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

Just for fun: What's a better name for the Gestaltgeist iteration of the Cosmintern?

  • Cosmicist Interstellar (Cosminstel)

  • Cosmicist Intersidereal (Cosminside)

  • Keep it the same! They're still nations even if they're on another planet!


Results are only viewable after voting.
Had a random idea that could evolve into a sequel down the line!
I had a random idea for my Power Without Knowledge TL and I'm so busy with that I'll likely never get to this so I'll lay it out here. As you may or may not know, that TL serves as a worldbuilding thread for a novel I've been tinkering with called Oubliette. The timeline itself is divided into an alternate history section (going from the ~1980s to present) and a future history section (set in the 2190s), to better map out a novel bifurcated between a 2020 election bildungsroman and a futuristic neonoir thing. Anyway, as a capitulation to my need to flesh out every random detail I came up with an idea for an in-universe novel, City on a Hill, as a work of uchronia and metafiction describing a universe where a Cosmicist revolution in America succeeded instead of failing as it did in the backstory of Power Without Knowledge.

My random intrusive thought was to do a TL presenting that scenario (as in a defictionalization of City on a Hill) interspersed with a point set further in the future than my novel. Aside from the fact that the idea of a TL that's a DBWI for another TL sounds like lots of fun and it gives me a chance to explore changes to the future only hinted by Oubliette, it also creates interesting implications for the novel, since the frame narrative is that the anonymous "author" of it (writing in the future) is claiming to merely be compiling the journals of Daniel Sutter, founder of Cosmicism and dead more than a century, that nonetheless are perfectly tracking with lived reality in the future history portion. Is the author a fraud or was Sutter a prophet (or a madman)?

In my wildest self-flagellating fantasy it would coalesce into a sequel to Oubliette called Ultimatum, interspersing epistolary and prose portions from City on a Hill (a blend inspired by Reds!) with a purely prose portion revolving around a random Antarctic citizen trying to adapt it into a TV series to celebrate it's 150th anniversary while falling down the rabbit hole exploring the true authorship of Oubliette, all while a new and more militant Cosmicism is building for the final war on the surviving kyriarchal powers. A sequel where the original novel is a work of fiction, revolving around a character exploring it while trying to adapt a work that's fictional in both. It's quite a lot and it'll likely never go anywhere but the idea haunts me 😅
The major change to the City on a Hill scenario would be a world where the Shatter doesn't happen at all, resulting in a system where Reform and the Republicans fuse instead to devolve back to a two party system. In universe it'd be seen as an unlikely contrivance but what are double-blind what ifs for?
 
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Had an idea for a 2016 media update and then I'll finally buckle down and do the 2016 election 😅 In other news I thought of another bit of nuance for the future portion: just as Columbia (the American people) and Uncle Sam (the US government) are distinct characters even if the latter tends to absorb the purview of the former in popular imagination, I thought it would be interesting to do the same thing with my Antarctica, with Ultima contrasted with Mithras. Aside from the fact his support was typically drawn from the military and state apparatus OTL, his prominent association with bull slaying is ideologically relevant as the conflation of the animal with global capital has led to a blending of Mammon/Moloch in Antarctic symbology. I'd already intended for the Commonwealth of Caprona to be a Special Economic Zone*, the only part of the continent where northern businesses could have any direct contact with the Antarctic economy, but now to drive things home there will be a huge statue that's basically the Bull of Wall Street being stabbed to death in a modern remake of the tauroctony, just to remind all the interlopers what the score is.


*The logic is that it's both ideally placed (having some distance from the main body of the continent and a harsher climate) and provides an excellent opportunity to collect defectors and steal trade secrets. Plus, either these companies abide by the Antarctic labor regimen (in which case great) or they get special visas to import menial laborers (creating another vector of Cosmicist thought in the north).
 
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Quotes from Alienation
To help hint at the broader changes of the timeline without relying too much (I'm not made of stone!) on infodumps and footnotes I've decided to preface every chapter of the Alienation half of my novel with an appropriate quote lifted from OTL but slightly modified to allude to changes!
  • "The Swamp": "The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam."- JG Ballard, 1983*
  • "Red Meat"- "I am in command here, at the White House..."- President Alexander Haig, 1984
  • "Copperhead"- "Britain and France have got to get our continental interests into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative."- Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1992
  • "Bread and Roses"- "The Age of Oil and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."- Seyyed Nasr, 2001
  • "Reservations"- "[...] So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."- President Carol Moseley-Braun, 2008
  • "Blue Wave"- "You don't need a Weatherman..."- Anonymous graffiti, 2014
  • "Leviathan"- "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."- Thomas Friedman, 2020
*OTL quote and context
 
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Based on some stimulating conversation over in the Could Have Been Ideologies thread I've been toying with a Xenofeminist fraction neutered (ha ha) in a similar way to the Antarctic Novuterans. After all, how can you be a full-throated accelerationist in a state that explicitly defines that set of thought schools as reactionary? Essentially, since the Basic Law guarantees bodily autonomy and freedom of choice in sexuality, gender expression and family structure they'd play into expanding that in a formal way. Given the fairly expansive list of things covered by the Antarctic Health Service there's not much to do in that arena and they can caucus with the Novuterans* for the transhumanism and AI planks but they are trying to further enshrine alternative family structures** and expand the number of genders in "Antarctic Colloquial English", since, as the constitutionally enshrined official language of the state, any changes they introduce would become self-reinforcing if enough people start using them. Ae/aer is already replacing they/them except in cases where you don't know what the person you're talking about prefers and they're trying to introduce ka/kan as a new gender for soldiers, police and politicians, since the fact that they have higher standards of conduct and are the only ones capable of facing the death penalty mark them out as an entirely separate class of people. For its brief life the Xenofeminist fraction used a dark pink Venus sign topped with an X instead of an O as their electoral symbol.


*That is until both groups are absorbed wholesale by the new Maximalist Fraction.

**Ranging from formalized polycules to line marriages to plain old polygamy.
 
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Writing on the Wall: Leviathan Redux
I've been giving some more thought to my Volksgeist/Leviathan framework 🤔 I like the Necropolitics/Acceleration dichotomy and it occurred to me as I was trying to fall asleep last night that rather than have it be two umbrella categories only manifesting in the schizophrenia of the Nihilist stage it would be better to have them manifest in different forms in every stage as competing tendencies rather than discrete movements. In the new framework, each stage would generate its own antithesis in the form of acceleration and coincide with the necropolitical traces of prior stages, with the acceleration in turn being transmuted into the dominant tendency of the next stage. The persistence of necropolities in every stage neatly sidesteps the critique that "You said X-state existed in Y-stage, therefore you're saying X was Y!", since that produces an incredibly unhelpful degree of reductionism.

In the rough guide below, the Origin represents fundamental cause of the deterritorialization of the prior model, with the generalized Manifestation listing the primary characteristics of the new stage. Meanwhile the Necropolity refers to the remnants of the prior model that have been warped by accommodating the transition and the new Acceleration to the seed crystal that creates the next stage through reterritorialization in a modified form. A consequence of the de/reterritorialization cycle is the generation of Hauntology, the atemporal imagined ideal future/past that has been snuffed out by the new model, created as a ripple effect as the necropolities are forced to adapt to the new stage.
  1. Imperium
    • Origin- First Agricultural Revolution
    • Manifestation- Centralization of authority, hereditary class relations, union of spiritual and temporal authority
    • Necropolity- Nomadic pastoralists, hunter-gatherers
    • Acceleration- Capitalism
    • Hauntology- Mythic golden age
  2. Liberalism
    • Origin- Little Ice Age
    • Manifestation- Republicanism, growth of private markets and ownership of the means of production
    • Necropolity- Enlightened absolutism, constitutional monarchy, Qin imperial model
    • Acceleration- Utopian socialism, anarchism
    • Hauntology- Ancien régime
  3. Socialism
    • Origin- First Industrial Revolution, Second Agricultural Revolution
    • Manifestation- Labor militancy, social democracy, vanguard organization
    • Necropolity- Mass democracy (populism/progressivism)
    • Acceleration- Futurism
    • Hauntology- Enlightenment rationalism
  4. Fascism
    • Origin- Second Industrial Revolution
    • Manifestation- Fuhrerprizip, national rebirth narrative, corporatist economic structure, return of frontier violence to the metropole
    • Necropolity- State capitalism
    • Acceleration- Neoliberalism
    • Hauntology- True communism
  5. Nihilism
    • Origin- Third Agricultural Revolution, Third Industrial Revolution
    • Manifestation- Capitalist Realism (reflexive dismissal of all alternatives), hegemonic global market system, near-total shift of the political horizon from economic to social matters.
    • Necropolity- Oligarchical populism
    • Acceleration- Longtermism, NRx (neocameralism, auntology*), XF, Regression
    • Hauntology- National rebirth (geopolitical multipolarity)
Under this new analysis the breakdown of the Nihilist stage would be that the accelerationist tendencies are slowly being digested and incorporated (in acceptable form) by the dominant model instead of maturing into a new stage proper. The fundamental character of the Nihilist stage is that, since it cannot tolerate any possible counter to itself and actively commodifies and absorbs any that arise, the sheer number of hauntologies has multiplied exponentially as conditions have degraded and alternatives have been actively discarded. This sense of lost possibility combines with the material realities of economic and social exploitation and constant sense of looming ecological and societal collapse (even on a subconscious level) to explain the expansion and continual privation of the lumpen precarian social class.


*Auntology proper refers only to a movement in China, but given its focus on actively fostering balkanization and the artificial reconstruction of prior national/ethnic identities, in the context of Cosmicism it's used as a broad category for various permutations of racial acceleration.
Cosmicism therefore sees itself as a unique development rather than another link in the Leviathan, squaring the circle by absorbing and redeeming hauntologies to create a viable alternative to the Nihilist stage and by awakening class consciousness among the precariat to create a popular base to actualize itself. The overcoming and suppression of the kyriarchal class will allow the new Cosmicist consensus to absorb the ability to digest/incorporate arising alternatives, albeit in a more stable and sustainable form rather than a purely symbolic commodified one.
 
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You know me, you know I'm curious, and you know I have a ton of questions to ask, so without further ado here they are:

What's the diplomatic status the ARC has with the rest of the world? I can't recall if you covered it in detail already or not. And by extension, what about the rest of the Cosmintern's diplomatic relations with non-Cosmicist nations?

Are there any official embassies for the Cosmintern nations ? And if so, where?

Have there been any sort of international agreements related to things like trade and the like between the Cosmintern and the rest of the world?

Right, I think that's all of them, keep up the great work!
 
You know me, you know I'm curious, and you know I have a ton of questions to ask, so without further ado here they are:
No worries lol, answering setting questions is part of my process 😂
What's the diplomatic status the ARC has with the rest of the world? I can't recall if you covered it in detail already or not.
That's somewhat complicated. During the period of the first Basic Law (academically the "First Cycle of the Crystal Age", but that's a bit wordy) the ARC was the only Cosmicist power and was officially first an unrecognized and later a rogue state. That being said they did brisk business trading raw resources and taking in recyclable material to basically buy off the rest of the world while they reoriented their domestic economy and jumpstarted production of war materiel. Despite the Burgundy Scare in the Arctic Council nations this was seen at the time as good business by the north, since it was increasingly starved of resources and needed a place to offload waste. At the same time it was very contentious domestically, since even if Antarctica was now independent, if they were still exporting resources and serving as the world's dumping ground it was something of a betrayal of their ideological commitments.

That state of affairs changed drastically as sister Continental Commonwealths began to form during the Second Cycle with the help of ARC military and humanitarian intervention. With the expansion of the Cosmintern the ARC and the growing Presidium finally had the leverage to clamp down on the exporting of resources without fear of foreign intervention, forcing the rest of the world to recognize the new Continental Commonwealths and fully normalize relations as part of the process. They've been busy building their interlocked semicircular* economies, trading resources among each other but essentially turning a vast swathe of the global south** into a black box as far as large sectors of northern consumption was concerned. Although they still take in and process recyclable materials, they exclusively trade in certain foodstuffs, finished goods and specialized items like medicine and cultural products with the Arctic Council members as part of a deliberate effort to radicalize the precariat in those nations.

The Arctic Council rightfully views this as tantamount to undeclared warfare aimed at crashing their economies, though even this state of growing hostility benefits the Cosmintern, since it's forcing the Council to get more serious about resource sustainability and driving them to stress their economies even further in a desperate drive to establish the infrastructure for acquiring space-based resources, all while doctrinal differences in the Council prevent a truly unified response that could arrest their decline.
And by extension, what about the rest of the Cosmintern's diplomatic relations with non-Cosmicist nations?
The newer Commonwealths have adopted the ARC position of cutting off the Arctic Council from large swathes of their economies, though they were still begrudgingly recognized after their revolutions, since the alternative was being fully locked out of a huge percentage of the global population and resource base. The nations outside the Arctic Council, on the other hand, are doing quite well under the new arrangement and were very quick to recognize their new neighbors diplomatically, as the Cosmintern was very eager to use its surpluses and skilled labor pool to help them develop their economies without the predatory corporatism that such aid would require if it came from further north. The fact that they're being increasingly persuaded toward Cosmicism is a happy coincidence 😉
Are there any official embassies for the Cosmintern nations ? And if so, where?
During its time as an unrecognized and then rogue state the ARC did not have embassies, though it did have "trade representatives" that functionally filled the role of ambassadors and they upgraded to true embassies after the Council and the UN were essentially forced to properly recognize them. The Cosmintern members have embassies in each other's capitols and consulates in each RC (as well as their own UN ambassadors), though embassies/consulates in countries outside the alliance are joint enterprises operated by the Cosmintern as a whole. Foreign embassies in Antarctica proper are concentrated in the Caprona RC given its status as a special economic zone. The Cosmintern itself is headquartered in Pretoria.
Have there been any sort of international agreements related to things like trade and the like between the Cosmintern and the rest of the world?
There are. The Cosmintern is knit together by a series of treaties establishing such things as internal trade, mutual defense and a common legal and diplomatic architecture, though as far as the rest of the world is concerned the most important treaty from their perspective was the Bogota Accords ratified in the 2150s. Signed by the Presidium members, the Arctic Council and most*** of the powers sandwiched between the two, the Bogota Accords formally normalized diplomatic and trade relations with the ARC and the sister Commonwealths.
Right, I think that's all of them, keep up the great work!
It's always very heartening when people like my stuff 😂


*They're not fully sustainable since there's still a drive toward expansion into space and continued (though much less intensive) resource extraction, hence "semi".

**Functionally a JDPON, though the P in this case stands for "Precariat".

***The Arab League is the exception, since their official state policy of Regression and tendency toward isolationism make diplomatic relations with other states somewhat complicated. That being said, the League is in the process of being brought around to the Cosmicist consensus, a process aided by the ARC's own easing of tensions with the Tsalal Hetmanates of the Symzonia Territory.
 
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Okay, so a while ago, you did a chapter talking about American political woes and the rise of groups like the Myrmidons and the Weathermen. Quite recently, and by recently I mean a couple hours ago, I got to thinking about them more. I take it that the Myrmidons are supposed to be a sort of equivalent/expy of the Proud Boys? And the Weathermen as the sort of Antifa that talking heads on FOX "News" and the like love to fear are just one riot away from causing a gay atheist socialist political revolution? I take it that political rallies and protests have become a lot more violent in recent times thanks to them, huh?

Another thing related to this rising popularity of political extremism is domestic terrorism. The likes of Buffalo, El Paso, and Christchurch come to my mind when trying to guess on what the state of America must be like ITTL. I mean, paramilitary-esque groups like the Myrmidons and Weathermen aren't a good look for any sort of true democracy to have. Stochastic terrorism is easily one of the scariest modern-day fears which most people can be affected by at any time at random. And considering that the Myrmidons were as you said a biker gang, which aren't really known for being pacifists, and the Weathermen most likely being inspired by the bombing campaign in the 1970s perpetuated by the original Weathermen, the FBI must have their work really cut out for them.

That said, hopefully America is able to avoid its very own Years of Lead. Hopefully. Maybe it's already begun. Guess we'll have to revisit America again to know for sure. Also, some last questions What are the ideologies of both the Myrmidons and the Weathermen? Aside from being far-right to far-left for the former and latter respectively I assume, what do they specifically espouse to try and both sway the public and attract new recruits? And are there any other prominent political paramilitary-esque groups like them running around blowing each other up? Alright, I think that's enough questions for now. Keep up the quality and take care!
 
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Okay, so a while ago, you did a chapter talking about American political woes and the rise of groups like the Myrmidons and the Weathermen. Quite recently, and by recently I mean a couple hours ago, I got to thinking about them more. I take it that the Myrmidons are supposed to be a sort of equivalent/expy of the Proud Boys? And the Weathermen as the sort of Antifa that talking heads on FOX "News" and the like love to fear are just one riot away from causing a gay atheist socialist political revolution? I take it that political rallies and protests have become a lot more violent in recent times thanks to them, huh?
That's basically the gist. To my horror I came up with the idea for both groups in the earliest notes for the setting from 2015! So technically I accidentally invented the former a year before their inspiration was founded 😅
Another thing related to this rising popularity of political extremism is domestic terrorism. The likes of Buffalo, El Paso, and Christchurch come to my mind when trying to guess on what the state of America must be like ITTL. I mean, paramilitary-esque groups like the Myrmidons and Weathermen aren't a good look for any sort of true democracy to have. Stochastic terrorism is easily one of the scariest modern-day fears which most people can be affected by at any time at random. And considering that the Myrmidons were as you said a biker gang, which aren't really known for being pacifists, and the Weathermen most likely being inspired by the bombing campaign in the 1970s perpetuated by the original Weathermen, the FBI must have their work really cut out for them.
The new iteration of the Weathermen takes its inspiration from the Days of Rage more than the bombing campaign, actually, given that the massive buildup of the domestic security state has shifted their tactics. They're functionally a black bloc group, though the fact they have a relatively small but active presence in Kansas/Nebraska of all places is a sign that things have kicked into a higher gear.
That said, hopefully America is able to avoid its very own Years of Lead. Hopefully. Maybe it's already begun. Guess we'll have to revisit America again to know for sure.
As seen in the City on a Hill updates, 2020 is only a decade or so away from the founding of the Commonwealth Party and the Bonus Army, so things are going to be pretty leaden in America until the 2060s, and even that eventual calm is due to a dubiously-constitutional coup by the legislature, security crackdown/mass arrests on spurious charges and the deportation of American citizens to the literal ends of the Earth.
Also, some last questions What are the ideologies of both the Myrmidons and the Weathermen? Aside from being far-right to far-left for the former and latter respectively I assume, what do they specifically espouse to try and both sway the public and attract new recruits?
The Myrmidons are essentially a pure paramilitary in an Americanized version of the SA model, they're authoritarian reactionaries who believe leftist fifth columnists are destroying the nation and the iron fist of the state (and lots of street violence) is needed to crush them into submission. The Weathermen have worn a lot of hats, originally forming for the Battle for Seattle, then sporadically resurging in the wake of the Second Levant War, Great Recession, and now the Buchanan presidency. As a consequence they're a blend of anti-interventionists, anticapitalists and antiracists, though they're all united under the belief that 1.) the current nature of the American government is to blame in one way or another and 2.) that being willing to fight the forces of state repression in the streets will demonstrate their resolve and directly motivate change.
And are there any other prominent political paramilitary-esque groups like them running around blowing each other up?
Not necessarily "blowing each other up", but Extinction Rebellion is a Left-Regressive (though they dispute that term) group very active in protesting/sabotaging things like pipelines, strip mining and logging and the Double-V movement (which will get a sadly unfortunate chapter before the 2016 election one) is a protest movement focused on antiracism and the abolition of the Department of Heartland Security, though they're not as militant as the Weathermen.
Alright, I think that's enough questions for now. Keep up the quality and take care!
Thank you so much! I always like your questions in my various TLs!
 
Cell service will be spotty for the next couple of days while I'm moving for my new job, just a heads up 😂 in the meantime questions (about any aspect of the TL) are always welcome, they help me process and keep me focused on my TLs while I'm otherwise engaged with boring life stuff.
 
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Mountains of Madness: Esoteric Cosmicism
Internet is still spotty but I'll try to do an actual update sometime over the next week or so once I'm in the swing of things at the new job! In the meantime have another rough one-off idea! Based on my love of all the sheer weirdness and intricacy of political ideology as a concept I had another concept I'd like to have percolating in the background of Antarktos 😂 Basically it stems from the idea that Oubliette will be written in such a way that it can be interpreted in three ways:
  1. The anonymous future "editor" is using Sutter's name for clout, explaining both the direct references to current ARC politics/society and Sutter's somewhat surreal adventures in the narrative past.
  2. The Sutter segments were attributed correctly but the future portions were written later, likewise explaining the current information and casting Sutter's adventures as a strange narrative blend of actual events and dreams/hallucinations he recorded at the same time.
  3. Sutter genuinely was having transmundane visions and accurately predicted the future. Just as straightforward as option one but naturally more unsettling to in-universe readers.
Anyway, I recalled an old idea I had for "Esoteric Cosmicism" that was mentioned in the Zoranist post and thought it would be interesting to flesh it out a bit more, with the idea that the reader would cast them in a different light based on which explanation they prefer, from LARPing culture jammers in option 1 and 2 to a shadowy genuinely occult current in option 3. The idea would be that they would cobble together an occult system by combining Zoranism with elements lifted from Sutter's writings and mainly content themselves with secret get togethers and counterculture art, writing and graffiti.
  • Zoranism would give them their central symbol, the concept of increasingly material root races, and the concept of the Three Poisons.
  • Sutter's novel Demimonde would give them their focus on vril and sigils (reinterpreted into a modern chaos magic context), as well as a fire-ice/life-death elemental system and a bit of Aztec five suns/Yiguandao three suns eschatology. Add in the Emerald Tablet and "Cassilda's Song", both quoted in the text, and blend well.
  • The Cosmicist Manifesto naturally forms the foundation of their worldview, though they've taken an unhealthy interest in a one-off illustration in the prose final third that they purport represents a six-element system.
So how would a counterculture properly synthesize all these elements? We'll start with the elemental systems: fairly straightforward, all things considered, with ice/sea and life/earth having one to one parallels. Fire would be associated with sky, death with time, void would be a medium the rest exist within and vril (as the counterentropic force in the Demimonde schema) with dream. Then it's a matter of assigning these elemental associations (and the Aztec five suns) with the Zoranist root races and interpreting the Yiguandao White Sun/Maitreya* as the Cosmicist salvation at the end of the current Kali Yuga, giving us the basic framework of a cosmology. Actual praxis, meanwhile, is more straightforward, with the Emerald Tablet serving as the foundation for the Western esoteric tradition OTL and sigilization providing a mechanism for expressing will on the world through magical direct action. The fact that "Cassilda's Song" is fully incorporated as a vision of humanity surviving to watch a dying universe is ultimately hopeful, despite its incredibly dour tone.

Root_Races_color_fmt.jpeg

-The new order would be Dream, Sky, Sea, Earth, and Time. The Thevetat of Zoranist belief would represent Void, a legacy the Esoteric Cosmicists seek to reclaim through the general Cosmicist drive toward space expansion (and shadowy rituals).

So, are they harmless dilettantes putting out weird art with strange symbols, black suns and Aztec motifs in the ARC's considerably more materially-secure environment of cultural expression? Or, if there really are supernatural actors behind the scenes, is there more to their work? Naturally it's all incredibly theoretical but if I can actually pull off Oubliette and get around to the sequel they'll eagerly absorb the book into their worldview, maybe even gaining some new practitioners in the process 🤔 And of course it's more fun if I never settle the truth of the matter one way or another 😉


*The use of the White Sun to represent the Cosmicist rejuvenation of the world has has synthesized with the inherent Cosmicist distaste for singular leaders to produce a belief that the Cosmicist movement as a whole is embodying the Maitreya as a sort of mass-generated egregore. The actual Sutterist symbol is a green Zoranist symbol in a gold circle, simultaneously representing the Emerald Tablet and Cassilda's Song.
 
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The struggle of the Esoteric Cosmicist/"Sutterite"* project to pull together a whole range of influences and weave them into a single system is a bit of metacommentary/self-critique on my part, since it pretty accurately maps to the worldbuilding spiral I seem to always find myself in 😂 For example, here was the process that gave me the Demimonde elemental system/metaphysics:

Q: "I'm bored. Alternate elemental systems are cool, what could I make that would make sense as a random bit of fun?"
  • A: "The Aztecs were interesting, if you take their core pairs of gods into account you could have a fire/water binary and a life/death one."
    • Q: "What else could I do with a fire/water binary?"
      • A: "Fire and ice! Tie in the Norse and justify it with those 'actually the mound builders were biblical giants' theories!
    • Q: "What other cool things could I pull from Aztec mythology?"
      • A: "Five Suns eschatology! And while we're on the topic of mystical suns Yiguandao has a Three Sun thing and on that note alchemy is rooted in a process with Four Suns and if I do that I need the Emerald Tablet which means hermeticism which means goetia and sigils and..."
And so it goes. All for an initially unrelated idea that will only be mentioned offhand as a work of fiction in my main project! You can see why it's taken me so long to flesh everything out to my satisfaction 😅


*Both because it flows off the tongue much more easily and also since it'll mark them out as even weirder, since the entire Antarctic project is rooted in Sutter's ideas but the movement's iconoclasm gives most of the rest an aversion to glorifying historical individuals as a short road to cults of personality.
 
Real life is infringing on my intellectual property again 😂
I really hope I can pull this book off, even if I do it's probably going to be too goddamn weird to sell but I'll have made it and I can be proud of myself
 
Oubliette Appendices
I've started the writing process but because I'm always getting ahead of myself and I love backmatter in books and comics I've been mulling over my appendices and these are the ones I've come up with:
  1. The Party Systems- Ideally an infographic timeline of how the American parties evolved into the Antarctic one. Nothing too extreme, just Founded: XXXX and maybe electoral symbols, with the Commonwealth Party also having a Suppressed: 2061 tacked on, with the content of the novel and the way the colored lines branch/fuse doing the heavy lifting. Much easier to put into an ebook, if I ever printed out a physical copy it would probably be a foldout insert 2-3 pages long or so and arranged into two halves. I'm still a little fuzzy on some of the specific dates but here's the gist:
    • 1979: Start of the timeline, featuring the Republican Party, Democratic Party and Citizens Party (with the last starting with a very thin line).
    • 1992: Founding of the Reform Party, positioned above the Republicans.
    • 199X: Founding of Manifest Destiny!, positioned below Citizens.
    • 2018: The Shatter. Republican split fuses with the Reform (keeping the color but renamed into the America First Party) and the new New Federalist lines and creates the Freedom Party. Democratic split swells the Citizens and Neofed lines and forms the Equal Rights Party.
    • 203X: Founding of the Commonwealth Party out of a fusion of the Citizens, Equalists, Manifest Destiny! and a faction of the Neofeds. Fusion of the America Firsters and Freedomites, retaining the former's name. This section goes until ~2060 before the Neofeds and the America Firsters branch out of frame and there's a sharp break.
    • 208X- Founding of the Antarctic Cosmicist Party and the branching off of its Fractions. The timeline would also shift from CE to HE dating.
    • 218X- Fusion of portions of the larger Fractions and most of the minor ones into the Maximalist Fraction. Probably need a new color for them though, since burgundy and black are taken 🤔
  2. The Antarctic Basic Law- Pretty self-explanatory. Since unlike the US Constitution the amending process directly edits the text instead of just tacking on to the end my normal instinct to footnote it would be better served with a short introduction explaining the general changes between versions.
  3. The Executive Quorum c. 12194: Similar to the breakdown of the executive departments chapter in Reds!, giving me some space to lay out how the government works during at the time of the Fourth Constitutional Convention.
  4. Primer on Regression: Nothing too extreme, just a brief breakdown of major currents within the movement like the one I posted upthread, albeit with a bit more info on what's become of them over the 21st century*. Depending on whether I can insert this organically into the text I might scrap this one 🤔
Expect some maps, flags or images of symbols inserted directly into the text. Appendix 1 will be the most technically challenging, but I might just commission someone to make it, since I really loved the timeline for Jonathan Hickman's East of West and desperately want to include something similar. The way he drew his maps is also incredibly cool.

East-of-West_The-World_Timeline.jpg

Isn't it stunning? Mine will have nowhere near this level of timeline detail but I'm in love with the look. Splitting it into two horizontal columns (1979-206X and 208X-218X) will keep it from being 10 pages long.
*Among other things, the Kaczynskians remain a recurring problem (not unlike syphilis), the Nasrists are the dominant political force in the Arab League, the Neomalthusians have been absorbed into the PEC and BaRD mainstream, XR has been absorbed into the global Cosmicist movement and the Tsalal have settled down from their decades of insurgency against the ARC government.
 
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I was tinkering with a rough draft of my infographic and worked out some tweaks and notes:
  1. The predecessor to the Constitution Party was founded in 1990, so given the state of the Republicans under Haig I'm butterflying them and appropriating their cool logo for the Reform Party. When they rebrand into America First I'll have them keep it instead of switching to a lion.
  2. The Citizens Party will use a recolored version of the Independence Party of Minnesota (f. 1992) logo, since it features a bison and looks nice.
  3. The Citizens will also absorb what in OTL would coalesce into the DSA (f. 1982) and Green Party (f. 2001), so they'll be larger from the jump. With the collapse of the Democrats and Republicans they'll actually be the oldest party going in to 2020, funny enough.
  4. The Steward, Populist, CosCom, Common Sense and Pacifist Fractions will be formed ~2110, marking the end of the post-revolutionary consolidation. The Globalist, Novuteran, and Xenofeminist Fractions will be centered sometime in the 2140s when the outbreak of other Cosmicist revolutions open up the political horizons.
  5. I'm also considering having the Pacifist and Common Sense Fractions fuse, since by the time Second Wave Cosmicism crests they'll basically be the dregs of the Antarctic political system and they both focus on economic and cultural competition rather than war with the north. I'm still considering names (Common Ground?) but they'll have a nice robin's egg blue. I've also settled on the Maximalists using maroon.
 
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