The Centre Cannot Hold...

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
~William Butler Yeats
“The Second Coming” 1919



Things do fall apart, and the world is changing. It is not so much a matter of the ubiquitous “globalization” that many point to when there are uncertainties; things simply change. Old forms lose their shape, entropy sets in, and things fall apart. Democracy is one such “thing” that has been exhausted – something that was once extremely revolutionary and functional for its time, but it has grown into the old man whose every cell is being pulled to the earth by gravity, and whose body is decaying in plain view. The centre cannot hold.

The best lack all conviction… Ideas, simply stated, are similarly “things” that must be challenged in their due course, and we have grown complacent and cannot be bothered to care about what other people decide for the sheer scale of who those “other people” are, and what “super powers” they possess. While the worst are full of passionate intensity, radical fools reach out from the bowels of the underworld to produce noxious, dangerous, ridiculous – almost laughable – outcomes if it weren’t for the toll taken upon humanity, the animal kingdom, and the earth herself.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere there ceremony of innocence is drowned… A great many scholars and thinkers have addressed everything herein, including Yeats, who obviously gave consideration and ample expression in “The Second Coming.” Marx also had it right – in theory: it all shakes down to those who have, and those who do not. Power and riches protect themselves while the poor look on with empty gazes, wondering when hell will freeze over for the fat bastards in their posh chairs and fancy offices, signing away lives en masse with a single pen stroke of illegible credence. Darwin might have had it right too: it’s about the survival of the fittest, and “fittest” in modern parlance would mean “possessing (hoarding) the riches” while masses perish under the weight of the same.

What exactly is this notion we hold that our “votes” make an iota of difference as to the direction in which humanity is heading? Democracy has become an arcane ritual – a blunt object used to “make right” what wrongs it has created from bygone eras and recent histories. For there to be “right,” the whole thing needs to be scrapped and taken apart – piece by piece – dissected, and completely dismantled, as it were. It no longer works, and is no longer viable for the world that is now governed by economics rather than politics – economic strategy as opposed to political strategy because it all comes down to the monetary units concerned.

Though “democracy” needs to be disassembled, civility must be pursued because we cannot afford for mere anarchy to become loosed, but this takes thinkers, and I am not such a person. I have no alternative ideas to offer up except for those anecdotal “Indian” stories of American history that speak of taking no more from the earth than that which is required, and living on egalitarian terms that neither oppresses or asks much sacrifice except for the shared experience of the long-lost community. We are systems functioning within systems – cogs within wheels and gears that have reach maximum capacity and have no means of continuing to fuel ourselves. We are the lost tribe of modernity – one without a face or name except for “me” and “I.” History, in America, starts out its preamble as, “We the people…” Now that that task has been squared away and every square inch of territory claimed privately public, something else must take place. Ownership must be foregone for humanity to survive – we cannot own what is not ours. We share life, but we are not the only actors, and yet, this is the only planet we live upon.