Reflections on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ “Moments of Bifurcation”
Since 9/11/2001 – when a 19 person volunteer unit from the Middle East, armed with a few box-cutters, forced the US public to watch a lifelong repeating loop of slow motion demolition – we have been busily attempting to bomb much of humanity into permanent submission. Somewhere, deep in the reptilian brain of our collective muse, we vaguely understand that few passions on earth eclipse the global hatred of the US. People around the world see what most of us cannot – the arrogant materialism, the eavesdropping intrusions into far away political movements, the installation of puppet proxies at gunpoint, the hair trigger wars and the military bases that spring up up like invasive choke-weeds across every continent. US international crimes play a masterful game of hide and seek with our muted conscience. Any normal, morally intact human being, someone with both a brain and a soul, would have viewed the 9/11 attacks as a moment crying for a national inventory. But no normal person can ever become president of these United States. No less a proponent of vapid slobber than George W, Bush summed it up like this:
“America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.”
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That may have been the mother of all missed opportunities – George W. Bush, fated to be offered a historic chance to look deeply inward, jumped on the moment with one more insipid platitude. There were vastly brighter minds that saw 9/11 all too clearly – like Hunter S. Thompson who had this to say about 9/11 on 9/12:
“Nothing – even George Bush’s $350 billion “Star Wars” missile defense system – could have prevented Tuesday’s attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull it off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency was terrifying.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.
Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job — armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.”
As the endless and ongoing US wars in the Middle East continue, we should appreciate that Hunter Thompson seemingly had a pair of eyes sending messages from decades into the future – “We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives,” Thompson prophesized with the casual air of a surgeon examining an X-rayed fracture.
In retrospect, it may be determined that our mysterious enemy – both then and now – is an internal construct of our own making. Colonialism creates its necessary demons – the inferior, immoral people (savages, in 15th century parlance) to be invented first and plundered later as a matter of principle. The colonial narrative (with its insatiable racism) also creates the very enemies that originate as fantasies – the victims of war and exploitation that, like the 9/11 attackers, channel their pain toward revenge.
If there is a fatal flaw in the US mindset – I am not merely talking about the politicians and corporatists, human shells that, by definition, have no capacity to think, but can only surge toward power and profit like a tree branch growing toward the sun – it is a flagrant inability to see our country for what it is. We not only fall short of being a “beacon of freedom and opportunity” we are the antithesis to human rights and equality – a nation continuously inspired to support dictators, to quash liberation movements and to murder civilians by the millions with a trillion dollar bombing industry.
Hunter Thompson proved that one did not need hindsight to comprehend 9/11 – that event revealed two truths that lend clarity to our disastrous war in Iran: the US is hated by the world’s poorest people, and no amount of vicious military destruction can save us from retribution. Box cutters, then, and cheap Iranian missiles, now, reach a lethal threshold when combined with the inevitable disgust that US colonialism inspires. And, as Hunter Thompson clearly saw on 11/12, the US military has been destined to play an unending game of whack-a-mole against the nations that despise America – almost the whole world but especially the poorest, most exploited, most plundered and most bombed – those whom Frantz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth.”
Now it is Iran’s turn to endure the venom of US malice, but Iran, unlike the victorious Vietnamese Army, unlike the 9/11 “terrorists,” has gained entrance into the complex economic structures of US markets. The Iranian stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz gives that regime the capability to significantly dismantle the financial mechanisms of US Imperialism. As Thompson observed on 9/12, people with nothing in the way of military technology can commit violent acts with “terrifying efficiency.” Now, in 2026, we again learn that even the most astronomical military budget pales before the resolve of the aggrieved victims of the colonial empire. Critically, the Iranian assault on US capitalism has become a virtuosic performance simultaneously played for both the US citizenry and the global audience. One drives to the pumps and reads $4.50 a gallon, with a new-found reverence for Iran.
The lesson is clearer now than it was a quarter of a century ago. The US has become increasing recognized as a rogue state, a serial violator of international law. The Trump/MAGA regime has applied the brutal, lawless assault, previously reserved for colonial subjects, to populations at home. Police violence has always been a feature of inner city intimidation, but now the threat of lethal violence permeates the nightmares of all who oppose the fascist state. The fate of Renée Good and Alex Pretti played out on nightly news. Those victimized in the imperial core, and the plundered targets of the US Empire have suddenly begun to exchange knowing glances across international boundaries.
Has 9/11 come home to roost? We have replaced the “goofy child-president” with a soulless, senile, somnolent husk, eager to scour the earth for bombing targets on a planet where hatred of America is as rare as salt in the ocean.
Was 9/11 a moment of bifurcation? The Portuguese sociologist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, describes bifurcation as follows:
“In the scientific field, the term “bifurcation” was first used by Henri Poincaré, but in the second half of the 20th century, the concept and theory of bifurcation came to be associated with the chemist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine’s theory of bifurcation is based on the following ideas: the fundamental indeterminacy of reality and the consequent insistence on not considering chance, chaos, and disorder as pure negativity, outside the scientific realm; complex systems create forms of self-organization that produce unpredictable changes and transitions (dissipative structures); in situations out of equilibrium (entropy, second law of thermodynamics), disorder prevails over order, and systems can enter moments of bifurcation in which small changes can produce enormous and unpredictable consequences.”
I should mention briefly that bifurcation theory is a complex branch of mathematics, and that when social sciences borrow from the physical sciences, the intent is to apply the broad contours of that science as a form of descriptive metaphor. There are no precise equations to quantify social changes as there are to examine changes in laser dynamics.
de Sousa Santos illustrates his conceptual framework with the historical conditions in the early 15th century and the battle over the Strait of Ceuta (Gibraltar) – a conflict that seemed local and limited at the time, but that acted as a spring-loaded historical mechanism to power the forces of Western Capitalism, and to weaken the Islamic hold on world affairs. He compellingly links the long ago shift in power dynamics pivoting around the trade route choked at the Strait of Ceuta, and the current battle for Hormuz. In the 15th century the Portuguese capture of Ceuta became the lynchpin for a cascading series of events elevating Capitalism, modern science and Christianity as the essential scaffolding of ascending “Western Civilization.” In bifurcation theory, momentary chaos creates the conditions in which seemingly minor events have vast and lasting historical sequelae.
If the conditions in early 15th century Europe represent the concept of bifurcation now witnessed in contemporary global relations, there is an important difference – the power of decision making in late medieval Europe rested solely in the hands of Kings, the nobility and the wealthy merchant class. Some 50,000 Portuguese and mercenary soldiers attacked Cueta in 1415, and these masses were allowed to plunder the sacked city – the disciplined loyalty of the professional soldiers (supplemented by the ordinary conscripted citizenry) linked to Church influence and shared spoils. Ironically, the 2026 “sacking of Caracas” allowed no shared spoils – the conquered wealth will go entirely to Trump and his oil industry donors. However, the Trump regime can be dismantled by the masses, either through elections (which may be corrupted or suspended) or by massive civil resistance. King John 1 of Portugal ruled for 48 years and needed no mandate from the common people. If the 1415 beginning of the age of empire represents bifurcation as a metaphor for our current “moment,” if Cueta is seen as a metaphor for Hormuz, the center of agency now resides primarily within the working class. One similarity and one difference link the medieval Portuguese peasantry and the exploited classes in the contemporary US – both endure(d) hard times under the whims of ruling authorities, but the working class and poor victims of US fascism have the capability of destroying the brutal regime.
de Sousa Santos notes that moments of bifurcation have no clear outcome when viewed from the initial point where vulnerable systems give way to temporary chaos. Referencing Immanuel Wallerstein, he states that our current bifurcation could resolve into, “something more authoritarian and hierarchical or more democratic and egalitarian.”
If 9/11 was not quite a “moment of bifurcation” perhaps we can imagine it as a foreshock, a harbinger of our dislocated world in 2026. In 2001, the 9/11 attacks seemed to be an aberration, a challenge to US hegemony met by a tightening of the security state and a public display of US military rage. Post 9/11 there were minor stirrings in US politics, a rejection of Bush style Republicanism in favor of Obama – more a reaction to the crash of 2008 than a movement against US militarism and the growing security state. Even in 2008, popular support for the War in Afghanistan stood at 50% (down from 90% in 2001). The 9/11 attacks increased George W Bush’s popularity, and while Hunter Thompson’s visionary understanding that Bush would plunge the nation into a lifetime of mindless war would resonate with a small number of people on the left, there was no popular groundswell against US militarism. But clearly, 9/11 set the stage for US collapse, colonial overreach and unchecked militarism. One might reasonably predict that the War in Iran will become the final post 9/11 war, the final collapse of a process set in motion by the clueless “child-president,” George Bush.
While the 9/11 attacks exposed US vulnerability, the US military never has experienced the sort of public castration that Iran has just performed before the eyes of global scrutiny. After 9/11, the popular narrative attributed the attacks to nothing more than lax airport security – a problem solved by X-rayed baggage and stringent rules regarding carry-on luggage. Hatred of Islamic people increased to the point where most of the public was primed to cheerlead for a war against any Islamic country. Few public figures viewed 9/11 as being a moment for introspection, and few questioned why people from the Middle East had such hardened urgency to improvise violence against US targets. Now, the public sees the Iran War as a sort of last straw, an act of needless military aggression that will simultaneously crash the US economy and shatter the myth of an invincible war machine. In a sudden instant, even the former jingoists have had a reckoning. Neocon pundit, Robert Kagan recently wrote in The Atlantic:
“Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done.”
de Sousa Santos does not dwell on the connection between “bifurcation” and political movements, and one can mistakenly imagine that he sees history as an unpredictable succession of mechanistic events. However, he poetically alludes to the possibility that the US bungled adventure in Iran might inspire an unprecedented class revolt:
“A new political conflict between the politics of life and the politics of death, replacing the modern conflict between left and right? The revolution of the sub-humans and sub-proletarians of the cyber-automated world, led by repentant insiders who know better than anyone the vulnerabilities of a power that presents itself as invulnerable.”
This moment of bifurcation (as I understand it) makes pointed demands on activists to understand the historical opportunity. Although unstated in de Sousa Santos piece, the connection between US militarism gone awry and homegrown suffering has never been clearer. As Trump dismantles the safety net in favor of gargantuan armaments spending, as ill-conceived adventures backfire with exploding prices, as missile launches burn oil fields and send raging plumes of CO2 infested smoke into a dying biosphere, the moment of bifurcation cannot be overlooked or outsourced to chance. The Portuguese ruling elites may not have sacked the city of Ceuta with historical pretensions, but they seized an opportunity with organized intent.
The Portuguese victory at Ceuta unleashed centuries of terror – the beginning of the African Slave trade, the age of empire and the genocide of indigenous people in the “New World” – a protracted period of brutality and slaughter that may never be equaled. When we talk of our current “bifurcation” the narrative analogy might be an exact negative of the early 15th century, with class roles flipped upside down, and the former victims – like Iran – manifesting unprecedented power and agency.
Moments of bifurcation demand a human response. Events will not take care of themselves. The moment of bifurcation that de Sousa Santos described in 15th century Portugal may be seen as a bookend to our chaotic moment. Imperialism arose from chaos and now collapses in chaos. The dominance of the West may have begun at the expense of Islamic cultures, but now it is Iran that threatens to bring the colonial era to a final resolution. We cannot, as de Sousa Santos tells us, know how this will play out. If small things can now create great consequences, we, the seemingly disempowered, politically disorganized residents of the Imperial Core, have a short window of opportunity.
Phil Wilson writes at Nobody’s Voice.
