The most brilliant analysis of the invisble forces that bind our thoughts, actions and emotions I have ever read. How you got here, I have no idea, but this is great thinking on every level. Thank you!
Excellent. I am looking forward to the development of these arguments and images. I am not fully persuaded on the 500-year habit of division, but look forward to how you develop this mentality. I had a thought on the bunker metaphor. The virtual bunker of the Whitehouse Situation Room has become the preeminent image of the deployment of power by US 'statesmen'. No more Napoleon on a horse, but Trump, Biden, Obama all watching the screens in the situation room as some Special operations team commits murder for them. This is the image routinely used to display the new logic of power from the killing of Bin Laden to the capture of Maduro. Voyeurs of the vanquishing of their enemies. And it seems to offer a special benefit to the control of the citizen. Every citizen - through these news reports and through movies, TV and games - can vicariously place themselves in the same position. Through offering their opinion on world events, they can pose as powerfully as a participant in battle. This bunker is not a gloomy dungeon cell. It is an invitation to push the buttons and say the words that can send death squads into any corner of the globe. It is a form of seductive co-option that perhaps underpins some of the psychology of many elite and mass supporters of the new logic of power.
Thank you, Jeff. I’m honestly also not convinced by the 500-year habit of division. It goes back a bit further. But it’s placative for the subtitle. I’ll get back to comment on your commentary, but I just wanted to say, I would say 500 years is not enough, the habit or orientation framework rather, goes further back in time. I’m still developing everything that’s in this essay. I would even say, monotheism has something to do with it (but even there, I would be cautious, because it’s monotheism used by whom and for what purposes? And did it actually remain pure or became syncretism? And what was used for the benefit of whom?)
You are onto something. This is a nice way to illustrate the strategy. Bunker—so good. I've intuited and followed my own musings on the 'bunker mentality' of new money and the myth of the West since before Bezos started building in Closeburn, Queenstown, around 2017. Now he's building data centers, and the TESCREAL crowd is eyeing Iceland, not only Greenland, for the energy for the Bunker Brains Network. The Great Game began falling apart in the 60s. Whatever you want to call the Anglosphere, the Players there have known for a long time that 'this thing of ours' was zombifying. We are now in the grip of several forms of accelerationism. Securocracy—quite good. It also links to global financialization. The Players' returns on capital must be transformed into physical assets tout suite to control the zero-sum Go board (Go is impossible for them to fathom) while they max power principle their way to building a Dyson Sphere around the Multiverse. One only has to watch the entertainment fare to understand the mentality. Being a huge fan of living systems, physics, Great Nature, minimum viable metaphysics, and of course, mother thermodynamics, I also like your shining a light on The Anti-Entropic State. Very good—'stay the course until the country club is secured' and the most psychopathic people in the room can get on with their twisted efforts at immortality. This form of supremacy is beyond the dark tetrad; nothing less than demonic metaphors can describe it. I am also glad you focus on 20th-century history to the present, and future, as there is too much else to dive deeply into over the past 7K years. Not to mention domains that focus on humankind. Metastatic modern techno-industrial civilization should remain the focus. We can't zoom out too far or zoom in too far; the focus must contain the right pixel density to be intellectually and emotionally salient. I think you can find a better word than "Manichean" for that illustration. I'm not sure what to suggest at this moment. So much to play with here...I like where you are going with it; all trains of thought must be translated into action. This thing of ours is dying fast, and the so-called garden was a flash if it existed at all. We must avoid the most horrific, painful, and violent of depopulation strategies. The new growth model they articulate (trust me, it's in there) is, if there is such a thing, pure evil. All the best with it. I will be following closely and sharing your work.
A lot of this relies on devious plans to sacrifice everyone, being dressed up in bureaucratic languge and pretended to be something else. Because telling millions of people that you plan to sacrifice their lives and property and liberty, for the enrichment of a tiny elite.....is not exactly a pitch that would be easy to sell.
So it is important to not be a knowing participant, or unwitting amplifier of the propaganda efforts. All this "civil readiness", "resilience" and whatever else they disguise it as: call it out. Refuse to accept and keep repeating the assumptions unchallenged. Which is what they want you to do. Don't do it. Say what is and be willing to be unpopular at first for saying so.
I just watched your interview on Neutrality Studies and have now begun reading your work. Thank you for articulating and analyzing what so many of us are perceiving at almost perhaps subliminal levels, but have lacked the ability to fully understand or describe. Excellent work and much appreciated.
Is there a section missing, right at the beginning of the paper following the first paragraph? I pose the question only because the next paragraph begins with the word “Thirdly” which would lead one to believe or surmise that there were two previous points, arguments, ideas, etc. articulated before this “third” item, which is clearly not the case. Please advise. Thank you!
“Thus, in essence, it is both: the control of resources and the of the worldview itself. You cannot do one without the other”
This is a core issue that is lost on a lot of analysts that focus on one field or the other. The complementarity of the fields and their overlap is critical to understanding power enforcement and dynamic deployment.
“ Herein, the population is conceived as a battlespace within a continuous cognitive war”
An excellent point, that has largely existed within decision making circles but as you rightly point out, is seeing reduced checks on its expression.
“This creates an opinion corridor with a narrow “green” zone supporting the official Manichean myth (We are Good, They are Evil). Any thought that humanizes the enemy or questions the siege, anything loosely alignable with a “strategic competitor”, falls into a “red” zone of treason-adjacent hybrid warfare.”
Precisely, because eroding the dichotomy would invite alternatives to security and adversarial approaches and those are less susceptible to outright management. The narrative control in this case becomes a foundational issue, whereby contradicting it becomes a quasi blasphemous position requiring intervention and suppression because by doing so the disagree puts themselves in the ‘evil’ camp.
““Allies expect adaptation of national plans to fulfil NATO targets.”
This is one of the core issues that will be rather difficult to overcome for European governments, not only insofar as NATO but also the EU itself; I have written on the tug of war between governments and large broad based organizations of which they are members, the gist of which is that if governments do not consciously keep these institutions in check, they will find their own interests supplanted by those of the organizations themselves as separate entities rather than amalgams of the member states.
Against this backdrop I am wondering about the whole Greenland situation. The most plausible explanation to me at the moment appears to be that the trump admin is trying to break NATO, against the will of European allies, but more crucially the own security establishment, congress, etc (by forcing the Europeans to leave). What do you think? What would be the European response in case he actually goes through with it? Or is it more of a power move to get them even more on board with US leadership in what you are describing? Barely seems necessary....
In my opinion there is a lot of US/Europe breakdown scenification that is not real. We don't generally understand Trump's wrestling (fake fighting) mentality, he constantly plays those pseudo-wrestlers, mostly as scripted supervillain, that's his style and our European chieftains run along with that within a wider plan that is designed by the NATOist deep state (mostly Wall Street, CIA-Gladio, etc.), which is well above the Mega-President himself.
The whole plan seems to be to actually have the European (and Canadian?) war dog pack to attack the Russian bear (with whatever pretext, art. 5 will be invoked surely but not fully adhered to, definitely not by the USA, NATO may be formally split, US bases may be evacuated even). This may happen in a matter of months even (preparations are already ongoing, Ukraine is in a tough spot, etc.) As much of the plan probably involves blockading Russia's ports (the European joint navy is much larger than the Russian one), Greenland and Canada seem important for Arctic Sea operations, therefore I think that, while the annexation of Greenland and Canada by the USA is a real ongoing operation, it will be delayed for several years while the Euro-Russian war takes place and potentially forces Moscow to accept worse terms in Ukraine.
Then and only then Greenland and Canada will be annexed to the USA, probably on "security" pretexts and after Canada especially has suffered enough to accept Anschluss as lesser evil.
Enjoyed reading your work. I wish this could be taught in every school on the planet so that students learn to understand and recognise the various machinations of power and how to resist these hegemonic forces at every level through conscious praxis. Thank you for writing this.
Absolutely brilliant and exactly what is needed at this moment. It explains why all western nations have conspired in the genocide of Palestinians, the never ending ramping up of the war against Russia, China, Venezuela, …. A framework for analysing and understanding these events.
You have a great talent for identifying mechanisms, conceptualizing, naming names and linking to philosophical renunciation.
These generals seem to have taken it upon themselves to convey our civilization's decay in an orderly fashion, shielding us from chaos. They appear to be giving us time to get our affairs in order before the ecological mayhem and the final energetic cooling.
The transatlantics (the aspiring globalists) seem to be retreating from the 'save the earth' and 'population degrowth' agendas. I wonder what remains of their hopes to—at the very least—ensure their own survival.
Do you infer a causal link between this new phase of the grief cycle and this shift in the defense paradigm?
Valuable analysis in a someway idiosyncratic terminology. What is missing in the cautiously phénoménologically restricted analysis is like the difference between Kopernikus and Newton: the description of the structural aspects of the system presented is the dynamics, the inner forces that configure its actual state, it's development and the necessities that enforce these developments of the global system modernity created, when it is considered that modernity itself was an attempt to escape intrinsic problems of the forms of human order it put an end to, like a man who runs to prevent to fall, with all the aspects of acceleration we witnessed since industrialization set in with all the consequences of permanent disruption of all traditional forms, and the causes that keep imposing their impact on the necessities of the further development that the author tries to capture without acknowledgement of these necessiities or fatalities the processes intentionally managed or reacted to impose on all of its actors whether they affirm or refute them and act accordingly. 👍🎶
Lots of great insights. I'm old enough to still wonder how we came to accept that telephone conversations and Internet exchanges could be tapped without a court order, really. It happened gradually but definitely 2017 (algorithmization, Russiagate), 2020 (pandemic scare and related censorship) and 2023 (Palestinian genocide and brutal increase in online censorship) are milestones in this authoritarian fascistoid degeneracy process.
"Death of politics" is not really a thing however. Reminds me of Fukuyama's "end of History" claim, of which he later repented (now he seems to adhere himself to some sort of Marxism, go figure!). I guess that what you mean is the death of representative or "democratic" politics rather and the return to a neo-Tsarism (or neofascism if you prefer) and thus to the road to 1917, this time, as Marx forecast, in Europe (or otherwise developed socio-economies but Europe is more conscious than the rest and arguably somewhat better organized). Europe also need something like that on "nationalist" (continentalist?) grounds, because the key to our degradation into a US quasi-colony is that Wall Street has taken over our economies (and thus also the media, and thus also the politicians) in ways never seen before, so mass expropriation (radical socialism or communism) is our only hope as Europeans.
Yes, exactly! It's about death of representative politics. I must say, I did use a bit of placative language here, but you are right. Everything in this essay is still under construction, but precision is important, and yes, it's about the death of a specific type of politics. And you are seeing things correctly, even though I would argue, the US needs to be transformed, as well. Otherwise the cycle will repeat itself.
The most brilliant analysis of the invisble forces that bind our thoughts, actions and emotions I have ever read. How you got here, I have no idea, but this is great thinking on every level. Thank you!
Excellent. I am looking forward to the development of these arguments and images. I am not fully persuaded on the 500-year habit of division, but look forward to how you develop this mentality. I had a thought on the bunker metaphor. The virtual bunker of the Whitehouse Situation Room has become the preeminent image of the deployment of power by US 'statesmen'. No more Napoleon on a horse, but Trump, Biden, Obama all watching the screens in the situation room as some Special operations team commits murder for them. This is the image routinely used to display the new logic of power from the killing of Bin Laden to the capture of Maduro. Voyeurs of the vanquishing of their enemies. And it seems to offer a special benefit to the control of the citizen. Every citizen - through these news reports and through movies, TV and games - can vicariously place themselves in the same position. Through offering their opinion on world events, they can pose as powerfully as a participant in battle. This bunker is not a gloomy dungeon cell. It is an invitation to push the buttons and say the words that can send death squads into any corner of the globe. It is a form of seductive co-option that perhaps underpins some of the psychology of many elite and mass supporters of the new logic of power.
Thank you, Jeff. I’m honestly also not convinced by the 500-year habit of division. It goes back a bit further. But it’s placative for the subtitle. I’ll get back to comment on your commentary, but I just wanted to say, I would say 500 years is not enough, the habit or orientation framework rather, goes further back in time. I’m still developing everything that’s in this essay. I would even say, monotheism has something to do with it (but even there, I would be cautious, because it’s monotheism used by whom and for what purposes? And did it actually remain pure or became syncretism? And what was used for the benefit of whom?)
You are onto something. This is a nice way to illustrate the strategy. Bunker—so good. I've intuited and followed my own musings on the 'bunker mentality' of new money and the myth of the West since before Bezos started building in Closeburn, Queenstown, around 2017. Now he's building data centers, and the TESCREAL crowd is eyeing Iceland, not only Greenland, for the energy for the Bunker Brains Network. The Great Game began falling apart in the 60s. Whatever you want to call the Anglosphere, the Players there have known for a long time that 'this thing of ours' was zombifying. We are now in the grip of several forms of accelerationism. Securocracy—quite good. It also links to global financialization. The Players' returns on capital must be transformed into physical assets tout suite to control the zero-sum Go board (Go is impossible for them to fathom) while they max power principle their way to building a Dyson Sphere around the Multiverse. One only has to watch the entertainment fare to understand the mentality. Being a huge fan of living systems, physics, Great Nature, minimum viable metaphysics, and of course, mother thermodynamics, I also like your shining a light on The Anti-Entropic State. Very good—'stay the course until the country club is secured' and the most psychopathic people in the room can get on with their twisted efforts at immortality. This form of supremacy is beyond the dark tetrad; nothing less than demonic metaphors can describe it. I am also glad you focus on 20th-century history to the present, and future, as there is too much else to dive deeply into over the past 7K years. Not to mention domains that focus on humankind. Metastatic modern techno-industrial civilization should remain the focus. We can't zoom out too far or zoom in too far; the focus must contain the right pixel density to be intellectually and emotionally salient. I think you can find a better word than "Manichean" for that illustration. I'm not sure what to suggest at this moment. So much to play with here...I like where you are going with it; all trains of thought must be translated into action. This thing of ours is dying fast, and the so-called garden was a flash if it existed at all. We must avoid the most horrific, painful, and violent of depopulation strategies. The new growth model they articulate (trust me, it's in there) is, if there is such a thing, pure evil. All the best with it. I will be following closely and sharing your work.
Well said. You have a firm grasp of the overall situation.
A lot of this relies on devious plans to sacrifice everyone, being dressed up in bureaucratic languge and pretended to be something else. Because telling millions of people that you plan to sacrifice their lives and property and liberty, for the enrichment of a tiny elite.....is not exactly a pitch that would be easy to sell.
So it is important to not be a knowing participant, or unwitting amplifier of the propaganda efforts. All this "civil readiness", "resilience" and whatever else they disguise it as: call it out. Refuse to accept and keep repeating the assumptions unchallenged. Which is what they want you to do. Don't do it. Say what is and be willing to be unpopular at first for saying so.
I just watched your interview on Neutrality Studies and have now begun reading your work. Thank you for articulating and analyzing what so many of us are perceiving at almost perhaps subliminal levels, but have lacked the ability to fully understand or describe. Excellent work and much appreciated.
Is there a section missing, right at the beginning of the paper following the first paragraph? I pose the question only because the next paragraph begins with the word “Thirdly” which would lead one to believe or surmise that there were two previous points, arguments, ideas, etc. articulated before this “third” item, which is clearly not the case. Please advise. Thank you!
Fantastic as always Nel.
Look forward to reading more!
Specific comments on this article follow:
“Thus, in essence, it is both: the control of resources and the of the worldview itself. You cannot do one without the other”
This is a core issue that is lost on a lot of analysts that focus on one field or the other. The complementarity of the fields and their overlap is critical to understanding power enforcement and dynamic deployment.
“ Herein, the population is conceived as a battlespace within a continuous cognitive war”
An excellent point, that has largely existed within decision making circles but as you rightly point out, is seeing reduced checks on its expression.
“This creates an opinion corridor with a narrow “green” zone supporting the official Manichean myth (We are Good, They are Evil). Any thought that humanizes the enemy or questions the siege, anything loosely alignable with a “strategic competitor”, falls into a “red” zone of treason-adjacent hybrid warfare.”
Precisely, because eroding the dichotomy would invite alternatives to security and adversarial approaches and those are less susceptible to outright management. The narrative control in this case becomes a foundational issue, whereby contradicting it becomes a quasi blasphemous position requiring intervention and suppression because by doing so the disagree puts themselves in the ‘evil’ camp.
““Allies expect adaptation of national plans to fulfil NATO targets.”
This is one of the core issues that will be rather difficult to overcome for European governments, not only insofar as NATO but also the EU itself; I have written on the tug of war between governments and large broad based organizations of which they are members, the gist of which is that if governments do not consciously keep these institutions in check, they will find their own interests supplanted by those of the organizations themselves as separate entities rather than amalgams of the member states.
Very interesting. Thank you Nel!
Against this backdrop I am wondering about the whole Greenland situation. The most plausible explanation to me at the moment appears to be that the trump admin is trying to break NATO, against the will of European allies, but more crucially the own security establishment, congress, etc (by forcing the Europeans to leave). What do you think? What would be the European response in case he actually goes through with it? Or is it more of a power move to get them even more on board with US leadership in what you are describing? Barely seems necessary....
In my opinion there is a lot of US/Europe breakdown scenification that is not real. We don't generally understand Trump's wrestling (fake fighting) mentality, he constantly plays those pseudo-wrestlers, mostly as scripted supervillain, that's his style and our European chieftains run along with that within a wider plan that is designed by the NATOist deep state (mostly Wall Street, CIA-Gladio, etc.), which is well above the Mega-President himself.
The whole plan seems to be to actually have the European (and Canadian?) war dog pack to attack the Russian bear (with whatever pretext, art. 5 will be invoked surely but not fully adhered to, definitely not by the USA, NATO may be formally split, US bases may be evacuated even). This may happen in a matter of months even (preparations are already ongoing, Ukraine is in a tough spot, etc.) As much of the plan probably involves blockading Russia's ports (the European joint navy is much larger than the Russian one), Greenland and Canada seem important for Arctic Sea operations, therefore I think that, while the annexation of Greenland and Canada by the USA is a real ongoing operation, it will be delayed for several years while the Euro-Russian war takes place and potentially forces Moscow to accept worse terms in Ukraine.
Then and only then Greenland and Canada will be annexed to the USA, probably on "security" pretexts and after Canada especially has suffered enough to accept Anschluss as lesser evil.
No.
The US has bilateral military pacts ( Defence Cooperation Agreement) with every NATO member in Europe that are far more invasive than NATO.
This is playacting to induce European public to accept their kids being mobized abd sent to Greenland to occupy it.
as eloquent as it is disturbing , thank you nel
Enjoyed reading your work. I wish this could be taught in every school on the planet so that students learn to understand and recognise the various machinations of power and how to resist these hegemonic forces at every level through conscious praxis. Thank you for writing this.
Thank you for this excellent piece, translated in French here : https://zanzibar.substack.com/p/le-bunker-and-le-vide-introduction
Absolutely brilliant and exactly what is needed at this moment. It explains why all western nations have conspired in the genocide of Palestinians, the never ending ramping up of the war against Russia, China, Venezuela, …. A framework for analysing and understanding these events.
Hi Nel,
You have a great talent for identifying mechanisms, conceptualizing, naming names and linking to philosophical renunciation.
These generals seem to have taken it upon themselves to convey our civilization's decay in an orderly fashion, shielding us from chaos. They appear to be giving us time to get our affairs in order before the ecological mayhem and the final energetic cooling.
The transatlantics (the aspiring globalists) seem to be retreating from the 'save the earth' and 'population degrowth' agendas. I wonder what remains of their hopes to—at the very least—ensure their own survival.
Do you infer a causal link between this new phase of the grief cycle and this shift in the defense paradigm?
Valuable analysis in a someway idiosyncratic terminology. What is missing in the cautiously phénoménologically restricted analysis is like the difference between Kopernikus and Newton: the description of the structural aspects of the system presented is the dynamics, the inner forces that configure its actual state, it's development and the necessities that enforce these developments of the global system modernity created, when it is considered that modernity itself was an attempt to escape intrinsic problems of the forms of human order it put an end to, like a man who runs to prevent to fall, with all the aspects of acceleration we witnessed since industrialization set in with all the consequences of permanent disruption of all traditional forms, and the causes that keep imposing their impact on the necessities of the further development that the author tries to capture without acknowledgement of these necessiities or fatalities the processes intentionally managed or reacted to impose on all of its actors whether they affirm or refute them and act accordingly. 👍🎶
Lots of great insights. I'm old enough to still wonder how we came to accept that telephone conversations and Internet exchanges could be tapped without a court order, really. It happened gradually but definitely 2017 (algorithmization, Russiagate), 2020 (pandemic scare and related censorship) and 2023 (Palestinian genocide and brutal increase in online censorship) are milestones in this authoritarian fascistoid degeneracy process.
"Death of politics" is not really a thing however. Reminds me of Fukuyama's "end of History" claim, of which he later repented (now he seems to adhere himself to some sort of Marxism, go figure!). I guess that what you mean is the death of representative or "democratic" politics rather and the return to a neo-Tsarism (or neofascism if you prefer) and thus to the road to 1917, this time, as Marx forecast, in Europe (or otherwise developed socio-economies but Europe is more conscious than the rest and arguably somewhat better organized). Europe also need something like that on "nationalist" (continentalist?) grounds, because the key to our degradation into a US quasi-colony is that Wall Street has taken over our economies (and thus also the media, and thus also the politicians) in ways never seen before, so mass expropriation (radical socialism or communism) is our only hope as Europeans.
Yes, exactly! It's about death of representative politics. I must say, I did use a bit of placative language here, but you are right. Everything in this essay is still under construction, but precision is important, and yes, it's about the death of a specific type of politics. And you are seeing things correctly, even though I would argue, the US needs to be transformed, as well. Otherwise the cycle will repeat itself.