Worlding and the labour theory of value part four - paranoia & cult

In part 1 or ‘Do it for the house' I discussed a narcissist who did really well out of a working bee or two, which he advertised as “doing it for the house". This improved the property before he sold the house, on the back of unpaid labour, other peoples' tools and skills. He just happened to own it when it was sold out from under them. The law was on his side and they had to take it to put it down to experience. Emotionally they subsidised the loss.

It’s here I invented the word sweorlfd for narcissists when we consider them in the frame of empathy and operating among us in the world, for them the self=world  —or sweorlfd.

In part 2 I covered the term alienation, highlighting it’s use in Latin to refer to the active transfer of property, its title in effect, from from one person to another, perhaps on selling it for an agreed price. It’s here that I get to the Marxianist ‘labour theory of value’ which is based on the exploitation of labour by capital (as described by the Narcissist and the ‘do it for the house’ that he owned. (There are lots of hippie stories like this from the 70s & 80s in Australia BTW).

This begins my criticism of critiques which rely on correcting systems to fix things when often we need to police bad behaviour, for I argue, then, perhaps, it does not matter which system we do or do not use, if we allow narcissists to get away with it.

In part 3 I looked at art, this is a bit of a sideshow to the main progress of thought here, and is basically a riff on what might be called ‘conspicuous labour’ in displays of wealth or other unvirtuous signalings of power. This is about the esteem or status of those who display art, which these days is often the brandname artist curating their own career, while other volunteer-serfs or wage-slaves actually make the art, for the house. Here ‘do it for the house’ and ‘art for art’s sake’ are basically the same thing. Both parasitise our worlding instincts.

This final part 4 is about the cultic practices of bad worlding such as cascades of self-fulfilling paranoia. But first we get a reprise of all of the above.

One aspect of the Marixianist ‘labour theory of value’ is that this theory overloads exploitation (which I obviously admit capitalism ‘allows’) as the basis for pricing value and ignores anything we might do to negotiate our way through the world on a day to day basis.

One outcome of this aspect when we overload the “exploitation of labour” idea, i.e. using it as a metaphor— that Greek word for property alienation we use for figures of speech which pivot on the copula of a sentence (often ‘to be’) —is that we then discuss everything too much in terms the status of labour, and not enough in the practice of labour. We get distracted by the exploitation and forget ourselves in doubling down against the system and its blame/credit balance sheet, which allows this exploitation to happen. The result is a co-evolution of Labour and Capital (which is further alienated, I mean metaphor-ed by the Valhalla of dialectics as some part of progress, with revolution as the eternal dawn when and where the thesis-warriors arise from death to fight again as anti-theses).

This is bad worlding. Or rather, it allows bad worlding. Much like the laws of capitalism allow the exploitation of labour by the owners of land, machinery and intellectual property. Who and why some get away with it is a very different question.

Much that happens is not the result of intention but implication, and complication. And does so as complexity unfolds in further involuted evolutions and stratifications allowing the throwback of the psychopath to dominate. We can be very confused by this process and so see dialectics as the best fit to explain it, but dialectics is just a story. It is just a world-building exercise. It let's us do stuff and make mistakes. Like all worlding practices.

As I have said elsewhere, our evolutionary advantage here is to world and learn in empathic negotiations, where we make mistakes and insure we can cope with that learning opportunity across generations. It does not lie in picking the right solution, and in double-downing on it so it becomes strict doctrine, dead grammar, & dogma, but in trying. And sometimes not even trying to pick the right solution is enough to survived… —but just trying it out, trying it on, trying it through, try…

We do find it all this trying, we often wish to rest, it takes so much effort, if only we could find the answer our labours it would all be over, the job done we could ascend to heaven in a techno-rapture, or whatever.

It doesn't end there however, it ends in the world, which is really tomorrow by another name. And tomorrow never comes, so, it will never end.

Basically I am saying that the ‘labour theory of value’ can be used for ill, like someone saying ‘do it for the house’. 

This would be fine if the person saying it was also doing it for the world, but if they are a sweorlfd, and no matter what the system/solution/uniform/belief/maxim/value is they will suit themselves: Stalin, Mugabe, Trump, Boris Johnson.

Sure some system encourage narcissism more, sure, some systems are set-up by narcissists for narcissists, but they are not responsible for that, we are, we are responsible when we do not actively police them. When we let them get away with it for the sake of a quiet life, when we do it for the house of order, or whatever else we exchange our agency for.

The strong form of this thesis is that systems do not matter at all, that our failure to police narcissists is the always the larger threat:

The trouble with communism/libertarianism/ism is that it has never really been tried.

This is the worlding urge speaking. I can hear responsibility for tomorrow in it, but it needs to be more streetwise.

So you promised me paranoia! Where is it?

Paranoia is a type of negative worlding, if hope springs eternal, then fear is often closer than our bones. Similar to some mild types of depression, paranoia can be an 'enjoyable' illness, though for different existential reasons. Instead of moping around like an ego in black, the gnostic fool know things that sheeple do not, even as the knowledge gained removes their own agency for good. Paranoia is a type of anti-wisdom. Wisdom is about knowing the world in the self, that ratio in all its forms. Paranoia is about knowing how fucked everything is. In paranoia mistakes are not there to be learned from, they are sins that damn us to a living hell.

In part 1 'do it for ther house' the narcissist sold a positive form of worlding, where hope springs eternal until it is burnt down by the scam. He had no access to it himself, but could push that button in others.

But a bigger area effect can be acquired by the negative worlding of paranoia and its fear-knowledge. The stronger effect is partly because it is often self-fulfilling, the conspiracy theorist organises an actual conspiracy to battle the imagined conspiracy. This is very bad worlding. This is the cult. Nazism's imaged Jewish banker conspiracies are of this order.

This conspiracying is so bad, you actually do better worlding by not conspiring against those who conspire against you, this is what justice if for BTW.

And this is what the quip “I might be paranoid but that doesn’t mean they are not out to get me” is all about. It describes that pathology of the paranoid's bubble where they enjoy the power they gain from knowing they do not have 'the' real power, they may have no trust in the system, and so the hope of the world is closed-off. The best they can do is hope for the end of the world, if not bring it on. This is the death cult of Jim Jones, and perhaps, Russia under Putin.

Remember secret services are institutionalised conspiracying, and they know the truth of conspiracying as a day-to-day worlding, they live it, they know nothing else, and I ask who polices them? Who watchers the watchers if they deny the world?

Narcissism is close to paranoia at all times, if only because the reality principle is ready to come crashing down on egocentric fantasies. Grandiose or not. It is perhaps most obvious in the covert or victim narcissist who is constantly on guard for attacks, because, if the world is not out to get me why am I not King of the world? My own lack of status is evidence enough that there is a conspiracy against me. My own lack of total control over everything-everywhere-all-the-time is proof they are out to get me.

It is only the most grandiose who escape this altogether. Perhaps they puff out as a singularity of their devising and we never noticed them in our midst.

For actual kings, of course, other narcissists will always have the monarch in their sights. The mere presence on the throne of somebody else is a conspiracy against them.

The imperial tendency is a narcissistic pit of intentions. Empires are bad worlding despite their economic swagger. Eventually the paranoid will tear them apart, decline and fall is always coming. Monarchies are failures, like any and all 'systems', valuing labour or not, where they fail to police narcissists. Monarchies usually do the exact opposite. Monarchies should always be policed.

There are two aspects between paranoia and the labour theory of value I wish to meta-ratio before you.

The first is the effort people put into paranoia and their concerns over their lack of agency, that which they feel has been stolen from them. This effort, this labour can be is astounding. It can give people a sense of purpose and meaning (i.e. the bad worlding) even as it does so by removing their agency to act well in the world. This bad worlding is often called entitlement. They act on this bad advice to the detriment of us all.

Not all labours are good work.

If not all labours are good what does it matter that they get alienated? If the devil steals his slave-demons’ labour does that make it worse/better. What value/s are we talking about here? What axiological frameworks are we using? What is the devil wearing this season? That lace work must have taken months!

The second aspect has been iterated above already, and is inter-twined with the first, some people labour at their conspiracies because stuff has been stolen from them, but if it hasn’t been stolen from them, or is an artifact of narcissistic systems allowing theft, basing your worlding on that kleptocratic framework (alienation valuations) is not going to unsteal your labour.

Tomorrow is another day. Logic is a hindsight. Hindsight is a rearview mirror. It will lock you in and mechanically lobotomise (robotomise) you into a another day like yesterday.

I understand this is still an urge to world, but stealing back that which has not been stolen, or even if it has, does not end the cycle of theft. Further, justice restores but does so in a negotiation of worlding in which the parties acknowledge the role of the world in the proceedings (the name of the worlding has many forms).

Admittedly narcissists do their utmost to stop that from happening as it forestalls their entitled attempts to privatise the world in their own name of the sweorlfd. This is why they always go to court at the drop of a hat, if not to go back for their hat. They need to control that which is the most threat to themselves and their narcissism.

Cults are microcosms of this entire process. Conspiracies are sweorlfds within sweorlfds, there is no world of selves here, only serfs who do it for the house, the dominating self who sets up the house rules. Sweorlfds de-world the self as much as they de-self the world.

The world is not one world or many, it is all both of all of them, there maybe value in unitary states, but the world does not count, not even up to one, nor even does it looks back to zero.

A worlding theory of value does not count the cost in a credit/blame system.