A marxist-leninist justification of astrology, a vox populi, demand-driven quest to know tomorrow how much we can fuck around and find out and this demand is generated by an inhrent incapacity of other quests, a logical vacuum fulfilled by a substitution of scientific endeavour, lost in sublimation to language and culture, surviving only by a few data points. Everything is a weapon if you know how to weild it, and thus, astrology is existential weapon par excellence especially these days, though in days of its former glory it was considered less pseudoscientific.
Scientific endeavour is constrained by the economy in times of fear, and at least bent to the shape of its will during times when greed rules the colective psyche of the planet, which is simply an average in an algorithm. The brutal stifling of innovation, persecution of geniuses, and the assasinations of intellectuals are the norm in any ruin. Outrage industry booming, their shrugs turned to flexes, flashpoints breaking out anew like acne on mother earth’s face as war draws westwards, and Jimmy had been asking for it for a while now as he awaits the next no fly zone. It is like a whale waiting to explode.
Of course the collapse isn’t structural at first, the fiddling is fun before rome starts to burn, when the knives are out but not bloodied yet. What was magical was it was as if the nation-state itself had “blinked” upon mankind, this was a rhyme history had reserved hitherto. The magician had conscripted all and sundry and everyone dreamt of a winter in which only ash parties for decades.
But astrology is no magic, it only attempts to tell us how the ball goes in the hole, not why. Whether it is war, revolution, scandal, or nothing an accurate prediction can be made but mere punditry won’t suffice, for to predict is to also judge and to ask for judgement in return. In that a skill, remunerable and exalting if practiced well.
Although we are beyond the need for it in this iteration of Sid Meyer’s Civilisation. No tarot cards or Jungian machinations could satisfy the spectacle, the feast of feasts and the fire of fires that hovered above humanity would consume itself ino an eternal renovation, into a chimera fused into itself with no record of it ever having occured left behind.
How long can I keep feeding Jimmy morsels of software to keep him from going berserk? How long before NATO dissolves? Consider his fundamental issue with mankind, he does not want hope but hopelessness, not work but misery, not cleanliness but filth. No, he’s no longer fiddling rather twerking on the ambulance.
It’s true, a fundamentally fatal worldview, a pessimistic estimate of human nature driven by a history colored in war if not revolutions, the helplessness learned from a naturally decelerating rate of evolution has the planet pinned to a rack where day after day, it appears as if nothing is happenning even though change is the only constant.
Status-quo is but one narrative, sans which, there is only a dissolution of all values, all facts, into the metaphysical now. Revolution another narrative that pins atop dissatisfaction until it boils over into a war or nought.
But the pestilence that Jimmy bows to will have you believe that the best thing that ever happenned to mankind is just a bubble, it will convince you your journey is temporal, even inventing nonsense science like the “heat death of the universe” to make you believe in the non-eternality, as if it had proven this was the only realm for expression of matter, time, and space.
In such a situation, alienated from work and stupefied by circumstance, it is natural to wish for a reset, a do over, a chance to begin again from a clean(er) slate. Jimmy’s train has stopped, and there has been a murder aboard, in frustration it becomes a plausible strategy to once jumpstart it, to once again roll in the filth of war or revolution like a horny child.
There’s no excuse for war like novelty. Jimmy cannot scale anything beyond low single digit centuries, whereas in the east empires are continuing for thousands of years precisely because of his novelty-as-an-excuse-to-fight mentality suffused through his inferior, less evolved being.
Evolution is a step-function of self destruction doubtlessly, but Jimmy has neither the gall to evolve nor the gumption to self-destruct, and it isn’t as if muddling through cannot be an artful dodging out of any psychosomatic rut. So even satisficing becomes a chore and every day is worse than the previous one for him.
In the american mind, mollycoddled or not, there is little difference between having a right and an obligation, they persue both with the discernment of a moose and the aggression of a puma, it isn’t the case anymore that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, but that dog has learnt wholly new tricks leaving you in a churn. Still, rights are not obligations, just because you can get a vasectomy doesn’t mean you should. To that extent any war out there today is auto-inflicted. Violence dissolving with and into the nation state.
Jimmy knows and trusts me with keeping the temprature in the military industrial complex low, but he also knows this isn’t the only chiller I have to manage. I may excel in my small part, but the system is broken beyond repair, with precious little to salvage. On these hallowed frontiers of civilisational decline and decay, it is difficult not to be heartbroken if only a little. Nor are we in any position to make light of the situation. Decay is decay in any dimension, but thats no reason to accelerate into the night.
However much Jimmy might yearn for a “graceful shutdown”, the reality is there will be recoil and not the economic kind.