2021-02-26, Breaking Illusions With Math

Howdy folks! I have an important update to start with:

The "emspeculation" newsletter, which I started earlier in the month, is ending, really before it got off the ground. Stripe won't verify my account, so there's no way for me to do a paid and private newsletter. Luckily, it's only the accounts associated with that newsletter that seem to have been affected - my primary Stripe account is still active!

Spring is rapidly approaching the part of Earth on which I live, and in fact the past couple days it was about 18c out, so I was able to do some work preparing the garden! There might be a photo of some of the compost that I riddled out at the bottom of this post. (And a quick glance at the weather forecast says we're in for weather in the 50s for the next week, with a rainstorms in a couple days… Maybe I can get some seed scattered before the showers get here tomorrow!)

The last time I wrote it was to share a shift in my praxis: I was going to move from endlessly performing labor for the Collaborators around me through an imbalanced and dishonest relationship masquerading as "anarcho-mutualism," and instead start using what little money I had to start doing speculative investing. (That's why I set up another newsletter: to talk about that investment stuff.)

Since then, the local community of "mutualist" folk have taken an… odd stance, that has really solidified my opinion to give myself space from them, to make space for other things. Also since then, I've had frank conversations with other people, who expressed that the main reason they can't really do more to act as anarcho-mutualists is because they don't have trust that their work will be valued. Having just had a community erase my work to justify excluding me, I understand those fears.

Sigh… this is another one of those pieces where I keep redrafting what I'm trying to say. - Colonial culture lives itself inside of an illusion it created. - This is actively dangerous to other cultures, since it makes actual communciation nearly impossible. - But most colonials that gain an awareness of the illusion do it through trauma. - It'd be preferable to educate people without trauma.

Now, I really mean "without trauma," here. I don't mean without discomfort. The things colonial people need to learn about are things like "the way you feed yourself guarantees starvation for your descendents," and that's an uncomfortable thing to learn about. But, there's a big difference between those sort of growing pains, and seeing your children's garden fail because you've burnt gas to get to and from work for an hour, 260 days a year, for forty years.

Part of the issue with trying to teach people who live inside an illusion where they have the power of creation, is that they can easily move into new spaces, creating new ideas. If your perspective if constantly shifting like that, without you even being consciously aware of it, it's really hard to actual understand anything!

One thing that's proven helpful - when people are willing to accept discomfort - is numbers. For example, asking folk to sit and do the math me with: how many hours a week do they spend earning money through the kyriarchy, where most of their labor's value ends up in the hands of capitalists and the state? How much of their income and remaining time goes into recreation that is also a part of the kyriarchy? For a lot of white-collar people, nearly every hour ends up, basically, being them putting their value into the settler-colonial system.

How, then, do they reckon they'll be able to dismantle it? Is the two hours a week - taken from the most exhausted part of the week, likely - that goes into resisting or disrupting the kyriarchy… really enough to outweigh a life lived entirely within it? Ask most white people to balance the cost value of their actions in favor of perpetual oppression, with their actions against it, and… the numbers aren't good. Add in the magnification of power that a settler-colonial hegemony enables, and the "market value" of any given person's Collaboration far exceeds the value of their resistance.

I don't say this to be mean, or make folk feel guilty, but… most of us have that mental image of an adult, up late at night at the kitchen table, bills and checkbooks scattered around them. We can picture the person finally finishing some arithmetic, and putting their head in their hands. Maybe they get up and get their spouse, and they stand around the kitchen and have a long and painful talk. The numbers do not work: something in life has to change.

And then the next day? Nothing "real" has changed. But the person's understanding has. And sometime, maybe that day or maybe the next week, there will be an opportunity to cause change. And the person might see it, and might even act toward it, when before, they would've never felt the need.

That sort of, late-night, bills-scattered-on-the-table, reckoning of life, is what I think more people need to do. To be frank, if oil energy is destroying life's capabilities, then holding retirement funds in oil companies requires a reckoning. We're being told to prepare for a ghastly future. Does that have a place in your retirement planning?

It must, but can it? Not only is it uncomfortable, but the illusion-world Collaborators live in make it very easy to simply change the illusion, rather than understand the reality it represents.

In our complex world, it's easy to forget the basic tools we created generations ago. The problem I describe here is that someone must navigate a world of unfamiliar landmarks, and the basic tool is a map. A world of economics is mapped with ledgers.

So far the past few weeks I've been exploring double-book accounting, as an… almost rhetorical tool, for helping see how I see the world around me. I'm not yet ready to share anything about that, but I wanted to give a little perspective on what I'm up to.

While I'm here, here's some other things folk should know: - I'm moving my digital garden someplace out of the public view. Keeping it there makes it too tricky to know who I'm writing for in any given entry. I know a lot of people appreciate the resource, and I definitely plan on producing something, but maybe like, on an annual basis? - I'll be maintaining a blog at Ecency, as part of my on-going exploration of blockchain technology. (Here's a link to the RSS.)

I know it's been hard to stay updated on what I'm doing, and I'm sorry for that. Good news is, it's not much, and it's nothing that I can't write about after-the-fact!