128E – The God of Chaos
The attempt to escape a terrible phenomenon with the help of the future regnosis.
With every tightening of the screw, the tyrant makes our hope more precise.
Anne Micheals
Let’s imagine that we are looking back on our present from the year 2050. We are seeing a strange figure who once called himself „Trump“? What would the result be? What would we most likely say and feel about his legacy?
Well done, we would say.
He managed it.
The T. phenomenon as I will henceforth call it, did its job.
Well someone had to do it.
Excuse me?
Let’s jump back to the present. The messy, annoying, disturbing present. I know many lovely people who are desperate. Who can no longer bear the morning news that announces the end of the world as we know it. They are despairing in the face of the T. – phenomenon. Despairing about life, meaning, themselves. And above all about the future.
It is a deep, deep pain that affects the whole world.
Mister T. has long been living in our heads as a rowdy squatter. He occupies our attention, he has bewitched us. It is time to deport him (without an asylum procedure). But how?
Many still try to understand the T phenomenon through causal reasoning and „causes.“ Was it the terrible social neglect of the people of the Midwest? Excited WOKE supporters exaggerating their concerns? What caused so many women, minorities, Latinos, to vote for the one who despises them? Who the hell is to blame for this disaster? Kamela? The Fed? Wall Street? The Internet? The infinite evil and stupidity of man?
No matter how much we twist and turn and ponder, the T phenomenon cannot be explained by means of causality. It simply doesn’t make sense. It’s like a black hole in space, a negative singularity that just sucks everything into itself.
But perhaps an answer can be found. An answer from the future.
The demon
First of all we can get closer to the phenomenon of T. by studying old myths and mythologies. Especially, demons.
Trump is a demon. In almost all human cultural systems there are demons. They that testify to humanity’s ancient way of dealing with complexity, time and chaos. In animistic, agrarian, feudal, pastoral, religious and secular societies, demons exist as incarnations of existential terror. They suddenly emerge from the darkness and corrupt the world. They represent the power of negativity and despair.
There are such demons in the modern world too. For example, in the Harry Potter world, where they suck the life energy out of people as Dementors. In ancient times, demons were bound to divine powers. One such myth is that of the ancient Greek Hydra. The eight-headed snake creature grows two new heads every time one is cut off. Does that sound familiar? Every time Mister T. revealed an unbelievable mess, a moral monstrosity, a stupid lie, he triumphantly gained even more followers?
In Hindu mythology there are no real gods, but rather „deities“ who do not represent fixed entities, but rather depict universal – and contradictory – forces of evolution. In the Hindu world, „The God of Chaos“ plays a central role. There are several of them, and they are always the strongest. The deity Kali (Sanskrit, f., काली, lit. „The Black“) is a force of death, destruction AND renewal. At her birth, Kali is said to have filled the universe with terrible roars that shook everything and threw it into disorder. In Tantrism, Kali is called Shakti, it is the basic female energy of the universe. Kali is considered one of the few goddesses who actually grants wishes. Next to it sits the elephant god Ganesha (Sanskrit गणेश ‚entourage‘, or ‚lord of the hosts‘). His ears are huge, his eyes small, his gaze piercing. A round belly represents wealth and the ability to absorb all experiences. And finally there is SHIVA, the gender fluid dancer of destruction (Vedic entities are gender diverse). The deity with the snake heads and many arms who dances for destruction, chaos AND renewal.
Trump is the god of chaos.
A dancing eight-armed elephant god of destruction.
And that is exactly his job.
His goddamn job!
He really does it pretty well, doesn’t he?
He can dance, yes he can!
Chaosmosis
Chaosmosis, a word invented by Félix Guattari, one of the poststructural heroes of good old Parisian intellectualism, whos texts nobody ever understood but pretended to do so (an by the way the name of the 11th Album of the Scottish band Primal Scream) describes the „process of becoming“, where order is created by chaos.
The physical chemist Ilya Prigogine worked out how far new structures emerge spontaneously from thermodynamic equilibrium. This is also called emergence, or new life. A living organism is an informed, autocatalytic, non-equilibrium organisation. And this is how social systems, civilisations, nations and cultures function. They balance „on the edge“, in the spaces between structure and chaos. At some point paradoxes arise, excesses of complexity that can no longer be integrated. Then chaos arises to make renewal possible.
This transformation need „agents“, which can manage the discontinuity and bring a new cycle to life. It`s hard to find Facharbeitskräfte for this job.
Deconstructing America
As the super elephant of chaos, the T-phenomenon has an important job. It must deconstruct US society. Plunge it into chaos so that it can regenerate.
The American cultural and social system has long been stuck in deep contradictions, paradoxes that have hardened into pathologies. The basic American narrative, the „American dream“, has turned into a paradoxical nightmare that is literally driving its inhabitants crazy.
There is, for example, the paradox between the heroic American ideal of freedom and the longing for community that is also part of the American myth. We, the people versus everyone, must be allowed to do everything. Or the security obsession – the fear of violence – in the paradox of rampant gun ownership. Or the gaping contradiction between the casual idea of equality that is deeply rooted in the constitution and culture and the extreme inequality that is created by hyper capitalism and is now being taken to extremes by anarchic capitalism à la Musk.
A society that lives to a large extent from the exploitation of cheap labor wants to make this very labor illegal – and in the process increase the gross national product at the expense of the partners to whom America also owes its wealth. And the central narrative of the dishwasher who becomes a millionaire collapses lwhen it becomes clear that not EVERYONE can becomes a millionaire, but only a tiny elite of super billionaires who threaten to emigrate to Mars or to tax-free islands if everyone doesn’t dance to their tune.
America was always „great“ and fascinating when it was generous. When it represented its values universally, as an offer to the future of the world. The T phenomenon will dwarf America. There is no easier way to dismantle a civilisation than to ruin its dignity and reputation. The T phenomenon is extremely successful in this respect.
„America First“ was a hopeful slogan of progress in the founding days of the USA: America should be the spearhead of freedom in the world, of human progress. „MAGA“, or „America Home Alone“, tips the whole thing into the next paradox. Into a retrotopia in which everything should be like it was yesterday, but as it never was.
The Renaissance Principle
According to the Italian holistic thinker Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), civilisations go through heroic, decadent and „human“ cycles at cyclical intervals. Through a process of „waves and counter waves“ (Corsi et ricorsi) and the process of „dissolution and merging“ (solve et coagula, the original formula of the alchemists), a stabilised new arises from a fusion of the old, the proven, WITH the emergent, the innovative.
New eras always arise from recombinations. In order for such recombinations – or renaissances – to arise, the old paradoxes must first be taken to the extreme and thereby resolved. Then the wisdom of balance, the patience of reconstruction, and the art of healing, of integration into a new whole are needed.
People, civilisations, cultures can do this. History has proven this. For example in Germany.
And here we are. At that tragic, inevitable, exciting point in history. When the old disintegrates and a NEXT AGE emerges from the fog of chaos in the distance. A new planetary civilisation that still has a long way to go. It hurts a lot, that’s true. It hurts, because the future is now so far away, that it is barely visible. It hurts in every limb and in the soul. But the prospects are strong.
So: what would we say if we looked back from 2050, in regnostic wisdom? Thank you, T., that was a real achievement. Dismantling America was something we had to do first.
It was also not so easy to maneuver Europe, which still had a tendency to cheaply quarrel, into a self-confident unity.
Or to finally end the fossil age after a phase of unsavory drilling.
What does Goethe say so beautifully? „I am the force that always wants evil…“
Someone had to do it. You were, literally, great!
PS: A few more words of comfort
Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of how we can survive this demonic time unscathed. But perhaps a wise old pop icon can offer us some comfort. Patti Smith, the grand old lady of Punk wrote in a short post-election note titled „A Few Words“:
There are times in our lives when we must go underground. Not to retreat, but to heal ourselves. To rebuild our community in the spirit of good. Not out of partisanship, not out of self-interest, but as a mobilising energy fuelled by goodness. This is not rhetoric. It is a plan. I started with my offspring this morning and then slowly with friends.
Don’t feel cornered, constricted. Don’t let others dictate your mental and emotional space. Navigate the world around you as best you can and live in the world of your world. That’s what I wrote today. Back to work.
In the language of humanist futurism: Our job is now Doing Future. Preserving and developing the future in the present. Let’s get started. Let’s get to work.
