Imperial Symbol Blender

I hadn't ever heard of Nikki Haley before the Trump administration. Based on her speeches and the media coverage of her, I assumed she is a zionist evangelicon from the south. She's from the South, and she's a politician so she's done the obligatory posing with guns and crosses thing, but her parents are actually from India, and they're Sikh.

Is her adoption of the symbols of people who live in the South genuine, or is she a calculating political opportunist? Nobody can know what's in her head and heart, so I wouldn't guess. Also, it's not uncommon for immigrants or converts to a new religion, by marriage for example, to dive in whole heartedly and adopt a new persona, so maybe she's as zealous about guns, the confederacy, and evangelical Christianity as someone with multi-generational family roots in the South. Conversely, what does it say about the long term stability of symbols like the cross or second amendment gun toting if they're merely political props?

If every symbol and religious notion becomes a kind of political currency is it possible to keep any fixed reference for categorizing people or groups? Probably not. What's the consequence of that? Interesting question to ponder.

Financial System as a Replacement for Neighbors, Friends, and Family

I'm in my mid forties. The United States of today is significantly different than the United States of my childhood in the 1970s. That world was not an ideal world--in a lot of significant ways it was worse. A lot of statistics, e.g. the per-capita murder rate, were worse for example. Pollution was worse. Viewing that world through rose colored glasses is a mistake.

It was significantly easier for regular people to make a living back then, though, and the financial system was structured to prevent the large scale fraud, crime, and systematic grifting that are a daily feature of life today. The con-men of Wall Street had been put in a box after the great depression--which was the era of my grandfather's youth, and my great grandfather's adulthood--and were only just being let out little by little. One round of post-depression banking deregulation happened under Jimmy Carter, which led to the Savings and Loan crime wave of the 80s, which  involved people like John McCain and the Clintons. Banks in my home town were shutdown and the mom and pops in my town were bailed out by the depression era FDIC.

Over the years, the financial "markets" have been a mechanism for many average people to get conned out of life savings, while at the same time pretending to be a secure and controlled environment where money can be managed to produce guaranteed returns and a stable income for old age. Indeed, without that costume of respectability and support by media, everyone on Wall Street would probably periodically be murdered.

Money's a dead thing. Financial assets are even deader than money. They need to drain people and living things to get a toe hold in the material plane. Many believe financial assets, probably because of their inert/symbolic nature, are more reliable and permanent than community, neighbors, friends and family. At the same time, the rules of the games that make financial assets "valuable" create systems like the stock market which systematically wrecks their communities. Their resources get sucked into the trash heap of Wall Street and the work that their neighbors once did ends up being done by Asian slaves.

People believe the hoarde of digits will preserve them in their dotage better than neighbors or family. It's led to a fairly shitty world.

Migration and Moralism

Median Age Map

The median age of the populations of different countries around the world is shown at the left. There's a fairly consistent inverse relationship with per capita GDP and the median age of the population of a country. That probably indicates that organizing for work and production eventually causes people to avoid having children for the sake of economic goals.

People in the poorest countries sometimes believe they can seek "opportunity" (a life of acquiring luxury goods) in the wealthy countries, rather than improve the lot of their own nation. When they all decide that at once, migration happens en masse.

The problem with that is the economic systems within the wealthy countries are integrated into their culture. People's beliefs and expectations and training from birth results in the overall patterns of behavior that result in millions of people spending their time on work and "career". Two cultural and economic systems have a hard time co-existing in the same geography. It's a lot like the native tribes in the americas and the anglo/american settlers trying to share the same lands. Pastoralists and farmers couldn't coexist.

Building physical walls or virtual walls of moralism and attempting to stem the tide of millions of people deciding to walk across borders is not going to "preserve" a given way of life in a world of constant change. Seeking refuge in ideologies, and fantasies like "Trad" life or fantasies about the crusades is a sad response. The physiological and psychological stress caused by two nations and systems clashing can force people into a more rigid and limited way of perceiving the world.

When anglo/american settlers encountered native tribes in the United States, and vice versa, they all really did miss out on the opportunity to learn from one another, probably because both nations of people were organized in fairly rigid hierarchies that served to benefit the upper echelons of their societies. A better response is to do something completely unexpected and novel. Maybe migration is an opportunity to collapse the hierarchy and bin the oligarchy instead of a way to ravage the common people of two nations.

"Trad" Trap

White Women are Known to Enjoy Frolicking in Wheat Fields

All the "trad" values in the world and $5 will get you a cup of coffee. "Values" and "Virtue" won't save you, because they never have. Panic about virtue is a good sign that your society is in a crisis. Machiavelli's distinction between virtue and virtu is a pretty good one to think about when somebody is promoting cultural virtue as an antidote to what ails. (But his concept proved to be every bit as flawed in practice.)

A few years ago, simultaneously and  seemingly ex nihilo a bunch of alt-media "personalities" started promoting "white nationalism". This was an apparent grass roots (though certainly planned and staged) reaction to muslim migration into Europe, which was  almost certainly planned as a follow on to the non-stop wars in the middle east. The same themes are promoted  in the United States via latin immigration. Every social media personality promoting this is a fraud.

One of the themes for the nationalist promoters is "trad" life, which apparently involves white women walking in golden wheat fields and also venerating dead and dusty medieval christianity the same way some religions venerate the bits and pieces of their dead saints.

Ideological themes are seeded out into the public by promoted alt/social media personalities. The "trad" theme is one such theme that took off, probably because it tugs at the heartstrings by playing on shared dreams of a golden age--a never ending harvest time, and a just social order in the face of a world of chaos, and malignant, corrupt leadership.

"Society" is really incapable of doing anything; it's essentially passive. Ideologies, like trad life, are a hall of mirrors or a box canyon. As those themes gain popularity, though, the ideology becomes a platform for a phony leadership to make proposals on behalf of their real masters who lurk in the shadows.

There are certainly significant culture differences that make mass migration untenable and prone to cause the worst kinds of violence. Also the economic causes of mass migration are  generally pretty stupid and easily solvable. In spite of  cultural differences, the typical person within any given group shares many of the same goals.

In many ways our time, as a result of years and years of stability in the western world, starts to have characteristics of unstable times. Much better models for what to do in response to the instability are to be found through study of colonial north america and the actions of "the people" versus the corporate entities that sought to control them than in appeals to a phony traditionalism.

The Christian Luciferians

One big theme of the Bible is that the world is fallen, tainted with original sin and in need of repair. If you've got a positive view of the natural world or of the universe to start with, you can shelve the bible with other fables. There's really nothing in it for you.

It seems like many of the Enlightenment era political thinkers and scientific thinkers were obsessed with the idea of the fallen world in need of repair, but thought of it as a philosophically materialistic DIY project rather than a spiritual exercise. They moved the focus of all thinking to the material world. (Redemption via the technological singularity)

Their mode of thinking is well illustrated by how biologists today think of animals, especially domestic animals like dogs and cats and horses. They eschew the commonsense daily experience of millions of people who have companion animals and favor variations on the theme of animals being some type of animated meat, and by extension people being some type of animated meat.

The anti-Masonic era in the US was a sort of moral panic about free masons around 1830. (This movement probably gave rise to Mormonism.) There's similar moralism about masons in alt-media attitudes about masonry, today. One of the common criticism is that masonry is Satanism in disguise.

I think it is Promethean (which is identical to saying its luciferian) and sees man as his own messiah. It is a sort of upside-down Christianity. God is missing, like an absentee landlord, and it's up to man to take what they imagine his rightful place to be, that is, managing the material world for the sake of man. I would not be surprised if the ostensibly Christian congregations in the Washington DC area consciously preach this materialistic teaching.

Enlightenment Civilization Sclerosis

During the colonial era, the New World was exploited by joint-stock companies like the Hudson's Bay Company or variations on the theme of the East India Company. In a lot of ways, the American Revolution looks a lot like a hostile take-over by the local management from the parent company, rather than an organic movement of the people for freedom's sake. It's really interesting that the Russians didn't get in on the joint-stock company game until it was almost over (around 1799). By then the Industrial Revolution was underway and the colonial natural resources exploitation game was tapped out.

The New World was sort of like an anvil upon which the old one broke-up or was mangled beyond repair. Those joint-stock companies became the basis for new methods of organization and production. They're really the basis of our entire social order today, while older institutions like religious cults are still around, corporate society organizes almost everything. In the United States, for example, marriages are registered at the county/state level and ceremonies are administered by licensed officials. While there are religious "laws" that govern marriages/divorces by individuals within specific religions, the state's laws almost completely trump whatever claims they make.

The new order feels pretty tapped out and sclerotic. Oligarchy from Europe eventually infected the United States. Similarly the goals of this society, e.g. building the Star Trek civilization seem vapid at best, and just like stupid cons at worst. Lots of people are scratching their heads about what to do next.

Mass Movements versus Corporate Entities

When the native tribes of the Ohio territory sought to counter the advance of the colonials, they tried to organize a pan-indian resistance that was based on new spiritual ideas and notions of racial purity and religious practices that sought to purge (in some cases literally by ceremonially puking) the influence of the white man.

Their plight isn't unlike the plight of white working class people today who look across their street at Mexicans moving into their neighborhood and think, "there is my enemy". For whatever reason, it's much easier for the people on the bottom rung of the social hierarchy to see one another as enemies than it is for them to see those in the top levels of the hierarchy prey on them.

The white man's society the Indians faced was a corporate entity. The people inside it made systems work and followed laws and procedures rather than doing almost anything directly. Corporate entities are severely centralized and hierarchical and decision making is generally closely held and secretive. Consequently, there's huge asymmetry in the "importance" of the individuals within the structure that make it function. That's their real, potentially debilitating vulnerability. The Indians raided forts and outposts and settlements. A better approach would have been for the Indians to create highly trained special forces teams who would disrupt commerce and attack the leadership of the colonists.

It will be interesting to see if a "distributed" approach to attacking corporates, like the US banks, can work. My guess is it is a type of mass movement, so it probably won't fare well. The inability to concentrate resources strategically, or to create the equivalent of special forces is a severe limitation.

Instinct for Preservation of the Whole

A video of a guy saving a rabbit from fires in California is circulating on Twitter now. There are lots of similar, even more extreme examples on YouTube of people saving animals and even risking their own lives to do it. There are even a few examples of animals trying to help other animals in distress in similar circumstances.

Obviously we have to have a built in desire and instinct to attempt to preserve the whole in addition to preservation of ourselves. Without cooperation and preservation of the whole, the individual dies. Quite a bit of cultural teaching emphasizes self preservation above all else and implies helping any other is a suckers game. Enlightenment political theory is based on observations made by psychopaths about the nature of the world.

Corporatism Sucks Balls

The owner and proprietor of a local business that sells wild bird and animal food just passed away. She was a kind woman who genuinely cared about what she was doing. Through her business, she helped many people enjoy a hobby and also took care of local wildlife.

When I was a kid in the 70s in my home town, there were still lots of small businesses on main street and several hardware stores in town. Aspects of that version of America were better than the current version. It had flaws, but was definitely more livable for the average person.

The main model for running a business, now, is to form a corporation and hope that it grows into a primarily financial entity. That is, the owners and managers hope to become idle rich living off of interest and dividends. The mad scramble to escape the necessity of life seems to make the pit of necessity ever deeper.

Even in their early days, those types of businesses are really adjuncts of the banking system and the government. The administration of those entities usually revolves around managing debt and paying taxes and meeting regulations.

Corporatism has made people dumber, meaner, and a weird combination of parsimonious money grubbers and wild eyed conspicuous consumers. It sucks.