Primate Politics and Vacuum Bombs
Plus some silver linings in the Ukrainian doom clouds
Help! I got fixated on the Ukraine war and can barely think about anything else.
Over the last two weeks, I have consumed innumerable essays, articles, podcasts, videos, live news feeds, Twitter threads, intelligence reports, also books (Timothy Synder’s The Road to Unfreedom, Robert Kagan’s The Jungle Grows Back, and Tony Wood’s Russia Without Putin, and Andrew Wilson’s Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West among them) seeking to understand what the war means, how it could unfold, what it portends for the future. Now that it is underway, this brutal assault is the obvious continuation of many historical trends and prophetic warnings. It is wrenching to watch.
Studying this war makes me realize I have been remiss, for many years, in tracking conflicts across the world. I admit I haven’t studied the intricacies of Yemen, Syria, Chechnya, and so on. I never even took the time to fully delve into the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I have therefore reserved judgment, out of ignorance. While I opposed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I haven’t assessed the depth of America’s culpability and responsibility in recent conflicts.
I find I am responding to this war more viscerally than I have to other ones. There are a few reasons for this, aside from the media propaganda. One is, admittedly, tribalism: My mother’s family comes from Eastern Europe. I feel more innate kinship with people from Kiyiv and Odessa – places I now wish I had visited – than I do with populations in South America, Asia, the Middle East. Some of my friends from Latin America or the Middle East are angry that Americans and Europeans seem to prioritize the lives of white Europeans over other slaughtered populations. I understand their anger. I will try to address this in the future — but any individual can only do so much. Apparently Kyiv was becoming a new cultural Mecca — the next Berlin. Now, instead of creative flourishing and youthful idealism, they suffer artillery bombardment and mindless annihilation.
This war has world historical significance. It is a reckoning we can’t escape. Against our will, we have been dragged into a world war fought, yet again, between deeply flawed liberal Democracies and soul-crushing autocracies. This is something most of us thought we would never see in our lifetimes. A repeat of the 1930s; a ghastly history lesson.
Beyond this particular horror, we confront a larger existential crisis as a species. Our political and economic systems “perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence,” Herbert Marcuse wrote, along with an excessive imbalance between the masculine and feminine polarities of the Psyche. The patriarchy has reached a degenerate phase. Trump — a flabby Reality TV caricature of the Strong Man archetype, an avatar of entitled, “toxic masculinity” — exemplifies this. With Putin, we see the twisted rage of the male ego, which turns diabolic, psychopathic, given unlimited power over others.
I hope there is a “lesson we must learn” from this catastrophe. Otherwise we approach the end of the line for this civilization, perhaps for humanity as a whole. To survive and thrive, we must rapidly evolve new political and social structures where destructive power does not concentrate and centralize to this extent. The ecological emergency must be addressed, which means dismantling the fossil fuel economy.
The human male’s testosterone-fueled tendency toward primate aggression — Alpha conquest and Beta revenge — is a flaw in our evolutionary program. Today we combine the visceral competitive chest-beating traits inherited from our bestial past with exponential technologies, ranging from AI-powered stock trading systems and social media algorithms, to biological weapons and hydrogen bombs.
We possess super-advanced technologies of disruption and decimation, yet we still behave like apes.
I don’t see how we get much further without a transformation of consciousness via something like the Hundredth Monkey Principle or Sheldrake’s “Morphic Resonance”. Perhaps this could happen through a new kind of social (re-)engineering. As I explored in How Soon Is Now, we could apply all our accumulated knowledge of human psychology, the power of persuasion, Neurolinguistic Programming, marketing, advertising, and so on, to undo the current program of hyper-individualism and hyper-consumerism — to redefine ourselves as participatory agents of a planetary ecology, and rapidly evolve. Artificial Intelligence might assist us in this. I admit this is a controversial, weird, dangerous idea. But something must be done.
We should take the threat of nuclear destruction, repeatedly invoked by Putin, seriously.
A former associate — an oligarch in exile — calls Putin an “enemy of humanity.” He is a narcissistic sociopath, lacking empathy or conscience, ideologically fixated on an abstract goal, a phantasm of power, that he and his inner circle believe to be more important than any number of human lives. The goal he pursues is the reinstatement of Russia’s former glory as a Great Power, an Empire. This means conquering the physical territory of nations that are now independent, subjecting their resistant populations to brutal, dictatorial control.
Exploring the reasons for Russia’s attack on Ukraine back in 2014, Andrew Wilson writes in Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West: “Russia’s action was really Putin’s action, but it was also the product of Russia’s addiction to dangerous myths — myths which, at some point in the 1990s, the world stopped correcting: that Russia had been ‘humiliated’; that the former USSR was the ‘lost territory’ of historical Russia; that Russia’s historic fear of encirclement was replaying itself because of NATO expansion. Russia has the world’s biggest persecution complex. Maybe Russia had been humiliated, but if so it is by other Russians — both the oligarchs who dominated the Yeltsin era and those who rule it now (known in Russia simply as ‘Putin’s friends’), who happen to be much richer than their predecessors in the 1990s.” If the West has often engaged in geopolitics based upon greed and self interest, Putin is fueled by a yearning for vengeance — against America, NATO, the former Soviet bloc, dissidents, and so on. As a basis for geopolitics, greed may be bad, but vengeance is far worse.
It does not seem, according to his own speeches, that Putin, with 900,000 soldiers in his army and 6,000 nuclear missiles in his arsenal, intends to stop with Ukraine. The good news is that it seems Russia’s conventional military capacity is, for a number of reasons, far less impressive than anticipated. The Russian army may get bogged down in Ukraine. Despite an overwhelming preponderance of force, they might even lose. In any event, it does not seem likely they can attain a meaningful victory. They will be permanently despised by the Ukrainians. Any occupation will be fiercely opposed.
As we have seen in the past, the dictatorial personality is a particular kind of criminal psychopath, driven by Thanatos, the unconscious Freudian death drive, to continue until the end, like a renegade killer drone. A distorted idealism and hubris often grows, metastasizes, along with such power. The danger is that such a personality may prefer universal destruction to personal humiliation or capitulation. One way to make your mark on history is to end it.
Th Ukraine war is a horrific catastrophe, a willful act of barbaric cruelty against a peaceful non-aggressor (I will address the narrative around NATO and Ukraine as part o Russia’s “Sphere of Influence” in a future essay). Even if it doesn’t lead to nuclear Armageddon, the war will have global consequences. One major concern is the impact on the world’s food supply. However, good things may also come from this conflict — silver linings in the bleak doom cloud. The Ukraine war could help:
Revitalize liberal Democratic ideals (as a starting point)
Accelerate the global shift to renewable energy
Ignite the global anti-war movement along with the (necessary) movement to dismantle the world’s nuclear arsenals
initiate a structural change in post-industrial civilization toward socialism / anarchism, or “commons-based peer production”
Reckon with the pathology of extreme centralized power as a cancerous expression of masculine egotism/aggression, and develop new horizontal social systems (decentralization) that fully integrate feminine polarities
I will review these prospects in my next essay.
Glad you're digging into this, Daniel. I've spent the past two weeks going down the Ukraine-Russia-US-NATO rabbit hole as well. While I've also been lax in tracking the history of geopolitical conflicts in this region, what I'm learning accords with my views on the postwar (problematic term!) world writ large. Studying books like Gregg Grandin's "Empire's Workshop" and overloading on anti-imperialist media/podcasts (e.g., Blowback, Moderate Rebels, TrueAnon, Chris Hedges 'On Contact') over the past 8 or so years has made me deeply cynical about the US/Western liberal democratic project. Whatever estimable values and tangible improvements to life and liberty the US-led world order can profess are so rife with grotesque hypocrisy and terror masquerading as nobility, it is difficult to take the moral temperature in the end.
Like Greenwald, Hedges, and other critics of western hegemony speaking out right now, I am struggling to square my disgust at the hypocrisy/culpability of liberal governments with my horror and condemnation of Putin (and other autocratic regimes). They both feel equally vile and depressing, in different ways. What bothers me most as an American is the sense that the promise of liberalism was horribly squandered and corrupted, straight out of the gates, following WW2 and the rise of US hegemony. With the formation of the CIA and the military-intelligence complex, liberalism and democracy became a flimsy rhetorical veil for warmongers and transnational corporations to hide behind while ruthlessly consolidating power. I tried watching some John Mearshmier lectures to understand the "realism vs liberalism" political science debate and found it seriously lacking in this context. Liberalism has now been fully taken over by corporate interests (Sheldon Wolin called this "inverted totalitarianism"), subverting democracy and eroding liberal values at every step. I find this duplicity particularly insidious and revolting. It's unsurprising to me that it has resulted in an existential showdown against more naked forms of authoritarianism. Feels like an inevitable conclusion in a long cycle of violence.
I agree with you about the toxic masculinity at the source of this mess. It really feels like a spiritual crisis reaching its apex in our time. The Algonquin "wetiko" archetype and the Demiurge concept feels very apt. I'm still hoping for a deus ex machina of some sort... 100th Monkey enlightenment, or maybe the aliens will finally make their appearance?...
Without finding a way to transcend/get rid of/abandon patriarchy, capitalism will stay with us until the world collapses of its own insane obesity. The embarrassing half-measures from a profit motive culture meant to address the climate crisis are a case in point. So how do we get rid of patriarchy? Putin and Trump (and millions of other men in all realms) will not simply roll over and play soft, they will not play nice and make room for women at the helm. There has to be no helm. We must learn from our deep shamanic past, our indigenous ancestors, where endless egoic competition hardly existed. Otherwise all the books and thoughts about Ukraine or anywhere else will -- to use a masculine metaphor -- amount to no more than pissing in the wind.