Update

I'm writing a bit again after another period of being extremely busy and then chronically exhausted and foggy and/or hurting. In the next couple of weeks I hope to write a little more about domestic developments in the U.S. and then circle back to the route I had embarked on some time ago: the state of the built environment and our collective social experience, as well as some of the practical steps for navigating those things. A sizable diversion getting here, but hey, we're getting there. I like to think there are some decent reasons for all of this. 

The Maze

Ill-conceived and poorly managed wars are often seen as major contributions to the decline of the offending empires behind them, and there are certainly a number of observable effects that prove this point, such as damage to collective morale and image, financial ruin, actual material damages, and the like, which have observable detrimental effects on a given empire, and this we have discussed in past posts. But there are a whole multitude of secondary and interacting effects that are less visible but no less consequential.

To put it generally, the decaying of an aggressive and expansionary power is especially dangerous, as it tends to emphasize those aggressive processes of expansion that brought the great power into being in the first place, only subsequently those processes are employed in an increasingly unskilled and irresponsible manner, which increases the velocity and frequency of chaotic and unforeseen consequences, which in turn beget increasingly unskilled and ill-considered responses to those consequences, and so on.

This point is becoming increasingly apparent as time goes on with the Ukraine invasion, continuing as a hot war for Russia and as a proxy war for the United States. For one thing, the initial NATO encirclement that helped geopolitical affairs lead to the current crisis was carried out not by a competent military authority that understands simultaneously the nature of its foe and the nature of its own strength and resources, but a thoroughly captured economic complex of interests that act more like its controlling paymasters.

That is, it was the crude short term financial instinct of blowing bubbles that largely drove that encirclement, motivated by the prospect of selling more and more weapons and infrastructure as an end in itself, aided with a little ideological window dressing of course, which in its paranoid and senile way envisioned the eternal revenge and neutralization of an old enemy that was no longer actually interested in fighting back, at least at the time. The thing about repeatedly poking a reluctant bear is that it eventually becomes less reluctant.

And financial bubbles are only good for the actors that have the resources and the freedom of movement to escape them with a favorable amount of loot before they pop. In this case, the bubble is popping, but it’s leaving behind a very angry and determined nuclear power with formidable military capabilities. So the West helped in a significant way to bring about a fight whose outcome it has not thoroughly considered.

That development itself could be traced back to a constellation of indicators of declining national health; it takes a weakening power to pick ill-considered fights in the first place, the consequences of which will further weaken it in turn. For the most part, the war is being conducted on the U.S. side as a proxy war, using Ukraine as the site of actual military resistance, while using economic sanctions in an attempt to weaken Russia’s economic footing.

There is plenty to say about the actual conditions on the ground for the Ukrainian war effort, but for the time being I’d like to focus on the economic side of the war, given the primacy of the economic sphere in U.S. society and foreign policy.

So we should also re-emphasize here that war tends to unleash a whole array of turbulent forces that unseat daily cycles of reproduction, which spread and cascade as the effects of the war spread spatially and temporally. We could look at the effects of the sanctions as a clear indication of this, as well as the military blockade of sea-based trade routes.

Sanctions are punching holes in an already brittle global supply chain, which given the re-tooling of the Russian and Chinese economic spheres for greater self-sufficiency and stability, amounts to self-inflicted injury on the part of the U.S. The de-industrialization of the U.S. and the corresponding hyper-economizing (just in time production) of the supply chain was already well-advanced by the time of Covid appeared on the scene, which with the turbulence it caused on both physical and on psychological economic outlook and the systemic production and trade policies, profoundly weakened the supply chain. And Covid itself, and then the secondary response to Covid, could all said to be shaped by the decades-long evolution of globally integrated capital and its transportation networks, as well as the public cohesion and trust (or lack thereof) cultivated by said evolution.

A chewed up supply chain, combined with a rogue constellation of monopolies and entangled high finance, still more interested in blowing and then bursting those bubbles as opposed to actually running a real economy, then results in a thoroughly alienated and fragmented hostile domestic population and uncontrollable inflation. We have here the twin shearing forces of resource contraction and a society at war with itself as it wars upon its neighbors and its own cradle.

A confused central bank possessing a calcified ideology that directs it to continuously smash labor and blow up asset bubbles is then directed to quell inflation by, yes, smashing labor by raising interest rates and triggering a mild recession, when in fact it can’t see through the own propaganda it shovels itself that labor is already thoroughly smashed and that raising the interest rates will only help pop the asset speculation bubbles it has helped prop up, which will eventually assist in the detonation of the greater economy, which powers the U.S. ability to act with impunity on the global stage.

Meanwhile, the effects of these turbulent forces set in motion will transform the rest of the global community, putting further strain on the world system, leading to more war and to more turbulent forces set in motion, to be dealt with in a, yes, unskilled and irresponsible manner.

So much for the West. What effect is this having on Russia? I for one live in the United States, and have been directly and intentionally experiencing what is happening in the society, on top of intensively studying it, for a better part of a decade now. Russia is a different matter, at least for me. But I’m actually interested in a reality outside of the boring dreams of supremacy of the acting hegemon, which can’t necessarily be said for many in the West, which only serves to compound the problem.

As Western war correspondents have noted, it is incredibly difficult to get reliable information on actual conditions on the ground in Ukraine, as that information is being carefully controlled, and then no one in the West wants to listen to what the Russian side is saying, partially out of hubris, but then partially out of fear of deceit, which is fair. But this makes it more difficult to gather a clear picture of the whole system, though we can certainly compose some decent speculation on the words of actual Russians, combined with economic data and geopolitical news.

In that regard, the rough outline I’m seeing is that domestically, Russia already went through an incredibly traumatic period of collapse, which though now is receding decades into the past now, was able to harden off the population – many of whom are still living with the memory and lessons of that experience, namely in getting by with less and surviving dramatically constrained conditions at a localized level. That and the nation as a whole is tending more towards economic autarky and a more sustainable foreign policy with its allies, after having watched the highly integrated and globalized U.S. leave a trail of failed and failing states in the course of its own affairs. Given the trend of changing climate trends and resource constraints – which are absolute and constitute the bounds of how the world system will operate in the future – it is apparent that this is a favorable development for Russia and its allies, who are allies by virtue of the fact that they have developed along similar or at least congruent trajectories.

The collision into a power (or powers) that is being forced to become increasingly hardened and coherent only serves to further wedge apart the growing divisions in the weakened power, especially considering that the former power is hardening off to accommodate the real and determinant conditions of a newly emergent global reality, while the weaker power loses the coherent dynamism required to adapt to newly emergent conditions.

As for the U.S. the image of Ouroboros comes readily to mind: the snake eating its own tail. The image is simple and powerful on its own, but to illustrate the point, I’d employ an albeit clunkier modification of the image and depict the snake in a maze, and having lost sight of itself and becoming disorientated, mistakes its tail for another entity entirely and proceeds to consume it, addressing the question of why it would do such a thing more explicitly.

Anyway, in a closed system perhaps the mythological snake could regenerate itself faster than it was consuming itself and go round and round in that fashion for some time. But this is not a closed system, and snakes that are consuming themselves hardly make for strong rivals.

Of course, powers on the upswing in their own imperial arcs will have to deal with the thrashing waves set forth by the flailing U.S., set against the walls of increasing resource constraint and climate turbulence closing on in. Developments that aren’t good for anyone really. So it goes.

Finding Zeno

There is a recurring historical observation that civilizations in decline are made up of societies whose religiosity have undergone a concurrent decay. Yes all fine and well, but a couple of caveats. We can acknowledge the vast complexity of religiosity and the many forms that it is expressed in throughout time and within a given society. But within the multitude we typically associate with "civilization" - the teeming expansionary mass of a procession of waxing and waning empires - the religious fervor that draws its vitality from a luminous awareness and reverence for the entire living field tends to be taken up - for a plethora of reasons both essential and pragmatic - to serve a political and economic machinery that is largely exclusionary and inflationary, which is ultimately in a bid to displace that very living field supposedly revered.    

If your religious vision is an exclusionary and even genocidal one, then it doesn't matter how sublimely uniting your vision is; dissolution is baked in from the start. You've established a pathway to salvation - which is, ostensibly, unity with creation - and then set the conditions for that pathway to violently move away from you with every step towards it. The decay of religiosity is inevitable if you've declared war on the vast majority of creation. 

To be generous here, it really must be pretty enthralling to be able to violently vanquish your enemies and completely wipe out everything that opposes your nature, and then to preside over the unfolding splendor of your provincial ideas and sensibilities as they come to dominate the earth. We see this ecstasy in ancient accounts that rejoice over the favor of the gods - or god - that bless them with this terrible fortune as they sack their enemies' settlements and cities, as a surfer may delight in harnessing the devastating energy of the "ultimate wave," being in the right time and place and possessing the proper means to ride it without being crushed. 

But unlike the ocean's waves, that is a wave that is necessarily composed of one's peers - over time, of one's ancestors and progeny - and which rolls right over one's fellow humans, right along with the rest of creation, and eventually that wave does break, and it breaks hard for everyone involved.