Provisional History

I wanted to get down the regular and obligatory qualifying post about talking history, as much for myself as for my friend, the reader, who deigns to slog their way through this stuff with me. To begin with, the really good scientists will tell you: well, science is always provisional. A lot of this stuff is really useful and illuminating, but it is always changing as new information and analytical technologies and methodologies come online, so don't attach to any of it too much. Use it warily and responsibly as it works for you in your daily life, and as it appeals to your sense of what is true to the nature of reality and to the stirrings of the heart and spirit. 

This standpoint has as much in common with the ever-shifting, infinitely complex, and elusive nature of reality as it does with the perpetually revolutionary technological and material nature of modern culture in time and space, in which existing knowledge structures and provisional cultural traditions are perpetually demolished as new technological modalities of perception and communication come online, lending to the wide cultural perception of the fragility of any sort of epistemology. And this is a standpoint which can provoke reactionary swings of the pendulum to fundamentalism as well. 

To apply this to history, one good example is the technological and methodological revolutions in archeology which have allowed for a higher resolution of daily life for average peoples living in past eras, a perception that was previously limited to the writings of limited historical individuals. In consideration that writing was incredibly expensive and exclusive, what we often got were detailed progressions of court and aristocratic activity, especially in the case of the ancient world. 

An awesome development that changes our understanding of history. But undergirding this development too is the cultural premium placed upon what is written and recorded, and the whole mass of skills, traditions, and technologies associated with that activity, reinforced in part by the constantly increasing material and technological complexity of the modern world, which plays a part in necessitating that cultural premium on written and recorded information. 

To bring things back around, I like to apply the provisional understanding to the history as well. These are incredible stories and findings, that given the amount of time and space I have here to discuss them given my life circumstances, I do have to do a fair amount of simplification and compression, and then organizing it visually through metaphor to make certain salient points. And that is setting aside me just getting something wrong or mistaking what is currently known due to my limited time, energy, and understanding. Further, even "knowing" something as it is currently and collectively understood, there is always much more to it going on underneath; the work is never done. So take it all as provisional and subject to revision as new information or correction comes in. 

But I'm not just shoveling bullshit either. Part of the attempted conveyance of aesthetic beauty and meaning in this project is to "get it right," or at least good enough to make sense and in harmony with the information that we have, and insofar as it furthers my own project in accordance with sound practical living and witnessing in our current time with the resources that I have. We're all moving through this perpetual material and technological convulsion together, and the ensuing ecological and civilizational instability related to all of that, and doing the best we can to make sense of it all with what we have. 

Destruction as Connection

Through ancient and medieval history - the steppe as a driving force seemed to disappear in the modern era, though you can say its influence was only transposed - the settled societies would record their interactions with the steppe peoples with a mix of suspicion, disdain, irritation, awe, and admiration, but these feelings would come at a sort of remove: we were situated and set-fast here, they were over there doing what they do. 

But eventually these relations tended to spill over. We've already talked about the waves of Germanic migrations, set into motion by climate change and the movements of the Huns, those Hunnic movements having a distant genesis of their own. 

And then on into the Middle Ages, with the successive movements of the Vikings, eventually establishing kingdoms of their own, and the movements and establishing of kingdoms of the Mongols in the east. And the Turks coming in from the east and sweeping into the Arab Muslim world, adapting Islam and then Europeanizing in turn as they clashed with the Byzantines, overtaking them while establishing the Ottoman Empire, which would take root in that cracked shell of Constantinople, with a new urban capitol coming into being as Istanbul. 

Not to make light of these successive human catastrophes, but a lot of these common processes bear a resemblance to the paradoxical regenerative capacity of wildfires, sweeping through existing societies in their paths, whether they were in a decadent phase or not, breaking them up into simpler constituent elements to eventually be recombined, containing the DNA of both conqueror and conquered. 

Besides the crosspollinating effects of the various trade networks connecting distant settled societies, you had nomadic peoples like the Goths and the Vikings traveling all over Europe, and in the case of the latter, far into the east and then even across the Atlantic to North America, moving slaves back and forth, intermixing, spreading technologies and culture and technique.   

You could see in the turbulent course of the collapse of Rome and the subsequent germination of the early medieval world a sort of "smashing together" of that nomadic vigor for movement and dynamism and the settled society's preference for stability and deep, sustained technological development. To simplify, those tall walls and fortresses that would eventually typify the medieval castle - a lot of steppe societies weren't good at siege warfare, though the Huns and Mongols were notorious for being quite adaptable with it - probably looked pretty good to nomadic chieftains growing tired of constant migration and warfare. 

Other than the Polynesian societies, the Vikings were some of the first to venture out into the open ocean. Whereas many previous societies could utilize quite advanced ship designs, they usually stuck to coastlines or at least stayed within visible range of land, when they weren't blown off course by bad weather or strong currents. 

In keeping with this, many earlier empires were land based - albeit with their various trade networks branching out through water-routes - so it was probably not a coincidence that we would see the culmination of this "smashing together" in the British seafaring empire, which developed in a particularly vulnerable region in which there was a constant clashing and crosspollination of the nomadic and settled societies. 

Lest we want to prematurely place human values on this process - I am loathe to call any of this "good" or "bad" - we could fast forward to the Industrial Revolution, that unprecedented explosion in technological development, mobility, and material power, taking place in that superheated cauldron of Western Europe, which created a problem or two for every problem it solved. 

Plenty of economic thinkers like Marx would look to create a little lemonade out of them sour-ass lemons: "Well, capital has socialized the means of production, so we might as well make use of that." Though at the same time, today one can't help but nervously eye those belching smokestacks as things continue to heat up. 

Time and Space

Time brings space to life: it is the duration of matter and energy moving in space, rushing in to fill in somewhere vacant, where it persists and intensifies, and then its saturation in one place begets its waning in another place, and then it peaks there and disperses somewhere else where there is room to move once again.  

Sketches of Spring

Waves of cold, frigid air come down off of the mountains to the east, and the wind moves through the forest in a rolling roar, the trees swaying and their leaves shaking, and then the rains come down hard and sudden and then abate, and the clouds disperse to the west and the sun shines through, strikingly and suddenly warm, baking the edge of the forest where the clearcut begins, where steam rises from the fresh rainfall vaporizing, which has barely had time to soak in. 

Too much difference meeting difference too quickly, but it carries on with a beauty of its own. Flocks of opportunistic birds burst forth, and the trees let out their pollen, everyone trying to ride the wave of an earlier and earlier spring, cut through the middle by a wobbly jetstream. The hot and cold oscillating like the rapid turnover of a strobe.    

This growing wilderness at this particular phase of the seasonal cycle is an environment for the pioneer, bursting forth to spread its seed and grow rapidly where it has the window. You get a lot of interesting things happening in these transitional zones, where large forces have to move and shift their course, such as a deep seasonal shift from dormant to active modalities of living, or in the case of the political sphere, a presidential election, in which a changing of the guard takes place. 

Up and Moving

Owing to its agricultural roots, settled societies tend to place a premium on stability and order. When you rely on growing crops in place, year after year, you have to stay put, and the conditions of the growing season need to remain within a favorable range for those crops to flourish and for harvests to remain bountiful. 

It is no surprise then that one of the most voracious appetites for modern industrial civilization is for the steady increase of mobility and the ever-accelerating rate of movement, coupled with the energy-expending manipulation of time, such as with refrigeration and food preservation and heating and climate control for growing certain crops. 

Here there is a way to surmount the most structurally prominent barriers to a settled society, so that spiritually it can always remain in place, while at the same time occupying everything everywhere at once, annihilating time and space to move to where it wants when it wants without giving up its presence from where it departs, to continuously grow and accumulate power. 

Resilience

Resilience is kind of a strange thing if you start to poke and prod it. Take ancient societies, in which most of the population were relatively self-sufficient and produced resources for their own consumption. You could have a major dislocation and people would have to move and migrate, but then they could build their own housing and start growing food again, and possibly hunt and forage in the meantime to get by. 

There were limits to this sort of resilience. You start to have more serious problems when there are a lot of people around, and a dislocated group comes up against the boundaries of another group and warfare breaks out, as was apparent when Rome found the need to increasingly expand the state to clamp down on warring neighbors and incorporate further and further reaches of the Mediterranean region into its trade networks, which allowed it to move bulk goods like grain around in large quantities, helping stabilize the state when a given sub-region was experiencing warfare or crop failure or both. 

The Roman state is considered by historians as being incredibly resilient for this reason and others, but then the complexity and continuity of this state would begin to pose problems as well, when the entire apparatus was increasingly controlled by a shrinking aristocracy and then military dictatorship and bureaucracy, and the direction of the entire system became increasingly volatile under the strain of civil war and plague and famine. You did start to have the early development of a proletariat, in which people living in the cities would become dependent on the political conditions in the city, and the greater economic conditions of the entire trade work that the cities depended on, and then you would have the described disintegration of polities into "mobs" or otherwise coalescing rogue military bands lead by usurping generals, with the entire system increasingly at war with itself, confused as to what shape it should take or what direction it should go to maintain its stability.   

The Roman state went through a series of catastrophic crises and breathtaking reversals, but eventually world events would beat it down enough as a self-regenerating system. After the civil wars of the late Western decline for example, you had the successive waves of bubonic plague that would wipe out huge swathes of the population, and just as things were recovering another wave would come and further frustrate those efforts. And you had the volcanic cooling which caused crop failures all over, stressing people's immune systems and making them more vulnerable to sickness. That larger system change struck hammer blow after hammer blow on the self-generating Roman system, driving it apart and then contributing to its disintegration in the West and its isolation and winking out in the East. 

In the modern world, you have what could be described as an incredibly fragile and complex global commercial web of interlocking societies, a vastly expanded and elaborated form of that Roman Mediterranean state and trade networks, all mutually dependent on each other in many ways, though which is also in the process of decoupling and reconfiguring of course. 

Most of the world population live in cities now, and theoretically, if you have a major dislocation of a population like this (such as in a coastal inundation event or some such), you can't just have them move and settled somewhere else and have some sort of polity spontaneously take root again. A lot of people don't know how to grow their own food, or grow enough of it to be productive and they also have a variety of modern requirements of living that aren't easily self-generated, especially considering the density of populations in space and the concomitant land zoning and regulation connected to those populations. 

In other words: to move modern people and resettle modern people, they have to be "plugged in" to an existing commercial arrangement in which housing and food and utilities can be collectively furnished and permitted. If you can't do this, you have incredible social discord and possible political and economic breakdown.

There is an existing resilience here though in the fact that modern societies, with their wide ranging transportation and communication networks, formidable manufacturing powers, and far flung supply chains (which grow more fragile simultaneously) can continuously move resources around to where they are needed when a given region fails, and produce incredible amounts of often redundant resources and surplus. 

But here too this wider system is increasingly fraught and at war with itself as to the nature of its composition and direction, especially as power consolidates and usurps the very life-giving operations of the system itself. 

And meanwhile you have a plague of a very different beast, that of the Covid pandemic, which continually and cyclically re-emerges at greater frequencies, not to wipe out huge swathes of population, but to steadily eat into the entirety of the populations' many faculties simultaneously weakening the system through time. And then there is the matter of the steadily warming climate, causing increasing chaos and volatility and squeezing environmental resources ever more every year. And there are plenty of other stressing dynamics that I won't get into now, but that have been well-covered here. 

Nevertheless, it is difficult to tell just how much strain the system can really take, and what it will really do as things continue to deteriorate, and what things will eventually look like. John Michael Greer provides compelling descriptions of the population contraction and resource depletion that will place real constraints on what the greater system can do to reconfigure itself over time, and what that might look like. And Ian Welsh has begun a fascinating exploration of theoretical political and economic principles of societies further along their curve of contraction. Which I think are great places to start. 

Still, from this vantage point, the tip of this precipice is a strange place to be. How strange a thing, this resilience that we are always chasing and then forgetting. What will it all do in the coming decades?

Nutcracker

After the cord between the Western and Eastern Empire was snapped, Byzantium would experience a harrowing contraction, especially after the plague and the mini ice age, and then resources like the Egyptian bread basket were lost to the Arab invasions. The Eastern Empire would retreat into its shell in the formidable fortified Constantinople, nursing its wounds and conserving its energy, before expanding once again when conditions improved. 

But that isolation contributed to an increasing divergence of its character from the West's. Though both Christian empires, Byzantium's centralized isolation and austerity - and their exposure to the might of the iconoclastic Islamic armies - would contribute to an inward-looking and icon-refusing Eastern Christianity, which appeared increasingly alien to the iconophile West, who was developing in a more distributed manner as a network of warring Gothic states. 

And this cultural divergence would further widen in time, contributing to the targeting of Byzantium in the Crusades. The twin pressures of the Crusades from the West and the successive Arab and then Ottoman invasions in the East, would close like pinchers around the shell of Constantinople, eventually cracking it like a walnut, with the Ottomans dealing the final blow. 

The West had transformed in its own provincial way, and the East, holding out as long as it could, still thinking of itself as "Roman," but still developing its own idiosyncratic character, would finally wink out for good. 

We Died?

It wasn't widely understood that Western Rome had fallen at the time that many historians point to it falling. For a period of time, there was enough continuity in Rome's institutions as the Germanic rulers were plugged in that for most people, daily economic and social life did not change all that much. Some of the more far flung and precarious frontier lands - such as Roman Britain - did experience steeper and more traumatic declines, but despite the brushfire civil wars and usurpations breaking out across the West, Western Rome itself seemed to carry on with its general populace steadily acclimated to a baseline of continuous discord.    

It was Justinian's reign in Byzantium that popularized the idea that the West had been "lost," with one of his ministers designating the deposition of Romulus Augustulus as the point at which the West fell. It took a coalescing ideology of loss, which was a profoundly reactionary ideology, which excited and animated the state machinery of the East, to eventually propel Justinian back outwards to reconquer the Western regions.

These efforts - and they really were quite remarkable - were eventually reversed when population loss from warfare, failed harvests from a cooling climate (possibly volcanic), and an early emergence of the Black Plague dashed apart the material power of Justinian's platform and eventually the West reverted back to Gothic rule. 

But then what was "Gothic" and "Barbarian" and what was "Roman?" What was it all about? Both Theoderic the Great and Justinian I were born in the Balkan provinces of the Roman Empire - where the toughest ruling stock would tend to come from by the way - and both went on at a young age to receive an education in Constantinople, yet Theoderic had gone on to rule the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy, and then just a generation and a half later, Justinian would go on to claim the mantle of Eastern Roman emperor, and by the conceits of his favored ideology, the Emperor of a singular Rome. 

At a certain remove, these ethnic and cultural questions seem strange. Though there was a clear difference between the nature of the settled Roman civilization and the Germanic tribes surrounding it, there was a constant intermixing of the cultures. Rome itself was a massive multi-ethnic state, which had a tendency to continuously expand and deepen and accelerate its trade networks, taking up conquered provinces amenable to its culture into its polity. And the Goths themselves got around just fine, oftentimes taking in members amenable to their culture as their own. 

As we've noted, there was a constant movement of Goths into the Roman empire, either settling into its lands or becoming incorporated into the military. Indeed, the demand for Gothic talent only grew as there seemed to be a spatial faltering of the Roman state through time, as its settled stability was tested by changing structural political and economic arrangements, setting off civil wars internal to it, and as plague and famine chewed up its military stock. The infusion of Gothic military leadership - due in part to their rugged and rigorous lifestyles out in the frontiers and wilds - was in many ways rejuvenating for the military prowess of the empire, and by extension, rejuvenating for its ability to cyclically reproduce itself. 

There was a bidirectional exchange to be sure: there was a steadily trickling out of dissident Romans to Gothic tribes, and Roman culture itself held Germanic "barbarian" culture in a strange liminal space of conflicting impressions, in which theirs was an alien and primitive and terrifying culture, but that they were still spiritually pure, living off of the land and vigorous and warlike, maintaining that glorious warrior spirit that the decadent Romans were in the process of losing. Historians often compare it to the "noble savage" motifs of Western civilization. There was constant complaining of the Roman youths getting too attached to the Germanic aesthetic: the tight leather pants and such. They were corrupting "rockstars" in a way. 

And then the Gothic tribes living closest to the empire's borders would daily be witnessing the powers and trappings of that enormous advanced settled society that was Rome. The dazzling architecture and the commercial manufactures: weapons and olive oil and wine which were flitting around the enormous trade networks, sprung from the furthest reaches of the Mediterranean borders and beyond. And these trappings could be used by the Romans to ingratiate various friendly tribes and play them against each other. And of course these amenable tribes would look with admiration and awe at what the Roman state and way of life could achieve. These were the type of people that would eventually seek to prop it up and reanimate it when it faltered. 

All of which is to say that the divisions between the Roman and "Barbarian" worlds were quite porous, and the worlds were constantly interfacing with each other and transforming each other. Why was it that Rome had to be a certain way, controlled by the right stock from the right places? 

It was the warring and the rending of the Western regions, partially to settle the question of what Rome really was, that greatly contributed to the West actually "falling" in a continuous economic and political sense, with the arrival of the plague and a small ice age which further dashed apart Justinian's platform, sending Byzantium into retreat and isolation, which finally snapped that cord between the West and East for good. 

This is not to downplay the complex human relations of ethnicity and culture: there is a real efficacy to a culture developing in a certain geographically bound region, which no matter how universalist its conceits propose, still seems to retain a certain spatially and temporally bounded character. Indeed, this is largely to tease out those prickly contradictions of a universalist imperialist state, that is composed of a multitude of intermixing ethnicities and far flung cultures drawn into its gravity well, which nevertheless stubbornly insists on maintaining a certain provincial continuity of what it really is, and these contradictions can help to take it apart and further divide it when it is under enough strain. 

The Emperor's New Clothes

To compress the story of the Liberal classes, we could slightly modify the folktale of the Emperor's New Clothes. That upon discovering that the emperor's garments are a farce, the retainers tear swatches from the clothing of the surrounding populace to cobble together a solution. For example, the Democratic party in the US snatches the mantles of the sciences and identity politics and organized labor to cover up the embarrassing excesses of naked predation. The problem with such a haphazard and cynical approach is that the cobbled-together solution is less effective, and does damage to the real thing that it draws from. 

A new garment is best instantiated whole with a cohesive technique whose integrity is intact. And to rend an existing garment is to interrupt the continuity of its threads and expose them, weakening it and encouraging further disintegration. 

Lying Liars

Given the historical tendency of large, powerful human societies in the last couple of thousand years, you do have to give it to empires: running one is hard work. Hard work by itself is not necessarily worthy of uncritical praise or regard of course: pillaging, swindling, and massacring can take plenty of work. But credit where it is due. 

To maintain a huge gradated complex of power, based both on the concentration of wealth on one end and the exploitation of whatever can be exploited on the other requires a delicate balance in which you have to convince a lot of people to cooperate with you while at the same time steadily exploiting them, or at least exploiting other people less like them but still human and connected to them in many ways. 

This often means a whole lot of lying and contrivance, and just disingenuousness. And when you do this, when you move further away from the heart, and the dictates of reality, it requires a better and better memory to keep track of the lies and artifices and to remain faithful to them, which also requires a strong executive control of one's emotional fidelity to them to remain convincing. And by golly, if you slip up just once, it introduces that seed of doubt, and the trust begins to erode, and things get more difficult, and you have to use more and more force. 

Couple that with ever-increasing entropy: lies form premises that generate long paths of dependence of their own, which increasingly spin world events in diverging directions. And you have generation upon generation, growing up further and further from an abandoned truth. From the top, how to impress upon subsequent generations of the privileged to at the same time benefit from and consolidate their positions, while not taking too much? How to teach your progeny to be good ruthless liars while remaining loyal to people like yourself? 

The lies will box you into a highly constrained set of possibilities if you can manage to follow them and remain faithful to them, and if you can't, it destroys your credibility and constricts your options further. So yes, in a way this is hard work.  

To relate this to our ongoing theme of creation and destruction, many of our particular human tools for affecting creation have destructive aspects that need to be pointed. In crude terms, if you want to take someone's productive land by pointing a gun at them, you better make sure you hit the right person, and not an ally or even yourself. 

Not only is lying making use of the abstract tools of language, pointing the lingual forces of creation in one direction (in your direction) and their forces of destruction in another (in their direction), but it also directs tools further downstream to point in directions that you want as well. If you lie your way into a war, that lie is pointing real world weapons and material flows in very specific directions toward specific ends. 

So it does take a lot of work to account for where all of these forces are pointing, and as things get more chaotic as a result of this and depart further from your control and you understanding, it becomes easier and easier to be harmed by your own instruments, your own tools, your own decisions and volition. 

Oops

*Correction: I added an additional sentence on measles below where it was originally intended, which makes the piece flow better and make more sense. Additional clarifying sentences added further down as well. Oops indeed. 

This piece is meant to be read in combination with the previous conceptual sketch of the relations between creation and destruction. I'll say in advance, this one is a little rambling and unhinged. I'll continue to elaborate on these themes in time. 

A previous dynamic we explored was that of the Fed engaging in ideologically self-constrained monetary policy to address a very complex and systemic problem: that of inflation, making use of the crude and imprecise tool of raising interest rates. They've largely confined themselves to this particular tool to maintain public fidelity to free market fundamentalism: "See? Hands are off!" Which is less a genuine commitment to economic freedom than an implicit kissing of the rings of the giant private financial and corporate states that actually rule the West. 

This "bare minimum" approach allows the Fed to exercise its historical institutional responsibility to maintain low inflation and high employment (which is achieved on the backend with fudged data) while doing as little as possible to "crowd out" the financial industry and the concentrating corporate monopolies. What this achieves is a slight stimulus to the monopolists and their investors by further crushing labor, getting a little more juice out of that stone, while transmitting an ideological signal to their fellow hallucinators - as Aurelien deftly puts it - that something is being done.    

The problem with this ever-tightening of the screws is that the beneficiaries of this process are of an ever-contracting and concentrating group of classes benefitting disproportionately from a growing mass of an increasingly emaciated general population. To take it back to the craft: if you tighten the screws, you firm up the bonds of the structure, but then past that you can overtighten, which begins to put too much pressure on the structure itself and can even weaken and crack the structure. 

Another knock-on effect of this is the steady strangulation of the deeply indebted and struggling developing world, which over the course of a century (and much longer if we want to blow the discussion up) has been steadily hooked up to a predatory global financial system in order to guide the direction and extent of that world's development. Couple this with the growing protest of the member countries of this world to the dictates of organizations like the corporate controlled WTO and the IMF, and the growing mass of failed states and military disasters associated with that complex, and you have an entire supply and trade system delaminating and decoupling from the hegemonic empire benefitting the most from it. Which, we should take care to emphasize, is the very destructive process initiated and maintained by that very empire in service to its own cyclical recreation. 

Now I want to turn to the ongoing disaster of the Covid pandemic and its slew of economic effects. Volumes could be written about the destruction wrought by the virus. Volumes more could be written about the destructive social and economic effects of the virus. Still more volumes could be written on the bungled response of the collective West. But countless volumes yet could be exhausted on the entire shifting arc of the Western response over time, betraying a frightening senility, loss of institutional coordination, and collapse of long term planning. 

Lets start with the emergence of the virus itself. It is in the creative nature of capital to pursue constant expansion, concentration, and acceleration, so that the collective productive process is penetrating deeper and deeper into the hinterlands, increasing the risk of novel virus reservoir spillover. Through a combination of the destruction of habitat, increasing interaction of wild and domestic animal life, increasing coupling of the many species going to market, and the taking up of that mass into global rapid transit, novel viral organisms are awarded fertile grounds for evolving towards contagion and virility, and then achieving the correct biological makeup, escaping into that great, rapid moving mass of the global human population. This is largely how we've managed to field a steady stream of deadly viruses that are appearing in ever-shortening intervals.  

In summary, here's something twisty for the mind to chew over for a while: the creative powers of capital unleash destructive forces which ultimately feed the creative powers of novel viruses, whose living processes entail the destruction of the living base of capital, that is, human labor. 

So now we can move onto the social and economic consequences of the Covid pandemic. A weak and haphazard response (due to larger destructive processes and ensuing weakening crises taking place in the body politic) quickly gave way to organized abandonment, flooding the commons with a dangerous virus that persists as it rapidly spreads through human material and evolves. 

This could be simplified into the microcosm of the dangerous processes of mining: you dig and dig and dig ever deeper and further out, chasing those veins, and then oops you puncture a water body and whoosh your tunnel is flooded and you're dead. The history of mining in the very canyon that I live is replete with disasters like these. 

In the case of the pandemic, the whoosh part happens a little slower. There is now a sort of persistent atmospheric radiation in the form of a rapidly evolving virus, steadily eating into the metabolic, circulatory, and cerebral integrity of huge swathes of the population in cycles that span only a few months. This steadily makes life harder and harder on numerous levels: missing work, failing health, recurring long periods of misery, social fear, disintegrating social bonds, deteriorating consciousness and perception of daily and public life, I could go on. 

This ever-present danger not only inflicts the damage described, it steadily eats away at an already badly frayed sense of public trust and legitimacy. Vaccine uptakes are at record lows, and an overexploited and abandoned populace, already wary of the medical professions and increasingly generalized scientific knowledge, are abandoning various public health measures at startling rates. So much so that the next pandemic could very well be set off due to changing internal conditions in the imperial core, as opposed to successive incursions deeper into the hinterlands. Whether they go pandemic again or not, diseases like the measles are coming back, spread through a combination of said declining vaccination rates and herd immunity, rapid transit to the neglected periphery, and social alienation and resent, which manifests as a radical libertarianism that effectively denies the existence of a public, which is a fancy way of saying parents are taking their sick-ass kids to school because who cares?

Speaking of measles, the Romans would recognize what we're talking about here. The historical consensus surrounding the Antonine Plague points to smallpox, but apparently there is growing evidence that it might have been measles (or something else). And with that plague they had their own "flooded mine problem" when soldiers possibly brought back the novel virus from conquest in the Near East. That virus, taken up into the enormous and rapid (for the time) Mediterranean trade networks, circulated deep into the Roman Empire, chewing up the Roman military and labor forces, and greatly exacerbating serious structural problems in the empire, precipitating the Crisis of the Third Century period. 

Back to that Covid response arc. We witnessed the miserable haphazard public response that nevertheless tried to do something, and then we watched them realize their error of actually trying to help - which was slowing down the accumulation process and improperly empowering labor - in which they gradually walked back their inadequate mitigation measures, clawed back their provisional emergency social supports, and abandoned the populace to their fate. There is no long term horizon, or any kind of integration or coordination of public purpose: only haphazard and half-hearted reactivity, followed by a regression into apathy and self-absorption as the wreckage grows. 

And now we have our own flooded mines, and laborers have dropped out of the work force in droves, either through sickness, disability, refusal, or whatever else. People don't want to work a shit job and barely scrape out a living, only to be repeatedly infected and repeatedly infect their family and so on. And so all of that commercial real estate feeding various financial speculation schemes is standing empty and tanking in value, and employers are trying to put more and more pressure on existing workers to come into the office despite the modern capabilities of remote work, and the business and financial lobbies are agitating for looser and looser pandemic protections to try to get things moving again. And the impossibility of this situation has accelerated the divestment of data collection and proper reporting, among other casualties.  

We saw the aggressive variant of this in first the Afghanistan and then the Iraq wars. 9/11 hit, and blinking, a confused national security state halfheartedly smashed their way into Afghanistan, first pummeling the country with one fireworks show after another, before drowning it in cash in the hopes of making the problem go away, which it didn't, after which they got bored and smashed their way into Iraq and did exactly the same thing: blowing things up and then throwing money at private contractors and corrupt warring factions as both conflicts dragged on without resolution, eventually walking away from both bleeding ulcers without resolution, though the past certainly isn't through with them. But that is another can of worms altogether.

To close with yet another partially opened can of worms, we can also watch as the Biden administration doubles down on its complicity with the genocide of the Palestinians, shredding and lighting on fire the remnants of its own electoral base, and then doubling over and attempting to put that Humpty Dumpty back together when they realized through a haze what it was that they had done. Sorry gents, that food air drop in time for the election season ain't gonna cut it.     

You hear whisperings that a lot of the administration's trouble is Biden himself: that people have tried to warn him about the consequences of supporting Israel without strings attached, and that he's personally doubled down on this. I get this image of Biden the Frontman, stumbling about on stage, accidentally kicking out the audio cables, bringing forth squalls of feedback, harshing the crowd's mellow. It would be a funny image if it was fiction, and not the actual country I live in with my fellow countrypeople. 

But Biden's inability to govern also has to be traced to the DNC and the donors as essentially brokering his presidency, for starters. Not to mention the string of catastrophic US foreign policy decisions over the course of decades. 

Oh, I could go on with this shit. There are no shortages of low-hanging examples to reach for at the moment. But you do have to stop somewhere. 

Creation and Destruction

To varying extents, any creative force necessarily contains elements of destruction, and vice versa. A tip of the hat to Sabina Spielrein, and of course, the ever-transforming body of Taoism. 

Even that popular symbolic pinnacle of creation, child birth, implies the razing and reconfiguration of land and resource into shelter and infrastructure, and the accumulation of the energies of countless plants and animals, taken up into the growing and birthing (and birthed) humans as food and energy. That relation is intensified with more births as well: more creation implies more destruction that must be weighted against the regenerative power of the resource field in which this all takes place.   

So the direction of a given creative or destructive process is attributable to the ratio and direction of the dueling forces of creation and destruction within them. If a creative process contains much creative power while its destructive forces are properly mitigated and balanced against the creative power of their targets, that process sustains the creation of the intended beneficiaries of that process. One can imagine the undesirable results when the destructive forces achieve a greater proportion in the creative process. And by the same token, a largely destructive process can contain creative elements within it, which if present in increasingly greater amounts, can tip that process over into a state of creation for the intended recipients of that destruction.     

For humans, a lot of creative power can be attributed to the power and effectiveness of their tools, and whether the tools -  and by extension, their traditions and institutions - aid the creative act while mitigating their destructive tendencies. That shadow side of a given tool that we've talked about before is relevant here. A hammer can be used to drive nails, binding pieces of lumber together to create shelter, with the destruction of a tree perpetuating the life of humans benefitting from it. That same hammer can just as easily be turned against its human master: punching holes in a skull for example. The intention behind the tool, and the direction the tool is pointing matters. 

This becomes a more serious problem when the location of the body can no longer be determined. For example, if one is hammering in the dark, or one is growing fatigued and one's attention and focus are drifting, the force of the swinging hammer could be applied towards things detrimental to one's original intentions. 

To generalize and complicate that image, this is an even more serious problem when the nature of the creative process is constantly shifting and reconfiguring the body being created and recreated, dispersing it ever outwards even as the executive control of it concentrates and calcifies, while at the same time the destructive processes involved in creation become ever more powerful and widespread, oftentimes owing to the processes of creation. And the tools themselves become ever more complex, and their discernable shapes melt away. I'm thinking here of the creative process of empire, of course. 

I've written about this problem plenty of times, though I made the case more explicitly in making use of a combination of the Ouroboros symbol and a maze to describe the ongoing geopolitical and economic realities making up the decline of the US empire, which continues apace. So I want to continue describing these phenomena from a different angle, using the creative and destructive framework in particular.

Hard Reset

When I feel bad enough, I can't do much of any writing. At times I can't even think very far. But what that does do is it forces me to stop and back away from the metaphorical pen. I retreat back to reading and absorbing, and it functions as a sort of reset, for better or worse. When I can think again, I have to take the time to process everything I've taken in, and the perspective shifts once again. Finally, when I can actually write again, everything has changed. I can't really say whether this process is good or bad, only that it is not all bad. It is vexing to lose a thread on an ongoing train of thought or subject that I've been working on yes. But is also dislodges my thoughts when they get stuck.   

All that being said, I don't have a whole lot of nice things to say at the moment. It remains rough out there, and I have some more gnarly stuff to work through. For a lot of the world, it is going to be another tough year. We'll do what we can on this end.