The Maybe-Heaven

Actuality, the Actual Totality, is a meaningless mechanistic conglomeration of cold, dead matter--the dregs cast out from the realm of the Virtual as being unfit to serve; Actuality is what is too bad to be even concrete possibility. The contradictions of past as against future, and of future as against past (this being distinct from the first), assure the present as the greatest contradiction of all, against whatever good reckoning might be brought to bear on the problem. In other words, the actuality of the present is pulled both ways by bullshit (the bullshit of freedom, or is it the freedom of bullshit?).

This is not to say that the Virtual Totality is a heaven. Virtual (symbolic) commitments are eternal, but only so long as we allow them to be. Unfortunately, that freedom only emerges from the self-determined (read: non-determined!). Thus, the Virtual Totality may be meaningful, it may make sense, but, being Virtual, it is anyone's guess whether this is the case. The fact that Actuality is fundamentally shitty (maybe primarily in its relation to the Virtual?) doesn't help one's spirits either. Notice the lack of referent--who's it shitty for? That question is one of the shittiest.

So here we have the closed loop of freedom once again, a loop which is not so much self-determined (as would be a real freedom) as it is determined by planar differences (these being Virtual or Actual as the case may be). A diremption necessary for time, but then again badness is eternally temporal. Reminds me of Benjamin--maybe doubt is truth, in its aspect as the Infinite, that self-determined parts-and-whole which was only so recently the Ought. I believe we are trapped in this Ought, though the dialectic may go on unabated, unheeding.

Freedom and Security: Society as Phenomenality

So this horrendous Ariel Castro deal led me to some thoughts...

The specific cultural logic in which we live (capitalism, patriarchy, the racial order, etc.) presents itself to us as Reality. This Reality is one of dualism, in other words Maya. The capitalist structure of government and social interaction creates not only opposing (as in logically negated) concepts, but forces concepts into opposition in novel and shitty ways. For example, the opposition between security and freedom that is so often discussed. This rests on a specific and unnecessary opposition between the two concepts, resting on (of course) private property relations. People believe they have the right to do whatever they want with/on their property. Privacy conceptions (as opposed to private property ownership) interact dialectically with the technical level of society, often reacting against the technological development which has engendered a state or conception of non-privacy. Next (or before, as the case may be) the ideology of property comes in, strengthened.

These considerations lead me to believe that opposition occurs due to social context (the old Marxist axiom). Thus they are highly variable. Formal logic's insistence on "logical negation" is contrived on two levels: the way people interact with the world, and cultural logic on a social level, do not conceive of binary negation, meaning there is always a "taintedness" to concepts; second, the individual concept of binary negation is doubly contrived because it is based on social context as well as on a process of dry abstraction which cuts horizontal relations completely out of the picture, thus bastardizing even the social context. There is no such thing as negation on the level of Brahman, of course. Maya functions on the level of phenomenality--in other words, on the level of the social.

So going back to Castro, ideally there would be no ability to do what he did, or to do a lot of related-but-not-as-extremely-shocking things that happen much more commonly and on a much wider scale, because there would be no debate on security and freedom, no conception of private property on which that could base itself, and no socially-defined opposition between the two things that I'm sure everyone wants: freedom and security.

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/8026418953/