That Ineffable Quality

There was an episode of Star Trek Next Generation called Measure of a Man in which a scientist who has been granted permission from an admiral to disassemble Data as part of an experiment comes aboard the Enterprise.

Even though the digital data in his positronic brain could be saved, this process of disassembly could be similar to killing data or wiping away his soul. He objects to having the experiment done but is refused. So Captain Picard helps Data fight the case in a military field court.

In one scene Data is having a conversation with the scientist who is trying to force him to undergo the experiment, and when asked why he is resisting the procedure, Data explains that there is an ineffable quality to his existence which is more than just digital data. Through the procedure the scientist wants to perform that ineffable quality of Data’s being would be forever lost.

Sometimes I think of Heidegger’s writings when I think about Being. We as beings are part of being. We experience being and Being presences, or touches, us. Being can also withdraw from us. But we do not necessarily have a method or skill by which the presencing or the withdrawal of Being can be detected.

In other words, we could be totally fucked and not really know it because there’s no requirement to Being that it announces its withdrawal. Although the withdrawal of Being essentially means a catastrophe. In a sense it means the annihilation of existence.

Heidegger gives examples like a bridge that is built by humans to cross a creek or stream, vs. something like a hydroelectric dam. The bridge, carefully built, can become part of the landscape. It brings together the various essences of water, Earth, human beings, a village, etc.

A hydroelectric damn does not bring together but demands or forces from nature. Such a process of forcing fundamentally changes the essence of the river.

What is that ineffable quality of things which forms a part of life, which humans know and feel when it is present, but without which something is lost? That something can be our own humanity as, when things like rivers or forests or Earth are lost, we too necessarily become lost.

Many years ago people seemed to be concerned about and were sometimes discussing the significance of the Gini Coefficient for societies. The Gini Coefficient is a measurement of the disparity between incomes in a society. A high Gini Coefficient means there is a high income disparity.

Societies with high Gini Coefficients are different than those with low Gini Coefficients. Despite all the PhD’s at so many institutions of “higher” “education”, it seems very few are dedicated to understanding things like this. Most are satisfied with designing more efficient mazes for rats to run in.

The effects of inequality on society are poisonous. As the level of inequality increases, the poisons become more and more bitter. When you live in a society where this is happening you are experiencing it first hand, whether you have words to describe it or not. Whether you have a context in which to fully comprehend it and to process it or not.

Just as when, bit by bit, little pieces of Earth are destroyed and things become parts of a spreading wasteland, so little pieces of something ineffable about each human being and about human communities and societies is destroyed.

As the process of poisoning continues at some point one may step back and compare the current state of things with a previous state and, at that moment, it becomes very stark how severe the damage is, how extreme the changes and the loss.

I am watching my city, my state, and my country die. San Francisco has died spiritually as a city. There is something ineffable, which cannot easily be measured, which is gone. I know because I have been here long enough to have witnessed it, to experience it with my blood.

Today I was driving past the financial district, the downtown area with all the new glass and steel skycrapers, and it all just felt so cold, so lost, so dead. One building had a sign in front that said “Center yourself here” or something to that effect, alluding to the fact that the location was in the center of the city, and attempting to appeal to some type of sense of spirituality.

How there could be any spirituality in that twisted disaster zone of an area I cannot imagine. You could spend billions and billions of dollars on so much synthetic shit and never create one bit of happiness or inspiration when it’s all spiritually dead.

Earlier I was driving in a very upscale area in the hills of Oakland. What a stark contrast from where I live. People living in these amazing homes with amazing gardens and the smell of fragrance in the air. To live in a place like that, you clearly are one of the ones who have “made it” in this society.

I guess when you have “made it” and are living in a place like that, you are so cut off from what is going on that you don’t notice that your city, your society, or your country has died. Because you live in a bubble of prestige.

I guess that is the model for the USA: Become successful so that you can exist in your bubble of prestige, the rest of society and Earth be damned.

I reject all of what is here: I reject the poverty and I also reject the wealth. They are both part of the same disease. That is not my society. That is not how my people live. That is not what my people strive for.

Success for my people is entirely different, and it involves being connected, not disconnected.

But part of the process of becoming successful involves attending the prestige institutions of higher education, which cut people off even more. They condition people to have disdain for those who lack the prestige, those who are unsuccessful.

I’ve written many times about the path of brahmanic cultivation and how it is part of a healthy society. A healthy society is not one in which it is possible to obtain wealth, but, quite the opposite, one in which it is possible not to obtain wealth. That is a truly healthy society.

A society which forces people onto a treadmill like slaves is not a healthy society, and in that type of society there is no freedom and no equality. It’s a given that the ground for brahmanic cultivation is disrupted. Such a society is cruel and becomes increasingly tyrannical and repressive.

That is the USA right now. It’s soul is dead. It is spiritually dead. The treadmill is spinning fast and if you can’t run fast enough you are expended. The system has no allegiance to the People. Rather, it practices human sacrifice.

Just like that bumper sticker that used to be popular years ago “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty” the motto of this society should be “Practice random treachery and acts of human sacrifice”.

All I can say is, it is all wrong. This is all wrong. I want to go back to where I grew up, where hopefully this horrible rot has not yet spread. But the rot is here, in the USA, and the country is doomed.

There needs to be a radical change – either some major break ups into brand new nations or else a complete revolution.

On a recent “Strike and Mike” episode Striker used the term “the Biden junta”. That phrase stuck in my mind. Yes, it is a junta. But what I’ve been thinking about is that it is so much more. The junta involves an entire tier of society. Even if the entire Biden administration were replaced, there would immediately be another group to take its place and continue doing the exact same things.

The poison has spread deeply across society and will not be easily removed. The poison is going to play out. White Americans are vanquished and, in what is a historical first, there was never a battle fought. A war was waged against us and we lost, and most people didn’t even know the war was taking place before it was already over.

There is a place today named “San Francisco”, but San Francisco is dead. Much of the USA is dead or dying. There are pockets of life left. I hope they are preserved and I pray I will be able to live in one soon.

Having a billion dollars and my own bubble of prestige wouldn’t make me happy. Having a country with borders – going back to the USA as it was in the 1970’s would. Have a society that is more equal, less congested, more spiritually advanced, and a lot slower would.

Just a little update. Today I was listening to a podcast with Blonde in the Belly of the Beast and Morgoth and at one point Morgoth mentions a path that was built somewhere in England. In building the path they expended extra effort to cut through rock so that the path would deliberately go near a little waterfall.

Morgoth rhetorically asks: Why did they put in the effort to make the path go near the waterfall? There’s no digital reason for it. Nothing in our calculating world about what is valuable and what is not would indicate any value in doing so. But yet they did it. There must be something, then, about the waterfall. Something outside the digital, outside the typical valuation that get chained upon virtually all of existence.

That is the same, ineffable quality that is a part of our human existence, but is not measured or calculated by the dominant system of the representation of truth.

Because we have become so consumed by the dominant representation of truth which masks concealment in itself, we allow devastation to unfold in myriad untold ways.

When a community, a city, a state, or an entire nation is turned into nothing more than a market for capital, defined by constrictive definitions of economic activity, everything else about its essence is devastated.

This devastation, which is a devastation also of ourselves, is marked in different ways.