Modern civilisation has become very good at preserving things that should have been dismantled decades ago.
The last decade has seen a veritable explosion of superhero movies. One of the most recognizable, and certainly one of the most popular, is Thor: son of Odin, god of thunder, and member of the iconic Avengers.
In one of the films, Thor must face Hela, the goddess of death. At the very end, Thor’s homeworld, Asgard, is destroyed by the demon Surtur.
The Edda, which forms the basis of the Viking mythological world, serves as an approximate blueprint for this particular destruction of Asgard. It is called Ragnarök, and that is what they called it in the movie as well. Never mind that the Marvel version of Ragnarök takes rather significant liberties with the original works. Hollywood has never been particularly troubled by the inconvenience of ancient source material.
The Necessity of Destruction
In the Edda, it is not merely Surtur who destroys Asgard. After a long winter, moral order collapses, families turn against one another, and monsters break free. The wolf Fenrir swallows Odin. Jörmungandr rises from the sea to fight Thor. And yes, Surtr does not merely destroy Asgard; he sets the world ablaze. Many gods fall in the final battle against giants and the dead, and then the world re-emerges. Some gods return, and two human beings repopulate it.
It is the grand scheme that matters to us right now.
Because one particular aspect of Ragnarök was understood rather well at the end of the movie: the idea of a never-ending cycle of rejuvenation. A cycle in which everything is created, lives out its existence until it has become too corrupted or exhausted to labour on any further, and is then destroyed so that something new can begin.
Old Norse religion is not alone in this idea of a cycle.
In Hinduism, the Trimurti unites the three cosmic functions of creation, preservation, and destruction. Each is represented by one of the three major Hindu gods: Brahma as the Creator, Vishnu as the Preserver, and finally Shiva as the Destroyer. The Trimurti symbolizes the source of all divine manifestation as a unity. The three functions complete one another and, more importantly, depend upon one another.
In Western culture, Shiva the Destroyer is often understood as evil, or even equated with what we understand as the devil. That is not merely incorrect; it is profoundly misleading. Hindus understand Shiva as a positive force in their lives. The destroyer destroys everything, including evil and bad karma.
Hindus therefore live in a universe that is independent of outside influences. Their entire existence is a never-ending circle. Creation, Preservation, and Destruction are equally important forces. If one of the three fails to perform its primary function, the world falls out of balance.
We may understand this circle as an eternal wheel of rejuvenation and development. Each time around, there is a chance to become better. But the circle works only when all three forces do their job. If one does not, the world progressively grows out of balance.
Similar traditions emerged in the Western world. The Stoic Ekpyrosis: a periodic conflagration and rebirth. Even the Christian apocalypse ends in renewal, not merely doom. And even some modern ecological cycles contain their own mechanisms of renewal: a forest fire, for instance, clearing the undergrowth and making room for what comes next.
The West once understood the value of destruction.
Modernity repressed it.
The Accretion Problem
In our developed world, we have acquired a profound distaste for the destruction part. Once something is created, we assume it must be preserved and built upon forever. Preservation has become a process of accretion.
The junk drawer. The dump folder on the computer. The archive full of paper nobody will ever read again.
When I worked in corporate, we had a department head who was famous for being a document hoarder. When I took over Business Development, I cleared entire closets full of old folders. Most concerned projects that had either been completed or cancelled. I was in Business Development. If something was dead or operational, it had no business occupying space in our offices.
You would not believe how I was looked at.
Giving up paper? Unheard of.
But it is everywhere. Committees that never disband, even though the reason for their existence disappeared so long ago that nobody remembers what the committee was originally supposed to do. Zombie regulations designed to address problems that vanished decades earlier. It creeps everywhere, even into popular culture.
And eventually it becomes a mental prison.
Because all processes of accretion necessarily reach a point where adding to what already exists does not merely fail to improve our condition. It worsens it.
When the human mind is not occupied with real problems, it invents useless ones to keep itself busy. And the accumulated structures of the past cast all of this in irons.
Of course, starting anything from a blank slate is intimidating to most people.
But it is also liberating.
Our developed societies have accumulated enormous structures of procedures, rules, codes, obligations and traditions. Every time we do anything, we drag a huge tail of commitments behind us. Fast and decisive action becomes almost impossible beneath a thick layer of consultations, approvals and political correctness.
At a certain point, this process becomes so unwieldy and crushing that change itself becomes impossible.
When I lived in France, I loved watching a television series in which ridiculous and superfluous public administration was exposed. We saw a man responsible for opening and closing the city gates in a city that had had neither walls nor gates for more than a century.
It was nevertheless a paid position.
Nobody thought of abolishing it.
There was an office for reconstruction after the Second World War. That was literally its name. Seventy years after the end of WWII, there was still a public body with a couple of million euros in budget, a pompous office in a castle and copious staff doing, essentially, nothing.
Those people, of course, invented plenty of reasons why they were still relevant.
And nobody changed it.
The Machinery Protects Itself
Almost a decade ago, I looked into the possibility of an LNG distribution project in the Caribbean. The islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique looked promising because they were burning expensive diesel fuel for electricity. So I spoke to a friend at EDF.
He told me privately that EDF was not interested.
Why?
Because they did not want to lose a very juicy subsidy from the French state if electricity production were made more efficient.
But France is not the only country with such structures. I simply happen to know France very well.
This insanity exists everywhere.
Administrative structures and rules create classes of beneficiaries who very quickly shift towards preservation for preservation’s sake. It is a human instinct. Accretion feels safe. It feels predictable. It removes the chaos factor from the equation on a personal level.
Every business is exposed to this.
Every person is exposed to this.
The business world itself is exposed to Schumpeter’s creative destruction. But the political and administrative world is not. Layers upon layers of process, structures and greed accumulate like worms, mussels and muck at the bottom of a ship.
From time to time, it needs to be scraped off.
Who scrapes off the administrative muck?
Short answer: nobody.
While companies can fail, governments cannot. They simply lay their failures upon the citizenry until the people can no longer resist the weight.
Then everything collapses.
People become accustomed to what they have. Insiders and those who benefit from the accumulated muck feel safe inside it. They will fight like hell to preserve it, and quite often to expand it. Like parasites that kill their host, they do not care whether the underlying organism — the community — slowly dies as a consequence.
They want their piece of the pie.
And they want it now.
Politics is always complicit because politicians are among the first beneficiaries.
I have given this many names, but the one I like most is the Compliance Industrial Complex, or CIC. Read more about that in last week’s post.
So, we need rejuvenation, but the CIC is doing everything in its power to prevent it.
This concrete needs to be crushed.
And looking at how thick it has become, we need the biggest and meanest sledgehammer available if we are to have even the slightest chance.
The Sledgehammer
No insider politician will do this.
Not merely because they are at the receiving end of the benefits this system distributes. And not merely because it takes guts, stamina and a certain degree of invulnerability to attack it.
Because the CIC will throw everything, including the kitchen sink, at bringing such a person down.
There will be no limits.
Make no mistake. Tact, manners and finely tuned speeches will not be the outstanding qualities of the person destroying for the sake of rejuvenation.
- This person needs to have the balls to say what needs to be said.
- This person needs to be willing to suffer unlimited amounts of abuse.
- This person needs to face down politicians with decades of training in deception and lies.
- This person will need to withstand relentless, and sometimes disgusting, attacks from the media and the hugs-and-kisses high society.
- This person will be spat upon and dumped on.
It needs to be someone tough enough to do the impossible.
Like Heracles when he cleaned out the Augean stables. Like Diogenes, who smashed social pretence with a brutality that ought to have become legendary. Like Shiva dancing in the cremation grounds.
It is the hardest job I can imagine.
It requires the capacity to walk through something resembling a vat of toxic waste and somehow emerge from the other side energized rather than destroyed.
Why Trump
We need Trump because he is one of the very few who can take such an ordeal without breaking.
He is not a shining hero in a comic-book storyline who saves the world through gallantry and conventional heroism. And it is not simply because he is mean enough. On that count, pretty much any politician in national office would qualify.
No.
It is because civilisation needs a figure of necessary destruction.
He is the one we need to complete the hardest job on the planet.
He is the demon Surtur without whom no new beginning can happen.
When I was a kid, I always looked at America as the Land of Boundless Opportunity. We need America to lead again. And for that to happen, it needs to smash some of the lithified muck that has accumulated inside its system.
The world is full of countries and empires — both current and former — that had their day, innovated, changed the world and yet eventually calcified. Most disappeared because of it.
Many like to compare Washington to the new Rome. The comparison has its charms.
But we know what happened to Rome.
It took centuries to crush its brilliance, but eventually it happened.
I know this will hurt. But I also know that he is the best chance the world has.
Because an America that begins reshaping itself through destruction will force reshaping elsewhere in the world as well.
Not all of it will be good.
All of it will be scary.
If you want, see Trump as a necessary evil.
I don’t.
I simply don’t see anyone else willing to destroy what needs to be destroyed so that it can finally be rejuvenated.
