Art In Active Suspension

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In 2025 I have been vitally interested in the role of art in social evolution and opposing authoritarianism for the obvious reason that America made some bad decisions it quickly regretted.

Anyway, art is powerful. It’s a combination of words, symbols, colors, lyrics, music, or whatever that gets into your head. Good art is both its own little ecosystem but also is something your mind and feelings latch onto – the goal of good art is to be effective. Art is a tiny world that so connects with your mind it changes you..

When art changes you and others the world can change – and change for the better. Look how it can build social cohesion with shared symbols as well as undermine systems of control, gnawing away at oppressors. Art can inspire people to do even more art, creating a cascade of ideas no tyrant can stem both by sheer power and because most tyrants have the artist sense of blacktop.

Just take a look at history. The Orange Men, anti-fascist songs, pamphleteers, insulting songs, sarcastic essays, mocking plays. You even start wondering about non-political art – perhaps seemingly innocent creations were just subtle assaults on The System. How many revolutionary ideas have we just not noticed yet? How many changed us and we didn’t realize it?

How many ideas in art were not noticed by those who were their target until it was too late?

And that’s just art. Art-adjacent things like religion and spirituality and science also use art to change minds and inform. Look at meditation diagrams and deep symbolic representations. Look at gorgeous art from old science textbooks, drilling that knowledge into your head. Art is powerful.

These days, I think we need more revolutionary art. But in contemplating this I had a rather chilling thought.

What is art as I write about it in 2025? There’s so many ways to publish and print and record, yes, but we’re encouraged endlessly to turn it to profit. We’re asked to make art that fits what sells, that can be marketed, that can fit into certain formats and so on. The overall “art mindset” of our culture is one of making things that we can sell, and that helps bring money to the assorted services and vendors we have.

Now I’m all for people making money, but having seen obsessive attempts by people trying to find the right niche, sell the right story, I wonder. How much effort to make art goes into trying to make the “right” art? How much of our artistry is just understanding how to sell something we’re not quite as enthused about making?

There’s so much product that doesn’t feel like art.

How much of our art today is just contentmade to fit marketing specs and bring in money, not change the world. How many potential revolutionaries are making another tired novel, another just-the-same painting, another knock-off game? How many revolutions could happen that aren’t not because of oppression, but just our endless grind in pursuit of profit.

No, I’m not saying Capitalism is a deliberate attempt to crush art. I’m just noting it’s got some anti-art systems built in. Don’t even start me on so-called “AI.”

There are a lot of future revolutionaries out there, art-wise – as well as just plain good artists. I get the need to make a buck, but maybe that’s restraining them from what they can be. I wonder how we can help them because we need them – and always have.

-Xenofact

Who We Were In Time

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I was recently reading Thomas Cleary’s The Tao of Politics. These are extracts from the heavily Taoist document the Huainanzi. Having read another set of extracts (Original Tao), I thought it would be a refresher, and helps convince me to buy a full translation which is 1000 pages long. As of this writing, it’s in the mail, so I got convinced.

However, beyond my compulsion and Cleary’s ever-excellent translations, he made an interesting comment on the Huainanzi and Taoism. The Huainanzi was written in a time of rebuilding after a painful period of war, a look back and a plan for the future. Cleary noted other formative Taoist documents, the Tao Te Ching and Chuang-tzu were written in times of war, and were affected as such. These were Taoist documents but written in radically different times.

That got me thinking about history and the words of wisdom we seek. Yes, we all know writings we partake in are written “of the time,” under certain conditions, and so forth. We accept that, but Cleary’s comment made me think that we know that but maybe we really need to think about it.

We may read books and scripture and so on that are written of their time, but even books of the same lineage like these Taoist documents are written under radically different situations. This isn’t different generations alone, these are people who wrote between war and peace, destruction, and construction, dying randomly from civil strife or having a chance to not do so.

I think it really behooves us to look at documents of our philosophical and mystical efforts and when we see something of it’s time, pause and reflect on that. Maybe we don’t just read and admire and learn from the great minds and philosophers in our library but ask what were they going through and seeing. History is experienced.

It’s said that Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching wrote it while hightailing it out of a city in disgust with the age. Sure, it’s probably mythical-metaphorical, but people of the time might get it as wise guys were saying “screw this, I’m riding a buffalo into the mountain” because things sucked.

It’ll help us better understand what we read because we get the time, the who, and the why. It’ll also let us have some empathy on those we seek to learn from. That above comment about bugging out of society makes me feel some sympathy for Lao Tzu even if he is a pen name or metaphor. Sometimes I want that buffalo – and boy do I get Chuang-Tzu’s desire to be poetically sarcastic as hell.

But another advantage to this? When you look at philosophical lineages – again like Taoism – across time, the writings occur in radically different situations. However among those books and essays across centuries you read, there are consistent patterns. Those consistent patterns are lessons that have survived different times, places, events – they’re worth learning from.

None of us are outside of history. When understanding timeless wisdom, we need to understand history to learn what’s transcended it – and understand what people went through. The timeless and the specific together.

-Xenofact