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One way to win is to stop “playing.”
You can still be in the game, and technically, the regulations allow you to stall, filibuster, or use the rules to maintain possession (of the ball) with immunity.
However, winning on a technicality is uninspiring. In the sense of fairness, it is always an asterisk of legality rather than achievement. A loophole of bureaucratic cleverness seldom inspires, which reduces victory until we bleed away what it means to have a hero.
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Money and protracted non-binding alliances have become our social immune system.
Given wars, familial relationships, poverty, or climate change, we gesture support with one hand and throw money with the other, spewing placating platitudes as we retreat into our affluence.
We build walls of resources around infections while we distance ourselves from direct contact, often through attenuated proxies and abstract language. The problem is that we neither excise nor subsume the toxin, the damaging agent. In our active avoidance, we never cure our spreading symptoms, leaving less and less ability to maneuver in a disease-ridden body.
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Algorithms are lauded as new processes in capitalism’s arsenal. While traditional capitalism dealt in heavy metals such as gold, machines, production, and labor to move assets, the new model is a light extractive filter sitting atop a tangled web of connected network traffic, siphoning off the nectar.
While increasing efficiency and value creation, an algorithm sits atop an already exploitative digital economy (harvesting of personal data and clicks), much as traditional capital set atop early civilizations (militarized states protect merchants and allow factories and supply chains). This additional layering offers benefits yet increasingly attenuates production from the physical into the abstract and speculative.
Arguably, the reliance on coordinated, cooperative networks provides stability beyond material reality until chaos ensues, at which point the revenge of the real reduces artificial systemic complexity very rapidly: algorithms are not capital but pleasant parasites easily swatted.
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The only reason an idea takes hold is because it answers an emotional need. This is an instinctual recognition: the idea or message makes sense of the world in a way that aligns with your experience.
This implies two things:
1. The previous ideology and common sense messaging are no longer adequate.
2. As the world progresses and grows more complex, we need more intricate and nuanced ways to interpret and process information.
Yet, in the face of increasing complexity, the appeal of simplicity endures, hence the rise of conspiracy theories. These fantasies offer neat explanations (aliens, government cabals, Jews, a fake moon landing), but reconciling them with reality requires increasingly convoluted arguments, leading to shambolic constructions. Complexity, it seems, is inescapable.
Historically, humanity’s progress has involved learning, moving beyond, and creating ever more complex systems to sustain ourselves and stave off boredom. Our simple pleasures require oddly sophisticated machines. As such, the most simplistic answer revert back to understanding human truths; classic myths which are never simple.
Even access to these stories and information increases, meaning every response must account for more variables than ever before, necessitating more sophisticated tools for reduction and understanding to break through what we fail to see.
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In capitalism, economic salvation is a promise occasionally made good: some small percent miraculously gets rich. For most, it is an illusory pretense, a propagandistic dogma, that hard work will pay off, lifting the poverty-stricken to grace.
There is a slim chance that it is better than the strict feudal/caste system, except psychologically, where capitalism internalizes the master’s whip: our striving and failures are our faults, our shame. In feudal systems and caste systems, it is systemic fate, not personal failure, that lands you in poverty or wealth.
The promise of possible wealth (economic salvation) moderates the volatility of a system that also ruins people. Hope fuels the winners, and when it fails, it creates the losers. Either way, hope is an essential fuel for the populace to accept the system and believe its goods outweigh its ills.
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If we believe in the meritocracy, it is odd we also believe in the lottery.
We believe in hope and redemption, despite circumstance or sin, retaining space for a lottery that rewards idiocy and illogic, despite simultaneously virtuizing (preaching) hard work.
We systemically maintain and fund luck structures: the logic is to enhance illogical outlets as a balance for excessive efficiency and reason.
Paradoxically, we also embrace the ideology of scientific progress while upholding the right to make irrational (stupid) choices, and even exploit that as giddy freedom that science and technology should support.
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Ideology is the frame in which we understand the world so that it seems non-contradictory. Therefore, it is a necessarily reductive structure that is contradictory; it just makes us blind to anything that does not fit the framework. Yet because ideology often breaks down when we glimpse the contradiction, it must be supplemented by fantasy at its core: an irrational belief that can overcome the discontinuity of reality.
from Todd McGowan
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To explain where you are now and predict (or forecast) the future requires understanding history, mythology, human nature, and science.
With only partial models (or only a couple of disciplines), your predictions will be biased and your forecasts will be askew.
Amplified ignorance across an entire democracy, manipulated by mediated algorithms, reduces the ability of people to model; they only react instinctively, emotionally. The result is that simplistic governance will take over as citizens become simpletons.
There is nothing wrong with simple. The problem is that complexities manifest, seemingly producing themselves from simple starts (just a few proteins produce all of life), and require multifaceted consideration and foresight to evolve even moderately alongside.
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When trying to make up for mistakes, we become vulnerable to new forms of manipulation. In looking for immediate solutions, we tend to choose flawed solutions that are easy to hand.
Applied to the social/communal sphere, our effort to avoid repeating atrocities (such as Nazism or slavery) creates new opportunities for totalitarianism: our insistent righteousness by saying “never again” becomes blind rigidity, overpowered extremism.
Rather than learning from the past, we become more concerned with becoming virtuous and increasing our positional distance from it. As such, we cease to react to some forms of empirical reality and embrace the symbolic, as it alone offers an eternal, ideological guiding star divorced from the world’s complex muddiness.
Since all symbols are stand-ins (reductive categorizations), the secondary traits of people (race/sex/religion) also become primary and more readily defensible. Yet, the symbolic defense becomes convoluted and complex, perhaps in inverse proportion to the discounted reality, as if we seek to recapture/recreate reality’s confusion, which we threw away for certainty.
The past is thus repeated from our desperation not to repeat the past.
