From Blue and Gray to Red and Blue, old hatreds rise anew: welcome to Fimbulwinter!
The neat thing about reading the Eddas of old Northern Europe as a scientist is that the underlying warning from the ancients comes through loud and clear — if you bother to listen.
Fimbulwinter and Ragnarok as detailed by Voluspa and other poems are an ancient representation of the inevitability of change in life. Nothing lasts forever, and most of the time catastrophes are produced by leaders who cling to the past, burning through scarce resources fighting to preserve what cannot be sustained until everything falls apart.
Welcome to partisan USA in the mid 2020s, folks. The coming disaster is now nearly impossible to avert, sibs becoming each other’s bane as all go mad from fear and lash out.
Fourth America is dead. Something new is being born. And the breach between partisan Americans is becoming so self-sustaining, driven by pure hate, makes a total collapse of the federal government the most likely outcome.
Prophecy is nothing more than reading the patterns of the past and recognizing that people made the decisions they did for very good reasons. There is no true progress in history, just eras of greater and lesser complexity, seasons wrought by human nature.
That doesn’t mean that anything is fated except change, though. The character of the future is always determined by the choices of those who made the past.
The United States of today is very different than the one my grandparents grew up in, before the Second World War. In the great global collapse of 1914–1945 the USA made after the Civil War died and was reborn, the federal government taking on new prominence and growing in power.
But America’s true divisions lay across regional lines: different parts of the country saw immigration from different parts of Europe. Though the English-derived stock who consolidated power before the Revolution made their particular culture dominant, as in the old country America’s young elite stood atop a pyramid formed by the labor of everyone else.
Base image from Nationhood lab
Preserving that position has been the primary objective of the wealthy landowners who funded the Revolution from the very beginning. And to secure their…
