The Innisfree no. 2: How I see it

When it comes to politics it's helpful for me to sort out my feelings based first on the issue's proximity to me. The further away (national, international) the less I have control over the outcome, therefore worrying about them, or spending a bunch of resources on sorting out a plan, seems like a waste. Further, there exists an enormous variance in potential futures since at scale there are so many vectors of influence, the potential for virtually any future to come about is possible. I could focus on the outcomes I feel are most likely, but even then I'm likely to be wrong and caught even more flat-footed than if I'd done nothing.

Naturally then, the closer an issue is to me the more important it should be. Certainly that is the focus of The Innisfree, to do things at the smallest scale possible and watch as they stack and become something much larger. Hopefully. But here's the thing about doing something like habitat and agricultural restoration, it's a net positive at whatever scale it reaches. If your efforts never find an audience beyond your own family, you've already won. The good for yourself and your community has already been done. There are precious few things that yield such a guaranteed moral return. And it's something anyone can do at any time, in virtually any place. Seeds, compost, mulch, water, sun, time. These are the only ingredients.

But what they produce!

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This is a rambling and uneven way to start, but though the thrust of The Innisfree is about the loving and the local, this particular blog entry is about how I see things at the planetary scale. I feel as though I need to suss things out at the largest scale and work my way down to the local and the real. It's like a fever I need to burn out of me before I can finally heal.

I'm willing to say at this point that we're living through the "end times." Or rather, we're living through the end of modern times, and for us modern people that's more or less the same thing. Now I don't particularly want to get into the theological discussion whether it's the real "end times," or just a cyclical imperial supernova (like Rome, like Greece, like Babylon, etc), because it really doesn't matter. An extinction event is an extinction event whether by fire or wind or sea or asteroid. And we're headed for one, or rather more than one at once.

I contend that while The Lord of the Rings was the perfect fantasy for 20th century war and politics, Game of Thrones seems the better pick for the 21st century. Nihilistic, violent and crude, with the moronic elites squabbling over dirt while multiple cataclysms steadily bear down. What's not to like? We're in a similar place now. The polycrisis. Climate Weirding is here and going to get worse and worse and worse. We've flooded every pore with novel chemicals and materials that are choking our ecosystems, our waterways, and our bodies. We're burning through the last of the material abundance provided us by a loving God, and leaving deserts in our wake. Here in the US we started with feet of rich natural compost grown over millennia by people and animals working together, and we're now pumping chemicals into the final scrim of dirt we have left to get just a little bit more production. It took just 175 years to use it all.

Notice that big swath of desert is where humans first appeared. Maybe this isn't the first time we've turned Eden to a desert?

And then there's the double-headed population crisis, which has humanity in a pincer grip. If we add more people to keep our growth-dependent economy running, we'll run out of everything. If we shrink the population, we'll collapse the economy. Meanwhile, most people seem to have made the decision already, as every country around the globe faces a TFR slump at the same time.

We have floods and earthquakes, and wars and rumors of wars, and everyone moving here and there at increasing speeds. All of the old Armageddon standbys. And now it appears a great mass of the world's leaders are in, or covering for, a vast murderous sex trafficking operation, headed directly or indirectly by multiple current and previous heads of state.

I have been a Doomer for virtually the entirety of my adult political life. From the Battle of Seattle and Bush II's first election to the Iraq War to the cynical disposal of Occupy Wall Street, to the utter catastrophe of COVID, the ruling elites have done nothing if not let me down. And here again is Trump, a man who is probably not the Antichrist, but who is absolutely anti-Christ. The open corruption, vulgarity, violence, and tawdriness, the never-ending lies and arrogance make it clear he is as far away from the Christian ideal that a man could be. This is obvious and true even without considering the sworn affidavits attesting to him as a murderer, pedophile, rapist, and gangster.

He is one vector in the theft of the global supply of resources, which a surprisingly small group of despots have managed to pull off. We're in a New World Order (funny that term popping up unironically a bunch in and around Davos), a multipolar world ruled by gangsters sometimes in coordination, and other times in violent conflict. Corporate heads, heads of state, and prominent political figures have managed to reform the world in a matter of a few decades, just in time for the ecological crap to hit the fan. It's clear they're circling the wagons and stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible, and they don't particularly care how many people have to die to protect themselves. Clearly the hope is that AI can come online fast enough to assist them in controlling the obvious chaos that will result from every crisis hitting at the same time while the political and business machinery is hijacked by a network of fraudsters looking to extract rents from everything.

When I look up at the national and international trends, I have to admit I see no hope. There is too much going wrong at once, and the old channels for handling global crises are broken beyond repair, held as they are by the very ones breaking it. To put it another way, we're about half way through season 2 of Andor. The Empire already has the Death Star mostly operational, and the pathways to beating global forces at their level are mostly gone.

Unless you are on the board of a Fortune 1000 company or a very wealthy person, there is no hope or joy to be found at the national or international level. That arena is a blood bath, and choosing to fight there will surely lead to ruin.

For the rest of us, we're going to have to find our path forward through more local channels. It's in this alternative arena that I find most of my hope for the future. The current Masters of the Universe are the ones most doubling down on modernity. In fact their entire plan depends on it. Endless electricity and people plugged into devices, easily tracked and manipulated, are the only ways to make mass control manageable. Otherwise, this country in particular is ungovernable at a continental scale. The Devil always over-reaches. It's his lack of faith that is his most distinctive feature. I believe that, while awful things have happened, are happening, and will surely happen in the future, there will be no victory for the Empire. They will be undone by their own hubris.

And I don't believe we have to be undone with them. Surely there's some hope in that.