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Andrew Sullivan and Bill Maher have started tweeting excerpts from their group chat about the UK election... time to re-up my little rant on Asimov’s Cult of Ignorance.

Cult of Ignorance (extends beyond the “Ignorant”)

I consider myself an intellect. I know a lot of stuff. I’ve read a lot of books. Not sure what Asimov’s standard is, but, hey, I pass my own standard. I would say that I am an expert in my field (while conversational in many others). I almost double Gladwell’s concept of 10k hrs of study and work. And I disagree with Asimov’s quote here with all my heart. Because knowledge is an arbitrary distinction. One usually made by people with “knowledge.” It’s used to divide “US” and conquer “THEM”. It rejects the concept of democracy at its core and yearns, baldly, for a time of autocracy or plutocracy that, btw, would count Asimov’ as one of its elitist leaders.

We all yearn for it in some way, that Alpha-dog leader, someone to worship or to bitch about, that will protect us from the wolves, that we can blame for our problems and string up to a crucifix or chop off its head if our problems become truly, existentially desperate.

To say one knows what democracy is over someone else is, IMHO, fucking stupid. You’re telling me that some guy with a 200K college degree is better and wiser than some lady without a college degree who works in a field or a mine or at a factory or in a restaurant only because he has a 200K college degree. Because what are we talking about when we talk about “knowledge”?

Direct democracy is an inherently simple premise - one person, one vote. To advocate anything other, or to say “my knowledge TRUMPS your ignorance” i.e. to say how someone should use that vote and then berate them for being ignorant if they don’t use it the way you want them to, is so fucked up I can’t even….

There’s this pervasive bully syndrome by those who believe themselves “intellects” or “elites.” And, btw, there’s a lot of folks who label themselves with these titles who are so fucking stupid that when they speak I just squint so fucking hard it jacks the pressure in my occipital cavity so much that my eye balls literally (LITERALLY!) begin slip out of my face.

I would say people who call themselves “intellects” or “elites” are more likely to be stupid than any other human on the face of the planet because they lack some important features of what it means to be a good, intelligent ape: self awareness, humility, and empathy. Know-it alls, indoctrinated by schools of thought, who become the preachers and missionaries for bad ideas that have a general consensus among their “elite’, “knowledgeable” neighbours and their “elite”, “knowledgeable” co-workers are the worst of us - why the fuck should we defer to them?

They can have their vote and I’ll have mine. That’s fucking democracy. It’s not always efficient and it can be messy and you might get results you don’t like and THAT’S THE FUCKING POINT. Oh, you’re quoting John Locke. And Thomas Paine? Wow. What about Hamilton and his New Army, or Napoleon, or fucking Cromwell? Because what Asimov is talking about here is not democracy, he’s talking about authoritarianism. He’s talking about democracy but only for the ruling elite. And this has always been true. Our royalty, our elite, just keep cycling through themselves. They have created a system that almost guarantees the maintenance of that same system. We are living in a system Asimov, according to this quote, desired. So what is he bitching about exactly? He’s blaming the “ignorant” for “elite” rule that has been the one constant of modern, human civilization.

Andrew Sullivan wrote about this very thing before the election and, without irony, explores Eric Hoffer’s THE TRUE BELIEVER to support his position, without acknowledging that Eric Hoffer was a blue collar, autodidact that, under Sullivan’s elitist system, would exclude him from the dialogue of governance! Irony is lost on the elite.

Asimov is wrong. Sullivan is wrong. Why would you take an elite advocating for the power of the elites at their word? It’s to their advantage! They do not have your best interests at heart. And even if they say they do, least we forget another famous quote: hell is paved with good intentions. 

America wouldn’t exist without the labor of those deemed “ignorant”. The elite wouldn’t have time to consume their books and write their diatribes and debate politics without the callouses and black lungs and scarred backs of the “ignorant.” The elite aren’t special just because they have the PRIVILEGE not to be “ignorant” and to speak it, out loud, without shame, from platforms created by others like them. And their bald face SCREAMING for power and control, their bashing of the “ignorant” masses is same old, same old, business as usual, cliche upon cliche - they’re blaming “them” for an “us” problem. And it has never been any different. There has been no time in human history where the “ignorant” have ruled.

This Asimov quote ignores the reality he lived in and the one we live in now - that elites have controlled human history since the beginning of time, in one form or another, blessed by Gods or Rich Men. This is punching down in action and if you nodded in agreement with Asimov (or Sullivan), pause just one split second and take a look in a mirror and realize Asimov and Sullivan, when they’re talking about the”ignorant”, they’re talking about you.

Everyone else is ignorant to the one who considers themselves an intellect. Trust me. I just wrote an essay about it and if you’re not me, you’re dumb AF.

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I reblog this whenever I feel like Kaspar Hauser....

On Kaspar Hauser

“Why is everything so hard for me? Why can’t I play the piano like I breathe?”

- Bruno S. (in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)

Kaspar Hauser walked into a village with his skull cracked and bleeding. He had a note in his hand. He seemed mute. And, after reading the contents of the note, it was quickly determined that he was raised in isolation. Not by wolves per se, but by beastly, human creatures that confined him – as Werner Herzog imagines – to a stable with only a cat and a donkey as his companions. He was dumb by all reasonable standards – he could not write, he could not speak although he did make sounds. He became a curiosity for the learned in the village. He became a toy for the intelligent to manipulate. He became an experiment in human ego. Could this feral savage be tamed? Could his humanity transcend his horrible, inhuman upbringing? And failing that, failing an innate humanity, could he be taught how to be human?

He learned to speak. He learned to dress himself and to clean himself. Although his companions consisted of aristocrats and geniuses, his status never altered from that of mere curiosity. He was poked and prodded and revealed as a sort of wunderkind (although the curiosity didn’t stem from composing operas in his sleep, it stemmed from his abilities, at 16, to have simple conversations and to eat with a fork).

He was entertainment. He was something to be exploited. To be ogled at. A pet monkey on a chain. And although his clay-like exterior began to shape itself into something resembling a proper human being (by the villagers’ standards of course), he was always seen as the other. The dumb. The feral child raised by beasts.

He is not like us, the villagers would say. We must make him like us. And as Kaspar Hauser flailed against all that he had not learned and was trying to learn (“Why is everything so hard for me? Why can’t I play the piano like I breathe?”), as Kaspar Hauser began to interact with the human world, it was always he who was the oddity. Even though he showed an innate gentleness, a simple curiosity, and his presence did little to harm anything but the villagers’ sense of smell, he was never human enough. He must learn to count. He must learn to play the piano. He must wear starched collars and silken boots. He must accept a Christian god into his heart. And he must do these things within the parameters laid out by the villagers’ own standards of humanity. Standards of humanity that were handed down through generation to generation, taught to children and then to those children’s children etc. etc. etc.

Kaspar Hauser wanted very much to be accepted by the villagers, to be accepted into the human race (a very human thing to want). So he did all that was asked of him, he played their games, and tried to understand and adopt their ways. And, in the end, he was murdered.

[wordsworkweekly]

On Kaspar Hauser

“Why is everything so hard for me? Why can’t I play the piano like I breathe?”

- Bruno S. (in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)

Kaspar Hauser walked into a village with his skull cracked and bleeding. He had a note in his hand. He seemed mute. And, after reading the contents of the note, it was quickly determined that he was raised in isolation. Not by wolves per se, but by beastly, human creatures that confined him – as Werner Herzog imagines – to a stable with only a cat and a donkey as his companions. He was dumb by all reasonable standards – he could not write, he could not speak although he did make sounds. He became a curiosity for the learned in the village. He became a toy for the intelligent to manipulate. He became an experiment in human ego. Could this feral savage be tamed? Could his humanity transcend his horrible, inhuman upbringing? And failing that, failing an innate humanity, could he be taught how to be human?

He learned to speak. He learned to dress himself and to clean himself. Although his companions consisted of aristocrats and geniuses, his status never altered from that of mere curiosity. He was poked and prodded and revealed as a sort of wunderkind (although the curiosity didn’t stem from composing operas in his sleep, it stemmed from his abilities, at 16, to have simple conversations and to eat with a fork).

He was entertainment. He was something to be exploited. To be ogled at. A pet monkey on a chain. And although his clay-like exterior began to shape itself into something resembling a proper human being (by the villagers’ standards of course), he was always seen as the other. The dumb. The feral child raised by beasts.

He is not like us, the villagers would say. We must make him like us. And as Kaspar Hauser flailed against all that he had not learned and was trying to learn (“Why is everything so hard for me? Why can’t I play the piano like I breathe?”), as Kaspar Hauser began to interact with the human world, it was always he who was the oddity. Even though he showed an innate gentleness, a simple curiosity, and his presence did little to harm anything but the villagers’ sense of smell, he was never human enough. He must learn to count. He must learn to play the piano. He must wear starched collars and silken boots. He must accept a Christian god into his heart. And he must do these things within the parameters laid out by the villagers’ own standards of humanity. Standards of humanity that were handed down through generation to generation, taught to children and then to those children’s children etc. etc. etc.

Kaspar Hauser wanted very much to be accepted by the villagers, to be accepted into the human race (a very human thing to want). So he did all that was asked of him, he played their games, and tried to understand and adopt their ways. And, in the end, he was murdered.

[wordsworkweekly]

BITTER NOSTALGIA: Modernism in the Now, the evils of Social Media, And how to recapture the modes of Mental and Physical Production

Note: this essay was included in a little book I made by hand for a class I took a few years ago.

What does it mean to be modernist within the modern context? Like those who have called themselves (or have been called) Modernist, one must, to label oneself as such, engage with the convention of “the now” (or what has become the convention of “the now”), within the ticking-clock – second to second – context of one’s own lived life.

This is an interesting pursuit – to know what is “the now”, to engage with it, to kill it, and reincarnate it as “the new” – because it seems like movements of thought, of art, of politics (etc) in the modern context come and go quicker than the tides. To know what is “the now” and what is “the new” seems like an impossible task with how quickly ideas spew forth via digital means. Movements (and the thoughts that inspired them – political, artistic, or other) that once took years to coalesce and take root before being considered convention, now go through an unnatural life cycle and become convention within months of being planted (their life spans, in extreme cases, sometimes limited to weeks or even days due to the speed of our Internet connections and the other tools that service our naturally flighty attention spans). The coming and going of exciting thoughts (and movements) is “the now”, it has become the conventional norm.

To make something “the new” until it becomes old, until either you kill it or some other idea comes along to smother it in its sleep (i.e. death by becoming convention), is the paradoxical goal of the Modernist. In other words, to be a Modernist is to always be in a state of de-stabilization, in a state of active “Boredom Murder” (because what is more boring than the rotting remains of some old idea). The modern context has provided us with the weapons (of mass destruction) we need to kill boredom, but, I fear, that some of us aren’t discerning in how we use these (potentially) destructive tools. Instead, we find ourselves being used by the weapons we think we wield (to maintain and nourish their development and existence instead of our own).  The big question I want to explore is how do we recapture the modes of production. The simple answer: do what Virginia Woolf would do.

The Digital Revolution as the Epitome of Modernist Thought

Something that was “the new” in recent memory and had a huge, destabilizing impact was the digital revolution. Technology is the rocket fuel to a (potentially nihilistic) fiery human instinct that was embodied and popularized by the likes of Pound and Woolf and their fellow travelers – “to make it new”. This, inherently, is a destructive force. It is a mode of thought that advocates the deconstruction of tradition and convention, but not necessarily in favor of a new structure or mode of thought (the deconstruction is its purpose). As Mimi Parent writes in her essay “The Poetics of the Manifesto”: “The spirit of modernism is characterized… by its refusal of description, for what it conceives of as its own form of reality; art, representing often simply itself.” (Caws xxviii). Modernist thought exists only for itself, but cannot exist without a tradition or convention that precedes it (it cannot exist without something to tear down and rebel against).

John Lehmann’s attempt at a late Modernist movement (via his New Writing) was a reaction to the destabilization Pound and Woolf et al. advocated and practiced. He wanted art to be a stabilizing force and, in someway, he saw the –isms that emerged in the early years of Modernism as destabilizing and destructive forces. Lehmann wanted New Writingto be “…a more coordinated interpretation of the world “ (Bort 670), and saw the artist as social agent (someone who might effect change not just in the world of his or her own art, but in the world at large – i.e. he wanted artists and their art to be a stabilizing force within broader society).

Even though I agree in general with Lehmann’s premise (that –isms are by nature a destabilizing force), I disagree with him that art and artists should be a stabilizing force. This was also my issue with Lehmann’s oft-published contemporary Louis MacNeice’s writing during World War II. MacNeice serviced the structure of society over the expression of his own art and his own mind (or as Woolf so brilliantly puts it, “If we use art to propagate political opinions, we must force the artist to clip and cabin his gift to do us a cheap and passing service.” [as cited in Mc 72]). MacNeice clipped and “cabin-ed” his own gift to be a stabilizing force within a mass of people and for a government body. This is an absurd and narcissistic pursuit – one, I fear, we’ve all embraced too heartily in the modern, digital context. We no longer look to destabilize convention, instead we look to bolster political discourse and ideology with our own 2 cents (yelling at Presidents and Prime Ministers and other elected officials online, repeating slogans and systemic thinking from other eras, and all the while doing this on publishing platforms we do not own or control with thoughts and content recycled by our interactions in the digital sphere).

The problem with Lehmann’s concept (that to make something “new” is to shake the foundation of existence as it is currently known – even if it is a minor, subjective crisis), is that his movement strives for stabilization and therefore is striving for convention ad infinitum (no revolution, only boredom).  There is an intriguing thread that emerges when you look back at this particular intersection of public people known for the exploration of their private selves and how, strangely, this once revolutionary act has become the norm. The digital revolution has allowed us to gut our private lives for the consumption of others. We have clipped and cabin-ed our own gifts and do our thoughts and ourselves a cheap and passing service indeed.

Our thoughts now, in the digital age, once spewed into the ever-expanding digital sea evaporate like rubbing alcohol on skin. Even though there’s more thoughts and places to put them, spewed by infinite anonymous hordes (of all classes, creeds, racial and gender categories – a good thing, in concept, to be sure), these so-called democratic tools that have seemingly given the horde’s voice has simultaneously erased those voices by hiding them amongst the infinite others (amongst themselves).  What at first shook the foundations of what was conventional (music, book publishing, newspapers, etc), now functions to stabilize itself – it has become the convention. But the barriers we now face have been made invisible (or, if not invisible, seemingly insurmountable). The revolution of digital publishing gives us a delusion of free speech, of control, and blinds us to the fact that we are throwing our thoughts, precious pebbles, into a vast sea. The advent of the internet and publishing platforms like Twitter or Wordpress or Tumblr or Facebook (etc) has at once democratized access (provided the ability) for anyone (despite their class, creed, racial, or gender categories) to build “intellectual capital” without, seemingly, the praise or approval or allowance of a Gatekeeper or a “Beadle” (ala Woolf’s “Beadle” from A Room of One’s Own). Yet what has really happened is that the Beadle has become the platform and our thoughts are its food (they exist for its sustenance and not our own).

One might argue that modern digital revolution has done for everyone exactly what Woolf advised other women writers to seek out: provided “money and a room of one’s own” (2) without acknowledging that the room and the money are made of 1s and Os (or, in other words, they’re made out of nothing or, perhaps, made out of a lie agreed upon).  When we publish into the digital sphere via these platforms, we are not in control anymore – despite appearances.

But it is not all bad. Sometimes miracles do happen – pebbles do float! People find each other. Communities are made. Revolutions are turned. And awareness that the digital realm is a sledgehammer and not the one that wields it, can lead to new ways of destabilizing what has become convention (of thinking and being and interacting with the world that, ultimately, in even microscopic ways, shift the ground beneath our feet).

But the question becomes, if this is “the now” what is “the new”? My answer: the new is the old. It is to treat our thoughts as precious and to give them a fighting chance to be seen in a light that transcends convention, to access or create an audience looking for a way out of “the now” and to move all of us toward “the new”. My answer is to follow in the steps of Virginia Woolf and make my own little book.

This is not necessarily a profound idea – to make a book. But it does do something interesting – it reclaims the means of artistic production. Not only the physical, but also the mental. It treats the thought as precious and as a commodity that the individual (not the platform) gets to exploit as they so choose.

Virginia Woolf

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf advocates a private reckoning with the self as “writer” and she advocates this for women in particular but also, by inference, all classes of people who identify themselves as human beings. Her self-printing methods, adopted and adapted into the Hogarth Press and its methodology, created a system that promoted content and conversation over aesthetic concerns of physical production (i.e. content and thought over pretty books). Her “cheap” publishing methods (meant to eradicate barriers) anticipate, a century later, a mode of publishing — the Internet — that, virtually, has no barriers (“virtually” being the operative word – because digital publishing, again, is still the domain of the privileged… those with a minimum of an internet connection and a device to connect to it, but also those who control platforms and social networking hubs).

The fact that we have the ability to self-publish hardcover books using almost identical methods to Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries (that all of us so privileged with an internet connection and a printer and access to paper and video tutorials can do this) is a tiny miracle. Virginia Woolf’s ability to exploit one aspect of her privilege (money and a room of one’s own – or, at least, a table in the stockroom of the Hogarth Press) and then use that to disrupt the convention of her Gatekeepers (in this instance: the male dominated publishing industry) by cutting them out of the publishing process was a revolutionary act.  By doing this, she burst through the barriers of the context in which she lived (her “now”), but also added value to her own output (she created her own market without asking for permission to do so). Another way of thinking about it, Woolf’s decision to self-publish and then create her own publishing house, turned her (and Hogarth) into a Lighthouse on a craggy coastline, a beacon in the dark, where other like-minded ships would be drawn to and a community (and market) formed around this simple, revolutionary act (of seizing the means of production – figuratively and literally).

This, I think, is something we have forgotten (or, at least, neglected) in our modern context. We’ve moved on from Woolf’s revolution, perhaps in a way Virginia Woolf, at least at first, would support. We live on digital platforms and publish directly to our peers. The trade off, invisible to be sure, is that the platform is not “ours”, it is an illusion controlled by folks with their own interests and goals, with their own terms of service (that might not have anything to do with our thought or expression of it, who have agendas that do not align with our message, but who exploit our participation for their own profit motives). In their modes of commoditization – these Pavlovian algorithms that trigger dopamine responses i.e. the pleasure we get from getting “likes” and “favourites” etc. – they, at once, attract a mass of humans (creating a market to exploit) and, at the individual level, intentional or not, alter the individual’s thoughts and language to comply with its meager rewards (with their system). These social media platforms have become our modern day Beadles telling us where on the grass we can sit. But the magic trick that these modern platforms have pulled off, the sleight of hand, is that they do this without confrontation. They use positive reinforcement to alter human behavior and make themselves masters (or, at least, profiteers).

Woolf, of course, had some thoughts on how to break these invisible chains. She said, “I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ [sic] & editors.” (as cited in Mc 64). What gave Woolf this freedom, of course, was her taking control of the modes of production of her own thought (mental and physical). In ’Opening the Door’: The Hogarth Press as Virginia Woolf’s Outsiders’ Society”, McTaggart articulates Woolf’s epiphany, “[as] she sewed bindings and set type, she saw that literary communications were not ethereal, free-flowing conversations, but material interactions between physical and mental labor” (66). Like behind the scene documentaries of films, Woolf deconstructed and stripped the “magic” and “power” out of the book making process, making it accessible to all sorts of folks from all backgrounds and, in her way, diminished the power of any gatekeeper (or “Beadle”) who would stand in her way. By making her own little book, Woolf recognized the inherent absurdity of the concept of the “Gatekeeper”. Why should we ask permission to have private thoughts or to share those thoughts with whom we like? Even though women and people of certain backgrounds and classes had to face real world Beadles, where real doors were locked and controlled, I think Woolf acknowledges that these Beadles (and the one’s that reside in our minds) embody the mass’s demand for the individual to comply in some way with broader convention (even though the mass doesn’t really demand it, it is not a thinking creature, civilization does not have a brain). Instead, these demands come from a small minority of people (white men with a vote and some coin, perhaps – be it in the British parliament or on the board of Twitter). But also it comes from the individual writer’s or artist’s or thinker’s mental projection and personification of the Mass and its conventions and traditions. These mental projections can be just as intimidating as any real world “Beadle” with a stiff collar and can hinder and block the freedom of one’s thoughts from within.  

Social Media publishing platforms and their “likes” and “favourites” and “retweets” have become the “editors” and “series” and imaginary “Beadles” of the modern era – something we have in mind as we compose our thoughts before we publish them (something that makes us mindful of where we step). By doing this, these digital publishing platforms subvert another freedom Woolf held dear – the ability for us to earn coin via the exploitation of our own minds. The design of self-publishing today creates a simulacrum of control (who needs to publish a book when you have a twitter account?). But to say Woolf would advocate our current state of publishing is perhaps a misreading of Woolf because if you examine her actions in regards to the mental production of literature vs. the physical production, in both instances she advocates the seizing of the modes of production – control over one’s own mind and selfhood and, also, over the mechanical tools and labor associated with the expression of one’s thoughts (to sell one’s thoughts via publishing, to earn the coin that allows one to have independence in this endless capitalist era, to “[e]arn 500 a year by your wits” and follow down that same path Aphra Behn and Austen and Bronte forged out of a history that did not look kindly on female or lower class writers [Woolf 76]).

A twitter account only provides the illusion of such publishing freedom because its very nature is not to service its users, but for its users (in the act of publishing) to service it. These places – twitter, facebook et al – like any system – have no value but the value we give them with our complicity and participation. McTaggart notes that Woolf had some things to say about complicity with popular tradition and convention (in this instance British masculine ideology) and how it “forces women not only to betray feminism but also participate in the violence of the empire.” (70-71). Complicity with the broader, pervasive ideology (of any time) should be a concern for any individual pursuing a critique of that problematic ideology. There needs to be an awareness of what is the controlling motive as we express our thoughts and where we express them (and be aware of what might couch and cabin them before they are put out into the world). Woolf, above all else, wanted people (women in particular) to acknowledge their own freedom of the mind, to find it any way they could, and be willing to pursue their thought as their own (not by satisfying some echo of tradition or convention for some “reward” or “treat” or “like” that, at best, has diminishing returns and, at worst, locks you in invisible chains).

Conclusion

So if “the now” is this illusion of control and we can acknowledge that Twitter  (and platforms like it) are the Gatekeepers and Beadles, how can we defy them? How can we be free, like Woolf, to write what we like? The answer is simple: do not comply. Create a space for yourself (digital or physical). And attempt to pursue freedom on your own terms. For me, the answer was simple: seize the mode of production (do what Woolf did and create your own publishing platform).  What is interesting about this simple act of seizing the physical mode of production is that it was its impact on my mental labor. It stripped away the awareness of the “Editors” and the “Series” (the “likes” and “favourites” and “retweets”), even the ambiguous concept of an “audience” or “followers” or “friends” and allowed me to engage with my own thought, to say what I was thinking and to say it without being complicit with some convention (or gatekeeper) of “the now”.

Woolf wrote, “Literature is no one’s private ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way ourselves.” (as cited in McTaggart 64). It is a good message. And if you look at our world now, the borders of literature have seemingly spilled open in the wake of the digital revolution. But new borders have formed, new nation-states have emerged and become powerful because we have mindlessly bolstered and supported them under the false pretense of freedom (and, by doing so, we have undercut our own positions in the market – we have shut off access to that “500 a year” and that room of one’s own… we’ve thrown it away for 1s and 0s).

If literature becomes too common, too ubiquitous, demonetized (or “re-monetized” to favor the platform over the contributor), there’s no way to set one thought apart from the next. We have become careless with our precious thoughts. They are pebbles (gems!) and what modern technology has given us in our ability to share these gems, it has also, by its nature, created a vast sea in which to throw them away. Some of our gems miraculously float, but not enough and never for too long. And this is where my little book comes in to play. It is to steal Woolf’s greatest advice (the self, the room, the money), recapture the mode of production (mental and physical) and in one simple act, undercut the Beadles of the modern era (digital publishing platforms). Instead of tossing my thought into the sea, I built it a little paper boat. It might get lost out there, caught in some storm that’s waves crash over the gunnels and sink it where it will rest amongst the millions of other pebbles long covered in sea weed and barnacles and bloated with the eggs of crabs, but at least it will have a chance to see the sun. Those few who can see it in this light (before sinking) might wonder why I have gone through the effort of building a boat for a tiny pebble in the first place. They might begin to wonder about the value of their own tiny pebbles and how they might give them the best chance to stay afloat on an infinite sea. Hand-making a book is only a tiny revolution, but if enough others were to join me in this pursuit, it too (like it once did in Woolf’s lifetime) would become the conventional now. And then we – like all good modernists – would have to respond and create “the new.”

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Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Penguin Books. 2004.

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Rawls vs. Nozick A dialogue

In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice outlining a political philosophy of Justice as Fairness. In 1974, Robert Nozick wrote, what some have called, a rebuttal to Rawls’ theory in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In it, he calls Rawls’ work: “...a powerful, deep, subtle, wide-ranging, systemic work in political and moral philosophy which has not seen its like since the writings of John Stuart Mill...”. He goes on to say, “Political philosophers now must work within Rawls’ theory or explain why not” (Nozick, Ch. 7, sec “Rawls’ Theory”). But even in his extreme praise, Nozick is hesitant to illuminate any specific part of Rawls’ thesis that he agrees with and, instead, limits his work to points of conflict (as he sees them). From these points of conflict, Nozick generates his own political philosophy called “Entitlement Theory.” The main thrust of his argument is that for society to provide for the have-nots is to impinge on the freedoms of the haves (i.e. it demands constant intervention by the political body and the stripping and redistribution of property/ownership/rights from those who have “justly” acquired them). Rawls’ distributive justice, Nozick argues, works in opposition to the freedoms of all men, that it is a “patterned principle” and an “end-state principle” (Nozick, Ch. 7. “Patterning...”), and therefore will eventually be impeded by the liberty of individual humans or the liberty of individual humans will be impeded by it. He says, “...any derivations from end-state principles of approximations of the principles of acquisition, transfer, and rectification would strike one as similar to utilitarian contortions in trying to derive (approximations of) usual precepts of justice; they do not yield the particular result desired, and they produce the wrong reasons for the sort of result they try to get.” (Nozick, Ch. 7, sec “The Original Position...”). To translate, Rawls’ design of Justice as Fairness cannot stay within the designed pattern without intervention of the political body and therefore, by design, will eventually harm/impinge the “precepts of justice” Rawls’ theory advocates.

The following, imagined dialogue between Rawls and Nozick hopes to illuminate not only their opposing concepts and define them, but to show the cracks and contradictions (and strange agreements) that emerge specifically in Nozick’s rebuttal. I will draw from their own works (Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia and Rawls’ 1985 essay “Justice as Fairness”). Unfortunately for Nozick, he’s right when he says, “Political philosophers must work within Rawls’ theory or explain why not.” It is Nozick’s job to explain himself and his thinking and show us, to mangle a boxing metaphor, where he’s landed clean blows (and that all of his blows are above the belt). Or to quote Omar Little from the HBO television show The Wire, “You come at the King, you best not miss.”

A DIALOGUE

ROBERT NOZICK: I read and very much admired your work.

JOHN RAWLS: You say that, but I’ve seen your rebuttal in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.and I am not so sure where your admiration lies.

RN: What do you mean?

JR: Your engagement with my theory of distributive justice, based on my belief in justice as fairness, seems to be superficial and, at least, seems to reject my definition of justice as fairness especially in regards to how the state, or political body, would have to intervene to make fairness a reality. Where my concern lies with the least advantaged, yours seems to lie with the most. You appear, time and again, to indulge in the myth of peoples’ disadvantages as being of their own doing. You say, “From each according to what he chooses to do, to each according to what he makes for himself (perhaps with the contracted aid of others) and what others choose to do for him and choose to give him of what they’ve been given previously (under this maxim) and haven’t yet expended or transferred.” (Nozick, Ch. 7, Sec. “Patterning”). Or, crudely, that they must, figuratively if not literally, pull themselves up by the bootstraps while ignoring that a lot of these have-nots aren’t born with boots to begin with (and, unfathomably, that this is somehow of their own making).

RN: I agree that we disagree on the concept of fairness. Your boot analogy holds little sway though. If the boots have been acquired justly, to have the state intervene to redistribute these boots, is, indeed, to infringe on the rights of the person who’s talents and labor went into justly acquiring them. To intervene broadly, as your justice as fairness would recommend, without knowledge of whether or not thiswealth was justly acquired, risks infringement on those living and earning a just entitlement.

JR: But you allow that some wealth and advantage that exists now has been derived via unjust means. You acknowledge this when you say, “Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges.” (Nozick, Ch. 7, Sec. “The Entitlement Theory”)

RN: Yes. And I go on to say that, “none of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another.” It is an important principle of my “Entitlement Theory”. The first two principles, of course, are as follows: one, “[a] person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.” And two, “[a] person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.” (Nozick, Ch. 7, Sec. “The Entitlement Theory”) Any existence of injustice or infringement of the first two principles raises the third principle: rectification of that injustice in holdings. My Entitlement Theory, by design, allows a remedy for any historical injustice.

JR: So you admit that in our current state, that some of the strife and disparity we witness is not simply the natural extension of just entitlements? It is not as simple as boots and bootstraps. That present injustice (and inequality) might be traced back to an original injustice, and that our modern concepts of wealth and justice, even the conception of your “Entitlement Theory”, might just be entangled with and originate from a premise of unjust acts (like theft, fraud, or slavery etc.)?

RN: I acknowledged this, but I ask: What now? How can we rectify these injustices? How can we know them? “If past injustice has shaped present holdings in various ways, some identifiable and some not, what now, if anything, ought to be done to rectify these injustices?” (Nozick, Ch. 7, sec. “The Entitlement Theory”).

JR: I have a suggestion. Justice as fairness! As I have said before, “the conditions for a fair agreement between equal persons on the first principles of justice for that structure must eliminate the bargaining advantage that inevitably arise over time within any society as a result of cumulative and historical tendencies.” (Rawls, 16; emphasis added). My “cumulative and historical tendencies” implies that the bargaining advantage that arises (via the accumulation of political power, wealth, native endowments) may also include disparities that have occurred via your concept of unjust acquisitions. I would go so far as to say, as your bafflement alludes to on this subject, that just and unjust acquisitions throughout history are inextricably and forever entangled.

RN: But you do not present direct accusations of injustice. You make no attempt to untangle the mess.

JR: We are both guilty of that, it seems.

RN: Instead, you broadly paint those with advantages as having come to those advantages via unjust practices. Meaning, that in the application of your theory, within its basic structure, you will harm those who have committed no injustice.

JR: I would say my position is less nuanced than that. I would say that any advantage – be it political power, or wealth, or native endowments – that allow for a “threat advantage” cannot be the basis of political justice (Rawls 16). I am not so concerned with how the power imbalance arises (historically, like you are), but how that power imbalance acts to oppress and destabilize right now and into the future. I allow for rectification of unjust acquisition by assuming that any threat advantage is unjust and will always be an imposition by the haves over the have-nots, those with boots and those on bare feet, implicitly. I am working from an original position, where absent the presence of any threat advantage, its negotiators, on the premise of justice as fairness, “...regards all our judgments, whatever their level of generality... as capable of having for us a certain intrinsic reasonableness.” (Rawls 30). We, when stripped of our arbitrary threat advantages (and the disadvantages they create), not only want to ensure a basic structure that allows for anyone to pursue the life they so choose, but also for no one to be left behind, forgotten, or be taken advantaged of in pursuit of the lives we so choose. This is a reasonable position. This is justice as fairness.

RN: This is what you would define as the “difference principle”?

JR: The difference principle is found within the second of my two principles of justice. The first principle being that “Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all.” And the second being, “Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions open to all under the conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society (the difference principle)” (Rawls 42-43). In other words, any inequalities that naturally arise from the first principle, must, too, benefit those at the least advantage.

RN: You know what I’m going to say.

JR: Wilt Chamberlain.

RN: Well, yes. But first I want to briefly discuss Locke’s theory of acquisition and his famous proviso. And how, from this, I get to Wilt Chamberlain, and locate the crack in your system of justice as fairness – namely that it is a patterned principle and how patterned principles, or end-state principles, will always be disrupted by human liberty.

JR: Okay. Tell me about Locke.

RN: Simply, “Locke views property rights in an unowned object as originating through someone’s mixing his labor with it.” But “[t]his gives rise to many questions. What are the boundaries of what labor is mixed with? If a private astronaut clears a place on Mars, has he mixed his labor with (so that he comes to own) the whole planet, the whole uninhabited universe, or just a particular plot?” (Nozick, Ch. 7. “Locke’s Theory”).

JR: Why use an astronaut for your analogy when Locke provides a simple rendering of his property formula via the “Wild Indian.” He says, “The fruit or venison which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be his, and so is his— i.e., a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it before it can do [the Wild Indian] any good for the support of his life.” (Locke 116; emphasis added). If the “Wild Indian” eats the venison, it is in his belly and the calories consumed are processed and delivered about his system to maintain his body and thereby his life. The venison and the fruit he has consumed are his property and no one else’s. He has “fenced” it off behind his organs. For another human to acquire what is in the “Wild Indian’s” belly would be for that other person to cut it out from him. But I would think this falls within your conception of unjust acquisition?

RN: It does. And is exactly my point. At what point does the venison become his property? When he ate it? When he cooked it? When he dressed it? When he killed it? When he picked up its tracks and saw it for the first time?

JR: Locke would argue, “The labour that was [his], removing [the object that was held in common] out of that common state they were in, hath fixed [his] property in them.” (Locke 117).

RN: Okay, for argument’s sake, let’s say property begins when the “Wild Indian” removes the venison from the commons, when he kills it, when he realizes the fruits of his labor. But before he can remove it from the commons, Locke’s proviso comes into play. “For this “labour” being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to [that which was removed via his labor from what is commonly held in nature], at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others” (Locke 116). That is to say that the taking of the venison is just so long as there are other venison held in common, so that the “Wild Indian’s” fellow humans are not disadvantaged by him making this venison his property. That is to say that, “Locke’s proviso... is meant to ensure that the situation of others is not worsened.” (Nozick, Ch. 7, sec. “Locke’s Theory...”). But there is an argument that this proviso introduces a problematic end point where, if all the venison are claimed by the labours of human beings, that the natural end point would be to the disadvantage of whomever did not lay claim or apply their labor to the acquisition of the venison. For, ultimately, to own something (of a finite nature – like venison) is to say someone else cannot own it and eventually disadvantage and inequality will emerge. This is all to say, “Someone may be made worse off by another’s appropriation in two ways: first, by losing the opportunity to improve his situation by a particular appropriation...; and second, by no longer being able to use freely (without appropriation) what he previously could. A stringent requirement that another not be made worse off by an appropriation would exclude the first way if nothing else counterbalances the diminution in opportunity, as well as the second” (Nozick, Ch 7. Sec. “Locke’s theory....”).

JR: The difference principle, you might say, is a stringent requirement not dissimilar to Locke’s proviso?

RN: You said it, not me.

JR: And how does Wilt Chamberlin come into play here?

RN: As an example of my Entitlement Theory, one not predicated on the need for a difference principle or a proviso, but instead a demonstration of wealth acquisition that is just and has no need of state interference (or a minimal need). It is based on the fictional situation that Wilt Chamberlain, being so sought after for his basketball talents, signs a contract that twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him. “The season starts, and people cheerfully attend his team’s games; they buy their tickets, each time dropping a separate twenty-five cents of their admission price into a special box with Chamberlain’s name on it. They are excited about seeing him play; it is worth the total admission price to them. Let us suppose that in one season one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has.” (Nozick, Ch. 7. Sec. “How Liberty Upsets...”). Is he not entitled to this wealth, this advantage?

JR: It depends.

RN: On what?

JR: Ignoring whether or not this plays within my own theory, I’m not sure this example can even live up to your own standards.

RN: Explain.

JR: The third principle of your Entitlement Theory acts to rectify any unjust acquisition.

RN: But I have demonstrated that that Wilt Chamberlain’s $250k was acquire via the first two principles.

JR: Yes, but you don’t account for the origin of all those quarters and whether or not each and every of those one million quarters were justly acquired. Not to mention the facilities in which the game is being played, and the owners of Wilt’s team, where did their wealth originate?

RN: This does not undercut the premise of Wilt’s just entitlement to that $250k. If injustice can be proven, it, too, can be rectified.

JR: And, say, hypothetically, those ticket buyers were all slaveholders. That not only did the quarter they gave Wilt Chamberlain derive from the labour of slaves, but the full ticket price too. Your third principle calls for an intervention, does it not?

RN: (says nothing)

JR: By amending your fiction even slightly with my fiction of 1 million slaveholders, we render Wilt’s natural endowments meaningless if the value of his labor is being paid for by unjust means. Before you protest, we know that your theory can be applied to the concept of slave reparations. Matt Bruenig discusses this briefly in a short article he wrote for the think tank Demos in 2014. He quotes you as saying “If the actual description of holdings turns out not to be one of the descriptions yielded by the principle, then one of the descriptions yielded must be realized.” (Nozick, Ch. 7, “The Entitlement Theory”). He rewords this to say, “If the actual holdings of property do not match the holdings that would have resulted under the conditions of justice, then steps must be taken to rectify that and place things back in just order.” In other words, Bruenig continues: “That's the most straightforward reparations argument there is.” (Bruenig “Robert Nozick agrees...”). Because the injustice of slavery is so vast and insidious and woven into the texture of all American wealth, rectification of this injustice would devastate the US economy (as we know it). Just like the realization that Wilt’s fictional $250k, and the fictional ticket prices, were being paid for by unjust means would necessitate a rectification (to put things in just order) that would devastate (force a redistribution of) not only Wilt’s $250K, but all revenues that the owners acquired and used to maintain their business and the facilities in which Wilt plays (including the pay cheques of Wilt and his teammates). For your Entitlement Theory to work, the third principle must be applied before the first two can come into effect. Just order must be restored. Even if all just acquisitions follow from one unjust acquisition, no following acquisition can be just. Your rules, not mine.

RN: But I did wonder, out loud, “Is an injustice done to someone whose holding was itself based upon an unrectified injustice?”(Nozick, Ch. 7. Sec. “The Entitlement Theory”). Is it not an injustice, in our fictional scenario, if Wilt’s just acquisition of wealth is used to rectify past injustices?

JR: So you would let an injustice stand rather than find an alternative to alleviate the encumbrances of threat advantages (like political power, wealth, and natural endowments) acquired via unjust practices?

RN: Ideally no rights would be impinged.

JR: Indeed. But rights have been impinged; they have led to inequalities and threat advantages in negotiating the basic structure of society. Your theory does little to rectify these imbalances; you even say you’re not really concerned with the specifics only the generalities of your theory (Nozick. Ch. 7. Sec. “The Entitlement Theory”). Even though you can acknowledge that these disparities exist and that some are derived by unjust measures, you still insist that one’s worth is their ability to tug on their own bootstraps. It is a troubling position to take, since, we established earlier, that it is hard to untangle the just or unjust origins of the person who wears boots and the person in bare feet (and what exactly their own abilities had in effecting their position or whether their circumstance arose out of an unjust imbalance). If Wilt’s wealth, like America’s, was built on the back of slavery, well, then as William Faulkner said about the injustice of the death of Emmett Till: “...if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or for what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” (Stein, “William Faulkner...”). If we allow injustice to stand, or to wipe the slate clean as you put it, even if from here until eternity all acquisitions are just and follow the three principles of your Entitlement Theory, we will forever be haunted by those injustices – by the slow deterioration of society into ever greater extremes of those who have and those who have not.

CONCLUSION

Contrasting these two thinkers is an interesting challenge because, it is obvious, Nozick is inspired by Rawls’ thesis (he is an acolyte and a heretic at the same time). But his arguments tend toward the narrow, the specific, the arcane, and his formulations always support the haves and always place the have-nots in a weaker position (of having to beg or wait for the volunteer charity of others – the charity, of course, being generated by the surplus of the haves’ Nozickian “just” ownership of resources). He also doesn’t seem interested in collective political stability the way Rawls is interested in it. Though he does allow for a minimal state to maintain some form of coercive power to maintain some form of political stability (favoring, again, those who already have vs. those who have-not). He allows for this via his concept of liberty and by evoking that old cliché: that the have-nots are in their circumstance by their free will, that they need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps to overcome those circumstances. He openly ignores that a lot of these have-nots aren’t born with boots to begin with and privileges those who not only have one pair of boots, but may have more pairs of boots than their feet can fill (and that they may have come to this wealth of boots via unjust practices – either directly or indirectly). The third principle of his Entitlement Theory allows for the rectification of injustices, but as shown with slave reparations and my fictional Rawls’ amendment of the Chamberlin allegory, it doesn’t acknowledge how entangled our current circumstances are with historical injustices and to rectify them may mean the dismantling of our society as we know it. Here Nozick seems, sometimes, to be the contrarian for the contrarian’s sake (concerned with matters of the mind vs. matters of existential reality – like whether or not someone’s just ownership might impede access for others to what Rawls calls primary goods, or how lack of access to these primary goods places at risk the stability of the society (and the market) in which those so advantaged can pursue their so-called natural liberties.

Citations

Bruenig, Matt. “Robert Nozick Agrees With Ta-Nehisi Coates” Demos. 2014. (accessed via: http://www.demos.org/blog/5/22/14/robert-nozick-agrees- ta-nehisi-coates)

Locke, John. Two Treatise of Government. Printed for Thomas Tegg; W. Sharpe and Son; G. Offor; G. and J. Robinson; J. Evans and Co.: Also R. Griffin and Co. Glasgow; and J. Gumming, Dublin. 1883.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Chapter 7. Basic Books. 2013. (accessed via: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/anarchy-state- and/9780465063741/Chapter007.html)

Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness, Part I §6 to 11, and part II §13 to 17. 1985.

Stein, Jean. “William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12” Paris Review. Issue 12. Spring 1955. (accessed via:https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/william-faulkner-the-art- of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner)

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Andrew Sullivan is trending on twitter... so....

Cult of Ignorance (extends beyond the “Ignorant”)

I consider myself an intellect. I know a lot of stuff. I’ve read a lot of books. Not sure what Asimov’s standard is, but, hey, I pass my own standard. I would say that I am an expert in my field (while conversational in many others). I almost double Gladwell’s concept of 10k hrs of study and work. And I disagree with Asimov’s quote here with all my heart. Because knowledge is an arbitrary distinction. One usually made by people with “knowledge.” It’s used to divide “US” and conquer “THEM”. It rejects the concept of democracy at its core and yearns, baldly, for a time of autocracy or plutocracy that, btw, would count Asimov’ as one of its elitist leaders.

We all yearn for it in some way, that Alpha-dog leader, someone to worship or to bitch about, that will protect us from the wolves, that we can blame for our problems and string up to a crucifix or chop off its head if our problems become truly, existentially desperate.

To say one knows what democracy is over someone else is, IMHO, fucking stupid. You’re telling me that some guy with a 200K college degree is better and wiser than some lady without a college degree who works in a field or a mine or at a factory or in a restaurant only because he has a 200K college degree. Because what are we talking about when we talk about “knowledge”?

Direct democracy is an inherently simple premise - one person, one vote. To advocate anything other, or to say “my knowledge TRUMPS your ignorance” i.e. to say how someone should use that vote and then berate them for being ignorant if they don’t use it the way you want them to, is so fucked up I can’t even….

There’s this pervasive bully syndrome by those who believe themselves “intellects” or “elites.” And, btw, there’s a lot of folks who label themselves with these titles who are so fucking stupid that when they speak I just squint so fucking hard it jacks the pressure in my occipital cavity so much that my eye balls literally (LITERALLY!) begin slip out of my face.

I would say people who call themselves “intellects” or “elites” are more likely to be stupid than any other human on the face of the planet because they lack some important features of what it means to be a good, intelligent ape: self awareness, humility, and empathy. Know-it alls, indoctrinated by schools of thought, who become the preachers and missionaries for bad ideas that have a general consensus among their “elite’, “knowledgeable” neighbours and their “elite”, “knowledgeable” co-workers are the worst of us - why the fuck should we defer to them?

They can have their vote and I’ll have mine. That’s fucking democracy. It’s not always efficient and it can be messy and you might get results you don’t like and THAT’S THE FUCKING POINT. Oh, you’re quoting John Locke. And Thomas Paine? Wow. What about Hamilton and his New Army, or Napoleon, or fucking Cromwell? Because what Asimov is talking about here is not democracy, he’s talking about authoritarianism. He’s talking about democracy but only for the ruling elite. And this has always been true. Our royalty, our elite, just keep cycling through themselves. They have created a system that almost guarantees the maintenance of that same system. We are living in a system Asimov, according to this quote, desired. So what is he bitching about exactly? He’s blaming the “ignorant” for “elite” rule that has been the one constant of modern, human civilization.

Andrew Sullivan wrote about this very thing before the election and, without irony, explores Eric Hoffer’s THE TRUE BELIEVER to support his position, without acknowledging that Eric Hoffer was a blue collar, autodidact that, under Sullivan’s elitist system, would exclude him from the dialogue of governance! Irony is lost on the elite.

Asimov is wrong. Sullivan is wrong. Why would you take an elite advocating for the power of the elites at their word? It’s to their advantage! They do not have your best interests at heart. And even if they say they do, least we forget another famous quote: hell is paved with good intentions. 

America wouldn’t exist without the labor of those deemed “ignorant”. The elite wouldn’t have time to consume their books and write their diatribes and debate politics without the callouses and black lungs and scarred backs of the “ignorant.” The elite aren’t special just because they have the PRIVILEGE not to be “ignorant” and to speak it, out loud, without shame, from platforms created by others like them. And their bald face SCREAMING for power and control, their bashing of the “ignorant” masses is same old, same old, business as usual, cliche upon cliche - they’re blaming “them” for an “us” problem. And it has never been any different. There has been no time in human history where the “ignorant” have ruled.

This Asimov quote ignores the reality he lived in and the one we live in now - that elites have controlled human history since the beginning of time, in one form or another, blessed by Gods or Rich Men. This is punching down in action and if you nodded in agreement with Asimov (or Sullivan), pause just one split second and take a look in a mirror and realize Asimov and Sullivan, when they’re talking about the”ignorant”, they’re talking about you.

Everyone else is ignorant to the one who considers themselves an intellect. Trust me. I just wrote an essay about it and if you’re not me, you’re dumb AF.

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Reading 2017 # 1: LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN

By Christopher Hitchens

I have a vague memory of Christopher Hitchens. It was a late night. I was young. It was Jay Leno, I think, or some other late night fella who introduced me. There was something romantic in the way he held himself, Hitchens, and his scotch, and, maybe, a pack of cigarettes and an unlit smoke pinched between clubby fingers and a wallet or a tiny notebook, it was leather but I can’t remember it all just that there were things in his hand, objects that cluttered up his grip making the handshake awkward. I didn’t shake his hand, if that was what you were thinking. Leno did. On TV. Or it was some other late night fella who seemed so lame (and sober) in comparison. I remember a wrinkly suit that I got the sense didn’t need to be as wrinkled as it was. There was scruff or a clean shave, but definitely a shadow. There was a flip of hair that would sometimes slip over the shiny parts that had long receded and made a nuisance of themselves until he combed them back with the flat of his hand. This was a rebel without a cause. A writer. A real live writer. On TV. Of all places.

I didn’t get around to reading him for some time. I’d only read 3 books at that point (15-years-old, football prodigy according to my father with middling grades and no intellectual curiosity beyond a desire to seem smart - to myself, to others - despite all objective evidence to the contrary). But, that late night, hearing Hitchens speak, seeing him move, smoke, drink - it was a trick. It was memorable. Impressionable. Or I was, I suppose. So 20 years later, here I am. Reading him. For the first time. All the way through. 

Of course, I find, we align in many ways. Not politically, or socially, or by need of attention or accolade (though sometimes we overlap in these areas). No, we align in our attempt to think, how we choose to be a citizen of the human race, and to think and be and propagate the bliss of that fight to others, to challenge people to think and be themselves (the only thing they were born to be and nothing more and nothing less). The fight, like art, is an art in and of itself. But sometimes, between the strum and drang (the sounds not the movement), there might be a place for pivot, a place for reflection and growth. Civilization is born from my lips to your ears and back again, from lips to ears ad infinitum. Talk it out, kids. Fight and argue and know that no one ever wins because this is not a game. 

[wordsworkweekly]

Cult of Ignorance (extends beyond the “Ignorant”)

I consider myself an intellect. I know a lot of stuff. I’ve read a lot of books. Not sure what Asimov’s standard is, but, hey, I pass my own standard. I would say that I am an expert in my field (while conversational in many others). I almost double Gladwell's concept of 10k hrs of study and work. And I disagree with Asimov's quote here with all my heart. Because knowledge is an arbitrary distinction. One usually made by people with “knowledge.” It’s used to divide “US” and conquer “THEM”. It rejects the concept of democracy at its core and yearns, baldly, for a time of autocracy or plutocracy that, btw, would count Asimov' as one of its elitist leaders.

We all yearn for it in some way, that Alpha-dog leader, someone to worship or to bitch about, that will protect us from the wolves, that we can blame for our problems and string up to a crucifix or chop off its head if our problems become truly, existentially desperate.

To say one knows what democracy is over someone else is, IMHO, fucking stupid. You’re telling me that some guy with a 200K college degree is better and wiser than some lady without a college degree who works in a field or a mine or at a factory or in a restaurant only because he has a 200K college degree. Because what are we talking about when we talk about “knowledge”?

Direct democracy is an inherently simple premise - one person, one vote. To advocate anything other, or to say “my knowledge TRUMPS your ignorance” i.e. to say how someone should use that vote and then berate them for being ignorant if they don’t use it the way you want them to, is so fucked up I can’t even....

There’s this pervasive bully syndrome by those who believe themselves “intellects” or “elites.” And, btw, there’s a lot of folks who label themselves with these titles who are so fucking stupid that when they speak I just squint so fucking hard it jacks the pressure in my occipital cavity so much that my eye balls literally (LITERALLY!) begin slip out of my face.

I would say people who call themselves “intellects” or “elites” are more likely to be stupid than any other human on the face of the planet because they lack some important features of what it means to be a good, intelligent ape: self awareness, humility, and empathy. Know-it alls, indoctrinated by schools of thought, who become the preachers and missionaries for bad ideas that have a general consensus among their “elite’, “knowledgeable” neighbours and their “elite”, “knowledgeable” co-workers are the worst of us - why the fuck should we defer to them?

They can have their vote and I’ll have mine. That’s fucking democracy. It's not always efficient and it can be messy and you might get results you don't like and THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT. Oh, you’re quoting John Locke. And Thomas Paine? Wow. What about Hamilton and his New Army, or Napoleon, or fucking Cromwell? Because what Asimov is talking about here is not democracy, he's talking about authoritarianism. He's talking about democracy but only for the ruling elite. And this has always been true. Our royalty, our elite, just keep cycling through themselves. They have created a system that almost guarantees the maintenance of that same system. We are living in a system Asimov, according to this quote, desired. So what is he bitching about exactly? He’s blaming the “ignorant” for “elite” rule that has been the one constant of modern, human civilization.

Andrew Sullivan wrote about this very thing before the election and, without irony, explores Eric Hoffer’s THE TRUE BELIEVER to support his position, without acknowledging that Eric Hoffer was a blue collar, autodidact that, under Sullivan's elitist system, would exclude him from the dialogue of governance! Irony is lost on the elite.

Asimov is wrong. Sullivan is wrong. Why would you take an elite advocating for the power of the elites at their word? It's to their advantage! They do not have your best interests at heart. And even if they say they do, least we forget another famous quote: hell is paved with good intentions. 

America wouldn't exist without the labor of those deemed "ignorant". The elite wouldn't have time to consume their books and write their diatribes and debate politics without the callouses and black lungs and scarred backs of the "ignorant." The elite aren't special just because they have the PRIVILEGE not to be "ignorant" and to speak it, out loud, without shame, from platforms created by others like them. And their bald face SCREAMING for power and control, their bashing of the “ignorant” masses is same old, same old, business as usual, cliche upon cliche - they’re blaming “them” for an “us” problem. And it has never been any different. There has been no time in human history where the "ignorant" have ruled.

This Asimov quote ignores the reality he lived in and the one we live in now - that elites have controlled human history since the beginning of time, in one form or another, blessed by Gods or Rich Men. This is punching down in action and if you nodded in agreement with Asimov (or Sullivan), pause just one split second and take a look in a mirror and realize Asimov and Sullivan, when they’re talking about the”ignorant”, they’re talking about you.

Everyone else is ignorant to the one who considers themselves an intellect. Trust me. I just wrote an essay about it and if you’re not me, you’re dumb AF.

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Every artificial element of civilization is a way to forget about a time when the unknown was a dominant source of fear.

Source

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...there is always disappointment when taking a feeling and trying to capture it (like a firefly in a jar that slowly loses its light), but talking about writing something before its written always feels like taking the firefly from its daytime resting place and killing it before it can show you what it can do in the dark.

The best part of the essay I just wrote.

[wordsworkweekly]

PITCHING AND TRANSCENDENCE

I read somewhere Spielberg advised young writers to just pitch story, not theory. Which completely makes sense from a business, survival perspective.

I would advise any young up and comer to do the same.

But the problem with me is that all I pitch is theory. How I render theory into story is the pleasure and magic of my work and my work is not pitching (even though it feels like that’s all it is sometimes - from a business, survival perspective). My work, on the page, is to make an insane concept tangible and through its tangible elements, in between its tangible elements: transcendent. 

There is technique for this, one that has many names, though none is suitable. It's a technique that is not easily defined or accessible in the sense that it is hiding in a book somewhere or that it can be related to you via another creature with just words. There is no system for it, it is the lack of a system that defines it. It exists in planes we feel, but cannot see or hold. It lives in between words, but are not the words themselves.

I once took a childhood psychology class and it showed me the limits of language and how humans see the world. The story goes that as a young child learns language, they learn it in a very binary way. They are raised with a dog, they learn to call it a dog. They identify the dog by the fact it has four legs and it is not a human. And, as this child grows and ventures out to the country-side with their parents, they see a cow in a field for the first time and they scream: "Dog!"

Now they know that it is not quite a dog. But it has four legs and it is not human and the only tool they have in their kit to describe such a creature is: dog. As they grow and learn and fill their box up with different tools, they will evolve a more narrow, but still binary, concept of what that animal is. Even as we begin to dig into the abstract world of genes, we define what we see via binary categories: it is this, not this, therefore we should call it this. Human language is what I like to call the compartment department (a seemingly endless Soviet-style filing system that lives in our collective brains). We pull from the drawers of what we know to describe what we don’t. The combination of words creates something more than binary and, sometimes, by accident, lets us access things beyond the limits of our language (only for us to struggle to define it with more language that guarantees a diminishment of returns).

What our work as artists should do is the opposite of what language wants - to define, to compartmentalize. It should speak to you without articulation or category, beyond binary meaning (or an attempt at binary meaning).

Pitching to me is about defining, inadequately, things I can’t explain with the limits of spoken language. I’m that kid and I see a cow, I’m the only one that sees that cow, I know that if I could just use a different way to communicate, you, too, will be able to see that cow, but the limits of pitching gives me only one word: dog. And even if I were to overcome this obstacle and were able to say, “cow”, scream it, that too would be inadequate because what I see is not a fucking cow. This is my struggle! Dog or cow, it’s never enough.

The problem with pitching tangible story (talking about what you will write) is that you have an even more limited way to make theoretical concepts tangible and you create obstacles as you move forward - expectations. Movies are feelings... accessing feelings is inherently a theoretical concept. So I always find that by just talking story before I've explored it through my preferred medium (i.e. pitching it, before I write it), I feel like a big fucking liar. The pitch is not the script and the script is not the movie. It’s the lie agreed upon. But it doesn’t have to be. I do wonder if by not embracing the nature of what we are doing (it's all theoretical until it isn't) we do a disservice to the process and place limits on it and do not acknowledge the inherent, necessary risks of the work we’re all trying to pursue, that, in the end, our current system, in its need for control, acts to diminish the final product.

Of course, there is always disappointment when taking a feeling and trying to capture it (like a firefly in a jar that slowly loses its light), but talking about writing something before its written always feels like taking the firefly from its daytime resting place and killing it before it can show you what it can do in the dark.

[wordsworkweekly]

Thinking about that Yemeni Kid.... this is from 2012. There is something structurally endemic about how the west selects its enemies (foreign and domestic). Also, the willingness for people to embrace open hypocrisy (to stabilize their own belief systems) is truly stunning and upsetting. 

I’ve followed the plight of these sad fuckers (aka “Somali Pirates”) for a little while now and for multiple reasons. People approached me to write a movie about them a few years back. Their idea was basically an exact reenactment of what the Navy Seals team did in the Wired article (linked above). Simply, white guys shooting black guys and being righteous about it. It pissed me off then and it pisses me off now.

I find this whole situation fascinating and depressing. Basically, because of a whole bunch of fucked up shit, Somalia became/is an anarchic state. No government. No rules. Pure chaos. But in this system of chaos, a form of order emerged. Former fisherman (with the aid of some criminal organisations) took their useless fishing vessels and used them to raid shipping lanes, kidnap Cargo and/or seamen. These “Pirates” were moderately violent but none of their captives were killed and most were never physically traumatized. And, for the most part, the pirates were fiscally rewarded for their endeavours (they found reward in a starving system of chaos) and therefore, based on positive reinforcement, the frequency of their piracy skyrocketed and other Somalis followed in their footsteps. Piracy boomed. Sure it wasn’t “government” sanctioned taxation for it lacked the legitimacy of an official governing body, but, essentially, it was, when you boiled it down, Somali citizenry taxing Cargo ships directly for passing through their water space (or near their water space). If the Cargo companies didn’t pay the tax, the Pirates would hold cargo/employees in collateral until the companies wised up.  Official governments do this all over the place, sure not with AK-47s, and not with human hostages (necessarily), but money does go from those who run the cargo ships into the pockets of those who run the countries. The only difference between the two is one is called a “pirate” and the other a “politician.” And what is the response of the politician to the pirate fucking with his gig - kill the fuckers.

Obama green lit two navy seal snipers (two guys who were also there when Bin Laden kicked it) to blow the heads off these fuckers’ bodies when they kidnapped Richard Phillips in 2009 (remember that, he’ll be played by Tom Hanks). And now they’ve (we’ve) gone and killed 9 more “pirates” (in their sleep and, although heavily armed, they were asleep!!). Richard Roeper will be interviewing one of the Seals on the radio. How fucked is that? 9 lives, man. Woot! We’re the kings of the world. They killed 9 guys who, yes, were heavily armed, who were asleep, who had imprisoned two people for three months (kept them alive and unharmed by the way) and whose training with said heavy weaponry has been limited to display and not actual use. Wow. Way to go Navy Seals.

The “Somali pirates” had nothing, no system, no way of making a legitimate income, no way to put food on their tables. So they could either just give up, choose to die, or, perhaps, do what all human beings have done through out time, god forbid, work with what they got (lemons to lemonade, people). And so they began to create a system, to create order in this fucked up place, that could aid in their own survival. Sure, it wasn’t an ideal system and these guys did have guns and were willing to poke them in peoples’ faces, but, least we forget, they weren’t the ones that killed first. It was the established system (Us - all of us!!!) that killed first and, being a part of that established system, being an apathetic loser with an internet connection, it makes me really sad and really sick to my stomach.

[wordsworkweekly]

Reading 2017 # 1: LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN

By Christopher Hitchens

I have a vague memory of Christopher Hitchens. It was a late night. I was young. It was Jay Leno, I think, or some other late night fella who introduced me. There was something romantic in the way he held himself, Hitchens, and his scotch, and, maybe, a pack of cigarettes and an unlit smoke pinched between clubby fingers and a wallet or a tiny notebook, it was leather but I can’t remember it all just that there were things in his hand, objects that cluttered up his grip making the handshake awkward. I didn’t shake his hand, if that was what you were thinking. Leno did. On TV. Or it was some other late night fella who seemed so lame (and sober) in comparison. I remember a wrinkly suit that I got the sense didn’t need to be as wrinkled as it was. There was scruff or a clean shave, but definitely a shadow. There was a flip of hair that would sometimes slip over the shiny parts that had long receded and made a nuisance of themselves until he combed them back with the flat of his hand. This was a rebel without a cause. A writer. A real live writer. On TV. Of all places.

I didn’t get around to reading him for some time. I’d only read 3 books at that point (15-years-old, football prodigy according to my father with middling grades and no intellectual curiosity beyond a desire to seem smart - to myself, to others - despite all objective evidence to the contrary). But, that late night, hearing Hitchens speak, seeing him move, smoke, drink - it was a trick. It was memorable. Impressionable. Or I was, I suppose. So 20 years later, here I am. Reading him. For the first time. All the way through. 

Of course, I find, we align in many ways. Not politically, or socially, or by need of attention or accolade (though sometimes we overlap in these areas). No, we align in our attempt to think, how we choose to be a citizen of the human race, and to think and be and propagate the bliss of that fight to others, to challenge people to think and be themselves (the only thing they were born to be and nothing more and nothing less). The fight, like art, is an art in and of itself. But sometimes, between the strum and drang (the sounds not the movement), there might be a place for pivot, a place for reflection and growth. Civilization is born from my lips to your ears and back again, from lips to ears ad infinitum. Talk it out, kids. Fight and argue and know that no one ever wins because this is not a game. 

[wordsworkweekly]

Sherlock Holmes and the Buffalo Men of the New World

Chapter 1

THE PUGILIST

In one of my pamphlets, The Sign of Four, I conveyed Sherlock Holmes’ predisposition never to be bored. He said to me, “I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.” And for admirable lengths of time, when his analytical mind was possessed with the tinkerings of the criminal animal, he was at peace. But in the lulls, when there was nothing to occupy his mind save for crossword puzzles and, admittedly, weak debate with myself, he turned to stimulants.

Holding a hypodermic syringe, a Moroccan box splayed open on his lap, he would roll back his cuff revealing tiny scabs like bug bites. He would search for a fresh vein and when he found one, he would drive the syringe home with a sigh. He used cocaine, mostly, and morphine on rare occasion. “Morphine dulls the senses,” he once told me. He would inject three times daily until a new case would come along.

My fears for his health were confirmed one evening, when upon his return from his nightly stroll, he told me a tale of illogic. “It was horrific,” He said. “A beast was hunched over a carcass, taking flesh into its maw. Its horns reached to double a man’s length. Its back was heavy with an oily pelt and a hunch kept it from standing upright.” I laughed, believing this to be a jest, but when I looked into his eyes, I saw something I had never seen in this man before – fear.

And then I noticed the tremor of his hand and the blood seeping through his shirtsleeve. I forced him to sit and I placed my hand to his head. His temperature was abnormal. His pulse quick. I rolled back his sleeve and revealed numerous, fresh pin-pricked wounds. When I asked him how much he had injected on this evening, he could not remember. His cocaine use had hit its pinnacle. I made him comfortable, assuring he still had liver function, that he would live through the night, and I bid him farewell.

Leaving him, I felt ill at ease, but I could not watch the man I had admired for so many years whither away into madness.

That was the last I saw of my dear friend. That was until a month ago.

I had taken Constance with me to Kensington to set up practice. Although my offices were small, they were adequate and I had built a good business of regulars and walk-ins.

It was late one evening, closer to the morning then I was used to, when a pounding came on the front door. I knew of a fight happening in Whitechapel, but little did I suspect one of the Pugilists, his face a bloody pulp, to be piled on my stoop and a child, no more than four feet tall and smeared with grime, standing by his side.

The child spoke for the man and said, “’e told me to ‘elp ‘im ‘ere and said I could ‘ave ‘is winnings.” The boy held out a hand that was brimming with paper notes.

“If that’s what he told you, boy, then be off.” I said dragging the poor beaten bloke into the office. I was hard pressed to believe this man to be victorious, although it was not uncommon for bouts of this nature to last 100 rounds or more leaving both men unrecognizable.

He was weak, but he managed to pull himself onto the table. His face was a mess. His eyes were hidden behind large hematomas, his nose was crooked, but his teeth were straight and there was something familiar about his smile.

“Are you in pain?” I said and he nodded. I pulled down my morphine kit and prepared a dosage. I rolled back his cuff, revealing an army of miniscule divots, a week or two healed.

Going against my better judgment, I moved to apply the morphine, but his hand, as quick as a thief, snapped up my wrist. And with his familiar smile, he said, “The game’s afoot, my dear Watson.”

 Chapter 2

THE WIDOW IRENE ADLER

Sherlock Holmes was a man accustomed to the art of deception. On some evenings he would leave 221b Baker Street dressed like a clergyman and return, craggy and bearded, a vagrant so long in years all were amazed who saw him standing upright.

But the Pugilists’ mask he wore on this evening was no dramatic tool. It was, best to my examinations, a serious tenderizing of my dear friend’s classic features. Although his mouth was swollen and his speech was affected, he told me of his intentions.

            “In my right mind, I know when I spoke of those beasts to you, there was no logic behind it. And, although intoxicated, I also know what I saw. I did see beasts eating human flesh. But, Watson, I assure you there was no hallucination behind my vision. In the weeks of your absence, of coming here to Kensington, I have set about on an investigation. I am working again. I want to prove to you that I am in control of my own mind.” He said.

I had feared seeing him like this. I ran from it. But, with the man, my dear friend, bleeding in my own office, I felt sympathy for him. I allowed him to draw me into his world once more.

“A woman with raven hair haunts me.” He said. “She, I am almost positive, controls these beasts. Her name is Irene Adler.”

“Dame Adler?” I said.

“Yes, you know her?”

“I know her husband, the late Sir Winston Adler.”

“Then you must know of his wealth and his misfortune, and of the shops he keeps in the low neighborhoods, the jewelry shops.”

“What of them?”

“The Widow Adler is playing a supernatural confidence game, striking fear into a fragile populous, and by doing so adding greatly to her already vast wealth.”

“I think it best you sleep the night, Holmes. You can rest on a cot, upstairs. I’ll permit the use of morphine in this instance.”

And with a violent thrust, Holmes sat up and struck the syringe and vile from my hand. His heavy lids fluttered under his anger. The pain must have been excruciating for his head wobbled on his shoulders and forced him to lie back down.

“No, Watson. Morphine dulls the senses. I must be on my toes. She is unlike any of her kind. Her blood has an unfamiliar history. And she is wise. When she smelled me on her trail, it suddenly disappeared. Her shops closed up.”

“What of these shops?”

“She sells amulets that protect the fearful from the beasts, The Buffalo Men.”

Although my admiration had weakened, he spoke a truth the papers had confirmed. I read of mysterious murders perpetrated by men with horns, hunchbacks with fangs. The papers called them Buffalo Men, a term that had traveled with repatriated colonists from the New World. Some called it the curse of the Empire. A punishment for wrongs committed in the name of the Crown.

Of course educated men, scientific men, knew this was a theatrical hoax. But those with spiritualist leanings, even those of the educated elite, believed England had fallen under a supernatural plague. My dear friend seemed to be one of the afflicted.

“I did this for you, my dear Watson.” He said. “She saw me beaten and even the least medical minded knew I would be bed ridden for weeks. While you care for me, she can reestablish her hold in the low neighborhoods and then we, together, can prove that my mind is still intact.”

 Chapter 3

A TRAGIC EVENT

For three weeks, Holmes refused to leave the residence. His wounds healed nicely. When I reset his nose, Holmes, quite impressively, refused the dulling of his senses. It was too painful for him to shave, so his beard was wild. And if it was not for his ramblings of Buffalo Men and spirits of their like, I would have believed, not only in the restoration of my dear friend’s appearance, but also in the restoration of his superior balanced mind.

Constance and even I were growing tired of Holmes. His madness seeped into us and sometimes I would catch myself believing the words he spoke. I even went as far as walking through Whitechapel and window browsing at one of Dame Adler’s shops. Holmes was right about the shops. They were boarded and closed. And it seemed that he was right about the human beasts too. In another shop I saw a man so deformed that a sign likened him to an elephant.

When I asked a beggar how long Dame Adler’s shop had been closed up, he told me, in a foreign accent, “They boarded them up days before the last fight night.” Everything Holmes said was checking out. Perhaps he was right. There was something strange afoot.

For the last week, Holmes had been sending Constance on errands. She would collect the day’s papers, retrieve bound volumes from 221b Baker Street, and, now, on a day I’ll never forget, he had her visit one of Dame Adler’s shops in the East End.

“Why would you have her do such a thing?” I said.

“There is no danger, Watson. She is a fine lady going shopping for an amulet.”

“In the East End?”

“She is perfectly capable. It is midday.”

“There is no need to send her on such an errand”

“There is an imperative need.”

“The shops are as you said. Boarded and closed.”

“The shops are open. I assure you. And she will retrieve an amulet to confirm it.”

“Why not send me?”

“Because the widow Adler knows you are my agent.” He said.

“How is it possible?”

“Did you speak to a beggar in Whitechapel?”

“How did you know I was in Whitechapel?” I said.

“You had the distinct odor of burnt timber and I found your issue of the ‘Freedom newspaper’ in your study.”

“Do you take issue with the study of politics?”

“Yes. It is a waste of human energy. I, and I do believe you as well, have better use of our mental powers.”

“Like searching for Buffalo men?”

“Precisely.” And he gave me a wry smile.

“Still, how does the smell of burnt timber and my political studies lead you to conclude that I spoke with a beggar in Whitechapel?”

“The paper was dated February 6th, 1887. A blaze was squashed only three days prior. The Freedom Press is located two blocks to the left of the site of the blaze, and I know your child-like fascination with remains, human or otherwise.”

“Again, how does it prove that I spoke to a beggar in Whitechapel?”

“Indeed, it does not. But the fact that you were there, that you went to one of widow Adler’s shops, meant that you were curious. You spoke with a beggar because one was near and could answer the questions you had boiling in your mind.”

“You are quite right. I had questions and a beggar did answer them, but there was no logical connection with my reading of the Freedom newspaper and my fascination with remains to this kindly beggar.”

“Yes. There was no connection until right now.” And he gave me another wry smile.

It appeared that Holmes had added a new, dangerous tool to his canon – assumption.

 Constance returned unharmed. She was breathless and an amulet, very carefully molded from a cheap tin, hung from her gloved hand.

            “She wants to meet you,” She said to Holmes.

            “When?” He said.

            “Now.”

I was quite stunned. It appeared that Holmes had not only sent my beloved wife on a perilous journey into the East End, he sent her right into the raven’s claw.

            “She said I must accompany you, John as well. She wants to prove to you she holds no supernatural powers, that the beasts you’ve seen are quite real.”

            “Did you believe her?” I said.

            “Yes, John, she was quite convincing.” And I could see in Constance’s eyes that she was less skeptical then when she first heard Holmes convey his tale of the Buffalo men.

             Night was approaching quickly and a fog had fallen leaving the street and its dark corners hidden from plain sight. For a brief moment, far in the distance, I thought I saw a large man standing and waiting for us. As we strode forward, the shape faded. With Holmes’ peculiar condition, I was not confident he could defend us if defending were needed. I had left my Webley in my desk, which I rather regretted at the time and I regret even more now.

            Constance was visibly disturbed, but Holmes’ stride was confident and he looked fresh after a hasty shave.

            The next shape to appear in the mist was far less intimidating. She had long, raven hair and although her skin was as fair as mine, she felt foreign to this time and place.

            “Mr. Holmes—“ She barely forced the words out before a beast, a truly ghastly creature, took her in its grasp and dragged her into the fog.  Holmes leapt at once, leaving Constance and I to fair for ourselves.

            As the sound of his footsteps dissipated, as the distance between us grew, silence took hold.

            “Come,” I said to my wife. I curled my arm around her shoulder and escorted her to the edge of a dark alley. After this, I cannot recall what happened next. I do not remember seeing any beasts lurking in the darkness. But when I awoke I had a horn sticking out of my chest. And Constance, my beloved, was bled out, gutted, and dead at my feet.

[wordsworkweekly]

This was my reader’s response to HIGH RISE from a Uni course I took a few years back. I like to re-read it from time to time from my chair on the 4th floor of my high-rise apartment building.

The Cement Caves: Dog Eating and Other Symptoms of Western Civilization in Decline

By opening the book with Robert Laing, a culturally western socialized human being, eating a dog, Ballard observes the fine (imaginary) line we human beings balance along as we walk through our daily lives. He points out how easy it is to stray from that line when it suits us, but he’s also indicating, at least in the world of High Rise and to a reader with Western sensibilities, that something must be terribly wrong if a western man, well-to-do, in a high-rise apartment, is eating man’s best friend. To some in western society, to eat a dog is like eating another human being.

This opening compels us to find an answer to a potentially horrifying question: how does a man who so resembles one of us become so degraded in his life to be driven to such barbaric, un-westernly habits? Ballard gives us a simple and equally horrific answer: Laing locks himself up into a modern high-rise or, to put it bluntly, mankind’s tendency towards “civilization” is its tendency toward repression of its true nature. Dog eating, cannibalism, and suicide are a perversion of our repressed nature that bursts to the surface the more we try to contain it. 

De-evolution, noted by a Ballard interviewer, seems to be a consistent interest in Ballard’s work. In The Drowned World, the entire planet regresses to the Triassic period and Kerans’ dreams are linked to his pre-historic, ancestral past. In Empire of the Sun, Jim fights for his survival in a place where the rules of the civilization he once knew have disappeared, and all he has left are his (animal) instincts and his imagination. In High-Rise too, Ballard seems to depict a civilized society de-evolving into the violent cave dwellers of our ancestral past. But it is in High-Rise, however, that he seems to twist this de-evolution hypothesis on its head and posit not humanity’s tendency toward de-evolution but, rather, the repression of our natural, current, always present cave-dweller state. We don’t have to de-evolve because we haven’t changed much from our cave-dwelling ancestors.

The physical structure of the high-rise is a representation of our repression. It is a symbol, a prop in a play, that hides our lowly origins and yet reminds us of them. The compartments – the units – are cement caves. Each floor is a territory providing sustenance in its own fabricated way (a pool, a playground, a liquor store, etc). And the residents are omega tribe members looking to be lead by an alpha.

Early in the book, Laing attends a party (the epitome of artifice) and feels an uncanny sense that someone may physically harm him. The first death, too, comes at the hands of a black tie party. The party is another creation where we attempt to act in a “civilized” way. We try to forget where we came from, but still know, somewhere in our sub-conscious, that how we act and interact within the artifice of civilization is at best a veil and at worst a lie. Every artificial element of civilization is a way to forget about a time when the unknown was a dominant source of fear. Not only the existential unknown, but also common fears that, with the advent of technology including the high-rise, civilization has seemed to vanquish (Where will I sleep tonight? What will I eat? Will I be eaten when I sleep? Etc.). Civilization is mankind’s attempt to forget where it came from and where it currently is and will always be – at a constant state of facing the unknown.

The high-rise is mankind’s greatest tool of repression. It answers all those unknown questions in one fell swoop (Where will I sleep? In my apartment. Where will I eat? At the restaurant on the 33rd floor. Will I be eaten when I sleep? Maybe if I live on the ground floor, but not all the way up here). No matter how many fears we can eliminate from the seemingly endless check list, they can all come back at anytime and the more we repress those fears, the more likely they are to burst through the artifice in hyper-violent and destructive ways.

Laing’s eating of the dog is just a symptom of civilizations’ tendency to repress its fear of the unknown. Once simple cave dwellers just trying to survive with repression become psychotics that can’t tell the difference between friend and foe, survival and extinction. They become cannibals and, ultimately, the repression manifests itself in an anti-survival action – with the loss of the desire to live.

[wordsworkweekly]

The Cement Caves: Dog Eating and Other Symptoms of Western Civilization in Decline

By opening the book with Robert Laing, a culturally western socialized human being, eating a dog, Ballard observes the fine (imaginary) line we human beings balance along as we walk through our daily lives. He points out how easy it is to stray from that line when it suits us, but he’s also indicating, at least in the world of High Rise and to a reader with Western sensibilities, that something must be terribly wrong if a western man, well-to-do, in a high-rise apartment, is eating man’s best friend. To some in western society, to eat a dog is like eating another human being.

This opening compels us to find an answer to a potentially horrifying question: how does a man who so resembles one of us become so degraded in his life to be driven to such barbaric, un-westernly habits? Ballard gives us a simple and equally horrific answer: Laing locks himself up into a modern high-rise or, to put it bluntly, mankind’s tendency towards “civilization” is its tendency toward repression of its true nature. Dog eating, cannibalism, and suicide are a perversion of our repressed nature that bursts to the surface the more we try to contain it. 

De-evolution, noted by a Ballard interviewer, seems to be a consistent interest in Ballard’s work. In The Drowned World, the entire planet regresses to the Triassic period and Kerans’ dreams are linked to his pre-historic, ancestral past. In Empire of the Sun, Jim fights for his survival in a place where the rules of the civilization he once knew have disappeared, and all he has left are his (animal) instincts and his imagination. In High-Rise too, Ballard seems to depict a civilized society de-evolving into the violent cave dwellers of our ancestral past. But it is in High-Rise, however, that he seems to twist this de-evolution hypothesis on its head and posit not humanity’s tendency toward de-evolution but, rather, the repression of our natural, current, always present cave-dweller state. We don’t have to de-evolve because we haven’t changed much from our cave-dwelling ancestors.

The physical structure of the high-rise is a representation of our repression. It is a symbol, a prop in a play, that hides our lowly origins and yet reminds us of them. The compartments – the units – are cement caves. Each floor is a territory providing sustenance in its own fabricated way (a pool, a playground, a liquor store, etc). And the residents are omega tribe members looking to be lead by an alpha.

Early in the book, Laing attends a party (the epitome of artifice) and feels an uncanny sense that someone may physically harm him. The first death, too, comes at the hands of a black tie party. The party is another creation where we attempt to act in a “civilized” way. We try to forget where we came from, but still know, somewhere in our sub-conscious, that how we act and interact within the artifice of civilization is at best a veil and at worst a lie. Every artificial element of civilization is a way to forget about a time when the unknown was a dominant source of fear. Not only the existential unknown, but also common fears that, with the advent of technology including the high-rise, civilization has seemed to vanquish (Where will I sleep tonight? What will I eat? Will I be eaten when I sleep? Etc.). Civilization is mankind’s attempt to forget where it came from and where it currently is and will always be – at a constant state of facing the unknown.

The high-rise is mankind’s greatest tool of repression. It answers all those unknown questions in one fell swoop (Where will I sleep? In my apartment. Where will I eat? At the restaurant on the 33rd floor. Will I be eaten when I sleep? Maybe if I live on the ground floor, but not all the way up here). No matter how many fears we can eliminate from the seemingly endless check list, they can all come back at anytime and the more we repress those fears, the more likely they are to burst through the artifice in hyper-violent and destructive ways.

Laing’s eating of the dog is just a symptom of civilizations’ tendency to repress its fear of the unknown. Once simple cave dwellers just trying to survive with repression become psychotics that can’t tell the difference between friend and foe, survival and extinction. They become cannibals and, ultimately, the repression manifests itself in an anti-survival action – with the loss of the desire to live.

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The Loss of Self

 The Loss of Self:

On the Individual and Mass applications of Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic”

  Reading Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic” is like walking into a maze with no center – all paths are suitable, all have no end. This lack of center allows thinkers to pillage the dialectic for their own needs and purposes. It allows them to create their own internal (individual) and external (mass) centers and applications.

For example, some thinkers read Hegel and find only its internal application useful – for self-identity. While others, like Karl Marx, use a more practical, external application – class identity. But there are some thinkers, in particular W.E.B. Du Bois, who use Hegel’s dialectic in both its internal and external applications – self-identity (individual) followed by class identity (mass).

It is this final application – of the “Master-Slave dialectic” to all human relationships even, and especially, to the relationship with the self – which explains the purpose behind Hegel’s center-less style (for to have a center is to ignore all others).

Hegel opens his “Master-Slave Dialectic” with a circular discussion of self-consciousness being split into two “…extremes; and each extreme is [an] exchanging of its own determinateness and an absolute transition into the opposite” (631). He defines one opposite as recognized and the other as recognizing.

In Hegel’s words, “they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is a dependant consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or be for another” (633). He further labels the independent as Herr and the dependent as Knecht (the recognizing/master and the recognized/slave).

Following Hegel’s logic, identity or self-identity is the process of the self recognizing the self that is of the self for the self. Or to “know thyself” is to eat your own tail creating no need of “…organs [to] receive… food or get rid of what [is] already digested, since there was nothing which went from [you] or came into [you]:  for there was nothing beside [you]” (Plato, Timaeus).

Because to “know thyself” is to walk the edge of a shale cliff, most thinkers turn to a more practical, external application.

In particular, Karl Marx (with Engels) in The Manifesto of the Communist Party uses Hegel’s writings as a prescriptive document, a practical method to diagnose and cure what physically ails the world – namely class division and the commodification of humanity.

Marx labels the Herr/recognizing as the Bourgeoisie and the Knecht/recognized as the Proletariat. In this relation, the Proletariat exists only to be recognized/exploited by the Bourgeoisie.  Marx writes, “The cost of production of the worker is… reduced to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance and for the propagation of his race” or the purpose of the Proletariat as a class is to live and breed and serve another (131).

Applying Hegel’s prescription, once the recognized becomes the recognizing then aufhebung[1] must occur (because “…each extreme [will be] exchanging… its own determinateness and [make] an absolute transition into the opposite”).

Marx believes in a continuing revolt where, “The real fruit of… labor lies not in the immediate result, but in the always growing unity of the workers” and posits an end goal: “Workers of all lands, unite!” (150).

By acknowledging the possibility of an end goal, Marx ignores the “Master-Slave dialectic’s” infinite, reciprocal nature – that there is no end in Hegel’s formula. Once “workers of all lands” have finally united, once they’ve obtained Herr status, there will be a Knecht waiting to be woken from its slumber and so on ad infinitum.

Mao Tse-tung in “Identity, Struggle, Contradiction” acknowledges this: “to establish the Communist Party is to… prepare for abolishing the Communist party…” (264) because “[w]ithout the other aspect which is opposed to it, each aspect loses the condition of its existence” (263).

Although Mao goes farther than Marx in admitting the “Master-Slave dialectic’s” infinite nature, he is hesitant, like Marx, to posit who or what this Knecht might be in regards to the Herr of Communism.

Specifically, he and Marx are hesitant to discuss the Proletariat/Communist base – individual beings. This may have been a choice (for the individual seems counterintuitive to a revolution based on unity) or it may have been neglected, unknowingly, by the personification of classes (Master and Slave).

In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois not only describes the struggles of the American Negro (Knecht/recognized) against the American white (Herr/recognizing), he also describes the effects this has on the Negro’s (individual’s) soul – “One ever feels his two-ness, –an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (2).

Du Bois argues that it is the “two warring ideals in one dark body” that must be quelled (or more rightly recognized) before mass change can occur. He writes, “the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – …to merge his double self into a better, truer self.” (2)

Even though the double self may have been created by societal conditions (American slavery and racial prejudice, etc.), it is the responsibility of the individual to activate or, in the least, become aware of the struggle within and allow for aufhebung to occur – allow the snake to eat its own tail ad infinitum. Once this has occurred the individual will, “[begin] to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another” (5).

From this realization, by seeking true self-identity through the internal “Master-Slave dialectic,” he will be able to work outward and address the external, multiple Master-Slave challenges he will face in his lifetime (racial freedom, class struggle, etc). He will be able “to look with open eyes upon his conditions of life and true social relations” (Marx, 128).

To conclude, Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic” is a maze with no center (all paths are suitable, all have no end). This style allows thinkers to pillage the dialectic for their own needs and purposes. Marx takes a practical approach and applies the “Master-Slave dialectic” to class struggle and the commodification of humanity. But by positing an end goal (“Workers of all lands, unite!”) he ignores the dialectic’s reciprocal, infinite nature (that there is no end).

Du Bois on the other hand sees no external aufhebung without acknowledging the internal struggle first (“…to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.”). It is this application of the “Master-Slave dialectic” to all human relationships even, and especially, the relationship with the self, that leads to the purpose behind Hegel’s center-less style – for to have a center is to ignore all others.

Works Cited

“Aufhebung” LEO German-English Dictionary. LEO. Accessed: June, 17, 2008. http://dict.leo.org/

Du Bois, W.E.B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” 2, 5.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Master-Slave Dialectic.” Trans. A.V. Miller. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2001. 631, 633.

Mao Tse-tung, “Identity, Struggle, Contradiction.” Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings. 3rd Ed. Charles Lemert. Colorado. Westview Press. 2004. 263, 264.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. G. Polakoff handout. Burnaby. SFU. 2008. 128, 150.

Plato. Timeaus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Project Gutenberg. Released: 01 December 1998. Accessed: 16 June 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1572

[1] Def. as noun: abolition, annihilation, sublation, etc. As verb: demand cancellation (LEO German-English dictionary).