Halfway through 2024 the world got to an unspeakable, unwritable place. Israel’s orgiastic genocide of the Palestinians. Malignant capitalism. Murderous misogyny. Poisoned politics. It was literally beyond words. The ethical bankruptcy of power everywhere short-circuited my vocabulary into a charred and smoking ruin. Since I process dark, smelly feelings by articulating them, wordlessness only made the feelings darker and smellier, and I walked around with their undead corpses eating my guts.

It’s not that the crimes are new. History is stuffed full of wars, mass killings, purges, slavery, sex trafficking and abuse, violent domination. The humdrum is hideous enough. There’s enough corruption and inequality, rape and hunger, enough ego and cruelty and fouling of the planet, enough horror in the usual. There always has been. Of course power corrupts. Of course the ‘rules-based order’ is racist and exploitative. Of course the fig leaf of trust we place in democracy is only a fig leaf.

What is new is the shame-free brazenness of it all. Today’s atrocities and outrages play out in full global view; nobody can plead ignorance of what is being done to people, and systems, and the earth. What is new is that the shockingly small number of unprincipled men who hold the world in their hands has gotten smaller, and the men more unprincipled. Power has become so concentrated, and its reach so vast, that the earth’s entire biosphere—animal, vegetable and mineral—is at the mercy of about a score of men riding a rogue capitalism that is eating the future. These men cannot be made to care.

Donald Trump is the fruit and fuel of that cancer-like capitalism, in which great power and great wealth are permanently locked together in the hope of rubbing off on each other (eww). He brings to the American presidency the sensibility of a felonious family-run corporation, steered by a megalomania that would be hilarious if it didn’t devastate so many lives. The words ‘No’ and ‘Enough’ mean nothing. Nothing can stop him but his own morality, as any pussy-grabbing, foreign head of state-kidnapping, conflict of interest-loving guy might say. Who needs global peace or cooperation, when you have the military muscle to simply take over Venezuela, or bomb Iran?

Nobody should ever have as much power as is routinely handed to single individuals. Leaders are just people, and people are all at least part-shite. There are almost no Mandelas and Mahatma Gandhis, and way too many Trumps and Netanyahus and Putins and Modis.

Power—how we have chosen to organise and run Homo sapiens—is more naked and ugly than ever, and the distance between what it does, and what people want, has almost snapped the relationship between the two. The ethical collapse is not of the people. Citizens worldwide retain decency and humanity. They have energetically protested against Israel’s barbarity, the depredation of the environment, the sexual criminality of Epstein and his sordid friends and clients. And they have been beaten, arrested, and otherwise penalised for their pains. For protesting against criminality. The rapper Macklemore got kicked off Ed Sheeran’s billionaire-sponsored musical tour; artists have lost patronage; people have lost their jobs and platforms, been threatened, hounded, slandered, and killed for raising their voices. Netanyahu stripped two Israeli filmmakers of their citizenship, for documenting the IDF’s role in Gaza. Meanwhile Jared Kushner is making power point presentations carving up the freed-up real estate they call ‘New Gaza’. Once we’ve cleared the rubble.

Power doesn’t seem to fear being caught out behaving repulsively or illegally, splashed across billions of screens. After all, for every truth, there is spin, or a payoff price. Or not, who cares? Power means never having to say you’re sorry. It just moves fast and breaks things and gets more power.

Those of us who scrabble around in ordinary life know that, behind the veils of ceremony, protocol, and national security, extremely powerful people live together on a planet of their own, getting up to extremely dodgy shit. The arms trade is their lifeblood, polarisation and distraction are their party tricks. We are aware that famous, influential men amuse themselves with the bodies of women and children. Still, I suspect that we don’t fully grasp exactly how sneering and decadent great power is, and how removed from consequence.

I spent my silent draggy period doing what I do in unbearable times: I looked at James Webb Space Telescope photographs of the galaxies, listened to physicists talk about vibrations in the electron field; watched videos about time-space and neutrinos. It helps to remember that the all-consuming problems of earth are, at the end of the day, a giant nothingburger.

And yet! One loooong period of deadened hope and wordless feelings later, I feel green shoots again. People seem to be fighting back. Where there is power, there is inevitably hubris. Even states are recoiling from Netanyahu’s savagery. Women, at least, will not forget the Epstein files, since they live with multiple daily rapes and murders of women and children. Younger people, especially, are alive to the threat from AI and its infrastructure. There is a Zohran Mamdani. There is an Abhijit Dipke, and a Ritika Chopra—put her name up in lights! There are countless others. There is even the sense that maybe, just maybe, all-powerful amorality is out rather than in. I’m allowed to hope.

In India, the Cockroaches gave hope to millions. They certainly gave me some words back. And in this moment, when the Indian Express has documented the incendiary scam at the Election Commission of India, confirming what many people suspect, we are at a potential watershed. Will millions of people shake off a feeling of inconsequentiality? Will the giant pendulum of historical cycles finally slow its out-swing, and begin to lumber the other way? Will the whole nation roar ‘Gyanesh, it’s done, bro’? Or will power do what power does?

I’m reminding myself that either way, it’s a giant nothingburger.

But it’s my giant nothingburger.

And suddenly it’s possible to feel: What an amazing giant nothingburger it could be.

Source: STET by Mitali Saran

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