Teaching Prosperity in the Underground, Composing, 29/07/2018

So it’s been almost a week since the last post. I didn’t mean to do this on purpose – it’s just been a busy week. Thankfully, it’s mostly been busy with some promising business opportunities starting to come together.

And sometimes, just some incredibly long days. So long that I’d run out of energy before getting down to write. At least to write this, as I’ve mostly been working on other things that I actually get paid for. The blog is meta – a writing project about my writing projects – meta takes a back seat to actual.

I'm one person, not a mechanical writing machine. I'm powered by
food, coffee, and serotonin.

I’ve started work on a small media project that will involve interviews, and I’m starting to line those up for later in August. More updates to come.

But there are some other interesting developments in my teaching job as well. As you might remember, I published my review of Raphael Sassower’s book The Quest for Prosperity last week. I read it months ago, and only got around to writing it all now.

But that means I’ve had a few months to stew over its arguments and ideas. I think the book does come up short in some areas. But its critical chapters on the political economy of the 21st century global economy are wonderfully insightful.

There's a lot going on in those early chapters of The Quest for Prosperity that I couldn’t fit in all their detail into the main review. I only had so much space and so much time to write the thing. But in working over the ideas, I've begun incorporating them into my teaching work.

To give you an update, I’m the head of a program in Business Administration at a small private college. We’re using a standard set of textbooks, but I’m working on lecture content that itself goes beyond just those lines.

For example, I’m not about to present uncritically a map from Freedom House ranking the economic freedom of different countries around the world. I’m not going full communism in there. I’m just asking students questions about what economic freedom means to them, whether they ultimately agree with Freedom House’s terms, and how to articulate their differences.

The marketplace should be a friendly place.

Actually criticizing some aspects of business school orthodoxy as part of the program is turning into a pretty effective value proposition for the place. Unfortunately for the rest of North American civilization, this is how we stand out from the crowd.

One idea of Sassower’s that I’ve incorporated into my program’s business lectures is how he distinguishes between markets and capitalism. Markets are a matter of what Adam Smith called “truck and barter,” small exchanges among community members that add up to mutual benefit.

Capitalism as an ethical attitude is a spirit of competition, where you can all too easily see another person’s benefit as a potential loss for you. Worse yet, you expect others to see your benefits the same way you see theirs. So you become paranoid, aggressive, and suspicious.

Solidarity is broken. Friendship is impossible.

Manuel DeLanda covered the differences of markets and capitalism in a book published more than 20 years ago. But he had an ontological focus on the macroeconomics of the massive capital flows that industrialization and colonialism powered.

Sassower’s emphasis on political economy foregrounds moral principles and ethical attitudes, so we can see the transformation of a society’s values along with their economic system. Good is no longer giving benefits to your community, but leading your community as a function of your wealth. You don’t want to be part of a community – you want to own it.

The Anxiety of Having to Work For a Living, Research Time, 13/06/2018

We think of the millionaire – or billionaire these days – businessman as the bold entrepreneur. A fearless experimenter. We hear the rhetoric all the time, and have for years. The startup business is where people take risks – develop new ideas – transformative new ventures.

Can't spell adventure without venture (capital), after all.

Look, I know that wasn’t even funny. It wasn’t supposed to be. I just want to make one brief point that I found very insightful – it appeared in Jeremy Gilbert’s book on the history of Cultural Studies, and Antonio Negri’s new book Assembly.

The will to become epochal is equally inspirational and ridiculous.

Entrepreneurial culture is a homogenizing force, risk-averse to the point of cowardice. Their fear is a psychological affect of life in capitalistic economies. It’s the fragility of the wealthy.

The entrepreneurs we lionize in our culture are those few who’ve taken great risks and been incredibly successful. They’ve transformed our culture with new technologies and business models. For better or, from many perspectives, worse.

But that’s only a very small number of people. They were uncommon, not just in their luck but their personalities. Every biography of a legendary entrepreneur is fascinating because they are genuinely remarkable, singular personalities. Brilliant to the point of mysticism, ruthless to the point of infamy, driven to the point of mania.

Such people are rare. Very rare.

So what about all those thousands of people I see in shared office spaces all over Toronto?

Graphic designers. Intellectual property lawyers. Call centre. Dudes developing an app to create insurance packages for you. A really good SEO guy.

But innovators? People out to transform the structure of an entire economic sector? An entire global economy? My buddy is a really good SEO guy, but that is not his goal. Dude just wants to pay off the mortgage on his condo, maybe pump out a kid or two with his wife in a couple of years.

Only a few people understand how rare that combination of the
inspirational and ridiculous truly is in society. So rare you can, for
the most part, only find it in fiction. Usually, they're the
supervillains. The fictional versions too.

The losers of a rat race die in poverty. That’s the problem with the rat race of a new liberal economy. It doesn’t actually empower most people to innovate their way to a bold new future. Desperation drives people to anxiety and heart disease, not creativity and risk. When you know you can lose the mortgage on a bad bet, you’re less likely to make bets at all. You’ll just be desperate for some security.

This is how most people live under our economic system. It’s a desperation that breeds poor decision making, anxiety that perverts reason with constant worry. People do not take risks when they are terribly worried, unless they’re so brilliant, ruthless, and driven that they can drown worry out with the raw screams of a sustained explosion of all-consuming volcanic will.

My buddy is a really good SEO guy, but I don’t think he’s really capable of that kind of thing. I haven’t asked him yet, but I’m pretty sure he’d agree.

When a dense theorist* talks about how capital is a homogenizing force, this is one of the actual mechanisms they’re talking about. The anxiety that quiets most people into complacent, frightened, risk-averse, desperate conformists whose judgment has been warped into thinking selfishness is a virtue.

* In both senses of the term.

Concepts express life at its most abstract. A good philosopher unfolds her concepts into reality, not more and more ideas.

We Prohibited It Because It’s Illegal!, Research Time, 23/03/2018

I haven’t been in the best headspace this week. All I’ve managed to do is get myself together enough to work on my paying gig at the moment, that think tank paper. Even the last few blog entries were exercises in getting through a conceptual block in the paper’s main argument.

It’s been difficult for me to summon energy beyond that, which has caused me to fall behind on some other commitments. And I’m sorry – but depression can be a pain in the ass. A pain in everything else too, which is why they call it depression.

This weekend will be catchup weekend, I’m just going to get tonight’s post finished – actually a short one this time – get a solid night’s sleep, and get back on track.

A long and unnerving shadow.
Art by Marcelo Neira

My thoughts about the nature of law are kind of funny and sometimes too simple. I knew a lot of legal theorists at McMaster, but I shared very different premises about the nature of law than a lot of that research community.

I don’t see law as something you have a moral obligation to obey. I think the law done right encourages ethical activity, encourages people to treat each other with kindness as individuals and with justice through institutions.

Now, that hardly ever happens in real life, so I actually don’t think we have much obligation beyond fear of punishment to follow the law – insofar as it’s the law. If the law happens to coincide with what’s ethically right, we’re obligated morally to follow it – not because it’s the law, but because the law actually encourages justice.

Examples of laws that encourage justice – laws against theft, assault, killing, fraud; regulating acceptable practices for health care, education delivery, utilities provision, record-keeping, ecological protection.

Still rolling through some of my notes on Ian Buchanan’s book about Anti-Œdipus. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts into my projects that involve politics, law, and the institutions of the state means understanding the conceptions of law that they reacted against in their own theoretical development.

What were the concepts that cast the longest shadow?

The Freudian and Lacanian models that dominated French psychiatry around the time of the Paris Uprising was probably the biggest single shadow. Except probably for Marx. That way of thinking had a disturbing concept of law.

Law, on this model, is prohibition. Law exists as one side of a yin-yang complex with desire – each can’t exist without the other. The manifestation of desire simultaneously manifests the law prohibiting it.

Desire can only develop through being continually stamped down.
What kind of political and social philosophy can come from a
premise like this?
Art by Ashley Montague

That law could be institutional if you live in a bureaucratic state, or cultural if you live in what Lacan and the mainstream Parisian intellectual community called a primitive society. But the law is the prohibition of desire which develops along with and in dialectic with that desire.

Deleuze and Guattari’s solution to this was surprisingly practical. You can’t argue against the concept on its own terms, because the concept rests at the premise of the whole discourse. You can’t talk a Freudian out of Freudian thinking by arguing entirely on Freudian terms.

So you stake out an entirely different way of thinking, and show how well those concepts deal with real-life problems the mainstream can’t handle. Psychiatrically, Freudian rationality can’t deal with schizophrenics.

In the legal-institutional context, Freudian rationality understands desire as something that needs its own prohibition to develop at all. It legitimates law as a necessary repression. Law is legitimate because it represses. Politics that considers repression necessary is fascism.*

* Thinking back to Snyder’s essay again. He also lists Freud as a major influence on Ivan Ilyin, the Russian fascist. Ilyin's conclusion that a civilization develops through the collective suppression of our drives as individuals. He seems to be a profound thinker against democracy. Terrifying.

Desire Makes Sales and Sales Make Desires, Research Time, 15/03/2018

You can’t understand how capitalism works without understand the economic power and role of desire. It’s an inherently transdisciplinary inquiry.

Your first instinct might be to look to economics for comprehensive analyses of capitalism. It’s an economic system, after all. But economic models have a hard time dealing with desire.

Psychology has a lot to say about desire, but nothing to say about economics. So it’s really hard to wrangle a psychological concept or principle into economics. One route that I think is promising is political economy, the return of economics as a field to its roots in the pre-disciplinary studies of writers like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

Pictured: The Rational Man

The problem is, economics shouldn’t make a straightforward return to its origins. An enormously destructive idea emerged from the origin of economic science. The Rational Man.

The concept has grounded their models and analyses for almost the entire history of the discipline. The idea makes perfect sense on the face of it. It's the presumption that people intrinsically act in their best interest, given their knowledge at the time.

It’s perfectly believable because we all believe this about ourselves, don't we? It’s definitely how most of us portray ourselves to others. If someone interviewing me for a job asks me how I make decisions, I’m going to describe a methodical, rational process. I’m not going to admit that I sometimes act from emotional or unreflective gut reactions. I mean, I could – but not without expecting that I’ll never see that office again.

The field of behavioural economics has overcome the reliance on human rationality. But aside from a Nobel Prize for its innovators, economics as a whole has yet to accept its basic idea – humans are a-rational actors.

We make decisions – including those relevant to economics – by a combination of reason and emotions, as well as cultural, class, and racialized biases. Our entire assembly of desire feeds into our actions. Behavioural economics understands this, but hasn’t yet followed the logic through to its conclusion.

You see this short stop when you look at the proposals for political and institutional change that emerge from behavioural economic analyses. Nudges, they’re called. Small, but consequential changes to people’s physical, social, and media environment that makes the more reasonable choice in different situations appear more sensible or easier. Even if that choice is actually more obscure, complicated, or difficult.

Not that kind of nudge, no. Too bad, really.

It’s a very effective policy approach. The problem is that it’s difficult to reconcile democratic values with a governance style of secretly modifying the physical environment of your entire society to condition people’s choices. I’ve written about the troubling character of government through nudges before.

The most obvious problem with the concept of the nudge is that it’s inevitably anti-democratic. The democratic relationship* depends on transparency and trust – they’re the norms of mutual respect among and across people, families, groups, cultures, companies, governments, institutions.

* Whether that relationship is among individual people, families, groups, cultures, companies, governments, institutions; among and across all those scales.

Here’s a nudge procedure that I read about in Joseph Heath’s Enlightenment 2.0 a few years ago. Detergent caps are designed to deceive you about how much you need – they’re too big, and the volume markers too faint to see. So the solution is a law regulating the size of laundry detergent caps.

Apply this generally, and you have a legal system enforcing fractally detailed rules to condition people to behave rationally without any self-knowledge of it. All transparency between people and their institutions disappears.

That’s one problem with the political economy of some approaches I’ve seen to behavioural economics. I have one more. The nudge goes too far to control humanity, but it was conceived as a way of freeing humanity – free us from our own inadequacies and ways the powerful use those shortcomings against us.

The nudge still manipulates the human power of desire, but real freedom lies in changing the character of that power. Don’t presume our enlightenment – enlighten us.

No Solutions I: Stripping Ourselves to One Line, Research Time, 03/02/2017

I don’t know if I’d say this is continued from yesterday’s post, as much as it’s another turn around the same idea. Appropriate for a post that follows Groundhog Day.

Set the stage. So Evgeni Morozov wrote a book called To Save Everything Click Here. Steve Fuller sent me a copy, and I’ve finally got around to reading it.

An aesthetic issue. I find his writing style a little too polemic for my liking personally, as it sometimes makes him sound more like a technophobe than he really is. Because it’s clear from reading the whole book that he’s in favour of a technological society – he only has a problem with some influential business ideologies.

With the government having been systematically defunded over the last
decades since the late 1970s, it's left to private industry to build the
brighter tomorrow we all dreamed of. And it sometimes feels like
everyone except Elon Musk would prefer to build a health tracking
app they can sell to Facebook for $1-billion.

The problem ideology. Solutionism. It’s the ideology that pervades Silicon Valley culture – people as different as Travis Kalanick, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel all think as solutionists.

What is Solutionism? In its simplest form, it’s the notion that any difficulty people encounter is to be smoothed away with the algorithmic and analytic powers of contemporary data technology.

That could come from self-monitoring, the dynamics of ubiquitous social media sharing, data analysis, or actually modifying the environment to restrict human choices from inefficient or destructive activities.

I mean it about that last issue. One of the ideas Morozov discusses to encourage people to follow the law is installing rotating cage doors in subways instead of waist-high wickets to prevent queue jumping.

That leads to another aesthetic issue. This book is too long. I mean that in the sense that it’s longer than it needs to be. Morozov’s style of exploring long lists of examples ultimately drags the book out much longer than it needs to be.

As a philosophical argument, you only need enough examples to demonstrate the point. Morozov seems to list enough examples to prove the absolute ubiquity of these ridiculous solutionist ideas all over the entire business class of the tech industry. And the examples – there being so many of them – tend to bury the core concepts of his argument, which are most important.

Do you seriously think your parking meter can help save your city from
being underfunded and disorganized? Then Evgeni Morozov will hector
you.

To Save Everything Click Here is about a moral inversion that Silicon Valley’s ideology perpetuates. And it’s a problematic ideology – the replacement of responsibility with efficiency.

Here’s how I lay it out, and the best way Morozov himself lays it out. He returns, in several contexts throughout the book, to an approach to business ideas common in Silicon Valley culture – gamification.

Literally, you solve problems by making a game of them. Creating a set of incentives and rewards for civil public behaviour – recycling, improving energy use, improving personal health. You earn these rewards as you carry out the activities we want you to. With each item you recycle, you earn points in the game, and those points translate into real rewards.

This interplay of incentives and rewards makes activity that has previously been a moral responsibility – we work to improve the environment because we’re good citizens with duties to do so – into a prize. Instead of recycling to help our society become healthier and more sustainable, you recycle to earn direct material rewards.

The presumption underlying making civic responsibility a game: that everyone acts only for their own self-interest. Morozov never says so, but it’s that sketchy libertarian principle underlying so much of Silicon Valley culture.

The veneration of self-interest as humanity’s central drive pervades the culture. That’s true for folks all over Silicon Valley whether their explicit political beliefs are as progressive and futurist as Elon Musk or as demented and retrograde as Peter Thiel.

Is self-interest humanity’s primary drive? No. No it isn’t. Morozov cites a few solid psychological experiments demonstrating such. But that’s not how you disprove a purely conceptual question like that.

No, you disprove it in the conceptual realm. Which means you have to point out that moral motivations – drives to act in the name of benevolence – have always been real. If we were only ever truly acting in our self-interest, we never would have developed moral principles in the first place.

We never would have developed concepts of our responsibilities to others if we didn’t perceive that responsibility in our ordinary, everyday social relations. Our moral obligations to each other are real – we experience them in our social relations every day, providing we don’t have something medically wrong with us.

Through understanding the strength and interdependence of our social obligations to each other, we see self-interest as one of many possible motives in the dense network of those obligations. So if you think self-interest is the only drive of humanity, you’re cutting away a lot of human experience.

Now, what does this have to do with efficiency? . . . To be continued

How About Let’s Talk About Our Mental Health Language? Jamming, 25/01/2017

Today is a Canada-wide corporate-sponsored day to talk about mental health issues. The event does a lot of good work in eroding the vile myths about mental health issues, and our culturally-ingrained tendency to demonize and isolate people with mental health issues.

I’ve certainly had my own mental health issues. Sometimes, I discuss them here. But today, I want to talk about how I’ve often heard mental health issues discussed. Canada has done a good job integrating the serious treatment of mental health into workers’ rights, employment standards, and legal rights.

For all that success, there’s still plenty of popular prejudice about people’s mental health problems. But I see that prejudice as rooted in deeper places than stereotypes and our spaces of ignorance. It’s rooted in the language we use to talk about ourselves.

Basically, popular conceptions of how human behaviour works leaves us either total robots with no moral accountability or fully responsible agents entirely in control of our own actions.

Clarifying before I continue – There are actually a ton of different models of thinking that develop many different concepts of human agency, power, responsibility. They’re bound up in different ways of thinking about the relation of humans and our environment – many degrees of lockstep firmness in causation and conditioning.

I’m pretty familiar with these different models of agency. I wrote a book that used quite a lot of them in theoretical development.

But I’m talking about popular ideas right now. The ideas that creep into our thought when we talk or think about mental health.

And I mean mental health in two contexts. Think about the casual conversations you have when you’re specifically using words like ‘mental health,’ referring to psychiatrists, and the relevant science.

You find yourself talking about mentally ill people as victims, as passive before their conditions and their treatments. If they’re in treatment, they’re doped up. If they’re undergoing problems in their lives, they’re helpless, adrift, caught up in their illness.

They aren’t responsible for their actions – they aren’t even really seen as acting. Just flailing about. And they’re always the objects of pity.

Later, you find yourself talking about someone you know. They’re having mental health issues – depressed and a drag, anxious and worried, or hostile and annoying. And this is all in their daily life. Going to work, running errands, meeting friends – it’s all tinged with this character of lower quality than yours.

Of course they’re responsible for their behaviour, you think. They’re out living their lives just like me – they’re just irritating, or assholes. Fully responsible for their shitty behaviour.

We have no way in our popular conversations yet to talk about that middle range of responsibility in everyday language. Someone with a mental health issue – in those ordinary expressions of pity or annoyance – remains either totally passive or fully responsible. A victim or a jerk.

This either/or of extremes is still how we think about too many health issues. You’re perfectly healthy until you need treatment – then you’re suffering, afflicted, at the mercy of some condition as if it were a contagion.

But most people with mental health issues are quite functional – they just have unfortunate tendencies. A tendency to worry too much, to become acutely agitated in some situations, to dwelling on the worst possibilities. What began once as unfortunate habits become ingrained ruts.

We’re responsible for our actions, yet it takes more effort to break the habit of these tendencies than it does for someone who doesn’t have them. My tendency to anxiety isn’t nearly as intense as some others.

Only very overwhelming situations set me off – being overbombarded with so much stimulation that I can’t concentrate my thoughts even enough to be a person. It takes having to do literally 20 things at once for close to half an hour or more to bring me here. But there are some who reach that threshold just walking down a busy street.

We’re responsible. We’re conscious and self-conscious. We go about our business like the rest of you. But in the course of the day, we’re in some ways just a little more fragile.

A Lesson in Political Psychology, Research Time, 21/11/2016

Over the next few years in my different writing and art projects, one of the things I’ll do is try to understand the political phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I’ve been doing that on the blog for the last few weeks as I read some noteworthy radical democratic political theorists in the leadup and immediate aftermath of his election.

A traditionally realist depiction of President Trump,
in a contemporary fresco.

As my next big book Utopias comes together over the next few years, reckoning with the nationalist movement and whatever terrors his administration unleashes will provide the book’s context. So, aside from my general interest in global politics, I’m thinking through a lot of the most thoughtful accounts of what Trump means for human society.

One of those comes from Laurie Penny. Ever since reading her book Unspeakable Things a couple of years ago, I considered her a brilliant philosopher as well as an insightful and incisive journalist.

It’s weird in a lot of modern contexts to call someone who doesn’t work as a university academic a philosopher. But I think it’s increasingly necessary for philosophy as a tradition, given the pressures of academic institutions on creativity and social leadership beyond the community of university researchers.

Even in those circumstances, more and more university professors are too overburdened and underpaid to be leaders even in their community. Like too many people whose careers have been wrecked by casualization or automation, the sectors that are supposed to produce knowledge devote increasing amounts of energy to mere survival.

So it’s up to journalists and artists to understand and develop the concepts that bring us to such incredible danger and can save us. To understand nationalism and develop a path to liberation.

Penny’s article “Against Bargaining” is one example of the public, open-access, mass market philosophy that people who oppose racism, bigotry, nationalism, and autocracy need to read today. We need it to feed our minds and keep us sharp. To focus ourselves on the differences that make real differences, the basis of accurate, worthwhile action.

The only reason Nietzsche wasn't a democrat
was because in the 19th century, it worked as
a mass politics, a dangerous kind of social
movement. Today, democracy is about
grooming people to be the ideally best people,
the bravest and most proud. Democracy has
become literally true aristocracy.

After reading Unspeakable Things, I called Penny a Nietzschean, and “Against Bargaining” continues this theme in her work – Donald Trump’s ascent and all it represents (and unleashes) is the most violent explosion of social resentment I think I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Nietzsche wrote about resentment as a seething, creeping social force. It was the cultural attitude that uses hatred to turn weakness into strength. But this isn’t the emboldening hatred of rage at an oppressor. It’s the petty small-mindedness of slimy disgust at anyone who dares to present themselves as your equal.

That’s one context of the attitude of resentment. It’s resentment triumphant, the decadent society of 19th century Europe, Europe at the heart of empire. Imperialism that was popularly justified by a morality of white supremacist racism.

The idea refuses to die. At least in some contexts. Homogeneously white affluent communities within spitting distance of more economically and ethnically mixed districts is one context. Places where no one knows enough non-white people to move their thoughts beyond stereotype and fear.

That petty attitude is also, at an individual level, the perspective of the abuser. He blames you for the violence he inflicts and you accept his narrative. Look at how many nice liberal journalists have written thinkpieces on how multiculturalism and identity politics caused President Trump.

You know what multiculturalism is? It’s living in a mixed community – walking down the street and passing by couples and families of as many possible ethnic and gender combinations as you can get out of a randomizer.

You know what identity politics is? It’s the assertion that your life and cultural heritage has value, especially if that life and heritage has been devalued and abused for generations.

It’s my fault that I’m being hurt because I stood up for myself and demanded that I not be hurt. If I’m compliant, then I won’t be hurt. I’ll be silent. I’ll be good.

To be good out of fear of an authority’s punishment isn’t goodness. It’s fear. The psychology of the abuse victim is to mask the outcome of overpowering fear as moral virtue.

In the face of hard years of violence from the
state and the mob, we'll need to find the
strength to smile.

Here, the psychological has become political. The most dedicated foot soldiers of Trumpism are the online trolls – abusers and harassers who are entertained by provoking more emotionally vulnerable people into mental distress. And who believe their own bullshit when they defend their violent actions as the exercise of their rights to free speech.

A movement of people who’ve learned to take pleasure in the psychological pain of others have taken their own will to violence to a mass-scale group phenomenon. Hence Penny’s astute observation – that the vulnerable people who are taking Trump’s ascent best have been those who have already overcome abuse.

People who’ve already worked through the self-cannibalizing philosophy of blaming yourself for the violence you suffer. We are facing today a political movement that literally wants to bludgeon dissent and difference into silence and invisibility. They see disagreement and ethnic, religious, or sexual difference as obnoxiousness.

Maybe you could call it getting uppity.

It’s our duty not to believe them and remember that rights to freedom aren’t meant to defend your attempts at violence. It’s to defend your attempt to be.

We Can't Live With Our Scars, Class: Nightvisiting, Reviews, 01/11/2016

Check out my first two reviews of Class, of "For Tonight We Might Die" and "The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo." You can support more TV review projects like this and even bigger things down the road at my Patreon page.
• • •
Three episodes in makes me feel safe enough to offer a casual description of what Class is all about, at least in this first season. It’s grief. 

Exploring all the aspects of grief – how it appears in our lives, what scars and traces it leaves, how it shapes our personalities, the different ways to travel along grief’s line of flight. What grief makes of us and makes us become.

It doesn’t get more explicit in this episode, where,

SPOILERS!!

cited, a hideous alien fungus that feeds off the intense emotional energy of grief squirms through the bunghole of time and manifests in front of thousands of Londoners as their dead loved ones. It speaks with all of them to amp their feelings of grief, sadness, and loss as high as they can go, then wraps them up in its spores.

If I could say there was one issue I had with "Nightvisiting," it would be
that the dialogue was a little too clunky at times. Tanya herself had
some of the most dangerously expository dialogue, occuring in an
emotionally intense dramatic conversation that lasted almost through
the entire episode.

Our Stories Make Sense of Us

The major confrontation the creature has is its talk with Tanya, manifesting as her father Jasper on the two year anniversary of his sudden death from a stroke. 

But it also confronts several of the other cast members, or at least tries to. It appears to Ram as his murdered girlfriend Rachel, naturally, as her killing is the central traumatic event that drives his character. 

The creature talks about how much humans crave closure in their lives, that they let grief and mourning torture themselves so much more than any other species it’s come across.

The reason why is rooted in how we make sense of our lives. Humans understand ourselves by telling stories about ourselves. These are our histories, at all levels of human development, whether as a family, a community, globally, or as individuals. 

We want our narratives to be comprehensive, complete, and clear. Comprehensive in that a narrative offers a full view of what it describes. The story takes in everything that matters to the development it describes. 

This is different from a narrative’s completeness. Being complete is to be definitive – it’s the only story about a person or a development in a person’s life that you need to tell, once it’s been told.

And a narrative is clear when its meaning as it ends is unambiguous, delivering a transparent set of messages. This is “the moral of the story” if I can talk like a mediocre grade school teacher for a moment. 

The ending stuck with you precisely because it refused to be clear-cut.
Most of us had to figure out the true ending, unable to accept the actual
ending of genuine ambiguity. We hate ambiguity enough in real life,
where it happens all the bloody time.

I would say that clarity is the most important feature of a narrative in that introducing even the least unclarity or ambiguity to the meaning or end result of a story is more upsetting than a shortcoming in comprehensiveness or completeness. 

Think of how obsessed so many people were over the ending of Inception. There, the story’s clarity was carefully manipulated to encourage just that reaction among its audience. Constantly arguing and interpreting together whether Leonardo DiCaprio was or wasn’t still in a dreamscape became part of the West’s cultural conversation. 

In that case, it wasn’t a flaw of the story, but an attentively calibrated part of the story itself. The arguments we all had over the meaning of the story were themselves part of the story. It was how Inception literally incepted all of our minds.

Humans fundamentally want the stories we tell to be complete, comprehensive, and clear. This is ultimately true for the stories we tell about ourselves – which is how we make sense of ourselves entirely. We understand our lives by making ourselves into a story.

This is a narrative way of describing what in more ontological philosophy is called the principle of sufficient reason – everything that exists has a cause or reason for its existence that all fits together in a perfect, if madly complicated, order. That the world fits together is the fundamental premise of human reasoning.

My mother even says this as a platitude, and she’s far from the only one. So many times when I’ve faced unforeseen problems or crises, she says, “Everything happens for a reason” to reassure me.

For all that Tanya's Vivian Oparah gets the extra-moving melodramatic
scenes in "Nightvisiting," April's Sophie Hopkins demonstrates the
most virtuoso (and also underrated) skill of any actor: She has some
of the most stilted dialogue in the entire episode, explaining her
history with her abusive alcoholic father to Ram. It's a moment of
simultaneous exposition and emotional rawness, nearly
impossible to carry out at its knife-edge balance.

I respond that this idea only makes sense retroactively, after we’ve already dealt with whatever disaster has been foisted on us. In the moment, I still have to wade through whatever shit that I have to deal with. Mom, you're a Leibnizian who raised an existentialist, and I'm sorry about that.

Grief is so troubling to us because the event of sudden loss or sudden ending destabilizes that premise. For example, Tanya describes how she would check in on her father whenever he came home from a night shift as a police officer because his patrols were a time of danger. 

If one night, Jasper didn’t come home, it would have been terrible, but it would at least have made sense to Tanya. There would be a clear cause in the potentially dangerous work that he did to his own death. Dying of a stroke in the bathroom makes a mockery of that coherence in her life.

That's the real horror of an existentialist look at the world. You accept the fact that a cause isn’t the same as a reason and that our narratives of our life won’t necessarily (or even that often) have clear-cut meanings and results. 

What Our Grief Reveals

Grief is the emotional and subjective dissonance when our yearning for a rational order in our lives meets the fact of real complexity and chaos. These moments of crisis can be quite revealing for a person, as it shows what we depend on to make sense of our existences.

The most illuminating conversation the creature has is with Quill, where it manifests as her sister. This sequence is the most sustained sequence of character development we’ve gotten for Quill so far, as we not only get to see her people’s paradoxical familial relationships, but also a look into her own motives.

Quill’s grief over her family and people – wiped out in the genocide of Rhodia – manifests as an image of who she should be. Ultimately, it isn’t love for her sister that most tempts Quill to let the creature capture her. In human ways of thinking, the pain of sudden loss would be the most enticing lure. 

One criticism that Phil Sandifer's review of the episode mentioned was
that the notion of Tanya's grief over her father being the strongest such
feeling in London seemed a touch sloppy. But I prefer to think of the
creature's focus on Tanya being a matter of her regular proximity to
the time bunghole as well, a mild piece of metafiction that the
interdimensional dangers of the rift affect the show's main cast the
most because it's their job to draw the rift's fire. They're the front
lines on these emotionally vulnerable alien invaders. Sounds like a
fine part-time job while you're finishing up high school.

But for Quill, it’s the fact that she’s been rendered impotent in so many ways. What truly draws her in is the prospect of being a true warrior again. The real object of her grief isn’t even the destruction of her people, but her loss of how she conceived of herself. The loss of her dignity as a warrior.

Charlie always held such emotional distance from his own family that he has no real grief. So the creature can’t even really manifest to him. Charlie’s story doesn’t have a rupture of the sort that breaks his sense of who he is. His narrative remains coherent as the guardian of the souls of his people in the Cabinet of Light.

We’ve already worked through Ram’s grief in the last episode, so Rachel’s spectre freaks him out, but then sends him out on the proactive role that he took on by the end of “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” 

And April has, like Charlie, already repaired whatever breaks in her narrative were caused by the violent abuse of her alcoholic father. The events of her father’s violence became the foundation of her personal strength.

As for Tanya, her defeat of the creature makes clear what seems to be another theme of Class in this first season. She severely weakens the creature by feeding it with her anger instead of the subjective breakdown of grief, so that Quill’s physical attack can force it back into the rift. 

It's literally an instance of a character using the force of her personality to defeat the story’s monster, just as Ram did last week talking the dragon into leaving Earth. So here we have the moral of the story – each of us can find the strength within ourselves to vanquish our demons and become who the world demands we are.

How Much Is On Me? Occupational Therapy, 13/10/2016

Well, that turned into a much longer break than I’d planned. Originally, I was planning to throw up the third post in that "Obsolete Democracy” series last Friday, take the Thanksgiving weekend off for a gathering with friends in St Catharine’s, then finish it with a fourth entry yesterday. 

Instead, those are going to come tomorrow and Friday, after a delay of nearly a week. 

I'm going to be honest on this space – it was the result of another mental health crisis. A panic attack whose repercussions I’m still dealing with. In my own person, in my relationship with my partner, and at my work. 

It’s been difficult to reorient myself, and income insecurity continues to gnaw at me whenever I think about it for too long. Which is unfortunate, because I need to think about it if I’m going to solve it.

What’s helping, is that I’m getting myself accustomed to some mild anti-anxiety medications – though finding the optimal dosage is probably going to take a while. Another thing that’s helping – if slowly – is my cognitive behavioural therapy sessions.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”

Horizons, full of night's midsummer blaze;

Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate

Through all its purples to the final slate,

Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident,

Out of such mildew plucking neater mould

And spouting new orations of the cold.

One might. One might. But time will not relent.

And I’ve been reaching out to some old friends. Not just friends in general, but friends who’ve had experience with depression and mental health problems. And friends who’ve been more successful at the post-doctoral career transition than I’ve been so far.

My current mental health issues are the product of a career transition that’s honestly been rougher than I had always planned. Soon after my teaching opportunities dried up, I realized that I had fewer resources than I originally thought for my Plan B outside the university sector. And despite my investments in retraining, a corporate or public sector career hasn’t really taken off.

Several parts of my life are going well – my research, writing and publishing, and film festival work. But none of those are actually making me any money at this point, and those financial worries have compounded over the years. That kind of constant stress doesn’t do nice things to a person’s mind.

The blog is called Adam Riggio Writes. And I do. But even though Adam Riggio Makes a Decent Salary wouldn’t be as interesting to read about, it’s something that I’ve wanted for quite some time. And for the last four years, it just hasn’t come together. 

So the years of stress, worries, missed opportunities, failed chances have all added up. The result is a powerful sense of shame, and all the feelings of worthlessness that implies. 

Shame that my first chosen career, the one that I dedicated my 20s to training for, the one to which I devoted myself to the detriment of a lot of other aspects of a well-rounded life, fell apart. Shame that I’m nearly 34 and still hustling to get a career and financial solvency together. Shame that I'm a failure. A non-starter. Shame at my own economic impotence. Shame at messing up. Shame that I’m ashamed instead of being an optimistic go-getter who gets results.

And always the worries that there is only so much time. That the more time I spend struggling, the more like a perpetual failure and a loser I'll appear to more and more hiring committees and human resources evaluators. The continual message from my therapist is that I must focus on what's in my power to change. 

But the forces and decisions that make the biggest impact on all our lives lie beyond our powers. That's the source of my fear, stress, and anxiety. Worse is that others all too often judge our character as if those forces and decisions were in our control. We're blamed for them. Attempts to name them as beyond our control are written off as 'avoiding responsibility.' And we feel ashamed.

I know it can get better, that there are plenty of opportunities that I can still take hold of, if I can find them. But I also know that life rarely feels that way anymore. 

And I worry that being honest about my mental health struggles will alienate me, and drive away possible opportunities. “Why would I want to work with someone who has to take anxiety pills? Who has these mental health problems? Who admits to feeling stress and lacking constant confidence?” Everyone who suffers from any mental health issue is afraid of that.

And I’m sick of being afraid.

True/False & What Else? V: Thought Conditions Life, Research Time, 11/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . If you'll grant me a little interpretive leeway, the notion that Louis Althusser’s personality could have influenced his philosophical thinking is a twisted mirror-image of his own theory of ideology.

The external and global – society’s ideological-ethical-moral structures – appear from inside an individual personality as psychosis, neurosis, horror, and utter madness. It’s very Freudian in a way, but not the bad kind of Freudian that reduces every psychological problem to Œdipal family dynamics. 

The external and global express themselves internally and psychologically. Also very Jungian, but not the bad kind of Jungian that gets tripped up on making a set of recurring mythological symbols into a mystical collective unconscious. 

Despite the strongly deterministic nature of his structuralist framework for thinking about reality, there’s a path to make our world better as individual actors. At different points in those essays of For Marx, Althusser discusses how ideology can change.

Because it does change. Societies change radically over time – just contrast how different human society is today from three centuries ago. Even fifty centuries ago, social and ethical values and discourses could change. The engine of that change is the interaction of life’s material reality and practice with how we think and speak about that practice.

We can act to tweak that interaction, shift it in some directions over others. This is the pragmatic radicalism I’ve been discussing – shifting the limits and boundaries of what society considers possible. Pushing more and more people to think what was previously inconceivable.

Maybe we can have a government without a king – Democracy. Morality without the underwriting authority of a god – Kindness. A conception of our nationhood that excludes no one – Brotherhood. 

Yet beyond this idea that I’ve already pretty much figured out, there is more in Althusser that I can pilfer for my own philosophical work. For example, there’s a grid.

Well, he doesn’t actually lay it out as a grid. Althusser’s For Marx is the produce of a French academic writing essays about marxist theory in the early 1960s. So he lays it out in immensely long and over-wordy arguments with sentences more than seven lines long.

But you can make a grid. It has four squares. It lays out the concrete and the abstract versions of thought and material or life.

Theory is thought that keeps its focus on understanding the concrete, concepts that have real, worldly power to change lives and social structures. They can be as elaborate and derive into all kinds of wild structures if the problem in view demands it. But its focus is always thought that increases and augments your power.

Practice is concrete material, the lived reality of daily life in all its drudgery and majesty. This is the tough work of getting shit done. This doesn’t reduce to the dusty old dualism of theory vs practice, airy-fairy thoughts and real work. Too often, that dichotomy is just used as a tool or a trick to denigrate intelligence or critical thought. 

Speaking of tricks to denigrate critical thought and protest, ideology. Ideology is, on Althusser’s thinking, abstract thought. It’s speculation without an interest or focus on our powers. Thinking disconnected from what we can do, distractions from developing our real potentials to focus on imaginary dream worlds instead. 

We can still act on the principles derived from ideology. But it makes no sense to. Quite literally. When we examine any of the moral principles that are based in thought entirely abstracted from our real powers, their logic falls apart. There’s no reason to believe in any of these principles beyond the fact that you believe in them. 

“It’s always been done this way.” “That’s just not right!” “Why would anyone do anything different?”

That’s why Althusser calls those principles dogma. Dogma – material life made abstract. So if I’ve learned anything from reading this very flawed thinker, it’s this quite useful way of distinguishing productive from self-destructive thinking. Thanks, Louis, you mad old commie murderer.

A Year to Remember Because We Shouldn’t Forget, 31/12/2015

This being New Year’s Eve, there are plenty of articles and thinkpieces floating around the internet summing up 2015. I originally didn’t want to clutter that already-packed space with my own thoughts, but I felt like I needed an exorcism. 

Because personally speaking, 2015 was pretty damn hellish for me. Up until the last couple of weeks, really, it was a cocktail of near-constant anxiety. It’s supremely difficult not know how long you’ll be able to keep paying your rent. 

Long periods of unemployment and working for free have become taken for granted, and they really shouldn’t. We’ve gotten so used to this state of affairs that underemployment and poverty have become normal. 

If they aren’t normal to you (whether from your own experiences or from your social circle), then you’ve become dangerously disconnected from your own world. But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. It doesn’t mean people don’t suffer from mental health problems or terrible stress in their relationships and friendships thanks to unemployment and poverty. 

January 2016 will be the first month where I’ll have actually made enough to cover all my basic expenses (food, utilities, rent, transit) since April 2014. Since 2013, I’ve either been unemployed, employed in jobs that didn’t pay enough, retraining in college without work to support me, or looking for work.

Yes, my best opportunities for next year came from my internship and volunteer activities over this year. And those opportunities as a communications consultant, in Toronto’s film community, as a labourer, and in political activism make me extremely hopeful for my future in this city.

But there have been a lot of crises and breakdowns along the way. And I’ve been very lucky that I’ve been able to support myself on savings and the support of my family for this long. If not for some very fortuitous luck, I wouldn’t even have had a home.

I don’t say this for pity. I say this because there are a lot of people out there like me, struggling simply to survive. Many of those people are losing that struggle and have already lost. 

And whenever I see an article or a meme mocking the Millennial generation for its laziness, self-absorption, or sense of entitlement, it enrages me because it encourages people to look away from poverty and suffering in their midst. This is especially true in Toronto, where fantastically wealthy and horrifyingly poor communities exist in easy walking distance of each other. 

What truly saddens me is how often people who suffer the mental health issues of the struggle to escape poverty and perennial underemployment are told to hide it.

“Why are you in those online groups for people who have panic attacks? No one will hire you if they think you’re unstable!”

“Why do you talk about mental health on your social media? People can google that! They’ll think you’re crazy.”

“No one wants to hire someone who’s unreliable and who’ll need to take time off for stress.”

“Look at all those job ads asking for someone who can handle fast paced work and stress. They won’t want someone who has to take time off for medical appointments. Especially if it’s for therapy.”

“You’ll never get a job if you admit you have anxiety. They’ll think you’re weak. What are you, stupid?”

Sometimes, that’s what I’d tell myself. Sometimes, it’s what people who loved me would tell me. Because it’s in my best interests never to admit that being underemployed and low-income for a long time causes stress and anxiety. 

I sometimes feel as though very few people understand that making someone constantly afraid to be honest about their health makes that person less healthy.

This was my 2015. This back-and-forth between the stress of having too much to do and the anxiety over never earning any money from it to support myself. Now it seems this will finally end, and I’ll be able to begin a real career instead of just hoping things will work out.

There are still plenty of people around us who are struggling. Many are worse off than me – they’ve lost their loved ones, their homes, as well as their jobs and careers. Some have even lost their countries. Though the determination of those people to regain what they lost can lead them to greater success than ever before, but not if we abandon or refuse them.

We’re people. We live in communities. We all begin to prosper, the more of us we help to prosper. We’re not each other’s competition. We’re stronger when we support each other. 

This is true at the personal, political, national, and global levels. 

We will win.

Speak Ancestors III: We Believe Because We Discover It, Composing, 03/12/2015

Continued from previous . . . So where exactly are we in understanding this myth of the golden age. Yesterday, one of my commenters I the Scientist talked about an article where a sample of right-wing media pundits were asked about when they considered their society’s golden age to be.

It worked out that each of their golden ages was a rosy memory of their society at about age 10.

Was that poll scientific? I highly doubt it. Was it even an interview-based qualitative study of a representative sample of remarkable test cases? Maybe in overlong-name only.

The joke suggests that there's a little immaturity to
modern conservatism in North America. I wonder who
could possibly ever think such a thing.

But you see the truth in it, even though you admit that the whole phenomenon of nostalgia’s power over conservative politics is way more complicated than this. It’s a metaphor that reads almost as a joke, but it expresses just enough truth to compel you to think about it.

So what does that idea say?

At first glance, it says that today’s radical conservative, at least the one powered by nostalgia for a golden age, is at heart a scared little boy who wishes he could still live in a world without realistic concerns or problems. 

Where all you needed was a hug from mom or dad to resolve any issue or conflict. Life as Growing Pains. But that’s not what all utopian politics are about, even the utopias I might find abhorrent.*

* That’s going to be another aspect of my Utopias manuscript when I examine the ideas and concepts of modern conservatism. Even utopian frameworks I find destructive and terrifying – like hardcore libertarianism, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism – has its governing concept of the perfect society.

That idea, that conservative nostalgia is really for life as a 10-year-old kid, has more to it, something that’s linked to real political revolution. And it’s a point Leo Strauss makes, oddly enough, given his reputation. 

When you’re 10 years old, you don’t really have a strong drive for rebellion, at least not if you were raised in a stable, relatively secure home environment. The authority of your parents is usually enough for you to trust. 

In other words, when something puzzles you about a moral or ethical issue, you go to your parents as the expert authorities. And their answer is authoritative. You have no problem believing them, your immediate ancestors.

When a son is closer to the traditional beliefs of his father
than he would ever have admitted as a youth. Not that
this photo and caption constitute any speculation on the
real identity of Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Kylo
Ren or Supreme Leader Snoke. Certainly not saying
something wildly implausible, like that one of them
turns out to be Luke Skywalker. I bet you one of them
turns out to be Luke Skywalker. I'd bet on it being Snoke.

Rebellion kicks in as a teenager when that ancestral authority isn’t enough. You probably won’t even end up straying far from your parents’ beliefs. Most people don’t. But their word isn’t enough to satisfy you. You look for something deeper.

This is what Strauss means when he talks about Socrates, and his role as an agitator in the culture of his Greece. Greek society was destabilized thanks to war. And at the same time, the culture was getting accustomed to regular peaceful interactions with many neighbours thanks to Mediterranean trade. 

They were meeting perfectly nice people who didn’t prescribe to any of the same myths or religions they did. Brotherhood and solidarity was building among people who would never have otherwise done so, as their ancestral traditions were too different.

Strauss writes about cultural collisions as engendering the first seeds of philosophy in a people. If people with different ancestral traditions and first principles about the nature of existence can also be decent people, then the traditions and their principles alone aren’t the necessary paths to truth and goodness.

This is the truth that would make a son kick the shit out of his father. The principles that mainstream culture believes to be true need a higher ground than the tradition of belief in them. Merely asking for that ground displaces and disrespects traditional authorities. 

Yet that role is necessary. We have to discover for ourselves the truths that our traditions (and all the different traditions) express in their peculiar, colloquial ways. We’d sound like total skeptics in the immediate term. 

But when we do discover them, they’ll have an even stronger foundation and a wider application than any other principle that’s come before them.

Tangents From a Psychologist III: Whose Eyes Are Watching You? Jamming, 05/06/2015

I originally planned to end this series of posts yesterday. Then I read some more of Ariely that got me thinking about more tangents, this time involving how his research can, in some small way, contribute to the legitimation of the surveillance state. 

Yeah, this is going to be a bit of a trip. But there’s something here, I think.

He describes a very minor experiment in his long and complex series of works on honesty and moral behaviour. It’s about an office change jar for a tea kettle. A lot of offices have a little jar or a bowl where workers can toss change whenever they make a fresh pot of tea or coffee. Just a quarter or two each time to subsidize the kitchen supplies budget. 

Will they ever stop watching me?

It’s a gesture, but it’s also linked with honesty and good behaviour. If you make a pot of tea or coffee, you throw a couple of quarters in the jar. It’s much less than you pay for coffee at a Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, Second Cup, or Aroma. And it’s for the benefit of you and all your fellow workers. But you don’t always throw change in the jar when you make each pot, or when you take a mug of coffee from a pot someone else just made.

Ariely considers this a minor immorality, and thinking about his experiment reminds me of another philosophical criticism I could make of his work. I also consider this criticism very sketchy precisely because it’s a philosophical criticism and I don’t know how appropriate it is to make it. It has to do with what exactly we’re following when we put our change in the coffee jar. 

So here’s the experiment. It has to do with how images posted above the coffee jar in an office affect people’s frequency of contribution. Posting a generic image of flowers above the jar prompted no significant change in the level of people’s contributions. What was most effective in promoting compliance to the unspoken rule of contributing to the subsidy jar for coffee and tea?

An image of staring, accusatory eyes. 

He writes that even the feeling of being watched encourages compliance to morality. We act more morally when we have the impression of being surveilled.

This is, of course, a terrible suggestion given our current political climate. It doesn’t uncritically endorse the surveillance state, since there are no actual cameras in the image of those hungry eyes constantly watching you while you make your coffee. But it may imply that an elaborate conspiracy to make the country’s entire population believe that it’s constantly being watched will be just as effective.

Why yes, they are watching you. Pop music is creepy.

It’s Michel Foucault’s panopticon, basically.* And it’s utterly anti-democratic. Either it’s genuinely complete surveillance over real life, partial universal surveillance in which everyone is aware that government agents could be watching them all the time, or an elaborate conspiracy theory that’s universally believed so that everyone believes they’re being watched all the time without the government having to spend any money on real surveillance. The overall effect is governance by fear of authority.

* Yes, I know Jeremy Bentham thought of it first, but Foucault developed the elaborate framework of conceptual analysis that lets us understand the panopticon not just as a weird way to build a prison, but as the conceptual framework for a billion-dollar international security apparatus. 

It reminds me of my major problem with Joseph Heath’s proposals to make people more rational in their everyday lives: they all require state micro-engineering of everyone’s environments to rid them of deceptive features that disrupt our reasoning abilities.

Ariely expresses his interpretation of this experiment as part of a process of investigating human psychology. He never goes so far as Heath did in Enlightenment 2.0, and make proposals for government action. But the discovery itself is troubling. If we’re only moral insofar as we’re affected by the subliminal suggestion of an authority watching us, that doesn’t leave much hope for genuine ground-up social progress.

But I think there’s one angle where I can make a legitimate critique of Ariely’s ideas. I’m not trying to walk into his disciplinary territory, as I’ve been nervously stepping over the last couple of days after finishing Dishonesty. Now, I’m dragging Ariely into the territory of philosophy, and asking just what people are really following when he posts those intense eyes above the change jar.

Because I don’t think it’s morality. . . . To be continued.