Total War

Cooperation/symbiosis versus domination/control

Sadly, I think we need to see ourselves as already fighting a war: This is a new kind of war — a total war. It is not simply a military operation involving guns and tanks. This is, first and foremost, a consciousness war — a war fought inside our minds — that has a military dimension as one of its theaters of operation. I would say it is a total war because it is an Orwellian war that ultimately seeks to reshape subjectivity itself into abject compliance.

Right now we are fighting a kind of total war for the future of humanity. But the vast majority of people in the West don’t seem to realize this yet. They are still floating along, sleepwalking, unaware. They continue to focus on trivialities while the war to define our future is being waged both in public (within the US government, Ukraine, and Israel at the moment) and behind the scenes (through social media algorithms, manipulated news, and weaponized AI). It is being waged through transformations of language, elisions of words, deletion of websites.

Some people reading this will already know this, and for others, it will sound alarmist and paranoid. Once you understand what is happening and know what the stakes are, you can choose, based on this information, what you will do with the limited time, resources, and psychic energy available to you. You may find that certain actions or career paths no longer make sense, while other options make more sense. You may start considering options you have never seriously considered before.

I’ve been studying “Putin’s Lasting State”, an essay by Russian political theorist Vladislav Surkov, where he writes about Putin’s “great political machine” and Russia’s “ideology of the future.” One essential point is that Russia saw itself engaged in a long-term battle against the U.S. Trump’s reelection is a tremendous victory for them and a massive, potentially mortal blow for us (if you are fond of liberalism, Democracy, and the Enlightenment tradition of “public reason”). Somehow, most of us in the U.S. didn’t understand what was at stake. Many still don’t. And many are now on the side of authoritarianism, “theocratic fascism,” or whatever Trumpism is.

As Russia began to reassemble itself in the years after the fall of the USSR in 1989, “West European and American experts began more and more frequently to err in their prognoses.” Surkov writes. Increasingly, as Putin rebuilt Russia, “our country refused to take ideology on loan, began to produce its own idea structures, and crossed over to informational counterattack.” Current Russian foreign policy doctrine explicitly names the U.S. and other Anglo-Saxon countries as “the main inspirer, organizer, and executor of the aggressive anti-Russian policy of the collective West.” They managed to win a war against us without military means: By attacking the fissures in our psychology and belief systems. Those who don’t want dictatorship were not able to recognize the threat in time or organize it against it. We must hope that other open societies, in Europe and elsewhere, can learn from our mistakes.

Most friends of mine remain out of touch, heads down, building their careers as artists, tech entrepreneurs, magazine editors, and so on. This is nobody’s fault: We are products of a consumerist, hyper-individual, ego-driven society. Our culture tells us what matters is advancing our personal ambitions and goals — “self optimizing” as an “entrepreneurial self.” We lack a context for integrating what is happening on a geopolitical and systemic level, and what is now at stake: We don’t know how to shift our focus from these narrow self-interest or entrepeurial goals to building a truly collaborative, collective and, in some sense, anonymous project for humanity’s future.

All of those fine career successes lose their their thrill in a world trapped under a totalitarian control apparatus, where you either kowtow to the leaders or live in fear. And that is where we are heading.

As a result of growing up in a materially abundant, superficial culture that made us soft and self-centered, we don’t possess the mindset for making a shift of this magnitude. As inheritors of secular materialism and rational atheism, we also don’t know — many of us — what values we hold so dearly that we would find it worth fighting or even dying for them. (I will return to the “meaning crisis” very soon and suggest an antidote for it).

As middle-class Westerners, we have lived our whole lives cocooned in comfort, postmodern irony, and vacuous privilege. Most of never needed to develop the muscle of courage or fortitude or any idea of sacrificing for the greater good. The younger generations have, also, been indoctrinated in a form of institutionalized identity politics — along with psychiatry dispensed through pills — contributing to a collective belief in human beings as victims, fragile and weak, rather than seeing ourselves and others as innately resilient and strong.

In the most abstract sense, this total war we are fighting now, without knowing it, is between the primitive part of the human Psyche that seeks control, power over, and domination over those perceived as inferior, and the more evolved parts of ourselves that seek symbiosis, connection, and interdependence, wishing to raise everybody up to a better level. We seem to be replaying an evolutionary struggle that has gone on for millions of years. On that long time scale, aggression and domination eventually lose out to resilient systems based on cooperation and symbiosis. On the scale of our lives — and beyond, for the next decades or perhaps the next hundred years — the results of this war are very much in doubt.

The tree is a much older organism than we are. Through evolutionary trial-and-error, trees found a way to thrive on Earth while providing maximal advantage to a vast range of other species (squirrels, vines, mycelia, birds, insects, etcetera). We are still in an adolescent, dominator stage in our development. As a species that exploits and takes, we currently threaten most other forms of life on Earth. As we corrupt and destroy natural systems, we may soon bring about our own extinction.

The total war is between two modes of being: Cooperating/liberating/accepting versus controlling/exploiting/dominating. The war is also between feminine and masculine traits, between Tao and non-Tao, and between maturity/internalized ethics/wisdom and immaturity/externally-defined morality/intelligence.

Certain societal factions or forces represent the impulse toward control/dominance/exploitation in today’s total war. These factions, which are increasingly coordinated, include authoritarian regimes like Russia, India, Israel, and Hungary; religious fundamentalist groups and secret societies such as Opus Dei and the Illuminati (whether as a legitimate organization or egregore); transnational oligarchs and the financial elites; techno-feudalists such as Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. For this faction, wealth and technology are mechanisms for an elite group to achieve dominance over the mass of humanity. Most people are reduced to mind-controlled serfs while the elite enjoy a great deal of freedom. Lacking capital, the human being is a mere thing, an economic unit of productivity, with no value outside of what he or she yields for the controlling apparatus and the “sovereign individuals” that own it. To be discarded when useless.

These agents of control already possess the lion’s share of the world’s financial capital and military power. Now they seek to further increase their dominance. It is likely that Trump and Musk are seeking to crash the US economy to cause a Depression. This will allow transnational wealth holders — the billionaire class — to buy up “distressed assets” in the US for cheap. The government will be made to sell off public land and legacy institutions to private concerns or plutocrats. Argentina is one test run for what they want to do to the U.S.: There we see soldiers shooting rubber bullets at elderly pensioners whose benefits have been cut and can no longer afford medicine.

In the short term, the immature domination system is thriving and the alternative is in disarray. However, if this is a proper dialectic, there is thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Perhaps we can envision a synthesis.

That is what I have been reflecting on.

In Microcosmos, microbiologist Lynn Margulis, one of the creates of the Gaia hypothesis, looks back at the oxygenic crisis in an earlier stage of Earth’s evolution when certain microorganisms started to produce Oxygen through photosynthesis. The Oxygen was toxic to other forms of life, like cyanobacteria, who went underground into the bowels of the Earth and into the interior of mammalian bodies to escape this poison. Margulis writes that certain organisms were in the midst of trying to consume each other during this meta-crisis, when they discovered new forms of symbiosis. They melded together, forming more complex structures that developed, over millions of years, into the differentiated organs of the human body.

In our current civilizational meta-crisis, could the forces seeking domination and control and the forces oriented toward symbiosis and freedom somehow mesh together, evolve each other, to unleash something new? At the threshold of technological progress and climate collapse, could we attain a new mutation of creative complexity?

Right now I am reading Taiwanese civic hacker Audrey Tang’s Plurality and listening to various podcast interviews with her. I think she offers something essential for us if we want to get serious about winning this war after losing the recent battles. A self-taught coding prodigy, Tang advocates for technology that supports open government and participatory democracy. As the first Digital Minister of Taiwan, she pioneered radical transparency initiatives, real-time citizen engagement platforms, and AI-driven policymaking tools. She was instrumental in Taiwan’s g0v (gov-zero) movement, which used technology to create open-source alternatives to official government services.

Tang first gained prominence during the Sunflower Movement in 2014, when she helped activists leverage digital tools to organize, counter disinformation, and livestream parliamentary protests. As a transgender woman, she has been a visible advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. Her work radically increased the Taiwanese public’s trust in government as they adopted tools for radical transparency, participatory democracy, and open-source civic engagement. With vTaiwan and Join platforms, Tang enabled real-time collaboration between citizens and the government. People were able to directly influence policies on issues like Uber regulation and mask distribution during COVID — Taiwan had the best COVID response of any country, due to this digital democracy infrastructure.

By proving that digital governance could be responsive, decentralized, and inclusive, Tang helped Taiwan become a global model for open democracy. Despite China’s ongoing attacks on their communication and political system, the Taiwanese people’s trust in government is very high compared to other democracies struggling with populist backlash and misinformation. In one recent interview, Tang talks about how Taiwan developed systems for “pre-bunking” AI-created deep fakes from China.

We need to apply these tools and technologies in the US and other Western democracies. In the US, this will not be possible under the current government. Perhaps we can implement these tools through a civil society initiative, a for-profit enterprise, or via a mass movement.

At the moment the US has plunged into a brutal experiment in corporate/technocratic governance, applying untried ideas from Curtis Yarvin, The Sovereign Individual, Balaji Svrinasivin’s Network States, among other sources. As I explored in How Soon Is Now, it may be the case that the form of representative democracy we’ve had since the bourgeois revolutions of the late 18th century has become obsolete and unworkable. This Constitutional system was devised at a time when change happened slowly, technology was not abruptly transformative, and we weren’t confronting existential threats in multiple domains.

The alternatives seem dictatorship/despotism - where a tiny few have freedom and control while the vast majority are robbed of freedom — or a much more participatory democracy, digitally mediated and trustworthy. I hope we find our way to this second option.

We also need to address the existential meaning crisis which underlies the loss of faith in liberalism, progressivism, and Democracy. I believe we have the tools to do that now. I hope to explore how we do this, next time.