The Dead-end Revolution

Conservatism, 'progress', and the linear cage

A month or two ago, I had to bury a fawn. This was not the first time. It has happened twice over the past couple of years that I found a dead fawn in the yard. The previous time, I had no way of knowing how the poor animal came to its end, but this time I did. We’d seen the little creature, ducking on the patio. Usually, they hide very well, and we only realize an addition to the herd saw the light in our garden when mom shows up and her fawn hurries over for a quick portion of milk and some motherly care. This time, the fawn had a darker coat than usual, seemed feeble, and hid herself as effectively as a squashed tomato on a polished gallery floor. When mom finally did show up for feeding time, she got up, tried to straighten her legs to reach the good stuff, but collapsed. She attempted several more times, but each time her little hooves slipped out from under her hopeful body across the gritty concrete. Her spindly legs were not capable of clearing life’s first hurdle.

At a certain point momma doe seemed to accommodate her fawn’s inability by lying down. On my toes, peeking through the window, I tried to see whether the baby finally managed to catch on, but deer don’t lie on their side. Once or twice I thought the kiddo may have grabbed the bounty, but if she did, it did not last that long. Not long after, the doe lost her patience - they’re not exemplary mothers in that sense, from what I have seen. It was only a day and a half later that I spotted either of them. I was working in my office, when a dark spot on the grass caught my attention, just as a deer headed over in its direction. The fawn, curled up on the lawn, did not move, even as the doe got closer. And as I realized the fawn had not made it another day, her mom started washing it, her tongue licking the spotted coat, over and over. I swallowed, staring through the glass. As I swallowed again, the doe looked up, staring me in the eyes with despair.

The digging of any hole in this part of Texas encounters a fat slab of limestone about ten inches in. Trying my best to beat this barrier, I had plenty of time to work myself past the emotions. Nature is cruel. Life is vulnerable. Civilization is our attempt to eliminate the cruelty from our lives. But the further we have removed ourselves from that reality, the more our vulnerabilities plague us. The more luxury we are accustomed to, and the more instant tools we have at our disposal, the harder it gets to tolerate any frustration. We have started to believe in our power so much, that we assume we no longer are subject to nature’s rules. But we are. We get sick. We die. There is no meaningful life without vulnerability. We love animals, and we eat them. We are predator and prey. We are powerful, and completely helpless. Human nature and the forces of nature push us into this existential split.

There is nothing like a natural disaster to remind us of our vulnerability. The common sense approach to the realization of our powerlessness focuses on the measures the prey can take to protect itself. But in a different timeframe - be it the Neolithic or the present - the predator projects the fantasies he harbors about his own power and agency on his environment. Someone did that. It must have been me. I could conclude that our vulnerability remains unsolved despite 5,000 years of technological improvements, and leave it at that. Over the past years, however, I have written a number of essays about my impression that it is exactly our increased security and control over our environment which have pushed our sense of vulnerability and anxiety further up. It is our tolerance of insecurity which is at an all-time low. Our concrete preparedness for life may grow, but our spiritual unease rises. In this piece, I identify two ‘modern’ approaches to this anxiety. Even if these two ideological answers seem each other’s opposite at the surface, I believe they share the same understanding of the concept of time and how we move through it.

There are more manifestations of the ways we believe we can deal with our insecurities. Bureaucracy is one of those expressions, an attempt to impose order and control on an unruly world. The coming weeks I will consider bureaucracy as a manifestation of the technicians of the ruling class who, if nurtured and unchecked, specialize themselves out of relevance for the public. One conclusion will have to be that bureaucracy, too, has a lifecycle. Another perspective on bureaucracy will compare it to the parallel world we have created on the internet. As with bureaucracy, it is assumed to be a representation of reality. However, the more importance we attribute to it, the more it behaves, not as our servant, but as our master. Obviously, the issue I perceive is not ‘partisan’. As a matter of fact, our constant rolling from one supposed binary-choice issue to the next is exactly what, sadly, unites our culture today. Just as there are other outlooks that can be found on ‘both sides’ of current debates. An example is the idea of linear progress.

The concept features both in the ideology of ‘progressivism’ and in that of ‘material progress’. Both are modern answers to the question of how we should deal with ‘nature’, and our own status therein. The ‘progressive’ ideology aggressively knocking on our door both institutionally and on the streets is environmentalism. While a fringe of this ideology is avowedly anti-human, most of its proponents still argue that their purpose is our own survival as a species. It is avowedly Leftwing scientists like Bjorn Lomborg who point out that their disregard for methods and for the vital role energy plays for our survival would - eventually or swiftly - lead to disaster. I do not intend to diminish (the importance of) his argument, but if we look at the historical preconditions allowing such an ideology to arise, we realize the word ‘irony’ hardly begins to describe the contradictory nature of its coming into being. Because only the most coddled, richest, safest, and most protected generation could ever start to believe that nature is anything if not blind and cruel. Once emancipated from nature, it is easy to forget the character of the master who once ruled. So for lack of an understanding of what the past was like, they propose to hurl us head first into a future that may well be just as sadistic. This would not be a unique occurrence. After all, it tends to be our wish to do unfathomable good which fathers the most atrocious bloodshed.

Environmentalism may be inspired by our damned conscience, and it may be oblivious of the past, but the irony of this movement does not stop here. Its understanding is prehistoric, though it unfortunately lacks its deeper wisdom. The prehistoric understanding is that there must be agency behind the forces of nature: it must be us! The lack of wisdom means that the modern shamans do their best to forget about our vulnerability. Where environmentalism shows itself a faithful student of archaic management - though this attitude is quite common today - is in preferring ritualistic conjuring over rational solutions. So whereas nuclear power, which provides cheap and clean energy, is rejected, windmills which on balance do not produce energy and destroy our visible environment are shoved down our collective throats.

You might say that this is the whole purpose of the movement: to make life unlivable. I agree it would be the ultimate result of these policies, but belief is different. That’s why they call it the Green Revolution. This way of understanding the term revolution seems to suggest that we could reach some higher plateau on a climb upwards. If we consider the origin of the term, however, we may see again how we are losing ancient wisdom, in service of a fiction that feels good to uphold. Because ‘revolution’ originally does not refer to a linear step forward - what we call ‘progress’ - leading to a brand new situation, at all. The Latin verb revolvere refers to the cycle of time that inevitably returns to its starting point. Like all revolutions of moon and earth, the days, the seasons, and life itself, the political order follows a cyclical pattern as well. Revolution therefore is our return to an original state.

One can argue that this simply happens to words: they change meaning over time, or their application changes context. American use of the term ‘Liberalism’ is an obvious example. But the increasing use of ‘progressivism’ for the same general political orientation may be even more intriguing, and - if we dig a bit further - revealing. What this term does is to define its values as ever moving ‘forward’, like a crusade conducted without a final destination, or an attitude without an end-goal. Maybe this development was inevitable: after all, civil rights issues to climb on the barricades for do not spontaneously keep flowing from an inexhaustible source. To keep movement and fervor going, ever more extreme beacons need to be presented to push towards, lest a relative electoral distinction and appeal would be lost.

It’s not just the Left which is caught in this tunnel prescribed by the empty standard of ‘progress’, however. Counterintuitive is that we could find similar patterns among environmentalism’ apparent opponents: the defenders of material progress. As an attitude, we can describe it as blind trust in technology - something I probably have been guilty of myself in the past. But benefits usually come at a cost. And the hubris of faith in technology has become most apparent in where it meddles with biology. Just one example is the promotion of formula ‘milk’ over mother’s milk. A generation grew up with an impaired immune system as a result. Of course, if you do not see the whole array of components of the original product, or you do not know their function, you are incapable of weighing pros and cons. But perhaps the perspective itself, based on a narrow understanding of ‘efficiency’ is blind from the outset. How could one otherwise disregard the unquantifiable value of laying on your mother’s breast to bond? For many, the ‘rona became an elucidating moment in that respect. Not only was a doctored virus unleashed on all of us. We were then basically ordered to take the advice from the same class of people, those responsible, and undergo treatment via a technology that had been hopeless for twenty years, but then was declared life-saving within two miraculous months. Science and progress, they said. The implicit assumption is that we must always move ‘forward’, even if neither we have the slightest idea where we are going, nor do they where they’re taking us.

Now, AI seems to be approached with the same uncritical attitude where its impact on our rights and autonomy is concerned. I am not going to deny that AI may bring us great benefits in calculating power. But where it is welcomed as a substitute for our discretion, our weighing of arguments, and - quite simply - our critical thinking, this way of blind and hopeful thinking is as detached from our origins as environmentalism. Empirical arguments regarding benefits and downsides or objectives and results, or common sense positions which rely on the simultaneous grasping of a set of different facts - or anything, really, that we would describe as wisdom - are not exactly prioritized within this framework. Do we still realize that, with all our fancy technology and unbelievable tools, the brilliance of our astronomers is outshone by far by the Neolithic tellers of time, who knew at least one thing: that the cyclical patterns in the sky are paired by the revolving story of our lives.

So what do the ‘green revolution’ and the ‘AI revolution’ have in common? It’s the belief you can secure your future by detaching yourself from the past. It’s the idea you can move forward without knowing where your roots lie. The delusion we can forget about being both predator and prey. That we can reach some new level where we leave the past behind. And so every next election becomes the most important, ever. We don’t need to fix things, we replace them. Yet, if we were to look at developments from a cyclical point of view, they might make more sense, and we would be better able to understand our own position in events. An example is the novel proverb making the rounds suggesting hard times create strong men, strong men easy times, easy times weak men, weak men hard times, when the cycle will start again from the top.

The ancients would say that decadence and corruption were a sign of the natural order breaking down and of the center of power reaching the end of its lifecycle. In the coming weeks - time and paid work permitting - I will set forth why I believe that ‘bureaucracy’ needs to be reviewed from the preceding perspective. I think the time is right, now that the new department at DOGE seems to have acknowledged that what was formerly referred to dramatically as the ‘deep state’ really is the vast basin of bureaucrats trying to define our fate. In any case, I will consider ‘bureaucracy’ from two standpoints. The first concerns its function as ‘the Center’s’ (the term is Gurri’s) technical class. I will venture that Gurri’s ‘Revolt of the Public’ is not a unique, but rather a repeating phenomenon which becomes inevitable when a mushroomed professional class has become so self-reinforcing in stimulating its own idiom - and, of course, its own favorites - that it loses touch with common sense and common observation of the public. This perspective does not make the tension in society go away, but it might eliminate some of the ideological flavor, which would be a good start.

The other view of bureaucracy that I will have to offer is one of the mindset that it reflects. As frustrating as our encounters with bureaucracy may be, it was obviously devised to solve our problems. Or let’s say that it is meant to be the system that renders manageable all those insecurities that I set forth in the opening of this piece. Now this system can never be satisfying, because it is a work-around - its world of multiple-choice pathways can only avoid the contradictory and the complicated. At some point, the system is believed to be more real than reality, and we are expected to comply. For some reason - and this is where we have to blame ourselves, because why should we put up with it, unless we are actually thinking in the same way - we have set up a huge virtual world out there along the same pattern, the world wide web, or, if we focus on a prominent part of it, ‘social’ media. And around it, the obsessed voices sound. They believe they are fighting their oppressors. And certainly we have seen sufficient proof of state and private actors colluding (which, incidentally, is exactly what the Romans defined as corruption: the subjecting of the public good to private interest) to predetermine public conversation in a specific manner. But perhaps the vocal opposition is equally captured, as much as the actors presumed to rule the internet. If all the talk about Overton Windows and ‘controlled opposition’ shows anything, it is that these supposed dissidents are engaged in the same ritual of control over a representation of our world which is not fit for purpose. It is time to stop projecting agency, and to reclaim it for ourselves.