What am I doing here?
The things that people always do, and always have done for millennia: attempt to figure this whole life shit out.
In mundanity lies the beauty and divine order of the inner workings of a perfect machinery some might call God.
In a wood, a spiraling flower head; on a beach, a broken piece of something’s shell.
Or inside your own body (the most mundane, yet most fantastical place of all—you carry it around with you day after day, yet will never see it Fantastic Voyage-style), live infinite forms-within-forms, fractals and branches and spirals, endlessly repeating perfect golden ratios, ever upward, stretching outward.
People are kind of like that, too.
And groups of people…that’s where the patterns we form get really obvious, where the beauty and divine order of the nested inner workings of relationships, families, societies, and states plays out across space and time.
People always think — like, everyone ever thinks they’re unique and much wow and that their particular epoch is special. Right now, while I’m alive, something huge like The Big World Ending Thing is going to happen. Existence fades to black, camera tight on my face. Roll credits, starring me. Pfft. Right. So the world’s always perpetually ending for someone somewhere— but for real this time, y’all, I’m not trying to be yet another oh-so-special Protagonist of muh own dystopian movie, but [$CURRENT_YEAR] is really really weird, and it might actually be time to get prepared for the go, you know, the thing.
Whatever “prepared” means.
For the first time in my lifetime, and maybe my parents’, and maybe even theirs, charting one’s lifepath into the future along a predictable linear extrapolation from the conditions defining now may prove a literal waste of time; it’s completely unclear, with what little actual information we have to go on, where we’re going tomorrow, let alone into The Future with this whole Western Civilization thing.
Where are we headed? More than likely, humanity is headed where it is always headed—into the next node along the endlessly repeating wave of human history. That can either sound optimistic, or apocalyptic. For fun (and for just like…actually being realistic), let’s go with the latter. The Worst Thing We Can Imagine might look slightly different than the cataclysmic human events in antiquity we’ve studied because now we have The Internet and stuff, you know, but it’s all. the same. shit. People are people, and always have been; we would do well to remember that.
States are also states, and always have been — we would do really well to remember that, too.
I don’t trust the state. But, given a long enough timeline, I do trust states to reliably bend towards tyranny. So I’m not exactly down to comply with whatever, the contradictory set of stupid things we’re all just supposed to do now, the New Normal®, quietly and complacently, like the nice people we are, riding the wave of human history into an indeterminate, and likely shitty, future.
Alright, is optimism still on the table? How do you chart a path towards a white-pilled future through the unknown? How do we—those who dare to live mindfully, purposefully, and free in the face of ever-growing fucked up-lefty-post-modern-woke-anarcho-tyranny—prepare for the future? What should we be doing right now? What can we build? Where should we build? What structures should we have in place before the inevitable(?) collapse happens?
And what happens if, complacent, well-fed and inertia-lazy, we do nothing at all?
I don’t know, but I do know that it won’t be good.
So, zoom out and observe the entire wave backwards into history to better grok the human patterns within patterns and structures within structures that emerge, fall, rise, and repeat.
And simultaneously, with the other squarely planted in the present, track current innovations, trends, patterns, and other emerging factors to understand what we should build, what we can build, and how the path forward through calamity towards prosperity might look different for humanity this time around.
A deep study of the macro- and micro-patterns and repetitions in human behaviour, language, philosophy, technology, economics, politics, and history may help navigate the way forward. Like a fractal, spiral inward or outward, zoom in or zoom out, and the patterns remain the same.
I’m interested in understanding where we’re going by analyzing the parts of the human story that represent those fractal, repeating, infinitely subdivided patterns within patterns.
Hence Subdivisions.
(And it’s also the name of a dope Rush song, so there’s that.)
Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.
In the meantime, tell your friends!