Assigning Value Rationally

Many apologies to Ancient Greeks and Christians, but the physical world has no order that pertains to living the good life, and humans are rare beings who delight in order living on the fringes of near universal chaos. We briefly exist, and this existence is chiefly comprised of encoded moleculecular chains constructing a machine and the machine organizes it's environment to suit the specifications of the machine.

There is no palliative for this crushing truth that in terms of the material universe we are worthless machines, as disposable as any other thing existing. A strange equality arises from that. Why do the rich get more if they're not more valuable? Why do the powerful have power?

Valuation is an inescapable part of being human, barring the perfectly enlightened of course, and as such we have many flimsy excuses for inequality. Essentially excuses to allow the machine around us, our community and society, to act out the irrational impulses of people who value. And we are all irrational.

The trick for the equal democratic society is to minimize those flimsy excuses that make the machine inequitable. We've attempted to vanquish religion as a justification, now let's eliminate the claim that the rich are better than the rest. That they've 'worked harder' is a common American saying. If they have worked harder they equally happened upon the ability to work hard, in the same way a person who is lazy has happened upon the circumstances that make him lazy.

Reward hard work because that's what makes the capitalist machine move, but don't let it become a justification for daylight robbery. We create value - value doesn't exist without valuer - and as such let's value what is conducive to human happiness and not what is conducive to suffering.

Experience resides in memory, while memory is an unlocatable ghost 'experience' seems to speak of something like an essence. Something must be there. As if the accumulation of memory is meaningful if that accumulated memory is experience, and the meaningful essence of experience will justify the attachment to memory.

What do we have? The clothes on our back? The back on our spines? Our consciousness on our brains, which is moving about and acting through an alien body? Do we even have our consciousness?

We don't properly own anything, and if we can't locate the self in any satisfactory manner, the self is then most likely an evolved construct, purposed to motivate us to care properly. If we care properly about ourselves we won't just let our bodies or our material assets parish. Reasonable, one might say.

But then the eternal question: why do I care so much? With my clothes and my back and my spine and my brain and my restless restless mind?

So is experience isn't ours; it's lack of self grates against our illusory sense of self which is only a concept that we allow to be.

Why care so much when it hurts?

There is and always has been a certain amount of alienation between government and the governed. That is the very nature of government; the alienation of those who have direct access to the mechanisms of power to those who have indirect access or no access at all. The conservative, liberal, and even the socialist response would be that such a separation is inevitable. The conservative would say it is a good and right separation, the liberal would say we can live with the separation as it is now, and the socialist would say that such a disparity should be reduced and eliminated when possible but ultimately there will always be some distance.

The socialist position is by far the most sympathetic. The vision of the left is that of communities and individuals reclaiming their own sovereignty and reappropriating their own resources so those resources aren't used against their or other sovereign people's interests.

Modern liberal democracy is as close as we have gotten to a left vision of the world where this central disparity is reduced. The people are not nearly as distanced from the means of power as they have been in the past and it has meant huge material gains. However, people are still fundamentally alienated from governance, and lately that real and mental distance has grown in the United States in elsewhere. It's an open secret in the US there is hardly anything left of a representative republic; the people's voices are routinely sidelined through the influence of the economically powerful and those that are in government to represent the people are part of this powerful class or closely aligned with it.

More than ever in history the common ideal of the left to reclaim governance for the people is relevant and pressingly obvious as the solution to the ongoing crisis of political legitimacy. What is the road map for a left in the United States that wont be subsumed into the capitalist Democratic party?  

Life comes apart very visibly toward the end. There are so many little cycles of birth and death; the death of a town is one.

You likely didn't see your town come to life some summer of capital years ago. Maybe it was the mills, making the earth hum with the urgency of constant production. Maybe it was a fortuitous location on the sea, with crushing hopeful crowds piling off boats to partake in the commerce of others who had similarly come ashore. Or maybe a new route between the places of commerce and production had bought the lives of commerce and production to the wild.

You probably are seeing some community's not-so-august fall, with the humming machines silent, the crowds cynical, and the routes between places empty of trade. Frost came early to end summer, and the fall seeps into every yard and home.

Walking and riding the streets of the new ghost town are those spirits who are only vaguely aware they are dead. They are still flesh and blood, they still dream, and they still rear pale little children. 'What went wrong?' they say, 'Are we less daring? More selfish? Too caring?'

Did we do anything different at all? The world moved on without us, and we let it go.

So now, fellow spirits, we must be called back to life, or, more precisely, cry out we never stopped living. These, our streets, we once built and will build again. Our roofs we'll reroof. Our stores we'll stock. Our larders we will fill with the fruits of our own labor and our own land.

Ours together, we'll say,

because the world moved on without us,

because we forgot the world is ours,
and  it wont be taken again.

Never forget,

and enjoy the spring.

I'm a failure of a reader. I can't locate the meaning of the movies theme in In the Beauty of the Lilies. I know it connects to the illusion of meaning it creates in the wake of the realization of God's non-existence, but that is obviously not much of a profound mechanism to drive the novel forward. Maybe it's my problem with being unable to identify narratives that don't follow my favored narratives (the revolution, Buddhist enlightenment, etc), or maybe it's my continuing lack of sympathy for Clarences revelation that God doesn't exist.

Updike makes the loss of God an irreparable one, and I just kept feeling that Clarence should get over it and embrace some sort of humanism, but then he didn't and it killed him. Despite the book being relatively recent (1996), the central discussion about the loss of God seems somewhat antiquated, something we got over after some soul searching between the wars and then fully released with the myriad of new thought and spirituality post-war.

A reverberation of the book I've been feeling the most is the fleetingness of life and the different non-omniscient perspectives each person holds. The whole point of ethics (for me) is to figure out what is universally the moral course of action, if there are different perspectives on the world to do if someone always thinks something else is the moral action! There is something primal in my brain that cannot separate the pursuit of a universalizable ethics and doing the right thing in the eyes of my community.

It appeals to me very much that ethics is fundamentally constructed, but how then can ethics be universal? How does relativism not seep in, and how can I not be the imperialist when I tell Iranians they're treatment of women is objectively wrong?

In the meantime when I act against the better sense of my peers and elders I justify it by thinking I have extrapolated on the same 'common sense' assumptions they base their morality. Maybe there is a fundamental agreement on the basis of morality (if morality is constructed), that we just need to find the best way to get along as a imperfect, sometimes empathetic/cooperative and sometimes selfish, subjects that are radically reliant on each other for our survival and happiness.

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The consumerisation of ideology is embodied by this quote.

The post-modern is a bizarre place to live; where the adoption of ideologies like Christianity or new age religion or anarchism/leftism (etc etc etc) is an extension of the impulse to consume.

Maybe this just proves that consumerisation just illuminates our preexisting relationship with physical and mental objects to mystify our essential existential qualms. To be fair, ideological objects where what we were rich in before industrialisation, so the modern consumer relationship to objects can be related to the european consumption of the ideology of Christianity before the modern period.

Death is not at all like sleep. Sleep is stories told, forms moving, destruction, and stories retold. The very stuff of life is in sleep; the vital and potent consciousness wrangling internally with an external world that is deaf and blind and scentless and touchless, without that which is external, or radically internal, to it, and thinking of it.

By day we encounter death. In the clasp of mortal hand to mortal hand. The woken under everlasting night and day and night. An unfolding story, with a countless cast, played eternal, and without author.

Awake and dream in the day. Dream hot and cold. Dream satiated and starved. Dream good and bad. Dream nations and wars and freedom and fiery revolution.

Dream of the author or not.

We are asleep in the day, triumph and defeat are images created of our large imaginations that fade in light, and desperate not to wake and cease the endless story.