The root of all existence is tension.
Including the tension between pure Being, which is perfect harmony, and the fact it can only be achieved, and therefore can only exist, via tension: the antidote to harmony.
Tension between two poles generates movement, actualizes energy. The tension of a string makes music possible. And the tension between what we don’t know and what we think we know may propel us not only forward, but up high, too.
Say what you will about the boomers, but many of them still had a gravity about them that went together with actually taking the Unknown seriously, enabling them to ride that tension: creating movement, strive, existence.
Today, not so much.
In case you missed it, we just had a whistleblower basically claiming that the government is in cahoots with hyperdimensional aliens that may keep us all enslaved. A semi-mainstream conservative event, associated with the Republican Party, had Tucker Carlson and other celebrity pundits openly and unironically discuss such things—including the spiritual component. A component, mind you, which has the potential of blowing to pieces the worldview not just of the materialist atheists, but many religious folks too. Not to mention that everything we thought we knew about our history and our institutions needs to be rethought.
And how do people react? A passionate, outraged debunking of it all? A research spree into the topic, discussion and sharing across all platforms, echo chambers and partisan niches?
Hardly. More like, hey, we might be living in an Alien-created hyperdimensional Matrix Ant Farm, LOL, lmao even. And have you seen that conservative calendar? Outrageous! And those outraged by it, double-outrageous! In fact, we are so outraged that we are not even outraged, lol.
And it’s not just about aliens and calendars.
It seems so much these days is a post-post something, meta-meta quadruple-reverse-hot-take, unironically ironically unironic.
All tension resolved in a stupid, docile grin.
People are so bAsEd they out-edgelord each other to the point that they utter the same stuff as a “normie” or a 1960s free-love commune guru, until 5 minutes later they realize that even that isn’t cool anymore, and so they become the anti-hippie, or the anti-Maoist Trotskyite, or a 1980s popper.
The hipster cycle reduced to the nanosecond it takes to oscillate around the well-worn track of eternal, tweetcycled, basement-BASED, gulping anti-conformist conformity.
It’s not that we don’t need all the humor and playfulness we can get, or that we should be obsessed with things to our detriment, but the yawning shrug of the in-crowd has never achieved anything except stifling the soul’s outreach.
Nothing new under the sun, I suppose, except speed, intensity, and quantity. And that high IQ people who are developmentally 14 year olds can now find each other online, their two-dimensional minds so complex that the adults in the house can’t make sense of it and therefore can’t send them to their rooms and tell them to stfu.
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The only minds being blown in all this are those of the Sperg Brigade, lost in little puzzles so logical that they become utterly irrational and unhinged: busy constructing the schizoid edition of a founding myth, concocted up by Putnam’s brain in a vat, where Klaus Schwab is running the flat earth puppeteered by moonlanding-faking Jews.
The rainbow brigade’s mirror image.
The color-pilled color revolution.
Where’s the imagination? Where the dreaming of a better world—a world of Truth, Respect, Courage, Deep Love, Peace, Goodness, True Understanding, and Vanquishing of Evil? A civilization built on a wholly different foundation? Not a retvrn to 20, 200, or even 2000 years ago, but a foolish, unreasonable, glorious dream of a new earth powered by as yet unthinkable new paradigms? I hear ironic takedowns of such dreaming buzzing in the quantum cloud, stampedious hot takes, stale wit grown out of the plastic layer of egoic sadomasochism.1 Applause, please.
To be fair, there is plenty of great alien-slaying lighthearted seriousness with deep soul-roots going around. It is what should give all of us hope.
As the new year starts, everything will get weirder exponentially. The little American madhouse-in-a-bubble will pop eventually, as indeed it already has for the rest of the world. There will be mayhem and craze, surprises undreamt of, challenges new in scope and quality.
In the coming age of weird, the hour is evolve or perish. Only strong, patient, loving souls will persist, the anti-expedient, the timeless, the deeply rooted in the subtle world glimpsed with our soft not-faint-of-hearts.
Sometimes (not always), those who offend us the most are our best friends; they compel us forward, downward into the depth of true existence, upward towards the Great Beyond, which sits between molecules of emotion, between compartmentalized brain cells, between impressions at the blurry edge of inspired vision. If we manage to stay sane.
Tension, remember.
What we're seeing in hyper-intellectualism without a grounding story and mythos holding anything together. It's a potpourri of abstract concepts that are worn down to a husk, not correlating with anything tangible anymore.
Combine this with every institutional myth-making and authoritative apparatus becoming utterly unhinged from the very people they are meant to serve, you're left with a cynical people who have been fooled so many times they dare not believe in anything.
The reason the alien things gets not traction is because:
- It's old and has been mentioned with few updates since the 1960's
- The people promulgating it are not trusted.
- The truth or falsity of the claim will not impact their life one bit.
I think a simpler explanation may just be exhaustion. A lot of people are so mentally spent from trying to keep up with the endless circus that they have just resigned themselves to passively shrugging off even the most dramatic and impactful news that comes out.