The Age of Wishfulness is winding down. The genii is running out of oil. The lid of necessity is lowering as the power of oil to hold it at bay begins to lose force. This is both a great tragedy, and a great opportunity, though not in the knee-jerk positivist way we have grown accustomed to finding “Silver Linings” behind every adversity. It is a great tragedy, because great suffering will come of this. It is a great opportunity because, the yearning for truth will lose its hallucinatory unreality; once the age of wishfulness loses its hold, it will no longer be an aberration to doubt that something-for-nothing is not a basis for living our lives.
One of the greatest challenges I find in these days, now that I’ve dropped a self-imposed censorship of my views, has been a difficulty communicating with many people I would expect to be natural allies, bright people; who have been connected, and have made successful careers. They see the same problems arising, they look for ways to proceed. Yet, when I attempt to break through the levels of wishfulness that encase their life experiences, and cushion their world views, they balk. The natural tendency in that situation is to back-off, soften the message, find a more palatable route towards making connection. The idea is that only once that connection is made, no matter what the level of co-option required to reach it, only then may we be able to slowly bring them around.
I’m beginning to doubt this tactic, to doubt the entire premise. It smacks of enabling. It makes no sense to me anymore. When the greatest difficulty lying between where we are, and some action that may lead to a better result than would otherwise occur, is the sleep-walking attitude of the most capable people in face of deep existential crises; then how can coddling that sleep-walking be part of an effective course towards removing this block?
We see this attitude everywhere. It has grown out of the infantilization at the heart of consumer culture. It reflects the level to which narcissism has been elevated into a defensible norm within this culture. Lest anyone think I am unfairly targeting their particular brand of consumer culture – one of the most widespread symptoms of this trend has been a defensive self-victim-hood embraced by the nominally powerful to cover over their inability to act effectively – I consider all of the worlds cultures today to be acting as subsets of an over-all consumer culture. Whether a particular group is benefiting or subjugated, their assumptions are all grounded today in the tenets of consumerism. Boosters and opponents, all in a merry dance around a world view they will defend or oppose in a polar attraction, in their own minds at least, until reality has beaten the notion out of them.
Most, hell, all of my own contacts have been on the booster side, among people who have in large part benefited, as the term is normally applied, from the leading edge of consumerism. I’ve been in this clad myself, would not have survived to adulthood, would have been literally inconceivable without the oil century. Within my circles, it is rare to find anyone with whom I have not had this problem.
I attribute my own perspective to accidents of birth, and certain traumas of early life that gave me a particular combination of qualities and experiences; that have shaped my viewpoint, my instinctive perspectives, from an early age. Many of those early experiences could have been fatal, either physically or psychically. By some accident, and luck, I survived them. What this has given me has been of great use to me, although so far none of that “shows.” It has led to years of self-induced marginalization that by some accident again, has helped me to see through the too-good-to-be-true. It has given me a long experience in not having “my way.” This has led to a high tolerance for the unpleasant, and a low tolerance for wishfulness.
Communication, we use that word to describe a panoply of activities that coalesce around the act of transferring information from one person to another, one group to another, one expert to the masses. As with so much of our language it has been burried within the consumerist mindset. It is a profession, there are courses, and experts. As with every other honest human impulse that has come under the consumerists’ sway, it has been co-opted and twisted away from its honest meaning, and reduced to jargon.
A tenet of “communication” as a subset of “marketing,” the greater good to which it has been subsumed, used as a tool; is that we make it easy for a “target” to hold onto their assumptions. The desire is to modify behavior at some level below the cognitive so the target is manipulated, either unknowingly – the ideal – or at least, unwittingly. To frontally question assumptions in one’s listeners is to court disaster. In the complex physics of propaganda and manipulation, there are countless paths. We may annoy, cajole, entice our way to success, but the laws of the enterprise don’t allow for open challenge.
Having lived our entire adult lives, and having been brought up in the infantilizing precincts of primary and secondary education; we have not only become accustomed to these rules, but we demand that they be maintained. We have lost the ability to face any challenge to our assumptions, and not see in it a direct attack on our very cores. However resilient we might feel, whatever strengths we might have, we react as though such a challenge would destroy us, as some kryptonite to which we have no immunity.
People dying of hypothermia relate – those who have survived – that the hardest part is resisting the wish to just fall asleep. The most pernicious affect of the cold is a sapping of the will-to-live. Self-preservation evaporates, and the greatest goal imaginable is to fall asleep. This is an immensely powerful instinct. It may be one of the final mercies built into a biological entity, that when struggle is no longer useful, this wish for sleep takes over. A final mercy when it is reached in truly fatal circumstances, but a tragic waste when it is jumped to as a hasty conclusion when there is still much fight left in us.
What is true in the solitude of one’s final moments is also in effect within the feedback mechanisms of groups. The ancient Greek idea of Pan, that he spread a delirium of frantic paralysis, a thrashing of activity that replaces effective action, is real. It is to be feared, its effects can be worse than the crises that may have brought it on, yet it is a powerful force that takes great effort to resist. That resistance needs to come from within, it is a trait that one must develop, it is a sign of maturity.
The received wisdom is to avoid panic. We are instructed not to cry “Fire!” in a theater. Such an attitude has its places, but if there is a fire?…
The admonition to avoid panics is convenient, if one stays within a manipulative stance towards others. If other people are objects to us, then it is in our interest to sway them to our will, and panic is, by nature, uncontrollable. Fetishizing the avoidance of bad news, to avoid panic; is useful in the deepening and maintaining of infantilization within a group one wants to manipulate. The panic of panic, the cultivation of an aversion to the very notion of the unpleasant as the negative side of a value judgment that puts the protection of our wishes as the ultimate good, does maintain a malleable population, up to a point.
We are at the edge of a precipice for the constituency that has built up around the accident of access to a convenient and abundant source of fossilized energy. Those who have made their lives within a successful accommodation to those conditions are in the most difficult position vis letting go of the habits of mind and action, that have worked so well in the past. It is unfair – there are worse things – to impute nefarious import to their actions as they resist abandoning what has worked in the past. But however it is characterized, the result is an effective block against moving forward, and adapting, and accommodating to the new realities that will make themselves felt, whatever one’s wishes.
Anyone who’s been in a dysfunctional relationship knows how much energy gets sucked into the vortex of mincing around the minefields of delusion put up by the addict. The mechanism here is the same, and I think, the answers to dealing with it here should also be the same. Bring the delusions to light. Make the delusional uncomfortable in the maintenance of the lie. Don’t engage in any attempts to argue the point, as though it were a reasonable position to hold delusional views, but firmly resist such engagement since it only perpetuates the power of the delusion. Act as though it is a lapse of reason, and a relinquishing of responsibility to maintain delusional thinking, and reward engagement that puts the delusion behind you. Expect to be treated as an adult, and treat the other as one too, as a subject, not an object.
There is so much to be done, so much that can still be done. Each moment that passes, doors close, we lose potential fields of action, our horizons of potential close in. The longer we struggle harder to maintain our desires to be wishful, instead of learning ways to be thoughtful, mindful, pro-active, adaptive; the greater the tragedy ahead. It is wishful to expect something-for-nothing. Abandoning that attitude will not remove obstacles, or eliminate bad outcomes, but it will help us be able to face our challenges as actors engaged in the outcomes of our fates, instead of mere objects on which greater forces play out at their whim.
Scratch through the prickly, brittleness of the wishful, and you just might find the effective action of the potentially heroic. Not as that term is qualified within fantasy, but as it has always played out in reality; when people have stood up to their plight, eyes open to what is at stake, and made truthful efforts on their own behalf. This, sadly as with so much else, needs to be debrided of the noxious effects of recent fantasy, and wishfulness; before we can see what it really means to be heroic, against the tawdry debasement that currently passes for it.
One of the greatest challenges I find in these days, now that I’ve dropped a self-imposed censorship of my views, has been a difficulty communicating with many people I would expect to be natural allies, bright people; who have been connected, and have made successful careers. They see the same problems arising, they look for ways to proceed. Yet, when I attempt to break through the levels of wishfulness that encase their life experiences, and cushion their world views, they balk. The natural tendency in that situation is to back-off, soften the message, find a more palatable route towards making connection. The idea is that only once that connection is made, no matter what the level of co-option required to reach it, only then may we be able to slowly bring them around.
I’m beginning to doubt this tactic, to doubt the entire premise. It smacks of enabling. It makes no sense to me anymore. When the greatest difficulty lying between where we are, and some action that may lead to a better result than would otherwise occur, is the sleep-walking attitude of the most capable people in face of deep existential crises; then how can coddling that sleep-walking be part of an effective course towards removing this block?
We see this attitude everywhere. It has grown out of the infantilization at the heart of consumer culture. It reflects the level to which narcissism has been elevated into a defensible norm within this culture. Lest anyone think I am unfairly targeting their particular brand of consumer culture – one of the most widespread symptoms of this trend has been a defensive self-victim-hood embraced by the nominally powerful to cover over their inability to act effectively – I consider all of the worlds cultures today to be acting as subsets of an over-all consumer culture. Whether a particular group is benefiting or subjugated, their assumptions are all grounded today in the tenets of consumerism. Boosters and opponents, all in a merry dance around a world view they will defend or oppose in a polar attraction, in their own minds at least, until reality has beaten the notion out of them.
Most, hell, all of my own contacts have been on the booster side, among people who have in large part benefited, as the term is normally applied, from the leading edge of consumerism. I’ve been in this clad myself, would not have survived to adulthood, would have been literally inconceivable without the oil century. Within my circles, it is rare to find anyone with whom I have not had this problem.
I attribute my own perspective to accidents of birth, and certain traumas of early life that gave me a particular combination of qualities and experiences; that have shaped my viewpoint, my instinctive perspectives, from an early age. Many of those early experiences could have been fatal, either physically or psychically. By some accident, and luck, I survived them. What this has given me has been of great use to me, although so far none of that “shows.” It has led to years of self-induced marginalization that by some accident again, has helped me to see through the too-good-to-be-true. It has given me a long experience in not having “my way.” This has led to a high tolerance for the unpleasant, and a low tolerance for wishfulness.
Communication, we use that word to describe a panoply of activities that coalesce around the act of transferring information from one person to another, one group to another, one expert to the masses. As with so much of our language it has been burried within the consumerist mindset. It is a profession, there are courses, and experts. As with every other honest human impulse that has come under the consumerists’ sway, it has been co-opted and twisted away from its honest meaning, and reduced to jargon.
A tenet of “communication” as a subset of “marketing,” the greater good to which it has been subsumed, used as a tool; is that we make it easy for a “target” to hold onto their assumptions. The desire is to modify behavior at some level below the cognitive so the target is manipulated, either unknowingly – the ideal – or at least, unwittingly. To frontally question assumptions in one’s listeners is to court disaster. In the complex physics of propaganda and manipulation, there are countless paths. We may annoy, cajole, entice our way to success, but the laws of the enterprise don’t allow for open challenge.
Having lived our entire adult lives, and having been brought up in the infantilizing precincts of primary and secondary education; we have not only become accustomed to these rules, but we demand that they be maintained. We have lost the ability to face any challenge to our assumptions, and not see in it a direct attack on our very cores. However resilient we might feel, whatever strengths we might have, we react as though such a challenge would destroy us, as some kryptonite to which we have no immunity.
People dying of hypothermia relate – those who have survived – that the hardest part is resisting the wish to just fall asleep. The most pernicious affect of the cold is a sapping of the will-to-live. Self-preservation evaporates, and the greatest goal imaginable is to fall asleep. This is an immensely powerful instinct. It may be one of the final mercies built into a biological entity, that when struggle is no longer useful, this wish for sleep takes over. A final mercy when it is reached in truly fatal circumstances, but a tragic waste when it is jumped to as a hasty conclusion when there is still much fight left in us.
What is true in the solitude of one’s final moments is also in effect within the feedback mechanisms of groups. The ancient Greek idea of Pan, that he spread a delirium of frantic paralysis, a thrashing of activity that replaces effective action, is real. It is to be feared, its effects can be worse than the crises that may have brought it on, yet it is a powerful force that takes great effort to resist. That resistance needs to come from within, it is a trait that one must develop, it is a sign of maturity.
The received wisdom is to avoid panic. We are instructed not to cry “Fire!” in a theater. Such an attitude has its places, but if there is a fire?…
The admonition to avoid panics is convenient, if one stays within a manipulative stance towards others. If other people are objects to us, then it is in our interest to sway them to our will, and panic is, by nature, uncontrollable. Fetishizing the avoidance of bad news, to avoid panic; is useful in the deepening and maintaining of infantilization within a group one wants to manipulate. The panic of panic, the cultivation of an aversion to the very notion of the unpleasant as the negative side of a value judgment that puts the protection of our wishes as the ultimate good, does maintain a malleable population, up to a point.
We are at the edge of a precipice for the constituency that has built up around the accident of access to a convenient and abundant source of fossilized energy. Those who have made their lives within a successful accommodation to those conditions are in the most difficult position vis letting go of the habits of mind and action, that have worked so well in the past. It is unfair – there are worse things – to impute nefarious import to their actions as they resist abandoning what has worked in the past. But however it is characterized, the result is an effective block against moving forward, and adapting, and accommodating to the new realities that will make themselves felt, whatever one’s wishes.
Anyone who’s been in a dysfunctional relationship knows how much energy gets sucked into the vortex of mincing around the minefields of delusion put up by the addict. The mechanism here is the same, and I think, the answers to dealing with it here should also be the same. Bring the delusions to light. Make the delusional uncomfortable in the maintenance of the lie. Don’t engage in any attempts to argue the point, as though it were a reasonable position to hold delusional views, but firmly resist such engagement since it only perpetuates the power of the delusion. Act as though it is a lapse of reason, and a relinquishing of responsibility to maintain delusional thinking, and reward engagement that puts the delusion behind you. Expect to be treated as an adult, and treat the other as one too, as a subject, not an object.
There is so much to be done, so much that can still be done. Each moment that passes, doors close, we lose potential fields of action, our horizons of potential close in. The longer we struggle harder to maintain our desires to be wishful, instead of learning ways to be thoughtful, mindful, pro-active, adaptive; the greater the tragedy ahead. It is wishful to expect something-for-nothing. Abandoning that attitude will not remove obstacles, or eliminate bad outcomes, but it will help us be able to face our challenges as actors engaged in the outcomes of our fates, instead of mere objects on which greater forces play out at their whim.
Scratch through the prickly, brittleness of the wishful, and you just might find the effective action of the potentially heroic. Not as that term is qualified within fantasy, but as it has always played out in reality; when people have stood up to their plight, eyes open to what is at stake, and made truthful efforts on their own behalf. This, sadly as with so much else, needs to be debrided of the noxious effects of recent fantasy, and wishfulness; before we can see what it really means to be heroic, against the tawdry debasement that currently passes for it.
In response to your post on consumerism/ age of wishfulness :
ReplyDeleteIndustrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment.
Industrial Society is destroying necessary things [Animals, Trees, Air, Water and Land] for making unnecessary things [consumer goods].
"Growth Rate" - "Economy Rate" - "GDP"
These are figures of "Ecocide".
These are figures of "crimes against Nature".
These are figures of "destruction of Ecosystems".
These are figures of "Insanity, Abnormality and Criminality".
Chief Seattle of the Indian Tribe had warned the destroyers of ecosystems way back in 1854 :
Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you realize that you cannot eat money.
Industrial Society has been spreading blatant lies over the years.
"Green Industry", "Green Technology", "Ethical Consumerism", "Sustainable Development".
These are contradictory terms – these are oxymorons.
Industrialization can never be green – it is impossible.
You cannot save a person after you have killed him.
You cannot save ecosystems after you have killed them for making consumer goods.
When we make consumer goods we kill Animals, Trees, Air, Water and Land - directly or indirectly.
Industrial Society destroys ecosystems - all Industrial Societies destroy ecosystems.
It hardly matters whether it is "Capitalist Industrial Society" - "Communist Industrial Society" - or "Socialist Industrial Society".
Industrial Society destroys ecosystems at every stage of its functioning - when consumer goods are produced - when consumer goods are used - when consumer goods are discarded/ recycled.
Raw material for industry is obtained by cutting up Forests. It is extracted by mining/ digging up the earth. It comes by destroying/ killing Trees, Animals and Land.
Industries/ Factories use Water. The water that comes out of Factories is contaminated with hundreds of toxic chemicals. What to speak of Rivers - entire Oceans have been polluted. Industry kills Water.
Industries/ Factories burn millions of tonnes of fuel - and when raw material is melted/ heated up, hundreds of toxic chemicals are released into the atmosphere. Industry kills Air.
Industrial Society has covered millions of square miles of land with cement and concrete. Industry kills Land.
When consumer goods are discarded/ thrown away in landfills it again leads to destruction of ecosystems.
When consumer goods are recycled, hundreds of toxic chemicals are released into air, water and land.
Consumer goods are sold/ marketed through a network of millions of kilometers of rail / road network and shipping routes which causes destruction of all ecosystems that come in the way.
We have limited resources/ ecosystems on earth which is just 40,000 km in circumference.
If we destroy ecosystems for fewer things [food, clothing, shelter] the ecosystems will last longer.
If we destroy ecosystems for more things [consumer goods] the ecosystems will finish much sooner.
The fewer things we make the more sustainable we are.
This is common sense - plain common sense - which the so called smart, intelligent, advanced, civilized and developed Industrial Society does not possess.
The collapse has already happened for millions of other species – most of them have been decimated.
Very soon it will be the turn of man to go.
sushil_yadav
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment
What is the best representation of the person we truly are? What exists because of what we do, what we say or what we buy?
ReplyDelete