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Forks in the Timeline and the Future of the West

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 7 Comments

Countryside in Winter, outside Milton-Freewater, OR

One of the more interesting plot lines of stories, along the lines of musing about the Multiverse, is the alternate timeline idea. Of course, “what ifs” along historical perspectives are nothing really new. And as far as literature goes, my intellectual engagement with the idea probably goes back to Michael Moorcock and the Elric series. But more recently, I’m a fan of the TV series Community, which has lots of fun with this particular literary trope. Community is a show about the producer’s idealized community college experience, which seems fantastical in all ways as someone who has worked in academia for most of their lives. There are study groups, engaged individuals, and of course, hot women and men who occasionally sleep with each other. This does not resemble in any way, shape or form, the modern university, which is more akin to a modern gulag, where students stare disinterestedly at professors, work 40 hours/week outside their classes, and the only community-building ritual is football.

But that brings one to the notion of an alternate timeline. Community has lots of shows contained therein where characters step outside of themselves at various branching points, with dramatically different outcomes dependent on varying choices the cast members make in their lives.

And as go the cast members, one can draw parallels to nations. Across Western civilization right now, there are all sorts of nations, making all sorts of timeline choices regarding civilizational outcomes, that are far more likely to yield unpleasant ends, or civil wars, than a make-out session in a car in the community college parking lot.

In the most recent election in the U.S., Kamala Harris, VP under Joe Biden, ran a strong negative campaign based on turning the country more Woke, and lost to Donald Trump, who, with a preselected “dream team” of counter-elites, managed a modest win in the national elections. While Donald Trump, an elite himself, runs as a counter-elite, officially aligning himself with the Republican Party, a firm majority in that party still identifies itself with an elite globalist agenda. Make no mistake.

More importantly, Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of multiple paradigm-busting companies himself, maneuvered himself into a key role, along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, as chief advisor to Trump. Even before Trump’s election, Musk had spoken out against many of the Woke issues of the day, such as continued support of the war in Ukraine, Internet censorship, and the elevation of transgender rights. And consistently, both Trump and Musk have spoken out against the key Immiserators in contemporary society, which Harris had passionately embraced.

When Harris lost, it was a profound fork in the timeline for the US. Harris had promised more Internet and social media censorship, under the mask of fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation”, more enforcement of DEI policies, as well as control of AI development. The press had (and still is) lined up behind Harris. Even as I write this, a moribund economy is being billed by the mainstream media as the strongest in the last 20 years. It’s easy to get paranoid and assume that the financial press believes there will be a fall, and that will be blamed on Trump, even though the lag times for any economic policy implementation is at least a year or two. But regardless, Musk and others have been running numerous moments of grounding validity across the political landscape, from buying Twitter (now X) and wading into the various culture war agenda items like transgenderism, and DEI policies that I’ve explained are prime tools of the Immiserators. At least for the present, the United States is on the upward path toward increased personal agency, and less government. As an example, Trump himself announced the creation of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), eponymously named after a meme based on a Shiba Inu dog. DOGE’s job will be elimination of government regulations — a subject of a post in itself.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, an entire nation is in the middle of a horrific branch in their timeline involving a sex scandal where primarily Pakistani immigrants ran large rape rings targeting white, underage girls in a variety of towns, including Rotherham, Telford, and other towns in the north of England. Authorities from both the local communities, and all the way up to the top ranks of British governance suppressed the scandal on the basis of maintaining racial harmony by not naming or prosecuting the Pakistani perps. The magnitude of the numbers involved is mind-boggling. Some 7000+ rapes were documented through these rape rings even this year, with basically no law enforcement efforts to stop the crimes, as well as plenty of victim-blaming.

Initially, when I heard about these crimes, I was very suspicious of a mass hysteria event, similar to the early ’80s McMartin pre-school trials in the U.S. In that situation, children had been interviewed for ostensibly repressed memories of devil worship inside of daycare centers. All of it turned out to be false, and you can read about it at this link. Instead, what the rape rings are shaping up to be is a civilization-ending event. Musk is tweeting about it on X even as I write this, and the British high command is condemning him for bringing up the unpleasantness. Apparently, the behavior has been historic, and tracks with surges in immigration in Britain — even dating back to the early 2000s.

Both these events — Trump’s ascendancy, as well as Britain’s collapse, would be worthy of a book. But what they show in the context of this blog is how during times of Elite Overproduction, which manifests itself in multiple ways, where the number of chairs available for both elites and their children shrink, and the number of elites themselves grow, there is profound societal pressure on immiserating the larger populace. As I wrote in a previous piece, in the US, the trans issue quickly gained ground as an elite signaling device, and luxury belief that elites could communicate with each other that they deserved to win the game of Musical Chairs.

The fact they were creating a more oppressive, authoritarian social environment for the larger population they believed to be in their favor. But fortunately, the votes and the governance system was in place in the U.S. that hopefully this will stop peacefully. We were simply not that far gone. While the immiseration of the populace was indeed real, what was also true was that the actual grounding of the entire trans issue involved a minute number of people. The number of trans male->female athletes, while high profile, were/are still relatively small. It’s wrong and vexatious, but it’s not civilization-ending if a man posing as a woman wins a bicycle race. And DEI has been noxious, but once again, not civilization-ending.

Nothing gives that impression of the rape rings in Great Britain. There have been massive numbers of British girls raped in a systematic fashion, by primarily Pakistani immigrants. Incredible system failure, under the guise of Woke policies and ostensible racial harmony, has been covered up. And Musk, and the entire X platform, has given voices to both the advocates for the victims, as well, incredibly enough, to the proponents of the coverup. Predictable elites have called the non-prosecution of these heinous crimes a “noble cause” and any notion that the people responsible, such as Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, should be held to account as immodest and unfair. As I write this, the British press is in alignment against Musk, protecting obvious Immiserators. It can be argued that Britain, for all of its history, has a far more comprehensive culture of elites getting away with literal murder. So it’s no surprise that Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and even King Charles, have lined up with fellow elites to defend the mass immiseration scheme. The problem with all authoritarian regimes, de facto or official, is that the people under them can only take so much. Then, psychopathic revolution becomes the stock in trade. Talk about a grounding validity moment.

The other key element to note here is that both large scandals, in both the US and Great Britain, are at their core sex scandals involving sexual abuse of minors. Transgender surgery on youth is the one thing that has profoundly fired up the larger population, as well as access of grown men to women’s spaces so that sexual violence can more easily occur. In Great Britain, the massive size of the rape ring scandal, once again directed at children, is emergent out of elite desires for immiseration in this latest regime of Elite Overproduction. As I’ve written before, sexual abuse of children is psychopathic in nature. But worse, it has the growth effect of producing even more psychopaths. And those relational disruptors go on to create broader psychosocial devolution across societies. You want to destroy the collective conscience of a culture? Rape a significant number of its young people. That train is never late. And it arrives at the station hosting the Tribal/Magical v-Meme. Which is no way to run a large, multi-cultural contemporary society.

This plays into larger psychosocial trends in the collective psyche of all of Western society. We are at a point where we have not kept up the agency-driven developmental needs of our societies. As such, we see elites establish elite coding to sort their kids into the winners’ circle, and everyone else into the loser’s category. How we reverse this, and prompt what in the short term will likely manifest itself as decentralization is an open question. But at the U.S. has some breathing room.

In the U.K., it’s going to be decentralization, followed by relational devolution. Stay tuned.

Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment and Elite Overproduction

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Cold Desert Rain, US 95 north of Winnemucca

One of the better pieces I’ve read recently is this one: titled Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, by David Samuels in Tablet Magazine. Samuels is obviously an Old Dog, and describes in detail the head game that the combo of David Axelrod, a communication specialist and marketing guru, and Barack Obama played on the American people — especially the American tech. elite, that led to the incredibly destructive political climate of the last 16 years.

The short version of Samuels’ thesis is that Obama, with Axelrod’s help, took Axelrod’s strategy utilizing permission structures,(the linked piece is pretty good!) that Axelrod had successfully used in various Chicago races (Harold Washington’s mayoral success is highlighted) to get white folks to vote for black candidates, often against their own interests. They did this by creating a false morality inside people’s value structures to make them believe that morally it was a greater good to vote against both their own interests, and their own grounded intuition. The closest analogy I can come up with essentially Obama’s and Axelrod strategy was the equivalent of unleashing an HIV virus on the natural belief immune systems that any cohort develops, that insures long-term cultural continuity. Once convinced that moral posturing and virtue signaling was somehow in their long-term interest. And it worked — something like 80% of white folks voted for Washington in the mayoral contest, as opposed to only 35% of African-Americans.

The problem with completely disconnecting any group of humans from what I call grounding validity — making sure what you believe has some actual, observable data to back it up– is that it has unintended consequences. My favorite go-to of an entire civilizational collapse due to a lack of it is the parable of the Aztecs, who obsessed on raiding neighboring tribes for human sacrificial tribute to make sure the Sun would rise by cutting out their hearts on the Pyramid of the Sun. Once you believe that level of bullshit, your civilization is uniquely fragile. And 500 badass Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, and accompanied by his translator and personal consort Malinche, proved the point. The consequences for ungrounding are wildly tragic. My fun statistic is that 95% of the Aztec genome is carried on the X chromosome. Which mean those conquistadores killed all the men and literally raped all the women.

What is great about this piece is it is obviously written by a pro, who can describe the ins and outs of how they actually did it, as well as the consequences of it coming undone. My analogy of why when these systems fail, they fail rapidly, is that ungrounded systems are prone to what we call signal drift — the difference between a signal with appropriate ground, and whatever the rest of systems and society decide to make up as true. This seems to have a pernicious effect on human brains. When you practice unreality, your brain gets worse and worse detecting reality. It simply doesn’t practice it. And what THAT means is that it is far easier for a cult (or national) leader to seize control and program people with whatever beliefs they want. Like 50 year old men wearing a wig have a right to enter women’s spaces. Or if you want to get into a women’s prison, and you’re a man, just tell the guard you’re a woman. But I digress.

The other thing that happens when you practice unreality, is that your belief system for navigating the actual world is prone, just like an electrical circuit, to arcing when it has to ground itself against actual reality. Arcing is inherently destructive (it’s how we weld metal) and there are sparks. I think it’s a worthy analogy — and we’re witnessing it right now in the aftermath of the Trump election. Samuels makes the point in the piece (and I agree with him wholeheartedly) that Kamala Harris was perhaps the worst presidential candidate in the last 100 years, and the permission structuring around attempting to force people to vote for her using racial and misogynistic guilt (she’s a woman! She’s African-American even though she’s not!) just couldn’t work. It was so unbelievable that enough of the electorate couldn’t just party line NPC it in. And she lost to a candidate who was widely reviled, and the entire press corps had fallen into lockstep of chronically attacking. The result was truly a silent revolution. Because of social shaming, you couldn’t even admit that you might consider voting for Trump without public ostracism. I voted for Trump myself, and still can’t bring up that issue with the majority of liberal friends I still hold. That’s majorly fucked up.

Where Samuels’ analogy falls apart, though, is that these types of outcomes and conflicts are literally occurring across Western civilization. The tendency that Samuels exhibits is to attribute the temporary success of Obama’s campaign to an amalgamation of old and new cunning, and particular individuals. If that were the case, though, we would not be seeing similar types of conflicts across a spectrum of countries, with different outcomes across a variety of countries. One might rack up conservative victories in Hungary/Orban and Italy/Meloni to nations that are in the process of re-grounding toward more appropriate national self-interest. As well, one might consider nations like France, Britain and Canada still in flux.

What is far more likely the overriding dynamic is that we are seeing Turchin’s Elite Overproduction in action across the globalist landscape. Elite Overproduction comes once every 150 years or so (do read Turchin’s book linked here) and happens when there just are too many elites’ kids, and not enough spots for them to assume the same social position as their parents. Why does that matter? If you look out across the political landscape, what we’re actually witnessing is emergent behavior, with the tools of elite manipulation being pulled out of the last century’s toolbox, and finally having the appropriate environmental conditions that they proved to be useful. And it’s U.S. – agnostic. Obama and Axelrod may be clever. But they are just men of their time.

Further, this also gives potential insights into how wider wars get started through Elite Overproduction. When you have too many people competing for too few chairs, then what’s not to like about a Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Turks? And the worst conditions for this kind of social virus are when you have an In-group and Out-group that hit the same point of Elite Overproduction at the same time. Then everyone’s raring to go.

If there’s a bigger lesson here, it’s that you’ve got to ground your kids — especially the elite ones — in reality. Or there’s a proclivity for elites to make up self-serving fantasies, and use lots of fancy words to project a preferred image of reality that has nothing to do with it. In our case, I feel like we got lucky by having a robust enough electoral system to elect Donald Trump, and his A-team level staff of advisors. Because the current crop of elites were converging on burning it all down. Or make us vulnerable to a modern day Cortes burning the ships at Veracruz.

P.S. — one thing that is interesting about Samuels’ take on all this is it links Turchin’s book, End Times, that I’ve written about with Rob Henderson’s Troubled — in particular his concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ — with the actual modality — permission structures — that’s a how-to for generating political anarchy. But the circumstances have to be right. Otherwise, the virality you need just ain’t there.

P.P.S. I’ve also recently been taken by Mike Benz. His Joe Rogan podcast lays it out. Another post-mortem way worth listening to.

Quickie Post — SpaceX and the Emergent Power of Memetics

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

SpaceX Starship Booster, post-launch

Today, October 13, 2024, is truly a momentous day. Why? SpaceX successfully launched AND recovered Starship V — the whole configuration, which included the heavy booster, AND the top stage, which will be the working part of their spaceship that will carry humans to Mars. Recovery of the heavy booster was accomplished by Mechazilla, the giant chopsticks-like device, while the top stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. It would have been great to have the top land on one of SpaceX’s recovery ships, but that will come in time.

There are lots of YouTube videos that portray the flight, and considering this was written in the AM of Oct. 13,, there will likely be more. Here’s one to get you started if you’re reading this early.

Launch and beginning recovery

Why were they able to do this? You have to go back to Conway’s Law and understand the memetic evolutionary step that SpaceX has taken — which is to launch full configurations, knowing that they could explode in full public view, to do what we call an All Up test. There is some complexity limit in such an advanced craft that there is no way to gain more insight nor understanding from component testing. Sooner or later, you gotta put it all on the line and Light That Candle.

But only a memetically advanced performance-based community can do this kind of testing. If Legalistic Authoritarian status-driven NASA blows up a ship on the pad, then heads inevitably will roll. The status blow to the operation is one that NASA simply won’t allow. Because the elites in the company look bad. So promotion of managers that will enforce that memetic standard end up getting promoted, as opposed to more enlightened and non-risk averse individuals. And in the current milieu, you end up with people who will NEVER get a rocket off the ground. Like this guy.

And people will fall into line under that kind of leadership. When status matters, and not performance, you might be able to make McKinsey happy. But you’ll never design the next generation of space flight. People know, for the most part, that they have to go along to get along. You get down to that “I gotta feed my babies” Survival v-Meme pretty damn quick.

It’s in the knowledge that an organization produces. Because that knowledge creates the design. You simply can’t bring in enough outside, or unknown knowledge to get your ship off the ground. It’s true for bacteria, and it’s true for spaceships.

If there’s a simple memetic takeaway, though, it’s this. Status-based companies will produce stasis, and incremental improvement, until capture by rule-gaming psychopaths. Performance-based companies will hit goals and design new things. Things can and will go wrong — but it’s your only hope of actually creating something new.

Starship is the result of a lot of hardcore, diligent work. Make no mistake about it. But it’s company culture, and importantly company structure that made today what it is. Congratulations, SpaceX. The future is starting to look like the future!

More Boeing Blues — Starliner, DEI, and Getting Saved by SpaceX

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Three cheers and one cheer more!

Two astronauts aboard the Boeing Starliner, a reusable space capsule design by Boeing Defense, have been temporarily stranded at the International Space Station due to maintenance and reliability problems with their capsule. NASA Mission Control decided to bring the capsule back empty, rather than risk potentially catastrophic failure of the capsule during re-entry, without question the most stressful part of spaceflight, when the capsule must plunge back through the atmosphere in a literal fireball.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the two astronauts who took the big vertical ride early June 2024, were sentenced to additional months in orbit on the ISS because of the mission failure, though when the Starliner was brought back through the atmosphere, it did touch down in September (uncrewed) successfully. Starliner was a program funded coterminously with SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, to the tune of $4.2B, while Dragon received $2.6B. According to Wikipedia, Boeing’s project had already exceeded its fixed price contract by $1.6B, indicating a major financial loss for Boeing.

There are all sorts of interesting top-level insights on the Wikipedia page, and I recommend reading it (I hadn’t until I decided to write this piece!) Of particular interest is receptivity to feedback from both the Boeing and the SpaceX engineering teams in the development phase of this project. The various mission failures along the path of Starliner resulted in the termination of Boeing Defense, Space and Security CEO Ted Colbert, who previously had been in charge of Boeing Global Services and CIO of the entire Boeing Company. From reading his resume’, Colbert had been rewarded with recognition that he was both African-American and an engineer multiple times in his career. I’m sure he was happy to play the DEI card in order to move up in Boeing’s chronic Game of Thrones hierarchy, and achieve entry into what many of us call Boeing’s Prince cohort. People at the level of Colbert wield a lot of power and authority. They get their own plane (and I’m not talking a Cessna 172.) I don’t know the exact number of levels in the hierarchy necessary to get to his position, but I’m guessing it is at least seven.

Was he hired because he was a black man? Well, that was probably a consideration. Boeing touts its DEI focus loudly, so I can’t really even understand why that would even be considered in a racist insult. That sword cuts both ways. But it’s just not interesting to me hanging the failure of Starliner all on one dude because he’s black. It really dodges the real blame of what different psychosocial systems produce. What does Conway’s Law really tell us, after all? Rigid psychosocial systems like the Boeing Company, at best, maximize incremental improvement and reliability. And at worst, reward the anti-risk-takers, who then propagate that attitude down the various levels of hierarchy toward a cult of new design mediocrity. Great for maintaining a legacy product line, maybe. Awful for producing anything new.

And Colbert didn’t take over Boeing Defense until 2022 — long after the various problems with Starliner’s problems with its thruster clusters were well-defined, if not understood. Sure — he didn’t fix them. But it’s not clear inside a massive, political rigid hierarchy, that he even could. What CEO, in a multi-stack hierarchical system, even does?

A better way of understanding the problems with Starliner, filled with status-driven infighting at the Boeing Company and its subcontractors, is to look at what SpaceX has done right. The answer is simpler than one might think.

SpaceX is willing to blow rockets up.

Why does this matter? One of the biggest challenges of complexity, that has been covered to death in the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, was the lack of what’s called “All Up” testing. All Up testing means putting the whole system on a launchpad, and launching it into space. Doing this recognizes that there is only so much information that can be gathered from reliability testing of components. Why? Components in a large-scale system can only have their respective interactions observed when assembled together and tested. Even then, there’s no hope of constraining complex subassemblies and gathering statistical data for the entire system. You can’t launch a space shuttle 1000 times (or a rocket, for that matter) and gain that kind of confidence. Sooner or later, you have to put it together on a launchpad and Light That Candle.

But rigid hierarchies crave that kind of security. Boeing and NASA have, in the last 40 years, enshrined a no-risk culture that simply is not feasible for pushing the boundaries of spaceflight. The key concept here is what’s know as “configuration control.” What that is is you know all meaningful interactions between the various subsystems before you move forward. And while some level of due diligence in predicting those interactions is certainly part of engineering excellence, the other part of this is realizing you can’t know. And this kind of epistemic humility does not emerge out of experts in rigid silos.

Colbert was not set up as a fall guy for DEI, though he was indeed likely given the position because he had proceeded up the hierarchical stack and had the resume’ for the position. And he was black. But just look at his Wikipedia entry — everything in his career pattern was about exactly what the v-Memes of the contemporary Boeing Company enshrines. And that ain’t risk taking. So metacognition dies, your organization becomes insular, and all your enemies are, of course, on the outside. Because no one on the inside would even bring up a problem before it would happen.

That’s what the death of metacognition looks like.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has been busy lining up rockets to blow up, knowing a priori that they would. And because of a young engineering culture, and an expectation that they are creating a learning organization, they’re successfully learning the boundaries of what they don’t know — which is what you need when you cannot a priori assess the limits of configuration control. Knowing what you don’t know enables you to cure your ignorance. And then push the system boundary continuously outward.

There are also some natural consequences of demographics that SpaceX has going for them. I’ve done a couple of projects with them (I’ve also done projects with Boeing) and the main thing that impressed me was how young their engineering staff was. Aside from a couple of my ex-students, I never dealt with anyone older than 30. Combine that with goal-based v-Meme thinking (we just want to solve the immediate problem any way we can) and deep Guiding Principles directions from Elon Musk, the founder (we want humans to be a multi planetary species) and you have a far more potent v-Meme structure than moving up one more click in a massive hierarchy.

Will Starliner ever be a successful competitor to SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule? I personally think that it will take a while, but yes. The v-Meme system at Boeing — a large Legalistic Hierarchy — has the ability to generate the information to cover the information space to make a space capsule. And in large part, their reputation for other lucrative contracts depends on it. But at what cost? We’re going to get some time/money comparisons out of this as far as the efficiency of psychosocial systems in generating and dealing with complexity. Right now, we’re easily at 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of SpaceX But the answer ain’t gonna be pretty for legacy organizational modes.

On Trump’s Assassination Attempt, Civil War, and Leaky LARPs

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Yosemite Fire Sunset, 2024

It’s increasingly hard to keep up with any cogent view of the news cycle, in these last couple of weeks in July. Short version — Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, PA. The breathless press first didn’t want to admit that Trump was shot, but then that was followed by an endless litany of calls for essentially civil war, especially in the subjunctive (“If Trump had been killed,” for all of those that weren’t forced to study Latin) and then followed on the heels of all this, the announcement by Joe Biden on July 21 that he was dropping out of the presidential race.

Screenshot from CNN after Trump was shot. Even then, CNN was attempting to monkey with the script

Everyone assumes that each of these events are independently momentous, finally, FINALLY leading to some Manichaean conclusion and Götterdämmerung, after which the world will be destroyed and born anew. History must have SOME inflection point, no? The press insists.

But no one’s asking any structural questions on any of this (except for a few voices like this blog.) If Donald Trump had died, how would that civil war actually have taken place? Other than gathering for meetings in the town square, or local park, with their pussy hats, or marching along avenues reserved by the multi-billion dollar entertainment mountebanks known as Black Lives Matter, Americans can’t hardly organize anything political. I have yet to be at a large rally where anyone was collecting names and phone numbers for future contacts. The Old Gods in both parties know this. But the show must go on.

And it does. Geography, as I’ve explained, is functionally dead, save for looting stores in Blue states. What you see on your computer screens, via TikTok, or X, is a postcards-from-the-edge approach to news. Some people manage to get together and break some windows. But more and more, what’s really happening is a slow slide into decay. I visited an old friend in Portland a little more than a month ago. There was some evidence of rioting activity present in downtown Portland. But the biggest sign obvious to me was the lack of shopping in what was once an energetic downtown retail district, as well as miles of dilapidated RVs parked along Lombard Street.

And fat people everywhere, of course. The national obesity rate has passed 42%. The real crisis is in the metabolic health of Americans, as well as a constant slide into poverty and homelessness. As well as the adaptive reality that if you’re going to live in a broken down RV, it’s a whole lot more comfortable to do it someplace where it is warm, and food is still relatively cheap. Folks have some eatin’ to do.

I still marvel at the people in the press claiming that the nation is on the brink of civil war. Wars are physical things, historically fought by young, healthy males. That’s just a statement of fact, with the truth of it aligned in our genes. When all your young males are fat, you’re not fighting anyone. Regardless of how many AR-15s you spread around.

And I still am impressed with the raw stupidity associated with calling January 6, 2021, an insurrection. Do people have any idea how utterly impossible it is to control anything from the U.S. Capitol? The elected officials on salaries of $200K, with a complete complement of near-slaves, in the guise of interns, can’t do it. Insurrections put different people in power that actually command some level of authority and respect. Not dudes with buffalo headdresses made from Gray Owl kits. It is a mystery to me how to get the federal government to do anything. How would the ostensible insurrectionists even know who to call to bark orders or threaten? I’ve said over and over that most people don’t even have any idea where their electricity or water comes from (give yourself a quiz and see if you can accurately answer that question before feeling smug.) “The Grid” is not a valid answer, though I’d be impressed if most people could even say that.

What’s really going on in front of our eyes is what I’ve decided to name a Leaky LARP. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing game, a combination of re-enactment, storytelling and gaming—players are given a role and act out their character’s actions within an overarching story, from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The reporters on said LARP are actually intrinsic, and important Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in the game. They certainly can’t comprehend the extent of complexity of modern society themselves. But they do know where they’re supposed to line up with the general story line. And they also know their paycheck depends on them delivering, through clicks and other measures of engagement on the Internet. So the story must be exciting.

The problem is, with all this “through a glass darkly” stuff, is that it’s like a fictional movie that leads with a trailer that says “this movie, while a work of fiction, is based on historical events.” Except those historical events are actually real, and are happening, and usually involve the harm or death of someone in the Real World. It’s all scripted. Until, well, it isn’t. Trump was nearly killed by a 20-year-old male (at least at this current time I’m writing) who set himself up as a LARP-player extraordinaire. The incompetent bureaucracy assigned to President Trump played their part as incompetent bureaucrats, replete with local law enforcement clowns, and DEI agent hires unable to holster their guns. Trump dutifully played his part as well, not dying, of course, but then standing up with the help of agents and raising his fist in the air and mouthing “fight, fight, fight!”

Of all the players in this Leaky LARP, Trump has known he’s a central figure, and his performance didn’t disappoint. Whether he authentically, instantaneously shoved his fist into the air, or did a great piece of improv. doesn’t in the end really matter. When someone nearly blows your head off, at least in my book, they get the benefit of the doubt. Fight, fight, fight it is. He was still a 30 degree twist of his head from getting his brains blown out.

I wrote a piece on Donald Trump back in 2016, right after he was elected the first time. It still holds up, and contains one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written. It’s solid, and I recommend reading it.

But in the larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution scheme of things, he’s just another relational disruptor inside a system declining for other reasons. 

And like a play based on characters violating the Fourth Wall with the audience, our LARP only occasionally grounds itself to the outside world in real terms. Bullets hit ears of presidential candidates. Small sections of major urban areas get turned into No-Man’s Lands, with looted Walgreens, or spin-out competitions in intersections. And while the line may seem blurred between fantasy and reality, the other truth is that people actually die, and lives are wrecked in the context of those grounding moments. As Melania Trump’s letter to the American people elegantly stated, Donald Trump has a family too. Regardless of which part of his brain center lifted his fist into the air.

If there’s a takeaway from this, it’s that we need to pay more attention to the backdrop, and less to the scripted moments. Shit never stopped getting real. And it would behoove us to focus on the long line of trailers on Lombard St. in Portland, or the fat folks waddling through the local Walmart — or Food Co-op. Not nearly as exciting — but a telling signal in a pattern of nationwide decline.