Disintegration and Chaos

In Washington, D.C., Latinos and especially African-Americans make up a significant part of the population. But the average wealth of WASP families is about eighty times greater. There are people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. When viewed from the immaculate villas of Georgetown, the starched agencies of Langley, from the tops of mountains of dollars, the world looks like a mishmash of reprehensible imperfections – in concentric circles, starting with a city that would like to become the world’s capital, but is certainly the nation’s murder capital: in 2023, the number of murders in Washington, D.C., rose 37% from the previous year, particularly killing more than 100 people under the age of 18.

During the most democratic period of American history, in the 1960s, riots and fires in Washington, D.C., reached only a few blocks from the White House. So, the FBI headquarters was built like a real fortress that boasts of having centuries of construction wisdom applied against siege and disorder. Some neighborhoods are periodically invaded by police officers in full military gear, armed like the Marines in Kabul at one time. With the same results. Washington D.C., had mayors of all colors. But no one has been able to change this inner characteristic of the city: very unequal, very violent, very third-worldly. The owners live on a substantially fenced and gated property, of the sort frequented by vacationers and candidates for luxury employment agencies.

The backyard of the United States seems just as chaotic, dirty, and reprehensible. From Latin America comes an unstoppable flow of hungry people, immigrants, and drug traffickers. Mexico’s hugely popular President Obrador has been indicted by the Drug Enforcement Administration for collusion with drug cartels, a charge that in various forms, mostly money laundering, has not been denied by virtually any Latin American leader, in a scenario that has sensational episodes, from the legendary General Gutierrez Rebollo to the latest arrest of someone who was most recently presented as the first ally in the war on drugs, namely Juan Orlando Hernandez, winner of the 2013 and 2017 elections in Honduras. Bernardo Arevalo won in Guatemala, but the previous model is still in place, with Rafael Curruchiche at the helm.

Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala are the countries closest to the US border, but in various forms the same chronic instability and insecurity is present across the continent. Even the victories of pro-American groups are interpreted with caution, as yesterday in Brazil and today in Argentina. Bolsonaro’s victory actually triggered the return of an enraged Lula, who became the leader of BRICS, that is, the engine of the global alternative.

For the United States, its “imperial destiny” to rule the world means living with a world in disarray. A subtle distinction between chaos, anarchy, and disorder came to the rescue. Since the 1960s, many have called for an unfair understanding of complex systems. The Nobel Prize, won by Ilya Prigozhin in 1967, already opened the way to a contamination between natural and social sciences: fluctuations and disturbances of a system under suitable and manageable circumstances give rise to new, better, or more advantageous functioning. In the United States, the chaos theory has had extraordinary success, blessed by James Gleick’s popularization in 1987. Dr. Strangelove was a real treat for many. Strategic thinking used it for its own good, updating the concept of Pax Americana, separate and distinct from the concept of a rules-based international order, RBO.

The theory states that some social configurations, unfortunately, cannot be organized as desired, but they can be managed. Instability, negative feedback, non-linear interactions, disorder, violence do not necessarily affect the network and vertical of power, boundaries and hierarchy. Indeed, fragmentation and even disintegration of subsystems can be useful to improve overall functioning. Sometimes it should be encouraged rather than discouraged.

Libya is a recent example: it was deeply destabilized and brought destabilization to Europe (Italy in particular), but reinforced the system’s limitations. The US House Intelligence Committee expressed it in black and white: even in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, no mistakes were made. The supreme area of application of the chaos theory as a source of life is the Russian Federation and its 24 republics. In Washington, an influential group believes that to win an epochal challenge with China, the Russian Federation must first be fragmented into multiple ethnic, linguistic, national, and tribal components, which would strike at the very core of the trinitarian identity of Russians, Malorossians, and Belarusians. They would like to reduce Russia to the size of 13th century Muscovy with a post-1945 Japanese-style forced democratic constitutionalization program. It’s not the belligerent choice that began in 2014, but rather the old option of occasionally applying the accelerator or brake. It is a work of patience: the Spanish and Ottoman empires took centuries to do it.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they hope for the collapse of the Russian Federation. It is known that this will only be possible through a series of very high-risk encounters, which, however, are considered less tedious than any other alternative. They say, the USSR collapsed, and we never had it so good after that. Kremlinology argues that sudden and radical systemic change has already been observed in Moscow from 1917 to 1991, accompanied by profound internal constraints and enormous external advantages. The only salvation would be to colonize Russia and its vast natural reserves. Increasing chaos is more beneficial than managing today’s recession. Even the threat of chaos itself reinforces the centrifugal RBO.

It’s crazy in a sociological sense because it creates an extreme existential problem in the age of the atomic bomb and hyper-connectivity, at the end of the Anthropocene. And it’s insane in a clinical sense. In one of her latest works, Melania Klein, compared to Freud, reformulated the ideas of possessiveness, annihilation, self-destruction, and returned to an ancient parable: two people fought not for life but for death; an angry God said to one of them: “I will give you what you want, but I warn you, I will give twice as much to your worst enemy.” He replied: “Pluck out my eye.”

The only hope is that those will win who have their heads in the right place and who think in different ways of coexistence, acceptance, and peace. From “tiger mom” Amy Lynn Chua to Senator James David Vance, thankfully there is another America.