The Crow's Eye: Recipe

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Nov 6, 2011

Recipe

Recipe:

5 - 1000+ people
1 shared space or project
Competing needs and desires
Ego
$500, 000 (or more)

Mix together in a privately owned park. Heat at ambient temperature. Plate cold.

Serves six.

*

Once a group begins to define its actions by the limited resource of consensus money, once currency recreates the conditions of scarcity in the distribution of those resources, you also get scarcity in the redistribution of influence and social relations. Scarcity makes power. The people with the power to distribute the money, the resources, the satisfaction of needs, the security - they band together. And then they use some of the take to protect their ability to control it. The replication, again and again, of the stable form of power.

Introduce money* (which is formalized scarcity), get a hierarchy.

Want a human community in resistance to end up looking like the society or group it opposes?

Send 'em money.

* - credit is money, see Graeber ("What is debt?") in links to the right

2 comments:

Anatole David said...: Bingo. Exchangeable value requires coercion and creates hierarchies.

Graeber's book on Debt is excellent.

Money's a Jealous God's trust.

"Debts are sacred!"; November 6, 2011 at 9:17 AM
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...: "Add ingredients, stir"
~; November 6, 2011 at 9:33 AM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.