Coin Proxies Nature

Often I think about how an advanced society’s economy acts as a loose proxy of Nature. Most of the time.

After all, animals in the wild spend many cycles on furnishing their lodgings and storing resources, if they’re a storing type, or perhaps migrating, as a used car salesman looking for another lot and a new lease on life. The economic games aim toward the same ends. A proxy indeed: limited resources and biased allocatings, abstracting fight between firms in the form of cranked up sales efforts.

What makes this proxy uncomfortable for many is how proxying Nature means inheriting its lack of benevolence.

There is no benevolence in Nature. There are no underdogs, nor temporarily displaced, nor those hoping for a new footing, a promising venture — all of these now slot under the category of “dead”. Consistent failure means to perish.

Indeed, if a purported economic system acted as a True Neutral, without any other type of outside intervention, death is the True Neutral answer. The same as Nature.

Of course, to assuage this uncomfortable truth so there are loose methods employed, whether social services or dispensaries, lavish political platformings and so on.

And yet, strangely enough, death is still common, just unnoticed amongst the ranks of whichever skid row you’d look away from. The difference is that it wasn’t necessarily the entirety of economic forces which evicted their life, but often their own will to live too. Where, technically, though debatable, as long as one judiciously attends the food bank, the church sponsored soup kitchens, donation grounds too. Sift through the discarded for a blanket this coming winter so one can aim for New Years.

Yet living consistently in such a demoralizing environment is unsustainable for even the most stubborn of minds. Additionally, it’s quite hard to imagine clawing your way out if you can only think on a day-to-day basis. Few do.

So instead of death due to pure economic forces, we now have death due to partial economic forces and an inability to overcome the psychological attrition. Even then, the “partial” qualifier may, at times, be void — sometimes these loose methods fail to reach those who need them the most.

Thus at times it seems these interventions exist not for those who need it, but for those who cannot stand the proxy of Nature humming around us. Still true as day: failure in the wild, komm, susser todd. Economic failure the same, though with more steps involved and you could always resort to playing a different game as the homesteader does. One can sustain the illusion these economically expunged somehow continue living by depending on how much outside support taken in. Our Game of Life, extended.

This is the more unnerving aspect of modernity: what used to be a swift correction process on right or wrong — that is, did you get food today, protect your fort — could now take decades to correct, whether in the form of NEETdom, or in the long trodden path of food banks until one can no longer stand to live and the drugs stop working ten years further, or just a simple game of savings which won’t sustain later on. For even a blip in one’s employment history, with the relative comfort modernity affords, obscures the harsher aftereffects — when you’re pushing 50, 60, and inevitably the demands of our abstracted economy no longer need one’s antiquated views and skills, how shall one feed, slowly witnessing their savings dip to zero?

The culling of Nature, though it’d be more comfortable to believe We’re Beyond It, hasn’t been removed. It’s slowed. In a way, it is an effective method to maximize a suffering extraction process if some beings could harvest emotion. Because you can only stare ahead as the headlights get brighter and closer and you’d have ample time to reflect on your coming demise, enjoy the degradation of living.

One could suppose the worship and celebration of the victim in most Western culture is more of a reflection that many may not feel capable to accept the underlying brutality that strings together this reality. To be a victim and to celebrate the victim — a position of weakness, seeking a justice — is to reject Nature, to hope a retribution and dethrone Nature instead. To install a new personal justice system and defy what seems to be a coded into a cold-hearted world.

The sad reality is we are always under Nature’s rule, and as such, to lean toward a victim inclination, if you aren’t sociopathic enough to understand this is purely a position to take for Game Theory and moral grandstanding in word games and vague idealisms, not to embed into your outlook and psyche, not to adopt as framework and come to believe the world acts to elevate and protect the victim, the weak, the disenfranchised, to reward — this is to set oneself up for great disappointment. Potentially fatal.

After all, those roaming skid row so anonymously probably have some valid atrocity claims to being a victim, and that’s it. For those misfortunate enough, there is no outside system or observing eyes to “correct” these wrongs that led them here. An indifference pervades, because that’s the default in how human nature works, how Nature works.

The current sympathy games are there to attack fundamental idealisms, break apart power structures and law and groups and appearing all great, but often these sympathies end right when it no longer works for a personal end. I imagine a time will come when such sympathies have no benefits, and thus human nature will be unveiled fully, beyond those roaming skid row. The cold stare as you try to make sense of the fog of war. Stepping over someone sleeping, maybe lasting five nights more.

And one could suppose, in a crude sickness, that the current games are set up this way because it’s quite difficult to stare back. It’s more comfortable put up a wall of social services, of Correct Beliefs, Correct Opinions, that “we” can “fix” this when we’re still, in spite of our determination to fix it, only delaying a demise. Maybe without such walls, some minds would very well collapse under the weight of our Natural world.

Let’s gather more coins!