Five years since Covid, guys.

About the long Quinquennium

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No, I won’t retraumatize you all by going through the Covid timeline again. It’s enough that I had to see one the other day, complete with the measures, lockdowns and their idiotic names. Talk about a PTSD flare.

The whole mess is now 5 years old, almost to the day.

And what a ride it has been.

People have talked about the long 19th century, and even the long 20th century. Maybe we should call the period from 2020 to 2025 the long Quinquennium. Like the previous long centuries, the long Quinquennium separates two epochs, having wrought massive philosophical, technological and political changes, literally bringing into existence an entire new reality: not just materially as in a changed world map or new governments, but spiritually, in the sense of a new paradigm snapping into place, forever changing “what we have always known to be true”.

It is hard even to remember how the world looked like before that fateful Ides of March 2020, how it felt. Most people were still firmly locked into BoomerCringe Dasein, toiling away in their superficial jobs, being cool with all the idiotic narrative frameworks of the day, from man-made global warming to woke hysteria, from globalist neoconliberalism to irrational trust in our institutions. There had been a few conspiracy theorists around, to be sure, but for many of those this was all more of a hobby than a serious outlook on the world. They might have engaged in dot-connecting on the weekend, but on Monday they went to work and talked NormieStuff with Normie people. Their ideas had no real bearing on their lives. The real test was yet to come.

Covid hit planet earth on the metaphysical plane like an extinction-level meteorite. It destroyed a world. It triggered an array of volcanos, henceforth sputtering the lava of mankind’s previously repressed thought and emotion: the vague sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong with this realm of ours. The recognition that the enemy isn’t left or right, up or down, or here and there. That the enemy is this other being, this other creature, the species of the NPC. A creature that looks like us, talks like us, shares the exact same surface qualities: he comes in all sizes and shapes, with all kinds of talents and faults, all psychometric traits, all intelligence levels.

The esoteric concept of the pre-adamic, “soulless” man, G.I. Gurdjieff’s sad vision of mechanical, automata-like humans, talk about higher centers (or “chakras” in New Age parlance) as the distinguishing factor - as opposed to the normal lower centers of body, feeling and intellect - suddenly didn’t feel so esoteric, after all. There simply didn’t seem to be any earthly criterion anywhere to be found that would give the slightest hint as to whether your buddy would turn into a mask-fanatical, elderly-abusing, childhood-wrecking, neighbor-denouncing piece of shit, or whether he would take to the streets to protest off-the-reservation tyranny at great personal risk, meanwhile giving himself an autodidactic crash-course in straight thought, day by long day evolving his mind to heights undreamed of just a week ago.

And this was just the beginning.

Sure, there have been casualties. Some people who leaned a bit too hard into schizophrenic territory, hypnotized by the abyss and unable to move on from a particular angle, fell off the cliff, bitchuted along the schizo spiral into the sludge of chimeric left brain hemisphere madness. (See my piece, The Limits of Skepticism.) Others, after initially listening to what their soul told them, couldn’t handle the heat, the implications, the necessary brutal changes they had to undergo in their own internal landscape and its relationship with the wider world. And so they rebuilt the wall around their souls to forever crush its faint music, which they had just discovered, to escape the unbearable suffering instead of riding it out until inevitably reaching gentler waters. Still others turned out to be of the NPC tribe all along; they just happened to fall on the right side of history by accident, but soon revealed themselves to be energy vampires and grifters not driven by the primordial pain of their souls in the face of spiritual harassment of the worst kind, but by shameless self-interest, like some religious scammers of old who would tolerate outcast status if it comes with some money and power over a small tribe.

Casualties aside, what we have seen overall is a most unlikely coalition of the sane, which in many ways has been ground zero for this Substack space of ours. We came from many corners. Some hail from the alternative health community, having watched in horror as many of their fellow critics of mainstream medicine shut them out of their lives for standing up against the apostles of technocratic allopathy. Others were honest-to-God Marxists, shaking their heads at their comrades who were busy celebrating the epitome of dehumanizing capital concentration that is Big Pharma. Then there were the 4Chan alt-right veterans who had to witness many of their fellow far-right anons, at least initially, go full retard Covidians. Not to mention those who just a day ago were respected academics, now being kicked out of the club no matter their high standing, the ordinary non-political folks whose families came apart at the seams, and all the others. It was a bloodbath.

We all came together. We all fought, laughed, cried together. We shared our struggles, tried to make sense of it all, floated theories and data and memes, then laughed and cried some more.

Sure, as time went on, our different previous backgrounds inevitably led to conflicts. Some on the homeopathy front might not have been ready for the racist memes by the frogs. Euro-socialists found themselves at odds with American rancher-libertarians. Conspiracy bros were a bit much for the academics-turned-outcasts. Christian fundies had little in common with the “trust the science, but the real one” rationalists. And so on.

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COVID and the Strange Death of Philosophy

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Amazingly, infighting and dopamine-fuelled online drama notwithstanding, in many ways we have been learning from one another. As the Covid madness slowly receded, only to disappear with the bang of Russia’s military engagement in Ukraine, we had to use the skills, the trust and the bonds created throughout the Rona years for other things. We all had to update or recalibrate our sense-making apparatus multiple times, dealing with events and Current Things as they unfolded. Each of these events, like Covid before but on a less dramatic scale, presented an invitation to look deeper, think differently, find new angles. In so doing, we almost accidentally ended up destroying most of the postwar consensus. We might even begin questioning much more: our very fundamental assumptions about the world and the universe, hardwired into our minds by our history unfolding since Antiquity. In some sense, ironically, we have recreated early postmodernist thought of the 1920s and 30s, that is, before the postwar consensus snapped into place. We might, starting from the OG becoming-aware-of-our-Being-in-time period, at this equivalent moment in historical consciousness, choose a better timeline than one once again misshaped by some new “postwar” hard-tenets. But that is a discussion for another day.

In this final year of the Quinquennium, which saw the complete upending of the thoughtplane, our psycho-spiritual level of existence, we have now arrived in the Trump era - brought into existence by a series of events that can only be described as a glitch in the Matrix. Here, too, some of the fault lines of our wild coalition become all-too apparent. Those - like yours truly - who come from an esoteric doomer background, naturally have a hard time seeing anything positive or hopeful in the madhouse that is our civilization and its clown-puppet show called politics. But we have to adjust and acknowledge that not all is bad all the time, and that, well, if we had a choice between the narcissistic American trash TV star and the retarded Cackler, we would gladly choose the Donald. Even this gentlest of souls,

Iain McGilchrist

, has come forward and said about Trump’s relationship with our civilizational madhouse, “the best way of jamming a runaway machine is not beatifically meditating, but shoving a spanner, another tool, in the mechanism.” Also: “[S]ometimes the left hemisphere can be defeated only by the left hemisphere, under direction from the right hemisphere.”¹

Those who hail from a more academic or straight-forward political background, lacking in the conspiracy lore and esoteric doomerism departments, might be tempted to MAGA-fanboy a bit too much. There is, after all, something deeply wrong not just since 2020, or 2014, or 1960, or 1945, but for all of recorded history. Plus, if Trump is a glitch in the Matrix, perhaps we should remember that such a glitch represents a program change by the invisible evil overlords. Lest you want to go full schizo, however, keep in mind that even then, the glitch is a reaction by the Matrix to positive and courageous action, hence the two perspectives are not mutually exclusive: The Trump era can both be the result of an organic movement by people who woke up and took appropriate measures, and an attempt by the invisible hand to ultimately steer things into a dark direction after the previous plan failed. I would warn, however, of any straight prediction about how this plan and their end goal might look like. Here, too, Covid is the great teacher: nobody saw that one coming. Acknowledging that we might see some dark plan unfolding here while not getting attached to any theory as to what it may look like, prevents us from missing the clever twists and turns the Evil One is plotting to derail us, whether you conceptualize it as the Schopenhauerian Will, a Whiteheadian process embedded in a teleological landscape, a Heideggerian maze of things whose being calls our attention while obscuring the background-totality, hyperdimensional alien overlords, a Gnostic demiurge or a straight-up Lucifer commanding his demons.

The great strength of our weird post-Covid coalition of the unwilling is that we are not homogenous — not geographically, not culturally, not philosophically, not socially. We bring together different angles. These can lead to contradictions, but I have long observed that to get anywhere in this minefield of a reality, it is paramount to learn how to keep both sides of a contradiction in mind without freaking out; you cannot always resolve it immediately. Instead, you can “try on” different angles, highlight different aspects and different nuances. Eventually, the different poles might come together, because you discover a way of thinking about it that lessens the contradiction, or even resolves the dilemma. Give it time to unfold. We are, after all, beings in time, as much as we are blind to this when in problem-solving mode.

We are nearing the end of the Quinquennium, if perhaps not the long Quinquennium. As Corona fades from memory, the strange, beautiful coalition it inspired perhaps inevitably breaks apart, too. New fault lines grow, old grievances need to be fought out, a new discourse emerges. One that hopefully surpasses the Covid discourse, our minds having evolved and all. And yet, we should perhaps sometimes recall what brought us together in the first place. Let’s commemorate the old battles and our victories. Most of all, let’s remember the crucial insight, once so vivid and palpable, that at the end of the day it’s about what your soul can truly perceive. If it can’t even recognize something like the Scamdemic and its psychic terror, well, what is there to say?

Let’s treasure the experience and its many lessons, the myriad insights we gained, even while we enter a new era, fighting new battles, picking up and losing comrades along the way.

It’s really been five years, guys. Incredible.

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1. Some of my essays referencing McGilchrist’s work:

McGilchrist's The Matter With Things: The Right Way of Engaging Materialism

The Fallacy to Rule Them All

David Chalmers, Iain McGilchrist, and the Zombies Among Us

The Death of Science