It is curious that the word "crisis" comes from ancient Greek discussions of disease, in which an important and decisive turning point is signified, and conditions change either for the better or for the worse. A judgment comes about, and beyond that, there is recovery or ruin.
Today the connotation of the word- at least publicly - is mostly bad, and we have before us a procession of so-called crises which subsequently weaken our collective constitution, with each successive crisis leading to a quality of life perceived as headed for the worse for most people. And systems are altered in crises - or weakened in this case - and various processes of destruction are set into motion, all of which precipitate future crises.
But then of course there are people speaking of opportunity surreptitiously, and then the billionaires are waiting on the wing, looking to exert leverage on the opening spaces, and reshape what has become hot and malleable, and expand their power. Here in the United States crisis appears as a stairway down into hell, tilted downward so that our collective muscles weaken and burn away as we struggle to climb back upward.
But what is in the character of a crisis that leads to either a recovery or a ruin?
I confess to being ignorant of the particulars of the drama in which a disease develops and then resolves in a biological system, or causes it to collapse altogether. But looking at all kinds of crises, their natures, and their courses, we could abstract a certain pattern and try to make sense of that.
A crisis seems to occur when a given system loses its homeostatic balance, such as in the case of a virus-caused disease when the virus is hijacking various production centers towards its own ends, draining power from the maintenance of the body's continuity, and the body turns to fighting off the virus, possibly damaging itself, and which reverts to homeostasis after the virus is banished and the body undergoes what repairs it requires.
The systems charged with restoring homeostasis must be robust enough, and the conditions must be right for those systems to acquire the energy and resources needed to both reverse the bad direction and replace what energy and resources were lost in the process.
More simply, if you trip while walking, you have to have the muscle power available to compensate for that bad acceleration, and hopefully the acceleration is not severe enough, or the subsequent compensations are not enough to prevent the body falling altogether and changing its state. Sometimes you go right down, and sometimes you lurch one way, only to lose more balance on the first compensation and the falling motion increases and the second compensation is not enough to right the previous wrong, and then you go down. And so on.
That last illustration consisted of a short chain of crises in which the homeostasis of a body in balance was strained further and further with each subsequent crisis, until no more compensation was possible and the fall became inevitable.
So it is with a living thing that dies. All of the elements of that thing's organization weaken over time, and eventually conditions continue to deteriorate until something like a major organ seizes up, and motion within the body ceases, and there is not enough power available to take the given maintenance and replace what was lost, and the body surrenders to gravity and entropy and its constitutive elements return to the earth, to furnish materials for the next growing state of organization.
One way to compensate for a loss of balance is to further integrate into the environment, mastering its flows so as to maximize, or at least harmonize one's collection of energy in it, which requires a constricting focus of energy in one direction. Another way is to alter or transform the systems that are to be integrated into the environment, which could consist of a broader application of focused energy across systems.
In the case of the US empire, constant and aggressive expansion is the natural homeostatic state, so that each of its constituents, as they further specialize and integrate, drive towards efficiency and acceleration to constantly direct resources into accumulation.
The problem with this pattern is that the homeostasis itself is a sort of crisis, in which an organism, to avoid collapsing upon itself, is driven to expand ever outward, in constant motion to stave off its collapse inwards, until it comes up against natural and mathematical limits.
The whole thing must transform to avert an ultimately terminal crisis, but currently all of its constituents are in a state of separation, struggling against each other, competing for concentrating resources to focus energy to further integrate and navigate the environment within their own pathways, starving the higher level governing systems of the energy needed to make large scale changes.
You're either the crisis, or you're living amongst systems in crisis, or you're living within a crisis. And well, really its a little bit of everything. And depending on the power you have, and the power your organizations have, you can navigate those crises in certain ways. Until you can't.
