The Discoursal Ant Mill

Most of us know full well that 80 to 90 percent of The Discourse in the English speaking world is anything from a complete waste of time to an active detriment. But we rarely realise this, and we rarely have the reasons why properly formulated. As we live in our sacred democracy, an extension and celebration of that into wider society is the ability to talk it out. The mere fact that the conversations are happening is itself a strong indication that some unchecked power somewhere is being minimised and held to account. But we would be very naïve to truly believe that endless public conversations about pointless symptomatic minutia of the rot of the Modern System, rather than the system itself, is to produce positive results that are worth the energy that was put into them.

In order to understand this more, let’s talk about ants.

What is an Ant Mill?

An ant mill is a strange phenomenon observed in the behaviour of army ants (ants known for aggressive collective foraging and not living in static permanent nests but in constantly mobile colonies). Ants in general primarily communicate by smell and touch, and minimally by sight, hence when they are following each other in lines, they rely on the pheromone trails and the physical contact with the neighbours to know where they are going. Sometimes it can accidently occur that some army ants will lose the correct pheromone trail – due to some disorderly occurrence, possibly from outside interference – and then will instinctively reform a pheromone trail but one that accidently follows itself. The ants will then be following each other in a circular trail, with no awareness that they are doing this, and will continue until they quite literally die of exhaustion. The circumferences of these mills can vary a lot from about one to one thousand feet.

It is interesting that such a phenomenon exists, for a variety of reasons. We would all assume that the psychology of complex organisms would easily be able to overcome such things as this, as it is like a feedback loop that one would expect from a badly programmed computer algorithm. Such a phenomenon would also seem to be evolutionarily damaging to the ant species it affects. Evidence of army ants dating back tens of millions years shows much consistency in the components of army ant behaviour that would cause the ant mills to occur. Some evolutionary biologists have theorised that the army ants’ collective foraging techniques – which intimately involve the pheromone trails – are so extremely ecologically successful overall that the risk of an occasional ant mill is an unfortunate but feasible trade-off for this success; the prevalence of the ant mills is not high enough to out-do the success of the foraging of the whole collective mobile colony. This is similar to the contentious theory of the Obstetrical Dilemma which claims that the pain and difficulty experienced in childbirth in human females that is rare in other mammals is an evolutionary trade-off for the ability of bipedalism in humans affecting the shape of the female pelvis and hence the size of the birth canal. But I digress.

Comparisons and analogies have often been made between eusocial animals and human societies – most prominently in observing the division of labour in society. With the specific case of the ant mill, it is a little more niche and risky. But the main purpose of the current commentary is not to be so profoundly scientific. It is instead to provoke a feeling a vigilance and peril for a particular order of men today – who in general should know better – who might not realise that they are caught in their own deadly pheromone trail which might end to their demise if they are not too careful, whilst they are aiding some greater malign cause (the ecologically supreme mobile colony) that is empowered by their self-negligence. There are of course many examples of political theorists, particularly those who theorise about class dynamics, who speak of some exploitative elite who profit specifically off the mindless gratification of the oppressed – via bread and circuses – and will supposedly reinvest their profits in processes that might maintain this state of affairs. But this goes one step further than that. The contemporary bread and circuses are things that modern man is perfectly able to do completely in isolation. Things such as Deliveroo and Netflix. With modern media discourse, it is a little different because it is not something people do in isolation; it is considered some kind of communal activity, well disguised as something that would break the people free of mindless atomistic gratification. But the difference between the effect of the mindless gratification of The Discourse and modern bread and circuses is very slim. It is only that the former involves more notionally communal activity that it is given the benefit of the doubt. The discourse occurs in an inorganic hyperreal realm as opposed to a real one.

This phenomenon also extends beyond the print media. The various parliaments and senates and chambers of elected representatives have now become just as ceremonial and theatrical and unsovereign as the monarchies that these chambers of elected representatives initially subverted. The sovereignty, not entirely but for the most part, has since shifted to the new centre of managerials, technocrats, academics, administrators, narcissists, parasites, demons, et cetera. Such people are quite immune to any particular democratic process and are generally invulnerable to public scrutiny of any kind. On top of that, if the analysis of Czech dissident political theorist Vaclav Havel is to be believed, the instilled values by these new ideological sovereigns of power will eventually reach a critical point in which the population are sufficiently engaging in a kind of ritualistic automatism, where they need little outside help to maintain their own circular trappings. Hence, they get damningly caught in the ant mill.

Though man is not an ant, the oversocialisation from certain modern crafted environments and arrangements of technologically advanced media and information programmes has caused man to be treated and to act as if they are ants in this particular way. Our full potential of faculties are somewhat diminished and we are generally made unhappy and lonely in a way that we can’t fully understand.

Though this is not to be thought of as akin to some Marxist class-consciousness type of thing. The main reason for this is since, in the Marxist diagnosis of The System, there is absolutely no scope for discussion of the symptomatic minutia in any capacity in any place at any time. When any and all misery is capitalism, any time devoted to more particular local scrutiny of a social issue is time not spent criticising capitalism.

In reality, there is an appropriate and correct time and place for discussing symptomatic minutia, and that is within a reflected size and scope of the minutia itself. If there’s a lot of littering in your town, you make it be publicly known and discussed with those who are either responsible or affected or relevant to the issue of littering in your town, you do not write a column in the Guardian about what this says about society. If George Floyd gets killed by a policeman, any possible genuine legal wrongdoings on the part of the police are to be carried out by the most local of courts and authorities as is possible, as opposed to ignite an institutional ideological cultural revolution throughout the entire planet. Of course, these are more abstract Humean oughts of the society and culture of whole populations rather than the expected occurrences in the world as it is right now, and we’re not going to collectively realise these oughts overnight, hence we should be working with what we’ve got as things are now.

How are things now? We are constantly obliged to ritualistically form and ruminate on opinions of all things all the time in the name of sacred democracy and holding power to account. But in truth, one is doing little more than gratifyingly following a circular pheromone trail that is keeping the real unaccountable and unjustifiable sovereigns of power in their place, no matter how virtuously communal such actions may appear to be.

In the meantime.

Break out of the pheromone trail, break out of the hyperreal, increase vigilance against wasting time and energy on pointless discourse and argument, pick the best battles, make more predictions of the relevance that distinct discourses will end with and whether any of those outcomes are to be of any net benefit. Find only avenues of discourse that are grounded, rooted, real, effectual, inspiring, resonating human motivations beyond mere gratification, and above all, truthful.