Musings on the Grotesquerie

I would like to forewarn you that if you are easily offended you should probably not read this.

I have been pretty quiet in this newsletter for the past couple of months.

Part of this is that I’m not feeling Substack in the same way. When I started writing here, one of the primary delights was uncovering depthful and profound writing in unusual places and from unusual voices. I would get an article from Caroline Ross, for example, filled with itinerant wanderings, musings on tai chi, her journey into the depths of a canyon to find a pigment in the Living World she was about to make into paint, or a photograph of a tanned sea bass skin translucent against the sunset (see below).

Recently, my feed has been filling up with outrage posts, and the very discourse markers of the site are degrading. Recently, an article entitled I believe, ‘Spiritual White Lady Shut the Fuck Up’ passed through my feed. This is not the kind of tripe I came to Substack for. The paradox of its growth; of its becoming a more and more popular site, is that it is now producing the very sort of outrage-grabbing headlines that I moved off of Zuckerbergian media to avoid; and its algorithm is feeding them to me. Hmm.

So there is that, which seems to be a sort of microcosm of something larger, some degradation of public discourse mirrored by the grotesquerie coming out of Washington. I am struggling, still, to find the right tone to write this newsletter in these days. The purview of this particular newsletter, first called the Original Fire, presently called the Hearth Science Substack, has been to apply the lens of our work in Autonomics to the cultural field– to look through it at the world-at-large, and to notice.

But the current regime has no nuance. It is an all-out assault of chaos. The particular malevolent intelligence of the Donald, is his ability to finger the collective, and to viscerally feel the ways to keep the entire world off balance. He is a master at making people feel unsafe.

The structural depravity of his hacking at the government is its efficacy in denigrating truth, and its chaotic removal of safety and stability from the most foundational government institutions. I keep listening to otherwise intelligent people struggling to find a rationale– for his erratic economic policy, for cuts to this or that agency– making reference to some kind of closely held master plan, as though Trump were a master poker player with cards tucked in close at his vest, some coherent vision just behind him, as though his deal-making and deceptions were part of some larger vision. I find this laughable and sad.

Trump has never had a plan in his life, beyond his own aggrandizement and enrichment. He’s not a Russian asset, though he may act like one. He’s not brilliantly trying to destroy China. They don’t have a master plan to get the Federal Reserve to lower the rate on interest payments on the national debt. He is a chaos monkey, and he intuits how to keep everyone around him off balance. Even he does not know what he will do next. He has no plan, though undoubtedly he is surrounded by a swirl of cunning profiteering cynics, including ranks of techno-fascists like the ketamine-addicted Elon Musk, and the apocalypse investor Peter Thiel. Trump is in call-and-response with his base; improvising. He will vehemently deny something officially, and then do it the next day. The result of that, this week, was trillions of dollars flowing out of, and then back into, and then out of the US stock market.

This is an era during which, if you put your attention on the external, you will get tossed around by its volatility as though you are strapped into a cheap amusement park ride. In the era of the grotesque we have entered, where can you invest and not see your earnings ravaged by the whimsy and volatility of a man with the attention span of a goldfish and savage instincts for the consolidation of power?

Inwardly, I would propose. The asset classes that make sense to invest in, in this moment of chaos, are inward assets, and relational.

Your money is not safe. Not gold, not stocks, not real estate. Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, has recently stated that the climate crisis is going to destroy capitalism. You should read the article. It is brief and to the point. They see a total unravelling of the insurance market, which is unable to keep pace with the existential risks of climate change. The insurance market works in lock-step with mortgage-lending, because banks won’t underwrite mortgages if homes are unensurable. These are two pillars of the global capitalist economy.

His statements are strangely congruent with the post-capitalist warnings and ethos articulated by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy in Post-Capitalist philanthropy, and its a strange moment indeed when some of the world’s most brilliant animist anarcho-activists and the chair of one of the world’s largest corporations are coming to the same conclusion about outcomes.

The grotesque as literary and artistic genre is characterized by bizarre, unnatural, and often disturbing elements, often used for comedic or unsettling effect. From the moment at the Inauguration where the country’s richest men realized that they had been lined up on stage into a sort of billionaire menagerie, when the most succinct headline for the photo below might have been