#but if it's just the myth then our net needs to expand way wider

[pochapal]

assuming this is a) not more witch narrative stuff and b) not referring to the Real Kinzo/Ideal Kinzo split then i think there's something telling about kinzo's other side being entwined with/triggered by beatrice

[jahgoinkstrunk]

On Power & Its Discontents

Hearing about DAPL and Keystone this morning, fresh on the heels of the recent executive order regarding abortion, I found myself wondering if it matters less now WHO is in power, without attending to the question of WHAT is (and in) power --- whether there is in effect a distorting lens through which we perceive the structuring of our societies, a fundamental flaw that keeps us booted under in the perpetual pyramid scheme of Rule from Above.

This is not to say that the seat occupied by the present Supreme Commander is immaterial. But abuse of power should come as no surprise to anyone with even the barest skein of a historical conscience. Thus it should be no surprise to see that the swamp was 'drained' only to make room for way bigger fish, no surprise that a cabal of outrageously-moneyed and power-hungry people have chosen their bully in the pulpit, and handed him the biggest bullhorn on the planet. And definitely, no surprise at all that the WHO in power appears poised at any time to exercise a disproportionate excess of authority --- disproportion, after all, was designed right into the seat he assumed.

Perhaps it's time to step away from the personality, and turn our gaze towards the structure. This seat is not borne aloft on air spun out of nothing --- the dynamic of its power was created OUT of us (while the narrative persists that it was created FOR us). We had eight years of an administration which was expertly-oiled to work the machinations of power under a polite veneer, of moving things forward, of representing our interests. While professing 'power of the people, for the people', the seat did not (and was hardly expected to) move one iota towards our level.

It's taken only a slight sanding off the patina to see that a widespread undercurrent of fear and aggression has been proliferating meanwhile in an atmosphere of distrust. Society appears to be splintering into factions, so much so the hive-mind of social media has resorted to a form of self-cannibalising in order to cobble together an explanation for why it feels like things are suddenly coming apart. But the world was not upended overnight; it has been upended for generations.

There is a feeling that we can no longer afford to be so innocent, or that 'innocence' is not sufficient enough a refuge to beg off taking a steady, un-blinkered view around us. We each crave safe places to live in, yet all around and within us there is pain --- inherited and personal, historical pain, the pain induced by anxiety for our futures, and deeper, unnameable pains obscured by time and denial. There is a reason for this, but we are required to gaze up into the lattices of power, and our possible complicity within it, to discover its source.

For some of us 'discontents' have the unnerving sense that the seat represents something much, much less benevolent than its supposed function --- to serve and protect not us, but the furtherance of its own appetites, which appear to grow more insatiable each incoming headline, and whose primal instinct is to feed and replenish itself without abetment on the organs of our lives, our labours and our energies.

I think the elephant in the room is this: why, throughout history, have we needed leaders? Are we a flock driven to appoint shepherds, because in their absence we might convulse into an undirected multitude at the mercy of nature (our own or otherwise)? Must we assign our collective wellbeing over to an authority supposedly qualified enough to guide us from the prospect of famine and chaos to an imagined land of plenty and discipline? From authority comes the implicit meaning of to 'author', to write or inscribe our fates. Should belief in an externalised authority thus remain an act of faith? Or are the seats of leadership created out of an engineered poverty, where one person's power can only be fed by another's dis-empowerment, in effect conditioning a need to be led?

Do we need this illusion still --- to mentally clothe the emperor with our minds even if we were gifted the sudden, magical power to see him revealed with our own eyes, in his terrified nakedness and raw ambition? Perhaps we've reached a point of no return, a collective state of co-dependency, where far too many of us are invested in this mass delusion to realise that power is anything but immutable, mere ephemera til we are coerced into believing in its existence (because its true ephemerality is disguised by the brutality of its instruments).

Power thrives but cannot survive without  the oxygen of support, the opposing force of a few vaulted upward by the many more pushed downward; though in truth the moment the weakness of the structure becomes apparent, the equally pronounced becomes the enforcement of its illusion. If the emperor's seat is indeed manufactured out of an illusion, that illusion is extracted from the material of our minds.

Whether we speak of monarchs or emperors, re-structured mantles of rule in the formation of republics (or any other ideological constructs), or these present-day notional realities pilloried into the collective hallucinations we otherwise identify as nation-states, the processes by which power is assigned has more often than not been pre-determined well before our births --- for our parents, our parent's parents, indeed for a multitude of ancestors centipeding back to the what constitutes our seminal, societal human-ness --- always by others (the vaulted leaders) signing our fates away in chambers beyond our reach.

And so the wheel turns. Regarding Keystone and DAPL, the POTUS has declared that the terms of negotiation will be defined 'by us' --- but that 'us' obviously precludes our brothers and sisters standing up for their families at Standing Rock. As such  'us' (thus pronounced) now signifies a presence that is in no way formed in the actualised body of the wider public, no longer even delimited by the governing body of the state, but instead reduced to a circumference wound tightly round a gated community comprising only a select few, whose net worth ranging in the billions has become the primary factor for determining the scope of their influence.

These days there no longer exists the illusion of 'morality', nor 'ethics' --- not even a prior, demonstrable evidence of meaningful engagement anywhere in the public sphere --- to properly explicate the awarding of this bewildering position of influence and its immoderate extension beyond sensibility to those we might deem fit to 'govern'. Rather we are now induced to bear witness to an incremental process of 'normalization', wherein the spectacle of representatives we assume to elect into positions of power feel emboldened to demonstrate how unapologetically at ease they've become with flaunting their grossly-inflated entitlements, all the while brazenly advertising what they intend to do with them.

Scroll through any newsfeed, and you become yet another spectator to the unbridled frenzy of an unprecedented class of super-elites, regurgitating all into the self-same pool of outrageous fortune, each enraptured by their own heady, 'self-created' aromas of power. It's a state of affairs where narccisists have assumed the helm, but we too are drawn unwittingly into the whirlpools and eddies created through their infatuations with power. It is not just an easy case of 'volunteerism'; our realities are inextricably borne along their currents, and their whims all too easily dictate our fates. The stream of their desires are harshly reflected in the frustration of ours.

Thus is planted a thorned seed, the secret wish to taste of the fruit which poisons us, an aspiration to rise up in such a way that can only be compensated through another tacit and sinister agreement, that in relation the others should stay the fuck down. The worship of wealth can never be separated from the worship of power. But the myth persists, working its way into almost every glowing screen and glossy page on the planet, every obsessive tracking of the glitterati, even infecting the language of self-help gurus who insist on refracting spiritual realisation through the lens of ever-expanding personal wealth. The compensation for feeling  powerless easily translates into the urge to fill a gaping void, even if it be without nourishment or satisfaction, by sucking vicariously at every morsel left over from the undigested dreams of the powerful.

However, 'power' can never exist in a vacuum; it is only able to reproduce itself in a spectrum where it is either given (away) or taken (forcefully). Where monarchs presumed to rule by 'divine right', the current model offers a thinly-veiled lesson plan in how best to prostrate ourselves before the powers of Mamon. But first one must implant a surrogate thirst, for these unpalatable realities only become food when one is surrounded by a famine of choices.

The so-called 'end of history', the nudge to resign ourselves to the irreversible supremacy of capital as our guiding light, is not (and has never been) a foregone conclusion, simply a fortuitously-timed strike aimed to draw the last blood from an already-wounded body politic, a politic predicated not on mutual care but the almost indifferent (and definitely un-empathic) language of success versus failure: where 'we' have won, 'you' have surely lost , and the proof of our infallible victory is to ensure that an unbroken lineage of your ancestors' losses will one inevitable day translate into your child's pre-emptive posture of defeat. We will rework your broken beliefs into a science of 'might makes right', so if we can't be beat, you may as well redirect your allegiances to join in the frenzy (even if the fallacy remains evident in our beating of the ones who came before you).

In this way your desperate reward becomes their undeserved profit, in a system designed to recruit you even before you were born.

We have fought for other ways. Yet whatever flowerings have blossomed in the emerging instinct towards self-governance --- 'self-rule' informed by an ongoing process of mutual consent --- have been tragically brief. The exceptions to this narrative have been so consistently obliterated or written out of history that we come into this world inheriting the false logic of our oppressors.

Any progress claimed was never willingly handed out to us by a benevolent authority, but paid out in blood by our families, yet still these victories are somehow constrained as hard-won openings, an attempt to make spaces to breathe within a fundamentally irretractable, ever re-shifting matrix of power. It is sobering in the extreme to remind ourselves that a challenge to power is still not the subverting of power.

An effective re-distribution of power will come not from toppling heads, but from examining what that power means, how it works, and who it works for, how we engage with it, internalise it, and eventually support it by the paradox of believing in salvation through an illusion we are constantly being denied. How do we re-imagine and differentiate power into a form that speaks for us? Can we indeed awake from the 'nightmare of history', and wrest back the inalienable rights of decision-making from a chosen few to a larger, much more lateral conception of 'us' as a variegated, diverse, heterogeneous, multi-hued and even internally-discordant family of human brothers and sisters?

To vent our anger (and expressions of resistance) on leaders is an understandably necessary psychological and emotional release for our collective and individual frustrations, but upon closer examination we should recognise that these frustrations in fact far antecede any recent election of any leader. Our rage translates into easy mockery, flights of dung hurled at despised figureheads on glowing screens will only serve in the end to reflect and amplify our sense of futility. This is one way for power to win over us (if it doesn't succeed in winning us over).

The other way is to be pulled backwards into the narrative of 'better times', a politically false conception of time staked on our binary separation --- like a screaming, implacable infant --- from a 'golden age' (what age was in any given time golden?) into the maelstrom of the dark present. The recent, sudden public offering of nostalgia for the Obama administration betrays at its worst an enabling, self-volunteered consent for its many transgressions, and at its not-quite-harmless best (if it can be called that) a naivety premised on the unquestioned, adoring worship of personality.

Presently the supreme seats of power are occupied by individuals whose agendas are very obviously necessary causes for alarm, in the extreme nakedness of their disdain for a social body inclusive of poverty, difference, and dissent, a body designed by capitalism. Trudeau, Theresa May, Trump, a collusion representing elite interests un-matched since the last triumvirate of Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney. The effects are catalytic and refracted in all the surrounding political landscapes around the world.

A resistance to power will need to go deeper than dissent, from a reactive pushing back to an adamant pushing forward, in order to form a society defined by a lateral exercise of power, a society banked and furthered by collaboration and mutual consent. Our idols not political leaders, or celebrities assigned to speak in our names, but the ones close to you, the elders and friends, brothers and sisters who will constitute a realizable force of effective solidarity, not just in the frontlines of political protest, but the frontlines of day-to-day existence, the terms by which we define both the material and invisible forces which translate into our lives. Actual empowerment, the agency which requires enough courage to make today a different  reality from yesterday.

Solidarity is impossible without confidence, confidence out of reach without collaboration, collaboration an empty gesture in the absence of real conversation, and conversations hollow if we do not know what we're really talking about. Let's learn how to talk, so we may best know how to act.