Wise up, humanity!

 

There’s something profoundly disheartening about the politics of our countries right now. The deep madness, I’m afraid, is British imperial thinking that has been taken over by the United States. My country, the United States, is unrecognisable now compared to even 20 or 30 years ago. I’m not sure – to tell you the truth – who runs the country; I do not believe it is the President of the United States right now. We are run by generals, by our security establishment. The public is privy to nothing. The lies that are told about foreign policy are daily and pervasive by a mainstream media that I can barely listen to or read any more. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the main television outlets are 100% repeating government propaganda by the day, and it’s almost impossible to break through.

What is this about? Well, as you’ve heard, it’s about a madness of the United States to keep US hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense, because their modus operandi is to make war. And they are cheerled by Britain, which is unfortunately, in my adult life, increasingly pathetic in being a cheerleader for the United States, for US hegemony, and for war. Whatever the United States says, Britain will say it 10 times more enthusiastically. The UK leadership could not love the war in Ukraine more. It’s the Great Second Crimean War for the British media and for the British political leadership.
– Professor Jeffrey Sachs in a 5 July 2023 speech to SHAPE (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth). Hat tip to Alexander Mercouris

Introduction

I watch on in growing hope as establishment figures from the highest levels of society slowly morph into “conspiracy theorists”. Of course they would not call themselves that, but those invested in and thus loyal to establishment (aka ‘mainstream’) narratives would not hesitate to label them so. RFK Jr., US presidential hopeful, currently doing surprisingly well in the polls, strikes me as an honourable man on a journey quite similar to the one Professor Sachs is walking. Both are men with open minds, a clear positive that, nowadays, will quickly get you labelled “conspiracy theorist”. And that the knives are now clearly out for Biden tells us The West knows Biden cannot win. With no one viable to replace Biden, and with RFK Jr. playing the independent-media circuit with aplomb, Kennedy may well be the next President of the United States.

In times of historical decadence, it seems, dark ambitions kept hidden – because not quite ready for prime time, because still held somewhat in check by institutions established to that end – are suddenly forced into the open by a combination of hubris, ignorance, and event-driven desperation. Conspiring is but one facet of this revelatory process, incompetence another. How to precisely weigh the relative importance of each – and other factors – is beyond my pay grade, though I do hope to appeal to your hearts by drawing attention to interconnections between the bleeding obvious but wilfully ignored, the not-so obvious, and the mysterious.

In that vein, this article is a counterbalance to my previous musing.

A blitzkrieg recap of recent times

The seven most amazing events of my life: 

1. Because of a virus, the constitution is suspended and an emergency regime of curfews and general psychological terror is established.

2. Anyone who questions this state of affairs is no longer a citizen, but a “Schwurbler” [transl. someone who talks rubbish, used synonymously with “conspiracy theorist”], or even a Nazi.

3. The suddenly omnipresent slogan "New Normal" is accepted uncritically, almost fervently. A return to the Old Normal – one hears and reads everywhere – will never happen. (How do they all know this with such certainty?)

4. A leaden silence settles over the country. Those who think the new situation is wrong better keep their mouths shut, otherwise their social status will immediately drop to that of doggie doo-doo. People talk behind closed doors and meet conspiratorially.

5. When a vaccine is rolled out, there is no general sigh of relief; instead we get the next mass hysteria. Those who, upon sober reflection, decide not to take the jab are mobbed in public, have to fear for their jobs and become social lepers.

6. And then, just like that, the whole thing is over. Compulsory masking, compulsory vaccination, compulsory testing are but a distant memory, a disturbing dream receding into the shadows.

7. Did anything even happen? Was there something? Everyone is acting as if nothing happened. Now there’s a war, and in the media disaster always travels alone. As if triggered by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, suddenly there is no more reporting of infection rates in the newspapers, and no one wants to be reminded of Corona.

The Old Normal indeed returned. 

’Twas a mere trifle of billions of euros spent? Sure looks like it. 

But you can't just pull off a stunt like that and pretend everything is normal again. History judges mercilessly. Slowly, but mercilessly.

I, for one, will never forget what happened and what an extremely ugly side society put on display. And I will share what I know. In books and films and wherever I can. My bet: this affair will be dealt with.

Maybe not for decades.

But it will happen. 

Because the critical mass of those who had to watch on aghast as the world around them went mad is large enough. I notice it every day and everywhere I go.
– German text shared anonymously on Telegram

The WEF / WHO / Davos Crowd bet the farm on their desired utopian/dystopian vector set in motion with covid lockdowns. Part of that was of course continuation of preceding shenanigans, doings that include sufficient control of midwit ‘leaders’ – the Build Back Better Brigade – placed in positions of ‘authority’ across the Western world by this malicious grouping of deranged, wannabe Global Rulers. 

Despite their best efforts, their plans fray and unravel all around us.

About a year and a half ago, The West’s specially selected ‘leaders’ (narcissistic, ambitious, controllable, not very bright) have managerially, obediently doubled down on that bet, this time giddy with the belief that Russia is weak, corrupt, a paper tiger, a gas station masquerading as a country. This particular exciting venture is the neocons’ Grand Obsession, or more accurately that especially visceral gaggle of ideologues among them who Hate Russia! so blindly, they seem ready to destroy humanity in pursuit of their grubby Eurasian dreams. 

Despite their best efforts, their plans fray and unravel all around us. 

Their panic is now plain to see if you but look.

What now characterises The West as a result of all this is the ideologically fanatical leading the vain, ambitious and shallow on ugly missions of destruction, with the bought-and-paid-for Western media acting as stenographers amplifying the ever deepening madness that has the West in its grip. Currently, most of the West’s peoples are some combination of too busy, too tired, too cynical or too paralysed by their angsty Stockholm Syndromes to respond with robust, meaningful protest. And of course there’s the vast institutional inertia grinding on and on and on.

And yet the fact that Professor Sachs, among several others, has noticed and is speaking out, and also that there are multiple grassroots and professional fightbacks underway in the UK and US, as indeed across the world, is part of the evidence I draw on when arguing that the cultural soils beneath the now-panicked clown show propagated so garishly by Western media outlets are – though still mostly out of sight – now richly fertile, ready to birth new forms of governance in the West.

Meanwhile, we find ourselves confronted with a tragic mess of epochal proportions, utterly devoid of charm, grace or glory. I will never be able to convey how disgusted I am by what I am witnessing. After earnest and repeated promises to do “whatever it takes”, The West slammed NATO’s doors in Ukraine’s face at the recent Vilnius summit. They may enter those hallowed halls after they beat Russia. But if they can beat Russia, why would they so desperately want NATO membership? 

The West ‘wants’ (needs) a way out, but the only way out appears to be the blunt correction of abject defeat. It will try to stealthily shift the narrative away from Ukraine to The Next Scary Monster, or it will escalate yet again; perhaps today’s the attack on the Kerch bridge was that escalation. My gut and intuition tell me, however, that if they do indeed risk escalation, they will be thwarted by an adult response from Russia/China that stop events boiling over into WWIII.

Ultimately though, the quality of The West’s madness is so tawdry, so malign, so devoid of decency and compassion, it is simply beyond comprehension. The non-Western world watches on, incredulous, trying to keep as far from our crazed insanity as it can, and assiduously gets on with the business of setting up alternative international systems in which one day – I hope – a healed West will participate.

The evil that men do

What The West has primarily squandered is its authority. Grown spiritually bankrupt, materialistic, pompous and narcissistic, The West has come to confuse raw power for authority. Blinded by its hubristic error, it has seduced itself into catastrophic overreach and destroyed yet another nation. It is also destroying itself. Its power, no longer rooted in true authority, is simply the repeated application of brute force, which is now visibly waning brute force.

It is authority alone which is the true and unique power of law. Compulsion is only an expedient to which one takes recourse in order to remedy a lack of authority. Where there is authority […], there compulsion is superfluous.
– Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot, 1972 (2019), pp77-79.

Where there is authority, there compulsion is superfluous. 

And yet perhaps The West’s malfunction is not evil, perhaps it is something duller, less romantic than that. It is a very human madness of vain pride whose roots clutch deep into decades, centuries of entitlement and privilege, drawing on dynastic belief systems spawned in the slow heat of too much power, too little corrective feedback, too little wisdom.

The “evil spirits” which deprive man of his freedom are not at all beings of the so-called “hierarchies of evil” or “fallen hierarchies”. Neither Satan, nor Belial, nor Lucifer, nor Mephistopheles has ever deprived anyone of his freedom. Temptation is their only weapon and this presupposes the freedom of he who is tempted. […]

[P]erverse human tendencies can deprive us of our freedom and enslave us. Worse still, they can avail themselves of our imagination and inventive faculties and lead us to creations which can become the scourge of mankind. […]

Resist the devil, and the devil will be your friend. A devil is not an atheist; he does not doubt God. The faith which he lacks is faith in man.
– Ibid, pp61-63.

Resist The West, and it will crush you without mercy. Its vanity demands total obedience, the total subjugation of your free will to its demands.

This is the pivotal question: What, in all this noise, has become of our faith in ourselves? How persuaded are we by the unceasing waves of dogwhistle messaging informing us we suck; we are vermin; useless eaters; greedy, porn-addicted breeders procreating too much, but producing nothing of value? How deeply have we internalised this cruel siren song? 

Should we go under? Should we allow ourselves to be culled like Marvel’s Thanos wanted? What are your thoughts on this oddly titillating moral conundrum?

In my previous post, I presented that part of me that forever vacillates, forever ‘progresses’ from one seemingly solid analysis to another. Like all such traits, such vacillation is boon and bane. 

We need faith and skepticism both. The former without the latter leads to fanaticism and machine-like obedience. The latter without the former leads to Hamlet-like inaction and erodes our courage.

My own faith, my knowing, is that humanity is here for a reason, and is on the cusp of rediscovering this truth. We are not pointless. But because free will is sacred and we are trusted with it, we are free to go wildly astray. Astray, our adventures teach us much – though very slowly at the collective level –, and one means of their teaching is great suffering. Sadly – cries the ego – it is a rinse-and-repeat process.

Note, however, that it is “great suffering”, not “great pleasure”! Something in us yearns for nobler lives, something more fitting to our destiny. As the saying goes, “Respect existence or expect resistance!” We resist because something noble in us must resist. We resist because we perceive something profoundly dysfunctional in tyranny. Of course it is never all of humanity resisting as one, but enough of us do resist, and ever more fiercely as times grow ever darker. Human nobility is a flame that can never be fully extinguished. We will always find a way to fight back.

What we need to understand, is what we are fighting for.

The dilemma of dilemmas

Apparently, it costs $20 to $30 to recycle one solar panel, but $1 to $2 to leave it in a landfill to rot. This factoid is a numerical reflection of the image that heads this article. The reason we ‘value’ the latter over the former method for dealing with old solar panels is because we measure value with numbers. In other words, we appreciate value in too coarse, too cumbersome a way at the cultural level. 

A science rooted solely in intelligence seems to tend to destructive technologies. Rooted also in wisdom, it would tend to the constructive. Consequently, one could argue (as I do) that some kind of return to God, to the primacy of consciousness, to the ineffable, is required to afford a shift of emphasis, a shift in the cultural value systems that direct our science, economics and politics. In my analysis, in my intuition, it is precisely this quality of shift that characterises the evolution underway in the cultural soils just beneath our collective perception.

My argument is that this is but one manifestation of that old dilemma, quantity versus quality. It is a very specific dilemma that is not easy to resolve. Or, better perhaps, is a dilemma we should not try to resolve. Part of the Western way seems to me to be a dialectical need to tease out dilemmas in order to choose one side at the expense of the other, as if compelled by an unseen urge to put one half of reality to shame while idolising the other.

Etymologically, a dilemma is a choice between two accepted assumptions or propositions. Positing such between “quality” and “quantity” is usefully illustrative, precisely because one should not want to shame the one and idolise the other. But isn’t this precisely what the West has done these last few centuries? 

Quality is ineffable, unmeasurable. Quantity is its ‘opposite’; we love to grade everything, set endless milestones and benchmarks, we worship precision, admire suspension bridges and internal combustion engines, respect the hard fact of money in the bank and solid trade surpluses, etc. But feelings about these things? Subjective impressions about what it all might mean? 

“Commit it then to the flames”! 

If a thing cannot be measured, if it contains “nothing but sophistry and illusion”, it is a thing to be banished from our attention. This 18th century call to action from David Hume is surely emblematic of how the West has treated reality for about three centuries. This approach has produced engineering marvels and astonishing increases in material wealth, but also much to lament. There is plainly more to reality than that which can be precisely measured. Dignity springs to mind, as do love, honour, friendship, trust, wisdom, to name but a few. None of these could be thought of as unimportant. None can be measured.

We are therefore faced with what I’m provocatively calling the dilemma of dilemmas, by which I mean a cultural inflection point in which the consequences of having idolised quantity for too long, and of having no cultural means, or wisdom, for taking quality effectively into account, are coming home to roost. We have paired reality into a bewitching array of dilemmas, a process whose advantages – precision, clarity, predictability, certainty – have somehow  morphed into a soul-smothering quagmire whose ugliest poster child is Ukraine, closely followed by the bureaucratic nannying and paranoid fear mongering of lockdowns, compulsory vaccination and medical tyranny. 

Our digital future of 0s and 1s is upon us!

Back to faith, back to reality

How backward and inappropriate this concluding subheading must seem to most. What sort of charlatan, what manner of snake-oil salesman would dare headline a phrase that equates faith with reality!? But I go further still. I dare to advocate a re-embracing of superstition. There be gold in them thar hills, the gold of encoded wisdom.

Wisdom cannot be purchased or stolen. You earn the Holy Grail; you cannot win it by chance. Nor can you, by logical extension, earn it and then gift it to others unearned. Accepting this is so, accepting further that wisdom resists measurement and definition, if we do want to make our culture alert to the value of earning and appreciating wisdom, if we do want to draw attention to wisdom as a most noble quality, generally and across time, we are consequently tasked with encoding the many pathways to wisdom in our initiatory and preparatory customs, habits, rituals and, yes, even superstitions. I suspect this set of solutions to the problem of preserving wisdom across time is broadly familiar to all cultures.

This is not to say superstition and its friends should usurp rationality or the scientific method, rather that it be newly understood, welcomed even, as a valued partner in establishing the many interweaving processes of social governance. 

But our centuries-long focus on quantity has sped us up into a white-noise frenzy of perpetual economic growth, 24/7 entertainment and narcissistic abandon. We are cynical, exhausted, emptied. Slowing down to taste the gentle pleasures of mindfulness, the calm solidity of patience, and more importantly to enjoy them, will be challenging, to say the least. I note, however, that Robert Kennedy’s campaign has wisdom and love as foundational elements. I note too that Charles Eisenstein is one of Kennedy’s campaign advisors. All that I write here is thus finding its way into the mainstream via powerful channels. Seeing as the meat and potatoes of this article are more than a little Eisensteinian, and seeing too that this perspective is, one way or the other, as old as time, I hope you can begin to feel the inevitability of wisdom’s return. 

Unbalance wants to correct, disease to ease. Mysteriously, reality always finds the right vehicles for effecting needed correction. I believe Robert Kennedy is one of the more prominent, though there are tens of thousands of less known advocates of what needs to be done. It is my firm conviction that we cannot be stopped.

Postcard from the ledge

It’s a mess out there. – Me.

Maybe that’s a good thing. – Me.

Introduction

It’s been a while. There has been much for me to do in too little time. 

Today is Sunday. I’m alone in the house, and my project work is done, for now. Though insanely busy these last three months or so, I’ve been deep in thought whenever space and quiet allowed, and while in that quiet noticing further elements of the body of my thought disintegrating with the disintegration of the Western world.

This is a lengthy postcard from that windy ledge.

A breakdown of categories

Charles Eisenstein’s career is aimed at inviting as many of us as possible to notice and then advance “the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible”. It is a romantic line, and a romantic vector, one that attracts me deeply. Lately though … less and less. I spy many ‘problems’ beneath its pretty surface.

The first has been visible to me for a while: “more beautiful” on whose definition? Beauty lies infamously in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps this is not a problem, perhaps this is in fact part of the solution, a strength. Diversity is the spice of life, right? But don’t we have that already, anyway, and in abundance? Yes, there is homogeneity and groupthink aplenty, but not to the point of an outright grey-washing of everything Out There. The tensions, the disagreements, the endless cultural fault lines speak of a very spicy, very interesting period of history. Multiple ideas of what we find beautiful are in ‘competition’ right now. Some favour safety, others risk. Some favour escape from limitation into who knows what digital utopia, others yearn for a return to tradition and immutable categories. I am drawn to love as it relates to wisdom and health while others enjoy the creature comforts modernity provides. Some are engineers, some accountants, some are corporate career folk, others mavericks. On and on the diversity goes. There is enough diversity in evidence to occupy whole oceans. To argue otherwise is to wilfully overlook the obvious.

And yes, of course there are terrible, terrible problems, and, yes, it’s very hard to deny that humanity stands trembling and afraid before a mighty historical crossroads – or mighty historical spaghetti junction – but this is not an unprecedented state of affairs.

These simple observations eat at me. They always have. I am by nature a doubter who doubts the very ideas I doubt into temporary existence. There are certain certainties in me – there is nothing but God, for example – but how to honour them, which constellation of ‘solutions’ is practical and fitting to the times … these are different challenges entirely to identifying Good Principles. And while there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, nothing is more impotent than one whose time lies far in the future.

Categories are indeed in breakdown, and yet our past is riddled with such turbulence. This is nothing new. Well, not 100% new; history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes, as the saying goes. There are, despite such emollient platitudes, very reasonable grounds for concern This Time, such as the complex supply chains and just-in-time delivery processes that, in the event of a broad collapse, would present unprecedented societal challenges. But perhaps this very risk keeps things tied securely together? Perhaps this existentially important complexity – deadly over-complication? – is our best insurance against collapse?

Furthermore, civilisational collapse is a misunderstood creature. Imagination has space to blossom in the dearth of information civilisational breakdown leaves in its wake. Apparently, “collapse” is now seen as too dramatic a word. Affairs simply transition to less documented times in which new ways of doing things have a greater chance of winning out than during more stable periods.

Or perhaps this time will indeed be different, who can say.

Catastrophists enjoy imagined (or real) approaching doom. Which mostly never comes. We have all watched countless dread predictions come and go unfulfilled. Who remembers the buzz around Y2K? Not only does catastrophism sell books and papers and movies, we humans are often darkly fascinated by catastrophe and can magic ourselves into a bewitching array of collective hysteria, when mood and moment permit.

Categories are breaking down once again, but nobody knows where this particular iteration will take us, nor how turbulent it will be, nor how much of humanity is bound up in it, nor how deeply. Some folks love to pontificate – I’m one of them –, but an embarrassingly high percentage of our output is just excited chatter on the wind.

To pontificate, or not to pontificate

The answer is yes. Yes, I shall pontificate. It is my wont.

To recap the core thesis as it once tottered about in my mind:

Money is a cultural technology required by the dissolution of trust that is but one consequence of civilisation-scale ‘communities’. When communities are sufficiently small, when specialisation has not taken hold, when social affairs are intimate and all-including, money (as unit of account and store/measure of value) is not needed. 

But things change. Societal evolution of a civilisational stripe includes the establishment of technologies such as private property and a state of some kind to protect it. This in turn produces class hierarchies, the consequent need for statecraft, and the need for money to glue it all together. As such, money effects trust among a community of strangers where far earlier there were no day-to-day strangers to speak of.

But things change. It just so happens money requires scarcity. This is a technological artefact of money in my view, not an immutable consequence of so-called ‘infinite’ wants dismally abutting finite resources to produce tedious supply-demand-price intersections so beloved of economists.

Things change. Scarcity appears to become ‘solvable’, slowly loses its dark charisma. Meanwhile, consumerism’s charms age and wither. And yet money remains the glue that holds all things together. What to do?

Things change. Digital technologies make (potentially all) information available to everyone at all times. This punches the dark arts of statecraft right in the solar plexus. When your chances of success at a Very Difficult Job Indeed require almost watertight and perpetual control of The Narrative, and that now at virtually global scale, the internet is a beast you must tame, pronto. But how? Censorship is what nazis do, and nobody likes those guys.

Things change. People dumb down because dumbness breeds further dumbness as society iterates forwards generationally. Wisdom cannot be handed over neatly to our progeny. To make matters worse, the danger and adventure humans need to grow in wisdom recedes inexorably as the hunger for ‘safety’ and Predictable Outcomes radiates ever outwards like a slow storm. The human crop harvested to produce the ‘leaders’ needed to usher in the glittering dystopian technotopia that will solve all ills via Change You Can Believe In is not remotely of sufficient quality. The human crop is now almost wholly infected by the narcissism that has been running rampant for decades. Those unaffected are unwanted, and anyway want nothing less than leading us dumbed-down oiks to some New Jerusalem.

What to do?

Communities R Us?

What is community? I don’t know, but what it once was and what it might be in future are likely two very different things. 

We need each other differently now. In days of yore, we needed each other existentially. Today, it’s as if we need each other as consumer items. Is this a bad thing? I’ve argued repeatedly that it is, that “meaning” is what humans need, not shallow, throw-away pleasures. 

Humans need humans, this is certain, but how? Meaningfully, and in unchanging ways? To raise barns for each other? To harvest each other’s crops? Stitch each other’s wounds? Rear each other’s young?

Or play online computer games together and have endless fun, with robot slaves cleaning up after us?

In a rain forest, the animals and vegetation take care of each other’s waste. One entity’s waste is another entity’s food. There is in fact no waste. By stark contrast, the domestic world brings with it, unintended, the need to clean up after ourselves. This is kind of against the grain, biologically speaking. No other animal does this. So why should we want to? Self-discipline? Maybe, but forever? Foreverever?? Aren’t we always striving to head back to our ‘perfect’ (idealised) jungle-forest home where our mess was cleaned up after us by other beings, whom we often thanked by gratefully eating them? Only this time around, we aim to recreate that ‘paradise’ with robot slaves, and gaze out across forests of mechanised vertical farms from our climate-controlled, sky-high apartments…

So what is the true character of the community humans must have? Play, or self-discipline? Both?

Much of civilisational effort is the manufacture of solutions to this irksome issue of waste and work, from animal and human slaves to mechanical and robot slaves. What’s wrong with that vector? I see a certain beauty in the minimalism of a disciplined life of low waste and simple living, but I’m not ethically against robot slaves. I’m not against ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of ‘waste’. I’m not against technology, at all. I’m not against ‘sloth’ either, except in the context of a civilisational phase that requires its opposite as a matter of survival. After all, the animal sloths that live well enough are not immoral creatures. They’re just doing their thing. And there is a place for their thing.

Another ‘problem’ of civilisation that dovetails with the above is one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’. Because communities that take care of each other disappear as states grow in skill and size, intimate knowledge of each and every citizen disappears, and each citizen grows increasingly dependent on the state. At some point, case-by-case remedies for each and every unique injury are utterly unaffordable. Thousands, millions, pay a bitter price for this harsh reality, which is also the soil of much corruption and nihilism. Bureaucratic, form-based, statistics-based ‘solutions’ predominate. We become Kafka cogs in a dystopian machine, anonymous, meaningless, quietly desperate. As this progresses, so we dumb down, increasingly dependent on remote ‘experts’ who know the best ‘solutions’ to our (infantile) ‘problems’. And it’s horrible. But also not really. We seep into our situation like spilled coffee into an old sofa, to get stuck there forever, too timid to dare anything different. For the most part.

This is the price we pay for the richly complex journey civilisation is. Except “we” is a very wide scattering of outcomes that is far from ‘fair’ to most. But who really knows what “fair” means? And those who claim they do, can they deliver their ‘fairness’ without accidentally spawning yet another dystopia, as the dream-crushing momenta of civilisation’s autonomic behaviours reassert themselves?

And can we really insist on a deliberate return to a context in which we need each other existentially, just so as to recreate the communities that are our healthiest social context? If indeed they are our healthiest social context.

Or can we become mature enough to produce graceful responses to these dull and terrible horrors, this overly mechanical time that is the post-modern era? Is this, my romantic prayer, simply too much to ask?

The more things change, the more they stay the same

And yet and yet and yet…

I am a man who for ultimately unknowable reasons chose a ‘spiritual’ set of ambitions over those on offer from the world of corporate careerism. At least, that’s how it seems to me at the moment; I’m increasingly unsure the dichotomy just implied really exists anywhere but in my labyrinthine reasoning. I am also a man with a family, four cats, and a dog. This rare combination of factors is not without its considerable stresses. So much so, I find myself wondering too much what’s what, repeatedly reassessing everything as the world around me decays. The answers I produce may be logically and rhetorically sound, but they are also wildly at odds with Life Out There. This practical dissonance appears to strip them of (functional) validity. Who’s right here? Yours Truly The Weirdo, or, in the ‘opposite’ corner, The Great They?

Like everyone else, I do not know how to measure success. In the absence of clear feedback, I plod on, do what I can, and struggle manfully to learn from my repeat-pattern ‘mistakes’. All to grow in grace and wisdom. On the whole, I’d give myself maybe a 4 out of 10 so far.

In my eyes, there can be nothing more ugly, more terrible, than the Russia-Ukraine war, nothing more darkly moribund than the WEF’s plans, the WHO’s pandemic treaty, the “safetyism” and compulsive virtue signalling that characterise the burgeoning totalitarianism that is corporatism’s Frankenstein monster. For the love of God I cannot make my peace with any of it! Why not? Have I correctly reasoned and intuited myself to the wiser, healthier take on all this, or am I but a stubborn old goat?

I have a memory that I now believe was one of my first dreams. I used to think it really happened, but my mother never mentioned the event while alive, so I think it must have been a dream. That I had it is incredible, considering who I am and these times the adult me is living through.

I am a toddler at a party, in a room playing with other toddlers. We ‘telepathically’ agree to go downstairs to visit our parents. We toddle and crawl to the stairs in our seeming multitude, but can’t descend them with skill. A small waterfall of screaming toddlers tumbles down the stairs and piles up at the bottom. I am the only one who manages to hold on to a bannister spindle. I hold on for dear life as if clinging to the edge of a cliff. From this vantage point, I see the shadowy shapes of our parents hurrying to the smoked-glass door of the room they are in, and let go. As I start to fall, the memory/dream ends.

Obviously, the tumbling toddlers represent those who just go along with societal moral decay, incapable of mounting any resistance. I am a lone but pointless exception holding on grimly against the flow of events. When I see authority figures about to remedy the situation, I yield and go with the flow, though I think I wanted to hold on until rescued, as if that would have been a noble accomplishment worthy of their praise. 

Am I about to yield ‘in real life’? The pressure of the flow of events is mighty. Resisting it, when you are essentially a lone wolf, as I am, is quite thankless, and draining. For me, there is no community out there that holds any lasting attraction. I have looked around, volunteer all my spare hours to those who want my technical help (IT skills), but am not attracted to fully join up. And it seems to me that no one is. We all like our customised creature comforts too much. We don’t need each other all that much. A little, perhaps, but not much. Aren’t we faking it?

More and more, this does not bother me. But one outcome of this cool observation that people, generally, are happy enough in their own four walls, is a growing conviction that my spiritual endeavours are misplaced, or misapplied, that I have misunderstood their character. Does this mean that I have likewise misunderstood the character of this historical moment? I suspect so.

I suspect that events are going to morph in unexpected ways that are both wildly anticlimactic and yet powerfully subversive, with a mix of contradictory ‘returns’ to several traditions, though as altered by evolved perceptions thereof. At the same time, these changes will produce, almost stealthily, new technologies and solutions that will bring about deep change. Much of what is ‘needed’ to effect all this is likely already embedded, but the wisdom of those ushering all this in is gravely limited, so limited in fact that their expectations will be dashed. Here I’m thinking of AI and its many Kafkaesque applications. 

I am one of those whose wisdom is simply not up to the task of seeing how things are about to play out. There may well be much turbulence across all societies on earth, but also perhaps not. There will be, I suspect, a re-separation of cultures, but one that mysteriously fosters renewed and deeper communications. Our lost youth will want to learn, and be able to do so, the new skills and social-governance methodologies required by changing circumstances. There will be incredible technological breakthroughs that seem par for the course: revolutionary, but oddly seamless. 

Some mix of these and other such things. Our many cultural soils are growing fertile just beneath our perception, their features and cracks opening to new germination and seeding that will prove Just So for how they have evolved, for the wounds that have enriched them.

“Have I not guided you to where you need to be?”

God said that. To me, when I was at my most desperately angry, when I raised my fist against Him like a spear. By “you”, I think He meant us all. And I could feel His deeply disarming smile course through me like a river.

(Note he said “need”, not “want”!)