An exploration of power

I was pondering some ideas that a friend of mine has. She is very conspiracy theorist.

And, despite all the glamorous Shiney yet behind the scenes workings of Self interest, my mind went to further or upon a deeper strata of the idea of power itself..

 I think what makes people nervous about power in our current global capitalist world, is that people will become so rich that they will be able to manipulate people because they have so much money. And that the rest of the people will be forced into doing things that they don’t want to do. Or something along those lines. I feel that’s the crux of the issue with power, that people will abuse it and that other people will suffer.

For example my friend who feels that there is a global conspiracy implemented by the liberal left and Donald Trump is the last bastion of hope for the American way and the free market system.

I’m not taking any position on whether this is true or not, but merely commenting on what may be Allowing or informing people to develop these conspiracies in such a way that they become so convincing. And my I conclusion is that it could be based on this idea that some people are going to control me despite my best efforts and intentions, And they will be able to do this because of, basically, the power that they’ve come upon with money. 

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But I would like to offer a different view of what’s actually occurring now with power and capitalism.

I feel that there is no putting a cap on the potential for people to want to gain power for themselves; I mean, we may want to, we may argue ethically why we should, but ultimately the capacity for people to manipulate discursive categories is infinite, and so we will never be able to put a cap on human potential.

But I don’t mean this in the sense of authoritarianism or despotism, I mean this in the regular sense that me as a free person, I wanna be able to go water skiing wherever I want whenever I want. I want to be able to have the best cut of meat on my plate, and the best chefs serving me the best food at all times. I want to be able to not have to work anymore. I want to be able to play video games 24 seven and do cocaine and crystal meth as much as I want.

I’m talking about this kind of basic human desire to do whatever they want. I’m not applying some sort of innate human idea of ethics, because we could argue for centuries about whether doing what I want is really doing what I want, or is it really doing what other people want and I just think that I’m doing what I want, or if there really is this fundamental “free self” that if left unchecked will fuck everyone else up.

Ok

My proposal is based in the fact that money is just an ideal category. It is not based on anything that is “physical”, for example “finite resources”.  The idea of money economy is not based on whether I have enough food to eat or the world does. Money has to do with the idea that there are resources. Because ultimately even if there was a finite amount of food to eat and less and less people are eating them, and starving and dying, I would still be able to be a member of the last group on earth able to survive on what resources are left. Given that there is no resources in that all humans die never happens in actuality. And I mean “never happens” in the sense that if all human beings die, then any knowledge that we would be having of any sort of analysis ceases to exist and utterly fails.

Ok S’more.

My proposal is that the human propensity, capacity, and ability, to take advantage and figure out a way to get what they need and want despite anyone else, is for all purposes, infinite. The idea that it is not is based on the idea of finite resources, which I said just above, is really just an idea category against this potential for human beings. People who make tons of money basically understand that all we are dealing with is ideas. Because all really someone Hass to do in order to make tons of money is think differently. And I would suggest that that is what people who make tons of money are actually doing: they are thinking differently than the rest of the people who just have to scrape by and work day today so they can go water skiing for two weeks in the summer. 

Now; The fear that we have of people having control over us is based in the idea of finite resources. That is really the whole of Marxist critique, namely, that money is just an idea and this idea is of finite resources.

But what I’m saying is that the reality of the matter for people to take advantage of situations, to come upon ideal situations as if they are material situations, to make what is merely an idea into material, but also to understand that the idea itself is material, this ability of the human being places us in a different relationship to power then we historically want or even like toto reckon.

The analogy that I will use right now is that the conventional and traditional way to view power is like power over the sun affects what can happen on the earth. And this is to say that if someone could control the sun, then everyone on earth would have to submit to whatever the person that controls the sun once. This is the primal fear which motivates pretty much every analysis of social economy and global capitalism, I feel.

But I’m saying that what will happen as people, as a certain sect or group of people, become more and more powerful because they have more and more money and are able to manipulate more and more sub systems, eventually the “rest of the people” will be unaffected by this echelon of mega money power brokers.

I am saying that what will happen is a quantitative change, as opposed to merely a qualitative change in the ability for power to exert influence.

Instead of someone controlling the sun who this puts everyone who lives on the earth under the potential control of the person who controls the sun…

…the analogy at some point, when some sort of threshold is crossed in the potential of power-money, is more like people controlling Jupiter Or maybe Pluto is a better analogy. Yes we could say by some strange gravitational analysis, that if someone can control Jupiter then the earth will be affected, but the analysis between the control of Jupiter and it’s effects on the earth would be so involved, so intricate, so theoretical in it’s nature, that the actual effect on the people living on earth would be virtually and for all purposes for people on earth, negligible. 

What I’m saying is that at some point the people with so much money-power have stepped so far away from the regular people, that the manipulations do not even matter anymore. That their effect is only theoretical and not practical in the least. The people who have gained such power feel good because they feel like they’re manipulating things on such a grand scale. But in actuality there manipulations are so far away from the minutia of regular daily life that they don’t even matter. It’s kind of the opposite of chaos theory; that is, The analogy is more like by the time The mega storm hurricane has developed over the Caribbean, The butterfly in Siberia is just hanging out on the flowers slurping up some nectar.

The traditional analysis of power pretty much ends with chaos theory as explaining all relations of power as interconnected. There really is no reason to believe that everything is interconnected Except that theorists have conjoined certain concepts which trickle down into the regular person who gets pieces of it, and then that person has faith that there is a connection between me using the word “meme”, say” and the actual occurrence of various pictures and words on the Internet. Yet never do most of these people even consider their connection to the word “meme” has to do with a proposal for cultural communication that has nothing or very little to do with these pictures and words on the Internet. For all purposes, the theory of the meme has nothing to do with this person typing on their computer and posting a funny picture with some funny words. They are utterly disconnected. And it is only in so much as I might want to think through my thoughts and make some sort of sensible connection, that there is indeed a connection. But in actuality it’s just me thinking that it is the case. It is merely a kind of faith based in a sort of hope.

So, as I continue, in so much as the theoreticians would continue to argue that there is some sort of effect between the mega power money people controlling Jupiter, and how that is having an effect on the earth, there will fear remain, and fears that justify various conspiracies that can never be founded in actual Knowable circumstancecircumstance.





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