Oh Death Why

[kingtycoon]

Something that's been getting to me since the State of the Union address. I know that I've posted some other congressional address there, but still - this idea, this meme keeps recurring. The Job man. You know I'm near to out of work and soon to be looking for a job. No sweat, I was looking for a job when I found this one. Same old story.

But the President comes to talk about incentivising industry to create more jobs. I think about this a lot. The whole urban shift of the American population, a hundred years of jobs. Not work, not investment, not invention or creation, but just jobs. It's uncanny, in its way it's crazy. The world, the American World, it's been built on this foundation of the urban worker. Not the sturdiest foundation you know. Population pressure at the very least undermines it. Or overpressure it, more like. Then you have automation, that's undermining, the automatic, the robotic, you just don't need that many people. There are jobs that just don't need doing anymore and there are still dozens of people wishing for those jobs. Wage stagnation ends up halving the jobs as two family incomes become the necessary norm, bringing more people into the workforce for a dwindling number of jobs. And... And there's the problem of what these jobs even do.

The financial sector has been the big earner for the country. Finance, Insurance and Real Estate account for basically all of the growth in the last 30 years. Financial services is kind of a nice niche, but it's also pretty ruinous to the country at large. What with the tendency to concentrate wealth into the hands of the very very few and the corrolary tendency to generate from nothing, as if by magic - wealth. It's kind of a house of cards is what I mean, nothing is produced but wealth and the raw material of that production is wealth. So our economy is inflated and commanded, at this point, commanded - by Math Problems.

And to this conflagration of immateriality the congress and the executive leadership owe their fealty - worship even. It's awfully pagan, the inmost mysteries of wealth and wealth's manipulation, the enterprise built upon abstractions above abstractions. It's interesting, who can deny that? But it's a rarefied field, of the few who can calculate their way to prosperity in this world of illusionary production. As it happens it is by having money that you can participate, and by not having enough that you are excluded.

Now. Jobs. Jobs are a byproduct of all of that, not the intent, not the hope or the purpose. There's a prevailing understanding in the financial sector that anyone can join and everyone can get rich. Maybe that's true. That lack of substance though, it nags at us, how is this happening? People get twitchy, uneasy, they advocate for metal currency - not seeing the symmetry between all the currencies. The illusion, the joke of it. But jobs. It may be that a job is formed from the manipulations of wealth, and then there is work and then pay and then something is bought, and must be replenished and made again. Manufacturing still has a place, agriculture, mining, we still produce, it's not that there's not manufacturing. We've made as much as we ever have. The last 30 years have seen a decline in manufacturing's importance, but not it's output. Not in the US. But the Job becomes more elusive, the competition more cutthroat. There aren't enough. But the President promises he'll do what can be done. Make Jobs Happen.

My point is that Jobs is a part of a system that should be reconsidered, abandoned, by a lot of people. Subsidizing industry to stimulate job creation - an ugly sentence but often repeated. But why not? Why not subsidize the worker to leave the cycle of work? To learn self sufficiency, to abandon the system of commerce and labor? Why not subsidize another system.

I think about this a lot. As a net producer of amusements - that is - I entertain myself more than I am entertained, I feel driven to be likewise situated in the rest of my life. Why shouldn't I make my own housing and food and clothing? Why shouldn't I have some latitude in the world to learn these crafts? It turns out that the state will absolutely loan and subsidize me through some kind of management program, some kind of professional training - but outside the dominant paradigm I got nothing. No aided way forward. Now - I doubt that this state of affairs can long persist. But I imagine it'll linger till a point in time after I am dead. So I'll likely lead my entire life between the cracks of the mechanism that dominates the world. Not in a large corporate engine, not in any valid collective. I think about it, in a worrying way. I need a job you know. so I think about it.

But I'm a dreamer after all and thinking is its own reward. So I've thought about the past and the future and the end or abolition of the system that has done me no favors and looks like it is in no mood to change its mind. There's always been an end to things. Not a goal, but a finish, a final resting place. Everything, religions, ideals, hopes, dreams, oppressive mechanisms of social control - they all end. They end and are replaced by something else. In the Tarot this transformative power of the end is #13 Death.

I love this image of death. It's very romantic, in the sense of antique imagery - Death rides the Pale Horse, it mows down everyone equally. It is indiscriminate and impervious to all authority. Young, old, kings and bishops. You can see there's a moralizing class-conflict element to the card. There's imagery of the final, victorious and inevitable power of death that is pretty solid. Just from the design perspective I like this image. But I am making my own.


Every life ends and every day as well. The permanence of death. I thought about a lot of things with this one. Taxes was an early thought, but cut, the Bomb, the Grave, the End. But there is that transformative power - Death is meant to symbolize a translation between states, not just the final end. It's meant to mean that the world is changed, maybe by your own passing. It can happen.


So I thought more about inevitabiliy and change. I thought about the monstrous edifice of civilization. The Bomb came from that, an end. "All flesh is grass!" Shouts the Neutron bomb... But that's a little more final than I want to suggest. The days... They come and go, and steadily the future arrives. The days, they flow one from the other, gradually we all age and eventually we all pass on. Like the days of our lives... But there's more than that. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? A cataclysmic change that will alter everyone's fortunes? A new experience that will change you forever? The Sun Goes Down and there is a new life waiting when it rises again.

From Ruin


To Renaissance


And back again. Inevitably, forever.

One final note, on the Seals. In Kabbalah the Sephira are traversed by the routes, and these numbered routes, in a lot of magical systems, are named for the Major Arcana. Now - I'm approaching certain limits - in my own project - I've been researching things and will likely need to make some more elaborate changes, formatting changes, to get where I want to go. nevertheless - there is the arc of history preceding my own efforts. Each of the Roues in the Tree of Life is named for one of the cards of the Tarot, and all of them are guarded in some way or another by some spirit. I've decided to go with the Goetic spirits, in their numeric sequence - and happily - #13 is Beleth - who rides upon a pale horse. Sometimes thee is symmetry - sometimes not- Google the 13th Hexagram if you're not persuaded.

Comments

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Yes; the condemnation of fiat currency & the call for a gold standard crack me up-- gold is a shiny rock, guys, its value is essentially fiat-- no? You don't get that? Wha...how...I don't even know how to talk to you, you think gold has absolute value.

I suspected you were doing a transliteration of the Seals-- I like the Unity of Rings, the Rule of Threes-- seal, hexagram, tarot.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Oh & those look like Donner's Krypton to me, yeah?

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

Krypton speaks to this whole business pretty beautifully now?

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much so; just congratulating your mindsacs.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

Also I try to do a little invocation with the seals - I'm trying to make a magic item after all.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this more, too-- how I might do it, I don't know. Notions. Nothing concrete, but I like thinking about it.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Oh, here is a thing. Entertainment industry: an example of creating jobs out of thin air that produce nothing? I dunno, I'm just thinking about ways for the system to continue as it, as well as models for the next phase.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

It certainly is making somethign but it's not quite self sustaining. Sometimes I wonder what it would be to make my own paints or think about how many countries my paints come from, the brushes, the canvas and the paper.

Sometimes I go to Hale Farm and see how people used to live.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

I only mean that entertainment (& education) are fields that attempt to monetize...culture? I don't know, I'm just always curious when people freak out about civilization moving away from manufacturing. Yeah, what if we have robots to do that? (of course, we don't have robots, we've just exported slavery & child labor to the developing world, but that is another topic...)