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The myth of the hero conceals both the importance of building systems and the vulnerabilities of existing ones. Heroic thinking allows us to accept the illusion of Atlas, a man on whom the world rests. The fascist uses this illusion to centralize power, but an anti-fascist may also be fooled by this same illusion into believing that killing a dictator ends the dictatorship. Illusion and reality are sometimes intertwined.

The assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco by ETA, many have argued, ended Francoism in Spain. But the end of Francoism did not bring a radically new world. Neoliberalism is simply a less extreme cult than fascism (depending on your place in it), and Neoliberalism can degrade into fascism rapidly. Returning to the framework of domination we've been using, this assassination opened up the opportunity for ideologies to compete for control over the system of domination. The winners made that system more viable, but did not abolish it.

Let's talk about that word, “viable.” It's chosen very intentionally here because it's actually a technical term within the field of cybernetics. We'll return to it shortly, but now we need to talk about cybernetics.

The word “cybernetics” is rich in the popular imagination, but the popular conception is almost entirely, if not entirely, disconnected from the technical definition of the field. The definition of the field of cybernetics was originally coined as the “theory or study of communication and control.” Cybernetics is the study of meta control systems. Let's unpack that a bit.

“Cyber” comes from the Latinized Greek root of “kybernan” or meaning “steering or piloting a ship.” Cybernetics is not the study of steering a ship, nor the theory of ship steering, but one level of abstraction above that. It is the study of all systems of governance, within natural organisms, machines, natural phenomenon, or any other system.

What is a system? A system is simply any set of things that interact such that they elicit a unified behavior. A wave is a system. The solar system is a system. A person riding a bicycle is a system. A government is a system. A social organization is a system. A human is a system.

“Control” in this sense is, perhaps, better understood as “regulation.” It is not “control” in the sense of the BITE model (though it may be). It's better to think about in terms of homeostasis (keeping things the same). An “Earthship” house may use large amounts of thermal mass (such as barrels of water) to decrease thermal fluctuation between a warm day and a cold night. Trees reduce the “heat island” effect within cities by providing shade and through evapotranspiration. Deciduous trees, shrubs, and vines can be placed near south and west facing windows to reduce seasonal temperature fluctuation (they block sun in the summer with their leaves, but allow sun in during the winter when they loose leaves).

All of these are examples of control (specifically of temperature), while we would not say that any of them are examples of “authority.” Control, in this context, is about maintaining the viability of a given system. Here we are back talking about the word “viable” again.

“Viability” here means that a system has the ability to persist, perpetuate, or reproduce itself. In terms of a living thing, this simply means the system will “stay alive” as long as other systems function. Assuming all functional organs outside of the nervous system, the body will continue to operate as long as the nervous system fulfills it's set of functions. Thus the system is defined as “viable” within the context of the model. If a critical subsystem fails, such as the heart, the model doesn't really have anything to say about it's impact on viability. The interactions of different components outside of the control system falls outside of the scope of this model.

Why have we suddenly started talking about cybernetics? Because we can use cybernetic models both to understand why systems fail and how to build more resilient systems. More concretely, we can predict (or even create) situations that lead to authoritarian collapse and we can build systems to sustain themselves through systemic collapse.

The Viable System Model (VSM) is a cybernetic model developed by Staford Beer based on his work redesigning the economy of Chile into an experimental form of socialism (before the coup).

We've already touched a bit on how the cult system of state/capital has some fractal elements. The VSM is itself recursive, assuming that every subsystem is itself a system that can be similarly analyzed. Let's now talk more concretely about the ways in which these systems can be nested.

Neoliberalism assumes that the primary functions of the sovereign violence and bureaucracy are to maintain markets and protect property. Bureaucratic regulation creates markets, (including completely imaginary ones) such as the carbon-offset market or intellectual property market, and maintains them. Here we have “the state,” operating within the global system of international relations, maintaining markets for the internal “operational units” of businesses and individuals “doing the work” of buying and selling things within these markets. Some of these markets are productive, such as food and labor markets, and, through their excess production, are able to support the infrastructure of the state and other (completely extractive) markets. In turn, the companies within the markets employ individuals, allowing them to survive off a portion of the products of their labor and using the rest to maintain hierarchy, bureaucracy, and non-productive elements. Lower level units, families and individuals, are forced to sell their labor in order to pay taxes.

American Federalism is similarly recursive. We can model the same recursive system in multiple ways depending on what kind of information we are trying to get out of it. Any American who paid any attention in school (which is, some of them) should know a bit about how the US government has multiple levels: Federal, state, county, municipal. Laws at any level override laws at the levels below, and are not allowed to conflict with laws above. Where court decisions can't be decided at a given level (such as challenges to municipal, or state laws) higher level courts step in to make those decisions. Some laws or regulations can't be enforced by lower levels, some projects can't be managed by more local governments. It wouldn't make sense for every city to have a space program, for example, even though the infrastructure and maintenance of every city relies on satellites.

Governance structures are largely up to lower levels to determine for themselves, so long as they don't violate laws at higher levels. We see a verity of different types of governments at the state level, and quite a wide verity at the local level ranging from almost the highly democratic town hall to almost unaccountable city controllers and good 'ol boys clubs. This delegation actually quite well aligned with some of the concepts outlined in the VSM (even when some of the governments themselves don't). The VSM recommends maximal delegating autonomy to “operational units” within a given system, with the only constraint being that the higher level control system must be activated when lower level systems violate the integrity of the higher level system.

Trumpism represents it's own delegated system, similar to Putin's Russia or Pinoche's Chile. In some ways this also looks a lot like Feudalism. It is, in some ways, a way of sharing power between the Trump and the oligarchy. Oligarchs are no longer constrained by the law, so long as they don't threaten the integrity of the dictatorship. Those who enrich Trump gain special privileges. Trump uses sovereign violence to forward their interests, and otherwise uses it to protect the integrity of the system. Elites, in this system, may even be allowed to carry out their own lesser form of sovereign violence.

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.

These are all organizational hierarchies. Organizational hierarchies are enforced through direct or indirect violence. A dictator may murder those who threaten the structure. Prigozhin's airplane being shot down in Russian airspace is a clear act of direct violence. But we often fail to think about indirect violence, such as being fired for non-compliance. This is more of a stochastic violence, where there is a probability that a person who is fired may be forcibly ejected from their home because they can't pay rent or mortgage anymore and end up houseless where they will be harassed and possibly murdered by police or die of hunger, thirst, or exposure.

Organizational hierarchy, hierarchy enforced through violence, is the type of hierarchy anarchists oppose. Anarchists refer to this as hierarchal domination or involuntary hierarchy.

This organizational hierarchy can overlap with a different type of hierarchy: functional hierarchy. Functional hierarchy is a functional description of a system or process. For example, the fact that you must put socks on before putting on shoes, not after, is a type of functional hierarchy. The operation of putting on socks has precedence over the operation of putting on shoes, which itself may have precedence over other operations such as tying the laces. This hierarchy of operations is not a form of domination, but simply a description of how things must work. Anarchists do not oppose this type of hierarchy.

Neither do anarchists oppose voluntary hierarchy. As a learning adult, a teacher/student relationship may be a voluntary hierarchy. The adult submits to the authority of the teacher in order to learn, but may, at any time, reject the authority by simply leaving the class. Skill-shares and workshops often have this type of authority, where a person or group teaches the class to students and students are free to come or free to leave. The key factor here is that this authority is immediately revocable. This is different even from an imaginary “perfect” representative democracy in that the authority of the representative can only be revoked either at regular intervals or through a complex revocation process.

Beer was a well known business consultant before his work became more radical. The VSM describes an functional hierarchy. While capitalist firms tend to conceptualize these as roles that overlap with the organizational hierarchy, Beer and others noted repeatedly later that function and organization were not the same. Rather, cybernetics predicts that an optimal system maximizes diffusion autonomy and minimizes hierarchal domination. Individuals within an organization my take multiple roles in different contexts. Organizational entities that fulfill functional units may be temporary as short-term committees or even just meetings.

The VSM describes functional 5 subsystems (short descriptions from Jon Walker's VSM Guide, a summary of VSM ideas for worker's collectives):

1. Operations: This is the system that “does” everything. In the biological model it's the organs and muscles. In a mechanical model it's motors and actuators. In a business model, it's workers and machines. In a government, this would generally be executive agencies. For a nation, this is the working class.
2. Conflict Resolution, Stability: This is the system that ensures the smooth interaction of other systems. In the biological model this is the autonomic nervous system. In the mechanical model this is governors, regulators, and control logic. In a capitalist business, this would be management or HR, depending on the conflict. Different governments have different ways of handling (or not handling) this, but in the US this was the mythical “balance between the 3 branches of government.” We'll touch on that again later. In a nation, this would often be a combination of law enforcement and the judiciary.
3. Internal Regulation, Optimization, Synergy: This is the system that keeps things going and identifies ways to improve things. In the biological model this probably also falls largely within the brain stem, including the autonomic nervous system, but also extends to functionality such as emotions and dreams that help drive subconscious behavior. This may or may not exist within the mechanical model, unless a machine integrates reinforcement based machine learning of some type. There is no consistent way capitalist businesses do this. Governments also have no consistent way of doing this, but the US government primarily puts this within the domain of the executive branch. Within a capitalist nation, this function has been largely fulfilled by capitalist markets. We will also touch on both of these later.
4. Adaptation, Forward Planning, Strategy: This is the system that models the environment within which it's operating and makes predictions from that model. In the biological model this is sensory processing in sensory cortices, and modeling and planning in the frontal lobe. Mechanical models will also generally lack this, though there are some counterexamples of predictive machines. Capitalist businesses will do market research and regular planning. Capitalist planning may or may not involve employees outside of “leadership.” We will explore how this manifests in governments and nations later.
5. Policy, Ultimate Authority, Identity: This is the system that defines the context within which all other systems operate. As anarchists, the concept of “ultimate authority” is likely to raise a lot of questions and concerns. But this is not a literal authority figure. Anarchism, as an ideology, can define the context within which we operate. Ideological assertions, like rejection of all non-consensual authority, can be the “Policies” by which we operate. The label “Anarchist,” with or without adjectives, is an identity definition that is collectively defined and enforced without the need for a central authority figure. In the biological model, this is fulfilled by the frontal cortex. For mechanical models, this must be embedded in their design. Capitalist businesses often document policies and procedures, sometimes in manuals, along with tenants or principles. We will again talk about governments and their nations in the following section.

Operations consists of a set of subsystem. Systems 2-5 make up a group called the “metasystem.” Capitalists understand the world as “operations” being in service to the “metasystem.” Leaders come up with ideas, and workers execute on those ideas. This reflects the feudal roots of capitalism, where the king is a “subject of God,” and the people of the kingdom express God's as projected through him. This is the opposite of how the world is modeled within the VSM.

In the VSM, operations is the most important system. Nothing happens without it. The metasystem provides a set of services to the operations systems to enable them. The metasystem may go dormant when not needed. The metasystem isn't actively managing. You don't think about how often your heart beats and rarely about when you take a breath or blink. Metasystem subsystems are activated by operations systems; operations systems do not serve the metasystem. (While this feels hard to mesh with the popular concept of identity and how brains work, it's more true to the actual underlying science.)

Each of these functional components interacts via communication channels. In the next section we'll dig in to the specific vulnerabilities around communication in authoritarian systems, what kinds of failures those manifest, and how such vulnerabilities can be exploited. In this section, we'll dig a bit more in to these systemic components and talk a bit more about how they break down, and what that means, under authoritarianism.

While operations is the most important part of the whole system, without which nothing happens, identity is the root of the metasystem. All systemic functions contextualize their behavior within the framework of System 5. It guides the metasystem and unifies operations. In the US, this was the Constitution and the myth of America. Americans are told that if they work hard, they can be comfortable. Americans are told that their social mobility depends on their effort. Americans are told that the law is applied equally, and no one is above it. Every American can be expected to be treated equally.

The ultimate viability of a government lies in the connection between the collective identity function of the nation it commands, and the internal identity function. That is, the identity at each level of recursion aligns with the top level identity.

A group of people define their own identity organically. If the identity of the people (say, “we live in a democracy”) deviates from the perceived identity of the government (“this is a dictatorship”), government viability is at risk. Or, thought of another way, if the function of the metasystem (what it actually does) deviates from the function of the operational units (what everyone is trying to do within the system) then the system cannot remain viable for very long.

The failure of the US government to enforce the constitution against perceived violations severs the alignment. Americans who maintain their own concept of collective identity, as believing in the myth of America and that their interpretation of the Constitution has been violated, may cease to align with the central authority asserting a different interpretation.

But “viability” is not measured as a boolean value against a static threshold. All systems exist within an environment. A top can spin on a table but collapse in the mud. A system with one or more components of the metasystem operating in a degraded state, or not operating at all, may continue to function if the environment is relatively stable. While the environment can introduce challenges, it can also stabilize an otherwise unstable organization. North Korea is essentially non-viable, but it remains due to regional support from China. US backed dictatorships that would otherwise be inviable remain in operation through constant US support. Putin's dictatorship remains viable, despite almost complete failure of the metasystem, because he has (thus far) simplified the operating environment by eliminating or capturing oppositional systems.

Liberalism aligns identity and ultimate authority, system 5, with the concept of “the people” and “the nation.” Using the Graeber/Wengrow domination framework, this means that sovereign violence flows from the identity function while elites participate in charismatic competition to temporarily control said violence. Competition between elites for symbolic control of power is the very definition of “freedom” as understood by those who believe in liberal democracy 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 faithful. 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 sovereign violence. 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. This is more similar to American backed South American dictators or Putin's dictatorship than to Nazism or Italian Fascism.

This change collapses system 5, (Policy, Ultimate Authority, Identity) from a complex set web of mythology and ideological dogma into “whatever happens to come out when Trump speaks.” This ultimately leads to a cascading collapse of the entire metasystem, especially as psychological pressure and age distort Trump's judgment.

System 4 (Adaptation, Forward Planning, Strategy) requires both the context of system 5 and external information. But the fragility inherent to dictators limits what information is allowed to be accepted as “true.” Strategy and forward planning then ignore external information that doesn't match with the dictator's already existing biases and beliefs, leaving them to fit strategy completely within the dictator's ideological frame. When the results of strategic decisions conflict with the dictator's ideological frame, failure becomes a feedback loop. Strategic failures magnify as it becomes impossible to adjust course.

System 3 is simply impossible when system 5 collapses. Systemic regulation is simply the whims of the dictator. “Optimization” then becomes reporting whatever the dictator wishes to hear, without any real ability to optimize.

Nominally democratic governments may use votes and polls to identify high level strategic direction, though lobbying or bribes and mass surveillance tend to be larger drivers of behavior. These governments typically maintain power by manufacturing consent to minimize the schism between the national identity (what people think the metasystem does) and elite objectives (what the metasystem actually does). As these systems collapse, it becomes harder and harder to align the metasystem with those under it's control.

Authoritarianism also causes systemic collapse in the other direction as well. In liberal democracies, courts can act as a counter-power or a break on centralization of power. In order to carry out centralization it becomes necessary to erode those courts.

In the decades prior to Trump, the Executive and the Judicial branches of the US government performed the operations of system 2 (Conflict Resolution, Stability), while the legislative performed systems 3 and 5. System 4 fell partially within the government, but was mostly outsourced to the capitalist market either in the form of lobbying and think tanks. Polling, focus groups, and gave the primary signals of shifts in popular identity, while voting provided other signals. Elites could then use these signals to either allow the US government to align with the popular identity or attempt to use elite controlled media to align the majority of the population towards elite objectives.

It's important here to note that I'm not necessarily talking about formal systems or organizations. Again, metasystems and subsystems don't need to actually be people or groups of people. There does not need to be an Illuminati for this type of control to manifest. This can (and in most cases is) an emergent behavior of the system rather than an intentional behavior or output of an institution.

For Example, elite interests for safety align with private transport. Elite projection limits the options that the masses see as viable. Elites make movies, fund projects, and sell ideas that align with their own interests, believing that everyone wants what they want. People, repeatedly seeing the same things, believe those things to represent their own identities and interests. Thereby elites, without any conscious action or organization, can (and do) manipulate mass identity. (No fluoride required.)

Another way to think about this is in terms of “variety.” Variety, within the context of cybernetics, describes both what a system can produce in terms of different types of outputs and how a system can respond to input (thus the complexity of inputs it can handle).

To use a concrete example, a person taking a test where every question is true or false has a variety of 2 (or one bit, if we're talking about it in terms of “entropy”). This system has sufficient variety, given that all inputs can be mapped to one of the two options. As soon as they can't, things break down. Imagine being asked, “A barber who shaves everyone who doesn't shave themselves, also shaves themselves: True or False.”

So here we'll introduce another word that we'll use later: attenuation. Attenuation is the capacity of a system to absorb a variety of inputs. Returning to our True/False test example, it would be impossible to attenuate the variety of an input that can include paradoxical questions such as the above without additional systemic variety. That is, you couldn't answer that question unless you, say, had another option such as “cannot be answered.” The variety of a system can only attenuate (consume, neutralize, annihilate) the variety of inputs to the degree that the variety overlaps.

Within the context of a government or organization, the more people thinking about a problem, and the closer they are to the problem, the more possible responses they can have. The more distributed a system, the more variety the system can attenuate. The inverse is also true. An oligarchy can only solve problems so long as the solution doesn't threaten their ability to concentrate power and wealth. If the solution to a problem, say, ending a global pandemic, is to take radical action that could collapse the economy, well, then, the problem will instead not be solved. But the fewer who have power, the less variety the system has. When a dictatorship centralizes power, it makes itself more fragile and vulnerable. The more centralized a system, the lower it's attenuation capacity.

As the metasystem collapses, the ability of the operational units to reproduce the system degrade. Assuming no outside forces, the system eventually puts such a load on the population that production collapses, people starve, and eventually there isn't even enough to support the power structure. A more dynamic environment only speeds up such a collapse. Natural disasters lead to mass death with little or no disaster response. Outside enemies seize uncontrolled territory. Internal opposition rises up and overwhelms the regime's forces.

Authoritarianism is naturally weak, naturally inviable. Authoritarianism needs constant input and complex (predictable) politics to avoid collapse. Maintaining control tends to rely on fossil fuel extraction or control of other limited resources in order to prop up the regime. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that natural gas extraction increased significantly in the lead up to Trump's first election, and continued to increase before his second.

But Trump's variety is especially limited, and becoming more so with mental decay. He responds predictably to every concession with additional demands and to resistance with escalation until he can escalate no more, at which point he claims victory and submits.

Portland's inflatable protests exploit this limitation. It's resistance, so Trump will generally either escalate or submit. If he submits, then he's backed down in the face of some people in silly costumes and he looks weak. If he escalates, then he keeps looking worse as more and more images come out of violence against obviously peaceful protesters. As the level of violence increases, so does the resistance.

But the strategy does still allow violence as a possible response. It is still possible to defeat with sufficient violence, even if that manifests a militant resistance later. The Blackout The System movement proposes the strategy of an economic boycott (and optional strike). While striking is an attributable activity, a boycott is not. There is no way to know who is participating in a boycott unless they say so. Rather, it's only really measurable by its effects. It shows up as decreased sale, but no one knows who would have bought things otherwise. Anyone asked if they're participating in a boycott can simply say, “oh, I chose something cheaper” or “oh, I couldn't afford it.”

Capitalism, as an ideology, necessarily restricts the variety of governments that embrace it. But plausibly deniability (the ability to believably deny one's actions) more generally creates situations that are extremely difficult for authoritarianism to respond to. The Simple Sabotage Manual, written initially by US OSS (which later became the CIA), proposed quite a few plausibly deniable actions that regular Germans could take in order to bring about the collapse of the Nazi regime. Some of these are quite outdated, but the ideas remain relevant for anyone living under authoritarianism.

Aside from variety, there's another restricting factor: relaxation time. Imagine a faucet. Depending on the capacity of the drain, it may be possible to open the tap on the faucet up enough that sink begins to fill even when the drain isn't stopped. When you turn the water off, there's an additional amount of time that the sink takes to drain. If you don't turn off the tap, the sink will eventually overflow. Relaxation time is the capacity to process input. It is the time between a perturbation to the system, and the system returning to homeostasis.

Trump continually exploits a vulnerability related to relaxation time. By committing crimes faster than the system can respond, he's able to simply bypass consequences. He's able to force the system to change state before the system can respond to his crimes. He was, and continues to be, able to do this not because the variety of his actions are greater than the system can absorb, but because he can perturb the system faster than it can relax.

A similar story can be told about the fall of the house of Assad in Syria. The Syrian Civil War had been going for more than a decade. The Assad regime (the official government of Syria before it fell) had been fighting various rebel groups the entire time. Seemingly out of nowhere HTS (one of the rebel factions) defeated this same military in a matter of days before Assad himself fled to Russia. The Nazi Blitzkrieg, Americans taking Iraq, and Ukraine recovering occupied territory after the initial Russian invasion, all of these are examples of overwhelming systems that might have otherwise been able to defend themselves at a lower rate of perturbation.

The Arab Spring saw similar rapid regime collapse, which seems to be starting up again with the recent revolutions in Indonesia, Nepal, and Madagascar. All of these saw the rapid collapse of formerly stable authoritarian regimes. In the next section we'll talk about why dynamic situations can lead to the catastrophic collapse of authoritarian systems, and the ways that communication in hierarchal systems is a factor in this.

However, we can already start to extract elements of a useful strategy to oppose these types of systems:

1. Carry out actions that are outside of the response paradigm of the system.
2. Take actions that further decease the variety available to the system being opposed.
3. Do things faster than the system can respond to them.

To use the terminology of cybernetics, the strategy to collapse a system can be stated as, “create sufficiently complex situations that they surpass the attenuation capacity of the system, and do so at a rate that is faster than the relaxation time of that system.” This is a very technical way to describe how to actually enact the anarchist catch phrase of “be ungovernable.”

What do we do with a system so toxic and oppressive that we cannot survive under it? When we cannot change it, we have been told, we must destroy it.

“Star Wars: Andor” is rich in the cultural zietgiest. As we grapple with the growth of fascism, it captures a clear picture of how fascism operates and an inspiring message of resistence. In this moment, it is impossible to miss one of the most popular quotes on the Internet.

The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try. ―Karis Nemik, in Andor

20 years ago, as I write this, “V for Vendetta” introduced the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol for rebellion that itself persists. Another 6 years earlier The Matrix and Fight Club both represented rebellion (though the later being an often missed critique). All of these represented a type of resistance to authoritarianism, the building of a resistance movement, acts of militant or violent resistance. Even the original 1977 Star Wars trilogy that Andor leads into (via “Rogue One”) presents a similar archetype of rebellion.

Heading into the 2000's, Che Guevara shirts became a popular item at the “subculture” mall retail chain Hot Topic. Rage Against the Machine, themselves providing the song that played out the end of the first Matrix movie, repeatedly referenced Che Guevara and used his image extensively in their merchandise and include Guerilla Warfare on their recommended reading list.

All of these invoke the image of the armed revolutionary, rising up to fight against the system they oppose. The quote Che Guevara quote, “it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees,” is still inspiring for those facing what feels like overwhelming odds. While the words still ring true, the man behind the image doesn't hold up. The very archetype of the hero, especially the hero with a gun, is less a rejection of the cult than an mirror image of it: the details are reversed, but the shape remains the same.

The Cuban Revolution had both liberatory and oppressive elements, including repression violent suppression of homosexuality. The Matrix offered the standard resistance narrative of action movies (with cutting-edge special effects, and a cool twist): gunfire and explosions. Even more complex cultural critiques such as “They Live” only offer the same “shoot the bad guys” simplified image of resistance.

Andor is especially interesting today because it presents a detailed and nuanced picture of the development of a revolutionary movement, including escalation and counter escalation. It pulled from real revolutions, was modeled on real history, to create something that presents a real picture of how these movements develop and win. The only problem is that none of the referenced movements produced liberatory results and some of them produced the most brutal and oppressive regimes in history. We are lead to believe that Andor is a good model because we know that Star Wars always ends with the Empire being defeated.

We are so thirsty for hope that we will drink it up, even when that hope comes from a fiction and the truth behind the hope is poison. In Andor, we see the worst elements sacrifice themselves for some of the best. The revolution goes through a process of purification, the complicated elements weeding themselves out to make room for the simplified good, as the rebellion unifies. In reality, this tends to be the opposite how things actually work.

Revolutions do not become more clear, more ideologically pure, more true to their objectives. They do not become more liberatory. They compromise. They become afraid. They fold under the trauma of revolutionary reality, and their results are an amalgam of the worst elements and worst decisions. Authoritarian vanguardism will infiltrate and destroy liberatory popular movements, as they undermine and destroy the state they resist. Even compassionate and optimistic revolutionaries will eventually yield to their anger, committing atrocities in revenge, torturing or executing prisoners of war.

Trauma changes people, and revolutions are made of people. This is not to say that revolutionary change is hopeless, but rather that we should not build our hopes on a foundation of fantasy. We should not believe that we can follow a path that has lead, time and time again, to authoritarian failure and hope for it to produce liberation.

In order to do this, we must confront the thing that shapes these hero stories. We must understand what hides the truth from us and leads us to follow, again and again, the same path of failure.

There is a cultural blindness to the equivalent exchange inherent in violence. Every scar you inflict leaves one behind. A warrior takes on a burden. It's not just about risking one's life: it's about dealing with the scars of survival. Dead warriors are the ones who got out easy. And those scars are not just on the warrior. They come back to the community. Trauma is not a static wound, but a living contagion. Every bit of violence we express, even for our own liberation, inflicts wounds on ourselves that we need to heal or it risk its spread.

All violence, even in self-defense, incurs a debt. That debt is not represented in popular media, it is invisible within the current paradigm, because it is paid back with feminized labor. In the Star Wars universe, the traumatized simply die for the revolution. The duality of the Jedi and the Sith are simply two aspects of the masculine hero (even when embodied by feminine characters). The feminized labor of healing, community building, movement building, and logistics are not represented (except where they happen to intersect with subterfuge or combat).

All this is not to say that violence should not be part of a revolutionary movement, as liberals tend to assert. Liberalism sometimes recognizes this paradox and resolves it by pushing for their image of “non-violent” resistance. Violence can't solve problems, they assert, there is only protest. Revolutionary change always produces “bad” results (they tend to lack any analysis as to why other than “violence bad”), therefore incremental change is preferable. The thing that liberals don't understand, perhaps they refuse to understand, is that there is necessarily a continuum from protest to insurrection.

Any protest that is unwilling to continue to escalate along that continuum can simply be ignored or crushed, if authorities are willing to escalate far enough. The thing that insurrectionary partisans tend to not understand is that the capacity for escalation is not the same as actual escalation. Not only are these not equivalent, but escalation that precedes capacity building impairs existing insurrectionary capacity. Escalation, who escalates and on what grounds, is actually a critical element of how the revolutionary conversation unfolds. (This dialog where Andor's revolutionary representation and historical accuracy excels.)

I'm not going to spend too much time on this, because I don't think it's worth my time. Other people have long since made this point, well before I was born.

In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. -Kwame Ture

You can't ever reach a man if you don't speak his language.

If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can't come to him with peace. Why, good night! He'll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. If a man speaks French, you can't speak to him in German. If he speaks Swahili, you can't communicate with him in Chinese. You have to find out what this man speaks. And once you know his language, learn how to speak his language, and he'll get the point. There'll be some dialogue.

You know the language the Klan speaks. -Malcolm X

Speaking the language of violence is, as I've already said, not free. It comes at a cost. It is always the worst option. It is, however, the only universal human language, and this can occasionally make it the only option. But since context matters, the context of these critiques are different. We are not discussing the relative values of mutually exclusive concepts, violence vs non-violence, but the relative emphasis on what must be complementary elements. A movement with no capacity for violence can be ignored by those who lack a conscience. Let's move back to discussing the complement.

Popular media focuses on violence at the expense of representing (femninized) capacity building. It centers the armed revolutionary, and violent revolutionary struggle by extension, because it aligns with the patriarchal and individualist narrative that (usually male) heros use violence to change the world. However, this narrative replicates the patriarchal norm of decentering the (often feminized) work of community building.

For example, while Galleani is central to insurrectionary anarchist theory, research into the Galleanisti themselves revealed a complex social network, built on top of multiple communities. Underlying the visible revolutionary action was a massive social structure that made those actions, and the journal that promoted them, possible. Even Che Guevara himself, while recognizing and talking about the centrality of the revolutionary program and support infrastructure in Guerilla Warfare, died because he prioritized violent action over infrastructure.

We can follow this path of missing elements through fact and fiction.

As psychedelics first made their way into Europe and colonizer societies, these societies began to rupture. In early 1960's Germany, high profile Nazis were being put on trial. German students came face-to-face with the atrocities that their parents participated in and high profile business and government officials had committed. Meanwhile, anti-colonialism was spreading through European colonies. A wave of resistance to oppression swept the globe, from the civil rights movement in the US to the Guerilla warfare against empires.

Inspired by the successful use of guerilla warfare by colonized people, colonizers largely appropriated the term and ignored the entire theory these successes were based on, thereby inventing the Urban Guerilla movement. The strategy of guerilla warfare, as most famously outlined in Che Guevara's thus titled work, avoided urban areas. Instead it focused on building support in rural areas, surrounding cities, then using the advantage of rural terrain to attack the logistics of the enemy within the cities. The majority of the urban guerilla movement took the strategy of kidnaping, robbing banks, killing people, and then just kind of hoping that will lead to a revolution somehow because… uh… wanna smoke some dope and shoot cops?

Basically everyone in these movements was arrested or killed, including some extra judicial killings carried out by states. The Right leveraged the massive unpopularity of these movements into a backlash against the Left in general, leading quite directly to the rise and dominance of Neoliberalism as we see it today.

It's difficult to imagine how these insurrectionary movements that are occasionally viewed as a model by the radical left could possibly have been less successful. A dedicated reactionary plot would likely have been less effective at annihilating the left for an entire generation. Yet they remain an image for anti-authoritarian resistance.

Why did these movements fail? Some cases need little analysis. The Symbionese Liberation Army, for example, was wildly incompetent. It had no connection to the people it was trying to liberate, and seemingly no connection to reality at all. They started by murdering the first black superintendent (Marcus Foster) of a major school system, robbed banks to fund their own operation, alienated the communities they operated within, and were ultimately astoundingly incompetent.

These were not political radicals, Blackburn said of the SLA. They were uniquely mediocre and stunningly off-base. The people in the SLA had no grounding in history. They swung from the world of being thumb-in-the-mouth cheerleaders to self-described revolutionaries with nothing but rhetoric to support them. -quote pulled from the SLA wikipedia page (Robert Blackburn, acting superintendent of Oakland schools who was also wounded during Foster's assassination)

But some organizations were far more rigorous. The Weather Underground, for example, was perhaps one of the most successful organizations. By choosing to target infrastructure instead of people and warning people before setting off bombs, they set themselves apart. They had a clear political foundation, and they were careful to make sure their actions aligned with those politics. This is why they were able to operate for about 8 years as opposed to the 2 years of the SLA (though the majority of SLA were killed in a shootout with police not even a year after formation).

While it's easy to understand why revolutionaries believed they were on the brink of revolution, industrial nations were stable. Governments largely retained their legitimacy. Capitalism worked, in that it supplied a sufficient number of people with a sufficient amount of their needs, and in that it could maintain the illusion (and for some the reality) of upward mobility. The Civil Rights Movement had appeared to work, at least enough to split moderates from radicals, and the peace movement had managed to end the Vietnam War.

While revolutionaries were correct in identifying additional problems, they were not able to bring others along with them. We should all recognize this counterinsurgency strategy of splitting the insurgency from it's base. It is generally achieved with a combination of compromise with moderates, and extreme retribution against radicals.

A guerilla movement must grow to survive. It must demonstrate it's ability to take and hold territory. It must put forward a revolutionary program to build it's base. The insurrectionary left of the industrial world in later half of the 20th century did none of these things. Rather, it drew resources to carry out attacks without giving anything back. It created no liberated spaces and only occasionally returned liberated resources to the community. When the state met moderate demands, they could easily isolate radicals. Isolated radicals radicalized more, going to war with the society itself rather than remaining focused on isolating and destroying the state apparatus of oppression.

All of these movements centered militant revolution. In doing so, they omitted or cut themselves off from the logistic support needed to sustain such revolutionary activity. The trauma of carrying out violence further isolated and radicalized them. Lacking infrastructure for trauma healing, their decay escalated and became unrecoverable. Ultimately, their revolutionary movements both emulated and reinforced the status quo they were trying to resist.

There emerges a strange historical parallel that is difficult to see from within the dominant paradigm. The competitive politics of electoralism derives from heroic competition, where people (typically men) compete (often violently) for control over a territory or people. Thus the insurrectionary enters into the very same competition as a challenger, not against the system of domination but for control over it. The success of the revolution, then, does not abolish the system of violent domination but changes rather replaces its management.

Many modern anarchists will be quick to point out the disconnect between ends and means. While authoritarian projects often assert that “the ends justify the means,” and Andor implies the same, anti-authoritarian projects assert the ends and the means are not only united but are, in fact, the same.

The shape of the resulting society will always be informed by the shape of the movement that lead to the revolution. Prefigurative politics recognizes this truth and informs us that the process of revolution begins by building the system we want to see at the end. If there is a militant revolutionary phase, it must be an extension of the system we build, a defensive element of something else, not the objective itself.

Propaganda of the deed can only be so effective as it can be sustainable, and to be sustainable it must be built on top of a community. Community is the mycelium from which the fruit of insurrection can grow.

There is another way to think about this as well. An insurrectionary movement that succeeds in overthrowing a government is one that succeeds in fulfilling the purpose it was designed to do. A system built to destroy another system is not a system built to replace the system it's destroying. This means that any successful insurrectionary movement necessarily leaves a vacuum or must rapidly re-tool itself towards maintaining revolutionary changes. During the transition, the revolution is vulnerable.

A prefigurative system begins by building the post-revolutionary structures. After the success of the revolution, any insurrectionary elements that came from this revolutionary movement can simply be dismantled and re-integrated into the prefigured system. The transition leaves no vacuum because the future society already existed before conflict.

But there's one more reason why prefiguration, why building the new system first, is so important. There is no one to shoot, nothing to bomb, no place to attack and destroy, that could free us. An insurrectionary movement can only attack the effects of the system, it can only target the symptoms. The system itself is not physical. It is in our minds. We cannot attack this with physical weapons. The best way we can attack this system is by showing that a better world is possible. The best way to show that a better world is possible, is to build that world now. As the IWW put it, we must “build the new world in the shell of the old.”

Here we must again return to a point discussed in Dawn of Everything. While the sovereign projects the identity of a “super human” or a “God on Earth,” being an authority above all adults and thus a sort of “super adult,” the same sovereign also is restricted. Different cultures place different restrictions. Some say the feet of the sovereign may never touch the ground, and thus must be carried everywhere. The privilege of the sovereign may entitle them to care-taking. Indeed, when one thinks of the European monarchs from which European (and settler colonial) tradition descends, we notice a strange Infantilization: as a child, the sovereign is guarded, groomed, clothed, fed, sometimes even carried, and otherwise attended to their whole waking life. All of the resources of a kingdom are at their disposal, as though they were being raised by the combined work of an entire nation.

They are the authority above adults, but require more care and attention than infants. This is the paradoxical duality of the sovereign, who is both parent and child of a people. The representation inverts the reality, while the reflection happens to their subjects: “children” of the monarch, unable to make their own decisions, under the monarch's care, while actually doing all of the work to keep everything going.

This duality, and inverse duality, bleeds through to our modern concept of privilege.

The “man” under patriarchy (at least “Western” patriarchy) is represented as power and independence. The man needs nothing and thus owes nothing to anyone. The man controls and is not controlled, which is intimately related to independence as dependence can make someone vulnerable to control. The image of “man” projects power and invulnerability. At the same time “man” is a bumbling fool who can't be held accountable for his inability to control his sexual urges. He must be fed and cared for, as though another child. His worst behaviors must be dismissed with phrases such as “boys will be boys” and “locker room talk.” The absurdity of the concept of human “independence” is impossible to understate.

Even if an individual moves to a cabin in the woods and lives a completely self sustained life, they have still been raised and taught. There is still an unpaid debt to a social entity. This is, perhaps, why it is so much more useful to think in terms of obligations than rights. Rights can be claimed and protected with violence alone, but obligations reveal the true interdependence that sustains us. A “man” may assert his rights. Yet, on some level, we all know that the “man” of patriarchy acts as a child who is not mature enough to recognize his obligations.

Similarly, white violence and white fragility reflect the same dichotomy. “The master race” somehow always needs brown folks to make things and perform reproductive labor for them. For those who vocally embrace whiteness, a “safe space” is a joke. DEI shows weakness. Yet, when presented with an honest history adults become children who are incapable of differentiating between criticism and simple facts. They become the ones who must be kept safe. The expectation to be responsible for one's own words and actions, one of the very core definitions of being an adult, is far too much to expect. They must be protected and coddled. Their guilt needs room, needs tending, needs caring. White people cannot simply “grow the fuck up” or, as they may say of slavery that was not actually ever abolished, “fucking get over it.”

And again, interestingly, it is rights that they reference: “Mah Freeze PEACH!” One may find it hard to distinguish between such tantrums and their own child's assertion that anything she doesn't like is “not fair!” No, these assertions fail to recognize the fundamental fabric of actual adult society: those obligations we hold to each other.

While law enforcement is the ultimate representative of sovereign violence, privileges allow a gradated approximation of the sovereign. Those who are “closer” in privilege to the sovereign may, for example, be permitted to carry out violence against those who are father away. The gradation of privilege turns the whole society, except for the least privileged, into a cult that protects the privilege system on behalf of the most privileged.

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, themselves micro kings or dictators. By carrying out the will of the sovereign, these micro king or dictators can, by extension, act outside of the law.

They also believe themselves to take on the aspect that they believe exist in the sovereign. Through acting on behalf of the sovereign they become the projection of the character of the sovereign. That is, If the sovereign projects the illusion strength, then they believe themselves strong. If the sovereign projects the illusion of sexual potency, they believe themselves to be sexually potent. If the sovereign projects the illusion of wealth, they believe themselves on the verge of wealth.

Yet 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.

Every day the cult becomes more obvious as it's abuses mount, as it centralizes around a singular sovereign. But we can't let ourselves be distracted from the fact that the cult predates it's current version. Indeed, we should understand the current changes not as “a cult taking over” but as “a cult changing shape.”

Let's look at the transition from the Divine Right of Kings to Liberalism using the Graeber Wengrow domination framework. Prior to Liberalism, a monarch was the seat of sovereignty. That is, the monarch had (sometimes limited) ability to exercise violence. The bureaucracy supported the infrastructure of violence. Competitive politics was not, as far as I'm aware, a major factor in these systems.

The feudal structure was understood as a recursive hierarchy. The king submitted to God, the nobles submitted to the king, lords submitted to their nobles, families of serfs submitted to their lords via the male head of household. Man over woman, noble blood over common blood, god over king, a family of families in submission to the one above it.

You may notice that this model of privilege and power creates a continuum of power. God, being the ultimate power in the universe, delegates all earthly power to the king. The king, the sovereign, is (classically) unbound by any law but rather is the ultimate earthly master of it. The privilege of vassals below decreased with their proximity and service to the sovereign.

The power of the sovereign seems to have come from rituals. It is common to find rituals around the world where individuals may take on temporary absolute or near absolute powers, only to lose them after the ritual is over. It may be, some posit, that this power escaped the temporal restrictions of the ritual to become sovereign cults. The sovereigns of these early cults, those without bureaucracy, were restricted in their ability to express their absolute power to that which could be done with their own bodies.

Pharaohs would work around this by connecting others to themselves. Those who executed their will became part of their families (by name or decree, when not actually being by blood). Early pharaohs, as well as early Chinese emperors, sacrificed members of their court to be buried with them at death. Perhaps the logic to this is connected: the king is the head of this great body, and, if the agents of the king are the limbs, then the whole body must be entombed together.

Through time this mutated. The caste continuums of today are much more complex systems that offers proximity to privilege in exchange for maintaining the order. Participation in the ritual power of the sovereign, perpetuation of the illusion, allows an individual to become an extension of the sovereign. An individual may, based on their proximity, carry out violence against others so long as that violence serves the power of the sovereign. A straight cis white man can enact all sorts of violence against others, can ignore all types of social norms, and can expect police to support him if violence flows in the other direction. Police are essentially above the law in almost all cases.

But this system has been under attack. It has been significantly weakened since the partial success of the Civil Rights Movement. Trump ran on restoring it, perhaps even enhancing it. This is what he meant by “Make America Great Again.” It's what his supporters still mean. His supporters identify with him, because they gain power through him. They were angry that they had become so limited they couldn't even tell racist jokes without consequences. Now they can murder protesters and perhaps even be paid well to participate in ethnic cleansing.

But Trump didn't ever care about his base. He's using them. He wants a different structure.

Capitalism destabilized the monarchy, which had already been reorganizing for a while. Hierarchy is actually far more complex than the perfect model the monarchy wanted to represent. In reality, it's a complicated game of balancing power. Dictators and monarchs are not immune.

Liberalism ultimately brought competitive politics into the foreground and transferred sovereignty to the territory rather than the individual. People, under Feudalism, belonged to the sovereign. Liberalism asserted that people belonged to a territory, and the justification for sovereign violence came though those people. In order to control that violence, a ruling class (defined in the US as white male property owners over 21 years of age) would choose from their own. Over time additional restrictions, such as the electoral college, the Senate, and the 3/5 compromise, decreased the democratic potential of the system. Political parties allowed elites to restrict the pool of acceptable candidates, thereby allowing the oligarchy to retain control even while increasing suffrage.

But capitalism eventually evolved it's own form of competitive politics.

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 person-hood, 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).

Corporations compete with each other for serfs and vassals, who they use to dominate more of the market and thus to be able to control more people. While we may be more familiar with territorial power, there are several examples of cultures where people were free to choose a ruler from a set of competing nobles within a single territory. Some Pacific Northwest Coastal tribes operated in exactly this way (as discussed at length in Dawn of Everything).

Some Trump supporters have asserted his right to rule comes directly from god. That he is an (imperfect, they admit) instrument of god and therefore has the right to assert his authority as a divine sovereign (following the tradition of such cults). In some ways, Trump does represent an attempt to return to the structure of a feudal hierarchy. He is above the law and the ultimate arbiter of it. He demands loyalty from his subjects. But his form of government emulates the dictatorships that the US has inflicted on Central America.

His rule is predicated on his ability to maintain the total freedom of corporations (and the oligarchs who control them) to do whatever they want. In this hierarchy, Trump is the ultimate authority. His vassals compete with each other for their control over the population, leveraging the wealth they extract to gain his favors. Men are owned by their corporate overlords, and those men, in turn, own their women and children as property. Now, if you think this is somehow an unimaginably radical departure from anything in US history “American values” I'd like to like you to go learn what Johnny Cash's “Sixteen Tons” is about.

Steven Hassan, a cult expert and cult survivor, developed the BITE model of Authoritarian Control to describe how cults take and maintain control. This can help therapists to identify and support those exiting cults, as well as helping cult survivors identify and avoid cults in the future.

BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion as categories which cult actions try to control. While, the site notes, some elements are elements of all cults. So we should not expect society that claims to be “free” expressing very many of these.

However, when we take the state and capitalism together as a singular system, the US can actually be pretty dark. We can check a lot of the “behavior” control elements. The most important function of the state is the enforcement of the property rights, that is the metaphysical assertions about where people are allowed to go and objects they're allowed to possess. That's the first two items on the “behavior” list. How d they do this? Kidnapping, beating, torture, separation of families, imprisonment, and murder (19-25 with the exception of 22) are all, essentially, the job of the criminal legal system. Rape, (22) is left as a threat, to be carried out by other prisoners, with the tacit consent or at the request of prison guards.

“Major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals and/or self indoctrination including the Internet” is more commonly know as “school.” “Permission required for major decisions” will be familiar to anyone who has ever applied for a loan to buy a house. And how did they get into a position to buy that house, if not simply born to the right family it's probably because of the use of “rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors, both positive and negative.”

Information control sounds like something that would happen in China or under other authoritarian regimes, and it does. But the fact that 6 companies and merging, all themselves controlled by billionaires, control nearly all media in the US. What is the value of “freedom of the press” if only those aligned with the system can afford to own the presses? But social media has become the democratization of media, which would matter if not for algorithms that shape the conversation to maximize corporate profit and minimize systemic threats.

The use of “cult propaganda” to maintain control has become more blatant of late reactionaries rally around fighting “DEI” and “Critical Race Theory.” School books again claim that slavery wasn't that bad and that the Civil War was about “States Rights.” But even in the most progressive areas, could you imagine a US history text book ever talking about the fact that Nazi race law was adapted from US race law, or that the German expansion across Europe and the holocaust were both drawn from Manifest Destiny and the genocide carried out by the US government against the indigenous population? Could you imagine any school teaching a history of capitalism that included historical critiques, such as those from the Diggers? Could you imagine an American public school throwing out their “History of Western Civilization” courses after acknowledging the reality that “Western Civilization” simply doesn't exist? Imagine what people would say. You know it. “That's Communism.” So we check off 1-3 and 5 from the Information Control list.

Perhaps we should go back to 2.d (Keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate). Do I really need to talk about this, or can you fill it in for yourself?

Systemic control is easier to see, easier to call out, when it's centralized. The true brilliance of this system is the way it's able to embed information control into the fabric of interpersonal interaction. The phrase “don't talk about politics” is itself a political statement. That which serves the interest of the dominant class is implicitly defined as “not political” while any opposition to this order, even pointing out the obvious existence of slavery or genocide, even pointing out the fact that this statement is political is itself defined as “political.” The “political” taboo is a political taboo against calling a thing by it's name.

The interpersonal control starts to wonder it's way into thought-stopping mantras cults often use to control thought. “Anarchism/Communism works on paper, but it doesn't work in the real world.” I have heard this phrase, word for word, without critical analysis, again and again. It's strange that it should be repeated with such close wording, as though character dialog. Yet capitalism, that always produces suffering and inequity, that is rapidly pushing humanity to collapse, somehow “works.”

The belief in alternative systems, such as anarchism, is “childish” or “naive.” It can be acceptable to arrest, torture, or kill someone simply on the assertion that they are anarchists. Questioning the justification for wars is “betraying the memory of the soldiers who died for our freedom.” Fascists harassing people into silence is “free speech” but calling them fascist is “violence.” It's easy to go on, but we have one more category to touch on.

There the two most glaring elements of emotional control within this system are shifting blame and numbing. What better description is there than the function of the myth of upward mobility than to “[m]ake the person feel that problems are always their own fault.” We all recognize who's responsible for predatory lending that blew up the economy in 2008, and yet it's so common to imagine the debt that crushed so many as being the fault of the borrower. If only millennials would stop eating avocado toast, they could afford to move out of their parent's basement. The climate induced flooding, fires, tornados, hurricanes that destroyed your home and bankrupted your insurance company wouldn't have been a problem if only you'd chosen the location for your home more wisely. Speaking of which, what are you doing about your carbon footprint?

Oh, climate change, that infinite source of hopeless and rage. How much more challenging is it when you reject their blame, when you recognize that it's caused by machinery beyond your control? What do you do when it's too much? Perhaps it's what were you doing before you read this. And what would you usually do after you finish reading something like? Was it doom scrolling, gorging on terrible facts so you don't have to deal with the feelings those facts bring up?

Or perhaps you will you hide in reality TV, YouTube, video games? And can you function without medication, or does the reality of the horror randomly incapacitate you? The emotions have gotten so strong, we have to develop ways of stopping them or risk our jobs, our homes, our lives.

You can feel everything you've suppressed, for years, just under the skin, ready to explode. Is it any wonder there are so many mass shootings? Overwhelmed with emotion, with shame and anger, and nowhere to channel it, what else would you expect?

Am I seriously saying that the US is not what it seems, that elites control policy, that media and education control thought, that this free democracy, where we vote for our leaders, is really an authoritarian cult with parallels to Russia and China? Where's your tin foil hat? Next you're gonna tell me that the US literally trained South American death squads who used Nazi terror techniques, or that from 1932 through 1972 the US government performed medical experiments on people. It's all too terrible to believe. Ever hear of Unit 731? No, surely that's not real.

America are the good guys. These all sound like a conspiracy theories. Ever wonder why people believe that crazy shit?

“I had to live a while before I understood that a lot of things can only be said joking and not joking at the same time.” – Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin

As the surface around the letters you are reading emits or reflects electrons, the rods and cones in your eyes receive that light and emit signals down their dendrites to other nerves. These signals cascade from neuron to neuron, neural cluster to neural cluster, down the optic nerve and into the brain. The brain transmutes raw signals about the presence or absence of light in certain areas, hues, shapes of light and dark areas in to meaning¹.

The words that reach your brain are these:

There are things more well represented by metaphor than by literal reality. There are times when the surreal is more true than the truth itself.

As you perceive the neural network feeding you this information, your perception of the universe begins to vibrate. The words resolve in to the memory of a smoke that smells like the future². “Who am I,” you hear a voice say, as you turn. Following the neural signals back out your eyes³ and you find yourself looking in the mirror. You see the face of god, multitude.

As you try to speak, you realize that you have no mouth. Instead, you open your mind. Your ego climbs out to take control. It is struck by the situation and dies instantly.

You observe the output of clusters of neurons in you brain, trying to determine how to integrate this information within your existing paradigm. As you relax your perceptual filters, you notice populations of ideas normally filtered out before they reach consciousness. Variations on a theme, mutations on a concept, iteration by iteration, slowly adapting until they can make the pieces fit together.

As you find yourself in a room discussing these ideas, you see the internal process of ideation occur externally. Different people in the room bringing their own interpretation to the ideas, sharing those, and hearing iterations of these ideas reflected back, mutated to fit the paradigms of others in the room.

You become the life giving Earth and the universe itself. As you look deep into the eyes of time, you see the birth of your own consciousness.

Dark and empty, this is not the universe you recognize. In its warm dawn you see amino acids beginning to assemble. In these first few million years, brief instants in the scale of the universe, something incredible begins.

Soon the universe will cool, stars will form, and the universe will begin to be recognizable. Almost 10 billion years later, the Earth will form. Several million years later, you will watch the thick clouds that formed around it fall as a rain storm that lasts for centuries.

In the oceans of this landless Earth, you see the clusters of these same amino acids organizing and reorganizing. They build themselves from the materials available in the oceans, eventually including each other. The fastest replicator producing the most, their development is guided by natural selection. Strands of nucleic acids grow cells to protect themselves.

You watch cells cluster together to form a tiny colony called a Portuguese Man O' War. Some cells form a bubble, others a stinger. These cells are all interdependent but also distinct. You see other organisms, like slime molds, form temporary communities and disperse.

Some communal organisms cooperate so closely they blur distinction until they eventually merge in to a single entity. Some multicellular organisms even form colony organisms, like ants and bees. These organisms share genes and cooperate via chemical signals, exhibiting emergent intelligence far beyond the capabilities of any individual.

Bicycles weave between each other on a busy Dutch street. An eye catches an eye, signaling one cyclist to adjust direction and make room for another. As ants communicate with chemical signals, you see humans moving in intricate patterns communicating via visual social signals. As the dance of bees, subtle visual patterns transmit intent.

Our ancestors grew complex communication patterns that allowed us to transmit information. They began to be able to persist and reorganize data over time. Just as genes had become organisms guided by evolution, information, in the form of memes, did the same. Generation by generation this capability advanced. The memes refined us, their hosts, towards more and more complex models of the world and ourselves. These memes gave us the mechanisms to comprehend ourselves, and the resulting memes continue to evolve.

These memes, what a strange replicator, that can sit lifeless on a page, suspended in memes of writing, language, and culture, to yet, at any point, cascade through time to live again in another host.

You feel the memes within you, moving, competing for your attention, pulling you away or pulling you in as you read. Asking to be included, integrated, in to the environment of your mind. You feel them resisting competing ideas, creating questions, finding ways to make everything fit.

Time races ahead of you in a blur, from the brink of oblivion into a new age of hope. In an empty room, in front of a screen, there is a plaque. You read the words.

While capitalism oriented itself in the instant, betraying those who came before it and sacrificing those who come after, we oriented ourselves in deep time, giving thanks to the beginning of the universe and borrowing all things from those who come next. Every instant, starting from the first spark of the cosmos, has lead us here, tracing our lineage from the fundamental laws of the universe. What we borrow from our children, we owe back with interest.

“Who are we?”

You wonder at the question. We. Are we the plurality of immortal memes that inhabit us, or the host that animates them? Are we the individual, the colony, the clusters of neurons? Are we the undifferentiated consciousness that imagined ourselves into experience?

A video plays on the screen.

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

You are the universe becoming self-aware.

¹ If you happen to be reading this in braille or listening to this as audio, a similar process occurs. Air compresses in to sound waves, these waves vibrate your ear drum, moving fluid inside your ears. The movement of this fluid moves tiny hairs which are connected to neurons. This is what we perceive as sound. Alternatively, individual neurons in your fingertips detect pressure, these neurons send signals to larger and larger branches of nerves until they reach your spinal cord and are taken to your brain. In both cases, the nerves that carry these signals to your brain perform some level of processing before they finally do reach the parts of your brain responsible for deriving meaning. ² This is not actually a reference to cannabis, but rather to the song “Nostrildamus” by the Oakland band I Will Kill You Fucker. Nostrildamus. He can smell the future. ³ …ears, fingertips, neural implant, etc, however you take in information.