Two days ago, the United States and Israel did their best to decapitate the government of Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei and several other members of Iran’s security council are dead.
What happens from here depends on Iran’s ability to adapt to a state of siege and keep fighting. Over the next few years, much will hinge on the willingness of their Russian and Chinese allies to help them out.
There’s an old rumor that Iran acquired three nuclear warheads from Ukraine shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It’s hard to tell how Israel or the United States would react to a nuclear weapon going off on or above their territory, but I have no doubt that Iran’s remaining leaders, who have murdered tens of thousands of their own people, would find out if they could.
Once the nukes start detonating, events on Earth turn into philosophical questions about unheard trees toppling over in blackened forests.
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Quantum physicists theorize that there are an infinite number of futures. Nothing is off the table, including the restoration of Paradise on Earth by aliens disguised as Old Testament patriarchs. Other futures involve human self-extinction via climate change or plastic pollution or nihilistic meme epidemics. Anything can happen, according to theory, in the Multiverse.
If you’re going to predict the future, it’s best to stay in one universe, preferably in a tiny corner of it, where tiny things happen. When you’re talking whole universes, most things that humans do are smaller than tiny.
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A few realistic prophets look to our world and the laws of physics and patterns of human nature for their predictions. They say what will happen, but not when.
They don’t predict wars or their outcomes. They don’t predict that certain autocrats will be taken out by an Israeli airstrike. You’d think they’d make a living betting on college sports, but they don’t, because they know coaches and players and referees can be pressured to modify the expected outcomes of games. They don’t bet on elections, because they know that every political party has teams of well-paid behavioral psychologists all doing their best to rob voters in swing states of their free will, and well-paid computer hackers doing their best to do the same thing. They don’t bet on karma catching up with bad people, because they know that karma has a spotty record as far as quick and appropriate retribution is concerned.
They know that any prophet who focuses on the long run will be right more often than one who calls next fall’s midterm elections or the one who has already filled out his printable March Madness bracket sheet. The astrophysicist who predicts the sun will become a red giant and swallow the Earth won’t be around to witness that swallowing, but it will happen. Karma will eventually get around to tormenting an evil person’s soul, but it takes a while. (A lot of evil people get off scot-free because they’ve already strangled their soul in its crib.)
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As a realistic prophet, I’m not about to predict what will happen in the next few days or weeks. But I will predict the long-run effects of this war, the destruction of Gaza and the Palestinians, and the ongoing destruction of Ukraine:
Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu have already normalized military aggression, cultural genocide, and state-sponsored murder. In doing so, they have created a future where their own normal emotional state, and that of their minions, will be psychosis, subvariety paranoia.
We will live in a world where any leader will be lucky to die of old age. Governments that centralize power in one man will be terribly vulnerable to decapitation. Methods of assassination will range from airstrikes to—more subtly—medical accidents, debilitating disease, or suicide. Poisons, designed with the help of artificial intelligence, will become harder and harder to detect.
It will be the end of the relatively civilized post-1945 international arrangement, and the start of one similar to Italy under the Borgias, or Russia under Stalin and Beria.
The Russians have a standard directive that any attack on their leadership is an attack on the whole country, but does anyone think that if Putin is taken out, his successors would risk nuclear war when all of Russia lies before them like it lay before Putin? There’s a reason that autocrats surround themselves with incompetents, but even the incompetents are competent enough to realize the perks of power when opportunity shows itself. Not much can defend against that phenomenon.
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I know it’s better to have world leaders killing each other than bombing each other’s civilian populations and drafting their nations’ young people to die for them.
But being paranoid, especially if lots of people really are out to get you, will exile you from the human arena. You will be completely alone and alien even to yourself.
Paranoiac leaders kill the people closest to them and end up dying unmourned. But before a power-mad leader dies, lots of innocent people die. Citizens are arbitrarily destroyed. History is emphatic on this point.
History is also adamant about leaders eventually dying, whether in bed or out of it. Old age doesn’t just make fools of us all, it kills us. Nobody, not even the richest or most powerful, escapes debility and death. In spite of what Ray Kurzweil says, nobody alive today will live forever.
And if you’re counting on an afterlife, consider the fact that none of us will get there without a lot of changes. Our ideas of power and wealth aren’t well-suited to survive the transition.
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Another easy prediction: much human effort will continue to be dedicated to rigging reality. Everything from social safety nets to murdering political opponents to fervent prayer to using a flattering filter on the selfies you send to your friends continues to support our illusion of fixing the future.
The problem with the future—and our country and our president will find this out—is that by definition it has no end.
Every war requires a narrative (although it’s difficult to see what narrative is propelling war with Iran) and if you want your narrative to have a happy ending, you need to stop it at the exact right time. But that only happens in storybooks. In real life, the future goes on and on and on. Tragedy is comedy plus time, as contrarians like to say.
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A subset of humans believes that our species is a form of planetary cancer, and the Earth will be better off when humanity is extinct. The re-election of Donald Trump has encouraged this idea and made its adherents louder and bolder.
A different subset of humans is praying for Armageddon, because they believe the Second Coming of Christ will fix things. Those people, too, are getting louder and bolder.
A third subset, serious students of human nature, has stated that the whole species has a death-wish, a vague desire to lay down the burdens of consciousness and the contradictions of living in an animal body while possessing the consciousness of a god. Ernest Becker and others have explored this idea in detail, and as far as I can see, it describes human existence pretty well.
While I can sympathize with all these ideas, I’m not about to act on them. For one thing, I like my animal body, even as creaky as it’s getting to be. Also:
Humans wouldn’t be malignant if they would reduce their population to 250 million or so.
Christ, if he comes, will choose a time of peace rather than war.
Consciousness is the most important characteristic we humans have. Developing it throughout our messy animal existences is the highest and best use of our lives.
Wars and political power and even money tend to reduce us to an unconscious animal existence. They are literal dead ends.
Humanity will either have to reverse course or experience the death of consciousness. Even now, human consciousness is being prepped for a ventilator.
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Didactic statements, some of them prophetic. Note that I’m not saying when they’ll happen or will be generally accepted as true.
In the meantime, it’s safe to predict that if you want hope in your life, you’ll find it in the microcosm of your days, in being compassionate to your fellow humans, and in attending to your soul if you haven’t wrecked it yet.