There Can Be No Peace

There Can Be No Peace

In our current situation peace is an impossibility.

The very fabric of our world is predicated on the use of violence to maintain and reproduce it; how can peace exist in such a situation? Our civilization has been built with tremendous violence. Our countries, states, and capital are built upon the corpses of countless and forgotten peoples—slaves, serfs, peasants, indigenous cultures, and nameless others—who either died building and maintaining it; or died opposing it. We live upon a great and horrific alter upon which generations and generations of humans have been sacrificed. We are proud of this alter, it is the “pinnacle” of all human accomplishment, the totality of our mental, moral, and physical mastery of the universe.

Ecce! Homo! Civitas! Civis!

Truly the human is a powerful creature, a willful, dangerous thing. How could one gaze out upon the Earth and not behold the great works of civilized man. Look how we have utterly annihilated everything that has stood in our way. Who dares to oppose our power? No living thing upon this Earth could oppose us! We are the apex of apexes; the alphas of alphas! What other creature could boast such a high number of synapses and neurons? Observe the deep cortical folds; the engorged frontal lobe. What species can outsmart us? With our intellect; our thoughts, we have faithfully manned the abattoir of civilization for generations upon generations, a filthy and stained monument to our own hubris and greed.

We are the world builders, the desertmakers!

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

With war against all we have marched across the Earth, raping and pillaging the Earth, denuding it of its verdant fertility, enslaving and subjecting those who refuse our gift.

What savages! What barbarians! Filth! Subhumans!

Who could not want the gifts of civilization? Who are you to deny them? You are not a true human, only the true human lives in the city, is ruled, and governed. Look at all of our abundance; how much we have accumulated. Only the real, civilized, human consumes so ferociously, so insatiably.

Partake or perish! Join or die!

There is no room for outsiders, others, the non-believers, heretics, and heathens. There are not enough resources, things to consume for the both of us. We must expand, must grow. We worship growth, we lust for profit, it fills us. The beast hungers in unison with its human caretakers and operators, all must be fed, they are so very hungry.

But such an insatiable hunger could never be satisfied; the creator did not leave us with enough for everyone!

“Be fruitful and multiple, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

We did as commanded but an entire Earth is not enough for the civilized and its citizens. We need another, for we have sullied this one, polluted and ruined it. We grow more desperate by the day, as Terra is changing, and is not as welcoming as we once recall. We suspect that our civilization is a parasite, a virus upon her, but we are reluctant to admit it. What would you have us do?

We have disrupted vital processes, altered cycles, interrupted loops in our mad quest towards “human progress”. They stretch into the distant past and into the far future. They interweave with one another form complex chains that stretch back millennia. We can hear its echoes, see its traces, and feel its fragments. We see the growth of civilization before us, see its movement and action across the ages. Look how it grows, so infantile and precarious at first, wobbling on its feet, not yet a true master of its environment.

Backwards. Undeveloped. Unrefined.

We are nothing like our ancestors upon the Yangtze, Indus, Tigris, or Nile we think to ourselves. Look how much more advanced we are, what complexity we can create, imagine, and maintain, we could have nothing in common with those ancients. Our forerunners would behold us as gods! What progress we have made from those pathetic precursors—we have surely overcome their weaknesses—gone beyond anything their small minds could imagine.

We are enlightened. Evolved. Wise.

And yet, we are doomed.

Some of us do not know it yet.

But we are to inherit the solar system, the galaxy, the universe! The human is eternal we are above all other creation; ascendent, exalted! We can take to the cold irradiated void of space, we will terra-form a planet, export our civis and civitas to other worlds. We must! Lest we do not exist. We are still so very hungry, there are new resources to devour, we must keep the machine running. We will grease the cogs with our blood, integrate our muscles and bones into its substrates. Most of us can’t even lie to ourselves, we are already completely dependent upon the beast, we are useless without it, we have become one with it, are nothing without it, we have been fused with it for time immemorial.

We have forgotten any time before it; cannot imagine a future without it. All of our beliefs and knowledge are derived from it, all meaning and value based upon it. We would be lost without its processes to sustain us. If we were to rise up against it and destroy it we would be most likely be destroying ourselves. We are unprepared for such a scenario. We have forgotten how to care for ourselves, we are so dependent and interconnected we have forgotten exactly where we and the leviathan end and begin. All seems to grade into one fuzzy fusion of flesh, bone, and blood; steel, concrete, and plastic. What can be the alternative to everything? What could even destroy this multi-headed hydra of a beast, so precariously and insidiously interwoven between and within us?

And yet still we dream, undaunted in the absurdity of the task.

No hope, no future

“Oh misery I have drank thy cup to its dregs! But I am still a rebel.”

“I throw off the burden and stop; I have enough of this in my life. I have not been capable of living, but I will know how to get my revenge. I will croak on some sidewalk, with the final blasphemy on my lips and the final flash of hatred in my eyes.”

Trapped in the decaying womb of civilization, our bodies are nothing but reagents and reactants for further processes—our lives catalyze the reactions that reproduce and maintain the processes of civilization. We are another component of these larger systems and processes. After all, we have created this world by our actions and behaviors, stretched over thousands of years, leading up to the present moment where we reside.

We cannot forget the ground which we stand on, the moment that we belong in.

This is now. The present.

It is all at once a strange and familiar place. Familiar patterns, routines, pathways, processes, interactions, and relationships unfold before me. Strange things.

Daily movements of people and things. Shuffling of places. Transportation and communication networks; interconnected and interlinked nodes. Extraction, processing, distribution, and storage. Urban conglomerates, suburban outgrowths, agricultural layers, wild boundaries. Finance, banking, numbers, statistics, data. Commerce, buying, selling. Ownership, profit. Technological dependency and worship. Work, wages, salaries. Money. Administration, bureaucracy, states, government. Power.

Are they all not signs of the civis and civitas?

These are the daily rhythms and forms of which can easily be observed across the planet, they are human creations and serve human purposes at the expense of all other life and our own well-being. They provide us needs, but come at an immense social and ecological cost. These externalities produce a trajectory of self-annihilation, the system (civilization) as currently expressed is heading for collapse and breakdown due to its destructive nature. When the system requires endless resources, infinite growth, and expects profit in every interaction above all other ethical imperatives—the end result is over-consumption, unsustainable resource use, ecological destruction, and erosion of the life sustaining cycles and processes of our Earth. This is facilitated by hyperviolence towards all other living things and one another. Violence is expressed throughout the social interactions and relationships and can also be manifested in the cultural expressions we encounter.

This is a world that has a terminal illness.

We have abandoned hope of any meaningful change or reformation of the system we are a part of. The relationship between ourselves, civilization, and Terra is one that can and has only been defined by violence, overconsumption, and malignant growth. A few tweaks to some of the parameters will not change it. Civilization will not be made sustainable; it cannot be sustainable. It was born from violence, from the subjugation of humanity and the Earth—it cannot exist without a continuation of this activity to maintain it.

You cannot reform the monster, we have seen what the reformers have done through the ages—they merely change the players, placing a new curtain over the ravenous machine, give the emperor new clothes. We see through these ploys, you place bandaids over the gaping and festering wounds that have been open for millennia. You cannot heal these gangrenous wounds, excise the metastasizing growth—you are the tumor, you only know how to continue your infection.

Revolution is merely the other side of the coin, what is a revolution but the continuing revolving of the wheel? We do not want the wheel to continue its spinning but wish to smash the wheel to pieces, spreading the fragments far and wide so they may not be reformed. You revolutionaries think of yourselves as saviors, great overcomers, but you are merely the newest managers of the civis and civitas. Revolution—like the reformer—changes a few players, alters some forms, but still the rotten substrate remains; unchanged. You tear down the idols of old; yet erect new ones to take their place.

Storm the sanctuary, consume the offering, destroy what is sacred.

This eldritch world we have created cannot be saved. Even if it were possible, we simply aren’t interested in saving it. We reject what we currently experience. We have given up on finding solutions. These are always based on a compromise, a devils bargain. Certain processes and relationships are preserved, parameters that cannot be altered without destroying the beast; thus things always end up taking on the same dull and familiar hue that we are accustomed to.

We do not approach the world as saviors, reformers, or revolutionaries. This is not a world that should be saved; it would be much more satisfying in destroying it. But such a task is not one that is so easily accomplished, we are weak, few, dependent. If we were to destroy this thing we would most likely destroy ourselves. As much as we despise it, it sustains us, provides for us, feeds us, houses us, clothes us, and heals us. We lack the power to attack or disrupt it in any meaningful or effective way, and find ourselves under its total power. We are in a trap.

To destroy it would destroy ourselves, but left on its own trajectory we come to complete systems collapse and self-destruction at some point in the future. What then is the path?

We cannot be certain of, nor do we offer any predictions for the disintegration and decomposition of the systems and processes of civilization. The leviathan will decay in ways that cannot always be predicted, and we feel that location will always be paramount to our individual experience of this process. Furthermore we do not think such a decomposition will be a sudden and drastic change in most locations, but more of a slow and protracted disintegration as networks, cycles, loops, and processes break down and cease to meaningfully project power or function as nodes in larger systems. Even more interesting to ponder for us, is the most likely scenario that there will be those who will work towards reconstituting and reanimating the leviathan; its vital organ systems reinvigorated and rejuvenated by fresh flesh and blood.

Do we necessarily help it along in its collapse? Hasten its decay and spread the rot? Do we deintegrate ourselves, become less dependent upon it? Make preparations for its failures? Attack it with reckless abandon? Infiltrate it? Sabotage it? Wage war upon it?

We see no real strategic reason to chose any one path, but realize more power and possibilities in exploration of all that is in our power. We do coalesce around a shared posture; one of hostility. This hostility towards the civis and civitas, is embodied in the activity and interactions of competition, antagonism, parasitism, and exploitation against it. The possibilities of these interactions are something that we are interested in and wish to experiment and play with and within.

While we express a hostile and antagonistic activity towards leviathan and its subprocesses, we engage with our kin, companions, and community with mutuality and reciporicity.

We desire companions, unions, communities where we can be used and use one another.

Companions of nothing.

Communities of nothingness.

Unions of nothing.

We are the amorphous, the autonomous, the acephalous. We aim to recompose rhythms, supplant other processes, alter adjacent cycles, and construct new patterns.

Death to the worldbuilder, the desertmaker!

Down with civis and civitas!