the cartoon bad guy in the first ironman movie, the one who lives in a cave, wants to be bigger than the khan brothers. the coked-up scriptwriters around the conference table in hollywood have him tell the kids in the viewing audience that the mongol empire was bigger than rome, bigger than alexander. but the mongols didn’t have an empire, they had occupied territories, from sumatra to kiev, but that was it. they exacted tribute, but they couldn’t administer dick.
at the time of the historical buddha, there were maybe thirty thousand sheepshaggers in mongolia. then they mastered horses, and became the killer elite. just after 1200, genghis khan depopulated the cities of northern china by three quarters, killing 35 million people in a decade and setting back the chinese demographic curve for 500 years. bad news travels quickly. if you had seen the scorched earth of northern china, you would have handed over tribute, too, but the mongols, the last of the free range cowboys before the modern world, were back to shagging sheep in less than a hundred years.
the tardigrade is also called a water bear, it is an extremophile, which means it lives in extreme environments. there are about the same number of tardigrades on earth as there are humans. what we used to call the future looks like an expanding horizon of opportunity for them, not so much for us.
a little guy from bhutan notes that the himalayas are melting, and puts forth the proposition that a dozen or so most developed nations ought to put a fund together to mitigate climate impacts on people who had no role in producing them. in the movie man on fire, the coked-up screenwriters have creasy give a history lesson to the little blonde girl: bhutan is a kingdom in the himalayas, they were having some trouble with the royal family not long ago. meaning, the black ops master was there, in person, settling things down for his employers in the west. creasy asks his friend ray: do you think god will forgive us for what we’ve done?
the leaders of the unfree world don’t care about you, they never have, they never will. they don’t feel that life is precious, and for that reason, human life now amounts to running out the clock.
that clock is moving much faster than they appreciate. in 2017, two sets of permafrost researchers working in alaska, from woods hole and harvard, reported separately that we had crossed the threshold for the climate feedback loop, suggesting an accelerator model of climate impacts. long story short, emissions are now not the only uptake channel for CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. melting permafrost and wildfires now constitute their own uptake channels, so that even if we reduced emissions to zero today, those channels would continue to heat the atmosphere on their own. we are not going to reduce emissions to zero anytime soon, so the climate feedback loop will continue to increase the uptake volumes in the other two channels at an accelerating rate.
what’s a mother to do. existentially, you only have two problems. one is how to stay calm while you are looking directly at the window of opportunity closing on human life, and the other is called agency, or acting directly on your own fundamental interests.
i can make the case to pretty much anyone of any political persuasion that the experience of the institution of western education, on the british model, is not about teaching and learning at all, it’s about the social control of agency over the entire period of human cognitive development. looking around, you would have to say it’s been pretty successful.
but that institution, like all modern institutions, including representative government, law and justice, and so on, is dead, but still moving, a zombie institution.
what we have is a breakout moment. either you realize true equanimity and skill in means, or we give it over to the tardigrades to start fresh. it doesn’t come from outside.
householder zen 