A Summary of most ideas so far...

Just thinking aloud - I think I'm almost thru this phase of the analysis of life... and isn't work, social structure, social rules, class, culture, money, shopping and property and HUGE chunk of archaeology that needs to be digested!

Back to basics: "Money" is a non consumable store of wealth prior to exchange for consumable goods [very broad definition]. So grain is not a good store of wealth because it rots, and so makes poor money, but it has the advantage of being "real" wealth since we Really need to eat. That which we need tends not to be a good store of wealth. Unfortunate irony there that to be rich is to fill our house with useless things!

But what is the point of having lots of money? In its simplest analysis it is to ensure the ability of future exchanges for consuambles.

Split consuambles into Real consumables (those needed for life) and Luxury consumables like this computer I write upon. I've re-proven I can write on paper, however I can't publish so easily, but then does anyone really "need" to read all this? Only advantage to this process is that airing one's progress enables valuable input along the way rather than all at the end. So there is some necessity to this, but I've received 1 comment so far so all the technology amounts to very little. Its luxury.

But recently the analysis in this blog has taken this a a whole lot further and shown this is not even half the picture. Social structure and participation appears to be the real nature of the matrix.

Looking at Money economically misses the point, its use is to tie together the social fabric.

As if we still need to worry about the necessities in life in western post-industrial society. Of the 60million in the UK only 50% are eligible to work, and only 1% of those work in agriculture: that is 300,000 in farming in the UK. 75% in services!

The work we do in the UK does not actually address necessities like in the common model, it addresses luxuries. In other words if we didn't do it it wouldn't make much material difference!

The figures are skewed because things are interconnected. Without oil, electricity, water, roads, processing plants, mines, chemistry, genetics the agricultural sector wouldn't be so efficient but it would be interesting to work out just how many man-hours are needed each year to keep us all in a fixed and comfortable standard of living. With advances in efficiency and technology each generation should see a reduction in the hours required to do the same work. This is how technology was sold in the 60s - labour saving. If we can produce the same for less work, our labour becomes more valuable and we should get paid more. But then less people need to work, so redundancies ensue and labour-wages stop being the best distribution system. Fundamental problems that need addressing in the near future - especially since we are trying to "Go Green" the fundamental way being to just shrink the economy and stop working! (No-one ever talks about this stuff.. amazing. Am I really the first?)

But, all this overlooks the real purpose: society. The reason why we continue to sail down this river of eternal toil and labour even despite many millenia of gradual improvement in efficiency and technology is because we are driven not by lifes necessities but by societies structure.

Labour, salary and capital are king-pins in our understanding of "civilisation". Without these no-one has any idea at all how to think about "life". It would be chaos if we didn't need to go to work. What would we do? This is the "nothing hour" problem which at least I've a name for now. How would we decide who got what? How would we decide who was top dog and who was subordinate? Sadly we might regress to fights which is more a reflection on how little evolution has really been effected by "civilsation" so far. Odd thing to note: the higher up the system you go the more regressive things seem to get - it is only countries that are sanctioned to fight today. The rest of use have to be civilsed. Strange to think I am more civilsed than Great Britain who has a very long history of fighting! I have never physically fought (couple of skirmishes at school maybe) and am even trying to reduce my rhetorical skirmishes - how civilsed is that!

It seems that "society" not just for me, but for people in general, is a very hard thing to maintain and develop.

I realise I hold a very ideal and radical notion of society - quite religious. Society is an already existing fabric (or potential) which enables us as human agents to interact. It is not the interactions which form society (as I read recently Tim Ingold argues), but the society that enables the interaction.

NOTE: desert island analyses to come. Explaining things Lord of the Fly style is a very useful analysis technique. Do it!

Two human beings on a desert island who have never met are most probably already involved in a society. If they speak a language for example the chances are that language had a common root somewhere in history. They are already embedded into a common world thereby. Even if it is only sign language they will have a communion. Even if it takes the form of throwing stones at each other, they have already engaged into a game which presumes rules that they must have already known. Where did this possibility of meaninful interaction come from (we don't think of human beings interacting like ball and racket, we assume meaning)? Do we really think that two people meeting on a desert island will have to start from a blank slate, no matter how disparate their origins. They already exist in a society before they even meet which furnishes them with all the tools to interact.

With this view of society we respect all humans before we even interact with them. Infact we respect all things treating them as what they are (viz. definition of 'fascism' which is to define ones interaction with some thing, based upon one's own side only). The potential for interaction is already laid - we can only utilise that potential for good or bad(fascism).

Sadly many, quite educated, people seem to think that humans might really exist separate on a desert island until they meet. Then they can chose whether to meet again and make society, or agree to build a wall and never meet again. What a fragile and limp notion of society and human interaction this is. Borrow a term from Marx and Freud - this is the worst part of Bouregois Ego. I have few interactions with people these days. I am seeking perfection, and I am not finding it in my interactions. Situations with girl-friends, bosses, society just don't gel - I have too many disagreement, imperfections to be satisfied with these badly formed relationships. But that is only the form my society takes. But, this does not stop me examining society and writing! Why is this? It is because I am part of society already (to be an "I" presupposes this!) how I express that in free/exploitative, textual/physical, sexual/non-sexual relationships is superficial... although it emerges that society is truthfully expressed in "good" relationships not bad (a definition).

[Mum just accused me of wasting my time as opposed to having a job. It is remarkable how ideas get absorbed without any real understanding how to use them. I simply said to her if I hired someone to do this, so that it was their job, would it then not be a waste of time? On that logic why not hire myself and pay myself, which while I am working is financially zero sum and makes employment pointless - Ergo: Employment is not the same as working - good old Ouroboros :-) He is called Jörmungandr in Norse and I read recently was one of the 3 evil progeny of Loki who would finally defeat Thor at the Ragnarök .. 1 less day to work then with no Thorsdays ;-) ... unusualy that the Ouroboros is an evil entity here - I can't decide whether it is delusive or enlightening - still to satisfy that self-reference issue which it encapsulates (tho ina tail in mouth way)]

[is it interesting to use the ! symbol in place of the I? So that ! might say, what ! really want to do is divert texts away from ontologising the self or maybe ! could use the '!' for all terms which refer to self? so that it deontologises the ! completely. Only problem is the keyboard layout.]

Finally a note on "sidedness" I noted in the preceeding blog. Contemplating a stone how can it be anything other than one sided - the stone has no thoughts, feeling or wishes of its own. Surely we can do what we please with a stone. This is the heart of the problem with Nature. Try and chew a stone and it will break your teeth (if its harder than 5 on Mohs hardness scale - given that enamel is hydroxylapatite a baaad joke: Q: what do healthy french teeth say to each other before a meal? A: bon-apatite ;-). The stone has its own nature which we need to be aware of in a relationship with the stone. The fascist might get angry at the stone for scratching his teeth and have it pounded with a hammer - but the fault lies with the fascist because the stone "did" nothing (interesting... another note here on "doing"). Thus we have a two sided relationship with the stone. The stone has its own Nature which must be respected first in any relationship. This nature belongs to the stone, the process of gaining knowledge of that nature begins then with respect for the stone. Oddly knowledges are often named after people. Take "Newton's" Laws of motion. He discovered them and codified them so "F=Ma" is Newton's, but the motion that it describes if anyone's at all belongs to God. After all the 'F=Ma' is only famous, and Newton by association, because of its correspondence with actual physical motion! Really it was Newton gaining the name of Nature which made him so successful. Humility and respect are the attitudes, even to a stone, that enable ironically humans to have such power. Watch a stone carefully, listen to it with utmost attention and you can master it! That is the lesson in science. How much more then should we listen and pay attention to our fellow animals and even more so people! What still confuses me here is that in a conscious interaction there are two fronts. There is the other-side as in a stone relationship, but there is the other-side in the conscious relationship also - that is where the problems for me occur - my own consciousness needs to grow here so this will come in time.

[After much private thought I'm introducting the double comma. Exactly like the double quotation " versus the single ', so separate lists of sublists - you will see in the next paragraph... it's practical to double then recursively, though it is hard to read I grant.. I'll try]

Quick note (and I'm tired of thinking and writing for the now). A fascist grows angry at the stone and curses, "look what you have done now". There is a sense when Nature acts that it is doing something. It is not intentional but is it wrong to say that things are "done". Mountains are built and decayed, water evaporates,, rain falls and rivers flow, creatures grow and decay, the sun shines. For the economy to do this would be impossible. It is vast immeasurable amounts of work, there must be some doing? What this highlights is that when we talk of "doing" we are not referring to any real "work", or effect that is produced we are talking about the intentions and human will behind that physical eventing. Sir Christopher Wren "did" St Pauls cathedral, not because he raised a finger toward the construction but because it was his Will that was effected. So in accordance with the analysis at the top that "work" is not a measure of energy expended, or things done but rather on Wills exacted, and the mediation of wills is achieved through the social order (which is an expression of the potential for society in human beings).

Which all flies in the face of the fact that no-matter what the social order, or the strength of people's will it is the food that is made and the water that is cleansed that fuels our Life.

OK so that lengthy refluxing of ideas separates two opposing substances: Nature and Will. Without nature we die. Will wishes to subsume this logic.