We live in a period of stagnation. The Western liberal dream that should have saved and emancipated the world shattered years ago. The promised land, we discovered, was someone else’s, and was taken not for us, but for our own landlords, that once, we don’t even know when, took ours.
The great Democracies of the developed world crumbled poisoned not by adversarial forces, but by their own compromises, by the deeds of their allies, and those of the Empire. The great ideals their institutions represent live now more in us than anywhere else. The planet is burning and genocide became trendy, after war did a few years prior.
We hyper-normalized our hyper-reality, got used to microplastics filling the blood of all living mammals, and indifferent to nation states getting swallowed by oceans. Our heads are spinning as lost the world became.
The documentary called “HyperNormal” is more than ten years old as this article is being written. We joke, as it’s the last weapon we have, about how a guy killed himself after being prosecuted for “stealing” JSTOR articles, while trillion-dollar companies destroy millions of physical books feeding AI all human knowledge without even blinking.
In this profound absurdism, while the King of the free people tweets nonsense past bedtime and our purchasing power slashes below that of commoners of the Ancient Regime, as our future is uncertain and our present is certainly harsh, we’ve learnt to feel appreciation, gratitude, even joy. As we cling to what remains, and we find security and even identity in scarcity, we get to a point where killing what’s left of this world seems the last thing we should do. Its complexity is too high to be governed by any other system than what we have. At least we have something, say we, that know what is like to have nothing. And so, we wonder, in that Region Beta Paradox of our World, in which Revolution is the only worse alternative to doing nothing.
For all of this, the Black Hellebore is its demise. Stagnation fosters pests and illness. The Black Hellebore is that illness. Helleborus Niger, the Christmas Rose, is thought to have been named to either signify a “lethal nutrient”, or an ancient city that cures madness. Either way, it is the poison we need. It is the abandonment of the last bit of hope we have for today’s Architecture. It is the vanishing of the last figments of the past illusion. It is a necessary demolition of conceptual barricades that keep the Bastille still standing. It is in that way the birth of a new dream, as much as waking up is the birth of the dream to come when we’ll go back to bed. It is a prologue.