Ya’ll, things have not at all been themselves since last I wrote which is a consequence of [so many things and] the current administration doing exactly what they said they would do and my having to live through the world coming to terms with the turbulent soup of predictions of our worst nightmares coming true. Since the DOGE coup in early February, I have started but failed to finish 8 essay/posts about the current dumbest apocalypse. They all start strong but finish either in the midst of or just before I descend into my all-caps-shouty-voice lamentation that it all is, alas, as bad as I had feared. This isn’t good writing, even if it is accurate, so I haven’t been posting it. It is writing that sort of turns on my audience, in the same way that the political left often eats itself out of some defense of imagined purity of principle. And it shits on people who maybe should have been paying better attention before this all happened and shames them after the fact when they have no power to do different.
For many, many years I have thought of myself as possessing a sort of prescience about the world that I realize is born of my autistic pattern recognition [because I don’t really believe in the supernatural, just the emergent meaning from vast pools of data]. I have access to all the same data that other humans have living in the world these days – a lot – but my brain does different stuff with it, and I have observed that I can hold and process a lot more of it than most other people [I have written about this a lot even if I have also not succeeded in publishing much of what I have written].
I know things. Things that are going to happen. The causes of things that are currently happening. And I know them in a way that other people don’t know. This is one of the reasons I talk about myself as an oracle. It sounds unbelievable, I get it. That doesn’t make it not true. Autistic people on the internet talk about this all the time, so it isn’t just me.
When the knowing is harmless and cute [like when I lean over to someone at a seminar and tell them what I know the speaker is about to say, and then they say it] people enjoy this quality of mine. It’s a fantastic parlor trick at dinner parties. In a professional context it shows up as me saying the thing that needs to be said to reveal the larger context to other people, the thing that makes them say, “oh, that IS true, I never thought about it that way.” When the knowing makes people feel good about themselves, or smug, they love it. But it has a darker side.
This dark side is what I cynically call Terminal Cassandra Syndrome. What this basically means is that I say something is going to come to pass and people are unable to believe me [because it’s too far from their own field of experience or their ability to process data or they don’t want it to be true]. People either ignore what I say with no memory of my having said it, or they rather mercilessly ridicule me like I am literally a prophet predicting the end of the world to be mocked because [obviously] I am overreacting. But then the thing happens. If they ignored me they run around moaning, “no one could ever have predicted this. Woe. Woe unto us!” And if they mocked me or said I was reactionary, then they have a particular repentant posture that involves downcast eyes and the inability to ever speak about the events ever again. It is understood that if I say something like, “I fucking told you so,” that I am the asshole. Because pointing out to someone that they were wrong and you were right is gauche, even though being wrong and obtuse and failing to be contrite about it though the error may be quite severe and costly is somehow not gauche. Being an asshole is a greater sin than pretty much all actual sins in our culture. I call it Terminal Cassandra Syndrome, because it happens so often that I am fairly convinced that one day I am going to die of not being believed.
Now, jokes aside. I am not the only one who said out loud that the current administration was a suicide pact. And I am not the only person on the internet who has expressed that there is no satisfying schadenfreude in being right when everyone is equally fucked. Like I don’t feel better that of course they were always going to do Project 2025 because all of the people who voted for it are going to suffer irreparable harm [just like all the people who didn’t vote for it]. That is what makes it a suicide pact, we are all going to suffer. Little Jaxon said skibidi one too many times before lunch and now the entire class has to stay in for recess. But recess are all our constitutional freedoms and our ability to achieve self-determination. The rain is falling on the just and the unjust alike.
Another reason it is Terminal Cassandra Syndrome is because, despite my intelligence, I am unable to understand that me being right doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t any sort of a gift. People mostly do not make decisions that they should make based on evidence and data, they operate on vibes. What is most likely to kill me is not being right and not being believed, but failing to learn that facts don’t really matter. That the way you sway people is not by telling them truths that they can’t understand or process, it’s in convincing them to do the things they should do for reasons that they think they believe in.
This is why, for the record, the Republican Party “wins.” They are better at manipulating people than everyone else is. Sure, the Democrats of a few years ago were smugly self-righteous about going high when their opponents go low, but the basement dwellers are winning [which is to say they won and they are sacking Rome so no one else can ever win again]. Because they know there is no higher appeal to reason when you can convince people who perceive they are under threat that the brown people are eating their dogs and cats. Sure Constitutional freedoms and care for our fellow humans are higher truths, but they are nothing compared to mainlining revenge over imagined attacks.
BUT that whole thing, the entire line of reasoning, is actually a trap. This is part of the essay/post that I have reached 8 times where I can only conclude that people are too stupid to do the right thing and I collapse into my jeremiad.
So now for something completely different?
As the Zen master says, we’ll see.
I’m a devotee of some shockingly optimistic writers of our time, to name two: Arthur C. Brooks and Rebecca Solnit. They may seem unrelated but they are both the sort of writers who see that shit is on fire and say things like, “but ok, what do we do about it?” Like really do, not just think, not just criticize. Solnit is a fan of saying that hope for the future should be an active process, not just a wish for someone else to do the work for you [Hope in the Dark, also Mediations in an Emergency]. Hope is not naive. And Brooks says many things about how to do that work based on what science says your brain is going to respond to. The one I have been contemplating the most these days is, “stop wielding your values as a weapon and start offering them as a gift.”
This won’t sounds like a gift, but I think the American Experiment has failed and that representative democracy is over in our nation and we are no longer the vehicle of prosperity and peace that we have tried to be [with some success] since the end of World War 2. I’m not happy about this, but I think it is true. I observe a lot of people in our society going through some denial about this [I see all the “stages of grief” but denial is the one that pisses me off the most]. These are the people who say, “we have to get out there and vote these bastards out!” You sweet summer children, we’re not voting anymore. Voting is over. They get so angry at me when I say this because that is their emotional support election cycle. Going to the polls is their ritual of freedom. When we have our sham midterms in 2026 I will vote, but it will be like taking the Eucharist after losing your faith: I will know I am not eating the body and blood of Christ. Putin wins elections too, after all, but Russian is not a representative democracy. But I realize that telling people these elections are meaningless is the old way of thinking. It isn’t going to help. It’s the trap.
I don’t think that telling people that the appearance of democracy is not the same thing as actual democracy is going to help. Part of the reason is that, for all the election cycles of my life there have been people saying that and all they have done is increase the block of non-voters, contributing to the self-fulling prophecy of elections not working. What makes elections really not work is that we only have the choice to pick a candidate from one of two parties, and both parties are almost entirely unified in one goal which is to get elected. In this way, the people who say elections “don’t work” or that both parties are the same are correct. You can see it in the way the Democrats are [largely] unable to respond as the opposition party and the only thing they can do is send emails asking for more money to run their 2026 campaigns.
Both parties, by and large, stand for a system that entrenches a ruling class. Yes, one of those parties wants a underclass that is contented and compliant enough to not seek to overthrow the ruling class. They are operating under Henry Ford’s philosophy of the underclass: pay them well enough that they can buy the cars that we’re selling them. Those are the Democrats. Have your pronouns, your cheap crap from China, watch your Netflix and football, continue to operate as if the American Dream is attainable. The other party, oddly, recognizes that we’ve maxed out that mythos. Republicans might be the party of climate change denialism and unfettered free-market capitalism, but they understand that the operating conditions that allow unlimited growth for the economy and therefore prosperity for all have ended. The American Dream is only for some people now. They are governing in full scarcity economics mode: there is not enough to go around, so it’s every man [and it’s always a man] for himself. Democracy is a luxury for the fat times that are over, you need a strong man to run your nation in order to have any hope that you will succeed.
On the one hand, I almost agree with the Republicans right now, in that I too think the American Dream is dead [despite, I might add, having actually achieved it myself]. The system as we have built it cannot persist. We do not get to hold on to the prosperity of America at her zenith that was the promise of the last mid-century. As we approach the next mid-century we will be fighting over water and food while everything is one fire here in the global North just like they are already fighting over it in the South [though mostly because we have extracted all their resources for ourselves, but that is another story]. The TLDR is that the global elites know there is no Planet B and that in order to emerge from that apocalypse with the resources they need to build the next world, they have to stage a wholesale theft of everything now while there is still a system to concentrate it. And that is the kleptocracy we are witnessing from the oligarchs right now. Cynically deny climate change for as long as possible, extract all the wealth, concentrate all the power, sack the institutions that can oppose you [governments, science, education] and should anyone wake up too early call them crazy or incarcerate them and seize their assets to fund your colonization of space. Don’t believe me about this, believe Naomi Klein [The Rise of End Times Fascism] and Amy Westervelt [What the Technofascists and Religious Fanatics Have in Common: End Days Theology].
What the Democrats are selling [the American Dream is still possible] is a fantasy. But what the Republicans are selling [you can survive the end times, but really just the oligarchs can] is dystopia. I am fundamentally a utopian, so I can’t be on board with either one. And because I’m outside the framework we have on offer for discussing reality, that means to engage with any audience, I need to find a way to offer my values as a gift, not a weapon. This process is why all my recent writing has felt like it is circling a drain. Because I can’t make the next leap to how to offer utopianism as a gift [and I already know people think it is ludicrous]. I can’t step away from the trauma of spending my life saying, “this isn’t going to work, guys,” and never being believed, to be vulnerable and courageous enough to say, “let’s try this.” Because I don’t have faith that people will believe a positive story about our future when they can barely believe the negative one about our present.
However, at base, I am a visionary optimist. As the wise collective unconscious of the Internet says, “hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles…” and I have endless experience of getting knocked down and standing back up. I believe in writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson [Abundance] and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson [What if we get it right? visions of climate futures]. I think that vision of our future, a longer table and a bigger boat, is possible. I am not afraid to work HARD. And I have been working to live my values in my own life. Importantly, when people might say things like, “well people aren’t like that,” I can remind them that I am a person who is like that. And if I can, others can.
In addition to holding the words of Arthur C. Brooks close to my heart these last few months, I have been meditating on a paraphrase of Timothy Snyder’s. This one isn’t from On Tyranny [the famous one] but his new book On Freedom. Freedom requires more than just the absence of a violent regime. It needs a positive sense of a new political order.
Our old political order is dying. We are witnessing its violent death throes. We are living through a time where most well meaning people are trying to pretend that the wise old patriarch is not on his deathbed, that the established order can go forward forever just as it was. That isn’t true. And our fear of confronting what is on the other side of that myth is trapping us in the land grab for the future. You better believe that the oligarchs know what they think the future is [they own it and we’re all their serfs]. They constructed it in Project 2025. They gave us their playbook. Rather than react to it and try to route them playing their own game, we need a new game. I don’t think the vision of a new political order than inspires people is just a slower apocalypse where everyone at least suffers equally. No one wants the leaders who are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I think it’s a truly different future based on different paradigms that already exist around us but that we are too devoted to the old myth to see.
I’m done trying to save this sinking ship that has never sought to achieve the world of my own values. I want something new that seeks their positive incarnation. So if you don’t see me trying to Weekend-At-Bernie’s our current society, it is because I’m imagining and then building what is coming next.
The Oracle of Z 