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.