"Power Without Knowledge...": President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings

[ZeSteel]

Huh, that's pretty interesting that the Antarctic revolution caused such a major regime change in North America. Is it solely a reaction to the cosmicists?

 

[Born in the USSA]

Huh, that's pretty interesting that the Antarctic revolution caused such a major regime change in North America. Is it solely a reaction to the cosmicists?

The Antarctic Revolution was a severe shock (Cosmicism having by this point evolved into a Red Scare-style boogeyman in the US) but other factors included the resulting global economic instability and renewed competition with the other Arctic Council nations over the now ice-free Arctic Circle.

 

[Born in the USSA]

-Flag of the United Commonwealths of Columbia. The stripes are meant to evoke the unfinished pyramid on the Great Seal and (following its expansion) the stars represent the 11 "American Nations", with the addition of central and southern Mexico.
​

Considered the first true work of Antarctic literature, City on a Hill was published in the 2080s by a (presumably) American exile writing under the pseudonym Fabian Palmer* and unsuccessfully suppressed by Macondo almost immediately. A work of uchronia, Palmer begins with a series of small organizational changes early in the history of the Commonwealth Party that strengthen it, butterfly the sinking of the Kanaloa and gradually compound until the fateful 2060 election, where a breakdown in the corrupt bargain between the New Federalists and the America First Party prevents the impeachment of the Commonwealth ticket and the subsequent mass arrests and suppression of the party. This, in turn, leads to an America First-affiliated military coup, forcing the NeoFeds and the Commonwealthers into a Common Ground alliance and shifting the balance of power within the Commonwealth party even further toward the Cosmicist faction.

The ensuing civil war further solidifies this shift, as the purely electoral dominance of the New Federalists pales in comparison to the tight integration of the now fully Cosmicist Commonwealthers when it comes to actually prosecuting the war, and the aftermath sees the latter in a strong enough position to form a provisional government and push through a new constitution, inaugurating the United Commonwealths of Columbia that gradually expands over the continent. City on a Hill covers a broad historical scope, beginning with the earliest years of the Cosmicist Party in the 2030s and going through the period of civil war and into the resulting Cold War phase between the UCC and its allies** and the reactionary forces of the Eurasian Union, the Hong Kong Accords and the now openly corporatist Antarctic Economic Territories, eventually concluding in the new century***.

The novel is told in an unconventional semi-epistolary style, combining more traditional prose sections with in-universe documents, wikiboxes, and purely informational interludes and appendices. In this way it provides a fascinating glimpse into the theory and praxis of the Cosmicist movement in the late twenty-first century, and would in turn provide plenty of inspiration to the Constitutional Convention that arose out of the post-revolutionary Cosmicist consolidation period. For example, although the new three-member presidency had been suggested by Sutter himself in the Manifesto, the structure of the new Continental Congress with its web of interlocking chambers was a new development that would be imported nearly wholesale by the new government, with the three-member Executive instead recycled for the Kurfursts of the Regional Commonwealths. City on a Hill would also be instrumental in outlining the shape eventually taken by the Cosmicist International. Fabian Palmer him/her/themself would never be conclusively identified, though the name lives on as one of the most common in the nation that owed so much to the novel.


*This is commonly cited for inspiring the current Antarctic trend of recycling the names of explorers and scientists associated with the continent. Many were originally chosen as pen names during the underground period of the movement before being adopted en masse as noms de guerre during the Revolution.

**The oldest sister Commonwealth was in the south Pacific, born out of a concurrent revolution begun by the crew of the Kanaloa, but the Cosmintern would eventually add two in the Americas, two in Africa and even one in Europe over the course of the novel.

***In a stroke of historic irony the novel concluded in the same year the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths would be created in the real world.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The only political faction enshrined in the ARC Basic Law, the Antarctic Cosmicist Party has an unconventional structure befitting its role, with each local Ward electing a representative to the Party's Regional Committees and those branches in turn forwarding members to the Central Committee in proportion to the population and fractional representation of the Regional Commonwealths. Unlike most political parties these elections are extremely regimented, with the entire elected party apparatus at every level required to stand for election every three years. Adhering to the principles of vanguard pluralism, the ACP is divided into a variety of fractions operating within the broader party structure, each with its own distinct proposals and solutions within the Cosmicist framework. While the elected leader of the largest fraction (or coalition of fractions) becomes the Party's General Secretary, the Central Committee is forbidden from interfering to favor one fraction over another in any election, instead merely deciding on the broad direction of the Party and managing the organization's funds, sophisticated data operation and robust network of operatives and volunteers. Although there are a variety of fractions, the Stewards and the Populists are larger than all the others, forming the closest thing the Revolutionary Commonwealths have to actually distinct political parties (outside of the perennial bloc of political independents). The former uses the Struggle containing a Southern Cross as a separate electoral symbol, while the Populists favor the wrench-and-pen surrounded by a gear.​

While the Stewards (black) and the Populists (burgundy) are the largest ACP Fractions by an essentially insurmountable margin (with the former anti-immigration/pro-environmentalist and the latter pro-immigration/pro-development) I came up with a few of the more populous minor Fractions, ordered from largest to smallest. In the Continental Congress the Stewards and the Populists each have a fairly stable floor at 35% and compete over the same pool of swing voters while the Independents tend to hold steady at 10% and the minor fractions combined tend to do the same.

1. Globalists - A Cosmicist Maximalist group that advocates for increased commitment to the Cosmintern, containment of the Nihilist powers, and the abolition of the Doctrine of the Last Throw, and as such are sometimes referred to as the Weltkriegers or the Soloists*. Symbol- a black fist in a maroon Struggle, color- maroon.
2. CosCom- The default communist "party", focused on the increased nationalization of the Antarctic economy and a transition from the money-form to a labor-voucher system. Symbol- a red wrench in a burgundy gear, color- red.
3. Common Sense- This Fraction has made its peace with the Dividend and some level of nationalization but wants to loosen restrictions on private industry. Symbol- a blue pen in a burgundy circle, color- blue.
4. Pacifists- They favor economic and cultural competition as the tools that will topple the Nihilist powers rather than force. Symbol- a white peace sign filled with burgundy, color- white.
5. Novuterans**- Another Maximalist Fraction, they're a bunch of transhumanists who firmly believe in the expansion of the genetic engineering programs, modification of the human genome, an acceleration of the space program and the creation of artificial intelligences to best manage the economy. Symbol- a purple h+ symbol, color- purple.

If you count the Independents*** as a bloc that gives the ARC what amounts to a 2.5 party system with a halo of minor parties on the edges not unlike what Canada has, though at least the small fry actually win seats sometimes in Antarctica.


*Since they advocate shooting first 😂

**Not nearly as insane as the Novuterans I covered in the Could Have Been Ideologies thread (less wedded to nuclear race war, for one thing) but still pretty out there.

***I know they're not a party, but the common symbol for political independents in Antarctica is standardized nonetheless as a gray honeybee in a black circle. They're the only major political group in the country with an animal symbol as a fun aside.

 

[Born in the USSA]

It wouldn't be out of place to say that the Bonus Army of the late great Commonwealth Party was (and still is) lionized in the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths. Aside from the standard Grand Old Cause historiography that they were an early, tragic example of a Cosmicist revolutionary vanguard mercilessly snuffed out by the reactionary forces of Nihilism, it's important to put the Bonus Army in a proper human context to fully understand the role it (or rather, the memory of it) would play in the world's first true* Cosmicist revolution. The development of what would become the Bonus Army dated relatively early, first arising in the 2020s as an organic response to the increasing political violence that characterized the American political system from 2016 on.

What began as an ad-hoc network of political street fighters was gradually systematized over the following twenty years into an organized and highly disciplined fighting force, a process which also saw it come into alignment with the new Commonwealth Party and saw the Army itself quickly evolve into the nexus of the Cosmicist faction within the party at large. At it's core, the Bonus Army was divided into two equal partitions: Coxey's Army, which organized east of the Mississippi, and Kelley's Army, which organized to the west. The Commonwealth Party's commitment to collective decision making shone through early in the project, with each chapter representing areas of roughly equal population and each electing an adjutator to a statewide command structure that simultaneously selected the officers of those lower chapters while also electing members to advance as Bannermen to the command structure of whichever partition of the Army they happened to be under. To create an air of plausible deniability the selection process for the Bannermen specified no political registration, but by this point it was an open secret that everyone below the highest level were Commonwealth partisans.

It was for this precise reason that the Bonus Army would be the most heavily persecuted organ of the party, and would therefore go on to form the lion's share of the American inmates transported to Antarctica in the immediate wake of the suppression of the Commonwealthers. Fully intent on a divide-and-rule policy in their new playground in the Antarctic Economic Territories, Macondo would heavily segregate new arrivals and limit communication between districts, and though this system would break down through a combination of the necessary transfer of skilled workers between districts and the later mass floods of climate refugees that characterized the 2080s, these initial settlement patterns left an indelible mark on the unique cultures and mores that would evolve in the later Regional Commonwealths. As a general rule in that first generation (2060s-2080s):

1. District 1 (later Riallaro RC**) received large shipments of dissidents from the Eurasian Union.
2. District 2 (later New Swabia RC) received Europeans active in both the far-right and far-left antigovernment militia movements.
3. District 3 (later Leng RC) received prisoners of war taken against the massive Regressive insurgencies in the Middle East and North Africa.
4. District 4 (later Xanadu RC) received a heterodox mix of dissidents from all over the nations of the Belt and Road Directorate and the broader Pacific.
5. District 5 (later Dakkar RC**) received masses of anti-government rebels shipped out of India.
6. District 6 (later Caprona RC) received another batch of Regressives, this time from all over South America.
7. District 7 (later New Nantucket RC) was the only one to receive a large initial influx of Cosmicists, these drawn almost entirely from North America.

It's no surprise then that New Nantucket is often referred to in the modern day as "the Gateway to the Revolution", nor that the eventual spread of Cosmicism throughout the continent would see the growth of Bonus Army-inspired Cosmicist militia movements in its wake. The period of post-revolutionary Cosmicist consolidation would see these militias, now battle hardened by the struggle, absorbed wholesale into the new Antarctic Armed Forces. Though the AAF has a far more traditional top-down military hierarchy the tradition of elected representation within the military lived on following this incorporation in the form of the Chamber of Adjutators, a special Chamber of the Continental Congress formed in times of dire need by elected representatives of the ships and units of the AAF to present grievances or testimony to the Congress as a whole. The Chamber is led by a steering committee selected by the members, a latter day reincarnation of the Bannermen of the Bonus Army.


*Proper Cosmicists actually consider the Kanaloa to be the first, but the Antarctic Revolution was the first one that succeeded at scale and wasn't destroyed within five years so that's the one everyone fixates on.

**The portions of Riallaro/Dakkar around the South Pole eventually get partitioned under the first Basic Law to form the new Karnak RC capitol district, while the islands that will eventually be reorganized into the Protonga Territory are annexed during the first constitutional cycle and incorporated under the second Basic Law.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I've also been tinkering with changes to the ARC map, though I haven't started actually mocking up the image. Basically I've transitioned from the idea that the highlands of the Leng interior (that weird angular bit in the geographic center of the continent) are just an underdeveloped hinterland and toward the idea that they'd be an unincorporated territory/national park that serves as the frontline of the ARC-engineered terraforming experiments. Officially known as the Symzonia Territory, it would be interesting if in my novel (starting just before the Constitutional Convention for the fourth Basic Law*) there's an organic movement for admitting it as a tenth RC, though given who's already living there it would almost certainly be called Tsalal if it somehow passed.

*They don't ever scrap the whole thing, but there's a clear history of amendments and revisions every generation. The standard process for the Convention is to first go through the previous generation of legal precedent (deciding whether to keep, scrap, or suggest incorporating each one on a case by case basis), then debating and voting on specific changes recommended by the body or put forward by public referendum, and then finally putting the whole thing to a continent-wide referendum. It's always passed so far but if the vote ever failed the previous Basic Law would be retained, though the changes in precedent would likewise be retained, since the core of the Convention is the legally-elected current Congress.

 

[Laserfish]

Right, Laserfish back at it again with a whole bunch of questions!

To start off, what are video games like in the ARC? I assume indies are the primary way they're made, but if you could shed some more light on it that would be very much appreciated! Are consoles, PCs, and VR relevant in the ARC's gaming industry? What sort of genres are popular, and what themes are most prevalent in the plot of the games? And has there ever been any sort of moving away from the stale cash grabs that seem to be what so-called triple-A studios have been pumping out in recent years outside of the ARC?

Next, what is the cuisine of the ARC like? How has technological advancements, along with things like worse climate change, affected the outside culinary world? For one, I assume that meat alternatives or cultured meats have taken off in popularity.

Lastly, although I know it is better saved for a proper chapter of it's own, how goes all things relating to space and our exploration to it? Any great returns to the stars, the moon, or hell, even our first steps on Mars? No need to go to detailed into it if you were already planning to cover it at a later date, but if you wish to do so, we're not complaining!

Right, that's all for now, nice to see you back, and keep up the great work!

 

[Born in the USSA]

Right, Laserfish back at it again with a whole bunch of questions!

Questions about my TLs are what I live for!

To start off, what are video games like in the ARC? I assume indies are the primary way they're made, but if you could shed some more light on it that would be very much appreciated! Are consoles, PCs, and VR relevant in the ARC's gaming industry?

Consoles and PCs are both relevant, though the legally enshrined principle of Synchronization (mandatory standardization of parts) has made the console something functionally closer to a gaming computer, i.e. a machine that could be ordered premade or built from scratch depending on the specific types of performance you want out of it. The biggest future innovation in gaming/media has been the advent of AR, since you can get contact lenses that open up a whole new world of interactive activities and information. The Continental Constabulary (a national police force) and the Regional Militias (standard police) use similar lenses hooked up to their databases to make their work easier.

What sort of genres are popular, and what themes are most prevalent in the plot of the games?

The list of popular genres is relatively broad in Antarctica, ranging from shooters to adventure games to a variety of slice-of-life offerings, though Cosmicist themes around class and human potential are fairly common in the Mievilleian sense that most aren't trying to beat you over the head with ideology but most of the creators make things informed by their ideological leanings. Makes sense, since the wide array of games are passion projects only made possible by the political and social structure rooted in the ideology.

And has there ever been any sort of moving away from the stale cash grabs that seem to be what so-called triple-A studios have been pumping out in recent years outside of the ARC?

Unfortunately the Nihilist powers are still in the death grip of the profit motive and economic rentseeking, so soulless cash grabs with pay to win and subscription models are far more common than not up north.

Next, what is the cuisine of the ARC like?

Each RC has it's own cuisine inspired by the founding population and the particular waves of immigrants, though Midwinter has a vaguely Passover-like meal on the Sol Solstice of "traditional fare" eaten by the first Antarctic explorers (things like hardtack, pemmican and broth) as a form of solidarity in the antipolar winter and Pavlova is the Antarctic national dessert.

How has technological advancements, along with things like worse climate change, affected the outside culinary world? For one, I assume that meat alternatives or cultured meats have taken off in popularity.

Vertical farming has allowed for the preservation of a pretty broad diet of fruits and vegetables in much of the world, though new cash crops are grown to deal with the fact that most can't grow in those conditions and climate change has ruined a lot of current farmland.

Diet for a hotter climate: five plants that could help feed the world

As the planet warms, these five drought-tolerant and highly nutritious crops offer hope for greater resiliency

www.theguardian.com

Lastly, although I know it is better saved for a proper chapter of it's own, how goes all things relating to space and our exploration to it? Any great returns to the stars, the moon, or hell, even our first steps on Mars? No need to go to detailed into it if you were already planning to cover it at a later date, but if you wish to do so, we're not complaining!

I'll definitely be doing an update on the future of the Space Race, don't worry! I'm not going to spoil it but I will say that space exploration in Antarctica is the province of the Corps of Discovery, a joint military/civilian entity that runs its launches out of Easter Island. The ideological grounds for seizing it were tenuous but it was considered an absolute necessity to have launch platforms closer to the equator. The Cosmicist International is also heavily involved in space exploration/colonization and has organized the creation of several space elevators within the more northerly Continental Commonwealths for that exact purpose.

Right, that's all for now, nice to see you back, and keep up the great work!

Thank you so much, I appreciate it!

 

[Cascadiawank]

When you talk about capital-N Nihilism, and Nihilist powers, do you mean nihilism in the Cosmicist sense as a state of social decay (if I understand correctly), or has it crystalized into a full-on proper ideology up north? And if the latter, what are its main themes and ideas?

 

[Born in the USSA]

When you talk about capital-N Nihilism, and Nihilist powers, do you mean nihilism in the Cosmicist sense as a state of social decay (if I understand correctly), or has it crystalized into a full-on proper ideology up north? And if the latter, what are its main themes and ideas?

It's still divided and defined as an umbrella of shared political tendencies rather than an overarching ideology itself. The Northern Powers remain allies of convenience with their own names for their systems (Eurasianism in the Eurasian Union, Bolivarianism in America Unida, "democratic capitalism" read: oligarchal populism basically everywhere else). They resent being all lumped together.

 

[Born in the USSA]

As a fun aside given the Reds!-esque nature (in both semi-epistolary structure and content) of City on a Hill, the actual analogue to the TL on mortonsfork.us* is called Emerald Isle!. The POD is that Henry George (whom despite being of Anglo extraction got along well with New York's Irish Republicans) gets swept up in the Irish Land War while on his OTL speaking tour for Progress and Poverty. This sets off a chain of dominos that build into a full-blown British Civil War in the 1880s culminating in an independent Georgist Irish Republic**. The rest of the TL revolves around the early years of the Republic and the growth of Georgism as a revolutionary anticolonialist ideology. Among other things this drastically changes the circumstances for World War I, with the postwar Fascism analogue filled by Social Credit***.


*It's much larger than its OTL equivalent, to the point where it has its own dedicated publishing arm and the analogue to AH.com: The Series is an actual webseries on TTL's version of YouTube.

**Their flag is a modified Starry Plough!

***Because the idea of a global ideological divide over the supremacy of fiscal vs. monetary policy is hilarious to me.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Another fun note: the dessicated husk of the Commonwealth Party survived the aftermath of the 2060 election and limped on as a CPUSA-style electoral drain trap. It was well on its way to extinction but was revitalized when the formation of the NAU allowed it to fuse with a Canadian Cosmicist party and Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Still heavily repressed by the NAU government it nonetheless has membership in the Cosmintern and has been expanding as climate change and automation thrust increasing numbers of North Americans into precarity. The party is still pining for a Cosmicist Revolution of their own and plan to adopt the UCC flag from City on a Hill after Final Victory, though their new government will probably be openly modeled on the Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Any other worldbuilding questions?

 

[Born in the USSA]

I've been thinking about the Hong Kong Accords and stumbled on this and thought it would be interesting:

Jiang Qing (unfortunately pronounced similarly to Mao’s infamous wife) is a decently well-known Confucian thinker in the modern PRC, who has some radical ideas for a Chinese government more rooted in tradition. To quote a NYT editorial by Jiang:

​

In modern China, Humane Authority should be exercised by a tricameral legislature: a House of Exemplary Persons that represents sacred legitimacy; a House of the Nation that represents historical and cultural legitimacy; and a House of the People that represents popular legitimacy.​

​

The leader of the House of Exemplary Persons should be a great scholar. Candidates for membership should be nominated by scholars and examined on their knowledge of the Confucian classics and then assessed through trial periods of progressively greater administrative responsibilities — similar to the examination and recommendation systems used to select scholar-officials in the imperial past. The leader of the House of the Nation should be a direct descendant of Confucius; other members would be selected from descendants of great sages and rulers, along with representatives of China’s major religions. Finally, members of the House of the People should be elected either by popular vote or as heads of occupational groups.​

This system would have checks and balances. Each house would deliberate in its own way and not interfere in the affairs of the others. To avoid political gridlock arising from conflicts among the three houses, a bill would be required to pass at least two houses to become law. To protect the primacy of sacred legitimacy in Confucian tradition the House of Exemplary Persons would have a final, exclusive veto, but its power would be constrained by that of the other two houses: for example, if they propose a bill restricting religious freedom, the People and the Nation could oppose it, stopping it from becoming law.​

Though it seems quite unlikely given the course of contemporary Chinese history, what if a government like this was set up in the twentieth century?

 

[Born in the USSA]

https://www.reddit.com/r/futurecompasses/comments/xncn6k

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/y9xboh

 

[Born in the USSA]

I added some images to the previous post. Needless to say the Antarctic bioengineers are really finding their stride 😂 I also have a rough list of updates I have planned (in no particular order):

1. The Era of Bad Feelings (present)
   1. A Media Matters about Gargoyles
   2. The 2016 election/second tainted victory
   3. The 2018 midterms/Shatter
2. The Coming Storm (near future)
   1. The rise to prominence of the Arctic Council
   2. A cover mockup for City on a Hill
3. Writing on the Wall (further future)
   1. The Third Space Race
   2. Stuff on the Ultima Antarctica media empire

I'm also open to any questions and will probably expand the list if people have areas of interest they want to see covered and I can do something productive with it.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Cthulhuscene: Ecological Catastrophe, Cosmic Horror, and the Politics of Doom

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”Amid the desolate winds of the Antarctic, the ice sheets strain under the increasing pressure of warming air and water. Cracks start to form, starting...

www.seanparson.com

 

[Born in the USSA]

https://popularresistance.org/from-new-economy-to-cooperative-commonwealth/

 

[Born in the USSA]

I had some thoughts about my Cosmicism ideology and wanted to work through them. As you may or may not know, the Cosmicist ideology that blossoms in the future history portion of my Power Without Knowledge TL subscribes to a nested form of historical materialism split into two sections, Geist and Leviathan.

1. Volksgeist- Pre-Cosmicist/post-settled civilization history, contains Leviathan.
   1. Feudalism- Settled states, dawn of agriculture, writing and class stratification. Governed by the the transfer of Imperium and the Mandate of Heaven.
   2. Liberalism- Dissolution of traditional class structure, rise of bourgeoisie and the cult of meritocracy. Governed by Whig history centered on the Great Man.
   3. Socialism- Attempt to level inequalities inherent in the contradictions of Liberalism, deformed by inadequate foundational conditions. Governed by dialectical materialism.
   4. Fascism- Conservative reaction to the rise of Socialism, return of colonial control mechanisms to the metropole. Governed by the National Myth and fuhrerprinzip.
   5. Nihilism- Decay of social horizons, mindless regurgitation of the prior four stages blended together and bereft of context. Governed by Capitalist Realism.
2. Zeitgeist- Revolutionary wave, Cosmicist states and movements.
3. Weltgeist- Cosmicist world state, space colonies.
4. Gestaltgeist- Fully colonized and integrated solar system, generation ships.

The idea I had was a refinement on one I've been turning over in my head, namely the way to define political movements in the Nihilist stage of the Leviathan. As you can probably tell by the stages listed above, while Geist is defined using concrete metrics about changes to the societal base, the Leviathan is defined more abstractly based on shifts in the superstructure that preceded or coincided with dramatic shifts to the base. That's categorizing 12,000 years of history for you, the boundaries are a bit fuzzy.

My basic conception is that while the base and superstructure were very closely linked in the first four stages of the Leviathan, a defining feature of the Nihilist stage is the breakdown of the connection between the two, creating two political categories that define modern* pre-Cosmicist politics according to the ideology. Neither of these are inherently left/right, since the terms define their relationship (or lack thereof) to material conditions** and Cosmicism therefore represents a mending of the breach between base and superstructure, marking the end of the Leviathan and the transition to the Zeitgeist.

1. Necropolitics- The politics of the Superstructure and the most widespread. Defined almost exclusively by cultural appeals, the intentional obfuscation of historical context and limitation of future horizons, and the willful inability to genuinely confront the root causes of the Cthulhucene.
2. Accelerationism- The politics of the base, far rarer and more radical. Focused on the acceleration of technology as both an end in itself and as a means to achieve drastic and far-reaching revolutionary social change, to whatever end.

*Roughly c. 1970-present

**Auntology/race war accelerationism create a blurred boundary between the two, since they are fundamentally necropolitical in their focus on culture to the exclusion of all else but adopt an outlook on social change inherited from acceleration.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Because I have an obsessive tendency to flesh out every scrap of minutia for this project have an outline for the Cosmicist Manifesto!

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief”
-Franz Kafka​

• welcome to the strange aeon- An introduction describing the purpose of the book and laying out an outline for the following chapters.
• FIRST PRINCIPLES (Mobilis in mobili.)-Define the ideology and lay out the layered chain of Cosmicist historical development.
  1. from womb to tomb- About the author, a self-analysis on Sutter's part of his political evolution through the contradictory lenses of the twin American mythologies of Cosmic Horror and Caped Crusaders.
  2. palimpsest- A breakdown of the stages of Leviathan, their causes, history, ripples and forms of interconnection.
  3. world as vampire- An analysis of the modern state of the precariat and the kyriarchy as well as the concept of Geist and the goals and metrics that define the three post-Volksgeist stages.
• ZEITGEIST (Quis contra nos?)- A starting point for a revolutionary wave.
  1. the magic mountain- Praxis of various types (from reform to revolution), a functional definition of a Zauberberg*.
  2. tekelili- An outline of a system of Cosmicist economics synthesizing from a wealth of historical precedents and modern developments.
  3. curious growth- Ecological policy, outlining both calls to create a circular economy through the principle of Synchronization and calls for serious research into environmental triage/modification and space exploration to prevent mass extinctions and resource exhaustion.
• THE COMING RACE (Ad astra per aspera!)- An experimental section delivered as a set of short vignettes set in an alternate history political allegory set in an alternate 1960s or so. In-universe this section will be extrapolated by the founders of the ARC and greatly inform their approach.
  1. kraken and kanaloa- Based on my own Lovecraft in Lemuria concept, basically describing a fictional continent as an analogy for the modern world and the spread of a successful Cosmicist revolution.
  2. an irreligious theocracy- A series of vignettes describing life in a post Zeitgeist society.
  3. beyond the primordial sea- Technical documents describing the goals of the Lemurian space program.
• dagon's dictionary- First appendix, a glossary of Cosmicist terms and concepts.
• some repetitions on the times- Second appendix, a reprint of the H.P. Lovecraft letter with authorial commentary.

*Being a revolutionary unit ranging in scale from an individual/family to a social movement to a nation rearranged along Cosmicist lines. The term is a play on The Magic Mountain, chosen because Zauberbergs "calve" like icebergs by cleaving from mystified conventional society.