Symbolic Immunity

How I got it. How you can get it.

Pulling away from the brain spew.

I’m pleased to have met and spoke to and with Musa al-Gharbi because he’s got famousity. I used to chase my own famousity when I was a regular on NPR, but it wasn’t my day job. I enjoyed what I had, but truly didn’t need it, but I know these are (Musa, NPR) signposts for people I want to write for, which is why I periodically bring my famousity up. The good news is I’m a permanent outsider. It’s also the bad news. In that simultaneous irony is a lesson to be shared.

Musa, from what I can ascertain as well as Mike Hind are people who have a certain amount of symbolic immunity. I’m riffing off of Musa’s meme, which I expect to ripple through the chatting classes. Musa speaks of the symbolic capitalists in his work. They are the brainy subset of what I call the Genius class in my Peasant Theory. The Geniuses are the men and women who work for The Man. They are the ones who taught you what the Overton Window was and why you should pay attention to it. They are the people who hipped you to Dunning-Kruger effect to addict you to their brain spew so you’re not the dumbest guy in the room. They are the ones who are writing the AIs that are sucking way more than their fair share of oxygen out of the American economic atmosphere. There’s more than a little bit of trepidation in their guts these days. Trump is going to be President, and those AIs just might make all of us the dumbest guys in the room.

Since you are well-read or at least have the good literary sense to enjoy good writing, you may probably have heard the ironic story about the young Wall Street broker who truly enjoyed spending a week in a primitive Mexican fishing village. He vows to return in his retirement only to realize 30 years later that he could have spent his entire life there. Dollars to donuts the most mouthy edge of the symbolic capitalist crew (who else but Hollywood stars) will be the first to announce their expatriation in the wake of the de-Wokification and the immanent rise of the MAGA regime. They always pick a destination other than the planet’s thousands of mosquito coasts, where their first world upbringing makes them the dumbest guy in the raffia hut. Did you ever think about how many dead bodies remain on the slopes of Everest?

Now having been a young man with a future, I have aspired to be Genius, but something happened to me on my own road to Damascus. At the tender age of 16, I was accepted on early decision to the electrical engineering program at USC - the college of my dreams. Only it wasn’t a full scholarship and I ended up dropping out for financial reasons. Within 90 days or so, I became a fully fledged Teamster in a closed shop. I went from the prep school track to hanging out in a warehouse with Vietnam vets. I lived and loved and learned on the other side. This contributed to my immunity.

The Immunity of Wayward Youth
It was January of 1979 and I was making $3.17 an hour selling radios, shelving sundries and bagging retail merchandise. The previous summer, I was programming a PDP 11/03 in FORTRAN doing dew point and bubble point calculations for refrigerants of the CFC sort now outlawed because of the ozone layer. The money was about the same. By Christmas I had a new motorcycle, a new girlfriend and a new jheri curl. I partied at roller discos and yammered in blockbuster movie lines with my new crowd of public school chums. I was getting thoroughly dipped into a working class milleu. I was comfortable and happy, but not unaware of the life I left. Today I still regret that I didn’t become one of the original D&D masters from the legendary Swamp at USC. I hated being outside of my preppy bubble in which I would be directed by my instructors and counselors which of my particular efforts would be impactful at the next level. Out here in the Peasant wilderness, things had to make another kind of sense - there were different old boy requirements. I adapted reluctantly. It helped develop a kind of resentment.

What I had always done is been a certain kind of athlete. Most specifically, and down to my 8th grade Friends of the Earth notepads, I was an inveterate hiker, camper and backpacker. From Clear Creek to Hidden Springs to Valley Forge to Kratka to Wikiup to Josephine Peak to Pacifico to the tunnels at Mount Lowe, I knew the Angeles National Forest like the back of my hand. The clerks at Sports Chalet in La Cañada knew me by sight before it became La Cañada-Flintridge.

At home, serving under the command of Dad, I poured concrete, painted walls, set pavers in bark, sunk fence poles, replaced windows, built bookcases, rewired light switches, built a two story playhouse, put up paneling and basically did everything but plumbing. We jogged at 6am every morning. For punishment we did squat jumps. Not even burpees are so exhausting. Nobody on YouTube does them the way we did.

Fête Manquée
There were a couple things that, after about two years, got me sick and tired of being that Jheri curl guy (no photographic evidence exists). One was an argument I had with a woman I knew to be my intellectual inferior about my suitability to do her job of inventory and price control. The other with a beautiful woman who turned her back on me on the dance floor when I responded about my job as a Teamster. I quit the union job, having survived a strike, and got into banking and cut the curls. In the fall of 1982 I began working my way towards a degree in Computer Science at State. I expected to transfer to Stanford and ultimately get a Harvard MBA but those institutions would have to wait as my entrepreneurial genes kicked in after my third internship with Xerox. My partner and I got burned by a scumball attorney and once again I had to drop out for financial reasons. I no longer had the patience to do undergraduate work and realized the Ivies wouldn’t have me. Hi ho, hi ho. Off to Xerox I go. Fulltime work again.

All the details may someday be in my autobiography, still untitled, but I had been forged in the practical survival tactics of working-my-way-through-college and taking-temp-jobs-through-agencies. These served me well many years later as an independent contractor with programming bona fides.

And yet my intellectual curiosity and discipline remained with me. It wasn’t until I was 30 when I finally had an MBA working for me when I was technical lead at Philip Morris, my first million dollar project, that I gave up thinking I would ever jump through the hoops of Harvard. By this time I had adopted the bohemian pose of being a hiphop organic intellectual. I was ‘daylighting’ as a Nordstrom wearing midtown Manhattanite. Well, I never quit my day job.

I had lived on the beach, drove the BMWs, thrown the pool parties, attended the plays, visited the museums, played the beach volleyball, ate in the private room, but I still didn’t have immunity. I mean here I was doing poetry slams at Nuyorican and partying at Spike Lee’s. What could be more symbolic?

Intellectually the emphasis was on the term ‘organic’. It means I wasn’t leveraged by institutions. I may have been their digital janitor but I was never at the right parties. It would be another seven years for me to break into the six figures. I didn’t even know where my peers were. I was all over the place, in exactly the places I wanted to be, but without a clue as to the inside track, the Goldman Sachs elevator as it were, remained illusive. So organic was my badge of courage, back in mid 90s when I still wrote all in lower case. The sad fact was that I was all up Cornel West’s & bell hooks’ collective ass, from a distance.

The Intellectual Immunities
Over the course of several years, I read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, American Mythologies by Marshal Blonsky and Drylongso by a blind cat named Gwaltney, Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stall, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and finally Confessions of a Street Addict by Jim Cramer.

• Eco: There is intellectual trickeration going on in the world. People who think for the sake of thinking will think any thought they think makes them a thinker. Their insecurities and hungers will make them eat their own tails. These are conspiracies without actions - they all take place in the minds of the deceivers who have the same vulnerabilities as those they seek to deceive.

• Blonsky: There is this thing called Semiotics, which is the study of symbols that stand in for actual knowledge. You discover it through marketing appeals which, when adopted, confer status. They grant ‘authenticity’ which bears only the slightest resemblance to truth. Indeed both can exist at the same time when only the proper symbol has social currency.

• Gwaltney: Black Americans know what’s going on and they each decide what to do about it, but nobody listens to them. There is no need for ‘black leadership’. You just need to hear people out individually.

• Stoll: Software is the ultimate symbolic manipulation. Don’t believe the hype.

• Stephenson: The discipline of digital warriors can uncover unknown history. The physical world has secrets just like the digital world. The proper individual can bridge the gap between these mysterious worlds. Beware what you my find.

• Cramer: Luck plays a role, never forget that. Beating the odds means beating the oddsmakers and all of the players. Lunch is not only not free, it’s brutal. Retail investors are sheep.

Yeah yeah yeah, but these are only attractive subversive ideas that warn one about the danger of attractive subversive ideas. You’re a programmer - you live in this world, what’s going to save you from its depredations, myths and lies?

The short answer are my tentpoles: Discovery, Reason, Humility, Humor. But the most thorough answer lies in physical discipline in the real world.

Physical Discipline: The Final Immunity
The final immunity is physical health. It is the active engagement of the centering of your embodiment. One of the mental images I’ve kept with me my entire career is that of a hillbilly spitting a gob of salty and highly conducive tobacco juice on the electric socket of a supercomputer. Sparks fly and digital knowledge is destroyed as are hundreds of hours of work. The actual nightmare is me having a chip embedded in my hand with my life’s work and I forget to wear my Faraday gloves when boarding a private jet.

Have you ever noticed this similar thing about vegans and devotees of Crossfit? They never fail to tell you of how you should intellectually respect their physical discipline. Have you ever noticed how people with abstruse sexual desires have such enormous influence on the Genius class? Have you ever noticed how this is connected to racial essentialism? Have you ever noticed how skinny bookish people generally cultivate disdain for American football and boxing? I mean anything that might mess with your brain must be insidious.

Need I say more about Peloton? 23 and me? All physical manifestations that challenge the supremacy of Platonic pure reason must be subject to heightened scrutiny. After all, we’re talking about deflation of the mental markets of the symbolic capitalists. The film Idiocracy makes no sense whatsoever if the physical procreative skills did not result in mental retardation. That’s the intellectual conceit of the film, that suddenly evolution stopped working and no geniuses were born.

The Ivy Cabal lives on the conceit of Geist Uber Alles, except they are demonstrably guilty of postmodern semiotic deceit - they aim to control the Geist by any means necessary. The extent to which this applies to all of symbolic capitalists is what the next decade will determine. Clearly the farmers who are not captured by Monsanto-esque agricultural capture are part of the Genius class, but they’re not going to be postmodernist, because the overwhelming majority of them understand that they are potential Kulaks. Before this year’s Presidential election they were only rural ‘racists’. They’re not likely to forget that anytime soon. Moreover they are engaged in an embodied, physically demanding discipline as are my other favorites, warriors.

I’m a data engineer. I love the back-end, not the charts and graphs and powerpoints. In industry speak, I’m all about Postgres, not about Tableau. I’m a digital sherpa. I don’t take selfies at the peak. It’s one of the reasons I’m out of a job right now. I don’t market as well as the ‘smell-good plumbers’. I’m about infrastructure, like the expert in construction dismisses the building codes of Levittown, in a nation loathe to build power plants because of ‘environmental concerns’. But I digress.

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Now What?
I daresay that JD Vance, as I appreciate one of his virtues to the exclusion of all else likely to be spun in today’s postmodern, populist, semiotically manipulative press, understands the extent to which a physical demand smashes the priorities of intellectual demands. If that physical demand is drug addiction, it’s obviously destructive. But physical demands can be virtuous. This is what we need to appreciate and remember. Not just recreational sex. Not just virtue-signaling diet. I talked about this before when I asked what are we supposed to be using our bodies for in society?

I think we need to get a little bit more out of our heads in terms of our dependency on brain spew. You could call that ‘screen time’ which is just the superset of doomscrolling. An alternative screen is not a thorough substitute. Hell, even going to Starbucks to drink coffee and leaving your laptop at home is a positive option, because it involves some physical discipline when it becomes your habit. Walk your dog. Weed your garden. Wrench your motorcycle. But beware of Reebokism. Your body is not a temple of vanity, there needs to be purpose. Don’t just create a look, make it a purpose - even if it is to only walk little old ladies across the street.

To give priority to your physical discipline over intellectual symbolism, most especially to the embodied, physically demanding discipline of motherhood, is considered a mark of social inferiority among certain elites. Think about that.

What brain spew?

More on physical purpose later. I hope this attractive subversive idea is appropriately subversive of other attractive subversive ideas.

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