There’s a collection referred to as American Gods with a robust idea: folks’s beliefs and beliefs are embodied as bodily gods. As outdated beliefs fade from folks’s minds, new ones take maintain—giving rise to new gods. This sparks a battle between the outdated gods, determined to stay related, and the brand new ones, desirous to dominate. The outdated gods, if forgotten, vanish into oblivion.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 Battle II consolidated a brand new nomos, within the sense utilized by German jurist Carl Schmitt. He defines nomos as “the rapid kind through which the political and social order of a folks turns into spatially seen.” This post-war nomos, primarily based 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 the complete 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 fingers. For those who couldn’t remedy 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 foreign money 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 doubt it’s occurring now. When an empire declines, its nomos begins to fade.
However that nomos doesn’t disappear by itself—it’s also compelled by these competing to take its house. These challengers are each bodily and ideological: they embody different visions of what society needs to be. Typically, the outdated order is pushed into the abyss, as a result of that’s the one means a brand new one can rise.
Two main conflicts in the present day have the potential to dismantle the U.S.-established postwar order: the battle in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. What hyperlinks them most visibly is the hand of the USA behind each. Although the conflicts seem completely different, every represents a unique face of the identical coin—a chipped one, at that.
Contemplate Ukraine. It’s exhausting to say whether or not the trail to this battle 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 probably, they believed Russia couldn’t react—as theorized by Brzezinski and his ilk.
The third chance is much more provocative, although tougher to show: that NATO’s japanese enlargement was a calculated transfer with two potential outcomes. Both Russia would acquiesce, turning into simply one other shopper state of the U.S.-led West. Or Russia would resist—and that resistance would mark the tip of the West’s expansionary cycle, requiring its nomos to break down in order that capital might proceed to develop elsewhere.
This final state of affairs could appear far-fetched, but it’s the one which’s materializing. The battle 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 selection however to simply accept it. And the primary beneficiary of this new rising state of affairs? Kapital—with Marx’s capital Okay.
The decision of the Ukraine battle will dismantle the earlier geopolitical order. Borders will not be fastened. Spheres of affect will shift. Sources will develop extra contested. Safety agreements should be rewritten—and with them, new alliances will take kind. House—each geographical and political, a cornerstone of Schmitt’s nomos—will likely be reshaped. A brand new nomos is being born.
However nomos will not be 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 battle, humanitarian rules—they’re being shattered with each hospital lowered to rubble, each faculty obliterated, each baby 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 can 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 power of capital. It is usually unraveling the sovereignty of its nation-states, changing them with a supranational governing entity. This course of will not be new, however it’s being accelerated by the battle in Ukraine. Re-arming Europe will not be merely a navy 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 subsequent logical stage. New financial energy, or, higher, a rising oligarchy, must upend the earlier order with the intention to set up its personal. That’s Ronald Syme’s thesis in his ebook 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 worldwide energy. Regardless of his latest fall from grace, Elon Musk stays one in all 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 venture—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 power 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 of common, or when equality earlier than the regulation was a shared aspiration. Now, expertise permits governments and companies to effectively censor thought and speech, accuse with out actual proof, and detain with out due course of.
But one power stays unchallenged: capital’s relentless drive to invent new methods of dwelling. In its Freudian compulsion to duplicate and broaden, capital is reshaping not simply markets, however house itself. It’s forging a brand new nomos.
The query will not be whether or not that is occurring—I belief readers will agree that it’s—however what kind this new nomos will take. If we enable capital to dictate its phrases, cloaked within the clothes of latest applied sciences, then we’ll all grow to be—if we aren’t already—subservient to it.
