Comparative ideology on the prowl

Sometimes I wish I could have little nations, nations no one would miss, to test out particular ideological ideas and observe the resulting effects. The procedure would go something like this: 

One would seal the borders. One would ensure that compliance with the test run ideology was met with enthusiastic support from the populace. One would then begin to watch the test subjects actually conducting their economic affairs as though they were implementing or even just trying to implement any of dozens of ideologies, as happy as clams. Even trying counts! Trying is data. 

"You, Lithuania! Yes, you. Steady-state economics. And you, Guatemala. It's Henry George's Single Tax for you! Good luck!" one would say encouragingly, as if blissfully unaware that a freshly-sharpened Sword of Damocles was now hanging over the inhabitants of the test areas.

After the first series of test runs it would be possible to refine the run design so as to take observed factors into account. "Mmm, yes, mm, so social credit policies managed to control inflation in the Neu Sealand test area better than expected before that final incandescent crescendo, but maybe if we tweak some of the policies of the Economics Directorate..."

Some of the test areas might experience difficulty, but we at the Ministry of Comparison and Contrast see the information thus gleaned as of supreme importance to the cause of constructing eudaemonic social patterns in the noise of human flux. Any victims may be assured of their contribution to the advance of empirical comparative ideology. Let the tests begin!

This is MY vote! Notes on the Nonexistence of Democracy

Terms like soft totalitarianism or enlightened despotism begin to convey the situation of representative oligarchy, which is one the strangest ideologies ever to arise. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, not always from the standpoint of aversion but sometimes even from grudging respect.

But my respect for 'democracy' is not based on its existence, since I have never known one to exist in all of human history which was not the inclusive rhetoric of an oligarchic class. Rather, such respect as it has pried from my white-knuckled fingers is due to the very license that the mass presumption of its existence entails.

The belief that freedom of expression and other rights are a bulwark against tyranny ignores the fact that autocrats have always understood the role of a limited degree of license, and never so sophisticatedly as at present; for there are subtler ways of controlling people than overtly crushing them.

Overt suppression spooks the herd, wastes resources, sours foreign relations, and discourages not only those activities on the part of the population which might be construed as negative but also those which might be construed as positive. Societal traumatization results in a regression in all classes of behavior, including those which rulers in general desire, those classes of behavior tending to preserve their power base while still affording the peons the opportunity to stretch their legs.

Social atomization? Meet freedom of speech. Freedom of speech? Meet social atomization. I’ll sure that you’ll have much to talk about.

The 1886 Ghost Waka of Lake Tarawera: anomalistic analysis and accompanying poem

I want to share one of my favorite Neu Sealand anomalies: the waka-tainua or ghost waka that was supposed to have been seen by a mixed audience of Pakeha and Maori before the famous Tarawera eruption. The sighting preceded the destruction of the Pink and White Terraces in the late 19th century. Those in the boat were supposed to have been wearing traditional flaxen clothing; to have taken no note of hails from the tourist party and their Maori guides; and to have been sailing exactly towards Tarawera, like the needle of a compass, roughly a week before the eruption. In addition, the waters of the lake rose significantly and then subsided on that very morning prior to the tourist outing's departure from the shore.

I was so fascinated by this New Zealand story, and also so taken at the same time by what is called "tectonic strain theory" or "earth lights" in their psychological aspects, that I combined the two; to my knowledge, the event was never taken seriously in that way before, but I have a habit of taking witness testimony seriously enough to credit the existence of at least an actual stimulus, whether it be exactly that apparent or not.

This is because I do not ridicule anything by nature, and know well the tendency of human beings to ridicule rather than to analyze. It is a waste of precious witness testimony on the bumpkin satisfactions of incredulity. I regret that so much reportage of anomalous events is automatically dismissed as though it cannot be considered from a broader point of view. This is the “more things in Heav’n and Earth” approach of anomalistics, the rigorous, applied study of anomalies; and it is exactly the sort of anomaly that I seek out wherever I find myself. 

The deliberate seeking out of anomalies can never fail to tell me basic things about the psychology and the sociology of the place in its cultural aspect, and so I am at least in that wise repaid by my interest. But it is precisely among the anomalies that one may find the sort of ball of yarn that unravels to yield a new vantage point on the universe. This is the elusive prey I seek, the realm where time losses and machine stoppages are analyzed openendedly without forcing the whole of multifaceted reality to be either “aliens/ghosts” or “hoaxes/photographic artifacts”. 

"Tectonic strain theory" -- as enunciated by the likes of researcher Paul Devereux or the book Space Time Transients and Unusual Events -- basically states that humans -- like animals -- are capable of sensing electromagnetic fluctuations related to seismic or volcanic activity; but, being visual creatures, the human brain would appear to mediate the sensation of this flux by way of externalized images. Hallucinations, in a word, that are as exactly spurred from without as the internalized images of dreams are from within. The fact that the apparition was reported to have been sailing towards Mount Tarawera is highly significant, and indicates that humans have not only an inherent relation to electromagnetic flux but also the ability to determine the direction from which is coming.

The 1886 Ghost Waka at Lake Tarawera

"...earlier on the same morning the waters of the lake rose suddenly over its whole expanse, and as unexpectedly subsided again in a matter of minutes." 

-- Te Ara Encyclopedia

Pressure clad in ghostly clothing
nudged those visual people there,
choosing images as dreams do,
painting these on willing air:

They were wearing flaxen clothing.
They did not respond to hails.
They were bound for Tarawera
as if gliding there on rails.

Analysis of the Spanish and Ukrainian Anarchist Revolutions of the early 20th Century

The Spanish Anarchist Revolution did not succeed long enough to draw a final conclusion about internal drift towards oligarchy before being destroyed from without. The same was true in Ukraine. The main examples of mass revolutionary organisation on anarchist lines in the early 20th century seem to suggest that outside forces will generally nix it before internal drift can. This puts me, personally, in mind of the saw about which aspects of teleporting to Mercury would kill one first. It seems that the heat would kill one first, but that lack of oxygen would eventually represent a problem...

Similarly, while it is natural for the Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists themselves to regard the collapse of their Revolution as the result of deliberate malice on the part of various Statist actors, I believe that the situation is easier to understand if compared to the flow of surrounding air into a pocket of vacuum. Yes, real Statists flowed into that vacuum, which was itself comprised of real Anarchs, but I prefer to take a broader and more abstract view of the matter because the naked process -- and understanding it from as distilled a point of view as possible -- is as important as remembering those living, breathing human beings. (Most people forget the ideas; I will try not to make the same mistake from reverse, but at the same time think that ideas have fewer champions.)

Well, these are not final thoughts but exploratory ones, and it is to be regretted that neither the Catalonia nor Ukraine test runs ran for longer . While not an anarchist, that ideology has an extremely useful body of history and thought in terms of a touchstone for one who is wishing to understand oligarchy, the legion of various forms it can take, and its exact role in relation to civil wars and revolutions. The touchstone is simply that the node of anarchism-- as a sort of plasmic or intermediate form -- sets the States into sharp relief. 

My intention is to process ideological material of the most various kind and abstract general principles from it, this being a mode of inquiry which feels very natural: most of the ideological material in question -- be it history or theory -- is known mainly by the relevant partisans... and people like me who read the work of those who would rip one another to shreds if they found themselves in the same room. 

Dear Occupant: Machiavelli contributed to the development of soft totalitarianism

(2014)

The oligarchs of the Western Lands long ago discovered that convincing people that they are free is a more efficient way to reduce them to helotry than crushing them with tanks, since even the most propaganda-enriched of helots can tell that something is off once the tanks move in. 

As Machiavelli says in his famous treatise on managing a primate nation, The Prince, it is well to have a parliament in-between The Prince and The People, since the existence of a representative body automatically widens the gap between rulers and ruled. I am so proud for him, the idea is simply eery. 

That is, incidentally, the most important idea in the bloody book. The rest of the book simply isn’t Machiavellian enough. Ramifying application of this idea is the ideological history of the world since the late 18th Century without all of the linguistic masks that it ordinarily wears, such as "Congress", "Parliament",  and "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" etc. 

The Princes of our time know full well that any attempt to actually enact the ideals of 1789, variously interpreted by the “Democrats” and the “Communists” etc of the post-Century of Lights era, would simply result in a Reign-of-Terror-like or plasmic instability which would lead to either the entrenchment or the replacement of the oligarchie du jour. 

I will close with a little nod to a certain East Asian nation which is finally, finally! grokking that there are gains in efficiency to be made from the deliberate exercise of soft totalitarianism, at least during times of relative prosperity. Xiexie! on behalf of its venerable people, who know not of what ideological principle they are the happy beneficiaries. And thank you, Machiavelli, for providing soft totalitarianism with one of its most important tools. 

Category error: reframing the 'Modernist epic'

"Category Error: Reframing the 'Modernist Epic'"

I was looking at a letter exchange between Hart Crane and Yvor Winters and I thought: what children these men were, like Alexander Pope at his worst, and how awful it would have been to discuss anything with either one. Look at them, just look at them squabbling over the term 'epic' and its applicability or not to Hart Crane's The Bridge. Winters appears to have been basically a sour, choleric man, although he has insight to share in-between the fits. Crane was an emotionally-turbulent, undisciplined ricochet of an alcoholic who was, in this instance, clearly attaching private, fetishistic emphasis on the syllables "e" and "pic". One could be forgiven for wishing Yvor Winters had been a junky, and Hart Crane an espresso fiend. Things could hardly have gone any worse, and their personal relationship could hardly have been more acrimonious and explosive. Imagine publicly denouncing a brilliant masterpiece over a disagreement so trivial, thereby trashing a man's reputation who, faults aside, was always the better and the brighter of the two (if not the stable one likely to live to a ripe old age)!

Now, as to what they were discussing, both men's positions are bollocks. It is quite clear that the Classical epic obeys certain rules and adopts certain trappings which were particular to the Classical civilisation. The Western long poem, on the other hand, is a genre which has flourished in the last two centuries in our civilisation. Examples of the Western long poem include T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, William Wordsworth's The Prelude, James Merill's The Changing Light at Sandover, Hart Crane's The Bridge, and David Jones' The Anathemata, a charred copy of which is in front of me. It was one of the books Professor Wizard managed to save back when his home was fire-bombed.

The Western long poem, to conclude, is a genre all its own; but it has always had something of an identity crisis. You would not believe the tortured extent to which authors of such works go to convince others that they are writing epics rather than glorying in the authentic, particular merit of what they are about. The Bridge, to conclude, is a fine poem, and it needs no other descriptive; or if it does need one, then let that descriptive recognize its essentially Western rather than Classical origins. Granted, future generations of sour art critics and alcoholic long poem authors will find some other triviality to savage each other about, but at least this particular knife is now stored on a high shelf.

As above, so below: the juncture between utopian beliefs and everyday life

(2014)

The juncture between utopian beliefs and everyday life is any act of fairness. The placement of an abstract point somewhere in the distance of the shining future, while unrealizable, is the realization of a certain actual movement towards that futuristic chimera which could not have occurred without its assistance. 

Utopians are humanised by their Utopias, but certainly one should consider the other side of the coin. Just as one variety of Utopianism humanises the Utopian’s everyday behaviour, so does another dehumanise in proportion. Utopianism is dangerous, as it involves basic drives, but inevitable and ubiquitous. There is scarcely a group but has its own sense of the shining future which is magically going to make life more equal or less entropic.

The point at which overarching ideology and beating individual intersect is complex, fascinating, and lost in a sea of ideologues. But pure ideological drives can be extracted from that sea, divorced from particulars, distilled to essentials. Comparative ideology is at least a tonic for an age of ideologues the prevailing custom of whom is to talk all at once. The resemblance to Black Sea polyphonic folk music is unmistakeable.

Flower the tom kitten confirms animal sentence construction

(written in 2014, retrospective in 2016: I no longer believe in the 'continuity hypothesis' due to rejecting the theory of evolution as it relates to human beings, but everything else I wrote about animals and the construction of sentences still rings true to me today. By the way, they know not to even bother speaking thus to most human beings, who rarely even communicate with each other. How I love animals, and how I wish I loved humans half as much.)

Flower, the tom kitten who visits on his rounds, went directly to the shower stall, a place where he does not habitually go, and began meowing. It happened that there was no water dish for visitors, since I had knocked it over and never gone about replacing it. So I did, and he drank about a cup of water. He had A) remembered that the shower, though dry, is associated with water and B) recognised that another animal ("Trent") would understand the combination of meowing and that association. One infers that the absence of water in the shower stall was adjudged to be structurally and syntactically similar to the absence of water in the spot where he ordinarily finds it. This is the same tom kitten who hissed at me once when he was meowing and agitated, which was when I actually noticed the scratch on his nose, remembered the cat fight I had heard earlier, and put two and two together. It was the most efficient way he could arrive at explaining his being upset on account of a fight in particular. It is clear that he prefers to use binary compounds to get his points across. In glossing terms, the two sentences would be "UPSET ABSENCE-OF-WATER" (meows + pantomime) and "UPSET FIGHT-EARLIER" (meows + unprecedented hiss).  Implicit in his choice of binary compounds is a recognition that single words or signs communicate less than clusters. The sentence as we know it arises from this recognition, and with it human spatial and temporal syntax.

An explanation for homosexuality which is neither a Rube Goldberg device nor a kwashiorkor-swollen Somalian nor a kicked puppy

(written in 2013)

The origins of homosexuality, I suggest, are to be found in the ingrained instincts of heterosexuals. Homosexuality is rather an exaggeration of heterosexuality than some kind of antithesis to it. For the tendency of those with similar fitness levels and looks to flock together to attract flocks of opposite polarity of like comeliness is obvious from everyday experience.

The exaggeration of this tendency is the natural byproduct of a mechanism which rather drives male and female together than ‘destroys traditional marriage’, and accounts for the occurrence of homosexuality among many species. One might represent it visually as the ritualistic separation of men and women at old-style dinner parties; the women would leave the men to their cigars, robber baronage and whisky, retiring somewhere soft, biscuit-replete and smelling faintly of lavender and mulberry. 

Some men, and some women, happen to take their respective domains as all-encompassing; this is natural because the ideal form which is, for instance, an adaptive trait such as the ability to reproduce at all refracts through actual circumstances so as to produce a range of expressions among which there will exist outliers, that being just the price of the trait’s existing at all in a range of individuals of the same species.