Monsoonami 4

Dear me

Is this the slow march to the end of the world? 

Joe Biden, the forgettable 46th, was right when he said that whatever happens in the next 2 to 3 years may shape the next 50 to 60 years. He may have meant different things, including the coming of Agentic AI, the convergence of biotech with it, ascendancy of Trump, the reconfiguration of geopolitics or a final destruction of the global monetary system of the post-war variety! Perhaps all of it, all at once! 

History is usually invisible, buried deep in everyday life. Until such moments when we completely forget about it and our 'death instincts' get better of us, we don't get it to see it. But we see it then, in its terrible flourish! The only metaphor that I can think of is of a flash flood, which turns a gentle and friendly stream into a sudden death trap, carrying all before it, but then the force vanishes and the tranquility returns as if nothing ever happened. Those who know of such terrible possibilities live in fear forever and sometimes see in a gentle wave premonition of the doom, but others, unmindful of the possibility of the flood, get into the stream all too readily and most of them enjoy, until the flood returns again, without a wave bringing its warning. Then all are caught by surprise - those who never knew the flood but also those who expected the waves to bring a warning! 

But so is the fate of someone tuned to the footsteps of history! I imagine it everywhere, in the exuberance of the entrepreneurs, who are currently winning and believe this would last forever, and those on the other side, whose ways of life have suddenly become redundant and who indulge in doom-saying. One knows that it wouldn't be a heaven on earth nor it would result in total destruction of human civilisation, but only a moment or two of history, which may stretch beyond my lifetime but would just be another story in the annals of time. There is nothing to hope for it, and neither to fear, but preparing for it is perhaps wise though one doesn't know how to prepare for it.

The war in Ukraine may be ending and may not become the third world war that we were fearing, but the war's end may not be what anyone foresaw. It won't be one of those majestic win-and-lose type endings, but rather a mangled anti-climax which won't have a winner or a loser, but a return to business as usual as if the people who died inbetween did not exist. Both sides would claim a strategic victory and Trump would want a Nobel Prize (just to get even with Obama), but that's not the moment of history. 

It is that people fear anarchy more than tyranny and an anarchic age has come. I don't believe in America keeping the peace - I come from the other side of the imperial divide - but I know peace is kept by a delicate balance of self-interest and death instinct which is now out of balance! The war-mongering liberals have tried to change too much too fast and have now failed. The point is not that the government's are falling - Syria and Bangladesh are two examples - but these are not followed by the usual fall of the dictator enthusiasm, but general uncertainty and, if I could call it that, a sublime anarchy, where the future is generally unknown and unknowable.

Perhaps it won't be bad - Syria and Bangladesh - when the incoming billionaire administration in the US changes the game and sees the world, free of good guys/ bad guys divide, as a flat world of doing business at any cost. But one can't be sure, because there are too many madmen around now. Nothing would end, I reassure myself, except the world I know.

On that note, I sign off. 

S