Ensō

I wanted to know the truth about life. So I studied history, philosophy, art, and literature. I learned what seemed like many true things. But I could not get a job with all that hard-earned knowledge. I realized that history, philosophy, art, and literature were nothing if I couldn’t feed myself or my family. I felt condemned and betrayed by life. I told younger people about it and urged them to go into a technical field to avoid making my mistakes.

I wanted to know the truth about life. So I studied science and engineering. I learned what I seemed like many true things. And I felt proud when I got a well-paying job. But the job demanded long hours and all of my energy. I got laid off and found another job, but it turned out to be no different. I forgot myself, what I loved, why I had started down this path. I only felt tired, used up. Neglected, my wife found someone else. I became a stranger to my children. I felt condemned and betrayed by life. I told younger people about it and urged them to go into business to avoid making my mistakes.

I wanted to know the truth about life. But I looked at people going into debt for degrees that would never make them happy. So I went into business, working for others and then for myself. I learned one true thing, which seemed like the only true thing in the world: everything is always about money and money is always about love. By recognizing this pain and desire in others, I knew how to make them dance to my tune. I became wealthy, feared, adored. But I craved to be understood without the mediation of my wealth. I wanted to be loved for who I was, not merely as a resource for others. I wanted people to see the real me. But no one was interested. They only wanted to do business, to acquire money, so that they could be loved. Disillusioned, I no longer cared about making them dance. I felt condemned and betrayed by life. I told younger people about it and urged them to study history, philosophy, art, and literature to avoid making my mistakes.

The Atlantic’s Survivalist Problem

Bullets look for targets. Hammers look for nails.

The survivalist problem is the US Marine Corps Scout Sniper School problem. You’ve expended an immense amount of time, energy, and resources to be prepared. You’ve made personal sacrifices to become engaged and proficient in a wide range of highly practical, exclusive, hard-to-acquire skills. And you’ve done this in response to something that seems more or less inevitable.

You’ve been taught that there’ll be a cataclysm, a collapse, a threat, a danger to life, to loved ones, to the social order, even to the political abstraction that raised you and put a gun in your hand. And you’re convinced that you’ll be called on, possibly by superiors, but certainly by circumstances, to begin pulling the trigger.

Maybe so. But what the trigger will feel like before, during, and after you pull it remains to be seen. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You just have a sense. There’s a vague blur, somewhere in the indeterminate future, hiding exactly how it’ll all play out. But you know something’s bound to happen. You feel the weight of it bearing down, emerging from the fog of cultural spite, social tension, and violence you read about every day in the news. Something’s got to give. We can’t go on like this.

And maybe, though in the light of day you’d hesitate to openly admit it, you want hell to break loose. Otherwise, what was all that planning for? Bullets look for targets. Hammers look for nails. Train someone up to do a thing and it becomes their raison d’être. Place a gun in someone’s hand and the fingers will close.

As Mendes’ Jarhead puts it, “If you are lucky, in that window will one day emerge . . . the figure of the enemy. The JFK shot. The pink mist.” If you’re lucky, fate will one day conspire to fulfill what has become your reason for being. The unlucky ones are sometimes called “preppers” in the sense that they are always preparing, always in a state of frustrated training and unfulfilled belief. But you—one day luck may smile on you in a moment of satisfaction: the pink mist, the apocalyptic moment, redemption, validation.

Apocalypticism has a long history in the United States, closely associated with exotic forms of Protestantism, then skewing into UFO abduction cults and transdimensional disembodied reptile prophecies from ancient Lemuria. But it’s all of a piece. Mythologies and reasons can be goofy, can emerge from a Star Trek cargo cult as easily as from an established religious body, because the survivalist problem isn’t about reason.

It pretends cause and effect, but it’s really just emotion, often with an opportunistic subtext. Interestingly enough, the highly trained 22-year-old with a Mk22 Mod 0 Advanced is also fairly low on syllogisms. His trigger’s greased. 7.62mm. He doesn’t have to think about it. He’s just having certain feelings while he waits for the word.

The survivalist problem is also the media problem. The first USMC Scout Snipers go back to 1943, but the media problem goes back to at least 16^th-century Venice with the first avvisi. The survivalist problem likely began as early as the rise of agriculture and got markedly worse with the Industrial Revolution. But the DNA is always the same: the existing order is corrupt, immoral, lost, and there must be a purification—messiahs, flagellants, fire-and-brimstone preachers, broadsheets, social activists, op-eds, Atlantian ghost masters, and angels of vengeance notwithstanding. The Big One’s coming. We brought it on ourselves. See page B-5.

So it’s not surprising that The Atlantic, a publication named after the lost city as much as the ocean, is trying hard to regain some of that sweet Trumpian dread that goosed up their readership back in 2017. They seem to have resumed publishing unapologetic apocalypse pornography in spite of the Biden Administration sedation. Now that Trump has returned and is performing electroshock on the federal bureaucracy, The Atlantic’s back to prepping with a quickness, the only thing left being some sort of culmination, some apotheosis of all that frustrated desire.

Aziz Huq’s “America is Watching the Rise of a Dual State” (originally “A Warning Out of Time” in the print edition) is a fair example. Huq is a solid writer, a law professor at the University of Chicago, something he mentions in his second paragraph, and his op-ed exudes a kind of spectral reasonableness in spite of the fact that it’s built on a thin historical parallel with the rise of Nazi Germany.

When he declares that Trump is trying “to construct a prerogative state where cruel caprice, not law, rules,” he’s too canny not to immediately follow with “By no measure does the extent of federal law displaced in the first few months of the Trump administration compare with the huge tracts of the Weimar’s legal system eviscerated by the Nazis.” Ah. Good. I was worried for a moment that we’d descended into Man in the High Castle.

Still, he continues, “it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism.” Maybe or maybe not, depending on how transparent Professor Huq wants to be about the inevitable legal firestorms at the state level contesting the validity of these executive orders.

For example, Washington state is currently trying to prevent the implementation of an executive order to end federal research and education grants focusing on gender affirming care. For the time being, the Western District of Washington has enjoined the enforcement of the order and thereby prevented the federal government from acting on it in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and Colorado. The court system isn’t asleep. The legal system is designed to prevent executive overreach and is, in fact, doing that. The courts have received a certain amount of voltage. And there is no sign that this is going to subside anytime soon.

Huq’s facade of reason collapses when he overstresses his historical parallel: “it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump’s lawyers—despite running roughshod over Congress, the states, the press, and the civil service—were somewhat slower to defy the federal courts, and have fast-tracked cases to the Supreme Court, seeking a judicial imprimatur for novel presidential powers. The courts, unlike the legislature, remain useful to an autocrat in a dual state.” Now we really are in Man in the High Castle.

How we got there in two paragraphs after “but this is no Weimar collapse” is a bit mysterious, but here we are—along with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s “Americans Are Buying an Escape Plan: Is it time for a second passport?”, Russell Berman’s “Musk Comes for the Third Rail of American Politics,” and Timothy W. Ryback’s, “What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler: Journalists accurately reported that the führer was a ‘Little Man’ whom the whole world was laughing at. It didn’t matter.”

At first glance, we might conclude that the magazine has a Hitler fetish. But it’s just the survivalist problem in an SS uniform. The Atlantic is yearning for the pink mist. The trigger’s greased. The figure of the enemy has emerged. They’ve been prepping for so long. Now they’re just having some feelings and waiting for the word.

No Such Thing as a Free Basket

Every morning on the way to my office, I walk past the business school, which is built like a hilltop crusader fortress, replete with battlements, a machicolated inner wall, turrets, crenelations, and arrow-slit windows. Somewhere inside, between accounting and management, there must be a dragon and a mountain of gold.

Headshots of rich and influential graduates flutter around the outside. They’re all smiling. Day in and day out, this becomes unsettling. Sure, it’s part of the business school’s self-promotion (you, too, can be this smug if you study here and make a load of money), necessary marketing perhaps because an MBA typically offers less concrete knowledge than a BS in peace and conflict studies or a semester at sea and because there is not, nor has there ever been, an education requirement for entering most business careers.

To make money, you have to be good at what you do. You do not need a certification saying that you are. You can get that peace and conflict degree, study basket weaving for 15 weeks in Spain, and still join the firm. But no disrespect: management courses surely have things to teach (I took some and learned a thing or two) and to become a certified professional or para-professional in the business world, like a CPA or a project manager or a contracts specialist, you do need the piece of paper. Ergo, the fortress, the pictures, the smiles.

Lots of smiles. They haunt me. One woman in particular has a grin that radiates a kind of dark energy. By any estimation, she seems attractive and smart, but that grin says, I’m clever and, not only that, I’m crooked. More importantly, I’m richer than you. Richer than thou. Richer than god. Study here, my young apprentice, and together we will discover many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

By the time I reach my office, I often find I have to cleanse my aura if I’ve allowed myself to notice that woman’s picture. Bring on the crystals and the sage. I also think about the sullen post-adolescents sitting in their cars along the street—not the shitbox deathtraps my friends and I drove in college, but SUVs, Teslas, Audis, high-end Accords with factory tint, and occasionally a Beemer or a Benz paying homage to the classics—cars that have been bought for the children because no 20-year-old can afford a $43k Tesla 3 in freshman year. Maybe their parents studied crusader management in the fortress.

What are these sleepy, sour-faced kids thinking as they stare at me through their windshields? At least some of them have to be considering the cost of things. How could they not? The cost of their education (having been lectured many times by dad that money is found in crusader castles, not growing on trees), the cost of their sweet ride, the cost of messing around the way they did two years ago in senior year, opportunity cost (when I was your age, I was in the Army and look at me now—what you need is self-discipline, son, not a cruise to Costa del Sol), maybe the lab fee for Basket Weaving 210. Everything costs money. Even money costs money. No such thing as a free basket.

I have no doubt that more than a few of them are picturing their own faces up on the battlements, smirking down at hapless students with all the condescension of success. And even more than the implications that flow from our illustrious school of business, that’s what gives me pause. What does a post-adolescent undergraduate know about what she wants for the next 20 years? For that matter, what do any of us know? We know what mom and dad have drummed into our heads (if we’re even that lucky) and we often fail to understand that they know about as much as we do, which is to say, nothing.

At some point, if they’re solvent enough to buy that new Tesla 3, they did what they were told and got rewarded for it. But what is the nature of such a reward? What does it mean? We know what we’ve assumed along the way. Sometimes, we know or think we know which educated guesses have worked out and which ones haven’t. Usually, we’re blind, expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and hopefully doing our best.

When I was as young as these kids, I had a friend named Chris, who came from a family of classically trained musicians. He, too, had a gift for music and was getting ready for the long uncertain life of the creative artist with an all-consuming vocation that might not earn him enough to buy lunch at Taco Bell. He also had a wisdom that, compared with the insight of most college kids, seemed far beyond his years. Once, he said to me, “Some people get exactly what they want. The rest of us become philosophers.”

I’ve been smiling at that for almost three decades. It’s funny and absurd, especially in the exasperated, road-weary way he said it. Now I’d laugh and say, shit, kid, last year you were a teenager. Try to have a little fun before you say something like that. But I wouldn’t deny the evident truth of it. Though, I might modify it a little after all my years of philosophizing: some people get what they want; some people don’t get what they want; everybody becomes a philosopher. Because I got everything I wanted in my 20s and I’m still asking what it all means.

Just don’t make me go to business school in a fortress. By the time I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop, I am, once again, infused with the immortal wisdom of Guitar Slim: “The things that I used to do/ Lord, I won’t do no more.” Preach, brother. For me, it’s not about what I wanted back then. It’s not even what I want right now. Because I acknowledge that I have no actionable grasp of what the world is.

I only have subjectivities and assumptions. I see through the filter of my memories, beliefs, and preferences, many of which are subtly irrational. I try to do the best with what I think I know and keep in mind that, because my knowledge of the world amounts to existential spit and bailing wire, anything other than humility is a failure state.

So you have to be good at what you do. But how do you know you are? Are you making money? Is that the metric? Maybe. Maybe not. When you look in the mirror, who looks back? Do you have any idea? Maybe. Maybe not. Do you even know what you don’t know? The ghost of Donald Rumsfeld was here just a moment ago and said there are unknown unknowns. I believe him. I’m taking it on faith.