The Rittenhouse Affair & Ecosystems

I guess it's fitting that I'd end up talking about this for my first real post.

It has been pretty wild to watch the reactions to the Rittenhouse Affair as it concludes. On my (supposed) right, I've seen people acting like this is some kind of deeply profound and spiritual victory over the pedophilic cannibalistic forces of progressivism. And on my (supposed) left, I mostly see people acting as if they just learned about Auschwitz, Unit 731, and Pitești Prison for the first time, all in the span of one hour. Both groups having these emotional reactions to something into which they’ve invested their political identities is normal—we see this at sportsball games all the time. But the reasons for these reactions seem to have nothing to do with “winning” and “losing” (though I’m sure that is certainly a part of it, at a deeper level). The bifurcation between these camps is based, quite literally, on narratives and not facts, both of which we’ve seen spun and revealed (respectively), like most things in the 2020s, in real time. Because this did indeed occur in real time, it comes off as incredibly strange to the observer. But one might argue it isn’t. Basically, the divided reactions and reasons for them aren't that odd. Notable bigoted racist transphobic neo-Nazi Jewish guy Jesse Singal put it really well when he wrote in his excellent recent article for Persuasion:

"It’s understandable how, to the casual onlooker, all these viral claims about Rittenhouse being a white supremacist who went out looking for trouble might FEEL true, might FEEL like the sort of thing that could happen in America. Whether we should fit the Rittenhouse case into that preexisting historical mold is a separate question—and all the available evidence suggests it would be foolhardy to do so."

And for the chaser:

"The misinformation also has a pernicious effect on conservatives. It’s been clear to many of them, from early on, that the media wasn’t treating this case fairly and that to get a more accurate version of the story, they would have to turn to alternative news sources. Many of those sources are right-wing and not particularly concerned with truthfulness either: they tended to portray Rittenhouse as some sort of bona fide American hero, when we obviously shouldn’t be encouraging 17-year-olds to embrace the roles of paramilitary foot soldiers."

[NOTE: If all you're seeing right now is the words "bOtH siDEs-iSm" or something on a big red background within your minds eye, I'm thinking you should see yourself out because I don't think there's any getting through to you. But for the rest of you...]

There is indeed a reason for this bifurcation of narratives we’re seeing. And it’s not “because we’re divided” (though that is also indeed an effect of sorts), and it’s not because this is “civil war” (though that too is a possibility of course). And simply saying “it’s the media” or “it’s social media” won’t do either, because from where I’m standing, I still see people consuming the media and using social media to air their feelings on this whole thing in very predictably, again, bifurcated ways; obviously if that’s the problem and if it’s as obvious as it’s often presented, then either most people don’t care (true) or it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter (also true). A lot of people have been asking why for years, including me: why are the two sets of narratives becoming so mutually exclusive and with increasing frequency and within higher and higher structures within our society?

And yet I don’t think it’s much of a mystery, as long as we try and look at things from a certain perspective: that of a natural ecosystem.

…

I keep using that word when having this conversation with friends: "ecosystem." To me, it's not just more convincing as far as explanations go for why American political culture operates the way it does, but it takes a massive rational step beyond the literally impossible conversation of "which side is wrong?" Haven't you noticed that facts don't matter anymore when dealing with an event or person or even idea in which people are emotionally invested? It's because they don't. They do when it comes to seeking out the truth of the matter—as noted racist, NB-murdering-with-his-words asshole Jesse Singal does, but when it comes to understanding the broader question of "why does this happen?"—this, Summer of Love 2020, whatever—the framework of an ecosystem is not just sufficient; it’s ideal.

When looking at a culture as an ecosystem, you don't have to sacrifice your values on who you think is right or wrong; that remains intact. But it helps in letting you understand that what you believe as an individual doesn't really matter all that much; you're riding the tiger of history, to paraphrase the Traditionalist Julius Evola. While Evola was really just a butt-hurt fascist/National Socialist fanboy when he said that, and trying to justify why his terrible and bland ideology didn't work out and change the world into what he wanted it to be, he was still expressing a nugget of profound truth: that time itself—that is, history—continues along with or without you and everything you say or do doesn't really matter with changing the direction of events directly.

The difference is that what you say now, in our interconnected world, will reach other people who will either repeat or refute what you say in one way or another, which in turn will reach other people, all of whom are doing the same thing as you are to their own networks. And because human nature contains a tendency toward self-organization, that's where the narratives happen. They don't come from a hierarchical Big Brother figure; they come from people talking to (well, at) each other and assumptions being made based on those interactions. There are loftier institutions that may get the ball rolling, but often times they're just repeating what their staff writers saw being repeated elsewhere, likely on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, the chans/kuns, etc. There's a reason I know someone who managed to have his name spoken by a former president (however dubious an honor that might have been, considering who that president was).

This is how it works. What makes this an ecosystem is the sophisticated level of interactions all happening at once and affecting one another, thus creating a balanced whole. The crucial difference between this ecosystem and natural ecosystems, however, is that natural ecosystems don’t contain participants trying wrest control of the ecosystem from within. And that’s what reveals this ecosystem to likely be an eternal feature of civilization; just something we are and can be much more aware of in far greater numbers.

At the end of the day, both members of the Nazi Party and its most fervent opponents within and without its borders, firmly believed that the Nazis were masters of time and space (in the sense that they would control the destiny of everyone if they weren’t stopped). Armed with the understanding that true power comes within one’s own mind, the Soviet Union under Stalin tried to take it a step even further by attempting to destroy men’s souls and rebuild them from scratch. And yet neither ever really had all that much power. Because they were slaves of the ecosystem. Nazism and communism only arose and thrived due to historical circumstances working in their favor and their own thriving created the incentives for peoples and thus nations to oppose them, because to enough people, their supposed virtues as civilizations were not self-evident.

This is where the difference between past ecosystems and our current one (if a distinction can even be made, and honestly I suspect it can’t) comes into play. The advantage we (post? meta?) moderns have at our disposal is not our hindsight (which is really just a form of bias); our so-called ability to “never forget.” The real advantage is that, thanks to the technology we wield that can and admittedly does make things worse at times, we can now observe this ecosystem in real time and in a way that no previous generation has ever been able to accomplish. Because the ecosystem is eternal until it isn’t, as any extinct species would tell you if it had the capacity to do so. This has never and will never go anywhere; this is the real benefit of hindsight studying history can provide you. But we can see the process happen as it happens; it’s like watching bacterial evolution within a petri dish. And while any psychologist worth their salt will tell you that self-awareness on its own is worthless, they’ll also say that it’s the first requirement toward making any meaningful adjustments to your life. And that self-awareness is in the hands of an ever-growing part of the public.

But here’s the thing: many don’t want this self-awareness in the hands of the public—i.e. the Elect, the Cathedral and by extension the hashtag-Resistance crowd—and others simply want to weaponize it for their own ends and likely, ultimately at the expense of the public—the Steve Bannons the Ron Watkinses of the world—and neither of these warring factions will do. Factions such as these are indeed perhaps inevitable—as perhaps were Stalin’ and Hitler’s attempts to wrest control of the ecosystem itself, Cathedral-style, echoing would-be totalitarians of ages past, from Cyrus to Alexander to Genghis Khan, as well as the forgotten Littlefingers/Jokers of history, like Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, and Osama bin-Laden; all of them, whether they are trying to control the ecosystem or benefit from it in some unnatural way, are under the same mistaken impression that the ecosystem doesn’t apply to them and that they will escape its effects.

A surrender to the ecosystem isn’t to do nothing. A real, meaningful surrender forces one to take stock of what they think is necessary and take responsibility for failure and be willing to completely reorient oneself at the drop of a hat and be transparent in doing so. Limiting that to individuals isn’t enough, however, and much as many of us (myself included) would like to believe it wasn’t the case, models need to be provided. And what better than our broken institutions that the public distrusts at best and outright loathes at worst. Indeed, as Martin Gurri has observed, if our Industrial Age institutions wish to survive, they must adapt. Adaptation is what allows organisms to thrive within an ecosystem, and those that do not adapt are typically the first to go extinct, and those who attempt to wrest control of it or suck it dry of its resources for their own benefit are the ones that bring the whole thing down.

…

Near the end of the excellent and underrated crime film The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Cormac McCarthy, a character named El Jefe played by Ruben Blades makes a brief appearance with one of the most astounding sections of dialogue in recent film history. In the midst of explaining the situation in which the titular Counselor finds himself, El Jefe says the following:

“I would urge you to see the truth of the situation you're in, Counselor. That is my advice. It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made.”

At its core, this man was trying, through McCarthy-level dense dialogue, to explain to the Counselor that he was part of an ecosystem that, through his choices, he, in part, created; “Actions create consequences which produce new worlds, and they're all different,” says El Jefe. “Life is not going to take you back. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist.”

There was, I suspect, a reason that the end of the film finds El Jefe, in his understanding of the ecosystem in which we all live, sitting comfortably in his mansion, sipping at his fancy coffee, while the Counselor, who attempted to wrest control of the ecosystem, hunches over a particular and truly ominous DVD-R in what can only be described as feral bereavement.