2021 03 19 - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

THIS NEEDS CLEANING AND EDITING, BUT DRAFT FOR NOW:

• New Insight based on understanding the domestication of populations or processes that give rise to slavery: The domestication of populations through slavery/colonialism is analogous to the taming of the individual mind through internalization of authority voices (actualized by institutions such as the church, teachers, parents) who keep the child ever-docile and compliant to an increasingly internalized set of constraints.
  • At the systemic level of the state, the state is selecting for (or creates the conditions for) an increasingly sedentary and docile population for the simple purpose of growing; the function of growing is to build and maintain an increasingly larger military; the arms race is therefore characterized by a competition to have the largest population and military which enables the tyranny that gives rise to more slaves through colonialism (or through the birthrate); in turn, leading to more industrial power
    • the state thus has all these mechanisms to create more slave labour (including wage labour)
    • an analogous process is occurring in the child's mind: just as they are being subjected to more and more rules
    • ideas connected to: consciousness comes through socialization processes; the over-socialized individual is the one who is effete, weak
    • Conscience may have existed prior to institutions, but the state massively amped up its power by designing a mandatory education process that is a cross-population brain-washing (wash, ha!... it was meant to "cleanse" the mind, provide it with a self-washing system to keep the individual in line); this was meant to scale society In order, the state, church, school, parents inculcate this set of rules, they create the pressure condition from which the child internalizes these rules unquestioningly; importantly, once these voices of authority are internalized, once they're "inside your head",
    • Simultaneous to this process, or maybe it is actually the very same process, is the creation of this form of "hyper" consciousness, the supervisory consciousness; same as superego (?)
    • sometihing like a nascent consciousness arises from these social power constraings
    • Remaining questions: what does this mean for consciousness? How similar is this to the superego? some metacognition is indeed required for guilt... the authority figure can only punish if it sees the ruel-breaking but if that authority is internalized, then punishment is swift and inevitable; it's another untethering effect
• Althusser: what are the material preconditions for production and (more importantly/to the point) how do you set up the conditions for a compliant labour force?
  • the firm has a way to pay the minimal viable wage to the worker to allow him to live, turn up to work, and to have sufficient resources to have children (which is the precondition for a renewable labour force)
  • related to several threads: (1) Hägglund/Marx: for capitalism to reproduce itself every day, the labor power (that gets diminished by "wear and tear" and just... death) must be replaced by an equal amount of fresh labour force; so the worker's replacement must be dealt with (i.e., his children); (2) Related to concept of primitive communism and work by anthropologists like: David Graeber, James C. Scott; (3) killing the alpha male; (4) movement and sedentism (state projects to force people to stay in one place)
    • We now have the concept of returning to a "home base" but that's relatively new; when you read about the hunter/gatherers, some move zero, but most 7 time and up to 58 times per year
    • mind blown emoji: there's such a huge difference between how much these old hunter/gatherer groups moved before and how we live now so there must have been selection pressures at a certain level such that if you can't stop moving around, states will persecute you; there are also cultural pressures that force people to remain where they are, enforced by power (?) structures at that cultural level
      • I: Tell me more about the level of the selection pressure. Although this doesn't feel at the level of Lemarck, this state-enforced "selection" seems a lot faster than species-level selection processes, right?
    • James Woodburn (one guy writing about primitive communism): the traditional way that people manage conflict is that people simply run away; in state societies this happens less because there are fewer places to go
  • Althusser: Once you're in closer contact, you need to reduce violence and so it's not **the firm **that produces the conditions that people are willing to work under slave circumstances, it's actually society that produces them
    • to work, there must be the threat of violence (e.g., policing, why loitering was a crime, why NOT working was virtually criminalized, for example, drug-related arrests are obviously connected; in prison, you do slave labour)
    • James C. Scott: You can only end slavery easily once there's no where to go, when the state saturates the land and no one can escape; the state didn't invent war or slavery, but it certainly ramps or amplifies those conditions
    • Norbert Elias argues that the same thing is/was happening in the mind of the child: after the 11th century, over time, there's increasingly more rules and kids get more and more docile in response, internalizing these rules at younger and younger ages
      • In part this is because there's an arm's race (clearly important in evolutionary explanations); the race between the nobility and bourgeoisie in terms of manners (in W. Europe)
      • I: Is this from his book, The Civilizing Process?
• The states are going to grow either by (1) assimilation combined with enforced sedentism or ... (I: you never finished this thought but it seems important if there is an "or")