hex_m_hell

In the land Kroy, there is a living sword. The people of the land worship the sword, and obey any who hold it. For they who holds the sword cannot die so long as they wield it. But one cannot wield it forever.

The sword demands that it may only be held by the greatest warrior, one who can raise an army and lead the people of the Kroy, the people of the sword, to victory. So it is that the blade demands that it be won by combat during each night of the blood moon.

There is a place on the holy mountain where sits a stone, a stone on to which the blade must be set before the blood moon rises. Only there can it lie, or shall it awaken a great beast who will seize it and bring ruin to the land. Then on that night will compete challengers and their armies, under the blood moon, for control of the sword and the land.

Generations have lived under the blade, have worshiped it's power, have stood with challengers and kings. The blade has reigned over peace and ruin, benevolent and monstrous, unwavering.

As night began to fall, many of Kroy felt both terror and hope. For it had been, since the last blood moon, the blade of Murtp. He had ridden in from the low country and promised, with twisted words, to spill the blood of those who weakened Kroy and lay waste to those who threatened it. But his was a reign of terror. For two years had the people starved, had they hid in fear, from Murtp and his horde. He promised to slaughter all who rose against him, all who stood with any challenger to the blade.

Yet on that night Demokalies the Younger chose to stand against Murtp, and with great oration called the fearful to unite. He promised to sheath the blade, but for this call to justice. Against Murtp and his marauders would the blade, once seized, be drawn.

And so it was, that the living sword, once again in the hands of a just king, did cease to bring such suffering to the people of Kroy. He chased the marauders to the edge of the kingdom, pitchfork to blade, that they cowered and hid in the swamps once again. This blade they have coveted, that they have held before, was once again beyond their grasp.

There had been those, who in these times of great suffering, had questioned the faith of the living sword. They had asked, “Can this blade plow our fields or harvest them? Can it thresh our grain? Is it right that we should allow ourselves to worship such a weapon, that retains its purpose even in the best hand?” Others still, in hushed whisper and only after wandering an ale too far, could sometimes be heard saying, “Let us rise together, without a challenger, as the next moon rises. Let us seize the blade to plunge into a blacksmith's fire. Let it be pounded into a tool that cannot be used as a weapon, a living tool that we can share, to bring us all prosperity.”

But with the blade in the hands of justice, such words no longer found ears. Thoughts of marauders slipped from their minds, and Kroy slept soundly. But the lowlanders did not, for the blade hungers for suffering and it calls to them.

Thought Slime dug in a bit on how Liberals really like to imagine a marketplace of ideas, and how that's total bullshit, in his video about Charlie Kirk.

Think of the term marketplace of ideas, right?

Like they present this as a market stall where people can pick good or bad ideas. And of course, people are rational actors according to market logic, who would naturally gravitate to the good ideas.

The good ideas just out compete the bad ideas. You don't really need to do anything other than present a better idea to defeat a bad idea, because it's just going to be innately more popular.

But if you're not terminally capitalism brained, there's a problem that is going to leap out at you in this analogy. Good ideas can't always afford think tanks and public relations people. They're not always funded by petrochemical billionaires. Good ideas might win in a fair fight, but why the fuck would people fight fair when their money is on the line?

I want to dig in on this a bit more, bit by bit.

Let's just start with the concept of “ideas as products.” This bit quote is from immediately after the first:

It also presents ideas, politics, ideology is simply a product to consume, a marker of identity, and a vehicle for self-expression rather than the means by which change is made.

I think it's worth talking about the difference between this model and a model that's actually informed by any kind of modern scientific analysis from the last … like what.. 50 years?

While the model of ideas as objects, chosen from collections of similar objects, by rational actors, is consistent with the science and social understanding of the 1600's (when the “marketplace” model first started to develop), it isn't consistent with anything anywhere near modern. Advertisement has been manipulating people for more than a century. Social psychology has given more and more insight into how people work. This has allowed advertisers to create more and more powerful and less and less visible messaging to control the customer behavior.

I would be remiss to not bring up the MKUltra mind control experiments from 1953-1973. While conspiracy theorists love to blow these out of proportions (there was a lot of crazy shit and wasted money), there was some success and work in this field didn't really stop in 1973. In the years following, psychological warfare became a central pillar of US military operations. It was ultimately turned against the US population in the form of, among other things, “embedded reporters” during the first Iraq war. Misinformation strategies that had previously been reserved only for the enemy simply became normal parts of military “public relations.”

The whole concept of “public relations” grows from the same root: the dark side of social psychology. The field of social psychology has shown that humans are definitely not rational actors, and are more prone to respond to their environments than to rationally respond to a given situation. The simple fact that one can predictably influence general (not individual) behavior by modifying a situation is alone enough to disprove the concept of a “rational actor.” Something, something, thank you for smoking.

But it's really ideas as inanimate objects that's most worth digging into. The Selfish Gene brought up the idea of ideas as replicators, like genes, in 1976. Memetic spread of mental disorders has been extremely well studied for at least half of that time. The idea of memes, the term coined by Richard Dawkins (brilliant evolutionary biologist and complete asshole who's wrong about a lot of other stuff), is impossible to miss in any discussion of Internet culture. There are whole YouTube channels devoted to dissecting memes in culture and analyzing their mutation. We literally use the term “viral” to talk about the spread of memes in common vernacular.

A modern model is not one of inanimate objects, but a contagion model. It doesn't make sense to talk about the relative value of one idea over another. We must instead think about infection vectors and immunity factors.

This is the difference between liberalism and anti-fascism. Liberals see no problem platforming bad ideas because they believe smart people will choose not to believe obviously bad ideas. Anti-fascists recognize the risk of infection vectors. Flipping the analogy, liberals believe that it's safe to spray everyone down with Ebola blood because any rational person would simply choose not to get Ebola. Meanwhile, anti-fascists quarantine the Ebola shower (much to the anger of confused liberals, who believe every disease has a right to be explored) while frantically trying to vaccinate as many people as possible.

Immunity is an interesting thing. It's not simply a matter of “has your immune system beaten this things in the past.” Rather, there are a lot of factors that go in to immunity. Pneumonia exposure is pretty common, but it's rare for people to actually get Pneumonia unless they already have a compromised immune system. Stress, lack of sleep, other infections (both past and present) can all influence how someone responds to exposure. Exposure time is often a factor, and sometimes a big factor, for infection rates.

You're more likely to get COVID from someone who's infected if you're in the same room without a mask than if you pass them on the street. You're less likely to get COVID if you have been vaccinated or have recovered from an infection (depending on the variant, vaccine, and previous infection). You're more likely to get Pneumonia if you've had COVID. Multiple factors play in to transmission rates.

The same is true for memes. People can be groomed to be more vulnerable to ideas. The Republican party has groomed it's base toward fascism for generations. Some memes can create pathways that allow other memes to spread.

In order to protect their business model from people trying to prevent mass extinction, the oil industry has been spreading disinformation to undermine trust in science. They didn't invent this strategy, they simply inherited it from the tobacco industry. These massive rich industries have managed to spread ideas that have absolutely no merit, to infect through pure exposure. Antivax and all types of conspiracy theories have exploited the pathways, killing millions just during the early waves of the pandemic (and continuing to kill).

These lies, this misinformation, was never the product of these companies. Rather, like industrial waste, this memetic effluent is a necessary side effect of business operation. Capitalism continuously floods our world with manipulation and misinformation. That's just what advertisements and public relations are.

In a strange way, even the persistence of the meme of the Free Market of Ideas against science and reason is itself memetic effluent, the toxic byproduct of manufacturing consent.

Would it help to bridge the gap between the old model and the new model by also using a market metaphor? Let us then refer to the updated model as “The Wet Market of Ideas.” Ideas, in this model, are not the products you are looking for but the pathogens you are exposed to. This market is not a street bazaar, but is rather located in a sewer.

Imagine for a minute you walk into a marketplace. You are splashed with blood from a butcher shop. You look over to see the table covered with the unrecognizable bits of animal meat. You start to realize there are quite a few stalls selling different parts of exotic animals from all over the world, both alive and dead.

The dead are in piles, blood running off the tables into knee deep water that you wade through. The living are stacked on top of each other, excrement from the top falling on those below and finally into that same water. Butchering and cleaning all happens in the same place. There is no running water, aside from that at your knees, or soap to be seen anywhere.

A person shuffles by you and coughs in your face.

This is, perhaps, a different marketplace than you had imagined at first.

But let's also recognize the fact that racists leverage derogatory images of wet markets to spread their own memetic pathogens. Let us then include the innoculative reminder that it is specifically the rich who demand exotic meats. It is specifically in service of their elite desires that these markets risk global pandemic, against the will, ignoring the protests, of normal people. This simple fact, more than anything else, makes the metaphor especially resonant.

We continue to be exposed to pathogens in order to serve the interests of the elite. This is a fact that unites all of us globally who are not those elites. Imagine what we could do if that idea went viral.

I keep finding useful ways of thinking about things as I continue to read Dawn of Everything by Graeber ( et al.)

The book outlines 3 basic forms of domination:

1. control over violence (sovereignty)
2. control over information (bureaucracy)
3. and charismatic competition (politics)

The modern “state,” it argues, is an illusion. Rather than being a thing itself, it's instead the combination of these three forms of domination. Additionally, these forms of domination, historically, did not necessarily develop together. While this is a useful way to think about the past, I think it's especially relevant right now to explore Neoliberalism as an ideology, Trumpism relative to other fascist movements, and what we can do about this whole mess.

Using this framework, I would argue that Neoliberalism positions sovereignty within the entity of the state (as the abstraction of “the people,” expressed through, occasionally militarized but often not explicitly military, law enforcement). In practice, a sovereign, as Graeber eludes to, combines elements of an authoritarian parent and a helpless child: the sovereign must be obeyed without question, but also requires constant care (to be dressed, fed, driven or carried around, etc). The sovereign is, by definition, above the law.

The aspect of violence beyond the law aligns quite well with modern law enforcement and the legal apparatus, able to kidnap, restrain, and kill without repercussion. While we will revisit this later, there is another group under Neoliberal capitalism that demands both obedience and constant care: the 1%. (In the US, the elite are so jealous of parents paying attention to literally their own children that they have rejected the concept of parental leave almost entirely.)

In 2014 Princeton University published a study basically proving the US is an oligarchy not a democracy (do you remember? Pepperidge Farm fucking remembers). We all know that the desires of the elite are more predictive of what policy will be implemented than are the desires of the population. So we are told that “We The People” are the root of sovereign authority, but we all really know, at least on some level, that none of us plebs are actually of that “We.” (Yet, there remains a cultural expectation that one performs belief in that illusion.) The US was designed, from the beginning, to produce this exact result. One of the most interesting and relevant (to this topic) observations in Dawn of Everything is, in fact, hiding in a footnote and is, actually, a reference to another book:

[…] whenever one group has overwhelming power over another […] both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will be an 'official version' of reality – say that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only ever have the best interests of their slaves at heart – which no one, neither masters or slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insist subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event.

How much more accurately could we describe “the job creators,” demanding us to perform submission? What are demands like “return to office” and “use AI” but the forced performance of submission against all logic and reason? As private equity drove up the price of housing, the threat to tech workers became “if you want to own a house, to build equity, submit. Otherwise, risk being houseless.”

Capitalism, as pointed out in Divine Right of Capital (Marjorie Kelly), took the structure of the monarchy pretty directly into the corporation. Historically, the monarch was the physical manifestation of the state. The corporation itself has legal personhood, emulating the same structure. Those within the realm of the monarch were functionally property, and so, Marjorie Kelly points out, this leaks through the veil when a corporation is bought or sold. Physical property is listed, but so too is a thing called “good will,” which, she argues (and I think demonstrates quite well in the book), is actually people (employees).

Historically the liberal “left” has pushed for a balance between bureaucracy integrated into the state and externalized bureaucracy managed by “markets” (markets which the state is then also responsible for managing). The liberal “right” generally pushes to externalize all bureaucracy to those markets and also not manage them at all. The global plague of Neoliberalism that lead us to fascism is essentially a complete acquiescence to the later.

Private security and, even more so, private military companies add yet another layer to the sovereign control of violence and right to act outside the law. But whether in the state or corporations, both sovereignty under Neoliberalism is solidly in the hands of the elite while bureaucracy may be offloaded to the state (so long as it does not inconvenience the sovereignty of the elite).

The defining facet of liberalism and Neoliberalism alike, though, is that of charismatic competition (labeled as “politics”). Competition between elites for symbolic control of power is the very definition of “freedom” as understood by those who believe in liberalism as an ideology. The fact that the two parties are not bound by any laws or restrictions to operate democratically, that they are simply clubs that can operate by any rules they see fit, that they are transparently controlled by elites to artificially restrict the pool of acceptable candidates, is irrelevant to the ideology. Freedom to choose who represents one's masters is the ultimate freedom.

This, not the arbitrary use of violence, not the blatant distortion of reality, not being rooted in white supremacy and Christian nationalism, this is the most important difference between Trumpism and the oder he's trying to replace.

Authoritarianism eliminates the competitive element of politics while maintaining or expanding sovereignty. State Communism unifies sovereignty and bureaucracy. Nazism and Italian Fascism moved sovereignty out of the state and on to the leader, but maintained bureaucracy (both for the execution of sovereign violence, but also for some elements of social reproduction). Trumpism follows Neoliberalism in the complete externalization of all bureaucracy not explicitly supporting the execution of sovereign violence.

In this way, Trumpism becomes a power sharing system between the dictator and the oligarchy. It stabilizes, some elites may believe, the relationship between corporations and the sovereign. It can even allow elites to express their own sovereign violence, so long as they don't threaten the core sovereignty of the dictator.

This is almost a fun house mirror reflection of the pre-existing order. Where once the federal government delegated sovereignty to the states, and states to counties, and counties to cities, all having maximum sovereignty within their own domain so long as it doesn't conflict with the sovereignty of the container, Trumpism places the dictator as the ultimate authority, delegating to oligarchs, and they to their corporate underlings, each earning their position through fealty to those above. Fealty being a key word here, as others have pointed out that this is just another take on Feudalism.

While analysis is all good fun, it's not alone actionable and what we need, in the face of this horror, is action. What does this tell us to do about Trumpism?

Let's turn for a moment to the section of Dawn of Everything from which the earlier mentioned footnote comes.

Such cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a rule's actual power (as in their ability to make anyone do anything they don't want to do). If 'the state' means anything, it reference precisely to the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.

Society is a ritual. There is a limit to the ability of any sovereign to force our participation in that ritual. The sovereign requires agents, who must, by simple resource limitations, always be a very small minority, to carry out their will. The agents must believe in what they're doing, they must get something out of it, it must be valuable to them to continue to do it. When it ceases to be valuable, they will stop. When the agents of the sovereign stop enforcing the sovereign will, the ritual collapses.

Then we have two strategies, in parallel:

1. Do not comply.
2. Make active compliance as unpleasant as possible.

Neither of these necessarily require violence. A system can collapse through non-compliance long before defensive violence is necessary. But the ability to absorb violence is critical as violence is the only tool of the sovereign who lacks bureaucracy and charisma. And violence may become necessary as sovereign terror, thus the capacity for defensive violence is always an essential element of non-compliance. But non-compliance is not always visible, and invisible non-compliance can be enough to bring a system to collapse.

Now, it would be absurd to claim that violence is not the fastest path to making active compliance maximally unpleasant. However, I don't believe that violence has a well balanced effort to result ratio. Violence has a tenancy to alienate less radical elements thereby decreasing resistance capacity. It also tends to reduce capacity by getting people arrested (some of whom may be the ones who carried out an attack, and many of whom are not). Arrests bring legal fees and defense organizing, all of which takes away from energy that could be invested in resistance methods with a better effort to result ratio.

It should, however, be noted that diversity of tactics is important. Reporting people to the police if they use a tactic that doesn't align with your own effort to result calculations is, in fact, a form of compliance. Cooperating with law enforcement in any way is a form of compliance that helps the regime. I feel as though this should be so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but some people apparently are ideologically incapable of recognizing it.

This is where it becomes important to consider the ideology behind the sovereign ritual. Participation within the sovereign ritual denotes to the participants elements of the sovereign. That is, all agents of the sovereign are, essentially, micro dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.

They also take on the aspect of the dictator. That is, through the dictator they become the projection of the character of the dictator. If the dictator projects the illusion strength, then they believe themselves strong. If the dictator projects the illusion of sexual potency, they believe themselves to be sexually potent. Openly mocking those those specific elements separates the micro dictator from the macro one. That is, it refutes their “right” to ritually embody the illusion. In doing so, it is a direct attack on their reason for participating in the ritual. Portland is nailing this one.

Acting outside of the law means acting without accountability. Trumpism (and to a lesser degree liberalism itself) asserts that only the state as the right to hold people accountable. Only in this way can sovereignty and the law be ultimately united. This is bullshit, as we've proved innumerable times in the past. There should be, and often is, a social cost to anti-social behavior (outside of the legal one). We have always had this power, and always will, regardless of Trumpist attempts to crush or belittle it. This is, of course, why they wear masks.

They wear masks because are afraid.

Then we turn to that most critical part of that so well known Ursula K. Le Guin quote:

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

The ritual can only continue so long as enough people participate in the ritual. The ritual is a collective illusion, a story we build together. Children pretend themselves into all kinds of world. Adults don't stop pretending, we simply forget that we've been pretending the whole time. Though a regime could even take your life, and force you to behave as though you were a believer, nothing on Earth is powerful enough to make you actually believe. That power, the power to believe the illusion, is in you alone.

The game we are choosing to play is one that has been given to us, not one we have chosen, not one we have crafted. Nothing stops us from creating a new game. Nothing stops us from playing something else. Nothing except the limits of our own creativity, and the fear that imposes those limits.

I awoke to the sound of a gunshot resolving out of the white noise of a fan near our bed. You can tell the sound of a bullet because it has a tail. I remember those nights after we first moved to South Seattle, listening and playing gunshot or firework. I bet most of the white folks gentrifying the area at the time couldn't tell the difference, but we could.

This is maybe the third or fourth time I've woken from a nightmare tonight, but it wasn't a nightmare this time. It was a sound… a sound that wasn't a sound. It took me a few moments to realize I didn't hear it with my ears, but with the skin above where my solar plexus was. There's skin there now, above the missing cartilage and bone, where there once, and for almost a year, was only a hole.

The next question, when we would identify a gunshot, was “whom?” You could hear the police shooting range in the neighborhood. Sometimes the sound was far off and ambiguous. Others it was close and there was no mistaking. Sometimes it was followed by screeching tires. Most of the time we didn't hear an ambulance.

If you were by the elementary school during recess as kids played, the sound of gunfire from the range would occasionally mix with the screaming of children.

I didn't hear the gunshot that night. At least, I don't remember hearing it. I didn't know I'd been shot until I saw the blood, then someone came up and told me. Those moments, of the actual shooting, were blank and remainded so for a long time. It took me years to put together what happened. Sometimes remembering is still a little like unscrambling an egg.

People want to know what it's like getting shot. When they ask, they're always wondering about the moment, or the time from the instant where everything stops making sense until it stops being interesting to them: when they knock you out in the ambulance, your first surgery, whatever.

Movies only seem to show those moments, and everyone knows, at least on some level, that they usually get those moments wrong. But even if they got them right, that's not what matters. That's not the experience. It's never that strange and narrow stretching minutes that feel like hours. It's the months that feel like days and years that feel like weeks that follow.

There is no easy way with sound and motion to convey the time dilation of trauma, the roller coaster of a long recovery. Nor is there a way any way to convey the spontaneousness of body horror that interrupts it.

It isn't the sound, the bullet, the blood, the shock, the moments that are important. It's the nurse coming in and roughly shoving you aside to change the sheets from under you, days or hours after surgery, leaving the gaping wide wound, from sternum to groin, agonizing and bleeding again, yet another reminder of the fact that your fragile humanity is an inconvenience to a world built to tighten schedules and drive numbers.

It's talking to a friend in the kitchen, a few weeks after getting out of the hospital, before you crumble to the floor as your muscles seize. It's waiting for most of the night to find out that, despite the fact they told you the it might be in there forever, the bullet was pushing out right then and had to be cut out. Fortunately there's someone who needs surgery practice, otherwise you'd have to wait, in overwhelming pain, until the next day.

It's the nightmare 6 months later about being hunted by a sniper, as you try to find place to hide, in a building entirely made of glass.

It's the anger the comes out of nowhere, the terror that surprises you. It's remembering, for the first time, being grabbed and held right before being shot, five years after it all happened. It's remembering the sound of the gunshot in your body more than 8 years later.

In the hospital, under ketamine, I was able to focus on my pain, to see it as signals coming from my nerves, to follow it down to my wound, and to watch the muscles and nerves weave together. Pain became healing. There were different types of pain though. There was the constant pain and there was a different nerve pain that would come and go, sometimes bringing memories.

I saw a language in my nerves, communicating between each other, signaling up when appropriate. Some nerves were severed by the bullet, others were walled off in my mind to protect my psyche from the enormity of it all. I imagined them screaming, unable to reach the rest of my body, unable to tell my brain. I imagine them reconnecting after screaming for so long. For years they have been trying to tell me that something horrible happened, and some new path opened up to allow the signals back in.

So here I am, waking up, at 4 am, 8 years after the shooting, hearing the gunshot for the first time as sensation in my body as. This is how you experience a shooting, not in the chaos of the moment but bit by bit, over the years that follow, as experiences in your body, as echos.

I have a shoe box full of cards from all over the world. If you wrote to me while I was in the hospital, I still have your letter. I read each of them. They were all really wonderful. I'm sorry I didn't write back. I was a little distracted at the time. Perhaps I still am. Consider this the thank you I never sent.

When I came down from intensive care the first time they were all set up in my room. There were some flowers. There was also a giant card signed by a bunch of local comrades. I still have that somewhere too. I've considered donating it to the labor history department of UW as a thank you to Anna Mari, with a few of the pictures we took for her in the hospital later.

One of the letters has one corners is cut off, but all the rest are as they were when I opened them.

The days in the hospital all blurred together. At the beginning it was easy to keep things clear. I was in the OR. My partner came to see me as soon as I could be seen. I think I was in Intensive Care for about a week. My tattoo was pretty well stapled together. I was impressed. Everyone thought I was healing really well. I do tend to heal well. My tattoo artist, the one who did the chest piece that got the bullet hole and all cut up in surgery, had said at one point while working on it, “you heal like Wolverine.” I do heal pretty quickly.

So after that first week or so, when they told me I would probably go home soon, I was a little surprised but not incredulous.

I came into that room full of cards, flowers, my loving partner, friends. I was hopeful, that first time out of the IC. We all were. We read the cards together. Everything was pretty good. But I did have a pain in my lower abdomen. I asked for a heat pack or something, and they brought me one. My partner and friends had left the room for a little bit. I don't remember the details. A nurse, I believe, came in and talked to me a bit. I mentioned the pain and she smelled my wound, then told me they were going to take me to imaging. After she flagged folks down she said something along the lines of, “No, take him straight to the OR.”

The pain got worse and everything became a blur. I remember leaving the room, but I don't remember what happened next. My partner filled me in later.

In that box there's also a note that I wrote. I think it was about the first night. They always keep you in the IC after that type of surgery, as I understand it. Being so badly injured, time really blurred. I was asleep, then awake, it was day then night. They came in every few hours to check on me, take blood, change my fluids. Every day or two they pulled my IV and gave me new one. Every few hours, I'd sleep for a bit and someone would come in, poke me a bunch of times, then go. Sometimes they'd move me around and change the sheets.

I remember it being dark, but honestly I have no idea. I wasn't fully awake at the beginning. I don't remember much very clearly at all, except the quiet and then the screaming, then the heavy sound of the zipper. It felt like she was crying for hours. The screams of agony, of despair, are not something you can describe. They started loud, loud enough to keep me fully awake, loud enough she must have lost her voice the next day.

It can't have been an expected death. Perhaps a parent dying early, perhaps a partner, or a child. Everything in her screamed at that first moment in response to the soft mumbling voice down the hall. Over time her screams became an exhausted whimper.

I heard another voice. “Yes. Yes.”

There was the juxtaposition between the business of death – this happened, that happened, sign here, what arrangements need to be made for the body – and the emotional experience of it. I imagined it to be a relative, perhaps a sister, taking care of this business and occasionally comforting her sibling. When the business was done there was some walking around, but the crying, slowly becoming quieter, stayed in the same place. The light came on so I could hit the button for more pain killers. In the first few days after surgeries, the pain was always right there. I hit the button and fell slowly back asleep. I think this was my first night in the hospital, so it was almost a week until I would spend my brief time back in the general care area.

When my partner came back to the room I'd just been rapidly evacuated from, they were already cleaning it. All the cards had been thrown into a biohazard bag. She was barely able to save them. There was an orange liquid coming out of one of the tubes in my body. We later talked about how my partner had to empty my guava juice pouch every day for some time after I got out of the hospital. One of the cards had been thrown on some gauze or something with some of this orange liquid and had soaked some up into the corner. She cut it off. The others were fine.

There was a carelessness and callousness to the business of the hospital. The room was empty, so it was cleaned for the next person. The humanity of the situation was irrelevant to maximizing the efficiency of bed usage. Capitalism does this too us all the time, but there are few times it feels so intensely visceral.

We weren't married at the time, and I was under a protective order because of all the death threats I'd been getting, so they wouldn't tell my partner where I was. She just came in and I was gone. I don't remember what they told her but I had to ask for her to be informed.

She told me that she screamed, and may have punched a hole in a wall.

I didn't die that time. In the following few weeks there were several times I didn't die. When I came back my wound was open.

There was another surgery where they gave me ketamine and little to no pain killers. so I woke up hallucinating that I was crevice, that I had been sliced up and was having lemon poured over the pieces of my body – all of which I could still feel. The tube was still down my throat, so I couldn't scream. I thought I was convinced I was being kidnaped as I came back. I signed into my mother-in-law's hand as best as I could remember, “help me.”

I think that surgery was from the other time I almost died, when my vision went orange and I collapsed onto the hospital floor. I tried to scream for help, but could only whisper, as I slowly bled out inside my body.

I would have never heard the screaming from my partner, but I know what it would sound like. Through all the craziness and chaos, those moments still come to me. I can't quite place the room. It's almost as if I remember myself floating in a void surrounded by those operating room curtains. I can remember, if I think on it a moment, the plastic grinding of the infuser. I remember beeping, but I don't remember if it was the EKG or if I'm just remembering the default hospital sound from a show or a movie. So much is blurry, far away, chaotic and confusing. The commotion is still amorphous, dreamlike. But the quiet, the screaming, the zipper, that all remains crystal clear.

This was the first reminder of where I actually was. I imagined myself in a place where people recover, where people heal. But this was also a place where people die. Recovery is not linear. I would be reminded of this many more times in the following few weeks, and year. All of the interventions, the x-rays, the plastic in my body, these were all dangerous. I'm still wary to take ibuprofen because of the strain on my kidneys and liver. Each intervention was weighed against my risk of immediate death. Each one could carve years off my life.

These treatments, these interventions, they would never leave me the person I was before. Trauma like mine doesn't work like that. Trauma always takes some of your life. Sometimes it ends your life right there, other times you can heal and have a long life before you fall into the hole left by those missing years.

Part of me has never left that place, floating in that curtained void, where I was both healing and near death.

The elite of today's America, those running the show right now, have lived their entire lives in a world completely dominated by Neoliberal capitalism. The function of American capitalism is to ensure that money and power are indistinguishable, to the greatest degree possible. Any time an American oligarch has wanted something done, they've been able to spend money to make it happen. Want a bigger yacht? Sure, what about a yacht for your yacht? Want to build a company? Put enough money in and it will happen. Want to destroy competition? Buy them out or run a loss until they give up. Money always wins. Want to change government policies to make sure you come out ahead? Give a politician a significant donation. Want to break the law? Yeah, “fines” mean “legal for a fee” and almost anyone can avoid prison for the right fee (pay a good team of lawyers, buy your way into being friends with politicians or judges, there's almost always a way).

The correlation between money and power has almost always been 1 to 1 for them, and for many of those reading this now. But This correlation has been maintained in order to support the illusion that power, like money, can be earned though work. And, circularly, it is exactly this illusion that is the primary tool for maintaining this correlation. “If I can earn money,” so the logic goes, “then I can earn enough money to be powerful. Then I should support the system that gives the rich power, because I, too, could be rich.” Insert cliche quote about “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” here.

The thing about illusions is, they don't maintain themselves. Money is not power. Money is a stand in for power under the current system, and only remains so as long as people believe in this system. But people have already started to see through the illusion. We have now have two generations old enough to vote who openly and vocally reject it. A whole subset of the political class has developed specifically around this lack of belief. Not only that, but the US has rejected the illusion multiple times. And each time the US threatened to fully reject the illusion, it has been offered a compromise… until Occupy. Instead of compromise, Occupy was crushed with overwhelming violence. The elite have seen the effectiveness of the police force they've been building, and have thus chosen to reject the opportunity for a compromise. They have instead chosen well funded violence.

“If we have all the money,” elite logic goes, “then we can pay people with guns to just force everyone else to do what we want.”

This system they've grown up under has given them access to essentially infinite financial resources. They draw money from taxes through contracts between governments and their companies, yet they pay no taxes themselves. They leverage their assets against debt, then use the growth of those assets to pay off the debt, thus have no “money” to tax. This illusionary wealth gives them access to political power, which they've used to manipulate the system to thereby increase their wealth again, in a “virtuous cycle” of increasing power. They have destroyed all competition and blocked out all paths for future competition. They expand their holdings, trying to own every home, all farm land, trying to extract fees from every aspect and second of everyone's life. Taking everything from everyone has made these elite godlike, more rich than multiple nations combined, untouchable, able to start their own space programs. They believe themselves super human, the rightful god-kings of the earth, saviors of humanity.

Why shouldn't they believe in the illusion? They are the most powerful humans who have ever lived, not simply a little bit but by an unimaginable margin. But they've painted themselves into a corner. The mechanism of debt leverage relies on infinite growth. They've already colonized all the land, they're already extracting all the resources, they've already pushed wages down and raised prices so high that they're eating their own. What's left? Taxes are, at their mast basic, the extraction of money from people with the threat of violence. There is only one path left for growth: robbing people at gun point. It's become necessary to take over governments, strip away everything except the infrastructure of violence, and use that violence to extract everything that could possibly be left.

The US is the richest country in the world. Having direct access to those coffers could be the answer that need to keep the “infinite growth” scheme going. And, as Garrison Davis paraphrased Curtis Yarvin in How The Federal Government Fell, “If you have all the guys with guns, who can physically stop you?”

Except they don't have all the guns. They have all the money, or so it would seem. But again, they actually don't have all the money. They have assets and they have to keep the up illusion that these assets have value in order to actually use them. Yes, yes, loot the US to keep that illusion going. But the thing is, the US isn't actually that rich. The currency is propped up by the belief in the stability of the US dollar, by the infinite tribute from vassal states, by a complex system of soft power built over generations. Spells like “Intellectual property”, “the reserve currency”, and “trade agreements” allow the US to simply demand foreign government simply seize the assets of their population to hand directly to US industry. Levies are paid on the sale of all hard drives and burnable media in Germany, among other countries, which go directly to recording industry investors. Vassal countries are forced to buy bonds to prop up the US dollar. As the global reserve currency, the dollar was always strong against other currencies. This drove down the relative price of electronics and other resources needed to build the most technologically advanced military in the world. Complex economic machinery and ever increasingly complex mathematical tricks have kept the illusion going… until Trump.

But generations of intellectual inbreeding have left the ruling class incapable of understanding the complexity of the system their ancestors built to maintain control. They simply cannot understand or operate it anymore. In order to siphon out more money, they've cut out and throw away their own life support system. Tariffs and dismantling soft power has annihilated the fragile and complex system of soft power that kept the US on top of the world. Crashing the economy so they can exploit the workers at lower and lower wages only works if the workers don't revolt. The money can only be used to prop up the illusion if all the complex math keeps appearing to work, if the “money” you dangle in front of people keeps coming and continues to be valuable… or, at least, valuable enough to keep people calm. Turns out, there aren't actually enough guns to point at people without using the military… and the military are not the cops. It turns out, those guns are only useful if there are enough of them and the people holding them will actually use them on command.

Now their system of control is flying apart. There were other wise elites who backed moderate compromise: corporate virtue signaling, small concessions metered out over decades, embracing the language of radical demands while ignoring the content. But the path of elite wisdom ends with their slow elimination. As the catastrophic crisis of climate change looms, as the necessity of eliminating the keystone industry that cements their power (oil) becomes obvious, as faith in the illusion started to collapse, the least competent have become the most powerful. They thrash wildly, trying to implement their unhinged vision, unaware of the illusions their power once relied on. They deploy agents to have them chased away by fearless unarmed citizens. They try to deploy troops, only to have generals delay and undermine. They bluster and threaten, only to be laughed at. They are becoming the martial arts master who, being used to throwing students across the room with burst of pure Qi, is knocked out with one punch when they fight someone outside of their cult. How long until the illusion breaks entirely?

Money is an illusion. It only has the value we all choose to give it. The power is in our labor. Not simply “paid labor” but reproductive labor, organizing, community, in everything we do to maintain the system both inside and outside of “work.” Real power is controlling food, controlling housing, and controlling what you want. You can only be controlled to the extent that you are not organized to resist that control.

Money and power were not always one. The illusion of money was built over thousands of years to where it is today. These two things can be separate again, if you build power by organizing against the dominant system.

So what are you doing to do to break the illusion?

We need to talk about “Western Civilization.”

But let's start by talking about a boat. Technically it's a ship, and it belonged to Theseus. (It's related, I swear.) For any not familiar, a few thousand years ago (give or take), Plutarch recorded the following:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and strong timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

• Plutarch, Life of Theseus 23.1

A millennium an a half or so later, Thomas Hobbes extended this paradox, giving us The Ship of Theseus that people contemplate today. This paradox would be covered in most “Introduction to Western Civilization” type classes and any basic introductions to philosophy. Folks familiar with the concept of digital immortality may have also run across it. (If you transfer consciousness into a machine, would it still be you?)

The paradox manifests from the disconnect between the ideas of subjective and objective reality. We believe that our subjective labels and groupings are somehow connected to an objective physical world. They are not. They are, in fact, arbitrary labels applied to arbitrary collections based on a combination of biological and social systems that evolved to help us order the world.

Those labels “ontologies.” The ontologies we use to order the world are the basis of our reality. There is an interplay between our ideological paradigm and our ontology: ideology shapes what can and can't exist, and we only things that we believe exist can shape our reality. While these restrict our thought, they also free us from the overwhelm of having to understand everything all at once.

A cyberneticist would say that these models exist to attenuate complexity. That is to say, they decrease the number of things for which a system (a person, a social system) must account. The greater the degree of differentiation, the more simple the model; the more simple the model, the less accurately it reflects real complexity of the set of things it's describing. It is necessarily true that embedded in any model is a trade off between accuracy and simplicity.

If we are honest, we cannot say that anything exists as such (outside of particles and the undifferentiated universe) but that it's existence fulfills a functional purpose for a system. Ontologies are created by systems to fulfill a system's objectives. Ontologies are (necessarily inconsistent and incomplete) models through which one can construct their own reality.

But these base assumptions are more malleable than ideology will often allow us to believe. To understand this one must only compare an address in Japan to an address in the US. Within the context of navigation, Americans identify streets as things that order space with buildings being largely unlabeled things where residences are identified by a combination of street name and number or set of numbers. A Japanese map generally doesn't label roads and uses a completely different addressing system in most cases.

The “self,” as a differentiated identity, is the product of evolution. A gene that produces things that have “selves” will continue to exist. Therefore, the “self” is a phenotype of a gene or set of genes, and the function of that phenotype is to replicate those genes. The self only really exists within the context of that genetic system.

But this most important object, the discrete identity of humans, isn't even allotted to all other humans. Rather discrete identity is reserved for those around us (our friends, our family, our pets, etc) and we create a other undifferentiated objects for everyone else (the crowd, the country, humanity as a whole). Of course, we must because the human brain lacks the internal complexity to model even a few thousand objects, much less so multiple billions.

Because the brain has a limited complexity, all objects we carve from the undifferentiated universe must serve a purpose. Then when we assert that something to exists, we must ask ourselves “Why does this exist? What purpose does it's existence fulfill?”

The existence of “two genders,” for example, is an ontological assertion, an intentional restriction of the continuous to the discrete. It simplifies a socially complex phenomenon into a simple binary based on a vast simplification of biological properties. What ideological purpose does that serve? How does that intentional restriction of reality shape what can and can't be? How does it constrain what we are and are not able to think about?

“Race,” by any scientific assessment, does not exist. Genetic variation within a “racial group” is greater than the variation between groups, showing that any classification as such is necessarily arbitrary. Race doesn't exist, the cleaving of undifferentiated humanity into discrete groups (with no definable boundaries between them) is an ontological construction that fulfills an ideological purpose. What is that purpose? All one needs to do to answer that question is open a history book.

Governments don't really exist. It's just a bunch of people making an ontological assertion, and some people with guns threatening everyone who doesn't act like they accept that assertion. Even these words don't really exist, except in our minds, after we learn to cleave them from the undifferentiated noise of the universe. What does and does not exist is always arbitrary, involves a conscious or unconscious choice, and fulfills some function.

So we arrive back at “Western Civilization.”

There are those who say that “Western Civilization” is collapsing, that it needs to be save. OK, let's start by defining it. What are the geographical boundaries of “Western Civilization?” Clearly “Western Europe” and “North America” are in the group. North America is easier to define than “Western Europe” because of the clear geographical boundaries of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Panama Canal. Except that North America isn't “Western” at all, but historically comes from a completely different tradition than the one claimed by “Western Civilization.” Sure, aside from the several million people and several hundred tribes that trace their identity to a lineage outside of “Western Europe,” sure, I guess North America is “Western.” Well, except that Mexico and “Central America” seem to have a much more complex relationship with that lineage, not to mention Caribbean nations who were kidnaped by those who are identified as part of “Western Civilization.” They are more likely to trace their identity back to the African Diaspora.

One of the defining things that “Western Civilization” identifies with itself is the concept of “Democracy.” While “Western” nations trace this lineage back to the slave states of Greece and the genocidal slaver empire of Rome, “Western Civilization” traces the roots of “modern democracy” back to American democracy. American democracy is largely copied directly from the Iroquois Confederacy, while the modern bureaucratic state that this democracy controls came to “Western Civilization” by way of trade with China and observations of how the Chinese state operated. The founding document, of course, was written in an alphabet that developed largely in the Middle East before being adopted by Romans (a people who were split between Europe and Africa). The predecessors to that “Latin” alphabet had originally modified Egyptian hieroglyphs to represent their Semitic language.

Those most staunch defenders of “Western Civilization” will also root their identity in “Christianity.” One of the most defining aspects of Christianity is the concept of “hell.” This concept is notably absent from Jewish tradition, but was a critical element of the most popular religion in the Middle East around the time Jesus is reported to have been teaching: Zoroastrianism. The archetype of a savior born of a virgin, who dies and returns to life, was a key element of the Osirus cult that spread via the same Roman roads as Christianity, and competed with it for converts in the pre-Christian Rome. John 1:1 is usually translated into English as “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” However, the original “word” is “logos.” The concept of “logos” is a direct reference to the Helenistic Jewish philosophy of Philo. That would be Philo of Alexandria. That “Alexandria” would be the one in Egypt… which is, as a reminder, located in Africa.

The interplay between cultures and groups is rich and bidirectional. Cultural borders blur as these exchanges make their way more slowly into the interior of an area we have arbitrarily labeled. Subcultures abound within borders. Dutch people will say that The Netherlands has a regional accent every 30 miles or so. Amsterdam is different from The Hague, and Friesland has it's own language. For the American reference, the country is somewhere between the size of Maryland and West Virginia. European borders, which North Americans tend to think of as more “real” and less “arbitrary” than, say, the Middle Eastern or African borders drawn by European colonizers, are just as arbitrary. Belgium is split between two languages. North Americans might expect signs in Spain to be in Spanish, but in Barcelona they may well be in Catalan. The Eurozone has almost as much cultural homogeneity across it as there is variation within the member states.

But what about Australia and New Zealand? Clearly these are “Western” nations, right? What about Israel? There have been debates about including it in the EU. North Americans may be surprised to know that Europeans generally don't consider England part of Europe since it's an island off the continent. “Western Europe” may be even harder to define geographically.

The choice of what we cleave from the undifferentiated universe is a political one. It becomes clear how especially political “The West” in context. Modern “Western” European countries are simply those that were not satellite states of the USSR. It is an explicit Cold War differentiation. The first reference to a differentiation of a “Western” identity was during the schism of the Roman Empire. These are mirrors reflecting an identity of conflict, of war, and, perhaps, of domination.

All this is to say, “Western Civilization” does not exist as such. It never existed. It never will exist. It can't exist. It is an arbitrary grouping of cultures and histories, an illusion, forged for conflict. And here is where we should loop back to another arbitrary definition: the self.

The self, this bedrock of our identity, is itself an illusion. We believe there to be an object, an entity, a persistence of experience, but there is none. There is only the experience of this moment, a side effect of a sufficiently complex system, that draws the illusion of persistence from memories that may or may not reflect a historical reality. It functions to pit the carrier of genes against the outside world. But we may, like so many other arbitrary definitions, return it to undifferentiated universe. In fact, this is precisely the goal of many meditation practices. Some mystics of Christianity, who share more in common with Buddhists or Taoists than with Evangelical Christians, might suggest this is exactly what is meant when one holds “Logos” within themselves.

Through psychedelics or meditation, one can truly “become one with the universe” simply by releasing this illusion of the ego. But what does that do for them? To release the division between oneself and the universe brings compassion, patience, and deep joy. It eases suffering and expands pleasure. Perhaps there are things which need not be differentiated, but are better experienced directly without the mediation of a model. Can we find the joy of simply being?

Perhaps, as one can improve mental health through the death of the ego, we should not try to avoid “the fall of Western Civilization” but rather experience the joy of transcendence through the death of Western Civilization.

The fascist obsession with fertility and replacement rates, and their solution (sexual violence and reproductive slavery), ignores or omits a deeper problem. Conservatives like to say that mass shootings, terrorist cults like Order of the Nine Angles and 764, and other antisocial behavior are caused by unwed mothers, video games, and the lack of prayer in schools. But the deeper truth is this: at some point a system becomes so toxic, so perverse, that it is no longer able to reproduce itself.

The streets of the United States have been emptied of children so that one of their biggest killers, cars, can roam free. The removed children are then confined to their homes, unable to leave without adult supervision. These homes become increasingly temporary and unaffordable as private equity forces more and more families to rent, to live on the street, or simply to die. Parents work longer and longer hours to pay for less and less stable housing, and less and less nutritious food, in a world that's becoming more and more hostile to human life.

How should one be a good parent, a present parent, a loving parent, when confronted regularly with pictures of dead children, the murder of whom has been funded by that parent's tax dollars? How can a parent not collapse in anguish, or explode in rage, at even the most brief and shallow observation of the world their children are inheriting? What parent can be kind and gentile, present and comforting, with the constant awareness that their children could be murdered by a mass shooter at their school? And what if those children survive to adulthood? What world will even exist then? What life will they live, under constant threat of natural disaster, in the tiny habitable band between the scorching center and frozen extents?

But this drawing is lovely. The glob of macaroni glued to toilet paper rolls is a marvelous display of creativity, I'm so proud of you. Yes, if you fling your body across the house you will probably get hurt, just like I've told you 1000 times tonight. Please go the fuck to bed already so I can spend the next 4 hours figuring out how pay my taxes, so I can figure out how to afford the higher price of everything, so I can try to figure out preschool for the 3rd time this year, so I can try to get insurance to pay for literally anything (holy fuck, what is it they actually do again??), so I can numb myself out so I don't have a mental breakdown… again.

I hope there isn't a drug raid next door. I hope the obviously mentally ill person who was mumbling and walking around on my porch last night doesn't come back again tonight. I hope the Nazi down the street doesn't snap and come murder my whole family because I put a sign up for that progressive mayor he hates. I hope I don't get caught in a protest tomorrow. I don't want to have to dodge rubber bullets to get home.

Did you know that tear gas can cause spontaneous abortions?

I wonder if the next preschool I choose will also be bought out by private equity and run into the ground. I wish my family could afford to live near me. I wish I had someone to help. I wish I didn't have to spend several hours more than every waking hour I have just to keep everything sinking slowly instead of sinking quickly.

How do you explain to a toddler that their preschool teacher was kidnaped by ICE?

And who would look at this all and think, “wow, that's exactly the life I want!” Better make sure you get a good house… or literally any house. Well, better make sure you have a good job. Well, better make sure you go to college. Oh, you took on an impossible debt burden and there are no jobs? You're not even able to manage your life right now? WHY AREN'T YOU BREEDING???

There have been times when people stood up, they opposed power, they fought for a better world. Sometimes they won, and that could never be allowed to happen again. The system will maintain control through escalating terror. The system will ensure that opposition is so traumatized that there can be no organized resistance. All rebellion must be crushed with ever increasing force until the people yield, until they crack, until they are broken. The trauma will escalate until you submit. That is how you break the will, after all.

Lots of animals don't breed, or don't breed well, in captivity. Lots of animals don't like to be caged. Maybe you've seen it at the zoo, animals pacing, swaying, pulling out their hair or feathers. There's a term for self-descrutive and obsessive behavior in caged animals: zoochosis. You can feel the bars, the walls, the chains, even if they aren't physical. You can feel the chains getting tighter. You can feel the walls closing in.

This system stinks of death. Though it rots, it shambles on, consuming the future to keep it's rigor mortis grip on the structures of the past. Here we are, captured in Goya's Saturno Devorando a su Hijo, feeling our stomachs turn. Are you turned on yet?

“What's wrong with you,” they say as they strip away rights to bodily autonomy, “Breed fucker.”

“We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine And the machine is bleeding to death.” – The Dead Flag Blues, GY!BE