Belly Button Lint

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Tag: order

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    Affluent Apathy

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    1–2 minutes

    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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    decolonizing is recolonizing

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    1–2 minutes

    When Deleuze and Guattari discuss deterritorialization, Mark Fisher notes that a new form of capital immediately reterritorializes any deterritorialized space.

    Similarly, when a group attempts to reclaim colonial spaces (decolonization) to challenge systemic injustice, they often reproduce the very colonization tactics they oppose: new rules and regulations.

    This creates an inherent hypocrisy: revolutionary tactics are absorbed by the entrenched system, rendering rebellion contradictory, foolish, and futile.

    So what is the rebellion to do with their angst? An antagonism does exist but lacks a logical recourse to a non-contradictory outcome.

    Ultimately, this points to the intended outcome—only by embracing illogic can one disrupt indoctrinated traps.

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    When truth is suspect

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    1–2 minutes

    We claim to want the complete unvarnished truth, yet when something traumatic happens, if someone reports it too clearly and concisely—like a good informational report—they become suspect because of that very clarity. Their truth becomes suspicious because of its fidelity.

    Instead, inconsistency (lack of fidelity) fits perfectly with human nature. Stories become lies when they’re over-embellished, or you can spot the lie by the absurd level of detail—they’re trying too hard to convince, no longer behaving naturally.

    As Lacan said, “truth has the structure of a fiction.”

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    Your Animal Operating System

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    1–2 minutes

    Your unconscious is an operating system for an animal: it speaks in images and metaphors, impulsive drives.

    It directs you before language can get in the way. It works before we can "make sense" of the world’s workings.

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    Gusts of Doubt

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    1–2 minutes

    Even at the peak of your balance and focus (your finely honed stability), take enough gusts, and you will look down.

    It is not looking around that leads to dismay, but rather the clarity of unfocused observation that leads to doubt. Widening your view recognizes the precarious fragility of our position.

    Recognition should invoke a fight-or-flight response, but often, we freeze wide-eyed when our ignorance is made plain, preventing us from returning to the stable, narrow focus that served us so well.

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    Capitalism requires hope

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    1–2 minutes

    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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    ideology supported by fantasy

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    1–2 minutes

    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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    progress undermining Stability

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    1–2 minutes

    Progress is laudable and, by its nature, unstable. However, focusing on some social advancements undermines the founding cause of why progress is possible: that progress must be sustainable, or it is merely an immature, immanent disaster.

    For instance, once a path to financial security, college education has become fiscally irresponsible and ideologically constraining. Its promised utility misaligns with post-graduation reality. Many graduates are left to return to academia or enter parasitic economic prognostics (enter the realm of speculative finance) rather than contributing productively.

    Consider the broader repercussions: Education’s increasingly self-referential logic continually draws on external resources to expand its crusades. The contradiction of taking tax money to condemn the government and citizenry while simultaneously raging against colonialism and capitalism risks the stability of its foundation. When progress overextends its base, instability follows: a correction or a crash ensues.

    This is reminiscent of a plant or tree whose attention is on gaining light until it topples, ripping its roots out of the ground.

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    Herd Mentality vs. Individual Freedom

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    1–2 minutes

    There’s an evolutionary tension between the desire to separate from the herd and the need to claim communal solidarity—we strive to be both individually free and communally secure. This conflict is mirrored in corporations and nation-states, which encourage extreme specialization while maintaining cohesion through structure, salary, and perceived stability.

    By nature, the "tribe" or "bureaucratic structure" often opposes our individuating desires while fulfilling cohesive others. At times, we find comfort in rules over relationships (Jack can’t get away with that) yet feel alienated when our personal wants are denied (I deserve this, this makes sense for me).

    Further, when mistreatment and unfairness occurs, we see the cult-like contradiction of charismatic leadership within the community and realize that it’s neither rules-based nor stable. Instead, it functions as a herd—providing protection and power to a few, while suppressing and exploiting the instincts of the many.

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  • Theme:

    Entitlement

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    1–2 minutes

    When life doesn’t turn out the way you want, that is normal.

    To rage about it is entitlement: to expect “personal consideration” or “proper context” in a system (society) that is both selfish and uncaring sounds like insanity. It is like arguing with a psychopath.

    (Note: This stoic stance does not mean we should accept unfairness, but we should expect it and remain humbly surprised when we are treated as valuable humans. This stance privileges reality over ideals.)