Tyranny’s harvest

Dose anyone suffer with anxiety and panic like me this all started with the COVID-19 I’m still struggling to get well getting out alone is not easy I’ve been on different medication over 2years I would love to do all the things again like walking crafts going on a bus to town all these things I panic with been at home alone been in shops it never ends. I blame Boris  Johnson. The mental Heath are struggling to support those that need help to get there lives back. what do you think?. – Carol C.

Hi, I agree. I won't go into my political stance or beliefs but I'm struggling to get back to how life was before the whole lock down. Everything for some reason just feels different. I hope you find your normal again. – Sami S.

Till my first panic attack, I was nice and happy boy.Drinking, smoking, going out, and in perfect health,  then everything get change. Now no drinking, no smoking, only doctors and medications that made me sick. One day I was on the street enjoying, and in a moment hit my nose by accident and little blood bleak. And a one simple think passed  by my head. Im dying. I baaaam. My first panic attack. Short of bread, tight in chest, the world started to circle, I was nearly fold down. From this moment to now, doctors and medications. I understand how you feelling and wish from my heart to win this battle. And then tell me :) . If you know some manly or mixed groups, I want to join :)  My English is not so good, sorry if many mistakes in the words. Thanks :) – Spas M

Introduction

I copied the above quotes from an online neighbourhood forum. Carol C. initiated the thread with her plea for help, the other two quotes are replies that most closely echo Carol’s fears, though there were tens of other comments in a similar tone, too many to deal with here. 

For someone like me who advocates love, the fear voiced in their words is, to say the least, a challenge. This is an attempt to address it.

What chance love?

I hope it is obvious from the above that fear is not a sustainable solution for navigating society’s challenges; a life lived in fear is neither healthy nor joyous, where joy is the fruit of health. Ego – “consciousness in the service of fear” – is gifted at seducing us into distractions that so often become addictions aggressively defended, gifted at enmeshing us in tangled webs of self deception, of seeing bounty in playing the role of oppressor or victim, and so on, all to keep us safe from and unmolested by dangers lurking Out There only fear can guard against. 

Ego’s perpetual refrain might be phrased as: Life is deadly, fear your most loyal ally. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread! 

This is the reflexive-instinctive substratum state power mines in its systemic need to (fearfully) control its subjects, so as to keep day-to-day life on an even keel and itself in power. Similar mechanisms of control are used by multinational corporations and organisations. Fear is the go-to choice for stressed-out rulers and ruled alike when facing the difficult challenges of keeping an entire people on the same page, or simply making ends meet. But freed to run its course, fear leads to corruption, decadence, misery, endless power struggles, grotesque inequalities, and so on.

Love, by contrast, is very difficult to attain; it requires a lifelong commitment to ruthless self-honesty, courage, compassion, humility, ego dissolution, while avoiding collapse into escapism and victimhood. How many individuals are ready to take on this task before their world falls apart? How many peoples, nations, corporations? It is rare indeed that individuals commit to love before devastating corrective feedback forces their hand, and yet more unusual that entire nations do so. In fact I’m not aware of the latter having ever happened.

It seems covid19 has distilled this age-old and very human dilemma into painful focus for wave upon wave of people, including Carol. The coming fallout from the disastrous Russia-Ukraine war will represent another distillation of this choice, and further intensify fear, already at fever pitch throughout entire societies. 

And yet, were I to run this foundational fear-love choice past any of the three people quoted above as an invitation to a healthier way of being, how could I be sure I was not unintentionally luring them onto a road they are not ready to travel?

Whom should we blame for our messes, who should make things right for Carol? What I see beneath Carol’s fear, and beneath that of others like her, is the system that promotes and sustains it. But in truth I believe blame misses the point; only Carol can walk her unique path to health, and by walking it, create it. For all of us within a broader system that promotes and sustains such fears, however, staying true to the only path beyond often seems impossible. Indeed, most succumb to the devil they know, at best seeking help from professionals and drugs that almost never address the root of the problem. This is too familiar a lament. The work that needs to be done is too hard, too exhausting, too against the grain of The Way Things Are.

In other words, the only way out seems so hard it hardly bears mentioning; it is almost cruel to suggest it, however gently. Is a commitment to becoming love a bridge too far for frail humanity?

I feel the intense need in Carol’s words and am instantly on the other side of reality, heart and mind. How can power be so cruel, so implacably violent yet remain oblivious to its impact, grind relentlessly on as if its measures were Ultimate Good? I find no satisfactory answer, see explanations referencing sociopathy and psychopathy as cartoonish, skeletal, misleading. I watch power’s effects unfold but have a minimally detailed sense of its root cause as generalised fear teamed with ego’s comfy allures. Stunned again and again by events, I am now like a light neither off nor on, my switch stuck between two binary poles, waiting for something to make sense. I suspect many feel the same way.

Love is clearly the only way, but almost nobody dares learn what this really entails. I take stock of my own situation, of what I am and feel, and come up wanting, even though I can find no flaw in the foundations of what I flatter myself I know. I want to do something effective, anything at all, but watch on dumbly as one event seeps into the next, on and on and on.

The powers of mass manipulation humanity has acquired in pursuit of state power, of status,  stability, safety, are far beyond its wisdom. We do not deserve them, and yet we have them. We wield them relentlessly, wanting to know no better. We are The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and our world has run amok.

How cruel is love?

The cruel, stubborn thought that will not fade away is that things must be this way, that I must accept – does “accept” mean love? – the horrors we have unleashed. These horrors – something whispers to me – are the only way we can learn. Without free will there can be no learning. With free will anything can happen. To accept free will and humanity as they are is to accept horror, evil banality, the most profound corruption and perversion, long dull lives of quiet desperation … all of it. The state of the human world is necessarily and always the truest reflection, indeed embodiment, of how we are as a species.

The third quote at the top of this article is from a non-native speaker obviously struggling to find his way. He is culturally at sea here, out of place, perhaps delivered here by processes beyond his control: the ebbs and flows of history. Carol is no doubt working class, did not receive an education beyond, I guess, age 16, is of a nervous disposition and has slipped into a confused state of crippling fear. Her view of the world is shared by Sami S. There are, I’m confident, millions more like them across the UK, and elsewhere in the world. And I sense their number is growing. They are all real human beings living real human lives the broader system cannot care about. They are ‘useless eaters’ from the system’s point of view: history’s detritus. I see myself as one of them by virtue of not fitting in, of not agreeing with the system’s base value system.

History is cruel and there is no stopping it. Systems become established, enjoy some period of success, lose their way, then collapse at some speed and are replaced. When civilisational systems emerge, and when they thrive, and when they fade away, some percentage of the human beings that constitute them ‘fail’, while others ‘succeed’. How can it be any other way? 

Does it follow from this, then, that love is cruel? Yes. No. Both.

Do you really understand ‘failure’? Can you value Carol’s suffering and aching loneliness for what it is, for the rich experience of futility it delivers, its contribution to the maturation of her wisdom as soul, and thus to humanity’s wisdom generally? If we are to choose love knowingly, willingly, we need to explore and exhaust the potential of every other way of being as well. 

In the Grail legend, Parsifal easily finds the Grail (wisdom/love), but does not value it. This is the fool’s early success, beginner’s luck. Undeserving, he loses the Grail and drifts into multiple experiences of failure, of suffering. These are the trials we must complete to truly earn love, to be capable of being a vessel for its expression through us. Only after we have travelled all paths that are not love, are we are ready to find and appreciate the Grail. This seems to be how reality works, fundamentally.

Must we accept evil, then? Yes. No. Both.

Yes, in that to squash free will out of existence in pursuit of utopia would create far more evil than it attempts to defeat. 

No, in the sense that evil leads to terrible suffering, and the only path towards a healthy relationship with suffering is the one that appears before us as we dedicate ourselves knowingly and willingly to love. The wisdom of accepting that we do not control all outcomes, all decisions, all emotional reactions Out There does not preclude encouraging love in ourselves and others, as our means allow. ‘Failing’ to be The Shining One who defeats evil for all time is no failure at all, no cause for self-doubt, self-hate, feelings of impotence, no reason to slip back into fear. 

Love is as cruel as we want it to be. While we yield to ego, to fear’s easy seductions, love seems idealistic, foolhardy, reckless, even terrifying. When we give ourselves in humble service to love, we learn through very difficult challenges that the rewards and outcomes of our service are fruits whose goodness is beyond our wisdom to know (for some unknowable length of time). This is a very difficult lesson to learn and its pains are directly proportional to the power of our fear, our determination to cling to what we think we know, to old comforts, ideologies, habits of thought and emotion.

It follows, then – if I am right in this –, that my own pain in the face of the world’s horrors is just that. I have yet to learn how to let be that which I cannot change so as to remain calm and effective for those things I can. No doubt most of us experience some version of this challenge. It is a very human state of being to be stuck in; nothing could be more ordinary.

Conclusion

Perhaps love is too much to ask. Perhaps this is true, but also false. Perhaps love’s daunting, unsurmountable challenge, rooted in its unconditionality, is precisely why we finally choose to walk willingly towards it, and delight in how it evolves within us as we learn.

God/love is the sole ‘perspective’ – state of being – from which we, while humans, can get a tiny sense of how it might be possible there is nothing to forgive, there are no enemies, nothing to fear. Human successes in this spiritual endeavour are fleeting; it is a state of being that cannot be sustained for very long in our realm, the realm of opposites. 

Love has no opposite. God has no opposite. From the human perspective, then, there is a cruelty to our situation, not only from the real pain our (necessary?) suffering creates, but also from the teasing potential each of us has to evolve into our maturity, grow closer to love while somehow never quite making it. Perhaps attainment of this state of being really is impossible in this realm. If true, this is precisely why we need guidance and faith, and, equally importantly, patience with ourselves and each other.

To the degree that there is evil, or even an entity we call Satan, that entity or quality of being is not God’s opposite. Ego/Satan wants desperately, compulsively to demonstrate it is indeed God’s opposite – and therefore equal – and so with luck prove that the real God is Ego/Satan. But God/love is beyond this dualistic hubris, this oppositional state of being. Ego is therefore barking up the wrong tree, fighting a futile war, a war whose battles can all be ‘won’ yet deliver ‘total defeat’ when all is said and done. And yet the battles are real and humanity carries their burden, reaps the mounting harvest of fear, that quality of being ego serves.

Humanity is necessarily embedded in, is perhaps a function of, dualism, but perhaps precisely in order to earn the quality of wisdom needed to progress beyond it, to evolve into whatever follows. Some argue this scales to a cyclical collective process, and talk of ages progressing one to the next until collapse back down to the beginning of the next cycle, with each iteration delivering vital lessons. Why this must be so will remain mysterious until we shed our bodies and reside fully in the non-physical, the non-dualistic, but I think it safe to say our incarnations on earth are not pointless; if they were, I’m sure incarnation in the physical realm would not happen. Something about what we go through on earth as physical beings positively affects the quality of how God/love evolves, it being eternal and ever changing in its fundamental changelessness. This paradox can only resolve for us when we are once more fully soul or spirit no longer thickly veiled by our humanity, when we can again know All That Is fully open to its splendid riches.

As humans, then, we need faith to have a chance of ‘accepting’, however briefly, what history delivers – history, that is, as the experienced manifestation of human evolution, an evolution irremediably shaped by the realm of opposites which is its sacred host.

Welcome to the Vicarious

“I speak that you know what may be done: what shall be done here. This Institute – Dio mio, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind, the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature.”  – From That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, a novel first published in 1945.

Introduction

In essence, the transhumanist project, or vector, strives to escape its sense of what “Nature” is: an imperfect machine. Imperfection, of course, is the cause of unnecessary suffering, and so really ought to be perfected (malapropian tautology intended). Now consciousness itself, held taut by gadgetry and software like weeds in a rushing river, is poised to be wholly subsumed by the gush of Progress, magicked away into a technological ether whence it will cheat death at last!

But this is a cartoon fantasy: confected system as spoiled brat with far too much money and a coterie of hangers on, squealing for fawning loyalty while egesting soft belches of faux caring.

Who wants what they’re selling? C. S. Lewis did not. I do not. Nor do I know anyone who does.

Listen carefully to the image from Zuckerberg’s Meta above. What does it speak to you? Do you really want to give yourself to its disinfected mediocrity? To those who do find it alluring, please consider this: Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. The one thing you can never leave behind is the quality of what, or how, you are – though you can and do degrade or improve your quality by the decisions you make. The grass may well look greener on the other side, but it is the same old you who goes there to enjoy it. And honeymoons are necessarily brief affairs.

In this article, we look at the profoundly disappointing wages of life lived vicariously – one metaphor for which is eating only sugar to meet all your needs –, and also at how that necessary disappointment is a function of the nature of reality.

Interesting, is it not, that “Zuckerberg” translates to “sugar mountain”.

No other side

There is only that which we experience in the ever unfolding now. Put differently, there is only God. God is an intimately interconnected multitude of organic entities – I’m beginning to understand “organic” as something irreducibly ineffable, alive, somehow beyond subject and object via the dizzying complexity of its interconnections, and finally beyond reason’s and logic’s capacity to comprehend –, where each entity is a unique perspective within and of God, a child of God whose experiences constitute, in an ever changing way, the flow of God, of All That Is. As such, there is no other side, no barrier to break, no Rubicon to cross but that perspective which is a (mysterious) consequence of our quality of being as it looks out into reality – which it co-creates – interpreting what it experiences through the filter of what it is. I can conceive of no escape from this foundational property of reality.

It is in fact of no particular importance – initially – whether you couch this as ‘spiritual’ or ‘materialistic’; the core concept presented in the above paragraph maps fairly neatly to both notions; for example, swap out “God” for “Universe” to give it a materialist bent. And yet there is something necessarily infuriating to the rational mind – mind entrained by the sequential pathways language and science necessitate – about such ill-disciplined circularity. Confronted with the apparently paradoxical nature of reality, the rational mind – for poetic effect I might say inorganic mind – agitates to neaten, to straighten out, to clarify. It has been busy working this problem for millennia. We call its endeavour civilisation.

Lo and behold, we now find ourselves face to face with the drab pinnacle of that agitation: the first serious transhumanist sales pitch for its utopian interpretation of Eternal Life. Version 1.0 looks like a condescending children’s comic written and illustrated by a board of directors desperate to offend nobody. But fear not, TwoPointOh! will be New and Improved. Better yet, it lies just on the other side.

In the Vicarious, better things must lie on the other side, just around the corner, just up ahead. (Our stewards will let us know when it’s ready, you can count on that.)

So… there is another side? Well yes, loads of them. Nothing but Other Sides everywhere we look.

We modern humans are atomised in bitter consequence of our cultural state of mind, a state that perceives reality as atoms (atomism), objects (Newtonian physics), commodities (postmodernism). This state of mind separates us off from Not Us, divides us into Us and Them, You and Me, Self and Other. So much so, in fact, that Self is fracturing under this weightless, indecipherable strain, a fracturing that is the bottomless pit of our insatiable hunger for communications, chat, entertainment, distraction.

Now we live fully in the Vicarious. Self is mist, diffused imperceptibly somewhere along the way. It is housed, ghost like, in a hall of mirrors that holds it in non-discerning attention, in a paralysis of anxious uncertainty, forever seeking certainty from someone, something, somewhere. In this state of being, we exude a scent that attracts tyrants insatiable for our hunger for them.

Bewitched in this shifting kaleidoscope of Other Sides, we have forgotten there is no other side. In the Vicarious, reality seems to be nothing but the other side: that tantalising, just-out-of-reach, real-unreal Out There we must forever suckle on, endlessly soul-destroyed by how unnourishing our feeding is. Always hungry, we devour images of ‘things’ as commodities of ‘things’ that were anyway never there quite as we imagined. Pressed hard against the limits of our culturally throttled imaginations, as if against the thick ice of a frozen river, we are pulled ever on by the flood waters of Progress to Nowhere Else But Here.

I think the insanity of it all is becoming apparent to more and more of us, increasingly now as Old and New Normals unravel at breakneck speed. I intuit a mounting desire for health breaking through. No… not WHO health, not corporate commoditised health, I mean organic health, the health that is the natural reward of meaningful lives.

This fractured relationship with Self, this perverted relationship with NotSelf as Unreality Out There, always experienced vicariously, is coming to a fevered climax – as it must. If I belabour this point it is because fear stalks the land, further addling already addled minds. In this historical turbulence, we all need to remember the fundamentals, to reconnect with them over and over again. It’s not that the turbulence is an unexpected superfluous cruelty that must be dispatched asap, it’s that learning from it requires constant reconnection with deeper truths. As I tried to honour in my previous post, confusion troubles us only because of how we value it – lopsidedly – from the perspective of rampant rationality as idolised good, a non-spiritual god hell bent on ‘perfection’ at all costs.

Those costs have come due and will be paid in full.

Who wants what they’re selling?

Transhumanists want to seduce us into doubling down on their Icarus escape into their virtual la-la land. To want what they advocate, therefore, is to persevere in desiring escape from reality. It is, in other words, to want an impossibility.

For the sake of argument, let us grant our transhumanist fellow travellers a flawless Virtual Reality (VR) several versions down the road from TwoPointOh! Should we conceive of this flawless VR as being exactly as biodiverse and astonishingly rich as the earthly biosphere we currently inhabit? Or should its perfection be understood as a diluted or perhaps distilled copy thereof? If the former, what’s the point? If the latter, what’s the point? Isn’t it necessarily a folly, a flat absurdity in fact, to pair down or recreate reality into what suits our current cultural imagination – particularly considering our (infantile) relationship with decay and death – as if in so doing we are somehow improving our lot in life? Can we really convince ourselves this path is wise or healthy? And if we fail to convince ourselves when pressed on such details, wouldn’t that failure beg the question as to the underlying purpose of the VR in the first place, both from cynical and functional perspectives?

We could perhaps argue that the above paragraph’s veracity is, albeit counterintuitively, demonstrated by the fact that most will not make any such analysis, will not subject the advertised trinket, the titillating bauble, to the scrutiny it deserves, and buy in. Heaven knows life is hard enough! This is the attitude transhumanism’s PR people prefer. But I think two observations make such an argument moot and condescending.

The first is that non-critical or frivolous consumption of the proffered bauble does not permanently snuff out life in souls so inclined. The spark of life can only ever be but temporarily restrained. Life is by definition a process that must favour healthy over unhealthy outcomes. (Please note I am not talking about individual lives per se, but life – aka consciousness – generally.)

One vital part of the life spark is free will. And although currently, and perhaps for some time now, a large majority of us lack the courage to wield our free will fully, it must out. The remaining minority represents, or is a champion of, free will. Its actions always penetrate somehow, call to the more timid to come out and live, play, create! The percentages representing the two sides are not all that important; free will is a fundamental property of consciousness. Arguing otherwise is arguing that reality is mechanical, which it obviously is not. A mechanical reality cannot possibly produce experience and meaning, whereas a conscious, organic reality is experience and meaning. In other words and to get back to the original observation, no matter the lack of judgement going into the honeytrap, life will, one way or another, burst the banks of that which seeks to restrain it.

The second observation derives from the first: reality is self-balancing, though often turbulent. Reality is also, to be extravagantly redundant, all pervasive; its rules are therefore necessarily present in everything humans might do to ‘escape’ it; we are of it, always and only. To repeat, we must bring ourselves with us wherever we go, and we are life. Everything we do can only transpire within reality. Since reality self-corrects, or more profoundly is always ‘perfect’ in a way that defies ego-based conceptions thereof, everything we choose to do contributes to the quality – or manner – of that continuing self-correction, that perpetual rebalancing towards health over time.

As you do unto other, so you do unto self. Everything is interconnected.

Rephrased in less esoteric language, we do not live outside ‘nature’. We are not alien scientists tinkering with a mechanical system we are separate from – let’s say the biosphere we are born of and live in –, as if reaching in through a hermetically sealed glass box, pushing our hands into impervious gloves then manipulating The World to our liking … by building ‘perfect’ smart cities and ‘cool’ virtual realities.

This reflexive, erroneous sense of How Things Are is reflected in false dichotomies like “nature and nurture”, “natural and artificial”, they and others like them being the misbegotten children of humanism and materialism, twinned paradigms that have structured our thinking for centuries. Their habits of thought have indeed produced marvels terrible and beautiful, but their limits are becoming ever more apparent. Being operated by humans, the institutions and infrastructure built to perpetuate humanist modernity are congenitally compelled to fight off the tide of change that threatens to sweep them away. It should therefore be no surprise that this historical moment is fraught with tensions, deceptions and turbulence.

But despite their fevered bluster, they must fail.

Certainly there are dysfunctional and functional, healthy and unhealthy ways we can be, but all must occur within reality, which is, for me, synonymous with ‘nature’ – where could ‘nature’ possibly ‘end’ and some other ‘thing’ ‘begin’? We have earth’s biosphere as our home, but this is just a tiny part of a system we call Universe. Or, put differently, just a tiny part of reality, or All That Is. Nobody conceives of the biosphere as somehow wholly separated off from the rest of the universe in which it is situated. And surely nobody conceives of cities, smart of otherwise, as wholly separated off from the biosphere. Whichever terminology we use, at whatever scale we think, we are confronted with the fact of intimate and all-pervasive interconnections as definitional for how reality is.

There is no other side.

Conclusion

Without change, there can be no life.

I know it’s banal, but there is, in the end, never a good reason to worry, no matter how horrible things can get. Besides, worry is always worse than a waste of time. We know this. Somewhere in all of us, we know this. It is the quality of life that matters, not whatever quantity of it we can defensively amass before we die. Change – here I mean in the form of discernible difference – is a prerequisite for experience, and includes what we call death. So if we want experience – if we want life –, by extension we also ‘want’ death, death being but one form of change.

Without change, life cannot be.

What does it benefit us to live in fear of change, of death? Whom does it benefit that we live in fear? None other than those who are systemically compelled to control us. And yet, being dysfunctional, this compulsion does not in fact benefit even those dominated by it, let alone us, the ostensible targets of that compulsion.

In the end, then, it doesn’t really matter who wants what they’re selling. And I say this believing nobody can wholly want it, for the reasons set out above. In other words, while there will be fearful, reflexive and/or frivolous participation in the VRs coming our way – and the many other palliative honeytraps like it –, what will transpire as a consequence of that part-acceptance can only conform in some unpredictable way to life’s nature, which flows towards healthier outcomes. Being afraid of the historical turbulence that is but one manifestation of the rebalancing we’ve touched on in this article is, in effect, being afraid of reality. It is undignified, joyless, and anti-life. We are capable of healthier, nobler states of being. When we embrace this, when we find the courage to act on this, it will become clear that we do not want the Vicarious any more, do not want to expend our energies in perpetual flight from the inescapable. We never really did.

Which means, of course, that each of us has work to do, but on ourselves in symbiosis with our contribution to the quality of how history – reality – effects its inevitable rebalancing and introduces us to what succeeds our rapidly disintegrating humanist-materialist experiment, as we experiment with what to do next.

The moon, the sun

A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.

Introduction

No, I am not qualified. Nobody is when it comes to the necessarily uncharted territory we will explore in this article. Indeed, the ground I want to cover simply cannot be clearly charted. And no ‘expertise’ other than the intuitive and instinctual can be earned in this territory – where neither intuition nor instinct yield expertise as commonly understood, strictly speaking.

I want to delve into masculinity and femininity, rationality and irrationality, intellect and instinct, mind and body. I want to examine how opposites might be better ‘understood’ (or ‘felt’) and so reflect on how oppositional thinking (diabolical – that which divides into two) is a profound problem when you identify yourself with one side and demonise the other. As with my previous post, then, this one is slippery and unlikely to yield clear-cut conclusions. But – I argue – it is precisely this uncertainty and confusion that may hold the keys to the subtle and nuanced wisdom we will need to gracefully navigate the collapse of civilisational categories now rampantly underway.

How confusing is confusion?

Duality and polarity are concepts easily conflated into a single domain of opposites. Sunlight elucidates, moonlight deceives: opposites. Masculinity penetrates, femininity yields: opposites. Black opposes white because each is the total absence of the other. The truth is not a lie and a lie is not the truth; they are mutually exclusive. And yet such pairs don’t all belong together in the same set; there are very important distinctions to be drawn.

For example, a truth stands alone as a whole, while the masculine without the feminine cannot. We might postulate ‘pure’ femininity, but doing so we never seriously assert a whole; male and female are halves of a polarity. However, to assert good and evil as the halves of a polarity is to mislead. Good is not made whole by the presence of evil; evil is the result of turning one’s back on the good, and so exists – comes into ‘semi-being’ – within the good. Put differently, the Satanic comes into semi-being within and subsequent to the Godly, but the Godly has no need of the Satanic anymore than light requires a shadow. Similarly, while a lie may be a manipulation of the truth, the truth can never be a manipulation of a lie. And while one could make a semantic argument to that effect, something important about truth would be missing. The same applies to war and peace; peace is still peace in the absence of war. War does not complete some whole whose opposite is peace. (Note please that this has little to do with appreciation, with taking peace for granted.)

In other words, two halves of a polarity are both required by that polarity. The elements (not halves) of a duality, however, are not co-equal. As you might imagine, conflating duality and polarity leads to all sorts of confusion and distortion, and I think over time to the sort of lazy moral relativity on which much of humanity appears to be adrift today. It must be clear to most that we increasingly see good equated with evil, war with peace, exactly as anticipated by George Orwell in 1984: a case of dualities confused for polarities. But unbalance and dis-ease also arise when confusing a polarity for a duality, which is what we are exploring in this article. Either way, there’s always a strong whiff of crass, cartoonish ‘thinking’ underlying all this, the sort of egoic, reflexive ‘thinking’ that breeds brute tribalism in pursuit of shortsighted self interest.

So I’m here to ask if there could be value in confusion. Have we somehow denigrated what moonlight has to offer in favour of the bright clarity sunlight affords, having favoured, in a grossly unbalanced way, one half of a polarity for far too long?

Well, we can start with the basics and define confusion. Etymologically, “to confuse” is to mix (“fuse”) things together (“con”) in a nonsensical or meaningless way. Over the last couple of centuries or so, confusion has come to mean a state of mind in which very little is clear or makes sense. Confusion is unpleasant and unwanted; it discombobulates.

The obvious question is, why does confusion discombobulate us so? Perhaps because we, governed by ego, need predictable outcomes to be able to navigate our lives safely, to survive. (I touched on this in my previous post.) We need a reliably predictable environment to function properly, generationally, culturally. That which is entirely unnavigable because unpredictable and ever changing cannot be handled or controlled, at least not as we understand navigation, constancy, direction and fixed location. We can respond to the realm of confusion, perhaps even adroitly, but we cannot meaningfully control or manipulate it, pretty much by definition. It represents a state of being or a domain entirely unsuited to egoic talents and predilections.

Putting it symbolically, moonlight obscures while sunlight is said to be “the best of disinfectants”; the sun radiates a light that reveals, that allows us to see clearly. The clarity of pure reason is a Beauty, a True Good, capable of delivering that most cherished of things: certainty. There would be no civilisation and therefore no culture without certainty. Much of the last three centuries has been the manifestation of this now deeply engrained reflex on the triumph of reason and science over superstition, fantasy, wishful thinking, etc. It is as if we have been consumed by the task of banishing the moon from its business. It is as if we have been subsuming the feminine, kicking and screaming, into the masculine in pursuit of ‘balance’ and ‘equality’, blind to the fact the ‘balance’ won is the result of loading the scales with sunlight on both sides.

I consider myself very much a sun person: all reason, logic, clarity, analysis. Over the years, I have had countless battles with my daughter, who inhabits an ever-shifting world of creativity and imagination. She refuses, on ‘principle’ – or is it on instinct? –, to fit neatly into my very clearly expressed conceptions of how to be. So I am a sun-wearied, though hardened loser of every such battle and can share this: What I briefly laid out above is not really the right line of inquiry. In fact, no line of inquiry can be correct in analysing the potential values of moonlight and confusion. We must come at what we call confusion, or better, simply be in confusion, with an entirely different attitude. Only the right attitude or state of being can sustain us there for long enough for it to be fruitful, instructive.

This is my supposition: confusion so discombobulates because we have lost faith in, lost connection with, unmoored in some important way, the Feminine. A tired old trope I know, but it bears repeating. We are nowhere near whole, or hale. We are sick, likely every civilised one of us. 

The shriller we become, the clearer it is we are on the wrong footing.

Nothing heals like sickness (or: Constraint liberates)

I was very ill from just before Christmas to early March. Because I have lost faith in western medicine, Big Pharma, hospitals, doctors and the ‘establishment’ generally, though not particularly – this is not a judgement of each human involved – I decided to let the sickness run its course unattended. Importantly, I was never afraid, remained calm even when I was struggling for breath, even when I looked in the mirror and saw a skin-skeleton staring back at me; I lost roughly 10% of my bodyweight in a little over two weeks. 

I intuitively knew to listen to my body by not interfering, by letting things proceed as they needed to. And “listen” isn’t quite right, either; listening is somewhat intrusive, demands structured communication. It was more that I took time to merely abide, or be, or commune openly with what was. No filters, no analysis, just being in the situation as it unfolded through the endless now. This was not of course 100% of the time and dreamless sleep does not count, but as often as I was able, I deliberately allowed myself to sink into that state of rich silence interspersed with wild emotions that coursed through and poured out of me. I was tossed about on emotional turbulence I just let happen, and finally found it liberating and restorative, bedridden and useless as I was at a very difficult time for my wife, who was also tending her sick mother.

(It ought to be noted that this is no prescription for treating any disease. This is an observation of a particular occurrence in my life and how I correlate it with the age-old problem of opposites, polarities and dualities.)

Piece by piece, element by element, it was entirely confusing. There is nothing to say about the parts that needs to be heard. But submission to the process, sinking willingly into that confusion, healed me and produced treasures I can only fumble to convey. 

Reduced to riddles (but not reductio ad absurdum)

Are the sun and moon, masculine and feminine, even opposites? Of course they can be presented as such, but my sense is that such presentations deceive and mislead. To cast them as opposites is to crassly simplify an exquisitely subtle relationship, or partnership, that could not be more fundamental or important, and perhaps irreducibly mysterious. If I have earned an increase in wisdom from my illness, it is because I left my intellect, reason and rationality at the door. Consequently, it is almost contradictory of me to retrieve the relevant memories and display them here in an orderly fashion, neatened by logic, made clear by the rules of grammar, lexis and syntax. I can hardly help but wound that which I am attempting to honour.

And that is perhaps the central point: we wound the mysterious by explaining it, strip it of its value, just as sunlight slowly peels paint from a wooden door. Explication is perhaps the gravest danger of the utopian urge. This intuitive truth is anathema to the rational mind. I note Putin was judged “irrational” in the western press recently. “Irrational”, that most irredeemable of sins. Worse even than sin by virtue of being devoid of logic, good sense, predictability, reliability. It reminds me of the impotence of childhood or perhaps what a dog might experience trying to warn its humans that the house they are about to move into is haunted. And I think this is a valuable image even if its value can only ever be found in fiction. When we shine sunlight onto what we saw under the moon, we discover we fooled ourselves, that our fears or hopes had been ill founded. But, I assert, there was value there that sunlight simply cannot reveal. Poo-pooing that value leads inexorably to dystopia, the fruit of the utopian urge. And in fact, the concept of “value” is deceptive here. Language is like a bull in a china shop when confusion must out.

“Tread softly”, wrote Yeats, “because you tread on my dreams.”

If we read Kant, we expose ourselves to an intellect that ‘neutrally’ worshipped pure reason, or rather the process of critical analysis as a means of distinguishing fact from fiction by referencing what our senses can confirm in consensus, as opposed to what we might experience solipsistically in dreams and fantasies. The former is real and thus matters; the latter is not, is a trifle, a passing fancy best forgotten. Fact and fiction are set immutably opposite each other with a view to lauding one and discarding the other.

But how opposed are fact and fiction: consensus sense-based ‘reality’ and individually experienced dreams? 

Our egos fear madness as they fear death; both spell our end. This means we are predisposed, reflexively, to denigrate what fantasy and dream might convey, for they lead to insanity … or at least are pathways down and away from the clear light of reason and rationality. Freud and Jung – and of course countless shamans, mystics and artists throughout the ages – have trod this territory in different ways, but each brought back insights of great value to the rest of us. The languages of tarot, astrology, and symbology generally endure somehow. And if this is because humans seem ‘lamentably’ prone to irrationality, perhaps it is our fearful fixation on the reliably predictable that limits our cultural imagination in this vital domain. 

Today I want to say, “What’s wrong with fear?” I have come to see our relationship with fear, with the constraints of our biology, our vulnerability to disease and injury, as the issue, rather than the objects of that relationship. This strikes me as a consequence of, or synonymous with, lauding the masculine over the feminine, the clear over the confusing.

Romance is an art lovers co-create as they fall in love. Romance has an experiential truth to it, is a real compulsion that defies reason with dizzying nimbleness. If, that is, you are susceptible to its allure, or have ever found yourself victim to cupid’s arrow, that biochemical soup science loves to reduce romance to. From my point of view as a man, I am granted access through my lover’s eyes into a state of being – for me the Feminine – that drowns the everyday me in something alien and bewitching: confusion as enchantment. After many such drownings, and recently from my illness and other experiences forced upon me, I now flatter myself that I have acquired a workable but intimate appreciation of that bewitching domain, the Feminine, where before it was by turns deliciously and infuriatingly incomprehensible.

But how to express this ‘clearly’ without doing it an injustice? I’m just going to say that it’s implicit in the parts of this article that cannot be readily grasped. Perhaps that’s the most polite and honourable course. 

“Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

Art speaks to us beyond how science can. Indeed, even if software can now produce art, it is the meanings we make when exposed to that art that count, not the software-created art independent of all interpretation thereof. Fact meets fiction in an endlessly creative embrace. Fiction is a fact. Interpretation is a fact. Meaning making is a fact. But to explain meaning is either to strip it of meaning, or add further meaning to it, requiring further explication. And of course I’m playing with words, pushing them slightly beyond their common usage to make a point. As my muse demands.

I want to say that art is making meaning into art above and beyond that fusion of skill and inspiration that creates it. It emerges from a deep communion between fact and fiction, between the feminine and the masculine, between the sun and the moon, the individual and the collective, in a manner that cannot be taught explicitly, that cannot be reduced to a formula of any kind. It simply escapes capture, just as the soul and the divine must, just as what we discover in the light of the moon must. Not because these domains are all fantasy or solipsistic apprehensions, but because our manner of analysis must remain blind to them for structural reasons, among other things.

Because, out of balance, afraid of what sickness might teach, dizzied too quickly by confusion’s wisdom, we have turned progress into a cancer that disinfects all before it in a compulsive spasm of smothering, as we become the harrowing shadow of what we wrongly insist we are.

That is my inconclusion.

The monstrosity, the beauty

 I could kiss you, lines of escape in my mouth. – Jeff Buckley, Vancouver

Introduction 

This is an article about romance and fascination. Or, more succinctly, how monstrosity and beauty arise, in ever repeating death and rebirth, from the living symbiosis of romance and fascination that beats like an immortal heart in the ego-wounded, creative void of narcissism.

Nowadays, if I gaze at monstrosity and beauty long enough, I can hardly tell one from the other. It’s this blurring of these apparent opposites that triggered this article, which I think is highly apposite in today’s rapidly unravelling world.

Listening again recently to two songs from Jeff Buckley’s posthumously released album (Sketches for) My Sweetheart, the Drunk coalesced for me the themes I was failing to develop in what has proved a difficult article to coax into coherence. The songs are Morning Theft and Vancouver. The former is allegedly about Elizabeth Frazer of the Cocteau Twins, a band that covered one of Jeff’s father’s more famous songs (Song to the Siren), a cover which caught Jeff’s ear. He was so taken with it, it led to his seeking out and meeting Frazer. She has stated publicly that she and Buckley had an affair.

The latter song is apparently about a primary-school teacher Buckley met at a concert in Vancouver. He was deeply moved by their encounter (just listen to the song), as, despite what he obviously felt to be the powerful, fated nature of their encounter, he could not reasonably ask her to come away with him for the rest of the tour, breaking off her career for a nomadic musician she had just met. Later, he apparently lamented that he could not form lasting relationships while a touring troubadour.

The romantic anguish in both songs is searingly earnest, yet each love song laments the passing of a different relationship. How serious was either if both were so agonisingly intense? What time ought to pass between romances for them to be meaningful? (Are such questions even remotely helpful? The answer is part of the meat of this article.)

The earnest but endless romancing I’m drawing into focus happens to be symbolised by the Knight of Cups tarot card. It represents an honest, charming, somehow eternally young, die-hard romantic questing endlessly to discover True Love, while penning beautiful poems or songs about his experience. Jeff Buckley was the Knight of Cups personified. He met a tragic, untimely end.

Some excerpts from Morning Theft:

Morning theft
Unpretended left
Ungrateful

[…]

True self is what brought you here to me
A place where we can accept this love
Friendship battered down by useless history
Unexamined failure

[…]

What am I still to you
Some thief who stole from you?
Or some fool drama queen
Whose chances were few?

An excerpt from Vancouver:

I am your failed husband contender
I’m your loan shark of bliss.

Now, smile, the rain of London it still insists
That we beg for our purity
As if we are pure in the rain of our contentment
As if I can think of this no more.

What catches my imagination perhaps more than any other facet of Buckley’s work is his compulsion to be ruthlessly honest. Romantic yearning and lament is, in many of his songs and all of his performances, inseparable from searing honesty; indeed, they are almost the same thing. What is most important about the Knight of Cups in my view is that he is genuinely earnest. He means every word with all his heart, passionately performs every deed. And yet he must move on to the next romance, the next quest, forever. It seems to be his bitter fate. He is thus earnest and insatiably restless. Does the latter vitiate the former? (Are such questions even remotely meaningful? How long does something have to last for it to be real? Why are we so unsettled by illusion, by deception, by the fleeting?)

For Buckley, I feel, earnestness demands ruthless self-honesty. Perhaps this intermingling of emotional forces can be cast as beauty and monstrosity entangled with each other forever, where neither makes lasting sense without the other. How can the beauty discernible in romance be richly meaningful until the full emotional truth of what both parties are is shared? Idle fantasy has no wholesome value; it is but one half of a process. Romance must die in the thorny embrace of the naked truth, but only to be born again precisely there, from full confessions of our hidden shame, of that which we find monstrous within. In another song, Fall in Light, Buckley sings: “Where you fall, I adore you.”

Where does fascination fit into this? Revealingly, the previous card in the tarot sequence is the Page of Cups, which symbolises self love. One interpretation equates the Page of Cups with Narcissus, i.e., self fascination. It’s not hard to discern a direct line between the two cards, from fascination with Self to fascination with (selected) Other(s). Both characters are romantic. In my view, this means both are governed by fascination. And, as I see it, death is never far from either romance or fascination, whether physical, spiritual, or emotional death (think Romeo and Juliet). There is something inescapably compulsive about both: in the Knight’s insatiable questing, in the Page’s insatiable gaze into the pool of his own eyes gazing back at him forever. The Truth both seek is necessarily beyond the horizon, whether inner or outer, forever out of reach. Fascination holds it there. And where the compulsion of fascination rules, there death is also.

What I’m attempting to bring into relief is a flowing, unbreakable connection from narcissism to fascination, from fascination to romance, and from romance back to narcissism, albeit this time as an interlocking embrace with Other rather than Self. This eerily nihilistic ouroboros, once fully exhausted, lands us on the shores of unconditional love. Love has little to do with any facet of the initiating cycle, even though romantic love is in my eyes a window onto unconditional love: true love, God as love: Love. An image that perhaps conveys what I mean here is the gaze shared by mother and baby as the baby feeds at its mother’s breast. I sense fascination in that gaze, and for me this fascination has a lot to do with the allure of death, or, expressed more gently, return to the womb, death being that final – though illusory – escape from all responsibility. The very escape with which nihilism is romantically fascinated.

But death is more correction than escape.

As humanity stands at the threshold of its evolution into a more mature version of itself, it is adrift on the intractable issues the constellation sketched out above must produce. If we do not land on the shores of unconditional love, if we are not yet done with this cycle, humanity will find itself locked into a brief but horrible period of global totalitarian rule. Totalitarianism’s predictable implosion will yield another opportunity for humanity to plant its feet firmly on the right path.

Anna Delvey and the reality of illusion

Anna Delvey is a real illusion, an illusion that fascinated Netflix enough to bankroll Inventing Anna, a compelling true and fictional account of her story. I won’t detail it here, except to point out that Ann’a surname is originally Sorokin, a common Russian surname (which interestingly means magpie, that jewell thief among birds).

“Anna Delvey” (devil?) is a character of Anna Sorokin’s invention, designed to be a vessel for carrying her to fame and ‘success’ as defined by modernity’s take on The American Dream: the finest champagne in every fridge of every luxury kitchen in her luxury villa in the Hamptons, a luxury apartment in every major capital city, luxury yachts moored in harbours on the world’s most beautiful coastlines, the very best designer clothes, and of course A List access to all the right places. Fiat luxus!

What more could anyone want. A young girl called Anna Sorokin gazed out into the world through the glossy windows of magazine culture, fit two and two neatly together, and dreamed Anna Delvey into being, made her real. She promptly fell into the eyes of her monstrous and beautiful creation and has yet to escape, as far as I know.

The materials used to power Anna Delvey towards her ambition were deception, brazen chutzpa, and social-media savvy, apparently mostly Instagram. Image is everything. Artful manipulation and command of one’s appearance is the royal road to ‘success’. An idea of success, however, not native to anyone, but instilled in most of us by The Way Things Are. The base qualities we reflexively associate with ‘success’ are not up for discussion. They are the solid, unquestionable facts that, properly understood, free us to be masters of our fates, to soar above the pathetic failures that make up that seething mass to which no one in their right mind wants to belong.

The crass short-sightedness of her ambition is in Anna’s story entirely unmentioned, seems beyond any possible acknowledgement. And this fascinates me. How old is this rags-to-riches tale? As old as civilisation as far as I can tell. Perhaps it defines civilisation’s soul. And yet here we are, regurgitating it ad nauseam. However, this is a minor point.

The more important point is raised by the downstream Anna Delvey, as played by Julia Garner; the professional reenactment of the raw original performance is likely the more persuasive. After all, a team of seasoned experts were assembled to produce it. Screen acting, with cameras focussed on every facial twitch and every emotion the eyes can convey, is now virtually indistinguishable from ‘real’ life in the sense of the emotional authenticity communicated. Screen acting is so achingly intimate. The viewer is connected to a (‘fake’) stranger’s soul through the professional and magical expertise of those involved in the production of modern film. When an actor weeps as her character with the camera in tight focus on her face, is that fake or real crying? What do “fake” and “real” mean here?

We want to be convinced. We don’t want to see the wig, the boom mic, the director, the cameras. We want our disbelief suspended, we want to be consumed by what we see, fascinated by the reflective pool of the screen as it gazes back at us amazed, fascinated by its power to convince, enraptured by how easy it is to enthral us. I think of this symbiosis as the narcissist’s embrace, which is somehow akin to the paralysis observed in a prey animal as a cobra rises to strike. We are invested; the illusion is as real as our commitment to it, and thus deadly. We give ourselves to it wholly and are thus at its mercy. It is a thrilling commitment, a dangerous, delicious flirtation with power. It is emotionally, psychologically reminiscent of our potentially fatal dependence on our mother’s love.

So we have a fusion of womb-like safety with deadly threat: an intoxicating and addictive mix. This is the source of the narcissist’s charm as it feels its way into the eager hunger of the empath’s receptivity. Can you hear the whisper? We two are one. As one, safety is assured. We are bound to each other by the contract of our mutual need. The devil’s chains are made of this. And they lead us to the dead end of nowhere. All sorts of social pairings are marked by this dynamic: “mortgage”, for example, is French for “grip of death”. The social contract between presidents and their people is characterised by the narcissist’s embrace. The media are relentless charmers of their audience’s narcissistic appetites, and so on.

The film industry itself is of course romantic at heart. Even gritty realism is idealised, distilled, and thus romanticised. Humanity seems to vicariously exorcise its pain and pleasure through art, now most often through the art of film, which is several art forms fused to one.  And the films keep on coming. Yes, this repetition is about profit as much as anything else, but the cyclicality of the romance we experience with each passing blockbuster and news item is more than reflective of the Knight of Cups’ endless questing. In our case, most involved are passive consumers where the Knight is a creator of art. We are the multitudinous Pages of Cups as so many embodiments of Narcissus gazing into what we know of ourselves as reflected in the pool of cinema screens, computer screens, TV screens and magazines.

They feed on us as we feed on them. Who is innocent? Who is guilty? Is not each of us responsible for our power?

Somehow, this all seems of a theme to me. And the living theme embodied by this uroboric cycle must reflect society’s quality of being – infantile –, just as it magically guides us forwards into new cultural possibilities.

What are those possibilities?

The death of idealism

Idealistic people, like me, are wont to seek out the beautiful and do battle with the monstrous. It is, perhaps, an unfortunate reflex. It is romantic, and thus narcissistic, and thus nihilistic at root. And I don’t even mean that disparagingly. It’s simply a cycle we learn from.

A few weeks ago, I made the time to watch Dark Waters. The film impressed me deeply. For me it captured how history pushes mercilessly on. The film also conveys how self-destructive groupthink can be, and how much individual effort can accomplish in redressing the ills born of history’s monstrous momentum. Dark Waters is based on a multi-decade legal battle between a relentless lawyer (Rob Bilott) and chemical giant DuPont around the environmentally toxic nature of Teflon’s manufacture.

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” said Spock in a saccharine Star Trek film of old. When I heard the line decades ago, I agreed. Now, I just don’t know. The many can become monstrous. When they do, they refuse to accept this has happened, do not want to have their true face reflected back at them. Fighting against monstrous groupthink is expensive, seemingly counter-productive for a long time, and of uncertain outcome. But remarkable individuals do selflessly stand up for what is right, and in so doing unintentionally unleash destructive forces they had not reckoned with. Is the charge that powers those forces drawn precisely from the tension between the monstrous and the beautiful, and how we perceive both into antagonistic interbeing?

The monstrosity I saw in Dark Waters is breathtaking. Twice I had to pause the film to cry, to process what I was seeing. For DuPont, the damage done is just doing business. My guess of any corporation’s base mindset is that they are vehicles for doing good in the world, that their size, power, reach, influence, and harnessed expertise are far more valuable than less efficient, less effective alternatives. People’s lives are made measurably better: just look at all those helpful products! Sadly, though, corporations do have to break eggs to make those omelettes. On both sides of this harsh reality, the successful are rewarded for their efforts, the unsuccessful punished. That’s how nature works. Pragmatics and logic require us to accept this. There’s no use fighting the way things are.

But – I protest – the utility of fighting monstrosity lies precisely in not knowing all outcomes, lies in the immeasurable. Doing the right thing, taking the loving course is a good in its own right, a priori. Perhaps this is tautological; good is good, love is love. Perhaps I want to believe this too much. And yet I see value in this particular tautology. It too captures the nature of things, the way things are.

And yet. And yet…

One of the babies born in the area of West Virginia where the film is set, is exposed in the womb to the toxins manufacture of Teflon requires. He is born with only one nostril and a very disfigured eye. His parents named him Bucky. Bucky makes a cameo appearance, as himself, now a grown man. He is happy, healthy, generous, warm hearted: a beautiful human being. While the film’s protagonist, Rob Bilott, had been duking it out with DuPont lawyers in West Virginian courts for most of Bucky’s life, Bucky just went about the business of growing up, and did a fine job of it.

Bucky’s beauty, or rather the beauty Bucky represents, does not vindicate the corporate criminality the film reveals, but is somehow born of it. Does it instruct us on something far more profound, a something that can only escape our control? (Is it monstrous of me to ask that? Aren’t there unforgivable sins?)

I feel we are not meant to robotically follow minutely defined life paths. If we try to build a reality free of tragedy, we will create more tragedy than we avert. Life’s terrible beauty – I now see a very different meaning in that famous oxymoron – can only emerge, as it does, because life – nature, God, All That Is – escapes our control. Life cannot submit to our egoic desires and fears that it be safe, secure, minutely predictable. We cannot ‘civilise’ reality. We are of it, in it, constitute it as one in diversity. And we simply cannot appreciate the immeasurable value of this truth through romantic-narcissistic eyes. However, as we choose love, as we move beyond romance, beyond idealism – beyond all isms –, reality changes before us. We begin to see differently. The filters through which we peered out at reality start to fall away, and we see more.

The bifurcation point that is covid19 and The Great Reset, generated by the demise of multiple isms, is an historic crucible inexorably forcing our attention on to the dysfunction of fearful tyrannical rule and the terrible beauty of more open, more humble, more liberating alternatives of social governance. To realise what the future offers, we must step into our courage and move past our fears. Only this will take us beyond the cycle I’ve tried to describe here. This too is the nature of things. This, too, peers out at us from between the blurred lines that will always fail to divide monstrosity and beauty, and hints at a love we are just beginning to learn.

Pandemic or plandemic?

What is real? What is a pandemic? Exactly how many people have to die, provably of some apparently infectious something, across exactly how large an area, for some authority to objectively declare a pandemic? Is such an event remotely provable in some impartial, ‘scientific’ way? Surely such events are primarily political, matters of power and persuasion.

How ‘real’ is a king? Surely it is collective belief that makes a king a king. (I’m certain kings know this.) If everyone stopped believing person X is a king, person X would no longer be a king. Doesn’t this apply to pandemics? Can, therefore, the tension between those who believe there was a ‘real’ SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and those who believe it was a plandemic and thus ‘fake’ – as I do – be resolved? I don’t think so. Except perhaps at a level above the tension between these two interpretations of reality.

Humans cannot live on romance alone. There is more to us than romance. But how much of what we are fits comfortably with what we think we are? How much can we admit? I have this strong intuition that we are terrified of the fact that illusion (perception) is as real as it gets. We are terrified of our power, our sovereignty. Anna Sorokin fascinates and terrifies us because her brazen deception as Anna Delvey – the very Devil – is exactly as real as anything else. So we bind ourselves to a deal that outsources our own power as institutionalised authority, an authority that commands us to ‘know’ that she was a fraud, a ‘fake’. A legal pronouncement is made within the institution of a court and our nerves are settled. I mean, what if anyone could claim anything about themselves? There’d be chaos!

(That chaos is an impossibility is lost on almost everyone. Equally invisible is that we are each responsible for our fate.)

I am a committed advocate of truth and authenticity, but am steadily losing my grip on what those things are. I suspect my experience is currently shared by most. There is a core religious assertion that Truth is immutable, with God as Truth, as the unchanging foundation of reality. In this assertion, the immutable core somehow sets illusory change into motion to allow us – we children of God, we souls of God’s making – to learn about truth. I find this unpersuasive. For me, if there are absolutes – and I feel strongly that there are – they are paradoxically emergent from dynamic context rather than ‘solidly’, ‘objectively’ immutable. The only ‘things’ that can exist are ever evolving facets of All That Is, which itself evolves (changes) as we evolve. And of course, All That Is has always been evolving. It is impossible for some fundamentally unchanging thing to produce change. So I feel – I don’t like “believe” – that it is our particularly human need for solidity and predictability that gives rise to the sense that that which is solid and unchanging – reliable!! – is the essence of the real. Aren’t sneezes and blinks real? What about passing fancies? Fleeting thoughts? Isn’t everything we experience just as real as, say, the alps? How can there be shades of the real? What use is an asserted hierarchy of existing based on duration? Can such reflexive hunches that reality is kind of like that somehow accurately reflect reality? Not in my reasoning.

The logic that reality ought to be somehow ‘solid’ is probably a projection of the profound utility of predictability that is an emergent consequence of how civilisation demands highly effective planning to work. Any civilisation’s success, composed in part of accumulated power and longevity, must depend very tightly on how well it plans, builds, constructs. The sorts of qualities peoples in civilisations will revere, then, will be closely aligned to these necessary properties of civilisation. Peoples outside civilisation will revere different qualities, I suspect with more emphasis on dynamic change. As civilised peoples, we are profoundly suspicious of constant change, of the illusory, the unreliable. So suspicious, in fact, that we reflexively reject it as unreal. If there were nothing solid to stand on, we would be lost in a terrible and unending swirl of vertigo. Or so we fear.

What awaits us over the horizon of our cultural imagination? I suspect it is something vaguely Anna Delvey, something freer, less fixed, less nailed down. The more we respect free will, the more we mature, the more we step into our power and sovereignty, the greater the diversity of expression we will produce and enjoy. Change is pushing us that way. Look around you at the abject and total failure of hierarchical authority, of centralised power, of ‘elitism’. It’s a mess of desperate, knee-jerk decisions leading the Old Normal over the cliff. What politician or judge or central banker or board member in some mega media corporation actually understands all the nuance that constitutes this historical moment? Which of them is an expert on reality, on wisdom, on patience? How can billions of people be instructed in the majority of their movements and decisions by some partially AI, global authority without carpet bombing cultural diversity? How on earth could a system of such petrified rigidity be wholesome?

History is pushing us towards greatly increased personal sovereignty. Anna Delvey is a pallid and dysfunctional foretaste of the freedoms modernity permits, a foretaste basted in the infantilism of our decadence, and thus wholly devoid of the wisdom required to wield such freedom with grace. Which is not to say her story is devoid of pathos. I see much beauty in it. But humanity has handed itself powers it is culturally too immature to use wisely … for now. The crisis we are passing through is teaching us this. Our job is to notice and learn.

As we grow into what we can be, so our fearful need for outsourced authority to instruct us on the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’, whether of pandemics or fraudsters, will fall away. We will outgrow it, are outgrowing it. The dizzying truth is that we make our own reality, albeit together, in dynamic consensus. Reality is not solipsistic. We are co-creators of the real.

Soon, it will not matter whether there is currently a pandemic; we will be adults who know what to do. Soon, it will not matter that some like to deceive us; we will be adults who can handle ourselves. We will live our responsibility for our own lives, knowing we are powerful and impact our environment profoundly. We will know that as we act outwards, so our actions return to us as fate, as karma, as consequence. We will be patient, not frantic; curious, not addicted; mindful, not fascinated; loving, not needy. This is what history now requires of us. Current structures were not built to accommodate this transition and so must give way, just as a snake must shed its skin to grow.

I have a sneaky feeling we know exactly what to do.

Postscript

Of detachment in the spiritual sense I used to think, nah, that’s just aloof avoidance of the beautiful messiness of life. I see it very differently now. Detachment is full freedom from ego addictions and fears that requires no reflexive suppression of negative emotions, no splendid isolation from the noise and bustle of rat-race living; it is freedom as honest and graceful as the sky, but rich and varied as a rain forest. You earn it just as you earn wisdom, love, true maturity. Detachment is not an easy goal, but its qualities include clear awareness of the intimate interconnections you have with everything around you, knowing how best to help others and whether help is the right response at all, an active intuition unaffected by the worries and stresses of others, keen empathy with no complicating co-dependencies developing in its wake, and so on. Properly detached, we see far more, are less cluttered in our being, are more creative, and care more but with joy rather than worry.

Hard to attain, yes, but ‘real capitalism’ and ‘true socialism’ are flat impossibilities, lite utopias that must crush their acolytes. I find detachment far more attractive and promising as a guiding principle for society that any ism.