Politics

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

Preserving the Legacy

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The world is in chaos. Politics is reality show. As I write this forest fires are burning up parts of LA while a deep freeze grips the US south. Climate change is changing pretty rapidly. I fully expect humanity to survive, and in centuries, prosper again. It’s just going to be rough and cruel.

One thing I’m doing is preserving philosophical and religious books to people that I know will be interested in them, that will preserve them, and give them away to reliable folks if needed. In the disasters that are here and ones that may come, these things that guided me may guide others. It’s a chance to leave something to help those in the future, and in a personal way.

I sit here and know the world isn’t ending but parts of it are, and many ways of life will. I ask what matters to me, what taught me, and what will help others. I ask who I can trust and who will care. I ask a lot of questions right now about a world I will one day not be in.

It’s a humbling experience. I am looking at books asking what helped me become who I am, wanting to pass it to people who aren’t me and knowing I won’t be there. I feel myself stretched forward in time, asking what’s next. I have to think about what will help someone unknown grow, what preserves what is good today.

It’s an enlightening experience. I have a large library but have to ask what truly mattered to me and will matter to others. I can see a pattern, a timeline of what books helped me grow, and it helps me understand myself. I can ask what will help others.

It’s also an experience I want to share. I recommend you do this if you have some specific holy books – or any books – to preserve. It makes you think, appreciate what you have, who you are, and who you can trust. It’s a way to think of the future.

So here, as we face a lot of challenges, take a moment to save what matters to you spiritually. Leave something for those to come. Maybe it’ll help shape the future into a better way just like it shaped you.

-Xenofact

The Tao Isn’t The Market

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In my Taoist readings, “the Tao” is always a subject of discussion. This is ironic because as the beloved Tao Te Ching notes, when you speak of the Tao you’re not speaking of the real Tao. A great deal of Taoist writing is talking about how ineffable the Tao is then writing a huge amount about it. There’s a reason I compare writers like Chuang-Tzu to people like Dave Barry – you need that mix of humor and sarcasm to handle such irony.

Of course that’s kind of the point. You have a word for the ineffable (Tao) that’s behind all things, and that word represents everything and how you can’t really define it. The Tao is everywhere, it’s why everything is, it’s the smallest and the largest, the near and the far. Taoism takes a word that lets you refer to the great connected isness of absolutely everything that words can’t otherwise encompass.

It’s kind of a linguistic hack.

That, I find, is also the power of good Taoist writing. Using a single word and poetic writing, it reminds you that the universe is great and connected. Leading you around by words and sentences, you start intuitively getting to understanding the power behind everything. In turn, that lets you live in the world, living in harmony with things, knowing it’s all vast and everywhere and connected – Tao.

If you get it you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. If you want to fake it, you probably can for awhile. But a lot of Taoism is words leading you to the wordless, that there’s a force behind everything.

What’s funny is I realized lately that the Tao reminds me of how Capitalists think of the Almighty Market.

What is is. The Market speaks. The great and powerful force that reconciles everything is perfect and everywhere and if you don’t get rich then The Market has decided. The market is unquestionable and good and perfect and the foundation of all things. The market is like the Tao in that it’s ineffable, AND like a personal god in that it makes decisions about things, granting everything a moral quality. The Market cannot be questioned, it’s that awesome! Yet also it makes decisions.

What’s funny is the market being a human construct, being about profit and gain and exploitation, is something Taoists warned about for aeons. As a construct that warps human feelings, it’s to be regarded with suspicion. As something about gain, it risks the traps of greed and acquisitiveness, which corrupt society. As something surrounded by flummery and endless long-winded justifications, it’s as suspicious as pretentious intellectuals and politicians and would-be sages.

The way people treat The Market as some divine force darkly echoes the words of the Taoists with a touch of theology, and realizing that I understand Market Fanatics passion much better. It’s beyond greed, into religion and even a kind of perverse mysticism.

And thanks to the Taoists, who would have laughed at the Market Fanatics and their pretentious, helped me understand that better. And laugh, of course.

I appreciate the irony. Which Chuang-Tzu and Dave Barry would probably both appreciate.

– Xenofact