Tag: midcult

Against Liberalism

2024-01-01

So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.
Revelation 3:16 NKJV

I’ve spent a lot of the past year writing in another language: sweet, emotive language. But there are certain topics that deserve discussion, topics which must be put to rigorous questioning. No niceties, no carefully crafted rhetoric, no manipulative shows of identity.

Namely, I’d like to discuss the state of American liberalism, which I have in the past called a disease, an opinion I still hold but can’t find a more empathetic term for. I don’t have the dexterity of my peers to cite exact sources of my knowledge; my reading habits are as sporadic and schizophrenic as the manner and rhythm I make these kinds of statements.

But the claim I make today is not a new one, it has been spoken of by writers, philosophers, leaders, politicians, and even businesspeople for decades, albeit in muted tones so as to not ring up their own names for the blacklist lottery. The claim I make is that American liberalism is a failed project and must be consciously deconstructed. This is a point that even those who consider themselves my political opposites agree upon, that the feeling of progress through unregulated and unfettered capitalism, the endless hunger for expansion and growth in a zero-sum game, has only deepened the very crises the liberal-center aims to eliminate. What has happened is that anyone who sees this reality—that poverty is rampant in the wealthiest epicenters of our society, that subjective, individual morality has only strengthened a few of the privileged, educated class—anyone who sees this reality and approaches it with shame, disgust, sadness at what this country has become is immediately labeled as an enemy, someone who doesn’t believe in the same conception of ‘freedom,’ rarely critically considered except for what it means in the individual sense.

The argument is that if only so-and-so liberal leaders held all the power of government then we would live in utopia—an endless flow of capital would heal the broken parts of our society, new non-profits and government agencies would finally fix the preexisting ails that cause poverty and homelessness. Besides the obvious points of why augmenting bureaucracies into an already massively sprawling bureaucratic militarized security state would not fix any problems, it is clear that most who support this sort of ‘let the government handle it’ attitude towards government is exactly the sort of political philosophy, and even political science, that drives what they believe to be the enemy of liberalism, that is left-wing historical materialism, right-wing nationalism. Liberalism is confused about who is an enemy because its flexibility, lack of philosophical backbone, allows it to be reflexed towards whatever is most convenient, what causes the least disruption in what they perceive is ‘the best we can do.’ It is not the angry left-wing that is cynical, nor the tempered right-wing that seeks a return to functional, moral government; it is the liberal-center that expresses the most contempt for their fellow human, believing that only the well-educated, well-learned, well-employed, well-adjusted are suited to know what is best for them. This is not to mention that, in my experience, most people who identify as progressive or liberal tend to know the least about the history of the political ideology they purport is the only suitable form of governance in our country.

If one reaches far back enough, beginning with the Industrial Revolution and traces lineage to the present, we begin with the amelioration of the lowest classes of labor, namely that of slave and immigrant labor, into the industrial economy. All this project was, simply named, is a rebranded, polished colonial ideology, that great wealth can be amassed from the hyper-productive labor of those most in need of access to the larger economy—newly freed slaves, East and South Asian immigrants, and those at our borderlands who saw greater opportunity in the unclaimed fortune that lied in the wake of a technological revolution. Decades have scrubbed this project clean of its origins, the proof is said to be in the rapid modernization of the country, the proof is said to be in how happy citizens are, the proof is said to be in the global domination of Western liberalism in the world forum. In each of these points, I concede that the country has succeeded, but wholly absent is the cost. The wars of aggression, the colonial expansion and domination through military might, the economic domination in global trade, the quiet truce with nations that agree to manufacture our utopian global capitalist lifestyle (which is always betrayed by the public declarations that such-and-such a country is an enemy to our ‘freedoms’). The goal of liberalism is to hide this expensive cost of freedom, to make everyone feel good about signing onto an agenda they know little about, touting personal freedom as the true measure of progress. I confess, I care very little for this brand of freedom; it is an ideology that says free speech must be protected at all costs, unless the speaker is from the left- or right-wing. It is an ideology that says preservation of one’s sense of self is a higher good than that of an entire group. It is an ideology that allows people to give rankings and judgments of deservedness based on the feelings, affects of a few, rather than material reality. If the liberal agenda of placation, non-disruption, palliative measures is to advance to total political domination, what we will have is not a utopian society of peace and ever-extending tolerance, no, it will be the opposite. An impossibly widened gap between classes, where one is blinded to the plights of those below, and the blame is assigned to the fact that they didn’t sign onto the program. This is reminiscent of the exact political movements in history that liberals cry as oppressive and worthy of damnation, the project of national socialism in reconstructing Germany, the empire of the Soviet Union, managed by its many bureaucracies and rules of moral behavior. The problem with the liberal conception of freedom is that it never equates to liberty. One is allowed certain forbearances regarding their identity, sexuality, belonging, religion, family structure, whatever etcetera, but remains enslaved to the economic model of pre-industrial capitalism, now to the point where surplus value can be extracted from businesses of thought—media, social networking, advertising. The point is to feel good without ever seeing the true cost, the underpaid labor overseas, the massive amounts of waste produced by our consumptive habits (look at carbon emissions per capita and the U.S. is always at the top, only China comes anywhere close, and we must consider how much of this is a byproduct of the production of goods and materials for the West), the economic and political alienation of those we call fellow citizens for their ‘wrong belief.’ The reality is, anyone who is outspoken about the ills of the liberal project of global capitalism is put to asylum, placed into a category of political death, marked for deletion from the commons of opinion. This is especially easy to accomplish in the digital age, as information—whether true or pure libel—can be disseminated in an instant upon any masthead that is signed on to the project.

I will not even touch on the fact that many of the government programs that liberals tout as successful were the brainchildren of Socialists and Communists, a fact easily obscured through association to the Democratic party. Let me be quick to remind you that many celebrated national heroes belonged to the socialists—Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, Henry Wallace. The liberal argument that socialism and communism has failed in every historical instance denies its own logic upon self-examination, that the Democratic party was a bulwark to protect slaveowners, that the party adopted platform points from the Socialist Parties because they knew they were popular demands from a great majority of citizens. This is not to say that platforms and parties do not change or evolve, but to point out that the same grace is never afforded to any ideology which directly opposes the individualist, hyper-consumptive neoliberalism which currently haunts our present, glooms menacingly over our future.

From James Baldwin’s No Name in the Streets:

“For intellectual activity, according to me, is, and must be, disinterested—the truth is a two-edged sword—and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.”

Sincerely yours,
–
On Repression and Self-preservation

2023-02-19

When it comes to repression, most often it’s spoken of in the realm of the libidinal. While useful in the exploration of Freudian theory, I believe the mechanisms of repression can speak to all the worst travails of postmodern society. Fundamentally, all repression stems from a place of self-preservation where if the repressed object or memory were to surface, fear prevents its circulation into consciousness. Practically, this transforms what begins as a fear of the alien, the foreign into direct antagonism or hatred for what is unfamiliar and unknown, though its manifestations can take on more disguised forms of exoticism, commodification, fetishization.

If we apply this process of repressive logics to any of our currently studied sociological spheres, we find at the root of racism, political polarization, war exists the same drive: to repress the unknown in fear of upturning what has come define the self. Maybe rather unshockingly, the primary manifestation of hatred is violence — physical, intellectual, spiritual or otherwise — for the sake of self-preservation, the human mind is predisposed to eliminating all sources of otherness whether through abjection, shame, or outright destruction. Where Freudian theory is limited is in proposing any solutions to managing these automatic mechanisms of repression beyond how they function within the individual. By its very nature, psychoanalysis can only provide liberation of an individual’s mind, as one’s psyche is only in control of one’s own body, not the body’s relationship to others.

Freud suggests that repressions operate by applying “continuous pressure” towards consciousness, and in reaction to the danger posed by unwanted ideation, the mind applies a cauterizing counter-pressure to keep a desire, thought, or memory at a distance. In this way, the mind must always stay active in the presence of a repressed desire, so as to not upset the normal mode of consciousness one wishes to maintain. In the libidinal, this hyperactivity of mind actually can be cause for the repressed object to remain at the forefront of consciousness, seeping deeper into the subconscious and being expressed in dreams/fantasy projections. A trained psychoanalyst might prescribe one to simply accept the presence of the desire for what it is, managing the symptoms to a level that allows one to function in a “normal” fashion. However, when we take this principle and attempt to apply it at the scale of interpersonal relationships and society at large, the combined energies required to maintain a sustained repression lead to harmful ends: over-policing or permitting the release of the repression. In either case, communities act in accord in order to satisfy these demands, multiplying the strain on collective consciousness where there should instead be efforts to alleviate the strain.

Any sort of rehabilitative practice requires intense focus, time, and energy. But modern capitalist society has conditioned our thinking to seek methodologies that produce immediate results, and in the case of strain on a collective consciousness, many groups find solutions in sloganeering, quick judgments, and alienation. One might argue that no alternative exists to policing or permitting; this is true to the extent that one expects immediate results. However, for sustained, transformative change that occurs over time, we must consider methods that do not expend energy on mechanisms of repression, but rather transcend the repressed thought itself, building protections around the sub- and unconscious to prevent the costly spread of repressed energies throughout the consciousness.

If repression begins as a form of self-preservation — maintaining the “normal” self in the presence of an abject or unwanted thought — how might we reconfigure consciousness from a mode of self-preservation to self-sacrifice? In this sort of reversal, I believe consciousness, individual or collective, can be liberated from the dooming cycle of sustained repression. How this might look practically is to accept others unconditionally, despite one’s preference to be around a certain type of person, and to dedicate time to seeking goodness on behalf of anyone within a community — this requires a complete sacrifice of the ego in order to obtain a greater common good, self-sacrifice made with time, care, dedication, and consideration. This entire concept can be summed up rhetorically in the Biblical wisdom “Love thy neighbor,” a syntactically simple phrase but infinitely powerful in its ability to subvert even the most complex logical knots tied by systems of repression over collective consciousness. I should note, that this precept is not exclusive to Judaism or Christianity — many world religions hold the same practice as fundamental to the sustenance and growth of a community, which I believe points to its primordial, transcendent wisdom.

Breaking down the phrase for analysis, we see an imperative command to “love” directed at “thy neighbor.” If we’re to take either portion literally, it’s a simple demand. But pulling our field of view to postmodern society, we encounter all the complexities and nuances that must be addressed. First, there must be some sort of common definition of what it is to “love,” rarely considered in academic circles outside of humane studies; and second, in our interconnected globalized world of online communities, is it possible that everyone we encounter should be considered our neighbor? I don’t wish to posit an answer here, but would like to suggest that in order to heal our world of its divisive ideologies, this is where I believe we must begin: with questions that threaten our own self-preservation for the sake of a greater good. Is it even possible to work so radically towards love and community building that we’ll all arrive to a point of agreement re: these definitions? I can’t answer with certainty but seeing the world in its current condition of reactionary thinking, I see a large void available for us to fill with revolutionary thinking.

Sincerely yours,
–
On the Precarious

2023-01-29

I have been thinking through, once again, the precarious nature of politics in America, given recent circumstance. Another instance of police violence inflicted upon a citizen population has begun to stir the usual conversations around power, violence, and the state’s role in these matters. Predictably, much of the conversation has devolved to the narratives of blame — that is whether the perpetrating party acted justly or not. I am of the belief that this is entirely the wrong conversation; when the discourse of social responsibility is descoped to a single interaction between two individuals, we are only able to make judgments that are binary in nature, right or wrong, justified or not so.

When we look upon the protests that emerge from acts of police violence, we must be careful to recognize that all acts of protest are not incitements of one side against another, but rather an overflow of a precarious psychic state — the exacerbated soul made weary and wary by repetitive cycles of oppression and repression, seeking escape when all other exits have been legally thwarted. However, only by first-hand experience of collapsed social responsibility does one come to this realization — so long as we maintain distance from others’ realities, we are free to make whatever asinine judgments we please without feeling any of the consequence.

Making determinations of who was just purely based on legality is a philosophically bankrupt position; to take such a stance infers utmost authority to a government that can hardly come to agreement about the smallest tax or necessary benefit like affordable healthcare. How can one entrust moral authority to a body of officials that remains in as much of a flux as a voter’s whim? Rather than seeking justification or vindication for one side or the other, I believe the more appropriate response is to survey what morals are on display within an eruption of violence — who has power, how is it maintained, who bears the burden of the outcome? In these now sadly regular events, society is quick to assign blame without considering the mass or proportion of responsibility each party holds.

In the case of police violence inflicted on Black Americans, the most cursory look at history will reveal that Black communities bear the greatest burden of grief, recovery, and psychic injury, quantitatively and otherwise. When trust is broken between people and the state, we can see this over-proportioned burden expressed in the aftermath. The response of police is to suspend or fire the perpetrating officer, whatever is required to return to the typical function of the office. For Black communities, there are years, decades of conversation between leaders and constituents required to even begin any sort of restorative process between people and state, centuries of history to be made right before any healing can begin. Each instance of police violence only sets back these negotiations with historicity, locking entire communities in a persistent state of mistrust — not without empirical reason.

This same pattern exists in all human relations; if one says “I will change” after a misstep or miscalculation, yet the action is repeated again and again, how can trust thrive when all actions betray expression? Simply, it cannot. Restoring a precarious state of trust requires transformation, made visible and real to all the senses, both physical and psychic. Words only remain symbolic gesture until there is reality behind them. Consequently, seeking justice in opinions can only remain symbolic gesture until some sort of tangible transformation takes place, whether that be in reforms or revolutions — and again, the greatest burden to create this new reality falls primarily on Black communities that possess less stake in social responsibility than the powers of the state, and maybe more grievously the majority population that makes up our social body.

I am not questioning whether use of force was unjust, but to posit a hypothetical, even in instances of violence that are perpetrated in “self-defense,” by inherent nature of their position, police ought still to bear the greatest responsibility for enacting transformative change so that such instances might not occur again — the solution is not to crack down or double-down on forceful repression, but to heal a community that is grieving and experiencing trauma, to rebuild trust through visible and verifiable change. So long as there is mistrust between communities and the bodies that govern them, antagonisms will only grow, heightened to the point of desperation as we see in an almost regular cadence.

Hatred is easy. Assigning blame is easy. Helping others when we feel no immediate benefit to ourselves is difficult. But isn’t this cooperative spirit precisely what makes us human? Should we abandon our most principal humanity to assuage our own anxieties of the precarious? I think to do so can only end in disaster, bloodshed, and total collapse.

I write this analysis not to stoke tension, but to paraphrase Lacan, I write this in hopes that our interactions with each other will be made kinder — that we’ll listen to those who are pleading to be heard, putting aside our own dispositions to consider how we might make precarious relationships between communities stronger through cooperation and conversation. This can only begin by understanding how much burden for change lies with those without power, and then enacting social transformation through our daily experience of community with each other.

Transformation can only happen through reform or revolution — without a culture of kindness and genuine love for our neighbors, we may find ourselves embroiled in the raging fire of revolt, in which all the precarious matters that worry us will be decided overnight without a say from any side. I prefer peace, to work together to build thoughtfully a world we want to live in. The onus is on all of us to actively listen and walk in lock-step towards a future transformed for good, rather than destruction.

All power to all people.

Sincerely yours,
–
On Inspiration

2023-01-24
In most creative pursuits, inspiration is touted as the necessary starting point for synthesizing anything with meaning. I subscribe to this belief, but argue that inspiration must guide the entire process of creation. The fallacy of exclusively tying inspiration to the earliest segments of the creative process lies in the fact that everything generated by the self is in actuality a product of exterior influences, tenuously jointed by one’s experience of life. Once you feel the electricity of inspiration, it’s easy to chase the vectors of this feeling towards an idealized outcome, paying no attention to anything but the lightning you’ve managed to catch in a bottle. This, to me, is too linear of a sequence to garner any sort of creative merit. My thinking here is twofold:
1. Lack of humanity: Anything that can be produced algorithmically without human intervention (judgment, input, curation) is not generative but merely iterative, mashing preexisting data into output.
2. Too dependent on chance: Waiting for inspiration to arrive is like standing on a river bank hoping the water will carry gold directly to your feet — such a phenomenon is certainly possible, but even if it happens, it’s unlikely to be in any quantity that will satisfy the desire to strike it rich on the gold bar.
An initial rush of inspiration can fruitfully guide a creative process. But as time passes and the electricity is no longer present, inspiration becomes a datapoint, pulling threads from the current moment to a historical serendipity that can’t be reproduced. Hanging onto that specific instance of serendipity will generate a product that’s permanently tied to artifacts of the past rather than something that forms new connective tissues and expands (read, liberates) a preexisting concept from its theoretical bounds.

In my personal creative practice, I find it far more enriching to gather inspiration at multiple points of reflexion, revising formerly established patterns of thinking and anticipating a wider variety of future outcomes, rinse and repeat. This supplants a positive feedback loop wherein curiosity not only carries but amplifies the creative impulse with multi-dimensional connectivity between disparate sources of wisdom. Because everyone’s experience of life is unique to themselves, within every individual there are some tensions that can only be expressed by said individual. When we relate to others’ stories, we aren’t relating to their story in full — in reality, we might only understand a certain percentage of the thoughts/experiences/concepts that formulated a presented narrative. Yet we see in literature, film, music, visual arts an endless schematic of derivations that thrust open all preconceived notions of the world by merely incorporating fractional understanding, reinvigorating the entire discourse with a uniquely human perspective. If one creates from their personal experience, there’s no risk of presenting something duplicative, unless they’ve lived another’s life step-for-step. And even in such an instance, the human psyche exists in the flux of increasing biological diversity and ever-changing environments; there is no guarantee that a shared physical reality will constitute identical patterns of thought between two individuals.

One of the most frightening aspects of inspiration is that we are intentionally leading ourselves into the unknown — the end result will often look entirely different than what was imagined before beginning the process. But really, what does it mean to be human except to overcome this fear of the unknown, to seek certainty where none exists, making meaning along the way. I feel that everyone’s had this sort of watershed moment at some point in their life, facing a new revelation and grappling with all the contradiction that would spring from submitting to an entirely new set of facts. But without this struggle against primal fear, we will eventually succumb to safe decisions that do nothing to challenge or enhance our current understanding of the world, and maybe more worryingly, we’ll reiterate the facets of history that formed our present dystopia. There’s definitely a place for ‘safe’ inspiration; the corporate workplace is the perfect arena for risk-averse exploration. Analogs, competitive reports, 1:1 replication; all of these are useful devices where agreement must be efficient rather than perfect.

However, when the purpose of a creative pursuit is to reorient significance and meaning, it’s vital to consider all nuance in proper proportion — leave no stone unturned, so to speak. Thoroughly considered work will always contain visible traces of inspiration, shown in both depth and width. One theoretical concept that I feel clearly illustrates how inspiration manifests itself is Foucault’s concept of discursive formation. At any given moment in time, if we are to slice a coin from the “sausage” of history, we should find within the circle all the components that make up the whole “sausage.”

Within each coin is a cross-section of time possessing a unique ratio of discursive ingredients and positional variance. Forgive me for continuing the “sausage” metaphor, but if we are to imagine taste (aesthetic, affective, or otherwise), a casing containing a multiplicity of discursive sources will typically produce a more complex relationship between components, thus a more complex/nuanced flavor, than a casing that contains one or two ingredients.

Tradition often demands a narrow selection of historical discourses, but in the era of the internet, we are confronted with the specter of simultaneity; history, current events, and futurism are all competing for authority in the realm of knowledge. Against the backdrop of postmodern cacophony, tradition offers a simple, linear understanding of the world and its progression into the future — truth can be understood as a fact, tied to specific people, places, and times. In contrast, what postmodernism gives us is an unconscionable truth, that is, a truth that remains in a dynamic state, wholly dependent on the flow of society’s undercurrents.

The consequence of a truth that cannot be grasped by discourse (because veracity depends on which discourse holds current authority) is metaphysical violence between historical reality and a sort of quantum unreality, where phenomena are released from the constraints of time and generate an overall impression or affect rather than an empirical truth. For this reason, I call postmodern truth unconscionable; instinctively, our conscious minds are prisoners of instinct, obeying naturalistic laws of energy, entropy, survival, etc. A postmodern truth thus threatens every known basis of reality, from physics to neuroscience. I believe it’s in this threatened state that we as humans possess our most powerful creative capacity, negotiating the distance between reality and unreality by connecting discourses into amalgamations of various truths. This isn’t to say that there’s complete unity or certainty in these formations of truth “modules,” but rather there simply exists an expression of truth in the interconnection of things.

Take for instance, dreams. Dreams do not constitute our material reality, yet they are true representations of the unconscious mind, reflecting some aspect of our experienced, physical world through signs. In dreams, all impossible things are possible, such as bodily flight, infinite architectures — things like never-ending hallways, gravity defying constructions. But these impossible phenomena cannot be categorized as true or untrue; they are simply unconscious symbols of one’s relationship with reality, from which a profound truth may be derived. The extracted truth could possess a universality, however this can never be proven by examining the sum of its parts or even the relationship between parts, for as I’ve hypothesized, our psyches are dynamically linked to the flux of language, what I posit is our primary tool for analyzing and synthesizing knowledge.

To return to the topic of inspiration, the profundity of one’s creative output is reliant on its expressed truth — all art should invite relation to itself, transporting the observer to an unconscious, metonymic realm via a physical phenomenon. The greater the interconnectedness and multiplicity of truths, the more opportunities exist for an observer to relate to a work of art. It’s for this reason we admire the works of classicists; the intense focus on divinity as an artistic subject gives us an infinite wealth of interpretation, even into a time when atheism reigns as a dominant ideology. Conversely, the output of AI-generated art, if traced to its most fundamental components, can only exist as a series of binary decisions which might draw from multiple sources of inspiration, but loses connectivity between ideas as binary decisions scale up into a final product. Truly inspired art instead seeks to express the tenuous connections between disparate inspirations, synthesizing thought beyond its creation.

I could say more on this topic, but I want to save some of my insights for other topics. Might write a second part to this, if I ever feel inspired enough.

Sincerely yours,
–
On Psychic Injury, Part 1

2023-01-19

Firstly, I want to say sorry for my style of writing, but I find it hard to apologize for writing how I speak. Consider this medium a relief from the fevered intensity I tend to show when speaking on these things in person.

—

At this point in time, most will observe injury to the psyche in accord with physiological symptoms — medical practitioners use a range of terms to define these effects: mental illness, mental conditions, cognitive dissonance, and all other diagnoses that fall under these sorts of categories. I believe this to be a fault of our uncritical belief in science. While treatments and methodologies to assuage psychic injury can be hypothesized, tested, and proven, all success in these areas is heuristic, not guaranteed. For those who hold science as rigid proof of reality, there is no motive for healing other than to produce the desired or expected result, thus any advancement in such fields is quantified and optimized for utility and efficiency.

The language of medicine exists solely in the realm of hypo-hyper, and normalization is pursued as the end result. This a-to-b framework for healing is no doubt useful in certain applications: addressing physical injury, equalizing biologically induced illness, maintaining progress towards certain metrics of health. But with psychic injury, the linearity of a-to-b treatments implodes under the weight of possibility. Symbolically, this might look more like a-th-?, wherein the endpoint, ?, is dynamically linked to the prepositional transition, th. If we follow an algebraic logic, we might be able to make formulations with knowledge of a single variable, whether the ? or th, but knowing all variables can still fail to produce a logical proof. Here, the Western approach of empiricism might alter variables to produce an agreeable proof or discount the data altogether, which in my view lays waste to the rich hyphenated passages between signs.

What might lie within these hyper-compressed interconnections? From a linguistic perspective, virtually anything expressed in language can occupy these hyphenated spaces, connecting states of being through time. Even in the flat, linear equations posited by science, all mystery and unknown fact remains swirling in hyphenated space, as clear as its points and vectors might be. I’m aware that my analysis is loose and near blasphemous to the religion of science, but imprecise, metonymic thinking is exactly what psychic reality needs to function. Consider the inherent virtue of open-mindedness, often tied to terms like “tolerance” in political and social spheres. “Tolerance” has become a measure of one’s open-mindedness — today, gauging what a person will or won’t tolerate determines their receptivity. But if we look at these two terms in the higher realm of psychic activity, we find that open-mindedness and tolerance do not belong in a linear sequence where one informs the other, but rather are dialectically opposed. Tolerance says, “I have other preferences but I will endure a to arrive at b,” while open-mindedness abandons preference with no vision for the endpoint, utilizing the space between to explore alternate conceptions of reality.

The difference between tolerance and open-mindedness compounds in the tension between strictures and structures, producing the psychological violence that guides our physical reality. The disappointing truth of our world is that all war is fought, all blood is shed over the belief that codifying words into policy can produce immutable meaning. Until we abandon both strictures and structures altogether, we will continue to conflict grievous wounds on language in order to seize control of definition under the false promise of immutable authority. All of modernity’s qualms with fundamentalism deal directly with this notion of immutability — that even if there is some permanence in the textual and formal presentations of ideology, its interpretations must not — or maybe cannot — ever achieve stasis.

If we listen in on the conversations surrounding spiritual texts, we see this contention most clearly. The Calvinist tenet regarding the inerrancy of Scripture philosophically is not an argument for the truth of a text, but rather the truth of a single interpretation. Leaders in Calvinist thought will point to the fact that this narrow interpretation has withstood centuries of progress and revolution as proof of veracity, while undermining any interpretation that falls outside its textually defined boundaries. To further bolster its claim to authority, a good Calvinist will point to the fruit of labor to prevent any change to the methodology. This is the same erroneous logic that guides sciences, and thus our modern reality: to see all phenomena as single occurrences in a cause/effect relationship, and interpreting a positive result as the product of a good formulation. The immense philosophical gap of Calvinism only reveals itself when one observes the same effect derived from an entirely different cause. If the call is to judge ideology by the fruit it bears, what does a Calvinist make of all the ways to learn patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, love in the wealth of the information age? Either 1. Scripture symbolizes a pattern of truth recognized by means beyond text or 2. Scripture only holds parts of a whole truth. In either case, Scripture is an interpretable object that is still being reinterpreted and retranslated for various agendas, yet many readers use it as a textbook for political belief rather than a poetic guide for spiritual and soulical strength.

I rarely write explicitly about Calvinism, but I feel that it’s the perfect microcosm of Western logics in their most heightened states of contradiction. The Calvinistic tendency to default to a single interpretation of a text can be seen in all spheres of socio-cultural and economic life; Marx versus the revisionists, high culture versus mass culture, the academy versus folk wisdom. I believe, rather cynically, that many of these arguments stem from intellectual laziness; when pursuing a specific result and presented with conflicting/contradictory nuances, it’s much easier to dismiss alternate realities as bogus than it is to renegotiate what was believed to be fundamental to one’s structure of reality. And again, the only outcome here is a war for definition, planting more landmines than building safe passages. How I see this manifest in our world is in the flurry of powerless protests, planned marches, and other events we deem “revolutionary.” Wherever there is failure in activism, I posit it’s because the goal is to topple a common enemy rather than find common value. Science, technology, and modern medicine have conditioned our minds to perceive the world in algorithmic outcomes, placing an a-to-b strategy of tactical maneuvers where we ought to be asking sincerely contemplated questions and really considering where the answers might take us. Leaders fall, institutions crumble, empires disappear, yet through it all evil persists, and even moreso today, the psychic strongholds of generations past remain untouched and unbothered by our obsessive need to “save” the material world and protect its extrinsic value.

To bring this conversation back to more relevant matters, the work of climate activism has drank from the same poison well of Calvinist belief: the current trend of populist rhetoric — railing against Big Oil, multinational industrial war machines, etc. — provides a fine enemy, but when confronted with the reality of their power, morale will slip enough for nihilistic belief to make an entrance. The solution I see most clearly is to instead love our planet and the life that inhabits it so fervently that there is no alternative action to protecting and nurturing life in all its forms. The same struggle for power will persist, but goodness and wellbeing can become purpose where adversarial passion will always fail.

I meant to write more on the process of healing rather than identifying injury, but I find it vital to properly recognize the sources of suffering before proposing solutions. More later

Sincerely yours,
–
On Anything

2023-01-17
In the war of haves and have-nots, what tends to get lost is documentation of mid-cult; an explosion of the cultural fringe that renegotiates the boundaries of both sides. I’m tempted to write with flourish and polish on a subject like this, but attending to mid-cult demands the opposite.

In ideological contests between opposing forces, the main site of struggle is for definition. This struggle plays out in various arenas — abstract/real, local/global, utility/equality, intrinsic/extrinsic, etc. — philosophical battlegrounds that produce the proofs we use to make sense of the chaos of daily life. But without the buffer of mid-cult, these ideological contentions can only generate endless loops of power, revolutionizing information too quickly for any staying change to take hold. Without mid-cult present in cultural conversation, all aspects of culture are reduced to a game of heuristics and majorities, stripping the common of all subjectivity and expression for the sake of winning numbers.

It doesn’t take much to imagine the disaster of culture defined by probabilities and statistics; we are already living through this dystopia. Whatever we love in life — whether things, ideas, or even people — can almost certainly be traced back to consumer behavior and images forced on us by a controlled flow of information. The role of mid-cult, in my view, is twofold:
1. Generatively analytic
2. Tactically subversive
In simpler terms, mid-cult 1. draws careful connections between ideologies and 2. expands definition while out of view. What I mean by out of view is that mid-cult is almost never presented as a tangible entity; ideological wars are always shifting, and mid-cult by nature remains in the same dynamic state. Optimally, mid-cult should take the form of cultural observation, extracting the psychic principles made available by analysis of the real, material world.

Eventually, as the apparatus of mid-cult dissects ideologies into a complex network of nuances, we should be able to see representations for what they are — representations — rather than absolute truth. Every war, physical, psychic, or otherwise, is waged on the inherent truth of language and laying claim to this or that definition. In my diagnosis of today’s ideological landscape, the only way toward peace is to disrupt the notion that language bears any sort of neutral truth; sowing doubt will produce good questions, and all that is true can withstand questions.

Polemics belong in the conversation of what culture is and should be. Without it, all we’ll hear on our climate-fueled death march is advertising.

Sincerely yours,
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Tag: midcult

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