There’s a collection known as American Gods with a strong idea: individuals’s beliefs and beliefs are embodied as bodily gods. As outdated beliefs fade from individuals’s minds, new ones take maintain—giving rise to new gods. This sparks a struggle between the outdated gods, determined to stay related, and the brand new ones, wanting to dominate. The outdated gods, if forgotten, vanish into oblivion.
The tragedy unfolding in Gaza can’t be defined by rational arguments alone. It symbolizes the collapse of rationality as we as soon as understood it. And but, we would grasp its significance if we settle for, as Matthew Arnold wrote, that we’re “wandering between two worlds, one lifeless, the opposite powerless to be born.” Identical to in American Gods, some perception methods are dying whereas others are nonetheless struggling to emerge.
The top of World Conflict II consolidated a brand new nomos, within the sense utilized by German jurist Carl Schmitt. He defines nomos as “the speedy kind by which the political and social order of a individuals turns into spatially seen.” This post-war nomos, based mostly on a U.S.-led Western financial order, unfold throughout the globe.
America was modeled, each symbolically and virtually, after Rome. Rome claimed universality—what lay past its borders was chaos. However Rome’s universality was restricted by the identified world. The U.S., in distinction, claimed imperium over your entire planet.
Rome reached the height of its common declare underneath Emperor Augustus. But that peak, as historian Ronald Syme noticed, additionally marked the start of its decline. Augustus’ seal was the Sphinx, an emblem wealthy in metaphor. Augustus was the guardian of Rome—however he was additionally the riddle. The enigma lay in the truth that, whereas the Republic’s formal buildings (senators, consuls) remained intact, true energy rested solely in his palms. In case you couldn’t clear up the riddle, you’d be devoured by the Sphinx.
The height of seen U.S. energy was, arguably, after the dissolution of the united states. But when Augustus’ symbolic seal was the Sphinx, the U.S. image was the greenback—each devouring these unable to unravel the riddle.
Historian Edward Gibbon pointed to forex debasement—particularly to fund overseas wars and state bills—as one of many clearest indicators of imperial decline. It’s debatable when precisely this started within the U.S., however there’s little question it’s taking place now. When an empire declines, its nomos begins to fade.
However that nomos doesn’t disappear by itself—additionally it is compelled by these competing to take its house. These challengers are each bodily and ideological: they embody different visions of what society must be. Generally, the outdated order is pushed into the abyss, as a result of that’s the one method a brand new one can rise.
Two main conflicts right this moment have the potential to dismantle the U.S.-established postwar order: the struggle in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. What hyperlinks them most visibly is the hand of america behind each. Although the conflicts seem totally different, every represents a unique face of the identical coin—a chipped one, at that.
Contemplate Ukraine. It’s onerous to say whether or not the trail to this struggle was plain stupidity, blind hubris, or a calculated technique. The primary two are intertwined, however I lean towards the second. Maybe NATO expansionists believed Russia wouldn’t react. Extra doubtless, they believed Russia couldn’t react—as theorized by Brzezinski and his ilk.
The third risk is much more provocative, although more durable to show: that NATO’s jap enlargement was a calculated transfer with two potential outcomes. Both Russia would acquiesce, turning into simply one other consumer state of the U.S.-led West. Or Russia would resist—and that resistance would mark the top of the West’s expansionary cycle, requiring its nomos to break down in order that capital might proceed to develop elsewhere.
This final situation could seem far-fetched, but it’s the one which’s materializing. The struggle in Ukraine can’t be resolved by reverting to the outdated established order. The U.S. appears to know that—however refuses to simply accept it. Europe, in the meantime, doesn’t appear to know it—however has no alternative however to simply accept it. And the primary beneficiary of this new rising situation? Kapital—with Marx’s capital Ok.
The decision of the Ukraine struggle will dismantle the earlier geopolitical order. Borders will now not be fastened. Spheres of affect will shift. Assets will develop extra contested. Safety agreements must be rewritten—and with them, new alliances will take kind. Area—each geographical and political, a cornerstone of Schmitt’s nomos—will probably be reshaped. A brand new nomos is being born.
However nomos just isn’t merely a spatial order. It is usually symbolic. It calls for new legal guidelines—and legal guidelines require new beliefs. For the brand new gods to emerge, the outdated ones should die.
Gaza is the place the outdated gods are dying. Worldwide regulation, the legal guidelines of struggle, humanitarian rules—they’re being shattered with each hospital lowered to rubble, each faculty obliterated, each youngster killed by a drone or a sniper. Greater than that, the very basis of liberal democratic legitimacy is being corroded by the complicity—and, usually, the silence—of the U.S.-led West. After Gaza, the world we’ve identified could have morphed into one thing else: the start of a brand new one.
We’re witnessing it in actual time. Europe is on a path to dismantle its social buildings—the final remnants of working-class resistance in opposition to the encroaching pressure of capital. It is usually unraveling the sovereignty of its nation-states, changing them with a supranational governing entity. This course of just isn’t new, however it’s being accelerated by the struggle in Ukraine. Re-arming Europe just isn’t merely a army endeavor; it’s an financial technique designed to ship the coup de grâce to nationwide sovereignty.
America is already far forward on this mutation. The White Home even circulated a meme depicting Trump as a king. A joke, maybe—however as if proving true Polybius’ cycle, it represents the following logical stage. New financial energy, or, higher, a rising oligarchy, must upend the earlier order as a way to set up its personal. That’s Ronald Syme’s thesis in his e book The Roman Revolution.
That is evident within the rise of what economist Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism—a system the place tech-lords inch ever nearer to the facilities of world energy. Regardless of his latest fall from grace, Elon Musk stays certainly one of them. So do Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. And Palantir—Thiel’s fief—is, by its personal admission, deeply concerned within the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Israel—modeled because the final Western-style colonial mission—is now main the West towards its personal demise. Just like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, its defining trait—the declare to nationhood—is the very pressure that propels its downfall. And it’s dragging the outdated gods with it into the grave.
If Ukraine is providing the geopolitical justification for a reordering of house, Gaza is offering the ideological justification for a change of spirit. Gone are the times when freedom of speech was even pretended to be a really perfect, when human dignity was thought-about common, or when equality earlier than the regulation was a shared aspiration. Now, know-how permits governments and firms to effectively censor thought and speech, accuse with out actual proof, and detain with out due course of.
But one pressure stays unchallenged: capital’s relentless drive to invent new methods of residing. In its Freudian compulsion to duplicate and increase, capital is reshaping not simply markets, however house itself. It’s forging a brand new nomos.
The query just isn’t whether or not that is taking place—I belief readers will agree that it’s—however what kind this new nomos will take. If we permit capital to dictate its phrases, cloaked within the clothes of latest applied sciences, then we are going to all change into—if we aren’t already—subservient to it.
