The Truth of Matter – by William C. Green

You wake up to a dead phone call. The charger failed overnight. Now the morning is falling apart. There is no alarm, no calendar, no way to check the meeting at 9am. The charger now controls your day.

Or this: valve freezes in Houston. The pipe burst in Texas. 246 people die. The grid gets darker because of the metal shrinking at cold temperatures, not because of ideology.

The confusion that unleashes us often starts with objects rather than ideas. The server crashes. The transformer blows. Wheel bearings overheat on trains in East Palestine, Ohio. The NTSB later discovered that responders did not need to emit harmful chemicals and burn them from derailed tankers. The crash itself caused the initial damage. The panicked decision to burn chemicals deepened.

Things have consequences independent of our intentions. A plastic bag in a wood lasts longer than the person who threw it. In a power outage, turn the refrigerator into a compost box. The IV drip in the sink is digging into your patience. A broken furnace will be eaten by your salary. These are not background props. They push back. They change what we do and who we talk about.

In 2023, wildfires destroyed Lahaina in Maui, Hawaii. California fires tell the same story: when infrastructure fails, nature answers.

It has been given so far We blocked the Suez Canal for six days. The supermarket felt that. The factory felt that. The budget felt that way.

In Flint, Michigan, new water sources met old pipes. Corrosion released lead into the child’s blood. The city learned that Pipe is an unelected official. And I learned that trust is restored not through press conferences, but through metals, chemistry, and time.

Under the heading, the Materials System sets the terminology. You can be furious about your motivation, but the grid doesn’t care who you vote for. There are no bearings or container ships.

I learned this through alcohol. I was able to manage it. Materials had other plans. It had power beyond my will, my intelligence, my imagination, my imagination, and even my spirituality. Only when I saw it clearly elsewhere did I get sober. It will go with the rest of your life. We immediately praise the “other” and tame it, and it becomes a culture war.

“Crazy” starts with maintenance being postponed, standards being ignored, sensors being too far away and vegetation not being cut. Law of things; we respond. Sometimes it’s so too of beauty. Bloom’s cherry blossoms stop traffic as quickly as a pothole.

This is nothing new. That’s how the world works. I always worked. In the midst of today’s chaos, it sounds academically: “Entropy supplies life.” But that means simple. Living things remain in order by burning the obstacles around them. entropy– The scientific word for drifting to messiness and dissipation is a useful measure of how energy spreads and dissipates, not a harsh worldview, but more physics than philosophy.

Living organisms maintain internal order by drawing energy from their surroundings and releasing obstacles. The flame does this. The same goes for vortex. The same goes for Moss on the stone. Each is a pattern that persists by capturing energy as it flows.

This is more than just mechanical. Political theorist Jane Bennett calls it “things.” Material itself is the ability to act, resist and organize. The world is not inert. It lives with the agency. Her insight is essential: the issues are important. But it is incomplete. Things don’t work only through blind vitality. They share something deeper. It is an order and meaning that runs beyond the material world.

This is important about how you think about daily concerns, such as job, unemployment, food, healthcare and more. These are not separate from material reality. They are material reality. It is the human order maintained through the same energy flow that keeps Moss alive and keeps the economy running.

Thoreau saw this in Concord. He didn’t need Paris. Bean fields, ponds and pencils revealed how objects shape thoughts and habits. Not only nuisance: Blooming lilacs and sudden sky sky can redirect the day as surely as a fence post or a broken hinge. We cannot separate ourselves from what expands us.

This suggests different citizen attitudes. It’s not grand, it’s a contingency plan that is held when the code, inspection, parts and winds are ineffective.

The current shutdown is no coincidence. Whether you blame President Trump, a Maga Republican, or deeper dysfunction, the damage is specific. Political collapse is physical collapse.

Pipes and poles, wires and wheels (job and pay infrastructure) set the stage. They break first. They are most important.

Before we can fix each other, we will fix things. Or, things govern us.

What is the truth behind the problem? that’s right.

Notes and reading

• Modern courtesy forces hidden prices: “We will soon praise the ‘other’ and tame it, and it will become a culture war.” (And God becomes purity). – William C. Green, “Swinglow, Sweet Tanks: Transformation and Religious Traditions,” Active society has revisitededs. Wilson Carey McWilliams (2006).
  The social cost of modernity is courtesy at the expense of material speciality. It is the loss of concrete and embodied differences that once fixed moral life.
  cf. Political sociologist John Murray Cuddhi; Trial of courtesy (1974) and There is no attack (1978), trace the same exchange: Liberal tolerance hones reality until nothing resists. Life will become like ours. The world is polite, then thins out, then backfires.

• The tension between the essential vitality of matter and participation in the transcendent order ranges from prehistoric animism to Spinoza’s pantheism (ethics1677) To the “new materialism” of thinkers like Jane Bennett. A lively problem (2010) Update the Vitalist tradition. In contrast, a Super naturalor better SupernaturalVision – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica; CS Lewisabolishing humanity (1943) – It means perfecting the matter rather than oppose it. David Bentley Hartyou are God (2022) asks the very disparity between nature and supernatural ( My Word) Will divinity enter from being, already within the creation itself, or both?

• The winner of Langdon said in his famous essay, “Do artifacts have politics?”Whale and Reactor1986) argues that not only does important things act with agents, but ideology mediates human political relations before it forms the outcome. When infrastructure like grids fails or pipes corrode, the effects are physically and politically simultaneously. The winner, a political theorist specializing in technology politics, is Autonomous Technology (1977).

• Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).

Green light

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