In what form does the order of our time appear? It appears as exclusive dinners at private resort clubs and as drone strikes on schools, as fleets of luxury yachts and as the rubble of carpet bombed cities, as expansive Amazon delivery warehouses and as razor-wired concentration camps, as archipelagoes of securitized enclaves and as generalized abandonment and poverty for the rest. The appearance of this order is constructed such that it can put itself forth as the beacon of all rationality and as the defender of all values, just as it is constructed so as to condemn those who present whatever minor problem for this order or who push back even in the slightest, disappearing masses of people into the cages of prisons or disintegrating them within the blasts of AI targeted weapons. It is because this order now unfolds so devastatingly, impoverishing our inner lives just as it sends waves of destruction across humanity and the Earth as a whole, that our historical task now arises as nothing less than the need to conjure an uncompromising and profound disorder against the entire order of this world.

As a means of helping us to understand precisely why it is disorder which arises as the formal method of our time, we must first generally reflect on the different fundamental gestures that underlie all political ontology. In Greek mythology there are three sisters known as the fates (the Moirai / Μοίρες) who each stand in for a relation to existence as such, and in this way can help us grasp the features of these distinct gestures. The sisters are known as fates precisely because they were understood as being responsible for the creation, duration, and destruction of each life on Earth, and thus who were responsible for giving form to our common existence as such. The first sister was Clotho who spun threads, and thus marked creation and the bringing of a life into existence. The second was Lachesis who measured threads, and thus was concerned with the length and living of a life. And the third and final sister was Atropos who cut threads, and thus was responsible for bringing an end to a life. In the three fates we thus see the potential to bring a form of existence into the world, the potential to care for and give duration to a form that already exists in the world, and the potential to extinguish a form in the world and thus negate its existence. As a strictly formal question, our own relation to existence always takes shape in one of these three forms, as creation, as duration, and as destruction, and it is not possible simply at the level of ontology to assign priority to any one over the other. Indeed, living always involves each of these three gestures to some degree, and is through these gestures which we each give shape to our existence. But as a question of history, there is nonetheless a need to grasp what is required of us in our time, of what we must dedicate ourselves to and what takes on more urgency and priority. Today we must recognize that we now live in the era of Atropos, a period within which our primary task isn’t to create or preserve but to dismantle and destroy what has come to so heavily weigh upon and suffocate the world.

The first dimension of such a task is to clarify the form of disorder we must bring into the world, and in this way we must also differentiate it from what has the semblance of disorder today. We must see that all of the destruction and violence our time which undoes so much of existence, whether arising as the evisceration of welfare programs and healthcare systems, or the devastation and erasure of whole species and ecosystems, or the conflicts between nation states and the counterterrorism operations which unfold across the planet, are each deeply integral to and perfectly in line with the present order of the world. These are all constitutive of the present order both in the sense that they all work to reproduce the disastrous whole, and also because they are all happily tolerated by those in power so long as the larger order remains intact, despite whatever superficial condemnations or concerns may occasionally roll off the tongues of elites. Money still steadily accumulates at the top, fossil fuels are still steadily burnt, and munitions still steadily flow. Genocidaires walk free and eat caviar, and AI companies draw limitless investment as they coordinate the latest salvo of ballistic missiles and reactivate dormant coal plants to power their data centers. At the same time, if we look at what is absolutely not tolerated in our society, it is all of those who introduce even the smallest of frictions into the order and operation of this world’s immense violence. To sabotage a drone factory, to resist the clear cutting of a forest for a police training facility, to block an arms shipment, or to protest outside of an ICE facility is to be labelled and tried as a terrorist, which is our world’s way of making clear that anything and everything can be done to you without remorse or so much as a second thought.

There are of course still those who are drawn to imagining other ways of arranging life so that such desolation and violence would no longer be possible, discerning the shape of different political and economic orders which would allow for lives of autonomy and dignity, pointing towards a speculative time and place beyond capitalism’s increasingly militarized devastation. These forms of intellect and imagination remain necessary. There are equally those who desperately cling to and defend what remains living in this world, who dedicate themselves to fighting for the survival of what the world works only to snuff out. Such work too is vital. But if we accept that we live in the era of Atropos, we must also accept that the movement towards a liberated society must necessarily pass through the destruction of this one, and that the shape of any such society will also be contoured by the form through which this society is brought to an end. If we are to one day arrive in a world in which the mass degradation and disposal of life has been made impossible, we must see that our time calls upon us to choose Atropos as our fate, accepting that our capacity to bring another world and way of living into existence is now conditioned on bringing this world and its ways of life to ruin, that our triumph will appear only as ever higher degrees and intensities of disorder against all of what now imposes its horrific order upon our time.