“Implicit in the concept of Strange Loops is the concept of infinity, since what else is a loop by a way of representing an endless process in a finite way?” -Godel, Escher, Bach, page 15

Human narratives are linear, yet we’re part of an endless process of life. The universe churns on in an endless cycle, but we’re training to think of our lives as a linear movie reel, with a concrete beginning, middle and end.

Something, something, Buddhism. https://www.amazon.com/Siddhartha-Hermann-Hesse/dp/0553208845

Law lag: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/526401/laws-and-ethics-cant-keep-pace-with-technology/

Presented without comment.

“The fact that totalitarian government, its open criminality nonwithstanding, rests on mass support is very disquieting. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars as well as statesmen often refuse to recognize it, the former by believing in the magic of propaganda and brainwashing, the latter by simply denying it… A recent publication of secret reports on German public opinion during the war…. is very revealing in this aspect. It shows, first, that the population was remarkably well informed about all so-called secrets – massacres of Jews in Poland, preparation of the attack on Russia, etc. – and second, the “extent to which the victims of propaganda had remained able to form independent opinions.” However, the point of the matter is that this did not in the least weaken the general support of the Hitler regime. It is quite obvious that mass support for totalitarianism comes neither from ignorance nor from brainwashing.” – xxiii

“…with the totalitarian contempt for facts and reality…” – xxxii

“…the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.” – xxxvii

“When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated… what makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together.” – 5 [related: “Mussolini made the trains run on time]

“…the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.” – 9

“The lower middle classes, or petty bourgeoisie, were the descendants of the guilds of artisans and tradesmen who for centuries had been protected against the hazards of life by a closed system which outlawed competition and was in the last instance under the protection of the state. They consequently blamed their misfortune upon the Manchester system, which had exposed them to the hardships of a competitive society and deprived them of all special protection and privileges granted by public authorities. They were, therefore, the first to clamor for the “welfare state”, which they expected not only to shield them against emergencies but to keep them in the professions and callings they inherited from their families.” – 36 [read: “white working class”]

“They could pretend to fight the Jews exactly as the workers were fighting the bourgeoisie. Their advantage was that by attacking the Jews, who were believed to be the secret power behind governments, they could openly attack the state itself, whereas the imperialist groups, with their mild and secondary antipathy against Jews, never found the connection with the important social struggles of the times… they started at once a supranational organization of all antisemitic groups in Europe, in open contrast to, and in defiance of, current nationalistic slogans. By introducing this supranational element, they clearly indicated that they aimed not only at political rule over the nation but had already planned a step further for an inter-European government “above all nations”.” – 39

“Their aim was a dominating superstructure which would destroy all home-grown national structures alike. They could indulge in hypernationalistic talk even as they prepared to destroy the body politic of their own nation, because tribal nationalism, with its immoderate lust for conquest, was one of the principal powers by which to force open the narrow and modest limits of the nation-state and its sovereignty.” – 41

“The representatives of the Age of Enlightenment who prepared the French Revolution despised the Jews as a matter of course; they saw in them the backward remnants of the Dark Ages, and they hated them as the financial agents of the aristocracy. The only articulate friends of the Jews in France were conservative writers who denounced anti-Jewish attitudes as “one of the favorite theses of the eighteenth century.” For the more liberal or radical writer it had become almost a tradition to warn against the Jews as barbarians who still lived in the patriarchal form of government and recognized no other state.” – 46 [note here: This shows us how labels can be misleading. “Liberals” today are often actually conservatives in the sense that they want to preserve the current order, while “conservatives” today are often actually radicals in the sense that they want to overthrow the current order, hence the label the “alt-right”. And the “conservative writers” mentioned above, naturally, have their closest parallels to #NeverTrump on the right.]

“Louis Ferdinand Celine had a simple thesis, ingenious and containing exactly the ideological imagination that the more rational French anti-semitism had lacked. He claimed that the Jews had prevented the evolution of Europe into a political entity, had caused all European wars since 843, and had plotted the ruin of both France and Germany by inciting their mutual hostility.” – 49 [I love this phrase, “ideological imagination”. A tool – for both good and evil.]

“Side by side, and apparently with equal stability, an anachronistic despotism in Russia, a corrupt bureaucracy in Austria, a stupid militarism in Germany and a half-hearted Republic in continual crisis in France – all of them still under the shadow of the world-wide power of the British Empire – managed to carry on. None of these governments was especially popular, and all faced growing domestic opposition; but nowhere did there seem to exist an earnest political will for radical change in political conditions. Europe was much too busy expanding economically for any nation or social stratum to take political questions seriously. Everything could go on because nobody cared. Or, in the penetrating words of Chesterton, “everything is prolonging its existence by denying that it exists.

The enormous growth of industrial and economic capacity produced a steady weakening of purely political factors, while at the same time economic forces became dominant in the international play of power. Power was thought to be synonymous with economic capacity before people discovered that economic and industrial capacity are only its modern prerequisites. In a sense, economic power could bring governments to heel because they had the same faith in economics as the plain businessmen who had somehow convinced them that the state’s means of violence had to be used exclusively for protection of business interests and national property…. while the state played an ever narrower and emptier representative role, political representation tended to become a kind of theatrical performance of varying quality until in Austria the theater itself became the focus of national life.” – 51 [note: Parallels with America, 1980s – 2010s  – RIP neoliberalism and the absence of politics from everyday life]

More to follow… when I rescue my copy from the clutches of my friend’s apartment in Philadelphia… [book robbers are a real thing.]

The fundamental problem with the “right-left” dichotomy is that neither is striving to move upwards, forwards, or towards the greater good.

The right is honest, but unemphatic. It is therefore evil in its solipsistic stance towards those it considers “the enemy” and the other, though it succeeds in being warm, empathetic, and protective towards its own, “the friends”.

The left is emphatic, but dishonest. It is therefore hollow and false. Its calls for universalism, cosmopolitanism, and global integrated ethics collapses as its adherents come to realize that it’s snake-oil, and all too often a smokescreen for those in power who wish to sell its nominally compelling brand to a populace yearning for something great to believe in.

But – and we must be careful here – even the notion of going “upwards”, towards a “higher” calling, is also dangerous. This is the dominion of Leo Strauss and of the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato who called for a return to the perfect forms. This is the dominion of Samantha Power and global neoliberal interventionists, who all too often believe that outside enforced morality must trump local concerns. All too often, those on both the left and the right use the notion of a “higher calling” to quash and destroy its enemies, rendering it hopelessly dishonest and unempathetic.

So where does this leave us? Having knocked down the pillars of the fundamental philosophical tenets behind all the major strands of political thought, that leaves us nowhere. Right?

Wrong.

I believe we must have faith.

This is a call for the construction of a better political, not an “ideology” – which all too often fossilizes and crusts over into unthinking dogma, but rather a radical re-evaluation of the realm of possibility, of the possibility of forever-vigilance, and above all, a call for radical genuine truthful empathy – without resort to an “emergency” state of mind, the state of mind that motivated Carl Schmitt’s justification of Hitler’s rise to unquestioned sovereign power, nor Mao Zedong’s philosophical justifications to destroy the elite in his Great Cultural Revolution – both of which wrought evil and destruction in the name of truth and revolutionary idealism. We must avoid the passive death-wishes of Gandhi, and the virile destructive seduction of Churchill. We need to acknowledge and desire the good of all people, without falling into the trap of resorting to the rhetorical lie of saying all people are the same. We need to believe in the intrinsic worth, value, and goodness of each and every person’s personal life narrative, the movies playing in their head, the stories that they contain, without believing that every person must adhere to the same script, the same story, the same universal narrative that’s defined as being “good” by some universal subscription of values. We need to find a way to promote the good of everyone – genuinely. And it may be an impossible task. But we must try.

Hey.

This is Dake.

I’m a journalist currently working for the Associated Press.

While my work allows me to write, take photos, and shoot video – and gives me the world’s largest platform on which to publish them – from time to time, I have things I want to say, or photos I want people to say, or stories I want to shed light on, that aren’t right for the AP or for a mass audience in general – but might be right for someone out there.

And that’s what this blog is for.

It’s also an experiment. We’re witnessing now the dawn of a new era in human society. As grandiose a statement as that might sound, over the past year or so I’ve really come to believe that we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in the configuration of our society – the biggest shift since the appearance of mass corporate organizations at the beginning of the 20th century.

Our world used to be dominated by massive, solid organizations and institutions that were immensely powerful in authority and the fabric of people’s everyday lives. We used to spend 40 years building a career in one company. Scientific and technological progress used to be driven by behemoths like the Department of Defense or IBM. The daily information diet was dominated by ABC, the New York Times, and yes – the Associated Press.

No more. As the internet is penetrating our lives and rapidly dissolving old barriers in communication, old institutions are disintegrating. Politics are being thrown into disarray. Intellectuals once fearful of the ever-accelerating homogenization of people into a “mass society” are now bemoaning the shattering of public life into a million different partisan factions. We’re entering a post-truth epoch, a time where people are entering their own digital echo-chambers, each with their own narrative of the truth, none able to agree on one narrative of the Truth.

While on one hand, this means establishment sources of information are breaking down – receding amid a continuous assault on the validity of their authority – this also means on the other hand that we’re being exposed, truly, for the first time, to new narratives and ways of viewing the world that we might never have been exposed to before. For the first time, New York elites are rubbing metaphorical shoulders uncomfortably with rural Kentuckians on the internet – and the result is chaos, and anger, but also exposure.

I’m going to use this blog to talk about anything and everything that interests me. But from the past few paragraphs you get an idea of what it is that interests me – the influence of the internet on politics and society, new media technologies, narratives and the truth, and the new post-authority world we’re all hurling towards.

With the dawn of new technologies comes a lot of confusion. Society is like a ship, and new technology is like a bunch of new buttons, levers, and screens suddenly appearing at the ship’s helm. We humans grasp around wildly, smashing buttons and pulling levers blindly in a desperate bid to retain our control over a ship we no longer can properly navigate. As we get used to the new controls, we gradually ease into to it, and finally start to figure out what it’s all about. Walter Lippmann was one guy who saw, early on, back in the 1910s, that America had yet to come to terms with mass social organizations, and wrote about the need to balance scientific organization – Taylorism – with the deeply human need for a sense of mastery and control over our own lives.

Today, we’re grappling with the need to balance the noise of the internet – memes, shitposting, newsfeeds, push-notification, clickbait and the easy, partisan, thrilling sensation of being with “our people” – with genuine empathy, humanity, and deep understanding. The internet is presenting unprecedented new opportunities for us to learn about the worlds of different people in a deep and fundamental way, but at the moment so much of it is getting lost in hypershrill partisan shit.

It’s exciting, it’s messy, it’s chaotic. We’ll figure it out. I have faith.