Beware the Woke Mind Virus!
Thoughts on Elon Musk Vs Don Lemon, plus Hopi prophecy
Since watching former CNN anchor Don Lemon’s interview with Elon Musk last week, I have been thinking about what it reveals about our contemporary moment. I have many inchoate thoughts, which I will share here in hopes of pushing through the ambiguous murk to reach that ever-elusive state of clarity. According to Vanity Fair, “the sit-down was just another maddening peek into the increasingly extremist and internet-rotted mind of one of the world’s richest and most powerful people.”
I am trying to locate an indigenous prophecy I read a while back that defines this time as one where uninitiated/adolescent “man boys” gain control of the world, with disastrous consequences for all life on Earth. I am not finding it. However, as I wrote in depth in Quetzalcoatl Returns, I suspect we see the fulfillment of indigenous prophecies such as the Hopi myths. This seems evident to me (let me know what you think in the comments).
As I explored in my book, “prophecy” has to be understood carefully. As Armin Geertz, an anthropologist of the Hopi culture, writes: “Prophecy is not prediction, even though it purports to be so. Prophecy is a thread in the total fabric of meaning, in the total worldview. In this way it can be seen as a way of life and of being.” In an oral culture like the Hopi, there was a shared capacity to elaborate on traditional foretellings. Prophecy changes and morphs with the speaker, while remaining coherent in its essence.
The Hopi prophecies, as well other Native American legends, refer to a time when humanity loses its connection with nature and spirit. We wake up the dark chthonic forces of the Underworld, get trapped by our machines, and suffer catastrophic losses as a result. Back in 1970, Dan Katchongva, a Hopi leader who died in 1972 at age 112, said:
We have teachings and prophecies informing us that we must be alert for the signs and omens which will come about to give us courage and strength to stand on our beliefs. Blood will flow. Our hair and our clothing will be scattered upon the earth. Nature will speak to us with its mighty breath of wind. There will be earthquakes and floods causing great disasters, changes in the seasons and in the weather, disappearance of wildlife, and famine in different forms. There will be gradual corruption and confusion among the leaders and the people all over the world, and wars will come about like powerful winds. All of this has been planned from the beginning of creation.
That, for me, is another fascinating element in the worldview of the Hopi: They conceive of an inevitable destiny in the pattern of cyclical time. When I visited Martin Gasheseoma, one of the traditional elders who has since passed away, he conveyed his belief that what we live through now is like a movie or an unfurling scroll. While we can make individual choices, we can’t stop the larger unfolding of this shared destiny.
Anyway, to return to the interview between Musk and Lemon, Musk — like Putin, Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Trump — seems to be one of those contemporary “man boys” who have attained tremendous power without the requisite training or emotional maturity for such a role. He seems a bit lost and in quite a bit of unacknowledged pain — no surprise he numbs himself frequently with ketamine. He suffers from childhood trauma, as so many of us do. We build our personality structures based on the mechanisms we develop when young to shield ourselves from a dangerous world.
Yet I found Musk far more appealing during the interview than Lemon, who came across as a bland corporate apparatchik, the kind of person who has suppressed the greater part of themselves in the determined effort to conform to corporate systems that reinforce old hierarchies and authority structures.
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