I think, not infrequently, about how we never got a public COVID-19 vaccine. US President Joe Biden announced something and public pressure let up, but it just never fucking happened. It was just a delaying tactic, and it worked.

Then I think about how an unelected brown man from the Goldman Sachs caste is running the UK and an African-American is bombing Africa for America, and it all comes full circle. They’re diversifying this dumpster fire rather than putting it out.

Then I think where it all ends. With a rainbow capitalism full of false promises, leading to the heat death of life as we know it. Delay, diversify, destroy. It’s the new divide and conquer and gods damn it, it works.

Delay

Elites are now flying their private jets to COP27, which is just a farcical cop-out at this point. More pledges, more promises, more pleading, which all amount to one thing. More delay. Emissions have risen every single year since the first COP. It’s a joke. The primacy of words over action in western civilization means that they talk everyone (literally) to death about climate change while consistently making it worse.

Every pledge, every promise, even all the data and projections, they all just amount to delays. The truth is they had all the data they needed in the 1970s,and the more advanced civilizations they genocided had figured out balance centuries ago. At this point, climate delay is worse than climate denial. At least the latter fuckers can be spotted and opposed. The delayers hide behind liberal platitudes and are slippery as eels. They’ll be talking about 20-year commitments until they die, and take the whole world with them.

Diversification

The great innovation of capitalism and of the whiteness that is its hierarchy has been devouring its rebellions. Whiteness always worked as a way of homogenizing warring West Asian tribes and turning their violence and brutality against the world. Whiteness has always been an expanding category, slowly admitting Irish, Italians, and now Ukrainians and upper-caste Indians.

Just as the whole system collapses into a heap (next section), colored people, women, and gays are getting the wheel. Just in time to take the blame. The dung heap of tech companies is increasingly run by brown people (Microsoft, Google, Twitter for now at least). A brown/black person is Vice-President of the US, a brown person is PM of the UK, and the US Secretary of War is black too. But what are they doing? Same old shit. Just as they greenwash capitalism, they’ve brownwashed imperialism. But it’s still causing the same problems. It’s still leading the same way.

Disaster

The fact is that the violent, extractive systems which produced such wealth for a few people are not sustainable. The entire ‘western development’ model is the extraction of wealth from everybody else in spacetime and that physical debt is coming due. Switching to electric cars doesn’t change the system.Switching to a brown PM doesn’t change the system. The system persists, and is bound for systemic collapse.

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. It’s just mathematically impossible. Capitalism remains incompatible with a stable climate, however much you keep repeating the mantra ‘sustainability’. In the same way, you can’t diversify the hierarchy of whiteness into anything other than it is now. A system of exploitation with certain people at the top and certain people necessarily at the bottom, making all the shit and cleaning up.

What we are sailing into is a system collapse and it’s A) unavoidable and B) won’t even be mitigated without at least a controlled collapse of the human systems causing it. That means the complete breakdown of things you probably hold dear, like liberal democracy, and getting products you want whenever you want them, and the general comfort of the global upper classes. That comfort is what causes collapse, and it’s honestly an evolutionary tale as old as time.

The fact is that systems like capitalism and imperialism are like any organism. They try to adapt to change by making little tweaks, a color change here, a breathing hole there, anything to survive without being something they’re not. But nature periodically, nay, regularly just kills the shit out of everybody and starts over with some other roll of the evolutionary dice. She’s not an editor, she freestyles, and when one rhyme gets boring she just starts over.

Delay, diversify, and destroy works fine on us in the present moment because we want it to work. We want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to have comfortable private transport despite it being dramatically less efficient than public, so we collectively delude ourselves into thinking electric cars are a solution. We want to have power and privilege, so we wait our turn for whiteness instead of overthrowing the whole thing. So we meet our fate on the path we take to avoid it, because we missed the point of turning the fuck around. Because we can’t turn around at a very high level.

And so we just keeping burning the dead and increasing imaginary numbers until the whole thing falls down. Delay and diversify are quite effective in the short term, but as Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead”. This is really how the old and rich approach climate collapse, basically ‘fuck it, just make money until we die in 30 years,’ which is conveniently the horizon for climate pledges).

In the slightly longer run, 90% of species are dead and their own grandchildren are fucked, but who cars. Delay and diversify are really just holding tactics against a restive population, allowing the guilty few to die peacefully and leave us with their mess. We’ve seen their playbook with the profiteering from COVID-19. They’re just going to do the same with climate collapse.This Empire was always built around raping people and the planet, and that’s how it goes down as well. It took the South down for centuries without too much notice, but now it’s coming for everyone.Divide and conquer was the old playbook, and now it’s delay and diversify. It’s always the same old destruction at the end.