April 10
This is in response to the chapter Owning the Self in a Disowned World in the book The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams.
NPR concert: Hurray For the Riff Raff, very relevant - Activism music is usually way too heavy handed but this stuff is great! I am highlighting Fourteen Floors at the 26 min mark, an immigrant song, then Pa'lante afterward. This is one of my favorite Americana bands.
This is in response to the chapter Owning the Self in a Disowned World in the book The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams.
NPR concert: Hurray For the Riff Raff, very relevant - Activism music is usually way too heavy handed but this stuff is great! I am highlighting Fourteen Floors at the 26 min mark, an immigrant song, then Pa'lante afterward. This is one of my favorite Americana bands.
I had a point I wanted to make in class today but refrained so I didn’t dominate the room, although I’m kinda thinking I should have regardless considering the tension. I think of Owning the Self in an active sense based on my education. Everything and every definition of those things is a motion with respect to time and physical energy transfer, and our biology is the dedicated structure for maintaining stability within that. Resistance is innate to biological structures, as organisms rely on homeostasis and cycles to maintain themselves, and thus any change to the nature of that structure will instantly incur defense mechanisms. Ideas work in the same way, especially considering they’re manifestations out of cellular networks, cells which need to survive with whatever they can get - including that social layer.
Also, human brains have mirror neurons. The magic with these is that they pick up intentions, whether simple like getting thirsty watching someone drink water, or complicated like tumultuous parent-child relationships or in judicial scenarios. This intuition for intention, seated in areas of the brain like the Prefrontal cortex, is part of structure.
This means we can equate intention to structure on this level. What does that reveal to us? First let’s sum up human structure as evolutionary physiology and behavior, sociocultural history, and the mental processes on top of that. Every intention of a human is an expression of that structure. Intentions are defined as aims, but also defined in medicine as the healing process for a wound - which has all sorts of interesting connotations to it.
Now, structural racism (or any other ‘ism’) is ultimately rooted in policy as societies this complex require policy. There are still colonial laws in places like Puerto Rico and Guam, as well as many native reservations. The 13th amendment is exploitable via the criminal clause, and racism in this country has managed to strip millions of their rights, just by dealing out felonies like candy a la Felony Disenfranchisement. Alabama and Florida, with some of the largest concentrations of minorities are the worst for this. Activists, too, are always the first targeted, and civil rights movements run into this constantly throughout history and as we speak.
Examining that, firstly actions reveal intentions. Results reveal even deeper intentions. If intentions are structure, and negative reactions to changing that structure are characterizable in terms of defense mechanisms, while enforcement of that structure is a natural process, then of course activism is going to be the head of the snake so-to-speak for those concerned only with preserving what is. Anyone complicit in these systems is thus a part of the structure and their actions will mirror that whether they can accurately characterize themselves or not. Unconscious structures are still structures too.
The conscious layer is particularly interesting here because that’s what we consider “us.” Consciousness allows for abstracts and models to be formed based on the environment that fundamentally alter physiology and social relationships and thus intentions. This is the point of mindfulness training. Unconsciousness means you don’t have access to that for whatever particular issue is being discussed, thus your reactions will be more clearly a biological expression than a conscious one, and most conscious expressions will be contained as a flow between these walls.
Thus, to become conscious is to gain that transformative power, that ability to fundamentally alter the worlds around you with a cool detachment. Your measures for doing that are your physical ability, your emotions, your knowledge, your wisdom. If any of these are out of swing or undeveloped, every single action will become slaved to that structure or intention. Think of your ideas for the world as just as physical as the legs you stand on. Like... we wouldn’t think about sex if we were floating clouds who reproduced by farting.
These are all just structures, and consciousness is both of and in-between as a "higher" manifestation of that biological structuring and energy transfer. If we really want to take that to its logical conclusion… everything organic is conscious.
And also, everything organic isn’t necessarily natural. Organic, in the theory sense, would be a structure that has enough complexity to function “naturally,” as in incur that stable relationship between structure and flow and chaos as living creatures do it. This means those outer social intentions, those pent up hatreds and fears, those disorders and assumptions, those falsehoods and ideologies, it’s all conscious in a way. Thus resistances in culture are inferences to the overall multi-organism's structure, and every oppressive act comes from the expression of that structure no matter what bodies it chooses to express those structures/intentions with. And if you aren’t the one expressing yourself over that and transforming these intentions, these literal physical stresses and impulses, then something or someone else is acting “conscious” through you.
Trauma is a big thing here, in that events can set up those walls for you in your deepest parts and you’ll never know better because those are some solid scary walls that make some scary expressions. People wanting control know how to weaponize trauma to suppress entire masses FYI. It’s been an area of study for millennia a la imperial scorched-earth tactics. We can see our Earth being scorched quite literally today...
So mental processes at the top are upwardly defined by physiology and historical socioeconomics at the base, which then turns into downward control as in our experiential, often narrative-driven navigating of the world and decision-making. That is so organically embedded in us we rarely differentiate it and empower it and thus raise our consciousnesses over other influences and intentions, yet that’s the original goal behind a philosophical education as far as I can tell. I dunno, this is just worth thinking about and analyzing as it does away with the typical isms and looks more at the developmental and physical side of things. I think it ends up giving more compassionate answers, too, that really capture the struggle. You just can’t simplify anything or leave any loose ends or you won’t get a sound answer, rather something anxiously fragmentary or hermetically-sealed.
The oversimplification comes through our need to navigate this mess, and when I try to observe it as a total structure I just run up against anxiety, so clearly working through how I derive my narrative here is really important for how I go about life and communicate. This simplification process is partly due to the need to make decisions within my environment on short notice, and partly the overall structure resisting definition as it is itself a powerfully complex and flowing thing in time that wants to survive.
We must resist resistance and demand change, because we more often naturally simply won't and those that are compelled to change the most are often those most in need. Those who crush those in need are those who find themselves deepest within this machine we call a republic, one founded on racism and scorched-earth and the deaths of others. Every right and every positive change came through hard-fought direct action, from rights to environmentalism to public health. I hope I've presented a useful argument in favor of that that gets at our very biochemistry and why the struggle is so real.
And here’s a relevant Collegehumor video, lol: I Don't See Race
Can't Stop Me
Edit: added the word chaos and organism, cuz I shouldn't leave that out.
We must resist resistance and demand change, because we more often naturally simply won't and those that are compelled to change the most are often those most in need. Those who crush those in need are those who find themselves deepest within this machine we call a republic, one founded on racism and scorched-earth and the deaths of others. Every right and every positive change came through hard-fought direct action, from rights to environmentalism to public health. I hope I've presented a useful argument in favor of that that gets at our very biochemistry and why the struggle is so real.
And here’s a relevant Collegehumor video, lol: I Don't See Race
Can't Stop Me
Edit: added the word chaos and organism, cuz I shouldn't leave that out.
