14 September 2022

The optics of it all

The coming midwinter will bring a reckoning. Western governments must either invite economic misery on a scale that would test the fabric of democratic politics in any country, or face the fact that energy supply constrains the means by which Ukraine can be defended. – Helen Thomson, Cambridge University, Professor of Political Economy [My emphasis]

Introduction

In my previous article, I took an unflattering look at some of The West’s many geopolitical entanglements, arguing that they drive its rapid unravelling into stubborn incompetence and metastasising dysfunction. Its descent, I reasoned, emboldens the rest of the world to seize its chance to create a multi-polar order that can supplant US/Western hegemony. 

The recent turn of events in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is perhaps the expression par excellence of The West’s decline, casts fresh light on The West’s prowess at using PR optics to nudge history where it will. This light offers us an opportunity to attempt a finer grained analysis of where humanity stands right now.

A shallow reading of my position as an advocate of idealism – everything is consciousness – might suggest I would be a fan of optics. After all, everything is perception, right? Not exactly. Our earthly existence is a consensus ‘illusion’, not a solipsistic one. So, though a nation or civilisation may be adept at and possess sufficient resources to powerfully influence the optics around any particular event, those optics need to tally closely with the actual details of that event if they are to have a lasting effect. And while I believe it is indeed feasible to nudge history in a direction counter to the needs and wishes of a people using optics management, if that direction runs counter to common sense and health, there will be an inevitable correction to a healthier state, at some cost, at some point.

If, on the other hand, those optics-based strategies nudge people in a healthier direction, then their effects will prove longer lasting and be more beneficial.

(What I am a fan of is authenticity, honesty and love. These principles are synonymous, in effect, with health, where by “health” I mean a homeostatic health of all interdependent systems.)

The Russia-Ukraine war, as all wars, involves optics, tactically and strategically. Wars are fought on the battlefield primarily, but also on the field of perception through how battlefield events are reported. I understand that Churchill said that in times of war, truth is so precious it must be hidden behind a fog of lies. 

A nation’s capacity to prosecute a war to victory depends on many things, one of which is its people’s belief the war is winnable. Optics influence their sense that victory is within reach, and therefore influence a nation’s capacity to support its troops and endure hardships on the path to victory. Optics are thus very important.

It is said that The West is masterful in optics manipulation and management, with Russia lagging far behind in this regard. This article looks at the possible long-term consequences of this cultural difference, and also examines how my steep learning curve concerning this conflict has informed my interpretation of what is going on globally.

The realities

You can’t win a war with optics alone. Even if country A has a militarily impregnable press but no army whatsoever, while country B has a shoddy, recalcitrant press but first-class army, sensible money would bet on B’s quick and comprehensive victory. A’s people would see one thing in their newspapers and on their TV screens, but learn quite another from the reality on their streets and in their homes. 

On the other hand, in the case of evenly matched armies between A and B, with A boasting vastly superior optics management, sensible money would bet on A.

What can we say about Russia and The West? 

For a start, it is of course far more complicated than the stick-man sketch above. The US may possess superior military technology and a larger war machine than Russia, but can it deploy effectively in Ukraine, even if geopolitical circumstances were to permit US boots on the ground? Russia borders Ukraine, the US does not. 

NATO could deploy EU/UK military might (less than Russia’s by all accounts), but again, not with the ease with which Russia can deploy its military assets. 

So, in terms of what can be deployed quickly on the ground, Russia has the advantage regardless of the relative strengths of the combined forces each group of combatants has on paper. (I’m ruling our nuclear war in this assessment; in that case all bets would be off.)

As I argued in my previous post, it boils down to the devilish details of the pragmatics that define the very complex situation that is Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Firstly, Russia has not declared war. It is conducting what it calls a “Special Military Operation” (SMO). This is essentially a list of objectives constrained by specific terms drawn up by Putin and issued to Russia’s military. The terms stipulate that Russia will not acquire Ukrainian territory, but rid Ukraine of its fascist elements, protect the Russian-speaking peoples of eastern Ukraine and enable them to function as independent republics free of threats and danger from Ukraine. 

Whatever your view of the sincerity of this contract, Russia has stuck to it quite rigidly, by all accounts (until Sunday 11 September 2022, more on which below). My understanding is that part of this SMO’s appeal to Putin is as a hearts-and-minds campaign to win over as many countries of the global south as possible. Success in this objective would help the BRICS nations advance a multi-polar global order to replace US global hegemony. If Russia had deployed its full might against Ukraine from the start, it would have appeared unpredictably aggressive to the rest of the world; the Russia-BRICS ambition could thus have been dead before arrival. Russia may well have defeated Ukraine more quickly, but might have been isolated internationally.

Secondly, Russia has no interest in further antagonising the Ukrainian people against them. Wars (and SMOs) end at some point, and peace negotiations begin. Were Russia to have wantonly destroyed civilian architecture, bombed all Ukraine’s major cities to rubble and caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, it would have transformed Ukraine into a time bomb, thereby only postponing its threat to Russian territorial security.

Thirdly, full war against Ukraine risks full war with NATO. With regards peace negotiations that always come at some point, the risk of collapsed relations with The West is not something Russia particularly lusts for. (Now that Russia’s trust of The West has been severely damaged, the initial importance of this point may have expired.)

In other words, Russia probably hoped to complete its SMO quickly and clinically, and then begin negotiations that would have had genuine potential to effect a lasting peace and so secure Russia’s security going forward. Such an eventuality would initially have been more attractive to Putin than prosecuting a horribly destructive war of highly uncertain global outcome.

But – and it’s a huge but – NATO and The West want to maintain US hegemony; US hegemony is, in a sense, their identity, their raison d’etre. Russia’s and the BRICS nations’ ambitions are a direct threat to that hegemony. Of that bloc, Russia represents the biggest threat, has the most enticing resources and is the easiest to dismantle (in The West’s estimation). Ergo, The Wests’ and Russia’s respective situations have driven them into bitter conflict over Ukraine. 

In sum, this is an existential, last-chance-saloon situation for The West. For Russia, this is also an existential, last-chance-saloon situation; it cannot advance its preferred historical vector, protect its territorial integrity, and not supplant US hegemony. I’m confident both sides see this. 

Hence, the SMO may well be cynical, but not 100% so. It may be that Putin calculated some low chance that Russia could wrap things up quickly – Russia made overtures early in the operation to agree peace terms with Ukraine, but these were scuppered by Boris Johnson – and walk away from the affair with all sides happy, before the operation escalated to war. Worth a shot, right? 

Up until now, a confluence of factors has kept Putin true to the SMO. That changed with the Kharkov offensive, which saw Ukraine make large territorial gains in a very short space of time – albeit immaterial gains from what I understand. The West then finessed this into a succulent optics victory for Ukraine, one that has reinvigorated support for their cause and triggered further tranches of aid from Ukraine’s Western backers. Prior to Ukraine’s success in Kharkov, The West had been losing interest, and facing an energy crisis with nothing positive to show for its imminent sacrifice.

Perhaps under political pressure at home on the back of this optics win, Putin has deviated from the terms of the SMO and struck civilian infrastructure. This may well be the opening overture in an escalation from SMO to an “Counter-Terrorist Operation” (CTO). Speculation has it that Russia may soon officially declare Ukraine a terrorist state. Such a declaration would ‘legally’ authorise Russia to attack more civilian infrastructure as well as the Zelenskyy regime’s command and control infrastructure.

If escalation is The West’s aim, its skilled optics management procured a positive outcome. But this escalation must lead to Russia’s collapse if it is to be beneficial to The West, hence the stringent sanctions that have been in place from the beginning. However, the sanctions have thus far harmed only The West. Further, the long-term effects of these territorial gains will be decided by the relative powers and available opportunities each embroiled combatant possesses.

This article begins with a quote from a Financial Times piece I find most apposite. One consequence of Russia having remained true to the terms of its SMO is that the global south has warmed to Russia and cooled to The West, generally speaking. This includes Iran and Saudi Arabia: two major oil producers. If the growing closeness between these three nations grows yet closer, and if Saudi Arabia brings OPEC with it, then The West’s access to cheap, reliable oil becomes uncertain. Its capacity to outlast Russia in this conflict would diminish perilously if OPEC’s and Iran’s strategic loyalties shift to the BRICS bloc, and this on top of Russia having switched off Nord Stream 1.

Apparently, The West’s capacity to equip Ukraine with sufficient munitions to best Russia is also dwindling; armament stocks are now too low for it to continue its largesse. Stocks must now be replenished, which takes time. Furthermore, Ukraine’s success in the Kharkov region, as well as its failure near Kherson, have proven very costly. Russia has sustained a fraction of Ukraine’s casualties. Destruction to Russia’s military equipment is apparently negligible, while Ukraine has suffered significant losses.

Taking all this together, it appears Russia’s military-industrial capacity massively outweighs The West’s; according to Western media accounts, Russia is able to launch endless torrents of artillery fire at enemy lines. If true, short on energy and dangerously low on munitions, The West has next to no chance militarily against Russia in Ukraine (again, I’m ignoring the nuclear option). Sooner or later, The West’s excellent optics management will be rendered immaterial by Russia’s superiority on the battlefield. With the EU/UK teetering on the edge of economic and societal collapse, with Russia’s economic outlook improving, The West is quickly running out of rope.

Why does all this interest Econosophy so much?

Econosophy is, in essence, an examination of the ramifications of resource-based economics. For those ramifications to be more than just idly interesting to a few oddballs, the peoples of the world must first want to pursue that vector. For the peoples of the world to want this, there first needs to be a transformation of global consciousness. This foundational requirement is why I have written so much of late on various aspects of and around idealist ontology. For me, part of what is evolving on earth in the human domain is a profound paradigm shift away from materialism towards Something Else. My bet is on some variant of idealism, but I cannot say what historians and philosophers will call it.

All of this means I felt the topics close to my heart could be reinvigorated by the mass hysteria the covid ‘pandemic’ triggered across the planet. My powers of reason informed me the hysteria was a purging preparation, a softening of the soil for radically different, counter-establishment ideas to take root and bloom. Perhaps that intuition, shared by many, is correct. Perhaps not.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict suggests not, at least not on the timescale I had hoped. And while I find the conflict itself sickening, while I find the tragically fated entanglements that bound humanity to its eruption earlier this year so frustrating, while it does not matter to me which ‘side’ wins as long as termination of this war improves humanity’s chances for peaceful cohabitation, I do want to understand what it means for us all. Two things weigh heavy in my thoughts.

First, does the complexity of global modernity require hierarchical social organisation? Or, does the complexity of global modernity doom top-down rule to messy collapse? The inflexibility on display, both on the part of our putative rulers and the mesmerised ruled, beggars belief. We westerners seem set to demand our immolation because we said we would ‘defend’ Ukraine, whatever Ukraine is, whatever the cost to us, to Ukraine, and to the wider world. We seem hell bent on hating Russia, on forbidding open discussion on the subject, and on forbidding disagreement generally: an outright absurdity. To me, all this seems a direct consequence of hierarchical rule. But only in The West? I’m not at all sure.

Second, how much must come undone before the soil of our many cultural beliefs softens enough to explore new ideas at mass scale? Confounding this question, does the amount of collapse required to effect such a softening mean we simply will not be able to do anything other than blame each other for that collapse? Will the carefully nurtured climate of paranoia, fear and suspicion so important to hierarchical rule brood itself deep into our future?

In The West, our sense of ourselves and what we are entitled to revolves around consumerism and, now, instant gratification. To what extent does the rest of the world desire our lifestyle for itself? Is the consumerist idyl beamed by The West out into the world perceived as real wealth? This is extremely hard to properly assess, but seems possible, even likely. 

If the BRICS bloc rises at the expense of The West in the zero-sum game of scarcity economics, will that rise simply import The West’s scarcity dilemma to that bloc? The West faces its demise for fundamental reasons: the end of cheap energy, the march of technological unemployment, the spiritual void of consumerism, and the systemic scarcity price-based economics requires. Does the BRICS bloc see these fundamentals as irresolvable? Does it see them at all? My guess is that if it does see them, it imagines it need only apply a few inventive tweaks to fix them.

Questions upon questions. And to make matters still more uncertain, The West is far from a single entity of hive-mind purpose. The WEF/WHO/Davos crowd advances its bizarro agenda with similarly existential determination. This group wants global control, probably because, in its view, earth’s limited carrying capacity is such that humans, with their insatiable greeds and bestial wisdom, must be tightly kept in line using the panopticon potential of AI, constant surveillance and central-bank digital currencies. Following Tom Luongo’s analysis, the neoconservatives are raining on Davos’ parade by escalating the war with Russia, and in so doing setting the BRICS off on a divergent vector.

Who will end up with what share of the pie? And how stable will that new arrangement be absent a reliable and plentiful supply of cheap energy? How stable will it be with a reliable and plentiful supply of cheap energy?

Conclusion

It seems to me, then, that this end-times battle between the various factions, each vying for its own version of how humans should live on earth, rages on precisely because each power player perceives scarcity as foundational to earthly existence, to life itself. This perception operates powerfully within and just beneath awareness to continually infuse its particular colourings into all optics, regardless of skill level involved. In this way, the mounting escalations, the skirmishes and tensions mushrooming up all over the place are driven by the power of optics to perpetuate beliefs that no longer serve us, that are taking us to the edge of catastrophe.

Human consciousness is shackled, as always, by how its imagination is shaped by culture. And, while there are multiple cultures involved, and sub-cultures within those, there is, I believe a meta-culture binding all modernity together in its conviction about scarcity, price, markets and trade, and how these ‘fundaments’ are true and unfiltered expressions of the human condition, rather than conditional to the civilisational project. 

I am still of the mind that a Civilisation 2.0 is in the offing. And yet, something about the Russia-Ukraine conflict has made it recede beyond the horizon. Watching it disappear from view is a sobering experience.

Humans incarnate to learn to become love in extraordinarily difficult conditions. Our successes and failures in this undertaking enhance the music of All That Is in ways we can but dimly understand. It is not for me to say what is going to develop next year, next week, or even tomorrow, but at the moment it looks like there is a long way to go – much breakdown to experience – before humanity develops a cohering desire to take love and health seriously, to structure its future guided by these truly foundational qualities.


[Edited ATO to CTO, "Counter-Terrorist Operation", 15 September 22]

08 September 2022

Those whom the gods would destroy

 Russian citizens should not have easy access to the EU. At the moment, there is no basis for trust, no basis for a privileged relation between EU and Russia. – Ylva Johansson, EU Commissioner For Home Affairs

Introduction

I’m still trying to make sense of how the Russia-Ukraine war does or does not fit together with the plandemic; is the chaos Out There “all part of the plan”, The Great Reset? Or is it all a confluence of coincidences? If there is a path out of this apparent insanity – whether plan or coincidences –, it would be good to hit upon it before disaster drags us into a downward spiral. 

It’s possible, of course, that a downward spiral is precisely what the doctor ordered, but it would be wise to understand this if true, and prepare fairly solid sketches of what to do next.

The people I find most persuasive regarding developments in the Russia-Ukraine war (The Duran, Brian Berletic, Tom Luongo) persist with their assessment that Ukraine cannot win. The West, on the other hand, does not want to – cannot – permit this eventuality. 

A recent and astoundingly bizarre set of attacks by Ukrainian forces to retake the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) illustrates The West’s reluctance to face reality. The attacks failed in grand style while a team of IAEA investigators were on hand in Ukraine to inspect the plant! Ukraine had been shelling the ZNPP, which has been under Russian control since some time in March, for weeks, if not months, perhaps to create or risk a catastrophic incident that would turn the tide of the war. The West’s mass-media outlets reported on this shelling as if it were the Russians shelling themselves. They have now left the recent attacks on the ZNPP unreported, with the pro-West IAEA declining to blame either side for the shelling in their report (ergo, it was not Russia), which apparently contains not one criticism of Russia (ergo, it was not Russia).

It is apparently the absolute top priority for the West that Russia be routed, cost what it will in treasure and human meat: Russia cannot be allowed to win this war. And yet Russia looks set to win this war. A Russian victory will cause a political, economic, societal and cultural earthquake that will likely break the EU apart, collapse UK and EU affluence, and possibly separate the US from the EU and UK for the foreseeable future. This will depend on how Russia treats Europe after victory in Ukraine, among other factors. In the meantime, one unavoidable interim cost of this war – or rather of The West’s sanctions on Russia and its visceral Russophobia – is an energy crisis in Europe and the UK of unprecedented proportions.

Now we’re cooking on gas!

For a wide variety of reasons, one of which is having exhausted all possible alternatives, the EU has become economically dependent on Russian gas via Germany’s dependence. A deal was struck with Russia in the early 2000s by then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The deal brought cheap gas to Germany and the EU via Nord Stream 1. Then, after Fukushima, Germany resolved to wind down its nuclear power plants. The consequent additional energy required by then Chancellor Angela Merkel to keep Germany, and thus the EU, globally competitive, led to lengthy, one-on-one conversations between her and Putin. The upshot was Nord Stream 2. 

Next came the Maidan ‘revolution’ in Ukraine, and with it Germany’s and the EU’s refusal to help enforce the Minsk Agreements Russia so urgently wanted upheld to keep the peace between it and Ukraine. Relations between the EU/UK and Russia, already awful, have soured considerably since then (2014). And of course the US has many fingers in Ukraine’s geopolitically pivotal pie.

For whatever reasons (self defence seems likely), Russia began what it calls its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in late February 2022. The EU/UK/US axis initiated harsh sanctions against Russia in response, has gifted Ukraine with treasure and weapons in eye-watering amounts, and demonised Putin as never before. To the EU’s and UK’s apparent shock, Gazprom recently switched off Nord Stream 1 completely, having been progressively reducing the volume of gas flowing through it for maintenance reasons. Nord Stream 2 has been all but abandoned. No doubt the nasty calculations of war played a significant role in shaping Russia’s decisions, but either way the EU’s and UK’s suicidally ill-considered posturing in this war against a country they depend on for their economic survival is hard to fathom. There is such a thing as pragmatics, and politicians are expected to be masters thereof. The current crop, with very few exceptions, are spineless careerists.

(If this really is indeed all part of the WEF’s Great Reset, it looks to me like a plan as boneheadedly violent as it is possible to conceive. I find it impossible to imagine – which does not mean my imagination is correct! – that Russia et al are explicitly now at war with the WEF’s and the Davos crowd’s ‘master plan’ while secretly advancing it. What seems likelier is that the latter’s global ambition is a horribly ordinary case of deranged overreach unleashing incalculable damage and suffering.)

Whatever our morality regarding war and Realpolitik, I cannot see The West’s strategising as anything other than infantile. The fact of the matter is that there is no obligation on its part to defend Ukraine “to the last man”. We are watching Ukraine lose territory and men, the Ukrainian economy implode, while simultaneously encouraging that poor country to carry on taking this nation-destroying beating to what end, exactly? Breaking Russia? Are we in a position to accomplish that?

Russia is doing well. The West is withering. Ukraine is being bled dry, literally and figuratively. Idealistic fervour and media optics are one thing, brutal life on the ground quite another. But if the economic demand The West represents implodes, what good is all this misery to the economic supply of the BRICS++ bloc (soon to include Saudi Arabia? Petrodollar and Eurodollar collapse??)? 

Perhaps this is the price they feel they must pay to be neutralise the unpredictable threat The West has become, to itself and others.

The morality of pragmatics

Again, regardless of our ideological position here, there is the far more important morality of facing hard facts as they are. I think it safe to say that The West is led by grossly over-ambitious incompetents. It is having its arse handed to it, naked and soiled, by a Russia in the ascendancy, fighting off everything thrown at it with one hand, while hosting war games with India and China with the other, watching its food prices fall and its tax revenues and balance of payments strengthen. 

Warm blood is being spilled by the gallon, real agony and real destruction of lives are happening at mass scale because The West refuses to see the world as it now is: multipolar. This is the hubristic incompetence typical of a civilisation in steep decline.

To turn this obscene tragedy to a matter closer to Econosophy’s heart, what appeal does The West exude? As far as I can tell, it’s consumerism, Hollywood soft power, and endless varieties of pleasure sliding into hedonistic mooching. The days of Western high culture are behind us until further notice (though we do still produce the odd wonder). Our legacy does seem to be dominated by consumerism, though it makes no one healthy or happy. Here our leaders are, gambling it all in mad-bull defence of trifles and addictions.

We have been faced with the problem of how to prepare for a future after cheap energy for decades. For a wide variety of reasons, not least of which being the exquisitely frustrating reality of becoming increasingly constrained by previous decisions, we chose collectively not to grasp the nettle and plan for a non-consumerist future, refused repeatedly to take steps to build a low-cost, low-energy societal and economic infrastructure that could afford such a thing. We squandered our apparent superiority on keeping our world nicely as is. 

(I suspect there was simply no other way. Perhaps we are as blameless as the weather.)

This is the challenging terrain of pragmatics: The balance between long- and short-term strategies is extremely difficult to get right. Consequently, the scope to adapt wisely to changing circumstances becomes vanishingly small. The smell of blood from self-inflicted wounds grows stronger, competitors circle for the kill. 

In the not-too-distant future, I suspect that whatever credibility the Davos crowd has left will be vaporised in an eruption of betrayed rage. How will that crowd of super-rich fantasists find trust among the survivors of the smoking ruin that is their handiwork? 

And what future would they want to build for us?

What next?

In truth, it’s impossible to say how bad things are about to get. It’s also impossible to say how much of this is planned and how much is inept mismanagement. But it is worthwhile seriously considering what we might want and what needs to be done to get it.

In my view, we need to consider non-hierarchical – anarchical – modes of governance. This does not mean lawlessness, it means non-hierarchical in the sense of preventing institutionally rigid power accumulations hell bent on ever more power. UK common law captures what I think of as an anarchic – or organic – legal apparatus. The excessive legal complexity built atop it over the centuries proliferated into being as a direct consequence of our money-based value system and the foundational scarcity that is its jealously guarded lifeblood. Add extreme specialisation and rigid hierarchical power to that mix and you end up here.

We need to break this wheel if we don’t want more of the same.

In terms of politics, then, I’d like to see regional polities facilitating self governance in ideology-free, fully transparent fora activated when small, local groupings cannot manage things above a certain scale. Regional groupings should be engaged by local groupings, not vice versa, to avoid nannying interference by those not intimately familiar with local context. I’d like to see such structures designed to be systemically incapable of producing large Power-Over groupings. I’m confident this scales to international levels.

These sorts of structuring arrangements could become desirable to large numbers of us if, before and while things disintegrate in the UK and EU, there is a sufficiently successful campaign to educate ourselves at mass level about how power corrupts and what to do about that pragmatic reality. Because political parties, civil services, justice systems and mass media have failed us in this essential duty – as checks and balances against power –, this will be quite the undertaking. We will need police and army on our side in significant numbers, as well as large sections of the judicial and business worlds. Nevertheless, we either take on that challenge, or leave our future in the hands of insane tyrants. 

Other options are not clear to me. Certainly the Old Normal is gone.

If ‘elites’ have demonstrated anything, it is that they are wildly incapable of wise long-term thinking, for the sorts of structural reasons touched on above; they strongly tend to maladaptive rigidity. To create something that effectively inhibits this dynamic – a dynamic that the BRICS++ nations will face soon enough – we Westerners would first have to leave the consumerist hamster wheel behind us, i.e., no longer want it. For us to desire that daunting socioeconomic vector, those of us who feel as I do will have to succeed in making our case while those who disagree watch their living standards seep into history’s fertile soil. 

That’s my wild hope, anyway.