Ok, I think I've got it... · 6 October 2008

What is the relationship of authoritarianism and intimacy?

This was the question I was trying to find. Questioning patriarchy isn’t a demand for gender-bending. People express their genders in so many different ways. It’s great! This has to do with personal history; and it has to do with your hormonal profile (seriously, this is fascinating: variations in hormone levels and intimate self-expression.) The energy in my self-expression is more dopamine than anything, equal parts serotonin and testosterone, and kind of low on the estrogen. And I wear high heels and, as they say, lipstick. Anyway. Gender is beautiful.

What I’m bringing to light is this very difficult, basically unseen masculine domination. I’m only doing this because I’m trying to understand a very wise teacher’s insight that yoga is going nowhere as long as it remains patriarchal. It’s pretty interesting, knowing me, that I’ve left this topic alone until now… but that’s why patriarchy continues. We’d rather not bother.

It’s like the editors of Ashtanga News, when I wrote to them about this mind-blowing article exactly a year ago. I asked, privately, why in the world they’d post something so old-school patriarchal and they said “we were just repeating what the previous woman had posted.” Yes. Exactly. This is how masculine domination gets legitimated! It’s passed on as if it’s just great and something to celebrate, and the non-critique is justified by saying it’s not our responsibility. At the time, I let it go. That is kind of bullishit on my part and all others, now that I think of it. Check out the comments on the post, too. It’s pretty amazing there was no real discussion there—only a few women expressing shreds of angst. Great illustration of the barriers to looking at this but also the fact that it's right here in front of our faces.

MM said that patriarchy is more evident in women teachers in this scene than in men. That’s true to my experience as well. In my experience authoritarianism is women’s effort to claim lineage-based authority—that is, authority within a still fundamentally patriarchal lineage. So in its manner, its still patriarchal. I could go all Pierre Bourdieu to argue this, but I have a sense that people will agree. Authoritarianism is pretty much a patriarchal thing. Yeah?

If practice is more about obedience than about self-exploration, what’s the point again? Reproducing domination seems to me to be a really large barrier to inside-intimacy as well as relational intimacy.

Sorry this is all scattered. My head’s in three places. Thanks for the patience as I try to find some traction on this topic… this blog is not normally such a haphazard scene. But it seems like a really good idea to figure out how to talk about this specifically in the context of ashtanga practice, and given the abysmal starting point here, I’m a bit at a loss for how to begin.

BTW, check out the penultimate post at Budismo e Yoga—in the article on ashtanga, there’s this wonderful discussion under the heading “Dharma en el Corazon.” The author writes that it is a great blessing to be able to use the practices of self-study without having to wrestle with the inherited baggage of a Guru system and the superstitions and self-denials this entails. I wrote to this guy to ask him if I can do a better translation of the article since the auto-translation probably isn’t great, and he said he'd be happy to work on that with me. but he did not write back. I’d go ahead and translate it anyway, but that’s a bit imperialist. A certain meaning is always lost in re-interpretation and I hesitate to take liberties with the author’s native language without his permission. I'll try to work up an English version when I have time.

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Categories: astanga yoga , social theory

Not to belabor the point, · 4 October 2008

Some questions opened in the long comment thread on the previous post.

This is an interesting set of questions, because of the ways they’re NOT interesting. It’s an almost-annoying topic, because it asks for reflection on stuff that’s somehow fun to leave unseen. Also, there’s this sense in me that talking about masculine domination is “whiny.” Ha! Obviously that’s the patriarchy in me trying to talk back. Still, it is good to speak of this forthrightly, not with self-apology and periodical impulses to run away.

I'm not trying to smash patriarchy. I'm saying it's a big, dumb obstacle that misallocates energy.

So if there is energy that I could put in to self-understanding that instead I'm putting in to reproducing and justifying patriarchal relationships and organizations, it's just inefficient. Why not strip away a bit of the clunky, heavy, distracting outdated technology? 

Maybe I’m asking these questions prematurely. Maybe people aren’t ready to think about masculine domination as an historical pattern, and are also afraid that all this will lead to a deconstruction of the basic ideas of masculinity and feminitiy. It’s not like that at all.

Patriarchy is both a way of organizing human activity (hierarchies, exhales, achievement, dominance) and a way of organizing personal, interior lives. Anyway:

Why would masculine domination be a problem in practice--a practical problem? I’m thinking both principles (goal oriented-ness, performance mindset) and politics (who gets/has to take power, who pretends/has to pretend to be needy).

Can there be systematic practice and transmitted lineage (two super useful things!) without patriarchy? (Is the very idea of energetic lineage just a legitimation racket for patriarchy? Shit.)

Is the experience of surrender sometimes—as we experience it—about participating in male-dominance? Can surrender be something else?

How can you learn to get really intimate with your own experience when you’re taught in a patriarchal manner?

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Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Men rule. · 2 October 2008

Could there be any more tension today? In every overheard conversation on campus, a dozen facebook updates, to say nothing of the places online where I round up my news. We’re doing this mass anticipatory schadenfreude, eager for Sarah Palin bite it tonight. Even the Christians are ready for her to get fed to the lions like a good old-time martyr (not kidding—they love it too).

Tease it out: where is about anger that such an incompetent could be put up as a leader? And where is it about latent patriarchy in us? I’m not kidding.

I’ve been thinking about what I’d say to Biden. Basically: DON’T DO ANYTHING, JOE. There’s no soundbite, no smackdown no coup de grace you can issue that’s better than the self-undoings she can issue herself. You’re a cipher for patriarchy, man; just stand there and emit no personality. I don’t care that this is the high point of the noble work you’ve done all your life to get here. Just become nobody, bubble under all the “You, Sarah, are no Hillary Clinton” lines. If you must, emit subtle condescention. Don’t do anything so overtly fatherly that someone can point to it later—just stand there above her inadequacy and don’t do her the compliment of really speaking back to it.

Sometimes I scare myself. I didn't know my own inner sexist shadow was that long. But yes: the winning strategy is pure patriarchy. And we (or, rather, I) want to see this. We want to see how unassailable patriarchy really is. What's not to like about this vision of Sarah standing up against patriarchy and revealing she’s just a little girl from beauty contests?

Fine. Ok. I want her to expose McCain as a corrupt, condescending player—as a man who has no standards for or expectations of women. But it is pretty messed up that to the degree that Biden comes down off the patriarchial pedestal, her loss will diminish. If he actually speaks as a person, rather than standing there and representing male domination, she gets points. If he addresses her as an equal (taking a subject-to-subject stance), she sort of wins because she's garnered some legitimacy. Gut-wrenching illustration of just how much a background of daddy-power is in our politics.

A post-patriarchical strategy is this: nobody gets to rely only on implicit cultural biases about what men and women are supposed to be--the supposed strengths and weakness that patriarchy says follow from genitalia. Biden has to beat her one-to-one. They have to engage each other as subjects, not objects bearing cute little sets of limitations and entitlements.

That's actually a much harder debate for the Dems.

Speaking of standards for women and the limitations of patriarchy, what if there were two tendencies—two patterns in the way we do everything—that make it impossible for the culture of yoga to enable genuinely nondual practice?

What if one of those tendencies were patriarchy? How does patriarchy manifest in individual practice and in styles of practice? How does it keep people away from their own immediate experience? How does it get reproduced? How do women in particular fight against its finally ending? Why are the most patriarchy-addicted women I know yoga practitioners? How are we still addicted to it? How does patriarchy prevent real intimacy between men and women partners? What will it look like when it is gone?

Today for the second time a teacher I respect immensely—the second time a man, because for now it still has to be—told me that the next generation of spiritual—especially yoga—practice has to be led by women or we are fucked. Krishnamurthi said this too. Apparently they also see that subconscious patriarchy is totally in the way of yoga or intimacy with your own experience or intimacy with others.

P.S. I've heard that what I tossed up here this morning was confusing, so I added a few paragraphs. Maybe this makes more sense. I wasn't ranting so much as raising delicate questions in an exasperated way. There's a difference, see? Maybe...

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Categories: evolution

Today · 1 October 2008

Three years ago, I spoke with a wonderful financial historian about all this. She said: let us hope that the US declines gracefully from its place of supreme dominance. Hope it for everyone’s sake.

Well… this is horribly abrupt and traumatic, and it will still be a long time before our mundane, taken-for-granted reality catches up. This vacuum of political power laid on top of a vacuum of market organization is ok, in a sense, because on mental and interpersonal levels things are holding together. We go on reproducing social order through our habits of being, thank god. It’s actually kind of great… the microsocial strength that sustains a whole society amid two phenomenal macrosocial failures.

Barack Obama’s ability to hold back from full-scale demagoguery makes me love him more—those crying for him to show more power and leadership are so very old school. He’s already running the show in his way.

For me, I love to watch the practical nature of the sense-making we’re all doing now. Had the LHC created a black hole last month the physicist would have all looked at each other shaking their heads Oops, tapping around to find where exactly it went wrong. The present crises are in certain ways the same. The levels of technical understanding vary, but even for those who have seen this coming for years, there’s some kind of aporia.

For me, there’s so much going on it’s ridiculous. I’ve been getting my dearest remaining presuppositions undermined to hell, and beautifully, by Mark Whitwell in recent days, and ought to blog about it but feel maybe it’s just too much to lay on you. Also, with what time? There’s none. I’d leechblock everything to stay on target, but the world is too good. Some bits for today in case you missed them and for my own future reference:

George Soros on a better bailout.

Thomas Frank on blame.

V Good Mark Buchanan Op-Ed

Kathy G’s Palintology

Oh, also important: Mohair Gravy.

Happy October. I woke this morning on the other side of about three rabbit holes, and will definitely need some time for these known and unknown revolutions to remake my everydayness.

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Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

Suicide Newscycle · 25 September 2008

I keep wondering what David Foster Wallace would say. With the collapse of the (financial) system and all. Each day is more accursedly interesting, pushes what I thought was the the solid envelope of social dis/order. The boundary between believability and unbelievability is moving. In a sense I am meditating on that boundary, like other times I practice at the edge of mind and body, and still others hypnotize by finding the space that is the meeting of the eyelids or the place the skin meets the air around it.

The question is: how do we believe the unbelievable as it goes down? How do we update the definition of the situation? The movement between belief and disbelief is, I have to admit, partly projection. I’m under hilarious stress at work—stress that feels epic. I see the dread in Nancy Pelosi’s eyes and think I understand.

Really, I wish DFW were here and could see all this, the same way I wish Hildegaard could listen to The Photographer through my ears or Mark Twain could look out of airplane windows from behind my eyes. DFW’s been dead two weeks now and the eulogizing’s done and forgotten. The first long obits appeared within hours (prepared in advance by those reading the signs? I have to wonder) and were bumped down within a day. This is what clickability does. Slashes mourning periods right down to the blip-length of “news.” But I love the way that some people resisted that or even pushed back in to it, turned the internet into an historical repository of memory and place for a new level of shared loss. The comments on the LA Times obit are better to me than any flowers at a grave.

I remember somewhere DFW wrote that Wittgenstein was the most terrifying writer of his century, but also so inspiring because the philosopher concluded that solipsism was for the weak. Did DFW really say that? Maybe I’ve made it up. Because it seems ridiculous—for an autistic genius between the wars, of course solipsism was a problem. For DFW? No, empathy was the problem. Lobsters and all. The few obits I saw wanted to understand DFW’s suicide as the conclusion to some sort of philosophical problem. You know, make it all analytical and conclusive and hold the man to account for his mistaken computations of the problem at hand.

Isn’t this all a bit high-minded, making it a philosophical problem? Sadness and loneliness are universal if stronger in some—the sharing of that sadness at ad-hoc monuments that would be postmodern jokes if they weren’t so deep and human is what we do despite technology (and other forces) that want to slice us thin. Community is as much the default state as isolation and “self ownership.” If there was any narrative that DFW’s deep natural sadness affixed to for me, it was the tragedies of connectedness as much as of isolation. He had a way of making me meditate on that boundary—individuation and community—better than my own discipline, which is supposed to be rooted in just that synthesis. He is behind my eyes now whether he likes it or not. He’d probably think this historization and borglike absorption of his perspective to be imperial and somehow mistaken, but this is what you get for dying, David.

Commencement.

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Categories: integration , markets-networks-society , morality

"Instincts" · 23 September 2008

We now break from regular mind-body-malarkey programming for a commercial message. (I watched “Advice” and “Education.”)

Also: a letter on the topic of unconscious racism (someone told me the comments are amazing)

                                      .........................................

Proposition: The way a campaign offers itself to the voter says everything about its social vision. Both the way it knows itself, and how it sees America.

Proposition: Almost all racism in western society is self-unconscious.

Proposition: For historical and everyday reasons, the bedrock of anti-black racism in America is fear of black men’s sexuality.

Conclusion: The McCain campaign believes the one really good reason to vote GOP is that you’re racist.

Yes, I agree with them! The only reason to vote for this jingoist deregulator and his girl Friday is if you’re racist. Too bad Obama’s too nice to run a straight “John McCain is a fool” campaign. I guess the Dems feel that would be insulting to fools.

It might take a while for us to realize that the age of decadence is our political culture is over. Too bad the election will happen before that. This whole fall is blowing my historical mind.

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Categories: markets-networks-society

Coordinate Language · 21 September 2008

Or, the post where my blog explodes.

Ok, so step right up. Choose a mantra, any mantra. I don’t care if it’s the sensation of the breath going past the tip of the nose, or some word in whatever language repeated and repeated, or counting as high as you can go before you lose track, or the secret gibberish for which you paid the TM society an ungodly sum, or the feel of your sitbones grounding down into the earth. It’s all exactly the same. This is meditation 101. Shamatha practice.

When you have trained your mind a long while, so there’s some strength and consistency to the practice (like training the body—it works the same… you do first series 1,000 days to settle your shit down), then maybe you do meditation 102 and relax the hold on the mantra. Spacious awareness can get so beautifully empty in part because it doesn’t care what it’s of: when content comes in, it may be "physical," like the ache between the shoulderblades or the cramp arising in the hip flexor; or "mental," like infernal line of a Steve Miller song or the strip of all-too-real memory that arises from out of nowhere. Sounds, emotions, feelings—at this level of concentration and sophistication—are just contents of awareness. In a practical sense, there's no difference between what’s physical or mental.

So ok. New illustration. Do you remember last year when the NYT ran the Op-Ed on the neuroscience of meditation? At first, all the Buddhist geeks were soooo excited—mainstreaming of practice and all that—but later they realized what was wrong with the article. It was scienceist. It did the same as all neuroscience since Descartes, which is reduce the mind to the brain (legend is Descartes said the cries of the dogs he vivisected were automatic blips, not subjective pain). It was explaining the experience of meditation in terms of neural hard-wiring, as if all mental conditions can be controlled once we know the exact brain process that produced them. Meditators said: Stop, reductionists! Mind is not physical! Mind is mental! Understandably, meditators (me included) get irritated when scientists reduce the mind to the body.

Well, that’s science. It wants physical explanations. Not mystical, ethereal “causes,” but rather causal mechanisms. De-mystifying apparently automatic relationships… even in the age of quantum. What do you think CERN is about, after all? Finer levels of physical data.

But then there is this other, equally reductionist tendency there on the other side of science. Reductio-ad-woo-woo. This is the Obama pranayamites, the make-your-own-reality mental recessionistas, and the yoga teachers who think the only reason your foot won’t go behind your head is you have some “emotion” stuck in your hip. Since this kind of anti-physical reductionism is more common in the owl realm, that’s why I wrote about it instead of anti-mental reductionism.

I also wrote about it because woowoo-ism is the metaphysics of the privileged. “The markets will sort themselves out” is what you say when whether you’ll freeze this winter isn’t really in doubt. “The Indian untouchables have such a sense of serenity and spiritual transcendencence about them” is what you say when you’re totally ignorant of the fact that passivity is the trance you fall in to when you are beaten down by physical life: it is only in the poorest countries where the stray dogs become too apathetic to chase you in the streets. “You just need to surrender your fear,” is what you say to your students when you never had to experience hamstring separating from bone on your way to paschi-ma. There is lovely truth in all these statements (and I do love the Obama pranayama), but they are also forms of mystification—efforts to hide from oneself the physics of class, national and embodied privilege. The rich, the American and the flexible: we want to think that the difficulties of others are all in their minds. The woo-woo side of reductionism can be incredibly elitist and uncompassionate.

Anyway. The woo-woo/physicalist cultural rift here is holographic of the mind/body rift that pervades everyday talk. And this is what I’m really trying to discuss. Some reader asked why I resort to dualist language to describe practice, as if there is a difference between body and mind. The idea here is that any talk that opposes mind and body instantiates a separation that is untrue, shaping experience into unnessary oppositions.

Well… I would say there is a difference, and there isn’t. Some sensations arise in the mind. Some arise in the body. These are fields of consciousness (or of reality); but they don’t have to be opposite. In everyday experience and in scientist-vrs-spiritualist culture wars we sometimes act as if there is a difference. But both reductionisms are self-limiting hack metaphysics. Everything is god; nothing is god; god is everything, nothing, whatever; one, many, emptiness, form, whatever whatever whatever. To live at all honestly we have to have a practical substrate that doesn’t make us hold absurd positions about the primacy of either physical or mental reality. 1-800-Integrate.

So I talk about the mind, I talk about the body, I talk about the interpenetration of the two fields. Is this dualist? A reification that locks me into binary experience of the world? It can be, yes.

But...! That assumption is not necessarily contained in language that speaks of mind and body, physical and woo-woo. Is North/South/East/West dualist? Mind/Body is coordinate language misapplied as metaphysical language.

Now, I might have to blow up the blog. You are not supposed to blog about metaphysics. It’s like blogging about your bowel movements—a kind of practical tedium that debases the form and makes your readers never feel quite normal about you again.

Oh well. You win for getting to the end of this discussion. Or I win for tricking you all the way through. Or maybe everyone can win all the time and this does not have to mean that there are losers.

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Categories: integration , science , self-deception , spirituality

Mental Recession · 17 September 2008

Are the boxes of deskstuff carted yesterday out of Lehman just so much mindstuff, Mr. McCain? The houses bought on nothing and the cars with the no-interest loan—these are also whisps of consciousness and not part of some self-sufficient reality?

Everyone in fiscal conservative land wants to say this is a problem of trust and coordination.

When did the fiscal conservatives turn in to new-age mentalists? Is it just that this line is an easy means of denial? Are they solipsists? (I'm not joking.)

To call this only a coordination problem and collective loss of trust, and to pursue solutions through propaganda and only that is to deny that the entire American economy is rotting at its core.

The people who have been telling us for ten years to “trust” and buy are the ones get the fees from our transactions. To them, our trust actually is commodity. But for the rest of us, the commodities look more like macbooks and condos. It’s all the same.

The whole reduction of the institutional failure to only a coordination problem feels like more bad avaita in my life.

I don’t even understand advaita, but do see some keen people who have bothered to take it deep practicing a metaphysics that understands that both the mind and the body—both ideas and the physical world—are equal contents of some consciousness. The substrate of reality is nondual big-mind or somesuch; and the apparent differences in its contents (that is, mind versus body) are trivial. Ok, sounds like a sort of tedious philosophical argument. It makes sense to me insofar as I can practice spacious awareness when I sit vipassana, but whatever.

What amuses is the clearly bad avaita practiced by westerners interested in eastern stuff: the attempts at nondualism that actually are extremely dualist because they reduce all of experience to the content of individual consciousness. For example:  

If you let go of all your fear, you’ll be able to take your calves in a backbend: no concrete limitations there, just emotional ones. The body isn’t real—it’s a collection of mental tics. The physical is an illusion.

Good avaita is slamming the wall and declaring “This is god!” (the physical is a manifestation of oneness, just as much as the mental). Bad avaita is slamming someone to the calves in chakra-b because the resistance there is only fear (the body is not real but only a container for mental problems).

Good avaita: the economy is fucked backwards and forwards!

Bad avaita: there’s a mental recession but the “more real” economic fundamentals are in no doubt. (Again, this is a reduction of the physical to the mental that actually just serves to deepen a dualism between the two.)

How much pain do we have to experience before we admit that there is a structural barrier to taking the calves in a backbend? And to how many suckers can get mortgages? Practice plays with just that physical structure—affirms that the physical is not less real than the mental. And ultimately makes space to see the edge where the physical and mental interpenetrate and don’t have to be isolated in “opposite” realms.

For someone who came to this practice wanting to pretend it wasn’t really about the body, the affirmation of physical reality that I do every day on the mat is the best way to realize that the physical is not reducible to the mental. Sometimes a charlie-horse is just a charlie-horse… a fluctuation of consciousness, yes—but embodied consciousness.

For me, pretending that the body is a shadow of the mind is a kind of retreat from the physical immediacy of reality. I recognize it as a lie I sometimes tell myself. For the mental-recessionistas, pretending that the crisis isn’t physical is a way of avoiding the more difficult physical realm of hunger and disease and homelessness and unemployment and pretending this is all about the numbers.

This uncanny marriage of mentalist New Age metaphysics to conservative if not regressive politics, led by the "we make our own reality" Rovians, continues to give me the shivers! But... maybe it makes sense. 

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Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Obama Pranayama · 12 September 2008

Pretty excited about Obama Pranayama here. “Whether we are doing yoga or just taking our next breath.... let us consciously breathe in the intent for change and help move Barack Obama into the White House.”

I want a breathe-in. Not kidding. I’m going through an extroverted cycle here

But about the OP. On the one hand, ok, it requires the solipsistic worldview of a very small child and hilarously low standard of reality-checking to think you can actually shape external political outcomes by sitting around breathing. The aether theory of consciousness-raising.

It is interesting that we Santa Monicans, whose lives are the most disproportionately blessed in the world by technological advancement and the inequities of global capitalism, hold to the most hocus-pocus explanations for our dramatic privileges. “The Secret,” the apotheosis of the hocus pocus, is first and foremost a legitimation scheme for those who are disproportionately privileged—so they can believe their parking spaces and the SUVs they park in them are manifestations of their own superior mental power.

Yeah; because people in H3s are the smart ones.

We actually don’t get to sit around and will Obama in to office. Ever hear of precinct walking? That’s what they do in neighborhoods a little closer to the reality line.

Onnnnn the other hand, intention does have power. Besides mind-reading and occasional clairvoyance (didn’t just say that), there are no superpowers of yogic consciousness. What looks like siddhis is just the intuition trained to a very high level of self-knowledge and knowledge of its environment. The more you are aware of the operating systems, the more freaky-accurate your reading of the present moment and the better your predictions of what’s to come. Breathing is really good for that: pranayamites have a mysticism about them because they’re hyper-aware. More conscious of the fine details.

A corollary of the idea that you can effect political outcomes with breath practice is the magical thinking that you automatically make the world a better place by working on yourself. If I may part ways with Ramana Maharshi and co., there’s no magic in this either. You don’t sit in a cave and raise global consciousness by some “vibration.” It’s that if you’re more worked out in yourself, you relate to the world in a series of relatively healthy encounters that increase the goodness in the world. Sitting in a cave (or at obama pranayama) doesn’t do that: it just prepares you to do that really well.

Preparing the ground for action is not the same as action. But… it is still a good idea.

So, it’s all good. I’m excited about obama pranayama.

The thing is: I’m wondering about Obama himself. Is he doing the OP and tapping in to the world-soul/ prevailing discourse/ dynamic possibilities of the present moment in a way that’s prepared him to speak with apparently-magical accuracy? Does he have a better map of this territory and where it might lead than the GOP with its tired fucking culture wars?

It might not happen, considering what I’m little I’ve seen of recent days’ politicking but

The guy could bust out. He may have his intuition so finely articulated, and may be so ready for this moment, that he finds the way to speak to these angry ghosts so a margin of them hear him. I only say this because the race speech in March was that. He wrote it himself when the time for it was perfect. The content and tone were the most brilliant political moment in the US in my lifetime. I was amazed.

The guy is carrying some measure of awareness and discursive power. The charisma factor, easy to forget amid this week of dread, is a big deal. But he’s also moving along in the rickety old sinking mothership of the Democratic Party, filled with a crew that doesn’t get it at all. So we’ll see what happens. If he can get some headspace to tap in, and just allow himself to get righteously pissed off, something might happen.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Breaking it Down · 8 September 2008

Why do I feel more anger when Sarah Palin mocks the Styrofoam Acropolis set at the DNC than when I think about what is going on right now in Guantanamo?

1. The GOP’s campaign is an attack on my feminity on many levels. Their fun insults me personally... whereas my tax dollars going to torture innocents feels somehow less about me. And for some reason part of me needs to experience these global events as being all about me.
2. Also: she’s messing up the plan! It’s our turn already. No fair! We didn't plan on being foiled by a last minute comicbook nemesis! Those wascally wabbits!!
   

What’s the use of my outrage at injustice if it’s built on self-protective fear and schoolyard reactivity?

I am not sure. I think it’s still useful, but there are also (1) it can’t be trusted insofar as it’s not self-aware and (2) it will spark a backlash in anyone I scorn. But… given that there is just so much straightup killing and torturing going on right now, why not work through the childish, un-self-aware, hateful anger and direct that energy into open outrage? Then act on it in a focused way, and let it go. Hmm. It would be nice to have a leader who could take it to that level.

(By the way, at the time, I really did think the columns were campy. But now: I really do feel they were a nice, fun touch. Kind of like ice sculptures! And balloon drops! Only the columns have the added bonus of being phallic! {P.S. let’s not talk about the hadron collider this week, ok? I’m completely taken by it but the name is a bit much.} The only thing that’s changed is that SP has ridiculed the columns, so I deduce that my newfound like for them is as much defensiveness as it is good humor. Poor ridiculed columns. I hope the BOPL rescues them from EBay.)

Who do some people not know what to see in all this… feel like it’s not relevant?

1. It’s too much information and there are too many issues. It’s hard to see the true difference between these two campaigns.
2. Staking out a moral position is too uncanny. It’s dirty and connects you too much to social events. The intensity of feeling makes one feel that much more ungrounded and disconnected—that much more Camus’ stranger.
3. There is too much irony in acting. Malaise follows from the impossibility of acting, is the 21^st century version of Arjuna at loose ends.
4. Nothing really matters.

Just random possibilites, those. I don’t have an answer to this second question.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory