Admit it, dear reader, you always wanted to know what caused our glorious edifice of iron, concrete, plastic, and silicone, that unsinkable Titan borne out of the sheer Faustian audacity of our ancestors, to suddenly shudder, grind to a halt, and start sinking.

Here's a thought. High empathy is the most essential element of a culture or civilization in its prime, and the absence of empathy is the most important marker of a collapsing culture or society.

Every civilization needs a myth of the future. Civilizations fall to entropy and disintegrate without it.

In my previous Cuff Notes post I wrote that we are only in the first act of the war. That is, the great economic, political, kinetic, and bio/socio/techno war to define the 21st century that is happening all around us.

The tragedy of the war in Ukraine is that it is not about Ukraine. This is a big-stage global drama with a small number of A-list actors and lots of unsuspecting and unwilling extras.

I recently spent some time in a rather isolated mountain village, where I was able to observe an interesting lesson about the modes of power in turbulent times.

Preface: It took me way longer than expected to finish this essay. Apologies, dear reader! I had to cut out a lot, and it still is both too long and too short. If you are in a hurry, feel free to scroll down to the end and focus on the modes and strategies of propaganda.

I’ve been meaning to write about the events in Ukraine for a while now, but discovered that what I wanted to say can be broken into at least three different posts. This is the first post in that series.

Nothing helps us to better understand any given historical moment than skipping 30+ years into the past and exploring the imaginaries of the future people had back then. Our medieval ancestors inhabited a world where the future existed as part of a sacralized cyclical time, on which the three Abrahamic religions superimposed the myth of the final revelation. The result was a synthetic vision of time, at once cyclical as personified in the festive rituals of the pre-Abrahamic solar calendar of equinox precessions, and millenarian as personified by the concept of a linear and foreordained end to the cycle. The future contained a repetition of rituals leading to an apocalypse.