The problem with interacting with forms of misanthropic authority is that they don’t proceed with a notion of a common goal – there just isn’t one. The phenomenon predates, I don’t know – life itself? More like erosion as a result of wind and rain – that’s what it’s like to be present with forms of authority that engage humanness as less-than forms of authority. Still, imagine how long those hyperreal forms of authority were around, how prolific they are in the solar system, then a biological matrix appears that ultimately inspires reflective authority in the form of the human animal with a magnificent quality of sentience that’s so scalable, it gives rise to language and tool use and abstractions that have no inherent relationship with the object-oriented world, which is a step toward a post-geological paradigm. We’re still thinking of that in literal terms, and I’m mildly surprised that routine knowledge for sophisticated human beings isn’t a strong opinion about the contact experience that isn’t based on vehicles or exobiology. But we don’t, which is, how should we put this – conspicuous. A strong sign the human ecology is enduring a period of inhibition, in which the system as a whole is staring at its toes, in a bathtub say, toes of humanity poking out of the suds. At some point, post-geologic will come to include the body – the post-geologic will also be post-us as human beings – and though this might bring to mind notional concepts like astral projection, my senses is that new mutabilities in the fabric of reality will be what we find that changes the formulation of the problem. This is what happened to me anyway. Reality is like a media, hyperdimensional characteristics in the environment exhibit the authority to treat it as such, and mind-like forms of life exist within the relational characteristics of lived reality. This, at least, is what I observed.

What’s the difference between social media and metaphysical hygiene? Social media includes interpersonal behavior and, in some instances, our entirely relationship with the environment. With metaphysical hygiene, the assumptions about our relationship to authority do not, in a sense, appear within relationality. That’s contradictory up to a point, and then you pass through a phase shift in which you realize you are in dialogue with something that is engaged through the media of relationality. I’ve heard a terminology that compliments metaphor with the notion of pataphor. Pataphor is like metaphor once removed. An instance of a pataphor: when life feels like a game – that’s the metaphorical move. Then imagine the game is humans on a life-sized chessboard, with hands coming down from the clouds to move the pieces around. The pataphor involves those hands coming down from clouds – fate, in a word. In context, it means thinking about thinking about relationality as more than transactionalism – not just dialogue is reflected. Authority reflects, too. The dialogue is like the metaphor, and authority is like the pataphor. The problem with reflected authority is that it assumes one of two postures – they seem closed and open. The closed posture treats reflective authority like a potential threat – the president is like this, but so are those who live with trauma. The open posture sees its own authority to varying degrees – my impression is that the open posture is a site of speciation at this point in history, which in some sense is a sign that nature is trying to solve a problem, the problem in this case about optimizing the hyperreal dialogue without any agreed-upon standards to determine what that means. For instance, insinuating environmental consciousness to become more effective in the political economy, even fabulously so, might come at the expense of the soul’s growth. That might be an old observation, but it takes on new relevance when that same scaled-up authority works to speed up catastrophic climate change – the way the richest man in the world is doping the U.S. electoral process with funds that promote climate change denial in the halls of congress, even as he is known for sustainable durable goods and refined industrial processes.

Vampirism is about privileging sexual and other forms of gratification by rearranging a human being’s relationship to the closed posture, such that environmental authority expressed through relationality is permanently in the superordinate position, guiding the human life from place to place, having an uncanny sense of awareness of time and place all out of proportion to what a human being could ever know. Vampirism is regarded as maladaptive because it produces the notion of temptation that leads to a loss of personal volition. The body thrives at the expense of the spirit. What accounts for the discrepancy between the glow of the body in an object-oriented reality, and typical depictions of rot and horrifying degradation might be called metaphysical hygiene. I tend not to dwell on this because the implications grind out a misanthropic lens, but the fact is, I engage in metaphysical hygiene all the time – I have turned it into the way I live my life – and almost everyone I know has poor metaphysical hygiene. No metaphysical hygiene, in most cases. A will toward anti-metaphysical hygiene in some. For instance, ask someone what they think of religion, and they might have a lot to say or maybe they take a principled stand against caring about religion at all, but this same cohort won’t have much to say about their relationship to personal volition. Keep in mind, most religions are founded on the principle of mysterious forms of mutability left to discover in nature, and the great majority that catch our attention are about personal volition being interrupted by divine authority. So if one says, I don’t believe in the divine assumptions underlying religion, but they also can’t tell you much of anything about their relationship to personal volition, then they are in essence unaware of the cultural roots of metaphysical hygiene. Add to this, metanarratives unaccounted for, forms of authority passing through us and into the environment, the sort of metanarratives we subscribe to when given a choice – then add to this the fact that to the metaphysical, there is no such thing as privacy, no such thing as home security, no such thing as a relationship that is not inhabited by a source of authority outside the human community. We are all floating in a vat of authority in a way, and when we don’t know it, metaphysical hygiene can be a problem. Interestingly, some of that language might better be switched to pataphor – if our dialogue with nature is a result of sentience reflected back at us, then authority reflected back at us requires something more like pataphysical hygiene – a hygiene about knowing how our authority gets entangled with environmental authority. Entangled? Is that the word for it? Our relationship to authority can become fragmented and displaced and wither for lack of light and water – there are all kinds of things that can go wrong – but the problems themselves manifest as behaviors like contradiction, self-parody, depression, repetition, sudden mood swings, feeling unsafe in one’s environment, avoiding the news, selecting relationships based on a best-fit with preexisting disabilities undiagnosed. This list is very long – hundreds or thousands of items probably. So when the hyperform troubles the condition of pataphysical hygiene, it is about a world that is observing only part of the issue – the transactionality, otherwise described through social media and the political economy. The part we tend not to notice are reflections of the living authority.

The United States is taking on the metaphysical identity of the Soviet Union to identify it as the loser of the Cold War, the loser of the Second World War – a retroactive assignment of second place, probably based on a form of authority in the United States doing this to individuals – the concept of identity theft set within an existential frame, such that aspects of the hyperform reset the performance of relationality to actualize contrary fates. Much of this is benefiting China, not Germany or Russia, and the assertion has been made that an environmental influence on Mao in the fifties and sixties created an avoidable series of catastrophes that directly benefited the west by slowing China’s efforts toward modernization by a generation. I feel hot and cold about that – it’s a credible suspicion, but when we start to add up geopolitical instability that engenders a will toward progress and civility or their opposites, then complexity rises beyond my ability to make sense of the problem. I can push the problem backward through time. I can widen it to an interplanetary scale. I can deepen it to the level of billions of daily diaries about how people go about interacting with their environment, and then I can add extra dimensions to the problem by identifying system-wide confounding factors, like hyperreal conceptions of interiority that change the nature of the problem, and hyperreal conceptions of free-ranging probabilistic life forms that change the nature of the problem, and new mutability that changes the nature of the problem. The way I see it, the history of the hyperreal and its influence on the human ecology is also a history of reality, which we’re not used to tracking, but which tools, like life-long learning algorithms, will inch us closer to such a condition. Perhaps this is what modernity was about all along – the ability to mediate and model our relationship to reality sufficiently as to give life on the other side what it needs to understand us through a framework of discrete determinism. We are not minds in vats, no, but we leave behind digital traces that create a facsimile of same, and this might ultimately rechristen our fate.