“It’s all about stories,” said the DIK, the Doe I Know. I am the Authorial Rabbit, the AR, and I have not told any stories in this format for some time, its having been so astounding a period between my last post and now.
“Stories?” responded the AR, shaking his shaggy head with its comic ears.
“You take your Stumps and your Plutins, those fat or small, orange or pale, narrow-eyed bunnies,” she nodded. “They have their mad fixed narratives, derived from immersion in family firms or secret agency in the Soviet Union, the Cold War, those good old days when tenants and women and children or nationalities could be herded with sticks, persuaded not to trust anyone, just cling to a piece of hard rock and hang on or conveniently die.”
“No, surely it’s all about numbers,” mumbled the AR, thinking of Peter Turchin, the Russian (Russian!) refugee American scientist, who, as described in The Atlantic in 2020, turned his mathematical models of the rise and fall of pine beetles to the human species and predicted a dire period for us in our time, thinking especially of the Trumpian USA, by no means quite past.
Turchin expected that these five years or so will be societally very disturbing, as indeed they have been, with BLMs, Capitol riots and anti-freedom truck convoys, exacerbated by Covid but driven by three factors at least in democracies: overproduction of elites and too few jobs for them, which inspires them, the Steve Bannons, to conspire to destroy and replace the governing class (and hope of decent government); faltering income of the middle class, which encourages them to follow the counter-elites in attacking their own governments; and increasingly debt-laden economies, which makes buying off the grieving middle classes less possible.
“We all have stories we live by, often not aware of our own story-telling or that of others, except when we swell with pride over a personal or a community or national one, or rage at one told by others.”
The AR listened and realized he was scrutinizing his own stories, those about ARs and DIKs and others. He also tried to catalogue this era of conspiracy theories but gave up on too daunting a task.
“If we recognized we are all telling stories all the time,” said the DIK, “we might be humble enough to acknowledge our own and others’ vulnerabilities, that we are only telling stories, that we can never know the whole truth directly, and so can be forgiving and perhaps more pragmatically compassionate in conducting our lives and our politics.”
The AR chirped up. “But if we don’t make that acknowledgement, if, for example, we believe our story that our old empire, so glorious, so inevitable, must be restored, that we will be nothing unless we instruct the military to invade a land that we pretend to ourselves was essential to that glory, and the story has almost nothing to do with the people who actually live their lives on that land, then we . . . “
“Yes, we kill and destroy, and eventually perhaps sooner than later are destroyed ourselves. We become one of those whom history marvels at for their murderous blunders.”
“What are we to do as the sticks strike?” I cried, expecting to not pass a restful night’s sleep.
The DIK gazed at me in her wisdom, pointed to the horizon. “Even as I tell you this story, think kindly of me and yourself, pause to reflect, take time to imagine how to tell a gentler and provisional story that could lessen the danger. As C. S. Lewis said, awaiting the possibility of nuclear holocaust, live well, live lovingly now, achieve that at least. We also must be brave and there are times we must fight.”
The AR reflects. In the meantime, he is heartened by a new spirit. David Brooks speaks of it in the New York Times. And Eliot A. Cohen gives practical meaning to it in his recipe in the The Atlantic for isolating Russia until it can cast off its malignant leadership, awaken into the challenges of democracy and perhaps find its own more lasting rejuvenation.
J. B. Thompson 