Did We Summon this Beast?

Societal meltdown as initiatory threshold

What I want to consider today, strangely, is the possible positive outcome of the demolition of our inherited infrastructure of social reality and our long-standing institutions (government, law, media, education, etc). Before I can get there, I feel compelled to take a detour…

Witnessing the demolition of the American experiment — imperfect and problematic as it was — I feel profound sadness. I do not think most people here in the U.S. are making enough effort to reckon with the devastating consequences of this for their personal future, considering how it will effect them and their children over the next few years, let alone decades hence. Most people still seem eerily dissociated and detached, particularly young people. Most Gen Z-ers believe there is nothing they can do, so why even pay attention or protest? In Manhattan, I sense unacknowledged trauma and secret panic, like trapped electricity, shivering invisibly all around us.

Even if you are wealthy and protected in some ways (foreign passports and so on), the Trump-ian Right is still attacking the minds of your children. Particularly, boys are susceptible to hyper-militarism, Nazi-like racist tropes, videogames as violent propaganda, and Andrew Tate-style misogyny. Basic ideas of justice and fairness that create a decent society are getting obliterated by this wrecking ball. The Christian Nationalists still claim a religious mandate, some kind of righteousness or manifest destiny, despite the lawless actions of ICE, despite Trump’s open declaration of his right to kill people based on whatever whim, despite the rampant corruption and total debasement now underway.

The large-scale cynicism and apathy concerns me just as much as the destruction and institutional collapse, all happening so quickly. Of course, I could be wrong. Obviously, some people are waking up and getting involved. Perhaps the tendency to dissociate is, somehow, an intuitive defense mechanism or immediate survival response when facing something that is too enormous to contemplate. We are learning that the will to a good or decent, at least putatively democratic, society dies in the spirit of the people before it dies in reality. For many reasons we can analyze (Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Social Dilemma, etc), most Americans lost interest in actively maintaining our shared social contracts.

The whole situation is very weird — it feels like an extended bad acid trip, with no end in sight.

Esoteric Narcissism?

Here are questions, meant quite seriously, which I keep asking myself. Let me ask you:

Is there some sense in which you chose to co-create the return of this malevolent theocratic Fascism? Are you responsible, culpable, for all of this, in some way? Did some part of you (as an “existential kink”) want to experience a new range of emotions, including fear, anguish, and powerlessness — perhaps even live through “the end of the world”?

Is some inaccessible part of you seeking to use this crisis to force a transformation or metamorphosis of your inner being, your consciousness, in some way? Did you, unconsciously, help to create, or co-create, this epochal geopolitical disaster to fixate on some external ongoing hyper-object, something imagined to be out in the world?

Did you create or co-create this manifestation of geopolitical catastrophe to either avoid undergoing some inner confrontation, or to do some work of inner development you were otherwise postponing indefinitely? Did you manifest this nightmare to create an intense, initiatory path of transformation for yourself and those around you? Or did you invent it to dissociate, become more unconscious, collapse into spiritual vacuity?

I realize this idea that you (and I) invented this Trumpian fiasco may sound, at first, like esoteric narcissism, paranoid schizophrenia, or narcissistic collapse. In the neo-spiritual world, the idea that “You create your own reality” became an annoying catchphrase. From the analytic idealist viewpoint, there is a partial truth to it: What “I” am is an expression of the underlying unified field of consciousness, primordial non-dual awareness. This field of consciousness can only experience itself by creating separation, by constructing individuated containers of consciousness, to attain the temporary experience of a separate self or an individuated self-awareness that has the sense — the paradoxical illusion — of agency and free will.

From an analytic idealist perspective, as in Hinduism or Buddhism, the universe is basically like a dream that consciousness has woven together in order to project itself into it — to have the experience of growth, learning, development, separation, love, hate, creativity, etcetera, and perhaps, eventually, reunification and self-knowledge. We are parts of the dream and we are also dreamers of the dream, from our tiny little cubbyholes of embodied self-awareness.

During the Twentieth Century, the world experienced dictatorships — fascist or Communist — that sought total control over all elements of society, including the political, cultural, economic and ideological dimensions of human existence. Then these totalitarian systems mostly collapsed. For a time, progressives imagined we were on the way to permanently defeating this menace, with the rise of the liberal nation-state which guaranteed a certain degree of personal liberty, political participation, and human rights. This was the “end of history” thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama, which influenced Obama’s approach to foreign policy and, in particular, to China.

For a time, liberals convinced themselves that some kind of “free market” Capitalism inevitably led to liberalization and democratization. That did not happen. Instead, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes learned how to assimilate aspects of Capitalism into their systems of indoctrination and technocratic regimes of control. At first, they stumbled, but now they are hyper-adept.

It is now painfully obvious that progressives started to celebrate too quickly. It is also obvious that liberalism and secular humanism had fatal flaws — cracks which widened into fissures, until the whole ideological structure finally collapsed into dust.

As I recently discussed with economist Brett Scott, modern liberalism tried to reconcile the predatory mechanics of profit-driven Capitalism with ecological and humanist values, but this ultimately can’t work, as the basis of the system requires competition and exploitation.

I don’t know about you, but today I find Neoliberal politicians such as Obama, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Chuck Schumer have become unbearable to listen to. They lack the capacity to reckon authentically with this new authoritarian reality. They still want to cling to some middle ground of comprimose and collusion, which has disappeared. They don’t get it.

Rapture Ready?

We sense this is not just a political moment — it is also eschatological; a mythic and archetypal threshold we are crossing together, in some sense.