In Decline, Restart from the Smallest

See what your eyes can see

I might be reading the signs incorrectly, but it feels like a certain type of global order that showed the oranges and purples of its sunset is now entering its visibility-challenged dusk. The confidence of a still-standing-after -world & -cold war empire, the widespread accumulation of American wealth, a robust-society-enabled cultural individualism, these characteristics are collapsing. Institutions are failing to offer consistently applied rules, softened economic hardship, or a meaningful sense of shared possibility. Hypocritical retrenchment and cynicism-fueled big & unattainable visions proliferate.

In short, a big chunk of civilization in a type of decline. I won’t say decadence, because neither a lack of discipline nor an individually mappable disorder are to blame. Rather, a cultural mode is reaching its apogee: individual control of the social body was always going to fail in some way, eventually. And isn’t that what was always offered by representative democracy, top-down organizational models, and any sort of assertive economics? A few individuals changing or maintaining the world as it is or as it’s meant to be.

There is no control-based remedy for this failing belief and social system. People gain control of institutions and groups, try to understand, tame, and ride them, and eventually get bucked off. Social horses won’t be tamed, and when they are stuck in a pen for too long, their functions and minds degrade.

I am not here to offer an alternative prescription or a way out. The culture of control will not be checked, in the same way that people, the environment, and any other wild and chaotic living system will not respond well over to that control. There are little things that can be done as these systems continue to break down, however.

First, one must sing the culture’s songs. Sing of control, even if control is only the culture’s fantasy, and that fantasy is breaking down. It may sound like a dirge at this stage. Participation in the theater is necessary to remain on the stage.

While doing the pretending-along, build tiny organizations that work, little systems. There isn’t enough institutional faith left to build giant systems that are not pathologically self-immolating, so do not do that. The giant systems will be like locusts, resonating wildly in the face of farmable material, eating everything they can, and then, even as we keep playing along, dying out. See: today’s successful political movements and companies.

Now is the time for tiny organizations that can be built at the level of a few individuals or even a single individual. Do not think globally, do not act locally. Do things that are so small that they cannot be seen from twenty feet up. Say hello on the sidewalk. Go for a walk with one person. There. That is the level of ambition appropriate to these times.

If you’re feeling an overwhelming urge to go further than that, build a tiny community, four people who make waffles together, two families that care for a couple kids together, one person who writes some things and then reads them. I do not know if these little mutualities will add up and become something wider; this is the wrong line of thinking, the broken question that got us where we are now. Narrow your gaze to what your eyes can see and then see what that looks like for a change.