Let's say you wanted to undermine an entire country. You would start by building your own base of power, and consolidate that base by creating a world for them that separated them from empirical reality. You would tell them what was true or false, what was real or fake, who were enemies or friends, and you would dictate the tempo of those shifting narratives -- when, for example, a trusted ally had suddenly turned into a bitter foe, when Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
You would gather unto yourself the few people you trusted the most -- relatives, lackeys, and their closest contacts, and gradually create a network of like-minded individuals who either allied themselves to you, or were at least willing to rent themselves to you.
Loyalty only really matters to the point of complicity, then the other person is balls-deep in the game as well. Now you have them, and they know it. There is no getting out clean for these people. Considering the sort of people who would work for you in the first place, they may not even worry about that sort of thing, except insofar as it affects their bank accounts and future prospects.
Now, with your network of rented minions and dogsbodies, you would set about immobilizing or subverting the institutions holding the national framework together. In a nation that at least still pays lip service to the principle of rule of law, you would co-opt the bodies of law -- the legislature, the judiciary, the administrative infrastructure entrusted with enforcing laws. You would make them all beholden to you personally, again by gradually bringing them in, until one day they realize that they are now accomplices.
You would actively undermine the country's foreign policy, using the "middle kingdom" trope that every civilization that has ever existed has used to justify their actions, to deny the framework of mutually-beneficial interdependence that has mostly kept (relative) peace for the last fifty years, or at least kept things from getting even worse. You would sell it out to the countries you have been currying favor with for years, whose governments rent entire floors of your real estate.
You would encourage the brutes and thugs and killers of the world, while telling your friends to go fuck themselves. You would make sure your knuckle-dragging supporters know it's all just a big joke, except when it isn't.
You would identify the more violent, reactionary strains in the society, and bind them to you by signaling your alignment with their marginal concerns. Find common ground between those elements and their companions in more conventional institutions -- the military, the police, people with money who will do anything and everything to avoid losing even one cent of that precious, precious money.
We all like money, even if it's just for the obvious reason that having money enables you to not have to constantly worry about not having money. But consider the type of person who already has more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetime, more than their great-great-great-great-grandchildren could possibly ever squander, yet still cannot bear to part with, say, a marginal three-percent tax after the first billion dollars.
The type of person who would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars renting senators and funding think tanks and doing everything they can to rend the fabric of their country, in order to avoid even a one-percent increase in their taxes, which they frequently don't even pay in the first place.
The type of person that wants to make government as ineffective and inefficient as possible, in order to bolster their claim that government is useless and even harmful, that it serves no purpose beyond bleeding the noble taxpayer to a dried husk.
The type of person who sincerely believes that poor people are dumb and/or lazy, even as they themselves piss their inherited pelf on five-figure handbags and nine-figure mega-yachts and such. People who have no identifiable skill, but as charter members of the Lucky Sperm Club, use their privilege to rent those who do have skills, in order to legitimize their own existence.
The type of person who believes that accountability is for other people.
If you wanted to undermine and destroy a country, these are the people you would use to do it, and these are the things you would have them do.
With that in mind, consider the people running this nation right now, and all their statements and actions over the past four years. The point is not to speculate whether Donald Trump and Jared Kushner and the rest of these fuckers are agents of foreign powers, installed to rob the country blind and destroy it from the inside out -- they clearly are, there's really not much to speculate about.
The point is that even if they aren't acting in such a capacity, they really might as well be, because that is the practical, predictable outcome of everything they've done and said. Perhaps the strangest part of all that is that they've barely tried to conceal it. Most of this has taken place right out in the open. Enough of us, citizens and their representatives who actually wield power, stopped caring enough to do anything about any of it.
How about that? Like a broad-daylight bank robbery without any weapons or masks, just vague threats and menacing looks.
The beast was at least nine feet long, four feet at the shoulder, impossibly muscular, black in color, yet he could still see spots and rings and knurls along the coat. The jaguar looked at him impassively, as if waiting for him to make the first move.
He reached for his knife, not just automatically this time, but with purpose and fear.
Your knife won't help you.
Startled, he glanced back over his shoulder quickly, seeing the trail whence he came, spotting all the high roots and low branches and all the little obstacles that marked the escape route.
You can't run fast enough.
He looked back at the cat, its left lip curled in a snarl -- or was it a bit of grin? Suddenly it was difficult to tell.
Tell what? Whether a telepathic jaguar is smiling at you?
He took a deep breath through his nose, hoping to clear his head. This is just a dream, after all.
Who are you? he asked the jaguar.
Who are you?
He felt his brain grasp at straws, searching for purchase. I -- I don't know, he responded with a puzzled look. He glanced into the stream and briefly saw his own reflection, reassured that he looked the way he remembered looking -- when? -- yet still unable to put a name to the face.
I'm not sure what my name is. But I asked you first.
True, the jaguar responded, but you are a guest here. The jaguar lifted and turned slightly, and the black coat shimmered to a dark yellow, and back to black. Some of your kind call me Ek Balam.
What do you want?
What do you want? the jaguar replied, again with that hint of a sneer-smile.
I -- I'm not sure. I don't know how I got here.
You don't seem to be sure of very much.
No. I don't even know where here is. I woke up in the desert and walked, and now I am here.
Here is better than there. At least there is water here. And you can get out of the sun.
Yes. But I want to go home.
Where is home?
His eyelids drooped slowly in frustration, and he exhaled audibly. I don't know. He shook his head slightly.
The jaguar peered intently at him. If you don't mind, I will call you Aapo.
Why Aapo?
The jaguar curled his paw into the stream and splashed himself with the water, then lowered his huge head and took a drink. Why not?
Okay.
Look past me, Aapo, and tell me what you see.
He looked back into the jungle past the great cat, a hundred feet or a hundred miles, and saw the white cube he had glimpsed through the high tree canopy earlier -- much nearer, and impossibly larger than before. The two cubes he had seen before were maybe the size of a room and the size of a house. This one on the jungle floor was so large he couldn't see either end of it.
Then he saw, about fifteen to twenty feet above, the next level in the stack. And another, and another, but still not able to see where the left and right ends of any of the layers were.
A giant pyramid, he replied to the cat, almost as a question.
The jaguar growled, and Aapo felt it in his bones, reverberating in his core, yet it seemed that the growl was not a threat, but an assent. Ek Balam turned and began walking toward the structure.
Follow me.
Aapo forded a narrow waist of the stream with a running jump, and cautiously trailed the jaguar.
Quickly the full breadth of the enormous white wall revealed itself, and the path veered off toward the left side. As they approached the corner of the massive structure, a beam of sunlight hit the jaguar, making the coat shimmer prismatic, from black to gold to white to green to chocolate and again to black, all before the cat had taken another full step. For a second, Aapo forgot himself and nearly reached out to touch the fantastic beast.
Do I look like a fucking housecat to you?
Startled, Aapo retracted his arm so quickly and with such force, he felt a mild pain in his shoulder and his side. He chided himself: Of course this is not something you pet, you idiot.
The jaguar chuffed and rumbled as they rounded the corner and came to the foot of a set of stairs that climbed up the middle of this side, seemingly all the way into the very sky. Aapo looked straight up and could not tell where the stairway ended from where they stood.
Side by side right in front of the bottom stair, Ek Balam and Aapo looked at each other. The jaguar turned his head back, laid his mighty paw on the stair, and the two began their ascent.
You would gather unto yourself the few people you trusted the most -- relatives, lackeys, and their closest contacts, and gradually create a network of like-minded individuals who either allied themselves to you, or were at least willing to rent themselves to you.
Loyalty only really matters to the point of complicity, then the other person is balls-deep in the game as well. Now you have them, and they know it. There is no getting out clean for these people. Considering the sort of people who would work for you in the first place, they may not even worry about that sort of thing, except insofar as it affects their bank accounts and future prospects.
Now, with your network of rented minions and dogsbodies, you would set about immobilizing or subverting the institutions holding the national framework together. In a nation that at least still pays lip service to the principle of rule of law, you would co-opt the bodies of law -- the legislature, the judiciary, the administrative infrastructure entrusted with enforcing laws. You would make them all beholden to you personally, again by gradually bringing them in, until one day they realize that they are now accomplices.
You would actively undermine the country's foreign policy, using the "middle kingdom" trope that every civilization that has ever existed has used to justify their actions, to deny the framework of mutually-beneficial interdependence that has mostly kept (relative) peace for the last fifty years, or at least kept things from getting even worse. You would sell it out to the countries you have been currying favor with for years, whose governments rent entire floors of your real estate.
You would encourage the brutes and thugs and killers of the world, while telling your friends to go fuck themselves. You would make sure your knuckle-dragging supporters know it's all just a big joke, except when it isn't.
You would identify the more violent, reactionary strains in the society, and bind them to you by signaling your alignment with their marginal concerns. Find common ground between those elements and their companions in more conventional institutions -- the military, the police, people with money who will do anything and everything to avoid losing even one cent of that precious, precious money.
We all like money, even if it's just for the obvious reason that having money enables you to not have to constantly worry about not having money. But consider the type of person who already has more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetime, more than their great-great-great-great-grandchildren could possibly ever squander, yet still cannot bear to part with, say, a marginal three-percent tax after the first billion dollars.
The type of person who would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars renting senators and funding think tanks and doing everything they can to rend the fabric of their country, in order to avoid even a one-percent increase in their taxes, which they frequently don't even pay in the first place.
The type of person that wants to make government as ineffective and inefficient as possible, in order to bolster their claim that government is useless and even harmful, that it serves no purpose beyond bleeding the noble taxpayer to a dried husk.
The type of person who sincerely believes that poor people are dumb and/or lazy, even as they themselves piss their inherited pelf on five-figure handbags and nine-figure mega-yachts and such. People who have no identifiable skill, but as charter members of the Lucky Sperm Club, use their privilege to rent those who do have skills, in order to legitimize their own existence.
The type of person who believes that accountability is for other people.
If you wanted to undermine and destroy a country, these are the people you would use to do it, and these are the things you would have them do.
With that in mind, consider the people running this nation right now, and all their statements and actions over the past four years. The point is not to speculate whether Donald Trump and Jared Kushner and the rest of these fuckers are agents of foreign powers, installed to rob the country blind and destroy it from the inside out -- they clearly are, there's really not much to speculate about.
The point is that even if they aren't acting in such a capacity, they really might as well be, because that is the practical, predictable outcome of everything they've done and said. Perhaps the strangest part of all that is that they've barely tried to conceal it. Most of this has taken place right out in the open. Enough of us, citizens and their representatives who actually wield power, stopped caring enough to do anything about any of it.
How about that? Like a broad-daylight bank robbery without any weapons or masks, just vague threats and menacing looks.
The beast was at least nine feet long, four feet at the shoulder, impossibly muscular, black in color, yet he could still see spots and rings and knurls along the coat. The jaguar looked at him impassively, as if waiting for him to make the first move.
He reached for his knife, not just automatically this time, but with purpose and fear.
Your knife won't help you.
Startled, he glanced back over his shoulder quickly, seeing the trail whence he came, spotting all the high roots and low branches and all the little obstacles that marked the escape route.
You can't run fast enough.
He looked back at the cat, its left lip curled in a snarl -- or was it a bit of grin? Suddenly it was difficult to tell.
Tell what? Whether a telepathic jaguar is smiling at you?
He took a deep breath through his nose, hoping to clear his head. This is just a dream, after all.
Who are you? he asked the jaguar.
Who are you?
He felt his brain grasp at straws, searching for purchase. I -- I don't know, he responded with a puzzled look. He glanced into the stream and briefly saw his own reflection, reassured that he looked the way he remembered looking -- when? -- yet still unable to put a name to the face.
I'm not sure what my name is. But I asked you first.
True, the jaguar responded, but you are a guest here. The jaguar lifted and turned slightly, and the black coat shimmered to a dark yellow, and back to black. Some of your kind call me Ek Balam.
What do you want?
What do you want? the jaguar replied, again with that hint of a sneer-smile.
I -- I'm not sure. I don't know how I got here.
You don't seem to be sure of very much.
No. I don't even know where here is. I woke up in the desert and walked, and now I am here.
Here is better than there. At least there is water here. And you can get out of the sun.
Yes. But I want to go home.
Where is home?
His eyelids drooped slowly in frustration, and he exhaled audibly. I don't know. He shook his head slightly.
The jaguar peered intently at him. If you don't mind, I will call you Aapo.
Why Aapo?
The jaguar curled his paw into the stream and splashed himself with the water, then lowered his huge head and took a drink. Why not?
Okay.
Look past me, Aapo, and tell me what you see.
He looked back into the jungle past the great cat, a hundred feet or a hundred miles, and saw the white cube he had glimpsed through the high tree canopy earlier -- much nearer, and impossibly larger than before. The two cubes he had seen before were maybe the size of a room and the size of a house. This one on the jungle floor was so large he couldn't see either end of it.
Then he saw, about fifteen to twenty feet above, the next level in the stack. And another, and another, but still not able to see where the left and right ends of any of the layers were.
A giant pyramid, he replied to the cat, almost as a question.
The jaguar growled, and Aapo felt it in his bones, reverberating in his core, yet it seemed that the growl was not a threat, but an assent. Ek Balam turned and began walking toward the structure.
Follow me.
Aapo forded a narrow waist of the stream with a running jump, and cautiously trailed the jaguar.
Quickly the full breadth of the enormous white wall revealed itself, and the path veered off toward the left side. As they approached the corner of the massive structure, a beam of sunlight hit the jaguar, making the coat shimmer prismatic, from black to gold to white to green to chocolate and again to black, all before the cat had taken another full step. For a second, Aapo forgot himself and nearly reached out to touch the fantastic beast.
Do I look like a fucking housecat to you?
Startled, Aapo retracted his arm so quickly and with such force, he felt a mild pain in his shoulder and his side. He chided himself: Of course this is not something you pet, you idiot.
The jaguar chuffed and rumbled as they rounded the corner and came to the foot of a set of stairs that climbed up the middle of this side, seemingly all the way into the very sky. Aapo looked straight up and could not tell where the stairway ended from where they stood.
Side by side right in front of the bottom stair, Ek Balam and Aapo looked at each other. The jaguar turned his head back, laid his mighty paw on the stair, and the two began their ascent.
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