Progress! We can kill millions in a moment

Daily Mail: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Putin is killing Ukrainians and Russians to stop The West / Ukraine killing Russians and Ukrainians. The West armed Ukraine to become NATO’s third largest army (after US and Turkey) because Russia is a threat (or maybe not). Russia feels threatened by The West’s insistence that Russia is a threat. Russia apparently tried to join NATO to ease tensions, twice. NATO said no, twice. (What’s the point of NATO if Russia is an ally?)

If I were Russia, I would feel threatened.

So then war, because Russian-speaking Ukrainians may not speak Russian in Ukraine and Putin Is Evil. And perhaps also because there’s no point to the infamous MIC (military industrial complex) unless there are regular wars with reliably belligerent enemies, or with unwitting scapegoats who can be made enemies.

Thinking beyond these obvious tropes, what historical vectors were set in motion after Russia declared that Ukraine joining NATO is a Red Line? It was surely clear to Russia that The West’s NATO Machine must expand ever eastwards. Unstoppable force meets immovable object? What can Russia realistically do to protect its perceived interests other than reabsorb Ukraine so as to keep NATO out, thereby preventing NATO from being at Russia’s borders, there where it really matters, but thereby putting NATO at Russia’s new expanded borders? Quite the conundrum.

What would happen if NATO were to defeat Russia, then China? What is the point of NATO’s existence after it defeats all its (required) enemies? Needing war to exist, should NATO set out to defeat all enemies until it no longer has a raison d’etre (other than alien invasion)? Would total victory be its death knell? 

In a similar vein, if the WEF/globalists were to control all nations on earth, what then? Would the ‘elites’ be content and sane at last with nothing left to do but loaf about on expensive jets and yachts? Would we fractious proles finally be respectful, obedient underlings?

When you win the ‘complete control’ you always dreamed of, what happens next?

Is utopia dystopia?

Israel/Palestine is just as ugly, just as dumb, just as horrific. What if Israel kicks all Palestinians out? Would that mean lasting peace? Or would Israel’s neighbours feel existentially threatened? Would Israel feel threatened by its neighbours feeling existentially threatened by its existence?

In Germany, the vice president of the SPD feels threatened by the AfD. She has joined calls to ban the ‘far right’ party. To protect democracy and celebrate diversity, we must first ensure we are all on the same page, and censure those whose views threaten us. But then those deemed threatening by The Good Guys feel threatened. People tend to think they’re the good guys, that those odd folks over there who speak funny can’t be trusted.

Though there are layers of intellectualising and party-political rhetoric between us and the core, it seems to boil down to the drab banality of human groups mistrusting each other because they can’t not. We are very adept at perceiving ‘fundamental’ differences in each other – because skin colour or ethnicity or culture or religion or nationality or class or rank or profession or IQ – and choosing enmity over humility and compassionate curiosity.

We can’t not; we don’t know how to stop; decisions are investments in the future and tangle us up, bind us in ever tightening ideological straitjackets. We become massed machinery going through the motions, dully horrified at what we’re doing. But, wholly unwilling to look in the mirror and say “I’m the bad guy!?”, we scream that it’s the fault of the other guy. The Enemy Other, the Hated Despicable Unhuman Monster Other. 

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self. – T. S. Eliot

We have become that ugly, that dumb, that dulled. To save face, to keep a machinery going that we don’t know how to stop, we are doing monstrous damage to self and others but desperately do not want to know this. We are the victims! They are the bad guys! Our visceral desperation to not know how monstrous we have become is tearing us apart. It powers us on with the self-replenishing fuel of its hot and horrible emotion to do yet more of the same horrors; we are, in effect, addicted.

It can be very hard to back down. Narcissism tends to escalate to sociopathy tends to escalate to psychopathy tends to escalate to … coloniopathy? This is the escalator that flows ever upwards from too much power in too few unwise hands. (I think it fair to say narcissism is an early infatuation with power over others.)

Some days, the noxious stench of it all turns my soul to ash. On others, I know we are about to snap through it to some other thing. Sometimes knowing that it can be no other way, but that this horror too shall pass, is enough to keep me sane. 

Dear Humanity, how much more tragically stupid can we get? How much more of this before we just can’t do it any more, break open, and burst into tears at what we have become?

The fury of history is now a whirlwind sucking all air from our lungs. We are stringless puppets tossed about, gasping to survive, rabid with fear and loathing but tasked with imagining something different. It is an impossibility that at times makes me rage at God so bitterly I am ashamed; it all feels so mechanically inevitable. It’s not about blame and guilt, but inevitability and what history can deliver by way of mutually reenforcing unintended consequences. Accepting this means accepting horror. Accepting horror, however sagely, turns my soul to ash.

And yet I know without doubt there is nothing but God, that I will always choose love and make the best of learning how. Again and again I ask myself on the solidity of these certainties: What is better than what we have? My best answer is to replace our current guiding principles of market, price and money (mechanical) with wisdom, love and health (organic). We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Our mechanical mindset turns beauty into widgets and manufactures insatiable hunger for more and more meaningless consumer items.

Humans are restless, that won’t change. We are curious and burn to know what lies over the horizon of every possible Normal du Jour. That won’t change. And there will always be tragedy because no rigid bureaucratic perfection guaranteeing Nothing Will Ever Go Wrong Again! is possible. But surely the current model is broken because it is at the end of its life. That’s all it is. It’s not about blame or Left versus Right. It’s not that Pure Capitalism isn’t Crony Capitalism, or that True Socialism isn’t Marxist or Leninist or Statist, it’s simply that we aren’t humble and loving enough to see straight. Not yet, anyway. 

Another of my convictions is that we have solved the problem economics deems insoluble: scarcity. We can produce enough of everything (if we drop Consumerism). On top of that, we no longer need each other economically as we used to. Technology and AI – neither is a panacea, both are misunderstood – have made the human predicament different. Economics ought to evolve accordingly to retain its veracity. We face fundamentally different challenges, structurally speaking, but our institutions and cultural reflexes, I suspect across the planet, are constitutionally incapable of perceiving and handling said challenges wisely.

Progress has progressed us here simply because it has. We can kill millions in a moment, find our way into real horrors we delighted and hated to imagine decades ago, but we can also create wonders. A team of hundreds, or even tens, or solo geniuses, can work for days or weeks or months and produce masterpieces that delight and inspire billions of us for decades, centuries. Or manufacture yet more oddly named pharmaceuticals that ruin lives or make no difference at all … because profit. Or produce bizarre financial instruments that enrich the few at the cost of the many … because money is what it’s all about. Or build AI overlords to censor and monitor us all, forever, because all trust is gone and nobody knows what’s ‘real’ any more.

These are the structural elements I believe power the noxious storm I describe here and elsewhere. These elements are no longer fit for purpose, but accepting this simple truth is anathema to the ‘elites’ – those structurally obliged to perpetuate the status quo – just as it is anathema to most of the ‘non-elite’ who are as attached to the familiar as the next guy. The banal obviousness of this is as ugly as it is hopeful. At some point we are not going to be able to take the stench of it any more, ‘elites’ and ‘proles’ alike. When that happens, when Tipping Point tips over on history’s pivot, the obviousness of what ails us will shine though our rage, hurt and tortured self-justifications like the sun, and we’ll be able to start healing, atoning, and imagining anew. 

One of my early experiments with AI art