Momentary Weightlessness

We are approaching the crescendo. The moment where the upward forces and the pull of gravity cancel each other out, and we experience a moment of weightlessness, before the fall comes.

This isn't metaphor. It's mechanics. The physics of political collapse follows predictable patterns—the straining upward, the momentary suspension, the inevitable descent. We're living through that precise moment of suspended animation now, that infinitesimal pause between ascent and plummet where everything seems to hang in perfect, terrifying equilibrium.

Two plus two equals four. The constitutional order is disintegrating. These are not separate truths but aspects of the same reality. When a society can no longer maintain agreement on the most basic facts, the machinery of self-governance seizes. The gears strip. The engine stalls. And in that suspended moment before the fall, many mistake the sudden absence of friction for freedom.

Look around. The illusion of stability persists even as the foundations crumble. Markets climb while institutions collapse. Social media buzzes with trivial outrage while fundamental rights dissolve. Techno-optimists celebrate new AI capabilities while the cognitive infrastructure of democracy burns. This weightlessness feels, to many, like liberation—the exhilarating moment when all constraints seem to vanish. They don't recognize it for what it truly is: the split second between jumping and landing.

The reactionaries understand this moment better than the liberals. They've studied the mechanics of democratic collapse, analyzed its rhythms and patterns. They know that in this suspended animation between constitutional order and autocratic capture lies their opportunity—the chance to rewire the machinery of governance while everyone else marvels at the strange sensation of weightlessness. They work frantically during this pause, laying the groundwork for what comes after the fall, while institutional defenders stand frozen, still believing in the permanence of systems that are already failing.

And so now we walk in the Interregnum. It's hard from here. And it gets harder. It will be easy to get mad at your neighbors who voted for this. But the truth is, nobody voted for this. They voted for things to get better. They just didn't understand how.

The great tragedy of democratic collapse isn't that people choose tyranny—it's that they choose something else entirely and receive tyranny as an unexpected dividend. The factory worker in Michigan didn't vote for the dismantling of civil service protections. The retiree in Arizona didn't cast her ballot for the fusion of corporate and government power. The suburban parent in Pennsylvania wasn't endorsing algorithmic authoritarianism. They voted for dignity, for stability, for some semblance of control over forces that seemed to be leaving them behind.

This is what the technocratic elite, ensconced in their coastal bubbles, never understood. People aren't stupid—they're desperate. When you've watched your community hollow out, when the promised future never materialized, when each election cycle brings new promises that evaporate like morning dew, you don't vote with a political scientist's understanding of institutional safeguards. You vote with the hope that someone, anyone, might actually see you.

The moral clarity required in this moment isn't about condemning our neighbors. It's about recognizing the profound betrayal that led us here—a betrayal perpetrated not just by cynical demagogues, but by a system that promised prosperity while delivering precarity, that preached meritocracy while practicing plutocracy, that championed democratic values abroad while letting them wither at home.

The Interregnum we now inhabit—this dangerous space between stable orders—isn't characterized by the complete absence of rules, but by their utter incoherence. The old constraints no longer bind, but the new ones haven't fully crystallized. Constitutional provisions still exist on paper while being ignored in practice. Courts still issue rulings that go unenforced. Elections continue while their outcomes are predetermined. It's not that there's no gravity—it's that we can no longer predict what will fall and what will float.

This is the cruelest aspect of our weightlessness: the persistence of democratic forms emptied of democratic substance. The comforting rituals continue—the procedural motions, the institutional ceremonies, the rhetorical genuflections to popular sovereignty—even as the machinery that gave them meaning is systematically dismantled. We're left performing a play whose ending has already been rewritten.

When the gravitational pull of history seems overwhelming, remember this: human beings are not merely objects in motion, subject to impersonal forces beyond our control. We are also the beings who named gravity itself, who found meaning in the fall. And in that meaning-making—fragile and constructed though it may be—lies our most essential freedom. The freedom not to prevent the fall, perhaps, but to understand it, to bear witness to it, and in so doing, to remain fully human even as we descend.

This is, after all… a philosophy blog.

---

Check out my, Mike’s Philosophy page. My living document that shows how my philosophy ties together across all my writings