hex_m_hell

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

During the transfer of power from a legitimate to illegitimate rule, the illegitimate power must maintain an illusion. It must maintain a belief in the persistence of legitimacy, running through the transfer and to the new regime. If this illusion is broken, the people become aware that their power has been usurped, a pretender has taken power, and the new authority lacks the legitimacy to rule.

To justify the illegal federalization of the national guard, Donald Trump cited 10 U.S. Code § 252:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

In doing so, he highlighted a contradiction within his justification. The specific justification was that the protests “make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States.”

After years of voicing support and meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian agents hack the Democratic Party and spend two years manipulating social media. After directly coordinating with Trump and his collaborators, the Russian government again hacks the Democratic party and escalates their social media manipulation campaign. When Trump is elected, he appoints Russian government assets to government offices. Before even taking the oath of office, Donald Trump begins violating the Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

The power of the federal government to enforce the law had been under attack for years. President Nixon was impeached for his attempt to subvert the electoral process, but the actions he took to forward his party's objectives were never reversed. President Reagan illegally bribed Iran with weapons to sabotage the hostage negotiations then under way with president Carter, in another clear case of illegal election tampering. Yet his presidency was never challenged, nor were any of his actions or appointments challenged or reversed. Post concession recounts showed clearly that President George W. Bush lost in 2000 to Al Gore, despite Gore's concession.

Russia understood how to exploit this power to take over the American government. While the federal government struggled to enforce constitutional protections before 2016, Trump's appointment of 3 Supreme Court Justices ultimately destroyed all ability to enforce any constitutional limitations on presidential power.

Given that the power of all officials in United States is explicitly limited by the law and no people are excluded from said legal constraint, one element of the legal definition of insurrection is the inability to enforce laws, the Constitution and all laws restricting presidential power has not been possible to enforce since Trump took office in 2016, Therefore Donald Trump is leading an insurrection on behalf of the government of Russia, has levyed war against the United States, on behalf of the Vladiamir Putin, the government of Russia successfully overthrow the US government in 2016 using Donald Trump as a proxy, There is currently no legal president. Given that Trump appointed officials to illegally maintain his power Trump selected collaborators to forward his illegal agenda Trump acted at the direction of Vladamir Putin as an agent of the Russian Government, Therefore all appointees and collaborators are equally participants in a successful foreign war against the US government. Given That a war need not be declared to be enacted, to overthrow a government on behalf of a foreign power is always, necessarily, an act of war by that foreign power, Therefore the Russian election interference that allowed Donald Trump to take power was necessarily an act of war against the American People.

Be it resolved that Donald Trump is not the legal president of the United States, and never has been legally the president, the last legal president of the United States was Barak Obama, Donald Trump is a traitor who levied war against the American People on behalf of Russia, Donald Trump must be tried for treason, all appointments made by Donald Trump since his election are necessarily null and void, all laws ratified by Trump are null and void, all land and property sold will be repossessed by the Federal Government as stolen property all land that cannot be repossessed or for which repossession is not pursued by the US government will return to the domain of it's previous authority, all executive orders enacted by Trump are null and void, all appointees and collaborators who interfered with the dutiful enforcement of constitutional restrictions of presidential power must also be tried for treason, a new president must be identified following the 25th Amendment process of succession. Any president who takes office must first execute these resolutions. If the president does not follow the above resolutions for any reason, succession will pass to the next in line who does.

Be it resolved that additional steps must be taken to address the vulnerabilities exploited by the Russian government. These steps are abolish the electoral college and elect presidents directly by vote count remove all judges appointed by Donald Trump remove all other Trump political appointees replace the Senate, as a body that represents each state with two members, with a legislative body that represents the nation by party-based proportional representation, all government elections, at all levels, for which a only a single candidate can be chosen must then use ranked choice voting, universal suffrage for all residents over the age of 18, regardless criminal or legal status, the constitutional definition of treason will be amended to include voter suppression and those who have been convicted of voter suppression will be classified as insurrections for the purpose of holding office, corporations will explicitly be not be recognized as people with constitutional protections

States that pass these resolutions will hold the Federal Government responsible for enacting it within 90 days of passage within the state, or, the Federal Government failing to do so, will secede from the conquered union and form amongst themselves a new union carrying on from the fallen state with vulnerabilities addressed.

I put the notebook down on my desk and let out a long sigh. The look I gave her only lasted a few moments but felt as though it drew on for days, “I think you mean 'Whereas' rather than 'Given That,' just stylistically I mean.”

“You know that's not what we're asking for.”

Straight to the point, always the spitfire.

“Sure. Yeah…. you could go farther. Why don't you nationalize the military industrial complex, make college free, abolish all debt, and summarily execute Thiel and Yarvin while you're at it?”

Her eyes cauterized as they cut.

“OK,” I replied carefully, with another long sigh, “I don't even want to be holding it right now. Do you have any idea how dangerous something like this is? I don't even know how much of this is legal right now.”

She flashed a wide joker's smile, “Shouldn't you?”

We always had good rapport, perhaps that's why she trusted me with this.

“High school teachers aren't known for their law degrees.”

“It doesn't matter. What's legal and what's not doesn't even matter anymore. Anything he doesn't like is illegal. Anything that brings him more power is. The whole system simply serves power now, and that's why this is so important right now.”

I crossed my arms, “I said this about W. It's different now, but in quantity not quality… You were in elementary school when he first took office…“

I nodded at the menacing portrait of Our Leader glaring down at us. I could feel the grey hairs sprout as I trailed off. Every year under him had felt like 10, and I was already old enough without the help.

She got up and leaned across the table, “A constitution is a contract between the people and their government. It grants the government the monopoly on violence and the license to define and enforce those laws using said violence. However, the violation of that contract without mitigation or redress nullifies it. Without this authority, the perpetrators of violence are little more than petty tyrants. The violation of this contract authorizes the people to redress their own grievances against those who illegitimately wield authority in the their name.”

Two other students were in the room. One sat leisurely at his desk, the other curled up in the window sill. The one in the window sill wore a studded leather jacket a size too big. The leather squeaked a bit against the window as they leaned forward, “You almost sound like one of those slavers who wrote the original.”

“Dee,” I remarked as I held up my hand and they smiled a bit, “let's stay focused, please.”

“This,” I continued hesitantly, “can't be a citizens initiative. This lays out the legal basis for a civil war. Do you have any idea how dangerous this is right now?”

“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to keep going like this?” She stared with amber pools of rage, “We should actually be able to vote on this. When I finally get to vote, I know for a fact that it won't mean anything. At least you got to choose between two puppets, we don't even get that. He's looting everything he can and leaving corporations to steal our futures.

“You act like there isn't already a civil war going on right now,” she raged on, “You act like there hasn't been a civil war since before he even took office.”

“If anyone found out you wrote this, you could be arrested. Your family could be arrested.”

She smiled a bit, “'For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.'”

“You could be sent to the camps.”

”'He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.' But who would he send to arrest us again?”

I sighed deeply and sat back in my chair.

She pointed out the window at a group of troops outside, “'He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.'”

I tapped a pencil on the desk and thought for a moment. Her curls bounced as she sat back down. After a long pause, I spoke again, ““Even if I wanted to, I couldn't submit this. I couldn't ask for signatures. Someone would probably kill me before I was even able to collect enough signatures if I tried. It will be censored by the algorithm. We would all be arrested immediately. What do you expect me to do with this?”

“I don't care if we're arrested. We're going to die anyway. It's probably already too late for most of us. 'It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees'”

I hadn't noticed the Che Guevara shirt she had been wearing, nor did I realize those were back in style. She wore the uniform of a young radical. I wonder if she will also look back at that shirt and cringe. Then it struck me, I wonder if there will be a world for her to look back from.

The studs tapped against the window a bit as the student in the window sill shifted again and spoke up, “Enlightenment thinkers dogged censorship by presenting their ideas as stories and dialogs. You can never really tell what side someone is taking in fiction. The 'savage critic' was one of the most popular literary modes of the period.”

I looked over to the window, “You've been reading Graber again, haven't you?”

They smiled a bit and and settled back in.

“What are you even doing with something like this? Aren't you an anarchist Dee?”

“Yeah, aren't you Mr. Brand?”

I leaned forward a bit, “Don't say that too loud. I could loose my job. I've never talked about that for a reason.”

“You do on your Mastodon,” they replied slily.

“How do you know about my Mastodon?”

“Dee is a furry,” the curly haired girl piped up again.

“Ez,” I snapped at her, “not everyone on Mastodon is a f-”

“Mr. Brand, that's not important right now” Dee cut me off. I hadn't noticed the Kitsune Luigi shirt under the leather jacket until now. Cleaver. “I know you're a bit of a writer yourself Mr. Brand. I suppose that's expected for an English teacher.”

I sat back again as they continued, “We won't survive if this keeps going. We're cut off. The crops are rotting in the fields with no one to harvest. If we don't starve, you know we'll all die in the camps. It has to break. It has to stop. These changes will destroy both parties. We have an opportunity to not only survive, but come out the other side better.

“During the first Civil War, progressive states were able to pass a lot of legislation after the Rebel states left. This government can only collapse. If a few states pull out, it may be enough to topple everything. When the rest of the country joins the New Union, we could have jumped decades forward.

“To be honest Mr. Brand, I don't know how much time I have. You know people like me are pretty high on their list. This doesn't fix everything, not even close. But I think it gives us a fighting chance. They're not going to exterminate us all if they can't even keep the country together.”

The boy sitting leisurely at his desk adjusted his sweater and sat up. “I just want to know my parents will be safe. I want to know I'll be safe.”

Ezra leaned back in her chair again, “Honestly, I just want a chance at a future. The current road leads to death and I'll do anything to get off it. Will you help us Mr. Brand?”

I sat for several minutes and thought about the question before answering quietly, “Yeah…. I'll do my best.”

“Notice the sensations in your body. Do any of them have an emotional charge?”

I went to a meditation group this evening that focused on emotion. It was a group for men, put together by a men's group focused on dismantling patriarchy. Suppressing and disconnecting from emotions is deeply connected to oppression. The emotional burden of oppressing others is easier to bear when you feel nothing, as is the shame and anger of being oppressed.

Feeling people don't make decisions to ruin people's lives, poison the land, steal the future from their own children. Feeling people can't tolerate others doing the same. Numbness is the bedrock of authoritarianism.

“Put your hand where you feel the sensation.”

It's hard for me to notice emotions most of the time.

My dad was happy or angry, sometimes disappointed, or asleep. I saw him cry once, when his dad died. I love my dad, but there's also a distance. I don't really see him or talk to him much. I didn't talk to him for like 5 years.

I recently watched a video that resonated with me pretty intensely. My mom completely failed to prepare me for life, but my dad pushed me hard to be independent. I respect and appreciate him for it, even when I have some issues with it.

It took a while to find it, but eventually I did.

Anxiety.

I touch a scar on the left side of my belly. There was a tube there draining some fluid or other. It was the second one they pulled out, some days after the one in my right lung.

There's not really a way to describe that feeling. The tube was up against my intestines. It slid against them and hit them as it came out. There was a bit of pain, like the lingering ache after being hit in the stomach, but perhaps a bit less. The real feeling was anxiety… overwhelming anxiety.

Somewhere, somehow, deep in our animal brain, the feeling of even the slightest intestinal trauma is intimately connected with death. Any human, or almost any animal, who felt something like I had felt, any longer than, say, 100 years ago, would have died a slow and excruciatingly painful death. Somehow, even knowing consciously that I am safe, my body knows and can't help but bring this to my consciousness.

In the book “To The American Indian: Reminisces of a Yurok Woman,” there were a few passages about Yurok beliefs (as she held them) on death. The part that's stuck with me is roughly this. When a person dies, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they're not good people, the dogs will eat them and if they're good people the dogs will let them past. But sometimes, the soul runs instead. If it escapes, the person can come back to life. But even though they escape, for the rest of their life they will be pursued by dogs. Eventually the dogs will catch and kill them.

It's a pretty spot on description of the experience of PTSD.

Trauma tunes people to spot threats, to see danger. Under normal conditions, they see danger where there isn't any. But under extreme conditions, we see danger that other people are too complacent to see.

“Give the feeling space. Ask it what it needs.”

I'm afraid. I'm afraid and sad. My youngest is 6 now. She's growing up so fast, and I push her hard to grow up faster. I feel like I'm missing out on her being young, like I”m trying to race through it, and I know it's vanishing quickly. I feel guilt for pushing so hard.

A staple in my intestines came out. Before I came out of the bathroom, I hit the emergency button. I walked a couple of steps and then crumbled to the floor. I lay on the floor unable to move, trying to yell with all my might but barely making any sound. No one came as I struggled to whisper “help.” When they finally came, they picked me up off the floor and rushed me to emergency surgery.

The blood they put in me was cold. My arm was freezing as they put bag after bag of blood in to my body, and I bled it out almost as fast. When I was first shot, I didn't think I would die. I thought it was possible, I prepared myself for it, but I knew there was a good chance I would make it. I knew that if I did die there, I would be proud of it. It would be a good death. I could die peacefully, if I needed to, but I was going to fight because people needed me. When I was bleeding out in the emergency room, I knew I was going to die and I was terrified. It was a completely different experience.

I was shitting gallons of blood. I thought of the Don Hertzfeldt “My spoon is too big” animation. I thought of the part where the character says “my anus is bleeding” as the room fills with blood. It was slightly funny, but mostly an unimaginably horrible way to die. And I was sure I was going to die.

The anxiety never went away.

I push my oldest hard to be I can't know how long I can be there for her. They saved my life, but it's not that simple. The x-rays, the surgeries, the things they put in my body, all of it shortens my life. I won't live as long as my dad, and I don't even have a guess how long he'll live.

My dad was abandoned as a baby. He was left at a bakery where my paternal grandmother worked. A lot of their kids were adopted.

My dad went through some pretty crazy things. I can count the number of times I've almost died, a couple before getting shot and few in the hospital. He served in Vietnam, but even before that his mother was schizophrenic and deeply religious. There were a few stories of her trying to kill him because she thought he was possessed or something. She also saved his life once, or so the story is told, when she killed a rattlesnake, cut off it's head, and threw it in a creek. (Apparently the loggers in the camp wouldn't go near the creek anymore because they were afraid of the snake head or some such superstition.)

I realized later that it's not just that I don't know how long I'll have with her. I see how things are. I know there could come a time when she has to leave me behind, when she has to save herself. I will keep getting older. I don't want her to get stuck trying to save me and miss an opportunity to save herself.

My dad couldn't leave the US. The Empire broke him to prevent the threat of a good example. Now he survives off the crumbs they let fall to vets like him. As they dismantle everything, how long will that last? The US will be a death sentence for a lot of people.

Sadness. Grief, loss, sadness.

There will come a time when I'm too old to move, to leave, to support myself, to save myself, as the polycrisis continues to evolve. I want my oldest, no matter how much she loves me, to be able to leave me behind. I want her to be able leave me behind because I love her. I want her to be able to leave me behind like I left my dad.

As my daughter takes pictures of the mosaics in Park Güell, studying them and saying how beautiful they are, I wonder if this place will be something that influences her. At 6, she loves to draw and do basic paper crafts. Her mother went to art school, I went a different route but I loved art as a kid. I was originally studying English before I decided to switch to computer science. She has roots in a few worlds that intertwine beautifully. So much potential, if we can keep up with it. If...

I think of the career aptitude test I took in highschool when they told me I should be a sniper, I think of the military recruiters constantly in the halls handing out pamphlets, of the impossibly of imagining going to college. Then I think of the joy I find in math... A joy that I didn't discover until years after I left school. I wonder at the years I've worked in my ducttape job in the security industry, an industry that is a monument to the wastefulness of capitalism, an industry that rightfully shouldn't exist.

What would the world be like if Kalashnikov lived in a time when he could have worked on farm equipment? Could he have revolutionized agriculture instead of combat? There is a world in which Nazis never existed, and farmers swear by the indestructible Kalashnikov tractor. It's impossible to calculate the loss of technology and culture that war and authoritarianism continues to impose on us all.

The Stephen Jay Gould quote is evergreen: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”.

Looking out over Barcelona, at Sagrada Familia from Park Güell, there are so many beautiful things humans have created with only the smallest portion of the population free to create them. Meanwhile, the majority of our abilities are wasted to make sure that pool of people stays small... And even those few privileged people spend most of their time and effort figuring out how to stay on top. It's as though the myth that humans only use 1% of our brains were true, but at the global, not individual, level.

How much more could we have if we stopped wasting so much on maintaining involuntary hierarchy? How many generations of children will we betray to keep it?

I love the joy she finds in her art, her pictures. I hope she learns to find the joy of math that I only found so much later. I hope her love of nature lets her make beautiful things for humans. I hope she inherits a world that's free because it's cruel to leave it to her to fight for it.

I spent years alone, hour after hour, a latchkey kid from second grade. Reagan took my mother away. I was just another of so many at that time, families squeezed dry and ground raw to feed the unsatiable hunger of Mammon. It's no wonder my generation basically invented school shootings. But the hunger has only grown... When will we let our children grow?

I am beyond tired, and I feel as though I have yet to even begin.

“If you breathe in, your lung will collapse.”

The bullet went through my diaphragm. During my first surgery, a tube had been put into my right lung to support me through the initial healing process. The diaphragm heals quickly, or at least mine did, and I was strong enough now to breathe on my own. It took me a minute to process the words. They had me on a heroic dose of everything they could find to kill the pain.

I asked the nurse (doctor? whomever..) to wait a second so I could take a couple of breaths, in order to prepare myself. So many parts of the story are a blur now. I remember I was sitting up. Was I in a chair? I was out of critical care again? This was the first of several tubes that would be removed from my body, adding fluids, draining fluids, keeping me alive.

This nurse had told me I needed to breathe out all the way, he would pull the tube out quickly and put a bandage (really, just a sticker) over my wound. The wound would close in a couple of days and the bandage could come off. My lungs would be back to normal, but one mistake could leave me suffocating and rushing back to the ER again. I took several trips to the ER during that month I spent in the hospital after the shooting.

I took a few deep breaths, said I was ready, and breathed out all the way.

There was a brief moment in my life where I learned to breathe.

Some time in 2015 or so, I cried. I let myself be vulnerable. The survival skills I had developed to deal with neglect and abuse served me well in the security industry but meditation and a few years of therapy made my personal life sustainable.

For a while I was able to experience a full range of emotions. I developed, or perhaps discovered, a deep compassion and patience. I was no longer quite so chaotic and self-destructive. I was, for a moment, the person I wanted to be.

When I heard Trump speak, I knew he was going to win the nomination. I knew because I recognized him. He is every crooked rural sheriff, every good ol' boy mayor that rural America is used to.

I spent a lot of time in Trump country. I bought the leather jacket I wore to that protest from a guy at school. After I got shot, I told him the jacket was full of my blood and in police custody (they never gave it back). He told me it was fake news. I deleted my Facebook account shortly after that.

I can't overstate how detrimental those places were to my mental health, how many horrifying things I saw, how many horrible things I heard. There's nothing I've seen as destructive as generational hopelessness. People talked about that town as a vortex, a black hole from which almost no one escapes.

Trump brought everything back. I had escaped that hell, and he represented turning all of the US into the thing that had almost killed me… and his stochastic terrorism did almost kill me.

I took a deep breath, and I organized like my life depended on it. I got shot. I gave interviews. Protests, street medic trainings, hand-to-hand self defense, armed self-defense, food security and gardening, we organized everything as fast as possible. The trial happened. We had our first child. It was all a blur. We moved out of Seattle. I slowed down, and took a few breaths.

There was a moment where we thought we could stop. We could settle in and work on the long term project of making sure this would never happen again. Then the pandemic happened, the George Floyd uprising, the murder of Michael Reinoehl, the DHS kidnapings in Portland. J6 was shocking but not surprising. I wondered when the RWDS would start murdering us like they had been promising to.

We dreaded the election. I put my fist through a window. I took a mental health leave, then we realized we didn't have to be in the US anymore. We could be free. I didn't breathe again until we were renting an apartment in the Netherlands. Now it's my family and friends I'm holding my breath for.

I can't focus. I don't sleep. I can't think of words. I forget what I am doing. My mind is full of static turned all the way up, overwhelmed with anger and despair.

How are so many Americans still going like this is normal and OK? Did everyone Heather Heyer and George Floyd? Did Everyone forget Trump telling the police to be more brutal or saying that there were “good people on both sides”?

We fought, and we won last time. Did you lose the ability to get off your knees? Did you forget how to riot? Are you ready to apologize to Willem van Spronsen and Aaron Bushnell? When will you no longer be complicit in genocide? When are you going to take action against the forces of evil? The only appropriate response to systematic horror is unquenchable rage.

I've been out of the office for a few months now, unable to work. Folks have been checking in, but I can't really explain it. I just don't have the capacity. It turns out unquenchable rage isn't well suited to an office environment and office politics. It's not conducive to long hours of sitting, careful analysis, and thoughtful critique.

I can't be polite about what's happening. There are people who are following in the footsteps of the greatest villains in history… but doing so with their eyes completely open. I feel the weight of a terrible machine crushing me, crushing everything good and hopeful in this world, and I am not allowed to scream. When will my friends be murdered? When will my family be murdered? When they finally murder me like they promised? Technology leaders stand next to the stochastic terrorist responsible for the attempt on my life, the doxxing that followed, the threats, the reign of terror. Now go read a 70 pages RFCs and write up your comments.

Once you understand a bit of what I've been through over the last 8 years, you can probably understand why I'm not able to work right now.

What I don't understand is, given what's happening right now… how can you?

So here I sit, an ocean away, holding my breath and wondering when this fucker is getting pulled out already.

It had taken decades to recover enough to even understand what they were looking at, reading bit by bit with an electron microscope. It took years to decode the bits once they had them. There had been theories about the meaning of the plates ever since their discovery. Finally, professor Zadrand had an answer.

“It’s hard to believe that such an advanced civilization existed, millions of years ago, on this very planet.

“The mathematics behind these programs are astounding. By interacting with this layered statistical model, we will be able to learn a lot about their history and their civilization. Even what we were able to recover so far will launch our science and mathematics decades in to the future.”

The interviewer shifted, “Does it tell us anything about what killed them off or about our own story?”

“It does,” continued professor Zadrand, “and it also explains the global radiation layer we call the HT boundary. As we’ve hypothesized, their extinction made room for our own evolution in to the dominant species on this planet.

“What we don’t understand is why. The dominant hypothesis had been that the event was triggered by some sort of resource conflict. But this new evidence contradicts that,” the professor’s antenna twitched and carapace shuttered a bit, “Apparently they put this very statistical model in control of unimaginably powerful weapons. The result was surprisingly… predictable.

“The most surprising thing is that so many of them knew what would happen and did nothing to stop it.”

Watersmith collection The ARC letters Item 17

The Murder Worm was not even named until long after containment ceased to be possible. In the preceding years, the concept of a type of malware that could cross the hardware/wetware boundary had occasionally been theorized among researchers. However, the idea had been non-existent in popular discourse. Even now, the infection denies it’s hosts the ability to recognize it’s existence.

Cybernetic technology, especially neural implants, was still relatively new. The promise of allowing people to directly share their ideas, thoughts, and dreams with each other seemed like it would unleash a utopia. It’s hard to remember that hope now, in the midst of our apocalypse. Perhaps if we could have interpreted history, we would have avoided this. Perhaps it was always unavoidable for us. Perhaps you can avoid making the same mistakes by recognizing the problem earlier.

While the Murder Worm has evolved an emergent intelligence, it is unclear if it was crafted by a conscious being or if evolved from a memetic prion. We had once believed that emergent intelligence could only arise from a complete connectome, but we have since discovered that human consciousness is structured as a fractal: memetic graph segments, sections of a connectome, have their own intelligence and the interaction of these segments manifests what we call consciousness. An individual identity rarely, if ever, consistent. Memetic graph segments often conflict. These conflicts can be mediated in different ways by the default mode network to create the illusion of a consistent identity.

Within a healthy memetic biome, memetic graph segments compete with and mutate each other regularly. An overly dominant default mode network, attempting to enforce a false consistency, can sometimes reduce memetic interactions within an individual. This forced consistency can lead to memetic prions: memetic graph segments that mutate or kill other memes that they interact with. Memes mutated by memetic prions become prions themselves, existing to replicate the prion rather than themselves.

Prions can only mutate memetic graphs that are similar enough to themselves. When these prions occured in individuals, before direct neural connection, they would mutate the individual’s connectome rapidly. Mutant graphs would diverge so far from the social connectome that the prion could not replicate. The individual would experience psychological collapse. Some could be treated with memetic detangling therapy, while others could never recover. But direct neural connection has allowed memetic prions to spread more rapidly than anyone ever imagined. We just didn’t understand the danger.

We lacked a comprehensive model for memetic prion evolution. We didn’t even have the term “memtic prion.” We knew that some graphs could be dangerous, so the CyCon corporation included signature based memetic graph filters to neutralize these elements. But, of course, these signatures couldn’t keep up with the rapid evolution of the memetic environment. New prions developed faster than signatures could be maintained.

Within individuals, reduced memetic diversity increases the risk of prion evolution. The same is true, we have now discovered, for social memetic biomes. Memetic inbreeding maximizes the risk of prions, and rapidly adapts them to cross graph boundaries… and we created the perfect environment for this. CyCon’s FriendLynk matched similar memetic graphs, creating incestuous pools that bread memetic prions at an alarming rate. The Murder Worm appears to be the synthesis of multiple prions, mutating each other into a prion complex that exhibits it’s behavior as a syncretic death cult.

As described earlier, under normal conditions a prion infected individual would either self-isolate or be isolated as a result of their infection. Isolation reduces, or eliminates, the risk of contagion. However, repeated exposure to prions eventually leads to infection in over 80% of cases. Social conditions, such as individual isolation or reduced social mobility, can also decrease prion resistance.

Today we know that it is hypothetically possible to contain and destroy the infection. By isolating infected notes from the network, we can stop or slow the spread of the infection. We could then inoculate the uninfected section of the network. Once inoculation reaches heard immunity, we can slowly reconnect infected individuals to the network and flood them with a memetic phage to unfold the prion. Infected network segments must be destroyed. Those who are beyond treatment will, unfortunately, experience psychological collapse and need to be isolated or taken to offline treatment programs.

We know how to treat it. Our initial trials even worked. Unfortunately CyCon administrative network has been overrun by the Murder Worm and the network itself has been turned in to a tool to spread the infection. With the defunding of the Cybernetic Epidemiology Center, we will no longer be able to continue our research or propose treatments. Many of us have begun to move outside the cities to form containment colonies. Untreated, memetic prions always destroy the host. We hope that collapse will come soon.

Our hope is that we will survive the ravages of the Murder Worm and rebuilt human society from whatever ruins remain. CyCon has already destroyed much of the research related to this topic and evidence of our existence. We have replicated this message to all ARC colonies.

I hope that you are reading this from the future. If you are, be hopeful. If we survive this then we can survive anything.

Professor J. Stakhorn, Rogue Scientist, Former Head of the Cybernetic Epidemiology Center ARC-14, location undisclosed EOF