Demonstrating Any Alternative At All, Composing, 19/07/2018

Another quick meditation. I polished off about half of my official review of The Quest for Prosperity over the last couple of days (as well as the draft of a policy paper I’m writing for the think tank). That’s why I didn’t have time to write a blog entry for Wednesday.

One of the leftover ideas from Raphael Sassower’s dense yet accessible book regards the different ways we try to create new forms of life. Now, this is a major concept in my own political philosophy – the utopian drive to build a new society.

The Occupation left Wall Street, but it never failed. It's still
succeeding, because Occupy was the uprising that generated the
ethical energy of anti-oligarchical politics in the 2010s.
Art by Eric Drooker

I’ve mostly been concentrating my historical eye on those creative revolutionary processes that have had real success. Maybe they’ve overthrown a government or two, like the Arab Spring or the Maidan protests. Maybe they’ve inspired an entire generation – on average – to reorient their deepest ethical and moral beliefs about what kind of political economy we want in our society.

Sassower, in a few remarks late in chapter one, makes me wonder what I can learn from the unsuccessful cases.

We’ve got to be careful about how we understand success and failure here, though. Remember that success is more complicated than having a succinct list of demands that are fulfilled. That was the complaint I often remember levied at Occupy – how to make change without specific demands.

But we’re talking about a social movement – not an election campaign or a collective bargaining session. So a utopian uprising’s focus must be general as it generates. The uprising is the social movement in embryo – the flurry of energy that focusses people’s thought and minds, and dedicates their lives, to the hard work of actually changing society.

The hard work of transitioning Tunisia to democracy, or overthrowing Bashar Assad. The hard work of restoring social democratic principles to governance in a globalized civilization and economy.

Actual material success in a specific task isn’t necessary to whether a particular utopian impulse is a success. It’s also difficult to tell when such a project is a material success. The Tunisian democratic government, for example, is still only a few years old and still embattled. Is a democratic Tunisia that lasts only a few more years a success?

Let me put this to you, to demonstrate that asking about persistence of an institution isn’t the right question here. Would you consider the Abbasid Caliphate a failure as a pluralistic society because it lasted only 800 years?

The energy of the uprising is not the same as the institutions people create with that energy. What remains when you bracket the material achievements of a social movement is the energy of the movement itself.

From one of the few long-term successful hippie commune farms.
The Stephen Gaskin Farm began as a community of radical utopian
Americans, who moved to Tennessee to drop out of industrialized
society. It still exists today as a scientific and political research
centre and charity. Its energy, creativity, and practical intelligence
continues to renew itself for more than four decades now.

If the energy of the movement, the revolutionary dedication and drive in a society – or at least a fairly significant number of people in it – is what matters, then we know what success and failure of a social movement is.

A social movement succeeds when the energy of its uprising is sustaining and renewing itself – when people join and contribute to its creative processes, as different contexts to do so appear. There is no point when a social movement has succeeded – that would imply that the movement is finished, and so no longer sustaining itself.

So the death of a social movement is its stoppage. Once people’s creative drive dies, the institutions that movement built immediately ossify and become authoritarian. Their only justification is their existence, which is no justification at all.

Now we have a conception of how to know the success or failure of a social movement on any scale. Success is sustaining its vibrance. Failure is dissipation.

I worked this out Wednesday night as I wrote this post, thinking about Sassower’s example of a failed, small-scale social movement – an experimental agrarian community. These are the farming communes to which frustrated Vancouver office workers retreat when the alienation of their corporate lives becomes too much for them.

That they go is a demonstration of their creative drive to develop a new way of life – a living demonstration that their old lives were obsolete. Not many get too far, though.

The utopian energy of their small group’s social uprising against the constraints and blandness of corporate life isn’t strong enough to overcome even their first challenge. When everyone arrives at the experimental farming commune and they realize that none of them know how to grow food.

Earth As Its Own Memory, Composing, 08/07/2018

Philosophical writing at its best walks a dangerous wire. Well, several such wires, really. The more wires you walk in your writing, the better your writing can be when you pull everything off. Of course, the more wires you walk, the riskier it is that you’ll succeed.

Acknowledging a truth doesn’t make it any easier to handle.

There's a curious image that appears in Jussi Parikka’s The Geology of Media – the Earth as its own memory. It’s an evocative image, and would be an impressive, brilliant image and metaphor when used in a literary context. If I ever write a sequel to Under the Trees, Eaten, I might use such a metaphor myself.

It's one thing to imagine walking in the earliest days of Earth. It's
another entirely to know walking in those days, living as much as
you can the real ancient past.

But in a philosophical context, such an evocative metaphor can be dangerous. The literary power of metaphorical imagery rests in its ambiguity. Metaphors can create an atmosphere for thinking and contemplation, expose a relationship that a write wants to examine.

But a metaphor resists any attempt to pin down its specific meaning for good. Its purpose is to open a spiral of interpretation – you’re meant, as a reader, to lose yourself in it. Metaphor paints thought, gives it a character or a general direction, a tendency. Yet it strays too far from the concrete to be philosophically productive.

Philosophical writing needs specificity – a philosophical concept is widely applicable, but very precise. Like a blueprint or a plan. Or an OS designed with intricate detail, which can then do a huge variety of different things – but a different sort of variety that you’d get with another OS.

No, those are all metaphors, similies. Images and comparisons, not the actual conceptual structures.

And there you have a demonstration of why metaphor isn’t very philosophically useful.

So does Parikka’s image succeed? Is it a philosophically interesting component of a planetary-centric way of thinking? Or does it only evoke?

I think it succeeds, anyway. For one thing, it relies on a conception of memory as a form of consciousness of history. You experience knowledge when you learn something for the first time, of review it, cementing it in your memory. So memory itself is an experience of learning and engaging with history.

This isn’t a purely discursive history – this concept of history leaves no risk of reduction to current human discussions. You aren’t left open to that juvenile interpretation of history as discourse about the past. You aren’t left wondering if history is only talk about the past, with the grittier, complex accounts no better than the empty exaltations.

Here is a concept of history as the material reality of the entire past, the persistence of past presents, events, and processes into the current time.

A piece of Earth, flying through space.

The material reality of the past is, geologically speaking, the crust of the Earth itself. Geological strata and the transitions between them reveal the actual development of Earth, the planet itself over time.

We can analyze rocks to reveal chemical, atmospheric, and geological conditions of the planet up to 4.4-billion years ago. The literal preservation of the most ancient past of this planet. Becoming conscious of this history, investigating and learning about these astronomically ancient conditions is an act of memory.

We are part of the same 4.4-billion year process of development of the giant ball of matter that we call Earth. We’re very strange, innovative parts – even sending little pieces of Earth far into the vastness of interstellar space.

We think of ourselves as separate from the planet. The planet is a giant thing that I live on. I personally pay a sum of money every month for the right to reside on a particular patch of the planet Earth.*

* When you explain rent and mortgages this way, it makes our entire civilization’s economy sound absurd and ridiculous. I think we should each do this regularly, to give ourselves a sense of perspective.

Now think about the history of your development. The web of causes that have produced your life so far. Causally, we’re part of Earth because the same processes of growth and decay continue as we’re born, eat, shit, die, and are eaten by bacteria, insects, and worms.

A few traces of the earliest days of Earth exist as they once were. All the other traces of the earliest days of Earth exist as they are now.

How to Turn an Image Into a Concept I: Living Earth, Composing, 28/06/2018

Jussi Parikka's book The Geology of Media is one of several books that have come out in the last decade exploring aspects of our global ecological crisis with an old image. The living Earth.

I’ve come across different aspects of this in Tim Morton’s work, as well as others in his broadly-related crew of thinkers – Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, a few others falling under the name speculative realists.* A variety of creative – and in Bogost’s case, delightfully bizarre – fundamental pessimists about the future of humanity.

* They all went to the same conference in 2007 that had “speculative realism” in the title, and appeared in an essay collection with that phrase in the title.

I hope the insane billionaires of the world will be happy to invest the
massive fortunes they've squired away in building inter-planetary
mining infrastructure by the end of the century. Because that's when
we're going to run out of all the metals that make computers work.

I mean, the most thoroughly absurd stance in ecological philosophy in the 21st century is optimism. So the image of a brutalized, raging, vengeful Earth – whether radically alien or hauntingly personal – is a constant.

But there are other, more impish, perspectives as well. I remember reading Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter during research for my last big book. She built a curious outline of an ontology she called vital materialism – major components were a return to vitalist biological theories and a quirky extrapolation of metallurgy.

Another book that delivered on almost all its potential, but petered out a little. Still excellent, if not quite great – fascinating ideas that weren’t tied together quite as profoundly as they could have been.

Parikka himself offers another set of sources for this image of the living Earth – an important one for him is the history of geology. Geology is, in the simplest terms, the historical investigation of a planet’s own development and the essential nature of a planet, along with the techniques for doing all that well.

It’s a science that could work on any planet made mostly of rock, but Earth is where we’ve done the most studies so far. Works just as well for other planets, moons, and asteroids – but for now such studies are prohibitively expensive, and getting there is a bit of a commute.

Throughout his book, Parikka turns to media theory and art for the
tools to turn the image of the living Earth into a philosophical
concept you can act on (and through). There are many hitches with
this decision, but one of them is that there have been so many
such images that focussing on a single one requires so much
justification that you spend all your time on it and not the analysis.

A lot of the first people to study geology shared a general, kind of vague image that served as their very rough framework for understanding how Earth worked as a system. Scratch that – it was a framework to understand THAT Earth worked as a system. This was the living Earth – that the generation and dynamic fluxes of Earth’s processes were its life processes.

Not as an organism like us. No one seriously thought they’d find igneous analogous to kidneys or lungs. If you describe these early geologists that way, you’re just doing it to dismiss their ideas from relevance by making their interpretive frameworks sound too plainly ridiculous.

Here’s how they thought, in brief. Having dynamic internal processes that generate themselves – one powers the other, the other powers the first – is a necessary and sufficient condition for being alive. For being a life.

It didn’t imply anything ontologically or physically – it didn’t mean necessarily that a planet would have a geological circulation like an animal’s cardiovascular system. The implication was ethical – that the Earth deserved the respect that you’d accord any living thing.

For example, take my personal favourite utterly barmy image of the
living Earth in popular culture – Mogo! The Green Lantern that's a
sentient planet! Mogo is pretty much the only thing I like about
Green Lantern proper, mainly because of its core premise that our
hero is a narc.

That’s different from the other common idea about respecting the Earth – philosophers use words like alienation and sublimity. Because the Earth is so much more powerful than a person – storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, massive mountain chains, vast oceans, etc – we respect it because it dwarfs us. We respect Earth because we’re so insignificant compared to it and casually destroyable in the face of it.

A geologically-inspired philosophy for our current crisis can’t inspire respect for the Earth through fear. Our processes – the grotesque pollution of mining and e-waste, the overflowing dumps of nuclear waste – are enough to strike fear into the Earth. We no longer need to fear the Earth – we need to fear ourselves.

That begins from understanding Earth as something which we harm. Not something we wreck, the way an angry toddler wrecks a plastic toy or a train set. You wreck something, and all that matters is the money to replace it and the mess you made. Earth is something we harm, the way a psychotic toddler yanks a kitten’s tail or pulls her ears to hear it scream.

Harm is to inflict suffering. And we need to learn how to understand the Earth as something we can inflict suffering on. Not suffering like an animal – any more than the Earth has blood and breath. No – There is suffering. Earth suffers.

Spinning Our Own Futures, Research Time, 14/05/2018

This has been a busy weekend for me. It was my first working in the campaign office of a major party’s election race in a densely populated urban district. It’s intense sometimes, but it’s so much fun.

I went on a little reflection on Twitter last night, about how happy I am that the New Democrats have stopped pandering to the ideology of marketization. Often, that’s called capitalism or neoliberalism. But I feel like using a more descriptive term that isn’t quite as much of a catchphrase as those two.

The words ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘capitalism’ work as tribalisms as much as descriptive terms themselves. So let’s try getting more explicit so you can really see the process in the word.

I'd love one day to ask Andrea Horwath to compare how she felt on
the campaign trail in 2014 to 2018, when the messaging she was
delivering was so different each time. I'd like to know which set of
talking points – taxpayers or care – is closer to her heart. I have a
decent idea, but I want a better picture. To contribute to her
posterity, if not my own writing career.

There’s a discussion New Democrats in Canada have been having for decades. It’s whether the party crafts its policy with an eye to winning power or an eye to political principle. Well, the general idea of running every institution in your country on free market principles is running out of steam – a good plurality of us now know that total marketization leads to the disaster of oligarchy.

So you don’t have to choose principle or power. Western people are catching up to the reality that marketization’s marketing is a pack of lies. The principles of the people are now our principles. Now we start the job of repair.
• • •
I still see parallels in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. As I slowly assemble the research points for Utopias, I feel like this book will be one for our time. By the time I’m probably ready to publish the thing in the early-mid-2020s, it should catch the wave of democratic pushback against 21st century fascism. It’s just building steam now.

In Deleuzian Concepts, Paul Patton writes about the concept of utopian thinking that emerges from Deleuze’s thinking. See, one of the reasons why utopian thinking has been largely dismissed over the last few decades is the totalitarian character of state governments run on marxist principles.

The Soviet Union, Mao-led China, Khmer Cambodia. They were all states that killed millions to remake their population’s culture according to radical communist programs. It was – to the tune of genocide after genocide – the biggest mistake of the Western left. The notion that a state could craft cultural transformation through police and military action.

To craft a population in your own image takes weapons much more
subtle than gulags and secret police. You need ideas, and you need
the people to embrace these ideas on their own terms. Only then
will people ever accept an idea – if they've thought of it themselves.

Gilles Deleuze calls philosophy utopian. Paul Patton calls Deleuze’s political thinking utopian. I consider my own approach to political activism utopian. But it has a very different meaning than the utopian thinking of those old statist totalitarian leftists.

A philosophical concept gives shape to an ongoing development – in many contexts, like thought, technological invention, psychotherapy, politics. Not as a blueprint of the perfect endpoint – that’s the totalitarian way of thinking.

The diagram of a concept is like a character sketch, or a personality profile. But of a complex transformation – like someone re-evaluating his morality, developing or implementing a new kind of machine, or managing a centreless political movement.

When you know the personality of a political movement in this sense, you don’t think in terms of an endpoint. You think in terms of potential – what that movement can do as it adapts to the dynamics of a world in flux. As the world always is.

Utopia properly done is a style. How you adapt to the problems that life will throw at you. How a culture develops, grows, changes. There is no endpoint. Only stopping eventually.

One day the sun will burn the oceans away. Then there’ll be no more politics.

The Only Way to Accomplish Anything Is Becoming Revolutionary, Composing, 03/05/2018

So I just finished the draft of a policy paper for Ghubril on activism as a process model for international organizations to adopt in their own outreach. I explain activism as a communication project.

Stage inspirational events – as small as a memorial artwork to murdered Indigenous women or as large as the occupation of an entire street. Some people will attend that, or see it, who hadn’t seen it before. They will have never questioned their presumptions about their culture, country, or way of life.

There's much to say about Gandhi's actual politics, how he so ironically
was a fellow traveller with the Hindu nationalist ideas that he helped
create the social conditions for the more violent radicals to thrive.
That's how we have Narendra Modi, and how Gandhi got shot.

But this demonstration questions those presumptions, making you question them yourself. ‘Perhaps,’ you think, ‘it isn’t so simple as I’ve always thought.’ So you read up on the subject – what people who think in this different way have to say about many aspects of your life. It goes into more detail than the event that kicked the whole thing off.

All the time, there’s continued contact with these people you hadn’t ever engaged with before. You read books by environmentalists, maybe even some of the classics like Aldo Leopold. You get a flavour of the different approaches that people have developed over the years. In your own small way, you develop your approach.

But your old values aren’t compatible with that new approach. You can’t drive a car everywhere, or go through so much plastic waste. You have to at least figure out ways to lower your impact on the world. Lowering your electricity bills when you actually use less power is supposed to incentivize you to do that.

So you have to reject them. Look upon those values with disgust – even a sense of shame that you were ever so wasteful, that you thought so little of your ecology, the world around you. Fly away from that territory – anger is your fuel. Live in the better way that you want.

Be someone else’s encounter that helps transform their life. Do it as often as you can. Demonstrate the future you want.

Yes, I basically wrote the Gandhian model of activism in terms more like a marketing pitch. He played the principle to his audience – Now you let me play it to mine.
• • •
Reading Paul Patton’s early book about Gilles Deleuze, Deleuze and the Political, I come across the same model of how social revolution happens. Gandhi was explaining the idea to rural Indian peasants. I’m explaining it to a subscriber base of NGO workers in the international aid and peace sector.

He developed concepts. They were technical yet succinct. Clear and
abstract. Uncertain and obscure. But very useful when you understand
what they're actually for.

Deleuze was explaining it to a bunch of other philosophers and people who could understand highly abstract, multidisciplinary conceptual theorizing. I just explained it again for a general blog audience that I’ll boost through Twitter during my spare moments at work tomorrow.

I’m trans-literating how I understand Deleuze’s concept of becoming-x into a model of progressive social activism. It supplies a lot more complexity, detail, and even guidance for implementation than the simple statement of populist Gandhi ever could.

Yes, everyone knows the phrase, “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” But people need more than just the title of the paper – part of my job is to turn this into an action plan. It works to help folks along, adding a few more steps. A little more detail.

So you think about a person deterritorializing their existence – departing from one way of life for another. You focus your moral beliefs around entirely different concepts, which requires you to kick the old concepts to the curb. That takes force, and the only moral force strong enough is anger and rage at yourself for what kind of person you’d been for so long.

Patton writes about this specifically in terms of the state. That’s what it takes to reject the morality that the institutions of your state enforce. Overcoming the codes of enforced universal conformity to fly away from them entirely.

That’s one place to take the ideas. I have no problem with that application of them. I’m just applying the ideas differently.

Meditating on the Flows of Power, Jamming, 01/05/2018

Today has been a good day. At the college, I got to give a really intriguing presentation to a group of international student recruiters from different places around the world. A crew from Korea, a couple of folks from Mexico, one from Colombia, one from Brazil, and even one from Kazakhstan, which was a pleasant surprise to me.

If we get some Kazakh students coming to join my business program, it’ll be a real education for me as well. I know a few things in general about the history and culture of Kazakhstan, but I’d be fascinated to learn more about everyday life in cities like Astana and Almaty, life in a social and political culture so different from where I grew up. Where there is no popular public conception of democracy as such.

Turkmenbashi, a man who made himself the state.

How does someone who’s lived all their life in a country like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, or North Korea think about freedom? Or duty? Or love of country?

The state is a powerful presence in the lives of so many. But we should keep in mind the central lesson of the ontology of the social for politics – all relationships in society generate power. They’re dynamic exchanges of energy among people as individuals, groups, organizations, institutions.

The state is one institution among many that people have developed to shape their lives and govern their communities. The major failure of left-wing political movements over the last century and change has been their frequent focus on using the power of the state to affect and ensure change.

There are alternatives. The state, when all of its institutional powers are marshalled over a population, constitutes this brute force of pressure on all these people. A society is crushed by its police, bureaucracy, and agencies. People are stamped flat with the imprint of a statue made of gold.

Symbiosis. That's one alternative way of organizing a society's power, and institutions that shape those relationships. Gilles Deleuze – and Paul Patton following him – call symbiosis a double-capture. Two processes link with each other, and develop together. It’s an alliance that builds a mutual dependence, an interdependence. Each of them become more together than what they could have been alone.

It’s a model that offers an alternative to the heavy hand and coercive machinery – and the guns, always all the guns in the hands of people with the sole right to use them – of the state.

What are some models of politics, society, and friendship that work according to a logic of symbiosis? Something to think about, as this is just a short post of reflections that I’m writing almost as a diary tonight. It's been a long and tiring day, and I’m scheduling this to post early tomorrow morning.

I hope everyone’s had a good sleep. The world remains dangerous. But there’s power in all our hands.

Mapping Thought III: Basic Ingredients of Becoming, Research Time, 26/04/2018

So I mentioned yesterday that I was going to use the third entry in Mapping Thought to talk about virtual multiplicities. That’s a deep cut technical term in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, and it’s really not worth the time getting into the meaning of the words themselves.

If you decide to explore Deleuze’s work, you’ll come to understand what that term is all about. It might take you a long time, because it’s dense with the acquired learning of many different research and writing projects over the years.

It is genuinely radical, especially for a Westerner, with our
heritage of Platonist* ideas about existence and truth, baked
into so much everyday and high-level Christian philosophy
and theology, to accept that change is really primary in
the universe.
* Not necessarily Plato's own ideas, which were much more
strange than even the weirdness of his reputation.

That’s probably the most difficult part of Deleuze’s work – he’ll develop technical terms in slow, painstaking progress over early works, then use them in the later works with little to no explanation. He makes completism almost required. It can get frustrating if you aren’t already super-into his work.

It helped that I was already super-into his work, so I had no problem playing ‘gotta-catch-em-all’ with the Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari collected works.

Here’s what the term amounts to in more straightforward language. It’s the central concept in the ontology of becoming that Deleuze develops, free of any reactionary thinking trying to negate ontologies of being.

Here’s some actual straightforward language to explain that not-at-all straightforward language. Western philosophy, as well as a lot of popular Western thinking after the philosophical ideas burbled through to regular folks, privileges permanence and the eternal. We fear change. Change being inevitable means that death is inevitable, and that’s damn scary.

But reality changes – everything changes. Everything collapses and everything comes to be. Impermanence and mortality is something we have to accept because it is the nature of reality.

A lot of the time, when a thinker wants to build a system that accepts and understands change as the fundamental nature of reality, they’re too reactive. All of their terms and concepts aren’t real ideas about becoming – they just take the ideas of being-centred, permanence-focussed philosophical systems and turn them upside down and inside out. It’s not a genuine philosophy of becoming – it’s a negative image of a philosophy of being.

What are the components of a genuine philosophy of becoming? Here’s how Paul Patton lays them out, and I rather like his thinking on this.

When an act of creation is an act of destruction, it's like hearing that
love is simultaneously hate. It doesn't seem to make sense, but that's
only because of the limits of your thought. If you really think
differently, you'll find joy in life and death. Even your own.

1) All the unity among complex bodies and processes in the world emerge from the relationships among components. Those components aren’t necessarily simpler in one of a few specific ways than what they make up. Those relationships are dynamic, fluctuating feedback loops.

You can use the basic relationship of differentials to describe, in very basic form, those material relationships that compose our world – dx/dy. A change in one causes, and is the cause of a change in the other. This holds among all relations at once, how they’re all connected together.

2) The world is fundamentally a matter of processes. Even objects we perceive and interact with as solid, permanent bodies are unfolding processes.

3) Understand possibility as potential. A process, in its moment of genesis, doesn’t somehow contain all that it can become. But a feature of its unique identity is that it can change in relationship with all the changes that it interacts with, within particular limits.

Every process has limits of its possible changes, but doesn’t contain each of those possibilities in its first moment. The past is memory, not the present. The present is movement.

4) All relationships create new assemblages and processes, even if other relationships, assemblages, and processes are destroyed in the process.

5) Just as everything is constituted through relationships, our identities – at the fundamental level of the existence of all processes and bodies themselves – are entirely relational.

A Thinker Is a Process Because She’s a Person, Jamming, 12/02/2018

Two passes at the mistake of searching for the universal, for the one true truth.
• • •
I pity the fool who had to write the essay on Sigmund Freud in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy. It’s because there actually isn’t much to say when a thinker so powerfully rejects a former influence in a fit of rage.

One of the most influential books Gilles Deleuze ever wrote was Anti-Œdipus with Félix Guattari – definitely the most influential among the political thinkers who build on his work. That book was built around a detailed, incisive, forceful, and total rejection of the core dynamics of all Freudian thinking.

Freudian concepts of desire dominated French thought about
psychology early in Deleuze and Guattari's career. They
wrote against it with the fury of a betrayed disciple.

Now, before meeting Guattari, Deleuze did take Freud’s ideas seriously. Many of Freud’s ideas were the core principles of the analysis in Deleuze’s book on Leopold Sacher-Masoch. Several chapters in The Logic of Sense explicitly relied on Freud to build a theory of desire and sexuality.

Nothing reversed so radically in Deleuze’s intellectual life than his belief in Freudian ideas. It took meeting Guattari for him to realize that Freudian psychology was the closest thing possible to an opposite of the direction he wanted to develop – a metaphysical framework based on heterogeneity, variety, difference, becoming.

Working with Guattari helped Deleuze realize that Freud’s entire system was built on a premise that those images – Œdipus in particular – constituted a universal structure to human consciousness.

Guattari – a man who worked all his life with schizophrenics – knew from the examples of his daily professional life that it was far from universal. More than that, the dynamics of Œdipal imagery, concepts, and principles in action on people’s personalities and identities grounds an ethic of unearned submission and servitude to authority of force and might. Father–King–Policeman–Gun–Man.

Fucking patriarchy, man.
• • •
Ronald Bogue ended up writing the most boring kind of history of philosophy paper imaginable – the list. He lists and dispassionately describes the appearances Freud’s ideas made in Deleuze’s work. Doesn’t contribute any more analysis than that.

There's a masterful essay in cultural theory on how Freudian
philosophy of desire and sexuality leads to the ideology of Zardoz.
But I'm not about to write it. That would mean I'd have to watch
Zardoz.

Bogue’s essay expresses a weird kind of regret that Deleuze rejected Freudianism and never relied on Freud’s work again. I can’t quite explain it.

Best I can do is speculate – about the habits and norms of the academics of the global university system. Not what everyone does, of course. I’m just talking about the tendencies people get socialized into as they teach their courses, hunt for research grants and contracts, submit their articles and edit their journals, chase tenure.

There’s a tendency to crave wholeness in a primary material philosopher. At conferences, in classes, and in articles, so many ask questions like, “What was Aristotle’s concept of the soul?” for example. As if there could only be one answer to that question.

Some philosophers are allowed breaks. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of those, but he was so extreme in declaring it in his life that no one can deny it. Kant was way more professional with his declaration, but it was still pretty extreme.

I was trained to think of such figures as outliers in the broader tradition of philosophy – those were consistent thinkers. Even the two Kants and the two Wittgensteins are each treated as being consistent. The concepts are clear in each one. You’d get weird looks if you suggested that the primary material thinkers were just as uncertain of the ideas they wrote about and the concepts they developed as anyone else.

So much secondary material is scholarship arguing over what a given philosopher really meant by a particular concept. If even the primary material writers didn’t quite know the exact concept – if they were figuring it all out like the rest of us – there isn’t any real hook for why they’re among the ranks of the great philosophers.

Well, there is. It’s the ambition, care, and skill with which they wrote their battles with difficult, vital concepts. Plus, they had the social and institutional connections and reputations to publish their work where it would be widely read and taken seriously.

If you think primary material philosophers reached any truth that make them categorically different from anyone else. We don’t read Aristotle to follow and join along with his concepts about the nature of the soul – We read Aristotle to know Aristotle’s concept of the soul.

Maybe we shouldn’t. You know that everybody shits, right?

No Rest in This World or the World to Come, Research Time, 25/01/2018

If you're wondering why the puppy is here, it'll
become important later. Right now, the puppy
wants to remind you of an old Talmudic saying
which was the closing sentence of one of
Salomon Maimon's first books.
Scholars of wisdom have no rest in this
world, or in the world to come.

You know what I love about Salomon Maimon? He was a dirty, smelly, drunk who sat in a bar for years, barely employed, pretty damn poor – but he could still get an essay out to one of the leading philosophers of the era to make an incisive critique of his work that still stands up centuries later.

Maimon was a scholar of Torah and Talmud for most of his life – teaching, writing essays on the great Jewish theologians, commentary on Kabbalah, textbooks on the Jewish religion and the Hebrew language, and works of original philosophy.

But Christian-descended people know him best for his critique of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Why his critique became so famous is actually a beautiful story.

Maimon was a fairly minor figure in German intellectual circles of the time, but knew some of the well-connected folks. Maimon knew a guy named Markus Herz, who also knew Immanuel Kant. Maimon read the Critique of Pure Reason shortly after it was published, and had some brilliant critical things of his own to say about it.

He wrote these ideas in a fairly long letter, which Herz passed along to Kant. Kant read it, and it blew him away. He publicly thanked Maimon, and praised him in public appearances as one of the only critics of his new work who was actually picking up what he was throwing down.

That any intellectual at the top of his game in creativity and public profile would do that is remarkable. That Kant would do that to a pretty obscure Jewish person – in 1780s Prussia, where Jews were pretty deeply racialized and persecuted – is a moment of ethical beauty.

I'm not exactly a Kantian, or a devotee of his philosophy. But I have a lot of praise for him as a person.

Maimon is the subject of an essay in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, the book that’s been inspiring my last few posts – even the ones that got more than a little weird and creative. So what was the main idea in Maimon's thinking that could be said to have influenced Deleuze’s thinking most?

After a fashion, we can't see it if it doesn't move either.

It’s an understanding of how perception works that broke radically with what was taken for granted in the intellectual and scientific culture and knowledge base of Maimon’s time, the last decades of the 18th century.

Kant’s discussion of perception – and pretty much every philosophical and scientific discussion of perception – rested on an assumption that appears pretty common sense. Assume that you see things in the world.

I'm not making some kind of skeptical argument. I’m talking about objects. I see a tree. I see a bus. I see a field of grass. I see a fence. I see a puppy. I see a person. When I see a puppy, I immediately experience the puppy as a whole.

Each of these wholes in our perception – the puppy, the fence, the tree, the bus – is a stable identity in our experience.

Here was Maimon’s alternative. We don’t see wholes with stable, unambiguous identities. We perceieve actions, movements, fluctuations of differences, changes, that our perceptual apparatus – the sense organs and nervous system – assembles into what we perceive as objects.

A puppy comes into our room. We first perceive the puppy through changes. Where there was silence, there’s now skittering and yipping. Where there was an empty room, there’s now this beige-and-white speckled vision. A faint odour of dog breath creeps into your nose.

There isn’t just that one change. The whole scene continues to fluctuate. Barks alternate breathing, paws pound the floor in rhythm. The shape of the dog in our field of vision grows larger as it approaches. Its legs and ears flop and fly about. At every instance, we perceive changes.

Our real experience of the material world isn’t the objects in it – it’s the changes in it, the differentials, the fluxes. You look at pretty much all contemporary science of perception – with input from neurology, medicine, biology, robotics – and they’ve pretty much proven Maimon’s argument. At least in a kind of essence.

Our world is material and real, but what’s most material – most easily grasped by an organism in perception – are its changes, its movements.

The Main Event, Research Time, 08/01/2018

Popping back through my notes on Gilles Deleuze, writing some pretty foundational ontology.

When Deleuze was an old, dying man, he often talked about the ideas that he explored throughout his career. He was a tough man to tie down, mainly because he refused a lot of the typical branding exercises the standards of academia required.

Consider the power of images that inspire us to become more,
better, than what we now are. Images that spark a creative movement,
which put us in touch with our potential, with our lives not as we
might live them in the humdrum moments, but as event.

Before any hypothetical academics get in an offended huff about my referring to their research programs as including anything as crass as branding, let me say this – I don’t care. Academics have to brand themselves – they promote their research interests and specialties, promote their teaching records and focuses.

Yet it’s all too often a little too constricting. Most researchers who keep their heads down in their specialties for decades find themselves facing some sneers when they move on to other topics to write on. Sometimes, they fall on their faces, and deserve the sneers. Other times, less so.

Although a lot of academics don’t like to encourage people to write with the changeability of someone like Deleuze, the weird thing is that his changeability made for a good branding decision. He was never considered to be someone who had no right to write what he did. You could love him or hate him, but the world was open for him.

But Deleuze would say, in all the changes that animate his decades of work, that the primary problem for him was the nature of the event. It’s a tough term in postmodernish philosophy, since there’s a lot of writing that meditates on the nature of the event without actually saying or thinking anything constructive or illuminating at all.

Let’s have a go at following along one illumination Deleuze works into What Is Philosophy?. The book is all about concepts, but what is a concept? Concepts are diagrams of material processes – the complex relationships among components of multifaceted processes.

Think about what we can be, instead of what we are. That's the start
of a process that, if you want to be provocative, you can call
liberation. Liberation from what, though? That's a very reasonable
question, as there's no need to leap from one potential to another
without paying heed to what you might leave in your wake. We
should never think of freedom as liberation from responsibilities.
We need our responsibilities to each other to hold human society
together.

When we think about these relationships in scientific terms – in relation to direct reference to actual processes – we can call them engineering diagrams of a sort. But understood abstractly from any real-world instance, it’s a concept. When we think philosophically, we understand a concept as a state of affairs in the world, but entire in potential.

There are events and there’s the event. Regular old events are simply the ongoing movements of those processes – states of affairs continuing and changing. But the event of any such process is its potential for development. Such potential is just as material as any other component – bodies, motions, relationships.

The event, in Deleuze’s sense, is all that any particular state of affairs can be – or can become, which in this context amounts to the same thing.* It’s the full range of a process’ motion, existence, changeability. All that a process can do, all that it can become.

* Being is sometimes becoming.

Action and becoming amount to the same thing too, in this context. What a particular process becomes along any given duration is a small slice of all that it can be. Most processes don’t come near approaching anywhere close to becoming all that it has the potential for.

But that’s fine. What matters for practical philosophy is understanding the potential. That’s the core concept at the centre of how I’m analyzing politics in the extended research for this manuscript Utopias – what are the potentials for human communities, provided we actually all act according to our greatest potentials.

On What There Isn't, Research Time, 22/12/2017

Here’s another takeaway from the chapter in What Is Philosophy? about the nature of science – Atheism is ridiculous.

Now, I’m not talking about the many different schools of thoughtful, philosophically rigorous, conceptually beautiful atheism that people have discussed and believed in for millennia.

Forget about Bertrand Russell’s arguments for skepticism. Forget Nietzsche’s disturbingly ethical rejection of Christianity, on grounds that it was a morality that made people weak and resentful. Leave the Hellenic Cynics behind.

He's just so smug. Frankly, all the trolling jerks and fascists are so
insufferably smug. Have fascists ever been quite so irritating as
they are today?

I’m going to come back to Spinoza, because of course I am.

Think about that shrill atheism of people like Richard Dawkins.* Dawkins own second, longest, and most annoying wave as a public intellectual began with his advocacy for atheism in the early 1990s. Deleuze was writing What Is Philosophy? He knew who Dawkins was, and would have heard talk of his new books.

* Canadian politics sidebar. Do you think Jordan Peterson might be shooting to become the Richard Dawkins for the revanchist set? Dawkins courted a populist college kid atheism of thinking religion was stupid. Peterson’s demo simply thinks the same about women’s rights. I think a severe category shift just happened.

Science and religion don’t need to be hostile to each other. They are pretty much all the time, but it’s not necessary.

I think the secret is in the ideology of Western science that’s grown up around it for the past couple of centuries. It goes – Science can investigate the entire universe, discovering the truth in the material world and proving religion empty dogma. The Galileo Myth, you could call it.

Galileo the person is totally absent from this mythic version of him so many of us learned, if not in school, then on PBS. His estate eventually licensed his image for use in the cleaned-up PIXAR-perfect movie version of his life.

The general method of science is to describe the world as it is in the greatest possible detail. Its domain is the entire universe.

Deleuze has the very rare clarity to say that this means science will inevitably fragment disciplines fractally ad infinitum – and that’s great! We need scientific knowledge to find out more and more about the world. We need scientific knowledge to help us figure a way out of this economic-ecological-political clusterfuck we’re in as a global civilization.

Pictured: A proper atheist. I only wish official portraits of
Spinoza depicted him as how brown he really was. The
man was born in Amsterdam to a family of Portuguese-
Jewish immigrants. Put him in a time machine, he would
likely fit in fine walking around Marrakech or east LA.

But that truth contradicts the today’s cult of populist atheism. Because populist atheism has two founding Myths – Galileo and Einstein. Well, more like Galileo’s Myth and Einstein’s Word.** E=mc2

** Fitting that the Man be Catholic and the Word be Jewish. Moses heard the Word and Christ had become the Man.

The ideology of populist scientific atheism has twin foundations. 1) Science’s truth stands against religion’s dogmas; 2) The most universal truth of science will be simple enough to put on a T-shirt.

I remember reading Stephen Hawking talk about the theory of everything having as simple a heart as E=mc2. These days, I can’t believe someone apparently so smart could be so naive.

When you understand the world in more and more detail, it doesn’t make things simpler. It makes things more complicated. There are so many domains of knowledge – what there is to be learned gets denser and denser. Each scientific discipline is a different domain of knowledge.

Real scientific investigation – discovering more about the world – will never unify all the domains because such an investigation moves in the opposite direction as simplicity and unity.

Empirical knowledge expands and proliferates – even the most arcane theoretical work relies on the empirical reality of having to make sense of our everyday world.

What about religion? God isn’t something you find like you find the Higgs Boson, building an experiment to detect God by a predicted ancillary affect. God isn’t even something you find like your car keys, remembering that they slid off the table where you threw them coming home and you thought you’d pick them up later.

You want to know how you discover God? Read Spinoza. Second time you read it, start with Book One. First time you read it, start with Book Five and go backwards. You find God in learning more about the world, and how to move with ease, happiness, and joy within it.

You realize that when a real atheist says, “I believe only in material reality,” he is literally saying, “I believe only in God.” Substance. Material reality, of which we’re each a flickering little quirky process.

Thought: An Uncanny Precision, Research Time, 21/11/2017

Gilles Deleuze has an awful reputation as an impenetrable writer. And I mean fucking impenetrable. Not like it isn’t his fault. Some of Deleuze’s sentences – especially in his super-dense late 1960s works – are the kind of language you grind your teeth on.

Working with Félix Guattari made his words more poetic, more like a teacher than a researcher. But the flow of this jazz was sometimes a little too out-there. Deleuze’s language was looser in his solo works during his last decade alive, though he never met the fever pitches of those collaborative works again.

I do sometimes think of their collaborative style like jazz musicians
riffing on each other's improvisations, or rappers freestyling in tandem.
Deleuze and Guattari's collaborations do have a very musical feeling
to their language.

But he doesn’t have a reputation for precision. Mostly stereotypes about being either immensely difficult or bizarrely weird. Which is too bad, because he’s actually a very precise writer.

When you read What Is Philosophy?, it isn’t just a book of philosophy – it’s also a look at Deleuze’s own method of philosophical thought.* Start by describing what it is he makes. Concepts.

* Why not Guattari too, even though his name is on the cover? A reference to the history. Their collaboration was pretty light on this one, nowhere near the intensity of their work in the 1970s. They were old by then, Guattari deep in a years-long depression. He’d die of a heart attack at 62 the year after it was published. Félix didn’t do too much.

A philosophical concept is an account – in thought and as best you can in words – of the full range of possible variations when several different processes collide and interact. It’s like a mathematical description, but without variables or constants, using only the ranges of all the relevant vectors.

A concept has no X, Y, and Z; no e or π. A concept has maximum and minimum ranges of development from a decisive, transformative point. There’s a collision of forces, a moment of change constitutes from its complex dynamics and turbulence a new system of those forces. The range of possibilities that event sets in motion is its concept.

Let's be honest with ourselves, however. They'd never be as cool as
actual jazz musicians.

A concept is an expression of this knowledge of the ranges of potentials, but in thought. When you ask what these thoughts make possible, you’re doing practical philosophy. Exploring what a particular way of thinking – a framework for understanding the world – enables you to do.

What does such a framework – the ability to understand the world using these ranges – open our minds toward? Practical philosophy – philosophical thinking and analysis going to work in the world.

But in this book, Deleuze is thinking only of the nature of concepts. He’d written enough about their development and use. What Is Philosophy? is Deleuze doing meta-philosophy. Trying to describe what philosophical thinking actually is, and what philosophers do when they’re actually doing philosophy and not just writing about it.**

** The occupation of way too many people who call themselves philosophers.

Studying a concept means examining how that concept is expressed, how it’s written, other explorations of it in different philosophical (or philosophically-inclined) literature.

Once you understand the writing, you can mull over its mechanics – its processes, the activities it suits, what it makes visible and invisible, the relationships and dynamics of all its components, how its structure can affect how someone would think through it.

You survey it, like a drone flight over a mountain range. It has to be a very careful survey, because of its complexity. Incredibly precise knowledge, but only after careful, attentive study. A survey to map thoughts themselves.

Is Alienation Inevitable or Escapable? Jamming, 05/11/2017

Alienation is a word with many different meanings. We use it – the ideas and images it evokes – to unpack a lot of fairly different concepts. That versatility makes the word very useful, but also very dangerous because it’s so easily misunderstood.

Here are a few examples.

What we take to be a hallucination, an illusion, is in fact the real.
What appears solid is a practical instinct that more careful
observation shows has very limited scope and application.
Real knowledge shows us that everything is connected,
interdependent, flows into each other, can sense each other.

When I brought Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to Palgrave a few years ago, one of the proposal reviewers kept talking about marxism. Now, I was using the word ‘alienation’ in an environmental philosophy context.

It’s a book on environmental ethics. But some folks, they see a word that has some deep marxist associations and they fly straight to marxism. The conversation with the reviewer turned out fine.

A lot of academics are surprised when I write back to journal and book line editors telling them their reviewers didn’t know what they were talking about. But it’s surprisingly effective.

So what’s underneath all those different definitions of alienation – the orthodox marxist, the popular lefty, the environmentalist / ecological, and other philosophical approaches? Think about it this way – What’s the experience or the state of mind that all these technical conceptions of alienation describe different aspects of?

There’s a passage in The Human Condition that, as far as I can tell, nails this description. Arendt talks about the peculiarly modern chasm between the nature of the world and our experience of it.

The last few centuries of research institutions have discovered more about the universe than we’ve ever known before. We’re able to observe planets orbiting stars all over our galaxy. We’re investigating the smallest, most elusive particles in our universe.

We’ve developed such comprehensive knowledge of how life works on a molecular level. We’re on our way toward a similarly comprehensive knowledge of life ecologically. All of that builds our medical knowledge. We understand the processes and flows by which our planet holds itself together and pulls itself apart.

Confronted by the ALie Nation
The subjects and the citizens
See the material religions through trauma and numb
Nothing is related
All the things of the earth and in the sky
Have energy to be exploited
Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls sold
Into nothing is sacred, not even their self

And I’m being way too quick about these different venues of knowledge. Only listing them to blow your minds a little by reminding you of how powerful our knowledge has become.

We’re learned an enormous amount about the universe. But it’s put pretty much all our experience to the lie. When we walk on the Earth, it feels solid to us. But our ground floats on a globe of molten rock – liquid. Objects feel solid, but they’re composed mostly of empty space, kept separate by electromagnetic fields.

Really, it would be more accurate to describe reality as the interaction – integration, interpenetration – of fields instead of objects. That we’re a dynamic reality where everything is constantly in flux. Alienation rises in us because our reality feels different to us.

We experience solid bodies. We experience stability, not flux. Flux, change, dynamism all tends to disturb us. But that’s the way the world really is.

So we’re left with another example of the traditional distinction in Western philosophy. Really, it’s the distinction that defines Western philosophy – one problem running through the entire tradition. Appearance and reality.

That chasm is our fundamental alienation. Something that we’re supposed to or actually do experience as a harmony turns out to be a chaotic discord. The solidity of the world is an illusion. No, not an illusion – a lie that we tell ourselves and convince ourselves from our earliest experiences.

A lie into which we’re socialized from birth. Our knowledge that gives us so much power also shows that the harmony we felt with the world is utterly unreal. As Arendt quotes Werner Heisenberg, all we have are our instruments and ourselves.

Expecting the world to be one way, we discover that it’s totally different. The ways we understood the world – so common that it feels intuitive, that we raise our children instinctively to believe in the world this way – are actually nonsense. Our subjectivities schizz from the world.

How do you heal this wound in our knowledge and self-conception? It may be as easy and as difficult as throwing that false instinct away. Understand the world as energy, flux, flow, and interdependence, multiplicity without hierarchy or rank. See what you can become then.

What Does It Take to Control History Itself? Research Time, 11/10/2017

When I come up with titles like that, you can tell I grew up watching a lot of Doctor Who. But I’m actually going there by the end of this few hundred words, I think.

I noticed a curious passage in The Human Condition, where Hannah Arendt – in her abstract conceptual approach and her historian’s style of evocative writing – starts talking about network effects.

Even something as ordinary as a timely trip to the bathroom can have
amazing consequences that are impossible to predict.

Not in any technical sense, of course. The Human Condition came long before Bruno Latour and his sociological actor-network theory, or the popular knowledge of neural networks in artificial intelligence research, or any of the networked communications infrastructure our civilization depends on today.

Arendt is talking about the capacity for a small act in any human society to have outsized effects. Consequences spiral outwards from any action, always expanding their power well beyond an actor’s intention.

What do we think of before we make any relatively significant action in our lives? I don’t necessarily mean only the obvious decisions about whether I should marry this person or bomb this country. Those are events with clear meaning and many unintended consequences.

She’s talking about events like conversations about important topics with a friend. Politics, love, business, family – anything that you’d share with someone you trust.

She's even talking about utterly trivial events like picking up a package from the post office, bumming a ride home from work with a friend, going to the bathroom.

Any event can have unintended consequences because we can’t perceive – in the moment of our action – all the indirect and systematic affects that can flow from it. We can’t see the entire web of causality – forward and backward, molecular and molar – at once.

That’s the power and gravity of human action, according to Arendt. Any one of our actions could occur at what turns out to be a critical juncture of causes and processes. Even our most trivial action can have knock-on consequences that transform the world.

That would be a fantastic novel to write, actually. Also reminds me of what I’ve read about Laozi.

What would it take to grab hold of chaos? To bend chaos to your will and make sure that only what you planned would happen.

Confronting History as Chaos, Composing, 10/10/2017

So a lot of my research so far for Utopias has been about political philosophy and thinking. Here’s another look at how I’ve approached the research for it.

Like I’ve said, there are three parts. The first one is about the human relationship with time, how we understand and engage it in our daily lives and in our larger self-conceptions of society and history.

The second is about how we can use the different aspects of that relationship to understand the dynamic processes of reality – the constructive, productive power of time.

Just around the corner, the limit.

The third figures out what ways to understand time best harness humanity’s most constructive, sustainably productive powers. Doing that also identifies what those powers are – the powers of enthusiastic, free solidarity in all sectors of human society.

I’ve been researching the third part mostly for two reasons. One is that the political philosophy concepts are where I needed the most work. I wanted to improve my knowledge about a particular direction in democratic theory.

A processual way of thinking about the development of communities, states, and societies, skeptical of all dominations, hopeful about the power of pluralism and freedom.

I’d already developed my concepts for part two writing Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. We understand ecological matters – and the general development of the universe – best when we think in terms of processes and dynamics.

My expertise on part one’s subject – humanity’s relationship with time – is a blend of the two positions. I’ve done a lot of the research about process already, but not yet about how we come to (mis)understand ourselves – historical, narrative humanity.

Analyzing how we understand history and humanity's development
through asking What Happened? is also a pleasant chunk of Gilles
Deleuze's writing. I actually see many similarities between his and
Arendt's concepts, even though there seems to have been no
influence between them.

Reading Hannah Arendt’s work is very enlightening, given that this is the setup of the project. I consider her a predecessor – in my pretentious moments – because The Human Condition is simultaneously about how humanity really develops over time, and the different ways we understand that development.

We understand our development by asking What Happened? Then we figure out the best ways to get answers. Once we have enough facts, we make a story – great actors, pivotal events, the power of humanity acting together. That’s our history.

History is what we tell ourselves when we answer the question What Happened? But that’s a retroactively written history – history with themes, great characters, running currents, a kind of unity. Whether it was a secular unity, or a Providence, Zeitgeist, Invisible Hand – it's still unity. Events as they’re unfolding have no such unity.

Events are chaos – maelstroms of colliding processes and forces. Military institutions like states smacking into each other. Terrifyingly complex economic and industrial systems span the globe, but emerge from thousands and millions of individual acts.

The system transforms those acts, but this feedback loop between a huge system and its constituents physically constitutes human civilization. There’s incredible variety here, a huge diversity of powers, processes, stories, lives. The history of humanity as it actually unfolds is an authorless history.

Despite the convergence I see in their concepts, Arendt and Deleuze
had utterly different philosophical approaches, styles, and thinking.
I think part of that is rooted in Deleuze's relative privilege compared
to her. Deleuze rode out the Second World War in relative safety,
losing only his brother, a resistance fighter. He was 20 by the war's
end. Arendt escaped the Holocaust and was a political refugee for
many years in her life.

Arendt makes very clear how utterly terrifying it is for human history to be truly authorless. Those metaphors about maelstroms are appropriate. We tell ourselves coherent histories – whether in scholarly books, or popular films and novels, or epic poems and myths in Athenian squares thousands of years ago.

It’s meant to give us a means to grapple with the chaos of time – to turn events into history through understanding. Sometimes, it works, and we understand the world in the best way to thrive.

Often, we lose track of how the world develops, clinging to old certainties out of inertia, or because we’ve culturally bathed in them for so long that it becomes difficult to conceive of anything different.

A complete conception of the real development of events is totally incoherent because of that chaos. Every simple story is too simple to be true – in the real complexity of history, all contraries are compossible.

But it’s seriously difficult to conceive of that kind of world. It takes complexity in thinking, and the ability to confront the terror of a rudderless reality.

A Society of Workaholics, Research Time, 30/09/2017

I’m never too quick to condemn capitalism. Two reasons why. One is because everybody’s doing it. We’re in a resurgence of anti-capitalist activism, equally critical of our destructive industrial practices and the financial policies that crush billions of lives.

For good reason, of course. There’s plenty about the drive to ever-more-intense industrial production that’s probably making Earth uninhabitable for us. Climate change, yes. But even beyond that, just consider the horrible effects that basic pollution has on our ecosystems.

The goal that most of us have in our lives is to spend our energies doing
something we love. That's the heart of so much career advice, even
though there aren't many folks who can do that. Even in the fortunate
industrialized West, too many people spend too much time having to do
something they don't want to do. This seems a source of social tension.

Do you know how much plastic you eat every day? Tens of thousands of microscopic plastic particles are eaten by fish and crustaceans every day. We eat those same plastic particles when we eat those fish.

We aren't just drowning in our shit – we eat it too. That’s the second reason why.

But if we can correct the mistakes and self-destruction of mass industrial capitalism, we shouldn’t abandon markets entirely. One obvious reason is because state-run industrial endeavours have rent scars in the Earth too. Consider the destruction of the Aral Sea to water massive cotton farms on the orders of the Soviet government.

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a critique of the industrial society human civilization had become – among the many things it is. That’s one of the many philosophical ideas she finds in comparison with the life and morality of Polis-era Greece.

This political problem is a question – pretty simple in the ordinary way we encounter it. Do you work to live? Or do you live to work?

Consider how the economy of Polis Greece worked. Yes, there are plenty of material differences that make directly emulating it ridiculous – the drastically lower population, that it was almost entirely agrarian.

Forget that – philosophy is about understanding what concepts can guide new action for our new situations. Isolate a concept – See what actions and processes its framework of thinking can lay out. See how it changes your conceptions of what’s possible.

I grew up surrounded by values like these about your work. You should
always feel that your work is dignified, a source of honour, pride, and
pleasure too. Work should be something that, even when it may drain
your energy, you enjoy it, and it has benefits beyond your own
pleasure as well. We want to make a living in a calling or a
vocation, not merely a job. Watch Mike Judge's Office Space, and
you see how he valorizes manual labour as honourable work.
That's true. But consider public service like community
leadership, or even teaching.

So look at how their economy worked. The whole purpose was to produce enough that you could live off its surplus for the rest of your life. Put a lot of effort, labour, and work into your life and career at the beginning. Make a huge enough surplus that you can stop working for a while.

You can now afford to pay other people to labour for you – run the household, make food, do all the little tasks of staying alive that take so much time. That way, you can devote yourself to what you’ve always wanted to do, what you’ve been raised to aspire toward all your life.

Join the government.

Of course, Polis Greeks didn’t have a government like we do. There was no welfare state bureaucracy. There was the military, tax collectors and financiers, scribes recording the debates of their leaders.

Leaders would plan new construction in the city, represent their community to other cities, make decisions about how the city as a whole would handle its business. But Polis Greeks didn’t consider any of this business of leadership to be work. They wouldn’t expect to be paid.

The whole reason why they were able to become leaders is that they’d already built enough wealth to live on without having to build any more. Surplus was to be spent on supporting your public life as a community leader and statesman.

What kinds of personalities do our values today of workaholism and
unstoppable accumulation create? I don't think I'm comfortable
living in a society where our most powerful people are the ones
deranged enough to think it's perfectly good to profit off the misery
of others because unstoppably growing wealth is the primary
good in your life. Is this a reasonable way to live? A good way?

That’s what they considered retirement. Rather, they had this phase of public leadership that came between your working life and your retirement.

Contrast that kind of personality with the attitude all too popular today about wealth. You just keep accumulating. There’s no stopping you. Just keep growing and growing and growing your personal wealth in assets. Own more and more and more.

Who needs $47 billion? Even the billionaires who become philanthropists never truly divest. They hold on to so much money and assets so their value can continue to grow and fund more philanthropy.

Why did you need to lock up that much wealth for yourself at all? Philanthropy moves faster when everyone else has the money in the first place through their own jobs and careers. This is the moral ideal at the heart of today’s mania for basic income.

But a basic income from the government is only necessary because the private economy isn’t providing it. It should, because that’s why anyone goes to work all – they want to earn enough to live, to retire comfortably, or spend more time in their lives as leaders in their communities.

We’re a society of workaholics. Why should we have to be this way? How else could we live if all of us chose to prioritize our lives a little differently? Imagine what our society would be if no one ever wanted to become a billionaire at all.

Look into the most abstract features of their souls. Now you’re doing philosophy.