Three Hundred Years of Solitude

"Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to "subservience and venality", and will "suffocate[s] the germs of virtue". And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principle
- Noam Chomsky

There seems to be a lot of faith travelling within the professional life, the guided life, the life that trusts in government. It is hard to comprehend where these projected values have come from. If I could make a quick, detailed account of the past three centuries it would be plain to see that the age of the expert or the professional stems from the categorisation of ideas, the development of professional characters and industrialisation, and the slow effacement of political autonomy within small groups. It would be difficult to find many communities with an understanding of mechanics, anatomy, general environmental understanding, the ability to cultivate, within this country. And the quiet are becoming too verbose, too abstract in their statements, all rounded and cultivated within a highly developed vocabulary that alienates exactly the type of people it attempts to restore to independence and mutual dependence. 

The trick mirror of art and expression is that it reflects a perfect idea which in short cannot be shared. What we struggle with is not being able to cultivate high-minded understanding to a great amount of people, but being able to liberate them into simplifying and making more comprehensible the forms which have been rendered too complex. Our society dispossesses lives of meaning because the forms of knowledge remain unchangeable and as personal knowledge about genera diminishes, the expert becomes more and more relevant. But this sort of human society is based on just the same industrial model which propagated the consumption or reception of ideas which were so detached from cultural norms that culture itself was forced to dissolve. One must understand that the human species is not an efficiency model, nor does it thrive on competitive circumstances; it is only because the illusion of freedom and fluidity within the individual was so successful that people were creative, and responded with such positivity. The truth is that we are living in an autonomous model of efficiency, encased by bureaucratic controls, power models, and cordoned off models of education, medicine, agriculture, mechanics, police force. 

These have been established in the past three centuries most vigorously, just as the religious model was established following the anarchic behaviour of people propagating faith in the gospels after the fall of Christ. Simple analogy, simply put. The anarchic nomadic, changing nature of medicine and science is shrouded by a projected model of order which is posterior to discovery. As Michel Foucault says, the epistemic break opens up the fold of science only to be closed over as though scientific discovery was open to that change in the first instance. The field of entry, the resistance upon initial discovery from the exact field that now holds the theory to be true, is later disguised by the appearance of consistency and control. Mathematics seems to have consistency from the outset but it is the most anarchic, free method of discovery and progress imaginable. Think of Spinoza and mathematics; think of the sheer misrepresentations afoot in humanity just now in representation of discovery and progress. 

So, the human society and western society reaches the point, as Virilio would suggest in his works, where it has to make a decision: it can try to hold steady the knowledge and framework it has been building autonomously out of an unusual interest in preserving an order which bears no resemblance to nature, or it can disinherit the humanity it was apparently supposed to protect and forgets because it is just that: autonomous. The people who have a stake in the order and relevance of order within their specialised roles usually have determined faith in the systems that they partake in, or even the specialisation with which they take part, which is ultimately based upon a system of structure that was determined at the dawn of science. So, rather than diffusing the role of science, simplifying terms, and making it a commonplace, practical discipline that can sustain communities and thus offer a more creative role, the scientific method maintains its hegemony through strained cultural practice, which leads to mass dependence and a dangerous one at that. 

So the task is very simple: the simplification of knowledge models and the removal of short-term structures which are causing difficulties in a larger-scale awareness, whether that is problem-solving related or whether that is a general awareness of medicine, nutrition, personal hygiene and safety. Move this into religion and the secularisation of societies attempts to overthrow traditional practices which are integral to the social and cultural aspirations of a group or a small instance of cultural development. One sees that the more abstracted a claim becomes, the more far removed (as in Swift's Gulliver's travels, the  country of Laputa, with its entirely abstracted understanding which removes commonplace man entirely from the equation) the discipline becomes, or the statement being made becomes, the greater impact it has on the general population's ability to provide its own nutrition, work on creative solutions &c. It is known that complex developments and new iterations arise in nature only through diversity in numbers, in the ability for organisms to remain attached to each other and thus feed back on problems.

The reduction of feedback loops and ecological cycles diminishes with the emphasis upon individual achievement or competition, a value in abstracted learning, or the division of labour which Smith imagined would lead to tremendous efficiency but at a certain cost, i.e. the diminished value of an individual's input, the creativity of the individual which Marx stressed. The added need to stress that labour is invention, that labour is systemic and a means towards maintaining certain systems and the appearance of power, but not necessarily the reality of power, is even more significant. That labour is life and is not separate from it is of immense value, and is stressed with the writings of much-ignored Alexander Bogdanov. So, you see, the division of labour is a model of efficiency, as is mass industrialisation. But what is noticeable about efficiency is that it does not equate either to creativity or the ability to adapt. An efficient model, much like the textiles industries of Victorian Britain, with their implacable furnaces and their ultimate capitalist utopias remaining within, is ultimately and in the long term inefficient, as a virus demonstrates net inefficiency; the virus's host is depleted and the industry must change. 

Same with slave trade and labour; the model was inefficient; the homogenising of the capital (the slaves) and the use of feeding the slaves in a poor manner whilst under duress of military threat, meant that slave labour was not profitable. That labour cannot actually function by itself, and requires certain other aspects of community, culture, inner development, to adapt and be productive in new ways. The invention of machinery and industrial tools was not an attempt to create efficiency for the most part, but at attempt to reduce labour hours, to reduce the cost of labour. It was spontaneous, unexpected, and the totalising role of bureaucratic capitalism meant that new efficiency meant over production, the failure of the textiles industry, and the movement into industries that were even more capable of maintaining themselves; the railways, the motor car, the infrastructure which would lead to a dual appearance of progress and overwhelming overproduction. So we enter into the competitive trade of factories, the competitive transport of commodities which were extraneous but required monopolies upon them to reduce costs and people could sell at prices that undercut foreign sellers. You can of course see that the posterior fashioning of controlled development is illusory.

In fact, the development of arms and railways inevitably led to the developing of high speed communication. The need to have speed and overcome competitive behaviours in other countries is the autonomous work of a bureaucracy, an unstable system trying to stabilise itself by means of occupying spaces that would lower prices (now we have colonialism and the need to stabilise industry with the reduced pricing of necessary commodities such as food and raw materials that would stabilise an industry that was productive only in financial terms, but not at all in the development of community, or by any means able to stabilise the development of a society). In fact, the emergence of the Metropolitan police ( and alcohol) force was an attempt to stabilise volatile cities, to counter the negative impact of the overall development. So a country is not developing but certainly placed in a certain overhaul situation, wherein the ability to develop creatively is minimised and the expanding borders of the country go unmonitored because of the general oppressive nature of the mechanism.

So now we have of course the teeming industrial movements within Europe, in which France attempts to maintain balance between industry and agriculture, Spain remains backwards looking and not particularly involved in the overall development, Germany begins its rapid expansion with no means of balancing its productivity, and Russia is mostly agricultural, making efforts to sustain an industrial complex but not quite keeping ahead for the overpricing of factories from Western Europe. As I discussed a year earlier, the major wars of the twentieth century were a forced inverted colonialism of Europe, and a need to maintain certain stabilising parts of an economy, which of course needs to expand outwards, consuming everything in its path with a homogenising tendency. So you have Heller's forthright critique of this in Catch-22 which is hard to discern because the value the reader puts of individual characters, which is not actually integral to the story at all. And then following the end of the war there is the new tendency towards polarities drawn between capitalism and communism, the fixation in America upon the nuclear family, the organised industrial complex which is deeply opposed to the realisation of community change; it is centrally organised and its leverage is the nuclear weapon, the ability to keep its industry ahead of everyone else. 

Germany's recovery plan is assisted by the United States and Britain develops a service industry complex whilst eastern and middle-East countries are not industrialised or "developed" to the same extent. Germany becomes an industrial giant now supported by the attendant needs of its investors and resumes a great capacity for production which relies upon the labour of Eastern European states. The system evolves and the need for oil production in the middle-East expands. The complex and the industrial impetus is entirely dependent on industrial expansion within Germany, the stabilising of the society which of course involves creating a certain homogenous environment for its inhabitants (not apparent on the surface, but certainly in the sense that their role is to stabilise a development to which nobody understands or anticipates the end-point). So this takes us up to critical moments; the terrorism within Germany which peaks in the 1970s, the green movement and rising awareness of an environment which is being depleted to serve the interests of a vigorous, unchecked development which requires more and more diversification of roles (greater alienation and less diffusion of responsibility), the greater production of commodities  &c). America invades Vietnam and at the same time tries to stabilise other countries to its South. These developments come as part of a rising awareness of a need to delimit the expansion of other countries, or their internal development. 

Move on to the fabricated republics and the farcical nature of these external movements towards control in Latin America which destabilise and reduce the ability for a community to adapt; the community is forced to feed into already-existing paradigms and thus the ability for spontaneous, reactive developments is minimised. And Latin America is forced by its increasingly unprofitable agricultural impetus to delve into over-exploitation of land, the homogenising of elements which is disguised by the title "developing country", which in fact refers to the capital model and profitability which was the initial destabilising influence. So we have an explanation for drug trafficking on the Mexican border and also the parallels acting within Europe on the Hungarian border, something of a buffer zone between West and Middle-East. The containment and isolation of countries which are being singly manipulated by a system for a particular resource, whilst perpetuating a complex which cannot maintain itself in any physical sense but rather in an abstracted financial sense. So we have the conflicts within Afghanistan and Iraq, the looming conflict in Iran, based entirely upon the hidden colonial impetus running underneath the capitalist model. The model is based upon growth and industrial development and when this is unchecked, when the model thrives upon individual consumption and a lack of attendance to social requirements, means essentially a break down in the capacity to control the attendant violence and minimisation of spontaneous development within countries.

Afghanistan, the narco-syndicalist state, and Mexico, the region of most drug trafficking into the United States are the filters of violence into countries which create the damage in the first instance. The need to use South American countries either for the production of raw materials or commodities, and the need to dispel growth in the middle-East of course fracture the social development of these places, and certain needs are forced into being met; financial needs, that it. Thus we have the trafficking of drugs which create miniature autonomous zones based on a reaction to the homogenising force of the systems to which their countries have had to aspire. This is especially apparent in places like Afghanistan, and Iraq in which the country was in fact a sustainable entity before the war took place in the past decade. So we have potentially sustainable forms which do not meet the requirements of an expanding industrial complex, one that is in the process of being questioned throughout Europe through models of "degrowth" and developing communities and social responsibilities, something that was singly displaced by the intellectual models of the past three hundred years. I, of course, have never been writing quite in the concrete, but the abstract, making claims about general rhythms within society which do not make credible sense.

For instance, the abstract argument that the business and law professions rely on internships to develop and maintain themselves, at little cost but with all spontaneous elements being filtered in; that is an abstract claim. It is a claim that can be met with reactions of "verbosity" or "over optimism" but it is a claim founded in certain thorough-going studies in literature, philosophy, politics, economics, history and symbolism. Some freethinking on my part, indebted to a prevailing sense of nature around me and the sharp contrast that can be drawn between cityscape and the economies of diffused responsibility, the tendencies of close relationships and responsibilities to be more creative, more adaptable in form than the distant, socially fatigues states resumed in larger cities. The role of a city is to preserve the industrial momentum, to encourage the division of labour envisaged by Adam Smith, and even Marx's theories tie in with this new exploitation of creativity as major resource; the appearance of freedom and happiness, as a commodity and as being produced by somebody with the requisite skills, is difficult to tear away from the reality of happiness, which is not in fact obtainable but a changing, mutating shape depending on the time, the place, the independence of a person.

So in order to give my abstract claims any sort of visceral reality, which by this point is far enough removed from reality as it is (I write in technical language prescribed by academic literature and from a background of independent study which is informed by symbols and indirect expression, and this is also not taking place in any sort of open space, but rather at a distance from people). The best and foremost way of expressing what I mean is vocally, but that is not an option. The world is immense and these mechanisms of development are stretched like pylons over landscape, creating apparent connection but really insisting on forward movement and a displacement of responsibility, attachment and ability to create, which is in fact integral to the human species, even more integral than the need for production or the quick development of society. The need for control extends itself in the absence of time for reflection, the sense that we are responsible for ourselves, or even the ability to know and interact with our environment. So my claims stand alongside the claims of Deleuze, Foucault, Virilio, and the earliest enlightenment thinkers: that the diffusion of roles in society is better than the segregation and intensity of one role. Consider the hospital, or the prison system; these systems are not preventive but rather means of containing and control. The rehabilitation of young children from damaged, disconnected environments is difficult because of the anonymity of the structure in to which they are received.

The relevance of specialisation within psychology and psychiatry is also to be stressed here; we only require deep specialisation within these roles because the ability of communities or persons to address these problems diminishes; the difficulty of a parent's relationship with a child becomes more pronounced as the parent establishes a certain distant awareness of inner cycles and problems. The responsibility of general growth is left to the school and education system in which the child or adolescent learns to consider himself individual, in a competitive environment, and forms a detachment to deep running anxieties, &c. So we have the need as the child develops to be filtered into care, into specific environment cultivated for the singular purpose of taking on a responsibility that could have been maintained had it not been for the dislocation of childhood. Rehabilitation within prisons and out with prisons is the same. The drug rehabilitation process; same. Without a valuable community to defuse certain anxieties or deep concerns, the recovery process is obsolete; it is a series of statements made by individuals who do not meet in every day life. And this rather rests of simple conclusions; the need for the realisation of flux as intrinsic to stability. We have free trade models, we have the confused definition of free will within the individual which is more or less a fatalist illusion; the propagation of free trade, free will, determines a vast number of people into the self-reflection that they are incapable do keep pace or to drive forwards their own independence. Sore dependence follows and the systems absolves itself my creating filters for these apparently inexplicable elements.

The key focus here is diffusion, the realisation that time is not equated with growth but in fact is completely malleable, changeable from community to community, person to person. Time cannot be bought, just as labour cannot be bought. Productive labour at least. A society cannot sustain itself if it is controlled, and back to Tolstoy it is impossible for man to be ruled by reason, because the possibility of life is destroyed. The most tangible and recognisable way forward is to admit that mankind is irrational, that reason is mere projection. That the truth is that discoveries are made spontaneously and because of trust relationships, and discoveries and abilities develop because of the movement towards feedback, that is quickly being effaced in the name of progress, in the image of a status quo which everyone knows has never remained the same. 

Our diminished ability to look after ourselves, feel value in our lives, understand differences in people is because of the tendency we have to believe that everyone is the same in the petty and commonplace. But television and marketing will, of course, have this very effect. The truth is that human thought is based on relevant analogies, that learning is based upon an emotional stake, some sort of feeling of freedom found in the learning process. That the invisibility of control is not invisible is certain, and that as it asserts itself a nation steps into decline unmistakable. So my statement  carries forth the very simple tenets of the enlightenment in France, the very one ignored by the United Kingdom in favour of the dead-end theories of John Locke, David Hume, Isaac Newton, who denied general involvement, who denied the possibility of growth in alternative, non marketable forms. Smith crested our enlightenment with theories of feedback which were financial, based on vested interest. But he stumbled upon later discoveries in The Wealth of Nations when he made the realisation that the very system he dreamt of was against every principle of self-value humanity had previously strove for. But, then again, this is history.