Empire is Dying

Disrupting the Myth of Immortality, Illusions of Control

Systems have life-death cycles, as all things do.
Societies die and are reborn in new forms. Larger systems splinter into smaller ones. Groups break off and start their own experiments in community. This allows for adaptation, for sustainability, for divergence, prevents accumulation and inequity and corruption.
Systems and cultures of domination reject and deny this fundamental truth.
At its core Empire¹ is the myth of immortality, a desperate flailing against the reality of death. Flailing against the unknowable. Against the void.

Empire is a futile attempt at control.
A futile attempt to assert singular Truth onto a reality that is fundamentally plural, paradoxical, and unknowable.²
A futile attempt to transcend Nature's cycles.
To create something that cannot die, that cannot be overturned by the ebbs and flows of an ever-changing world.

Empire is Pharoah declaring himself God, embalming himself in chemicals so he will never decompose and trapping his corpse in a stone monument to his eternal glory.
Empire is the illusion of “profit,” an impossible theory of accumulation without consequence, of infinite growth without death.
Empire is the myth of Fundamental Truth, which colonial academia uses to assert a singular Order onto a pluralistic ever-changing reality. To erase ways of knowing that embrace paradox, embrace relational wisdoms, embrace that which we fundamentally cannot Know.
Empire is the claim to “ownership” of the land, inventing deeds and borders and philosophies that present our living earth—our ever-changing interdependent family of nature—as inanimate “resources” that we may extract and dominate. How naive to imagine that this would have no consequence. Without an inevitable transformation that reflects back onto this civilization every death it has stolen and denied.

In order to maintain this artificial eternity, in order to delay this reckoning, empire must be ever-expanding. Ever more quickly consuming. Ever-increasing borders, ever-increasing profits, ever-increasing violence. Just as a dying person must take up more and more resources as they seek continual revival and replacement of failing organs.
Empire seeks to control death with systems of war and policing, in the vain hope that to monopolize death is to be safe from it. And yet all this does is separate us from life, from all meaning and connection. All this does is sap the living soul from us in a flailing against the reality of death. The reality that no king, no kingdom, no corporation, no theory, no border, no system or person or even story lasts forever.
All are the tower of Babel, destined to fall from its own hubris.
Empire is the illusion of control. And death is the ultimate truth that we cannot control.
Nothing can go on forever. Not even stars and planets. Perhaps not even our universe. Everything is in a constant state of cyclical change. Life into death into rebirth. 🌀

As I see it, right now the bulk of humanity IS empire. We are the cells that make up this massive living machine, a biomechanical beast set on eternal consumption. And this lost hungry vicious creature is dying. Its own organs rebel against it, the wells from which it saps life from the land are drying up. It has become more and more machine, losing core parts of itself in the desperate vain struggle for immortality.

I believe Empire is nearing a turning point, an extinction.
This has been inevitable since humanity first decided that we stood separate from and above all the rest of nature.
The species of empire have evolved many forms, growing to cover nearly the entire planet. Their systems and strategies have been known by many names across history: colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, theocracy, feudalism, racism, nationalism, authoritarianism, supremacy, slavery, policing, militarism, to name a few.
The wars between members of this species have created destruction on scales unimaginable, and continue to disrupt every natural species on the planet. Including our own. As John Trudell³ expressed many times, our own bodies and minds and spirits are constantly being mined by these systems. We are the source of the monster’s lifeblood. The source of its power.

To live beyond the death of this monster I believe we must do as our own cells and bacteria will when we die: become nature. Come back into harmony with nature’s cycles, with the ecosystems we rely on and are a part of. Become once again myriad creatures, attuning and relating to the lands we call home, the ecosystems we must once again call family.

Mother Nature has given us an ultimatum. It is empire's death, or humanity's.
We can cling to this monster and be driven into extinction alongside it…
Or we can choose to break free from the machine as it is broken apart by the white blood cells of our planet.

We can reject the mythos that equates human nature with domination, and restore our deep roots of interdependent relationship with the land. Reconnect with and recreate the diverse range of relational animistic cultures, spiritual practices, wisdoms, ways of being that live within each of our ancestries.
We can return to our place(s) in nature's extended family.
We can nurture and work alongside the rest of the animal and plant and environmental world to restore balance in the body of the earth.
We can forge a living legacy in a better world for our generations to come, and embrace that they will change it in their own time as well.

For me the key to this is learning to surrender.⁴ To the unknown, to spirit, to the countless forces that are beyond me and that connect us all. Accepting that I do not have control. That I will die. That there is so much that is out of my hands. And from there I can embrace where I do have influence. I can connect to the interconnected powers and responsibilities⁵ that each of us has been given, to use the Nature within me to shape and become change⁶ rather than reject it. And in that process I am learning to trust that Mother Nature will show us the way.

I pray this storm will wash away the concrete and stagnation and allow us to begin anew.
I pray these few thousand years of empire will wash away in the waters of time, a mere moment in the the three hundred thousand year history of our species and the four billion year history of our planet.
I pray the human machines of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, all domination will crumble and decompose, giving way to the many new organisms, the new worlds we will become the roots for.
I pray our descendants will experience societies rooted in love and peace and balance and autonomy and adaptation and interdependence that live in harmony as a part of the ecosystems they call home.
I pray we can heal the broken and war-worn threads that connect us to the Web of Life, the family of all Nature.

And perhaps through reconnecting to that greater collective, that ever-changing cycle, we do achieve a sort of eternity. For although no person, no species, no planet, no star system, no galaxy will last forever, nothing is ever truly destroyed. Energy simply changes forms.
And no matter what exists, existence will always be relational. The mutual magic of community. The delicate balance of species within an ecosystem. The conversational ebb and flow of waves and rivers in the ever-shifting earth. The dancing orbits of planets and stars. The interplay of atomic forces.
No "I" is eternal.
But there will always be a “We.” ❤️‍🔥

Maireann an crann ach ní maireann an lámh a chuir é.⁷

1. I use the word “Empire” to refer to the mythos that underlies all systems of oppression, growing out of the empires of the ancient world into systems of imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, militarism, whiteness/racism, patriarchy/gender oppression, prisons, slavery, monarchy, theocracy, etc. To me these systems are characterized by an attempt to control reality by asserting fundamental “order” onto nature. Such systems require continuous oppression and extraction in order to maintain, which the culture and mythos of Civilization exists to justify. (I plan to write more on this myth of Civilization and how it serves Empire. Comment if you’d like to hear more.)

2. I highly recommend reading Ayandastood’s article “The Wisdom of Feeling Lost” and listening to their podcast Soul Salon where they speak on the deep wisdoms of embracing the unknown. (I plan to write more on the western colonial mythos of a singular Truth, the ways it has been used in domination, and the necessity of embracing pluralistic paradigm made up of many divergent perspectives and wisdoms. Comment if you’d like to hear more.)

3. John Trudell was (and is, bless his spirit) a Santee Dakota poet, activist, sage. One of my core influences, a powerful teacher who spoke truth that broke through the lies of colonial reality. I reference him frequently throughout my work.

4. I will certainly write more on the power of learning to surrender and trusting in a higher power from a spiritual liberation lense. Comment if you’re interested in hearing that perspective.

5. I’ve learned this understanding of powers and responsibilities being fundamentally interconnected from the teachings of a number of elders indigenous to turtle island. The Kayanerenko:wa “Great Law of Peace” of the Haudenosaunee people has been a primary source for these deep wisdoms. I highly recommend the version compiled by Kayanesenh Paul Williams.

6. Reference to Octavia Butler’s Earthseed teachings, from Parable of the Sower.

7. An old Irish/Gaeilge parable/seanfhocal. It roughly translates to “The tree lives beyond the hand that planted it.”