In Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel Escher Bach, there is a story about an anteater and Aunt Hillary. These two are friends, and Aunt Hillary communicates with the anteater by making patterns with her individual ants which represent her thoughts. As a friendly gesture, she offers the anteater some ants, which could even be the same ants she has used to express that thought.
Aunt Hillary, of course, is meant to suggest an anthill, which, while being made up of ants, is also an intricate web of connections. She is also a metaphor for the human brain, which, though made up of individual neurons, is a thing in its own right. We all have a sense of ourselves as not just a collection of cells, but as individuals, with compulsions that often contradict what our neurons and genes want. Our neurons may not want us to drink alcohol, which is toxic, but our thinking mind may crave it. Our genes may want us to reproduce, and give birth to as many children as possible, but ‘we’ still find reasons to delay having children or to not have children at all.
Could we too, like ants, neurons and genes, be ‘individuals’ living inside an entity that is one step up from the world we can perceive?
In the last few weeks, I have been following video reels of what is happening to Gaza. Unlike with earlier conflicts, this time we are able to see footage not only of the people on the ground as they are being bombed and seeing their lives completely disrupted but of the ones at the top doggedly supporting the carnage as something necessary. One sees their faces, as they speak into the camera as leaders, and we get to observe their robotic body language as they all, one by one, push themselves to fall in line with some curious but invisible diktat.
‘Do you condemn Hamas?’ is not the sort of question I have ever heard before in British or American public discourse. It feels like something out of Orwell’s 1984. It sounds robotic, like a functionary following a script. I find myself wanting to ask the speaker to do a Captcha test. It is also recent, dating back only to the conflict between Ukraine, supported by the West, and Russia. It is… Newspeak.
This links to the question that has been vexing me for the past few weeks. What is the real reason for the dogged support by the West for Israel, which is in stark opposition to the anger of huge swathes of their general public, and now among a big chunk of young Jews, even in Israel? Young people who increasingly feel that their elected leaders do not represent them, but are actually serving something… else? These young people do not get to engage in reasoned debate with their governments. Instead, we find their leaders shifting focus to avoid seeing them. And droning on the same tired old lines.
A mother and child in Gaza, before the attack. Photo: Catholic Church England/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
None of the reasons offered is enough to explain the response of Western leaders and governments to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Loyal support for their base in the Middle East? The Gazan gas fields? The Ben Gurion Canal they want to build via the Gulf of Aqaba through the center of Gaza? Guilt about the Holocaust? Profits for the arms industry? The Israel Lobby in the West? That they were all once settler colonials themselves? Blackmail?
The singularity of their response, as they strain at an invisible leash, is a sign of something bigger, a force outside of human logic. Because these leaders are doggedly set on a suicide course, risking reputations carefully built back after their days as settler colonials when they stand together to block a ceasefire in Gaza. They look helpless, often tongue-tied. They look like figureheads. Telegenic. Convenient. Compliant. And whoever else we may find on the slate to vote for can only be people like them. Anyone else with independent ideas will be scuttled.
They are the System talking.
We often speak of ‘the System’ as something bigger than us, but we still tend to see it as a collection of like-minded individuals, individuals with power, and common interests. What I am suggesting now is that a system as powerful as the modern capitalist system is not just a few individuals with power. It has a vitality, and a will of its own. Like Aunt Hillary, or the human brain, or the ecosystem, it is a higher-level entity, alive in its own right. By defining it as ‘alive’ we can ask ourselves a different kind of question. Can a higher-level system have preferences the way humans do? Does it have an instinct for self-preservation? And are its objectives necessarily the same as our human objectives? Is it on our side at all? Do humans have any power to control it?
Like Aunt Hillary, it has no problem offering up some of its own ants as a treat.
As a living entity, it will not wait to be ‘fed’, like a car, or charged like a cell phone, but will seek out its preferred energy source. In this present age that would be fossil fuel, and now lithium and cobalt. And the places where these come from are now the conflict hotspots. It wants constant growth of the economy it feeds on. Being non-human, it is indifferent to things like religion and ethnicity, but it would prefer working with existing networks that run smoothly, respecting old communal fault lines. There is a field known as nonequilibrium thermodynamics which studies how such entities ‘come to life’, and how they fear entropy and demand total control. And how they die.
This last issue is the one that interests me. Everything I see as I work on another intangible living system, language, tells me that it has a different tempo of evolution. Not death, as a human would experience, which could be gradual or sudden. The correct analogy is a species extinction, which is sudden, and is driven by ecological forces. The System has become unsustainable, but it cannot transition gradually to another which contradicts it. So it ‘flips’ in a moment of chaos, as a melting iceberg flips over, to become something that fits in with the new ecosystem. And we settle down to a new period of stasis.
The big question that excites people like me is how to predict the moment when a failed System is about to ‘flip’. What are the signs to look out for? What will happen as we enter the transition phase? I have often spoken in my online posts about a ‘shakeout’, and about a ‘great cull’ as the System comes crashing down, hoping against hope that it will be mild. But these are only guesses, projections based on a catastrophic change we have seen in the past (‘catastrophe’ here is used in the sense of a sharp departure from what has gone before). We are still in learning mode, as we look on at a new kind of power shift taking shape, when the innards of the old System have become visible.
And that is why the events in Gaza assume such Earth-shaking importance. Is this a ‘flip’? Because it may be the sort of watershed moment we have been on the lookout out for. People now know how much their information, their lives, have been curated up to now. We are in the midst of a ‘great cull’ too, a carnage we didn’t see coming, though we were expecting one, but didn’t know where it would be. Now we know it is Gaza which has become the locus of the war of the worlds.
This is a transition I dearly hoped to see in my lifetime. I had also hoped that India would play an important part in this start to a new age, but that is not to be. As a nation, we have been distracted, and have missed the headwinds that point in a new direction. The days and weeks ahead will be a time of opening our eyes to see beyond these dim present days, and to imagine a different future. Maybe there is still a chance…
Peggy Mohan is a linguist and the author of four books, the most recent being Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages, Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2021. She teaches linguistics at Ashoka University.
