mocks her for it, as though it’s foolishly utopian to expect fairness. Never is Sarah even able to articulate why fairness is some thing realistic or some thing to strive for, because the aesthetic of capitalist realism is too strong. This is just the way it is, and you only value fairness because you are a child. But more than fairness, in the end it’s companionship that Sarah values most. It is no longer fantasy that she longs for, or escape, but friendship and more specifically social support: ‘If you need us.’ And it’s not just her friends that answer her call, but all sorts of goblins appear, including the King’s soldiers. Sarah’s new social values unite the people, and the Goblin King is left alone, isolated and invisible in his antisocial selfishness, left with only the power to fly away in to the night and be forgotten.
Fuck the ruling class. Workers of the world unite! DANCE, MAGIC, DANCE!