Numbthing

curiosity and desolation

Monday, nothing
Tuesday, nothing
Wednesday and Thursday nothing
Friday, for a change
A little more nothing
Saturday once more nothing

- The Fugs

I’ve been taking a few days to brood and reflect on what’s happening. It seems clear that we have entered a new stage of civilization collapse — we are participating, against our will, in the slow-motion breakdown of our post-industrial civilization in its familiar form. This is something many of us have anticipated for a long time. But it is always different when you physically and temporally cross the threshold. Consider the difference between reading a novel about some significant life event such as the death of a parent or the birth of a child, and directly experiencing it yourself. The direct, lived experience adds many depth dimensions, colorations, nuances.

There isn’t one clear or sudden point where civilizational collapse occurs. We are living through it as a gradient, a series of mini-thresholds. I mean, there could be a sudden switchover. There could be a point where all electricity stops or we turn on the tap and brown toxic sludge pours out of the faucet instead of water. Or we can’t leave our homes for fear of armed vigilantes. Or AI drives everyone stark raving mad. We’re not quite at that point yet. But it is not a stretch to imagine those prospects up ahead of us on the horizon. Chris Hedges writes on the likelihood of American concentration camps in the near future. The Hopi elder I visited in 2003 also warned me that this was part of the prophecy, presaging the transition into the Fourth World.

My friend Bruce Lyon, a New Zealand-based occult teacher, offers a little text on what he calls “Numbthing,” which resonates with me. He writes:

Chaos theory reveals that emergence happens at the edge of instability. The bifurcation point—the Numbthing—is a site of rupture and revelation. In this model, planetary consciousness follows a recursive dynamical function:

xₙ₊₁ = xₙ² + C(t) + δₙ

Here:

- xₙ: State of planetary consciousness at time n

- C(t): Control parameters (e.g., technological advancement, ethical maturity, environmental feedback)

- δₙ: Perturbations—synchronistic, random, or deliberate, such as archetypal transmissions

This equation, like the Mandelbrot iteration, allows for the unfolding of strange attractors, new orders of coherence, and transformation through iteration.

The Planetary Bifurcation

The Earth, seen as a self-organizing system, is now in bifurcation. The breakdown of ecological balance, the surge of artificial intelligence, and the collapse of linear progress narratives signal not failure but the necessity of phase transition. We are entering the Numbthing—a collective rite of passage. What lies beyond depends on how we meet this threshold: with fear or with mythic integration.

It is an interesting question to ponder: Whether “what lies beyond depends on how we meet this threshold” or not. I suppose this is one of those paradoxes where both sides are true: We have absolutely no control, yet we are, at the same time, participatory “co-creators” in the unfolding or emergence. We are, as individuals, simply transitory aspects or masks worn by the universal consciousness — God or “world spirit” — which may have long-range intentions we cannot fathom. These may not support our short-term interests or even our survival.

Considering authoritarian repression, technocratic mass mind control and hyper-surveillance, I found myself depressed, semi-incapacitated, for a few days. A Ketamine journey with a friend — ironically — helped shake me out of it. I remembered, once again, the Cosmic Joke.

I find myself struggling to even envision a path for humanity to escape the technocratic totalitarian nightmare we seem to be racing toward. Yet at the same time, the authentic possibility of humanity attaining authentic collective emancipation is closer than ever before — perhaps here, for the first time in our history. Ironically, this is also due to the rapid evolution of AI, which also threatens us with “infinitely stable dictatorships” and near-term extinction. I recommend reading Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where he foresaw, from 1891, how machines could evolve to end human drudgery and conscripted labor, allowing every human being the freedom to cultivate their unique essence.

I explore Wilde’s wonderful, still-trenchant ideas in my new video essay, AI Job Loss & the Rise of Techno-Feudalism. Please watch it here:

(By the way, if you could take one second to subscribe to the channel and “like” the video, it would be super helpful for us as we seek to build more of a presence on Youtube. We also post many shorts which you can share on social media, if inspired!)

One analogy for civilizational change I explored in my book How Soon Is Now was the caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis. Biologists tell us that the caterpillar doesn’t simply sprout wings, but, instead, in the cocoon, the caterpillar consumes all available resources and, as it dies, a small group of “imaginal disks” or “imaginal cells” start to propagate, containing the code for the transmutation of the biotic goop of the caterpillar into a butterfly. These imaginal disks are attacked by the dying caterpillar’s immune system, which sees them as a virus. As the imaginal disks evade this attack, they gain strength. They start to propagate themselves more efficiently until they take over the entire organism and convert it from crawly consumer to floaty pollinator.

Human social evolution could be understood as an extension of biological evolution in some sense. The United States provided the original flawed template for a limited “democratic” nation state based on imperialism, extractivism, capitalist market dynamics and consumerism, allowing for limited civic participation on the part of the masses while maintaining elite privilege and hierarchy. The basis for this system was ongoing economic growth and progress, plus hydrocarbons which gave us billions of cheap slaves. This was possible for a few centuries because we had not yet hit the resource limits of the biosphere. What seems clear is that we have now gone way past those limits: We are in overshoot.

As we can no longer escape the consequences of a hydrocarbon-dependent economy based on overproduction and over-consumption, the elites who control our capital and our military forces find themselves forced to re-engineer and redesign the system that benefits them so excessively, on the fly. They need to do this without allowing for authentic democratic participation. A meaningful democratic process would break their dominance, revoke their privilege, and lead to an overturning and leveling of wealth and power through progressive taxation, reappropriation of wealth, and the establishment of some form of democratic socialism. What’s crystal clear at this point is that the wealthy progressive establishment doesn't want this socialist outcome anymore than the reactionary fossil fuel and tech oligarchs do. The mainstream Democrats’ response to Trump’s onslaught has been so measured and tepid as to seem almost comatose (a few are starting to wake up, including Chris Murphy, Gavin Newsom, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

As Pissed Magistus explores in this short video, the ruling elite seeks to force a massive systemic transition — and they want to do this without forfeiting any of their power and control. In fact, they want to intensify that control. They can’t admit they caused the failure of this system as this would lead to popular outrage. The only way to perform this magic trick is by unleashing total chaos and horror on the population — misdirection — until the people beg for the restoration of order at any price.

The Trump regime is undertaking this very effectively — almost, one could say, scientifically. Even elements of Trump’s policies that seem insane, like the unpredictable tariffs, make sense, once we understand the goal is not to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., but to destroy the country’s prosperous upper middle and middle class. These are the most likely classes to organize opposition to tyranny and despotism.

Why did the tech oligarchs decide to take over the US government from the inside at this particular juncture?