evaporating the kiloton–political motivations

there was an international relations class i was taking that had the most ridiculous theories to it–by the time we reach ~psychology or anthropology, we are approaching the absolute limits of a scientific method and attitude. when this attitude is thrown all the way to politics, one of the most chaotic functions imaginable, the results are bizarre. there were three main theories, which they purported to compete with one another, everyone filling journals up arguing over who was right, that basically went like this:

1. realism- states want power and use militaries
2. neoliberal institutionalism- international organizations share wealth and determine policies
3. constructivism- ideas and values shape societies

these were supposed to be competing ideas. theory is an attempt to simplify a set of phenomena to make it more manageable in some sense of that word or another–you make yourself a little more stupid so you can get a certain job done. but don’t let the medicine become the disease! intellectuals often get lost in their self-induced stupidity, which leads to saying silly, silly things like either states look to maximize their power or multinational organizations shape the societal landscape. the two clearly don’t exclude each other. that makes no sense.

anyway, what would my groundwork theory in understanding politics be? i think most helpful would be a recognition of what engages us (or should engage us) with politics in the first place–that the world is filled with much, much suffering. this would be something akin to the ‘first noble truth’ theory of international relations. human beings are cruel to one another. if we weren’t, there’d be no need to discuss politics. people must be saved from themselves and from other people and also from the people doing the saving in the first place! this knapsack of concerns is only filled because men and women are not kind to their brothers and sisters. a kind world would organize itself spontaneously and without trouble–thus without much deliberation. thinking is the pebble in the shoe–debating happens when something gets jammed up somewhere. when we encounter a political event, instead of first approaching it as “where will the state act to maximize its power in this situation?” we should ask “how is the 20 billion kiloton mass of suffering in our world affected by this development?”

so for instance communism and capitalism. slajov zizek, in his book ‘violence,’ reminds us that there is more to evil than isolated acts that appear before a background of stability and neutral, fair living. there is also a systemic violence that exists like an all-white background of a picture, unnoticed because we pay attention to the foreground. communism was not fascism, as vicious as their police states both were. the former was motivated by a desire to change a systemic violence, the violence of having and having-not, which appears so natural in our country but is still a measurable kiloton worthy of being addressed. their attempts to enforce society, a messy, messy thing, to adopt the policies it thought would evaporate the kiloton were like shipping a parcel of water in the mail–too fluid and malleable to be brought into the kind of order necessary for a state-controlled redistribution of wealth. the tools were not fit well for the goal and so suffering was increased as a police state had to be instituted to ensure the desired reforms could take place, and we were left with a failure in suffering-alleviation. capitalism offers us a lack of foreground violence–things are much more stable because competition for resources is a much more natural mindset of a human than collectivizing oneself into a larger whole of the People so that all may be equal and free. so the first things we notice are not secret police and dictatorships. but behind it is a world where a person born into a poor lot finds himself helpless, his story untold in the foreground-reporting of our culture. both systems circulate their suffering but one appears in execution, another in ideology, one in the foreground and another in back.

expedient means

a facebook friend of mine’s bubble-box of personal info says, ”the soul should always stand ajar/waiting to welcome the ecstatic experience.’-emily dickinson’.

a while later, driving, i wondered to myself–”how do i make my soul stand ajar?” i really wanted to know.

this is called ‘taking things too seriously.’ you bore down into your content of mind like a mean drill, spinning and entering downwards into helpless rock. but you don’t find the gem inside the rock. so you throw the drill at something else, always drilling, drilling, drilling.

you don’t need to do anything at all. but this drill still wants to attack, needs a gem. wrong talk, send him to the gallows.

a light touch is necessary. don’t rage against the dying of your thoughts. lucifer stands proud where too much thinking is.

a proposal to change timekeeping

november 7, 10,010 A.T.

what does the sentence “the year is 2010″ mean? what does the number 2010 do to help us understand what time it is? it is 2010 years after a religious leader was supposedly born, and for most people i doubt this event in world history is so important it is used to contextualize their present actions.

but think about how one treats BC and AD times differently. there is the tacit assumption that AD represents something more modern, something in its early numbers medieval, something ‘common’, while BC times are all ancient and pagan and a host of other things. it makes studying history a real pain in the hindparts sometimes, having to remember that 200 BC is a later time than 300 BC, remembering that they are both before 0 AD, so on and so forth. it is like trying to count numbers in some other way than base 10–taxing on the mind, and in this case needlessly so.

remembering that numbering days and years is a tool meant to help us organize perceptions, i think the tool would be more helpful if it started around the time when the idea to keep track of these things, to write stuff down and calculate and conceptualize the past as something tangible first took root. one might be tempted to start the count when thucydides first wrote his history, since it is the first time ‘history’ as such occurred (or the first time historians told us so). but that isn’t a round number, and for big events we need numbers that are more guesstimations–no one says the dinosaurs lived 365,678,498 years ago. it’s needless complexity. so how about when it first became possible to keep track of history? that is, when we first had the time and energy to dedicate ourselves to these things, with simpler tasks like obtaining food no longer constantly pressing us into action?

agriculture began around 10,000 years ago–a perfectly round number¹. there are a few advantages to using this as the new way of keeping time:

1. no needless cognitive dissonance between times on the cusp between BC and AD
2. no lame calculations or backwards mathematics in talking about BC times
3. better contextualization–a feel for how long history is and how long(er) humans have been around; we have been doing this for a LONG TIME
4. a more important historical event to mark the era; also easier because any time before 10,000 years ago will not be recorded in specificity, only guesstimates, so that all is precision with our timekeeping.

since tens-of-years are at an irrelevant level of precision when it comes to the emergence of agriculture, we can retain our usual ones, so that our time in A.T. (agriculture time or w/e) would be 10,010 and we wouldn’t have any trouble adjusting. (this would be especially useful in the study of history, especially early history. the ancient sumerians lived from around 5,000-4,000 A.T. alexander the great conquered much of persia around 7,700 A.T. the united states was founded in 9,776 A.T.) understanding our anthropological roots and the history of human evolution is critical to knowing our place in the world, and cultural artifacts can either aid or hinder our understanding in this respect. it is our decision.

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1. obtained from officially the coolest thing ever, new scientist’s ‘becoming human’ flash timeline.
also, after browsing around there you should listen to this song:

on a quiet night

this same chair in this same spot on this same back porch has kept me company in thinking for almost 3 1/2 years, a choral accompaniment playing softly in the background of my cognition; cigarette in right hand, ashtray on right hand side–days so hot they’d melt the skin off a pig’s back, so cold i have to wear two socks and a snuggie. three am, nine am, every time a human being can be conscious. i put my feet up on the sill of the screen, and to the right of them there are two statues of buddha: one a little green cutesy one i think i stole from some stand at the mall when i was 16, another grown-up and grey version that holds a small candle. little green martian-buddha stares at me, his mischievous eyes purring like a cat, his hands in gassho. grown-up buddha sits facing my 3:00, in an absorbed samadhi that probably has nothing to do with me, teaching me humility in this place where like no other on earth i am living inside my own mind.

i have went crazy on this back porch, have held my head in my hands and shouted things at myself. i have watched my dad shoot airsoft guns at the next door neighbors’ yipping dogs. i have eaten breakfast, lunch and dinner. i have written poems and essays and also have written nothing and worried over it. i have thought my way to the great big answer to everything, thought my way out of it, thought my way through it, tried to think my way to it and failed, meditated, thought about girls and parties and replayed social situations in my head, tweaking them with new witticisms. this back porch has been a good, good friend.

today is not a special day and my back porch knows it. i am up to nothing special. but funny–when you notice things, even when they aren’t special, there’s still something kind of beautiful in them.

sorry

Have you ever noticed that when people apologize, a lot of the time they are apologizing to themselves and not the ones they’ve hurt? They are not apologizing for some slight or inconvenience they’ve put onto another person–their apology does not mean they wish what they did didn’t happen so their companion would not have been injured. They apologize because they’ve recognized their companion has lost some amount of respect for them, and out of fear of such a thing they need to let him know they’re sorry. They’re sorry for themselves.

saving the world and leaving it be

chess night was 15 miles north and took a lengthy trip up 95 to get there. i was leaning against the kitchen counter with my hands stuck in my hair telling my mom i couldn’t go. a waste of gas. gas! how is ecological catastrophe supposed to be avoided when i, one of that .001% that knows the direness of the situation, still even drives a car?

she laughed–at me, which my mom never does–and told me i was taking all of this way too seriously.

i couldn’t understand what she meant. at work the next day i’d be sure to turn the lights out in the employee office whenever i saw no one was in there, which made the other summer camp counselors wonder who ‘the light fairy’ was and express their frustration over this change in their environment. i found no humor in the epithet and only contempt for their grumblings. i was in the incorrigible funk that comes from Trying To Save the World. it was trouble for everyone involved.

the evidence should’ve been staring me in the face; i was addicted to a blog named how to save the world that, despite the absolutely heroic efforts of its author, couldn’t accomplish its aim even with a phD’s worth of learning on the subject and complete existential dedication. skipping a couple months of chess night, still december came and christmas eve was as balmy as a san diego spring. what could i do? nothing was not an option.

until it became clear to me that there weren’t any options–there really is, contrary to elementary school motivational posters, nothing a single person can meaningfully do to impact a worldwide anthropological event. a bird cannot will its species wingless. this plus the realization that problems must be handled as they came up–and not as giant matrices of sub-sectioned complexities–finally let some steam out of that giant pressure cooker known as “what can i do to stop the world from ending?”

the fried egg of social acceptability

ok, it breaks down like this.

first you are at the center of the yolk, a frightened individual, uncomfortable with yourself. around people you are worried that to speak your mind you will become ostracized and no one will like you.

you are at the center of the yolk. it is an uncomfortable place. you are trapped within yourself. it is a terrible way to live. and because it is so terrible, you decide something must change, so you move outside of the yolk a little bit. magnificent! to your utter amazement, people like someone who acts however they want to act with no concern for what everyone else expects of them. it’s kind of nice.

now you’re on a roll. things are moving much smoother. to your utter amazement, you become half an extrovert! people think you’re super cool. and how strange that you accomplish this by rejecting all expectations of cool behavior! by this point you’ve hit the sweet spot, where you live as far away from nervous withdrawal into yourself as you possibly can while still staying respectable. this is what people closer to the yolk’s center want to be. you’re the (Wo)Man.

by now you are addicted to this wonderful game of radical self-acceptance. ‘oh lord,’ you say, ‘i never knew it was possible to behave however the hell i want. i thought it would make everyone leery of me, but instead not only am i enjoying my own company more, but others are too. i’m gonna keep riding this out.’

but now you are in danger, because there’s a limit to how far a yolk-dweller can stray from the center. there are still rules to social intercourse even if the rules are best followed when stretched a little bit, just like lawyers perform best when they can twist the laws to their liking. but a lawyer can’t commit a crime or endorse something obviously against the law. when you stray too far from normal behavior, everyone huddling together in the yolk has to strain their eyes to see you. you’re too strange for them by now. you have broken the yolk and your self-acceptance reverses its fortunes.

the yolk is broken because at this point being yourself already implies that you break conventions, thus unsettling those who find comfort in playing by the rules. rules can be stretched but not broken. the lawyer tells everyone, ‘hey, fuck it. the drug war is failing and a kid has the right to smoke weed if he wants to.’ now you’re just flat-out crazy. here is where the real test begins, because you must rely only on that intrinsic reward of being yourself, that feeling of peace. no carrot on a string. the monkey does not get the banana. no treats for you. prepare to lose your friends and save your soul.