The Forces That Move Us

I have a lot of drafts piling up already on this blog… seem to be getting my thoughts half out there, then abandoning them, sometimes to time, sometimes to second guessing the content. I think I just need to be more consistent, but not forceful, keep myself to a standard that is fun, enjoyable, but work to maintain some type of standard. Anyways, on to what I wanted to get my some thoughts out about today.

Something that has kept coming into view in my own work and ideas, as well as everything I’ve been reading and watching lately, fiction or non, is the prevalence of unseen forces. Joseph Campbell calls it the will of all life, Jung called it the collective unconcious, both these thinkers drawing on plenty of influence from eastern spiritual thought, such as the Indian idea of Atman. Atman is our true self, the consciousness that is within all of us, and is only playing at the roles that exist in the forms we perceive. This idea is also reflected in the concept of Indra’s net of gems: a matrix of nodes, where each are connected by strings, and each node holds in it the reflection of every other node. The infinite in the infinitesimal. It is a beautiful sentiment, but with how bleak the world feels of late, I’ve had a few moments of reflection on a negative side to this conception of the human spirit.

I was reading Joseph Campbell’s Mythic Dimension right around the same time as I was giving a second go at Robert Sapolsky’s Behave and I think there are connections even to the world of natural sciences. There are, after all, more systems and mechanisms in our little finger than we as a species have been able to adequately explain or analyze. Sapolsky’s book is structured in a brilliant way that steps the amateur through scientific loops without dumbing anything down. After a brief introduction about the dangers inherent in the “categorization” that makes human thinking so powerful in the first place, we proceed to look at human behavior through an ever-wider lens as the chapters go on. Sapolsky starts by presenting us with a behavior: “You pull the trigger on a gun”. Was this a good or bad behavior? Context matters, at every level. We then go through different stages of time leading up to that action, to talk about what is behind it. He starts with a chapter titled “A Millisecond Before” and eventually takes us to “Millions of Years Before”. Spoiler Warning, turns out that not only for philosophers, but also for scientists, the question of “what caused this to happen?” Is an absolutely impossible question to answer. Not just for the trigger finger of Sapolsky’s framing device, but for any action in the universe, we can have only an unknowable degree of certainty. No one can say simply and truly why anyone does anything, It gets a little easier when you move down to individual cells, which are basically protein calculating automata. But even there, unanswered questions abound. And further down to the processes of physics, some questions as seemingly simple as “how does gravity act on an object?” avoids explicit identification.

We don’t understand most of how we work, functionally, so where do we get this overgrown sense of agency? I suppose this is just another symptom of being an up jumped species, gaining more mental faculty than is good for them, but really… It is so hard to be optimistic about the troubles and trials of the modern world, or of civilization throughout it’s tiny history, when you realize that there is so little human control over these unseen forces that manifest through us, and it is impossible to say even if it is we who created them. In the book Empire by post-marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, a theory is presented of an ongoing transition of the unseen powers of our world. Empire, as they see it, is shedding the skin of nation-states, evolving into a new, international nationalism, the modes of command and rule, always seeming to shift before our very eyes, unable to be identified. “It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command” But if Empire is an apparatus of rule, who is utilizing it? I think it is wrong to look simply at who benefits from it. It’s the Pirate Game thought experiment, if you assume everyone involved is a rational actor, some will benefit, but each person will only benefit to the exact minimum amount that they need to benefit for the one who holds power to get the largest cut. Some people will get nothing, and this too is simply a matter of efficiency. Furthermore, for the ruling class—that being those with power either of resources or of influence—to be the apex benefactors, they would have to be thinking through every level of this ongoing transition of Empire, which is far beyond anyone’s intelligence, let along an international, diverse, and uncoordinated caste of people. It is instead my view that most everyone, ruling class or not, is acting first and foremost in their direct self interest, at all times. And that the system of Empire itself, is the highest benefactor. Thinking about the game, the captain seems to be getting the most out of the deal, but if the strange system they’ve worked out can be seen as a thing in and of itself, then it’s continued existence is its goal, and it is succeeding, so long as the lower level deckhands don’t realize they could work together to create a more equitable system. In this way, Empire as a thing in itself also acts only to remain in reproductive existence, it has a property of metaphysical inertia, tending to stay in the shape it already has. It hands out wages only where needed to keep itself alive, and it’s benefactors quell any currents of change. This is why it is so capable of melting into the shadows whenever inspected too closely, there are no direct, human connections of cause or intent because these connections don’t exist, there is no one at the head of the system, it acts through us, not the other way around. And as we are seeing now, it is capable of transforming entirely, stripping away the forms and functions we thought where definitional to Empire, because the system is the thing that must continue to exist, it’s old incentives are cast aside as soon as they lose their usefulness. As Hardt and Negri point out, this makes it incredibly hard to imagine what social or economic order will arise out of this transition, whether other forces in the collective unconscious will overpower it.. or if we are doomed to become like cells in some greater animal, controlled mostly without even knowing it, shambling through the dark trying to understand something that can’t be understood, as the authors say themselves: “It is midnight in a night of specters. Both the new reign of Empire and the new immaterial and cooperative creativity of the multitude move in shadows, and nothing manages to illuminate our destiny ahead.”