Enclosed by Modernity; Chafing Against the Litigation-Insurance--Complex

Enclosed by Modernity

Chafing Against the Litigation-Insurance--Complex

"People who talk about Late Capitalism, Neoliberalism, other abstractions etc. as cause of problems are those who shift attention away from the 400-500 individuals with specific names and faces who are actually the cause...some do so intentionally, others no, but is same." - Bronze Age Pervert

I was walking around today, trying to think of possibilities for paths forward, as I often do, when a certain thought occurred to me: how great would it be if Geometry was taught to young boys via Architecture? What if they got a primer in architectural engineering and geometry by building things as part of a class? Speaking only for myself, I usually don't really care about an academic subject until I understand just what its possibilities are, and how all of the things in the real world are predicated on it. Mathematics, in particular, was something which I regarded with near-complete indifference. But now, in my nigh-middling years, as I see how many interesting things really require more in-depth study of mathematics, I wonder if it would ever have been possible to have cultivated a more vital, a hungrier interest in mathematics from a younger age. If I had known maybe that mastery of mathematics could yield the mastery of physical reality (provided sufficient resources), by the arts of engineering, architecture, and so on, maybe I wouldn't have been so indifferent. Or maybe, if mathematics was taught less as a field defined by disembodied quanta, and more defined by the ratios between physically existing magnitudes and vectors and so on, it would have been more interesting.

Anyways, I was imagining a class of boys going outside with their (male) teacher and possibly gathering brush, cutting down trees, skinning and planing logs, drafting a blueprint incorporating the geometric principles of their lesson-plan and then constructing a shelter based on their plan, crafting the roof and supports such that all of the pressure and tension of the structure was redirected down into the ground, rather than in the structural weak-points. Boys could thus learn the Secret of the Arch and various other geometric and architectural principles, developing an intuition for their significance by the act of creation. This all seemed a very good idea to me until I realized all at once that it could never be. The reason, of course, is that we live in a fallen plane of existence, where all potential existence we might create for ourselves is stifled under a pestilential yoke, plagued by the social hegemony of litigators, insurance companies, and, unfortunately yes, the insatiable neuroses of ill-governed women.

The Bronze Age Pervert makes much of the hysterical risk-mitigating woman and the threat she presents to freedom and open space, the things for which all men and particularly young men thirst. The ability to create things and mold one's environment in accordance with one's own visions; these are the first targets of the dissatisfied woman. Whether it is to permanently cripple her sons and thereby keep them under her love forever, or simply to squash out the joys she cannot understand or take part in, who can say. But he draws the distinction between the life of open spaces and freedom, and the yeast-life, the life devoid of vision, action and creation, the life of mere existence.

Nobody can read this part of Bronze Age Mindset without resonating deeply with this hatred and refusal of the yeast-life and the matriarchists, whose deepest impulse is to snuff out the possibility of spontaneity and adventure unfolding in real time; Enclosure, in a word. On this I couldn't agree more. Now... but, why did I pick that quote of his to start things off? The implicit contention of this quote is that all time spent talking about Neoliberalism, Capitalism, etc. is wasted time. The implication is that systems are not the threat, but it is powerful individuals that are the threat. This false dichotomy has long irritated me. The Marxists say that the conspiracists and the Faithful are idiotic because they believe that everything could be solved by disempowering a few malicious individuals. The Christ-believers or Bappist Straussians say the Marxists are idiotic because they believe that everything has to be overturned when it's just a few bad actors that need to be disempowered. Both of them engage in a self-serving and erroneous dichotomy here, which is that the relation between Man and Power must either be the relation between Man and Man or Man and System. The Marxists say it's Man and System, and the Far-Right (often, not all of them) say it's Man and Man. But there's really no need for this dichotomy. The relation between Man and Power is really Man-System-Man. Systems both govern men and are conditioned by men, some sit on top of them and some chafe under them; it really need not be so complicated. There are those that can mold systems to their benefit and then there are those that cannot and suffer the designs of the former camp. This dichotomy of Man-System vs. Man-Man persists just as many other politically advantageous dichotomies persist: because the involved parties benefit. If the Marxists have it that it's Man-System, then everyone needs to read Marx, and if the Far-Right have it that it's Man-Man, then everyone needs to read the Protocols. To be fair, many right-wingers push this dichotomy less dogmatically than the Marxists; but then you have people like BAP claiming Man isn't oppressed by Systems but simply by other Men (almost as if to wreck the budding Man-System-Man consensus that might be emerging between the dissident right and the disaffected anti-woke left...). One might really more accurately say that, if it's Man-Man, then no one need learn anything about Society or Systems and then they're liberated to pursue their ineffectual Nietzschean romances.

Anyways what is the point of all this? If you tried to make a school, where children were taught Geometry not just analytically but synthetically, which is to say not in the mathematical "infinite space in every direction and everyone's naked" purgatory but in the act of rational design and creation, who would be the first to stop you? Yes, Big Woman would try to stop you but how and with what? People are no threat without their power, so what is hers? If Big Woman didn't like it and came down on to the construction site wailing and flapping her wings, you could simply have her escorted off the property and calmed down with a glass of water. But she wouldn't try to stop you physically; she would stop you with the Law, or rather, with the threat of Litigation. Or, even more precisely, she wouldn't threaten you with Litigation, but the threat of Litigation would hang over your head so heavily that you wouldn't dare ask the children to build a shelter because if one of them was hurt in the process, your school would be bankrupted immediately. It is the threat of financial ruination that causes us to live under the tyranny of a woman's delusional and insatiable neuroses, but whence cometh this power?

There is such a thing as evil; that is the Insurance-Litigation-Financial Complex, much like the Military-Industrial Complex in that it ruins lives everywhere, but as the latter sucks up the peoples' wealth and siphons it off to Defense Contractors with badass Israeli wives, the former makes sure that our creative organizational visions never come to fruition.

Consider for a moment, the case of Action Park. Action Park was an amusement park in New Jersey that was permanently closed in 1996. The reason for this is that many people had died going on their rides. Action Park was a place where none of the rides had been built by professional engineers but were in fact built by amateur hobbyist carnies, whose dream it was to create an highly adventurous and exciting amusement park atmosphere, where the risk of dying was half the fun in going on any of the rides. One of these was a concrete Loop-De-Loop waterslide, whose dimensions hadn't been calculated properly and the water-sliders would never have enough velocity going in to the loop to clear the upside-down part without smashing their head on the inside of the concrete tube on the way down. Many people were injured going down this slide and all of these injuries and deaths were indeed a tragedy; no one should die at something like this. And yet, on the other hand, Action Park is a testament to the things that once made America great: the idea that you and your buddies could just get together and build rides without any need for certification or engineering talent or anything like that, and then you could just sell tickets for the rides. Simple! Action Park was closed because there were too many deaths, but I imagine that while it was open, it was just brimming with the energy of creative vision, potential and possibility. Open Space, in a word.

But why was Action Park allowed to operate in this Promethean splendor in the first place? The simple reason is that New Jersey did not require amusement parks to take on liability insurance. The Park thought that it would just be easier to handle things in court by itself rather than take out an expensive insurance policy which surely would have prohibited most-to-all of their creative and visionary rides. This was the source of Action Park's genius: it was released from the smothering calculations of Risk Assessment.

 First, a word on this: at insurance companies, for anyone who doesn't know this, the risk that is calculated for an insurance policy is determined by an equation with two factors: consequence and probability. Consequence is the possible dollar amount of the damages, and probability is the likelihood that the damages will happen. Under this set-up, something insanely perverse happens, so perverse it ought to rend the moral fabric of the universe in two: the concepts of money-value and probability are reduced down to a single impossible quantity: Risk. This really is absurdity at its highest. How could a single number possibly represent both probability and money-values? By simply multiplying them? Taking just a second to think about it, the absurdity becomes clear. Probability is a qualitatively different number than money-value, there is no mathematically meaningful way to combine these two qualitatively different concepts in a single quantity; the only way they can co-exist is as a multi-factored quantity or ratio. And yet this is the bread and butter of the Insurance Companies. And what's worse, the higher these risk figures are, the higher the premiums they can ask for their policies.

Take an example: say the liability for Action Park would be $15,000,000 in the event of a mass death incident, and the insurance company reckons that this has a likelihood of 1%. The "Risk" therefore would be $150,000. Taking this policy over a long timeframe and adding a regular rate of profit, the insurance payments might be something like $9,000 a year. Now let's say that the possible worst consequence goes from $15,000,000 to $25,000,000. Now the insurance payments might be something more like $14,000 a year. This is all hypothetical, a bit unrealistic even, but serves to prove a point: the so-called "Risk" increases when the insurance companies assessment of the risk rises, regardless of the probability of the incident happening. This sets up a perverse incentive structure where insurance companies benefit from inflating the possible legal damages from certain incidents. This probability-indifferent concept of Risk means that everything with a non-zero probability of risk falls under the tyrannical proscription of the insurer. With Insura, hath no man a tree house or a diving board. With Insura, the fence is set between the young boy and the world; they have taken away the rocks and slingshots to Eleusis. The calculations of insurance companies make it so that everything fun, dangerous, and adventurous can no longer exist by the sanction of society, and that it must be stamped out so that the business-owner or the property-owner is insulated from either ruinous legal fees or higher insurance premiums. In this way, the World comes under the unremitting governance of market calculation.

Now what is the point of all of this? The Bronze Age Pervert's idea of the world is such that it is just nagging, scolding women or cowardly, brainy journalists that make life hell for us. Well, we needn't care about these people but for the power they have over us, and what is their power? For the most part their power is in money, and money falls under the domain of complex systems, economics to be exact. The problem with adopting this Bappian worldview of ignoring the material aspect of things, ignoring the complex systems that govern our behaviors, is that it dooms us to a politics of symbolic and impotent protest. By this politics, we're all doomed to be the heroic Mishima, crying out for freedom from an officer's balcony, shortly before we're quieted down, rolled up and swept away into the nowhere-corner. If it is our goal to regain the freedom of Open Spaces and the possibility of executing our creative visions in the real world - and this is indeed a noble goal - we have more to contend with than just the women with the cat-eyed glasses. There are serious entrenched material interests that will not willingly let go of the clutch they hold over anyone who owns a location where people gather, or over anyone who teaches peoples' kids, or over anyone who has any kind of social role. Because if daring and adventure are reintroduced into these spheres such that they have no fear of ruinous financial consequence, then these insurance companies lose the markets for their policies. And likewise with the lawyers as well.

It is often the case that Americans who go to other countries in lesser developed parts of the world are sometimes struck by the apparent freedom with which the locals live. They are awestruck because they are Americans, and it is they who ought to be free, not the people in the shit-hole countries. There are many different kinds of freedom, and America does, or used to have, many admirable freedoms that were guaranteed to its citizens. But with America's wealth, it also spawned a host of eager litigators and insurers thirsting to sink their hooks into our way of life and thereby attach a financial risk-cost to anything we might do. The very idea of Risk Assessment and Insurance reaches out to all our conceptual horizons in order to snuff out the possibilities of spontaneous creation. In some of these shit-hole countries, people live more freely simply because there are no lawyers because there's not enough money or education for lawyers. And thus, people live with the immediacy and urgency of Being-out-from-under-Risk-Calculation, which is after all, the only kind of authentic Being that there is. They live with the expectation that, whatever they're going to pay for, they're going to pay for in human terms: either with their own blood, with the grief of the mothers, the ostracism of their community, or what have you. But not in terms of financial oblivion.

This is all to say that, the Bappist politics is one of symbolic protest and catharsis, of letting out one more defiant cry before the boot presses down completely, exiting the last of the air from our lungs. This is because it only seeks to push back in symbolic or aesthetic ways, rather than material ways. And it is the sphere of the material (or the economic) that affords us all of our possibilities, even if it doesn't necessarily determine them. Put another way, in Russia, they could probably teach math by forcing kids to build shelters.