Matthew T Grant

I believe there is no legitimate power or illegitimate power. There is only power.

If you view a particular instance of power as ‘illegitimate,” it’s probably because you are on the other side of it.

Even legitimate power—say, the power granted a rightfully elected president by a constitution—depends on the power, pure and simple, whose exercise made said constitution an arbiter of legitimacy in the first place.

For example, the conquest of the territory now referred to as the United States of America bestowed legitimacy on the constitution of these United States. The only thing that bestowed legitimacy on the conquest was the fact that it occurred.

Were the conquered able to reverse their fate, the result, however gratifying, would be a power no more or less legitimate.

It does.

It always puzzles me when people dismiss homosexuality, or frankly, any particular human behavior, as “unnatural.” 

It puzzles me because people who hold this view are not thereby saying that homosexuality is physically impossible. Indeed, its physical possibility is a necessary pre-condition of its being either denounced or proscribed. But this then begs the question:

How can something that is physically possible be “unnatural”?

In other words, if a particular behavior can be observed in the natural world, we must admit of its “naturalness.” Since sexual interactions occur between members of the same sex in at least one species (ours), and possibly others, homosexuality is, ipso facto, natural.

So what is really going on when humans claim that a particular human behavior goes “against nature”?

Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone says, “Time is money.” But isn’t it more true that space is money?

I can’t increase the amount of time I have. In fact, I can’t possess time in any real sense because, in a very real sense, time doesn’t exist.

Time is not; it’s more like the is-ing or is-ness of everything. (I think a Nazi philosopher once wrote about this.)

By contrast, I can increase the amount of space (actual, physical space) that I own and control. In fact, through rents and the extraction of natural resources, this space can be fairly easily converted into money.

The notion that “time is money” is the expression of a wish: the wish for immortality. If time were something that we could accumulate and hoard, then we could, through force of will, stave off death, the end of our specific time.

But time doesn’t work that way.

Nor does money.

When we are asked to “tolerate” the religious views of others, the assumption is that we harbor no religious views of our own or, at least, that such views do not lay claim to absolute truth.

In other words, calls for religious tolerance (and this includes the “freedom of religion” ensconced in our Bill of Rights) tacitly imply that all religions are equally valid, which is just another way of saying that no one religion is the true religion.

Of course, at least in the case of Christianity and Islam, such an insistence is baked into the religion itself. For this reason, asking Christians to be “tolerant” of (in the sense of neither criticizing, mocking nor lampooning) Islamic doctrine, or vice versa, is tantamount to asking them to disown (or at least relativize) their own creed.

That many believers are in fact willing to do so, thus accepting the relatively modern perspective that one’s religious beliefs are a matter of personal preference, rather than universal obligation, testifies to humanity’s willingness to favor social bonds over dogmatic, doctrinal fidelity. It also suggests that many people understand their religious identity to be as much an accident of birth as their native language or particular ethnicity.

That others are unwilling to do so and, in fact, ready to persecute and attack adherents of rival faiths or be martyred in the name of their own, strikes us as both hopelessly antiquated and, if seen as an act of principled, unwavering devotion, oddly heroic.

Which does not mean, however, that such “heroism” need be tolerated.

The Finnish eco-fascist Pennti Linkola once said that, “The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth.”

Along the same lines, he also opined, “”Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent [a] dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. [The] best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.”

While I’m on the fence about the rolling heads, I share Linkola’s skepticism around growth and have always wondered why anyone would advocate bringing the “American Dream,” for example, to the whole world when, just from a resource allocation perspective, we could not have even half of the Earth’s current population living the way Americans, who represent about 4% of the Earth’s population, do.

Turns out the skepticism is justified and there are mounting problems with the faith harbored by politicians and economists, a faith most visibly at work in the notion that our debt woes will be brought in hand as soon as our economy “starts growing again” or “returns to the growth we saw X years ago.”

The bad news is that the growth the West in particular has enjoyed for the last 200+ years may be an historical anomaly and a chapter in human history gradually, and even precipitously, drawing to a close. If I follow the arguments of the doomsayers, the idea is that said growth, especially in the US, arose out of the confluence of a large, undeveloped (albeit indigenously inhabited) continent ripe for the plucking by the technologically advanced hand of Europe, ongoing technical innovation, and cheap energy (in the form of oil).

The continent having been plucked, technical innovation now tending to increase productivity while decreasing employment, and cheap oil peaked or peaking, the drivers of growth are on the ropes.

And that means things are probably going to get grim (or grimmer, depending on where you are at now).

If you want to read the bad news for yourself, I encourage you to check out: “Forecast 2013: Contraction, Contagion and Contradiction,” by James Howard Kunstler,  “No More Industrial Revolutions, No More Growth?” by Charles Hugh Smith, and “Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds,” by Robert J. Gordon.

I guess the good news is that we may, as a species, be on the road back to the feudal days, rather than all the way back to the stone age.

Actually, I’m not sure that’s good news.

You know how people say that when they got nothing?

Well, that’s why I’m saying it now.

Back in August I became conscious of this fellow, Derek Sivers, who created CD Baby (later selling it for $22 million and giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education). If you poke around his blog, you’ll quickly find this post on saying “No.”

Well, technically, it’s about simplifying your life by deciding what you should do—go out with friends, take a job, live someplace, etc.— based on whether or not you say “Hell yeah!” to the opportunity or idea. If you don’t, Sivers suggests, you should say, “No.”

While I’ve never been able to apply ideas like this to my own life with any rigor, I have always admired the urge to do so because that urge is based on following one’s heart, passionately engaging with life, and not settling for anything but the best.

(Perhaps my lack of rigor has something to do with my ambivalence about the “seize the day” approach in general. I mean, do we really need the best? Always? Ever? Does the world really just consist of “The Best,” and “The Rest”? If something isn’t the best, does that make it worthless? What drives us to find the world perpetually wanting? Etc.)

I was reminded of Sivers’ ethos when I recently came across this video of Steve Jobs from 1997, in which he defends decisions to kill certain projects when he returned to Apple: Read the rest of this entry »

We were talking about all the things that we’d missed out on and I realized that negativity is endless.

There is no limit to what might have been. The negative knows no bounds. For every definite thing that is, there is an infinite number of things it is not.

But the infinity of the negative is not an infinity of variety and difference, such as the infinity of the physical universe. Instead, it resembles the infinite emptiness of the vacuum.

Freeing oneself from a negative perspective or mindset can be difficult precisely due to the weight of this undeniable endlessness. It draws us into its undifferentiated vortex and we lose our way.

By cleaving to the empty, endless space of loss, however, and taking the negative to be the true, unshakeable, never-ending reality, we also hope to master death, our own endless negation.

Nevertheless, you cannot master death, even by trying to see through its eyes.

An old friend accused me of “playing it safe” on my blog. Apparently, writing about death metal, however aesthetically outlandish the music or my love of it may be, is of little consequence, big picture-wise.

Of course, I thought that my post on communism and change was kind of edgy—not to mention my frequent advocacy of atheism and/or nihilism—but apparently such musings neither touch nerves, shatter preconceived notions, nor speak truth to power.

Can it be true that there is nothing dangerous about this blog? Have I remained too scrupulously within the lines of accepted opinion, too conscientiously observed protocols of civility, too gently treated the thoughts and feelings of my contemporaries, even when I found them preposterous, stupid, or atrocious?

I suppose this is possible.

Will I henceforth change my approach?

This, too, is possible.

Am I playing it safe with this post?

Undoubtedly.