THIS IS HOW A CIVILIZATION DIES

THE PATHETIC STUPIDITY OF THE TIME WE LIVE IN

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)