Politics and Perspective
Society and Subjectivity
There seems to be this historical notion that in order for society to function and people to get along, that we need a fairly monolithic belief system, yet perspective is subjective. When you look at something close up, versus from far away, the effects are two very different frames. Everyone has their point of view and personal history. Which is the basis of human civilization, our ability to collect, combine and try to make sense of all this knowledge, within that presumably singular framework.
The reality is that there no ultimately objective point of view, no omniscient omniscience. A spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. Simply that we are aware. Knowledge is emergent and evolving. It is just that only the more static patterns can be easily analyzed and communicated, so what is collectively known, is seemingly stable.
Knowledge is as much, if not more, a function of limiting information, as including it, since the amount of available information is many orders of magnitude greater than what we can absorb. Like leaving the shutter on a camera open, it all starts to cancel out quickly.
So not only do we limit the information, extracting signal from the noise, but information is itself a function of contrasts, ie. differences. If everything is the same, color, sound, texture, temperature, there is no information.
Since society has this presumption of knowledge as that larger objective reality, we don’t appreciate the consequences of the fact each of us can only have this unique, particular, extremely finite vision, so political conflicts will develop, since contrasting viewpoints are seen as erroneous, or at least, more biased than our own, rather than consequences of how our knowledge functions. Then they polarize into opposing camps, as the social implications of conflict cause sides to gather and any effort to tease out nuance and complexity is shunned as being faithless to the cause. Whichever side that might be.
Basic black and white is a much more distinct contrast, than all those confusing colors and shades of grey.
Neither side can prevail, in any absolute sense, as the situation will simply fluctuate back and forth, as each side puts their energy into a particular strategy and carries it as far as possible, until the other side gathers enough strength in whatever weaknesses are left open. The fact is that, like two sides of a coin, neither can exist, without the other.
While we have current cultural assumptions regarding conservative and liberal, every society that ever existed has had those enforcing the norms and conventions and those seeking to transcend them. It is as basic as desire and judgement. The heart and the head.
The fact is that we can’t have everything we want and neither can society, so there are systems that evolve, fair or not, which establish those norms and conventions. The more effective, resilient and flexible ones tend to outlast the more inefficient, unstable and brittle ones. Like everything else, none last forever, because they do settle into inflexible habits and corrupted processes, that don’t adapt to changing circumstances. Similar to how our minds and bodies age.
Humanity has been going forth and multiplying for a hundred thousand+ years and we are just now reaching the edge of the global petri dish. As this momentum turns inward, it does start cannibalizing its own societies and not just consuming the earth’s resources and fighting between tribes/nations.
Might this be a good time to actually sit back and try figuring out what is going on, rather than just finding an appropriate scapegoat? Do we really want to suffer the same fate as the bacteria, on reaching the edge of their petri dish?
We might be linear, goal oriented creatures, but we do live in a cyclical, reciprocal, circular, feedback driven reality. We can’t always be going up and the consequence of trying to do so is that much bigger a fall off the other side.
Our finely tuned ability to distill signal from the noise has switched from positive to negative feedback, as we spiral into self re-enforcing cocoons of consuming anything that immediately feeds our various appetites. We can have our cake and eat it too, when there are factories churning out endless cakes. No one ever grew rich and powerful by promoting restraint, so our freedom of action has been distilled down to the freedom to consume and we worship at that totem of consumption, money.
The tool that enables markets to function, has become their god.
The problem is that when we curse the gods, we will be ostracized by the community, so no one can question the religion, but if we break the tools enabling society, it will collapse and we will starve. The engines of production break apart.
So every problem society encounters, is solved with a sugar rush of fresh money being injected into the system. Even though it keeps taking more, to ever more limited effect.
Since those controlling the medium of exchange have effective control over society, politics is increasingly a theater of the absurd, as increasingly meaningless gestures to the various constituencies only prevail to the extent they serve the desires of those running the system.
While the country is consumed by this current political drama, whichever side wins, the same solution, more money, will be used for the compounding problems.
With alcoholics, this is known as “hair of the dog(that bit me).”
The fact is that money is a contract, between the individual and the community, not a commodity to mine from society. It is a public utility and we better learn to accept that. It’s not our own picture on it. We don’t personally hold the copyrights and are not individually responsible for sustaining its value.
As a medium of exchange, its functionality is in its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies.
As such, it is an accounting device, in which the asset is backed by a debt. Even gold backed currencies are the receipt, not the gold.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, though a medium circulates, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can figure it out, but economists are subjects of the system, not objective observers.
When we try treating it as a store of value, similar amounts of debt have to be generated, to back the assets. Which is why our national religion requires an economy largely designed to generate debt, through obsessive consumption, not work toward a healthy society.
Squeezing the money flowing through the general economy causes it to turn to debt, drawing that saved money back into circulation. Which creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of the community, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Since banking and money serve as the value circulation mechanism of the social organism, this is analogous to the heart telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
The Ancients used debt jubilees to reset this process, but the modern world has had several centuries of geographic expansion, colonial extraction and technological advancement, to stay head of this wave and continue to maintain fairly stable societies.
The other primary method of generating debt is having the government as debtor of last resort. Rather than drawing out surplus money through taxation, it is borrowed out. Generally then spent in ways that further enhance those with surplus money, compounding the positive feedback, rather than strengthening the larger society. Even our system of social welfare treats the recipients as a passthrough, with the money rapidly collecting in the corporate coffers of ConAgra and Walmart, rather than finding ways to develop healthy, self sustaining communities.
The evident fact is that the financial markets could not even imagine functioning, without the government borrowing up trillions in surplus investment money, providing public debt as the bedrock of presumed secure investment. The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
That we can have an enormously expensive and inefficient military, along with the various wars our presumed leaders chose to engage in, are logically driven by this need to spend some of that surplus money, so more can be borrowed. Consider it doesn’t take much knowledge of world history to know such levels of military waste would not normally be tolerated, along with mostly positive consequences for those making the decisions, if there wasn’t some ulterior motive.
The consequence is that our military industrial complex has become the functional equivalent of an autoimmune disorder.
The logical next step for the current system will be to focus disaster capitalism/predatory lending back on the United States, as its ability to issue ever more debt starts to stall. Then those sitting on the largest piles of public debt will use their influence to trade it for remaining public assets, like mineral and water rights, highways, national parks, etc. Essentially privatizing everything. Then we will have real oligarchy, not just this behind the curtain variety.
Though even that will run its course, as people eventually become inured to fear.
There simply is not the investment potential to individually save the amounts necessary, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so when this enormous ponzi scheme eventually does implode, the concept of the commons will have to be resurrected, as a way to store value in the community and the environment, not just treat them as resources to be mined.
Which is not socialism, as society does need both private and public assets, like a house has personal and family spaces. It is more a matter of recognizing what do function as public utilities, even if they originated as individuals finding and filling needs for the larger community.
There was a time when the executive and regulatory function of government was private, institutionalized as monarchy, but as kings lost sight of that larger social function and misused their methods of control, they were usurped. Now banking appears to be having its own, “Let them eat cake” moment.
Not that banking can be a direct function of government, any more than the head and heart are one, since politicians live and die on the hope they inspire and the enthusiasm of the society this encourages, so the printing of excess money is a sugar high, that has to be regulated for longer time frames, than that of political careers.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is that the resulting atomized society is more easily manipulated by those institutional authorities and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks, organic, social, economic, matter as much as the nodes inhabiting them.
We are just leaves on the tree. That dimple in the middle of your stomach is where you were connected. Learn to deal with being human. Curiosity is the best guide. That is how we grow, not assuming this increasingly brittle status quo will willingly usher in a better world.
The future we have been borrowing against, has arrived.
