“Beauty is making the perfect of the good.“
-Aristotle
Our way of life requires far more attention to and care for our communities, families and friendships and far less arrogant outsourcing of the things which bind us to sources of confusion.
Aesthetic judgement is an indispensable factor in everyday life. Aesthetic judgement maintains an ideal of objectivity, and moreover a continuity with the moral life. It is not purely metaphysical. Not only does human purpose require a poetic vision of our own purpose, but that this vision also comes down to meet our pedestrian economic activity and the daily life of our communities. It is around the vividness of these visions that our communities coalesce.
Beauty in building community is experienced as a sense of meaning which seeks to bring concern for metaphysics and economics extremely close together. Organizing concentric rings of value in coherence with each other is experienced as togetherness.
Beauty should be the guidepost for all decisions – the end for which all other things are chosen. When a thing touches us, we know its authenticity and worthiness. It would not be touching otherwise. This means that at the very least, spending our lives on unworthy and false things is not sufficient redemption for being alive. Phoniness is extreme arrogance and ingratitude. It treats the gift of the possibility of building meaningful art, companies, buildings, etc. as something cheap, yet it is for these purposes that the entire sum of human evolution had to be endured by our forebearers, to pass on the psycho-cerebral wealth we possess in our beings.
Creating works of real authenticity and worthiness is not so easy. For one thing, we are often distracted by tantalizing, cotton-candy activities and products that may even invoke a sense of fantasy within, but leave us with hollowness when they are complete or consumed. For another, it’s natural to be fearful of digging more deeply to find ways to express our voices when we are skittish about our vulnerabilities. Despite the challenge and the digging, a refusal to is phoniness, arrogance, ingratitude and the forsaking of our sacred nature as Man.
Only exceptionalism is worthy.
We recognize the ingratitude of inauthentic products and experiences and are repelled by them as affronts on our own decency. The same is true within us – that our static, unrefined nature which rests inertly in our base appetites is what is predictable and expected. In revolting against our static, unrefined baseness we achieve that which is exceptional within.
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” – Sun Tzu
The rebellion against our own inward mediocrity is the kernel of heroism. It is the totalitarian enemy within us, drawing us into mediocre entropy, that is gravest threat of all. We instinctually understand that our happiness should be proportionate to our virtue, and know we are committing an error of phony arrogance when they are not. Only after exceptionalism is cultivated within is it then naturally expressed without. Refusal to take on this charge is the definition of unworthiness.
We instinctually understand that our happiness should be proportionate to our virtue.
It is this work of making ourselves exceptional in some or many domains within ourselves, not the second-hand consumption of products and experiences which give us an aggrandized and fantastic view of ourselves, which is worthy. We are attracted to those who have undertaken these works of exceptionalism for the sake of virtue, and repelled by those who seek to experience it second-hand by outsourcing onto others the generating of the natural, outward manifestations of that work.
Today we are flattered by our politicians such that we may live within the fantasy of our deservedness without the inward work of exceptionalism, both within ourselves and within our communities. We often seem content to outsource the maintenance of our way of life to these superstructures. The Washington Consensus, the “exorbitant privilege” of perennial trade deficits we enjoy through the global US dollar system, the abundance of “master-planned” systems like private neighborhoods and national highways, strength of the judiciary to hold back oppressive natural rights violations, the FDA’s guarantee of food and drug safety, etc.
We often seem content to outsource the maintenance of our way of life to these superstructures.
Localism
We want to be told that we need not be concerned that our communities will lose their integrity even without our earnest engagement and uplifting. But what would it take if maintaining the beauty of our communities required more concerted engagement, more conscientiousness? What would this continent look like? What would our own inner landscapes look like?
Very few people in the world enjoy the homeostasis in their communities as the benefaction of some hegemon as seem to in the United States. Most have to work far harder and care more – to the extent they are at all successful.
The result is so often a type of blithe, second-hand consumerism which makes many of us more like tourists in our own neighborhoods rather than capital owners. We so often have been aggrandized into believing we can hold tightly to ideologies while waiving our hands at the uplifting up our neighbors. We are deluded into the fantasy that if we uphold the diktat of a continental regulator and suborn our private relationships, not only will no consequences ensue but that we will actually be better off with they the guarantor of our bovine, unconsidered consumption.
This is the sociological version of the cotton-candy product we consume to tempt us away from husbanding exceptionalism within and succumbing to our unworthy nature. And in doing so, we treat ourselves more like material objects to be fed than beings with latent purpose. Often, a ruthlessness emerges when are left with our political ideology as our only cohesive agent. We come to think of one another as units of an external mechanism. It is a soft materialism that will find no bottom should these master-planned superstructures fail.
And… They are failing as we speak.
Alexander, Son of William
The American Order, or Empire as cynics tell it, has roots at least 1,000 years deep. The system of globalization we enjoy, with the US dollar at its heart, has supplied surplus consumption of inexpensive products and most especially consumption of government for Americans for 50 years.
Long ago, the ideology that led to the construction of this globalism and peculiar kind of empire was infused with the Yankee, elitist meddling and commandeering typical of that culture since the English enslaved 2/3rds of Ireland. In fairness, Alexander Hamilton’s “American System,” and the British System before it, were more truthfully heirs to the Continental method of conquest and social bulldozing of William in 1066.
The Saxons, just like heartland Americans today, always made their politics at the county level. The intimacy offered by linking community concerns to those actually present ensured that an individually inward sense of exceptionalism and worthiness could be invoked when dealing with impactful subjects.
Today, the “American System” is being unwound. US military deployment is at its lowest in a century. The US dollar as a zero-collateral, infinite-credit scheme is failing owing to its need to finally inflict inflation on Americans.
And as the petrodollar is unwinding as well, shown in stark relief through the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gulf oil states are scrambling to diversify their economies and asset base into nuclear power, experimental charter cities, crypto, etc. The US Navy even refuses to protect tankers traveling through the Persian Gulf itself! These controlling families which have been dependent on oil monopoly, US defense guarantees and selling oil to the industrialized economies at the expense of local development of their own, are nonetheless sophisticated and responsible for assets in the hundreds of billions. Their economic rotation is in a sense a valuable validation that the community-minded Americans who reject the globalization of the American System are not only correct, but winning, even if the metaverse of deep state institutions scream bloody murder on the way out.
Meanwhile, the population of Americans which have fought in its wars have been drastically over-sourced and today the most patriotic are among the most anti-war, especially as the financial system they now realize they deployed to fortify does not benefit them or their families.
And so, as the United States withdraws from its status as the guarantor of globalization, and its bonds no longer represent the risk-free rate, the “metaverse” emerges as a bizarre attempt to backfill the amorphous mental vacuum left behind. Media monopolies purveying online worlds that suck us into perpetual fantasies, a kind of folie a deux, attempt to assert a regressive rehash of how to replace this Yankee Washington Consensus: if you can’t have real globalization any longer, you can at least try for virtual globalization. The ideological derangement which is imbedded in the software comes off as more and more bizarre as viewed from the sober normalness of our communities.
If you can’t have real globalization any longer, you can at least try for virtual globalization.
Politics is a metaverse of its own. The layer after layer of contingent, “master-planned” systems are all metaverses of their own. But the actual media metaverses live at the forefront of enrolling us in leaving-by the otherwise hard-won cohesiveness, togetherness and beauty of our communities. The more these systems writhe in their inevitable financial bankruptcy, the more they attempt to enroll us in the false belief in our fragmentary internal nature, the belief in our strictly material nature and inevitable mediocrity, and in the manufacturing of schisms between the different colors and stripes of humans. There is nothing wrong with chauvinism and gusto in the uplifting of your community, especially the chauvinism that rejects the attempt to delude us into abstract, transcontinental coalitions instead.
Turn it all off. Visit the library or the rodeo or the farmer’s market. Be chauvinistic in learning about the lives and aspirations of your neighbors. Appreciate their worthiness, as “normal” as they might be, and immerse yourself in the sense of beauty and meaning that arises. You might find a sense of belonging that all screens tell you you lack.
-RC
