et tu, Brute?
Memory is an unreliable thing. So unreliable that it is commonly known that eyewitness testimony cannot be used in courts due to the minds bending of the reality of the past event. Details can be added and subtracted, and often the emotions associated with the memory alter the recollection. Yet, memory is not to be discounted entirely.
Take this memory.
The soft midmorning sun shone through the windows, filling the classroom with a muted, gray sort of light. My teacher was standing in front of the whiteboard. The fluorescent lights weren’t on, and the teacher using a projector to give their sermon on the fall of the Roman Empire. In detail they described it. I could imagine Julius Caesar, surrounded by flaming banners and faceless men gurgling on their last breaths. I could imagine him, once so mighty and powerful, lying among them – dying, mortal – hot blood poring from his stab wounds as the last bits of worldly consciousness glinted through his mind. I wonder, did he think it all must have been a bad dream? Wasn’t he chosen?
And I remember thinking to myself with utter clarity, “This is what will happen to us, too.” Call it precocity, call it melancholy (I was a sad kid), or call it simple pattern recognition – I was seeing clearly at that young age which should be abundantly obvious to all of us: that civilizations invariably fall, and when they fall, it is not pretty for anyone involved. The rest of my education and upbringing, however, boldly denied any possibility of the parallel between this unbroken trend of eventual civilizational collapse and our civilization.
Manifest Destiny – the religion that we have unwittingly chosen, thus that we cannot fail, thus that we have no limits – is what will be glinting through our minds as the flames engulf us.
Weren’t we chosen?
I’d see news reports of coups and civil wars throughout my life, lamenting, “Oh, how terrible for them.” or “Oh, what a victory against tyranny.” I would never outwardly regard these societal catastrophes as being anything relevant to me in any real way. Each time, though, a nagging little voice would call to me to remember that day in class learning about Rome.
My entire culture has constructed a compelling façade about the impenetrability of this global civilization. It does so semi-organically, through conditioning, and subsequent subliminal cultural reinforcement of its invincibility. Speak to most people about societal collapse and you’ll be labeled as an alarmist or extremist, often defensively so. These institutions are our most trusted allies. The stores fill up with food, the doctor is always nearby, and the electricity always returns when it shuts off. It all seems to happen seamlessly – our needs are always able to be met whenever they materialize. We have no memory of anything different. Our physical reality (I’m speaking primarily from a Western perspective) reinforces a narrative of relative homeostasis within the system.
Can it be possible that this seeming camaraderie between the system and ourselves is only a fiction?
What do we do if it is?
There are many fictions abounding within our world. Even Caesar’s last words are a fictional memory. “Even you, Brutus?” Shakespeare ascribes to the emperor’s final uttering. Aghast and betrayed – even allies, in the face of imminent collapse, are not quite who they seem. Are we going to find ourselves similarly deposed when the illusions of all of this come crashing down around us? Will we be surprised that Joe Biden didn’t save us from ourselves? Will we say, “Even you, United Nations?” I expect not. Because the betrayal that we will be confronted with will be diffuse enough that blame won’t be easily cast.
It is said that the fall of Rome was a perfect crescendo of multiple linchpins simultaneously being pulled. Even Rome, relatively small compared to the global system we live in today, had a collapse of diffuse causal origins. I’ll list a few.
Barbarian mercenaries who were disloyal to the empire had been hired into the military, many of whom played instrumental roles in the sacking of the city despite being in Roman legions. The economic system and over-taxation lead to incredible wealth disparities between the rich and the poor, and the empire relied on slaves to maintain agricultural and commercial goods production. Overspending and over-expansion of the military also led to logistical and technological declines, creating an opening of weakened infrastructure for invaders.
Memory, in a species with apparent historical amnesia, is a trifling thing. So what of the memory of Rome? Does it seem familiar to you?
A key point to focus on is that Holy Roman Empire fell due to an over-reliance on slave labor – what is so different now? That the people tilling our fields and making virtually everything we own in factories around the world are making a couple dollars a day, so we delude ourselves into thinking they aren’t slaves? This may hold the key to our undoing, as our economic system is fundamentally predicated on monetary expansion at all costs, using the tricks learnt from the Roman Empire, namely slavery.
Our dispossession from atop the Great Chain of Being will be an ugly event, I fear. I also fear that its most fervent believers will never give in until the knives pierce their hearts. That’s why we see the clamoring, the bargaining, the denial of what is real. Climate change is happening, yet the loudest environmentalists and yes, leftists, deny it – if only we use solar panels, if only we have electric cars, if only we don’t eat meat, if only, if only… Never-mind climate deniers – I am truly more afraid of the former pattern of belief because they don’t even recognize that they are in denial of anything. They fervently believe that they are on the side of “progress,” unaware of the trap they are laying for all of us.
Underlying this denial is the basic assumption that anything about our way of life is sustainable.
Call it nihilism, call it fatalism, call it whatever you want – I do see a corridor of hope in the awareness that this will all fall. I think I saw it then, in that classroom, too. I was born into a world that felt so wrong to me, and the idea that it would all fall down in time… it honestly felt like justice. Maybe the Earth and all of its creatures would have a moment to breathe. The slaves may truly be free if this system collapses.
“The system is broken,” is a common, sighing pronouncement made by people of all cuts and creeds. I think it behooves me to put this bluntly – there’s nothing broken in this design of civilization. It’s operating precisely as it’s supposed to. Imperialism is a tried and true method of accruing wealth and power, which is all this civilization cares about. Why else was the British Empire so “successful” at conquering the world as it did? It had practice. It had history to reference. It had historical memory of how to brutally destroy and enslave all that got in the way of its God-given right to expansion, and a lot of this savagery was learnt from the Roman Empire. Resource-based conquest is unnecessary for a polity that can live sustainably within the limits of its land base – not so for the Roman imperialists. As the soils were depleted around the Mediterranean due to their ecological negligence, the only option was to extend outward, enslaving and pillaging as it went. It was a key component of their economic system – a feature, not a bug.
The difference, of course, between the Roman Empire and the Global Empire we are currently subjects of is that, soon, there will truly be nowhere else to expand to. The Earth itself has been swallowed whole by this empire. Who is our modern Caesar, one may ask? Elon Musk? Bill Gates? One may call their colonizing, imperial behavior barbaric, but these men represent the most civilized exemplars of the human race. Manifest Destiny seeps out of their very pores, and we, the ignorant and exhausted peasantry, consume their products as they continue their conquest. We don’t really have a choice as the dispossessed peasantry.
Whether it’s Musk supporting coups in Bolivia to blow open the entire Atacama Desert, destroying indigenous communities and endemic species, or Gates turning all of Africa into soy and maize monocultures for his global plant-based agenda, the process is the same as the Romans.
And yet – it’s all the more sinister for one particular reason. Not only are we letting them do their evil-doing, we are encouraging it. Both men are widely believed to be saviors of this world – gods among us in their infinite intellect. Musk with his electric, sexy looking cars, and Gates with his vaccines, agricultural advancements, and revolutionizing (monopolizing) our beloved computer technologies. Never-mind his nefarious dealings, “Gates is helping cure malaria!” people cry, playing the part of ignorant bystander ever so perfectly. We look up at Starlink with awe, rather than horror. Did the Roman peasants turn the other cheek, too?
We, the peasant class, largely unaware that this is our title, are drunk on the unconscious knowledge that at least we are not slaves. The slaves of our time are in the outskirts of our peripheral vision. They are the African children mining rare earths for our technologies. They are the Bangladeshi girls stitching our clothes together. They are the Vietnamese mothers with acid burns on their hands so we can drink cashew milk. They are real though. While we bicker about this and that, slavery persists. They exist.
They are largely invisible to us in our suburbs and cities, but slaves to the Global Empire nonetheless. Our empire, like Rome, is predicated on slave labor. How much more profitable is your business if you don’t have to pay for the labor? Immeasurably so. And money, as exemplified by the Musks and Gates’ of the world, is close to godliness. So, of course, in the mythology of Manifest, a person will outsource their business to recently conquered countries and pay them a dollar a day in their factories. “Lifting them out of poverty,” liberal globalists say without flinching.
And we will say, someday soon, with fear creeping up our spines, “Even you, World Bank? Even you, World Wildlife Fund? Even you, Green New Deal?”
I’m not going to provide a prescription of boycotting Tesla or Amazon or Walmart so that we might be able to signal our virtue of circumventing the most obvious monsters while continuing to contribute capital to the Machine in all other aspects of our lives. We all feed the Machine. It’s largely unescapable. I’m not going to perpetuate the silly notion that individual monetary choices have any affect whatsoever on injuring the Global Empire – we’re really trying to use the existing economic system to fight the Empire that this brand of economic system created? Brilliant.
What I will say is this: fight your rebellion in more significant, internal ways. Search for the corridor with the light faintly shining at the end of it. All you need is to take it a step at a time. For example:
In a culture that makes you want to drink alcohol excessively to forget about it, do mushrooms and lean into it. See the fungal networks that connect everything throughout time and space. Experience awe and revelation, as it is your birthright. Also experience pain and truly feel it. Grieve, and laugh, and cry, and have sex, and thank God that fireflies exist. In a culture that purchases attention and sells you as the product, read books – particularly books that help break the spell of this illusion. Read books that aren’t so singularly focused on humans and remember there is a whole, nonhuman world that is living on as our human world dissolves into panic and derision. Give these books to your friends and family and sow the seeds of liberation and dissent through knowledge and a culture of gift. Don’t ask for anything in return – know that the gift is that with each person seeing clearly the myths that surround the Empire is a linchpin pulled, weakening its megalithic hull.
And remember how I said memory is an unreliable thing? Julius Caesar was not the final emperor of the Roman Empire. In fact, he wasn’t even an emperor. The Roman Empire lived on for hundreds of years following his assassination. Actual scholars of history probably spent this whole essay fuming about my belligerent inaccuracy. Still, that memory is so burned into my head, so true from my vantage. And yet, it is historically and factually entirely incorrect. Does that denude the revelation I had of its legitimacy? Perhaps the memory is fabricated in its entirety, crafted by my brain to have a genesis for the conjuring of that thought – “This is what is going to happen to us, too.”
Perhaps, it is an altogether different sort of remembering that I am tapping into – a remembering that hovers on the outskirts of our simplistic conceptions of time. Perhaps it’s a whisper of warning, from some fragment of consciousness in the past, compelling me to look at our human history and see the patterns. Perhaps we all need to seek this mysterious remembering for ourselves. See the hubris, the conquering, the mythology, the consumption. Compare it to today, and prepare.
This memory is telling me that the real rebellion is in remembering with as much clarity as possible. Asking myself, “What am I certain of?” and sifting through it with a critical, unwavering focus. Remembering our lineages, our traditions, the ways of our peoples. Remembering that we all came from peoples who listened to the land and felt enmeshed and belonging to it. I think we all must do this. We may find that many ‘facts’ that have constructed our reality hold little validity. We may find that many ideals we have aren’t actually ideas of our own. We may find that we value trees and starlight more than a new car or a drink.
Written history and its patterns are far less fallacious than our own individual conceptions of reality. It is, however, undeniably imperfect, but it’s a good place to start unpacking the narratives we believe. Civilizations falling is a universal phenomenon, not some pesky outlier fudging our statistics. Memory will tell us that everything is fine, as each day blends into the next without catastrophe. But the tremors are reverberating all around us, if we take a moment to listen. The Roman Empire did not fall overnight, although it may seem like it did. It fell over time, as the Empire became too complex to manage. We are seeing the warning signs around us all the time, too. Everything in our Global Empire is complexifying out of control, too. Hop onto Twitter for 30 seconds and see how unmanageable that microsystem is. Think how many different hands, industries, sub-industries, and machines touch an item before you place it in your shopping cart. Drive through an agricultural area and see the dead soils. It’s all right there.
See the world through the eyes of a rogue lit match – see how easy it is for all of this to burn.
And when the fires come for us, I hope we don’t utter in desperation, “et tu, Brute?” I hope we say instead, “Even us.” I hope we will have taken ownership for our role in this mess, and that we won’t be surprised that history didn’t cease following this pattern just because we foolishly believed it couldn’t happen to us.
Above all, and through it all, I hope we each find some corridor of hope for ourselves. It exists, buried beneath the despair and fear. It exists in the knowledge that frogs still sing by the river’s edge, and hawks still glide effortlessly in the air. It exists in every blade of grass, turning sunlight into life, into food for someone else. Hope exists in every cell of a butterfly and every salmon that makes it back to its spawning ground. It exists in the laughter among new friends and in the wrinkles on our elder’s faces. It exists in every dam destroyed – yes, it may be just a glimmer, or a faint whisper, but it is there: hope.