It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

Wendell Berry

As we limp towards the finish line of 2025, awash in institutional abuse, chaos, and collapse, it can be almost impossible to zoom out for a bigger picture of where things stand on a grand scale. The epic zone-flooding of Trumpism is exhausting and can seem all-consuming, but a step back here at the end of the year can be helpful, if not exactly inspirational. To that end, let’s dig in.

MACRO-TRENDS

• One of the controlling mechanisms we are seeing today is the consolidation of power through technology, in the broadest sense of the word. This is a continuation of the triumph of the machine in general, the engine of industrial capitalism
• Demographic transition is making the advanced industrial nations internally vulnerable, as populations age and the working-age cohorts can’t support the aging cohorts through the traditional format of the welfare state.
• International and intranational inequality is on the rise, as the machinery of the system allows for the hyper-concentration of income, wealth, and power. And that concentrated power takes all forms: economic, political, and cultural, as we are seeing now with the full-scale onslaught of Project 2025.
• These growing inequalities have spawned the rise of right-wing parties across the world, posing as populism, but really more interested in empowering autocrats, strongmen, and dictators (what is the “Unitary Executive” if not a dictator?). These ascendant right-wing parties are in the business of blaming the victims of exploitation and colonization for what are essentially the internal weakness and unsustainability of our current system.
• International inequality, along with collapsing ecosystems, due to global warming, resource depletion, and the cratering of natural life-support processes, are also generating accelerating migration, as people flee oppression and lack of opportunity, in search of better lives in the global North.
• And underneath it all is the fundamental ecological unsustainability of the entire global system of industrial-consumer civilization, something which more and more people sense in their guts, but don’t know how to deal with, aside from the free-floating concern for “climate change”, which is just one part of the overall natural cataclysm, and the disappearance of wild animal species and groups, which is addressed through nature programs and green charities/NGOs. But there is almost never any discussion about how every major natural support system on the planet is in rapid decline: global warming, fresh water disappearance, deforestation, coral reef die-off, collapsing biodiversity, topsoil loss, the profusion of microplastics and forever chemicals in our food chains and bodies, the unbalancing of the nitrogen-phosphorous cycles, etc.

At this macro-level, we really can’t stand to hear all this bad news, because there doesn’t appear to be anything we can really do about it. The current regime in the US won’t even acknowledge the settled science on these issues, let alone propose anything to be done. The defunding and disappearance of science research, combined with a repeated mantra of “drill baby, drill,” are not positive opening salvos for domestic action or international cooperation regarding ecological collapse.

Further, we can’t face the brute fact staring us in the face: that our way of life itself cannot continue, as it is presently formatted. Perpetual economic growth is not possible. Trickle-down will never work. Full employment in a robust sense, where jobs and careers are stable, well-paid, and dignity-generating, is gone forever. Careerism, as such, is dead, especially in America, because labor-value is in decline, mainly due to the power-concentrating nature of technology. Plutocrats will not surrender economic, political, or social power, and our societies are virtually hermetically sealed against actual change.

Future Path #1

If nothing is done about all the above issues, then we’re headed for a bleak future, as countries will continue to pursue nonsensical, illusory goals, as the entire system corrodes underneath. In the US, if Trumpism outlives the Orange One himself, we are looking at a full-scale alignment of the US with Russia and other autocratic regimes (we’re mostly there already), and against the “soft” societies of Europe and the 500-lb gorilla of China. And speaking of Europe, which has built the most successful societies in human history — it is not immune to the downward trends. They are also feeling the pinch of demographic transition, accelerating immigration, and the subsequent rise of right-wing autocratic parties.

To put it another way, countries seem to be preparing for another nation-state based global conflagration, largely spurred on by the US and Russia, but it will play out in a natural world that is dissolving beneath us. This path is basically just world leaders pretending that we still live in an indestructible ecological landscape, where we can push our weapons and technology around on a life-size Risk board, with little thought to the actual material conditions of our natural home.

This will be the last gasp of the Machine, in the broadest sense of the word, which could be defined as: treating the natural world as a technic or mechanism, where every part can be manipulated, improved, and augmented. In this view, everything is interchangeable: land, labor, money, information, content, technology, power.

This desperate attempt to see the world as a giant machine, which humans can change, re-design, and re-deploy at will, will allow the “great” nations to continue their patriot games, moving pieces around so that there will appear to be clear-cut winners and losers. But reality — ecological reality, natural reality — will not brook these machinations much longer.

As the meta-collapse of natural systems deepens, all these old worldviews will totter and fall. We’re seeing this now. The rise of right-wing “populism” is a direct result of the chaos being churned out by a dying system. And it’s really not that complicated, on the surface: aging societies, due to demographic transition, need influxes of cheap products and labor from abroad, because the existing plutocracies make these societies economically top-heavy. The result is mass immigration to fill the working-age niches, which then generates right-wing backlash.

In the US, the Polarization Industrial Complex has developed to handle this situation. It is a segment or tool of the plutocracy that tries to explain away systemic injustice and collapse via dualistic scapegoating, but that still attempts to fend off full-scale rebellion and overthrow of the whole system. Trumpism and the MAGA multiverse are signs that the PIC project is reaching the limits of its dissembling to ward off catastrophe. The demonization of the Other, which has been the conservative master motif for the last 30 years, cannot work forever, if the underlying conditions are not changed. Eventually, it tips over into full-spectrum fascism and violent authoritarianism.

The Other Path

So the path of the machine leads to meta-collapse. Pretending that everything can be controlled will result in widening spheres of despotism and authoritarianism, which will do untold amounts of damage before eventually just collapsing altogether, as part of an overall civilizational collapse, the unavoidable fate of an unsustainable system.

Instead, we could choose a different path, and live as animals again, instead of machines. The machine is about controlling from above, using power to eliminate all diversity and dissent, so that the system can theoretically continue to deliver the goodies to a numerically-shrinking but powerful segment of the population. Living as a creature means recognizing our actual needs and capabilities as animals, and creating foundational living units that can satisfy those needs while withdrawing energy and consent to the top-down machine.

What are our actual needs? Well, we need security and predictability, not necessarily jobs. We need general shelter, but not necessarily single-family houses and apartments, which are incredibly ecologically, economically, and psychologically wasteful and destructive. We need direct social interaction with a good-sized group of intimates, not virtual communities as our primary means of social contact. We need support, cooperation, and solidarity from and with others, not just “success.” We need small-group stability and flexibility, not massive ideological identity tribes served up to us by the plutocratic organs of mass media. We need natural curiosity and skepticism, not blind faith and patriotism. And we need more human faces, not more screens.

CODA

Regular readers of this blog know what my proposals are for getting things back on track. I don’t have space here to rehash that, so please check out older posts, to see my views on Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory

But in closing, I wanted to quickly look at AI, perhaps the most salient manifestation of The Machine right now. The emptiest of promises is: “Oh, AI will free up people to be shepherds and curators of technology, to be be creative workers instead of passive task-doers. So we don’t need to worry about AI wrecking everything. We’ll adjust to it like we have to every other challenge we have faced.”

Really? The rise of right-wing populism inside Western societies is all about people rejecting this machine future and wanting to go back to a time when there weren’t hundreds of emails in our in-box every day; when we could call a company and speak to a person who could understand you, and whom you could understand; when there wasn’t self-service portals for everything, with triple passcode encryption and authentication; when we didn’t have to worry about people stealing our identities and scamming our seniors out of cash; when we didn’t have to start GoFundMe pages to pay for necessary medicines and surgeries.

And the very generational cohorts who might be expected to welcome the AI-Shepherd model, our younger generations, are dwindling in number and are awash in debt and desperation. When you can’t find a stable job, and you can’t afford to get married, have kids, buy a house, save for retirement, or even go on a vacation, it is difficult to see how younger people will welcome the creative destruction that is coming via AI. They are feeling less like shepherds and more like lambs led to slaughter.

The right-wing dystopia that we are experiencing now is not something that popped up overnight. It is the culmination of a decades-long project of social engineering, a pursuit of a very specific machine-version of America (and the world), where everything is subsumed into the faux-patriotic, ethnoreligious-nationalist BORG, where all difference and dissent are demonized and expunged, and where the current BORG leader’s name is emblazoned on coins, buildings, battleships, Bibles, and golden sneakers.

There is a temptation to view Trumpism as the pursuit of a more personalized past. But in reality, it is a quest for a totalizing machine future, where human beings are just fuel/consumer for a potent plutocratic apparatus, a totalizing system that is flattening all true humanity and creaturehood.

Recapturing that creaturehood, and thus our true humanity, is our pressing mission, perhaps our last. We can either swim in the natural waters of biological and ecological limits and imperatives, or we can sink into the Trumpian BORG future, where we are all just grist for the satanic mill gears of authoritarian domination.

(Cover Image: “De Haan Two Paths,” by Laura K Smith, 2020)