From cultural critic Mike Davis, RIP. One of his last essays, March 2022. [ after Russia's invasion]. I am esp taken with "nightmare edition of Great Men Make History".

[Darah Kehnemuyi]

 Giambattista's cyclical theory of history: the Age of Gods, followed by the Age of Heroes, followed by the Age of Man, followed by Chaos, recorso back to the Age of Gods... 
I have tended to think with Enlightenment we entered the Age of Man looking forward toward Chaos.  But the point of view offered here is that perhaps we are in the Age of Heroes (Great Man History) looking toward the Age of Man ... maybe ... hopefully ...             D.
    On Thursday, October 27, 2022 at 09:43:41 AM EDT, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 (Let me note, however, the curious example of the speech that Thomas
Piketty gave on 16 February at the Pentagon’s National Defense University.
As part of a regular series of talks on ‘Responding to China’, the French
economist argued that ‘the West’ must challenge Beijing’s rising hegemony
by abandoning its ‘dated hyper-capitalist model’ and promoting instead a
‘new emancipatory egalitarian horizon on a global scale’. A strange venue
and pretext, to say the least, for advocating democratic socialism.)

Nature meanwhile is taking back the reins over history, making its own
titanic compensations, at the expense of powers, especially over natural
and engineered infrastructures, that empires once thought to control. In
this light, the ‘Anthropocene’ with its hint of the promethean, seems
especially ill-fitted to the reality of apocalyptic capitalism.

As an objection to my pessimism, one might claim that China is
clear-sighted where everyone else is blind. Certainly, its vast vision of a
unified Eurasia, the Belt and Road project, is a grand design for the
future, unequalled since the sun of the ‘American Century’ rose over a
war-shattered world. But China’s genius, 1949-59 and 1979-2013, has been
its neo-mandarin practice of collective leadership, centralized but
plurivocal. Xi Jinping, in his ascent to Mao’s throne, is the worm in the
apple. Although he has economically and militarily enhanced China’s clout,
his reckless unleashing of ultra-nationalism could yet open a nuclear
Pandora’s Box.

We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’.
Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential
cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the
top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and
Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power
been put into so few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero graves
of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem
Schwarzbard.
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