Monitoring

Technology has made it possible that no longer are we limited in our "desires for security" by a practical and actual inability to be secure in those ways- we no longer need to pay or trust armed guards to secure our homes, we can install home security cameras and electronic locks controlled by our smart phones. We no longer need trust our children to the care of strangers, we can have them monitored 24/7 with gps tracking. If we go out in public we can be assured that video cameras are watching things so crime becomes negligibly a threat to our sense of security. And etc. etc.

Before technology it was less a question of how much we consciously wanted to give freedom/privacy away for security and more a question of the practical limits to being secure. The question was largely put off, until now.

So we cannot keep thinking in terms of the past ways of addressing this issue, we must formulate the question of monitoring, of privacy or security, the feeling of certainty against the feeling of uncertainty and trust, all must be thought in terms of the new environment of the possibility of actual complete and perfect surveillance. Because these questions were formerly thought in terms largely of the practical limits on security, the desire for security grew disproportionately to the desire for privacy- this ironically has led to a rise in the image of freedom as a central value while security as value is more deeply rooted and "emotional", fear-based. The old thought basically was able to value privacy implicitly because privacy was largely given, while security was not at all given and thus had to be valued more directly.

Now the new thought is able to value security more and more as a given, via monitoring type technology, also the proliferation of insurance, while the value of privacy has become needed to be valued more actively. If an active "balance" is to be found it must take place upon the new thought. As security becomes implicit the lack of privacy also becomes implicit, just as how in the past the lack of security being so implicit was also the implicit fact of privacy. If modern thinking continues to frame these issues of security and privacy/freedom from the old perspective and feeling then the impetus of "givenness" will simply shift naturally from privacy to security and we will find ourselves in the "big brother" state before we know it. (Of course we are already on the way there, but it should not be understated the extent to which this state is still not yet here, that total surveillance and loss of privacy has yet to extend itself over us.. Even the many modern forms of monitoring, extensive as they are, are extremely little compared to what is coming if the value of freedom continues to be so much less actively willed than is the value (fear and anxiety) of security).

I suddenly realize a hope and a faith; the world is too Bergsonian in its unfolding-expansion for a security apparatus to ever completely anticipate what it needs to secure in order to be secure. I have only read a first chapter of one of his books, but I get his snowball-notion of history; the world is never reducible to its previous parts. All time adds to it, nothing is replaced.

Of course security is pre-emptive for this precise reason, it attempts to anticipate the nature of the next layer, but it can not, as following the metaphor, all snow crystals are different, and as time unfolds, the scope of difference increases with every turn and most of all security apparatuses will be primarily perplexed rather than effective. In the end they turn on the very basis of their security, as this is the only thing they can properly identify.

I suspect however that people in power realize this, and that they have decided to use the limiting device of threat to curb and curtail any possible incentives that they could not actually block - a tectonic approach to causality, similar to the prophecy of hell. Those threats can not be realized without disrupting the fabric of power, but they are used to sustain the working hierarchy. The conclusion would be akin to 'the only thing to fear is fear itself' - except it is pointless to fear fear, one must rather find a way to laugh at it.

Consider the intense coercive power of the combination of Islamic terror attacks and conspiracy theories about who is possibly behind them. A phased detonation of shock to the heart. First he learns of an acute threat to his life, then of an unfathomably more ominous threat to the whole of mankind. It is not surprising that this keeps most of mankind in complete suspension. Most, but not all - these difficult conditions are useful to the end of a selection process - it is not possible to estimate how much of this even is part of an intelligent top down scheme - what is certain is that the results, be they of conscious intent or of more diverse and layered drives, are no less real than the products of truthfulness simplicity.

In keeping with the topic of analyzing the ends of modernity let's look at the intersection between politics and art as productive of "economy".

The artistic, creative act can be assumed by anyone for it is only an issue of the degree of depth one sinks, is able to sink and allows oneself to sink within that act; the appeals of the act are many and potent but the costs also, this usually keeps most people arms length away from creativity. To gain the benefits with less cost is the goal of every artist and of every man in the sense that all men are to some extent artful- an "artistic community". That's really all communal philosophy had ever been or is. Likewise with so many impulses to organize in groups around common interests.

Seeing politics as the essentially unconscious remainder and largely negative expression of philosophy allows us to see that the group-political emerges out of the communal philosophical need or "artistic community" as an expression of that communal nature in truth but bent toward the group realities. Art only fails to serve and works beyond politics when art is radically individual, as soon as two or more artists get together they become a political (psyche-polis) unit. Because of this we also see eminently politically critical art stem from individuals who have objectivity upon the political, when they act it is always "against" the group but therefore also reflects the group in how the objective image offers itself implicitly and always as a challenge and antithesis to the political space/s. Conversely we also see in group art a gathering around the ideological and a basically essential requirement to embed the creative act in political substances; rather or not those group acts are formally opposed or supportive of a particular ideologico-political idea or state is irrelevant, they are always "defending something".

Economy is the image of will inscribed into the artistic heart in so far as that heart instantiates an individual or group mode and psyche- the personality is reflecting those modes across shifting experiences and as "will" engendered by economic apprehensions. The body is the center of power of the economic, always. With modernity's stunning attack on the body we see unfolding a new space of possibility for extra-economic or non-economic activity governed by new regimes of signs: art freed from the need to either instantiate an individual or group dynamic across the creative instinct, passion, and intellectual compensations. Video gaming culture is a particularly potent example of this emerging extra/non-economic series of exchanges of meaning and vital force qua artistic-creative expression.

Modernity, by violently suppressing and opposing the body, has cut economics with a deep wound that festers and may yet prove fatal to it: all economic transactions nowadays take on an almost comedic tone, as superfluous excess or self-mockery in the running joke of the continued perseverance of the archaic forms of social reality whose seemingly atavistic nature becomes great fuel for modern comics and social critics. Economy is dying because the body is dying. Modernity offers injections of amphetamines as a solution, then later the opiate bliss of cutting away the body entirely. The "hope" here is that so little will be left of the human enduring spirit that the final injection of heroin will not be resisted except as superficial objections and mutterings of quiet despair in the back room while the doctor readies the poison around the corner. It is funny to perceive the invisible, gaping hole between economy and modernity, politics that still thinks it can either hold the yawning abyss together or at least smooth the transition into the new utopia.

Meanwhile people struggle in their lives and rightly don't give a fuck except for that quiet dread which thankfully goes away in the heated moment of passion or utilitarian action, what still lingers as the old psycho-social forms of reality-exchange, "economics" of real worldly or interpersonal relations.

Eventually modernity will offer itself as the only alternative to the complete collapse of large-order economic systems and substitute its own species of credit and demerit exchange for "the market of money", infrastructure to that regard has already been being put in place for several decades now. Framing the economic crisis in conventional political or economic terms is useless; the polarity of false thinking and self-ruined perspective only feeds the monster inside the machine. The only strength left to man is what he always had and still relies on even as he is made to ridicule and despise that very strength: his body and the brain of his body, the body of his brain and the whole wide earth beneath him. Look for the signs of transition, collapse is the great enemy of the modern spirit and lover of all things earthly but controlled demolition seamlessly introduces the new reality while eyes are transfixed on the supposed "chaos" of collapsing skyscrapers.



One discovers the real substance of one's ideas, as well as their inadequacy, only when one attempts to truly live through these ideas. This is in large part because the states of contradiction inherent to ideation have so far been implicit and must now be fully realized, also because those ideas are found out in that realization their actual nature- they are not nearly good enough, they have never been good enough.


Wisdom is like a substance that, being stored up gradually through pure speculation, is expended in the concerns of our habitual actions and in aligning ourselves for or against values that have been imposed upon us from outside; "making decisions"; there are cases where applying our wisdom increases wisdom, and cases where applying wisdom only impoverishes and empties it and so too us.


The instrumentalization of modern man seemingly knows no bounds- it would be quite accurate for us to state that man has become a literal tool shaped to fit a particular techno-psycho-social niche, his ideas and values pressed on him accordingly and very little mercy, if any, shown when he attempts to change these values or find new ideas. The utopian visions of some future totalitarian superstate of Absolute Control and Repression serve only to sever man as he presently is from his actually current surroundings and life- that supposed "future state" is already here, it is everywhere around us and, because the cancer still lies dormant and is largely benign, we cannot see it. The well known goal of every good tactician of psychological warfare and brainwashing is to allow a new method to slide into place without anyone ever noticing, and that is precisely what has happened: exercising the new power would only provoke the victim into seeing the chains that encircle him. Best to keep the shackles in the dark - says the hidden ghoul of the dark recesses of the subhuman superunconscious - as loose as possible so that if man does venture too far and happens to feel the imposing limit of cold steel upon him he might convince himself this is simply his own limit and error, or even more so, just simply that of "life itself".

We live in a proliferation of controls, rules, restrictions, limits, obligations, atrocities meant to keep our "free" actions corresponding to a narrow set of possible outcomes, and even these are effectively monitored to ensure compliance. The lifeblood heart of human flourishing and will in his world, his own effort and capacity to work and create his life for himself and his love, has been stifled by countless layers of that kind of contrived impositional architecture of assumed right and reality under the dead god of morality, silently evoked- the negative stimulus has come to rule the world-consciousness. Everything else is mere surplus, leftover and allowable remainder. Philosophy cannot save man because he cannot save himself, his ideological pathology mechanism works overtime in the interest either of self-validating denial or planned release of the psychic excess of body-depletion convenient to massive fucking amounts of cognitive dissonance; meanwhile the abstract reasoning idles in quaint fictions and satanic images adequate to stimulate the heart's red passion long enough to forget the gross act of self-terrorizing and allow something like a shade of self-value to appear.


Modernity had won but it cannot complete its victory- the final battlefront always recedes like a soap bubble carried away along lustful currents, man is so ignorant his ignorance has become the only means of defense against the imposing monster of his reality. And yet the living true heart and love's very counsel of nobility affords the same hope it always has, in total disregard to whatever hellish or duplicitous world man finds himself born into. It is precisely this combination of absolute self-ignorance of the deep philosophical nature/self-valuing and the totally self-adequate interpersonal love-pathos and agape between real human hearts overflowing with time that acts to hold off the modern premium on death. A partial victory meets partial defense and we have gridlock, the puzzle pieces locked and ground to a halt. What is most hilarious is to see modernity struggle for the soul of man even as it had already "won" that soul (neither man nor his glorified systems of obedience and superficiality-power ever aware of it), biting and grinding its teeth over the unyielding steel exoskeleton of the animal spirit.


Long before that jaw evolves enough atomic strength to pierce the eternal spirit, that spirit will have shaken off the oppressive nature of death with quiet laughter and a smile of supreme innocence. I hope the "victors" are enjoying themselves- they may factor to plunge earth into the chaos of war and destitution lasting a thousand years but know already the absolute certainty of defeat. Meanwhile we stand astride history, chronicling the human tale for the great titans of a different age, the eventual bedtime stories for the youth of future gods.

Abuse, assault has been defined as "any feeling of pain/discomfort"; mental illness/insanity has been defined as "anyone who thinks".

Modern definitions.

The latter definition is not originally modern, it was also they key to the enduring hell of the Middle Ages. But in those times the former, the condemnation of pain, was absent, and therefore the condemnation of thought had a different effect. In these days thinking is itself considered a cruelty inflicted on oneself, but more gravely on ones environment. To think means to be outcast, or to rule like a crimelord.