the downtrodden are trodden down

"The primary excusatory function of ideology... is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe." Havel, The Power of the Powerless

"What Empire demands is not that each conforms to a common law, but that each conforms to its own particular identity. Imperial power depends on the adherence of bodies to their supposed qualities or predicates in order to leverage control over them." Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

luxury and lechery have an ongoing discursive and historical relationship. they are moons orbiting morality, which may (or may not) exist, which in its oldest sense is an appeal to a higher authority, a transcendent authority, which could be a god or a community, a sense of customs, a certain manner. Moralis engages rhythmicity, i.e. it shapes patterns at certain intensities and frequencies over time in governance of the actions of human beings by whom it is raised as an influence. in another time it may have been the light which guides, but for who? a privileged elite, economically empowered to have the possibilities of decision-making, to exalt the idea of what it is to decide - muddling around in the micro-potentials of fate, stepping on the faces of those do not have such luxury. a luxury which comes at the expense of the needs of the neediest, whose diverse needs are relevant to the specific material conditions in which they find themselves (their node or coordinate in the flow of capital).

capital moves. it flows from one node to another, through a vast array of machines, literally at the speed of light. human beings are also nodes. anywhere money pauses is a node. a node is the abstraction of the concrete bundles of history and possibility that humans move around in the form of money. money is pure exchange value. money is the symbol of abstract mediation of human relationships. by this i mean relationships in general; a relationship of family or tribe, work or custom. a relationship in which there exists socialized (cultural) structures of expectations - a moralis. we, as oppressed human agents, are constituted by a combination of coercion and our own consent. this is a dialectical relationship likened to the shaping of a growing tree through intensities of localized pressure. we grow, it directs, we resolve to keep growing because that is what beings do.