Peeling Away the Layers of Performative Social Mania
There are angels and assholes in all creeds and colors. The trick is to understand the roles they play.
My first effort was to look to philosophy. Yet it seemed much of what is considered professional, academic philosophy is every bit as muddled and obscure as the surface factors it presumed to explain.
The next step was physics. Now even its practitioners would describe the field as obscure and difficult, but given our modern technological world, at least it would have to give me some insight into the reality.
What I’ve come to realize is even modern theoretical physics has its own conceptual flaws.
The most important and informative error is how time is conceived.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.
While this might seem obvious, pointing it out can get you banned from some physics sites and ignored on the rest.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. That culture is about synchronizing the group into a larger social organism, using the same languages, rules, measures, it might seem like there should be some universal, Newtonian flow of time, but it’s rabbit time, turtle time, etc. Nature is so diverse and yet integrated because everything doesn’t march to the beat of the same drummer. It’s multicultural, not monocultural.
Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is a second order effect and not the cyclical rhythms usually measured as time.
Energy is “conserved,” because it manifests this presence, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, which are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought, but we don’t assume them to be extensions of space.
So energy, as this presence, goes past to future, because the patterns it generates coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Potential to residual. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though the digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information.
Which would explain why current efforts to understand physical reality tend to focus on the information that can be extracted from it, assuming the forces driving it are synonymous with the information projected.
Yet they go opposite directions of time. This is foundational to our reality. Consider a movie, where the projector light goes from one frame to the next, past to future, while the frames are flashed on the screen for a moment, future to past.
Galaxies are a cosmic convection cycle, of energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
This foundational binary really is the elephant in the room. There are various dualistic aspects to culture and philosophy, but, especially in the West, it tends toward a monolithic paradigm.
Monotheism would be the most significant example, yet consider democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. To the Ancients monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.
Ancient Greek religion originated around fertility rites. The young god born in the spring, of the old sky god and the earth mother. Yet by the time of Classical Greece, it had hardened into stone, as Zeus didn’t give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over rebirth and renewal.
So the story of Jesus, crucified and risen, filled the need for the cycling, the young replacing the old.
Yet by the time of Constantine, it had become set and established, with the Jewish monotheism predominating over the pagan Trinity. As the Roman Empire was finally solidifying out of the ashes of the Republic, by adopting Christianity as the state religion, it served to validate rule from above. The Big Guy Rules.
Logically though, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the narrative projected. As Emerson said, “We are but thickened light.”
Ideals are not absolutes. An absolute is a universal state, therefore no divisions, distinctions, qualifications, categories, etc. While an ideal is very much a standard. The perfect form, flawless, above the messiness of reality.
Consider the implications of conflating these two concepts. Given there are multitudes of forms to reality, if every such ideal was held above the rest, the effect would be endless conflict, between the fanatics of every faction.
Knowledge is a function of perspective. An objective point of view is an oxymoron. The signals we extract from the noise are our point of view and our knowledge. If we tried extracting all the information, it would revert back to noise.
Knowledge is information. Wisdom is in the editing.
Obviously there have always conflicts in history and the evolution of society, but these were relative to the situations involved. Now every ideology has to claim universality. Just look at the premises driving the various factions in our current culture wars, where the quest for supremacy ignores even the most evident factors arising from actual reality.
Morality is not absolute, given its evident scarcity, while the subjective is dismissed as relativistically amoral.
To culture, good and bad are some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, while in nature, it’s the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience. What’s good for the fox, is bad for the chicken. That’s because it’s the function of culture to synchronize society as one larger communal organism. Which is why the moral dictates often only really apply to the in group. Real morality is learned the hard way. Karma. The Golden Rule. What goes round, come round.
The basic division of conservative and liberal goes to that underlaying dichotomy, between the energies of life pushing out, versus the traditions and structures holding society together. Yet in our current worldview, we can’t see them as two sides of the same coin, only that our side is on the path to nirvana and the other side are misbegotten fools.
Synchronization is balanced by harmonization. Energy radiating out across the field, as form coalesces into structure. Nodes and networks. Organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.
Currently the Western Eurocentric world is spiraling into one enormous hegemonic vortex. Any skeptical voices are canceled, as the cultural and social immune system kicks them out. To the point of a societal autoimmune disorder.
While the initial driving positive feedback of this hegemonic dynamic has crested after a few centuries, now the negative feedback is pulling it back down.
The rest of the world is organically reacting, as a network of nations, harmonizing their efforts in an ecosystem.
Government, as executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system, pulling society together and organizing it. While money and banking serve as blood and the circulation system, distributing value around the community and harmonizing it.
When these two elements are in reasonable balance, the effect is a healthy, coherent, organized society. In theory. Though Michael Hudson wrote a book some years ago, about the collapse of the Ancient world, in which he observed that debt jubilees developed as a circuit breaker to the feedback loop of compound interest sucking all wealth out of the larger society, leaving it vulnerable to outside predations. Thus requiring this check on the accumulation of wealth.
Now the current situation of having public government and private banking gives the financial sector the upper hand, as they don’t have to work around election cycles, nor have as much oversight. Consequently the financial sector has gained effective control over the political system and the actors, flunkies and hustlers allowed to fill the roles really only have one job, to create as much public debt as possible, in order for the banks to function.
As these linear, goal oriented creatures, in a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people tend to see money as a commodity to mine from society, while it functions as a social contract, enabling society. We see it as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate.
Contrary to current economic theory, that money is both medium of exchange and store of value, a medium and a store are different functions. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. A road is a medium, a parking lot is a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can figure out the difference, but economists are educated otherwise.
As a medium, we own money like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies.
As money is pulled from circulation and theoretically stored, more has to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted have to be devised. The exchange mechanism of the economy has been turned into a casino, where much of it is suspended in networks of wagers, creating enormous distortions in the effective functioning of the economy.
In order to store the asset side of the ledger, a debt has to be generated to back it. Which is where all that public debt comes in quite handy. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
The Federal debt has been growing steadily since the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well. Then World War 2 came along as the greatest public works project in history and the die was cast.
In essence, the military industrial complex is the trophy wife of the banks. It soaks up all that debt derived cash, serves as an industrial and public works project that doesn’t empower anyone who might question the conceptual premises of effective rule by the wealthy and gives a patriotic and national cover to their economic depredations.
Unfortunately though, effective decision making is the role of government, so hollowing it out, in service to economic growth and the wealth extraction built on it, creates a process without any overall vision. The growth dynamic alone has the strategic aptitude of bacteria racing across a petri dish. So the primary function of the over priced military and resulting wars are a burn pit for the debt, so more can be borrowed into existence. Thus the total military ineptitude.
That our political class has devolved from stage actors to sociopaths is a consequence of the lack of real authority to guide principle, but possessing lots of weapons. Basically children with matches.
Donald Trump has proved to be the Great White Whale of these moral prostitutes, because he is every bit as much the hustler, but devoid of the pretense. As no one of any moral authority would have soul their soul, in order to be allowed in the club, it has taken the deranged clown to show them up. Now the best they can patch that large hole in the center with, is an apparent zombie, who could never make the cut when he was sentient.
The question now, is whether we continue that slide into nuclear war, or do those pulling the strings realize it would blow up the remaining system of laws, on which their control is based.
It certainly seems this slide into nuclear Armageddon looks inevitable, yet this dynamic has had no trouble casting aside the various crazies and goons they funded, Al Qaeda, ISIS, likely soon the Ukrainian pawns (one Patriot battery??!!). Would those actually feeding this fire with the funds to power it, turn on the monsters they created, the Neo-Cons? If so, we will probably see hints of it, as the Republicans take control of the House.
Though the Monster might be bigger than Dr. Frankenstein.
The fact is that there isn’t the investment potential for everyone to save individually, but we all save for many of the same purposes, so a functioning society has to accept some degree of public commons. First and foremost, to realize that banking has to be every bit as much a public utility as government. Otherwise we have to go back to some form of private government, as Russia and China have done, with Putin and Xi.
If the medium enabling the markets is privately held, we are all just tenant farmers to the banks.
As it is, the only real danger to our current system are those running it. The banks are having their own, “Let them eat cake.” moment.
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This is an interesting read metaphorically written on the ebb flow of metaphysics applied to the social paradigm. I always found it ironic that those who demand tolerance seem to be the most intolerant of others. Hopefully society will find a harmonic homeostasis before it self-destructs.
Very interesting and thought-provoking overview of our current state. Your discussion on time reminded me of another interesting take on time by Phillip Zimbardo, "The Time Paradox." The focus is different but nevertheless fascinating stuff.
I once knew a John Merryman some years ago. I think it must be a distance relative, perhaps.