Some proceed to an emotional outburst on just seeing the word 'relativity' outside of a discourse on speed's contingency with distance and time, but the only alternatives available to logic as well as sophistry are absolutism and nihilism, neither of which say very much at all. Do I go too far? Doesn't a qualified absolutism express the provisional? Is it not equivalently absolute to insist on none of the above, or in fact nothing at all? It may just be that the outburst itself hinges on the fear to leave the constraining certainty of mathematical relationships, turning a blind eye to life itself – hence the sometimes-seen bumper-sticker, "freedom isn't free", tailing drivers immune to hypocrisy, that is, without a care in the world. Then again, there are the considerate and caring who believe that without constraint, the evil seed would sprout and everyone would rape their grandma prior to feasting on her for supper. Wait a minute ... don't we already do that? And you were worried about a few broken windows!
They say there is no experiential memory of it, but pain can be a phantom like a missing limb, providing for prevention of repetitive mistakes or protection from them in the fashion of a reminder, talisman or souvenir. Pessimistic impossibilists proclaim that pain and its avoidance is the very source of consciousness. But it is as well akin to the bullshit detector and negative aesthetic – the impetus for nursing a different taste (a transgression of sorts) and that is reminiscent of the altruists' utopic (or not) optimism regarding affinity, bringing an existing disposition toward death or sleep back toward life – pain can be the terror of a liminal break some say necessary for any authentic transcendence to take place, but who hasn't noticed the healing influence of an aesthetic interest – the pleasant perturbation?
But it is overly simplistic to confine pain to the semantic realm we abhorringly call violence – many perturbations with equivalent impact are in fact quite pleasant, but who can hear them under the drone of alarm-clocks or the alarming advance of drones in a timely fashion? Pain has too long been associated with punishment, that authoritarian perturbation which more "humane" sorts attribute to the birth of neurosis and confusion. Equally long has been the consideration that a movement along lines of encouragement or reinforcing contingencies, resembling play rather than performance contingent on pay, is sinful, childish (which it is) or downright illegal – duty is to be the only source of "pleasure". Joy, with equivalent transcendent potential, has been erased from all dictionaries of possibility unless sold by the pharmacist.
On the one hand, all of so-called medical science is a condition of magical or wishful thinking. We hope for a speedy recovery after a performance of the proper rites by those "in the know", that is, those owning all the right answers as religious property. But the fluid, in-out juxtaposition of the half-full and half-empty produces no contradiction or dialectical friction or even a swerve to social antagonism. A full glass symbolizes health for both the glass and the drinker. One too many, for some, is a signal just like the point of unconsciousness for a spinning child or whirling dervish directing toward the limits of one's endurance – limits which when stretched embrace uncertainty and the chance of death (or life). Where do we mark on the lexical map the distinction between bravery and acute fool-hardiness? Only the stretching will tell you, if there is maintained room to back off or a "social net" which is like a nurse standing on the sidelines in anticipation. Uncertainty is a good reason for solidarity, another term for density occasionally confused with sovereignty.
Stoicism can generate courage to endure, like parturition is said to be the most painful but is always followed by, not just relief but joy (or its potential). The praise of stoicism (in face of imposed austerity) and punishment for sinning miss two thirds of the equation, intending to eliminate self-defense or prolonged resistance with the simple formula that inflicted pain or its threat will break any iteration. Stoicism can therefore be seen in some sense as resistance itself, despite the odds and contrariwise, a resignation to surrender. In other words, the courage to push through and see what comes out the other end or the alternative valorisation (slash fetish) of pain made virtuous by the phrase "grin and bear it" or "stiff upper lip" and "damn the torpedoes" which almost ensures the permanent situation negating birth or rebirth itself, the abortion or stillbirth as the only iterated survival in a perpetual renewal or eternal return. In such a state, suicide is the only full-term alternative to persistent sado-masochism, as "rebirth" is reserved for the religiously fanatical.
In this day and age, perhaps only a recidivist mother could see the benefit of broken barriers like the pain experienced of old in rites de passage. The best at midwifery and smooth transitions was once the safe ground for transgressive boys avoiding a beating from dear old dad. Such is the difference between an archon and a nurse, as the latter understands the notion of encouraged reinforcement better than any old soldier returning from battle.
Like altruism, the stoic stance has been bound semantically to sacrifice, but it needn't be. In fact, every so-called altruistic act can be successfully argued an extension of ego-motivation (the tendency to follow reinforcing contingencies is certainly the function of the "id", and there are a variety of ways environmental feedback can be construed as pleasurable, even assuming Freud's reality principle has set in). On the other hand, and especially within the paradigm of evolution, every egoistic act, by virtue of its success, survival or durability is a priori good for the species should they benefit (or survive) and therefore, an altruistic mechanism irregardless of personal motivation. The only way to enforce the distinction between altruism and egoism is within the moral zone of teleology, which can not only lead to paranoia (an over-emphasis on agency or direction) but has always presented problems for scientists intrigued by intervening variables, which is to say the free-play of chance. Besides, un/sub-conscious and conscious motives need not agree, and how often are consequents inadvertent or result from mistake? Discovery itself (if truly a surprise) is by definition a matter of good fortune. The best laid plans usually only reproduce existing conditions under a new veneer: an arrow and bullet are equally range weapons by comparison to a dagger. The advantage of one over the other is situationally relative and death by either is equally dead.
Perhaps the greatest discovery by William Morris was that war and commerce are substitutable in any sentence, like twins separated at birth. War and ware split when practioners of the universalist religion, Competition, made an incision not unlike a caesarian section which thereafter makes the mother inconsequential and relegated to myth-time or the funeral pyre. How soon we forget that ripe conditions can only give rise to possibility – and then encourage it. They do not make demands. Today the middle is entirely excluded and never the twain shall meet – the similarity between war and ware is just one of those linguistic curiosities separated by the difference which makes a difference. Kinship is out of the question ... by way of adoption doubly so. The tit-for-tat or pigeon-holing semantic theory we today call "clear and distinct argument" (plainspeak) can only function to prevent heresy (psychosis in today's jargon), rendering both new and old lines of thinking inconceivable. Gods are born only when kinship (or history) is rendered irrelevant. Kinship is only revived by kings and parliaments for the transmission of property, and that takes a certain measure of commodification and its "honor-bound" enforcement: duty in every sense of the word.
After much consideration and research, I find I'm not alone suggesting that tit-for-tat or quid pro quo relations were superimposed upon human psychology by civilisation (that is to say "they emerged", to play it safe) during the late Neolithic/Iron age, before and outside of which the exchange paradigm and jurisprudence did not exist, except as statistical flukes, judging by "uncivilised" survivors. The obliquity (which is to say, 97-99%) of human existence ran along just fine (we are, after all, their descendants!) without property and the state or its high priests, the judge and economist preaching the virtues of sacrifice and theft and stoic asceticism should you be the target: like, "stand still so I can shoot you deader, er, exploit you better!"
Maybe we are a new species – Homo economicus – but the diverging point seems to have been the separation of ego and alter, self and other, individual and society by means of successful thuggery and consequent helplessness (the order is irrelevant as the con-man and mark are interdependent in any well-run insurance scam) in an inversion of the normal curve where, in an involuted twist of altruism, the healer is replaced by the assassin ensuring that future selective conditions would not eliminate an elevated status by destroying those conditions as they arise. A kindred word is alienation (and I'm not suggesting the mere ratio of worker and means of production but life itself as commercial transaction). Jurisprudence or political economy (the so-called collective good which is more and more interpreted as corporate gain at the expense of the un-ranked and filed away) ensures that we've become the alien invaders of our own planet. Some call it (the conquest and destruction of planet Earth) a matricide which supersedes any oedipal complex. Only the Nordic myths out-and-out envision a return from survival to life when the gods kill one another, having run out of credit-worthy prey and other consumables.
Today resistance is ageless and genderless, increasingly ubiquitous, an expanding impendency. The globe itself seems starting to awaken shaking and wriggling like it's about to be born. Some think it death-throws – a half-empty consideration. Maybe we're only undulating with it, like a chick pecking at the shell. The breakthrough one can witness stretching the passage for chance or risk and therefore life is seen among the unruly, whose altercations with the constrained environment some call violent mayhem and disorder. It is only tearing away the plastic placenta so fresh air can once again fill the lungs. If there are any dialectic oppositions like the ancient cyclical legends portray as flip-flops in the statistical distribution of "normality", it is the reverse of the rapatious extractions we call civil order, the death or impoverishment of earth's beings for the protection of property and its tenders. There is a reason tolerated behaviour is restricted to the "proper": it's easier to confuse war for peace, hero for villain, and in fact, that confusion which some call gullability is what creates them all as the terrifying phantoms they are to any who wake daily to a nightmare or are dropped into it. From the standpoint of the earth itself, the engulfing flames of Surtr could only be seen as the end of the violence of asphalt and concrete and plate-glass windows which block life from emerging from the current toxic sludge nurturing police in gas masks and riot gears, raining polution like the ultimate volcano blocking out the sun for three consecutive years.
"There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin spells out in Theses on the Philosophy of History. It is terrifying to face the wreckage of history that constitutes the present. One loses count of the tragedies. Despair, recoded as “happiness,” runs through every aspect of social life, increasingly reflected by Hollywood and ironic television sitcoms as if to anesthetize us.
The arguments for orderly, passive demonstrations by Hedges and other liberal pundits miss all this. One doesn’t sweep the floor in a house falling off a cliff. In a world that feels absolutely hostile and alien, every element of social life acquires a sinister glow. In this light, the black bloc appears as a ray of optimism because it creates an opening that leads through to the other side of despair...
Via the black bloc, we open the space to play with power. We radically reverse its operations on our bodies. Casting off the assumption that our bodies need to be protected, that we should give them over to the care of the state, we collectively re-inscribe them as as source of power. We also reverse the notion that freedom ends at the boundaries of individuals. I want you to put me at risk: in this axiom, we find the basis of love, friendship, and death, the three irreducible risks of life.
The black bloc is the site for a new sentimental education: a political reordering of our sentiments. We learn new sensations of love, friendship, and death through the matrix of collective confrontation. In the obscurity of the black mask, I am most present in the world. This unfamiliar way of being compels me to focus and intensify my senses, to be radically present in my body and my environment."– I.E.F. On behalf of the Unruly
I will tell you another tale from Myth-time: Once upon a time mothers loved their children (and vice versa) and no one questioned what that meant nor felt obliged toward reimbursement – back when it was less clear to children as to the distinction of mother, matrix, middle and the periphery we infer with the preface, "meta-", and that's what really mattered in "love, friendship, and death, the three irreducible risks of life". The security force of Father State is just no substitute.
Personally, I think it's just a matter of Newtonian gravity and personal density: a broad band-width increases the perception of mass as well as its desirability, but density ensures it, regardless of speed or shape of the elliptic. Good nursing can change the world in a generation, once one removes necrotic material, and that will always push the limits of someone's comfort level. I can't say this to just anyone, as many still cling to that in vogue faction of objective material fashion: "It's the economy, stupid!" which is the perfect equivalent of helpless arrogance: "Whatever! ... 's not my problem!". The unruly have always known that stoicism cannot simultaneously refer to courageously stretching limits and self-restrained complacency. The aesthetic is called "thrill" at which youngsters excel: even the elders are starting to see that the rigidly ordered invite it.
– see also The Purpose of Black and Red
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