The tug of power: ‘Elites’ drawn to the fascistic flame

Patrician disdain will out

We so often find ourselves in narrowing cul-de-sacs, don’t we, somehow unable to turn around and extricate ourselves. Whether in lives of insignificance or in positions of great responsibility and power, events grind on around us, favouring or dashing our hopes as they will, far from our immediate control, but so often down narrowing corridors that get harder and harder to escape. When this inevitability befalls the subjects of this article – those seduced by the tug of power – the consequences can be epochal. This is one of those moments, and has been, with growing intensity, for years now, probably decades.

What is power in its negative aspect but the desire and ability to make others act in ways they would otherwise not freely choose? What is fascism but power leveraged to extremes of abuse? Power corrupts cumulatively towards absolute power that corrupts absolutely. In so doing it stiffens, steadily losing its adaptive vitality until it breaks against its own rigidity. 

I have argued here repeatedly that the clothing and paraphernalia with which power decorates itself don’t matter all that much; the State as a process is necessarily about Weberian monopoly (and thus over time, absolute) power at its core, that all institutions established to hold this dynamic in check can be corrupted over time, as history works its magic in tandem with the ambitions and flaws of those in positions of institutional authority. Again: “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That tending corrupts in only one direction: towards the acquisition of ever more power. Corruption, in this context, offers no other reasonable interpretation.

None of this should be surprising to anyone. History records many details that can be devilishly hard to interpret, but its broad civilisational sweep tracks this pattern of power.

Can anything be done about this unintended artefact of civilisational advance? Should anything be done? Answering that question has become the primary objective of this blog, crystallised into the call to “Demote money, promote wealth”. It is an objective I abandoned in 2015 as personal events overtook me, but one that was thrust back to the front of my life by the shock of global lockdowns. The first article I wrote on that phenomenon was entitled, “Only the intensity has changed. Nothing will ever be the same again”, a title that draws on the perspective I set out above. Though I published the finished article in June 2020, the title popped out of my mouth in a conversation with my daughter in early April. The phrase emerged from a deep intuition that had flooded me in late March, that the lockdowns were the beginning of something very sinister, and as such filled me with a horrible foreboding. 

Events continue to develop more or less as that intuitive flood intimated, and as historical patterns of decadence and collapse – regardless of timescale and intensity – would suggest. Just a few days ago, the entire Canadian Parliament gave a monstrously unapologetic Nazi named Yaroslav Hunka a standing ovation. Not one single member of Canada’s Parliament remained seated. Mr and Mrs Zelenskyy cheered too. 

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a jew. He gave Mr Hunka, a Nazi, the honour of an enthusiastic fist pump. And Volodymyr knows very well how riddled Ukrainian power structures are with this vile ideology, the ideology of power and entitlement on the grounds of ethnicity alone, the ideology of dehumanising Untermenschen to ‘mere beasts’, which may then be treated however it pleases one to treat them. 

Trudeau, a man who looks like a dull but dangerous narcissist to me, announced to the press that the House’s Speaker was at fault for this terrible blunder, and that consequently Russian propaganda was to be studiously avoided. A more baseless non sequitur you will be very hard pressed to find, and this one from the mouth of Canada’s Prime Minister. The BBC have assisted Mr Trudeau in his efforts to slide the blame over to Russia.

Any claims of ignorance are pure manipulation. Why celebrate a man in front of cameras recording images that would potentially be shared with the world, a man who surely would have been minutely vetted before being allowed into the House – two heads of state were present –, allowed into the House for the very purpose of that celebration, but about whom you know know very little? Two standing ovations in Canada’s Parliament for a man of whom one knows next to nothing? “A 98-year old Ukrainian-Pole who killed Russians? Hero!!” An organised photo-op of such delicate PR import that was unplanned, or at best egregiously mismanaged? 

It doesn’t add up to me. A quick Wikipedia search would have sufficed.

More likely in my view is that ‘elite’ arrogance and sclerotic venality is at its ribald zenith. Their blunder was getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

But blunder or not, it was a very dark day that had been long in the making. Is it of a piece with the censorship, the mandates, the draconian lockdowns, the lies and deceptions, and so much else, that have been unleashed on the Western world in waves, whose onset was late March 2020? I suspect so. Global lockdowns were the very audible starting gun, though preparation for this broad and lasting assault on The People has likely been long indeed. I cannot be sure, but that initiating global event, though inaugurated in China and rolled out globally, appears to me to be primarily targeted at the West.

In its wake, having finally initiated Project New Normal, is patrician disdain for us hoi polloi now so intense and unbridled they can no longer conceal it? Has the deep and abiding revulsion that has festered so long behind their narcissist smiles burst free?

State power becomes toxic over time. (Et: l’État, c’est nous.)

Yes, [covering the Russia-Ukraine war] has changed my world outlook. It has taught me something about the West, something about Britain, which, you know, I’d sort of come to understand up to a certain point, but Ukraine has – let me put it like this – it’s shattered whatever remaining illusions I had. And it needs to be understood that Ukraine is really where it all begins: Russiagate, the response to the pandemic crisis, the disinformation campaigns that we see in the West – which are really purges of dissident views – all of these have their roots, in some respect, in this crisis in Ukraine. And of course it has been the great catalyst, also, of the Americans … I think … of the Americans starting to understand […snip…] the collapse of the unipolar system that the United States created. But what Ukraine has shown is that as far as the West is concerned – let’s talk about the leaders of the West – there really are no boundaries; there are no moral boundaries, there are no political boundaries, they’re perfectly willing to get into bed with Nazis – this is what this Canada business ultimately shows –, they’re prepared to work with the most terrible people, even people they’ve spent the last 70 years rightly condemning for their […snip…] extreme evil in the 1930s and 1940s. There are absolutely no limits, there are absolutely no restraints, there’s no point where these people will stop. And they are also prepared to take absolutely monstrous risks with the survival of humanity.  – Alexander Mercouris in answer the first question asked in the linked livestream (registration required to view)

All the toxins are coming to the surface, oozing from the rot that is the nasty fruit of incestuous entitlement, that ugly perversion of noblesse oblige left too long in its own bubble. But where there is a ‘noble’ ‘elite’, there must also be a hoi polloi, an unwashed mass. The former needs the latter to have meaning. 

Together, we are the State.

We are being shepherded – or are we shepherding each other? – from hysteria to hysteria. In mass hysteria, what is most ugly in us urges to the surface and will out. Our suppressed depths are suddenly on display for all to see. Reason and decorum are jettisoned as the survival instinct takes over. From where I stand, it looks like collective debts have come due; some kind of psychic reckoning is at hand (not to mention geopolitical).

What is it we are party to? How has this horror come to be? How have We, The People become so easy to coax into whatever state of hysteria the ‘elite’ deem useful?

Well, because we have been necessarily dumbed down – for factory work, repetitive manual labour, grunt work, to be reliably manipulatable consumers –, because we are the State, because real history is being made an irrelevance in the interests of durable stability and more financial wealth for our ‘protectors’, our ‘superiors’. These are the essences of the root deal, the “social contract” that is the State, that ‘beneficent’ protection racket. 

Now that a profound bifurcation point is upon us – The Fourth Industrial Revolution – there where history really counts it is being stealthily rewritten. Our past is being rewritten. Our minds are being rewritten. We must fit into what is being installed, neatly, compliantly, willingly.

In Hiroshima earlier this year, Ursula von der Leyen implied that Russia was and remains the planet’s nuclear threat. She failed to mention it was the US that dropped the bombs that devastated two Japanese cities in 1945. 

History and cultural norms are being bent out of shape to accommodate the New Normal. Can’t you see that nazism/fascism is being carefully rebranded into a shiny niceness that translucently gloves autocratic rule? Can you feel how pedophelia is stealthily being made ever more acceptable? Blacks across the US and UK seem to believe slavery is a phenomenon in which white people enslave black people, and that’s all there is to it. Whites are therefore racist. It is as simple and unambiguous as that. 

In the interests of better control, to ensure a lasting stability some time after a period of managed chaos, we are being set at each other’s throats. Culture is being deliberately reengineered while we are endlessly encouraged to bicker and brawl. The stage is being set, the lights dimmed, the exciting new show is about to begin. As far as I can tell, this programme is occurring primarily in the West, but will be extended globally if the ‘elite’ globalists get their way.

In other words, We, The People can be led like sheep from mass panic to mass rage, and back again, for the simple reason that much time and money has been invested – decades and centuries of it – to make sure we are sheep. (Whisper: “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.”) There’s no more important tool of statecraft than propaganda, right? How good is We, The People at inter-group dialogue these days? Worse than ever. So many topics are taboo, what we are left with, socially, is a pervasive toxic niceness – the misbegotten brat of respectful manners –, a shallow facade that cracks quickly into red-faced rage. 

Triggered yet?

Three quotes I cite regularly: “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” 

I hope it is clear to you how these three quotes belong together. My fear is that the opposing historical current – the endless conveniences delivered by the march of progress and technological advance – has so shaped how we in the West see the world, how we apprehend reality, that the pivotal importance of these three quotes is lost on most today, certainly those under 40. These three vital quotes would have to be animated in rapidly changing saturated primary colours and be spoken dramatically by very cute unicorns and very scary demons to have the slightest chance of making an impression on an entitled and spoiled Western world. Which is precisely why I have argued that deep collapse is a prerequisite to a healthy historical course correction. 

Perhaps this very correction is being part-engineered by Putin’s SMO in Ukraine, an horrific necessity he sorely wanted to avoid. Whatever the truth of this, his is a decision that has awoken the non-Western world to its own potential, its growing ability to loose a weakening global bully from its throat. I understand over 60 nations want to become members of BRICS+. Their desire speaks volumes, as does their willingness to make that desire public, regardless of how viable BRICS+ proves to be. Does this momentous geopolitical shift presage the correction the West so desperately needs?

The West is in steep decline, its credibility and authority disintegrating precipitously. Seeing this, watching on incredulously as the West needlessly eviscerates itself, the rest of the world responds accordingly. Currently, the main vehicle of that response is the BRICS. This battle of the giants spells historical turbulence aplenty, turbulence whose fallout will be devastating for the West, though primarily for the EU and the UK.

Love is always the answer

But one that tiggers most people more than any other. 

Nobody leaps from zero to love just by deciding to do so. Love is a long and winding way that starts small and delivers mysterious fruits whose joys and sustenance are hard to taste at first. 

Love is an emanation, is endemic to consciousness, to the nature of reality, and is both earned and unearned. It is the state of being you become at peak health, or rather when your health – the health that you dynamically are – is rich and complete, from top to toe. Love is thus true wealth that wants for nothing.

I don’t measure friendship by the number of my friends, but by the quality of the moments I share with my fellow earthlings. Friendship emerges from the quality of a shared moment to fade away organically as the moment moves on. As with breathing, one cannot hold on to the in breath forever.

Something deep in the DNA of civilisation, in humanity’s reflexive socialising groupthink, wants to hold on forever to that which secures power, affluence, pleasure. The State is an evolved social technology that structures this possessive desire towards impossible permanence. We are caught up in it more intimately than are fish in the sea. As we fear, so the State fears. As our fears oscillate turbulently, cumulatively outwards and upwards, so the State decays. And so we all suffer. 

So goes history.

This is easy to observe, but far harder to change, to evolve beyond. Logic suggests that as we learn to love, to become love, so will the State. The State may well be breathed away one last time, to be replaced by something else, I don’t know. But if we want something healthy, something deeply good and beyond the rot of today, love is the way that will birth it.

The West stars as Old Mother Hubbard in “The Rape of Ukraine”

Joe Biden’s performance as a senile US president in The Rape of Ukraine convinces to the point that one cannot tell fiction from fact. His commitment to the role borders on the obsessive; apparently, scans of the actor’s brain at work produced data wholly consistent with a man suffering advanced senility. Beneath the senility, Biden hews tenaciously to the core character arc of a street gangster somehow elevated by historical happenstance to Most Powerful Man on Earth. His business interests in Ukraine, that tragic country, embroil both him and the rest of the world in a sequence of events that gathers threatening momentum like a runaway juggernaut. 

Representing Germany, Olaf Scholz is equally convincing as a man of low character bereft of ideas, too compromised to control a government of low-IQ zealots driving an ideological agenda whose only feasible outcome is Germany’s shabby denouement. He acquiesces again and again to every demand made of him by his true master, the United States, no matter its price to the nation that is his charge. 

In France, Emanuel Macron persuades volubly as an unpopular French president inspired upwards on the winds of his own rhetoric into intoxicating delusions of grandeur. These hover him aloft at a quivering zero-point between the conflicting needs and agendas of the French people, the EU, NATO, the US and, of course, his magnificently inflamed ego, from which position he accomplishes precisely nothing but obedience to US demands. All this clothed in a high-priced style that fails to mask his mediocrity. He is the only actor I know of who could pull off such a delicate cinematic feat without over egging his performance. Chapeau!

The formerly impressive United Kingdom stars in an important cameo that might be summed up as a poorly attended parade of unwanted prime ministers, each tasked with bellowing louder and yet more stridently than the US for “more war!”. I hope you can forgive me in forgetting their names, but all actors cast in their roles were as convincingly uninteresting as they were paradoxically pivotal. A job well done, all in all.

And who can forget the EU! Perhaps my favourite scene is The Rape of Ukraine’s most pointedly dramatic. Ursula von der Leyen, played brilliantly by none other than von der Leyen herself, stands astride two gutted washing machines, dominating them completely. Behind her, blue and yellow flames rage, morphing at times to suggest the Ukrainian flag, at others that of the EU. Pinched between the forefinger and thumb of each hand, von der Leyen holds aloft two glinting microchips  that she wields ferociously, using them as razorblades to rip to tatters a red square of fabric, meant, I assume, to represent the Russian economy. Her golden mane remains implacably opposed to the winds of history howling around her no matter how wildly her movements and the winds rage. No matter indeed; the fabric will not tear! Around her, as if emerging from the yellow and blue inferno, grows the booming, menacing laughter of Vladimir Putin, evil Judo Master, Master Geo-Chess-Politician. He haunts the movie’s every scene.

The overall tragedy, recounted by the film’s many principal and supporting actors, is of a once beautiful country – Ukraine – devastated in the clash between Western powers in the right corner, refusing – angrily, destructively, sociopathically – to accept a more equitable balance of geopolitical power, and in the left the non-western world waking up to the tantalising, nay irresistible attraction of shaking off its economic subservience to that now fading Western power, and it is truly a horror to behold. One is of course always a passive spectator at the movies, but this incredibly moving account of a faraway land turns one’s passivity into bitter impotence as the needless savagery builds on itself in ever escalating waves, each more nauseating than the last. It is truly Greek in its inevitability, but at a scale perhaps even the Greeks could not have imagined.

The actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy brilliantly portrays the actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Ukrainian TV celebrity painfully incapable of balancing the external and internal forces that propelled him to Ukraine’s presidency in 2019. Watching on from the warm glow of the movie theatre, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry as his fate turns ever crueler. Real actors from The West flock to his banner in moral support of his gritty performance to defend his beloved country from the Pure Evil of Grand Judo Master Vladimir Putin, Dictator of The Soviet Union, formerly President of the Russian Federation. But their support proves too little as events unfold. Intoxicating hopes burn to ash again and again as Russia’s military-industrial onslaught grinds relentlessly on consuming everything in its path. The bitterness is almost too much to bear. 

With The West mercilessly egging Zelenskyy on from a safe distance, with the deadly and fascistic Banderites openly threatening his and his family’s lives, he cracks. Hard drugs help him cope, but of course with decreasing effectiveness. Not remotely up to the historical challenge, he resorts to type to rely on crass propaganda and low-brow messaging to conceal from his people this increasingly plain and bitter truth; he heads a country being torn apart at the behest of a Western world coldly interested only in its own power, and in the familial wealth of its angrily demented president. As support from The West wanes, as Ukraine’s ability to resist the monster it faces is exposed as too little, so the Old Mother Hubbard aspect of this tale comes to the fore. The West’s cupboard is shown to be bare, emptied too much for too long by the hungry ambitions and grandiose ventures of previous productions.

Though allegedly based on a true story, it is hard to type The Rape of Ukraine. Is it farce? Is it a theatre of the absurd? Tragi-horror? Thriller, war flick, political intrigue, mobster movie? It is all and none of these at once, a unique experience in story telling more entertaining in an easily bored post-modern era than everything that preceded it and prepared the way. It is a veritable Hall of Mirrors for modernity in which image and reality fuse to one. So horrific and terrible is it to behold that I am loathe to recommend it to your attention, but feel I must; it is just that compelling.

The only question is whether humanity can survive much more entertainment of such electrifying quality.

(The Rape of Ukraine is brought to you by Neocon Magical Thinking, Produced by Robert Kagan and Directed by Victoria Nuland.)

UTOPIA

Great city of reason

let loose all your meaning

your soul torn and bleeding:

an opening wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Sweet, seductive, craven

rainbow’s tempest raging

the never-ending blaming

flowing from the wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Bring all your children

all guilty feeling

that deep imposter syndrome

and feed them to the wound.

I can feel myself sinking

I can feel myself sinking…

Dark sun you are

you are –

you are dark star

dark radiant star you are

we you are

we are

you we are     we are         we are

(With gratitude to an old friend)

Key differences between The Digital and The Real

Source

1.  The Digital is highly controllable (at least in theory). Even when it disobeys or behaves unpredictably, the fix seems to be but a few code tweaks away, the initiating cause human error. The Real is organically, unpredictably defiant, with free will working its magic always. Every living thing has its own idiosyncratic ‘agenda’, expectations and plans be damned.
2. The Digital is measurably precise and fully knowable, governed (in theory at least) by pure logic. The Real is irreducibly ineffable.
3. The Digital deceives, bewitches and seduces. The Real inspires profound awe and could not be more authentic, even while it deceives, bewitches and seduces (on purpose).
4. The Digital belongs to us, is in our possession, and can be infinitely adapted to our will. The Real owns us; we are at its mercy and must adapt to its vicissitudes, or perish.
5. The Digital –

Hold on, aren’t I spouting false dichotomies? Aren’t the above words, at best, an idly provocative exercise in click-bait entertainment? (Click bait? I wish!)

Or perhaps they are a playful-but-serious attempt to understand how we now have a couple of lost generations, those around 30 and under, who have grown up enjoying access to Instant Gratification. The few comparisons above bring into relief various observations we can reasonably tease out of the prevailing milieu that are not wildly off target. I believe something like the above has haunted modernity for centuries and is now doing serious damage.

In my eyes, something is going dangerously wrong for the 30s and under; I 4 1 would like to understand and appreciate as much of the causal phenomena as possible. This article is a tentative foray in that direction.

“Welcome to the desert of the real.”

That’s a (digital) meme. I am composing this text (digitally) on a laptop to be shared soon (digitally) across the internet. All digital, all convenient, all easy peasy and isn’t it lovely all this sharing! But are we (irredeemably) spoiling ourselves with Easy Peasy and instant gratification of our ephemeral desires? Have we spoilt ourselves too much this time? 

To balance the above somewhat, how enlightened, how well informed, have we become?

It depends. Certainly it’s both-and.

The internet is an impossibly vast ocean of every conceivable kind of visual and auditory delight: entertainment; trickery, sobriety, deception, and honesty; science, entertainment and news; delusions of grandeur, unintended and blisteringly open honesty; kittens; the monstrous and the beautiful; self-indulgent victimhood and virtue signalling, and so on. We are so spoilt for choice we could browse forever and a day and barely make a dent on the content yet to be consumed. The day after that we’d still feel restless and empty, empty and unwanted. 

Into what strange paradise have we progressed ourselves? A digital paradise of Ultimate Convenience and high-saturation colours, the next thrill or delight or shock a mere click or swipe away. We consume content, we create content: we spend our attention, we clamour for attention. Doesn’t it feel like something is missing, something very important, something frustratingly hard to define, bottle, mass produce, and control? It feels that way to me.

Am I a luddite curmudgeon, you ask? Actually, I kind of love the internet, computing, programming, all that. However, as with any tool, The Digital can be abused, and in being abused, abuse. As you do unto Other, so you do unto Self. We have progressed ourselves into a miraculous toolshed whose power we understand but dimly. Our dim understanding undermines us unseen … partially unseen.

The Digital is powerful. It is in some ways technology’s latest and greatest armoury, and as such entices humanity’s best and brightest to pursue wealth, power, and immortality ensconced within it. Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton said that). Fake news and deep fakes belong to humanity now. Movies look utterly convincing, but all they seem to do is bang our bucks into fireworks of glittering spectacle that sometimes become story – as an afterthought almost –, but mostly do not. And when the lights go back on, we wonder, dimly, what remains that we can still trust. Restless and empty, empty and unwanted, it seems like our one remaining ‘power’ is maintaining peace of mind until the next distracting fix can be found. Our abilities in this regard seem to be quickly deserting us.

What’s that gnawing doubt I can’t quite dispel? Have we left something important behind, some ineffable equivalent of smell, taste, caress?

I’ve been musing of late that ‘community’ (whatever that is) might not be The Answer. Indeed, I’m convinced The Answer is not the answer. Looking for such, as variously as we have done, seems to have progressed us here. Persisting with that search continues to lead astray.

Community is to me a complex social context in which humans existentially rely on their fellow community members, people they know very well indeed. Community evolves organically as a result of very intimate life-and-death interdependencies that are the natural expression of human beings, that very social creature. Community is thus, fundamentally, a stranger-free zone. 

The internet, on the other hand, is a ‘community’ of consumable experiences created in concert with other humans who are (almost) all physical strangers to us; it is a stranger-rich zone in which no one really relies on anyone else, at least not existentially. All the other members of this new ‘community’ are deliciously, bitterly replaceable. 

Are we steadily rendering impossible any chance of a return to a situation in which we do rely on each other intimately and existentially? If that is what is needed for community to be community, what might be the costs of fervently trying to recreate the conditions from which true community can evolve?

On the other hand, if the future continues to be more of today – just more intensely –, in how bad a state of affairs are we? How far are we drifting from what is biologically, or organically, appropriate to humanity?

As part of the answer, is it a valid argument to observe, “I look around and see lost, depressed young people almost everywhere”? Or is it more valid to point at the alarming growth of the antidepressants market? Or the drugs designed to ameliorate hyperactive children? For those who’ve looked into this sort of thing, as for those with children of their own, this is familiar but troubling territory. Surely, in light of both our intuitive impressions and research on such matters, it’s not overly dramatic of me to ask whether something is going dangerously wrong.

If it is a Brave New World we are headed for, do we know what we’re doing?

Fundamental error?

While I’m confident some part of our predicament is the pace of technological change clashing with our far slower rates of cultural and biological adaptation, I suspect it’s fair to say that some of what ails us is rooted in fundamental error. Being fundamental, this is error that intrinsically demands correction; it eats at us from within. Some of the quality of our error is, in my view, reflected in the (surface) differences between The Digital and The Real hacked out into the foreground above. And I assert this specifically as someone who argues that The Real (organic, analog) is composed of The Digital (incorrectly understood by most as mechanical, binary); The Digital, I argue, is in fact organic: neither mechanical nor binary, possibly ternary, certainly mysteriously complex. Likely, that’s quite a confusing confession for you. 

Well, I aim to please.

The Digital percolates up to, or manifests into, our field of perception through particular analytical filters that affect our perception as we try to make sense of reality in particular (mechanical/computational) contexts. And yet The Digital we have thus perceived into existence is not, as a consequence of this filtering, outright illusion; it’s just not the whole story. The mythical 0 and 1 of the binary world, though seemingly very literal and ‘real’ when rendered on a page or screen, depict – not are – foundational yes-no decision-making processes, or logical-gate operations that are nevertheless not as foundational as we might think. There are no actual, physically existing 0s and 1s. Different phenomena are leveraged to act as true-false, yes-no, 0-1 binary elements to run systems built atop such logic-driven procedures. And it is all just as ‘real’ as anything else, like all information, but not ultimately foundational. Not until, that is, we add in the missing ingredient: the ineffable.

Nor are 0s and 1s indivisible atoms, nor can physics find any bits of matter or stuff that are finally indivisible (atomic). The search for an Indivisible Something yields “virtual” entities that defy full understanding (quarks and other sub-sub-atomic phenomena) that are co-existent with an array of interdependent forces and rules all required simultaneously for anything – for thingness – to be possible at all. The search for foundational building blocks has instead unearthed webs of information (mathematical rules) that are anything but indivisible lego bricks that can be reduced no further. It’s will-o’-the-wisps all the way down, where each one of which dissolves as soon as you isolate it (notionally) into the palm of your mind’s eye. 

Nothing makes sense in isolation. Or at least, not for very long, nor ever in some complete manner.

This string of non-controversial observations, for me, hints at the organic foundational underpinning of The Digital. Part of our civilisational exploration into the nature of reality has given us The Digital (in fact centuries ago). The way we peer into the nature of reality determines to some unknowable degree what we discover. The journey is the destination, the means are the ends. The Digital is no exception: Way become Goal, unexamined Mindset become Paradigm. The Digital is a useful, powerful, helpful paradigm or perspective, but not the whole story, and not in fact the ultimate foundation, which is, in my view, ineffable. The Digital thus has its roots in the ineffable and could not persist uprooted from it … cannot be uprooted from it.

(There is nothing but God. Everything is God.)

A car appears to be a purely mechanical entity, but it emerged from the organic and is inescapably subject to it, embedded in it, made of it. Each ‘identical’ car that comes off the production line – even if no human hand touched any part of it during its manufacture – faces a unique destiny. It will be subjected to different owners, be driven every single time on a unique, impossible-to-repeat journey, endure unique moments while parked wherever, each moment impossible to repeat. All cars, all manufactured things – be they pencil sharpeners, razor blades or Jumbo Jet cockpits – emerge from the organic, remain forever in the organic, and are inescapably subject to it. 

The same thing goes for computers, software, tiny little bits of code, everything. It is not possible to separate The Digital from The Real in an ultimate way. Notionally, yes, to a degree, and it is helpful to do so, but the separation achieved is just notional.

(Everything is God. There is nothing but God.)

Just as a thought is of consciousness but is not itself conscious, just as it is finally impossible to fully appreciate consciousness and spirit, so The Digital must always escape our grasp and produce unintended consequences our wisdom will never be able to anticipate. Our pseudo-mastery of this powerful set of tools far exceeds our grasp of its ramifications and meanings. 

We leap forward technologically in mighty bounds, but the great acceleration of our advance is breaking us apart. We are puppets yanked this way and that on the strings of our invention. We are dazed and dizzy, lost and soul-sick, but, strangely, can hardly tell this is so; everyone around us is, more or less, in the same condition. Only if we were to pop back in time, say to the early Middle Ages, would our manic state of being become discernible to us. Potentially, anyway; we would need to be there long enough to truly internalise the stark differences, then pop back to the present day and be horrified.

Now what? 

At whom or at what do we point the finger of blame? Where is the cause of our predicament that is simple, weak compared to us, and rectifiable?

Nowhere. No one and nothing is to blame. This is a very very difficult and involved situation. 

Decisions are investments in the future. Our willingness and ability to change course – should a course change be needed – is directly proportional to the amount of effort and energy the required course change would consume. And we tend to drift into our decisions, which takes very little energy: the infamous slippery slope so many of us reflexively prefer. So regardless of any morality or ideology we might impute to a situation, we become emotionally invested in How Things Are simply because changing them is most often an almighty undertaking. That very emotionality then becomes entangled in some ideology or other, which is itself also an investment born of hundreds of tiny ‘decisions’ that produced it, such that the inertial resistance to change grows over time. Despite the fact that nothing lasts forever.

Such is our entanglement with The Digital, and our modern disaffection with The Real. Such are the deeps roots and the deep soil of this false dichotomy.

My sense of what we can do in the meantime, is that the best we’ve got is noticing, talking about what we notice, taking small measures to meaningfully slow ourselves down, switch off, share with each other how the differences between the Infinite Cornucopia of The Digital compare to the Infinite Cornucopia of The Real, and learn how to really feel the beauty and mind-boggling complexity of the latter. The Real tends to seem drab and slow to gadget-addled minds, frustrates with its vital refusal to submit to our whims, always goes its own recalcitrant way, makes a mess of everything, makes our efforts seem puny and pointless. Learning how to see it with more open eyes, with humility, to feel, appreciate and then love it is one part of how to compensate for the breakneck speed with which modernity keeps bursting out of itself – ever forwards and wilfully blind to the past – into ever more spectacular iterations of itself, without ever really ‘nourishing’ anything other than our manufactured hunger for yet more intensity, yet more saturation, yet more stimulation and (entraining) entertainment.

To repeat, this is a very difficult situation. We had best make our peace with this fact. History is bigger and badder than ever, globally interconnected nations and corporations and organisations and habits of thought and academia and media and all of it are incapable of sufficient decoupling to escape history and go it alone, while we individuals, we fish in history’s violently undulating waters, are stuck to it all, embedded as constitutionally in All That Is as words woven into an incredible story. 

But “make peace” does not mean to accept the decadent insanity, it suggests we moderate our expectations. There is most assuredly a Better Way – probably several of them. However, what lies between now and then will be determined microscopically by our individual efforts at peace of mind, at mindfulness, at love and wisdom as they pertain to how we treat each other, in humility, and so discover in the warm lights of our healthy skepticism, courage and openness what this Better Way might be.