Yule Thing: 12/21/22 (late)

Nature, human and otherwise

Lemme just get a few of these out of my system.

I have no real-life updates because they’re all boring or personally depressing (which translates to “boring”).

Here’s some random thoughts instead.

First World Problems

This is a dismissive phrase that’s been around for a while that I’ve enjoyed swinging around once or twice myself, because it’s typically used to be justifiably dismissive of complaints like “my internet doesn’t load fast enough” or “my expensive grocery story is out of my expensive niche food preference” or “I have to pay for goods and services.”

But I think there’s something meaningful hidden under this scoffing insult normally leveled at expressions of entitlement or bitching in the face of having very few real problems.

There ARE such things as “first world problems,” and they’re not a joke, and they’re not trivial or overblown or the result of entitled whiny teens and young adults.

Here in the first world (which is where you nearly certainly are if you’re reading this), we seem to view the advancement of societies as a kind of maturity- a 30-year old is (probably) potty trained and can eat with a fork, but a 2-year old needs to learn those things and “graduate” to more complex life skills. It is a linear progression of masteries of civilizational “skills,” a ladder you climb up and look down from at “primitives.”

I’ve come to think that this attitude is an important piece to understanding where we are today in terms of our manifold systems failures. Many of the survival-scale issues that we consider “solved” or “done” in the first world have simply become more complex iterations, and many of the solutions create challenges of equal existential gravity that less-complex societies don’t face.

We’ve largely solved for very cheap, abundant food in the first world (in a way), and we’re all obese and incredibly unhealthy- and have no really great solutions for these as of yet. We dramatically improved baseline literacy and education until we didn’t, and are now rapidly declining not only in basic education standards like literacy and simple math but professional competency.

And the breakdown of democratic systems. And declining birth rates. You get the idea.

These are not “first world problems” in the sense of a blue-haired brat complaining their favorite flavor of latte is out today, they represent the same “lots of us or maybe even almost all of us could die if this isn’t fixed soon” kind of existential threat that our ancestors and contemporaries in the “second” and “third” world face around things like food supplies and access to now-basic medicines.

What’s worse, first-world problems, once they rise to the level of noticeable problems, are BIG. Antibiotics changed human survival forever; antibiotic-resistant diseases absolutely represent an extinction-level possibility. Great-great-great-great-great uncle Sven might have burned your barn and carried off your sheep and your daughter but a full launch of nuclear missiles from a global power will kill millions or billions.

And here’s the part where I might lose some of you- the traditionally silly “first world problems” we rightly mock whiny Millennials and Zoomers for aren’t necessarily trivial in a big-picture way, either. The outlook that breeds this kind of behavior has also bred the aforementioned decline of families, plummeting mental health- including the kind of neurotic-anxious-depression that led to the widespread embrace of COVID biofascism- and so on.

It’s fine to point to the loss of traditional religious values and similar things as being precipitating causes of this kind of cultural disintegration, but WHY do those values decline in the first place, and why do they always seem to coincide with population-level improvements in survival-level quality of life issues?

And what do you want a “cultural solution” to look like? There are already some pretty powerful folks out there that want to reprogram our values, beliefs, behavior, and life trajectories with the power of state violence as a threat.

The blue-haired whiner deserves a wedgie and probably a good smack, but the fact that a healthy, not-starving person with a home is in genuine emotional pain because a minor comfort has been withheld isn’t a joke, and its implications aren’t trivial.

Late-Stage Whatever

A lot of people have been throwing around another phrase for about as long as “first world problems,” which goes something like “late-stage capitalism” or, more often lately, “end-stage capitalism.” It’s usually attached to complaints by the liberal or more often the progressive left about the market behavior of corporations or consumer prices or working conditions.

I bring it up because it’s as much a misconception as the way “first-world problems” has been used.

If you think THIS is end-stage capitalism, or even late-stage capitalism, baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The implication of the phrase “late/end-stage capitalism” is that the current market system governing global economics is rapidly approaching or has reached the point where it cannot evolve anymore- a kind of “maximum entropy” where, like the entropic death of the universe, every single thing is frozen equidistant to everything else and enters a state of static death where nothing ever moves or changes again.

If we use the word “capitalism” in its least ideologically-loaded sense- an economic system where privately-held “capital” is used to trade goods and services in a market- what we see around us doesn’t even come close to “end-stage” or anything approaching a “final form” whose only further movement is to collapse.

The very scary aspects of GloboCap (or whatever you want to call it) like full-digital currency tied to universal passports, the push from private ownership to renting everything from stakeholders, manipulation of energy supply and costs and assorted other “green” bullshit, etc., as well as every consequence of data monetization within social media or otherwise are an intended NEXT stage of capital, just like the development of increasingly abstract and intangible financial instruments and commodities to be traded on global markets moving at digital speed.

It’s a scramble to assign and capture value from everything that hasn’t been assigned or captured, and to facilitate this by turning low-value “consumers” (99.9% of us) into commodities themselves, something that has always existed to some extent in the context of the value of labor (how hypothetically productive you are as an individual in the market) but is now accelerated because our labor is becoming increasingly worthless (and the majority of existing concepts of labor will probably become completely worthless, very soon). Remember all the talk about the “attention economy?” As more and more value gets spoken for and locked down by an increasingly smaller group of stakeholders, new sources of value need to be found.

If global elite interests get their way, each individual will be fully converted to a highly-measurable unit of value with the same agency and personal meaning as a box of cereal. Our value as consumers is rapidly approaching an end- you have to be very, very wealthy to throw meaningful amounts of money around as an individual, which is why there has been tremendous interest in quantifying us as consumer blocs as this is the only way we meaningfully impact global markets.

Further, we can be taxed by governing powers- whether nation-states or something else- until we have nothing left. It wouldn’t be ridiculous to say we’re approaching that point, pretty quickly. At least in the West, our governments show every indication of passing the costs of massive, undemocratic policy ventures like Ukraine and the controlled demolition of energy infrastructure directly on to the citizen through a combination of inflation and increased taxation (especially painful when applied simultaneously).

But that isn’t the end of capitalism or a market system. It’s simply the end of a vast majority of us existing as meaningful agents within it and instead fully transforming on the spreadsheet from an audience or a consumer to a commodity with some, no, or negative value.

There’s no logical reason to sustain huge numbers of costly inventory if it doesn’t profit you in any way and won’t do so in the future. Humans-as-commodities would only be kept around at cost because of the threat a large number of them would represent in an uprising- as soon as there is a cost-effective solution to this problem, there’s no reason to keep us around in large numbers. Concepts like Universal Basic Income are a kind of life support system that only make logical sense if there’s A) no longer any meaningful amount of value you can produce on your own to get what you need and B) there’s a reason to sustain you. “Because it’s the right thing to do” has, sadly, never really been adequate sole motivation for anything. “We’re going to feed everyone indefinitely at cost- and not control their numbers- because it’s wrong to let people starve” doesn’t sound like something that would happen in any universe, capitalist or otherwise (ask the former USSR and PRC how they traditionally handle food shortages).

What will be the purpose of any governing body or global market at that point? Fuck if I know. My guess is that GloboCap could go on for a good while artificially sustaining national populations (for some reason) while brutally controlling reproductive rates and lifespans to align with some spreadsheet with sustainability data. The overwhelming majority of meaningful work will have been automated/AI-ed or made obsolete, so I imagine most jobs will involve helping the state police the rest of us overtly or covertly or entertaining the elite. It’s existentially very bleak to ponder, because there won’t be much reason for most of us to do anything or to measure value in our individual existences.

Maybe THAT’s what end-state capitalism is. But there’s quite a lot in between, and plenty of fail points along the way, especially if it isn’t as technologically viable as the elite have gambled it is.

What’s more interesting is to ponder how or why it, or something like it, isn’t inevitable. At no point in history has anyone successfully intentionally (as opposed to global disaster or collapse) reversed or frozen the advance of technological innovation or the evolution of markets. Whether evil globalists are at the helm or not, the majority of meaningful human labor WILL be automated out of existence and there simply won’t be enough for 8 billion or even 2 billion people to do. Feeding and housing them all with no value inputs inevitably puts us entirely at the mercy of the stakeholders of that infrastructure, whether they represent capitalist or communist or other values. Submission to any kind of welfare system for basic sustenance will necessarily include controls on our population growth, either at the beginning or the end. Will opting out be an option? “Fuck your food replicators, I’ll live a harder existence in a parallel economy producing my own food so I can retain my agency” sort of thing?

I don’t know. Whenever I read that “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” essay (I’ve probably read it at least a dozen times now), and I get to the part about “the people in the villages,” I always ask myself why the omnipresent state would be allowing them to exist out there, unregulated, if they were achieving anything like success at subsistence, because they’d represent a viable alternative.

Yule Shoot Your Eye Out

Today marks the beginning of Yule, specifically by the arrival of the Winter Solstice. For me, the Solstice is the proper mark of the “new year”- the tipping point where the longest night gives way to longer and longer days.

I’ve found myself very reflective this Yule, partly because all the practical problems and ongoing issues precluded any kind of particularly social or energetic celebration (I had hoped to have a big, boisterous feast with friends and family and a roast boar blót tribute this but this proved impossible for a multitude of reasons) and so I’ve mostly been wandering around out in the cold and/or dark staring at pigs or trees.

While out with Husbandmouth yesterday I saw what felt decidedly like an omen because of its unusual nature: in the field adjacent to us, there was a bald eagle and a large raven sharing the very fresh carcass of a deer fawn. Both bald eagles and ravens (especially solitary ones) are extremely uncommon sights in our region, and do not typically share space or carrion peaceably. Each bird was politely bouncing a short distance away to allow the other a minute or two at the carcass before swapping roles with the other. By the time Husbandmouth and I managed to walk back from where we stopped the truck, they were startled away and both took flight as we approached (Hmouth got a brief, crappy video of the bald eagle flying).

Anyway, I’ll continue to spend some time considering its implications.

The transition that Yule symbolizes makes one reflective of life, death, darkness and light as an inevitable cliché. For whatever reason, I cannot bring myself to be tired of life, or to welcome death as a release from pointlessness or despair. I remain very much in the business of survival, but find a vast, open void in trying to see the purpose in that survival. I suspect I’m not alone in this- many of us want to be, but lack a why and can’t seem to distract ourselves from that lack.

We cannot have back whatever we had, and most of what is on offer now is sickly sweet, or bitter ashes, or poison. Hope is a fine thing but a thing that takes no small amount of convincing ourselves- it is not exactly a lie or a deception, but a kind of willful brainwashing that takes maintenance and is vulnerable to distraction and disruption.

It is not a trivial thing to choose, for many thousands of days on end, to go on living with ourselves if we indeed have a choice.

Finally…

The Guttermouth and Brothermouth Christmas Weekend Playlist for 2022 is:

• Die Hard

• Gremlins

• A Charlie Brown Christmas

• Scrooged

• Bad Santa

• A Christmas Story

• Home Alone

• The Ref

• Elf

• Fat Man

Whichever holiday is upon you, a blessed Yule, Christmas, Chanukah, et. al. from The Gutter.

Stick around; these times will not be dull and there is room at the table for every Gutterball.