Chemical Freedom

In the “I have a dream” cutscene of Metal Gear Rising, the striking contrast between Armstrong and Raiden is between their bodies. Raiden’s cyborg enhancements are overt, upon the surface of him, his being remade and built upon with artificial plating and mechanization. In contrast, Armstrong has his fully integrated within his biology, the cybernetic part of him being within his being at a microscopic level. This difference makes up the tension between them in their fight, and shows how Armstrong so effortlessly defeats Raiden in the scripted battle. The organic system is better able to integrate war into itself far better than any inorganic machine can - a lesson shown time and time again, as in the case of nomadic versus sedentary armies. The former being made of a command structure which moves and shifts in tune with organic changes within itself, while the latter is made up of immobile strictures and orders. The latter’s fragility makes it an easy target for a fully developed antifragile system competing in the same space.

“Dope destroys” says the American anti-drug campaigner, describing the horrors of southern imports. The experience is always one of annihilation, the life torn apart by the drug’s ravages, the high experienced tearing the mind to pieces. The drug acts caustic, an acid imported subtly and then dissolving cells within the corpus of the nation. Addicts are turned to zombies, their streets hollowed out in a literal sense as lives are cast apart to wander in an empty wasteland.

It’s telling that the language of the United States Government’s attempt to halt the usage of narcotics has been termed a war. Indeed, it’s the conditions of a war which make it, as a drama, so strange to itself. The United States has its insides torn apart by a foreign caustic, an organic against their inorganic - a steppe peoples against their stationary people. The United States deploys inorganic machines against the organic outside and on the level of the inorganic, the fight is a nonstop victory-rush for the United States. Cartels and their bosses are taken down, dismantled, arrested, assassinated on a nearly weekly basis. And yet, what changes? When Gaillardo was taken out, did the business go away? Was there any change, in the basic route of cocaine from Colombia, through Tijuana, Sinaloa, Gulf, Juarez? The organic fact of the trade, of the destroying-caustic flooding into the cellular units of the American corpus remains, unfazed by the attacks against its superstructure.

Inverting the knowledge of systems, that as wholes, they become more than the sum of their parts, the inorganic’s parts are always lesser than their existence as wholes. It’s for this reason that nomads are so capable of making war against the sedentary peoples. Sedentary peoples exist always in-context of machines larger than themselves, which cause their individual personhood to be diminished. This diminishment causes them to be annihilated at contests of individual combat, as is forced by the steppe nomad who forces challenges on a cellular level, denying the inorganic’s inorganic plateau of contest.

For the inorganic, the threat additionally exists that its organic (cellular) could attempt to form either in nomadic contradiction or in inorganic competition. Such is the threat of the drug war. There, the inorganic level is that of human lives (as experienced as individuals under the judicial apparatus), attacked from underneath by the eternally boiling organic, that of narcotics within the body and their submerged movement via economics, in the same fashion as oil in Negarestani’s theory.