Dark Tide

Most people, across most of history, have probably just tried to survive and get on with living in an already difficult world, while watching domineering fools drag whole societies into imperial escapades, compensatory aggression, and other remedial engagements with reality. For ordinary people, the view has often been one of exhausted disbelief: not only horror at cruelty, but exasperation at the sheer stupidity of it all.

That same feeling hangs heavily over the present. Much of the world now seems arranged by insecure men, brittle institutions, and decaying powers acting out their confusion at planetary scale. What makes it so bleak is not merely the danger, but the dark absurdity of it: that so much suffering still issues from vanity, fear, greed, theatrical posturing, and minds too small for the forces they are trying to command.

Imperial decline is giftwrapped in opulent selfishness. We’ve (all) been here before.