Key differences between The Digital and The Real

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1.  The Digital is highly controllable (at least in theory). Even when it disobeys or behaves unpredictably, the fix seems to be but a few code tweaks away, the initiating cause human error. The Real is organically, unpredictably defiant, with free will working its magic always. Every living thing has its own idiosyncratic ‘agenda’, expectations and plans be damned.
2. The Digital is measurably precise and fully knowable, governed (in theory at least) by pure logic. The Real is irreducibly ineffable.
3. The Digital deceives, bewitches and seduces. The Real inspires profound awe and could not be more authentic, even while it deceives, bewitches and seduces (on purpose).
4. The Digital belongs to us, is in our possession, and can be infinitely adapted to our will. The Real owns us; we are at its mercy and must adapt to its vicissitudes, or perish.
5. The Digital –

Hold on, aren’t I spouting false dichotomies? Aren’t the above words, at best, an idly provocative exercise in click-bait entertainment? (Click bait? I wish!)

Or perhaps they are a playful-but-serious attempt to understand how we now have a couple of lost generations, those around 30 and under, who have grown up enjoying access to Instant Gratification. The few comparisons above bring into relief various observations we can reasonably tease out of the prevailing milieu that are not wildly off target. I believe something like the above has haunted modernity for centuries and is now doing serious damage.

In my eyes, something is going dangerously wrong for the 30s and under; I 4 1 would like to understand and appreciate as much of the causal phenomena as possible. This article is a tentative foray in that direction.

“Welcome to the desert of the real.”

That’s a (digital) meme. I am composing this text (digitally) on a laptop to be shared soon (digitally) across the internet. All digital, all convenient, all easy peasy and isn’t it lovely all this sharing! But are we (irredeemably) spoiling ourselves with Easy Peasy and instant gratification of our ephemeral desires? Have we spoilt ourselves too much this time? 

To balance the above somewhat, how enlightened, how well informed, have we become?

It depends. Certainly it’s both-and.

The internet is an impossibly vast ocean of every conceivable kind of visual and auditory delight: entertainment; trickery, sobriety, deception, and honesty; science, entertainment and news; delusions of grandeur, unintended and blisteringly open honesty; kittens; the monstrous and the beautiful; self-indulgent victimhood and virtue signalling, and so on. We are so spoilt for choice we could browse forever and a day and barely make a dent on the content yet to be consumed. The day after that we’d still feel restless and empty, empty and unwanted. 

Into what strange paradise have we progressed ourselves? A digital paradise of Ultimate Convenience and high-saturation colours, the next thrill or delight or shock a mere click or swipe away. We consume content, we create content: we spend our attention, we clamour for attention. Doesn’t it feel like something is missing, something very important, something frustratingly hard to define, bottle, mass produce, and control? It feels that way to me.

Am I a luddite curmudgeon, you ask? Actually, I kind of love the internet, computing, programming, all that. However, as with any tool, The Digital can be abused, and in being abused, abuse. As you do unto Other, so you do unto Self. We have progressed ourselves into a miraculous toolshed whose power we understand but dimly. Our dim understanding undermines us unseen … partially unseen.

The Digital is powerful. It is in some ways technology’s latest and greatest armoury, and as such entices humanity’s best and brightest to pursue wealth, power, and immortality ensconced within it. Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton said that). Fake news and deep fakes belong to humanity now. Movies look utterly convincing, but all they seem to do is bang our bucks into fireworks of glittering spectacle that sometimes become story – as an afterthought almost –, but mostly do not. And when the lights go back on, we wonder, dimly, what remains that we can still trust. Restless and empty, empty and unwanted, it seems like our one remaining ‘power’ is maintaining peace of mind until the next distracting fix can be found. Our abilities in this regard seem to be quickly deserting us.

What’s that gnawing doubt I can’t quite dispel? Have we left something important behind, some ineffable equivalent of smell, taste, caress?

I’ve been musing of late that ‘community’ (whatever that is) might not be The Answer. Indeed, I’m convinced The Answer is not the answer. Looking for such, as variously as we have done, seems to have progressed us here. Persisting with that search continues to lead astray.

Community is to me a complex social context in which humans existentially rely on their fellow community members, people they know very well indeed. Community evolves organically as a result of very intimate life-and-death interdependencies that are the natural expression of human beings, that very social creature. Community is thus, fundamentally, a stranger-free zone. 

The internet, on the other hand, is a ‘community’ of consumable experiences created in concert with other humans who are (almost) all physical strangers to us; it is a stranger-rich zone in which no one really relies on anyone else, at least not existentially. All the other members of this new ‘community’ are deliciously, bitterly replaceable. 

Are we steadily rendering impossible any chance of a return to a situation in which we do rely on each other intimately and existentially? If that is what is needed for community to be community, what might be the costs of fervently trying to recreate the conditions from which true community can evolve?

On the other hand, if the future continues to be more of today – just more intensely –, in how bad a state of affairs are we? How far are we drifting from what is biologically, or organically, appropriate to humanity?

As part of the answer, is it a valid argument to observe, “I look around and see lost, depressed young people almost everywhere”? Or is it more valid to point at the alarming growth of the antidepressants market? Or the drugs designed to ameliorate hyperactive children? For those who’ve looked into this sort of thing, as for those with children of their own, this is familiar but troubling territory. Surely, in light of both our intuitive impressions and research on such matters, it’s not overly dramatic of me to ask whether something is going dangerously wrong.

If it is a Brave New World we are headed for, do we know what we’re doing?

Fundamental error?

While I’m confident some part of our predicament is the pace of technological change clashing with our far slower rates of cultural and biological adaptation, I suspect it’s fair to say that some of what ails us is rooted in fundamental error. Being fundamental, this is error that intrinsically demands correction; it eats at us from within. Some of the quality of our error is, in my view, reflected in the (surface) differences between The Digital and The Real hacked out into the foreground above. And I assert this specifically as someone who argues that The Real (organic, analog) is composed of The Digital (incorrectly understood by most as mechanical, binary); The Digital, I argue, is in fact organic: neither mechanical nor binary, possibly ternary, certainly mysteriously complex. Likely, that’s quite a confusing confession for you. 

Well, I aim to please.

The Digital percolates up to, or manifests into, our field of perception through particular analytical filters that affect our perception as we try to make sense of reality in particular (mechanical/computational) contexts. And yet The Digital we have thus perceived into existence is not, as a consequence of this filtering, outright illusion; it’s just not the whole story. The mythical 0 and 1 of the binary world, though seemingly very literal and ‘real’ when rendered on a page or screen, depict – not are – foundational yes-no decision-making processes, or logical-gate operations that are nevertheless not as foundational as we might think. There are no actual, physically existing 0s and 1s. Different phenomena are leveraged to act as true-false, yes-no, 0-1 binary elements to run systems built atop such logic-driven procedures. And it is all just as ‘real’ as anything else, like all information, but not ultimately foundational. Not until, that is, we add in the missing ingredient: the ineffable.

Nor are 0s and 1s indivisible atoms, nor can physics find any bits of matter or stuff that are finally indivisible (atomic). The search for an Indivisible Something yields “virtual” entities that defy full understanding (quarks and other sub-sub-atomic phenomena) that are co-existent with an array of interdependent forces and rules all required simultaneously for anything – for thingness – to be possible at all. The search for foundational building blocks has instead unearthed webs of information (mathematical rules) that are anything but indivisible lego bricks that can be reduced no further. It’s will-o’-the-wisps all the way down, where each one of which dissolves as soon as you isolate it (notionally) into the palm of your mind’s eye. 

Nothing makes sense in isolation. Or at least, not for very long, nor ever in some complete manner.

This string of non-controversial observations, for me, hints at the organic foundational underpinning of The Digital. Part of our civilisational exploration into the nature of reality has given us The Digital (in fact centuries ago). The way we peer into the nature of reality determines to some unknowable degree what we discover. The journey is the destination, the means are the ends. The Digital is no exception: Way become Goal, unexamined Mindset become Paradigm. The Digital is a useful, powerful, helpful paradigm or perspective, but not the whole story, and not in fact the ultimate foundation, which is, in my view, ineffable. The Digital thus has its roots in the ineffable and could not persist uprooted from it … cannot be uprooted from it.

(There is nothing but God. Everything is God.)

A car appears to be a purely mechanical entity, but it emerged from the organic and is inescapably subject to it, embedded in it, made of it. Each ‘identical’ car that comes off the production line – even if no human hand touched any part of it during its manufacture – faces a unique destiny. It will be subjected to different owners, be driven every single time on a unique, impossible-to-repeat journey, endure unique moments while parked wherever, each moment impossible to repeat. All cars, all manufactured things – be they pencil sharpeners, razor blades or Jumbo Jet cockpits – emerge from the organic, remain forever in the organic, and are inescapably subject to it. 

The same thing goes for computers, software, tiny little bits of code, everything. It is not possible to separate The Digital from The Real in an ultimate way. Notionally, yes, to a degree, and it is helpful to do so, but the separation achieved is just notional.

(Everything is God. There is nothing but God.)

Just as a thought is of consciousness but is not itself conscious, just as it is finally impossible to fully appreciate consciousness and spirit, so The Digital must always escape our grasp and produce unintended consequences our wisdom will never be able to anticipate. Our pseudo-mastery of this powerful set of tools far exceeds our grasp of its ramifications and meanings. 

We leap forward technologically in mighty bounds, but the great acceleration of our advance is breaking us apart. We are puppets yanked this way and that on the strings of our invention. We are dazed and dizzy, lost and soul-sick, but, strangely, can hardly tell this is so; everyone around us is, more or less, in the same condition. Only if we were to pop back in time, say to the early Middle Ages, would our manic state of being become discernible to us. Potentially, anyway; we would need to be there long enough to truly internalise the stark differences, then pop back to the present day and be horrified.

Now what? 

At whom or at what do we point the finger of blame? Where is the cause of our predicament that is simple, weak compared to us, and rectifiable?

Nowhere. No one and nothing is to blame. This is a very very difficult and involved situation. 

Decisions are investments in the future. Our willingness and ability to change course – should a course change be needed – is directly proportional to the amount of effort and energy the required course change would consume. And we tend to drift into our decisions, which takes very little energy: the infamous slippery slope so many of us reflexively prefer. So regardless of any morality or ideology we might impute to a situation, we become emotionally invested in How Things Are simply because changing them is most often an almighty undertaking. That very emotionality then becomes entangled in some ideology or other, which is itself also an investment born of hundreds of tiny ‘decisions’ that produced it, such that the inertial resistance to change grows over time. Despite the fact that nothing lasts forever.

Such is our entanglement with The Digital, and our modern disaffection with The Real. Such are the deeps roots and the deep soil of this false dichotomy.

My sense of what we can do in the meantime, is that the best we’ve got is noticing, talking about what we notice, taking small measures to meaningfully slow ourselves down, switch off, share with each other how the differences between the Infinite Cornucopia of The Digital compare to the Infinite Cornucopia of The Real, and learn how to really feel the beauty and mind-boggling complexity of the latter. The Real tends to seem drab and slow to gadget-addled minds, frustrates with its vital refusal to submit to our whims, always goes its own recalcitrant way, makes a mess of everything, makes our efforts seem puny and pointless. Learning how to see it with more open eyes, with humility, to feel, appreciate and then love it is one part of how to compensate for the breakneck speed with which modernity keeps bursting out of itself – ever forwards and wilfully blind to the past – into ever more spectacular iterations of itself, without ever really ‘nourishing’ anything other than our manufactured hunger for yet more intensity, yet more saturation, yet more stimulation and (entraining) entertainment.

To repeat, this is a very difficult situation. We had best make our peace with this fact. History is bigger and badder than ever, globally interconnected nations and corporations and organisations and habits of thought and academia and media and all of it are incapable of sufficient decoupling to escape history and go it alone, while we individuals, we fish in history’s violently undulating waters, are stuck to it all, embedded as constitutionally in All That Is as words woven into an incredible story. 

But “make peace” does not mean to accept the decadent insanity, it suggests we moderate our expectations. There is most assuredly a Better Way – probably several of them. However, what lies between now and then will be determined microscopically by our individual efforts at peace of mind, at mindfulness, at love and wisdom as they pertain to how we treat each other, in humility, and so discover in the warm lights of our healthy skepticism, courage and openness what this Better Way might be.

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.