The veneer of social order is so thin. We live in angry, selfish times. All it takes is a half-blocked intersection and some screwed up timing on traffic lights, and people start doing whatever it takes to get their way first, even if it obviously makes things worse for everyone including themselves. Horns blaring, windows rolled down to spew rage, people flapping their hands in frustration, and all over just an extra few minutes of travel time.

Maybe what I saw today was just a bad drive through a tense scene, but I’m really disturbed by the level of venom that I have observed more generally around the blizzard this week. A lot of people have really been put out, and, sure, public and private sector responses could have been better coordinated. But if the aftermath of some bad weather does this, then what’s next? Disorder arises too easily. When do impotent rage and primate aggression displays turn into true violence? It feels like a sign of much worse to come.

The likelihood that people could handle a crisis collaboratively has visibly gotten much lower. And it seems likely it will only get worse as infrastructure and environment degrade, as public services are defunded by deficit hawks and constitutional fundamentalists, and as the bubble of social anger grows.

In so many places, you see signs small and large of an opportunistic rot that eats away at government, at common good, and at each person. In that opportunity, a new form of sovereignty is taking hold, one that thrives on social fragmentation and radical privatization, and one that is undoing people’s basic ability to come together around a common problem. Reflecting on moments such as what I saw today, I worry. When the common problems created by this corporatized sovereignty become too intense for it to withstand, it will collapse; the only thing left behind will be the rot and the rage.

The state of men without civil society (which state may be called the state of nature) is nothing but a war of all against all; and that in that war, all have a right to all things.
—Hobbes

Almost 30 robots have started teaching English to youngsters in a South Korean city, education officials said Tuesday….The 29 robots, about one metre (3.3 feet) high with a TV display panel for a face, wheeled around the classroom while speaking to the students, reading books to them and dancing to music by moving their head and arms. The robots, which display an avatar face of a Caucasian woman, are controlled remotely by teachers of English in the Philippines — who can see and hear the children via a remote control system. Cameras detect the Filipino teachers’ facial expressions and instantly reflect them on the avatar’s face, said Sagong Seong-Dae, a senior scientist at KIST. “Well-educated, experienced Filipino teachers are far cheaper than their counterparts elsewhere, including South Korea,” he told AFP.

“S.Korea schools get robot English teachers,” Agence France Presse, December 28, 2010

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity—when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step—you need a guide no longer—strain, and see.

Plotinus, The Enneads

From their home they fly now here, now there, feeding on honey-comb and bringing all things to pass. And when they are inspired through eating yellow honey, they are willing to speak truth; but if they be deprived of the gods’ sweet food, then they speak falsely, as they swarm in and out together.

The Thriae, who practised divination by means of pebbles (also called THRIAE). In this hymn they are represented as aged maidens (ll. 553-4), but are closely associated with bees (ll. 559-563) and possibly are here conceived as having human heads and breasts with the bodies and wings of bees.

– From a note to an unspecified edition of the Homeric Hymns

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there, just so that it may be on call for a future ordering. 

The forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did is today ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part, is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand. 

In the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to revise what is past, but rather a sober readiness to be astounded before the coming of the dawn. 

All revealing comes out of the free, goes into the free, and brings into the free. The freedom of the free consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraints of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing shimmers the veil that hides the essential occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing on its way.

– M.H.

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow ;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear ;

Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
Alas, quoth he, but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I !

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns ;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defilëd souls,

For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.