In Praise of Shade

I've been talking about the "shadow side" of things here and there. It's a useful turn of phrase that gets a lot of use: metaphorically you can flip the life-giving and life-sustaining properties of a given object or element under the analytical lens and in turn describe its destructive properties as traits common to the same object or element, thereby illuminating the contextuality and contingency inherent in all things. 

But we can turn that very mechanism towards the concept of the "shadow side" itself. To risk leaving out what is doubtless a fascinating etymological and mythological history, we could briefly intuit the misty origins of the concept's genesis. Due to the particular evolution of our sensory array, we rely heavily on visual information - so light radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum - to navigate and to coordinate with our bodies to carry out basic daily tasks. We're talking about an average here: the blind find their own way just fine. 

Similarly it is light energy that powers photosynthesis, and a majority of the earth's ecological processes. The day phase of the daily cycle is the time for a majority of the earth's living things to get moving, happily fed and at work in their daily production. The night, that all-enveloping fall of the earth's shadow, is a time for retreat from predators and the cold and the drop in production brought about by the lack of coordinating light. Again, averages: there are plenty of nocturnal species out during their thing, and species subsisting on energies emanating from sources other than the active fusion of the sun - at least, directly. 

So that's where the dominant mythology comes in anyway, sustained by historical majorities and organized and sustained power: the sun and the light brings everything that is good and sustains it, while the shadows stamp out energy flows and precipitate the arrival of predation and destruction. 

But even within this overarching narrative, we have concepts and meanings that are softer in relation to "shadow," such as "shade." To the desert dweller, the shade too is very much a form of sustenance, where the intense falling solar energy is deflected and where one can slow down and cool off. Even us forest dwellers seek out the shade during the summer work season with a thirst to rival that of the parched desert dweller searching out the local watering hole or seep. Your labors won't get you far under a condition of overheating. 

If you leaf through a survival manual, one of the first things you will find in a section on desert survival - or survival out at sea for that matter - is to either immediately seek out shade or to construct it with what you have. Water is one of your most precious resources in any environment. And with too much sun, you're overheating, and the water is leaving you faster than you can take it in. 

Anyway, I think the point has been made. 

Collapse

The collapse of the Western Roman empire is a notoriously tricky subject matter, the conceptualization of which is still vigorously debated to this day, with even the question of whether the empire collapsed at all still a contentious issue. I suspect a large part of the reason for this lies in the clunkiness of our Western language structures though, which for complex historical and cultural reasons, developed into a largely thing-centered language as opposed to a process-centered one. 

Lambert Strether over at the Naked Capitalism blog recently explored some of the technical aspects of this issue, and makes a series of excellent points about it. Further, a commenter noted that Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass more or less expresses a similar view: that the 70/30 ratio of nouns to verbs in English is inverted in the Potawatomie language, which is much better at expressing living processes as opposed to "things" which are to be manipulated. A wonderful and moving book, I might add. 

The late David Graeber and other thinkers have located this disjunction all of the way back to the ancient world, in which the thing-centric thinkers Plato and Aristotle came into favor at the expense of the process-thinking Heraclitus. 

To illustrate, even many of our verbs possess a noun-like quality. One of the most common words - alongside other words like "fall" - we use for what happened to the Western Roman empire is "collapse," which is chiefly a verb and a process but is often used as a noun, frozen in the mind's eye as a sudden and calamitous deconstruction, say like a collapsed building or bridge, which in their strict functional sense, are no longer the specific, functional structures they used to be, but mere chaotic assortments of disaggregated components, at their final rest and of use to no one. 

And this frozen, decisive image is rooted in the observer with a potent emotional impression, which could be a mixture of awe and dread and other feelings, and which is carried in the present moment, and compared with and measured against one's own surrounding circumstances and experiences. 

The academic and collective intellectual understanding of this historical event then - like many others - proceeded in a sort of "tumble," in which a generation of somber scholars sifted through the historical data and concluded, "my god, the empire collapsed and its people were plunged into a dark age." And then the next generation came on its heels, their sunnier disposition recoiling at the dour outlook of their predecessors, and so the history was revised to account for a possible "continuity" of the empire through the sprouting of the Germanic kingdoms within the Western empire's shell: "no no, it didn't collapse at all, and there was no such dark age," and so on. And then the subsequent generations would take the truths intuited by the various camps - and I should add move intellectually in a relational and process-centric direction - and synthesize those with newly added historical data to produce what we have today. 

And what do we have today? The "collapse" of the Western empire was indeed calamitous when taken over the couple of centuries it took to happen, and it was calamitous for everyone involved, though the catastrophe certainly unfolded through an uneven geographical and temporal distribution. In particular, the 400's CE in Western Europe were complete bloody chaos. A lot of this could be attributed to a conjunction of historical timing and the rapid and mass movement of an enormous amount of human energy in the form of the great Germanic migrations touched on here before. 

To simplify, the triggers could be conceived as climate change and Hun migrations from the east, which set a rolling mass of people into motion, crashing them into each other, first in the steppes and then into the metaphorical and literal walls of the Roman Empire in turn, overwhelming those walls as they weakened and degraded in historical time. The calamity occurred in those deadly oscillations of difference: in the great amplitudes of rapid and mass movements and antagonisms of desperate people. 

The Germanic peoples and the Roman empire had existed side by side for centuries, if not in peace, then in resigned and occasionally irritated tolerance. But that uneasy dam finally broke under the strain of the great migrations: the displaced Germanic tribes required a constant expansion and movement to escape the human flood of climate and war displaced peoples from the north and east, an expansion that met its limits at the huge and inflexible borders of an emplaced territorial Roman state, which required a set-fastness and a stability to provide the constant political, economic, and technological development of a settled civilization. It was this sharp difference in delimited ways of being between the Romans and the Germanic tribes that pitted these forces against each other, eventually shaking the Roman state apart. 

We locate the calamity in this process in the catastrophic loss of continuity in the functions of the Roman state, and the loss of wide-ranging trade and economic and political circulation within the massive Mediterranean domain of the Roman Empire, which clearly shows in the historical record in profound changes in material quality of life across class during that time period, and the steady regional material degradation that shows up in the archeological record, as well as the collapse of global complexity within the empire and the progression into localization and simplification in the western side of the empire, not to mention the constant bloodshed in the form of warfare and civil war that both caused and was caused by this loss in continuity. 

But we also have a couple of very different tracks of continuity to disentangle from this mess, which vastly complicates - and makes much more interesting - our conception of collapse here. The very peoples that helped to topple the weakening and tottering Roman Empire were also the ones who helped dust it off and reanimate its corpse. 

Over the course of centuries, the Germanic tribes were gradually hooked into the Roman system in various ways. In divide and conquer strategies, the Romans would shower sympathetic chieftains with wealth, ingratiating those chieftains and inculcating into them an identification with the empire and a settled way of life, setting them against enemy tribes. Germanic peoples would also be taken up into the empire itself and settled within, serving in the Roman legions. 

Especially after the crisis of the third century when the Roman military was chewed up by plague and civil war, Rome's appetite for Germanic soldiers grew, and as the empire's decline advanced in the 4th and 5th centuries, Germanic peoples would advance ever higher in the military ranks and were given ever more responsibilities, and eventually land and delegated authority, which took root in time and would grow into kingdoms of their own as the central authority of Rome finally disintegrated. 

The Romanized Germanic peoples would come to identify with the empire, and looked up to its power and prestige and believed in it as a political, cultural, and economic entity. And they would form an alliance with the still-standing church, commanding its spiritual and ideological authority in return for its military protection in order to reproduce the forms and functions of the empire at smaller scale in a more localized manner, economically simpler and using less circulating energy, at least for now. 

Existing infrastructure that still functioned was used, and what was not functional was stripped and repurposed, and the monasteries worked feverishly to copy all of the knowledge they could, while authorities scraped old Roman political and legal documentation in order to reproduce and properly name and carry out the old legal and political forms of the empire. 

Words like "fall" and "collapse" do have a focusing function: they point to something that did indeed come to an end, in order to describe the consequences and directions of that end. But also, what fell and what collapsed and when? And then what did it do after that? Apparently, things didn't fall as far - or collapse as completely - as the images suggest. And Western Europe was indeed plunged into chaos and tumult in their own sort of "Warring States" period for another thousand years while the Eastern empire stayed standing during that time. 

But then the walls of the Eastern empire did finally fall, while the turbulence and fragmented turmoil of the West - with that turmoil taking place amidst the ruins of the Western empire, complete with all of the material, ideological, and intellectual trappings those ruins would provide - would produce that terrible and vigorous stable of European powers which would explode onto the global stage in the colonial era and dominate the rest of the world in turn. 

Language is a funny thing. But you can use that very funniness to dig deeper into the history, to reveal a richness and strangeness that defies the understanding. 

Art of Relaxation Revisited

It is true that laziness - or a simpler and less moralizing sort of "inaction" - can pose certain problems, especially when it comes to sustaining a certain skill or tradition. The laws of thermodynamics never rest after all, and so as soon as you cease putting work into organizing matter and energy into a certain configuration to suit a given need or want, that configuration is hard at work drifting back apart, or at least seeking out greener pastures, or the more interesting conversations at the cocktail party, in so many ways to speak. 

Take a few strums on that guitar, and start to familiarize the mind and body with getting it right, and then put it all down for awhile, and that stuff will fade away real quick. It takes longer and longer to fade the more rigorous the repetition and the deeper you ingrain the patterns, and the more vivid and impressing the lesson is. You put more energy in and the configuration gets denser and it persists for longer. And you can put something down and it will leave an imprint, and you can return to it later and pick it up again and it will be easier to resume. But all of that is beside the point I wanted to make here. 

The opposite problem can also be the case: if you are constantly putting energy into a given system, it begins to oversaturate and overload the existing patterns within, while simultaneously depriving other surrounding systems, ultimately impoverishing them and setting them into an antagonism with the oversaturated system. This is a lesson that could really benefit our Protestant society: that sometimes it is good that one dial back the obsession and the fixation and the constant targeted application of energy to a given configuration and just fucking relax. 

So now we're getting back to our "art of relaxation" motif. It isn't just that relaxing tends to relieve stress and paranoia and overextension, and therefore, improve performance. It is also that the world is composed of an incomprehensible multitude of living things, all with their own forces and interests, and part of living in harmony with these forces and interests involves letting them simply be themselves and do their own things. Indeed, even becoming aware of certain things and turning one's attention to certain things can disrupt their function if one gets too fussy. 

One of the better examples of this is the relationship between sleep and learning. You can field anecdote after anecdote about this: someone is banging their head against the wall on something. Say, practicing a musical instrument, or hitting a stumbling block in a construction project, or getting tied down with writer's block, or unable to solve some sort of puzzle or problem, or whatever. And then they walk away from the problem, hit the hay for the night, and then the next morning, or sometime during the next day, the solution pops into their head. 

After a couple of intense sessions of practice and theory, and then some rest to let it all absorb, one's hands start to move miraculously across the fretboard. One's musical fluency and virtuosity can leap in bounds, in sudden changes of quality. Inspiration can often strike when one isn't looking for it or striving towards it. 

A lot of this has to do with the brain and the body needing downtime so that all of those hidden lower processes can do their work integrating data and experience and consolidating it, oftentimes while one is sleeping. But this can also be generalized into the waking hours and with simple rest. For example, engaging in a variety of tasks - as opposed to a repetitive single task - allows the various muscle groups to heal, and strengthen, while they are not being used and strained. 

Culturally, we don't trust what we are not directly perceiving or acting on. If we can't see it or are not aware of it, its existence and efficacy is suspect, and either needs to be ignored, discarded, or else engaged and trained into the patterns we think are proper. And what is not in active motion is "lazy" and "idle," breeding "evil vapours" or whatever the hell they call it these days. 

The land is not "productive" if it is not seized upon and worked to exhaustion. Resting land and ecosystems that are recovering and recharging are a waste of space and losing money. And we must vigorously till and rend the soil, laying waste to the indigenous flora, and trashing the mycelium networks, so that we can inject our processed nutrients and punch in our monoculture. And then we create our deserts and call them peace. 

We're not going full hippie here. Directed energy and effort must still be put into one's world. There is a countervailing cultural tendency to distrust anything visible or perceivable, and to place an uncritical faith in what is mysterious and inscrutable. That is another problem that we'll have to set aside for now. 

Chainsaw Wisdom

I've been thinking about chainsaws, so we're going to do some bits on chainsaws. Also, a title like "Chainsaw Wisdom" is a hell of a title, just like anything else really with "chainsaw" in the name. The urge to have a little fun with this is of course irresistible, but I'm not just being facetious. Bear with me; there are some interesting things to suss out here. 

First, as is the case working with any tool, you're eventually going to become aware of its shadow side. You can smash your thumb with a hammer just as easy as driving in a nail, and indeed, your thumb is a bigger target. You can cut your hand slipping with a knife or a hand saw. For that matter, you can get into plenty of trouble simply instantiating abstractions - such as using words to converse or write - when you get into a disagreement with someone and then you have a fight on your hands, which can do progressively more damage depending on how deep-seated the disagreement is and how entangled the relationship is. Not a non-sequitur: we'll get back to that part later. 

The more powerful something is, the higher stakes there are for making a mistake when becoming acquainted with that thing's shadow side, the more formalized and elaborate the procedures become for even engaging with that thing in the first place. 

Take the chainsaw, which features a gas engine (or now electric) powered chain, linked in a loop, with its entire circumference studded with razor-sharp teeth, moving at high speed, which can remove incredible amounts of wood very quickly. And it does this with very little feedback or warning: you start the engine and then squeeze the trigger and then without any further effort, an enormous amount of force is put out by the saw, a level of force that would otherwise take an extremely vigorous exertion of strength and concerted effort, directed with intense and focused intention, to achieve, if it can even be achieved at that level by hand. 

Even setting aside the immediate danger of the whirling blades themselves, there is the matter of accounting for one of the most dangerous tendencies of the tool: kickback. With that chain moving at such a high speed, if the wrong part of it - typically the tip of the bar - runs into a solid object, it can buck the entire chainsaw back violently - oftentimes upwards and backwards due to the motion of the chain - right into the operator's shoulder or face. Rural nurses everywhere nod in solemn agreement. 

The dangers - and the consequences of those dangers - associated with the tool have contributed to all sorts of ingenious improvements on the overall design added over time, such as a spring-loaded brake on the front of the engine assembly that stops the chain if it is tripped by kickback, spikes at the base of the bar which allow the saw to be embedded in wood and stabilized, a safety on the trigger, and etc. And then there is wearable safety gear like chaps, helmets, and face shields. And even all of these improvements don't eliminate all of the more serious dangers. 

I've been cut plenty of times with knives and saws, and I've smashed my thumb plenty of times with a hammer, but not once have I let the chainsaw - when it is in motion - even graze me. Why?

If you consider how much damage - and how quickly that damage is sustained - that chain can do with any sort of contact with it, it becomes clear that you have to put in much more prior work to ensure that such a thing does not even happen in the first place. This is not even a claim that I am a chainsaw expert and that I haven't made dangerous mistakes with the thing. Let's look closer. 

There are specific ways to stand with a chainsaw, and there are specific ways to hold it. There are ways to place wood, and ways to cut into the wood, to avoid triggering kickback, and there are methods of cutting that avoid binding and other troublesome tendencies that can lead to kickback. One carefully controls when the saw starts running, and one moves very carefully when the saw cuts through and is free and winding down again. 

There are also maintenance considerations, such as ensuring that the saw is always sharp, and that the chain is tight and in good condition, and that the saw is running properly, and etc.   

All of this makes up an entire additional insulated layer of precaution before you even get to the real danger. A mistake could be made within this additional layer, resulting in the saw binding or kicking back without even coming close to grazing you, and it is still incredibly alarming that it happened in the first place. One's reaction is: "oh shit, that could have been bad." 

These dangers, and their accompanying protocols of precaution, leave a deep emotional and instinctual impression. Not only are close-calls and mishaps frightening in themselves, but the people with the experience of them and who can grasp the gravity of them also react accordingly and impress that gravity and caution onto others around them through teaching and scolding, which is often intense and frightening as well. 

This is also true of other powerful modern tools such as automobiles and firearms. Consider automobiles, which involve complex traffic laws and codes of conduct which govern their smooth operation, which are absorbed over years as children are socialized and then trained with them, before having to go through schooling and licensing procedures to finally drive them. 

The very existence of automobiles as a mode of travel implies an intense impression that is inculcated in children at a very young age. We're all familiar with the image of the tottering child shambling off into the road, whose delicate and developing nervous system and brain is irradiated with the fearful and wrathful scolding of the parent, desperate to correct what is certainly a dangerous errant behavior, in the context of a society based on the car, anyway. 

It is that scolding, that hot and high-velocity signal that is to hammer in a strong enough impression to correct that errant behavior for good. It stays with you. 

And these protocols migrate. The content of the protocols themselves may remain specific to the activities they govern, but the protocols themselves come with impressions and ethics that stay with you, and can be transferred to other daily activities. 

For example, the cautious impression remains, and one enters into a completely different field, like writing and related intellectual pursuits. The more one learns, the more one discovers how much there is to know, and one's cautious perception discovers that there are a multitude of mistakes and pitfalls to be had. Early on, one gets in a bad argument and gets yelled at by the teachers. Later on, bad arguments can hurt reputations, careers, and relationships. One gets to be more and more careful as one puts down the words. 

One thing I'm leaving out though is that these protocols do present as systems and traditions, but they also have to be absorbed by the individual. One can have a cautious personality and be ready-made for the protocol, just as one can have a reckless personality and choose to ignore the protocol altogether. 

After all, setting aside flukey accidents, we still have plenty of people laying into their legs, arms, shoulders, faces, and etc. with chainsaws all the time. We have a steady beat of accidental firearm deaths in the United States. And don't get me started on people's trash driving habits and the related yearly traffic deaths. 

Well, I guess I will get a little started. Subjectively, I have observed a steady qualitative change in driving habits over the years, with habits getting steadily worse, more reckless, and more solipsistic.

The average car in the US weighs 2 tons or so, and of course cars have trended larger in this country for some time. Cars are built really well now. They handle well, and they're well-sealed and comfortable, and minimize road bumps and road noise. They're loaded with TVs and stereos and all manner of creating a comfortable inner world. 

All of this is great, but also drivers forget that their wills are locomoting these 2 ton hunks of steel, and the faster you are moving, the less time you have to respond to what is an increasingly complex driving environment. The car designs are safer, so there's that. But the accidents, phew the accidents.   

One solution is to move away from the technological suites that are the most dangerous anyway, in the hopes of mitigating some of that damage. But this is a society that likes to have its cake and eat it too. Self-drive is going bust, and we shit on trains. We'll hang on to our most dangerous toys, and acquire more, and all the while allow those solemn precautions surrounding them to degrade and lapse. 

Whoops

I should know better by now than to set definite intentions for writing output on this thing. When you live in the giant industrial shredder that is the United States, a loose shirt sleeve could very well get you caught in the thing, and then in you go, torn in a multitude of directions. 

The only issue with this particular metaphor is that it implies conscious and competent design: a precisely constructed machine that executes its intended task with purpose. As this is only partially true in the case of the US, I'll use another metaphor of a different color, mixing it in like a paint, and maybe we'll get closer to the right hue. 

I think also of an increasingly turbulent environment, say like an overcharged river or a chopped up ocean or great lake. It pays to have organized and concentrated energy to have on hand, such as a kayak and paddle and the knowledge and muscle power to use them, or even a small engine on a boat, and one can at least attempt to navigate between the chop and the whirlpools, charting a course through the turbulence. 

But when you lack that energy - in my case money is pretty tight - then you're more liable to get sucked into the prevailing currents, and the best you can do is to attempt to go with the flow and see where it all goes. And besides, being a semi-nomadic worker and somewhat free agent, I'm freed up for all sorts of loose requests floating around, unfulfilled in this burning trash heap of a country. 

What I'm getting at is that I've gone into some construction work (the money sounded good) offered to me: an extensive remodel that has gone way overschedule and blown past its budget, lending an extra hand to help these poor guys wrap things up and finally get out of there. They're at wits end: they're under constant and mounting pressure to finish a job that seems to never end. 

The reasons for this are many. Mistakes and changes on the part of the overworked and scatterbrained contractors and the workers yes, but also changing design decisions on the part of the owners, skyrocketing material and fuel costs, miscommunications and misunderstandings with suppliers, leading to inappropriate materials such as unsuitable water-based paints peeling right off of the steel posts and rails. 

The project was delayed for two months because a scattered architect couldn't send through the proper building plans. Crucial inspections that could cause operations to screech to a halt have been delayed by days or even weeks. 

I've seen this sort of thing elsewhere too and have attempted to describe it previously: you're getting an enormous wide-ranging and systematic degradation of the country's civic and economic institutions, and this damage begins to accumulate and reveal itself gradually in the operation of the daily life that keeps the country running. 

Construction for example is an interesting intersection of the material, legal, political, economic, and domestic spheres. Dysfunction in any one of the spheres can put a project on hold: costs can mount up in supply chain squeezes or gouging for example, and then these cost overruns cause disputes that can get held up in dysfunctional legal systems and so on, so the entire operation can jerk its way down through stops and starts until it finally arrives shakily at its conclusion, presenting the illusion that something has been done while simultaneously sustaining damage that accumulates in people over time. 

For that matter, it can get more personal. I've observed a number of anecdotal affairs in which increasingly desperate people are caught up in inheritance disputes in which legal processes get held up with various dysfunctional mechanisms and professionals, and the the increasingly desperate people get more desperate and perceive the dysfunction as back-stabbing and malice - which may be present as well - which destroys those relationships for good. 

People get a little weaker. They get a little angrier. Their wallets and bank accounts get a little emptier and less cash is flowing in to contribute to domestic reproduction and the restoration of daily autonomy and dignity. And so they get a little more resentful. And then the New York Times sails by overhead, aloof, with headlines - just saw one this morning - that drawl on: the economy is showing signs of robustness. Well, I suppose the point has been made. 

All of that aside, I'm getting tossed around again and seeing plenty of interesting things. Grist for the mill as they say. Lots of partially-written pieces backing up, and hopefully more will be forthcoming soon. 

Right!

What does it mean then, to be "right?" 

You live truth in accordance with what you are. You can judge what you perceive and are aware of, which is a complex amalgamation of genetics and environment and socialization and upbringing, and also all of the small and large efforts and acts which make up the trajectory of your life, which accumulate in your character and experience and the governing conditions of your lifestyle. 

How you are brought up, and how you are composed necessarily form constraints around how you can maneuver and act, but then how you maneuver and act can steadily transform the conditions within which you live, which in turn changes how you can maneuver and act. 

All sorts of people can be right about all sorts of different things, depending on what they are and where they are at and what they want. But this "rightness" has varying magnitudes of depth and duration, and its given premises proceed to certain conclusions with certain consequences. 

Warlords may look around at the nihilistic struggle for power in their war-torn homelands and correctly perceive that given their ambitions, their own ruthless perfection of organized violence is the path forward, and then in short order receive bullets in the head for it. 

And CEOs may correctly perceive the truth of the coercive laws of competition of capital, and build their empires upon heaps of betrayal and broken bodies, and enjoy breathtaking views from the greatest heights for some time, and perhaps die comfortably in beds as individuals, after which their progeny eventually watch their bequeathments crumble and their names cursed and dragged through the mud, and the conceptual compressing together of those extreme poles forms that truth. 

Or you could have an archetypal Diogenes correctly perceiving the nature of human material existence and choosing to live in avoidance of the pursuit of power, in the pursuit of a good life instead, and exist in material poverty for it, perfectly content sleeping in a barrel with the stray dogs, and that too is a truth. 

And one can occupy anywhere between these extremes. One could entertain trash opinions but feel quite right, supported by the buoyance of one's equally wrong peers and be given access to their pooled resources and exist with some regard and public respect for it. Before being proven wrong again and again until one's word becomes worthless and one's dignity becomes stripped, but this could take plenty of time too. 

And one could be right all along, but remain in quite modest or even impoverished regard and circumstances, and remain in obscurity for some time, or throughout one's lifetime. And to invert all of these scenarios, one could wallow in the mud indefinitely, wrong as wrong can be, or be quite right about the world and the nature of reality and enjoy material success for it. 

Sometimes wrongness is the point, as in the case with something like strategic deception. And the truth can be perceived as either a means or an end. It all depends on what one is, where one is at in time and space, and what one wants to be. And then as one's activities proceed in accordance with one's truth, the world changes and those new conditions are confronted by those coming upon one's heels. 

You might have noticed that this is an attempted synthesis of a relativist conception of truth and an absolutist one. Yes, truth can twist and turn in time and space in accordance with perception and historical and cultural positioning. But that moving in accordance with a truth takes on a path dependency in accordance with its premises, and that a given truth proceeds to a given set of consequences in time, which can be judged by its fruits. 

And that synthesis can be done well, and it can be done badly. And even done well it has certain strengths and weaknesses, and so too do its constituent relativist and absolutist parts. And such an attempted synthesis I'm doing in a particular way to further along a greater analysis, that has its own character, its own strengths and weaknesses, and its life trajectory. 

Empire's Hand Pt. 1

Talking about the recent high profile conflicts - such as Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine - in terms of the US Empire's involvement is a tricky business. On the one hand, you do have clear geopolitical maneuverings like the US' long history of global occupations and bases, covert wars, punitive sanctions, political coups, economic warfare in the form of debt trapping, austerity, and privatization and the like, and also its motivated and cynical economic and political support of its allies' repressive politics, such as with the successive regimes in Israel, which point to a real material and geopolitical efficacy. On the other hand, you do have to acknowledge the long independent regional history of these conflict zones, as well as the autonomy and dignity of the actors struggling within them that are not necessarily a part of the United States. 

At any rate, the US Empire is there, its power is effective, and these things must be talked about and put into consideration, if anything, to develop the structural aspect to an effective analysis of the world system, as I've talked about before. 

Needless to say, this stuff is exceptionally complex and difficult to discuss, requiring years upon years of intensive study and experience to get a grip on, at last without sounding like some sort of sloganeer, but nevertheless it can be done. There are a whole galaxy of excellent thinkers and frameworks which develop effective critiques of the historical evolution of empire and its manifold effects, in all of its subtlety and nuance. 

Of course right here at this moment we have this here blog post and its functionally smaller space, so what I'd like to do is attempt to compress all of that, using a simpler metaphorical analysis to make a point - something I do here regularly - which draws off of that large body of work that has been put in to make it work. 

I want to start with the image of spinning plates, as in the exhibitionist spectacle. A plate - a generally symmetrical, balanced, round object made of ceramic, wood, porcelain, china, stoneware, plastic, or what have you - spinning upright balanced at the top of a pole or stick is not something you typically find occurring in nature of its own accord . 

No, that is a phenomenon that owes its sole existence to human intervention, a specific, delimited species branching out in a very particular evolutionary path, a complex and unlikely dance of energy winking in and out of cosmic history, which has become dominant in the natural world at this particular point in time and space, and so is afforded the surplus for phenomena like exhibitionary spinning plates.  That's a drop in the bucket of course: we can talk about unlikely surplus phenomena in the modern world all day, but we do have to start somewhere, and we all have places to be. 

What set of conditions makes something like a spinning plate possible? You're talking about generation upon generation of traditions developed and perfected to craft perfectly symmetrical and balanced dinnerware as well as the historical development of the aesthetics, needs, and sensibilities which implore those crafts, and the same goes for the poles and sticks used to balance them, and the production and manipulation of the materials that goes into making them. Then add in the history and development of the exhibitionary spectacle, which implies the human surpluses that make such spectacle possible, and also all of the time and energy that went into developing the techniques and methods and the imaginary for conceiving of the spectacle in the first place, time and energy which must be afforded by the collective labors required to produce the necessary food, shelter, and security.

Given this set of conditions, if one drops a spinning plate and it shatters on the floor, it isn't typically said that gravity and unbalanced movement finally felled the plate and the superior denseness and  stability of the stone floor shattered the plate for good, except perhaps by means of a joke. 

What is more likely is that one points to the person doing the spinning and locates the cause there, exclaiming, "oh, you dropped it!" and then asking: "what went wrong?" Did the person lose focus? Did the person lack the sufficient level of skill and concentration? Did the person's hand get tired? Or was it intentional? 

This is partially due to the thermodynamic unlikeliness of such an event happening of its own accord except through human intervention, so by convention we locate the genesis of the cause in the condition and intentionality of the person doing the spinning, which was the only likely place from which the event could have possibly occurred. Responsibility and consequence are properly assigned to the place where the energy is moving, and where the direction of that movement can be changed. 

With this image in mind let's address an earlier iteration of the world system. From almost two centuries away, the Opium Wars appear absurdly cruel and preposterous, and maybe they really were those things. But why would the British Empire traipse halfway across the globe to force opium upon the Chinese people, setting aside the comically villainous reason of "fun and profit," or the slightly more serious reason of simply wanting it all (the sun never setting upon the empire and etc.)? Considering the operation of the world system at the time, and Britain's interest in dominating and manipulating that system for its own gain, things begin to make more sense. 

To begin with, much of the civilized world from the ancient period up until then ran largely on silver (alongside gold, with preferences occasionally shifting), due to the various physical properties of the metal as well as long arcs of economic tradition and global convention, which through its histories and conventions, produced a magical property of trade circulation as it was introduced into an economy. 

A lot of the silver mines around the Mediterranean were exhausted in the ancient world, and since pure silver is more reactive and degrades quicker than gold, supplies were tighter and more precious. A lot of the discovery and production shifted to South America and Asia. And for various historical, cultural, and political/economic reasons, a lot of the world's silver trade was ending up in China, and China was holding onto its silver stores. 

In the run-up to the mid-19th century, British finances were shaky, owed in part to recovery from the Napoleonic Wars and the experience of a series of poor harvests in the region (yes, the Irish Great Famine was one of the many disasters directly produced by this iteration of the world system). More immediately, Britain's silver store was draining, a lot of which was going out to China due to a trade deficit caused in part by the British people's insatiable demand for Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain. 

Wow, the hemorrhaging of silver over tea? But besides a clear consumer preference for the pleasure and growing tradition of tea-drinking, the tea itself - especially black tea with its caffeine content and accompanying traits of concentrating focus and speeding up activity - was the perfect drug to facilitate a continuously accelerating and industrializing and modernizing imperial society.  

And upon further thought, this does make sense, especially considering the razing of whole societies and regions for the sake of tobacco, coffee, and chocolate, which continues to the current moment. And to put it really crudely, when a lot of people really want something, it behooves capital to give it to them, which makes it easier to extract value in unequal exchange. 

So silver was draining out of Britain; how to keep it circulating in Britain's favor? The West didn't really have anything that China wanted in return. How to set that silver free again? The East's long tradition of opium use was one weak-point to exploit, which like many traditions of mind and body-altering intoxicant use, could easily go pathological through imperial exploitation. 

Through its long history of conquest and monocropping, Britain was able to subvert large swathes of land in its crown jewel colony, India, for this particular purpose, where traditions of opium production were already developed and cultivated (introduced in India by Arab traders in the 700's CE). And so the opium was produced in India and then traded to China - another region of traditional opium cultivation and use, also introduced by Arab traders - in increasingly greater amounts, in exchange for that coveted silver. 

At the same time, opium usage was increasingly becoming a social and economic problem in China. Silver was once again draining out of China, but also opium use was going increasingly pathological since 18th century, which was then accelerating, not just because the country was being flooded with it, but also due to more complex social reasons, attributable in part to the decline of the reigning Qing dynasty, and growing turbulence due in part to increasing Western imperial aggression. 

This is all culminated in the Chinese destroying a large store of British opium, which touched off the first Opium War, with the British military prevailing, winning a grab bag of concessions in an unequal treaty, including trading privileges, acquired territories, and the forcing of opium back into circulation in trade with China, which formed an early part of China's traumatic "century of humiliation." 

So there you have it. To wrap this up and put things together, this phenomenon of an empire flitting around the globe, conquering through trade seems to be an important attribute of modern imperialism and conquest. 

Through historical accumulations of wealth and technological development, the British Empire was able to develop in particular the appropriate maritime and military technologies to be able to move rapidly and effectively anywhere around the world, engaging in brutal military conquests yes, but then accumulating much of its wealth through the rejiggering of existing conquered societies, subverting their economies and their land towards the intentionally asymmetrical circulation of trade and goods in Britain's narrow favor.

In many cases, wealth was directly expropriated and extracted, yes. But the deftness of the British system was such that it kept many of its subjects largely intact (save for the famines), so as to continuously circulate trade in its own idiosyncratic image, while the Empire would continuously skim and accumulate and concentrate value off of that circulation, at least before bleeding that value out again in its late stages, given its late 19th century onset of free trade fundamentalism, its advancing financialization, and its offshoring of capital to its colonies.  

The globe and its centuries of built up resources and economies became so much raw material for Britain's spinning plates. But as a concentrated intentionality manipulating those plates, eventually Britain would lose focus, and concentration, and strength, and the plates would fall, at least until someone else would come along to pick them up. We'll continue on into more contemporary matters next time. 

Wrong!

Besides having favorite legacy political, economic, philosophical, and literary works to draw upon, I've read, listened to, and in some cases been in conversation with a number of contemporary thinkers and communities whom I respect for quite some time now; at least a decade let's say, and I've had the pleasure of adding more trusted lights as I go. And despite the occasional disagreement, I consistently come back to them because I've come to trust them to be consistently right, given my own predilections, knowledge, experience and worldview. 

The notion of being "right" is so loaded with baggage that I just need to draw attention to that respectfully and warily, but then set that aside and move on.  

Anyway, what a lot of these people have in common is the vaguely cranky (this is me too) acknowledgement that they've been consistently right, all things considered, but that it has largely been a thankless and mirthless task. The Cassandra archetype comes up a lot if we're talking imagery. You see this a lot actually. So why? How? 

There is a whole lot to this, but I just want to explore something we've been addressing: the mechanisms and tools of abstraction. A lot of these people are what I would consider talented craftspeople who have given a lot of careful thought to their own thinking, which implies a much deeper and broader worldview that must be reflected upon as well. 

And when you do that you're talking about longer timeframes and timescales. When you are regressing to more and more general abstractions that are covering a larger amount of categories over a longer amount of time, you can get it really right, or really wrong (and we'll get to the wrong side). 

Because given a human lifetime, if you are talking about endeavoring to understand whole decades, and then centuries, and then even millenia and beyond, and then if you get a good working model of that stuff and it is serving you in navigating reality given that understanding, well, that understanding is good for your lifetime as long as you are continuously developing and maintaining it, because those arcs that you are describing arc quite a ways, and probably far past the end of your own life. 

If you've gotten to the point where you are accurately describing the arc of the US Empire for example, and then by extension the arc of Western civilization, you might miss some details and short term predictions, but you're probably going to be able to call the general direction of a lot of important events. 

Which looks like prophecy to a lot of people, and in a certain way it is. But to the archetypal Cassandra, you get a familiar and consistent attitude: big whoop. You've been doing it for long enough, and probably calling enough accurate shots, that you've gotten used to the whole repeated exercise. 

At the same time you've probably been in enough bitter arguments and butted heads with enough people, and read and heard enough boneheaded opinions, and then in turn come to the realization that the materially, politically, and economically efficacious world runs on those bad opinions and poor arguments. And no matter how many times you've been right on this or that geopolitical development, it ain't worth a damn, because the same bonehead ghouls are still running the show, failing upwards, and living proud amidst the widening ruins they've been cultivating. 

Which brings us to the shadow side of abstract thought. Because again, when you are talking about more and more general categories at greater and greater timeframes, you can go really, really wrong. On an individual level, this might lead to consequences in terms of misapprehending the world and making a mistake that costs you personally. But in relation to others - especially in steep hierarchical structures of power -you can be catapulted to the top with the wrongest opinion possible, oftentimes by virtue of the very wrongness of that opinion, favored by the powerful. 

In the end, abstraction is a tool: the mind assigns a simplified symbol to a complex state of affairs to decide what to do with that state of affairs or how to relate to it, which can then be fixed socially with language and written symbol, and so the abstract sign is quite flexible in its usage. 

When you map this onto gradations of power, you can have powerful people using these symbols to fix simple determinations onto complex states of affairs, manipulating those they have power over to adhere to those simplified truths, while at the same time having the power to maneuver around the consequences of those truths. 

And so you get powerful and sophisticated propaganda that specifies how the world works, how power is to be legitimated and organized, what types of energy should be invested in and used, what types of forces should be used on others for whatever reasons, what means should be worked for and disposed of in pursuit of the good life, and how all of these things effect the world in turn. 

And it is precisely the wrongness of these things that gives them their power. It is the mismatch of the symbol and the reality that allows the powerful to remain astride of the confusion and destruction that that mismatch causes. This game can be carried on for quite some time. And this is the nature of living in a general era of decline. 

That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to do the work, and that one should just drop what one is doing and try something else. No, I'm just doing a bit of venting and trying to have some fun with it anyway. Right thinking and right living are important ingredients to living decently in a generalized era of decline. You can profit handsomely in playing fast and loose with the faculties of thought, but even that gravy train eventually comes to a stop. 

Play

Oftentimes it starts with a faint idea. You notice a pattern in something, so you instantiate an idea that ties that pattern together into a cohesive structure, and then work on the structure until it is resting firmly upon the reality it is describing. 

I've expressed the thought plenty of times before that once you get down a working idea and let it sit and you get to looking at it, you can start to see additional ways in which that idea can be worked. You might start seeing a contradiction that needs to be worked out for example, or you might see some gaps in what the idea is trying to address that you didn't see before.

Eventually it starts to dawn on you that you can keep fiddling with the idea any which way, and it is good to have this flexibility. But there is only so much time and energy available in the day. Eventually you do have to stop fooling around and let the idea go and be itself. 

Something can be overworked and over-shaped. Never quite deciding on a coherent aesthetic for example, or adding too much ornamentation and the thing gets too busy. Or as I found working heavy wire on a fence, you can put an incredible amount of force and tension on that wire; it is incredibly strong, but then if you bend it one way and then decide you want to bend it the other, it weakens the wire and that's when the thing fails. 

But what this also reveals is that you can get a whole lot of play out of the idea itself. Yeah, there is a solid foundation down there that you have to work around and which imposes a real constraint, though hell if you have the means and the wealth you can cut right through the rock below if you wanted to, which makes the navigation of reality a matter of the availability of energy too. But still, at the end of the day you only have so much energy to work with. 

The idea allows for comfort and the navigation of the reality that it rests upon or sheathes, but that it is also all negotiable and mutable and that the bare reality underneath is really strange and baffling, and should be treated with respect, which implies a humility in the idea too. 

Perception

I've been talking about perception a lot, so maybe we could have a brief look at that one. What you perceive is what you become aware of, which is what you have to work with in the course of analysis. 

Your state of being matters to your perception. If you're afraid you notice certain things related to that fear, and you're much more motivated to pursue or avoid those things, and they take up more space in your consciousness and you are sensing them more thoroughly and thinking about them more thoroughly - which is what we've been exploring with paranoid perception in particular. 

The same goes if you are hungry or have some sort of appetite for something, or angry and wrathful towards something. Or on the sunnier side, you are satisfied or joyous. There are differences of perception even in your level of engagement towards something, whether you are intensely interested in something or whether your attention is diffused and your mind is emptier. 

Meditation and ritual changes your perception and what you are noticing and what is moving and motivating you. And eating certain foods and ingesting certain stimulating plant matter like teas or coffee, or intoxicating substances; these things too can radically alter your state of mind and your perception and therefore what you are motivated to think about and do, which builds additional structures through memory, analysis, and experience. 

Part of what makes perception what it is, is that it is a sort of pivotal point of mediation between what is happening in the world and in you, and what you are thinking and feeling and experiencing. 

Bent Reality

There was a hint of a contradiction lingering there in that previous discussion on the relation of ideology to reality, and I think working out that logic could be helpful and illuminating. 

On the one hand, we have the contention that part of an ideology's power lies in its ability to faithfully describe reality, and in so doing, allow its adherents to successfully navigate that reality, which seems to ring true. Bald lies and sad, desperate iterative representations of an increasingly irrelevant and bygone era can certainly hold things together for a little while and motivate some, but we can observe that phenomena to progressively weaken and eventually fail, and it often becomes ever more vivid and insistent before the moment it finally collapses. 

On the other hand, a mass movement charged with the prevailing instincts and moving forces at the time can achieve a sort of escape velocity all of its own, regardless of its proper descriptive relation to reality, and indeed, set in motion forces that confirm its own contentions, thereby functioning as a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

One example that comes to immediate mind was the emergence of neoliberal ideology in the 70s and 80s, which of course had its roots extending back long before that. There were complex reasons for this emergence and rise to dominance, but part of it had to do with the fact that its basic thrust appealed to a broad range of economic and political actors. The ideology's prescriptions of turning the private sector loose once again and setting free the suffocating webs of regulation and so on were enough to get the broadly stagnant and dysfunctional political and economic machinery moving again. Nevermind that its basic contentions were nonsense, and that half a century later we'd be cursing its name with clenched teeth and flying spittle, trying to kick it into the wastebin as it holds fast through its death throes. 

And for that matter, we have ideology after ideology that do in fact do a good job of describing reality while holding consonance with its moving forces, only to be smothered in their cribs or stamped out, or which have to go underground and subsist on roots while holding out hope of an eventual re-emergence.  

As always, we have to take into account the movement and concentration of power. Who is associated with whom toward what end, and to what extent can they bring ideas into their full embodiment in material reality? From the perspective of us truth-lovers, attempting to greet the world with an open heart and converse in good faith with the spirits, reality appears bent by the long historical evolution of human power, along the contours of which lies the aforementioned contradiction. But that too is reality.  

Paranoid Abstraction

There is something that can help alleviate the worst effects of the paranoid instinct, while at the same time harnessing the potential power nestled within that temperamental beast: the generalization of its focus. But, as we'll see, even this measure ain't so simple, and it ain't so easy. 

With the paranoid perception's "gaze of Sauron"-like specificity, the "spirit" of the matter becomes located in the limited object of perception, with all of its limitations and distortions that accompany that restricted perception. 

But upon turning the gaze upon object after object, becoming acquainted with them intimately and how they connect with everything else, certain patterns begin to arise that are further and further generalized as more objects of perception are assimilated and which can eventually become cosmic in scope, and the provincial paranoid fixation is dissolved, leaving behind a navigable explanatory and anticipatory framework. 

Well, in theory at least. If this latter phase sounds like the makings of straight-up conspiracy theory, that is because it often is. On the contrary, what can happen is that the provincial perceptions can be strung together and added up, and the object of paranoid fixation becomes ever more grand and malevolent in its all-encompassing power, and now the problem is much worse, because you've turned an anxious fixation into a potentially powerful and consuming worldview, expressed in the stereotypical wall-scrawlings and cork boards spider-webbed with networked post-its, photos, and red yarn. 

Part of the difference of outcome lies in the simple art of relaxation. This is something that is also common to people living with OCD - and paranoia can often be read as a supercharging of OCD in a lot of cases - in that part of living with it consists in attempting to function alongside it and with it and then disengage with it when it ceases to be helpful or productive. One of the structural aspects of OCD is the tendency of the perception to hyperfixate, making it difficult to smoothly transition from one object of perception to the next. 

The idea is that whether the fixation has to do with daily living and perceptual interest or a threatening object of fear, fixations can be quite useful for learning about various elements of reality to anticipate them and therefore harness them or navigate them or counter them in whatever way, but then too much fixation destroys the very ability to act. And this is true whether one is encountering a limited object in daily life or developing a worldview to live one's life. 

Anyway, to put it more generally, any sort of hyper-concentration of something can lead to dysfunction. Matter needs space to extend in. Water needs air to move. 

To use an extreme case, this principle can be illustrated in warfare, the effective exercise of the paranoid instinct par excellence, because the threatening objects of your perception are literally trying to kill you. 

There was this unforgettable account I read of a Kurdish fighter dealing with ISIS - I can't remember where I read it unfortunately - where he talked about their terror tactics in combat. They would breach defenses by setting off explosions and rapidly drive up in vehicles amid suppressing fire, basically moving fast and hard and making a lot of noise, which would terrify and overwhelm defenders. 

But the Kurdish fighter insisted: you just had to stay calm and concentrate. Choose a target, stick with that target, dispatch the target, and then move to the next one. Take one at a time; deal with the greatest priorities as they come, and with enough luck you won't become overwhelmed and live long enough to continue to be effective in combat, whittling down the opposition. And with more soldiers trained this way and functioning this way, the effectiveness of the fighting force is compounded, and the priorities are dealt with simultaneously and the enemy is grinded down. 

 

You see this principle appear in military training across armies throughout history. It was certainly true of the Greek and Roman phalanxes: the formations were built for stability, grouping together soldiers trained to remain calm through all conditions, with veterans placed in strategic locations throughout the formation and the entire body of soldiers trained to work confidently together so as to maintain the formation's cohesion and strength, so as to stave off that dreadful appearance of the god of Phobos, which can fragment the protective shell of the phalanx and trigger a panicked rout, which was where the real disasters often happened. 

But here it is important to point out: it is the paranoid fixation that develops and affords the calm. One fixates on the object of threat and trains to understand and anticipate it, to aim and shoot effectively, to properly hold a shield, or to thrust a spear, and all of that training produces a wealth of competence that can be drawn from and trusted when it counts. One fixates and prepares while it is productive to do so, and then let go and trust that the elements are in place and that the work has been done and one has done the best one can do with what one has. To continue to fixate on threat after threat in combat, to hold onto that fear and anticipation for all that is happening, eventually there is too much to fixate on; too much to account for and deal with. One becomes paralyzed and cannot act. 

And hell, we sure took the circuitous route, but that's living in so many words. Focus on the priorities that matter, do the work that is needed, and then take a rest with the trust and satisfaction that that was enough, at least until it isn't. Living well is also dying well in longer timeframes. 

That's what you can do anyway. What is happening in the world is another matter altogether.  

Watchful Eyes

There is a whole lot to say about the current Israel-Palestine conflict, but for now I just wanted to situate it within the greater geopolitical crisis which has been unfolding in slow motion for nearly a century now, and which is very quickly picking up speed. 

Israel's situation in that region makes up what I and others have previously called a "bleeding ulcer," or you could call it a "hot spot" or a "pressure point" or a number of other metaphorical encapsulations that could be useful. Another could be located in the Ukraine conflict, and though these two points are some of the most intense and capturing most of the attention - for good reason; they're both quite awful for one thing - there are plenty of other pressure points around the world that are intensifying as the world system undergoes increasing strain. 

Structurally, it is mostly the weight of the US Empire that has been bearing down upon those pressure points for most of the century. You could call the US' larger rivals - like Russia and China - empires as well, and they would have to be to pose a real challenge, but we've been able to see where most of the world's resources have been extracted, and where they have been concentrating in the last century, and in the unfolding of the geopolitics of the last century, we've been able to make out who the hegemon has been. 

And so a large part of the nature of these pressure points is the revolting of local and regional powers against this greater state of affairs, which in uneven geographic concentrations has become intolerable in those places, and the shifting and concentrating of power into different geographic concentrations so as to start to alter that state of affairs in a different direction, mainly by appealing to the power of alternative rivals who may offer alternatives. 

The US has strived for geopolitical monopoly, what the military liked to call "full spectrum dominance," and so as it and its allies weaken, it has to work harder and more viciously to maintain that position, as those growing rivals emerge in bolder and bolder configurations to challenge it. 

So, here is one thing to look at and speculate upon: in the modern world, information travels very, very quickly. Historians like to point out that during its later periods of crisis, the incredible highway system that Rome built facilitated the rapid movement of its invading enemies. With that in mind, consider a modern analogue, which is by no means the only one: the rapid movement of information globally. 

The intolerable conditions within these conflict zones generated their own crises for their own reasons, but one thing to keep in mind is that the powers at play in these conflicts are all sizing each other up and gathering intelligence on each other very quickly. Everyone knows of the increasing internal political instability of the US, as well as its increasingly heavy handedness and incompetence in a vast array of global affairs, which also goes for all of its allies taking its marching orders or who are otherwise supported by it.

On a more technical level, anyone can get on the Internet and learn of the increasing supply chain dysfunction of the West in particular and the increasingly embarrassing struggles to procure and move materials, such as ammunition, artillery, equipment and vehicles, and so on to the conflict sites. This is just one of many windows into the ongoing operating power of the empire. As that power is perceived to wane, rivals may attempt bolder and more direct challenges of their own, and as the disasters for the US pile up, and the victories for its enemies increase, it will all be perceived and disseminated quite quickly, and of course, acted upon. 

Learning and Development

There is a plasticity of learning at the crest of development, which itself rests upon older striations which have calcified into their respective strata. The former depends upon the latter and vice versa: to effectively learn, one has to stand upon the stable and held-fast and dependable with confidence. Too much flexibility of trial and error and too many possibilities means the dispersal of one's efforts and a loss of movement and purpose. One has to be confident of what works and what is true, to measure further attempts against those things. 

But on the other side of that coin, it helps to have some flexibility in what has been developed as well. As greater conditions change, what works and what is true could change, and if one is measuring all of one's efforts of trial and error against an increasingly falsifying body that refuses to change, one is also in trouble, and dispersing one's energy and movement in a different way. 

 

Accumulating Influence

I think paranoid ideologies present a good opportunity to describe the increasing influence and effects of a growing body of people moving in concert with a given coherent ideology, so I wanted to take a minute and look at that sort of thing, and perhaps try to come to terms with it somewhat.  

In popular culture there is a lot of wariness and poking fun of the genuinely paranoid modes of thought and action, such as various flavors of conspiracy theory or general crankery. 

As someone with a paranoid side and who has directly experienced the movements and consequences of those modes of thought, for the most part I'm fine with that in the context of a relatively stable society. At the extreme ends of that behavior and perception, paranoid people are searching for very specific signs and indications, and when they think they can confirm those signs and indications, regardless of whether those signs and indications mean what they do, paranoid individuals can act very suddenly and sometimes violently when triggered. 

So having a bunch of people around on hair triggers that can lead to rapid and potentially vigorous action when exposed to certain stimuli is probably not the best thing for the stable functioning of a complex, stimulus-dense society. Better to tamp that down a bit if possible.

There is a catch though when your society is becoming increasingly unstable for various reasons. One of those reasons could be the greater proliferation of paranoid ideologies themselves: when you have a bunch of individuals on hair triggers who carry the same coherent set of beliefs and stimuli-triggers, the movements set in motion when those triggers get activated can get larger and more powerful as you add individuals in concert. 

But at the same time a lot of the power of those ideologies is derived from their successful anticipation of and description of the realities they seek to navigate. Critics of the paranoid style in politics for example like to point out that when increasingly bad things are happening to increasing numbers of people, and the reigning government partially responsible for those bad things refuses to communicate a satisfactory accounting of those things, then a vacuum opens in the collective discourse and the conspiracy theories and fear mongering is able to rush in. 

The mass paranoia itself creates a gravity of its own to contend with: it doesn't matter that the ideas themselves are wack and out of touch with reality, the instincts and behaviors nurturing those ideas generate volatile forces of their own, which annoyingly can require a paranoid perceptive element to analyze. 

Because one signature of the paranoid perception is a hyperfixation on potentially destabilizing elements, and so a given individual might obsessively learn everything they can about a certain element to anticipate it and act accordingly. 

Walking across a bridge, one may obsessively fixate on a pattern of supports, declaring that the bridge may fail at any moment. This behavior on a perfectly stable and sound bridge can be thought of as preposterous, but if the bridge is actually in danger of failing, well that behavior is something else entirely. And so how to properly judge all of these elements in relation to each other, while entertaining a healthy apprehension, without giving into the fear? Aha, very carefully perhaps.

It all brings to mind that hilarious adage which can be sometimes true: "you may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean that they're not out to get you."

Powers of Abstraction

Abstractions correspond to real things, and they matter, but they can be used in very different ways, and so they can have very different effects. Oftentimes we abstract to describe a grouping of things that are very complex, but which tend to move together, and so a simplification of something on a lower level can achieve an increasing complexity of understanding when relating more of those lower level things together. 

I can look at one of those towering giants, generalized as a plant for how it moves and grows and produces food and energy, and call it a "tree" in complete ignorance of the great mass of its root system and its movement of nutrients and its colonies of micro-organisms, and still succeed at cutting it down and turning it into lumber. What you are seeking to do in relation to the tree and how all of that is bound up with culture and economy can influence what sets of abstractions are called forth and how they relate to each other, and the effectiveness of those sets of abstractions depends on their fidelity and their correspondence to their referents and how actions and impressions and perceptions move and change when they act on their referents and whether all of those things are good. 

We attach then to our abstractions and love them for their power, an attachment that can even outlive the results and fruits of their application. Which is how one can build enormous relations of abstractions that describe a certain state of affairs in great detail, such as the life and evolution of the US Empire, and still be hated and despised for it, if it is not prescribing a certain preferred direction and unfolding of that life and evolution. 

All of which is to say that I like to regularly remind myself that it is good to love and trust good abstraction, and nevertheless always be wary of it as it relates to the world and to one's self and one's place in the world. 

Seasonal Movement

Now the cold is really setting in up here. Things are slowing and quieting down, which in a way allows me to get back into action with the reading and writing and thinking. That localized seasonality lends to a circulation of its own: constant heat and long daylight leads to a constant growth and flourishing of living things running on solar power, which paradoxically leads to a repetition and stasis as one tends to them, which is finally put to rest as the daylight wanes and the cold sets in and everything goes dormant, and one's thoughts turn inwards and one's patterns of activity and consumption shift in turn. And then one eventually gets tired of the quiet and the dark and greets the coming sun and shoots of green with joy and relief. 

This is of course a privileged conception. It could be that one greets the coming winter with dread and consternation: was enough food produced? Was enough fuel gathered and stored? 

The modern advanced built environment flattens this seasonality and flings it outwards. That movement and circulation makes the transition, and indeed, is accelerated in some respects. The seasonal foods are gathered further and further outwards from regions conducive to their production, according to parallel seasonal movements of their own, or which otherwise have such long seasons as to be effectively perpetual. 

The movement and variation and circulation is for the most part available to those wealthy enough anyway, but it is often available all at once. There does remain a seasonality to shifting ideas and focus, but then there also arises a new internal logic of a sort of self-referential seasonality, in which thoughts and activities move in accordance with the interests and preferences of the most influential and powerful, and then of course the reactions and counter-movements to those things, all of which is in relation to what the greater system is doing and how it is changing. 

Anyway, this is mostly a warm-up post as it gets cold out there. I've got some rough and abstract bones to lay down as I get going again. I've still got a whole load of things to wrap up for the season, but I wanted to get some writing in as I go. A warning that the writing might be a bit vague and esoteric for a bit as the rust gets sanded off and the joints get oiled again, but eventually we'll get going here again. 

Where We At?

OK so it has been almost a month and I do need to get something down; too much silence can get pretty loud, especially as the pressure grows to break it. 

In terms of something really meaty, I'll have to continue to kick the can for a bit. I've got a growing list of notes: I keep thinking of things to elaborate on and then am continuously pushed downstream, having to put off the writing for one reason or another, and now I have a shit-ton of things to write about. Hopefully things don't get too diluted with thoughts going every which way. 

Probably not the most pleasant image to contemplate, but one does get a certain sense of constipation, if one is accustomed to regularly writing and formulating and representing thoughts, and then to have all of those thoughts pile up, not fully processed or moving completely through the system. 

And in a similar way, its taken a lot longer for the heat to go away this year, up here in the PNW. The weather itself seems constipated. We had a good long rain last week, and then it dried up again and the heat came back on for a couple of days. The land has soaked back in a hell of a lot of water and the streams still haven't recovered. Unprecedented from what I've seen living here for the last couple of years. Up in Washington at least, it starts getting cold and wet throughout September, with a couple of possible last gasps of summer, and then in October the switch gets flipped and things turn cold and wet for good. Not this time. 

The poor bugs - I'm always observing and worrying about the bugs it seems - keep trying to get ready to winter over and go into hibernation, and then the heat comes on again, later and later. In a temperate rainforest there is a dense, constant, and intense quality of striving, where the many forms of life are vying for their niches. The fall and winter provide a sort of relief, where everything takes a rest and goes dormant. Not so with the heat continuously lapping in again after having seemingly gone away for the season. 

It seems as though the raw energy itself, in its surplus, is continuously pushing the web of life to strive just a bit further, confused, bewildered, half-hearted, half-awake and roused prematurely from the beginnings of its slumber, perhaps wondering in its own instinct-language, "what are we doing, where are we going?"

Look and Breathe

Well yet again it has gotten heavy around here; it usually does. Fall is coming on and Winter is quickly approaching, and I'll have much more down time to get through all of these notes and ideas and get some more writing out. I have some really gnarly stuff to work through in the coming months, much of which is attributable to the fact that there is a lot of really gnarly stuff going on, and one must face it. But I don't want to lose sight of the fact that a large part of understanding and coming to terms with reality has to do with living well in accordance with that reality, which is what I'm constantly trying to do here. 

And oftentimes it means taking a step back and looking around and taking a few breaths. I like to get out and take a look around and really take in the beauty of the world we've got. I can share some of that through the occasional picture or so at least. 

I get a lot of pictures of Rainier - Tahoma in indigenous language - in particular. You could call it a form of worship, a reverence for those titanic forces of nature, which in this case forged this great water tower, blasted into the air by volcanic eruption, and then catching and holding a massive store of water through the accumulated glaciers, which cut their way down the mountain, forming those beautiful snaking lateral moraines, and then finally terminating at the snout with a river pouring forth, nursing incredible ecosystems all along its course. 

And if you squint at the entire thing, you can make out the unified movement of its many curves, moving together with gravity, and you can hear the roar of the river traffic, miles upon miles away, all moving together and with purpose. 

 

On and Off

It can be hard to get one's head around the phenomenon of fascism, or the death cult, or the increasingly twisting and self-destructive logics and actions of the rabid nationalists, or the desperate papering over and forced smiles of the liberals and progressives for that matter. And on an individual and subjective level it is as it should be: if one wants to live as one is, one is to fight one's enemies after all. 

But I have to remind myself - and there are plenty of others even more befuddled and lost than me - of the artificial dualism that we've so sharply drawn collectively, concerning the simple contrast between life and death. I mean on the one hand it is a very stark and oftentimes useful simplification: on an individual level you are either alive or dead; we have that one down at least. 

But on the other hand, at larger scales and at higher levels of abstraction, it is not so simple. There is a deep and intractable intertwining of the forces of creation and destruction. And as such, an explosive and destructive release of energy, or a rapid draining out of vital force, is driven through its own internal will, and only wishes to be itself, and fulfill its own nature. 

If an explosion could talk, or the calving off of a mountain, or a ruptured artery, it would only say: "I'm doing what it is that is in accordance with what I am. What else would I do?"

Because living is also coming to terms with what is. 

Signal from the Deep

I think of a literal fault line, where over time the evidence gradually mounts in favor of its existence in the form of little tremors issuing as the plates grind and slip, and the tremors might grow in frequency and amplitude as the tension builds up, until something gives and you get a massive earthquake.

Over long stretches of time, there have been a wide range of explanations for these phenomena - all with an internal logic and consistency of their own - using data gathered from the senses and daily experience and memory and collective tradition, to attempt to piece together some sort of model to explain and anticipate these subterranean movements. Moving earth set into motion by the activities of great beings for example, or the machinations of angry gods. 

Even the sciences of geology and tectonics are comprised of vast mosaics of accumulated theory and pieced together data sets: the inferences drawn from observable geological phenomena on the surface, or data taken from drilling and core analysis and dating, measurements of continental drift and the study of the movement of bodies of water in relation to the earth, measurements and historical data sets of the frequency and amplitude of tremors and quakes, the geometrical and mathematic descriptions of planes and landscapes, and so on. 

What got me going on this though was something more biological, and by extension socioeconomic and political in nature. That's right, that subject near and dear to my heart - both literally physically and metaphorically - the socioeconomic and sociopolitical dynamics of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. What we're becoming ever more aware of, through the study of Long Covid cohorts especially, is the sheer depth and complexity of the damage being done, with the passage of time being an additional confounding factor. 

The passage of time especially has some salient implications. We've talked about the longer term social and economic implications of the damage being done by Long Covid, but there is more to consider in even longer arcs. For example, the science communicator Eric Topol likes to bring up the fact that researchers have barely started scratching the surface of what Long Covid is and what it is doing, and we only have 3 years of observation to go by. Covid is a strange and baffling disease, and it is easy to forget that the multi-system disorder took everyone by surprise initially, where everyone was looking for respiratory issues. 

But as Topol has pointed out, this has been the case for over a hundred years: viruses do some very strange things to people over time, and we've been ignoring a lot of it, or at least not understanding the data sets well until there is enough to go on. For example, there was a large growth in Parkinson's disease cases some 15 years after the 1918 influenza epidemic, which has increasingly been traced to it. Or the explosion of post-polio disorders that arose some 30 to 40 years after that epidemic. In the early years of the pandemic we're very much in the dark, and one can only speculate about the cumulative effects of very slow and invisible structural damages that are mounting over time on top of other forms of damage, which are growing more frequent and more extensive: it has been pointed out that given the acceleration in velocity and reach of global industrial civilization, we could only expect more pandemics coming down the pipe at greater frequencies and greater levels of destruction. 

This is just one of the many fault lines, on a multidimensional axis, that we're simply choosing to ignore, like some sleazy developer building out a sprawling grid of single family housing over a known quake zone, or a flood plane, or deeper and deeper into the woods, or what have you, with full knowledge of what it means, and deliberately setting that knowledge aside and tucking it away, while pocketing the cash and leaving the area in good time. 

I use this image deliberately because as I write this, much of the limited funding going to studying Long Covid - and let's be clear, a lion's share of this funding is for observation, with very little going towards therapeutic solutions, of which there are currently zero in accepted practice - is scheduled to dry up, nearly simultaneously with the abandonment of testing and tracking and environmental mitigation like ventilation and masking. 

I mean, having Long Covid in a society that has abandoned even mitigation...in microcosm it is kind of comparable to someone with asthma living with a smoker, in a house with poor ventilation and nowhere really to go. Wave after wave of infection, triggering the affliction all over again and setting back the healing process and doing ever more damage...I can say with personal experience, living with Long Covid is many things, but one of the most insidious on a social level is the sheer alienation to the experience of others involved. 

I watched Parkinson's advance in my step mom - the complications eventually killed her - and one thing you see happen over time is the subjective wall that goes up between that person's experiences and the rest of the people around them. You can sympathize and be present with them, but nothing will really penetrate into that person's experience. The more she started shaking, the more her speech started to slur, the more trouble she had supporting her own weight and chewing her own food, the more she simply wanted to be alone, and away from the observation of others. 

We're talking about enormous amounts of slow, distorted, hidden, grinding human suffering that will happen between countless closed doors over longer periods of time, which will be heaped upon many other converging political, economic and environmental dislocations and traumas in the coming decades. There will be consequences, and that is putting it lightly. 

To dramatize and compress and simplify what will take place over decades, with some irreverence to balance the spicing: you've been following the steadily growing trail of destruction, trying to make the shape of the problem out, until the thing itself rises up from the depths and breaks the surface, showing its face, and then you get that Jaws "we're going to need a bigger boat" moment, much too late of course, when the only recourse you have is shooting a gun at some oxygen cannister - or whatever the hell that thing was - in the hopes of simply blowing everything up. 

The Changing Nature of Violence Pt. 3

Damn I kind of dropped the ball on this one. But let's finally wrap this one up and see if anything interesting shakes out as a result. This'll be another long one. More to come after this post. 

To briefly recap the previous parts of the series, we talked about the problem of violence over the past couple of thousand of years and the accumulations of power and wealth that have occurred over time to deal with that problem, which have slowly built up historically as a kind of strata and steadily changed the structural circumstances that in turn shape the trajectories of the cyclical rising and falling of empires that continues today. 

The ruling style of the Assyrian empire I think serves as a near crystalline example of an older, more direct solution to tamping down on widespread violence, when direct violence was a regular social mechanism across many different societies interacting with each other. Terror and overwhelming force were used to extinguish any potential for violence in rivals. The only problem with this was that it instilled intense resentment and bad memory in those tamped down, and as soon as the pressure eased, the downtrodden were ready to roar back to the top. 

What seemed to have happened over thousands of years was that the problem was solved - or at least the nature of the problem shifted - more or less accidentally through the gradual proliferation of wealthier and wealthier societies and persistently shifting cultural norms and political ideologies, evolving over a backdrop of centuries upon centuries of accumulating and enduring human wealth, knowledge and technology. 

See, to put it really crudely, the threat of going soft from accumulating too much power and wealth and enjoying too high a quality of life for too long becomes less of a threat if the same thing is happening to everyone else. 

There are a whole lot of other things happening in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern era that we have to gloss over at the moment, and we've covered some of them in the past. There are a whole lot of twisting and turning stories in there to address and to readdress in time, and as always the closer you look the stranger and bewildering things get to looking. 

But at a bird's eye view there were a couple of converging pressures that were contributing to this change in the nature of the violence problem. Just look at the dramatic change in personality of the Abrahamic god going from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and then the change from those accompanying principles to the Enlightenment principles and on into the Modern era. 

Though on an individual basis there was more than enough hypocrisy to go around, you did have a rapid and explosive proliferation of a religious ideology that stressed love and forgiveness and nonviolence, often at the tip of a sword, but the message was there nonetheless. And Napoleon did the same with the Enlightenment principles as well. 

The messages - however cynically they were employed and manipulated - do matter: people begin to internalize guiding principles that they are checking against their lived reality. And on top of that, the messages themselves reflect real changing material and cultural realities in the societies promulgating them. 

Further, the imperial European powers were spreading wealth and rapid technological advancement all over the globe during the colonial era, the lions share of which was hostile to and exploitative of conquered populations, but which was nonetheless wealth. Eventually, the modern world exploded into existence, propelled in part by the Industrial Revolution, and the rest is history, to indulge a cliche. 

But first, is all of this to say that it was the rapid imperial expansion of the Western world that indirectly brought about the proliferation of wealth and thus changing conditions that allowed for the suppression of direct violence on some absolute level? No and emphatically no. European imperialism steamrolled countless societies whether peaceful or violent or somewhere in between, and there are numerous forms and conceptions of wealth to take into account besides. 

What we are describing here are the internal conditions of an evolving civilizational body that has transformed and spread across the globe over thousands of years, which through its imperial nature forces an average mode of conduct upon the many varied societies taken up within it over the course of its evolution. What we are concerned with in the course of this discussion is the evolving nature of bounded civilization as it exists across the globe, not with any sort of possible way of life that a given society could offer in its own provincial domain. 

Further, this narrative occurs from a Western perspective, and omits the evolution of societies across the rest of the world which have their own trajectories as they enter into the generalizing and globalizing project of human civilization. 

But let's at last deal with the modern problem of violence and what it might mean for the future, as we've now arrived at the contemporary, modern world in the narrative. Much of the violence we see in the modern industrial world is more indirect and economic in nature. We see less widespread kinetic violence and a more distributed, slower, quieter economic violence, which does eventually lead to louder and more spectacular violence over time as the damage is done. Needless to say, we need to unpack this. 

There was this observation from a prison therapist that always stuck in my mind: that at the root of most violent acts he observed in his clients was a perceived lack of respect. This to me rings true: if you watch any kind of schoolyard fight break out, it starts with disrespectful comments and sneers and snickers, which leads increasingly to grave and menacing facial expressions, which leads to shoving or chest bumping or spitting, and then eventually the fists start flying. One goes from feeling the need to express one's worth and dignity to others publicly to simply trying to hurt the other person, and make sure one is still standing while the other is on the ground. 

Increasingly in the modern world, impulses like these are immediately seized upon by the authorities and marked off for quarantine. This stuff is is very quickly and vigorously socialized away in children: "use your words not your fists" and "violence is never the answer" and so on. You see this in very immediate and decisive personal disciplinary actions, as well as in the transmission of more abstract cultural mores in the course of education. 

The state monopolization of violence is carefully doled out through professionalization and credentialization, replete with trainings and rules of engagement and legal maneuvering and so on. We see that further out in the borderlands, or inwards in the impoverished sacrifice zones within the core, the stewards of violent action are given a lot more leeway and lenience, but by and large the administration of violence is carefully controlled in a modern society. 

There are many and complex reasons for this. For one thing, a blood feud is much more destructive when you move away from arrows and spears and towards firearms. The sheer explosiveness of the contemporary utilization of energy and the advanced suites of technology that come with it requires elaborate and vigorous taboos on its movements and flows. 

Just as interestingly though, direct violence seems to be something that culturally you are to climb up out of, like getting up and out of the dirt. Just as you employ labor power and resources to lay down stone to get out of the dirt and move up the class ladder, you engage in education and the cultivation of trades, commerce, politics, the arts, and so on to build up platforms of public respectability in pursuing higher respect, regard, and ultimately social power. 

These games of social prestige often turn out to be sublimated forms of violence, but in a complex, interconnected, and energy intensive society moving at extremely high velocities, it is certainly preferable to the more physical and kinetic methods.

In the average citizens of developed countries you see a very basic aversion to direct violence. People in the streets turn away from it where it threatens to express itself, just as one walks over the homeless person on the ground, hoping that it will go away if they aren't antagonizing it and that they will be spared. Just as there is a turning away from the dirty and sweating laborer, beastly and atavistic somehow. 

And when you do have spontaneous outbursts of physical violence, such as with a mass shooting, what you most often see is a widespread sense of shock in those forced to participate in it, unable to escape its clutches. These events are experienced as surreal and otherworldly, like the disembodied unfolding of a movie, perceivable but disconnected from one's own direct life. 

People do remain connected to - and titillated by - the older and so-called "baser" people relations. It shows up in entertainment in particular, but also in the division of labor in general. You see that traditionally a lot of prizefighters are drawn from lower class neighborhoods and hustling immigrants for example, and professional soldiers from rural communities and troubled urban districts, and they are often awarded a prestige of their own for their efforts. 

You even saw this sort of thing as far back as ancient Rome: the gladiators for example were drawn from slaves and lower class criminals and prisoners of war. It was a harsh and violent living, but as they existed in a constant struggle for glory given the Roman aesthetic, they were afforded their own niche of bequeathed public regard and often sexualized for their physicality and daily feats of bravery. There was a constant anxiety about aristocratic women being attracted to them, which was quite a dangerous proposition for those garnering too much attention. 

Yes, Roman society was predominantly a military one, but in more stable and affluent times more of the aristocracy was insulated from the dangers of military conquest and were often seeking out prestige through political intrigue in the capital for instance, while remaining titillated by those still adhering to the old aesthetic of glorified violent conquest. It was when the society broke down through invasion and civil war that you saw aristocrats don their armor and weapons again, and you saw the warrior emperors re-emerge. 

That's sort of the rub of the modern world too: these carefully constructed platforms of social peace and physical security and the realm of the rule of law and civil rights form quite the fragile safety net when tested. The forces of violence are never quite far from the surface, and readily come roaring back under extreme collective strain and duress. 

Given the energy intensiveness and the rolling instabilities of modern capital, our social engines of production are perpetually destroying the environments they are ensconced in, and perpetually alienating and antagonizing the human labor they run on. The energy-intensive game of sublimating violent domination into the realms of political, cultural, and economic regard can very quickly break down when it runs up against limits, such as with environmental degradation, pollution, failing states and streams of refugees as imperial systems break down, financial depressions and internal strife, and so on. 

And when it does run up against its limits, all of that concentrated energy moving at high velocity can break away sharply and explosively. We saw this expressed spectacularly in the World Wars, when multiple empires vying for power and prestige collided into each other as the imperial system broke down, and multiple fires broke out simultaneously within societies pushing the health of their populations to their breaking points.  

Those layers upon layers of technological advancement and material power - pursued by multiple competing powers for the sake of security and prosperity - were the real danger in the final analysis: the vast oceans of firearm and endless walls of machinegun, the mountains of artillery shell and the industrial complexes to back them and produce them, and the exploding populations to set them into motion, which created the conditions for a maelstrom of industrialized violence that turned vast regions into moonscapes and which mutually brought the various combatants to their knees. 

This was the meatgrinder that put the old fear back into the hearts of the commanders witnessing them, which led to the mass terror bombing of civilians in WWII, universally utilized by the fighting powers in hopes of cauterizing the wounds and staving off the grinders, forcing their opponents hands before their societies were once again turned inside out by the breakneck industrial pace of the wartime arms race, culminating in the dropping of The Bomb. That old Assyrian tactic of instrumentalized terror had returned to once again rear its ugly head. 

Those old taboos were never as far behind us as we thought. From the atrocities of the Eastern Front, to the boobytrapped jungles of Vietnam and the IED strewn sands of Iraq, the cascade of retributive atrocity and war crimes crop up as a reliable human behavior where the conflicts get too hot, moving increasingly from the abandoned and impoverished peripheries closer and closer to the cores. 

And where "civil society" breaks back down into violent conquest, the heat and velocity not only produce much destruction, but also intense individual and collective traumas and bad karmic zones that can echo for generations like nuclear fallout. We're seeing this play out in the Ukraine now, and we'll see it continue to advance as the years wear on. 

In a way, that strange saga of the Prigozhin mutiny was a striking emblem of this modern brand of fragility. Superficially, it is easy enough to scratch one's head at the spectacle: why would someone stage a mutiny like that without a greater base of support in a place like Russia under a ruler like Putin? What did he think was going to happen? 

But looking at the man himself, the saga makes perfect sense. This was a man forged in the criminal underworld and in prison, and whose unique talents became quite useful to the Russian state in the form of contained military power, projecting surplus populations and violence outward to conflict hotspots of interest to the state and society. 

All of that energy and desperation of the Ukraine war, which was to be contained on a delimited battlefield, began to leak out. Just imagining the pressure that someone like this had undergone in the field: the waves of traded artillery, the claustrophobic urban warfare, the maddening slog through minefields, all of which was to be contained where the wars were happening, and not tracked back into civilized society like so much mud. 

All of that pressure made him pop when it started to become apparent that the Wagner Group - and his power - was going to be taken from him.  The simplest explanation for his doomed march to Moscow. He popped, and the rest of the state held, and a fragile state of peace was maintained throughout the failed mutiny in observance of international law, and his forces stood down and he walked. Until his plane went down anyway amidst clouds of plausible deniability. That sort of open force was best contained in the battlefield. For now.