Part three, concluding Paul Kingsnorth’s excellent trilogy of essays on “all this…” was published today, and is worth ten minutes of your time, or more. My choice of title, above, is a minor snark that isn’t entirely fair to the tenor of the piece. In a sense this is old ground, covered in many of PK’s previous writings, as curated in his outstanding book Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. It is very heartening that he can end on a positive note:
The world is not a mechanism: it is a mystery, one that we participate in daily. When we try to redesign it like a global CEO, or explain it like an essayist, we are going to fail: weakly or gloriously, but fail we shall. The Machine, the technium, the metaverse: whatever we name our 21st century Babel, and however overwhelming it seems to us in the moment, it can never conquer in the end, because it is a manifestation of human will and not the will of God. If you don’t believe in the will of God, call it the law of nature instead: either way, it speaks the same thing to us. It says, gently or firmly: you are not in charge.
Even more simply: todo cambia - everything changes, anicca.
If I don’t post again this Solstice - though I expect I will - a cool Yule to all habitués of 5-filters.
Copypaste of a Q&A exchange between Dmitry Orlov and a subscriber, regarding the damp-squib reset, copied from the btl comments below the recent mailout of Dmitry’s latest essay:
QUOTE:
soapy:
They are calling the so called Great Reset a "global” event . But to me it seems like a western adventure . Will the collapse of the western system effect Russia and China to any degree? And Is there any way of stopping the reset in any way or is it inevitable ? If you were living in a Western country what measures would you take towards your survival both economic and physical. Is there any hope or are we doomed ?
2 days ago
Dmitry Orlov:
The Great Reset is not happening. The Great Wizard of Davos himself said that it can’t happen unless Russia and China come along, and they have refused. What is happening is called COLLAPSE and, no, there is no stopping it.
UNQUOTE
What Paul calls ‘The Machine’ Dmitry calls ‘The Technosphere’, and the Hopi native Americans call ‘Koyaanisqatsi: world out of balance’: a borg/human egregore-intelligence which uses humans and human activities, selectively, to further it’s powerful drive towards a Matrix-like control of everything. Paul, Dmitry, JMGreer, I, and many others expect confidently that it will drive itself into the ground, collapse, and dissipate into total entropy. Visit the first movement of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, ‘The Leningrad’, for a soul-racking account in unforgettable music of this process of inevitable self-destruction of an insane machine.
The Technosphere is already in its final fatal battle with the Long Descent, which has already begun killing it. And after that chaotic process has played itself out, and - as JMG likes to say - “the rubble stops bouncing”, Mam Gaia will STILL have total control of her planet - where we, hom-sap, are indeed not and never will be in control - and she will be re-fecundating it in a storm of life-creative recovery, as she always does; and the survivor humans after this Single Giant Pulse Event in the Earth’s story will look back on the lunacy to which we fell victim during the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First centuries CE, and marvel at our astonishing capacity for naive self-delusion. Down Faustus, yer damnfool mongrel!! Lie down and shut it, till you’re wise enough to be able to say something worth listening to!
Well, on this issue I beg to differ with Orlov. Russia has mask mandates in various regions and has all sorts of “vaccines” popping up with real long-term trials. China has already gone down the total surveillance state route. So to say that Russia and China are not coming along, what is happening on the ground says otherwise (to me at least).
No, I think it’s a question of who gets to wield power: the Western criminal capitalists, or the state-power wielders in the other two big states. We can take it for granted that whoever has it will hold on to power and extend it when they can, since that’s the nature of the addictive. It’s just that in the rising empires, it won’t be the nest of criminal manipulators holed up in the falling empire and its satrapies, and symbolised by the crew who gather at Davos; where I know very well that VVPutin has been a convivial guest from time to time. But then, being Russian, he would, wouldn’t he. As Dmitry points out, Russians always talk constantly to their enemies as well as to their friends. It’s a diplomatic habit with them.
Regarding China: If - big if! - their social control system is as bad as it’s painted here in the West, then it stinks and I have no excuses to offer for it. But it’s characteristic of that state that we in the West think we know things about it, when in fact we only know the propaganda about it with which we’ve all been gavaged all our lives. Somehow, I don’t think that the CCP will be giving up any world-government concessions to the Davos crowd…
Russia and China are both contaminated with home-grown billionaires, but I suspect that they don’t get to be cocks of the walk, the way they think they can be in the disintegrating West - till we lynch them. In the rising empires, the hyper-moneygrubbers have been, figuratively speaking, shown the rope now and then, and have knelt chastened before the real power-wielders. They don’t seem to get to capture state and international outfits, the way they’ve captured the World Hoax Organisation and its national franchises.
And fortunately for us all, there’s always the Long Descent, continuously hacking away at the very foundations of the Technosphere, of which the Davos loonies want to make us all serfs. Not going to happen. Certainly not worldwide, nor permanently. Get re-born a century or so on from here, and look and see for yourselves…
