Class resentment: debate edition

A provocation offered by our favorite Archdruid:

“[T]he affluent classes from which the leadership of the liberal movement is drawn, and which set the tone for the movement as a whole, benefit directly from the collapse in wages that has partly been caused by mass illegal immigration, since that decrease in wages has yielded lower prices for the goods and services they buy and higher profits for the companies for which many of them work, and whose stocks many of them own.”

Sacred cows, things tough to talk about.  He has his arguments for the idea that an influx of more folks corresponds with depressed wages, an idea of whose mechanisms I’ll leave alone.

But the idea that one class might benefit from the immiseration of another – what a powerful idea. This is a true zero-sum outlook.  Is that what is going on?  Are some jobs created by offshoring other ones?  Perhaps the jobs held by a more upper-middle class group?  So that lower-wages are experienced by what we would call a lower class?

And let’s map this onto the current (2016) national election (even though I continuously and, obviously, ineffectually swear off thinking about or spending any amount of effort on).  Do the candidates bases – the core group/demographic that supports each of the two candidates – match up with the two participants in a zero-sum game mentioned above?  I think this makes things just that much spicier.

Two classes that are not simply at odds with each other when it comes to, say, values but whose very existences rely one on the other.  A negative relationship that isn’t broached publically.  Not talked about in the debate.  A clear source of resentment that goes on not being expressed.  What benefits the elite impoverishes the poor.  The elite being those with degrees who have jobs that require degrees and the poor being those with zero post-high school education not making much money if not any at all.

How embarrassing!  Embarrassing?  Is that the right word?  That sounds weird but, man, it is an awkward relationship.  That link and the link doesn’t get talked about.  Not just free agents pursuing life in different but still unencumbered ways.  No.  What is going on in this case is an elite, the upper-middle class being in a position of power, holding sway over an underclass.  The two groups come to the table as un-equals.   But, as though some fairytale curse had been cast, they find themselves incapable of putting words to this idea.

But beyond the resort to storytime curses there are real structures and concept to apply here.  Resentment was mentioned above and perhaps that is a good way to look at how poor sees rich – and, heck, even how rich sees poor.  The sense of injustice that the word resentment carries with it is easy to see from the perspective of the poor.  What a shitty relationship to be in, being the one who has been wronged!  And those that wronged you have more power.  But flip the script and think of the awkwardness the rich must feel – I’m being serious.  They are in the position of feeling like their well-off existences is the product of greed – and then they have to (maybe occasionally) rub shoulders with those that they’ve wronged.  They must be all like, “Umm, sorry?  Suckers? . . .  I stole it fair and square.  You don’t know what it’s like”. 

So, for the elections . . . bring on more spectacle!

Bombs are good and I don't care

This article.  The impetus to write my thoughts down in a weblog.  The article a cause of ire and consternation.  Perplexity: this is acceptable now?  To casually claim that being an accomplice to murder is okay since the manufacturers of the armaments provide jobs?  Let me paraphrase the sentiment offered by the interviewer:

Mmm, okay, you mentioned morals.  So, yeah, that’s bullshit first of all.  I mean listen to the tone of my voice . . . morals do not concern me in the least and sure as hell do not come primary in my view of reality.  “We” need those jobs and who even really cares about what Saudi Arabia is doing with these weapons.  Jobs.  JOBS.  And I’ll go ahead and state what I’ve implied about these jobs.  These jobs are the best jobs ever.  The only jobs we will ever need.  Screw using this money for education or aid or rebuilding domestic infrastructure.  No.  Boom, boom, boom!  And when those bombs hit and those lives are ripped apart in every which way, I DON’T CARE.

How common this attitude?  Is it a belief?  Or is it just a sign of the absence of any questioning or concern.  And this cultivated understanding of the world and understanding of how our economy works is coming from the smart people.  Someone voting for either of the candidates for president thinks this.  Even someone voting for the “lesser of two evils” must think this.  Bombs are good and I don’t care.

Virtues are vices, the modern world is less than times past

Look at the modern world and consider that it is a de-evolution. A regression.  Examples of progress are mapped over the faults.  If they are not in fact themselves faults: technology, democracy, equality – go down the line.  Maybe some good.  What is good and great and is an exemplar of our modern world is, it turns out, unjust and perverted.

Perhaps this is manifested in the healthcare system of the US.  For profit (docs earn a pretty penny), big business, allied with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  Allied with the soft drink lobby.  All in cahoots.  This inversion is not to be fought against though it is meant to be understood.  These are the shackles that define the outlines of our slave status, a world where the slave permits the chains on one condition: that he may criticize anything but the chains, i.e. that he has the right to live in a fantasy, the chains untouched and ignored except for periodic perverse maintenance done on the chains by the wearer in acts called voting, consumer choice, patriotism, inclusiveness and the principled acquiescence to war.

That technology will deliver us from the ills that it created is “magical thinking” as James Howard Kunstler says – though, well, erm, okay I guess I don’t have a beef with term “magic”.  It’s true.  Magic itself is not inherently good.  It can, in fact, be used to influence people to consume, to “buy into” the status quo. We marvel at our own bedazzlement.  We laud our actors who entertain us into a state of distraction, whose fictions capture our imagination.  We believe, or suspend disbelief, in the ability of consumer goods to deliver a solid, seamless reality where product types are improved each year and “coolness” may likewise be perennially purchased.

A bad myth, a celebration of captiveness.  Everything is opposite.  Constraining our life energy into a safe standard conduit – it will never change; can’t I use this as a decisive argument that utopias – where all are equal – will never, ever materialize.  To help realize that those utopias by definition will never exist because their definition includes man, groups of men and women . . . therefore mass behavior will exist.  Might I use this definitive understanding to do away with the moral pangs that want to turn an idea like magic into an operative of some assumed good?  Might I still have compassion?  Do I have to scale the ideas of love, the good, and compassion into the redoubt of the family or of the tribe?

A small thought that pops up, I will welcome it into the circle as it arises and make peace with it in order to nullify it.

Melancholy and somewhat aggressive thoughts on work

This is the working hour,

We are paid by those who learn by our mistakes

- Tears for Fears, “The Working Hour”

We want work.  We want jobs.  We want the things that an income helps provide.  But how to structure work?  Do we base it solely on what people are capable of doing, how much water can be squeezed from a stone? 

We don’t have a say in how much we work.  In the past workers’ movements got the work week reduced to 40 hours – perhaps we would be better off if those controls were removed.  Maybe then people would be healthier, less fat.  Maybe then people would better prioritize their off-hours and peel their eyes at least momentarily from the torrent of shit presented on whatever kind of screen.  Maybe if 60 or 100 hours a week were the norm people could grow some compassion and fellow-feeling for their co-slaves being worked harsh hours around the world.

But keep in mind the US worker already works more than any other worker amongst developed nations – more than the stereotypically harried Japanese worker.  We have no mandated vacation time.  39% of Americans work 50 hours a week or more.  This in a country where so many simply want a job. 

This will never go away.  Work and toil are part of the human condition in whatever age, whatever epoch.  Work is a part of human life from the blind work of the body itself out to the visible working world.  Structured differently at different times.  Serfs didn’t organize, at least not when the kings sat solidly on their thrones.  We are subjects today, subjected to working regimes dictated from above.  The rhetoric around schools is likewise captive: we strive for better education and for call for students to “go on” to higher education in order to get better jobs.  Is this a cargo cult?  Can I walk around town wearing a suit, advanced degree tucked securely in my briefcase and expect an employer to run up to me, offering a sick job?

The regulations and standards surrounding work will change and disappear in the future.  In 10 years, 20, 50, 100 years work here in the United States will look like work now in China.  Or the Amazon.  People will be forced to work untold hours.  Or they may live under some feudal regime that dictates their work schedule.  Who knows what the people of the future will think of our working lives today.

Existential musing no. ?

In the wake of finishing True Detective, Season 1 (finished a month ago or so) plus reading Colin Wilson's The Outsider:

I am an American – a United States citizen – here, now, on Planet Earth.  I am one of those who have not only rad some Existential thought but have deeply identified with this thought.  I feel for Meursault, another denizen of this realm into which we are thrown.  Made flesh.  Incorporated in these meat suits.

All structures of life seemingly arbitrary, the right way to live subject to idiosyncratic manifestation in different times and places.  Ways of living – morals – crystallize.

But it is all still the Wild West.  We are subject to frontier justice.  We must make our stated religious/secular moral systems conform to the world as it is – the mental gymnastics people are so disappointingly well-suited to.  The Wild West populated with children.

I am an existentialist in this Wild West.

Can’t other see the absurdity of things?  How they are hypocrites who cannot acknowledge their tiny-ness, the inconsequential-ness compared to, well, any picture whether that picture is big or small.  Fools.  I live among fools.

But that is the world.  I’ve made my peace with this world, though I still ask questions.  On a lot of cars I ask what each is capable of, what its characteristics are.  Human society is one type of car.  Its stats are on print-out taped to the driver’s side window.  I will not ask that the car go faster than its known and stated max.  I won’t cry that the car has already been painted.  I won’t wish that the sedan drive over mountains or that the sports coupe carry more than two people.

The cars on the lot are what they are.

And the perpetually new super car that we always mistake America for is really just a base-model Ford Taurus.  Don’t ask for more.

But there are other cars on the lot.  And some of those come only in inchoate form, their outlines a sparkly glow, a true mystery in car form.

My existential world is not a purely materialistic one.

We all struggle for control, understanding, maybe enlightenment.  Our Christian God is cloaked in mystery, an entity with an ethnic history that Himself has found (another?) apotheosis, become capital “G” God, the one and only, assumed the platonic form of God that before had room for other entities.  This God the big boss who doesn’t even live in town your office is in.  he surly isn’t manifest in our lives, or if he is, those he talks to are not exemplars of humanity.  The movie hasn’t changed but people keep paying the price of admission. 

But in the bible people talked to God.  They supplicated themselves before him and he made them special.  In America today we have jettisoned the Christian God of mediaeval Europe.  We have passed through.  We are in Heaven.  We are different and special and unique in history.  We are the apex of history.  A story told a thousand times.  A story recited the loudest while walls are being breached.  Told the loudest while cities burn and the citizens left alive flee to the wilderness.  The exceptional ones of history each and every one.

We’ve diversified religion today, polytheism that doesn’t call itself polytheism.  There is the Christian God, yeah.  He’s still around doing his thing.  But alongside Him are new Gods” Progress.  Science.  Technology.  Blinding us from reality, all of them.

Voting not voting 2016!

I find myself inexorably drawn to politics – while at the same time saying that politics is futile.  Just mainstream politics?  No, all of it: even the radical fringe that provides a more incisive view is still part of the big game, the big machine.  So with election season in full swing I’d like to consider avenues for real change.  What are some other ways to “vote”, i.e. alternative lifestyle choices, good philanthropic institutes to support, etc.

1. Nothing.  This ultimate option immediately comes to mind.  No, there are no avenues for real change.  And I’m not just saying this to set up a straw man to tear down.  Not doing anything is the same as doing something.  Actually, if participating in a calcified/corrupt/hypnotizing official political system is pointless, then we are all doing nothing anyway.  Maybe it feels good to vote: sure, that is easy to see.  You get the pat on the back and the “I voted” sticker.  You sacrificed for a change and took the extra time to rub shoulders your fellow proles in (meaningless) social pageantry.  Whatever, since: voting = not voting.

Proper placement of the "I voted" sticker - photo from T.r. Lang's post in Jill Stein's Dank Meme Stash

2.  Get radical.  Like environmental shit that Deep Green Resistance does.  (This might be the only/right answer).  As Derrek Jensen states, it is always good to have some activist project going.  And not just a protest revolving around the election – get out make your community better.

3.  Just wait.  The historical tides of demographics, the ratio between perceived-

disenfranchisement/actual-disenfranchisement, etc. will eventually have their say.  Change occurs because people try hard to create change.  But change takes time to build up.  Do people trying to cause change actually cause change?  Sure, they help.  But the change they try to affect could not happen without the dull weight of time.  Example gratia: is Hillary a war-criminal?  Yes.  Do popular conceptions allow the average American to see her as such?  No.  Not yet, despite the efforts of people getting radical.  If you are against war then of course you would not vote for Hill (vote for Jill!).

4.  Have fun!  Host an alternative election in your living room with your collection of weird dolls – or – wheelchair yourself to voting place then rise out of your chair and walk out proclaiming that “Voting works!  We do live in a democracy!” – or – stay at home chain-smoking while reading The Stranger.  Whatever you do this election cycle, be creative!

Of elections and alternate realities

The party's over: Bernie being led out of the DNC

So confession time about election time: a sense of unreality has taken over me during this presidential election cycle.  A month or so ago – before either party had officially declared their candidate – is when I first really felt this uncanny feeling.  And it wasn’t with Trump.  With the Republicans I could care less: remember the cast of characters Trump was running against?  No, it was when Hillary finally got the delegate counts that the little voice said, “This is really happening”.

Perhaps age makes this feeling possible and not the candidates themselves.  I’m older, seen more shit.  Maybe people felt this weirded-out when, say, Reagan became president in ‘81.  Part of it too is my interest in the Sanders’ campaign.  He was an unreal alternative with a very real network of support.  When Hillary got her unsurpassable lead down the stretch it became clear that The Machine had spoken.  Inertia would rule.  That is when the feeling kicked in: when the Democratic Party demonstrated that ultimately they had a lid on things.  The Party had decided on Clinton and the Party was, in end, getting its way.

That is what made the Sanders’ campaign so exciting.  He was an independent who switched to Democrat for the election, i.e. he was an outsider going against the status quo.  Again, maybe others felt this feeling of unreality.  Maybe Ron Paul supporters felt this when their candidate was finally eliminated from contention in ’08 and ’12.  Just like Paul was running in a Party that had an ideological foot in libertarianism, Sanders was operating within the recently sympathetic to progressivism.  Different dreams, same result.

It turns out that, to me, Sanders was last chance for doing something.  And that chance disappeared and the sense of unreality unfolded.

Now we are operating in the wholly symbolic.  Choice has been reduced to political acts that align with a political point of view – purchasing certain products, shopping at certain stores, listening to particular types of music.  All surrogates for real choice.

Unreal reality has been restored.  The illusion that voting is your voice may continue.