Long drives across the United States is my preferred way of travel. It is slow and subject to alternations in route. This trip across the US has had more backroad travel than normal.
Two days ago, I did my second 700-mile day driving between St. Louis and North Platte, Nebraska. I decided to avoid the cities between those two places. I drove north to Hannibal, Missouri (famous as the birthplace of Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain), and then West toward St. Joseph.
I turned North before arriving at St. Joe and into the roller coaster-like rolling farmland of northern Missouri and southeastern Iowa. The picture below captures the roller coaster terrain. My GPS even took me down a gravel road past a huge farm tractor pulling a disk harrow.
Yesterday, I took a farm road North out of Pine Bluffs, Wyoming. It was a rainy day.
I stopped at a little store at a crossroads. The sign on the door said, “Inconvenience Store.” I laughed, walked in, and said, “I’m here to be inconvenienced.” The proprietors are David and Judy, and they have owned the store for 18 years. David is 89 years old. Immediately, I knew this was going to be a long stop on my journey. We share a lot in common. I’ve invited him to be interviewed on The Eddy Network.
While sitting there, a young Native American of Crow ancestry came into the store. He was headed to his grandmother’s home on the Crow Reservation in Montana. Someone in Cheyenne had brought him this far. I’ll take him on to Casper. Someone there will carry him along to Sheridan and beyond.
We talked about his life and the decisions that are before him now. In talking to him, I realized that the kind of help that once could be counted on from government, non-profit, and church groups is no longer readily available. As we rode to Casper, he told me about his life, about his four children and the two “baby mommas”, of riding the rails with Shoestring, famous on YouTube, and his hopes for the future.
As David and I were talking with the young man about my taking him on up to Casper, a customer came up to me and said, “Do you really want to do this? Do you think it is safe?” I told her that a homeless wanderer out in the middle of nowhere is more vulnerable than I am.
Orders of Reality are Real
I want to pick up on Wednesday’s post, Between the Particular and the Whole. This is a hierarchy of the order of reality that I posted there. I’ll return to my traveling wanderer friend at the end.
Spirituality - transcendent, encompassing all of reality, and can only be grasped in bits and pieces.
Philosophy - abstract thought seeking to make sense of the larger picture of reality.
Culture - how human beings transform abstract thought into concrete representations of reality. This culture would include things like science, business, education, religion, entertainment, etc. It is individual, personal, communal, tribal, regional, national, and, strangely, attempting to be global. These are the particular expressions of Spirituality and Philosophic thought.
Politics - not the science of governance, but rather the context where people and institutions seek to establish society. In a democratic context, it is a society of We The People. In an authoritarian context, It is a culture of The Matrix, 1984, and, The Big Short. It is the overculture over all particular cultures. It is a reductivist culture that denies that there are larger questions or conversations that involved the Spirituality of Reality and Abstract reflections of Philosophy worthy of conversation. It is a micro-culture seeking to be a whole comprehensive culture.
Reality is the lightning rod for spirituality, philosophy, culture, and politics.
Reality takes two forms. It is either the context of the world we live in, or it is simply a perception that I can either embrace or ignore.
In my post, Transcendence, Immanence, and Materiality, I address how we access reality through these three different perspectives.
With transcendence, we see that reality is beyond us. It is something that we are surrounded by. It is what existed before The Big Bang. It is an ethos, an environment, a context, and the situation that we always find ourselves negotiating our way through.
With Immanence, we see reality as an object that we can explore, quantify, commodify, and monetize. It is the focal point of science. Yet, from an immanent perspective, we treat the experience or the presence of reality as a particular. My particular perception of reality is reality. I am its subject. Our perception or analytical conclusion does not represent the comprehensive whole of existence unless we suffer from some narcissistic psychopathology.
With Materiality, we find reality has a hard surface. We lean over to pick up our pen that fell underneath the table. As we pick it up, we rise up and crash our head into the underside of the table. It hurts. Hardship enters our lives, and we blame God. Unexpected success comes, and we are proud of our accomplishments. We don’t like reality, except when we do. We are fickle human beings in relation to the material world.
We develop cancer. Our marriage ends. A neighbor’s teenager commits suicide. We lose our job. We complain about how much Reality SUCKS.
We hike the Appalachian Trail. We learn Ju Jitsu. We develop the skills of a chef. We learn to speak Italian. We earn a degree after the age of forty. We test ourselves against reality to see what we are made of. Reality can make us proud and fulfilled. Reality reveals character, releases our potential, and shows us our true selves.
Reality is the great revealer and leveler of existence. Without reality, there would be no hierarchies. There would be no successes or failures. There would be no need for leaders, healers, or, people who need rides to the next state.
It is for this reason, as much as anything else, there exists a belief in the Immateriality of reality. If there is no material reality, then no one can contradict me. I can be whoever I say am. I also have no obligations to anyone, but to myself.
Immateriality denies that material reality, or even the context of reality, has any claim on my life. Words have their own reality separate from anyone else’s. Gone then is the reality that “a person’s word is their bond.” This is how dignity, respect, and trust are lost in society.
The Reality of Immateriality in Politics
The story of the homeless young man above is a picture of the Orders of Reality.
On a spiritual level, he recognizes that he is lost.
His capacity to think rationally through his circumstances is limited by a lack of education and his former drug addiction. He is an alienated person in society. He has two women, one an ex-wife and the other an ex-girlfriend, who want him back. But only as someone who can do things for them. He has no skills, except to do the most menial of jobs.
Culturally, he is homeless. If you know anything about homeless culture, once you become homeless, it is extraordinarily difficult to generate the financial savings in order to qualify to rent an apartment. This young man was making a living as a musician before COVID. Then all his gigs were canceled, and he has been a wandering traveler ever since.
The Order of Reality for this young man is hard, unrelenting, and with very few options. He doesn’t have the luxury of playing word games about perceptions of reality and systemic social justice. Immanent immaterialism is the luxury politics of the wealthy and privileged.
The algorithm of modern politics may look something like this.
Politics = Status + Access to Wealth + Prestige
As we approached Casper, I asked him if he wanted me to drop him off at a truck stop, where he could hitch a ride from there. He said wanted to go to Walmart. He’d play his music out front and earn enough to get a room for the night. I put him up for the night in a hotel where he’d be out of the rain. He has choices, but none of them are very good.
Societal Collapse and the Orders of Reality
For a decade, I’ve been studying what various writers understand as the causes of societal collapse. Each expert has their own perspective. For some, it is related to cost of developing natural resources. For others, it is related to societal elites utopian dreams of a transhumanist perfect society.
For me, I see it as the failure of institutions. This failure comes as a product of a growing administrative overhead that is neither financially productive n in or has a beneficial impact on society.
The people in these jobs are not at fault. For them, it is a job. Rather, it is the loss, both spiritually and philosophically, of a purpose to society that transcends the narcissism of modern culture. Every aspect of our society that once worked for the benefit of the whole, is now failing because it is focused on the benefit of the few.
Politics as it is currently conceived and practiced, and interpreted through my algorithmic construction - Politics = Status + Access to Wealth + Prestige - has become a culture of immanent immaterialism. This is what happens when the Center of Society collapses, forcing the Periphery of Society to refocus on what it do to replace the lost institutional strength that once served the whole of society.
The problem we face is that the culture of politics dominates and dictates the other cultures of society. The solution is not how do we resist the corruption of an immanent immaterial culture of politics. Rather, how do we recenter society through a revival or restoration of the spiritual and philosophical order of society?
Andrew Breitbart saw that “Politics is downstream from culture.” My reaction was, “What is upstream from culture?”
If you are following my line of thought, the institutional structures are not failing because of my political algorithm - Politics = Status + Access to Wealth + Prestige. Instead, we have lost the capacity to be spiritually and philosophically alive people. It is reflected in how we have organized and led society.
The two diagrams above were created to help me understand what the philosophical ideas of centralization, decentralization, and The Center and The Periphery “look” like. This is an intuitive approach. The spiritual component is represented here by people as the inhabitants of each of those small circles. Those are networks of relationships.
This is what is missing in our current political culture. Tribalism, which is a vehicle for my political algorithm, is not networking as human community building.
I think about this in the context of the young man who rode with me yesterday. He has no place to call home and will be, for me, a reminder of the challenges that we face in the future.
Back on the road tomorrow. Here’s a little video of my drive through the rural land with Colter Wall.
Great.
I am seeing a convergence of observations. We are seeing similar things yet from different perspectives.
I just finished "Revolt of the Public" by Gurri (https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143) and he frames the situation out the same way (He calls it Center and Border). Enjoy the ride!