Nation vs Nature
Overt political posting? On MY egg report?
It all starts with the word “nature”. In industrial society, nature is conceptualised as a nice garden, or a park. A pretty image. Nature is an aesthetic, really, not an object or force. It is an adjective, not a noun. Nature “is” really nothing, only a hallucination layered on top of “physics” which “is”. “nature” is the shadows on the wall, and “physics” is the light outside the cave. Nature is bound by laws, which ultimately we have dictated - articulated. Nature, insofar as it is anything, has been totally domesticated and neutered.
This is not what has ever been meant by the word “nature”, at any point in history, and when we read anything older than our contemporaries, without knowledge of nature, we cannot interpret the text as intended. The ancient conception of “nature” is not, birds and bees and gardens. To the Ancients, gardens mean the exact opposite: civilisation. Before modernity, “nature” is better translated as something like, “Infinite Danger”.
Not merely an infinite ceiling of potential intensity of danger - that sort of caps out at death anyway. But infinite in all directions, insurmountable, incomprehensible, un-tire-able, eternal. The transcendental principle of Danger.
Evil and nature are not synonymous, but there is a deal of overlap. Nature in ancient text is best understood as a metaphysical force, representing infinite danger. Not a practical danger with a practical solution you can solve for mechanically with mathematical certainty, but eternal, transcendental danger, the principle of danger, the concept itself, the platonic ideal, Danger Big D. The things people call Gnosticism is making this mistake.
Nature is an active force that directly and self-directedly interacts with you, in time, with humans in history, not a set of disinterested laws. It is an animal, not a machine. Nature is metaphysical constant, but it is an active one, an active force, that is always and eternally trying to, essentially, get you.
This applies both to “nature” as forests and bears and lions, and to something like “human nature”.
The general conception of being, of “the world”, of humanity in the world, is a constant conflict between nature and civilization. Civilization is the walled garden, a place of relative safety, walled off and protected from Nature. Civilization is also and active force, but it is like a fire that must be tended to and cared for. You have your Polis, your city state, your walled garden, and you are basically constantly under siege by Nature, trying to get in and fuck you up. It’s a constant uphill battle.
The danger in forgetting what nature is, or being wrong about it, is that when you forget what it looks like, you can't recognise it and keep it out of the Polis, so it starts to creep back in, digging under your protective walls.
What we are living through is not the heights of technological progress and domination of nature, but the failure of our nations to “keep nature out”. Nature Big N (no relation) has already crept in and is asserting itself, and its not a question, its not even a binary, its just the only path and it will happen whether you like it or not: the future is, we are going to build new nations. The king is dead. Long live the King!
Decadence and decline is what happens when nature gets into your Polis, because you forgot what it looks like, and starts to assert itself. The ugliness of decadence and decline is the horror of Ancient Nature.
Springtime of nations 2:
It's going to be something entirely new. It's impossible to predict how it's gonna work out, but the one certain thing is, it is not going to be the modern nation-state. Its not going to be the same thing, but something radically new. As soon as someone has a strong proof of concept, it will catch on and people will begin to mimic it.
Putting it in other terms: Liberalism won the world war, a total victory, and enforced, over 100 years, complete, radical individualism, and demolished all States. It reduced us to a hobbiesian state of nature(!) of perfect individualism, a total victory of the revolution. You can also call this a state of affairs where every man is king, 9 billion tiny micro-states which borders extend only as far as their individual bodies. And well in recent years the borders might even have gotten even smaller.
Politically we are in a great battle royal - which I think is the reason for its popularity in video games and TV - we recognise subconsciously that it represents our political lives.
Literally every person in the world against every other person in the world. There is no meaningful difference between total liberalist victory, and total political anarchy. We are, already, working out a new social order, slowly and gradually, as small kingdoms start forming around border skirmishes and invasions.
Collapse already happened. We are already in post-apocalypse. It is already time to rebuild. Yesterday. This thing, "society", “the global economy” - this is a ruin we are scavenging. It IS dead. One day there's going to be no more left to scavenge, and the people who are waiting for that day to declare it dead, will be very surprised that it suddenly disappeared in a flash. The "system", the "establishment", are a deranged apocalyptic death cult living in denial, worshipping a corpse of a dead god. They are deranged and dangerous, and scavenging their shit is dangerous. They will rip you apart in a frenzy and ritually cannibalise you if they catch you. And they have nuclear weapons.
(Historical Materialist and socialist scientists are the frenzied mindless mutants/fast zombies)
When you drink 2 litres of milk a day, you are not "participating in" or 'supporting' an "unsustainable industry". You are LOOTING a dead civilisation, while the getting is good. The promised bronzen age of Piracy is NOW.
Most likely we will be able to stabilize these new “nations” before everything turns to shit and the sea lanes die.
This is not advice, but a prediction. My only advice is "act accordingly". As you think best.
New social organisation will (re)emerge and replace 19th century national identity. It is my hope that these will not be called or recognized as nations for a long time, and that they will be small and plentiful, and practically in the shape of localism-high-trust-extended-family-compound situations. With compound more or less metaphorical.
It is my hope that when people give me money on the Internet, that I am not pickpocketing or hoodwinking them, but that accepting an act of charity. I do consider my day job - In which I show up on time, work hard and professionally, pay my taxes, and try to be a good colleague and help everybody out - to be looting.
But almost everything in the Internet is of course looting. And I may just not have the guts for it.
Young men lacking vision and goal for the future, how about this: survive the age of the death cultists dying out for the next couple generations, and prepare a future where your children can live. Gamers How About This: you literally, not metaphorically, live in Fallout: New Vegas.
Participating in "real" wink wink, democracy, should be conceptualised as your tribe federalizing with neighbouring tribes.
The real question at this point is then, the real distinction you can make about people, is: are you looting for gratification now, to get as much shit off the corpse of civilisation and gorge yourself on it, for your own hedonistic nihilism. Or, are you looting for long term, for your children, for your future. Me, as a good Christian I believe “this life is preparation for the next life”. I'm looting for Jesus. I'm looting for the kingdom of God.
You can't save the world, there is no world to save. You can only build the world.
Turn that catastrophic thinking and paranoid anxiety of yours into a proactive, joyful, apocalyptic mindset, with one simple trick:
Yes.
That was well-written. This vision of needing to build now as opposed to tomorrow can help give meaning and help become pro-active as opposed to waiting for a collapse. The differentiation of the kind of looting you can do too. Thanks for the article.
RE: Nature. Although Jordan Peterson gets a lot of trash nowadays (often deservedly), he got this idea absolutely right in his works.
RE: Nations. It's okay to be pessimistic, but have you read John J. Mearsheimer's 'The Great Delusion'? He shares loads of arguments for nationalism and why it's a more potent force than progressive liberalism. In the US, the two gets confused as some liberal sentiments are actually American nationalist ideas. American exceptionalism e.g.
So, I wouldn't bet on nation states disappearing. On the contrary: I've never seen liberalism (or any other ideology for that matter) get priority over nationalism in times of real crisis.