Experience/Protagonism/RISK /StoryLife/Meaning-making

EXPERIENCE --> Definition per Turner You have to risk via DP to confront problem of knowing and gain perspective on your world. Get outside of it with time to think. But you have to stay in your native world. You cannot go camping into “nature” for that nature has been pointedly criticized. We try to locate our roots thru blood, by genealogy. To have a sense of identity. This is about countries, locations, often distant in time and place. This reflects the same habit of knowing. It’s turned into something more concrete and logical, it seems, when we talk of our immediate family. Our parents are the most important thing, whether they are on good terms with us or fucked us up by being either present or absent. The Nurture aspect seems so obvious; psychologically it’s evident that people are carrying around the shit their parents did or didn’t do. I don’t deny this or that it plays a role. But truly, unless you want to go chasing back your parents to their parents and who and what and when went right and wrong to figure out who you are, there is a better way. The nature and nurture we embody is from the world around us. Understand your family past but realize that knowing our parents as parents and never reframing this is limiting. However much you like or dislike your parents, they are just two more people in a world reaching a population of 7 billion. America. That is our extended family. Our in-laws and all the problems we seem to have with them. Wounded people find strength in the saying “we choose our friends not our family”. I suggest we go further after picking “knowing” and the Stranger apart by saying we choose our family, not our friends. But not yet. PROTAGONISM --> PROTAGONISM PROCESS: Interesting as if falls in definition of doing to achieve results and “a natural or involuntary series of changes… aging) – time! Risk-taking behaviours often reflect ambivalent ways of calling for the help of one’s close friends and family – those who count. It is an ultimate means of finding meaning and a system of values; and it is a sign of the adolescent’s active resistance and his attempts to find his place in the world again. It contrasts with the far more insidious risk of depression and the radical collapse of meaning. In spite of the suffering it engenders, risk-taking nevertheless has a positive side, fostering independence in adolescents and a search for reference points, it leads to a better self-image and is a means of developing one’s identity. It is nonetheless painful in terms of its possible repercussions: injuries, death or addiction. But let us not forget that the suffering is upstream, perpetuated by a complex relation between a society, a family structure and a life history. Paradoxically, for some young people who are suffering, the risk is rather that they will remain immured in their world-weariness, with a potentially radical outcome (i.e. suicide). The turbulence caused by risk-taking behaviours illustrates a determination to be rid of one’s suffering and to fight on so that life can, at last, be lived” http://bod.sagepub.com/content/10/1/1.abstract Political economy of self. Protagonism. Mysticism. Experience. Other end: freight trains. Experience. Create play program for blog. Act 1. Etc. Risk will draw from play, of course, but from other areas as well. One of those is work done on adolescence and risk-taking. If Stranger uses Tango and Deep Play uses Freight trains and RISK 1. A probability or threat of a damage, injury, liability, loss, or other negative occurrence that is caused by external or internal vulnerabilities, and that may be neutralized through preemptive action. 2. Finance: The probability that an actual return on an investment will be lower than the expected return. Financial risk is divided into the following general categories: (1) Basis risk. Example: Changes in interest rates will cause interest-bearing liabilities (deposits) to reprice at a rate higher than that of the interest-bearing assets (loans). (2) Capital risk. Example: Losses from un-recovered loans will affect the financial institution's capital base and may necessitate floating of a new stock (share) issue. (3) Country risk. Example: Economic and political changes in a foreign country will affect loan-repayments from debtors. (4) Default risk. Example: Borrowers will not be able to repay principal and interest as arranged (also called credit risk). (5) Delivery risk. Example: Buyer or seller of a financial instrument or foreign currency will not be able to meet associated delivery obligations on their maturity. (6) Economic risk. Example: Changes in the state of economy will impair the debtors' ability to pay or the potential borrower's ability to borrow. (7) Exchange rate risk. Example: Appreciation or depreciation of a currency will result in a loss or an naked-position. (8) Interest rate risk. Example: Decline in net interest income will result from changes in relationship between interest income and interest expense. (9) Liquidity risk. Example: There will not be enough cash and/or cash equivalents to meet the needs of depositors and borrowers. (10) Operations risk. Example: Failure of data processing equipment will prevent the bank from maintaining its critical operations to the customers' satisfaction. (11) Payment system risk. Example: The payment system of a major bank will malfunction and will hinder its payments. (12) Political risk. Example: Political changes in a debtor's country will jeopardize debt-service payments. (13) Refinancing risk. Example: It will not be possible to refinance maturing liabilities (deposits) when they fall due, at economic cost and terms. (14) Reinvestment risk. Example: It will not be possible to reinvest interest-earning assets at current market rates. (15) Settlement risk. Example: Failure of a major bank will result in a chain reaction, reducing other banks' ability to honor payment commitments. (16) Sovereign risk. Example: Local or foreign debtor-government will refuse to honor its debt obligations on their due date. (17) Underwriting risk. Example: New issue of securities underwritten by the institution will not be sold or its market price will drop. 3. Food industry: Function of the probability of an adverse effect and the magnitude of that effect, consequential to a hazard in food (FAO/WHO definition). 4. Insurance: A situation in which the probability distribution of a variable (such as burning down of a building) is known but its mode of occurrence or actual value (whether the fire will occur at a particular property) is not. A risk is not an uncertainty (where neither the probability nor the mode of the occurrence is known), a peril (cause of loss), or a hazard (agent or condition that makes the occurrence of a peril more likely or more severe). 5. Securities trading: The quantifiable likelihood (probability) of a loss or stagnation in value. Trading risk is divided into two general categories (1) Systemic risk affects all securities in the same class and is linked to the overall capital-market system and therefore cannot be eliminated by diversification. Measured by beta coefficient, it is also called market risk. (2) Nonsystemic risk is any risk that is not market-related or is not systemic. Also called nonmarket risk, extra-market risk, or unsystemic risk. 6. Workplace: Product of the impact of the severity (consequence) and impact of the likelihood (probability) of a hazardous event or phenomenon. For carcinogen effect, risk is estimated as the incremental probability of an individual developing cancer over a lifetime (70 years) as a result of exposure to a potential carcinogen. For non-carcinogen effect, it is evaluated by comparing an exposure level over a period to a reference dose derived from experiments on animals. STORY-LIFE See this part of the story is only problematic if it remains the same. If your chararcter changes, however, and forever cuts themselves from the way they were... if this part of the story were missing, and these mistakes were never made, other mistakes would have had to be made, or else, you'd always be doing the right thing but you would never know why. MEANING-MAKING We must make meaning while we still have time. Meaning is what is going to save the world. This is about producing real meaning through a self-aware engagement with the immediate world that requires risk to transgress the laws, norms, habits, negative tendencies, etc. I am raising the stakes on deep play and they are high. This is about taking action towards individual and social revolution, simultaneously. Story-life. All the storied versions of reality that we tell ourselves about life add up to one story. We need to story our way out of this. Live increasingly in service to this Story, as protagonists. Story-Life is the foremost dichotomy- the Primary Dichotomy; the originating portal of the great dichotomizer. And risk finally becomes the final word on anything true- the risking of the very thing itself that one firmly believes to be true and of value in order to validate that that is true. To love life means to love death, or else you don’t believe in Life. To love God one must give up their being to meet God. To love riding trains, a true hobo must be willing to give up being a hobo to have the world they dream of. To love anthropology one must be willing to sacrifice it’s disciplinary form to live out the message it promises. To love the other means to dissolve the other and so to love the stranger one must live fully willing to die for the stranger. You can die for an individual stranger or you can die in the battlefield in the war of those who believe in love and freedom and autonomy and trust and those who live in fear and live in service to the vampire of capitalism. I want to say here and now, more clearly perhaps than I have said elsewhere, that I love God, and I love people, and I love life, despite all of my fears and doubts, and that if I die by the hands of a stranger or strangers, I have no problem with this and I do not desire for people to be angry with the circumstances of my death but to channel their energy on the battle to dissolve the stranger. For such a death does not confirm that the stranger is actually to be resisted or feared; that is too simplistic. To die in such circumstances is merely another example that the war is taking place. You fight because it is the right thing to do not because you know the outcome. You don’t go along with Nazis at some point if it appears you can’t beat them. That’s not the point. People will die in the fight against capitalism. They will be imprisoned and be killed and all that. People will die for the stranger too. This is going to happen. There is more to be said on this but for now this suffices. If some crazy guy stabs me in an alley where I am sleeping it is no less worthwhile to me than any other way of dying. The stranger is insidious. Dangerous. But not because they can kill you. Because you kill the world in believing in them. You must believe in human beings. When shit hits the fan we need to feel like we can touch something inside that is as real to us as Africa is to African Americans. This is why we need to create a new history that is more real than anything we have been told, and it’s more real because, without sacrificing any fact, but in fact, demanding more of it in the people’s histories, it locates This is where I must talk about meaning and making meaning and meaning-making apart from all else and before meaning-making with freight trains. When I do this and it leads into trains it will make sense connecting everything I said much earlier in the book about freight trains. Why meaning-making with freight trains? It will be evident at that point but I will essentialize it. Their greatest trick that keeps us back, thinking what brings freedom to be silly or meaningless behavior. Life is here faced off against meaning. Is there a meaningful life versus a meaningless life? Yes, but the issue isn’t about making life meaningful, it’s about using life as a space to make meaning. If Hitler took over the world and victory was certain would you capitulate because life offered the greatest shot you have? No, because you are then suggesting that life, isolated from all else, is more meaningful than meaning. Revolution and self-love and freedom and immortality are all part of the same thing and it is a process. Anarchistic living always fails not because there are always those who will seek to take advantage etc, and therefore we need a system that can handle those people but because there are always those that, were Hitler to have succeeded, asserting Nazism over the world, would reason that since certain victory was accomplished for the enemy no need to die for a lost cause mine as well make a go at staying alive and who knows, have a chance to turn it around. But this is to put life over meaning. And this example can be followed thru to implicate every single one of us, here and now. Right and wrong are as much about meaning as anything. Life as in self-aware existence isn’t intrinsically meaningful. It’s meaningful because of right and wrong but only because we see that right survives against or in relation to wrong. But the struggle with or against wrong isn’t the meaning-making device. That would make wrong essential to meaning-making and therefore equal to right. No. Meaning is not struggle against wrong but conviction that meaning is what’s right and therefore what’s right is preferable to life. The logical argument about what “works” best is absolutely illogical to insinuate meaning is secondary. Do I think life is meaningful then? No. Do I think there is a purpose to suffering? No. Do I find meaning in struggle? No. Let me try to say it succinctly. Anarchism is about process. I believe not merely that anarchism is A process but is about process. It is not about what will be the answer to future imagined or certain problems but it is about what is happening right here and now. It scares people because they want to know what the answers are and we are saying the answer is that it isn’t about results it is about doing. It’s not about means justifying end it’s about believing only in means. Some people go thru hardships and we see that they gain wisdom and we hear even them say that they found meaning in their struggle and wouldn’t be who they were without it. They lost everything but still have meaning. But we must remember for every one of those people we know are wise there are a mess of other people who went thru a bunch of shit too who are not wise at all, to put it nicely. Why is it that two people can go thru the same thing and one grows and “finds” meaning in their struggle but not the other? Because they made it. Before they attributed it they had to have it and how they got it to begin with was by making it. You don’t need pain or struggle to have meaning you need the desire to make meaning. Someone imagines the things around them to have meaning. Then those things are stolen from them and therefore they imagine that meaning has been stolen. With that feeling of lost meaning they desire to replace that meaning… to defy the devil by saying they have the last laugh. But see, they just created that meaning. The struggle was simply a kind of engagement with materials within themselves that rubbed together like sticks to make a fire. But the insistence to make meaning for one’s self so defiantly contributes to the success of that meaning-making because that process is put in the limelight for a change. Children engage the process who have not known such pain or loss. They merely play but we as adults who feed the educational “process” have to work harder to connect meaning back to maker. Out of a desire to have meaning they get to work making it. Complicity is faced off against when we realize the world is being destroyed because the ravenous quest for meaning is insatiable so long as it is being looked for in what is made. My current quest is to find pure meaning and then how it is made. But that’s the problem already; pure meaning and how it is made do not exist as separate things. The meaning is its making. Meaning is made so long as meaning-making is what is happening but when the meaning-making ceases the meaning disappears. We try to store it in the things around us but they do not really hold those things. This is why we save money. We think that enough money equals meaning so we store it in banks. Scarcity of food, etc is contorted explanation for desperate feeling of scarcity in meaning for those who create the lie of scarcity in goods. THEIR MEANING: Their meaning is to be found in money, and production, and power. As far as imagination the people before us have utilized the imagination to lay out their plans and dominate the world. The federal reserve is a great example. How do we trick capitalism. We come to the wolves dressed as wolves. To the foxes as foxes. The yes men. But we are shape shifters. Absurd Hero/ CAMUS/The Rebel/- “rebel must somehow find his solutions along a spectrum of means between two impossible borders:/ The rebel's "only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him, and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good". (me)Pursuing the unattainable ideal is the only way to live in Process, when process is an end in itself. (Jewish anarchy-final speech) P10/Absurd hero/”Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photograph is also the absurd”. p.11: “through heightened consciousness , bind himself so closely to absurdity that it becomes something to live for” … “the world is seen to contain nothing worth living for and therefore nothing worth dying for”. “Thus can we know our own subjective depths as much by scrutinizing the meaningful objectifications expressed by other minds as by introspection in complimentary fashion/self-scrutiny may give us clues”