Manichean Realpolitik

When good and evil cancel out in the picture

The Contraptions Book club March pick is Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates. Chat thread here. We will discuss this the week of March 24th.

I had a post in the works about the futuristic farce that is the battle between DOGE and the US state apparatus, but I’ve decided to bump that to talk about the bleak medieval drama that is the Ukrainian situation.

Elon’s war of “efficiency” does not have any conscious moral dimension in the prosecution, even if you or I place moral interpretations on the consequences. I believe Elon when he says he “runs human in emulation mode.” Any moral computations he might be doing are emulations of how the rest of us reason morally at best. Any morally loaded demagoguery he puts out on X can be regarded as purely instrumental kayfabe. The domestic politics story is a story of misguided but inevitable organizational creative destruction I’ll save for another week. It is doomed to be both a failure on its own terms, and irreversibly transformational, for those left to pick up the pieces and rebuild.

Not so the Trump/Vance foreign policy end of the drama around Ukraine. There is a striking evolution along the moral dimension there. Or devolution rather.