Homegrown

There are certain qualities you can expect from a genuine homegrown product, qualities which could be desirable or undesirable depending on what you are looking for. Homegrown products are often unique and have a character of their own, attributable to their localized origin: without the standardization and systematization you would typically have in a commercial operation, the quality of the product is more dependent on the quality and the standards and local circumstances of the craftsperson putting that product out. This is not to say that a craftsperson or household does not have certain repeatable standards or systems, but they just aren't going to be as developed or set-fast as a commercial operation, in most cases. 

An example might clarify this. Every year I like to brew some seasonal herbal beers. One of those beers is a nettle beer, brewed from stinging nettles gathered in the immediate vicinity. The quality of the brew depends on where the season is, an increasingly tricky prospect given the increasing volatility of the seasons. You gather in the spring when the nettle are young and fresh, but have had some time to grow and get established, and then you can gather on into early summer, which is when the mature nettle get leggy and start flowering, which changes the quality of the brew. 

The microclimates where the nettle like to grow are constantly changing as the forest undergoes constant change, amidst a backdrop of climate change no less. Old and damaged trees go down in the winter, changing the light conditions on the forest floor in the spring. And the streams occasionally change course, drying up in one place and growing ever more vigorous in others, altering the water content of the surrounding landscape, and so the plants themselves are constantly changing in terms of where they are thriving and what they actually look like, in the course of their seasonal, cyclical development. 

I have the requisite equipment and a good recipe, and a proper routine to get consistently good brews, but I don't have a commercial kitchen and commercial equipment and climate controls and all the rest. I don't have the time or the resources to monitor every variable and fine-tune and control the process from start to finish. 

The shop is subject to fluctuating temperatures and conditions throughout the seasons, so fermentation happens at different rates. The plants change. The color of the brew changes, but all in all the product stays consistently good, which is the objective. Consistently good in the sense of being consistently enjoyable and desirable, even if its specific attributes change from batch to batch. 

Further you can't typically find a beer like this to buy anywhere. It tastes good, and it feels good. Nettle is medicinal and its effects accumulate with regular consumption. You develop a relationship with the plant that is hard to describe here. 

But sometimes you just want to go out and buy a cold six pack. You know what you are getting, the quality is consistent, and the product is dependable. You know where to find it when you want it. There is a familiarity and a continuity to having constant access to it. That too is nice, and that is one of the advantages of commercial. 

Getting that consistency and quality is really hard: those quality products that have withstood the market competition and established a standard often have histories of a lot of hard work and experimentation. They can also have histories of predatory behavior, or otherwise as loci of wealth accumulation after having made it, they can become targets of predatory interest and their institutions change in the direction of that interest, but that is another topic. 

With the larger commercial endeavors you have a relentless fixation on all of the variable sets that contribute to quality and consistency, and whatever can be controlled is invested in and capitalized to cement that control: say with the quality of raw materials, of the labor and processes that go into fashioning product out of those materials, of the infrastructure and environments and conditions where that fashioning takes place, and so on. And then you get that coveted quality and consistency which encourages a loyal consumer base and the ensuing market continuity. 

Which is not to say you couldn't achieve this sort of thing with a robust enough household system. Indeed we've been doing it that way for a very long time, with the modern iteration of commerce being relatively recent and anomalous. But the modern commercial system is dominant and widespread, and so we look to that system and its products for sizing up quality standards and the like. But from an entire system flows larger consequences that go beyond the simple advantages and disadvantages of that system's products. 

All of this is a really long way to set up another angle to describe my project here. In a way, this writing is homegrown. I don't have an established brand or consumer expectation, or even a set of institutional pressures to reproduce a certain product. There is a certain consistent commitment to quality, and a coherent set of interests and methodologies you'll find here, but as you can see, the quality and focus of the writing can fluctuate depending on living conditions which can be quite volatile. There are advantages and disadvantages to this, as there are with everything else. 

Further, the dichotomy between homegrown and commercial set up here is only being explored for explanatory purposes; the reality is that there is a huge variability of operations and products along this spectrum. My own project my change in nature over time. But one thing I can say is that I've tried to avoid the commercial realm for various reasons, and for better or for worse, and that activity has consequences of its own, which I continue to explore in these writings. 

You Can't Take It With You

As we've previously explored, the chainsaw is an incredible tool. You can go out into the woods with a chainsaw and fall giants in minutes, and then carve them up into fuel and infrastructure over the course of a couple of days. An enormous amount of muscle energy is converted into that little handheld engine you can carry around with you. 

But hidden within that amazing device is a social relation. Encapsulated within that engine and the studded chain it powers, as well as the fuel that feeds it, are the relations of the city. The chemicals and plastics industries, metallurgical operations, fabrication, and generations of research and development are among the many complexes of human beings working in concert that make the body of the saw alone possible. 

Implied in all of those complexes are extractive industries to secure the raw materials, oil extraction and refinery chains to fuel and lubricate everything, tool-making factories to produce the tools to work the fabrication and the extraction and infrastructure itself, transport industry to bind it all together, educational and scientific institutions to develop it all and guide it all, and so on, all of which requires a density of many human beings living and working together, in the city, human beings whose specialized labor in concert is freed up by the additional supporting branches of agriculture and construction and utilities and etc. 

The earth feeds the growing mass of organized human activity, in which the city and its infrastructure and institutions emerge, spreading across the earth, producing tools like the chainsaw within that process, powerful tools which make their way back into the countryside to transform the very cradles they sprang from. 

Back out in the woods, a seed of doubt is planted in your mind. You are sawing away at huge chunks of wood, feeling like a boss, and you run out of gas. The chainsaw at that point is completely bricked; good for some weight training at the most, as you carry the weight of its lifeless body back out of the woods. A chainsaw is not designed for manual sawing: even if you locked the chain and tried to run it back and forth across the wood like a handsaw, you would not get very far. 

The power of the chainsaw is dependent on the whole smooth functioning of the entire mechanism: all of its constituent parts must be maintained and work together, which with limited mechanical skills one can do, though those thornier problems might require the trained eye and resources of a professional mechanic. A lot of fixes require the replacement of a specific instantiated part, stamped out new from the factory. Or the saw may be a lost cause and require full replacement, destined for the pedestal of some logging museum in the best case scenario.

Steady access to gasoline, 2 stroke engine oil, and bar oil is another must. Without gas and oil the saw does not run. You watch a combination of your income and the state of industry and the supply chains with consternation. The daily reproduction of the chainsaw is linked to the daily reproduction of the city and the vast supply chains that make it all possible, all of which is linked to the global condition of capital which reproduces the city and the supply chains, in its own interest we should add as the dominant power. So a large part of your livelihood is negotiated among interests far outside of your daily life, interests which are increasingly getting wobbly and unstable from the looks of it. No wonder us moderns are getting a little more anxious and twitchy. 

Do you get the feeling you have your hand stuck in the cookie jar? When to let go? But it is always much more complicated than that. Even particular tools are embedded within the social systems they are part of. 

The saw mill is tooled to produce lumber with its straight lines and corners, which put together in construction, must be measured with measuring tools and cut and then joined together with hardware like nails and screws, and so on. To fall back on a traditional mode of lumber production, say hewing logs with an axe, implies completely different sets of tools and requires different sets of skills to be developed. It takes time and energy, and draws off a different base of knowledge and experience and tradition.

Further, everything connected together moves together: introducing labor-saving and time-saving tools speeds up the whole of production and the relationality of that production to daily human reproduction. If you enter the construction yard with an axe and a handsaw, you might get laughed back to the tool shed depending on the management and the urgency of the project. And then construction projects themselves are embedded in the dynamics and the interests of the societies they are part of.

If you are suspicious of the stability of the chainsaw in particular and the combustion engine in general, you have to move away from an entire suite of technologies, which can imply an entire way of living in turn. Slowing down means using less resources, and placing an economic drag on the communities around you by moving away from them, though at the same time you are introducing a resilience and redundancy to those communities too, which we'll have to get into at another time.  

To get some of these points across, I've had to gloss over a number of things, though a lot of this I've been writing about for a while and will continue to write about and explore in time. Some of this is elaborated on slantwise in a companion piece getting posted in addition to this. We'll continue to explore these themes in time. 

Construction Waste

So after a series of posts on empire and warfare, this one seems to be coming out of the blue. It all eventually connects, as everything tends to do, though that can mean quite a long story. This was just one of the fleeting thoughts I had as this remodel wraps up and I get back on the road. 

Many of us carry the statistics in our head of how much construction waste contributes to the landfills. More personal and spiritual experiences with the waste however remain restricted to those directly handling it. Still more restricted is the number of those really absorbing what it all means. 

This is because commercial construction is hard. There is a lot of money involved, and a lot of scrutiny on those working, and those working have to work hard and steadily while attempting to make as few mistakes as possible. The crews are often self-policed by those contractors anxious to continue winning bids and projects in a highly competitive environment, at least depending on the part of the industry you're working in. 

You want to waste as little as possible of course - your job often depends on it - but really everyone has to work hard and fast to get the thing done, and you just don't want to think about it. The stuff you're demo-ing and tearing down? That's headed for the dumpster, preferably something that is mechanized that will be carted off as soon as its full so you don't have to worry about it anymore. 

Many of these materials are heavy and make a mess. Sorting them and recycling them is a nightmare, especially if the project is on a tight timeframe and there is a huge quantity of new material coming in. And there is always a portion of the new material that is wasted too, as it can be difficult to estimate just how much is required to finish the job: too much and it gets wasted, at least what is cut and worked on. Some of it can be taken back. And then too little of it and the job gets put on hold and someone has to go get more. 

And then there are the concrete caked buckets, the dirty rags, the piles of heterogenous debris, the partial cans of sticky paint, the soiled plastics such as gloves and packaging and temporary tools and guides, and so on. All of that stuff gets tossed, and as quickly as possible. And then it goes to the landfill, hopefully also as quickly as possible, so the dumpster is freed up for the next huge load. 

There is a lot of material constantly moving, a lot of weight, which is hard work to move and a lot of it is stuff you no longer want to touch or be in contact with. Space is limited, transport and disposal is expensive, and its gotta go. 

Through this process, a particular spiritual cadence starts to pick up. All of this waste is difficult to handle and manage, and it is much easier if it is all just transported away and done away with. With a vague sense of guilt, but then much more relief, you just want to part with it and be done with it, and not see it again or deal with it any longer. There is a sort of revulsion, and sometimes fear, of those hazardous materials that you're supposed to handle with gloves, or with a face mask, or both, and those are to be thrown out as soon as you're done with them and as soon as possible. 

What might start to become apparent is the unidirectional flow of these materials, which have a spiritual origin of their own. A lot of this stuff is incredible stuff in many ways, the product of generations and even centuries and millennia of research and human ingenuity and invention. But a lot of it functions as a way to make things decisively dead and no longer moving around. I want to get more into this "dead things" question, which I won't do here, but intend to soon enough. 

These materials are a way to freeze the earth into a shape pleasing to one's provincial comfort, and to get up out of the dirt and further and further from the ground, whether up higher or further inside and sealed off, and to turn away from the outside. And then after these materials have served their purposes, they are to be cast away, far away, and buried or incinerated or digested, out of sight and out of mind. Underneath the glossy and sleek surfaces of this higher form of production and habitation is a basic life denial. That's something we'll have to elaborate on later. 

Locked Horns

Every great power has its share of decisive victories which led to its dominant position, and so subsequently goes on to pine for additional short, sharp victories in the future, eventually hubristically lodging itself into a protracted conflict it can't win, or which seriously damages it in some way. This is a tendency that is probably as old as warfare, as one can imagine. The United States has shared this very fixation since the Civil War. 

The Germans called their preferred short wars "Cabinet Wars," and then in a fatal miscalculation, were undone in what they referred to with dread as a "People's War," when they were caught in the World Wars, as Big Serge brilliantly detailed in a post. That dreadful People's War more resembles a wildfire that is touched off by a campfire getting out of hand, in which an entire country is moved to wrath over what should be a localized and contained conflict, bringing into question just what conditions are required for such a terrifying turn of events. 

A war can bog down in many different ways, and each "quagmire" war bogs down in its own way. Similarly, that archetypal quagmire of trench warfare can emerge for a number of different reasons. Its emergence in WWI for example is often attributed to a mismatch between a revolutionary leap in firepower and a corresponding lag in progress for mobility in general. Though of course there was a complex interplay of additional factors, such as Germany's desperate geopolitical situation, the emergence of "democratic" armies in the Napoleonic era, miscalculations of leadership in the fog of war, and so on. 

Leaps in mobile armor technologies, like the tank, and advances in aircraft capabilities helped to break large armies out of the trench rut in WWII, though trenches reappear for various reasons in various theaters after that, most notably today in the Russia-Ukraine War. 

Most immediately, in a bogged down conflict such as this, one of the most important winning factors is sheer economic power, or more specifically, manufacturing power. As Ben Aris put it in a fascinating War Nerd Radio podcast on the economic side of the Russia-Ukraine War, trench warfare tends to progress towards a material attritional conflict: both sides in trenches, unable to clearly see each other and get at each other, have to simply launch more and more quantities of artillery shells over to the other side, with the aim of sustaining more and more casualties on that other side. He continues on: with 1 - 5% casualty rates in the trenches, the combatants can fight on, but as the rate climbs up to 30%, morale starts to break down. Under this calculus, fighting power translates to manufacturing power: the production of artillery shells. And it has become clear that Russia's war economy has been rapidly ramping up, while the West's - which backs Ukraine whose industry is in ruins - industry is sputtering out, laden with sclerotic plutocratic operations. 

Such a conflict more resembles two stags or bulls locking horns in order to continue fighting without necessarily goring each other. But then, as history has shown us, these bogs grow deeper. They pull in more resources as each side engages in deeper commitments to sunken costs, and soon enough the entire landscape - which had been growing ever more parched and desiccated and sullen - is lit aflame. And then the goring happens anyway. Indeed, we're seeing that now in a more distributed manner, in the growing conflicts springing up across the globe, and the economic tensing and winding up and attached and growing geopolitical tensions. 

Don't Be a Dick

From whence comes the United States' love of blowback? You kill off and snuff out all of the commies and destroy all of the secular organizational capacity that gives off even a hint of social welfare, and then juice up all of the religious reactionaries and proto-fascists and wind 'em up and shove 'em off, and then wail on and on when those reactionary forces slip their leashes and run away from your control. And then having made the whole of the world an enemy, there comes the pitiful lamentations that there is no one left sympathetic enough to pick you up, dust you off, and retrieve your fallen ice cream cone after you finally get your well-deserved ass-kicking. 

Reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove's Major Kong riding the nuclear bomb, the second half of the last century, and a near quarter of this one - and we could easily go further than that - saw the United States gleefully causing chaos and destruction in everything it touched, riding that destruction and thriving in that chaos as it coasted from crisis to crisis, causing bigger crises and deeper entangled quagmires as it went. And the Empire has run out of foamed runway to land on. 

So why do it? When you have so much power, why act like a goddanged prick all the time? Just ask the Athenians. Eventually that game comes to an end. 

But also, why ask silly questions? Being a prick is how you get the power of course. But more seriously, when you're the hegemon, it is implied that what you are doing plays some part in your global dominance, so the only thing left to do is sabotage and scuttle all the many alternatives sprouting up that can pose any kind of challenge to that dominance. There is nothing left to offer, other than staying on top, so you just sort of subvert and destroy everyone else's programs, and then try to maintain that position in that perpetually turbulent environment and hope for the best. For you, anyway. Further, with nothing left to constrain your power, boredom and nihilism have a tendency to settle in, so why not go to excess and absurdity for the fun of it, and see how far it can go?   

Fold into that explanation the reality of the US' source of great power: the nature of capital, a force whose only real guiding motivation is growth and profit. This is a nature that can be apprehended in both the domestic and foreign spheres: witness the perpetual blowing and popping bubbles that make up the US Economy. This landscape can be described in a variety of ways in a variety of angles, but a quick illustration can leave us with the image of the rapacious automobile, firearm, chemical, and agricultural industries (to name a few) perpetually growing and speeding up, harming wider circles of the population, with the US health care and pharmaceutical industries waiting in the wings to mop up, mitigating the damage in one direction while causing ever more damage in another direction, backed by predatory insurance and finance.

And this explosive growth must expand outwards, seeking ever more markets, oftentimes in the form of disintegrating societies where arms, contractors, and drugs flow in. The essence of this dynamic can be found in the fawning reverence for the measure of GDP and its constant growth, which not only measures the growth of manufactures and energy utilization, but also "services" such as predatory finance and rent-seeking. 

Blowing bubbles with a basis in warfare is just fine as long as you are doing the ass-kicking. There is a sort of Goldilocks zone that capital thrives in, in which there is just enough fear and desire piqued to promote continuous growth in products and services - whether the productive or destructive kind - without going over the cliff into a state change of war and revolution. Unfortunately it is precisely this sort of Goldilocks zone that progresses in just that direction. 

   

Crossroads

The thousands of years that Afghanistan has existed as a "crossroads of empire" - with the corollary of "graveyard of empires" that that position implies - tells us as much about the surrounding histories and geographies as it does about the history and geography internal to the region itself. However transformed in the modern age, we can still make out a Persia to the West, an India to the South, and a China to the East, just as we can make out an irascible and unconquerable Afghanistan itself, all with their own historical characters persisting through time.  

There is something not only in the geography and corresponding culture, but also a historical accumulation in which the great empires, through their cyclical rising and falling, fall back upon themselves and break upon their respective high watermarks, only to rise again upon the deep tracks of development they carved into the world system. 

This is something you can also see internal to a given empire: a great city may have been founded in some strategic geographic location, all of the way back in the ancient world, which persisted through various razings and sackings and natural disasters, continuously rebuilt and restored, through a combination of persisting infrastructure and human activity in the region, and that age-old instinct for continuity and reverence for symbol. Old cities like London and Constantinople (now Istanbul) come to mind. 

The concentrated energy of the hegemon may slosh to and fro across the inhospitable surfaces of the crossroads, but the given hegemon du jour leaves its own marks upon the accumulated graveyard today. At least until the greater climatic paradigm changes and wipes the board clean once again. 

Ethnicity

If anything, conceptions of ethnicity have gotten even more abstract as categories have advanced to "national origin," and the rapid and wide movement of peoples across the globe has encouraged rapid and widespread intermixing. Though even earlier iterations have proved to be just as murky. Yes, people from certain broad geographic regions have developed certain distinguishing physical features and cultural traditions, which were more concentrated in the premodern era when people didn't move quite as far as quickly or intermingle quite as much. 

But even in the ancient and Medieval worlds people could move around quite a ways: the Vikings showed up anywhere from Byzantium to Iran and Arabia and to North America for example. And oftentimes a certain ethnic group may have acquired a reputation as being based out of a certain geographic area, but through their increasing prominence and expansion, their ethnic designation would become more determined by a way of life or an ethic or mode of labor. Their ethnicity would morph into a more abstract way of being. The Germanic tribes, like the various Goths for example, would take in runaway slaves and political dissidents, and those peoples would intermarry and effectively become Goths. 

Ethnicity was always a shifty designation. Though that doesn't stop us from still seizing upon visible and immediately apparent grouping differences and then dividing and manipulating those groups in order to control the flow and maintenance of wealth and power, a la the construction of race, which has proven to be perpetually useful for the ruling elite. 

Jackpot

They talk about the Western Roman Empire "going out with a whimper," or "delegating itself to death," or whatever other useful phrase is at hand to describe its anticlimactic end. Which is true in a very provincial and strict sense, where you see the gradual delegating out of the central authority's functions to Germanic chieftains, who gradually assumed control of their respective domains, and then you have the symbolic final act of the strikingly-named Romulus Augustulus being deposed by Odoacer. But then if you look at the processes that led to that point, and then the processes that carried on after that point, you see something altogether different: at the very least, you can make out a little more than a whimper. 

The entire arc from the beginnings of Rome to the rise of the modern world is an incredible thing to behold as a continuous object, but what I had in mind at the moment is the thousand years or so after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The entirety of that period itself is impossible to get into here, so I wanted to briefly sketch out the Viking Age within that period to give a general impression of what I'm getting at here. 

To hook this analysis up with the previous illustration of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, we'll start with the Germanic efforts to reanimate the Western empire after its fall. It was the Franks that really started to pull away from the other tribes, allying with the church and centralizing power in Western Europe. Through the Merovingian and then the Carolingian dynasties, culminating with the peerless reign of Charlemagne, the Franks were able to temporarily re-establish a continuous empire in the early Middle Ages, which subsequently flamed out with the death of Charlemagne, plunging the region once again into chaos. 

But it was also Charlemagne that helped to cultivate the conditions for that chaos, relentlessly and aggressively Christianizing the remaining Pagan tribes, such as with his genocidal campaigns against the Saxons, in a bid to weld the "warring states" into a new empire. Also in conflict with the Saxons were the Vikings - thought to be originally from Scandinavia, though their exact origins remain murky - who would nevertheless witness the violence meted out to their rivals, the Saxons, by the Franks in a war of annihilation, which would have a profound effect on the Vikings' own geopolitical outlook. 

Frequently enough, Christian depictions of the Vikings - depictions which are still revived today, but which have also undergone extensive revision and reimagination - unsurprisingly painted them as a fearsome scourge, descending upon the settled societies to raze their settlements and sow chaos. Perhaps there was some truth to this, as the Viking Age saw the Viking economy as chiefly a raider society, in which armed bands moving about on longships in between planting seasons would raid societies throughout Northern and Western Europe. But then there were historical accounts in which the Vikings themselves would present as under siege and in danger of extinction. 

The reasons for the Vikings' increasingly explosive and expansive conquests are complex and speculative. Climate change and the collapse in old trade routes after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire are good reasons advanced, as well as the demand for women in the competitive Viking culture. Finally, the aforementioned Christian war of annihilation against the pagan peoples - and the progressive Christian incursion into Scandinavia - was said to have intensified the Viking instincts of self-preservation, and eventually they would descend, exploiting the increasingly fragmenting Western European region after the disintegration of Charlemagne's kingdom. The subsequent raids, growing larger as resources accumulated in the form of booty, would be met with ever fiercer resistance, and eventually the Vikings would turn to colonization and then consolidation into larger, more hierarchical kingdoms of their own. 

Allow me a quick digression. There has been a lot of talk going around about William Gibson's Jackpot concept, which is kind of a funny concept all in all. Because in colloquial speak, the idea of a "jackpot" still exists today as a really lucky break, a much less likely event in which you basically "win it all." And then Gibson inverts that idea into a singular event that takes place in which you basically lose it all. To Gibson's credit though, his Jackpot concept is also realistic, it being a long, continuous, multifaceted, and drawn out process. 

And if you take a look at the gambling concept of the jackpot and then at Gibson's apocalyptic inversion, there is actually an ingenious unifying thread between the two that is quite illuminating. In the gambling concept, you have a set of poker players advancing their money to a common pool, the "pot," and to simplify the rules a bit, the winner had to have three of a kind, jacks or better, who would then take away the pot. If no player could match this standard, everyone would go onto the next turn and the pot would be raised. Statistically someone would eventually win, and the win would get bigger and bigger the longer the game went on. That big win took on the name "jackpot," which is a form that shows itself in contemporary gambling constructs like online gaming and lottery systems.  

So for Gibson's Jackpot, we turn this concept inside out, while retaining that same statistical thread. You have multiple cascading crises growing in the world system, on multiple environmental, political, economic, and cultural levels. As long as the system continues on its cyclical turnover, it retains its particular form and function, staving off disaster, while the existing crises spread further and deepen, until disaster finally arrives by statistical inevitability, and cascades through the system, tearing it apart.  

In relating to the Viking era however, I'd like to give the Jackpot concept a slight twist. Thinking of the turbulence ensuing during that era, the concept popped into my head in light of a pinball variation: that unlikely event in which the pinball hits the first bumper at just the right angle at just the right speed, and then goes bouncing all throughout the course, lighting up every bumper in a cascade, resulting in a "jackpot" of light and sound and accumulated points. 

All of that mass of desperate humanity, flowing to where it could and then crashing into itself where it couldn't, doing violence to itself as it moved throughout Western and Northern Europe, splintering off and seeking out security and safety and wealth and freedom, or else putting down roots and firming up stances to sprout new kingdoms in seeking out stability. 

After a while, conditions were right for the violence to continuously circulate and get more and more spectacular. The chaos and destruction ensuing from these masses of peoples colliding into each other would set more and more people and resources free, and accelerate those tendencies of warmaking and conquest, setting into motion greater waves of warring humanity, causing more destruction and chaos to set more people and resources free, and so on. 

You could see why the great Christian nations would become so vicious and totalitarian, as much in constant war against themselves as with themselves and with rival powers, baldly contradicting their theologies of peace and love, as embodied in the symbolism of the blunt weapon of the mace, wielded by the warrior priest so as not to spill blood. A symbolism which although is historically dubious, is quite direct and poetic in its messaging. 

And eventually those Christian nations would centralize and concentrate power and tamp down on the warring warlords, exporting their explosive and expansive violence outward to subdue the rest of the earth. 

The lesson here? No matter how hateful the dam, beware when it breaks. But then to instantiate a meta-lesson from that, perhaps it is the particular building of the particular dam that is the problem in the first place? And then there are often manifold reasons, many of them arising out of desperation, for building the various dams in the way they are built. Ah, there is no lesson here. 

Continuity

Reminiscent of the muscle contraction caused by electrical stimulation and the ensuing tightening of one's grip around exposed wire, we tend to fixate on life-giving and life-sustaining systems and processes, which can range anywhere from habits and preferences, to traditions, commitments, institutions, and even empires. 

One's consciousness can really seize upon a given commitment and continuously pursue it through all kinds of minor disruptions, reorganizing one's life and resources to maintain that commitment, so long as the disruptions aren't traumatic enough. For example, families getting together for the holidays every year amidst interpersonal conflict and intergenerational trauma, money troubles, cars breaking down, personal injuries and illnesses, and so on. 

Not only are many of these fixations beneficial for those interested in the stability and continuity they can confer, they're often incredibly compelling, even when - and perhaps sometimes because - they are actively harmful and destructive to those left out of their sphere of protection.

"Life-giving and life-sustaining for whom?" is one of the questions that can threaten a given fixation. It is oftentimes the really large disruptive events that change what people think is possible, events which are substantial enough to dislodge people from their daily living patterns and commitments. For example, one of the less tangible - but no less consequential - things that the Covid pandemic did - and continues to do - was soften up the constitution of the body politic, and change what people thought was possible or usual. 

It took the presence of a dangerous virus to temporarily and structurally change the daily living conditions of a lot of working people, who finding themselves in new living and working structures - however temporary it might have been - experienced the change of consciousness that a large living disruption affords, which caused them to re-evaluate their priorities, values, and preferences for living and working. 

And the more catastrophes you encourage by maintaining a present destructive course, the more radicals you create who will eventually do the moving and changing for you.