The Importance of Sin Eating Buffers
“As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
I'm sort of running on empty today. I get tsunamis of thoughts for a period until I work my way through them and then the "Thirty Miles to Empty" light begins to flash.
I am interested in something friend Wretchard T. Cat posted yesterday. He wrote:
"I think there is a new player in the grand strategic stage besides Moscow, Beijing, Washington and Brussels. And that is chaos and entropy which none of them control. Weak states will fail, systems collapse and shortages, at least temporarily appear."
Wretchard’s post and several mentions of Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings” connected in my weakened brain last night.
I began to think about chaotic, unstable systems and how they can function as long as there are buffers to soak up the errors - at least until the weaker parts of the system can catch up. The buffers simply serve to temporarily take part of the operating load until the weaker parts recover.
In a chaotic/unstable system the buffers are not necessarily strong parts of the system, they are just not as weak as the others.
These buffers also exist in ordered systems. In these systems, they may be strong enough to take over the functions of all the other parts of the system and keep it running on their own, almost becoming the system itself. They are robust and self-contained enough that the minor players don't really matter, those parts are just manipulated to benefit the strong buffers.
For the first half of my life, the US and the USSR were the strong buffers in a largely ordered system, the sin eaters that soaked up all the sins - the errors - of the global system. They each had weaker parts of the system in their orbits as they fought each other for control. In truth, neither the US or the USSR was interested in controlling the entire system, they just wanted to maintain the integrity of their sphere of influence, both using proxies to fight their battles.
Then the USSR failed.
The US became the dominant buffer in the global system.
The problem is the global chaos and instability is too much for one buffer, no matter how strong. America handled it for a time but was hit with a great disruption in 2001 when the 9/11 attack happened. Radical Islam was that disrupter. To absorb that chaos and instability, America accepted the challenge of eliminating that disruption and tried to order the global system through war and unsuccessful nation building.
Because the system needs more than one strong buffer, due to the USSR’s absence China began its rise. The rise of China was more of a threat to the system than at any time since the retreat of the British Empire. China DID aim to control the entire system. China had been on the rise since the early 80’s but that rise was greatly accelerated when they were admitted to the WTO during the Bush administration.
Now both the US and China are struggling to soak up the system instabilities.
The chaos/instability is coming in a cascade, and the disruptions are not regional, they are global. The pandemic began the cascade, then the global economic shutdowns that completely obliterated supply and demand, the outrageous spending by governments to sustain populations that were not allowed to work and now the Russo-Ukrainian War continues the flow of disruptions.
China is struggling with a botched response to a pandemic that more than likely started inside their own borders, with their knowledge, a mountain of off-the-books debt as a result of real estate speculation, a banking system on the verge of collapse, and a GDP that is in free fall.
President Trump ushered in a period of strength for America but thanks to Hillary Clinton’s criminal activity that was joined in by our own government and resulted in nearly three years of political warfare, then the pandemic, George Floyd/BLM/ANTIFA, and now the idiotic policies of Joe Biden, America is on its knees.
Like America, China now has more than enough internal disruptions to fully occupy the buffers. I think both countries are in such a condition that absorbing system chaos and instability from outside is a near impossibility.
So, what happens with a chaotic and unstable system loses all its buffering capability?
To Wretchard’s point, there comes a period of chaos and entropy that cannot be controlled. This period of system instability can rewrite the operating code, it can destroy constituent parts of the system, eventually it will either completely self-destruct or in the most likely case, over a period (who knows how long it will take), it will allow new buffers to arise.
One thing is assured, since the system in its current iteration is failing there is no guarantee what the new ordered system will look like. Chances are it will NOT look like anything we have known over our lifetimes.
This chaos is exactly what the Davos/Great Reset/World Economic Forum wants. They have been positioning themselves to be the designers of both the new system and its buffers. Think of them as the Bill Gates of the global system.
Will they be successful?
I don’t know. They might.
If we all become beggars, since beggars are easy to please, they might have a shot.
But there are glitches in their system, as there are in any system.
They didn’t account for people like Elon Musk. Musk has always been a disruptive force and right now his purchase of Twitter and stand for freedom of speech are real thorns in their collective side.
It isn’t going to be smooth sailing for the global governance crowd.
They could lose.
Either way the fight is going to be messy, and as I have noted before – there will be no innocent bystanders.
“As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
Not sure if any of that made sense, as I said, my noggin is running on fumes.
Wow! I have not thought of this whole thing in this way - very thought-provoking!
Really touchy subject .... and one I have not quite wrapped my head around .... Have you ever looked into the possibility that 9-11 was actually NOT a terrorist attack??