THE NECROCOSM AND HYPERCIVILIZATION

Protective Spirit, 883–859 BCE, Neo-Assyrian

Things around us are dying now. Great and noble things. Pillars and foundations whose stones took millennia to lay down. You and I exist in one of history’s most tragic ages. And the question before us is this: how do we do that well? Just exist in…amid…through…this tragedy?

Let me be more precise. Things around us are dying now. Democracy. It’s in an implosive state. Science. How long will it last? I opened up my hometown paper, The Washington Post, now a plaything of a billionaire, Bezos, and there was an op-ed which not so long ago would’ve been a stain on its name—it called for the “abolition” of the NIH. Literature, art, which barely exist at all anymore, and no, “BookTok” doesn’t count, LOL. Peace. Justice. The idea of a world, not merely a jungle, a prison, a body to rape, naked earth to scorch.

Do you understand what I mean? I feel alone these days. I feel that too few of us see what’s becoming of all of us. Things around us are dying now.

I’m going to call all this the Necrocosm.

That’s not because it needs a clever name, but because I want you to see it clearly with me, through me. There are those of us who still believe in life. That it must, can, should, be better, wiser, and nobler than…this.

But what is “this”? What I’ve described to you is a process of necrosis. Let’s not play the games pundits play. Ezra Klein, Chris Hayes, such good boys. Polite. Nice guys. One gets the sense that the world could crumble around them, and the nice guys would smile, shrug, and…go on being very, very nice about it at all.

I’m not a nice guy. I’m bad. Rotten to the core. I always have been. I never believed the point of life was to make money, amass power, and play games with it all. I believed in love, and I lived my life that way, to the edge, at the brink. My friends joke that it’s dangerous just to be around me. That’s because I have a bad habit of shaking them out of any complacency they might have. Of challenging them to live.

The Necrocosm. Let’s see it clearly together now. The nice guys won’t take you a tour of places like this. They’re too busy pretending everything’s going to be OK. LOL, fuck that.

Democracy. It took human beings five thousand years to build this pillar. Five thousand years. Science. There is a broken line from Archimedes and Aristotle to Galileo to Einstein and beyond, scarred by dark ages and inquisitions. Literature. Between the birth of drama, in the hands of figures like Sophocles, to the revolution in Camus, lie two and a half thousand years. Art. Its earliest traces, are found fifty to seventy thousand years ago. Ethics, reason, justice, truth, wisdom. I could go on. But perhaps you see my point.

All these things are now dying around us, and. And sometimes I run out of words when I think that thought. I feel a terrible emotion for which there is no name. A sense of wrongness at where we are in history, and where we should have been.

Then I think of hypercivilization. It’s just the space of all possible civilizations. There’s another us for whom all these things didn’t begin to die. Another trajectory, place, state, in this space of all possible civilizations. Just as there’s a different set of lives for all of us, so too there are for civilizations. We could have been one which carried all these great projects forwards.

And this is the tragedy of us, of now, of it all.

We really do live in an age where “the world is falling apart,"“ or “things are going very badly,” but these colloquialisms badly understate—and fail to apprehend—the nature and weight of the issue, the problem, our plight. Millennia of human civilization are turning to dust in our hands.

When I say that “things are dying around us,” I’m describing a process of necrosis. Parts of the body are dying. They’re turning black. Infected, gangrenous. Here, the hands of democracy have been struck by a flesh-eating bacterium, moving at lightning speed. There, the mind of humankind is being liquified, turning to mush. There, the Eros of humanity is disintegrating into nothing, meaning our libido, if you like, in a crude way. Within, what’s left of our will is paralyzed, by narcotics, sedatives, as we’re drugged asleep while the process of necrosis accelerates.

I’ve called them “things.” What I’m discussing with you are the fundamental institutions of civilization. And when I use this word, “civilization,” I do so in a different way. Academics, here, I think, have failed a little bit. They’ll say that civilizations are all equal, and if you’re simply going to study them impartially, I suppose, that’s true. But I think that civilizations can—and should—learn from one another. Grow. Mature. Unfold.

I think that these pillars, democracy, science, literature, art, reason, justice, and so on, are the greatest accomplishments of humankind. And they have endured across civilizations. Not in a simple, linear way. Many have been lost for thousands of years at a time. But for those civilizations which choose to learn from their predecessors, and build on the great pillars, the project of civilization continues. Advances. Grows and matures.

And it’s in this sense that I came up with the concept of “hypercivilization.” Precisely so that we can see that successful civilizations build upon the great pillars they inherit, and don’t merely squander themselves, by destroying them. There are many forms and patterns civilizations can trace. Let’s take the idea of human sacrifice. We’d be foolish to pick on that practice, because it led nowhere. Like slavery. And yet here we are, back at the brink. When Americans die because they can’t “afford healthcare,” how different is it really from a human sacrifice to placate a vicious god? Oh, shit. The nice guys will say that’s controversial. I told you I’m not a nice guy.

The Necrocosm is a place in hypercivilization. And others have been here before. Decadent Rome. Weimar slash Nazi Germany. The parallels and examples are obvious. Think of civilizations who didn’t build on the great pillars, but turned wrecking balls on them. How did it work out for them?

I’m writing all this so that you can see. I want you to be able to visualize what I do, to see this all the way that I “see it in my head.” Because…that’s a complicated question. And I often wonder myself. Why bother? What’s the point? By now, if you’re intelligent, you know, and if you’re the other kind of person, you don’t give a shit. You’re too busy pissing all over democracy, science, art, literature, truth, meaning, love. You’re how and why the Necrocosm happened.

People come to me and ask questions about money. And I always tell them what I’ll tell you. Money is nothing. Civilization is everything. In our lifetimes, the great tragedy is this. Civilization is nothing, and money is everything. How many trillionaires does it take to screw in a light bulb? Infinity, they’re too busy screwing the rest of us to care about the lights going out. Bad joke. Sorry. The point is this.

If you want to understand things like economics, finance, and wealth, you had better begin here. The rest is all bullshit. How long do you think “money” is worth much in a hypercivilizational state where democracy doesn’t exist? How long do you think economies will “grow” when there’s no science, knowledge, literature, or intellect left, just dumb fucks glued to their idiotphones? What happens as we cross the threshold from aspiring to be a peaceful world, to a place of billionaire dynasties whose robot armies kill each other over the last few resources of a dying planet? What happens when AI takes everyone’s job, anyways, and the idea of an “income” is a distant memory? Do people just sell their kidneys to feed their kids?

Don’t fuck around with this. Don’t be a nice guy. Or girl. Or grandma. Be angry. Be upset, disappointed, horrified. Be intelligent. Fucking see it all for what it is. Then and only then will you begin to understand where you are, and what you should do about it. Think you can live your life the old way? Are you kidding? Would you seriously advise a kid these days to try and be a…LOL…scientist…journalist…writer…teacher…executive…anything of substance…and no, that’s not an exhaustive list? What are we supposed to do now? First, just this much.

See where we really are.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)