Affliction

So I did mention that attention will shift to the electrical grid as both a crucial social good and a serious vulnerability that needs protecting. But the socio-political forms of preservation and protection are not always the most effective ones. 

This is sort of a constant. One of the better examples of this was the U.S. security priorities during the 911 era. Countless observers pointed to the paranoid surveillance and security theater and noted that deaths from so-called "terrorist" attacks were a fraction of the daily deaths from domestic firearms, car accidents, heart diseases and cancers, and the like, and that much of what we could be doing to reduce those deaths - far more serious to vaster majorities of the population - was not being done. The security priorities were clearly political and remain largely as political levers to this day. 

We've known about the problems posed by the electrical grid for a long time. It was almost a decade ago that I remember seeing the protective walls going up around certain power stations after a couple of isolated and mysterious firearm attacks on the grid began to crop up. Every once in a while there is a story in the news about someone attacking a cluster of transformers or some such. I you think about it, attacks like this could be pretty destructive, considering the difficulties of replacing transformers now. 

But a few protective walls is pretty freakin' small potatoes compared to restructuring the supply chain for transformers and reshoring critical manufacturing, or revolutionizing the existing power grids for that matter, or even merely passing slightly more restrictive laws on critical utilities and rolling back some of the monopolization and consolidation that has been occurring across every industry, including critical industry. 

Every year we field a flurry of articles worrying about the dire state of the electrical grid - we got a particularly intense crop of them after the PG&E fiasco and the Texas power outages - and yet nothing substantial is ever done, even as we move to further electrify transportation and various energy networks. We are seeing anti-trust emerging very gingerly in the political sphere, as well as more nationalist strains interested in reviving industrial policy, but it is happening pretty slowly and mildly.

It turns out that imperial decline is a little bit of a bigger problem, and simply putting a few more walls up and welding on some armor plates or whatever isn't going to cut it. A given body requires a coherent set of protocols for maintaining and reproducing itself, but its internal government is not always coherent. 

I remember when I first had Covid, and barely having the strength to get up and go to the bathroom. When you gotta go you gotta go, but apparently even that clear directive comes into conflict with a body riddled with virus. You can't always choose your afflictions and the course they will take. 

From God-King to God and Back

The Romans did subscribe to a sort of great man political theory, at least during the phases of imperial expansion. You could see it in the way the body politic would conceive of fortune and misfortune: they'd blame the individual moral character of a given emperor if things didn't go well, and a major military defeat, or a string of defeats, could spell certain doom for a reigning emperor or military commander. By the same token, a major victory or a series of victories could make the political fortune of whoever managed to get in front of that parade. 

It is true that there are individuals with rare perceptions and talents, and in a world where conventional warfare played a huge part in shaping the development of empire, an exceptionally talented general could alter the fortunes of an entire empire, and would be encouraged and rewarded as such. 

Of course we know that for a gifted and talented individual to actualize their contributions, the resources and opportunities must be available; the pathways must be open to their flourishing. The great historical figure is as much a function of their own localized vitality as their embedded position in the flow of history, and the arc of their own lifetime is expressed in the directionality of the historical era. Further, the celebration of an individual requires a collective valuation: who has the power to deem what is important? 

There are many good things in life, but as we are all frustratingly aware of at this point, a given society chooses a more limited expression of the good, which is all the more true in proportion to concentrated power and the concentrated utilization of that power to determine what the good is and impose that determination on the ruled. 

Nevertheless, a unified collective ideology - whoever crudely it cleaves off the deeper complexities of reality in favor of a functioning narrative - actually works in the sense that it is communicating with its environment to concentrate power for its wielders, coordinating the efforts of all of its adherents - whether by force or no - in order to achieve a given result. 

The belief in the great man gives rise to a vast institutional apparatus: the processes of the transfer of power and its wielding, the development of the individual character of the emperor and the deference to that character, the geopolitics of societies of similarity and difference, and so on. If everyone believes the emperor is right, then everyone naturally coordinates their efforts and organizes their actions in accordance with a guiding protocol that is manufactured out of the activity of the emperor and all of the family and handlers and advisors and allies and the like, and the society is able to move as a coherent whole and interact with other societies as a coherent whole. This is always imperfectly realized in varying amounts, but nevertheless the ideology works. 

The better the ideology works, the more suited to its geopolitical, domestic, ecological, and thermodynamic environments, the more the ideology is reinforced and entrenched, making it more difficult to dislodge when conditions change.  

This principle also works in times of contraction, but the rationale is reversed. This was one of the major ideological changes that took place from the decline and fall of the Western Roman empire to the major upheavals in the seventh century that the Byzantine Empire experienced. The process was slow and took centuries, but it was nevertheless a distinguishable process with distinguishable gradients that we'll briefly look at. 

An inevitable biproduct of a contracting empire is the ubiquity of dysfunction and failure. Civil wars do break out after the inevitable string of economic and military failures, and one leader is replaced after the other, but eventually the body politic figures out that its problems are much more universal and intractable, and that blaming an individual emperor no longer makes sense if the society is to continue to function without being embroiled in perpetual civil war. 

You can see the great man theory transition into the fallen man one: the increasingly desperate emperors begin to identify themselves with the developing idea of the Christian god, as god emperors with divine right to rule. But even this universalization of the individual begins to buckle under the pressure of ubiquitous collapse. 

Here the religious leaders take over, and describing a whole people as immoral and corrupt and as a whole collectively responsible for the misfortunes of the society, were tasked with devising the correct moral and spiritual doctrines which were to be implemented by capable leaders. Here you can make out the preservation of the patriarchy and the great man theory: fallen man has advanced inevitably into catastrophe because of his very character, but it was up to the religious patriarchs to describe the correct pathways to moral and spiritual salvation, and these pathways were to be embodied and expressed in particularly rigorous and faithful individuals and then emulated by the masses. The very idea of the Christian god itself was of a monarchical figure that had to be obeyed. 

As the fallen society stabilized, the organization around the individual was preserved by shifting attention away from the individual, but which would return as exceptional individuals led by example and the attention would again turn to the individuals doing the leading, with the great man theory to re-emerge in the process. 

Under Pressure

The popular conception - a conception that I still held until recently - was that the western half of the Roman empire collapsed in the 5th century, and that the eastern side of the empire - the Byzantine empire - would survive for another 1,000 years. On its face this is true, but in the 7th century the Byzantine empire experienced a collapse even more dramatic and traumatic than the western one; survival can look like a lot of different things, depending on the particular story.   

As always this incredible story was long and complex, but in a rough outline, the ambitious Roman drive to expansion remained even after the terrible convulsions of the 5th century, in which Western Rome fell and Eastern Rome struggled to fortify its remaining possessions after cutting its losses. 

Eventually the east would rebound and make a bid to reconstruct the empire, as its citizens hadn't stopped believing in their Roman identity. However, the reconstruction would lack the continuity - at least in terms of sheer landmass of the original Roman Empire - reminiscent of the past glories. 

The emperor Justinian in particular was a famous emblem of overreach: he was an inexhaustible personality that pursued relentless reforms, civic engineering projects (the Hagia Sophia being one of them), and foreign adventures to reconquer the lost territories of the empire, with the added resistance of the doubts and skepticism of Justinian's inner circle and subordinates. The doubt and skepticism would prove prescient: much like with Diocletian's character in the late third century, much of the vitality of the reformist fervor would be localized to the individual, in contrast to deep cracks and weaknesses in the greater system, which would eventually overtake the gains afforded by the reforms. 

In the short run, these spectacular conquests lent to a bright, sparkling extension of a reconstructed and even improved Roman Empire, an extension that hung precariously in the air no doubt. The saga of the Hagia Sophia would prove to be a milder and lower-stakes microcosm of things to come: as spectacular and awe-inspiring as the actual structure was, the project was rushed and the dome walls would not be given enough time for the mortar to properly set, causing them to lean, requiring them to be rebuilt. In addition there were several other architectural flaws that made themselves visible when a series of earthquakes caused cracks to form in the main and eastern domes, with the eastern dome partially collapsing at one point, so that they had to be reconstructed as well. 

Similarly, the spectacular, sparkling reign of Justinian would give way like a flashing chunk of magnesium catching fire, after domestic unrest, a series of earthquakes, and early waves of the Black Plague itself would wipe out huge swathes of the population, and an already tenuous imperial extension would be weakened further. And then in this period of vulnerability, the Arab invasions erupted in North Africa - which thundered into the region like the German blitzkriegs, but which by contrast produced a durable and lasting empire - wiping out huge swathes of Byzantium's precariously reclaimed holdings in the east, resulting in a slew of terrible military losses and attendant casualties, and collapsing the empire back down into the rough footprint of Constantinople and the surrounding region. 

The accumulated population loss and the catastrophic collapse in imperial holdings - which included Egypt, a crucial strategic source of grain and geopolitical advantage - meant a profound disintegration of wealth and standing, which triggered a sea change in political and religious ideology and self-conception, which I'll try to touch on later.  

There were a number of reasons that the Byzantine empire survived this, but the denser kernel residing in the middle of it all was the geographical and material fact of the city of Constantinople itself, which proved to be a durable material shell protecting the greater socio-economic and political continuity of the empire, and which had and would for centuries nurture a steady stream of refugees from the late classical collapses, developments of knowledge and intellectual endeavor, a modernized bureaucracy and its attendant pathways to stable professional and civic life, a modernized legal code that would be adopted throughout Europe, and so on.  

In an era in which conventional warfare decisively determined the continuity and fate of empires, it was the superior material fortification of the city itself that provided the physical and then cultural and spiritual continuity of the empire, which retreated into the hard shell as all of its extended geopolitical commitments collapsed all around it. 

The city of Constantinople rested on a peninsula, surrounded by the Sea of Marmara, with a protective inlet curving up and to the northwest, known as the Golden Horn, which would protect centuries of military and commercial ships. The sea-facing sides of the peninsula were fortified with walls and gates, and the entrance to the Golden Horn was blocked off by a huge iron chain, which allowed the city to control its maritime traffic, regulate the entrances to its harbors, offer protected points of resupply, and maintain its eastern trade networks. 

At the same time, there was only one direction that the city could be entered by land, and this limited entrance afforded resources to be concentrated into the daunting Theodosian Walls, which with their three barriers of increasing height, separated by swatches of assailable no man's land, proved to be insurmountable for centuries, until the Turks had to roll up a giant cannon and blast a hole in them to finally enter the city. At that point the early Ottoman Empire rushed into that broken shell and situated itself within. 

All of that pressure and turbulence, two thousand years of expansion and collapse; that was a tough nut to crack. For as long as you can manage to keep a smoldering core of coals, you can always spark up another flame. 

Putting Things in Perspective

To amuse themselves, the neighbors had a snow blower trucked in, which blasted artificial snow all over their lawn and atop some stacked straw bales so that their kids could do some sledding. This in the middle of Southern California, where the "winter weather" consists of daily lows in the 60's, with the shining sun proceeding to promptly melt the snow within hours of it being laid down. A short-lived and pricey expense, and a quite tacky and highly visible display surplus. On its face and in the face of our cascading economic and environmental crises, this behavior is preposterous at best and even immoral at the worst. 

But it is not much worse than the greater system that that excess springs from. At a larger scale of time and space, the very ground in the form of the built environment that we stand on is just as preposterous: the oil-fueled sprawl of Los Angeles and Orange County is itself an unsustainable excess and will be impossible to maintain into the contractionary future; it is the material analogue of large checks being written based on lean bank accounts, with the biting water and energy crises making those contradictions more visible. 

While the community can do plenty of grumblings about the excesses (or shortcomings) of its neighbors, only a minority ever seems to have the capacity or even the will to see realities that far out. Much inter- and intra-organizational feuds seem to involve excess and dearth as extensions of a single system.

When Optimism Becomes Pathology

In many individual cases, or cases of general expansion, erring subjectively on optimism translates to real world benefit. There is a feedback loop that arises: one moves forward with the belief held fast of good things happening, and ignoring and surmounting the bad, a more general prosperity arises as strength is accumulated and past a certain threshold, the good becomes easier to maintain, and the bad is avoided or surmounted. This is the nugget of truth that the mind-over-matter fanatics seize upon: one must think good thoughts, and the rest will follow.  

But then what happens when the general conditions for prosperity are steadily eroded universally? You see this kind of thing with empires in particular: there is a relentless ideological optimism that pervades collective activity, and perpetual expansion proceeds on a buoyant cloud of cyclical striving. Cyclical in the sense that one proceeds by the law of diminishing returns, and then seizes upon the next updraft when the current avenue begins to become exhausted. 

Something like an empire, which must steadily expand and concentrate power by converting the territory around it into its subordinate subject, eventually runs into a familiar problem. The thermodynamic limits of its expansion eventually become reached, and unable to quickly change its nature, it continues to pursue its expansion simultaneously as those limits bite. In this case then, there arises a contradiction: the necessity of material contraction comes up against the collective psychological need for optimism. 

This contradiction is resolved through the course of the bubble, which suggested by the image of the metaphor, is a fragile form of expansion that must annihilate itself at the peak of its growth. You see this expressed throughout Western society in many ways. Boundless optimism is selected for at an institutional level, with "yes" people and adoring sycophants promoted and sustained, and the dour naysayers and skeptics gradually filtered out and ostracized. We are bombarded with relentless marketing pitches, breathless and sunny: technological optimism, foreign adventurism, scientific handwaving, economic and financial chicanery, and we could surely go on and on. 

Of course in an expansionary phase, when a given avenue of growth matures and slows, its sustained products validate the optimistic picture and even demand the necessity of its truth. The more advanced the general exhaustion however, and the more a necessity for a generalized contraction emerges, the more each of these avenues of activity appears as a bubble. Bubbles, which rapidly unwind and evaporate at a more unpredictable and unanticipated rate, tend to destroy the capacities and faculties they arise out of, and exhaust the faithful optimism and trust that makes them possible. But the collective optimistic drive proves durable - at the very least it metastasizes into manipulation and desperation, elements which already existed in the first place - and failures in one avenue can be waved away in favor of pursuing an alternative in another field: the differentiated and specialized pathways, expressed in professional politics, economics, warmaking, research, and etc. can be siloed and insulated to various extents. 

This is a more turbulent and unpredictable form of contraction. The thing to do would be to adopt a collective resignation and pessimism and pursue a path of managed contraction until a new stable baseline is achieved, after which limits could be re-evaluated and alternate avenues of growth could be considered. But it is difficult for an empire to turn on a dime, and so forward optimistic motion continues against hard limits and contraction is achieved through a procession of exploding bubbles, towards simplification and lower energy usage, and as seen in the pattern of development in high profile cults, a trail of scandal and outrage and social and material destruction is left in its wake. 

High-Rise

The pattern of industrializing and developing societies is towards urbanization and the movement of populations into cities, where economic activity can concentrate and intensify. This is expressed materially in the modern age by the high-rise building in particular, maximizing density by building upward. But consider what is necessary for the high-rise to function. 

Setting aside the massive amounts of energy required to produce and manipulate the concrete and steel, and other materials required to fight gravity, you do have to continually move people and materials upward and outward. The production of food and water happens in the soil and down low: it is literally subjected to the laws of gravity. With people living up high off of the ground, they must be able to return to the ground and access further and further outward the reproduction of their resources, which requires energy in its various forms, and then of course they must be returned with the added mass of their retrieved goods. 

Elevators and transportation are one thing. But one of the more interesting aspects of a high-rise building is the movement of water itself. To get water to people living stories upon stories above ground, you need electricity and mechanical action. It simply wouldn't make sense to expend muscle energy carrying water up even a single story on a daily basis. Electricity of course moves right up the copper wiring that carries it, and heat rises, so hot air has no problem finding its way up the duct work that transports it. Water on the other hand is heavy, and as a fluid, it is a little trickier to get it from place to place without losing it. And you actually need a lot of it: it goes quick when you drink it, use it to bathe, to clean and renew cooking utensils and clothing, and etc. 

It can be done on lower technological tranches of course, but a separate problem is the constant expansion of industrial hegemons and their rivals, so that there must be a constant acceleration of motion and efficiency in economic activity. 

To achieve the constant circulation of water then, it is typically lifted by mechanical pump, powered by electricity, to the roof, where it is then allowed to fall back down, directed to the various tenements on the way down. An artificial gravity feed. All of this requires pipe infrastructure too, which must be produced offsite and transported in and perpetually maintained, which involves piping and joinery and seals and gaskets and all the rest. 

The production of electricity then becomes a hard necessity, all the more so because of its efficiency and transferrable nature, so that the whole of society, looking for constant increasing motion, becomes tooled for it - and this is only one of many ways that necessity is expressed - for an industrialized society which wishes to remain perched high enough on the value chain to command domestic legitimacy for consumption and foreign legitimacy for war making. No wonder then that it is targeted as a sort of Achilles heel in modern military doctrines. That and the supply chain: one can cut off electricity by also cutting off the reproduction of its engines, by denying parts and materials needed to replace them. 

We could expect then an intensification of attacks on those elements, as well as a strengthening and shoring up of their protection. 

The Way to Ruin

It is my preference to live away from the urban centers and watch from a distance, but my itinerant lifestyle does occasionally take me into them. When that happens, the viewpoint I prefer is deep into the actual guts of the thing, or to make use of another image, under the hood - whatever you prefer. I have the fortune of knowing - and occasionally working with -  a talented plumber, and so my preference gets fulfilled quite directly and literally from time to time. 

In this particular case, the world I got access to is the socio-economic ecosystem of a luxury high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles, which in accordance with the preferences of both the management structure and the population it serves, usually remains invisible and insulated from public view, much like the piping and machinery that carry out its functions. These buildings operate like small cities, with their governmental panel of building managers and subordinate janitors and technicians, and all of the connected outsourced contractors that perform the various tasks of maintenance and repair which keep the infrastructure running, humming away as their workers dart to and fro throughout the building, performing their duties as the building empties out for the day, as it cyclically inhales and exhales its occupants through the course of the working day. 

On the couple of days I was present, there were elevator repair technicians and telecommunications workers present in addition to us plumbers, all swarming about in their own little cliques carrying out their respective duties, on the roof and in the basement, just above and below the perpetually irritated and frustrated occupants of the building. 

The generalized and prevailing picture of the entire process was one of a workable dysfunction, not quite progressing to catastrophe, but steady and disruptive enough to constantly anger and concern the well-heeled occupants, who were paying top dollar after being lured by the glossy adds showcasing the prestigious location and surrounding architecture. This particular snapshot can be attributed to one of the most salient geopolitical facts of the century, in particular the steady decline of the current world system's hegemon, as expressed through the very pores of daily economic life in the imperial core.  

Keeping in mind the generalized socio-economic trends in the United States in this particular era: the steady financial concentration of political and economic power, the rescinding of the social contract for a vast majority of the population, the plummet in public trust and central political legitimacy, and so on, we can see these broad and salient trends reflected in the daily economic life of a single high rise building, the prototypical living structure of the modern world city, with all of its attendant imagery of the trappings of advanced industrial civilization: the beautiful modern architecture, the sweeping urban landscape views from incredible heights, the massive and grand shopping and dining plazas, the colossal skyscrapers sharply rising from the street, the many delightful amenities in the actual living spaces, and so on.  

The mechanics of the actual dysfunction of these things, and the attendant marring of the built up images are quite fascinating if nothing else. In this building, the glossy beauty of its streamlined lobby and hallways hides constant water leaks and shutdowns, malfunctioning elevators, strung out and alienated management, a self-destructively stingy administration and ownership structure, unscrupulous contractors, irate inhabitants and all the like, all perpetually colliding into each other and grinding each other steadily down. 

The building is only 8 years old, but somehow it is falling apart: its elevators occasionally go offline, and leaks are constantly springing throughout the piping, damaging walls, ceilings, and floors alike, occasionally flooding whole rooms and floors. These were the limited infrastructure issues I was exposed to as I was visiting for a specific purpose, but there is undoubtedly more out of sight at the moment. 

After this lengthy introduction, what I really wanted to get into were the mechanics of the dysfunction, which I'll briefly summarize and put together, abstracting away from them a more general problem and a squinting glimpse at the general direction of things. 

I had a clearer view of the plumbing issues, so let's take those apart. Immediately apparent when taking apart copper pipe in troubled areas was the thinness of the copper pipe walls: with thin walls the passing water wears away at the pipe wall and eventually breaks through in a pinhole leak. Once you get a pinhole, the water pressure helps to drill through the pipe, widening the hole and worsening the leak until it starts doing real damage. 

This is partially an economic issue. What it looked like was that the developer opted for thinner piping to save money. The less copper material in the pipe, the cheaper the pipe by the foot, and savings can be quite large by skimping on copper. The greater plumbing system also skimped on isolation valves, so that if there was a leak, the entire water system had to be shut down and drained before the leak could be repaired. As a result, the building routinely has leaks and the entire water system is routinely shut off, resulting in the regular scheduled misery of the building occupants. 

In response to general economic stress - much of it which can be traced to a greater dynamic we will sketch - the building's administration and ownership also skimps on its duties: it drags its feet to replace to important equipment like water pumps and boilers, opting for cheap alternatives or delays that result in inevitable failures that end up more costly in the long run. It also seeks to invest in cheaper plumbing services in which lower quality fixes, which temporarily solve the problem but create more problems in the long run when inevitable failures of repairs reoccur. 

The cheap plumbing contractors at the same disinvest in their own employees, foregoing training and resources, opting to throw inexperienced workers at the problem who are underpaid and overworked, and as a result are apathetic to their own roles and contributions, and who inevitably institute poor and unsustainable solutions. Even the talented and competent contractors are working with poor construction and lower quality building materials thanks to developers cutting corners and manufacturers degrading the quality of their products to save money on their end.  

The self-interest of the developer is set against the rest of the system, who opted from the beginning to skimp on construction, taking advantage of an economic policy and incentive structure in which economic actors seek out the most profit with the lowest effort that is legally acceptable (sometimes even not legally acceptable) in the short term, regardless of the misery spread in the long term. 

This sets everyone in the ecosystem against each other. Management, which wants a smoothly running building so that the occupants aren't constantly yelling at them, fight with the administration and ownership for proper resources and repairs. They also fight with the contractors over botched jobs, and with the angry occupants who are experiencing regular inconvenience and even misery in their own homes which they have no real control over. And all of these people are fighting the developers and contractors and manufacturers that seek out as much of their socially available resources as possible while giving them as little as possible. 

Amazing, we see here an entire constellation of simultaneous degradation based on a common general principle: that of the disintegration of the social contract and the mercenary pursuit of all economic actors in profit and financial concentration as the greater system comes apart and the surplus is used up. And everything simultaneously degrades and with a weakening cyclical renewal until a crucial lynchpin is broken for good. 

Seneca frowns from his ancient grave. There can be a silver lining to this dark cloud though: creative processes of renewal can erupt after obstructing and obsolesced structures are cleared, resulting in creative solutions that burst forth into the vacuum as rapidly as the previous order crumbled. New bonds are forged by those navigating a given crisis. That is the hope anyway. It can always get worse.  

Spiral

In the course of analyzing history, there are some competing frameworks and concepts that pose apparent conflicts and contradictions, which we are trying to clear up and reconcile here. 

In particular, we have on one hand a cyclical account of history, in which civilizations rise and fall with a somewhat dependable and regular occurrence. On the other hand, there is the linear conception of history, in which there is a discernable arc of historical changes going in a certain direction. 

If you read Spengler for example, you can see a fine example of the cyclical account at work. He likes to posit each great Culture and Civilization as distinct and bounded organisms, with too much intermingling and dependency seen as a corruption, and which rise in fall in dependable rhythms and patterns in specific regions of geographic space and across specific stretches of time. 

This is a useful conception that is developed to have a certain character, useful for explanatory purposes, and it contains important lessons that our linear progress-minded culture repeatedly ignores. But it is also only part of the picture. I'd also posit that there is far more interpenetration and interconnection between great powers across space and even time, and this too has important explanatory power and contains lessons of its own. 

There does seem to be a cumulative path of development, in which technological, economic, political, and social change builds on itself, with some lost in the course of various collapses, and then some of it retained and carried away from the detritus. 

Nothing new about this, but a spiral can be synthesized out of the cycle and the directional arrow, which has its own particular uses in the course of analysis. 

Grind

If one surveys the recent protests in China - apparently localized in response to specific formulations of the Zero-Covid policy - and the seizing upon and exploitation of those protests by the Western press, one begins to become dimly aware of the moving forms beneath all of the sound and fury, slower and quieter than the Ukraine war but no less significant. 

Within China we see cracks in the body politic made more visible by the protests, cracks which track with the concentrated power in the Party and the function of the more autonomous local governments, as well as the uneasy relationship of these political entities with the mass of the people. The idea of Zero-Covid enters into this structure and is expressed as policy, being carried out in a geographically and structurally specific manner. At the same time, the West with its financially concentrated power, insists on the laissez faire of economic predators, letting their many ill mannered progeny run wild, kicking up all kinds of dust, which are waved away as externalities. 

We also have to take this state of affairs as not occurring within a closed system, but an open one that must pit a more strictly economically and politically disciplined apparatus of control against an economically laissez faire one, being impressed to constantly clamp down on outbreak after outbreak, back to back, being regularly emitted by its Western trading partners and their constellation of colonies, who with their economic and free trade dogmas have acquiesced to becoming a perpetual rolling reservoir for the shifting and mutating virus. One's mind drifts to the fictional geopolitical dynamics of Starship Troopers, in which a beleaguered humanity must fend off with a belt of orbital cannons a never-ending stream of asteroids being hurled by the distant arachnids. Every once in a while one gets through...but I digress. 

Covid turns out to be a very complicated problem that requires a coordinated public approach. The virus is highly contagious, and very good at repeatedly sneaking in due to its low profile, its shifting chimeric nature, and its low death rate (relatively speaking), but which does immense amounts of long term damage that is cumulative, both on the biological and on the socio-economic levels. 

Yes, people do get tired of repeatedly being boxed in and isolated, but they also get tired of being perpetually irradiated by a ceaselessly shifting and voraciously spreading virus. There are many tools and approaches available in order to solve this problem, and a given constellation of techniques and policies may work differently over various geographical and temporal gradations. 

For one thing, nothing less than a complete restructuring of infrastructure would be appropriate: the rethinking and retooling of ventilation in indoor spaces, the overhauling of indoor plumbing and venting, and the utilization and integration of outdoor spaces for starters, and then the organizational deployment of testing and contact tracing. There is also the cultural and economic matter of masking, and the ongoing technological development of vaccines, as well as alternative treatments and even preventative measures. What's more, this battery of measures must be coordinated: for example, the non-sterilizing vaccines become useless in the face of collapsing containment measures. All of this requires broad and energy-intensive social, political, and economic changes, which in turn requires an upstream marathon against the laws of economic concentration and political and organizational decay. 

As a result, we are reduced to the steep simplification of all of these considerations into a strict binary, each pole presided over by great powers: clamp down completely or let it rip. We have a bifurcating world economic system, separating into two distinct blocs with distinct characters, both geographically derived, which in the past one hundred years were able to fold into one another, presided over by an exploitative imperial hegemon of course, but which now is separating into two, and which will continue to separate after the upheaval caused by those grinding tectonic plates. And that separation engenders sharper definitions of the competing systems. 

The point I would like to make here is that this tussle over public health is really just warfare by another set of means. We can watch the spirit of war, or the god of war, whatever you prefer, begin to take shape and make its influence felt in the material world, fractally, in real time, through matters ostensibly distant to conventional conceptions of war. 

What I mean is this: there are multitudes in the so-called West, and there are multitudes in the so-called East (unfortunate shorthand, the geopolitical picture is much more complicated), all of which could be marshalled to craft coordinated, creative, and geographically appropriate measures to contain the virus and mitigate its damage. But this is an ideal, comparable to the idea of global coordination to halt climate change, which is also in the course of breaking down in a similar way. In reality we gravitate towards the binary as it forms in the bifurcating world system, because we have concentrating powers of differing economic and political structure threatened by each other and by their own populations. 

The threat of war encourages internal war within the powers as well: dissenting opinions must not be listened to and learned from, but rather suppressed and crushed, and between the powers, the internal dissent serves as handy levers for outsiders to do more damage besides: as an example, Chinese observers are noting the Western colonial efforts at riling up the dissenting youth to demand more "freedom" and etc. All of this weakens the respective powers internally, and the virus does more damage as a result, and the powers themselves become ever more insecure and belligerent and antagonistic to each other. 

Cultural and economic warfare, in a complex modern industrial society, serves to strip away all of the many intricacies of running and coordinating such a society, throwing out the baby with the bathwater so to speak, so that all is left is the bare bone: an actual threatening enemy. The prophecy is self-fulfilled, and the spirit of war comes to full fruition and is able to express itself in kinetic, conventional warfare. 

Its a bad way to go about things. Actually, its the worst way. As ecologically devastating as it is to bring in the bulldozers and the wrecking balls and the jackhammers and reshape the built environment, I'd much prefer the steady and measured hand of thoughtful and coordinated construction to the desperate razing and flattening of whole cities via aerial bombardment, a form of purification certainly, one the fascists are so fond of, but one that is devastating on every level and which lays the foundations for more of its kind. 

Faces of Death

There is a more graceful and dignified process of dying that can be set against the ticking timebomb image of death as some impending disaster to be avoided with the violent and desperate uptake of energy and resources, which on the contrary, holds the image of death as a natural and necessary aspect of existence. In this alternate conception, the dying being mellows and smoothly winks out, accepting the end, growing peaceful and reverent even to the surrounding earth being returned to, addressing benevolently past harms and releases one's energy and resources into the greater world that made one what one is. 

This relationship tracks with a more intimate and accepting participation in the surrounding world, as opposed to viewing that world as an alien object to be conquered, a tendency seen in aristocratic persuasions in particular. Here the life-refusing translates also into a death refusal: witness the shiny and sterile CEOs suspended high above the earth and the teeming masses, refusing then to accept death and engaging in all sorts of creepy bids for immortality substances and technologies for example. 

There are many ways to live, and death too is multifaceted. 

On Economic-Industrial Warfare

I keep returning to the Ukraine war and the connected tensions between hegemon and challenger because I think there is something very important happening here, something which is not yet readily understood or easily anticipated, but which is nevertheless taking shape as a matter of consequence, and one would be well-served to take stock of it. 

Much of the day to day coverage on the war has focused on the ebbs and flows of the conventional warfare side of it, with many commentators trying to make sense of what each side is trying to do in that light, and tallying up the corresponding ups and downs of each side. Fortunately there are more astute analyses coming out from various corners of the Internet that offer more nuanced observations, particularly on the economic side of the conflict. 

In terms of what Russia has been doing, there does seem to be an assortment of head-scratching failures in intelligence and leadership and tactics...as far as conventional standards are concerned. But they're also up to something that is quite different if one is looking at both the conventional warfare and the economic warfare as an integrated unit, especially if one is comparing the Ukraine invasion with the Iraq invasion for example. 

Let's keep in mind that economic warfare has been around for as long as conventional warfare; we just don't talk about it as vividly as the conventional side. Siege warfare in the ancient world for example had a far greater proportion of economic dimensionality to it: forming blockades and cutting off access to water and farmland and starving out holdouts and the like, which is often what it took to crack an early urban military power. 

Further, since the World Wars, we haven't had a number of great powers to compare in terms of war-making tendencies; the US as hegemon has been the only game in town, with the other substantial powers possibly engaging in smaller brushfire wars of their own, keeping the lid on in the course of those conflicts. 

As an aside, we should also keep in mind that a combination of industrial wealth and available potential energy for modern weapons - read nukes - has helped to put a lid on kinetic total war for now, though the perpetual process of imperial domination has been sublimated to the economic realm, and continues apace there just fine. You get better at what you do repeatedly, and the greater powers have been less active in large scale warfare and more active in economic maneuvering for the last century. 

And so what is Russia up to given the conventional and economic intersection of war making? The attacks on electrical infrastructure have been especially striking. Destruction of electrical infrastructure is nothing new: modern militaries are well versed in the importance of electrical infrastructure as a critical military target for a modern nation. You take out the electricity, and you cause serious havoc on many levels. 

What is notable is how this is actually being done in Ukraine. As we can recall, the US went after the electrical infrastructure in Iraq, but they did it indiscriminately, and ended up with a completely dysfunctional nation to rebuild. This was a pattern repeated on a fractal level: the general instinct was to pulverize everything with overwhelming power, including the Iraqi military and civil service, and then attempt to substitute your own shitty and equally dysfunctional market facades into the vacuum. That does destroy your enemy's ability to resist, but then if you are in the business of nation building and exploiting that conquered nation, you have to deal with a smoldering pile of rubble that is dysfunctional for those that live there, and so the government and economy collapse and the people turn on you as a result. 

This of course mirrors the financialized economic nature of hegemon, and the sprawling wasteful nature of its infrastructure, and the vast expanse of abused allies and subjects. The hegemon had too much surplus to play with, and so its economic regime is about laying waste to the surplus, which turns into cannibalization when the hegemon is done skimming off the cream. And then all of that energy wasted in daily operation - read vast suburban sprawls, supply chains, and industrial agriculture relying on cheap oil inputs - begins to bite when energy sources contract, and it is too late to retool the infrastructure to respond. And then all of the memory of that abused trust in foreign relations begins to translate to increasing distrust, breaking bonds, and shifting alliances. It is the generalized result of possessing too much energy and too much power for too long. 

What Russia is doing with the electrical infrastructure is quite different and worth observing, and let's repeat here that it doesn't have to necessarily succeed in order to have a profound effect on the future shape of geopolitical struggle. Russia has been more discriminating in its targets, going for the connecting infrastructure between systems that are providing generating capacity, such as the transformers and balancing stations, leaving the generating bulk of it intact, but also making the system dysfunctional and unusable as a whole without completely destroying it. 

What this tactic would eventually achieve - let's say theoretically; we've developed the argument by now that wars, and especially wars on this scale, are quite messy and get chaotic quick - is to serve as a source of leverage: you agree to satisfy our military and geopolitical goals, we help you rebuild your electrical infrastructure, which is wholly necessary for modern industry, heating and water, communication, and etc. The way in which the modern industrial world has developed - which forces that development onto participants globally due to the totalizing land, energy, and resource usage requirements - requires electricity as part of its engine and also part of its Achilles heel.  

In a greater geopolitical sense, this tactic only really makes sense because of the Soviet-era nature of Ukrainian electrical infrastructure, with their electrical equipment configured for Russian-made systems, which was quite a long time in the making. This chokes off the supply side of the infrastructure repair, and it would take years and years to completely reconfigure the system to favor Western-aligned manufacturing capacity, which itself is already showing serious problems, as infrastructure experts have long been talking about the precarity of sectors like transformer manufacturing, which is threatened with concentrated and distant supply chains. 

As others have observed, this not only puts serious pressure on Ukraine - legitimacy conferred by a warm, secure, fed, hydrated, and generally functional citizenry - but also on neighboring European allies as well, and their economic partners, to absorb the refugees and the multitude of economic costs incurred by the advancing conflict. As the world system bifurcates into separate power blocs, one of the overriding questions for each bloc will be: can you provide that sprawling suite of modern powers, abilities, and comforts that contemporary developed nations have come to expect and even require? And how to deprive one's rivals from doing so, in order to weaken their legitimacy, and by extension, their strength and geopolitical threat? 

That Russian leadership has now shown a fuller hand in prosecuting this war - as opposed to staying quiet and biding their time as was the usual in the last two decades or more - speaks to the weakness and stability of the Western-led industrial world. Another industrial personality is taking form, and it is only a matter of time before China begins to supercharge that expression when it is forced to show its own hand more fully, as it is drawn in to the greater conflict. 

The system is turning on itself, which is further eating into the incredibly complex, interconnected, and energy intensive fabric of modern industrial reproduction, and this at a time when it was already starting to be crushed soda can-like by the turning climate and general resource and ecological crisis. These global transformations would take centuries to fully express themselves, if centuries were left for the extravagance of unfettered industrial development.  

Restricting Structure

After the naive question is asked - in order to tease out more nuanced answers from a set of bedrock analytical positions - a more structural analysis is useful to set out the parameters within which we can reason from our basic assumptions. 

And so related to the naive impression of Western individuation is the less naive analysis of the overarching structure within which individuals develop, and within which their ideas and guiding ideals are actualized, which both guides and constrains their paths of development and realization. 

We've talked before about the strangeness of complex social organization. In a modern nation you have the uneasy relationship between a regulative state and business and capital, the latter of which ascended to dominance in the Western world, and whose "markets" have created a world that structures and constrains economic, political, and social activity. 

So you had the bizarre spectacle of the Truss administration in the UK attempting to solve its economic problems with a holographic set of solutions instantiated through decades of economic propaganda, which given the inappropriateness of the solutions, caused the bond markets to go haywire, with investors ready to pound down the doors of the administration, forcing them to retract their harebrained plans before the plans were even out of the gate, with the professional politicians responsible banished in turn. Local governance is helplessly dependent on a global economic system that itself has become hopelessly unstable. 

So who is in control? As the conspiracy theorists like to ask anyway. What it increasingly looks like is a complex system of jostling factions held together with barely aligning interests, which is going supercritical, in which any given attempt at governance by a given faction sets off a cascade of crises, causes the rest of the system to respond in kind, until it settles back into an equilibrium of a resting critical state, weakening with every convulsion. 

The strange and pathological contemporary formation of the individual makes more sense in this context. It is difficult for one to sit back and put up one's feet on the coffee table, much less go about one's daily affairs to live in dignity, when the house is on fire. But for many the burning house is all there is. One tries to be oneself despite the expectation that one is to go up in flames. 

No Country for Old Men

There is something striking happening in the individuation and actualization process in the Western industrial world that I wanted to get at. This has been noticeable for quite some time, but for much of the time I've personally observed it, I've been quite puzzled by it, though now it is starting to make a little more sense. 

This is another tough and complex subject to broach, but it might be made a little easier by simply pointing to a comparable allegory in a familiar literary work. In particular, I'm referring to what I think is the more interesting of Hemingway's novels: The Old Man and the Sea. 

In that novel - or novella - there is a progression that is faintly visible in his previous novels, but which becomes fully crystallized in the story of the old man. What we see throughout Hemingway's work is a relentlessly austere descriptive style, a "just the facts, ma'am" which posits a harsh "man of action" ideal of masculinity that seeks to cope with an equally harsh but frankly rendered modern world, eschewing internality and reflection in favor of a stripped down bare action and power of observation, which posits itself as pared down to the essentials, a contention which is highly suspect, and which has been thoroughly criticized and picked apart over the last century. 

However in the frank descriptions of the protagonists' dour moods, alcoholic lapses, and the deterioration of the protagonists'  personal lives and surrounding circumstances - which often culminates in a personal tragedy - and in the details of Hemingway's life itself, just as much work as the reacting criticism is done to deconstruct such a stance.

In the Old Man and the Sea in particular, we see this tendency bloom fully into the overarching plotline itself, mirroring the progression of deterioration and resultant degraded fruit of the greater individuation process in the West, which we'll get into shortly. 

An old fisherman takes to the sea in pursuit of a big catch, and eventually hooks what is probably a legendary marlin. In the ensuing struggle, both man and fish engage in the fight of their lives, with the old man going through a trial of mythic dimensions, fighting to the edge of his life to take home his prized fish which he eventually bests.

But then the fish is too big and has to be lashed to the boat, leaving a trail of blood that attracts sharks on the way back home, which then have to be fought in turn. By the time the old man returns to his home town, the prized marlin is but a skeleton that has been completely stripped away and destroyed by the sharks, leaving nothing but an empty husk as trophy. 

This is a very curious plotline to be celebrated in those factories of productive individuation: American high schools, which in my experience have overwhelmingly turned to Old Man and the Sea as the emblematic literary work of Hemingway's to be studied, though of course interpretations of that work will vary, and a work's message can always undergo some sort of spin. 

So now I'd like to turn to one of the more visible and universal of the West's individuals, the American President. I've personally found the last two decade procession - and of course you can always go back further - of American Presidents very odd to watch: they are welcomed up to the governance pedestal with both great fanfare and derision, and then proceed to self-destruct, dragged apart by the sharks of American big business, the state, and the body politic itself. 

With highly varying but familiar narratives, they become embroiled in personal scandal, disastrous foreign venture, failed domestic policy, and so on. Of course depending on the perception and location of the observer, all sorts of manner of image construction and rehabilitation can be employed to alter the direct subjective experience of said individuals' legacies, but one can survey the facts and watch the deterioration in real time and glean what one can. 

From a deliberately cultivated standpoint of naivety - because there are so many ways to rationalize and account for this phenomenon - I'd look at these presidents and think, "Why do it? How could someone want something like that?" It was appearing more to me like some sort of ritual sacrifice, to be elevated to some high vision of honor before being dismembered and set alight. This was nothing new of course, one could observe the same process in Roman emperors which culminated in incredibly short and violent lifespans in the periods of state turbulence and civil war. 

One could make the same case with the never ending procession of Western celebrity and creative talents, enjoying varying lengths of brilliant output and regard before their predations - or the predations of the surrounding management and audience consuming their images and expressions - catch up with them and they flame out, with the fall itself becoming the spectacle to be consumed. 

Similarly with the "captains of industry," or just simply the billionaires in a financialized economy: the individual emerges as a conqueror on a wave of economic myth, which then proceeds to evaporate as the product is shown to be noxious and/or a public nuisance, and more and more scandals of economic malfeasance are laid bare. 

To mirror the never ending stream of planned obsolescent material waste, what we see more generally is an accelerating decay of the old and aged, and the corresponding necessity of an accelerating instantiation and replacement with the new. 

Of course this is a highly subjective and fanciful analysis. The naive "why do it?" question can be easily set aside in favor of the parsimonious acknowledgement of the familiar and faithful human pursuit of ever growing power, wealth, and fame, which although in the longer run may appear increasingly fraught, absurd, and even dangerous, is in the shorter run all too irresistible for the ambitious and unscrupulous, naturally barred off from any hindsight at the time. The same was the case for that procession of Roman emperors living through the civil war periods, stepping up to the throne to be cut down, almost as if they were waiting in line for the chopping block. Each one had to be thinking, "but I can do it better, I will survive." What else was there to do? 

The point about indulging in such a subjective and fanciful analysis is to attempt to instantiate a narrative and a pattern and abstract it away for later use further into the analysis, aware and wary of what it really is. And gazing through this lens, I do think there is something there in this light: an accelerating degradation of the process of individuation. 

Tick Tock

Behaviors do vary, but the average person when pressed with starvation and dehydration will go to certain lengths to acquire resources and avoid death. And these lengths tend to increase when available energy increases. So the energy usage starts to spike at a certain point when it is waning, before that tipping point in which there is not enough energy available to acquire more energy. 

So you figure an individual starting to freak out and thrash about when the hunger starts setting in. Going after animals, tearing up the local flora, etc. to meet that deficit. You start grouping individuals, organizing divisions of labor and compounding and streamlining that labor, and resource exploitation goes up, and you may also have warfare starting to break out if limited resources are to be had between competing groups. 

Past a certain threshold of energy usage and technological development, you start getting firearms and explosives and rapid transportation. The utilization of energy correlates with potential energy: the more you are using structurally enables more and more energy to be let loose at once. Indeed, through our collective relations, individually we become a bit like these walking timebombs that can go off past a certain point of decay. 

To compound this, mind-body interactions are such that you can start feeling the bite of hunger - and all of the associated psychological and physical turbulence that represents - long before starvation sets in. Especially on a modern grain and starch and sugar diet, with the types of bacteria we are putting in our gut, which begin to antagonize and agitate and send hunger pangs with headaches and foul moods and the like, which have real world consequences. The popular observation of the hungry judge handing down harsher sentences before lunch is one of many examples that comes to mind.  

Reflecting this, it is impressive to consider how difficult and complex it really is to smoothly run a modern industrial nation. Modern leaders have to contend with a massive and dynamic population that is constantly expanding and decaying, setting higher and higher benchmarks of living standard and resource usage along its paths of development. As such, governance departs from a simple furnishing of a designated community with the necessary resources to survive, and proceeds to a more intricate and complex balance of interest groups with needs ranging from bare and material to abstract and completely unnecessary. The rich and powerful must be kept happy with preposterous needs, standards, wants, and interests that span the globe. 

A single human being can go quite a long time without food. Less time without water, but still a few days. Even less time for exposure, but it doesn't take much for a crude shelter to suffice. But when you start adding these complex social relations, all of that goes out the window. Available shelter changes along profoundly uneven contours: amidst the amazing abundance of an urban environment say, the sheer density sharply limits the creativity of shelter construction for the individual. To be situated higher in the social hierarchy is to be blessed with all manner of modern material comfort, but to be homeless in such an environment is to be in hell with little protection. Social violence and its causes become more complex and chaotic. More far reaching and porous harms such as pollution and mass transportation accelerated pestilence become more salient. 

Such uneven development and turbulence reaches all of the way up into the highest economic and political leadership structures of a nation. One can go to war over mere abstractions such as long term financial designs, international treaties and alliances, and speculative access to resource corridors on the other side of the world. And the threat of warfare itself becomes ever more materially and literally explosive as development advances and energy utilization increases, as the potential energy level continues upward. Time marches on, and expansion and decay and the oscillation of those things accelerates and their amplitude deepens. 

Typos

Phew that last one and the typos. Reminder: don't do a bunch of physical work, and then drink beer, and then try to write. But there's also something there. 

This is besides the fact that typos don't bother me as much anymore, for reasons I've elaborated on previously. But also, I continue to find the experience of the typo quite odd. You are typing away, and in your head, everything is sounding just fine. The typo interrupts later on as a surprise: oh I didn't mean to type that. But you did, and it is there. 

There was something happening in your head that starts to drift away from what is happening in your body, in your muscle memory and the movement of your fingers. The mental experience was enclosed in a bubble with its own internal logic, and the muscle movements influenced by that experience were operating on a plane of their own. In this case, the state of fatigue and inebriation caused a distortion in that process. 

And of course this happens all the time: we mean to walk down the sidewalk to go from point A to point B; we certainly don't mean to trip on the seam of that slab that has slightly and slyly been raised by tree roots, which is not a normal occurrence of what is supposed to be a level and seamless sidewalk. And then that seamlessness reinforces itself, establishing standards and expectations, and so the seamlessness must be reproduced.  

For that matter, the West glides along drunk on its mythology, increasingly annoyed with all of the misaligned slabs, many of them perturbed by its own activities, rising as stumbling blocks and frustrations to its smooth movement.  

The mind does guide and drive in a powerful way, but then the material world it interacts with persists for longer, and can be influenced and shaped by the mind, but only so far: it operates on its own plane with its own logic, and the mind in turn has to adapt to those realities it cannot easily and readily transform. 

Woodfire

Nothing quite like sitting next to the barrel stove with a beer. One thing about woodfire is the slow localized radiation of its heat. Ah, the contrast. Coming into a warmer room, even if it chillier than room temperate, feels great if it is cold enough outside. And sitting in a cold room next a radiating fire feels great. 

Late Fall

Fall has finally come here in Washington, dousing the fires of a seemingly never ending summer, a preview of things to come. I'm learning to savor the winter, like one savors the last couple of swigs of a glass of whiskey. Paradoxically (yeah yeah, so it seems) it is the dynamism of the seasons that allows one to slow down and switch gears. The elongated summer this year felt as a stasis: the constant oppressive heat, the halting of the winds and the drying up of the moving streams; there was a stillness that was more menacing than peaceful, as one knew that the soil and trees were drying up, and the fuel was piling up for the fires that would pour suffocating smoke into the canyons. With the coming rains and chill everything moved again and was flushed out, and the perpetually growing vegetation that demanded constant labor and attention slowed and went dormant, and one could retreat to a warm place and have the inner thoughts come back. 

Counterpoint to My Counterpoint

Yes the prevailing regime is eternal, but a quick survey of current affairs in the West. There is mounting evidence that the so-called economy is cannibalizing itself, as opposed to re-organizing the supply chain, flushing out the calcified political and economic incumbents, and radically paring down resource usage and re-orienting the direction of existing energy flows. Apparently reinvention is too hard, and self-destruction is a little easier and thus the order of the day. 

Cannibalization is a strong word, so perhaps a quick glance at that. We have a decent idea now of where all of the inflation is coming from, and it is possible that enough of the ruling elite to effect change do too, yet all of the prevailing free market and anti-labor propaganda has effectively cordoned off those avenues, so the treasured national pastime of smashing labor is what is rolled out. Let's keep in mind that a lot of the effective demand comes from labor, which is already smashed anyway, and there is also collateral damage involved: the deliberately blunted tool of raising interest rates to induce a recession and crush labor also happens to drag down investment and deflate those inflated asset and credit markets too. 

Another aspect of this general instinct to double down on failed policies is to refuse to meaningfully address the supply chain issue - connected to the labor issue I might add - which apart from resulting in emptier and emptier shelves, higher and higher prices, and general uneasiness, also results in incredible reports such as defense contractors buying up the available washing machines to tear the computer chips out of them, which if true at a certain scale, substantiates the cannibalization accusation. 

The only thing left is a harder and harder throttle on propaganda to move forward - a technique when overused actually destroys the capacity to direct with image and symbol, so that we are left in a state where no one actually knows for sure what is going on or what will happen. The engine is making strange and troubling sounds and we are nevertheless pumping the accelerator, which is only the most obvious and local lever for forward movement, which can actually accelerate the destruction of the engine if it is not running right. 

I get this image of the drunkard, mumbling: "no no I'm fine, let me do it," before lurching forward and flat on his face. Again, it could take a while or it could be any minute. The regime seems most eternal when it is ready to fall. 

Membrane

Previously I mentioned the eating from the inside out of the Western Roman empire by the Germanic tribes. There is quite the story there. For now I'll get a rough sketch in, focusing on the changing borders and the composition of Roman society. 

Early Rome saw constantly expanding frontiers which were relatively open and porous, but as the empire matured and its boundaries reached their peak, and the surrounding processes of exploitation advanced deeper, their traditional enemies in the form of barbarian tribes grew more organized and unified, and began to pose a greater threat to the frontier. The borders were fortified and became less porous. 

These fortified borders would begin to weaken with advancing political and economic stress brought about by military overreach and resource depletion, plague, social and cultural crises, and so on, culminating in the crisis of the third century, which accelerated profound changes in the composition of the body politic. 

There is debate over whether key defensive and logistical changes in this period were deliberate or simply came about through necessity and chance, but the important part is that the growing invasions were more and more managed by relaxing border controls and fortifying key cities, garrisons, and supply centers, so that as the various invaders advanced deeper and deeper into the empire, their supply chains would be lengthened and strained and their efforts and pillage and local resupply would be frustrated, as more localized military forces would triangulate on their location like a closing net. These structural changes would precipitate the walled city state as the eventual center of gravity in medieval society, which would expand again and unify until greater empires with expanding borders were again instantiated, another interesting story itself. 

For now, the invading tribes would gradually make inroads in settlement, striking deals with a weakening Roman state to coexist, offering to serve in Roman armies as part of the agreements, becoming more and more integrated in Roman society, so as to shore up the weakening state and be played off against still hostile tribes. 

There was eventually a period of warfare in the late 300's AD with the Goths in particular which would prove transformative, and it is a fascinating period to pick apart and analyze in its own right. 

A large group of Goths arrived on the Danube border, seeking refuge within the empire itself, as they were fleeing a Hun invasion themselves. The tides and pressures in borderlands like the steppes, within which more and more powerful nomadic tribes in the centers would put more and more pressure on and invade weaker tribes on the outer edges, putting pressure on the borders of settled societies in turn, is another fascinating dynamic to keep in mind for another time. 

Anyway, it was agreed that the large Goth contingent could settle, but they were improperly settled at that, from the perspective of the Roman empire anyway. They were settled as one coherent and continuous group, as opposed to breaking them and scattering them throughout the empire and assimilating them, and allowing much of them to remain armed, for various speculated reasons. 

There was a resource shortage where the large group was settled, and logistics like food supplies were botched and/or sabotaged, and the group, starving and desperate began to enter into exploitative agreements with Romans such as selling their children into slavery for dog meat. Unsurprisingly, this situation became intolerable and the Gothic contingent revolted and raged across the countryside. 

Typically, the nomad peoples were not skilled or equipped for siege warfare, so they would roam and pillage the countryside while avoiding the fortified cities, circulating indefinitely and ravaging the landscape, as material and political resources were insufficient to defeat the circulating force (sound familiar?) setting resources and allies and Roman detractors free to gather strength as a marauding force, culminating in the disastrous Battle of Adrianople in which a terrible rarity occurred: a Roman emperor was killed in the course of the defeat. 

A settlement would be reached and the Goths would be reintegrated into Roman society, bringing about political transformations in which the integration of barbarian tribes would advance and accelerate, plugging them deeper into civil and military life, their leaders rising in the political leadership in Rome, gathering social resources in the process, eventually sacking Rome under Alaric and gaining greater political and economic footholds as the Western half of the empire continue to fragment. 

Modern Imperialism

I was getting excited drawing up this vivid and dramatic characterization of US imperialism as incredibly reckless - and it is certainly that, all things considered - but such a characterization misses a large part of what has also been achieved: there is a deftness and astuteness to modern imperialism that has to be addressed, especially for what it reveals.  

As even anti-imperialist detractors admit, the US has been able to bend the will of nations more through financial chicanery, debt, and ideological persuasion, bypassing the brute force required to invade and militarily conquer a land (eh, usually), or even to establish a colony within it, giving its victims the illusion that they are a willing and autonomous partner in a business relationship with a wealthy power that only wants them to become a free democracy so they can become prosperous like itself. 

Of course it does take terrible acts of violence and sabotage to establish regimes amenable to such relationships, but then once the deed is done, the real work can be done to manufacture consent and get the imperial exploitation running more quietly and less visibly, requiring less raw military violence once it gets going. It is like cooking with gas instead of woodfire: all that is needed is a spark and that stream of gas becomes a steady flame without the mess and smoke. But there is an important point I'll get to here: exploiting that gas requires specialized infrastructure built up over centuries and even millennia. And of course different political and economic situations called for different methods of domination.

You saw these gradations in the ancient world too. Rome was famous for incorporating conquered nations and assimilating them into its empire, which made for a more stable process of exploitation. But depending on how tortured a conflict was, and how they felt towards a certain enemy at a certain political period, they would have no compunction with razing the town or city, killing off all the male population, and selling all of the women and children into slavery. 

But the really astute rulers would prefer the diplomatic route, particularly through economic means. If they could smooth the relations with their rivals and subjects with bribes and persuasion, it would sure beat the resources required to mobilize the military and do it the old-fashioned way. And it would keep one's enemies closer, so to speak. They were usually a bit sheepish about this in the ancient world: in Rome especially bribes and cloak and dagger politics were seen in the mythology as weak-willed and cowardly, with the need for bold and glorified battle to settle one's conflicts as a core part of their self-conception. Nevertheless, those rulers who knew how to hold power would only dream of having the avenues available that the United States had in its golden age. 

But that is just the thing. Reflecting the fact that coinage and markets were still quite young in the ancient world, there was still a broad cultural uneasiness of them and a limited understanding of them. Aristotle would be scratching his head over how the commodity was even possible, in which so many disparate objects with profound differences could be reconciled to that single medium: money. 

It took quite a bit of time for a modern understanding to develop of modernity itself, which is readily apparent if one surveys the thought of classical political economy, with thinkers wrestling over the nature of markets, capital, and value, much like the Christian mystics wrestling over the nature of their god centuries before. And someone who really understands modern imperialism like Michael Hudson likes to regularly remark that the US state was interested in his work because it helped them understand what it was that they were actually doing. 

And if it took a lot of time and work for that understanding to develop, it also took a lot of time and work to develop the means and infrastructure for those processes themselves. Financial tools of control presuppose not only thousands of years of development of finance, but also developments of money and markets and capital and the very understandings that make those things work more efficiently. Ideological forms of control like PR and propaganda in general presuppose complex and stable social arrangements and long histories of the development of the semantics and the realities that make those semantics work. 

That's where the recklessness of the whole thing comes in. The West is burning away all of that hard-earned manufactured consent just as it is burning away all of that gas and oil, all of those hundreds of millions of years of captured sunlight. 

And I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face: I'm one of those anti-imperialist detractors. My amazement at the power of the evolution of empire is well-mixed with horror and repulsion. But even I can look at what the late imperialists are doing and say, "eh that's not a good idea for you either."

Stretching and Flexibility

This vacillating between opinions sounds a little wishy-washy I know. But there is a reason for it. Concentrating on world affairs and forming judgements and opinions about them, especially in terms of how one lives one's life, can really serve to tense up one's faculties of perception, at least for me. Like a hand gripping a lever, applying mechanical pressure, the joints start to ache, the muscles start to burn. One's opinion and judgement emanates from one's self, and reaches into the movements of the outer world: conclusions start to take on an existential quality; they must be right! There is a moral significance to what must happen, in accordance with those elusive natural laws. Living in an unstable world, bad judgements could serve not just as an embarrassment to one's ego, but as negative effects on one's very life. 

But there is a self-defeating quality to this heightened significance. To attach too tightly to one's opinions is to hitch one's fate to the movement of the opinions themselves, which don't always align with the reality, especially as one's ego runs away with itself. One's perception about what is possible constricts. One misses things. One may eventually go down with one's own faulty perceptions in turn. 

I find it useful to regularly loosen up the grip and stretch out the perceptions; build up a little flexibility. If one is going to think hard, then think hard about all of the many possibilities and ways of doing things also. Yes we're going to do some work here, and apply some force and grip. But let's do it limbered up. 

State of Play

In the course of these brief elaborations, I wanted to contribute a bit more to this picture we have of the world system and its tensions and shifting character. We are living in this moment in which the empire we call the "West," presided over by the United States, is in a gradual state of decline after having enjoyed almost a century of hegemonic control over much of the activities of the global economy. We could easily resituate the gradients of the rising and falling of the empire in that period, or argue a different naming scheme altogether, where the "West" - or whatever we would want to call it - is something that extends much further back. For now, I just want to look at the US-led order that rose out of the challenges of the World Wars and then accelerated its decline in time for a new round of global upheavals. 

Yes it is true that regime changes on this scale can take quite a bit of time given the study of history, setting aside the argument that the modern era is characterized by a profound acceleration of the movement of energy and transformation of matter, which could involve time dilation as well. But surveying the Western-constituted world system, it does appear desperately unsustainable and growing more unstable by the minute, and as such, an increasingly unwelcome place for a US empire desiring its brand of control, or at least its brand of controlling and encouraging the spread of chaos anyway; we'll get to that. 

The Western imperialist could cast a worried glance at a number of red flags: the processes of de-industrialization that shifted the central locus of control and center of industrial gravity away from the US, processes that can be readily attributed to a degradation in national coherence and coordination and competence of the ruling elite. And let's be clear: it is the control and leverage of industrialization that is the modern king-maker in this world. Also, the degradation in domestically controlled raw materials and energy products. The shredding of what was left of public feeling and political trust. The shutting down of novel problem-solving forms, and the subsequent never-ending stream of collective problem-solving failures in the form of derailing supply chains, collapsing public health systems, random and senseless violence, and so on. There is the cultural cynicism and despair. There is the prominence and priority of propaganda and manipulating image. I could go on. The average person can look at a rotting wooden plank, and perhaps put a little weight on it and tease out its strength, and then judge that the plank will not bear weight and it is only a matter of time before it falls through, refusing to trust it any further. The Western world system is certainly looking that way. 

I also have to give the begrudging admission that I am constantly impressed by the sheer persistence and longevity of a system that seems like it should blow up just by looking at it. Historically the US has been incredibly reckless in its foreign policy, and continues to behave that way as some very obvious and noisy chickens come home to roost. The history of its foreign policy has been to smash any alternative systems that attempt to maintain some sort of coherence to the bounded nations it trashes and drains of wealth, and then to set all of the tattered and flaming constitutive elements free, to be taken up into a rigged world market, with benefits funneled to the hegemon and costs sprayed about everywhere else.  And part of why it can do that is the unprecedented material bounty it has presided over, helped along by an intense exploitation of the most powerful energy source known in human history, at least in terms of net return to human needs. 

There is such an incredible and sheer ebullience of material production and reproduction: it is a system that proceeds to literally cheapen life, allowing it to continuously and messily expand with wanton waste and ruin. Which is where my nagging hesitation comes from when calling the pocket of that eight-ball shot where the whole rotten, yet blooming edifice tumbles down. Figuratively anyway: we know about major shocks and shifts, but the change is messier and more gradual than all that. Historians still debate when the Roman empire actually collapsed after all, with some wondering whether it ever collapsed at all. 

From the outside looking in, there is also the impression that China and its allies - with the obligatory reciting of their own serious problems - does in fact display a problem-solving dynamism, or at least problem-solving that is more dynamic anyway, and an overall seriousness in intent that suggests a future direction for the greater system to take. Much of this endeavor does have a tragic quality however, considering our collective predicament. 

Why Bother?

I wanted to take a minute to set aside a few posts here and elaborate briefly on a couple of points I was trying to make in a previous post. I can only claim to understand and anticipate the longer term movements of our prevailing world order. I have confidence to claim that because I have spent a lot of time studying a wide range of subjects that help to elucidate those longer term movements, such as political, economic, military, and social histories, histories of thought and technology and technique and tradition, natural and geologic histories, and then of course the shorter range political, economic, social, etc. histories that help situate those longer term movements in our present timeline, backed up of course with scientific, sociological, mystical, and experiential understandings of how human thought, greater ecologies, thermodynamics, natural necessities, spiritual considerations, subjectivity, and so on all interact to structure and influence those movements. 

I'm much less confident about anticipating the shorter term movements, at least in terms of nailing down any sort of definitive timing or finality with any sort of precision, because as I'll also briefly elaborate in an accompanying post, these things are complex and take quite a bit of time. In terms of really historically significant shifts such as changing world regimes or even changing empires, these things can take centuries, and the breadth and depth of my own personal experience is limited to less than a century, assuming I make it to old age. 

Why would this matter? Why not relax and stick with contemplating longer and more stable timelines and then throwing one's hands up about precisely nailing down the subjective experience of the turbulent and uncertain present? For me some of the most interesting and compelling subjects have to do with the immediate present and the ensuing short term movements: for a limited living being, I have a temporary but very vivid access to a first-hand apprehension of world events as they unfold, and those events have a direct bearing on the course of my life and what that life looks like, and how I ultimately should attempt to live it. So of course it feels compelling and worthwhile to attempt some kind of comprehension and anticipation of current events. 

Of course the longer term understanding itself is refracted through our current historical accumulation of facts and data, structured by the prevailing ideologies and cognitive tools of understanding, but at least with an understanding like that you can set aside a perpetual work in progress and refine and revise it as you wish, whereas it seems to me a trickier task to live well, on the run, as a once stable order begins to shift and to lurch and to shudder. 

Corruption

Corruption is oftentimes a measure of how sordid the activities of the "other guys" are, but the process of corruption - whatever that means really - also has to take into account the ambient atmosphere and all that entails. In other words, concentrated wealth itself is inherently corrupting to whomever bears witness to it, which in a highly interconnected world with advanced communications technologies, is virtually anywhere at any time. So it becomes the high watermark - within wealthy society and without - of what will always be possible, and there will always be a portion of any population that desires it, so that there is a relentless striving towards it that pervades a society's efforts and activity. 

On Propaganda Further

Propaganda itself remains a constant as an essential tool in complex societies: with the many intersecting interests and perceptions, it is important to establish a centralized ideological "north star" so to speak which orders perceptions and directs the activities of a multitude, however crudely it stamps out deeper resolutions of the underlying reality itself. However in excess and in ascendancy, such a tool begins to do serious damage to the communication faculties of its target, and severely constricts the avenues of productive action that its recipients can take. 

Changing of the Regime?

There seems to be a broad sense that the Ukraine Invasion and the ensuing war is proving to be an early century-defining conflict, drawing in its participants and transforming them and their relations with one another as it intensifies and generalizes. Despite the plethora of hot takes emanating from all quarters however, anticipating the direction of the conflict - and even the conflict's nature - continues to be difficult and elusive.

So much of the information pouring out of the conflict is showing itself to be unreliable, which is to be expected from a theater of war where information and perception make up additional aspects of weaponry, which doesn’t help. But further, making sense of the larger dynamics at play and attempting a speculative extrusion of the deeper currents is exceedingly tricky as well.

A key obfuscating tendency is the construction of the delineated combatant players "Ukraine" and "Russia," which as far as military necessity goes, makes sense concerning the immediate kinetic theater. As wars tend to do, there is a bifurcation in larger interconnected systems in which geographically circumscribed combatants concentrate power to do violence to one another. 

But this late industrial era is quite the interconnected one. Ukraine, with its history as an intermediary between jostling empires is suffused at this historical juncture with jostling oligarch factions from differing regions of the world system, and as a delineated nation its political and economic goals can be seen more as being shaped by its nature as a medium and as a pawn. Russia, on the other hand, is less the Soviet bogeyman of yore and more the composite of a series of regional and historical images, attempting to prop up a geographical claim on global capital. 

For decades the Russians were attempting to turn their nation inside out and join the Western economic and military unions, and then the Western powers - lead by the US anyway - relentlessly encircled them and continued to demonize them, as they were simultaneously directing wealth and resources into the very shared system dominated by the West in the form of raw materials, engineering talent, privatized public resources, and etc. And much of the Russian middle class still identifies favorably with the West, viewing the Western system as dynamic and promising, whereas so much of the Western middle class views Russia as the recurring evil empire; the various regions of the world system understand each other little. 

What this conflict really communicates is the breakdown and gradual realigning of a highly integrated world system. With each turn of the news cycle we see a superficial summary of factional ebbs and flows, but which are all connected to contracting resource flows and growing system-wide tensions: the buckling of various sections of either aligned side of the world system under the weight of sanctions, sabotage, and political tensions. 

But to reiterate a previous point, the character of the system can change, in accordance with the designs and machinations of the established hegemon. There are regional differences in character of vying empires for the position of hegemon, and the outlooks and associated methods for acquiring and maintaining power do matter. 

As hegemon, the US and its Western allies have taken to an increased emphasis on propaganda and the manipulation of a previously acquired surplus, while Russia and its allies - not without their own serious structural problems common to the industrial world - waiting in quiet desperation are more interested in national survival and eventual angling to hegemon, favoring a shift in more practical and utilitarian methods of attracting and directing surplus. 

This division is reflected in the observation that Russia is attempting to fight an early twentieth century-style war, in which material logistics and practical considerations drive progression in the theater, but that in the twenty first century, effective PR and the navigation of huge, complex industrial associations into directing overwhelming energy flows in one's favor is the way to win the day. It has also been observed that the recent surprising Ukrainian victories are also PR wins, that will eventually translate to an increased flow of material and fighters, restoring their forward momentum. 

However, given the increasingly severe resource contractions and increasing instability of the natural and political world, the time will come when the industrial world does regress back to that material utilitarian nexus of considerations. The pertinent question here however would be when? 

Not that this is a directly comparable historical parallel, but I think of the Lusitanian leader Viriathus who was far more accomplished military than a lot of the individual Roman generals sent in his direction, but that his people were eventually worn down by the relentlessness and the persistence of the Roman advance, until he was assassinated via bribe. And then it would be centuries before the western half of Rome would eventually be eaten from the inside out by the Germanic tribes, illustrating that the character of a world system can take quite a long time to change, regardless of the more localized gradients and contrasts between powers vying for hegemonic control. 

And besides, with the clash of nuclear-armed powers, it behooves the enterprising hegemon to reach the top of the value chain, as it no longer works for a simple plane to drop a simple warhead, calling it good. It takes a complex network of offensive technologies and defensive technologies to maintain military supremacy in such a climate, which itself requires a shift to PR in order to direct those complexes of industrial activity to maintain such technologies and infrastructures. 

Let Me Try

One more note in this series: rulers and empires are always looking back into history, and then looking back at the watermarks of their predecessors and thinking: oh I can do it better, and avoid the various mistakes as elucidated in popular readings of history. History can be learned from, in the sense of a long linear line, in which a past failure is coded as a mistake in a learning process that proceeds in a linear direction, and not simply as the expression of a long interconnected and cyclical process. 

There is a lot to take apart here of course. Tactics and experience are one thing. Napoleon influenced by Alexander the Great and Hannibal of Carthage for example. But then there is also the interacting thermodynamic decay of empire to be considered as well, in which rulers embedded attempt to transcend their historical position by gleaning lessons from history, a form of applying evolving technique and technology to overcome those thermodynamic limits, such as when Hitler and his generals apprehended Napoleon's failure in Russia and sought to build upon and modify that strategy and succeed where Napoleon had failed, failing in turn. 

There is a lot to further elaborate on there, but for now an observation about the Ukraine invasion. Its been observed that Putin and his generals have been taking care to preserve infrastructure such as critical electrical networks, and suffering casualties to avoid excess civilian deaths. And the denazification concept echoes the debaathification efforts in the Iraq war, which in turn echoed denazification in WWII. 

It has been pointed out that the US coming in and indiscriminately smashing infrastructure and economic structures in Iraq played a key role in fomenting an insurgency. Iraqis were fed up with not having adequate water and power, and "nothing working," encouraging hostility to the ongoing occupation. It appears to be the case that with the Russian invasion, the Russian have studied that debacle and are attempting to do it better. 

Worth studying the ongoing mess, as it this will change things. But change is not success, whatever that means anyway. A hostile invasion - however carefully carried out - is still a hostile invasion and is fundamentally another form of turbulence to add to the growing and accelerating pile. But in the short term, one empire doing it better than another empire can really change things.