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We often dislike the creators of cultural artifacts we enjoy, such as disdaining hippies or baristas while appreciating the Beatles or a well-made espresso.
This contradiction can provoke an openness that can change biases.
The gap between the distasteful interactions and tasteful consumption, harbors compelling evidence that we are socially conservative and desiringly decadent.
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Suppose our state is sponsored by capitalism (shaped by it), and corporate platforms have supplanted free-market capitalism (platforms set the market participation terms). In that case, the state has been inverted to be controlled by platforms rather than being the platform from which markets arise.
The problem is that citizens can be controlled (limited), but pixels are sovereign (not recognizing borders.)
The inversion (from state to corporate) requires the state to appropriate dominion from corporate platforms to remain relevant: setting the terms of participation.
from Benjamin Bratton
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The opposite of good is evil. But, as Hannah Arendt and others point out, generally, it is not malevolence that leads to evil; instead, it grows from passivity and conformity.
Evil is born of taking the easy path too often, assuming too much, and avoiding painful efforts.
That is to say, evil is evolutionarily natural: the less you struggle, the more calories you conserve. However, society is not based upon entropy and conservation but effort and consideration staving off casual collapse.
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Empathy for those less fortunate leads to pleas for benevolent altruism: Universal basic, open borders, or reallocated police funding.
Taken further, all structure and any limitation is oppression: empathetically, anyone should have whatever they want whenever they want it.
This becomes anarchy or chaos unless by design the people are so dull that they only desire what they are told, or so enlightened they can self-regulate.
Unfortunately, denuded of limits out of a desire for freedom, we become oppressed by our neighbors, collapsing standards, and bankrupt infrastructure. (oppressed by others and circumstances)
This hyper-empathy mistakes Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty (freedom from restraint) and positive liberty (freedom to self-determine): the paradox of allowing self-determination is that it will infringe on the rights of others.
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A mono-answer is when all problems lead to one overarching issue, i.e., capitalism.
Similar to a monoculture (where one crop is grown to the exclusion of bio-diversity, creating a fragile ecosystem susceptible to blight), the mono-answer’s simplicity is vulnerable to collapse with one argument.
Reality is complex and by artificially simplifying it, we simplify our faculty for understanding and leave ourselves blind (from hyper-myopia.)
Unfortunately, complex thinkers are dangerous and often alienated. Allies do not want you to have more than one answer; they need you to be predictable to pretend stability through consensus.
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Problems stem from excess.
Something that is good in moderation, say the freedom from authority to explore or engage in taboo thoughts and desires, is liberatory.
However, embodied as an institution, or ethos, liberation is oxymoronic: excessively pursued it undermines (deconstructs) with the goal of removing any stabilizing reality with subjective relativism and irony. This excessive liberation is now akin to chaos, anarchy, or hedonism.
But now -as the new norm- “freedom” or “liberty” means escaping the fragmented disorder into stability: new liberation from chaos is safety, tradition, and discipline.
These types of reversals stem from excess and are crazy-making.
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When you are working on a complex machine, or maybe even a simple device like a bicycle, its ability to thwart you repeatedly, despite your persistent efforts, feels like you are struggling against the stubborn will of another person.
Machines seem to possess a will: a determined antagonistic force that requires arcane psychological voodoo to overcome.
To get your way and coax the cantankerous machine to abide by your control (temporarily) requires an affinity that finds life in the inanimate: a gremlin or golem soul invested in the stuttering steel to whom relational attunement cedes benefit.
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Digital reality (if it is to thrive) requires a knot, a point of chaos, at the center, which cannot be made to make sense: it is not cartesian and, therefore, can give birth to chaos and dreams that can save a world from the mathematical impulse of control.
This allows not for linear time (once again cartesian) but circular time with variation, Aeonic or Aion time.
In this cycle we find infinity, and this singular point (the knot of chaos) reminds us of The Aleph, where we can see and comprehend everything in the universe.
However, seeing worlds within worlds, such as digital reality, reminds us of the unimaginable excesses that the brain cannot fathom or grasp, an abundance we do not have language for, and thus cannot remember. Our recall is to only see glimpses recalled hazily (dreams), and from this chaos, we begin to create.
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The cybernetic system approach (machine-like control) to shaping your world is predicated upon the appeal of certainty. In cybernetics, influences are cataloged and countered, inefficiencies blocked and reduced. This allows for toggling of controls to better predict and influence the future.
Raised in controlled systems, we seek more certainty, which does the disservice of softening us to the intrusion of reality: the unexpected conundrum is devastating, and we have no resilience upon which to parry it.
The ripples of this systematized way of thinking, arguably rejects reality and thus our resilience to unexpected conundrums, converting them to catastrophe.
The opposite, perhaps the antidote, is a surreal fuel logic; for instance, the Hopi would not plaster a certain spot on the wall, so that the unseen, spiritual Otherworld, the shadow world could also have an unfinished piece of plaster on their house, which they could then plaster over, of course, this plaster would remain unseen, but allow the spirit world to complete the house.
This ritual introduces a complex nonsense that cannot be controlled and instead is folding the bizarre, the insane, into the every day. In such a manner, it is an inoculation against the odd shock.
