The Absurd Mechanism

Once you accept that the current crop of wickedness, grift, juvenile cosplay machismo, narcissistic greed and open betrayal of the public is not an aberration but the operating system, something else steps forward with a kind of horrifying slapstick clarity. The whole thing is absurd. Not metaphorically, not as a clever literary flourish, but structurally. What is happening in the United States, and by extension everywhere wired into its gravitational field, is so catastrophically incoherent that no competent writer could have sold it as a script. Institutions that once pretended to adulthood now behave like exhausted stage props. Power clings to itself through tantrum and spectacle while the planetary situation quietly crosses thresholds that do not reset. You look at this and the question forms almost on its own: is this really how a civilisation commits suicide, not with a decisive act, but with a long improvisational farce that eats through its own foundations while everyone argues about the lighting.

The deeper unease is that this does not feel merely like individual failure or even collective moral collapse. It feels like a system, something larger than any one actor, taking its own strange route toward equilibrium. Oscillations, feedback, amplification of the stupid and the vicious, all braided into helical vortices of policy, media, finance, code. Our worst traits are not just tolerated, they are harvested, refined, and looped back into the field as fuel. In that sense the madness is not random at all; it is the pattern by which a complex, overextended civilisation tries to regulate itself with tools that are radically out of scale with the world they now shape. Life in the universe is probably rare. Conscious, technological life that can describe its own disappearance in real time is rarer still. It would be a peculiar kind of tragedy for this brief flare of awareness to gutter out under chandelier light in a few gold ballrooms while crop failures, fires, and famines write the real ending outside. Yet this is precisely the knife edge we stand on, watching to see whether this oscillation stabilises into something survivable or tips, irreversibly, into the long dark.