6297 words.

“Nothing human exists in the future.” – Nick Land

In “Man and Technics,” noted civilizational scholar Oswald Spengler paints a vivid picture of man sacrificing himself with his principles. To achieve greatness against the inevitability of change, it is better to bravely succumb to the sands of time as products of our own greatness even if that greatness cannot survive into the future ^​1​. For the Western man, this supposedly embodies the last dignified stand, as ruins to ourselves.   

“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.”– Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics

Sacrificing one’s life is seen as the highest form of courage in the Western world, and this has the unintended consequences of agents of change seeking it out and achieving the ultimate exit. Some blame this tendency on the Liberal ideology while others on Christianity, some like Spengler point to the natural cycle of civilizational commencement. We must cease searching for Mount Vesuviuses to plan ourselves beneath, eagerly awaiting the pyroclastic flow.

Dignity at the cost of survival is a millstone around the neck of this civilization that can no longer be tolerated. The search for answers to this problem must necessarily bring the ambitious mind right to the edges of sanity, in search of intolerable tools.

What if Collapse is an Endless Freefall?

We begin with one of the most illuminating concepts in the realm of geopolitics: the status quo, more specifically the state of relative peace as a snapshot that must be maintained. It is frequently understood within the context of political conflict and the state of relatively stability prior to war, invasion, or economic strife. The status quo can also be understood as a known known: it is something we know we know, as opposed to an unknown known which is something we think we know but we do not. As imperfect and contentious as this state of affairs may be, we have a familiarity with it and can thus control it more coherently, in stark opposition to a known unknown which could prove to be cataclysmic. To upset the status quo is to conceivably upset every system and process; chaos reigns and even ideological opponents have an investment in maintaining relative normalcy, especially when it comes to keeping rising powers in check. To effect radical change, sizeable segments of elites need to defect to the side of those seeking change. This is not something that we can currently detect in the West, except on the Dissident Right as it flirts with Third Worldism in the configurated swarm of purportedly friendly foreign psyops.

The global status quo as of this writing is dominated by a confederation of nations known as The West which functions as a holistic civilization, with the United States of America as its core area. While it is nigh-impossible for a sole global hegemon to physically project power across oceans and dominate each continent, it can position itself as an uncontested regional hegemon and encourage a preferred order of controlled chaos elsewhere. At the dawn of the 21^st century, contentions and alliances appear to fall along ancient civilizational fault lines irrespective of political ideology, with the conflict between Russia and Europe being a persistent example. It is clear there is a Western sphere of influence that is routinely signaled against by those subjects outside of it, even while those within it debate its very existence.

According to geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan, America formed what he termed “The Order” through Bretton-Woods trade alliances to defeat the Soviet Union, and after the fall of the Berlin wall President George HW Bush attempted to redirect this momentum in other regions ^​2​. Despite subsequent presidents opting to ignore this imperialistic project, the current American Model for world order exists as a secure marketplace through which to pursue economic self-interest, while politically kindling the internal forces within member nations that desire this. America sets the terms and controls the interconnected global system of economics and trade; it defines the status quo. This status quo, however, was never about extracting resources or capital directly for the benefit of Americans; it was effectively the opposite as American industries were hollowed out and offshored, redistributing much of its own gold reserves throughout the 20^th century. Additionally, America’s willingness to sacrifice its own military personnel in the name member countries proved over the course of decades it could be trusted as steward for this global hegemony.

“Today’s economic landscape isn’t so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch. Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our ‘normal’ is going to end, and end soon.”- Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning

The idea here is that while America retreats from orchestrating this economic ecosystem, it can still project power in a variety of different ways for its own interests. If this withdrawal from security responsibility were to come to pass, it would be the true dawning of what some have called “Turbo America:” a more explicitly self-interested Western empire that utilizes its vast resources, superior geography, and untouchable military might to pursue its isolationist goals in a kinetic way ^​3​. Advantageous disorder could be maintained indefinitely through military, intelligence, and cultural projection.

The retreat of America from global trade stewardship would not signal the decline of America as such, and most significantly the nations its sphere of influence has touched do not know what it means to de-Westernize.

An inventory of geopolitical history reveals a curious trend: irreversible changes strike like lightning, creating new paradigms which thereby set new standards. Inexorable geopolitical norms are frequently upset; a multipolar world gives way to an unprecedented bipolar world during the Cold War with totally new strategies, upon the terminus of which we have the present unprecedented unipolar order with its totally new strategies. While many envision the answer to the Great Reset being a Great Collapse, the fact that we exist in unpredicted circumstances guided by innovations of technology, economic science, identity consciousness, and uncounted traumas inflicted by ideology and progress means we wouldn’t even begin to know how to survive as our ancestors once did. We can speculate that if we could purposefully reset the clocks to a previous epoch, there would likely be a ravaging eugenic filter that would take generations of suffering to successfully pass through, the stained glass of our humanity warped by savage heat to a wholly new configuration. Destruction of the status quo throws us into unknown chaos, and while we all engage in daily knife fights over the minutiae of utopia – even the elite nemeses within the system – the current power structures will preserve the status quo at all costs, as imperfect and contentious as it may be. Indeed, the internal instability may be a feature rather than a bug.

Every true change is a cataclysm, and we must be aware of the infrastructures in place to prevent cataclysms or wield acute disasters to maintain the larger tectonic plates of the modern superstructure. The largest perpetrators of the status quo, contrary to the presumed elites, are of a heretofore historically insignificant group that achieved colossal influence in advanced societies: the modern managerial class.

In his landmark investigation “The Managerial Revolution,” James Burnham explores how a managerial class is required for the functioning of society defined by complexity growth, and the process through which to excise this essential scaffolding on would necessarily reduce the complexity of a system. The Managerial Elite is an institution-class of people raised from birth to want to change the world but despise tyranny, making it easy to be manipulated because change itself – even minor revolutions – are seen as the goal ^​4​. This is the current paradigm of “progress:” an unending stream of disruptions. We understand the power of this group – removed from both private market pressures and the democratic process – because we understand that power is not by the man who claims he wields power but by those whom that very man must approach for approval of his decisions. Some will know these organs as the “deep state.” The persons who hold power are the various administrative boards or bureaus who actually action the social or geopolitical decisions and whose approval must be sought. Whomever you elect must contend with the entrenched bureaucracy and its distinct power players within the departments of Education, Trade, Energy, Military, intelligence, etc. Who can actually make decisions in a society, and by whose consent do these leaders draw their ability to rule?

“In a new form of society, sovereignty is localized in administrative bureaus. They proclaim the rules, make the law, issue the decrees. The shift from parliament to the bureaus occurs on a world scale. The actual directing and administrative work of the bureaus is carried on by new men, a new type of men. It is, specifically, the MANAGERIAL type. The active heads of the bureaus are the managers-in-government, the same, or nearly the same, in training, functions, skills, habits of thought as the managers-in-industry.” ― James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution

The first group to accumulate power in the Managerial class were lawyers and this continues to this day; you will notice the preponderance of politicians who cite their legal or administrative background, and as designers of the bureaucracy they are the only ones who truly speak the language of the machinery of the state. It is the machinery itself they serve, and the machinery is to secure the status quo against the cataclysms smuggled in through change. They own the rails upon which progress travels.

All this reaches the following apex: what if we never actually undergo a Great Reset? The minutiae of the status quo shifts, but the internal incongruity and external chaos is simply perpetuated indefinitely due to the emergence of unthinkable technology and a distinct multidimensional elite class that has the ability to maintain the superstructure containing the conflicting, confusing inertia.

Evolution Conceals its Footprints

A perennial question many politically conscious individuals ask is “what have conservatives ever conserved?” This is common in North America where it would appear that Conservatives have suffered a sequence of ideological losses and concessions until they simply appear as Progressives from 5 years prior. While many of them make vague gestures to tradition, the execution of these traditions becomes increasingly hyperreal over time, commodified but rarely genuinely lived. In fact, traditional identities themselves are redefined until that which we claim to be ancient is merely a subverted replica and we have no practical way to legitimately find our way back to these folkways.

There is no more illuminating story of this than the advent of “Judeo-Christianity” as a defining characteristic of America. In “Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise,” Kevin Schultz presents a detailed historical account of how the dominant – if fractured – American Protestant identity was ultimately subverted by Jewish and Catholic immigrants, projecting this subversive political project into the past and inexorably altering how Americans conceptualize their own history.

The distinctly American union of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics only emerged after World War 2 – priorly a Protestant majority – and was finalized with the election of President Kennedy. It was a war being waged on two fronts by groups whose only allegiance was unseating mainstream Protestantism as the default religious identity ^​5​. Jews were instrumental in removing Christianity writ large from the American public sphere (and against majority rule generally) while Catholics were trying to edge out Protestantism. The Protestants were altogether unwilling to stake out a defensive position against these political subversions and was gradually dragged away from its own interests. The National Conference for Christians and Jews (NCCJ) was created for the purpose of servicing the most vocal faiths and spread across the nation, preaching how democracy itself was built on the survival of tri-faith America. In 1942 the NCCJ published “Declaration of Fundamental Religious Beliefs,” to further cement Judeo-Christianity and it was propagandized across America.

The organization further worked its way into the media, military, and education system. The idea was spread practically through events, holidays, propaganda, and speaking directly with teachers.  Publishing leaflets placed directly into the hands of young soldiers; an entire generation of men were brainwashed to believe in American tolerance as the defining civilizational characteristic. It was what they were supposedly fighting for. Protestants were put in a difficult position in having to aggressively reaffirm its position as the overwhelmingly dominant political and ethnic identity, which it found difficult to reconcile with its foundational beliefs. With each concession the national conversation changed by degrees, and each step of the way Protestantism was edged closer to the margins.

“During the 1910s and 1920s, amid the nativist revolt, many leftist intellectuals began arguing about the possibility of better recognizing America’s ‘cultural pluralism,’ of embracing a ‘transnational America,’ of reinterpreting the meaning of ‘democracy’ and the ‘melting pot.’ Some educators, meanwhile, were developing an educational theory premised on the notion that outsiders brought ‘cultural gifts’ that could be shared with other students and thus enrich American society through the teaching of principles such as tolerance, respect, and an appreciation of others.” – Kevin Schulz, Tri-Faith America

Thus, the Tri Faith became the only acceptable identities in Liberal postwar America, and if you were to ask many Americans now from either major political party they would essentially agree with this premise. As the groups gained ground, their conflicts against each other eventually forced the Supreme Court to take a stand against all religious connections to the state, especially public schools. Here you find the relatively recent division of church and state that most Americans regardless of ideology believe to be sacrosanct.

Standing outside this titanic cultural shift we return to our main problem: is there any way to return to a Protestant European status quo in America, especially since the status quo of America on the global stage has accumulated such power? Despite a huge swathe of Americans viscerally despising the Progressive agenda, they yet still believe America as forward-thinking and possessing a dynamism of fluid tolerance. American Nationalists across the ideological spectrum direct attention to this truth but routinely find their most rabid opponents are their kin and countrymen. They understand a subversion occurred and that their own entrenched folkways have been upset, but they lack the resources, institutional support, and indeed the determination to wage a multi-generational war to subvert the subversion and weaponize their own status quo.  

With this in mind we must then wonder, is the ratcheting function of progress a mechanism of this particular system, or a mechanism of the human mind? As humans we find it easier to maintain a fire than rekindle it, and those who preach a return to form find opponents everywhere. The change the huck lacks the electricity of progress required to be tolerated in the current power configuration.

Make no mistake, return is change viewed within the status quo, and social change is not a naturally occurring populist phenomenon. Often times it is those most likely to champion change that are the first to surrender the fight in their self-interest, especially if they are in a culture where this is encouraged. In Albert Hirschman’s classic “Exit Voice and Loyalty,” we see how agents of change migrate and how the ones most likely to have a solid strategy are the most likely to leave the system at first opportunity, even those traditionalists loyal to their region. Perhaps limited by a distinct Western outlook, nonetheless in these cases is it an issue of commitment and more of an issue of time horizons, and the ability of those few possessing the skills to rally the people to change also being the few with the skills to make it on their own. When presented with a system they are displeased with, they vote with “exit.” ^​6​

In the case of public vs. private transit or community engagement around municipal school policies, the people with the power of voice may simply leave, causing a cascading effect where that community eventually becomes dominated by the remaining apathetic majority so long as there is relative stability. It is not so difficult to normalize surprising trends in this apathetic environment.

“The traditional American idea of success confirms the hold which exit has on the national imagination. Success – or, what amounts to the same thing, upward social mobility – has long been conceived in terms of evolutionary individualism. The successful individual who starts at a low rung of the social ladder, necessarily leaves his own group behind as he rises; he ‘passes’ into, or is ‘accepted’ by, the next higher group.” – Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

In politics, the vote of “voice” is the obvious method to enact change, however many influential pundits believe “exit” remains superior and try to instill it into political strategy. If you don’t like a workplace, just quit until you find one you prefer. If you don’t like your hometown, go to greener pastures. If you don’t care for your marriage, divorce at the first convenience. No-exit scenarios are preferable to fixing a system when we witness exit strategies tend to drain the most invested and active voices, robbing the system or recuperation permanently.

Despite this, we live in an exit-driven society. This is where we find a competency crisis, as the most intelligent and qualified individuals utilize the hypernormalized vote of their own feet. You have most likely experienced this yourself, and while you may now view this as selfish in retrospect, if you currently exist in the Western sphere of influence this is the paradigm for the foreseeable future, does sacrificing yourself as the last decent man in an indecent time really serve your long-term survival?  If we are looking for persons most likely to harness the organs of the status quo and enact change, we are unlikely to locate them on their home turf.  

Reterritorialization Within Permanent Entropy

There was a time where the exit strategy made more sense due to expansive frontiers that demanded to be occupied, beckoning those minds most attuned to their call. Space for expansion was a dominant concern for the past few centuries, and as we have established there are hard limitations based on this innate drive, especially for those peoples primed for population growth.

In Colin Woodard’s “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” we investigate how this drive is best exemplified in the formation of America prior to the Judeo-Christian Revolution explored previously. After the revolutionary war, most of America was traversed by four rival cultures who never really comingled, and these represent the main brushstrokes of America to this day. Immigrants would typically choose where to settle based on these pronounced cultures that founded towns all along their travels. The principles, beliefs, and cultural brickwork of these foundational folkways guided everything from town layout to languages spoken to how houses were designed. For example, the Deep South saw themselves as superior Europeans to everyone else, as the inheritors of Rome and Greece and Anglo Saxons as beneath them ^​7​. Appalachia, a region of rogue tribes hostile to the government, was never united until after the Civil War. Yankeedom was striving to be the definitive American culture and frequently received pushback from the other regions such as Tidewater, El Norte, the Midlands, and New Netherlands.  

Throughout history great cities and civilizations are consecrated by rituals brought into the negative space of the frontier like sperm fertilizing an egg. The common throughline connecting many original settlements was freedom, likely due to necessity and lack of central authority amongst the first arrivals who relied on their own internal systems of faith, governance, and justice. Well into the establishment of formalized governments – and for most of the existence of Appalachia to this day – these decentralized forms of governance and law were still practiced. These early tribes, colonies, and families set the tone and tenor for the proceeding civilizations. While history can be reinterpreted through subversion or depopulated into a different form entirely, these are muscles that form around the bone work of these original agents of change embedding their presence into the chaotic frontier.

The bones may be all that remains long after the body succumbs to gangrenous syphilitic self-destruction. Such is the significance of those who inseminate the unknown.

“Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been. Thus, in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later.” – Wilbur Zelinsky, Doctrine of First Effective Settlement.

As it stands now, the frontier zones are controlled, the negative spaces filled in, and horizons reached. Geography may once again be plunged into a chaotic multipolar scramble to balance, but the identities in play are strongly coalesced in large groups and the gardens with which one can grow a new type of man are in short supply. If there is an undeveloped frontier, it’s likely either controlled by criminals or an irradiated minefield sustained by acid rain. That is, of course, until we turn our eyes skyward.

So imprisoned by geological imitations that we are forced inward and experience a constant flux of deterritorialization; the process of breaking down or loosening the ties that bind people to a particular place or culture. On the other hand, reterritorialization is the process of creating new ties to a place or culture, and one can phase in and out of these states while never leaving their geographic region, especially as the matrix of invented identities multiply seemingly exponentially.

French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argued that deterritorialization and reterritorialization are in a constant state of occurrence, and that they are essential to social change specifically within a Capitalist system. For example, they argued that the Industrial Revolution was a process of stark deterritorialization, as people were forced to leave their rural homes and move to cities. The Industrial Revolution also led to a new form of reterritorialization, as people developed new ties to their workplaces and to the cities in which they lived ^​8​. This disruption opens up possibilities for temporal flows and alternative modes of existence, especially since an individual can be an agent of deterritorialization.

“To deterritorialize is not to withdraw from the territory, but to install oneself on it in order to dismantle it.” – Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

They christened the “body without organs” a structure or zone without imposed organization that can be sentient or inanimate, the raw product of social alienation and destabilization, and a surface on which repressed and uncontrollable desires flow without organization. This allows for the exploration of new lines of flight and creative potential. Accelerationist in its aims, it seeks to encourage a new form of ideological automatic writing fueled by the exponentially multiplying informational superstructures and the psychological evolutions demanded to internalize them.

Similar to how there is no way to turn the clock back on globalist economics, there is no real way to turn the clock back on concepts such as deterritorialization which, despite their academic nature, are viscerally felt within societies of individuals looking for answers concerning their own mutating identities. While familiar territories are increasingly barred from us, we seek out new abstract territories to dominate, the mastery of which will allow us to project into truly inhuman spaces and indeed other planets. It is a mindset completely alien to our ancestors; this ultraviolent spiritual malaise felt by those within the secular humanist utopia at the end of history. The marriage between man and machine locks us away from truly inhabiting the past, our awareness of the commodification of tradition into repetitive tasks and the phasing of identities to fandoms cannot be un-understood, and the fracturing of the perception of our place in the universe cannot be reconstituted ever again. Our search for new frontiers is truly maddening to the classical mind but colonize them we will.

Most of all what has changed is our understanding of making antifragile systems that last towards time horizons we couldn’t comprehend previously, in hostile territories that weren’t even glanced by our imagination. Norbert Wiener, the originator of the term cybernetics, posited that man and machine are parallel in their desire to control message entropy through feedback used for physical performance. Entropy is the measure of decay, or the complete absence of usable information. It is the absence of energy, the emptiness of life, the message lacking meaning ^​9​. Entropy is what we are constantly fighting against simply to remain active from one moment to the other.

Our brains and by extension our minds are evolved to both pack and unpack information through abstract concepts, nuance, context, and hidden meanings that allow us to create redundancies that strengthen the transfer of information and more certainly stave off entropy.  You have seen what happens when this message is presented in a broken fashion, or at such a distance as to sound like meaningless words. What you are experiencing is a successful entropic event: the destruction of information.

A machine, like a human, is defined as an entity that locally and temporarily combats increasing and inevitable entropy in its environment. Even synapses in the human brain, once you drill down deep enough, are a lot like all-or-nothing yes/no machine learning switches. Humans possess more advanced hardware such as the Internuncial Pool, which is a cluster of neurons in the brain that work with larger informational assemblies and abstract semantic interpretation. It’s what allows you to infer double-meanings and contextual messages, translating not word for word but idea for idea.

This is at the heart of what is known as information theory, the trippier science that makes cybernetics and this whole quagmire possible. In information theory, everything is real. Your DNA is an adaptive information carrier that constructs a giant meat machine around it to help it survive, language carries information, on the quantum level it’s all information exchange that is functionally indistinguishable from the spirit of creation.

The most stripped-down version of the concept is “bits” as the smallest measurement of data, representing binary choices and the cloud of uncertainty, randomness, and patterns in this data. Qubit is the smallest form of information measured, and information must be understood as a physical thing, which is important since many people believe the digital realm isn’t real. Elegantly summarized as “It from Bit,” everything in the universe is the oceanic interchange of information and therefore from bits. Far from a vulgar materialization of soul, it could be interpreted as the connective tissue of intelligence in all things. The universe can therefore be imagined as a vast computer keeping track of these packet exchanges at the quantum level, a immense record keeper permitting reality to manifest as a consequence of its balancing of the books ^​10​.

“Information is closely associated with uncertainty. Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information.” – James Gleick, The Information

As our capacity to craft more complex messages evolves, as do our mental realms become more traversable and arguably real. It’s all data, it’s all bits, it’s all information down to the quantum level. What animating forces, spirits, or intelligences lurking behind the fog of probabilities have yet to be beheld, but currently we understand the interconnectivity more intricately. Our extension into the abstract space does not abandon the material world, it merges them. We are no longer at odds with machines, we understand that they are extensions of ourselves just as digital spaces are not unreal realms. The tension of existing in this state has warped us beyond repair, and we find ourselves possessed by new hungers for alien frontiers.

The abilities of the mind are directly related to the limitations of the physical form and the ability for growth, and to make a human mind you need a human form. This was a problem encountered by early forays in artificial intelligence as it proved impossible to create an intelligence that thinks like a human if it lacks the ability to inhabit physical space with the same sensory inputs. Any deviation from the precise corporal experience of a human will make it less human. The human entity requires the context of its inhabitable space to be human, and the tension between these two elements allows us to develop solutions for entropy. A mind without context doesn’t know how to survive.

Going Insaner in Entropy Victorious

We can see gaze upon entropic victory when we imagine the promulgation of nihilism. In the early era of the 21^st century, nihilism found plentiful stock for thriving in the environment of secular humanism electrified by materialism. Nihilism is entropy in the sense it represents the total death or absence of useful information, and in all examples, it chooses emptiness over multitudinous. Nihilism is entropy speaking directly to you, proclaiming that nothing has meaning and with everything being frivolous noise, silence would be the superior option.

“Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really ‘out there’ cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own.” – Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Nihilism multiples when we are presented with questions we cannot answer; why anything when there can be nothing? Why should we suffer when we have the power to not suffer? Why should I be expected to be an agent of change if my reward is death?  Rather than a wicked conspiracy, nihilism seems to propagate as informational awareness increases, challenging everything we thought we know. As we have heretofore unbelievable access to knowledge, the darkest corners it provides gestate diseased creatures. Nihilists generally believe humans are “over armed” with consciousness, and this is anti-life ^​11​. They point out how people frequently mediate their consciousness with substances and tricks. This is the essence of the Zapffe Paradox: humans spend all their time trying not to be human.

When prompted with the inquiry of why they all don’t simply commit suicide or definitively reject life itself, the most common reply is that they shouldn’t have to. To kill oneself is saying “yes” to action when they only believe in “no,” and even suicide affirms life just Satan affirms God. To truly rebel against a meaningless life, one must not choose anything in the affirmative, even rejection itself. There is no concept of the “I” at all, the final rejection of information overload and the mountain of questions required to engage with a reality slowly revealing itself to us, driving the most aware and intelligent among us insane.

If we assume that the current situational awareness of humanity cannot be simplified, how do we emerge victorious over entropy’s final form? The protective shell one might don to traverse this state of information overload could lie in the technic of schizoanalysis, a rhizomatic mode of thought advocated by Nick Land. A rhizome is a non-hierarchical yet interconnected system, in contrast to the linear and hierarchical structures prevalent in traditional thinking. The core presupposition is that sequence is not order; order presupposes a doubling, or redundancy. Pure decoded sequence is without an inserted structure or linear causation. In his essay collection “Fanged Noumena,” he along with Prof. D.C. Barker hypothesize an alien message one might stumble across travelling through space and how it might be decoded. It would be wise to assume it would not follow any human linguistic syntax, furthermore it would not be linearly understood at all ^​12​. A message may need to function like an organism, a holographic hybrid of blossoming tissue and data that can be viewed differently from each dimension. It’s an interesting new way to think about information formatting and how to adapt through acceleration.

It is similar to how evolutionary biologist JF Gariépy arrived at his theory of the revolutionary phenotype. He cites the RNA World theory, which shows how the machines utilized by replicators become an independent replicator itself. In this case, DNA – a form of information encoded into biological form that has discovered increasingly effective ways to survive in an entropic universe – at one point was subservient to the RNA in its quest for reproduction and became such an effective tool it was trusted with more data through which to replicate, until the machine essentially inherited the ability to replicate itself without input from the controller. DNA’s stability and the versatility of proteins in performing various tasks offered advantages over RNA, making it superior once it was granted the ability to operate on its own and make RNA subservient. This kicked off life on Earth as we know it.

In The Revolutionary Phenotype, we are invited to imagine what would lead to a similar revolution which would downgrade DNA as the tool for a superior replication process, thereby making the human sexual replication process obsolete.  One must reconfigure how they understand their own place in the grand scheme of gene replication to even begin to walk through this scenario, which would involve humans surrendering so much of their reproductive process to a combination of transhumanist gene editing and AI-driven eugenic selection that we remove ourselves from the Darwinian selection process entirely, the final destination of this path that the human DNA protein itself becomes a tool for this nigh-incomprehensible matrix of digital-biological mechanisms, but by this point human beings have more or less ceased to exist as we know them ^​13​.

This line of thinking exists on the fringes of utility and requires ejecting oneself from their realm of familiarity and all their current circumstances. In these experimental flights of fancy, the only way out is through, and a new generative organic process must be created in bewildering gardens on the outskirts of sanity.

Midnight in the Garden of the New Men

We may yet see the new species of man who can truly thrive in this historical epoch driven by information overload. In “The Law of Civilization and Decay,” Brooks Adams directs our attention to the ascension of the Economic Man over the Martial Man as a parallel example. Over 300 years of Roman history nature culled a plutocracy from what had originally been a martial race. Every Roman was at once a landowner and a soldier, a cell within the body of the state itself. Yet near the end of the civilization its structure was largely financial, controlled by landlord senators and a financial elite that propelled the great civilization towards imbalance which invited several culprits of its eventual downfall ^​14​.  

“In proportion as movement accelerates societies consolidate, and as societies consolidate, they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to find vent through the imagination and takes the form of capital; hence as civilizations advance, the imaginative temperament tends to disappear, while the economic instinct is fostered, and thus substantially new varieties of men come to possess the world.” – Brooks Adams, Law of Civilization and Decay

In Rome, landed magnates and landowners came to be the only ones seen as valuable, even as the cities flooded with the pauper class – formerly husbandman and soldier – chased there by foreign labor. This created the infamous disproportion of slaves – approximately a third of the population in the city itself – and the impoverished. As merchants rose to social significance – lacking the spirituality and imagination of their prior martial class which was tied to the land – cities become financial centers (like Venice and Genoa later) and this emergent monied class, unbound by spirituality or ancient social norms, eventually came to dominate. We see across time that in every environment where he blossoms, the economic man thrives in a more dynamic environment than the martial man who is made subservient like an RNA protein. Many seek to reinstall the martial man to a place of prominence, which is an admirable cause in the name of reclaiming a savage vitalism. The purpose of this piece, however, is to identify the evolution that shall dethrone the economic man. We seek a new brand of savagery.

Survival is the distant mountain we must direct ourselves towards at the vanishing point of the time horizon. Deterritorialization, the evolution of ideological men, the nature of entropy against the vitality of information, we must recall this is all in our existential strategy, as amorphous as it may seem right now. We are recontextualizing what legacy looks like, where it happens, and how it occurs in a world of reified entropy. In a politically and spiritually deterritorialized space which agents of change are magnetized towards, we will observe which forces of information and spirit beyond our direct control can birth new anti-entropic bodies to carry us into the future.

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