Systemic Rebellion and Economic Malaises
I have a weird, totally unscientific theory about pot and cancer. If it stops it in any way it might be because the overall person if seen as a system is usually less stressed if s/he uses it in some kind of moderation. A less stressed life means there's less "rebellion" and "unrest" in the body's system, so its cells don't automatically try to buck that system by going rogue, not knowing what they're doing, just wanting SOMETHING ELSE than what IS so start creating TUMOURS. I can see the cancer cells shouting at the regular ones "See, I made this tumour, you fucked up overworked under-rewarded body, you never sent me those neurotransmissions that make me want to help you, so fuck off. I'm with the Other Side now. And we're gonna shut you DOWN!"
Which is what cancer IS, essentially, as well as the crop of "autoimmune diseases/disorders" like lupus that seem to have not been around before the late 20th century (or were perhaps just never properly diagnosed...like I said, this isn't scientific. Correct me, please, if I am mistaken.) It's rebellion within the system, but its victory is beyond Pyrrhic.
It seems that people have more health conditions that aren't microbially-based like cancer, auto-immune shit, and weird unexplainable malaises that are medical mysteries, vectorless, sourceless and strange, things like Kleine-Levine Syndrome: this bizarre sleep problem that primarily affects younger males--they sleep for like 20 hours and then have insomnia for days, and it comes in unpredictable "episodes", during which the afflicted will be irritable and hypersexual (talk about a weird combination...) Or for that matter, my inane non-anorexic food-aversion, again, totally weird, sourceless, for some reason since I was old enough to eat solid food I've consistently hated to do it and thus I'm probably so mentally woobly because malnutrition stunted my development in the crucial years...things like this, did people get this shit happening to them in the days before everything got so...homogenous, compacted, overpriced and underworthed?
We're both disconnected and overconnected. Overconnection through technology is causing our brains to luxuriate yet sometimes reel from massive information overload, which IS BETTER THAN UNDERLOAD, by far, but we're vulnerable to being overwhelmed since most folks don't have time or headspace to process it. (You do, I don't, I have far too much time to process it...so I just amp up the overload, which is dumb. But I've also been really mentally fucked lately by a merry-go-round of personal stress, but the horses seem to be bobbing up and down more slowly and the wheel grinding to a halt at LAST - and man, is it about time, too.)
Mental note: figure out what to do about this overload habit I've escaped from it all into, though, since it's probably worse for me than I think.
It's still vastly superior to pre-internet era information accessibility. I want to know something? I can go call it up NOW, not have to wait til Monday morning and see if the library is updated enough to show me what I wish to know. I have a long-developed talent for ferreting out information online and know things I'm not supposed to because of it. Give me something to find online and in 4 minutes I find it, tops. ANYTHING can be found online, all you need to have is some rudimentary knowledge of where to look for it and how. Clue: Get Beyond Google. Google does NOT index the whole Web, and you miss lots of things if you don't hit the minor search engines, and also, look for things in places search engines DO NOT GO. That's how I got..well, never mind. Digression over.
While overconnected we're also vastly DISCONNECTED. Here I mean economy is totally losing momentum because the reward system is failing.
How it is now: most of you, unless you have been really ambitious and disciplined enough to get an idea, figure out how to make something no one else has made, or make something BETTER than what's available, or CHEAPER...and then throw everything you have into doing it and never get discouraged during the time it takes to get established...if you're not like that, or aren't a professional wingnut (I think I'm above the red line in fulfilling my wackjob duties but could stand to slack off less and spend less time escaping emotional reality and more time DOING and MAKING WEIRD SHIT and going bananas properly) you likely work for someone you can't stand, doing or making things that you are not even slightly recognised as the source of, spending day after week after month after year being a faceless backgrounder, cog in the machine and no matter how much they pay you it is NEVER ENOUGH to do much more than make yourself a viable employee or makework middle-management small-talk-making, asskissing robot.
They call "rising" from the shop, or the factory, or the cubefarm a "promotion", which is supposed to reward you with honour, but it's totally meaningless since NO ONE GIVES A FUCK, especially you...the extra buck an hour is just enough to cover inflation, and Gods help you if you're just graduating college now since you are SO fucked since a degree job isn't going to pay you a lot more than a non-degree job will, IF you can find one. Unless you're an engineering geek-droid, who's spent 4 to 6 years in ruthlessly competitive education - to prepare you to do the same thing for money, which promptly is GONE, and so the banks woo you with a million credcard offers and you gobble them up to keep some sense of progress going. See, I got a new doomaflotchie, didn't even have to pay for it, just show this PLASTIC CARD that says to a merchant "Hi, I'm a corporate wank who pisses in a cup, or worse yet gives a strand of hair which lets them see not only what I've ingested a fucking month ago, but if I've even been hanging around any smokers of Evil Drugs, who went to school, got a job with "benefits" (some horrid HMO health care which is actually worse than what one gets as a professional wingnut...I used to know someone who was a mechanic at BANK OF AMERICA and she confirmed this for me) and since I'm the sort of jerk who just does whatever they tell me to, that automatically means you should trust me. I will end up being able to pay for this...REAL SOON NOW..."
But two years later? $20,000 dollars in the hole, and looking at life, you realise, shit, look how many hours I'm gonna have to work to pay this off...and your reward system's back in the toilet again. Meanwhile, the merchant is also in the hole because YOU can't pay for your doomaflotchie. Is this looking healthy to ANYONE?
Here's how it was in the pre-corporate era: you have more craftspeople and farmers, who often carry their trades through their families for two or more generations, the fathers teaching their sons and the mothers their daughters, and you learn to make something, or grow something, or do something from someone close and known to you, a family member, or else you join a guild and become apprenticed to a master who teaches you everything s/he knows, one-on-one, hands-on...
Then you go to the agora, which is there instead of malls, open air markets like the flea markets we see in the better cities, but selling you everything that you would now go to Target or (puke) Mal-Wart for...cutlery, furniture, clothes, food, weapons, herbs and drugs which aren't illegal at all since there's no huge racket around it, and since the agora is not there every day it becomes a community event, where you say hello to your neighbours and friends. The agora atmosphere would seem to promote more of this than malls, strip or otherwise, since it is OPEN, that's what "agora" means.
A mall? Sequestered little stores. You don't spot your friend shopping two stores over from you, there's WALLS. Lame.
You spread your rug, you set up your stand, display your craftwork, or harvest, or fish-catch, and sell it. You want to have pride in your work since good products will be sold and bad ones won't be, word of mouth gets around, and you don't do well. If you DO a good job the opposite happens and you get flocked to. You talk to the customers, not some store clerk ringing up your stuff in a wasteful box which will just get tossed out once the customer gets home. You haggle with the customer, a sort of ritual which is all but lost and which helps the customer get a sense of the person who is the source of what they're about to buy since IT MATTERS. Your reward system is stimulated directly, since you make it happen from start to finish...and then, you interface with the people who will use it/eat it/enjoy it - resulting in actual pride in one's work which rewards the worker, with TWO kinds of coin. One is money (or barter, or trade) and the other is RECOGNITION.
Compare that with manufacturers who build on assembly lines, factory-farms that cover acres, hire cheap (illegal, therefore unregulatable) labourers who barely survive working fields to feed everyone but themselves, who never get to see the customer who buys it, nor does the buyer ever see or even ever THINK about the person who made it, or grew it.
That has a collective effect on the mass-consciousness-ego. A person who works at anything craves more than just the essential stuff necessary to live and keep working to keep living to keep working, lather, rinse, repeat PLEASE SHOOT ME NOW, lather, rinse, repeat THE CLOCK IS THE DEVIL lather, rinse, repeat, go home, shove a packet of preservatives laced with something faintly organic into the microwave oven and "nuke it", shove contents of packet into mouth, amuse yourself vicariously for an hour via TV, netsurfing or chat rooms, whatever, so long as it doesn't take much energy since YOU HAVE NONE, and sleep so you'll be nice and ready to DO IT AGAIN, and AGAIN, and AGAIN until you retire and collapse of a heart attack 6 days weeks months later (this happened to my dad, which explains why I am such a slouch, I figured it out early, that's not for me, no way. Seriously, I'd rather be a vagrant than work at any corporate job, even if I was fit for it.
People want recognition, and there's no recognition outlet available in daily life any more, not for most working people...unless one is artistically talented, really funny, REALLY physically attractive (which wears off fast, leaving someone who's used to that form of recognition rather suddenly bereft of it) and if you are mediocre in these things, or just don't have the time or energy to develop an avocation, there's a cumulative effect on the body that manifests as cancers and auto-immune shit.
The system in revolt against itself...but like the hardcore anarchist who just wants to FUCK SHIT UP, and won't even think about the rest of the system because it pissed him off so much, when the system suffers, the revolt suffers even as it grows larger, and when the system dies, the revolt dies with it.
Whatever new system replaces this all when it collapses, or rather, finishes collapsing since it's ALREADY COLLAPSING, HAS to offer an individual RECOGNITION and not just money. Do that and you fix half the malaises of "post-modern society".
I'm going to end this rant with a plea for SOMETHING to call the time we live in, other than THAT, since it bugs the SHIT out of me when something doesn't get called anything of its own, only refers to what was BEFORE IT. I guess this is the Age of Technology, but the trouble with that is "technology" was around in the 1950s, too, it just wasn't COMPUTER tech. I'd call it the Information Age. I think some already do.
But the "information economy" is a mirage. You can't eat information.
Damnit. Would that I could. I've a much more tolerant palate for it than food.
Which is what cancer IS, essentially, as well as the crop of "autoimmune diseases/disorders" like lupus that seem to have not been around before the late 20th century (or were perhaps just never properly diagnosed...like I said, this isn't scientific. Correct me, please, if I am mistaken.) It's rebellion within the system, but its victory is beyond Pyrrhic.
It seems that people have more health conditions that aren't microbially-based like cancer, auto-immune shit, and weird unexplainable malaises that are medical mysteries, vectorless, sourceless and strange, things like Kleine-Levine Syndrome: this bizarre sleep problem that primarily affects younger males--they sleep for like 20 hours and then have insomnia for days, and it comes in unpredictable "episodes", during which the afflicted will be irritable and hypersexual (talk about a weird combination...) Or for that matter, my inane non-anorexic food-aversion, again, totally weird, sourceless, for some reason since I was old enough to eat solid food I've consistently hated to do it and thus I'm probably so mentally woobly because malnutrition stunted my development in the crucial years...things like this, did people get this shit happening to them in the days before everything got so...homogenous, compacted, overpriced and underworthed?
We're both disconnected and overconnected. Overconnection through technology is causing our brains to luxuriate yet sometimes reel from massive information overload, which IS BETTER THAN UNDERLOAD, by far, but we're vulnerable to being overwhelmed since most folks don't have time or headspace to process it. (You do, I don't, I have far too much time to process it...so I just amp up the overload, which is dumb. But I've also been really mentally fucked lately by a merry-go-round of personal stress, but the horses seem to be bobbing up and down more slowly and the wheel grinding to a halt at LAST - and man, is it about time, too.)
Mental note: figure out what to do about this overload habit I've escaped from it all into, though, since it's probably worse for me than I think.
It's still vastly superior to pre-internet era information accessibility. I want to know something? I can go call it up NOW, not have to wait til Monday morning and see if the library is updated enough to show me what I wish to know. I have a long-developed talent for ferreting out information online and know things I'm not supposed to because of it. Give me something to find online and in 4 minutes I find it, tops. ANYTHING can be found online, all you need to have is some rudimentary knowledge of where to look for it and how. Clue: Get Beyond Google. Google does NOT index the whole Web, and you miss lots of things if you don't hit the minor search engines, and also, look for things in places search engines DO NOT GO. That's how I got..well, never mind. Digression over.
While overconnected we're also vastly DISCONNECTED. Here I mean economy is totally losing momentum because the reward system is failing.
How it is now: most of you, unless you have been really ambitious and disciplined enough to get an idea, figure out how to make something no one else has made, or make something BETTER than what's available, or CHEAPER...and then throw everything you have into doing it and never get discouraged during the time it takes to get established...if you're not like that, or aren't a professional wingnut (I think I'm above the red line in fulfilling my wackjob duties but could stand to slack off less and spend less time escaping emotional reality and more time DOING and MAKING WEIRD SHIT and going bananas properly) you likely work for someone you can't stand, doing or making things that you are not even slightly recognised as the source of, spending day after week after month after year being a faceless backgrounder, cog in the machine and no matter how much they pay you it is NEVER ENOUGH to do much more than make yourself a viable employee or makework middle-management small-talk-making, asskissing robot.
They call "rising" from the shop, or the factory, or the cubefarm a "promotion", which is supposed to reward you with honour, but it's totally meaningless since NO ONE GIVES A FUCK, especially you...the extra buck an hour is just enough to cover inflation, and Gods help you if you're just graduating college now since you are SO fucked since a degree job isn't going to pay you a lot more than a non-degree job will, IF you can find one. Unless you're an engineering geek-droid, who's spent 4 to 6 years in ruthlessly competitive education - to prepare you to do the same thing for money, which promptly is GONE, and so the banks woo you with a million credcard offers and you gobble them up to keep some sense of progress going. See, I got a new doomaflotchie, didn't even have to pay for it, just show this PLASTIC CARD that says to a merchant "Hi, I'm a corporate wank who pisses in a cup, or worse yet gives a strand of hair which lets them see not only what I've ingested a fucking month ago, but if I've even been hanging around any smokers of Evil Drugs, who went to school, got a job with "benefits" (some horrid HMO health care which is actually worse than what one gets as a professional wingnut...I used to know someone who was a mechanic at BANK OF AMERICA and she confirmed this for me) and since I'm the sort of jerk who just does whatever they tell me to, that automatically means you should trust me. I will end up being able to pay for this...REAL SOON NOW..."
But two years later? $20,000 dollars in the hole, and looking at life, you realise, shit, look how many hours I'm gonna have to work to pay this off...and your reward system's back in the toilet again. Meanwhile, the merchant is also in the hole because YOU can't pay for your doomaflotchie. Is this looking healthy to ANYONE?
Here's how it was in the pre-corporate era: you have more craftspeople and farmers, who often carry their trades through their families for two or more generations, the fathers teaching their sons and the mothers their daughters, and you learn to make something, or grow something, or do something from someone close and known to you, a family member, or else you join a guild and become apprenticed to a master who teaches you everything s/he knows, one-on-one, hands-on...
Then you go to the agora, which is there instead of malls, open air markets like the flea markets we see in the better cities, but selling you everything that you would now go to Target or (puke) Mal-Wart for...cutlery, furniture, clothes, food, weapons, herbs and drugs which aren't illegal at all since there's no huge racket around it, and since the agora is not there every day it becomes a community event, where you say hello to your neighbours and friends. The agora atmosphere would seem to promote more of this than malls, strip or otherwise, since it is OPEN, that's what "agora" means.
A mall? Sequestered little stores. You don't spot your friend shopping two stores over from you, there's WALLS. Lame.
You spread your rug, you set up your stand, display your craftwork, or harvest, or fish-catch, and sell it. You want to have pride in your work since good products will be sold and bad ones won't be, word of mouth gets around, and you don't do well. If you DO a good job the opposite happens and you get flocked to. You talk to the customers, not some store clerk ringing up your stuff in a wasteful box which will just get tossed out once the customer gets home. You haggle with the customer, a sort of ritual which is all but lost and which helps the customer get a sense of the person who is the source of what they're about to buy since IT MATTERS. Your reward system is stimulated directly, since you make it happen from start to finish...and then, you interface with the people who will use it/eat it/enjoy it - resulting in actual pride in one's work which rewards the worker, with TWO kinds of coin. One is money (or barter, or trade) and the other is RECOGNITION.
Compare that with manufacturers who build on assembly lines, factory-farms that cover acres, hire cheap (illegal, therefore unregulatable) labourers who barely survive working fields to feed everyone but themselves, who never get to see the customer who buys it, nor does the buyer ever see or even ever THINK about the person who made it, or grew it.
That has a collective effect on the mass-consciousness-ego. A person who works at anything craves more than just the essential stuff necessary to live and keep working to keep living to keep working, lather, rinse, repeat PLEASE SHOOT ME NOW, lather, rinse, repeat THE CLOCK IS THE DEVIL lather, rinse, repeat, go home, shove a packet of preservatives laced with something faintly organic into the microwave oven and "nuke it", shove contents of packet into mouth, amuse yourself vicariously for an hour via TV, netsurfing or chat rooms, whatever, so long as it doesn't take much energy since YOU HAVE NONE, and sleep so you'll be nice and ready to DO IT AGAIN, and AGAIN, and AGAIN until you retire and collapse of a heart attack 6 days weeks months later (this happened to my dad, which explains why I am such a slouch, I figured it out early, that's not for me, no way. Seriously, I'd rather be a vagrant than work at any corporate job, even if I was fit for it.
People want recognition, and there's no recognition outlet available in daily life any more, not for most working people...unless one is artistically talented, really funny, REALLY physically attractive (which wears off fast, leaving someone who's used to that form of recognition rather suddenly bereft of it) and if you are mediocre in these things, or just don't have the time or energy to develop an avocation, there's a cumulative effect on the body that manifests as cancers and auto-immune shit.
The system in revolt against itself...but like the hardcore anarchist who just wants to FUCK SHIT UP, and won't even think about the rest of the system because it pissed him off so much, when the system suffers, the revolt suffers even as it grows larger, and when the system dies, the revolt dies with it.
Whatever new system replaces this all when it collapses, or rather, finishes collapsing since it's ALREADY COLLAPSING, HAS to offer an individual RECOGNITION and not just money. Do that and you fix half the malaises of "post-modern society".
I'm going to end this rant with a plea for SOMETHING to call the time we live in, other than THAT, since it bugs the SHIT out of me when something doesn't get called anything of its own, only refers to what was BEFORE IT. I guess this is the Age of Technology, but the trouble with that is "technology" was around in the 1950s, too, it just wasn't COMPUTER tech. I'd call it the Information Age. I think some already do.
But the "information economy" is a mirage. You can't eat information.
Damnit. Would that I could. I've a much more tolerant palate for it than food.