Safely Distanced

/rant on

New Year’s Day (or just prior) is the annual cue for fools full of loose talk to provide unasked their year-in-review and “best of” articles summarizing the previous calendar year. I don’t go in for such clichéd forms of curation but certainly recognize an appetite among Web denizens for predigested content that tells them where to park their attention and what or how to think rather than thinking for themselves. Considering how mis- and under-educated the public has grown to be since the steady slippage destruction of educational standards and curricula began in the 1970s (says me), I suppose that appetite might be better characterized as need in much the same way children needs guidance and rules enforced by wizened authorities beginning with parents yet never truly ending, only shifting over to various institutions that inform and restrain society as a whole. I continue to be flabbergasted by the failure of parents (and teachers) to curb the awful effects of electronic media. I also find it impossible not to characterize social media and other hyperstimuli as gateways into the minds of impressionable youth (and permanent adult children) very much like certain drugs (e.g., nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis) are characterized as gateways to even worse drugs. No doubt everyone must work out a relationship with these unavoidable, ubiquitous influences, but that’s not equivalent to throwing wide open the gate for everything imaginable to parade right in, as many do.

Hard to assess whether foundations below American institutions (to limit my focus) were allowed to decay through neglect and inattention or were actively undermined. Either way, their corruption and now inter-generational inability to function effectively put everyone in a wildly precarious position. The know-how, ambition, and moral focus needed to do anything other than game sclerotic systems for personal profit and acquisition of power are eroding so quickly that operations requiring widespread subscription by the public (such as English literacy) or taking more than the push of a button or click of a mouse to initiate preprogrammed commands are entering failure mode. Like the accidental horror film Idiocracy, the point will come when too few possess the knowledge and skills anymore to get things done but can only indulge in crass spectacle with their undeveloped minds. Because this is a date-related blog post, I point out that Idiocracy depicts results of cultural decay 500 years hence. It won’t take nearly that long. Just one miserable example is the fascist, censorious mood — a style of curation — that has swept through government agencies and Silicon Valley offices intent on installing unchallenged orthodoxies, or for that matter, news junkies and social media platform users content to accept coerced thinking. Religions of old ran that gambit but no need to wait for a new Inquisition to arise. Heretics are already persecuted via cancel culture, which includes excommunication social expulsion, suspension and/or cancellation of media accounts, and confiscation of bank deposits.

A similar point can be made about the climate emergency. Fools point to weather rather than climate to dispel urgency. Reports extrapolating trends often focus on the year 2100, well after almost all of us now alive will have departed this Earth, as a bogus target date for eventualities like disappearance of sea and glacial ice, sea level rise, unrecoverable greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, pH imbalance in the oceans, and other runaway, self-reinforcing consequences of roughly 300 years of industrial activity that succeeded unwittingly in terraforming the planet, along the way making it fundamentally uninhabitable for most species. The masses labor in 2023 under the false impression that everyone is safely distanced from those outcomes or indeed any of the consequences of institutional failure that don’t take geological time to manifest fully. Such notions are like assurances offered to children who seek to understand their own mortality: no need to worry about that now, that’s a long, long way off. Besides, right now there are hangovers to nurse, gifts to return for cash, snow to shovel, and Super Bowl parties to plan. Those are right now or at least imminent. Sorry to say, so is the full-on collapse of institutions that sustain and protect everyone. The past three years have already demonstrated just how precarious modern living arrangements are, yet most mental models can’t or won’t contemplate the wholesale disappearance of this way of life, and if one has learned of others pointing to this understanding, well, no need to worry about that just yet, that’s a long, long way off. However, the slide down the opposite side of all those energy, population, and wealth curves won’t take nearly as long as it took to climb up them.

/rant off

Reality Check (redux)

/rant on

The previous time I was prompted to blog under this title was regarding the deplorable state of public education in the U.S., handily summarized at Gin and Tacos (formerly on my blogroll). The blogger there is admirable in many respects, but he has turned his attention away from blogging toward podcasting and professional writing with the ambition of becoming a political pundit. (I have disclaimed any desire on my part to be a pundit. Gawd … kill me first.) I check in at Gin and Tacos rarely anymore, politics not really being my focus. However, going back to reread the linked blog post, his excoriation of U.S. public education holds up. Systemic rot has since graduated into institutions of higher learning. Their mission statements, crafted in fine, unvarying academese, may exhibit unchanged idealism but the open secret is that the academy has become a network of brainwashing centers for vulnerable young adults. See this blog post on that subject. What prompts this new reality check is the ongoing buildup of truly awful news, but especially James Howard Kunstler’s recent blog post “The Four Fuckeries” over at Clusterfuck Nation, published somewhat in advance of his annual year-end-summary-and-predictions post. Kunstler pulls no punches, delivering assessments of activities in the public interest that have gone so abysmally wrong it beggars the imagination. I won’t summarize; go read for yourself.

At some point, I realized when linking to my own past blog posts that perhaps too many include the word wrong in the title. By that, I don’t mean merely incorrect or bad or unfortunate but rather purpose-built for comprehensive damage that mere incompetence could not accomplish or explain. Some may believe the severity of damage is the simple product of lies compounding lies, coverups compounding coverups, and crimes compounding crimes. That may well be true in part. But there is far too much evidence of Manichean manipulation and heedless damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead garbage decision-making to waive off widespread institutional corruptions as mere conspiracy. Thus, Kunstler’s choice of the term fuckeries. Having already reviewed the unmitigated disaster of public education, let me instead turn to other examples.

Fast Food is Dead

/rant on

Despite its obvious satisfactions, fast food has always been a guilty pleasure for anyone with … taste. Redirecting the evolved culture of the table to standing in the parking lot, eating in one’s vehicle, or skulking off with the feedbag to eat in isolation (typically in the blue glare of the TV) always felt somehow illicit, like getting away with breaking some unspoken rule regarding how people ought to manage to get sustenance in a civilized fashion. What was lacking in quality and self-respect was typically made up in speed, price, and consistency. If one simply needed something to stuff in one’s face while on the road or in a hurry, familiar fast-food options were easy to settle upon rather than go out of one’s way and/or commit extra time to eating at a diner or mid-tier restaurant with actual waitstaff. Back in the day (get off my lawn …!), one could fill one’s hands (and belly) with a burger, fries, and drink for around $5 within a few minutes of ordering at the counter. The comfort food itself was predictable and gratified the senses, being suffused with all the ingredients now understood as irresistible hyperstimuli: salt, sugar, and fat. Exactly no one thought of fast food as quality, but boy did it satisfy immediate cravings.

Well, that era is over. Although still ubiquitous in a degraded landscape overun by franchises (franchise hell is what I call it), the fast-food option has stopped supplying food that is any of cheap, quick, or savory. I’m no aficionado of fast food, but I’ve certainly consumed my share. Over the decades, prices have increased substantially, quality has suffered, and worst of all, it’s no longer fast. The saving grace of fast food was getting it into my grubby paws quickly and chowing down eagerly, followed predictably by the sensation of it sitting uncomfortably in my gut as a giant, undigested mass. The last few times I’ve indulged, the wait at the counter has been 30+ min! I’ve never done it, but I suspect anyone ordering fast food through one of the food-delivery apps on their phone pays extra and waits for roughly an hour. The two obvious factors causing delays are (1) the implicit and wrongheaded (says me) demand to keep the drive-through lanes moving before serving those inside the restaurant (term loosely applied) and (2) the cost-saving reduction of staff to a skeleton crew functioning constantly in crisis mode. I recall how decades ago an entire school bus of “diners” could be unloaded into a fast-food joint and all be served relatively efficiently. That could never happen today with six or fewer people behind the counter trying vainly to take and fill orders. There are no fry cooks anymore flipping burgers, though fries are still dropped into the fryer on site.

Quality suffers, too, as the food, if it can even be called that anymore, is increasingly some chemical concoction of nonfood prepared elsewhere, flash frozen, and reheated on site. The resulting upset stomach, often nearly to the point of vomiting, relegates fast food to an option only for those with iron bellies — formerly an attribute of youth but now considerably less so because of the precipitous rise of autoimmune disorders and food intolerance/allergies. Dunno what’s to be done to restore the past glory days (?) of fast food, and I’m not in the business of solving this dilemma, if indeed either a dilemma or solutions exists. Reports indicate some large portion of the public gets most of their meals from fast-food restaurants, and some unaccountably get nearly all their meals that way. Profitability also seems not to suffer even as patrons suffer long waits and considerable gastrointestinal distress. If the death of fast food is another example of the race to the bottom (of what?), it shows no sign of having yet sunk to the floor.

/rant off

Nothing Beats Stupid

/rant on

One of my personal favorites among my own blog posts is my remapping of the familiar Rock, Paper, Scissors contest to Strong, Stupid, and Smart, respectively. In that post, I concluded (among other things) that, despite a supposedly equal three-way power dynamic, in the long run, nothing beats stupid. I’ve been puzzling recently over this weird dynamic in anticipation of a mass exodus of boomers from the labor force as they age into retirement (or simply die off). (Digression about the ruling gerontocracy withheld.) It’s not by any stretch clear that their younger cohorts divided into not-so-cleverly named demographics are prepared to bring competence or work ethic to bear on labor needs, which includes job descriptions ranging across the spectrum from blue collar to white collar to bona fide expert.

Before being accused of ageism and boomerism, I don’t regard the issue as primarily a function of age but rather as a result of gradual erosion of educational standards that has now reached such a startling level of degradation that many American institutions are frankly unable to accomplish their basic missions for lack of qualified, competent, engaged workers and managers. See, for example, this Gallup poll showing how confidence in U.S. institutions is ebbing. Curious that the U.S. Congress is at the very bottom, followed closely and unsurprisingly by the TV news. Although the poll only shows year-over-year decline, it’s probably fair to say that overall consensus is that institutions simply cannot be relied upon anymore to do their jobs effectively. I’ve believed that for some time about Cabinet-level agencies that, administration after administration, never manage to improve worsening conditions that are the very reason for their existence. Some of those failures are arguably because solutions to issues simply do not exist (such as with the renewed energy crisis or the climate emergency). But when addressing concerns below the level of global civilization, my suspicion is that failure is the result of a combination of corruption (including careerism) and sheer incompetence.

The quintessential example came to my attention in the embedded YouTube video, which spells out in gruesome detail how schools of education are wickedly distorted by ideologues pushing agendas that don’t produce either better educational results or social justice. Typically, it’s quite the reverse.

In short, school administrators and curriculum designers are incompetent boobs (much like many elected government officials) possessed of decision-making authority who have managed to quell dissent among the ranks precisely because many who know better are invested in careers and pension programs that would be sacrificed in order to call bullshit on insane things now being forced on everyone within those institutions. Those of us who attended college often witnessed how, over the course of several decades, faculties have essentially caved repeatedly on issues where administrators acted in contravention of respectable educational goals and policies. Fortitude to resist is not in abundance for reasons quite easy to understand. Here’s one cry from the wilderness by a college professor retiring early to escape the madness. One surmises that whoever is hired as a replacement will check a number of boxes, including compliance with administrative diktats.

Viewpoint diversity may well be the central value being jettisoned, along with the ability to think clearly. If cultism is truly the correct characterization, administrators have adopted an open agenda of social reform and appear to believe that they, uniquely, have arrived at the correct answers (final solutions?) to be brainwashed into both teachers and students as doctrine. Of course, revolutions are launched on the strength of such misguided convictions, often purging resistance violently and revealing that best intentions matter little in the hellscapes that follow. But on the short term, the basic program is to silent dissent, as though banishing disallowed thinking from the public sphere collapses viewpoint diversity. Nope, sorry. That’s not how cognition works except in totalitarian regimes that remove all awareness of options and interpretations we in open societies currently take for granted. It’s barking mad, for instance, to think that all the propaganda flung at the American public about, say, the proxy war in Ukraine is truly capable of buffaloing the entire population into believing we (the U.S. and NATO) are the good guys in the conflict. (There are no goods guys.) Even the Chinese government, with its restricted Internet and social credit system, can’t squelch entirely the yearning to think and breathe freely. Instead, that’s the domain of North Korea, which only despots hold up as a salutary model.

My point, which bears reiteration, is that poorly educated, miseducated, and uneducated ignoramuses (the ignorati, whose numbers have swelled) in positions of power and influence embody precisely the unmovable, unreachable, slow, grinding stupidity that can’t be overcome by knowledge, understanding, expertise, or appeals to reason and good faith. Stupid people don’t know just how stupid they are but sally forth with blind confidence in themselves, and their abject stupidity becomes like kryptonite used to weaken others. One can use smarts (scissors) once in a while to cut through stupidity (paper), but in the end, nothing beats stupid.

/rant off

Mad World Preamble (redux)

I use the tag redux to signal that the topic of a previous blog post is being revisited, reinforced, and repurposed. The choice of title for this one could easily have gone instead to Your Brain on Postmodernism, Coping with the Post-Truth World, or numerous others. The one chosen, however, is probably the best fit given than compounding crises continue pushing along the path of self-annihilation. Once one crisis grows stale — at least in terms of novelty — another is rotated in to keep us shivering in fear, year after year. The date of civilizational collapse is still unknown, which is really more process anyway, also of an unknown duration. Before reading what I’ve got to offer, perhaps wander over to Clusterfuck Nation and read James Howard Kunstler’s latest take on our current madness.

/rant on

So yeah, various cultures and subcultures are either in the process of going mad or have already achieved that sorry state. Because madness is inherently irrational and unrestrained, specific manifestations are unpredictable. However, the usual trigger for entire societies to lose their tether to reality is relatively clear: existential threat. And boy howdy are those threats multiplying and gaining intensity. Pick which of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with whom to ride to the grave, I guess. Any one will do; all four are galloping simultaneously, plus a few other demonic riders not identified in that mythological taxonomy. Kunstler’s focus du jour is censorship and misinformation (faux disambiguation: disinformation, malinformation, dishonesty, gaslighting, propaganda, fake news, falsehood, lying, cozenage, confidence games, fraud, conspiracy theories, psyops, personal facts), about which I’ve blogged repeatedly under the tag epistemology. Although major concerns, censorship and misinformation are outgrowths of spreading madness, not the things that will kill anyone directly. Indeed, humans have shown a remarkable capacity to hold in mind crazy belief systems or stuff down discomfiting and disapproved thoughts even without significant threat. Now that significant threats spark the intuition that time is running perilously short, no wonder so many have fled reality into the false safety of ideation. Inability to think and express oneself freely or to detect and divine truth does, however, block what few solutions to problems remain to be discovered.

Among recent developments I find unsettling and dispiriting is news that U.S. officials, in their effort to — what? — defeat the Russians in a war we’re not officially fighting, are just making shit up and issuing statements to their dutiful stenographers in the legacy press to report. As I understand it, there isn’t even any pretense about it. So to fight phantoms, U.S. leaders conjure out of nothingness justifications for involvements, strategies, and actions that are the stuff of pure fantasy. This is a fully, recognizably insane: to fight monsters, we must become monsters. It’s also maniacally stupid. Further, it’s never been clear to me that Russians are categorically baddies. They have dealt with state propaganda and existential threats (e.g., the Bolshevik Revolution, WWII, the Cold War, the Soviet collapse, being hemmed in by NATO countries) far more regularly than most Americans and know better than to believe blindly what they’re told. On a human level, who can’t empathize with their plights? (Don’t answer that question.)

In other denial-of-reality news, demand for housing in Sun Belt cities has driven rent increases ranging between approximately 30% and 60% over the past two years compared to many northern cities well under 10%. Americans are migrating to the Sun Belt despite, for instance, catastrophic drought and wild fires. Lake Powell sits at an historically low level, threatening reductions in water and electrical power. What happens when desert cities in CA, AZ, NV, and NM become uninhabitable? Texas isn’t far behind. This trend has been visible for decades, yet many Americans (and immigrants, too) are positioning themselves directly in harm’s way.

I’ve been a doomsayer for over a decade now, reminding my two or three readers (on and off) that the civilization humans built for ourselves cannot stand much longer. Lots of people know this yet act as though concerns are overstated or irrelevant. It’s madness, no? Or is it one last, great hurrah before things crack up apocalyptically? On balance, what’s a person to do but to keep trudging on? No doubt the Absurdists got something correct.

/rant off

Deformed Under Pressure

To set up this blog post, let me venture recklessly into a less-familiar (for me at least) area of science, namely, physics. Intersections with particle physics and cosmology might be possible, but my concern is within the everyday world of objects that don’t require an electron microscope or telescope to be seen by humans. Most of us know in a routine sense that liquids, solids, and gases come under a variety of influences, e.g., radiation (including light), heat (and its inverse cold), and pressure (and its absence vacuum or its inverse suction). Could be other causes of deformation; it’s not my area of expertise but rather that of materials engineers who determine how much stress various kinds of a particular material can withstand before becoming useless. Pressure in combination with heat governs when an object, tool, or part is likely to fail over its projected useful life, which can be the root of either planned obsolescence or permanence for particularly hardy man-made (?) objects such as Neolithic ruins. For solid objects in particular, the amount of deformation that can be absorbed relates to its function. Rubber bands, springs, and paper clips serve their purpose by tolerating deformation, whereas bridge framing has far less flexion. When objects become truly massive, such as planets and stars (suns), gravitational forces in their interiors where the highest pressure/heat is found produce effects that are understood imperfectly. As I understand it, the (inferred?) molten iron core of Earth is responsible for its magnetic field, which has been determined to reorient repeatedly over planetary history. The sun is massive enough to produce nuclear fusion and energy roughly equivalent to the explosion of 91.92 billion megatons of TNT per second.

/rant on

Importing deformation under pressure into human character and society, opposite ends of the socioeconomic scale arguably produce the most distortion. Although many welcome the prospect of a big lottery win, anecdotal evidence suggests that most winners simply can’t take the sudden release of normal financial responsibility (pressure). Similarly, those who rise from austere beginnings to become hundy billionaires (names withheld) reliably become maniacs, diverting their wealth into undeserved influence, boondoggles, and self-serving bids for immortality. Born into obscene wealth? Arguably never even had a chance at normalcy. And because fame, influence, and indulgence go with extraordinary fortunes, idle whims are given serious consideration because, after all, why the hell not? Nothing holding back someone who can essentially purchase anything.

Pocket Reality, pt. 1

/rant on

The ongoing epistemological crisis is getting no aid or relief from the chattering classes. Case in point: the Feb. 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine has a special supplement devoted to “Life after Trump,” which divides recent history neatly into reality and unreality commencing from either the announcement of Trump’s candidacy, his unexpected success in the Republican primaries, his even less expected election (and inauguration), or now his removal from office following electoral defeat in Nov. 2020. Take your pick which signals the greatest deflection from history’s “proper” course before being derailed into a false trajectory. Charles Yu and Olivia Laing adopt the reality/unreality dichotomy in their contributions to the special supplement. Yu divides (as do many others) the nation into us and them: supporters of a supposed departure from reality/sanity and those whose clear perception penetrates the illusion. Laing bemoans the inability to distinguish fiction and fantasy from truth, unreality masquerading as your truth, my truth, anyone’s truth given repetition and persuasion sufficient to make it stick. Despite familiarity with these forced, unoriginal metaphors, I don’t believe them for a moment. Worse, they do more to encourage siloed thinking and congratulate the “Resistance” for being on the putative correct side of the glaringly obvious schism in the voting populace. Their arguments support a false binary, perpetuating and reinforcing a distorted and decidedly unhelpful interpretation of recent history. Much better analyses than theirs are available.

So let me state emphatically: like the universe, infinity, and oddly enough consciousness, reality is all-encompassing and unitary. Sure, different aspects can be examined separately, but the whole is nonetheless indivisible. Reality is a complete surround, not something one can opt into or out of. That doesn’t mean one’s mind can’t go elsewhere, either temporarily or permanently, but that does not create or constitute an alternate reality. It’s merely dissociation. Considering the rather extreme limitations of human perceptual apparatuses, it’s frankly inevitable that each of us occupies a unique position, an individual perspective, within a much, much (much, much …) larger reality. Add just a couple more axes to the graph below for time (from nanoseconds to eons) and physical scale (from subatomic to cosmic), and the available portion of reality anyone can grasp is clearly infinitesimally small, yet that tiny, tiny portion is utterly everything for each individual. It’s a weird kind of solipsism.

I get that Harper’s is a literary magazine and that writers/contributors take advantage of the opportunity to flex for whatever diminishing readership has the patience to actually finish their articles. Indeed, in the course of the special supplement, more than a few felicitous concepts and turns of phase appeared. However, despite commonplace protestations, the new chief executive at the helm of the ship of state has not in fact returned the American scene to normal reality after an awful but limited interregnum.

Aside: Citizens are asked to swallow the whopper that the current president, an elder statesman, the so-called leader of the free world, is in full control of this faculties. Funny how his handlers repeatedly erupt like a murder of crows at the first suggestion that a difficult, unvetted question might be posed, inviting the poor fellow to veer even slightly off the teleprompter script. Nope. Lest yet another foot-in-mouth PR disaster occur (too many already to count), he’s whisked away, out of range of cameras and mics before any lasting damage can be done. Everyone is supposed to pretend this charade is somehow normal. On the other hand, considering how many past presidents were plainly puppets, spokespersons, or charlatans (or at least denied the opportunity to enact an agenda), one could argue that the façade is normal. “Pay no attention to the man [or men] behind the curtain. I am the great and powerful Wizard of Oz!”

With some dismay, I admit that the tiny sliver of reality to which many attend incessantly is an even smaller subset of reality, served up via small, handheld devices that fit neatly in one’s pocket. One could say theirs is a pocket reality, mostly mass media controlled by Silicon Valley platforms and their censorious algorithms. Constrained by all things digital, and despite voluminous ephemera, that reality bears little resemblance to what digital refuseniks experience without the blue glare of screens washing all the color from their faces and their own authentic thoughts out of their heads. Instead, I recommend getting outside, into the open air and under the warm glow of the yellow sun, to experience life as an embodied being, not as a mere processor of yet someone else’s pocket reality. That’s how we all start out as children before getting sucked into the machine.

Weirdly, only when the screen size ramps up to 30 feet tall do consumers grow skeptical and critical of storytelling. At just the moment cinema audiences are invited to suspend disbelief, the Reality Principle and logic are applied to character, dialogue, plotting, and make-believe gadgetry, which often fail to ring true. Why does fiction come under such careful scrutiny while reality skates right on by, allowing the credulous to believe whatever they’re fed?

/rant off

Staring at the Sun

/rant on

Remember when the War on Christmas meme materialized a few years ago out of thin air, even though no one in particular was on attack? Might have to rethink that one. Seems that every holiday now carries an obligation to revisit the past, recontextualize origin stories, and confess guilt over tawdry details of how the holiday came to be celebrated. Nearly everyone who wants to know knows by now that Christmas is a gross bastardization of pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, cooped by various organized churches (not limited to Christians!) before succumbing to the awesome marketing onslaught (thanks, Coca-Cola) that makes Xmas the “most wonderful time of the year” (as the tune goes) and returning the holiday to its secular roots. Thanksgiving is now similarly ruined, no longer able to be celebrated and enjoyed innocently (like a Disney princess story reinterpreted as a white or male savior story — or even worse, a while male) but instead used as an excuse to admit America’s colonial and genocidal past and extermination mistreatment of native populations as white Europeans encroached ever more persistently on lands the natives held more or less as a commons. Gone are the days when one could gather among family and friends, enjoy a nice meal and good company, and give humble, sincere thanks for whatever bounty fortuna had bestowed. Now it’s history lectures and acrimony and families rent asunder along generational lines, typically initiated by those newly minted graduates of higher education and their newfangled ideas about equity, justice, and victimhood. Kids these days … get off my lawn!

One need not look far afield to find alternative histories that position received wisdom about the past in the cross-hairs just to enact purification rituals that make it/them, what, clean? accurate? whole? I dunno what the real motivation is except perhaps to force whites to self-flagellate over sins of our ancestors. Damn us to hell for having cruelly visited iniquity upon everyone in the process of installing white, patriarchal Europeanness as the dominant Western culture. I admit all of it, though I’m responsible for none of it. Moreover, history stops for no man, no culture, no status quo. White, patriarchal Europeanness is in serious demographic retreat and has arguably already lost its grip on cultural dominance. The future is female (among other things), amirite? Indeed, whether intended or not, that was the whole idea behind the American experiment: the melting pot. Purity was never the point. Mass migration out of politically, economically, and ecologically ravaged regions means that the experiment is no longer uniquely American.

Interdisciplinary approaches to history, if academic rigidity can be overcome, regularly develop new understandings to correct the historical record. Accordingly, the past is remarkably dynamic. (I’ve been especially intrigued by Graham Hancock’s work on ancient civilizations, mostly misunderstood and largely forgotten except for megalithic projects left behind.) But the past is truly awful, with disaster piled upon catastrophe followed by calamity and cataclysm. Still waiting for the apocalypse. Peering too intently into the past is like staring at the sun: it scorches the retinas. Moreover, the entire history of history is replete with stories being told and retold, forgotten and recovered, transformed in each iteration from folklore into fable into myth into legend before finally passing entirely out of human memory systems. How many versions of Christmas are there across cultures and time? Or Thanksgiving, or Halloween, or any Hallmark® holiday that has crossed oceans and settled into foreign lands? What counts as the true spirit of any of them when their histories are so mutable?

/rant off

The Cheerleaders, pt. 3

Continuing from part 2. I’m so slow ….

If cognitive inertia (i.e., fear of change) used to manifest as technophobia, myriad examples demonstrate how technology has fundamentally penetrated the social fabric and shared mental space, essentially flipping the script to fear of missing out (FOMO) of whatever latest, greatest innovation comes down the pike (laden with fraud and deception — caveat emptor). With FOMO, a new phobia has emerged: fear of technological loss, or more specifically, inability to connect to the Internet. This is true especially among the young, born and bred after the onset of the computing and digital communications era. Who knows when, why, or how loss of connectivity might occur? Maybe a Carrrington Event, maybe rolling blackouts due to wildfires (such as those in California and Oregon), maybe a ransomware attack on ISPs, or maybe a totalitarian clampdown by an overweening government after martial law is declared (coming soon to a neighborhood near you!). Or maybe something simpler: infrastructure failure. For some, inability to connect digitally, electronically, is tantamount to total isolation. Being cut off from the thoughts of others and abandoned left to one’s own thoughts, even on the short term, is thus roughly equivalent to the torture of solitary confinement. Forget the notion of digital detox.

/rant on

Cheerleaders for technocracy are legion, of course, while the mind boggles at how society might or necessarily will be organized differently when it all fails (as it must, if for no other reason than energy depletion). Among the bounties of the communications era is a surfeit of entertainments, movies and TV shows especially, that are essentially new stories to replace or supplant old stories. It’s no accident, however, that the new ones come wrapped up in the themes, iconography, and human psychology (is there any other kind, really?) of old ones. Basically, everything old is new again. And because new stories are delivered through hyperpalatable media — relatively cheap, on demand, and removed from face-to-face social contexts — they arguably cause as much disorientation as reorientation. See, for instance, the embedded video, which is rather long and rambling but nevertheless gets at how religious instincts manifest differently throughout the ages and are now embedded in comic book stories and superheros that have overtaken the entertainment landscape.

Mention is made that the secular age coincides roughly with the rise of video stores, a form of on-demand selection of content more recently made even simpler with ubiquitous streaming services. Did people really start hunkering down in their living rooms, eschewing group entertainments and civic involvements only in the 1980s? The extreme lateness of that development in Western history is highly suspect, considering the death of god had been declared back in the middle of the 19th century. Moreover, the argument swings around to the religious instinct, a cry or meaning if you will, being blocked by organized churches and their endemic corruption and instead finding expression in so-called secular religions (oxymoron alert). Gawd, how I tire of everything that functions as psychological grounding being called a religion. Listen, pseudo-religious elements can be found in Cheerios if one twists up one’s mind sufficiently. That doesn’t make General Mills or Kellogg’s new secular-religious prophets.

Back to the main point. Like money grubbing, technophilia might quiet the desperate search for meaning temporarily, since there’s always more of both to acquire. Can’t get enough, ever. But after even partial acquisition, the soul feels strangely dissatisfied and disquieted. Empty, one might even say. So out roving into the public sphere one goes, seeking and pursuing something to fill one’s time and appetites. Curiously, many traditional solutions to this age-old problem taught the seeker to probe within as an alternative. Well screw that! In the hyper-connected 20th-century world, who has time for that measly self-isolation? More reified Cheerios!

/rant off

Borrowed Time is Nearly Up

/rant on

Since deleting from my blogroll all doom links and turning my attention elsewhere, the lurking dread of looming collapse (all sorts) has been at low ebb at The Spiral Staircase. Despite many indicators of imminent collapse likewise purged from front-page and top-of-the-broadcast news, evidence continues to mount while citizens contend with other issues, some political and geopolitical, others day-to-day tribulations stemming from politics, economics, and the ongoing pandemic. For instance, I only just recently learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC — oh yeah … them) issued AR6 last month, the sixth periodic Assessment Report (maybe instead call it the State of the Union Address Planet Report). It’s long, dense reading (the full report is nearly 4,000 pp., whereas the summary for policymakers is a mere 42 pp.) and subject to nearly continuous revision and error correction. The conclusion? Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying. And although it’s true that mundane daily activities occupy center stage in the lives of average folks, there is simply no bigger story or concern for government leaders (I choke on that term) and journalists (that one, too) than climate change because it represents (oh, I dunno …) the collapse of industrial civilization and the early phase of mass extinction. Thus, all politics, geopolitics, economic warfare, class struggle, Wokeism, authoritarian seizure of power, and propaganda filling the minds of people at all levels as well as the institutions they serve amount to a serious misallocation of attention and effort. I will admit, though, that it’s both exhausting and by now futile to worry too much about collapse. Maybe that’s why the climate emergency (the new, improved term) is relegated to background noise easily tuned out.

It’s not just background noise, though, unlike the foreknowledge that death awaits decades from now if one is fortunate to persist into one’s 70s or beyond. No, it’s here now, outside (literally and figuratively), knocking on the door. Turn off your screens and pay attention! (Ironically, everyone now gets the lion’s share of information from screens, not print. So sue me.) Why am I returning to this yet again? Maybe I’ve been reviewing too many dystopian films and novels. Better answer is that those charged with managing and administering states and nations are failing so miserably. It’s not even clear that they’re trying, so pardon me, but I’m rather incensed. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of knowledgeable experts compiling data, writing scientific reports, publishing books, and offering not solutions exactly but at least better ways to manage our affairs. Among those experts, the inability to reverse the climate emergency is well enough understood though not widely acknowledged. (See Macro-Futilism on my blogroll for at least one truth teller who absolutely gets it.) Instead, some lame version of the same dire warning issues again and again: if action isn’t taken now (NOW, dammit!), it will be too late and all will be lost. The collective response is not, however, to pull back, rein in, or even prepare for something less awful than the worst imaginable hard landing where absolutely no one survives despite the existence of boltholes and underground bunkers. Instead, it’s a nearly gleeful acceleration toward doom, like a gambler happily forking over his last twenty at the blackjack table before losing and chucking himself off the top of the casino parking structure. Finally free (if fleetingly)!

Will festering public frustration over deteriorating social conditions tip over into outright revolt, revolution, civil war, and/or regime change? Doesn’t have to be just one. Why is the U.S. still developing and stockpiling armaments, maintaining hundreds of U.S. military bases abroad, and fighting costly, pointless wars of empire (defeat in withdrawal from Afghanistan notwithstanding)? Will destruction of purchasing power of the U.S. dollar continue to manifest as inflation of food and energy costs? Is the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture actually doing anything to secure food systems, or does it merely prepare reports like the AR6 that no one reads or acts upon? Will fragile supply lines be allowed to fail entirely, sparking desperation and unrest in the streets far worse than summer 2020? Famine is how some believe collapse will trigger a megadeath pulse, but I wouldn’t count out chaotic violence among the citizenry, probably exacerbated and escalated as regimes attempt (unsuccessfully) to restore social order. Are any meaningful steps being taken to stop sucking from the fossil fuel teat and return to small-scale agrarian social organization, establishing degrowth and effectively returning to the land (repatriation is my preferred term) instead of going under it? Greenwashing doesn’t count. This headline (“We Live In A World Without Consequences Where Everyone Is Corrupt“) demonstrates pretty well that garbage economics are what pass for governance, primarily preoccupied with maintaining the capitalist leviathan that has captured everything (capture ought to be the trending word of the 2021 but sadly isn’t). Under such constraint, aged institutions are flatly unable to accomplish or even address their missions anymore. And this headline (“Polls Show That The American People Are Extremely Angry – And They Are About To Get Even Angrier“) promises that things are about to get much, much worse (omitted the obvious-but-erroneous follow-on “before they get better”) — for the obvious reason that more and more people are at the ends of their ropes while the privileged few attend the Met Gala, virtue signal with their butts, and behave as though society isn’t in fact cracking up. Soon enough, we’ll get to truth-test Heinlein’s misunderstood aphorism “… an armed society is a polite society.”

Those who prophesy dates or deadlines for collapse have often been slightly embarrassed (but relieved) that collapse didn’t arrive on schedule. Against all odds, human history keeps trudging further into borrowed time, kicking cans down roads, blowing bubbles, spinning false narratives, insisting that all this is fine, and otherwise living in make-believe land. Civilization has not quite yet reached the end of all things, but developments over the last couple months feel ever more keenly like the equivalent of Frodo and Sam sitting atop Mount Doom, just outside the Cracks of Doom (a/k/a Sammath Naur), except that humanity is not on a noble, sacrificial mission to unmake the One Ring, whatever that might represent outside of fiction (for Tolkien, probably industrial machines capable of planetary destruction, either slowly and steadily or all at once; for 21st-century armchair social critics like me, capitalism). All former certainties, guarantees, sureties, continuities, and warranties are slipping away despite the current administration’s assurances that the status quo will be maintained. Or maybe it’s merely the transition of summer into fall, presaging the annual dormancy of winter looking suspiciously this year like the great dying. Whatever. From this moment on and in a fit of exuberant pique, I’m willing to call the contest: humanity is now decidedly on the down slope. The true end of history approaches, as no one will be left to tell the tale. When, precisely, the runaway train finally careens over the cliff remains unknown though entirely foreseeable. The concentration of goofy references, clichés, and catchphrases above — usually the mark of sophomoric writing — inspires in me to indulge (further) in gallows humor. Consider these metaphors (some mixed) suggesting that time is running out:

• the show’s not over til it’s over, but the credits are rolling
• the chickens are coming home to roost
• the canary in the coal mine is gasping its last breath
• the fat lady is singing her swan song
• borrowed time is nearly up
• time to join the great majority (I see dead people …)
• the West fades into the west
• kiss your babies goodnight and kiss your ass goodbye

/rant off