Do you feel it too? This looming feeling that old order is collapsing. That the people on top are as trapped as the rest of us in this doomed machine. This past century, institutional science has finally begun to catch up to what Indigenous nations have maintained for millennia. This system isn’t right, or inevitable, & there are better ways to live. Here is a decades-long attempt to gather facts into something useful—a map to share, a philosophy to wrestle, a plan for a jailbreak at dawn. The next step depends on you.
CERBERUS
Section I of VII: the prison & the key
I.I Everyone knows the world is ending.
Almost no one understands why. 70% of wildlife has disappeared in the past 50 years. Only 4% of total mammals remaining on the Earth are wild. The inch of topsoil that feeds the whole planet is fast turning to dust. Temperatures rise, storms rage, nuclear weapons proliferate, and individual tyrants sit upon draconic fortunes larger than any held in human history while the rest of us are exhausted just paying the rent. These are not unrelated tragedies, or inevitabilities of human nature, but a war. A war we have been losing for 5,000 years. A war we didn’t start, but that we could still win—if only we knew we were fighting it.
I.II There is no one in charge.
The enemy is not just kings and billionaires, but the machine that rules them too: An engine of history older than all of the nations yoked to its drive and left as ruins in its wake. World leaders are nuclear-armed fools in its grasp, hostages compelled to keep feeding this beast they serve or be devoured by it. Their insatiable master is “Empire” - a self-replicating parasite system birthed when the human drive for individual control was able to break the bonds of kinship and establish the first ruling class. It might most simply be understood as a global social and ecological crisis that has evolved the capacity to defend itself - in large part by convincing us to defend it while simultaneously preventing us from being aware of it at all.
I.III This isn't the first "end of the world" - but it may be the last.
Empire is a world-eater: Born in the first breaking of covenants of reciprocity and balance, it spreads across the Earth devouring lands and peoples, always collapsing in fire under the weight of its own extension, each time reforged with ever more destructive weapons and ever wider reach by those most deeply infected with its sickness. Collapse offers no hope and there is nowhere left to run. Each cycle births a more complex monster, spreading further and deeper, leaving behind poisoned soils and broken bonds. The danger is not that the world will end, but that beautiful, diverse and infinitely sacred worlds are shattered again and again, each time leaving us less material capacity to sustain life. This is the Hell of Empire to which we are condemned unless its curse is broken. The Earth and our ancestors gave us a treasure, sacred belonging in a life-giving world unlike anything else we know. This birthright is being sacrificed before our eyes to enrich some few far in excess of any individual’s capacity to enjoy. We are forced to arm these executioners, and clean their knives.
I.iv
This machine survives through hate, division, and selective reward. It severs people from land, from each other, from the web of life and history. It manufactures categories in our minds, actualized through violence. Race, patriarchy, ethnic war, borders invisible to the rich but barbed-wire prisons for the poor—all made real by people spilling blood to grasp more while their actions reproduce the false scarcity that creates our hunger.
I.v
Our ignorance is cultivated by the machine. We are fed wall-to-wall illusion and spectacle—the IV drip of corporate algorithmic slop served up on our commute through cloned stripmalls and landscapes poisoned into silence. Captivity is made to feel like an inescapable reality. “There is no alternative” the feed quietly sings while the vampiric machines hum through the wires above.
I.vi
The honest operation of power is rarely discussed. We are fed a pablum of podcast pop-conspiracy because it protects the powerful, pits us against the weak, and comforts us with the thought that someone might be in charge after all. The TED-talk intellectuals and academics sell an endless stream of books about problems that they know in their hearts we can’t solve without a fucking revolution. We are never taught how power actually works: how it reproduces, gets inside us - and how it might be seized. I have studied it for decades, like many before me, but you don’t need a degree to understand. You need a curious mind and a beating heart.
I.vii
This is one attempt to gather, understand and perhaps contribute to the knowledge of thinkers greater than myself—scholars and fighters, individuals and nations, named and unnamed, remembered or forgotten. I do not intend to claim honor for other’s knowledge - especially the sacred knowledge of reciprocity and kinship that long held balance in the world. I write as a settler descendant inside the heart of Empire, translating what I gather and try to understand into forms and language I hope may help others understand better in turn. This is originally written in English, using the languages of contemporary science, philosophy, emotion, and myth - not intended to mark any of these as the superior way of knowing but just to communicate as effectively as I can. I don’t give you my name. I do not want prestige or profit. I only want to help break the machine my ancestors served, to which we all remain captive, and to strengthen the struggles that other nations and peoples already lead. I write out of grief for what is lost and love for what remains. The metaphors I offer—Cerberus, Hydra, the Vampire Class, the Vampiric Machine—are chosen intentionally as symbolic tools to help make the hidden visible and memorable. When we understand Empire, we break its spell and can begin to destroy it. When the Hydra is dead, we may finally discover who we could be.
TO BE CONTINUED