War is like Wildfire

War is like wildfire. Those who start wars do so believing that the act of initiating war is an assertion of control that in some sense leads to a persistent and purposive, intended or predictable direction to the downstream consequences and there, inhabiting a fantasy and fiction of mastery they find themselves doubling down upon self-validating mythologies and lies to justify the continuity of aggression and violence. This is foolish hubris. The combinatorial entropy as high-dimensionality of the complex adaptive state space(s) of conflict follows its own logic. Putin is not in control here, he is merely fanning the flames of fear and hatred, seeking to extract power and personal benefit from the turbulence, and as with all acts of historical tyranny – it will not be long before these boomerang and burn down his own hopes and aspirations of unending imperial power. The cyclic return of dictators in Russian history is really only a component microcosm of the grander historical arc of civilisation; our shared enigma is that because breaking is far simpler than making, we find ourselves endlessly drawn back into these conflicts. Putin does not make history, history makes Putin and now that this wildfire has been started, I doubt any of us can forecast where or when and how it will end.