I. HOW LONG CAN IT LAST?

How long can it last? The world is in crisis. Much of it, caused by America’s President. And yet the US economy is “booming.” Is it?

I think it’s a house of cards.

The US economy today is often called “K-shaped,” meaning that there’s a class of people who are doing well, and a class that aren’t. So far, so predatory capitalism. It’s a pretty…simplistic…metaphor. It has no dynamics, no interactions, no inner structure at all. That’s why I think it’s lacking.

This frame hides a number of crucial—and catastrophic—realities.

A much better metaphor is a house of cards. How we see social realities matters, if we want to understand—and be able to predict—them.

Let me explain.

II. THE CRUCIAL WEAKNESS OF THE US ECONOMY, OR, MONEY MONEY MONEY

The US economy has an Achilles Heel. A critical weakness.

It’s 70% consumption. That means that it’s exquisitely sensitive to changes in consumption, which is how much people spend (versus invest, and we’ll come to the investment part shortly.)

This is unique, different, and a true point of critical weakness. It’s unique in the world. No other economy on the globe consumes at such a high rate. It’s different from the rest of the wealthy world, too, which is much more sensitive to changes in government investment, because of the expansive social contracts in Europe and Canada.

And it’s a true critical weakness in the sense that a small, unforeseen change can wreak absolute havoc. It can cause failure cascades.

Like those in 2008, where banks failed, or in 2003, where the dot com bubble crashed, or during the pandemic, where the economy went haywire.

So: the US economy depends critically on consumption, which is also why the news about it is always about how much other people spend, and that’s deeply weird if you’ve ever lived overseas. And if that number falls, even a little bit, then the economy can go south, fast, hard, and deep, unlike almost anywhere else in the world, too.

III. THE THREE MAGIC NUMBERS IN THE ECONOMY

What is an economy? Let’s think of it as a set of markets. Stock markets. Bond markets. Currency markets. The labor market. And so on. There are more, but those will do for now.

What happens when this Magic Number, consumption, begins to falter, even just a little bit, in America? One almost elementary consequence is that the stock market falls. The bond market weakens, too. So does the currency. And of course, eventually, labor markets do too, meaning that unemployment begins to rise, which is easy to understand if people are buying and spending less.

Now we’re going to begin discussing the house of cards metaphor a little.

America, like I said, is unlike any other economy. Not just because everything depends on Magic Number One, consumption. But also because that Magic Number determines Magic Number Two, the stock market. Magic Number Three, by the way, is GDP, which depends on the first two.

The stock market in America is everything. People obsess over it unlike anywhere else in the world. Europeans and Canadians by and large have no idea what their stock markets are doing, and that’s because they don’t have to care: they don’t have these miserable things called 401Ks. Investment and retirement’s taken care of for them.

But in America, Magic Number One, consumption, determines Magic Number Two, the stock market, or people’s 401Ks, savings, etcetera, which is everything.

The stock market in America is everything in a literal sense. Europeans and Canadians have expansive social contracts, like I said, from retirement to healthcare to childcare. In America, you work, and your money’s put into the stock market more or less automatically.

The stock market is the only safety net there is. It has taken the place of every single functional system in working countries. That’s why Americans obsess over it, and they’re right to, they have to. No money, you die.

Now think again of the link between Magic Number One, consumption, and Magic Number Two, the stock market. See how America’s always on edge about the economy?

That’s because the economy is always on the edge. It’s on a perpetual knife edge. A tiny move in the wrong direction can have life-wrecking consequences.

Even for “rich” Americans.

V. THE CLASS STRUCTURE OF AMERICAN WEALTH

Now let’s picture the house of cards.

The K shape metaphor says: richer Americans are doing well. And it implies that they’ll continue to do well. We imagine the branches or legs of the K having their own momentum, separating, bifurcating.

But is that true?

“Richer” Americans these days have grown wealthy largely due to a single industry: tech. It’s provided a route to the upper middle class, what’s left of it, through astronomical salaries and stock market gains. So much so that Americans now make 3-4 times what their counterparts do in the rest of the rich world. Does that sound sustainable to you? I digress a little bit.

My wife and I were in Seattle recently. I was astounded by the level of wealth a little bit. Nice shops, restaurants, cafes, with astronomical prices, tiny houses that cost a fortune. So I did a little research, and learned something I didn’t know before. Seattle has the largest number of tech workers in the country. Hence, all this newfound wealth.

“Tech,” we’ve discussed recently, is misnomer. It’s really advertising, and mail order. They’re responsible for a very, very large portion of this K shape. And the story goes like this. This class of richer Americans will just keep spending, spending, spending.

So there’s an idea that “the wealthy can just keep spending…forever.” But will they? Can they? Maybe if their money came from the heavens above, certainly. But the wrinkle in this very earthly tale is that their money is coming from below, because they are in the business of mass advertising. Global, in fact, and the world economy is emphatically not doing well. However you look at it, their wealth comes from the rungs of the ladder below them.

Once you understand that this is a story of advertising, then things become much clearer. To advertise, you need people in mass, society-scale, markets to buy stuff. Who can. If they don’t, then of course, there’s little reason to advertise.

So while it’s true that these richer Americans may want to keep spending, the point is that they’re employed in and by an industry which depends on advertising to everyone else. Not just them. This is how the US economy really works right now, and has for a decade plus.

See what I mean by house of cards a little bit?

VI. THE HOUSE OF CARDS

Now let’s put it all together.

This new class of techno-wealthy, and here I don’t mean Musk and Bezos, but your average tech worker pulling a quarter of a million plus, is working in an industry—advertising—that’s premised on selling ever more stuff to the people below them in the economic ladder.

That is where their wealth is really coming from.

And they’re one step away from catastrophe, too, make no mistake. One lost job, one missed paycheck. This level of wealth doesn’t insulate you much at all from the brutal realities of American financial life—that comes with having tens or hundreds of millions. At this level of wealth, family, groceries, and housing are still very much an ongoing basic issue of household financial management.

To put it another way, this level of the house of cards is fragile. It’s not on solid ground. It depends critically on the one beneath it.

Now think of the other stratum beneath them on the economic ladder. How are they doing? The ones being advertised to?

Not very well at all. They’re under immense strain. They are struggling to make ends meet, and we see it in every statistic there is, from bad debt, to rising credit card delinquencies, to car payments, to savings rates, to levels of distress, and so on.

Magic Number One, Two, Three. See how much risk they’re at? Of…

VII. WHAT HAPPENS TO A HOUSE OF CARDS?

What happens in a house of cards?

The bottom falls out.

The bottom layer suddenly gives way, and the rest of the thing collapses as if it were nothing at all. A breeze blowing the wrong way undoes it.

This is where the economy really is.

And I think that the “K shape” metaphor hides this. Prevents us from really seeing it or understanding it well.

If we think about it clearly, a house of cards is a clearer pattern for us. It has internal structure, dynamics, logic, the elements are related, and there is a pattern to it at the macro scale. It isn’t just “some cards are doing well, and others aren’t.”

None of the levels of such a house are safe, on solid ground, secure.

Let me continue my little explanation.

Remember Magic Numbers One and Two? Consumption and the stock market?

What happens if the bottom begins to give way, and the people at the bottom stratum stop spending at what are now rates they can barely, if at all, afford? The rung above them feels the pain instantly, and in multiple ways. Their jobs, created by advertising, are at sudden risk (and I won’t even get into AI for now.) And so is their wealth, which is tied up in the stock market, and locked into stock options of the very “tech” meaning ad companies they work for. They face a triple whammy.

So there are feedback effects here, which make the edifice a house of cards: unstable by its very nature.

All this is why Americans are under so much financial stress and pressure, too, no matter what rung of the economic ladder they’re at. Everything is poised to fall apart, perpetually and constantly. Precisely because nothing is on solid ground.

Every rung of the economic ladder above is sitting above one that’s precarious and unstable and shaky, and so the economy just stays unstable the further you go up, perhaps even more so. This is why you see the interesting and morbid effect of couples making a quarter to a half a million dollars a year jointly, which is an amount the entire rest of the world would be flabbergasted by, and who still “feel poor.”

If you make it to the very top, which is to say, you made hundreds of millions, or dozens maybe, you can jump off the whole damned thing, buy a yacht, and sail away. But until then? You’re still trapped in it all.

VIII. A HOUSE OF CARDS IN AN EARTHQUAKE ZONE

Now think of all the shocks heading our way as a world. Trump started a foolish war that’s causing an energy crisis that’s going to cause a massive inflationary wave. The economy worldwide is stagnating. People are getting sick of tech and it’s weird man-child obsession with controlling their lives in puerile ways. Climate change. Fascism. Etcetera. AI, ripping away all those jobs from this tech meaning advertising class, and replacing them with idiot sales bots.

Any one of those alone would be enough to cause the house of cards to teeter and sway in the wind. But all of them together?

I think of the US economy as a house of cards standing on an earthquake zone. Was that a rumble I just heard?

I’d be very, very careful about where you invest your wealth these days. Wise investment isn’t about catching the breeze. It’s about foundations, resting on solid ground.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. THE YEAR THINGS BEGAN TO IMPLODE

You can feel it in everything around you. Headlines. People. Events. The fatalism, nihilism, nothingness, deafening silence. The crumbling. The unravelling. The fascists, authoritarians, psychopaths. The wars, violence, conflict.

The flame of human consciousness dimming. This is the shadow of Thanatos, the death impulse, his wings covering the globe.

Our civilization is beginning to die.

II. WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR CIVILIZATION TO DIE

LOL…these are the kinds of words that get me in trouble. Let’s dissect the nature of the problem.

To people like me, and you, that is to say, thoughtful, it’s self-evident that our civilization is beginning to die. We can see it in the unravelling of everything that we think of as civilization.

Science. Democracy. Peace. Justice. Truth. Reason. The fatalism that these noblest of aspirations even matter anymore. It took human beings five millennia to develop these greatest of breakthroughs.

Now we have “tech.” Go ahead and chuckle. The age we live in, I often say, is…

Our civilization is beginning to die. Everything that we think of as civilized is being demolished around us. Can we say that out loud? Aren’t we all thinking it? Even, LOL, Trump? Is it still “alarmism” and “hyperbole” to talk about this yet?

I don’t know, guys. Should we even bother?

III. THERE WAS AN OCEAN HERE ONCE, OR, THE RECEDING OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

People like you and me are now anachronisms. We are out of time. The world is now going backwards. But we are still where we were, which is forwards. So we are like voyagers stranded in a place that used to be an ocean, but is now a desert. And we are sitting here trying to tell people that there was an ocean here once. Are they capable of understanding what we’re saying?

Tell me if you think the following three statements are true, even halfway.

1. The average person does not think our civilization is dying.

2. The average person doesn’t care if our civilization is dying.

3. The average person doesn’t know how to think about whether or not our civilization is dying.

That’s why I gave you a simple enough way to understand it. Civilization is the sum, union, set, transcendent figure, of these institutions or accomplishments, a way of cohering, a project undertaken together. Now we are not going anywhere together but nowhere at all.

Consciousness is many things. It is love, it is unity, it is universal truth, at its highest. At its lowest, it’s just perception, understanding, crude awareness. We are failing catastrophically at all these things, even the lowest.

The average person has no consciousness of this whatsoever. And that is because the flame of human consciousness is dimming. It has dimmed so far in many people that it barely flickers at all. That isn’t an insult. Is it? Maybe it is. Maybe it deserves to be. We’ll come back to that.

It’s easy to observe that many people around us have scant consciousness now. They appear to be unaware of much at all. History, futurity, what might have been. Who they are, who they should be, why their lives suddenly seem so futile and miserable and frightening. That their moral concerns are limited to themselves, and in the narrowest senses. Please me, desire me, like me, want me, fuck me, seduce me. That is because they have been enslaved by the algorithm and the model. Every choice they imagine they’re making is in fact made for them, social, psychological, cultural, relational, economic.

The expansion of human consciousness is breaking down everywhere around us now. In this consciousness itself is now ill, sick, malade, as we say in French, a word with no good English translation, “made bad,” which implies an absence and a cause both.

Hey, should we ask ChatGPT what it “thinks”? Kill me, I’m already making an UmairGPT. These are the depths to which we’ve all sunk. Sorry, UmAIr.

IV. THE BROKEN DIALECTIC OF CIVILIZATION

The trouble begins here. For many people now, “civilization” is precisely the absence of any or all of the following things:

—Democracy
—Peace
—Justice
—Truth
—Reason
—Knowledge
—Decency

As with so many things in our age, the very meaning of the thing to be understood has itself been not just perverted, but inverted. Perverted is to be lopsided, a misshapen caricature. But this inversion of the fundamental ideas inside things is a hallmark of our age. We still don’t have a good word for it, and not even Orwell himself could scale these intellectual heights.

The point though is that for many people “civilization” has come to mean the precise opposite of what it is. So: education is bad, science doesn’t exist, truth has no veracity, reason is to be mocked, knowledge is to be denied, and decency is weakness.

I don’t need to point out that this movement, this social current, this way of thinking, is ascendant. It is not a battle or a contest. We have already lost. Too many people think of “civilization” as something practically medieval for modernity to have much hold on our world anymore.

And of course that is because you can hear now from billionaires everyday who tell kids that science is a no-no, don’t get an education, democracy is bad for you, knowledge is worthless, and decency is obscene. They’re joined in this by a chorus of demagogues.

So. Let us try to summarize what “civilization” means to many people. It appears to mean a thing where authoritarianism prevails over democracy, where truth is given from the top down, rendering science and art both meaningless, where peace and justice are liabilities, and therefore, decency between people is something laughable.

This I’ve called a “broken dialectic.” Dialectic just means: a thing and its opposite. In classical ways of thinking, thesis and antithesis yielded synthesis. But here we have a breakdown. Civilization and anti-civilization aren’t going to yield a synthesis. They’re yielding less than zero already.

Let me put that in a simpler way. There aren’t “two sides” here, and this isn’t a “debate.” Civilization, in the way we think of it today, and should think of it, in the way the Athenians thought of it, in the way Sophocles wrote of it, means something. And yet here we are. Both-sidesing civilization itself. Chuckle with me.

V. POWER NOW WANTS THE ABSENCE OF CIVILIZATION

We live in a relativistic time, and this is a great sin of the left. The left will always say that two ways of thinking about a thing, which are diametrically opposed, are both “valid.”

But are they?

Can we say that civilization and anti-civilization are both “valid” ways of thinking about the subject or idea?

Of course not.

If I say to you that “civilization” is a thing without science, democracy, art, literature, freedom, truth, justice, peace, and so on, what am I really saying, and what discussion are we really having?

It’s true that may be “a” civilization. But it would be, LOL, a contradiction in terms. An “uncivilized” one, at least in terms of modernity. It’d be something, like I said, earlier, medieval, imbued with the spirit of the Dark Ages, a thing which hadn’t yet discovered liberation after liberation, political, economic, social, cultural, empirical.

Powers now wants the absence of civilization, at least in any thoughtful sense of the word. All forms of power: political, technological, financial, cultural. And it is conditioning people to want it too.

VI. LET THEM EAT TECHNOSLAVERY

Power wants the absence of civilization now. And it is conditioning people to want it too.

So let’s think about “civilization” in a still more sophisticated, yet even simpler, way.

“Civilization” is, as the word, implies, a process. It is dynamic, not just static. It suggests a certain motion and momentum. It’s clear subtext is if not a goal, then at least an orientation, note the ending of both words.

So when we say that “civilization” is a value-free idea, we are incorrect. The value inherent in the idea of civilization is precisely that of progress. Otherwise we might as well just say kingdom, empire, or realm. It would be incorrect, by the way, to say that every civilization before ours was “uncivilized” for precisely the same reason.

Our civilization is dying now in the sense that we no longer make progress towards shared goals of any kind. And what’s fatal about our trajectory is that nobody seems to care. Because power wants that, and more than that, power wants them not to care.

And to this, the average person has happily acceded. Let them eat Netflix, the algorithm, technoslavery, and nobody gives the faintest fuck about civilization.

VII. THE LAST TABOO, OR WHY NOBODY CARES THAT NOBODY CARES ABOUT ANYTHING ANYMORE

So. Nobody much cares about the fact that this is the year our civilization began to die in disturbing and critical ways, because that is what power wants them to want. It is manufacturing fatalism, not just consent now. But fatalism to what? Civilization as we think of it beginning to end also means this average dumb shit of a person doesn’t exactly have a rosy future, after all.

Nobody is supposed to care that nobody cares that civilization is beginning to die. If I write about it, my friends groan. My lovely wife says: why bother. Even I think: LOL, are you a fucking idiot, Umair, not this again.

Because now norms have set in. We’re supposed to be…content…with the end of everything decent and interesting and thoughtful and sane. Just let it fade away and not make too much of a fuss. We’re supposed to gush over the scenery while the ship sinks and pretend.

And most of us aren’t even pretending anymore. Because nobody’s supposed to care that nobody cares, nobody is allowed to, encouraged to, will much admit to, has time to, care.

We’re just math now, did you know? And because we are…

A taboo has been carefully constructed for us. Nobody is supposed to care that nobody cares about anything fucking real anymore. That anybody much thinks, learns, grows, matures, uses their mind, tends to their responsibilities, takes the world and themselves seriously. We’re all just atoms of indifference now. You Do You! I’ll Do Me! Then…who the fuck is doing civilization? This taboo is what power wants. Fatal indifference is what we have become. And in it, we’ve surrendered being in the world in mature, adult, and healthy ways.

We’re just mathematics of the crudest kind. I’m one, and you’re one, and we add and subtract. Like, heart, follow. Smash that subscribe button! Do we interact, intersect, form a union, become a transcendent number? Nope. And so…

Caring about civilization—are you kidding me? What the fuck, isn’t there another Amazon Prime movie to watch? Hey, I heard so-and-so just made a rock album! Wow! Ever noticed how none of this idiotic shit is about anything that matters anymore? So we accept the taboo. Nobody cares that nobody cares. Fuck civilization. Just give me technoslavery. But one way to think about civilization is: I care that you care. This is the job of people like us, by the way, artists, musicians, intellectuals, writers, journalists, scientists, teachers, just normal decent people, etcetera.

Americans might struggle with the way I’ve put it. “And nobody cares.” That’s because when they read, or think, they tend to do so narcissistically. I care, they’ll think, therefore, the proposition’s invalid. But of course this isn’t the way I mean it, or a correct way to think, at all.

It’s true that there are those of us who care. Care very much indeed. The little town I grew up in outside Washington DC is full of thoughtful and learned people discussing this every evening, deeply troubled by it. But it’s also a place with one of the highest education rates in the world.

When I say that “nobody cares,” it’s not a quantitive statement meant to be interpreted individualistically. I care, therefore, I exist. Wrong. You may care, 10/10, but that makes you (and I) very much the exception(s). It’s hardly a topic of discussion or import or weight. Except when a demagogue or billionaire says it, and they mean it in the inverted sense.

So we’re speaking in qualitative and collective senses, which is a European way to think. In French, we say “tout le monde” to mean everyone, which doesn’t literally mean every single person in Paris or the world, but just a current, atmosphere, sensibility.

VIII. THE ABDICATION OF EXISTENTIAL RESPONSIBILITY

…and nobody cares.

Do they?

Isn’t it true, what I said at the beginning?

The average person is more interested in whatever dumb shit is on Netflix, whatever AI garbage Spotify will serve up to them, whatever influencers YouTube et al are going to smack them in the face with, than anything remotely real. True. Worthy.

Anything that shapes or impacts their lives.

And this part is a condemnation and a jeremiad. Because in this, we see an abdication of responsibility. It is every person’s responsibility to learn, to be moral, to try to reason, to use their intellects, to infer what is best for them, and for everyone. This is adulthood’s hallmark. It’s never easily attained.

Do you see people doing that anymore? I don’t. I see technoslaves and algorithm zombies. I see people so defeated and broken inside that to remind them is their responsibility will immediately be to told that I’m asking too much from them. But I’m not the one asking.

IX. THIS IS THE YEAR OUR CIVILIZATION BEGAN TO DIE, AND…

So here we are. Our civilization is dying. This is the year it began to, in serious, grave, and irreversible ways. And nobody cares. We’re just sort of…resigned…drained…exhausted…weary.

You can be clever and say, but Umair, it really began to die that year, that day, that month. That’s fine. We are intelligent people. We don’t nitpick. We think synthetically.

Where does that leave people like us? People who a) can’t accept the inversion of civilization as something emptied of science, democracy, literature, music, art, truth, reason, justice, peace, and b) also can’t be fucking stupid and pathetic enough to just shrug and Netflix away our lives, because we take our responsibilities a little bit seriously, since we’re adults?

It leaves us in a great deal of pain. We’re anachronisms now. The world has no use for us. It is only counting down the days to its own self-destruction now, by way of pretending that Everything’s Fine, Dude!

And I think it also leaves us with a task.

Which is to remind people of what civilization is and means. Just that much. Not even defend it, or champion it. Just set the definition of the damned thing straight. After that, the responsibility is theirs, not ours. No, “civilization” isn’t just the Dark Ages falling again while technoslavery throws Netflix and Spotify at you, you poor hopeless moron. No, this isn’t a “debate” with “two sides.” There is a there here. Maybe that way the “nobody cares” part begins to…change. Can it? Will it?

I don’t know. What I do know is this. Perhaps if we do that much, we can at least stop them, in a small way, from becoming the wretched, pathetic, embarrassing things they’ve become. And in that, perhaps, we will recover some small semblance of the dignity an age like this has stolen from us, too.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. THE RITUAL

There’s a scene that unfolds before me day after day at the cafe. A ritual, with careful steps. And yet these days, it’s so badly broken that I can predict how it’s going to turn out the moment it begins.

The Date.

The Woman arrives first. Almost always. And she’s trying. It’s a curious turn of phrase, which we’ll examine in a moment, but first let’s discuss what it means. The girl, woman, lady, and by this I mean the ritual of The Date cuts across generations, is making an effort.

She’s put on a nice dress. Wearing carefully chosen shoes. Make-up, tastefully done. A little bit of lipstick, just so, some eyeshadow.

And she’s shining with excitement. As she should be. This is the evening, night, afternoon, that her life might suddenly change.

She orders a glass of wine, a coffee, a tea. And pretends, impatiently, to wait patiently.

And then the Man arrives, and it all goes to hell.

II. THE BROKEN ARCHETYPES OF DESIRE

There I am, sitting at a table nearby, precisely the same “in real life” as online me. The cool intellectual. Smoking a cigarette and just…thinking. Not trying to overhear anything, not eavesdropping. I can’t help but notice, still.

The very first thing that happens is…that the briefest look of dismay crosses Girl-Woman-Lady’s face. Her eyes veil over. Sometimes, there’s a grimace. It only lasts a nanosecond. She goes back to trying.

But in these social rituals, first impressions count. And The Man is already…done. She knows it. I know it. Anyone looking knows it. The only one that doesn’t know it yet is him. Finished, unless he can redeem himself.

Why? Because the goddamned guy showed up just emanating…radiating…like a thermonuclear supernova…pure man-child energy.

He looks like a baby. Sometimes, my lovely wife is with me. She’s a nice person, OK, not always, but mostly. And lately? She’ll let out a kind of yelp-slash-giggle. In the beginning, I’d frown. Puzzled. Now, I completely get what she’s sort of horrified by.

The Girl Woman Lady is there, trying. She’s already made an effort. In our capitalist argot, she’s “invested” in this ritual of a “marketplace” for “mating”already. She’s tried to look pretty, attractive, to just…you know…not emanate the vibe that she’s a goddamned little baby.

Meanwhile, the Man has showed up apparently as a Boy Child Savage. He’s wearing some combination of the following. A nylon vest of some kind (men! NEVER WEAR THIS ON A DATE. Are you idiots?) Some kind of T-shirt or maybe a weirdly ill fitting shirt underneath, that looks like it hasn’t been ironed since 1994. And if not the awful sneaker-loafers that men these days wear, then just…pretty terrible shoes, like sneakers (MEN! never wear sneakers on a date! Are you idiots?).

He’s unkempt, and not in a good way. No, he hasn’t been in the forest chopping goddamn cords of wood. No, he isn’t disheveled from just giving a concert to adoring fans. He just hasn’t….bothered very much. Please understand me, because while this sounds superficial so far, it’s anything but. Understand this isn’t about looking a certain way. It’s about kinds of presence, ways of being in the world, how you inhabit yourself.

The Man is emanating Boy Child energy. You can smell it in the air, see it a mile off, intuit it from a glance. This is not really a man who is one yet.

There is nothing that kills the female libido faster than what just happened. Oh my god, I wanted to spend time with a man, just a man, and who arrived was a Boy Child in the shape of one. Do I have to be this guy’s Mom Mommy Mother Nurse Maid?

Nobody wants to be your mommy, guys. Not even your mom, most of the time. Do you even know how many times my wife tells me this? And I’m like the veritable prototype of Not a Man Child. Men: this is how insanely lethal the goddamned stakes are of Being the Wrong Archetype are for your love life.

See this colossal mismatch in Archetypes already? Eternal Boy Child meets Girl Woman Lady? How do you think this is going to turn out?

We’re going to talk about that, and it’s going to suck.

Stay with me, because…

This is where things get funny.

III. WHEN EROS TURNS INTO “SOS”

And I know what’s gonna happen next, because it’s happened so many times by now. It happens so predictably, and so often, that by now, my wife rolls her eyes when we leave to have coffee together.

(This is the good scenario, by the way. The bad ones? A “MAGA coded” guy shows up, wearing fascism lite stuff, and by the way, Ralph Lauren Branding Team, you might wanna think about this. She shudders and leaves. A guy who looks suspiciously like a wannabe manfluencer shows up, and she tries to hide under her glass of wine.)

The Girl Woman Lady is already disappointed. But suddenly, she brightens up. Decides to give the Child Boy Savage another chance. Maybe there’s a Man hidden in there, somewhere. Maybe I just need to let the stone reveal the statue, and chip away at it a little bit.

She asks him a question. And he makes this ritual of The Date, which is already going off the rails, into the trainwreck that’s by now becoming a cultural touchstone. He just…gives some kind of inane, half-mumbled reply. She’s sort of lost.

And then he tries to recover the Ritual. By talking about a) his job b) how much money he makes c) sports d) some status symbol he aspires to, like a Rolex collection or e) something else incredibly boring and completely fatal to the libido.

Now comes the part I sort of dread but also chuckle at. The Girl Woman Lady starts looking around. And she looks at me. Remember, I look like the one guy who doesn’t ever need to be part of this Ritual. I’m wearing my obligatory leather jacket because the sunlight can kill me, I’m having a cigarette, and I have a tiny white dog with me. I’m weirdly safe.

Her eyes begin to…sort of…plead with me. Rescue me! Dude! Do something! Alright, if you can’t help me, then help him. You look like the kind of guy who’s interesting and fun and cool and smart and thoughtful and has had a life. Jesus! Just…fucking…be this guy’s wingman slash big bro slash cool friend already! Tell him what to say! I’m trying to give him a chance! Jesus! What the fuck is wrong with men these days!

Now. Forgive me for writing all that in such excruciating detail. It’s funny and it makes my wife groan because it’s true. I could tell him what to say, and I wish I could, too, to do my part to just sort of play my role in putting the world right today. Hey, I’m happy to be your cool big bro. But of course, I can’t.

The Ritual is the Ritual, and by now, it’s reaching its conclusion.

The Girl Woman Lady makes her excuses. The Eternal Boy Child looks deflated and bewildered and disappointed. Angry, even. He doesn’t get what just happened to him. I sort of raise an eyebrow and look wryly at Snowy or my wife.

You know how many successful dates I’ve seen in a year of watching The Ritual unfold before me almost every single night? One.

And do you know how many times I’ve seen the plea in the eyes of Eros?

IV. MEN, WOMEN, AND PLACES IN BEING

So what should the Eternal Boy Child Savage say? Look, this isn’t dating advice. But it’s what you probably want to know, which is fair enough. The answer is: it’s a lot less complicated than you think. The short version is: it’s not about what you say at all. It never is.

It’s about…

What’s going wrong between men and women? What really happens when the ritual of The Date goes so wrong as it does above? A lot more than you think.

Women are closer to being than men. And all the macho bullshit of every culture that has ever existed is only there to mask this fact.

Freud famously theorized Penis Envy, which was also the name of one of our teenage bands. He was wrong, though, as was his larger general principle of reducing Eros to a mere sex drive.

What is going wrong in this ritual of The Date Turning Into a Trainwreck, so often and so fast and so much that by now “heterofatalism” is a trendy social more, is Eros itself.

It’s more accurate to say that men have Womb Envy than to say that women have Penis Envy. Yes, I really mean that. Let me explain what I mean. Women, like I said, are closer to being than men. They are braver and tougher and right at the edge of life and death, just by virtue of existence.

Women risk life and death in the act of pregnancy. It is natural and inevitable for (most of) them. Women bleed. The stuff of life pours out of them. I’m close to the edge of being, in a way, too: my blood turns to dust. This place in existence, the edge, is real. You suffer there, you exist in a totally different way, and women do this every month, for much of their lives, when they bear children, when they reckon with creation itself.

Men have to make wars to get to this place of the edge of existence. For women? It just happens. It’s where they are. Go ahead and chuckle, it’s only funny because I’m not kidding. Why do men love making wars, anyways? Have you ever wondered? Now you know. Womb envy. They need to prove how tough and brave they are. Women don’t.

We don’t think of women this way. But we should. The macho bullshit going back eons in history is precisely a way to repress this most basic set of facts about existence. Men are not at the edge of life and death just by being alive. Women are, very much so. Over and over again.

Their “facticity,” or their raw facts of existence, the way life feels, is, to them, if you like, in this way, is utterly different to those of men. Just living can kill them, bleed them, wound them, end them, finish them. Like I said, men have to make war on each other to draw blood and be at death’s edge in order to then be lauded as this “tough and brave,” which for women, is just existing in the first place.

So men have spent millennia repressing and denying this elemental and unchangeable truth, in almost comically absurd ways, when you think about it, as a way to redress the cosmic scales and elevate their own place in existence, hence, the birth of the macho, from the Spartans right down to today’s internet manosphere dorks. It’s war! I’ll make you bleed! Dude, I’m already bleeding, hand me a pad and give me a fucking break.

This is why in our oldest myths, creation herself is female. The God-made-the-universe-in-seven-days mythos is derived from the Babylonian myth, which predates it, and parallels it almost exactly. The difference is that the primordial being in the older myth, Tiamat, was female, and she was the raw stuff of creation, a turbulent, roaring ocean, “salt water and chaos.”

So. Men and women are different in their Eros. They are not the same, and one of the myths of our age is that they’re the same people, just in different bodies. I don’t think that’s remotely true, because the facticity of our raw existences as men and women is so radically different.

What the fuck does all that have to with dating?

Everything, actually.

V. WHAT DESIRE (REALLY) IS

What is a “man” in relation to a “woman”? I put that in quotes not to relativize genders, but to reinforce the point that we’re talking now about our deepest, primordial ways of being. Eros.

What is it that makes us desire each other?

Women, existentially, are closer to the edge than men are. Just by virtue of being women. They can die through the consequences of the act of love. Many do, in fact.

What does that mean a man should be, if he wants to genuinely “attract” a woman, a word I don’t like, so let’s restate it, be able to draw her into a place of being-in-the-world-together? What does that mean a “real man” is?

Is it just someone who represses the facticities I’ve spoken about above? And says: no, Girl Woman Lady, you’re the weak one, and I’m the macho one? And just goes on trying to play out this patriarchal fantasy? Or is it…the opposite…a gentle soul, a pushover sort, the Nice Guy? Of course, it’s neither.

Our models of manhood now are deeply muddled. They’re idiotic, many of them, offensive, plenty of them, and ludicrous, almost all of them. Is a man what the manosphere thinks he is? Trump? Your AI boyfriend? What the fuck is a man?

Let’s cut through the bullshit, then we’ll come back to talking about all this with some depth and rigor and beauty and truth again.

Eros, like all things in our unconscious, is symbolic. It’s not rational or logical. It operates both beneath and below but also beyond, above, through these lower levels of mentation. That is why the ritual of The Date goes so badly wrong. When the Girl Woman Lady arrives, and then the Eternal Boy Child shows up, instead of The Man, and she grimaces, it’s because the poor guy showed up in all the wrong forms symbolically.

A trainwreck in Archetypes just occurred. And it’s not a superficial one.

(Am I saying, hey guys, act like psychotic billionaires? Of course not. They also behave like fucking children, too, by the way, they’re the biggest Boy Children of all, Boy Children with fantasies of omnipotence, Oedipal complexes in hoodies written all over them in Greek tragedy which our entire civilization is now suffering. I want to kill daddy. But I digress.)

The point is the symbolic, or what “money and power” symbolize. So now let’s put two and two together. Women are closer to the edge of life and death than men are, just by existing. They are looking for a symbolic sacrifice from men. The consequences of love for women are mortal, infinite, existential. And until a man can show that they are for him, too, Eros misses its mark. This is where men become men, or stay boy children.

Archetypes must fit together. Just as individuals “integrate” towards a whole, so do lovers. Lovers only form a unity when Archetypes fit. And today, they don’t anymore between men and women.

Make me whole. Make me one.

But let me tell you the mystery and the secret. Logic doesn’t work here anymore. A higher mathematics hold.

I am whole in my incompleteness. I am one.

You are whole in your incompleteness. You are one.

We can only be whole and one together in this way.

One plus one equals one, which also equals infinity.

If you understand this, you will never misunderstand desire again.

Our hunger to be one never moves one inch. It’s immovable because it’s the deepest thing in us. With each other, with the cosmos, with being itself. The transcendent mathematics of unity.

This is what desire is.

VI. BECOMING AN INTERESTING PERSON

What the fuck…Jesus, someone make Umair stop! I will soon. But we still need to answer the question.

What does the Man need to sacrifice to become one? To become one. Key words. To become one, as in, the one, a unity, with himself, that he can offer at last to the Woman.

A man only becomes a man when the Boy Child in him dies. Is killed. Is dead and buried with honor and gratitude. His presence may remain, it’s true. But that’s all. Now someone new has emerged, which is The Man. It’s true this also happens for The Woman, but here we’re talking about men. This process is called “integration” in Jungian psychology, which is what we’ve been talking about. The Boy can live within the Man, but the Man is more and greater than the Boy.

Let me give you my own example to make it clear. When I wrote my first books, when I helped run one of the world’s biggest companies, when I keynoted some of the world’s biggest conferences, when I did all these big and wonderful things…interestingly, I was still a boy.

None of these things made me a man. So it’s not what a lot of guys think, the accomplishments or the money or the accolades. Sorry, completely wrong.

I became a man only after I went to the underworld and found my way back. After I got sick, learned I had a weird condition where the light could kill me, spend years in pain, then lost everything, all the money I’d made, my career, all of it, then failed three, four, five times in a row at trying again. In that sacrifice, and only in that—and it was fucking agony—did I even start to become a…man.

A prince is just a Boy Child wearing a little crown. Slaying the dragon is when the journey of manhood begins. Do you see the point I’m making? I’m not sort of saying that “you have to be hazed,” and I’m not boasting. We’re just talking. What's interesting is what the women in my life say. You were a boy then, you looked like a boy, you acted like a boy. They laugh about it. All of them, friends, my lovely wife, my mom, my sisters, everyone.

This sounds…radical…almost manosphere-ish…pretty bad…actually…fuck, did I get it wrong? I don’t mean it the way you think, so let me try again.A man becomes a man when his concerns rise above the fucking trivial, and reach the existential and the universal. In Jungian terms, we say: a person’s grown, they’ve integrated their fears, anxieties, concerns, anger, disappointment, failures, shortcomings, even hatred. And man, was I angry in some of those days when life was just tearing me down and pulling me apart.

In plainer English, we call this “becoming an interesting person.”

VII. BECOMING YOURSELF, OR, THE PRIMAL SACRIFICE

The best dating advice used to be: just be yourself. There’s one big problem with that these days, though, which is: men aren’t anyone anymore.

Men need to offer Women oneness, beginning with themselves. And they’re not doing that, which is why we have this constant complaint that men aren’t men anymore.

Too many of them, anyways. They’re all trying to pretend to be the same person, which is some insane combination of American Psycho by way of Elon Musk met a looksmaxxer on the way to Covert Resentment Against Everyone City, or, I Spend Too Much Time Online Guy. Too Much Time Online Guy is the same person, a billion times over. The same anxieties, fears, hungers, and wearing the same boy child outfits, emanating that energy, too.

Too Much Time Online kills you. It kills your soul, mind, body, intellect, all of it. And this where men are becoming…nobody at all.

Let’s revise yesterday’s dating advice for today. Just Develop Yourself. Become your…self.

Be an interesting, cool, funny, thoughtful, smart, intelligent, warm, charming, normally abnormal person. In whatever way you like. Me? I’m still the teenage goth I always was. That’ll do. Read a book, for fuck’s sake, instead of Reddit. Don’t have a fucking favorite, I don’t know, pundit, have a favorite artist, poet, thinker, and no, fucking Seneca doesn’t count, because nobody wants to hear how Stoic you are on a date.

Have a life. A bold and daring and intrepid one. That doesn’t mean you have to be goddamned Errol Flynn, playing Blackbeard the Pirate, but it does mean that you tried stuff, you failed at stuff, you gave it your all, you went to the very edge of existence and came back from the dead. This is what makes women swoon. And it’s not a matter of “making” them. It’s just a matter of becoming a man.

Becoming a man is hard. You have to suffer, to reach the edge of existence, to let the boy child go. A man isn’t just a jokester or a trickster or a cute little cherub. There’s something else in him that has finally had the courage to go to deeper, darker depths. The deepest ones of all. Down to giving it all, losing it all, and that is when you, in that heat and test and fire, finally begin to become yourself. And by the way, in this way, becoming a man is a choice. A difficult and dangerous and hard one.

Women’s facticity is different, remember? They’ve been at the edge their whole lives. That’s why they’re not looking for boy children to be mommies to. They’re looking for equals, in an existential sense. Eros, erotic love, in relationships of this kind can only be between equals. One plus one equals one or infinity, remember? But for men to be that, they have to become equals, they have to try.

They have to slay a dragon and risk it all.

They must make a primal existential sacrifice.

Themselves.

VIII. YOU EITHER HAVE IT OR YOU DON’T

There’s a strange thing about masculinity.

You either have it or you don’t. Real masculinity never shouts about it, does it? And yet.

We know it the instant we see it, feel it, sense it. And we can see through its caricatures so easily, too. (I know, I know, there are going to all kinds of people who object. But should they? Is Trump a real man in this sense, or just playing at being one?)

Why is that? Because like all things existential, it either is, or isn’t. There is no in between. Either one is a man, or one is not. And this is precisely the point of what I’m trying to teach you, that there’s a threshold at which one becomes a man, a point of sacrifice and a surrender. (Hence, the “manhood rituals” of so many cultures and civilizations.)

For women, I think you should understand by now, this threshold, this turning point, comes naturally. It’s involuntary. It happens whether they like it or not. A girl becomes a woman existentially even if she doesn’t want to. But a boy does not become a man until and unless he wants to. These are such radically different ways of being that they are in fact opposites.

(By the way, I’m emphatically not saying that you can’t be whatever gender you want. Sure you can. In fact, if you read the above closely, that’s exactly what I’m saying.)

And this is the precise point at which manhood itself is breaking down now. Men aren’t crossing this threshold. They’re staying trapped in an eternal boyhood. But of course Eros there is possible only in a very different way—Mother/Son, Caretaker/Child, etcetera—than between equals.

A man is just a person who says: I became a man by sacrificing the boy child. He is still here, and I keep him close to me. But he is gone, in the sense of who I exist as now. I have been to the edge of existence. Only one of us returned. I am not him. I am as tough and brave as you now. I know what life and death are. I have risked it all for something, and I know what it means to stand at the edge of the abyss of mortality, fragility, and nothingness.

Not in the way of acting tough, or throwing your weight around, or bragging about how you killed people or what have you. Please understand I don’t mean macho bullshit at all. I mean: in this act of becoming an interesting and full person, you sacrificed the boy child willingly. You didn’t stay trapped in infantile bullshit, in plainer English, but risked deep and essential parts of you to exist in the world in a more powerful way.

Now you have shown you have power over yourself. In an existential way. And you exist with responsibility, self-respect, and dignity. No, you can’t prove this with Rolexes and money and muscles, by the way.

You either have it or you don’t.

When you do, everyone knows, without a word having to be said. Remember the plea in the eyes of Eros?

IX. THE ORIGIN OF EROS

This is wayyyyy too much for a little essay. LOL, sorry about that. Let me try to sum some of it up.

I think that men are the primordially weak ones. They have the privilege not to have to risk everything just by living. Women don’t. That is precisely why men are the ones who must show that they are strong. And have had to throughout history. If they were the strong ones, we’d all know, and they’d never have had to show it at all. Hence, war, violence, empire, patriarchy, etcetera.

We all know that women admire strength in men, but this is really why, and it’s not just physical, about muscles or brawn. If it was, LOL, guys like me, who’ve never had a muscle in their lives, would never have had a chance, by the way.

This is what real masculinity is. Existential strength, we might call it. It’s a quiet thing. Real men don’t have to say a word. We all just know.

And it is strength in this existential sense that makes Eros flow.

Because it balances the scales at last. Women look for strength in this deep way because then a loving relationship can happen. Then two people are on the same plane, if you like, in being. Women these days put this eternal truth like this: hey, wow, I don’t need to be his Mommy Mom Nurse Maid. What that really means is: here is someone who can walk with me where I am, which is closer to the edge of life and death.

It’s the primal sacrifice of the Boy Child that makes mature Eros possible. It always has been. Men today have forgotten that.

The Woman is pushed to the very brink of self sacrifice without a choice. And so The Man must choose to sacrifice if he is to become one, and the sacrifice must be himself. The Woman is bound to the power the Man needs, over life, just as the origin myths say. But the Man must develop the power the Woman needs, which is over death. And together these become freedom.

Eros is about oneness. It’s primordial. Remember our transcendent mathematics? One plus one equals one equals infinity. Love is always an act of symbolic and transcendent sacrifices. Between Father, Mother, Child, Husband, Wife. But in the beginning, between Man and Woman. Women are women, but men are not always men. They must choose, and that choice requires sacrifice. Of themselves.

You can’t be both. Either you get to be the Boy Child, or the Man. And becoming the Man is precisely surrendering the Boy Child. This is the first step in the slaying of the dragon. In the transformation of the soul towards its truest self.

That is why when a Boy Child shows up on the ritual of The Date, the Girl Woman Lady is so instinctively disappointed. It’s—literally—the last thing she’s looking for. She’s looking for what we’re all looking for, which is oneness, primordial union, but to offer it, men must first have it within themselves.

One plus one equals one equals infinity.

This is the origin of Eros.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I. THE MAGNIFICENT FIVE AND A HALF

There’s a myth in finance, economics, and business. That things change. They don’t.

Right now, the US economy is powered almost single-handedly by “tech.” The American stock market certainly is.

But “tech” is a misnomer, which is why I put it in quotes. At least if you want to understand the economy. Here’s how “tech” really works, and what it is.

The “Magnificent 7” is made of Google, Meta (aka Facebook), Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla. Let’s drop Tesla, because it’s a has-been of a company. Microsoft is sort of hanging in there, trying to constantly play catch up. That leaves us with a Magnificent five and a half.

III. WHAT BUSINESS IS “TECH” REALLY IN?

What business are the Magnificent five and a half really in? The answer is going to surprise you, and maybe even make you chuckle.

Google and Meta are in the advertising business.

Amazon is a mail order company.

Apple is something interesting, which is a luxury company masquerading as a “tech” company. That’s why Apple commands a premium, by the way. Feel your iPhone or MacBook. Doesn’t feel much like junky “tech,” does it? It feels (and behaves) more like a nice watch or car or suit or what have you. I’ll write more about this. For now, let’s leave Apple on one side.

That leaves us with Nvidia, who makes the chips that power AI.

IV. WELCOME BACK TO THE 19TH CENTURY

So. The US economy, and its stock markets, are powered almost single-handedly by “tech.” But tech is…surprisingly…old school.

The majority of the Magnificent Five and a Half are in…businesses that’ve existed forever. Amazon’s the new Sears, more or less. Google and Meta, meanwhile, are just in the advertising business.

There’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to finance, economics, and business.

I’m emphasizing this to demystify what’s going on. All of this is surprisingly…almost...19th century. The economy is powered by a) two big advertising companies and b) a gigantic mail order behemoth (and a handful of companies who make the infrastructure for this to work.)

Now. If you doubt me, consider for a second how much of a mail-order Sears Amazon really is. Less so, in fact, than Sears. Sears claim to fame was that it’d vet what you’d get. But on Amazon, you can scroll for hours, we’ve all done it, sort of biting your nails, wondering if you’re going to get garbage, crap, a fake, or something that, out of a bad date, looks “nothing like the pictures.”

The business models are as old as time (the Mad Men sold advertising, too.)

Google’s business is about 80% advertising, and Meta’s is about 99% advertising. Amazon, meanwhile, makes about 75% of what it does from it’s gigantic “marketplace,” in various ways.

It’s just mail order and advertising.

IV. WHERE SUPERNORMAL PROFITS COME FROM

Why am I teaching you all this? So that you understand the reality behind the spin and the hype, number one, and number two, so that you understand how to think about what’s supposed to happen next.

That is that AI is supposed to catapult these incredibly profitable companies profits to the moon. Will it?

What’s different about mail order and advertising today, what makes these companies more profitable than Sears and the Mad Men, is that they’ve automated parts of it.

And that automation hasn’t always been good. Amazon is like the world’s shittiest bazaar. Google and Meta ads, meanwhile, have all the charm of a tech bro trying to propose marriage to you. Still, despite that, automation has done what it does, which is create supernormal profit margins for them.

So: it’s just mail order and advertising, with automation behind it, to jack up the profits. (And, beneath that, a healthy dose of what are called network effects, meaning, these giants have created monopolistic marketplaces for advertising and mail order stuff.)

V. THE DREAM OF A NEW BUSINESS MODEL, OR NORMAL PEOPLE DREAM OF LOVE, BUT TECH BROS DREAM OF $$MONEY

Enter AI. How is AI going to change all this?

The dream is that…there’s going to be a new business model.

Nobody’s “figured it out” yet, which is Silicon Valley code for “it doesn’t work very well so far.” It’s sort of important to note how money-obsessed this culture, this thing, really is. Normal people don’t spend their lives dreaming of business models. They dream about love, life, happiness. And for that reason good businesses aren’t just about money.

Let me try to explain.

Google makes about $3 per month per user. From advertising. That adds up to the billions it earns over the course of the year.

Did that number just make you shudder? Maybe you know what I’m about to say next.

The dream is that AI will become a “business line” itself. And it’ll do that because people will pay for it. They’ll pay, according to Silicon Valley, something like $30 a month for it. That’s sort of what it has to make to be profitable, given the tremendous investments in it. We can’t say for certain, because the companies are cagey about the numbers, but rest assured, those numbers are not in the single digits.

So. Google currently makes $3 per month per user from advertising. The AI dream is to make $30 per month or so per person.

That’s ten times what Google makes from its existing business model.

Meta’s situation is even crazier. Its revenue per user, $5-6, is even higher than Google’s, even though, LOL, it’s a terrible, soulless sort of experience.

And yet that’s still not even remotely close to the notion of charging people double digits for some sort of AI subscription.

Are you beginning to see the problem here?

VI. HOW BUSINESSES (REALLY) WORK

“Tech” has business models that work very, very well. They do that for a reason. They’re simple, and they’re old. They’re time honored and battle tested, stretching back through the centuries, because they solve problems in relatively efficient ways, while providing profitability.

But to make the AI dream work, “tech” is going to have turn it into a new business model, and charge people for it, forever. And it’s true that many “will pay for it.” No doubt about that. That’s not the point. The point is that that is a very, very different business. In its entirety.

You don’t pay Google or Meta for much of anything right now. You pay Amazon begrudgingly a very, very small amount, for the absolutely awful, just dismal, horrible service it barely provides. To say that Amazon offers “quality control” is like saying Donald Trump talks a lot.

Getting people to accept a new business model is hard. How hard? Nike failed at it. So did most of the car companies, not once, but over and over again, for decades. So did most of healthcare. Etcetera.

A new business model depends crucially on having a brand people genuinely trust, respect, and admire. This is the Number One Thing in business, in fact. A brand is the most valuable any successful business has. Always.

Does “tech” have people’s trust and respect?

VII. THE PROBLEM WITH A VERY SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS MODEL IS…THAT IT IS ONE

But even that’s not the real problem

The real problem is this. AI is going to eat these companies existing business models alive.

This is an old problem in b-school lingo: cannibalism.

Let’s think about it.

There you are, and me too. We type something into Google, and now we get “AI results.” But guess what? The AI results aren’t as profitable as the regular ones, because Google hasn’t figured out how to put ads into them. It will, but even then, the economic problem remains very simple: if AI works, then the ads become more efficient, meaning that you have to hit people with less of them to sell something. See what I mean by “cannibalism”?

The same is true for Amazon. Let’s say that AI can tell you, hey, don’t buy this whatever, it sucks, it’s terrible, it looks nothing like the pictures, the seller will never give you your money back, the whole thing will just be a hassle, buy this one instead, or maybe try not buying any of them at all, and try this thing, that’ll do all three of the things you want at once. See what I mean again? And again, this is economics at work, which is that the uncertainty of buying some piece of crap at Amazon goes down, and so far, that uncertainty works very, very much to Amazon’s favor.

So even if AI is “embedded” into the existing models, the outlook is…dubious.

Can you make advertising and mail order more efficient using AI? Sure you can. But right now, these supernormal profits are coming precisely from inefficiency. From the fact that you have to buy a thousand crappy text ads, or pay a dozen grinning influencers, or order three of the same thing just to get one that doesn’t suck.

So: efficiency is the enemy, in many ways, of business models. It’s good for the economy, that’s true, but it drives down profits.

VIII. THE FUTURE OF THE ECONOMY

Where does that leave us? I just wanted to share some thoughts with you. About the economy, finance, business, and what really happens underneath the hood of it all.

I think that the case of AI is dubious. Not because it’s socially creepy or culturally toxic or just plain theft, which it is. But even the hard-nosed business case for it.

Eventually, I think that Wall Street and so on are going to have sit down, think this all through clearly, do some simple math, and see through the hype. Let me try and do that for you now.

The US economy is powered by advertising and mail order. LOL, it’s funny when you think about it that way. It’s not stuff that’s really…rocket science…quantum physics…to begin with…which is why…applying AI to it…isn’t likely to yield as much as people think.

How much more efficient can you make a pretty dumb, already very automated thing?

And that’s also why, by the way, if AI takes the massive number of jobs it’s already beginning to, the economy is hypersensitive to the catastrophic consequences: advertising and mail order depend on people spending money.

Think about all that. Let me know what conclusions you reach.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

Hi! How's everyone? As you might have read, I’ve been very sick for the last few weeks. We’ve been moving, and every time we do, the light (which can kill me, yes really) is something that I need to adjust to. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow, and this time, it was pretty…bad.

Apologies for writing less (actually, publishing less, because I have tons of posts that are in the queue.) And for missing sessions with some of you. If this is the case, please use the sessions make-up calendar here.

We’re going to change things up here for a while. For now, this is going to become just my…website. I’m still recovering, and Havens is a lot of work. It’s made quite a bit of money for many of you, which is good, but it’s in fact too much work for just little old me by myself. And I think it’s a little unwieldy for many of you, too. So Havens will continue running in a simplified version for subscribers, who need help with finances, since I know that your financial advisors aren’t much use these days. And if you need one on one guidance, you can book a session with me.

I often say that I hate writing about economics and finance. LOL, I do. Here I’ll discuss all kinds of things like I’ve usually done in the past.

PS The subscription price will drop, and so if you enjoy my writing, you’re most welcome to stay subscribed, too.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

Hi everyone. Apologies for not writing more, I’ve meant to, but I’ve been ill.

We’ve been moving. And when I move, then I have to adjust to the light.

I joke around about my condition, where too much light can kill me (yes, really.) It’s called Porphyria, and it’s the historical basis for the vampire myth. Which is funny if you know me, because I’ve been a teenage goth all my life, way before we ever knew I had it.

Sometimes, adjusting to the light in a new place is easy, and sometimes it’s hard. Here I am in a new place, and it’s made me quite ill. It can last a few weeks. My body has to begin adjusting to a new level of light, and that takes time (and effort from me.)

If you want to know what happens, it goes like this. Have you ever seen the little orange stuff under some doggie’s eyes? If you look closely at the pic of me and Snowy above, look just under his eyes. You can justttt see it in the corner of his little eye there. That stuff is called Porphyrins. It’s iron dust. And funnily enough, that’s biochemically what my blood turns into with too much light.

So me and Snowy, it turns out, have this funny cosmic connection. As you can imagine, having your blood turn to dust isn’t...pleasant. (Another funny symptom of Porphyria is that your gums recede and your mouth bleeds with too much light…hence, the vampire myth.)

And by the way, when I was told that I had this condition—it was my lovely wife who diagnosed it on our first date, no less—I didn’t believe it either. The light…can kill you? LOL, come on.

For those of you I’ve had to postpone sessions with, we’ll try and do them this week.

As for what to do with money in the middle of all this, my recommendation is just…breathe…take it easy. Don’t do much. Stay in cash if you can. Just relax with it. Don’t worry about markets bouncing around here and there. Markets have been wrong about this for quite some time now, which is why they desperately bounce up, and then plummet back down. They LOL (want to) believe in Trump, which is very foolish indeed.

The world is now going to enter some very, very difficult times, an energy crisis atop inflation, stagnation, and severe geopolitical turmoil. I’ll talk about that more in coming days.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

I. A TINY LITTLE ONE EYED DOG

There I was, standing on the pretty cobblestone street in between two of my favorite cafes. Having a cigarette. Thinking. Of all the things happening to us and our world today.

And a tiny brown dog with just one eye popped up and came and sat beside me. As if to say: hi. What are you thinking about, big guy? Why are you frowning so hard? I laughed. What a delight. I brushed his fur. And thought about how brave you’d have to be a one-eyed dog in a big, gleaming city.

His mom came along. I nodded and looked down. She giggled. He’s pretty cool, I said. She nodded with pride.

And I felt good. Not: I felt healthy, amused, pleasantly surprised, had a rush of pleasure. But…

II. THE MORAL COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD

Our world is now suffused by what I can only call the demonic. We speak these days of energy or “vibes.” What we don’t know is that we’re now awash in demonic energy. Thanatos, the death impulse.

What do I mean by that? My friends say: you can’t write about that! Even my lovely wife pauses. And me? I suppose that I worry about disappointing myself. I’ve never been a good liar. I don’t know where to begin. So here I am, with a certain truth, perhaps alone.

Do I mean it literally or metaphorically? Both and neither. I mean it in the sense of human consciousness. But let me introduce you to this idea step by step.

And you can wonder, it’s only fair, whether or not I’ve gone crazy. I suspect, though, that many, many people feel what I do, only they can’t quite say it, name it, bring themselves to call it what it is.

So. There I was, making friends with a tiny one-eyed dog, and wondering: how am I going to talk about demons?

When I say I felt good—let me pause. I’ll come to that.

The way I felt was striking. Because in truth it’s a way of feeling, of knowing ourselves, of relating to the world, that’s becoming alien to us.

I want you to think about the world today with me.

It’s easy to observe that the world around us is now morally collapsing. What strikes you about that? Not in a superficial way: war, violence, greed. But that they’ve become all so banal as to evoke just shrugs.

The moral collapse of our world makes us feel a certain way. We feel anxious, we feel afraid, we feel upset, unmoored, disoriented. We may have expected self-serving leaders, we may have come to be disappointed in our institutions, and even to accept our own failed dreams. But all this is something beyond that.

What do we know about human consciousness? Our souls. Where does the microcosm meet, embrace, become the macrocosm? What’s true about us has always been true. It is the fundament of what makes us human. And it has gone by many, many names. It’s a Law. One of the Great Laws of Being. You know it, already, in many of its forms, not just one. Kant’s Categorical Imperative, the Golden Rule, and so on. Every prophet and every seer, every saint and every poet, has taught it to us.

But to say that it’s a teaching is wrong. They are only just reminding us of who we are. Of the way of being that is right, and in that sense, is the root of “morality.”

III. THE EXPERIENCE OF OURSELVES

I’ve put that in quotes because today we have forgotten what the good is or why it matters. I don’t mean in the sense of a jeremiad or a lecture, it’s not there to hector or goad you. It’s not a form of moralizing. We’re going to use it to understand ourselves, and our place in time, being, and the world.

I mean this in a phenomenological sense, which is to say, the experience, the feeling. Of being, or becoming, moral beings. So: there I am, standing beside my new friend, the tiny one-eyed dog. And what do I feel?

I felt good. But not in a trivial way. Not in the way of synonyms for good. Pleasure, delight, surprise, etcetera. Not at all in that way. I felt good about being in the world.

I felt: it’s my duty to befriend such a little guy. To take care of him, even if it’s just for a moment. To just stand there, and respect him. His bravery, courage, his being, to try and imagine, or “connect with,” or stand in the presence of, his little being or presence or consciousness.

And in this, I felt good because I was experiencing the moral good. I felt alive. Why? The good is eternal. In it, we are an unbroken circle. We are one. And if we cannot stand in the presence of the good, we never touch eternity. Human beings were not made to never touch eternity. We need it as desperately as we need water and air. Denying ourselves the experience of the good leaves us alienated, alone in cosmic time, alone in timeless being, riven, broken inside, and, ultimately, where do we end up that way? We are always in pain and always in rage. We have broken the circle and now stand outside it. Does this sound like an apt description of where we are now?

Do you understand the vital link I’m trying to make for you? I’m trying to teach you something that will crush the noise and bullshit of this age like a great hammer, if you truly understand it. But let me continue, and perhaps we’ll get there together.

IV. THE MOST WOUNDED AMONG US

I felt good because there I was enacting the Great Law of Being, which says that we are all one. In our age, we might say, the way that it needs to be put, should be put, goes like this.

We are asked to begin with the most wounded among us.

Tending to them, taking care of them, seeing them, standing beside them, just even being in their presence.

But who are they, the most wounded among us? Perhaps they are the forests. The oceans. Certainly, they are all the animals who we treat like nothing. They are the people, too, whose lives appear not to matter to the monstrous systems now controlling what is left of life, which is it’s transformation from Eros to Thanatos, but I’ll come to that, too.

The point is simple. In our age, which is an age of so much horror, so much hurt, so much pain, our imperative is simple. To begin with the most wounded among us.

And it is an imperative. Kant spoke of this as a philosophical matter, often, we’re told it’s a religious one. But this is a Great Law of Being. It is something every single one of human history’s great minds and spirits have agreed on. When we ignore, forget, minimize, disobey this law, where do we end up Perhaps in hell itself.

You see, a life that is good, that is spent well, must be made up of—can only be made up of—moments of goodness. There is no way out of this fundamental truth. None.

IV. WHY WE FEEL SO BAD IN THIS AGE

Why do we feel so bad in this age?

Why? I want you to really think about with me. Not just accept it, shrug at it, or dispense with it.

It’s true that an unstable world makes us feel anxious, scared, and frightened. These are material concerns for our own welfare, usually. How will I pay the bills, what will happen to my career, my kids, my grandkids, etcetera. And all that is true.

But this doesn’t answer the question, not fully, and not adequately. It only tells us: there is a presence of what creates discomfort here. But that is not enough to explain why we don’t feel good.

The reason that we don’t feel good is hiding in plain sight. We are not obeying the Great Law of Being. It has come to have little place in our lives. It’s an afterthought. There is no room for it in the system. It’s a nicety. A folly. Perhaps there are moment where we tend to our families, or our friends, and suddenly, we feel a flash, just a glimmer, of this mightiest of light. And then, suddenly, those moments are gone. And we are back to feeling bad.

Do you understand what I mean a little bit? You might imagine that what I’m saying is trivial, and maybe it is. I’m not trying to impress you, just to teach you. There’s a big difference, and the first part of this lesson is distinguishing between the presence of the bad, and the absence of the good.

Now. How do most people spend their time these days? They have become slaves of the algorithm. We’re going to discuss that more in the future. Just think of how much time people spend enmeshed in the algorithm, which essentially makes all their decisions for them, from whom to fuck, to whom to date, to what to watch, and so on. Attention, intention, interaction, knowledge, information. All of it is now circumscribed and controlled.

And the algorithm will never, ever tell you anything like: tend to the most wounded among you. That would be ridiculous. So much so that that sentence is laughable, precisely because it’s so ridiculous.

The algorithm will only ever tell you something like: desire me, want me, have me, fuck me, own me, possess me. And then it will instantly take you to the next moment of hyperconsumption. Addict you to it. Make you a junkie to this cheap simulation of desire, which will never fulfill you. That’s it.

V. THE GREAT LAWS OF BEING

So. Of course people are feeling bad. Not just because the world around us is collapsing in dramatic and frightening ways. But more deeply, because, they themselves have given up the capacity, the ability, to live good lives. Genuinely good ones. Again, I’m not moralizing. I’m just observing, and let me make the distinction clear.

People today are enmeshed in living simulations of lives in which there is little to no room for the Great Laws of Being. The Great Laws of Being aren’t just there for the sake of niceness or what have you. They are there so that we have the moral experience of the good. And the beautiful, true, just, etcetera.

So that we have the moral experience of the good. This is what makes us feel good. Too much of our modern psychology overlooks this, or pretends that this fundamental relationship doesn’t exist. It does that to attain the status of a value-free science. But that is wrong, not just because it’s false, but because we do not mature and grow without living in accordance with the universe, creation, and being.

And the truth is that the world can be burning around us, right down to our very rafters, and we can still have some feeling of the good. That is not a trivial one of pleasure or happiness, but one of the high forms of strength, courage, purpose, beauty, truth. We grow and mature this way. We “become ourselves” in the act of our moral development and unfurling.

I can take you in my arms when the fire draws closer. And isn’t that when I should?

VI. THANATOS AND THE DEMONIC

I have tried to make it very, very clear for what a lived experience of the good is. In the smallest, everyday kind of way. Me and the little one eyed dog.

This is Eros. The life force. It flows through us like a mighty river when we obey the Great Laws of Being. The most fundamental of which is to love. When we enact moments like these, we say that we “feel fully alive.” And we feel that way because we are becoming purer in life force, we are in the center of the current of the mighty river.

Now let’s understand the demonic, Thanatos, the death impulse.

There I am, on my phone. I’m staring at the screen. A rictus grin on my race. Will this person like me? Heart me? Follow me? I’m grinning, but not in happiness. In a kind of anxious flush of anticipation, beneath which is fright, inadequacy, unworthiness. Which will soon enough transmute to anger, rage, disappointment, and then become nothing at all.

I never notice the tiny one eyed dog. I never look down, look up, look around, look anywhere.

I am not one with life at all. I am not here in the universe at all. I am in the algorithm, and I am only a formula to be solved by the mathematics of desire. I’m gratification and need and hunger. But the point is that none of this primal wanting can be slaked by anything, anything, that the simulation of life has to offer. It can only be put right through its very essence, and this is where logic fails us.

Our need to be loved isn’t logical. It’s the very opposite. We are looking for something, someone, somewhere to love. No rational sense can be made of it. Trying to say that we “give” and “receive” doesn’t work at all, which is why our modern models of relationships are such a mess, and so is all the advice about them. The need in us to receive is only satisfied by giving, and here the limits of Western rationality are reached.

And now we are called to think at a higher level than mere cause and affect. We must think analogically and symbolically. The beloved dwells within us when we love. We are one. Object and subject disappear. Observed and observed merge. And finally Eros flows.

The demonic is the absence, the negation, the impossibility of all this. It is being trapped in the futility of primal desire, impossible to fulfill, because the presence of life itself has been erased. We go on clicking and swiping because we know, that the next time, it has to work. But it can’t. We’re addicted to the absence of what it is we most desire.

And in all this, we have become nothing. We annihilate ourselves. In true and startling ways. As free actors. As moral agents. As loving things, not wretched supplicants before false mathematical gods.

This is Thanatos, the impulse, craving for, towards, into, death, and it is what ripping apart our world now.

Can the algorithm make you feel good, in the way we’ve talked about, the good? Of course, if it could, we would be in a new utopia, a golden age of cooperation and kindness and justice and beauty. We are not, because none of this can make us feel anything but woe, anguish, and torment. At best, we feel indifferent. The algorithm will never, ever tell you: begin the most wounded among you. Why would it? It’s only there to seduce you with pain wrapped in the illusion of pleasure.

And this is the demonic, its lure and its purpose. To teach us futility, to tell us that there is nothing left in the moral universe except the triumph of evil, to annihilate us.

VII. COMMUNION AND ANNIHILATION

We’ve become wretched things this way. It’s not just that “we’re unhappy.” It’s far worse than that. It’s that we’ve given up on the idea that the good is something to value, cherish, treasure, enact, fulfill, become, create, and when we do, when we stand in the presence of the good, then Eros flows through us, all separations erased, lover and beloved one, subject and object unified, observer and observed in communion.

Thanatos takes this from us, which is hope itself, the sacred nourishment of the soul, the desire, the need, for communion. Communion is between life. And it replaces it with the opposite of communion, which is annihilation, and annihilation is the demonic’s truest and greatest power. With whom are we in communion the way that we are choosing to live—or not to live—now? Nothing and no one. The mathematics of the idol we call desire. And that is all.

What lies this way?

How much further down Thanatos’s abyss do we have to go before we wake up and see where we already are?

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

Today we’re going to talk about what’s happening to our world. Really happening to it. Beyond the bullshit. And what’s happening to us, as a result.

You’re not going to like it, it’s going to be a difficult, strange, and unsettling read. I strongly recommend you don’t read this, in fact. Go watch some dumb shit influencer selling you their dumb shit plastic smile, no, that’s not a mind game, I Really Mean It. This is 100% Not Safe For Most People to Think About.

Except me. I think the time has come to begin writing what I actually think, but I don’t think the time has come for anyone to read it just yet. So maybe this will just be a secret diary now. I don’t know. Or maybe I’ll write it all up, seal it in a bottle, and…

I.

“The eye of Heaven beholds the just of men,
And the unjust, nor ever in this world
Has one sole godless sinner found escape.
Stand then on Heaven’s side.”

That’s from Sophocles. From one of his last plays. Where Oedipus, history’s most tragic figure, begs for one last redemption. To be buried in hallowed ground.

We’ve come to a point now where fascists are lecturing the Pope. Trump posted an AI video of himself as Jesus, after mocking the Pope, who criticized Trump for making war. JD Vance stepped into the breach, and still is. This is the lunatic place we’re at. Go ahead and chuckle. Now: what does it mean?

It’s just pure demonic energy.

Laugh, chuckle in outrage, splutter your coffee if you must. Umair’s finally lost it, guys. He’s talking about demons. Am I? How do you know? Maybe I’m one. Maybe nothing is real anymore. Maybe I just mean “demons” in a metaphorical way. We’ll come to all that.

It’s been on my mind for months now. I sense it around me. Do you? Some of us are finely attuned to it. We’ve become attuned to it, in many cases, through trauma, suffering and pain. Or we were born attuned to it, sensitive, literally, possessing a strange set of senses that others don’t have, which are hard to explain. I get bad feelings before things bad happen. For much of my life, I wrote it off. I didn’t listen. Now I do. I’m a much better everything since I do, husband, investor, person, thinker.

Jung called all this synchronicity. The unconscious at work. And so we don’t need mystical explanations of demons. The human mind is mysterious enough itself. But do I just mean it this way? Let me come back to Jung, once I explain what is happening in, to, our world.

Our world is now possessed by demons. Yes, I mean it. We’ve been talking about Thanatos, the death drive, one of humankind’s primal instincts. And the demonic energy now surrounding us, that I think some of us are beginning to viscerally feel, is its expression.

And furthermore, to add insult to injury, I think it’s totally OK and reasonable for thoughtful people to actually begin to describe all this as demonic. We’re going to talk about precisely that, psychologically, mythologically, cosmologically, spiritually, and morally.

Laugh, laugh with me. Go ahead, be outraged. It’s cool. I know it’s faintly ridiculous to talk like this, for the modern mind. But should it be? Here we all are wondering: how can so many things go so wrong for a world at once? Here I am, able to teach you every equation I know and then some. Y = G + C + I - (X-M). That’s GDP, by the way. Does any of it get us much of anywhere anymore? Let’s cut to the chase and try thinking in a new way, or maybe a very old one.

Our world is now possessed by demons. Thanatos. Death drive. The dark impulse. The demonic energy is now practically screaming off the charts around us.

We will come shortly to the matter of if they’re “real” or merely “metaphorical.” Does it matter much? If I say to you, that isn’t a demon, that’s sociopathy, or psychopathy, which ontological hairs are we splitting? You might say: the difference is, call an exorcist, or a shrink. And both exorcist and psychiatrist will probably say, call the other one first, and then get back to me. After that, they’ll both likely agree that something is very, very fucking wrong in our world today. Something demonic, which is to say, psychopathic, or sociopathic, if you want to use modern terminology, take your pick.

Yet these modern terms haven’t served us well. To say that someone or something is sociopathic—we all know it. And it means nothing anymore. Less than nothing, in fact. Because…remember Sophocles?

Sophocles is teaching us something profound, and something terrible. “The eye of Heaven beholds the just of men, and the unjust…stand then on Heaven’s side.” The poet here puts it better than both exorcist and psychiatrist.

We come to expect that we exist in the moral universe. Amongst and amidst spiritual and moral order. In a moral universe, it’s true that monsters exist, too—but it’s also true, precisely because monsters usually end up in labyrinths, not on thrones, that there is some measure of justice. The point is simple: in any conception of a moral universe, we expect some form of justice to prevail. Any kind at all. Natural, human, institutional, divine. Let us distinguish three categories: from above, from beyond, from within.

So. Where is it? How the fuck did we end up in a world where demons appear to be running everything? Are they real actual literally fucking demons, or just people with intentions indistinguishable from demons, or people possessed by demons? What the shit is happening? Does it even matter, except to say: our civilization is apparently now possessed by the demonic?

Justice means many things, but I don’t want you to imagine here laws. Let’s dispense with human justice for a moment. Just go back to our primal conceptions of beings in a universe in which some force, origin, source, force exists, of which we are descendants and children. We’re not demons, and so this primeval oneness is good, and therefore, brings moral order to being, too.

So we imagine that there is some form of justice in the moral universe. And to this we ascribe the names of the gods. The gods may be stern or merciful, they may be capricious and mercurial, or they may be anything at all. But their purpose, so far as we’re concerned, is justice. Hence, the last judgment. The last supper. The resurrection and the light. And Oedipus, begging, at the end of his terrible life, to be buried, at last in hallowed ground, because all his mistakes were no fault of his, he wept, before his daughter, a beggar, dressed in tatters, pleading to Theseus and Zeus. Do me justice, he pleaded. See me, Eye of Heaven.

Again, put aside the modern conception of justice, which is about laws and jails. Understand that we have felt from the beginning of the human experience this way. In us, there are feelings like hubris, overreach, a grasping too far—and the sense that all these incur the wrath of heaven. We will be punished for them, by fate, by the gods, by Heaven itself. In this notion, all cosmogonies and eschatologies are born and end. From this, we kneel and kiss the soil and give thanks for life, instead of cursing it bitterly.

What has gone wrong in our world is that the eye of Heaven seems to have gone blind. We are ruled by the kinds of figures who are made only of the stuff the gods should have punished by now. Hubris, violence, overreach. The Pope warned: no man should aspire to omnipotence. Sophocles’ ghost smiled, because this, too, was the message of all tragedy.

But today we come to a terrible epiphany. Where is the eye of Heaven? Where is it to be found? Why is it blind? Why is it that hubris and overreach and terrible desires like omnipotence and omniscience aren’t punished? But in fact rewarded? Shall we happily conclude that the gods no longer exist, like Nietzsche did? It’s easy to do that, and we style Nietzsche too much as a rebel. Harder to have faith. But that’s not my point.

It’s this: we are realizing something terrible about ourselves, the world, and even history. Nobody is there and nothing is there to ensure a just universe. And we have this sense, suddenly, that we are orphans. And the most vicious amongst have come to rule. Lord of the Flies, except for a civilization, which is what it was always about.

The kinds of figures who have power over our world now are, it has to be said, and it has to be said openly, I think, are revealing themselves perhaps as some of the most evil people to have existed, maybe ever, in the story so far of humankind. And evil is not just a childish game: who did something bad, mommy. It is about, first and foremost, what we wish, desire, and want. The obscene and the monstrous. The demonic.

The mighty river of love has run dry in our age. But who turned its water to dust? And what is all that doing to us? Do we even see evil at work in the world around us—really notice it at all? Click, tap, swipe. Who gives a fuck about this metaphysical shit, Umair, hey, I just want people to smash that like button!

Am I the only who senses that our world is now awash in demonic energy? I doubt it. But I wonder who will have the courage to say it aloud. And to investigate what it means. What does it mean, then?

Desires like omniscience and omnipotence are not ones that the normal human mind accepts or embraces. It shrinks from them. It forces them into the darkness, represses them, precisely because they are so terrible that they are a kind of eternal violence and ultimate annihilation.

If I say: I want omnipotence, I am also saying that you are nothing.

If I say: I want omniscience, I am also saying that you are nothing.

You have no freedom, will, choice. Nothing you do will ever matter. You will never have a single thought or idea. You will never truly love, feel, or know anything or anyone.

I am all that exists.

Now think about our world today. The kinds of figures we are confronted with genuinely desire omnipotence and omniscience. This is what the authoritarians and techno-barons openly dream of.

We are ensnared in their dreams.

What does that make us? What does that leave of us?

What would Sophocles say to us?

And is this why the Eye of Heaven has gone blind?

II.

What does all this have to do with demons? What the fuck is Umair talking about these days? Jesus, someone shut this asshole up, already.

What is a demon? A demon isn’t just the personification of a sin or an evil. A demon is in anguish—eternal anguish—because of the sin or evil they personify. And there is only one way to expiate the suffering, which is the reverse of the way of Christ. To possess.

Christ gave his body, and millions upon millions of the faithful are reminded of it at every Mass. They take the host into themselves.

But the demon possesses our body. Do you see the inversion? It’s only the first one, and we are not talking in strictly Christian terms.

Every civilization has believed in demons. We are the first ones not to. We might think that makes us very sophisticated, but if you ask me, it only reveals the limits of our ignorance. Because demons are very, very real. Whether or not we believe them to be “entities” inhabiting the ether or mere metaphors makes them no less real at all. Whether we say: forces emanating from the unconscious make this person sociopathic or psychopathic makes them not one shred less real. Perhaps only more so.

And so the fact remains that there are energies within us that can only be described as demonic. But that much needs careful and delicate explanation.

What does the demon want? What is its purpose? It possesses a body, but that much is just spectacle. The demon can’t truly “own” a soul, or even consign it to hell. The vomit and spit and shrieks are a show.

The demon is there to teach us: nothing in this life is ours. Not even our bodies, selves, minds, limbs, skin. Nothing. And in this way, the demon confront us with the most terrible of truths, which is of our transience and fragility and mortality. Here is a thing that is made of nothing, just shadows and darkness, and it can take us away from ourselves, like that. This is how evanescent we are.

How slight our grip on existence is. It’s barely a fingerhold, and we cling to it, stretched above an endless abyss. This is what Heidegger described as being-in-itself. We could just call it: being human.

The demon is a thing which says: I am omnipotent. I am omniscient. I can take everything you have, are, will be. I know your deepest desires and thoughts, and I will use them against you.

I annihilate you. The goodness in you, the beauty in you, the love in you, until all that is left is the terrible, awful truth: you are nothing but evil. You are just like me. You are just like the devil. And there, just like that—they are not so alone anymore. This is the purpose of a demon. Annihilation, but through the dark testament, the revelation, that after the goodness is stripped away, which is merely superficial, at the core lies the secret truth of a person, which is just appetite, hunger, hatred, envy, malice, rage.

And in that horror, we lose our faith. Not just in the gods, but in existence itself. And with it goes the idea that there could be any order to the universe, from moral to spiritual or beyond. All is lost. Even death is not a consolation anymore. There is only one thing left to us, to become the annihilation we fear. This is the demon’s game.

Contrast the demon. The angels are serene. Even if they are warriors and guardians, what marks them out is their serenity, and they feel this inner calm because they know that God’s victory is eternal. It is without beginning and without ending. But here, for us, fragile, mortal things, the struggle is what’s eternal, because we are trapped in time. The demon is not serene. He is made of pure anguish, because he is trapped in time with us. He only has so much of it to make his presence felt, and to emerge victorious, through possession.

And so comes the role of the exorcist. The exorcist is there, in the now familiar telling of the story, to recite his incantations, and with the power of God, to cast the demon whence he came. But what is God? Who is God? God is light which became Logos, the word. Light illuminated the chaos, and the word, the symbol, brought order to it. The demon, too, has a place in this order, which is to tempt us. And the name of this order is: justice, which is also truth, which is contained in beauty, and from whom goodness flows.

God is generous, expansive. He gives. It is his nature to give. And when Oedipus begs Zeus for his dying wish, to be buried with dignity, it is precisely only because he, like us, imagines: the power of expansion, of creation, is precisely this. This generosity is the birth of all things. Is is the nature of God, which we also call love.

And it is this power the exorcist invokes to cast out the demon. “Casting out” must be understood. It is not merely a rejection. It is an exile. Just as Lucifer is exiled, and that is his punishment, so too are the demons. But the demons do not live in hell. That is why Lucifer is a lonely being. When a demon is cast out, where does he go? He goes nowhere at all. He becomes something like a seed. He returns to the shadows. And the shadows are in us, as Jung says.

Now think of the algorithm and the model. Think of the authoritarian and the fascist and the techno-baron. Do you see the demon in them, or the angel? Are they after cold, total, absolute omniscience and omnipotence, as ultimate power, or the generosity, the primal impulse, the love, of the creator, towards fragility, mortality, and humanness?

In our world, demons are very real. They always have been. But they have never been more real, in fact, than now.

III.

I know that this is complicated and difficult writing and thinking. To many people, it will be…LOL…like an alien language. Maybe it is. Who knows?

Let me try and come to my point now, which is that our world is possessed by demons, or awash in demonic energy, which is the expression of Thanatos, the death drive.

Demons return to the shadows, where they hide. What are the shadows? The shadow is what we repress, Jung says. And you might conclude: Umair is saying that a demon is just a repressed desire. That is partly what I’m saying, but it’s way too easy to simply stop there.

There are desires that we repress all the time. We see people we find “attractive” walking down the street, and just smile to ourselves, and reassuringly hold our partner's hand. We dream of fortunes, but aren’t foolish enough to press go on the “gamble away your life savings” button.

The demonic is very, very different.

There are desires that the normal human mind wants no part of. That it finds repulsive and grotesque and repellent. It’s nauseated and sickened at the mere thought, the mental image. I’m sure I don’t have to give you examples.

Let us call these desires: fantasies of annihilation. Here, I don’t mean the childish wish we’ve all had: “I wish you were dead,” we’ve all said to our parents, in a teenage tantrum.

I mean true fantasies of annihilation. You may be turned on by being tied up or what have you, but this isn’t a fantasy of annihilation. It’s a fantasy about control and power. A fantasy of annihilation is very different, and I suspect that most of us have never had one. We don’t need to repress them because we don’t really have them. Have I “dreamt of killing my wife”? LOL. I’m sure she has me. That’s not a fantasy of annihilation, either.

A fantasy of annihilation is the desire, the wish, to possess. I don’t want to possess anyone I love. Do you? Truly? No, we’re not speaking sophomore year feminism here, objectification. I mean: in the demonic sense. Do you want to possess your child, wife, partner, potential lover? To know their every last thought, to repaint their every mental image, to control every movement of their limbs?

Of course not. What I’ve just written should repulse most people. Chill them. It’s about as unnatural an idea as a mind can have. Precisely because that is what annihilation really is.

Annihilation isn’t just murder. Murder is killing someone. Annihilation is possession, which is inhabiting them.

This is the demonic.

Now think of the world around us again. What do the authoritarians want? To inhabit us. To control us in exactly the way above. Every movement of our limbs, every image we have, every word we say, everything, all of us. Now think of what technology wants from us, or is already doing to us. It’s the same thing: it controls our every last action, thought, mental image, and intention.

Omniscience and omnipotence are annihilation. They are fantasies of annihilation. No sane or normal human mind wants such things. We create gods precisely because we ourselves cannot bear the responsibility. The grotesque and terrible weight of it. Would you want to know every thought every human being on earth has? Are you fucking kidding, that’s repulsive and disgusting, it’s a form of mass rape. But guess what, the authoritarians and techno-barons drool over precisely this.

IV.

Here’s what I think.

The world is now possessed by demons. The demonic, Thanatos, is now trying to possess the mind, body, and soul of humankind. In a way that history has rarely, if ever, seen before. If you imagine I mean witches are to be burned at the stake, and that I’m demanding an Inquisition, please relax. That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is: goodness, truth, and beauty are slipping away from us, mocked as stupidity and futility, derided as worthless. And in all this, a certain kind of dark energy, whose object and subject, wish and fantasy, is totalized annihilation, is coming to inhabit humankind, institutionally and systemically, mathematically and literally, socially and technologically, multidimensionally.

Let me make it even clearer, because I think that a great deal of the future of human civilization now hinges on us grasping where it really is right now, which is: possessed by Thanatos

Oedipus was history’s most tragic figure. And in his first act of penance, he tore his eyes out. Why? Precisely to say: I am not a god. I never had omniscience and omnipotence. I never wanted them. I couldn’t have known the terrible nature of my sins. I wanted only human things: love, mercy, justice, truth. Those were enough for me. And yet the gods punished me, though they are the omniscient and omnipotent ones. Why?

Only the demon and the serpent teach the answer to Oedipus’s riddle. Though they themselves do not know it, either.

The demon possesses us, and attempts to prove through us, falsely, that the devil has omnipotence and omniscience, that he is greater than God, and therefore, the eternal struggle is lost, and all human suffering means nothing, has no redemption, no purpose, no meaning. Better to cast your lot with the devil.

The serpent says: you. human one, are exiled from the Garden now. And your only way back is through omniscience and omnipotence. Perhaps if you know all, and you can accomplish all, somewhere, in that tangle of all possibilities, you will find your way back to the primeval state of perfection.

What is the answer to Oedipus’s riddle? What was Sophocles trying to teach us? Why is there this strange, perfect inversion of Jesus giving his body to redeem us, and the demon possessing ours, to abjure us? What lives in Jung’s shadows?

Oedipus committed no sin except being born human. That alone was enough to damn him, the most ill-fated of men. And in the end, he asked for only thing. Mercy. A good death. A home under the stars, that would be a boon to his children. And through him, we learn: the fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence are the most dangerous things of all. Had Oedipus known, might never have had to tear out his eyes, and live as a beggar, wandering from shore to shore, in rags. But then what would we have learned, about fate? And forgiveness? And mercy? And gratitude? Love? Nothing at all.

Oedipus could have been many men. Damned by the gods, for nothing at all, he alone would have been justified in the demonic. And yet he chose to try and find redemption. Redemption is always a giving act, because love exists only in this form. Jesus gave his body and his earthly life, Oedipus tore out his eyes. The Buddha answered every question he was asked.

And the question before us, too, is the same. What are we giving? Giving is never easy. It is not a trivial matter. This is all that exorcises the demons. What does the exorcist do? He gives, and through the act of giving, the demon’s annihilation is revealed as a game, a gambit, a bluff. A person is not just the evil in them. The truth of each of us is not just the dark shadow in us. That much is always there. But is not all that is there.

But unless we give it, what prevails, in our world?

The Eye of Heaven, which we also call moral order, or goodness, isn’t like our eyes. It can see what is there, and also what is not there. And in that, only its vision discerns: what, that could be, is given, and what isn’t? In our world, the questions are all those. Because if all we go on giving is the desperate, crying, insatiable darkness in us, to the worst among us, then this is where we will remain, and continue to be, and things will get worse.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

What really happened over the last few weeks? Between Iran, China, America, Europe? War, violence, conflict, oil? I’m sure that this will make some people angry, some sad, and some disgusted. I’m sorry to have to say it. What’s happening is this.

Trump conquered the world.

Let’s discuss this grim turn of events together.

Trump choked off China’s oil supplies. Its exports began to shrink. Its economy, already teetering, began to shake like a leaf in the wind.

Trump plunged Europe into an historic energy crisis. Nation after nation raced through its emergency stockpiles, was forced to outbid Asia for what little gas was left, and will now plunge into already deepening recession.

Trump caused Asia to go into an energy shock. Nation after nation imposed emergency measures, from rationing to price controls. Lines snaked around gas stations. People began to hoard oil and gas. Countries found themselves at the brink of being able to function.

Trump held a razor blade to the world’s collective throats. Europe, China, Asia.

And the response? Nothing.

Not a single one of these regions took any kind of action whatsoever. Their leaders were barely able to muster up the courage to speak. When they did, it was in the most muted and hushed of tones. They lodged the feeblest of complaints, as if the knife at their throats was now up against the edge of their very tongues.

Europe’s leaders, bewildered and baffled, did not rise to the occasion. China remained quiet. Asia sat there and barely said a word. It was as if an epidemic of cowardice had suddenly made the world’s leaders mute.

When I say that no action was taken, of course, I don’t mean militarily. All of these regions have power. Or as Trump likes to call it, “leverage.” They hold immense quantities of American assets of all kinds, stocks, bonds, property, currency. Not even a warning shot was fired. Instead, for example, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, reassured Trump: it wasn’t, it said, even thinking about selling American assets.

After Trump plunged all of its closest neighbors and allies into energy crisis, shock, and recession.

Think about that for a second.

Often, in history, weakness is easily conquered. Beaten. It’s the most aggressive, ruthless, and cutthroat who emerge triumphant. Not because the other parties involved in contests and conflicts hold no cards, but because they are too divided, craven, bewildered, and frightened to use them.

And this is exactly what happened over the last few weeks.

What would a rational country have done? It would have said: you caused our currency, stock markets, and bond markets to crash by this much. Purely for the sake of balancing the books, we will exact that price from you. None of it came to pass. Every single country, nation, and region on earth ran scared, stayed silent, and cowered.

Silence, too, in matters of conflict, speaks volumes. We’ve all had relationships where one party stays quiet, so as not to provoke the other—who is the belligerent one to begin with. In this way, they hope to keep the peace. What’s the outcome? The belligerent only becomes uninhibited, knowing that their aggression is met with silence.

Silence speaks volumes. When I used to march with my friends at the height of the AIDS crisis, we’d wear T-shirts that said: silence is death. And it is, in when conflict arises. To lose one’s tongue is to have given away one’s power from its very source and fount.

We have a world whose necks were placed at the razor’s edge, by Trump, and all of it stayed silent.

It didn’t lift a finger to defend its own interests.

Not a single European country took measures to, for example, raise funds to garner the now much more expensive gas necessary to power its economies by divesting from American assets. Instead, interestingly, some sold their gold holdings. It’s not too hard to point to how foolish that is. That would’ve been rational, sensible, and powerful. Now they’re even more dependent on Trump, who wants to make them powerless.

Not a single Asian country, for example, directed its sovereign wealth funds to raise the money for the gas that Europe, richer, was now outbidding them for, suddenly, causing massive price spikes, by selling off dollars or American stocks and bonds. That would’ve been rational, sensible, and powerful. Now, like Europe, they’re even more dependent on a violent, authoritarian America.

All this is the single greatest failure of collective action in the world in post-war history, probably. Not a single country or region acted rationally, nor did any act collectively, either. Not a single one defended their own interests in any way whatsoever. Understand how profoundly important this is. The masses are foolish and easily misled. We depend on leaders to act with some semblance of rationality, sensibility, thoughtfulness, mindfulness, to exert power when they are threatened, to defend their self interest.

It didn’t happen even once.

The world abdicated its self-interest in a way that should shock any observer of history or thoughtful mind.

Why? Why did we see the world fail to act with any modicum of rationality, common sense, not defend itself from being held at knifepoint?

Because it was frightened. Too frightened to even speak, much less to act, much less to act collectively. We could have seen something like this: Europe telling America in no uncertain terms that an energy shock caused by it would be me with a vigorous defense to the tune of forcing America to pay for it. But we didn’t. Precisely because Europe’s leaders are weak.

That’s far too unclear a term, so let make it more precise. The world’s leaders are morally weak. They cannot tell right from wrong anymore. They are mentally weak, unable to think clearly or rationally. And they are strategically weak, incapable of defending their own self-interests.

And worse, now they are even weaker. Because Trump has learned that he can get away with anything, and the world will stay quiet and still. That is what prey does when a predator approaches, if it can’t run. Trump has learned that he can take a knife to the world’s throat now, and it will do nothing. In that sense, the world has made a victim of itself.

That is how Trump conquered the world.

A conquered world is not a pleasant place to be. Trump will exact his price. He will force the world now to pay him his tribute, as he already is, which the energy shock is just the beginning of. The world has acted profoundly foolishly now.

And we have something we have never had before. A dictator of the world. That is the way the world has humiliated itself over the last few weeks. All are now vassals to Trump’s new world order, which is not a world order at all, but a world empire. Vassals must pay up, or see their heads roll. The little blade of the mugger soon enough becomes a sword.

All of this makes our job much easier. Investing in a conquered world is, LOL, childish and idiotic, as simple and dumb as it probably sounds. Hint: if the vassals are paying the price, you probably don’t want to be part of it. I’ll publish the updated portfolio for subscribers as all this comes to a head.

We live in times of great tragedy my friends. To see a world conquered by figures this malign, so easily, so simply, so quickly. In such obscene ways. Barely a voice raised. In fear of fear.

We’ll see. If the world likes being a wretched, conquered thing. If it continues to accede to its subjugation. If it goes on cowering in fear, a weakling, hoping the bad man will just go away. Or if it discovers some spirit of rebellion.

For now?

History laughs. We have lost our way. The strong triumph over the weak. That is the vision throughout history of darkness and hate, conquest and slavery. Yet it is assured of triumph when those who might be strong and wise, just and noble instead make themselves weak and foolish.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

These days, people come to me to teach them how to make money. That part, I always say, is easy. And it is. If you followed along with the last two recommendations, then you’d have made between 10-20% in a month. Not bad. But is it good? Is it fair? Does it even matter?

Today I’m going to teach you not just how to make money. But also the price. Everything has one. And this way we understand what it is to profit. Whether we do at all.

In times as horrific, nightmarish as these, riddled with evil, cut apart by stupidity. How do we “make money”? The truth is that we lay our traps. And we wait. We wait for a wounded thing. To fall into our snares. Crimson streaks the forest floor. It bleeds. It staggers. It can barely see. Hardly walk.

We trap a half-dead, nearly-blind thing. The teeth of our trap close around its ankles. It howls in pain. It cries out to the heavens. Its anguish pierces the empty sky.

This thing that we have trapped is civilization itself. Our trap goes like this. Ah, you see, perhaps today, this shattered thing is running out of water. Oil. Energy. Food. Let us buy them, some abstract variant of them, and have them. Let us parch it, starve it, ruin it, destroy it. And our traps splinters its already shattered bones.

You see what I’m saying. Or do you? Let me make the practical mechanics of all this clear. Our civilization is now dying. As the thing it used to be. One aspiring to peace, democracy, justice, truth, intellect, reason. Art and science are laughable things now. Nobody but people us reads books anymore. They watch influencers whose alien smiles are made of acid. They watch “videos” where they themselves are the meat eaten by leering faces.

Our civilization is dying. And we buy up what little there is left. Today, it’s oil. Food. Tomorrow, water and air. Perhaps, if there’s some infinitesimal grain of decency left in us, we draw the line at killing machines. Is there a line there? Or is it just made of sand, a thing which reassures us, but can never hold back an ocean?

This is how we make money as a civilization collapses.

I don’t like my job. It makes me feel dread and sadness. It’s an indecent thing. To lay traps for a wounded civilization. To stalk it, hunt it, and feast on its threadbare meat.

This is the price. And I want you to know the price. Because in this price lies the truest perversion of all. People like us were meant for better things. And what’s left to us now? Do art and science matter now? Does anything? Annihilation surrounds us. Of the mind, body, and spirit. Of all the ideals we once aspired to. But annihilation comes from nihilism, from not merely the belief in nothing, but the triumph of nothingness over substance. The noblest substance is love. It flows between us like a mighty river. Does it? Why has this river run dry? Shall we flee through it? What lies where its mouth used to be?

Where have the waters of life gone?

What shall we dedicate our lives to? This, my friends, is the question before us now. Shall we dedicate them to love, or to nothingness? Many people, most of them, now settle for nothingness. This is the way of the swipe and the scroll, the blind obeisance to the algorithm and the model. What do the algorithms calculate? Desire’s empty vessel. What do the models cast in dead stone? Language, words, logos, the beginning and the end.

What will we dedicate our lives to? Do we settle for nothingness?

You see, when we feast on the wounded thing called a civilization, which barely provides us a meal every time we catch it as prey, because its muscles are so atrophied that they are almost dust—when we feast on this barely living thing, what does it make of it? Leave of it? Less and less, each time. This way lies nothingness.

And what does all that, this act of feasting on a wounded civilization,. make of us? It makes cannibals of us. We hold up its bloody bones, and roar, the life coming back to our veins. At last there is sustenance. But the gods forbid this most terrible of acts for a reason. In the consumption of that which one is, one becomes annihilation itself. This way we become Nothingness itself. We are Servants of Thanatos, the death force, whose primal impulse is annihilation.

What do we dedicate the only treasure we have, which is life, to? This is the question before us. It is the great question of this age. And it is left unasked. We are too frightened and scared. We hide behind our traps and snares. We are desperate for a meal, no matter how callow and gray and the meat. Just tendons will do, of a dying thing. We pray for our prey to come near. We scroll and swipe to hide the terror we feel, that we are becoming nobody, nothing, and life now is a joyless, futile exercise in letting the days pass.

We are oblivion this way, my friends.

All this is the price.

The price is the question.

We are doing something ignoble now, something obscene. The gods will mark us for it with the brand of shame. The shame will cut into our souls, and tear us apart. There are no happy rich men. There are only empty shells with money, money, money, forever seeking more.

Understand what you are asking me to do. Understand yourself, your place in the universe.

I know a man. He is respected by the kinds of men who are eager to give their respect to men who boast and beat their chests. Small men, seeking power. He imagines himself to a great success, because men like this come to him, their hats in their hands, and speak in reverent tones. He imagines that he has built something as great as the Pyramids, as watchful over time as the Sphinx. He is a digital slumlord.

Understand the choice. Between nothingness and everythingness. This is the only choice there is. Between love and annihilation, between Eros and Thanatos. In our age, the choice is made for us, or we let it be made for us, by systems and institutions that annihilate us with their very glance. Medusa stares at us from the algorithm and the model. We turn to stone. And then we shatter with the hammer blows of our own eternal hunger.

Perhaps you can sense my anguish. It is there, in you too. And now we must offer it to each other.

What will we dedicate our lives to? The river of love has run dry in our times. It takes courage of the truest kind to walk in its mud, to struggle through its dry course, and climb towards its mouth. To take one’s self there. And see what lies waiting. The waters of life themselves. Do they still trickle from the soil of being, there, in the mist? Will they run through our fingers, for just a moment, if we walk this path? Will the gods spit on us for this choice—or are we nothing to them already, having become nothingness itself?

This is the (truth of the) question of profiting from a dying civilization.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

We just took one step closer to the edge, and now we’re on the brink of world war. A place we were always going to find ourselves, as I’ve discussed with you, macroeconomically, financially, and geopolitically.

Let’s review the events of the last few days.

The “negotiations,” a sham, failed. The idea that a figure like JD Vance was going to act in good faith is about as laughable as sending a burglar to peruse the Louvre. And so they broke down, as they were designed to.

So now Trump’s announced a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Which is a little like holding a gun to your own head. Iran’s already blockaded the Strait, of course. Trump’s gambit is transparent: to turn the screws on Iran’s economy, which depends on oil exports. To whom? To China.

Let’s imagine what could happen next. America blockades, or seizes, or maybe even attacks, a ship in foreign waters. One that’s bound for China, or flagged by China. That, my friends, is an act of war. A formal and literal one. Not just against Iran, but against China.

Then we are somewhere profoundly dangerous. America is at war with China. De facto war. No declaration needs to be made, because this is technically an act of war. Just like that, bang, we’re on the brink of world war.

Put the shoe on the other foot. Imagine some other country began blockading, attacking, sinking, American ships, or ships bound for America, in international waters. Easy enough to see how it’d be an act of war. This idea is one of the most foolish in modern history.

Iran, meanwhile, has already responded by saying that oil and energy facilities across the Middle East are fair game. Cue more days and weeks of chaos. The oil shock already ripping across the globe gather speed and momentum like a tsunami. Trump will almost surely attack Iran again, and perhaps try to seize its oil outright.

What happens if events proceed this way? China depends critically on oil. It’s the world’s second largest consumer of it. That’s why tonight, it’s already called for calm. It doesn’t want to be at war with America. It has been trying to emanate equanimity since all this began.

But if America does something as reckless as the above, seizing ships bound for China, attacking them, sinking them, then China will be forced to respond. If only to maintain its own position in the world. How will it do so? If America blockades China’s oil, China can just as easily blockade America’s microchips, which come from Singapore and Taiwan. Bang. Just like that, again, we enter the beginnings of a world war.

China can also respond with capital war, not just physical war. It can dump its vast holdings of American assets. We all know by now that China can financially nuke America overnight, by dumping T-bills. It hasn’t yet, not just because a fire sale doesn’t benefit the seller, but more crucially, because it doesn’t want to. But in this scenario it’ll be forced to.

What happens if China does that? The American economy crashes overnight. All of it. Stocks, bonds, the dollar. It’d be an event so immense that even a bailout from the Fed would be about as firing a shotgun at an incoming meteor. Understand that I’m not saying that’s what will happen. We’re discussing risks and probabilities now.

What’s crucial to grasp is how close to the brink of world war we are coming now. Really coming. We are now mere steps away. The events above could happen in days or weeks. And once such escalations begin, they’re difficult to stop, because things take on a momentum of their own. America sinks a ship. China is compelled to respond. America escalates. Game over.

Trump has no plan, that much is obvious. Nor can he “win.” That’s equally clear. But this war has never been about Iran. It’s always been about oil, and it’s always been about China. Trump wants to control the world’s oil supply, and he wants to do that because he imagines that he can suffocate China that way. The world to him is a zero-sum game. Less for you, more for me.

In his eyes, China is America’s latest greatest enemy, responsible for a "bad deal” that impoverished America. No such thing is true. America itself designed this world economy, and China just played by the rules. And it’s Americans who voted for the gains from the last several decades of world trade to go to billionaires, not the average person.

Now things are coming to a head. They always do. Because this war has always been about China, and oil, that is precisely what it is now revolving around. Iran is merely a means to an end. And very, very soon, America and China might be formally at war. Not, it bears saying, through China’s actions, but through America’s. If you were China, and America was “blockading” your purchases of oil, what would you do? Just sit there and fret? Perhaps you see my point.

Let me make it even clearer.

This is the course history was always going to take under Trump. Trump was always going to take the world to the brink of world war. It’s inaccurate and irrelevant to simply say that “he doesn’t have a plan.” True, but what he has are impulses and fantasies. Of omnipotence, grandeur, and malevolence, on the level of emperors of falling empires of millennia past. Men like Trump always take civilizations to the edge of all-consuming violence. It’s in their nature. It is their most fundamental wish, desire, and longing.

What should you do about all this? You should not be in the markets. I warned you that if the negotiations failed, things would go south, and they are. The markets will have a very, very difficult time now. Go ahead and chuckle: if they thought things were bad before, now we have not one but two countries blockading the same Strait. Like I said recently, we live in times of colossal idiocy.

We now face a horrific scenario for the global economy, and I’ll talk more about that in days to come. Markets are already cratering in anticipation of the blockade, and there’s much more of that to come. The longer the Strait stays closed, the worse the damage will be.

And heaven forbid the events I’ve described above come to pass. If they do, Americans’ life savings will be instantaneously wiped out. Please be mindful of these severe and extreme levels of risk.

If you’re a subscriber, and you followed along with the last two suggestions, energy and commodities, you can enter those specific positions, strictly bearing in mind the caveats I gave you before. These are risky bets, and they should only be taken in small amounts, and definitely not by those who aren’t well versed in futures and volatility.

Understand how grave the stakes are now. We’re one, two, three steps away from the beginnings of a world war. The deepest fantasy of malevolent authoritarians has always been to take us there, to rape and degrade a civilization. We’ll be fortunate to escape one.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

How do you feel about what’s happening in the world today? To it? There I was, standing around like I do. Downtown. Watching the city go by. People. Fat men squeezed into little sports cars. Women strolling in new spring dresses. Tiny dogs marching. Snowy grinned up at me. I was thinking it all over.

This weekend, the USA and Iran are “negotiating”. Over what, exactly? To begin with, a ceasefire in a needless, pointless, idiotic war. What’s the war itself over? Nobody can say, except that: America chose yet another country in the Middle East to bomb.

So here we are as a world. Watching lunatics and crackpots “negotiate” with each other over…I’ll come to that part. Let’s first just observe. On the one side, we have America’s fascists and authoritarians, and on the other, Iran’s militant theocrats. It’s hardly the stuff of glory for human civilization, go ahead and chuckle.

Here we are as a world. Watching fascists and authoritarians bicker and squabble with theocrats. Over…oil.

The one side, America’s fascist-authoritarians, want to control the world’s oil supply. To put the screws to China’s communists. Did the Cold War end? Will it ever end? Can it? Never mind, let’s continue understanding the world as it is now, in the sheer ferocity of its stupidity.

The other side says: not so fast. We just realized that we control a critical chokepoint through which the spice, sorry, the oil, flows. And guess what? We want to control it, too. So now we’ll charge a toll. Every drop of it will now be taxed by us.

Do you see the pathetic stupidity of it all yet?

Let’s imagine the other kind of world, for just a moment. The one we could and should have had, though that should is laboring very hard. In this world, we'd weaned ourselves off of dirty energy, because of course, wait for it, here’s the punchline everyone with half a functioning brain cell left knows, “climate change,” which is the understatement of the millennium runaway global warming, is slowly laying waste to everything we know of.

And so in this world, having already made the “energy transition,” none of this ever happened. It never needed to. Controlling the world’s spice, it’s oil, the dirty, poisonous stuff mattered little, because it was no longer such a critical resource.

Now. You might say, that’s nice Umair, what a wonderful, idealistic dream, but what’s the point of all this? One point, sadly, is to make money, which we will continue to do. Money is a cheap consolation for watching a world burn. Any civilized person should think of it, too, as a poison, and treat it as such, with great care, and more than a little contempt. So that’s the practical point. Money in a world gone mad like this. I’ve already told you how to make it. It’s not a secret. But only because we are not in the sane, good, or decent world. And that is the first part of “pathetically stupid.” We’re the pathetic ones.

But the larger point remains, which is that this is so, so painfully stupid. We are living in the midst of one of the Most Stupid Events in History. It’s up there with…The Inquisition…Socrates being forced to drink the hemlock…the burning of the great libraries.

The stupidity is so vast, so immense, that it defies belief, is almost impossible to contain, to conceptualize, to comprehend. This…this fucking wretched civilization is…warring over oil…crashing its world economy over it…while their planet was beginning to melt down? What happened to these poor bastards? Did their minds stop working? What broke in them?

Silence echoes. We barely discuss it at all. Why? Because doing so reveals the true state of us. Our annihilation. Because it rubs acid in the wound.

Here we are, as a world, watching fascists and authoritarians fight theocrats over oil. Plunge the world economy into shortages of everything from food to money. While the planet begins to heat to levels never before seen in human history, all of it, from the first moment the first hominids stepped forth from a rift in a valley in Africa.

This is what we’ve been reduced to. This is the wretchedness of the moment we’re in, living through, trapped in. Being suffocated by.

This is how pathetic we are now.

Why bother? Why talk about it at all? You know it and I know it. It serves no purpose, some will object, except only to remind us of all the very things we’d rather forget. And my response to that is childish and impolite. Hey, fuck you. In fact, fuck you so much that let me say it again.

Here we are. Trapped in a time, in a world where fascist authoritarians are warring with theocrats over oil, while the planet burns, the global economy crashes, and people suffer and die. This? This is what the death of a civilization begins to truly look like.

Nobody, no mind, no soul, can bear this pathetic stupidity. That’s why we don’t talk about it. It’s beyond obscene. The obscene has its purpose. Everything around us is pornography now, have you noticed? That’s all we do now, consume porn. Porn is desire turned to sterility. It is something that will never be fecund and fertile. Everything is pornography now. The influencer’s caricature of a face, the YouTuber’s mock smile, the lifestyles of the celebrities we’re to fetishize. All these are replacements for true desire, desire for each other.

We’re cheated of Eros in a world where everything is pornographic, and no connection is allowed. With each other, to ourselves, to carry history’s golden thread forward, to nobility, truth, meaning, purpose. Everything is just a body to fuck now, so that everyone can watch you fucking it, and feel your power.

What the…fuck? What is Umair even talking about?

I’m talking about our world. What’s happening to it. The “negotiation” is pornography. The war is pornography. The oil is there to feed the machines that feed us pornography of the mind, soul, spirit, the artificial intelligences, the lightbeams carrying the repressions and subjugation of true desires into “influence” and “likes.” Trump is a pornographer of civilization. And we are infertile, castrated things now, impotent, helpless, trapped in the spectacles which replicate this masquerade of desire we call a life, but isn’t one, never will be, and never was.

There’s nothing more pornographic than the awful, hypnotic, insane, spectacle of fascists and authoritarians warring with theocrats over oil to crash the global economy in an age where the planet is beginning to burn. How many people will die? How many must? How many more?

This is where it all begins to end.

Everything’s just a body to fuck now, own, ruin, destroy, kill. You, me, the world, history, dignity, reality, decency, all of it. The kinds of figures who now run our world cannot imagine, conceive of, or understand anything else. The only point left is who gets to fuck it, and the rest of us are only there to watch, in horror, in glee, in shock, this lurid scene. The pathetic stupidity of it all runs into our blood, and turns it to poison. We self-destruct into futile, wretched things, who endlessly watch things that used to be greater and nobler and brighter things now get meaninglessly fucked, fucked, fucked. A society, a planet, a future, a world, a civilization, history, futurity, time, us.

This is all we are now.

Me? I’m at the cafe, watching the world go by. A girl smiles at me and asks me for a cigarette. I oblige. She hesitates, and then walks away. I can almost hear her unasked question. And I wonder. Does anyone else see what I see? It doesn’t matter. It never has. Show Me the Money. That part’s easy. Who cares? Should you care? No quantity of it will ever, ever serve as a consolation to be a spectator to this. The ultimate pornographic scenario, show, display there ever was. Caligula smiles. The Inquisitors light the stakes. The death of a civilization.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

You can feel it in the air. The loss. The grief. The absence. Of hope.

Where are we in the world today? We’ve lost hope. I won’t recite the statistics for you. They’re universal, stretching across the globe. Levels of despair, anxiety, distrust, distress. Soaring off the charts. Let us sum it up in the loss of hope.

How did we get here? Why should we talk about it? I sit at the cafe. I watch and observe. I feel. And in all this the sense of the loss of hope is in everything and everyone. Downcast eyes, staring blankly at screens. Searching for a glimmer. The doom scroll and the hate watch. The dopamine addiction. “Survival mode.” Sometimes a thing, an attitude, is conveyed best in what’s missing. I almost never see a hopeful face anymore. It doesn’t matter where in the world I am.

Americans call this a “vibe.” It’s a poor mode of expression. Americans are uncomfortable admitting, expressing, the fact that societies too have moods. That there are such things as collective sentiments. America is the land of the rational individualist, so the myth goes. All else must be repressed and denied. Hence, this beautiful idea of social psychology and social currents is reduced to a “vibe.”

I digress. How did we lose hope?

At this precise moment, an interjection will arrive. But I haven’t lost hope! My life is fine, wonderful, all is well. And the world is doing just fine, too! You know by now the kind of person who’ll express this, at first in surprise, and then, if you press them, angrily, then finally, at last, scornfully. These objections, universally, flow from the Mediocre White Guy. He’s had it good all his life, failing upwards. Of course, not every “white guy” is like this, far from it. But the objection will almost always come from having enjoyed a certain position in life.

And this objection can be dispensed with. Because it isn’t about hope at all. It is just expressing satisfaction with the present. Hope is of course about the future, what is to come, what has yet to unfold. To say that one is doesn’t worry about it is only another way of saying one doesn’t have hope. And so again, this sense is seen to be universal.

The loss of hope is a profoundly dangerous thing. The church says: despair is a sin. The existentialists say: despair is a virtue. Which is correct, preacher or philosopher? Both, perhaps. Despair in the existential sense is what leads to the creation of hope that one can have mastery over one’s own life.

And this is precisely what we are losing.

Who feels a master of their own life now? Do you? If you do, you are exceedingly rare, or more likely, simply lying to yourself, and to me. The sense that we are masters of our lives is slipping away from us now, day by day. The world descends into chaos, that’s true, but it descends into chaos at the hands of lunatics, men possessed by history’s demons, who dream of omnipotence and omniscience. They search for immortality and hunt for the golden touch. And in this, history reminds us of the only exorcisms for such demons. War, collapse, implosion.

In the hands of the malign figures we have turned our destinies over to, our destinies, equally, have turned to dust. The idea that one can exercise control over one’s fortunes is now widely regarded to be a lie that induces bitter laughter. If I say to you, work hard and you will get ahead, do you believe it? And so we see movements arising that are every bit as delusional as they are pathetic, depressing, lurid, strange. Young men beat their own faces in to try and gain the looks they imagine women desire.

We’re made of desire. We’re beings of Eros. And our unmet hunger for Eros is everywhere now. Only we will not give each other the very sustenance we ache for. We long to be loved, but nobody is very loving. We yearn to be seen and held, so today’s cliche goes, but we are too busy holding and seeing screens to bother with one another. We are too busy turning over our vital forces of Eros to…

To whom are we giving our wellsprings of life? Our desires, our longings, our attentions? All this we call, sometimes, “energy,” and it is, but understand, that the human soul is a thing made of need. It needs to be needed. This is the thread the Fates wove around us. We are covered over with glittering threads of desire. And in my desire for you, I become my fullest self. This is the source and the origin. Together we become one. This is love. This is the answer and the message.

On this, the preacher and the philosopher, the saint and the warrior, the judge and criminal all agree. The message and the answer remain the same. Love is the scale by which we frail human things are weighed. All else turns to dust, in the end.

Who are we giving our wellsprings of life to? If you’ve followed me so far, you may think I’m saying: to billionaires and tycoons, to demagogues. True, but I want you to take my hand and come deeper with me, deeper into the source and origins of all things, the place we began.

Eros is the life-force in us.

Who are we giving it to?

We are giving it to Thanatos. Thanatos is the death-force, the death-drive. When Eros can’t be attained—or perhaps its better to say this: when we don’t feel ourselves possessed by Eros, and here, think of all its personifications, from Cupid to Psyche, from Venus to Aphrodite, from Apollo to Prometheus—when we don’t feel one with Eros, what happens to us?

Then we feel a thing called pain. It’s the truest pain of all. So true, so fierce, cutting so deep, that we have so, so many names for it. Loneliness, isolation, depression, anxiety, distress, angst, despondency, dysthymia, and so on. The names change through the ages. But the idea behind them all remains the same.

It is hidden behind history’s veil. And now I am going to ask her to remove her veil, so that you can see this pain for the first time, perhaps. See it for what it really is, through all the ages of humankind.

It is the pain of the loss of Eros. And after too much of this pain, at the point it becomes unendurable. The ancients speak of shame and dishonor, of being abandoned in a maze, of a sense of disorientation, of reaching a place, finally, of no passage.

This pain reaches the point of becoming intolerable. What that means is: we lose hope in Eros herself. Of becoming one with her. Of finding or knowing her. Of seeing her and discovering her. We become estranged from Eros, our own life-force itself, which is stopped, contained, cannot go anywhere, is left trapped in this maze with no solution or exit, from which nothing can pass. It cannot go anywhere.

This is the point at which we throw our hands up in despair, and abandon hope. And then there is only one thing left to do: give our life-force to Thanatos. Thanatos, the death-force. If Eros is stopped up, contained, cannot go anywhere, then all that is left to destroy. To destroy, demolish, obliterate, everything we can around us, until, at last, or perhaps in the hope of, finally ending ourselves, our futile, pointless, empty lives, which have become just withered things.

All this, too, has many names. This passage from the narrow strait, to the maze with no exit. Anger, shock, rage, helplessness, anomie, depression—again, the names change, but the journey, the process, the way, remains the same. Our boat is lost in the underworld. We have come to a bitter end. There is no way out. All that is left to do, at last, is one last terrible gambit: to destroy the maze, set fire to the vessel, to lash out, and perhaps, in the rubble, either we will find the ghost of Eros, or if not, at least we will have the revenge on the thing which has disappointed us so cruelly, which is life itself, being, existence, and if there is justice left in the cosmos, our existence will end alongside everything else we destroy.

This is what’s happening to our world.

I don’t know if you can see it. I can only guide you. Much depends on your attunement.

We are enmeshed now in Eros becoming Thanatos. Our systems and institutions now are mechanisms which invert life-force itself. They take Eros, our will, desire, power, attention, energy, need, and turn it not into sustenance, nourishment, energy, the light of knowledge, the heat of passion, the unfurling of the self, and its embrace by and for love, but into Thanatos. Into darkness and coldness and entropy. Into nothingness. Into the void and the black.

This is what is happening to our world. Our systems and institutions turn Eros into Thanatos. We are becoming mere engines that convert Eros into Thanatos. We are becoming not Eros but Thanatos.

This is what the loss of hope is and does. It is now a necessary function of our world-system. How are the men who rule these systems and institution to prevail, if not through our own acceptance of the evisceration of our life-force? So the systems and mechanisms surround us, and we use them willingly. Instead of talking to a person today, I will talk to the machine. Instead of learning, doing, accomplishing, trying something today, I will recite the incantations of the doctrines of allegiance to my masters, and remain a slave. Instead of being and becoming who I am and am meant to be, I will obey the instructions of the algorithm, the system. I will enter the maze with no solution. I will trap myself in the cave of darkness.

This is what is happening to our world. We are losing hope. It isn’t a small thing. It is the essence of us. It is a loss of the soul, an absence of the miracle, an emptiness of the most profound thing we are and have and were.

We don’t know how we long for Eros. No one has ever taught us that. We’re reduced now to her caricatures. Violent men preening their muscles, women with faces made of self-mutilation. Eros has been forgotten in this time. And as we forget who and what we are made of, and need and desire most, must return to, must become one with, in order to feel at home in the universe, so, too we find ourselves puzzled and bewildered, by what arises in the void left by the loss of Eros. Thanatos, whose kingdom now stretches as far as the eye can see, the missile can land, the bomb can fall.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to you about the idea of annihilation. And now perhaps you see why. How quickly we got here: “a civilization will die tonight.”

If you imagined that I was speaking to you in abstractions, think again. I’m always trying to prepare you for what comes next.

Civilization and annihilation. This is where we are. We have given lunatics of every kind the power to annihilate. To annihilate us socially and culturally, which is the power the techno-barons have, to annihilate our democracies and economies, which is the power the demagogues have, and the power to annihilate our minds, which is what AI does.

We are at an existential point now. We stand poised on the brink of many annihilations. They already proceed around us, and we’re only dimly aware. American democracy was annihilated, and soon enough, Trump threatened annihilation on a country. It won’t be the last—it’s just the first. The oil crisis that ensued threatened to bring the global economy to its knees. And in all this, the world’s leaders were silent: annihilated, afraid to even speak out against Trump’s hyper-genocidal threats.

I warned you about this some time ago. That we stood at a civilizational turning point. And then I tried to teach you the stakes, annihilation, nothingness, the reduction to zero.

Me? I’m tired. Faintly amused. Sort of irritated. Maybe that’s scandalous. I don’t know. They always find a way to scandalize me, or maybe I do it to myself. I don’t know about that, either.

It’s sort of funny in a way to me now. Me, or maybe people like us. We waste our lives trying to help the rest of these idiots understand the stakes of what’s before us. They tell us we’re wrong, it’s not going to happen, they call us idiots, hysterics, alarmists, doomers.

And then they cry and whimper like babies.

When it all happens just the way we say it will, because, wait for it, we remembered what we learned in third grade. When people like you and me warned of fascism, what did the rest of them think it meant? Did they not get the “violent expansionism” or “genocidal warfare” part?

Why is anyone surprised by any of this?

Forgive me, I’m actually going to answer that question.

Because what we learned recently is that no matter what we do, people are, remain, are intent on being, fucking idiots. They are full of hubris. They don’t use their minds. They override what they know with what they feel. “It can’t happen here” or “it can’t happen to me” is a feeling, not a fact. And while I’m a romantic, very much on the side of feelings, to fail to think clearly at this juncture in history is the precise hallmark of a…fucking idiot.

I’ve been perusing the newspapers, their comments sections, forums. And you know what? They’re full of people who are surprised, startled, shocked, waxing indignant, outraged, etcetera. I sigh and I chuckle. Does that sound snide, arrogant, condescending? Jesus, forgive me for having read a goddamned history book and taken it seriously. What did these people think “the 1930s are repeating themselves” meant? Did they think we wouldn’t get to the “demagogues threatening genocide” phase? Hold on, let me answer that question, too. That’s exactly what they thought.

I’m tired of it, my friends. I can’t fight the fucking idiocy of the idiots anymore. Neither can you. We’ve tried. We’ve fought the good fight. We’ve spent the better part of our lives trying to educate, teach, guide, civilize these morons. Whether as teachers, artists, writers, psychologists, professors, scientists, journalists, doesn’t matter, add to that list as you see fit.

But these fucking idiots will not be civilized. They won't learn. They don’t care to, until it’s too late. Until that point, they’ll fight us tooth and nail, with their foolish, half-formed opinions, their manufactured love for fake debates, their two-sides-to-every-story-even-fascism-and-world-war, the way they’ve been conditioned by capitalism, violence, fear, and greed to just reject any semblance of truth because it’s too dangerous to hold for even one moment.

So I shrug. I chuckle. I try to…walk away. I barely write anything anymore. What’s the point?

See all those posts out there, all those columns, all those words expended? My God, how on earth is this happening? Let me issue the biggest eye-roll in the world. Call a fucking exorcist, I just snapped my own neck. Wow guys, what a mystery! Who would’ve thought that fascism, authoritarianism, a broken global economy, and rampant capitalism’s anti-values of inhumanism and narcissistic totalization would have ended here? Wait, only every single capable thinker of the 20th century, from Einstein to Jonas Salk.

Words fail to express my weariness with the idiocy that surrounds us now. The faint ripple of amusement I feel isn’t a thing of condescension, it’s aimed at me, for not getting how fucking truly stupid people are. The average person is more interested in “shape wear” and Ozempic than they are in the end of human civilization as we know it. Three days without oil, energy, electricity, etcetera and they’ll be crying and whimpering, asking: where did it all go? We were this close to that brink. We are this close to that brink.

I try to keep my chin up. I try to retain my faith in humanity. But I know it’s a lie. So I try to live this lie. I take Snowy for a walk, and smile at the girls at the cafe. They giggle. What a cute dog. They don’t say: how funny it is to see the cool guy in the leather jacket with a tiny white dog. The daily stuff of my life. It gives me a tiny window of light.

But the darkness surrounds me now. I watch people. At the cafe, on the street, at midnight, at 4Am when the city sleeps. Lovers and workers, nobodies and somebodies, junkies and addicts to the truer drugs of money and power. I observe them all. And in too few of them do I see any kind of light anymore. At least the kind that I need to see.

And so I ache from how tired it all makes me. I laugh at myself, the joke that I am now, this fool. I think that my days of trying to be a good and decent person are over. Not because it served no purpose. I’m a friend to futility. But for a deeper reason. I feel too old to care anymore. I’ve gone gray in the soul, somehow, as the world around us fell into this dark age. The light in me has gone out, too. I can’t see it anymore. Can’t find it. Maybe it was never there.

Where am I? Where are we?

The world doesn’t know it’s in a dark age yet. But idiot by idiot, the lights of the human soul fail. Harsh words. Perhaps they serve no purpose, either. I have no purpose now, I think. Maybe we don’t. What is the purpose of learned and decent people in a world, in a time, like this? Who are we now, any of us? You see, in the darkness, we can’t even see ourselves anymore.

Did I waste my life, I wonder, every morning? When I wake up, the question haunts me, glares at me like a demon. And I try to go back to sleep. Did I? Waste my life? Learning, understanding, knowing. Writing books, teaching, pursuing the idea of all ideas that something is truer than all this? I know the answer. When you have to ask questions like this, it’s only because you are trying to bury the answer deeper than the winter.

Of course I wasted my life. Look at where the world is now. Look where people like us are. Look how the worst among us crow and cackle and take what they want. Bodies to rape, countries to genocide, economies to pilfer. They’ve never had it better. Quick, let’s ask ChatGPT how much it stole today. Or should we ask Trump’s goons? But the truth is that I don’t think they’re really the ones to blame anymore. I think that the idiots are, the ones who let this happen, wanted it to, not just by commission, but by omission.

Annihilation by annihilation. Civilizations end this way. Do you see it yet?

So I mourn. Me, the life I threw away on the idea of a better world, the time I wasted, us, the future, now, civilization. Night after night. I try to mourn the ache away. Isn’t that what mourning is supposed to do? But the funeral only goes on, because the world around us is entering a dark age, annihilation by…

The morning beckons. I sleep until I can’t take the pain anymore. Or maybe I sleep because I can’t bear the agony anymore. I wasted my life. What do you do after that? What do you do with that awful epiphany? Snowy says: dad, wake up! Come on. Let’s go for a walk!

I smile at the little guy. Alright, buddy. Let’s go. Let’s go far, far away from here.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I’ve opened this post up for everyone, by the way, so that everyone has a little bit of guidance.

Those of you who bought into the last two positions we discussed, energy futures and commodities, did very well: you made between 10-20% in a few weeks. These were risky bets, and I hope they helped teach you how to invest well. These positions have now run their course for the time being.

It’s possible that Trump will double cross Iran at any point in the next two weeks, and try to seize control of its oil. It’s possible, too, that the negotiations will fail. In either case, markets will begin to decline sharply again across the world. Please be watchful of all this.

Over the next day or two, markets are likely to skyrocket. Then reality will probably set in. For example, one of the world’s major shipping companies has already said that it won’t magically whisk ships through the Strait of Hormuz just yet, because the risk is still too great. See the lesson: the risks are still grave, very much so, for business as usual to fully resume. So there’s likely to be a great deal of volatility to come.

(Meanwhile, of course, Iran has said it will charge a “toll,” and that, too, will place a damper on any hopes of a quick recovery to normalcy.)

If you’d like to stay as safe as possible, remain cashed out. There’s no great need to chase returns which are still quite risky for many people, especially retirees.

Please understand that a “ceasefire” especially in the hands of a figure like Trump, who can’t be trusted to begin with, is not “the end” of the war. That remains to be seen.

If you’d like to be a little more aggressive, it’s OK to re-enter the markets, but keep an eye on things, and if your nerves twitch, my advice is: exit.

There are always ways to make money. That’s what markets are for. In scenarios like this, there is a great deal to be made, and I’ll give you some counsel about that in the next few days.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

After a few days of making genocidal threats of the kind the world has scarcely seen since the 1930s, finally, Trump surrendered.

“A civilization will die tonight.” A civilization did begin dying tonight. Ours. But I’ll come to that.

Why did Trump surrender? For the obvious reason. America was losing this war, and losing it badly. Incredibly badly. Not a single one of Trump’s objectives were accomplished. In fact, the precise opposite happened.

Instead of regime change, Iran’s regime survived and hardened. Worse, Iran has emerged now as a new global power. It withstood the might of both America and Israel’s militaries, and choked off the world’s oil supply, causing chaos around the globe, sending markets plummeting.

For Iran, this war signals its emergence as a major global player. It has shown it can withstand war to the point of mass war crimes, and not just emerge intact, but exert punishing, catastrophic cost of its own. And for all these reasons, Trump finally surrendered.

Now we are at a fragile ceasefire. You might thank an unlikely country, Pakistan, without whose efforts at diplomacy we would be soon standing on the brink of world war. That is where we will be, anyways, for some time to come now. This fragile ceasefire isn’t likely to hold. A man who can threaten the kinds of…let me pause here.

What are we to call it, a proclamation, a threat like “a civilization will die tonight”? Even war crime isn’t quite an adequate term. Perhaps even "crime against humanity” is a concept that fails us now, because if such a threat were to be carried out, it would be something new. The the Middle East would have been in ruins, from electricity to drinking water, millions upon millions at risk, and the world’s oil supply would have been dust.

Perhaps just as new concepts were necessary for what happened during the 1930s, they are now too. Maybe all this can only be called a crime against civilization.

A man who can threaten such crimes is unlikely to be capable of hewing to any principles or norms of decency, and we should already know that about Trump. And so this ceasefire is likely to be tenuous at best. How, precisely, is the Strait of Hormuz to be managed? Will Iran and America split the “toll”? Go ahead and chuckle.

Now let me come to the point, which isn’t why Trump surrendered, but what it means.

Let me begin with us as a civilization, which I’ve already done a little, and come to the financial and economic realities before us now.

As a civilization, we lost our dignity. Few stood to Trump’s threats, which, we should all understand, are at or beyond the level of the 1930s. To threaten to take a nation of a hundred million people back to the “Stone Age” is a crime so vast that it has little precedent in human history. And that we as a world stood cowering before such threats robbed us of our dignity.

Dignity isn’t a mere abstraction. It has a very real price.

Who will pay for the energy crisis, financial crises, or stock market crashes that Trump has imposed on the world? If you were the finance minister of any country on the planet, you should be looking at all your major financial markets right now, stocks, bonds, currencies, and thinking to yourself: America cost me this many billions or trillions, and the rational response is to protect myself, by divesting exactly that amount from a dangerous, implosive America that can loose this chaos upon the world.

Eventually, America will pay this price. The great trend of the world running away from investing in America will gather pace and force now, at least if the world is anywhere close to some semblance of rational.

It will want its dignity back. What shred of it is left after the shocking cowardice shown by leader after leader who remained silent in the face of Trump’s insane ultraviolece.

The world has been playing nice with America. Far too nice. Europe took a soft line with Trump, and where did it end? With a war on Iran, that choked Europe itself off from the energy it so vitally needs. If you were Europe, where would you put your money? How long would you suffer this kind of humiliation?

History is made of cowardice. And yet the world changes, too, when courage is mustered. There are a few foolish nations left in the world who will follow Trump into the abyss. Middle Eastern money has flowed into America over the last decade, a cycle of oil becoming money becoming oil, becoming instability, dictatorship, and war. But will the rest of the world want to join in this fatal bargain?

Trump’s humiliation will prove to the world that he is wearing the feathers of a hawk, but on the body of a chicken. He is a man who talks loudly, but accomplishes less than nothing in the end. Violence is his forte, true, but in the way of a petty gangster, who will always back down from a bigger threat.

Let me summarize all that now. America has lost control of itself and power over the world. It’s risk premium has risen massively now, and alongside it, it has the lost the power to force investment in it or cooperation with it. To put yourself beside America now is to be one of history’s greater fools. Meanwhile, we will never quite know when Trump rattles his limp saber again.

Every time that he does, the world will see it more and more as an empty threat. He is a nuisance and a menace, and the only way to contain the costs he imposed is to finish the job of making America a pariah state.

That is a very dangerous place for a world to be. Divesting from its major power. It will be ugly, and at every step, Trump will try to stop it. This alone will bring us to the brink of more wars.

And this too is in Trump’s psychology. After Iran, who will he go after next? Whose oil, minerals, land, will he covet and scream over? Greenland? Canada? South America? This is hardly the end. Trump wants to be dictator of the world. He has not succeeded this time, and only humiliated America, the world, and civilization itself, showing us all what true cowardice, in the form of the deafening silence of leaders, really is.

But he won’t stop here.

Where does all that leave us? With a new level of risk baked into the system. We have a would-be world dictator. Willing to commit crimes against civilization to steal a world’s resources. This is civilizational risk, and what we all just experienced was a civilizational crisis. I’ll talk more about that. You are already paying the costs. The question now is: who will be left to pay the price for the disasters such figures leave behind them?

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

We’re now at severe risk of entering the opening stages of the next world war. The world at a civilizational level is now repeating the financial, economic, and structural cycles that led to the last two. If there is to be another world war, it begins like this.

I’m hesitant to speak to you openly anymore. You can sense it. My words are too often misinterpreted by lesser minds. I’m weary of it. When I say that “we are at risk,” that is what I mean. We are speaking of probabilities and possibilities. Please understand the nuance before you read what I am going to write.

Very, very few people understand what I am now going to teach you.

The last world war broke out this way. Germany was the world’s largest debtor nation (and we’ll leave aside the fact for now that many modern nation-states didn’t yet exist.) It owed reparations for the First World War to France and England. Which it couldn’t repay. As a result, it’s economy stagnated, went into hyperinflation, and Weimar Germany became Nazi Germany.

Perhaps you already glimpse the parallels I’m about to recount.

“Imbalances” triggered the last world war. Not in trade, but in capital. Germany was the world’s largest debtor, and it couldn’t repay its debts, which led to economic ruin, that in turn, caused to it to turn to violence, expansionism, as a source of growth. Here laid the seeds of fascism. Fascism is an economic problem in the beginning, a violent solution, which isn’t my discovery, but that of Keynes, who reinvented finance and economics, not to mention laid the foundations of the modern world. We’ll discuss that another time. Think of the Nazis stripping everything from corpses.

Now let’s fast forward to today.

America is the world’s largest debtor, by a very long way. As so many times in history before it, it is turning to violent expansionism. That’s predictable, given America’s long run economic stagnation—real incomes are at Great Depression era levels now as a share of the economy (yes, that’s a fact, and like I said, I tire of quibbling over facts with unlearned minds.)

America’s President has already sown the seeds of expansionism in many, many ways. From Greenland to Canada. But these were mere beginnings and bagatelles. The prize he appears to have his eyes on is to control the world’s oil supply.

Why is that?

China is often painted as America’s “enemy.” America needs an enemy. Societies often do, for the sake of cohesion and order. The truth though is that China is hardly America’s enemy. America is doing a fine job of destabilizing itself, with nobody’s help.

What China is is America’s largest creditor. Or among them, at any rate. The extent of its holdings of American debt are unknown, because they are held by “entities,” not just the state itself. What’s certain, though, is that China and America are caught in precisely the same set of imbalances that Germany and France plus England were exactly a century ago.

Please understand how crucial that is. If it seems eerie, it is. Here we see history repeating itself with brutal mercilessness.

This is what the war on Iran is about. Control of the world’s oil. Trump himself has said it openly many times. “Wouldn’t it be great if we took the oil?” I paraphrase. I’m sure you’ve heard the words by now.

Why does this matter?

Because China is the world’s largest importer of oil. It imports oil to the degree of 75% of its consumption. That means three quarters of its economy depend on imported oil. China is the world’s second largest oil consumer. Guess who the first is? America, of course.

So. Here we have a situation of financial imbalances, precisely repeating history from a century ago: the world’s largest debtor, versus its largest creditor. Only the names have changed in this story. The plot, theme— and perhaps even the conclusion—have not.

America’s President has decided that the best way to revive a moribund economy is to control the world’s oil. The trade wars didn’t work. They were too lightweight to accomplish the task. If one controls the world’s oil supply, then one has “leverage” over China. And Trump is a figure who is always looking for “leverage,” and it should also be said that this is a very American way of thinking.

(Can you even define leverage, which is why I put it in quotes? What is it? A way to blackmail, to force, to punish, to control. Americans understand what it is without ever even having had to think about it.)

Now we approach the path to world war.

Trump controls the world’s oil. How does China respond? It has one obvious response. It invades Taiwan. Because then it controls the world’s microchips.

The world is now a thing of chokepoints. It is a neck to be suffocated and snapped.

How does this game end?

Trump, it’s true, can bring China to its knees, by controlling the world’s oil supply. Even at the margins, through effectively controlling 25-30% of it. That’s why China’s Premier, recently, has called for a new energy system for the world. He’s worried, and in China’s ruling classes, panic must be setting in now.

Here is “leverage.” With it, he can try to force China to give him what he wants, which is basically money. It’s what he always wants, and in this case, he’s been open about China “investing” more in America, which is funny, an oxymoron, because if you have to force it, it’s not exactly an investment, LOL, is it? Here, Trump is trying to rebalance the imbalances now looming over the world like a terrible spectral figure from history.

But China can equally bring the world to its knees, in many, many ways, Especially America. It can dump American bonds, as we should all know by now, setting off a chain reaction that begins with a stock market crash, and ends with bank failures that make 2008 look like a nice day in the park.

That’s only the beginning. If it seizes control of the world’s microchips, the global economy as we know it comes to an end. Without oil, we are back in the Stone Age. Without microchips, we are back at the Iron Age, perhaps.

The pattern here is easy to see from this far away. Let me now summarize it so you can see it clearly. Trump controls the world’s oil supply, in war after war, to suffocate China. China is hardly likely to just accept this, and retaliates, by seizing the world’s microchips. And perhaps it’s remaining sources of other critical resources, like rare earths. And it ignites a capital war which plunges America into chaos.

Does all that sound unlikely? Or likely? I won’t remind you how many of my predictions have come true. That’s needless if you understand the above.

We will make a great deal of money from this. As we have been doing. That’s regrettable. All the money in the world isn’t worth one moment, one glimmer, of human civilization. Money is only worth what you can buy with it. In the world we are in now, that is less and less by the hour.

We are talking about risk here, remember. I’m not saying there is “going to be” a world war. I am saying that if you understand history well, and know it seriously, then we appear to be entering the beginning stages of one. Only time can tell if it proceeds the way the last two did. What we can say now is this: if a world war was to be beginning before our eyes…

Financially, economically, strategically, civilizationally…

It would look exactly like this.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy)

We don’t really have a stock market anymore. We don’t really have an economy. What we have is hell’s casino. A roulette wheel, that lands on the money or out of the money according to Trump’s whims and moods.

Let’s take the last few days as a lesson.

Trump claimed the war would end soon. It was reaching its apex. Victory, he said, dozens of times by now, in fact, has already been achieved.

And so markets roared. The war was over! Surely, Trump wouldn’t double cross them, would he? Bang. The roulette wheel landed on the money.

And then Trump gave a speech. In it, he said…a dozen things, all of which we’ve heard before. The war had been won. But it was going to go on. For how long? Another “few weeks.” One might hear echoes of a man telling his creditors to hold their nerve, in this, too.

Bang. Markets slumped. Which way was Trump going? Doubling down on the war, or ending it? Escalating it, or finding “off-ramps.” There are no off ramps in hell, my friends.

Welcome to Trump’s Yo-yo. One day, with one social media post, he yanks the markets this way. The next day, with a phrase, sentence, speech, he drops them that way.

It goes on and on, day after day, month after month.

Trump’s Yo-yo. You can see it at work during the course of this war, in vivid, stark detail. He’s dangling from his little hands the strings by which the wheels of the world’s economies turn.

The question is if you will be puppeteered along with this.

All of this is what it means to have an authoritarian economy, by the way. A stock market is always a flawed thing. Still, in better times, it responds to real signals. This company will do well, because the economy depends on this or that. Long-term trends prevail, and “fundamentals” matter, the most foundational of which isn’t really the pursuit of money, but whether or not companies and institutions are well-managed.

An authoritarian economy is very different. In it, the authoritarian’s whims and moods are all that matters. When he’s in a foul temper, then watch out—there may be a war, whether a trade war or a real one. When he’s feeling good, then perhaps the good times may roll. But all this is divorced from economic reality—and of course it’s precisely why authoritarian economies suffer, because investment can’t really ignite or endure this way. Capital runs scared from this kind of risk and folly. Authoritarian economies are systems of patronage, which do not generate wealth in the long-term.

Trump’s Yo-yo is very real. Up he yanks a market today. Down a market plunges tomorrow. This hides the deeper cost of markets and economies becoming a yo-yo in the hands of an authoritarian. Those costs are the risk of a perpetual lack of safety, the divorcing from fundamentals, the constant precipice of instability. And all these costs are real. They are felt in the price of bonds, in credit spreads, in the rudiments of investment itself.

When an economy, and the markets in it, become a casino in the hands of an authoritarian, and he decides which way the yo-yo will climb or fall today, then wealth itself is destroyed. Who would invest in such a system? Who should? And yet this is where we are. To “play the markets” now is to gamble on Trump’s moods and whims, not to invest wisely and well for the future. Who’s to say if there’s much of one?

The correct place to be in the midst of this is to have cashed out. I’ve said it before, and let me reiterate it. Remember the lesson of the last few days. Trump said the war was coming to an end, markets roared, he double-crossed them, as he always does, and bang, they plummeted again. Don’t be foolish. This game doesn’t end here.

When markets become casinos, then of course traditional forms of analyzing them scarcely work. What’s left to us is psychology. It’s precisely why markets now are so struck with manias and frenzies, yet in constant fear of the Big One, the crash we all know is coming.

Trump is who he is. Our world now is in the hands of Thanatos, men possessed by death drive, who’ll happily burn down everything just to smear the ashes all over their chests. And that should tell us something. Do you really think that men like this “end it here”? Trump has wished to be the world’s great force of annihilation all his life. To make the world kneel before him, trembling in fear. Do you suppose he won’t escalate this much, much further, in all the ways that we should know by now?

If you want to gamble, then you can gamble. You might even have better odds. Trump has done what he was always going to do. Just as his businesses were some of the world’s worst investments, so, too, is an economy in his hands.

Do you want to be on the other end of Trump’s Yo-yo? There are many people who’ll take that bet. And so far, they are losing, big time. That should tell you something. Maybe even everything.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

I feel lost these days. Alone. In a world, lost to me, lost in violence, ugliness, obscenity, that’s becoming something alien to me. To people like me. Those of us who live, stupidly, in the service of noble and beautiful and timeless ideas. I walk along the water How did we get here? To a world erupting in violence, enflamed in horror, ridden over by the horsemen of apocalypse? What happens next?

I’m a fool. To try and write in this way in times like these—LOL, there I am, an alien, speaking an alien language. What’s wrong with Umair? Why can’t he just be normal? Just sell me something like an influencer! Dude, just give me something to ease the pain! Let me try and start over.

What men like Trump want is this. To have their hands arounds the throat of a thing. A being. An existence. People. Countries. Societies. Democracies. A world. They want what is called “optionality,” in the anodyne words of the way we think today. But it’s not really just that, is it? Hands around the throat. I will choke you, strangle you, suffocate you.

Maybe I will snap your neck, suddenly. Or maybe I will starve you of air, breath by breath, and watch the life slowly leave your eyes. Maybe I crush your larynx, and smile gleefully as you gasp for one last breath you will never take.

I am in control. I am the master. You are in my hands. And I decide. Not just if you live or die, but how.

The world today is at the mercy of monsters who have their hands around its throat. We have allowed ourselves, as a civilization, as societies, to become wretched things. We said: please, put your hands around me Perhaps you can save me, because you are the most frightening and vicious ones of all. But to beckon a monster to embrace you this way is a fatal invitation.

What am I talking about? Do you hear me? Am I making any sense yet? There I am, walking along the sea, alone, staring into the grey. The rain pours over the waves. Speaking an alien language to a world which no longer understands me, itself, where it is, or how it got here.

But I understand it. All too well. Let me continue the often futile job, then, of discussing it, and put to one side, my grief, the sadness that some days says: just walk into the ocean, and never look back. Some embraces are impossible temptations. I understand how, why, we gave ourselves to monsters. We were only children. We still are. And children long for love, in any shape.

In the world we are in now, the monsters who we have allowed to control our destinies now contest “chokepoints.” And by now, you know what some of these are. The Strait of Hormuz. The Red Sea. It doesn’t matter, really. There’s a long list, and there will be others tomorrow.

Now we live in a world where fascists and authoritarians will vie for control over the resources of a dying civilization, on a dying planet. If that hammer blow of a sentence is too much for you, please, reject me, abjure me, scorn me. Does it matter? I am alone in my estrangement already. I feel like the last human being on a planet I no longer recognize.

And perhaps you do too. Maybe we find some solace in each other in times like these. I can teach you about money. That’s easy. We have already made a great deal of it together. But money is nothing, when.

When the monsters have their hands around the necks of. The necks of. Everything around us now. This one, of our consciousness itself—these are the techno barons and the demagogues. Another set of monsters has their hands around our democracies. Still another, around our wealth and futures.

And now the contests are already erupting. It is my slave. It is my body. To choke, starve, suffocate. It is my neck to snap. It belongs to me. This is what these contests are about, and will be about. Oil and minerals. Then water and land. Then air itself. And finally, what is left of “money.”

We call these “chokepoints,” but that only elides the truth that someone must do the choking. And that choking is a terrible way to die. Is the air to the lungs blocked, because of the foreign body of war? Or has the throat been ripped out entirely, like in America, where the deafening silence is all that is left most days? There are many ways to die when a monster has his hands around your neck. And you are at his mercy, which is there is scarcely much of.

That is the point here. Trump calls all this “leverage,” but I suppose that you might see for what it really is. The power to commit this violence. This is what the double game is for, to establish this dominance. Today I might end the war, tomorrow I might escalate it. Doesn’t matter. I am willing to choke the entire world economy to death. Can you hear it already gasping?

So we have monsters using the “leverage” of suffocating things to death to establish dominance over the act of choking itself. A game of chicken played by demon against demon, and the winner is the one who is the closest to being sliced open by the razor claws of death.

Who will pay the price? Notice how many countries are already taking emergency measures. Hospitals, schools, homes. Lives. The vulnerable, the young, the ill, the frail. All of these are reduced. They are meaningless. They don’t matter at all, to the monsters choking a civilization to death.

It shouldn’t have been this way. I hear fate chuckling. It always is, she says. I am the mother of all misfortune, and around you, for you, I have woven the thread of calamity. My three daughters have bound you with it, until the very end. Or is that just the sound of the waves? There I am, watching the sea.

Eros and Thanatos. These concepts will be too abstract for many of you, I fear. For Americans, almost certainly. By them, we mean: Eros, the life force, aliveness, meaning, purpose, nobility, purity, elevation, expansion. Thanatos, death, the withering hand. In us, these drives, these primal forces, battle. And our destiny, as frail human things, is their journey. But which do we serve? And how?

We are now in the hands of Thanatos. Like vises around the neck. In the hands of Thanatos. This is what it means to be in a place where monsters claw at each other, to establish control over the throat, which is the place from which all sustenance comes. So that they can say: I will be the one to decide. How many breaths you will take, and how. Whether or not I snap this neck, or if I just wring it. If you will eat or breathe at all.

I see the hands of Thanatos like great black limbs, stretching around the world now. Can you see them with me?

And in all this, Eros—where is she? What have we left of her? We have failed her, my friends. Life itself, its beauty, nobility, force, power, truth, meaning. Is Eros just money? Just power? All the lurid obscenities which surround us? Why do we feel so empty now, if it isn’t because we have failed Eros? What is she now, in a world like this, in a time like this? All of us bear this responsibility, and owe this confession to being itself. We let the monsters make what they have of us, and the excuses are just that. I am too busy, I am too frightened, I am working, don’t bother me, I can’t, I won’t, I can’t.

Let me amend that. Perhaps we all have thinking to do when it comes to these matters.

The terrible hands of Thanatos, made of darkness and the abyss, encircle us now.

That is how to suffocate a world.

I think that I just long now for the peace of the sea. I know that what I have to teach is useless to a world gone mad. Mad enough to have said: put your hands around my neck, darkness. That is all the love I deserve. That is all I remember of a thing called love. That is what love is. And that is how wretched and small and unworthy I am. When a civilization makes this fatal choice, the rest is just destiny.

As the world suffocates, let me take my place. I will go first.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!!)

We’re seeing the ugliness of the wretched thing that America’s becoming. It’s unfurling before our eyes now, its shadow stretching through a place that used to be called a future.

We’re going to talk about civilization, what it really is, why it matters, and who we are. In the deepest ways of all. Sit around the fire with me. We are old friends now.

To men like Trump, there’s a thrill, not one that’s erotically charged so much as charged with Thanatos, death drive, the antithesis of Eros, life force, the will, striving to live, to create, to give the gift of existence, all of which is love. Behind the barely concealed glee, the revelling in power, lies pure Thanatos itself. Men like Trump seem to “get off” on violence precisely because they are “driven” by Thanatos, not Eros. They climax that way, not this way. Thanatos is in both the bomb and the algorithm. It is annihilation. And we are living in an age where it is becoming all that is left of us.

I take it. I do whatever I want with it. A body, a nation, a world, a civilization.

Civilization is Eros’s child. But in our age, Eros is slumbering. While she is slumbering, her wrists are being slit. Our age is becoming one of annihilation, of Thanatos. What do I mean? Am I just calling names? I know Americans will find all this difficult. They are taught that only materialism matters. So let us begin there.

Now the world will pay the price for Trump’s obscene wars, but to use this capitalist language is inadequate. It conceals the reality. Still, let’s begin here. The world will pay the price. In higher prices for all the basics, which will affect the world’s most unfortunate disproportionately. Here, too, the truth is concealed. The “unfortunate” are merely those dominated under the boot of centuries of violence. Now they will go hungry. They won’t be able to keep the lights on. Annihilation unfurls this way.

Trump has conquered a world. This is the power of Thanatos, of death, the triumph of the skeletal beast of annihilation we once wished to leave behind. Its riders break the backs of the present once again. They draw and quarter the failing project called civilization, ripping off its limbs, laughing in delight. Trump has conquered a world, with annihilation, just like that.

What is a war? The war isn’t really on this country or that one. It never is. It is on Eros itself. The only point and purpose of men like Trump is to be missionaries of Thanatos, and executioners of Eros. Their only real job is to erase the joy, laughter, happiness, kindness, goodness, in the rest of us. To leave us drawn and quartered, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. To numb us with endless horror, speechless in transgression, revolted and in shock at the lurid spectacles they create. And so Eros dies.

The point of men like Trump has only ever been one thing. Which is the point of their wars. To annihilate Eros herself, in all of us. All of us. And we must understand how fatal a blow this truly is to the moral circle of humankind, stretching back through the millennia. We do not, because Eros’s teachers and masters and disciples have fallen strangely silent now. They are afraid, diminished. They quiver and whimper and whine. And what goes left unsaid is this.

Some wars, it’s true, are political, economic, or social. But these are not really those. Wars like these, Trump’s wars, are lessons and warnings to worlds and civilizations, about what is allowed to exist. These wars are for annihilation against, over being. That is why they seem so “stupid” and “foolish” and “pointless.” In political and social terms, indeed they are. But in existential ones—ah, in those terms, wars like these are the truest of all. They never end, never begin, they only recur, in the hands of those possessed by the demon named annihilation, Thanatos, undoing, ruin.

So these wars are not really land or money or titles or any of the rest of it. But to annihilate Eros herself, to claim the victory of annihilation over being, and in that way, to attain the closest power men like this know to being gods. They cannot bring what they truly wish to life, which is to be loved, respected, held, so they kill life itself, in the purest way it can be killed, which is to annihilate its force, power, truth, meaning, purpose, all of which are love. I am death himself. What are you? Who are you? You are only who I let you be, because I am death. I am the bomb and the gun. I am starvation and rape and agony. Know me. I exist only to annihilate you. I exist only to annihilate.

Am I talking about Trump? Epstein? Some comically evil tech baron? Am I talking about capitalism, fascism, authoritarianism? Money and power? What the fuck is Umair talking about? Ah, my friends. Come, see through the veils with me now.

Around us now, everywhere, Eros is slumbering. Dying, even. Can you feel it? Sense it? What I’m talking about? Let me put on my American-white-guy pundit suit, and recite for you, in a toneless voice, some statistics. You already know them. Relationships aren’t forming, intimate ones, or even friendships. People aren’t having sex. Levels of anger, despair, and distress are though the roof, and so of course are depression and anxiety. Come on, we all know this. Only we won’t say it out loud. Because we don’t really know what it means. So we say that we don’t “live in happy times,” but this misses the point altogether.

The joy has gone out of everything now. We put on the TV, and hate-watch. Tap and swipe, and doomscroll. The “creators”—LOL, imagine any real artist or musician reducing themselves to that—”rage-bait” us. And then of course there’s Trump and the wars. Fishers of Thanatos, drawing from within us what dwells deep in the subterranean fathoms of our souls, the blind, wretched things writhing there in hunger. Anger, envy, jealousy, greed, hatred, despair. And so here we are, joyless, and afraid to really admit it, because then we will punish each other for violating the taboo. But it is Eros who is being violated here.

They are winning this war of annihilation over and against being. Things have gone grey. Hazy. Empty. We barely exist at all anymore, have you noticed? We just fade away into grey. You can sense the numbness in people. Why is that? We’re ceasing to exist at all. The war is real. It is not just over there. It is right here. You are its subject and its object. The point is to annihilate you, as it always is, because through you flows a universe, an everything, which is simply called love, or being itself. We “fade away” precisely when Thanatos’s abyss claims us as its own. How does it do that?

The joy has gone out of everything now, and is it any wonder? Some will say, as they always do, that I exaggerate. They’re going to be—LOL—the most joyless ones of all. The ones who obsess over the latest articles in American media, which are always so “well-balanced” that they don’t even seem to see there we are, teetering on the edge of the very abyss itself. Is it sensible to maintain the pretense of happiness while the world burns? What do cowardly lies like this do for us—and to us? Thanatos beckons. The way begins with just a…just a…tiny…step. Which becomes a dive into an abyss.

This is why the feeling of obscenity now surrounds us and drowns us. To murder Eros while she slumbers is the most obscene act of all. She is being murdered around us by the demagogue and the algorithm, the machines and their masters, the bomb and the missile, the kinds of men who have never read a book but dream of rape. Eros is being shackled and caged and enslaved. What does that leave of us? I sense that Americans will shrivel away from sentences, ideas, truths like this. Is this what made cowards of them?

We joyless things, wretched things. The truth, too, is that this is what we’re becoming. Cowards and idiots, numbers in algorithms, silent sleepwalkers amidst ruins. In an eternal journey towards ourselves, only Eros unlocks our doors. Where else does courage come from? Do these seem like courageous times? And what does it mean to be courageous, now, anyways?

We must damn ourselves to exist first in order to live. Do you understand? The reason America became so grim, and so compliant, so obedient, so easily tamed, is that this first, primal truth is called a lie. We must never fully exist, and only then are we allowed to live, in America’s inverted way. And it is wrong. It hasn’t worked. No job, no healthcare. Keep still. You are only prey. Be silent. Or else.

I remember joyful times. Do you? I remember not so long ago when the world was better than this. In every single way possible, really. Fashion sang, music roared, film glimmered. Politics aspired, economics tried, intellect lit, the world was full of ideas and concepts and things and knowings and doings. Things were fun and cool and interesting and not just this total all-engulfing shit. Can any of us honestly say that we feel that way anymore? Maybe if you were never there, you can. But if you were? Come now. All the world around us now seems almost laughably dead, and this is precisely why being laughably dead is so modish that it is the only way of being left to us. No, “but I had a great time on vacation in Provence!!” is not the disproof, but the proof. Remember the statistics? We’re all becoming “the statistics.”

And this is the first step Thanatos wants us to take. The surrender of Eros, this guarded, suspicious, numbed, dulled down, shrunken way of living. Which says: I don’t remember, don’t need, won’t champion, a world, a life, that was so much better than this, in every way imaginable, not so long ago. It’s too dangerous to want such a thing. It’s too dangerous to want the people that made it so, and to want to be one of those people. I will settle for the mediocrity and embrace the disappointment that marks now, the meek submission to it all, the bombs, the rage, the spectacle, the killing, the idiocy, the lowest common denominator, hey, just feeding tube me some fucking Netflix already. There are two sides to every story, you know! It’s Not That Bad! It Was Worse in the Middle Ages! Hey, At Least You’re Not a Slave!! Whine, whine, whine. Where is the moral bar of a position like this, I always wonder? How low can you go?

Instead, here we are, whining and bitching not about how much the world sucks now, but how much nobody should ever say it. Whine, whine, whine. Is that the sound of a coward, or is it Thanatos sharpening his knives?

Ah, my friend, if only it were true that the world didn’t suck now. Isn’t full of dull, all-encompassing mediocrity leaning towards something like, “shrug, fascism, what do you want from me, dude?” It’s a million facts that the world sucks now. We all know it, we just won’t admit it—worse, we’ll sullenly squabble over it. And that makes us, to say the least, sigh-inducing cowards, but more than that, useless, impotent. Whine, whine, whine. But, but, but. But they came for you too, in the end, is how that story concludes. And this one does too. Are you even here anymore? Who is? Who wants to be?

Eros whispers songs of emancipation. But we must sing, speak, hear them. And we aren’t. To love is to emancipate, to liberate, to elevate. We are on an elevator to hell, and if you say so, some earnest New York Times reader will say: but at least it’s a very nice elevator! See how burnished the gleaming wood is? Slap! And so Eros has fallen silent.

Let me clarify my point. We are now locked in a raging battle between Eros and Thanatos. We always have been, only in some ages, this battle becomes all too real, overt, engulfing all like a tidal wave. It spills out into war. World War. Fascism, authoritarianism, hate. The globe convulses, as the missionaries of Thanatos preach their message of fear, and make too many drink their poisons. And then we fall. The elevator to hell, remember?

How do we fall? What the fuck am I even talking about? Mom, Umair’s being mean to me! He called me whiny!

There are, just as there are the missionaries of Thanatos, those on the side of Eros. But we are not doing so well these days. We. We’re the artists, musicians, poets, intellectuals, teachers, writers, thinkers—add to the list, it’s as long as the night. We’re the ones whose job is to spark fires in the human soul that lift it to the stars themselves.

And what are we settling for? Nothingness, really. Shit, crap, in many people’s eyes. The awful stuff that’s come to define now, whether in film, music, literature, or don’t make me say it, the stuff “creators” and “influencers” make. Imagine if Jean-Luc Godard or a young Charles Dickens or a budding Nelson Mandela were to confront this sea of not just mediocrity, but the fatal idea that the only job of the missionaries of Eros is to…give people numbing agents…that temporarily dull the pain…of Thanatos just ripping their souls out and turning their hearts to ashes. Where would we ever have been? Gotten? Who would we have become?

It’s not just that the bad guys are winning. They’re winning because we’re barely even trying anymore. You can include me in that condemnation, if you like, which is more an observation. Can you honestly say that a book, film, song, anything, has been written that’s adequate for now? Don’t kid yourself and tell me that the Hunger Games are 1984, or that the cheesy show or book during jour are Animal Farm. Etcetera. Don’t kid the world and tell me that losing the progress we’ve made over decades and centuries is somehow OK because, fuck, look, we’ve got iPhones and influencers and AI flavored soft drinks now! Don’t. It’s not just false, worse, it doesn’t just make a fool of you, worse, this is the awakening of Thanatos, and the slumber of Eros.

We have to better than this. We. We will never make the bad guys less bad. Never. There will always be Trumps, just as there were always mad kings and crazed emperors. Our job is to tend to the human heart, to give the human eyes vision with which to see, to mend the broken places in the human soul—before.

Before the missionaries of Thanatos can plant their bitter harvest in that arid soil. Before it grows into the failed harvest of hatred. Before it becomes the pockmarked, poisonous fruits of violence, rage, and stupidity, which we see before us today.

We are the lovers. We always have been. And we are failing our era. Eros slumbers because we have not awakened her. The bad guys aren’t failing the era. They’re defining it. But we are not teaching the world anymore how to, why to, in which ways to, love, tend, mend, need, grow, desire, speak, be, exist. And so there the world is, doing just the opposite. Divided, breaking down, stupefied, spellbound, still, silent. We are failing so profoundly at our job that we are not even capable of admitting that we are. And this is the greatest failure of all.

Me? I’m fading away. Winking out. A friend recently accused me of slinking into obscurity. She was right. I am. I long for it, secretly. I stare at the sea and whisper: just take me. I wonder how I grew so old so fast, and failed at so much along the way. It weighs me down like a million anchors. Take me, drown me, end me. But I am not the man anyone needs me to be then. I am wrestling time and it is turning me to dust. In this there is nobility and grace. Only in this. Yet some days, here I am, lost in my regret and sadness, only pouring the seeds of Thanatos through my hands, instead of taking Eros in my arms, which are all I have left.

Maybe you understand me. Maybe you don’t. I can’t say anymore. I often wonder: should I write the way Americans want people to write? Here’s what the markets did today, Bob! Great Powers Compete! Bombs Are Made to Fall! So are we. The question is what we fall into. Annihilation, slumber, or dust. So just. Just. Take me, drown me, end me. Is this a jeremiad? A eulogy? A lament? Maybe it’s all those things. And maybe none of them matter anymore.

Civilization is Eros’s child. It is a being made of love, or it is nothing at all. We forget that not just at our peril, but at our ruin and self-destruction. The joy has gone out of everything. Where did it go? It turned to fear, despair, pain. How did it do that? In the hands of Thanatos. Why did it happen? Because men who are possessed by this greatest demon of all rise among us, and they have only one purpose: to turn us, too, into agents of death. Who silently say nothing, as the world around us unravels, into mere specks, until all that’s left is pure death itself. What is that? Nothingness? It’s not even that: it’s just the desire to destroy, to hurt, to kill, what is most alive.

And if we become inured to that, blind to it, or worse, accepting of it—then, my friends, the game is already over. And the one who sits on the throne above all the mad kings and emperors laughs. Death himself. Having taken ourselves away from us, his missionaries having made his word our flesh. Death is all there is, was, ever can be, all you are allowed to be, you will not sing, smile, laugh, fuck, need, touch, taste, know, want, become, anything, anything, but me. I am annihilation, and annihilation is all you are now.

Hate watch me. Doom scroll me. Like me, follow me, hit subscribe on your way out! Obey me. Worship me. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want now, and all that’s left, anyways? To be little Trumps? Smash the button. Smash the city. Smash the body. Thanatos shrieks. Eros is patient, true, real. Nothing is anymore, is it?

Thanatos says: I am the algorithm and the formula and the machine, the object and the subject. I am the demagogue and the spectacle, the war and the bomb, the nothing that is becoming everything. There is no more than this to a thing that was once called life. Here, here is joylessness. It is all you can tell yourself you deserve. It is the beginning of me.

And I am the destroyer of all things. See my arms whirl. Feel the blades of my nails. I am everything. And you are nothing.

Who are we now? What have we become? The wretched thing we see before us is only ever made of us, too.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)