May 2. The devaluation of everything: The perils of panflation. It's not about prices getting higher, but about language and culture getting distorted by the desire for things to appear better and better. So women's clothing sizes are four inches bigger than they used to be, academic work that used to get a C now gets an A, the cheapest room in a hotel is called "deluxe", the smallest pizzas and coffees are called "regular", airline "miles" have no relation to actual miles, and so on.
This comes down to the same thing as an article I posted a month ago about signal spoofing, and I think this is a bigger threat to civilization than peak oil or climate change. Those will cause pain and force adaptation, while the overall system muddles through. But a ratcheting distortion of language cannot be reset by anything less than total cultural collapse. It's easier to burn down every school in the world, than for one school to change its name from "university" back to "college". And the farther our language veers off from reality, the more we will despise our own society and wish for it to collapse.
May 4. The Jet That Ate the Pentagon. The F-35 is designed to do everything, and the result is that it's obscenely expensive and does everything badly. The article concludes that "the problems, integral to the design, cannot be fixed without starting from a clean sheet of paper." Does this remind you of anything else? This is one more example of what seems to be a universal cycle: systems get more and more complex, until the costs of complexity so overwhelm the benefits that the system can be made both cheaper and more effective by a radical simplification. The challenge, in human society, is to achieve this simplification without causing so much trauma that life is nasty for generations.
Related new Archdruid post: Democracy's Arc. Greer describes a cycle, observed as far back as ancient Greece, where a dictatorship turns into rule by a small group, and then a larger and larger group, and finally a democracy, which gets bogged down by complexity and factionalism, until people are ready for a dictator to come in and wipe the slate clean:
Glance back over American history and it's hard to miss the pattern, repeating over a period that runs roughly seventy to eighty years. The dictator-figures were George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, each of whom overturned existing structures in order to consolidate their power, and did so with scant regard for existing law. The juntas were the old Whigs, the Republicans, and the New Deal Democrats, each of them representatives of a single social class; they were overthrown in turn by Jacksonian populism, the Progressive movement, and the complex social convulsions of the Sixties, each of which diffused power across a broader section of the citizenry. The first cycle ended in stalemate over the issue of slavery; the second ended in a comparable stalemate over finding an effective response to the Great Depression; the third -- well, that's where we are right now.
May 9. Anne has some important thoughts on dropping out:
Recently I had an odd experience staying with some friends in a nearby suburb. These are folks I love dearly, they eat similar stuff to what I eat, read similar stuff, get similar cultural references... but unlike me, they never went through an outsider subculture, and in their world, everything is available by commercial transaction. You get food from a store; you get fit by joining a gym; you get smart by going to school. Its hard for me to remember that people live like this, but they do.
The fact is, commercial relationships are corrosive. Do you really expect comfort and a sense of being cared about from spilling your guts to the twenty-five year old bartender at Chili's? So after a while, people become obsessed by two delusions. First, that if the good life is out there, it must be something you buy, and it must cost a lot because you can't afford it right now. And second, that all these people you only interact with in ritualized commercial ways are something you can't wait to leave behind.
What I notice most about the Thoreaus or the Suelos is how assiduously they maintain non-commercial social connections, and what I notice about the internet discussions where people plan to buy their way off the treadmill, is how much they look forward to spending a butt-ton of money and never having to talk to anyone again.
This reminds me of something I read years ago in a zine. The author was traveling around dressed in anarchist punk clothing, and someone asked her why she was dressed that way. She said, if I dress like this, I can go up to other people who are dressed like this, and they're likely to help me out with food and a place to stay. But if I'm dressed conventionally, and talk to other people dressed conventionally, there's almost no chance they'll help me out.
As I think more about commercial vs non-commercial relationships, suddenly I understand why I haven't done anything to monetize this blog. It's not that I think money is evil and I want to stay pure. In this society, both the commercial and the social are necessary. Some things are much easier to get with money, and other things are much easier to get through friends. But when the commercial and social get blurred together, it makes people confused and insane. If I demand payment, are you my friends or my customers? If I sell ads, then every time I make a post, part of me will be asking how it will effect my income.
My philosophy is, with any particular decision, make up your mind if you're going for money or love, and go all out. If there ends up being some of both, that's great, as long as one or the other is one hundred percent. One example of half-assed blurring of money and love is socially conscious investing. You want to believe you're making money doing good, but there's a risk you'll end up losing money serving the lesser of two evils. A reader thought I was trolling yesterday when I mentioned investing in Monsanto as an alternative to having a job. That was an extreme example, and I have no idea if Monsanto is actually a good investment. But the point is, when you go into the money universe, jump in with both feet and make damn sure you're making good money. Then if you want to save the world, do it in your own neighborhood, among your own friends, with your own hands.
May 11. The new Ribbonfarm post, Welcome to the Future Nauseous, is almost too heavy for my brain to lift, with sentences like "The future is a stream of bug reports in the normalcy-maintenance software that keeps getting patched, maintaining a hackstable present Field." The general idea is that technology is constrained by the human need to not feel too many changes. So futurists are excited about technologies that will cause radical changes in human behavior and consciousness, but in practice, there is a "Field" of human consciousness that will reject any technology that brings too much change, or will "normalize" it, so that even if it's radical, it doesn't feel radical. This reminds me of the first line of M.T. Anderson's novel Feed: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck." Venkat mentions how jet airline travel feels about the same as riding on a boat, and how Facebook channels incomprehensible technology into something that we can make sense of as an upgraded school yearbook.
So that's human consciousness at the leading edge of technology, and here's something about the trailing edge: two Edge of Grace posts from a few months back, Gnosis and Primitivism and Book Review: The Mystical State. The idea in both is that when we learn primitive skills, or idealize a return to the stone age, we think we're seeking a change in technology, when really we're seeking a change in consciousness.
Beyond this point, it's easier for me to do my own thinking than figure out someone else's -- especially if it's Ken Wilber. So I would say that what we're seeking, both in high tech and low tech, both in sci-fi and fantasy, is to break out of a set of mental habits that are usually called "rationalism" or "western thought". These habits include but are not limited to: 1) the boundaries between self and other, internal and external, mind and body; 2) objective truth, where we imagine a master reality that exists independent of observation, and which we should all see the same way; 3) philosophical materialism, in which physical matter and energy are fundamental, and consciousness is something that emerges from them. As we break out of these habits, we begin to see all of reality as having the structure of a dream, where it doesn't even make sense to ask about a tree falling with no observer, where nothing is an object and everything is an experiencing perspective, where we don't have to see things the same way until we force it by comparing notes.
Now, if I'm sounding New Agey, it's because the New Age movement is itself an attempt to normalize this change in consciousness. But I'm wondering, is the change being slowed to maintain stability, or is it being blocked? Isn't western metaphysics stronger now than ever? I like to think that we're in the final tightness before a great mass awakening. At the end of the Ribbonfarm post, Venkat says that the pace of technological change is getting too fast for the normalcy field to keep up, and we're plunging into an age of "psychic chaos", which sounds to me like fun! But I recognize these as apocalyptic fantasies. We are always in the middle of history, the normalcy fields will keep muddling along, and the exit door is always open, but you have to walk through on your own feet.