Aesthetic Materialism

My personal guess as to the solution of the Fermi "paradox" (not really a paradox) is fairly boring: 1. Space travel is virtually impossible.  This is really the main reason.  The Tsolkovsky Rocket Equation is a harsh taskmaster.  This shows how hard it is to get out of a planet's gravity well: you need to burn fuel to launch yourself.  But the more fuel you have, the heavier your craft is, thus the more fuel you need.  The expansion is logarithmic, and it implies that the expense of even lifting a small number of people into orbit is enormous.  And then, once you're up there, out of the atmosphere, beyond the magnetosphere, then you have real problems: space is trying to kill you.  The radiation up there is extremely unhealthy.  And the faster your spaceship moves, the more problems you have.  If your ship can move close to the speed of light, then, relativistically, there will be particles whizzing into the front of your ship at close to t...

  There's something really nice about people who remain passionately steadfast in their devotion to a religion that has largely discredited and abandoned.  In a way, that's when true faith begins.  I want to comfort and encourage such a person - Linus in the pumpkin patch. That's how I feel about logical positivism. 

Jung and Lacan are more similar than either of their followers would like to admit. Jung said "God enters through the wound."  That's Lacan in a nutshell.

  When we describe people as "reasonable" or "logical," these are usually regarded as synonyms.  And in many contexts, this is probably true.  But in my experience, in certain contexts, logical people can be quite different from reasonable people - almost opposites. By "reasonable," here, I mean something like what Aristotle called the "golden mean," which is perhaps comparable to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, called the "middle path" - that is, remaining moderate and not going too far in either extreme.  "Moderation in all things," as the saying goes.  It means being open to hearing ideas or criticism from any source, without prejudicially rejecting them or automatically dogmatically adopting them, and always being ready to change your mind.  In short, it means holding onto one's own beliefs "at arm's length," as it were.  It means being nuanced in one's picture of the world and recognizing that realit...

The reason that the situationist analysis of the "spectacle" is a better theoretical lens than the Frankfurt School's concept of the "culture industry" is that the concept of the "culture industry" is based on a concept of "regression" that allowed theorists like Benjamin and Adorno to pass off reactionary cultural politics as Marxism.

      Give 'Em What They Want   There is no greater thought-terminating cliche than "revealed preference". If you ever meet a person using this phrase, run. For those not familiar with this phrase, it was coined by economist Paul Samuelson in 1938, in his paper, "A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer's Behavior."  Samuelson was a self-described Keynesian economist who later wrote a popular economics textbook, "Economics: An Introductory Analysis."  (As Samuelson himself once remarked, "Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.")  He also wrote a popular newspaper column about economics.  Gradually, the term spread through the field of economics, and then into broader culture. Samuelson's initial discussion of revealed preference was modest and technical, describing a way of measuring consumer behavior.  And understood that far, revealed preference is a perfectly reasonable standard by which to make...

  I am opposed to the degrowth movement.  I'm in favor of growth: growth of the population, growth of scientific knowledge, growth of technology, growth of industry, growth of art, growth of music, growth of creativity, growth of diversity of culture, growth of diversity of lifestyles. I think one day, the world will outgrow capitalism . 

  I've written before about the history of the "national question," without putting forward my own viewpoint.  So what is it?  I am an anti-nationalist.  As I've written before, I think nationalism is a scam.  An "imagined community." But that's just a negative assertion.  What positive proposal do I make, as opposed to nationalism? Am I saying that the nation-state is too small?  Or that it's too big?  Am I pushing for larger scale organization, or smaller? The answer, of course, is both.   First, let me say, very clearly, as I've said before, I oppose one world government.  Totally. But apart from that, a wide variety of forms of organization are possible.  And different forms are desirable for different purposes. But I would say that, for the most part, today, in the early 21st century, the nation-state is too big.  Certainly, in the case of the United States, not to mention China or India, the nation-state is way too ...

  One thing that I hate is that, in political discussions, people are almost never engaging with your ideas in a rational or even an emotional or empathetic way - they're just trying to label you, to categorize you, to stick you into a specific slot and make you equivalent with all the other people that they've filed away there, so that they don't have to think about you at all. If you are in any way critical of capitalism, they call you a communist, and make you equivalent with Stalin and Pol Pot. If you are then, let's say, critical of Stalin, they call you a Trotskyist. Then, if you're critical of Trotsky, they call you an anarchist. As if there are only two possible positions on the left: the extreme authoritarianism of Bolshevism, or absolute rejection of the legitimacy of any kind of government at all. There are thousands - perhaps millions, or billions - of possible political positions between and outside of anarchism and Bolshevism (and of course there are m...

  Seven years ago, I wrote my long post about why capitalism is ending . Here's my argument, but using far fewer words:

   

  EQUITY: Own Your Own Job  What, if anything, should be saved from the wreckage of Marxist theory is the concept of labor power.  Marxist theory is often accused (by, for instance, Foucauldians) of not focusing enough on the question of power.  Even if that is so, nonetheless, Marx highlighted a kind of power that is often forgotten: labor power.  The primary lesson I get from Marx is that the power to labor is a kind of power, and a fundamental one - don't give it up without a fight. I'm sure old Leninists will accuse me of engaging in a kind of individualist reading of Marx, here.  To that, I plead guilty.  I am an individualist.  (At least as much as Hegel was, if not moreso.)

Bourgeois morality Bourgeois morality is discrete: the individual is the quantum of bourgeois morality, the indivisible unit.  Bourgeois morality can only calculate in whole numbers of persons.  This is, of course, what is meant by "individual" - for bourgeois morality, a person has no parts, and cannot be divided.  One might say that in bourgeois morality, an individual is a "body without organs."  In this sense, the individual - the quantum of bourgeois morality - is ideal, and ideological, rather than material. For bourgeois morality, individuals are conceived as separate.  That is their essence.  They are fundamentally, unbridgeably distinct.  One individual can never merge with another individual, and one individual is never inside of another individual.  Which raises the question: where did these individuals come from?  Have they always existed?  Are they eternal?  Will they always exist?  But these questions are beyond t...

    Start at the Beginning Previous Chapter: Day 1 Part 10 Back at the house, Dismas and Gestas talk with the mother of the children. "Come in, come in!  The very least I can do is make thee a fine meal." "I'd be happy to, Ma'am, but we have to get our friend.  He's just over there." "Very well, bring him in as well!" "Ehm," says Dismas, scratching the back of his neck.  "That might be... a little...."  "What?  What is the problem?  Go!  Hie thee hence, collect your friend, and bring him inside!" "Oh.... kay...." says Dismas, clearly uncomfortably. Dismas and Gestas head back to the tall grass where they've left Jesus.   "Mister... Jesus?" says Dismas, quietly, leaning into towards him.  Jesus does not move a muscle.   Dismas and Gestas look at each other.  Gestas shrugs.  They get down to pick him up.   When Dismas touches Jesus's hand, the wound on Dismas's hand closes and is magic...

  I hope we're near the end of the era of the aesthetic of sleekness.  Everything these days is designed to be sleek, simple, smooth.  Everything is frictionless, characterless, blank, boring, nothing.  When, one day, we look back at the aesthetic of this era, when it has become quaint, even retro, how will it look to us?  What will it signify?  What kind of vision of the future did it portend? Nowadays, there are two overriding aesthetics, especially radiating out of the tech world: infantilization and sleekness.  (You see the infantilization in, for instance, the colorful font of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and in many other places.)   I see them as two sides of the same coin.  The implication is clear: you, the consumers, are children- innocent, simple idiots. We, your tech oligarchs, are inscrutable, mysterious, awesome, opaque, dark, very slightly menacing.  Occasionally gray or silver or white, but mostly jet black...

  I'm not saying I agree with them - I think there are probably problems with their ideology.  Frankly, I'm skeptical of any political ideology that focuses on government taxing and spending rather than worker power - whether of the liberal, Georgist, or (pseudo-)Marxist variety. But... well, at least they have something.  They have some kind of goal, some kind of clear policy proposal on how to get there, and some kind of economic analysis about how it would all work.  Which is more than the Marxists have.  Marxists are way less sophisticated on policy.  Marxists, you've got to up your game.  

  Dominating cultures tend to freely appropriate ideas and traditions of the cultures that they dominate.  They just add the gods of the people they have conquered to their already-existing pantheon - even when the mythologies clash and are logically incompatible, dominating cultures shrug.  Thus, for instance, Genghis Khan's descendants were happy to adopt the cultures they dominated.  The Yuan Dynasty took on Chinese customs and beliefs, Berke Khan became a Muslim, and so on - without hesitation.  Often they believed great swirling mixtures of Tengrism, Buddhism, astrology, Christianity, and anything else they came across, all at once, without feeling any cognitive dissonance.  There is always something sweetly naive about conquerors. Dominated cultures, on the other hand, seethe with resentment and hatred.  They remember every infraction and count every penny they've been cheated.  Not only hatred towards those who have dominated them - not eve...

To my mind, the best decision making process would probably have elements of meritocracy, sortition, democracy, subsidiarity, and stability.  Exactly how much of each and how they can be balanced is an open question.  But for the sake of argument, here's one way of incorporating all of them. Society is divided into many small portions, (each containing, perhaps, 15,000 people) each of which has some fairly large degree of relative autonomy, capable of deciding on a wide swath of policies for itself.  (We can call each of these a mini-society.) Within each mini-society, there is a process for decision-making.  This process can, itself, be changed - the Constitution of each mini-society can be amended by the mini-society itself to change the process.  But the default process, as it were, would be as follows: Step 0: The mini-society has laws, in official law books, beginning with that mini-society's constitution.  They also have at least 2 (though probably ma...

  I don't think that conservatives are evil.  Thinking of conservatives as "the bad guys" is totally wrongheaded and ineffective as a strategy, because it misses the point. I think that conservatism is something that happens to most people - probably to everyone, to one degree or another, especially as people get older, although different people become conservative in different ways.  As they age, people become more and more stuck in their ways.  It becomes more and more difficult to change your mind.  "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," as the saying goes.  People become more and more convinced that they are right, more dogmatic, more authoritarian, less and less open to new ideas.   In much the same way that, if you don't exercise, you will become out of shape, and if you don't exercise your mind, with reading, sudoku, crosswords, or something, your mind will gradually deteriorate as you get older - similarly, most people gradually become c...