"Don't disassociate" as act of defiance

We must watch AND not go insane. Some tender ideas for this...

There’s a subtle dance we must now do. We’re all here trying to learn the steps.

The new tyrannical elites are Flooding The Zone With The Most Horrendous Shit. It’s their plan. And they’re doing it super well. I’m not going to spend any time listing All The Horrendous Things. Because that’s what They want me and you to do. And I’m not going to tangle myself in commenting on exactly how and why it’s wrong, backing up the evidence and providing detailed references. Because that’s also what They want.

This is the entire point of Operation Flooding The Zone. As these new elites syphon funds to their own late-stage collapse coffers, they need us - the masses - to be tied up in distracted, overwhelmed knots. They need us to miss the *actually substantial* orchestrations amid the scatter-gun Shit. And they need us to give up, tune out, disassociate and to go…consume. The Roman elites used bread and circuses. Trump, Musk, Peter Dutton (in Australia), Google, META and all the other emerging fascist forces are swamping us with DEI bans, plastic straws and Greenland real estate plans.

But at the same time, staying tuned in hurts. It’s nigh impossible not to rage and despair. We take it out on each other, our loved ones, ourselves. Which…is also what They want us to do. They need the chaos.

It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of scenario. But we must find a subtle through-line. We must learn the dance.

Not to distract, but to give human context, above is where I wrote this post, sitting on the platform of the Portbou station on the Spanish border in the Pyrenees, awaiting my 9-hour train back to Paris.

Below are a few ideas I’ve had around this, and some reads and links that have helped me the past week or so. Feel free to add yours. This will have to be an ongoing, engaged conversation for a long time to come, heartbreakingly.

We don’t have a choice. The times demand we bear witness.

We can rail against it all, resist it, wish it wasn’t so. And we can walk around saying things like, I can’t even. But it is going down. And it’s going down now. And, alas, we find ourselves the adults in the room in this moment, the ones who can fight and protect. And, just as the adults in the Dark Ages and during the Blitz had to, and just as the adults in Gaza, Sudan, Congo and Ukraine currently have to, we must rise to the moment. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

Accordingly, we must draw on the most hardy, fundamental human character virtues. The ones adults have always had to draw on when an era of abundance and comfort tips into hardship.

The New York Times editorial board has pleaded: “For goodness sake, don’t tune out.” And they add, “America faces a new reality, and it demands wisdom, endurance and courage…We must meet the moment.”

I like the words demands and must. We can no longer bargain our way out of this. Or think we can apply for a special leave pass. Or do a watered-down version. Or hope that someone or something will come to save us.

We must now learn to relax into this choicelessness. We must channel the energy we’d previously put into justifying and making vacation destination decisions into embodying wisdom, endurance and courage, and “being noble in our suffering” as I put it in my Collapse Book Serialisation.

New to the Collapse Book Serialisation? Here's where you can get started

Be we must be artful with our attention.

We must witness and discern.

We must watch what is happening, bear witness and speak up, for reasons I outline here. But not allow ourselves to be flooded. This is the ultimate act of defiance now.

I advise getting off social media for chunks of time (I just did a week off IG and Facebook and will do this regularly and in longer increments; it works) and to artfully choose one news source to send a daily alert into your inbox. Alert but not flooded!

Me, I also feel a responsibility to stay abreast of balanced commentary and analysis, as much as I sometimes want to tune out from the desperate need for everyone to have a hot take. I use my body to guide me on who and what I follow - if I notice I’m cringing at a journalist’s headlines, I unsubscribe from their work for a bit. I try to keep about 5-10 opinion writers in circulation, across podcasts, newspapers and Substack, at any one time, mixing them up regularly.

Question: Shall I get a Community Thread going on the ones we all “feel” are speaking balanced, left-brain stuff at the moment?

In the Collapse Book Serialisation I advise speaking up and out in defence of humanity and decency specifically. Channelling our responses to this end, rather than entangling oneself in left-brained notions of wrong v right, keeps us focused (and not flooded). We must avoid using the same tactics They use.

Outrage, rather than rage.

In the Collapse Book Serialisation I advise outraging rather than raging. Women in particular need to get comfortable with speaking up and out, accessing Kali rage unapologetically, rather than bottling it up and raging internally (and taking it out on ourselves and loved ones).

Economist

Robert Reich

suggests we flood Trump and Musk’s zone. He argues this is starting to happen. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski says the Senate phone system has been receiving around 1,600 calls each minute, compared to the 40 calls per minute it usually gets — thus disrupting the system.

I’m not sure I agree with deluging and adding to chaos. However, Reich also wrote this post with suggested artful actions. He also suggests being discerning with your news sources and suggests the following (I support most of these): Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, The Guardian, ProPublica, Heather Cox Richardson.

Liz Lenkinski

at

Burn It All Down

writes about leaning into the insanity and taking up space. But she also stresses artfulness: “We need to put down TikTok and start a new trend of cultivating our own power from within.” I like this call to action. Liz adds:

“The kind of ‘insanity’ I’m choosing to embody is unique to women. I’m going to keep speaking my mind in a way that would have seen me burned at the stake or committed against my will in previous eras.”

Me too.

Engage in perspective dialogue, too.

I’m observing a lot of commentators down-playing things a little too much. But at the same time, there are some practical realities we should stay alive to.

Ezra Klein has done several episodes on his podcast to this effect, including this one that advises “Don’t Believe Him”. He makes an interesting point - eventually the Zone Flooders will exhaust themselves. Their tactic requires coming up with an endless stream of Shit, and that tap will run dry eventually.

Flipside, I advise listening to this interview in which Ross Douthat drills the brains behind the Flooding The Zone tactic, Steve Bannon. (As I watched it, I found myself getting quite seduced by Bannon and Douthat’s brilliant left-brain waltz; it was a useful exercise in observing what we are up against, and what is ultimately collapsing).

I also advise revisiting

Naomi Klein

’s Shock Doctrine. She’s doing a series over at

Zeteo

on this and will be updating the book for the current moment soon.

‘It’s All About Shock and Awe’: Trump’s Plan to Distract, Overwhelm, and Deplete

This perspective from

Rachel Donald

writing at

Planet: Critical

also got me sitting up straighter, alert and suitably alarmed about how we’ve been numbed into this demise.

“Enough wealth now circulates among the upper echelons of society that they can continue to extract natural resources and pay for machinery and employ labour to craft goods which only the rich will enjoy, rendering everyone else a serf. It’s not so long ago that Europe looked like this. Except, now most won’t be working the land but the cloud, a digitised attention economy in which we labour for free. This has been the case for some time, that when workers clock out for the day they go home and continue working by generating content on platforms owned by billionaires who sell adspace to other major companies. Our time has become even more valuable than our labour. But we will likely arrive at a point when the consumer economy is no longer targeting us, but securing the planet’s scarce resources for the wealthy. Whatever scraps are left over will be served up to us as cheap digital distractions and unaffordable material necessities, like food and housing.”

Keep seeing it all through collapse goggles

I was speaking to a friend and subscriber (

Emma Macdonald

) today on the train back to Paris and I told her I derive odd comfort from the fact this is what the elites have always done in all collapsing civilisations. It’s a locked-in part of the process. This post here gives a little background. And this Peter Turchin interview gives the full rundown. Or you can read my book!

The more we understand about moloch and complex systems collapse, the more we can accept what is going on, rather than rail senselessly against what is a “predicament”, and no longer a problem that can somehow be fixed. We can’t fix a predicament, we can only respond.

And our response can only be to

1. Pay attention and outrageously defend humanity and decency; and

2. To live as fully and beautifully as we can.

Everything we do now can go through these simple, essential, original filters. They also work perfectly in tandem, a package. Both are acts of defiance.

Quit the circa-2020 languishing

This is a slight aside… We are emerging from an era that celebrated disassociating. As I cover in this chapter in my book, we are an avoidant attachment-style civilisation. I’ve been tracking the commentary to this effect for a number of years. Adam Grant wrote about the languishing trend as a response to the increasing distraction: “Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work.”

The journalist Daphne K. Lee flagged a Chinese trend that translates to “revenge bedtime procrastination” - staying up late at night to reclaim the freedom we’ve missed during the day. The hit novel was Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a story about a beautiful 26-year-old New Yorker who comes up with a plan to spend only 40 hours awake in a four-month period as a response to a wealth-obsessed culture she finds noxious. And do you remember all those T-shirts and memes promoting “Naps and snacks,” “Namast’ay in bed,” “I just want to stay home with my dog,” and “Introverted AF” mugs that read “Literally Can’t Even”?

Languishing no longer works. Quit it. And challenge those who continue to sink into it. Steer young people away from it, too.

As many of you know, I’ve campaigned against “acedia” (a listless, slothfulness that descends in times of opulence) for close on a decade. I explain the principle here, if you want to catch up:

Why we must go to our edge

Tenderness as an act of resistance

Ultimately, the sweet spot we seek can be found when we come back to the basics of our humanness, over and over. We can witness and bear it, accept and live fully, be in it and resist, when we come from - or are reduced to - our most tender, vulnerable place.

Margaret Renkl wrote in the New York Times to this effect. She addresses the quandary we all find ourselves in:

“The question is how a heart can be broken again and again and again and not fall into a fruitless desolation. How is it possible to protect a tender heart when it’s dangerous to turn away from what is breaking it?”

She quotes an author she interviewed:

“I fall into the mineshaft of despair over and over again, and over and over again something (the moon, an eagle, the snow) or someone (…a stranger who looks me in the eye and smiles, a grandparent who tells me about reading aloud to their grandchild) will reach down to pull me out”

And adds:

“Anger lets in too little beauty, but heartbreak? A tender heart feels the fury and the fear, the sorrow and suffering, the beauty and the bravery alike. In the years ahead, we will need them all.”

As I write in the Collapse Book Serialisation, this very collapse process is taking us down into our tender, vulnerable, heart-broken selves. We are effectively been delivered to where we need to be to endure what’s ahead. Oh, the beauty of it!

A final thought from Rumi

“Stay together, friends

Don’t scatter and sleep

Our friendship is made

of being awake.”

---

A long one, but I wanted to share some of the reads and listens that support some of what we’ve been covering here. As always, whack yours in the comments!

Sarah xx