HOW TO PROFIT FROM A DYING CIVILIZATION

ROBERT MOTHERWELL, ELEGY STUDY A

These days, people come to me to teach them how to make money. That part, I always say, is easy. And it is. If you followed along with the last two recommendations, then you’d have made between 10-20% in a month. Not bad. But is it good? Is it fair? Does it even matter?

Today I’m going to teach you not just how to make money. But also the price. Everything has one. And this way we understand what it is to profit. Whether we do at all.

In times as horrific, nightmarish as these, riddled with evil, cut apart by stupidity. How do we “make money”? The truth is that we lay our traps. And we wait. We wait for a wounded thing. To fall into our snares. Crimson streaks the forest floor. It bleeds. It staggers. It can barely see. Hardly walk.

We trap a half-dead, nearly-blind thing. The teeth of our trap close around its ankles. It howls in pain. It cries out to the heavens. Its anguish pierces the empty sky.

This thing that we have trapped is civilization itself. Our trap goes like this. Ah, you see, perhaps today, this shattered thing is running out of water. Oil. Energy. Food. Let us buy them, some abstract variant of them, and have them. Let us parch it, starve it, ruin it, destroy it. And our traps splinters its already shattered bones.

You see what I’m saying. Or do you? Let me make the practical mechanics of all this clear. Our civilization is now dying. As the thing it used to be. One aspiring to peace, democracy, justice, truth, intellect, reason. Art and science are laughable things now. Nobody but people us reads books anymore. They watch influencers whose alien smiles are made of acid. They watch “videos” where they themselves are the meat eaten by leering faces.

Our civilization is dying. And we buy up what little there is left. Today, it’s oil. Food. Tomorrow, water and air. Perhaps, if there’s some infinitesimal grain of decency left in us, we draw the line at killing machines. Is there a line there? Or is it just made of sand, a thing which reassures us, but can never hold back an ocean?

This is how we make money as a civilization collapses.

I don’t like my job. It makes me feel dread and sadness. It’s an indecent thing. To lay traps for a wounded civilization. To stalk it, hunt it, and feast on its threadbare meat.

This is the price. And I want you to know the price. Because in this price lies the truest perversion of all. People like us were meant for better things. And what’s left to us now? Do art and science matter now? Does anything? Annihilation surrounds us. Of the mind, body, and spirit. Of all the ideals we once aspired to. But annihilation comes from nihilism, from not merely the belief in nothing, but the triumph of nothingness over substance. The noblest substance is love. It flows between us like a mighty river. Does it? Why has this river run dry? Shall we flee through it? What lies where its mouth used to be?

Where have the waters of life gone?

What shall we dedicate our lives to? This, my friends, is the question before us now. Shall we dedicate them to love, or to nothingness? Many people, most of them, now settle for nothingness. This is the way of the swipe and the scroll, the blind obeisance to the algorithm and the model. What do the algorithms calculate? Desire’s empty vessel. What do the models cast in dead stone? Language, words, logos, the beginning and the end.

What will we dedicate our lives to? Do we settle for nothingness?

You see, when we feast on the wounded thing called a civilization, which barely provides us a meal every time we catch it as prey, because its muscles are so atrophied that they are almost dust—when we feast on this barely living thing, what does it make of it? Leave of it? Less and less, each time. This way lies nothingness.

And what does all that, this act of feasting on a wounded civilization,. make of us? It makes cannibals of us. We hold up its bloody bones, and roar, the life coming back to our veins. At last there is sustenance. But the gods forbid this most terrible of acts for a reason. In the consumption of that which one is, one becomes annihilation itself. This way we become Nothingness itself. We are Servants of Thanatos, the death force, whose primal impulse is annihilation.

What do we dedicate the only treasure we have, which is life, to? This is the question before us. It is the great question of this age. And it is left unasked. We are too frightened and scared. We hide behind our traps and snares. We are desperate for a meal, no matter how callow and gray and the meat. Just tendons will do, of a dying thing. We pray for our prey to come near. We scroll and swipe to hide the terror we feel, that we are becoming nobody, nothing, and life now is a joyless, futile exercise in letting the days pass.

We are oblivion this way, my friends.

All this is the price.

The price is the question.

We are doing something ignoble now, something obscene. The gods will mark us for it with the brand of shame. The shame will cut into our souls, and tear us apart. There are no happy rich men. There are only empty shells with money, money, money, forever seeking more.

Understand what you are asking me to do. Understand yourself, your place in the universe.

I know a man. He is respected by the kinds of men who are eager to give their respect to men who boast and beat their chests. Small men, seeking power. He imagines himself to a great success, because men like this come to him, their hats in their hands, and speak in reverent tones. He imagines that he has built something as great as the Pyramids, as watchful over time as the Sphinx. He is a digital slumlord.

Understand the choice. Between nothingness and everythingness. This is the only choice there is. Between love and annihilation, between Eros and Thanatos. In our age, the choice is made for us, or we let it be made for us, by systems and institutions that annihilate us with their very glance. Medusa stares at us from the algorithm and the model. We turn to stone. And then we shatter with the hammer blows of our own eternal hunger.

Perhaps you can sense my anguish. It is there, in you too. And now we must offer it to each other.

What will we dedicate our lives to? The river of love has run dry in our times. It takes courage of the truest kind to walk in its mud, to struggle through its dry course, and climb towards its mouth. To take one’s self there. And see what lies waiting. The waters of life themselves. Do they still trickle from the soil of being, there, in the mist? Will they run through our fingers, for just a moment, if we walk this path? Will the gods spit on us for this choice—or are we nothing to them already, having become nothingness itself?

This is the (truth of the) question of profiting from a dying civilization.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)