Notes on the Heavenly Aeroplane

♫ Oh one of these days at about twelve o’clock
This ol’ world’s gonna shake and rock
Sinner’s be a tremblin’, cryin for the pain
For the Lord’s gonna come in His heavenly Aeroplane ♫
J.S. McConnell, of the Ozarks

An analysis, pursuant.

Preliminary:

Violence is Its Own Party

Preliminary:

I Told You: Chaos is Coming

1. On the Instability of the System. The political system, in its current state, is a series of linear, interconnected structures. It operates on the illusion of cause and effect: legislation produces stability, debate produces consensus, and policy produces order. This is a false model. All complex systems, particularly those involving human beings, are inherently nonlinear. They are not like clocks, they are like weather systems: you can predict the general climate, but never the precise path of a tornado. You may know enough to take an umbrella but never enough to postpone the wedding. The current political system is failing because it has grown too large, too dependent on feedback loops it does not comprehend, and too rigid to absorb the inevitable shocks from its own periphery. Its collapse will not be a singular event but a series of cascading failures, each one amplifying the next. The frog boils slowly and then all at once.

2. The Emergence of the Strange Attractor. I posit a stretch of computer code: violence in search of justification. This is an apt description of a strange attractor. The traditional model dictates that ideology is the initial condition that leads to violence. A deterministic, linear path: A leads to B leads to C. But in a chaotic system, the outcome is the attractor, and the initial conditions are irrelevant. The violence is not the consequence of an ideology; it is the fundamental state, the point to which the system is drawn. The search for a justifying ideology is merely the system’s desperate attempt to rationalize its own trajectory. The violence will find its justification, not the other way around. It will cycle through different, seemingly contradictory ideologies, all of which are functionally identical to the system’s core function. The ideology is the decoration, the violence is the engine, the engine of a vehicle that is going nowhere, that has no destination but the desire to determine a destination.

Your model is that ideology produces violence, but the ones who pilot the Heavenly Aeroplane hope that violence will produce in them some sort of intuitive ideology. They are not killing and dying because of what they believe in. They are killing and dying to be made into meaning itself, to become meaning in their final violent useless acts.

3. The Propaganda of the Deed as a Feedback Loop. Posit: “Propaganda of the deed.” This is not a political strategy; it is a positive feedback mechanism in a social system. A single act of violence, no matter how small or insignificant in isolation, produces a perturbation. This perturbation is perceived by other unstable elements in the system, and it lowers the energy barrier for them to perform a similar act. Each act validates the next, creating a positive feedback loop that amplifies the initial signal. The political message of the act is noise. The physical act itself (the disruption, the destruction, the violence) is the signal. And the system, the global information network, is a perfect amplifier for this signal, ensuring its rapid propagation and the inevitable escalation of events.

4. The Young Male as Inflection Point. We observe that this phenomenon is driven by young men. This is predictable. In any complex system, the elements with the lowest inertial mass are the first to respond to a perturbation. They are the most susceptible to a change in state. The young male, socially and economically unanchored, increasingly broke, ineligible for sympathy, ideologically unformed, represents a point of low inertia in the human political sphere. They are not the cause of the system’s instability, but the most visible symptom of its underlying decay. They are the pioneer species of the coming social collapse, adapting to a new, chaotic environment before the more rigid, established structures can. Their actions, while seemingly random and directionless, are a direct measure of the system’s energy state.

To be clear, I am not rescuing them from their pathetic state. I am, in fact, pointing out that they are so pathetic that they are functionally unmarked. In all of their sad, grasping, sweaty impotence, they are the canvas on which the struggle for the future might be written. And they will attempt to write that future on themselves, sad as their efforts might be.

Aphorisms

• The future is not a destination; it is a strange attractor.

• Ideology is the syntax of violence.

• Entropy is not a theory; it is a condition.

• When a system loses its purpose, it finds a new one in destruction.

• The illusion of control is the primary source of all systemic failures.

• The noise of a political message is a distraction from the signal of the act.

• Nature abhors a vacuum, but human systems crave one to fill with chaos.

• The most dangerous force is not ideology, but the search for one.

Lessons

1. Do Not Attempt to Contain It. You cannot contain a chaotic system with linear countermeasures. The very act of attempting to “de-radicalize” or “re-educate” will be perceived as a control mechanism, which will be resisted and perversely lend some degree of legitimacy to their resistance. The violence is a function of the system, not an external threat. To suppress it in one area is to guarantee its emergence in another, likely in a more unpredictable form. The system is dynamic; it adapts. The violence will simply find a new, more effective conduit. A gas expands to fill its container. Your attempt to solve the problem creates a more complex problem. You must dig the weeds up by the roots.

2. The Ideological Mirage. The individuals involved will tell you that they are fighting for a cause, for a specific political goal. This is a false narrative. They are not drawn to the specific ideology but to the violent act itself, which the ideology merely sanctions and in sanctioning, sustains. The ideology provides a cognitive framework for a pre-existing drive. The specific beliefs are interchangeable and will be discarded as the system evolves. To engage with the ideological claims is to fall for a distraction. You are debating the weather map while the hurricane is already on the ground. The only meaningful analysis is of the physical and social conditions that made the system capable of this behavior. We are not doing chemistry, anymore; we are merely observing the inevitable and crude outputs of the most simple and bloody of Newtonian mechanics. The agents involved are not sufficiently sophisticated to prompt a deeper analysis than who, what, where, when, why - whose bullet, fired at what, from where, at what point in the turn of the gyre, delivered for what imagined purpose.

3. The Inevitability of Chaos. The current social and political system is an unnatural state. It is a contrived order built upon a foundation of infinite complexity and unpredictability. It is a dam built on a fault line. The coming violence is not an aberration; it is a return to a more natural, turbulent state. The system is simply shedding its artificial constraints. Those who advance this process will see it as an act of purification, albeit a brutal one; you and I will see this as offensive, but in the long run, the distinction will make no difference. This is where the “take” goes to die. Those who are prepared to survive will understand that you do not fight the weather. You prepare for it. The system is returning to a state of complex, unpredictable equilibrium. This is not a tragedy, though each of its acts will be tragic in the simplest human sense; this next stage is the culmination of a predictable process, our process, the process we all chose.

4. On Purpose. The modern world has provided an abundance of convenience and a scarcity of purpose. The human animal is a tool-making machine that requires a function. When the function is denied, when the purpose is vague or nonexistent, the animal will find its own purpose, and that purpose is often destructive. The violence is a form of meaning-making, a self-justifying narrative of purpose and consequence. It is a horrifying but logical solution to the problem of existential void. The system is providing its own meaning, and that meaning is a function of its own dissolution. You may be moved to see some sort of justification or defense in what I’m saying. - that I am saying, what is coming is good. What I’m saying is that where we are heading is the place where there is no justification, where there is no need for defense; where we are going is where justification goes to die. We will not be able to sort out any meanings beyond the same reflexive ones we always draw, the feeble Twitter conclusions of the first 30 minutes. The young men who pilot the Heavenly Aeroplane, like their victims, will be too dead to care.

Conclusion

The system will, of course, find its equilibrium. All systems do. But it will not be through a smooth, linear progression. Equilibrium is not a state of stasis but a dynamic balance, achieved only through the application of sufficient energy to stabilize the variables. In this case, that energy is violence. The question is not if it will occur, but from where the violence will originate. Will it be an exogenous shock (a war, a pandemic, a catastrophic environmental event) that provides the necessary pressure to realign the social variables? Or will the current, directionless violence, this prurient background radiation, rise to a sufficient density that it becomes the catalyst for a societal reset, for the next emergent order? The choice, if one exists, is between a singular, overwhelming event and a thousand cuts that bleed the system to death. We will only be able to tell the difference in hindsight, and no matter what, there will be blood.

It’s a grim calculation, but a simple one. The system is experiencing a meaning-making deficit, and those most empty of our society, the young men who have no chance at virtue or meaning or power or glory, will go on filling that void with a destructive, self-reinforcing narrative. They may be interdicted, they may be individually defeated, but there are more points of vulnerability than we can protect, and they are Legion, that is their true nature and their only strength: their disposability. So, for us, the only way out is through. The societal rejection of this pervasive, low-level destruction, of this purposeless violence, will not come from a place of philosophical enlightenment or reasoned debate. It will only emerge when the violence overwhelms our capacity to rationalize, debate, or instrumentalize it, when there’s so much chaos that discourse itself drowns and we are reduced again to the status of immediate survival. It will be a moment of saturation, like blood filling a cloth bandage, a moment when the cost of continued chaos becomes so high that the human organism is forced, by natural law, to find a new purpose. The new order will not be born of peace, but of a shared, terrible exhaustion with the old. You will be offended to think that these pathetic young men can prompt such renewal. So will I.

They will, of course, trade blame with each next victim; they will debate if the next shooter is blonde like the Aryan Youth or dark like the mujahadeen. And they will no doubt violently reject the notion that ideology has nothing to do with it. I am confident, though, that in time this attitude, the insistence on the binary, the partisan impulse, the dogged assigning of ideological blame, will be overwhelmed by the sheer deadening weight of the spectacle. You will probably not understand what I mean, not right now. But in time, I think you will.