The carnival is over

The end of the good dream

“So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

“Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

“Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

A Man for All Seasons. (1966).

I’ve been thinking a lot about human frailty this last week or so.

St. Paul took the idea one step further. He writes, and I don’t remember exactly where (even though I very well should) that the foolishness of God is greater than all human wisdom. This, in effect, sums up the entire history of salvation. It’s a naked paradox beyond our natural understanding, a sort of glimpse of the transcendent in such simple prose.

The weakness of God is greater than any conceivable strength.

I wrote a poem on this same intuition when I was just a kid. I didn’t understand it at the time, of course, but the idea made itself known and seemed significant to me. It was about how the fragile transience of a single moment of beauty somehow contains within it all of eternity, and this precisely because it’s frail, because it’s something we have to let go of.

Sand mandala being destroyed

Funny enough, the atheists I used to debate about a quarter of a century ago tried to teach me something akin to this.

The point they always returned to was that human existence was precious for the very reason that it’s finite. Meaningful only because it’s absurd, and yet is smack-dab, devil-may-care right here in all its strange splendor. Because the human equation somehow breaks through and defies all of that nothingness.

While this idea still seems a bit off to me, especially phrased in their contradictory way, there’s something to it. Nowadays, I would concede as much — but counter their deeper premise in saying that all of this makes sense only because the contingent, specifically through needing everything and possessing nothing of itself, implies the transcendent. In its absolute and complete vulnerability, the deep and abiding brokenness of all of creation reveals any notion of its independence to be the ultimate absurdity.

Finite being, precisely because any notion of its self-sufficiency is impossible at the outset, reveals the presence of a God closer to ourselves than our own jugular vein.

A gilled Jesus shivering on a fisherman’s hook.

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought,

‘What can this be?’

And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’. I marvelled that it could last, for I thought it might have crumbled to nothing, it was so small.

And the answer came into my mind, ‘It lasts and ever shall because God loves it’. And all things have being through the love of God.

Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love

And there’s another perspective possible here that I in the end might be more partial to. Maybe it’s not actually the finitude of the human condition that makes it meaningful.

Could be we’re mostly just unable to love what we’re taking for granted.

After finding out he was dying from cancer, Terence McKenna writes that every seemingly trivial experience from daily life now suddenly attained this mythical splendor. He looks at a beetle on the ground and realizes the transcendent beauty of being allowed this singular moment in the history of existence, one that shall never come again, and before which nothing like it ever was.

Extraordinary like a whole Creation all on its own.

And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and
pokeweed.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

Walt Whitman

It’s not going to last. That’s what makes it real.

And one cold Saturday morning in early January, it just went belly up and died. The myth of ius gentium. The law of the Nations. The good dream of the West, withering and uprooted from its Christian soil, the merely human apparently unable to retain it.

At the heart of it all, there’s the spectacle of a mother being shot in the face, point blank range, by the thugs of the state, and of all the memes spitting on her grave.

After putting three bullets in her head, her car limping away into a utility pole, we hear one of the cowboys muttering “fucking bitch”, the woman discarded like so much refuse.

But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Such absolutely great TV. This is what mass media was designed for.

And the Pavlovian response is a beautiful ideological meltdown across the spectrum, right on cue.

Much of the old guard of the resistance movement we formed during the covid event, increasingly funnelled into the radical right, is obediently celebrating the murder “since she was a dyke and questioned government authority”. Others on the hard right decry the shooting due to alleged IDF connections and the perpetrator’s “race mixing” proclivities.

The social justice neoliberals are likewise playing their scripted role of righteously indignated moral majority, yet align with a nationwide formation of astroturfed, pay-for-play riots orchestrated by increasingly mainstreamed “crowds for hire”-businesses — and out the side of their mouths still calling for an escalation of the imperial proxy war in the Ukraine, and soon enough in Iran.

“The left”.

You can’t make this shit up

In terms of the ICE shooting, the propaganda machinery really couldn’t find better raw material even if they’d fabricated it all from scratch. The story is repressive in two distinct dimensions, since it both serves as an obscene, bald-faced display of imperial power, synergizing remarkably well with the Venezuela and Greenland narratives, and also functions as the perfect wedge to drive further in between the two warring factions of Western political culture. Our two increasingly authoritarian hockey teams.

But something is tangibly different now. There has been a change in the air.

Overshadowing this precise moment in history is an unprecedented, naked rejection of the very meaning of the rule of law, flanked by these two grimy symbols of a summarily executed woman and a blindfolded Maduro, a head of state deposed in an ostentatious rejection of international law.

But the mask is finally off now, isn’t it? They don’t even care to lie to us anymore. Don’t have to pretend. We’re back from decades of “the liberal defense of murder” to good old naked imperialism.

“We did it for the oil.”

As bad as all of this is, you’d be forgiven to breathe a sigh of relief.

These recent events seem to cut through all of this euphemistic dross, these layers upon layers of lies and obfuscation with a spade at last just being a spade again.

This is not trivial. Nor is it a good thing.

It’s perhaps easy for us, dear reader, to say that it doesn’t make much of a difference, that this is the way of empire; that there have always been hitmen and jackals and the yellow press; that the face of this earth is pock-marked by the unmarked graves of those who dared to resist.

But it does matter.

Most people have faith in the system. Most people aren’t like you and me. And when that faith is finally snuffed out, the centre will no longer be able to hold.

We’re now in unchartered waters. This final drop, this trembling, ultimate rejection of a tattered moral order is something our civilization has never endured before, however many times it’s been on the ropes.

You might think I’m conjuring a storm in a teacup over the events of these last couple of weeks, but they’re merely the final straw, the coup de grâce with the mask at last taken off for everyone to see the nothingness beneath. It’s been a decades-long process, with the covid event, the Ukraine proxy war and the Gaza genocide marking its terminal stage.

And during the first few days of this ominous 2026, our rulers blatantly and unashamedly have now severed the golden thread that keeps a complex society functional. The moral imaginary that preserves the collective focus on shared goals. The duties by which we live and die, through which the relations of production are maintained.

But what I fear the most isn’t collapse and dissipation.

What bothers me during the early morning hours is the possible emergence of a new kind of authoritarian society that finally needs no legitimacy whatsoever. A dominion whose cohesion can be effectively provided through an all-pervasive system of penetrating digital propaganda where your primary relationships are formed to the machine itself, and where truth, being and the very good itself are supplanted by raw power.

‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly.

‘By 2050 – earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different.

In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four.