Bourgeois Fragility

Hobbes and me.

The first thing you need to know is that I am personally weak and at a low point in my life. The dimensions are financial and mental health, with the latter being a trailing indicator of the first. It’s a tough thing to confess, especially when I’m not trying to make parallels between artistry and suffering. Time will tell. In the meantime I am handling myself with care and making credible efforts at managing my stress.

Nevertheless, as is my old habit, whenever I am feeling the stress of general idiocy and corruption, I tend to read military history and watch combat sports. Most of the time that works to remind me that I don’t have to literally spend arms and legs to deal with the dangers and costs of life. On other occasions I get in a little bit over my head as my depression has led me this week.

For the record, I subscribe to:

• S2 Underground

• School of War

• Sarah Paine

• Hardcore History

• CDR Salamander

• Mooch Report

And who knows how many others. Curiosity hasn’t killed this cat, but I’m probably just following laser dots. I found myself abed over the weekend listening to Supernova In The East. It pushed me even deeper into the dark and unwilling to get up. You see this is something of a follow-up on last year’s reading of Tombstone, with me trying to get a fix on geopolitics just before and after the great wars with regard to what China was up to (and Arab nationalists). This time I got the horrific details of Japanese atrocities in doses that were too heavy for my muddled mind. It’s probably not sensible for me to have been seeking details on the Rape of Nanking knowing what I read about Peleliu from E.B. Sledge, but I went there.

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Spare Me The Details
I’m not prepared. You’re not prepared. None of us are prepared for the kind of war so much of the world outside of US and Canada have avoided. I can watch a movie like Sicario, and now I’m into the new season of Lioness, but this is cotton candy brutality. In fact, I recall certain special operators remarking about the fact that even with battles like Fallujah in Iraq, these were nothing like what American troops had to deal with without rotations out of combat duty, indefinitely as in WW2. Basically if you were a ground fighter, you were at war until you were a casualty of war or until the war was over.

In this way, I find myself spoiled like ‘other Americans’ and in a quandary about how I should feel about my air conditioning. I’m at a loss to figure out how much information I should be taking in and how sensitive I should be about keeping my nose in the news which I know to be shallow and bite size with a great deal of discoverable detail and deep context for the ridiculously curious. I know ‘they’ are lying to us because we can’t handle the truth. I believe that collectively we can but we’re way out of the habit, and I think we’ve lost our edge. We’re really not in control of as much as ‘our right to know’ would inform us. Our attention is only on our obsessions with ourselves.

I’m reminded of a recent story about the late Senator from South Carolina whose rapid rise kept him thinking that in the next promotion he’d finally be around the smart people who had it all figured out. It never happened, even after he was in discussions in the Oval Office.

We’re a democracy in theory and we feel connected to the issues of the day, but we don’t know what’s down the rabbit hole, and we’re ultimately irresponsible to it. Thank god for representative government. We actually cannot handle the truth. We’re not the practitioners we think we could be. At least the distance between ourselves and actual power let’s us off the hook. That’s the benefit of being a peasant.

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The Depression Vacation
This year I’ve been orienting myself around focus and beauty. But I focused too much of my focus on focus. I haven’t done a decent film or music review in months. Here’s a very small one. Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a series of: Oh shit everybody run back to the boat situations, and dammit if it’s not another Matt Damon gets lost flick. Do yourself a favor and get the audiobook by Stephen Fry. It’s masterful. I had no idea his voice was so very expressive. The story is all there, plus all the context one needs.

My first focus on focus was stopping doomscrolling and outfitting. This was my bourgeois habit of watching videos about cool little things that I could [once] easily afford and pretend like they were improving the quality of my life. There are lots of handsome young people selling me the computer equivalent if IKEA furniture or splitting hairs between vim and tmux. So I decided to use my terminal all the time, and keep my machine in dark mode. It worked. The problem was that I had a job looking for a job and I was doing a pace of like 30 applications per week and getting one or two interviews per month. At the end of July I had two interviews in the last week, plus a dentist and doctor’s appointment. I flunked the interviews and passed the checkups.

Then my enthusiasm fell off a cliff.

Right now I am at about 20 months of unemployment and so I’m going to have to retire. At 65, this is much earlier than I expected.

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So now I’ve pulled the trigger and have consigned myself to a modified version of the fixed income life. I can still imagine a collapse of that Social Security system 20 years from now. I am officially in the Depression Vacation and readjusting myself to thinking practically what it will mean for me to live hand to mouth for extended periods of time.

Mostly however, I am thinking about how quickly I have fallen from my own summits of financial success down through a series of bone breaking tiers, like Peter Parker first trying to be Spiderman. Two years ago I was playing in the stock market and had an 800 FICO score. Today I’m getting used to eating oatmeal and ramen. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but the real difficulty will be… well who knows? The kind of $2000 problem that occasionally arises that I used to think nothing of.

Depression is, in its own way, a remarkable antidote to the adaptation of middle class desires for the luxury beliefs of the rich, famous and bounder classes of influencers, pedants and obnoxious attention getters so prominent in our media and culture. It reminds me of the old joke of the Cocaine Diet, you just get so frenetic that you forget to eat. I’ve lost five pounds of appetite and hardly even noticed it. Early to bed and late to rise, just shut your eyes until anxiety dies. You have to get your courage up to run to the bathroom so that nobody in the house sees you coming or going. Following up on email? I stand wringing my hands watching the screen saver and wondering if I should really hit the escape key. Every fail video on YouTube reminds me of my own failure. I put my phone on do not disturb. I don’t greet anyone in the house when they come down the stairs to find me obsessing over Easybrain Sodoku. Sodoku is my comfort. I am the leader this week with 4.2 million points.

I am on vacation from LinkedIn. I stopped looking for ways to improve my agentic loops AI assisted hedging against the superintelligent apocalypse. I stopped my premium ApplyMe.ai subscription. I stopped responding to all appeals to self-improvement that have targeted me from this and that data engineering academy. I’m almost to the point where my boredom is out-pacing my anxious depression, but not quite. I have been working on this dog’s breakfast of an essay for two weeks in spurts and I need to get to a point.

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Hobbes And Me
The Lorite has made me reassess my alignment with John Locke, which of the three [Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau] made me most believe I stood with the most principled republican patriots of America. Yet my skepticism that populist politics would deliver a consistently rigorous set of centralizing principles pushed me over towards Stoicism. Basically I’m stoic because I consider myself out of sync with the popular mood of American politics and I choose not to be bothered. If I were rich, I’d probably be much more Epicurean. As it stands I now feel much more fearful of our social stability. It feels as if somebody slipped a boot into the washing machine and the inevitable spin cycle is going to wobble the bushings into oblivion. Nobody seems to have the courage to boot the boot. The new resonance is dangerous.

So this is an admission of fear, in the acknowledgement that things can go horribly wrong, as I in my new retirement am ready to confess I don’t want to knuckle up. We remain extraordinary in our geopolitical situation and our infrastructure (especially with sports stadiums) is the envy of the world. That doesn’t change the fact that slovenly leadership is capable of grinding our bearings to rubble. We need maintenance more than we need disruption and reform.

So, yes I am bearing witness to the fact that we are not the Greatest Generation and we don’t have the experience of grinding through the grit to know better than to run with our mouths open during a shitstorm. More of us are needing to feel the fear. I hear people believing that AI is going to extend our lifespans. I have two words for that: Joe Biden, and if you don’t think so, then Ronald Reagan. On the other hand, Hegseth is no prize and JD Vance’s soufflé has reverted to the mean. I have yet to see Rubio stumble. That doesn’t change the insouciant energy of many vectors of stupid possessing the minds of young people, especially those petulant enough to humblebrag their own privilege. Did I already mention luxury beliefs in this essay? Claude? Anyone?

Jews in America are frightened, people. The chilling effects are real. We don’t seem to be calm enough for regular law and order to preside. So I understand the sentiments of crackdown. I think it is going to have to take some kind of replay of the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago.

In brief, I think America is due for another Nixonian figure who will be called to speak for another ‘silent majority’ who have had it with all of the globalization of the Intifada and the culture of victimization that has so much of America in its ideological grip. I say so with a serious appreciation for the sort of insecurity and paranoia that he attempted to cover up in his Administration. This is the sensitivity that my own weakness reveals. At some point every middle class American realizes that they’re not driving the bus and there are no seatbelts. Hobbes doesn’t speak entirely for me, but I’m heeding him more than ever before.

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Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English political philosopher who spent most of his working life in the service of the Cavendish family as tutor, translator, and traveling companion. He engaged Galileo in Padua, fled to Paris during the English Civil War, tutored the future Charles II in exile, and there wrote the book that made and unmade his reputation — a systematic derivation of absolute sovereignty from the fear of violent death.

Big idea

In the state of nature, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. To escape it, self-interested individuals covenant to lay down their natural liberty and submit to a sovereign whose power is absolute because it alone can be — the alternative is the war of all against all that reason itself commands them to leave behind.

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Hobbes himself wasn’t philosophically Royalist. He would remind Democrats today that Congress can bully the President into submission. He might sign on with the Defunders, but would demand a mandate from Congress. Well, actually he’d be very frustrated. There’s nothing quite like a mandate from Congress unless you’re talking about funding for the TSA for example. Let’s leave it at Nixonian. We need ordinary people at the center of all things, and we cannot afford to leave our streets and thus our society in disquiet and chaos.

Lee Jussim reminds us of where we have been.

Lest They Forget

Are We Done Yet?
I don’t think we have enough bread and circuses to distract us. What’s worse is that there is a class of us who are entertained by the likes of Bill Maher and Tucker Carlson and others I ignore when possible. The thrash is healthy in the abstract, but what gets done? Where’s the actually effective altruism? Where is the actual abundance? Why on earth do we believe it’s all going to come from Silicon Valley? I am encouraged by the success of Substack and the marginal boost I get from being in the top 75 philosophical blogs, and I’m quite happy with the quality of information that I get by being a subscriber here, as I hope you are as well. Nevertheless, I think people are going to dig in, and we are going to be subject to the loud minorities invested in mindless viral disruption.

I remain disturbed, but I’m still eating well.