HOW TO SUFFOCATE A WORLD

HOW THE WORLD UNRAVELS NEXT

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!!)