The Last of Our Blue Skies
making sense of the end
A note on this strange piece of writing: Presented below is a quasi-fictional attempt to make sense of how we got to where an all too likely nuclear catastrophe seems to have snuck up on us. Writing this was a deeply grounding and gratifying exercise that probably saved me a lot of money on psychotherapy. Love, Ciaran 24th Aug 2022
It only seems like yesterday we saw the last of our blue skies. At least in some ways. In other ways, it seems like years ago that the heavens started to blacken. While fond memories compress time, harsh realities stutter it along with agonized creep. Especially so when hunger, cold, and terror saturate what have been increasingly grey moments. Scavenging for sustenance, scrambling for shelter, and scurrying for safety has taken its toll on us. Only 37 days have passed since the Event.
Eyes closed, forehead to forehead, I just felt the last of the dimmed warmth leave the body of the woman I loved like I didn’t know was possible. Her final breath lingers on my cheek. I am alone now. What should I do? Should I “rage against the dying of the light” and refuse to go “gentle into that good night”?
Despite a longing for relief—relief from loss, hunger, cold, pain—a bone deep sadness wells up at the thought of hastening matters along. This sentimental sorrow is not from a fear of death per se. It is more from a bittersweet place of nostalgic mourning for all the life that would never be lived, not just by the two of us and those we loved most, but by the countless trillions of unique souls who were yet to come but will now never get a chance. The joyous laughter that will not erupt; the music that will not be heard; the children that will not play; the unconditional embrace that will not emerge from true friendship; the simple comfort around a meal that will not be shared; the darkness that will not become dawn. I’ll write first and decide later. Journaling always helped. If for no other reason than closure, I long to make sense of what led to this.
How many could be out there? Maybe some wealthy stragglers are managing to get by in bunkers? Maybe there are still parts of Earth where enough sunlight can get through for plants to grow? Unfortunately, research from a pre-Event past life—a life in which I was writing a book about such matters—means I know enough to not be very optimistic. Even if survivors can outlast this nuclear winter, and manage to feed themselves for what may be the decade needed to weather the darkened skies, accelerated ozone layer destruction from the heated upper atmosphere leaves them with another problem entirely: unimaginable global warming.
Dr King seems to have been correct. In some beautiful writing published just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he suggested humanity’s choice was “either nonviolence or nonexistence.” A passage from the same piece was burned into my psyche:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”
And so, was violence that was capable of escalating to the nonexistence of humanity justified in order to resist the expansion of tyranny? Was fighting for the opportunity of freedom, in other words, worth jeopardising the chance for Homo sapiens to exist at all? The post-1945 nuclear age, and the growing power and influence of authoritarian regimes, meant this fundamental existential conundrum was being asked of all of us, whether we were philosophers or not, and whether we realised it or not.
How did the West get to the place where such a basic Cold War quagmire seemed to blindside so many of us? This played over and over in my head in the weeks since news came in of mushroom clouds over Western cities. And while poor in food and fuel in the weeks since, we had been rich in time to think and chat while hunkered down in wait of help that would never come. Even though we knew our best explanation may not have been true in terms of impartial objectivity, neither did it feel like a lie. “We do not see the world as it is,” like Nin put it, “we see the world as we are.”
An almost universally shambolic response to the virus from Wuhan woke me up to our largely ignored systemic fragility. Moreover, we seemed to learn nothing of real benefit from our pandemic failures. Our fragmentary ideological roots were only deepened by it. Hence it was not merely the putting of too many eggs in the gradual global warming basket—at the expense of preparing for more pressing threats like pandemics or nuclear war—that had set us up for failure (the extravagant theatrical pomp at COP 26 epitomised this myopic focus; it occurred at the tail end of a disastrously mismanaged pandemic involving a relatively benign pathogen, and not long before the Event). No, it was really the increasingly intensified possession by intolerant ideologies underneath our blinkered hubris that did us in.
Too many of us, as craven individuals, could not carry the burden of existence and so longed for explanatory certainty in the form of tribal stories. Standard critiques of Western materialistic greed are relevant but only part of the story. We could not bear the notion that the cosmos of which we were part was an experientially Divine Mystery that did not require an explanatory dogmatic mythology. “Surety Brings Ruin” was inscribed over the door at Delphi twenty five hundred years ago, yet the message had still not sunken in. Becker called us “gods with anuses,” yet we couldn’t tolerate our place in the enigmatic pantheon. We couldn’t love one other because we couldn’t tell the truth to ourselves. And in the secular West, this existential dis-ease manifested most clearly in the zealous religiosity of internal socio-political strife.
Progressive impulses are inherently proactive and prospective in that they stem from a detection of perceived stagnation in tradition. Conservative impulses, on the other hand, are inherently reactive and reflective in that they stem from perceived excesses in change from tradition. What happened in the supposedly enlightened West, is that the progressives got led astray by dream world fantasies. Fantasies where biological sex didn’t exist, and where cultural mores like female genital mutilation or religious intolerance couldn’t be criticised for fear of imposing “imperialist” agendas on the Woke anointed perma-victims. Superficial identity worshipping trends took primacy over helping the dispossessed off of their knees, not only socially but economically, regardless of their pronouns or skin colour. This decadent nonsense elicited understandable reciprocal pushback from those who saw through the virtue signalling and hypocrisy of the “elite” classes. Brexit and Trump were not random events. These were, at least in strong part, two fingered salutes to the plastic technocrats who insisted that the unwashed plebeian flock did what they were told. Rises in far-right sentiments across the West could then be seen, again at least in strong part, as merely the tip of this reactionary wing as it unfolded and lengthened in proportional response to its excessively progressive counterpart. Newton’s teaching that actions have equal but opposite reactions needn’t apply only to physics.
Though easily dismissed as linguistic Rorschach cards, the socio-political terms “left” and “right” do have a pragmatic use here as they allow us to imagine a spectrum. We can think of excesses in progressive left-wing ideology as leading to babies being tossed out when the bath is emptied: too much is progressed at the expense of justifiable conservation. Excesses in conservative right-wing ideology, on the other hand, can lead to babies lingering in cultural squalor: too much is conserved at the expense of justifiable progression. Balance between these temperamental and philosophical forces is key. In fact, it was the ability to find balance between competing desires that had made the West such a wonderful anomaly.
The real superpower of the West, one realizes after getting to first principles, was characterized by a very simple concept: error correction. Key Western social technologies like Science, Democracy, and Freedom of Expression all functioned by allowing us to cut away deadwood. Science as a means of investigating nature begins from an assumption of human ignorance as functionally infinite. Thus it allowed us to correct errors in our understanding of nature by systematically asking us to find out where we were wrong in our creative conjecturing, not where we were right. Democracy begins from an assumption that the human capacity for incompetence and malevolence was ever present in all of us. Thus it allowed us the freedom to get rid of political leaders before they could do too much harm, through the use of ballots rather than bullets. Freedom of Expression underpinned all of what made the West so great and begins from the assumption that, at best, we each hold only partial truth. Thus it allowed us to voice our dissent—without fear of persecution—in order to both contribute to collective intelligence, and acquire from it. It was not an assertion of infallible truth, nor an ability to find the perfect leader that made the West the greatest civilisation ever, but the assumption of inescapable human ignorance and a systematic recognition of animalistic fallibility that did so.
This foundational need to find equilibrium through epistemic humility and shared humanity was, however, abandoned by extremely vocal and influential minorities in favour of moral indignation and toxic tribalism. Ideological conflict in the West intensified for years that was then captured and shown to the world through interconnected information technology. The almost nightly “anti-racism” riots that raged in certain US cities for months on end after George Floyd’s killing, alongside the January 6th riot in DC by those who opposed election results on spurious grounds, were prime examples of the sort of chaotic socio-political theatre that showed the existentially free people of the West at their ideologically marionetted worst. As were the videos of civil unrest that occurred off the back of naively bullish vaccine mandates in places like Austria or New Zealand. Enemies of the Open Society could never have dreamed of spawning such powerful anti-Western propaganda as we ourselves generated by virtue of epistemic arrogance and the desire to control, or even destroy, an all too easily demonized other.
Utterly central to this suicidal milieu was the “culture war.” While intensifying for years prior to the pandemic, the constant mortality salience provided by the Wuhan virus served to ramp things up in a manner Terror Management Theory would have predicted. This culture war drained our attention from the real world outside our comfortable little bubble and started long before Putin sent his war machine into Ukraine. It was an ideological civil war within the West whose absurdities and inconsistencies the Russian leader could gleefully brandish as depraved madness in attempts to convince his relatively captive audience of their superiority. To be honest, he wasn’t entirely wrong in some of his critiques; stopped clocks and all that. We fought over deck chairs on the Titanic while ignoring the obvious dangers. Intolerant unipolar moralism won out over tolerant multipolar realism.
Through dogmatic focus on power differentials between identity groups as the primary lens of viewing human relations, the witch-hunting adherents to the puritanical church of Woke progressivism drove the culture war. As a result, we found ourselves sleepwalking into a world of enforced diversity, inclusion, and equality that refused to acknowledge these words were Trojan horses used to smuggle totalitarianism in the guise of compassion. It was diversity of identity characteristic we saw enforced, not diversity of opinion. It was inclusion based on identity and ideological conformity we saw enforced, not the inclusion of anyone of sufficient ability and goodness of character. It was equality of outcome between group identities we saw enforced, not the equality of opportunity aimed toward giving any individual who was willing and able a chance to succeed. We conflated aspiration with domination, and vilified competence even in the form of hard-won achievement. Thus, we neglected to heed Nietzsche’s warnings of a “slave morality” characterised by “resentment” becoming an insidiously dominant cultural force in the post-Christian West. Although, that said, I do now wonder what the moustached-melancholic would have made of his “master morality” in an age of thermonuclear weaponry? But I digress.
The Woke called us “bigots” for suggesting individuals should be evaluated, in education or professional settings, based on their actual competence rather than group identity characteristics like race, gender identity, or sexual preference. We were called “Islamophobes” when raising concerns about failed immigration and social integration policies as violence occurred on European streets—particularly in France—that was explicitly religiously motivated according to the actual perpetrators themselves. We were called “racists” when raising concerns about the double standards evident when anti-lockdown protests were deemed too dangerous due to fears of protesters spreading the virus, while anti-racism protests were deemed totally justifiable. We were called “fascists” if raising concerns about government overreach and impingements into civil liberties by people who evidently had no idea as to the irony of their accusation. We were called “transphobic” for raising concerns about any aspect of trans ideology, such as male athletes destroying female competitors in women’s sports, or male offenders being allowed into women’s prisons. Genuine women’s rights activists were even called “trans exclusionary radical feminists”, or “TERFs”, if they dared raise concerns about the incursion of the reality denying trans ideology on their safety or sovereignty. We were said to be protecting our “white privilege” if questioning as to why only the slavery of the past received any real focus, when nearly as many people were enslaved in pre-Event modern Africa as had been involved in the entire four centuries of the trans-Atlantic trade. The nonsensical list goes on and on. If bigots or fascists or racists were everywhere then they might as well have been nowhere. The boy cried wolf so often that once powerful labels became practically meaningless. And so, when the furthest tip of the reactionary wing responded to the progressive excesses in turn, our words were hollow.
There is also the strong possibility, of course, that bad actors—maybe even Russian or Chinese ones—interfered in Western ideological conflicts by employing information warfare techniques on social media to amplify strife. However, this is less important than a base fact: every person is a unique locus not only of suffering, but of responsibility. Hence, the rubber meets the road within the mind of the individual. Despite any foreign interference, it simply seems intellectual humility and shared humanity were too rare a commodity.
Our truly hubristic and anti-humanistic failures drove cultural fractures that functioned to divide us from within. These oscillating forces and widening schisms weakened the fragile walls protecting a civilization that, while seriously imperfect, was the best yet attempted. When these trends were accentuated and accelerated by the pandemic, and when America’s self-immolating military embarrassment in leaving Afghanistan hinted at weakness in the West at large, it became somewhat easier to garner a possible understanding as to why Putin crossed the line when he did. Vlad’s bold move, however, did not exactly go to plan.
Ukrainian resistance was more trouble for Putin’s war machine than almost anyone expected. A people who would rather fight to the death in the hope of protecting their independence than surrender to foreign tyranny. Death rattle echoes from the Holodomor rang loud in their ears. Untrained civilians put down their keyboards and shovels to pick up Kalashnikovs and Molotov cocktails. And while we heard reports of relatively small ethnonationalist, religious, and anarchist factions putting aside their differences to resist the invasion, we mostly heard that Western freedoms—the very error correcting mechanisms many of us did not know we had, let alone appreciate—were what countless Ukrainians were willing to give their lives to protect. This fighting spirit stemmed from the repugnance of subjugation and the sanctity of self-determination. They would not bend the knee to a wannabe Tzar in Moscow. Ukraine’s President—sitcom thespian turned war time talisman—set the tone: “I need ammunition,” said Volodymyr Zelensky in response to an offer of evacuation by the US, “not a ride.” In Tribe, Junger wrote: “What would you risk dying for—and for whom—is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves.” A “profound” question indeed, and one for which many Ukrainians answered not with words but actions.
Many of Putin’s chess pieces, in contrast, were quickly stripped of the noble delusions that might have driven their will to fight. The most obvious source of cognitive dissonance is that they were sent in to “de-Nazify” a country that had elected a Jewish President by huge majority. Moreover, how long can a man continue to believe himself to be the hero when faced by untrained men and women of all ages willing to die in the protection of their homes? How long could young soldiers who grew up watching soccer matches from all over Europe, or enjoying American music and movies, continue to believe that they alone were somehow superior by virtue of being born Russian? That they alone were on the side of liberation, and it was the West who were the brutal aggressors? Add to this the troubles that arise in trying to stage a hurried invasion using a top-down military command structure that has self-selected against independent thinkers and decentralized decision making. Such a system of centralized command and control understandably flounders when struck with communication troubles. And with an autocratic system in which everyone is afraid of handing bad news up the chain of command, trouble in communicating consistently accurate information from the battlefield to the Kremlin is baked into the cake: when nobody at the top wanted to hand bad news over to Putin, or ask difficult questions of him, nobody wanted to receive bad news from the level below them. This fear driven wilful ignorance continued right down to the bottom; right down to a naïve young believer who found himself doubting; right down to the confused pawn who was told he’d be a hero but found himself staring at a blood-spattered teddy bear amongst the rubble.
Countless Western leaders in government and media then added fuel to the fire with their virtue signalling and elitist self-appointment as truth police. With what often amounted to hypocrisy and morally righteous grandstanding, they served to make themselves perfect fodder for anti-Western rhetoric from within and without. How could Western leaders denounce Putin’s crushing of anti-war protests in Russian cities, when they had failed to do so in response to Justin ‘blackface’ Trudeau using fascistic emergency measures to go after dissenting Canadian truckers? Truckers who protested vaccine mandates at a time when the dominant Wuhan virus variant was less dangerous than the seasonal flu? How could Western leaders criticise Russian censorship of speech when they themselves had been supporting creation of infantilising “hate speech” laws that threatened the very lifeblood of democratic error correction—Freedom of Expression—on the obviously false, yet ironically bigoted unspoken grounds, that people in minority groups were so weak and pathetic they needed protection from mean words and name calling? Or when many of our elites had been supportive of censoring genuine scientific questions around the pandemic that affected us all; questions around the big picture effects of blunt force lockdown measures; questions around the enforced masking of young children in school despite a dubious cost to benefit analysis; questions that sought to critique vaccine mandates; questions around the possible lab origins of the very virus that wrought havoc in the world for nearly 2 years? And when, in late February, the EU banned the broadcasting of Russian state media in Europe because it was deemed dangerous “propaganda”? Instead of seizing the opportunity and seeking to lead by example in demonstrating that a truly Open Society has the capacity for Freedom of Expression—whether ethically unpleasant, politically inconvenient, or intentionally puppeteering—because of its inherent capacity for decentralized error correction, our leaders long sought to operate with the very authoritarian spirit of hubristic control and epistemic arrogance that they had claimed to condemn. Shapeshifting technocrats labelled anything they didn’t like as “misinformation” or “disinformation” to justify censorship. Factual plausibility was merely commentary.
Worse than all of this, however, was that few if any of the egomaniacs at the wheel, in all their blustering chest puffing and arrogant notions of grandiose supremacy, seriously acknowledged the radioactive elephant in the room before it was too late. Instead, they assumed the Bomb would never again be unleashed after Japan and the many lucky escapes from the Cold War that followed: ‘It would be suicide’ they said; ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ they said. As a result, we saw megalomaniacal husks defiantly stand at podiums acting tough behind their groomed personas. We saw them regurgitate what was merely a different flavour of the same disingenuous word soup spewed during their pandemic mismanagement and climate hysterics. It was all too easy for these careerist chameleons to gang together in facing a bully when the wind was blowing that direction. But where was the moralistic grandstanding when the winds blew differently? When the Chinese Communist Party crushed Hong Kong’s democracy? When the CCP tried to cover up the very plague that affected us all by silencing heroic whistle-blowers like Dr Li Wenliang? When the CCP lied to the WHO about human to human spread? When the CCP refused to facilitate a proper international investigation into the origins of the Wuhan virus? Could a show of strength against China’s tyrannical swallowing of Hong Kong, and its refusal to communicate openly regarding the virus, have served as a warning to Putin? A warning that our flawed and fractured West, for all its explicit discontent, may well have been more willing to unify than he presumed? Alas, we will never know.
Regardless of why the Western elite let the CCP off the hook for so long—not only with Hong Kong and the virus, or their aggressions against Taiwan, but the well-documented human rights atrocities against the Falun Gong, Uighur, and Tibetan peoples—and whether a unified front could have deterred Putin from his foray into Ukraine, the West came together in surprisingly quick succession at the end of February. So much so, in fact, that the mainstream mass media blob repeated soundbites so often that much of the population was soon singing from the same hymn sheet: ‘We need to increase defence spending’ they said; ‘We need to shut them out of Swift banking’ they said; ‘We need harsher sanctions’ they said. And of course, it wasn’t long before the worn-out Hitler card was whipped out in reference to Russia’s leader: ‘This is his Sudetenland’ they said; ‘Ukraine is just the start for him’ they said. The blob may even been correct about some or all of the above. Again, nobody will ever know. What I am certain of, as much as can be given the unknown unknowns, is that our complacent leaders presumed the nuclear demon would never again be summoned. As such, they neglected to seriously consider anticipating and preparing for its ever-present dangers.
But despite gross failures, I do not hate our leaders; they couldn’t have been other than they were. And neither could the far-left progressivists who drove the culture war, or the far-right traditionalists who reacted with proportional extremity in turn. Nor could I have been any different; free will is an illusion. Besides, free will or not, choosing to forgive emits a warm glow that is missing when clinging to disdain. The chilling loneliness of a nuclear winter makes this crystal clear. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness,” as King said above, “only light can do that.”
But why did Putin do it? Was his view of reality simply warped and corrupted by years of being surrounded by frightened and manipulative yes-men feeding him bad intel? Did he crave after power for its own sake like some Machiavellian-vampire in need of intoxication through the spilling of blood? Could he genuinely have been a believer in some sort of teleological destiny for Russia, and that it was up to him to restore the Third Rome? Was he some combination of the above: an increasingly isolated gangster with a messiah complex? Fucked if I know what his central motivation was. Maybe he didn’t even know himself. But what I do believe with some conviction, was the surprising messiness of the Ukrainian invasion, alongside the ostracisation of him and his regime by most of the world, had backed him into a corner in which he felt trapped. A military gamble against a highly motivated opposition that required increasingly barbaric weaponry and siege tactics to overcome, a Soviet style suppression of anti-war elements within the Russian populace itself, and international sanctions that were transforming Russia into a giant North Korea, probably led to the kind of hesitancy and flickering glances of doubt on the faces of his closest circle never before seen. This culminated in deepening paranoia that his house of cards was about to come down around him. On top of him.
A bet I would wage—if there were anyone left to offer me odds—was the pressure reached a pinnacle and the release valve needed to be struck. Death, to Putin, might well have been preferable to humiliating failure. Especially so if he imagined himself on a religious crusade of cosmic significance. Mushroom clouds appeared over Western cities. The Event. Panicked retaliation by NATO forces almost immediately ensued. Russia burned. Communications and power went down and stayed down. Chaos is its own multiplier as Yeats noted:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
There will be no “Second Coming” though; we had our chance, but cowardly arrogance blinded us to the ineffable Beauty of existence.
During a short period that followed the Event, there were some attempts to organize the distribution of rations by the Irish government. They assured us things would be ok. This didn’t last long; totally unprepared is an understatement. Avoiding other desperate souls soon became a necessity in and of itself alongside seeking food and shelter from the cold. One grey day became the next.
Now here I am. Here She was. Here we All were. “To be, or not to be,” that was Our question. Now it is mine alone to answer.