Much has been made over the years of the decline of western civilization. In the past, armchair theoreticians, dry academic articles, and the occasional ominous news stories have highlighted declining birth rates, environmental concerns, and even the shaky dollar as evidence.
We no longer need rely on theory. We are seeing it daily in the news, with politicians who openly make name-calling tweets and give barely literate speeches. We see it in open high tech warfare against distant countries with barely a nod to any believable reason for the mass killings and destruction. Corporations and wealthy individuals openly bribe our politicians and call it “lobbying,” and there are no longer any legitimate parties representing actual voters in the US.
This is slow motion collapse, right before our eyes, and attempting to deny it is just sad. You can continue to participate in the partisan rock-throwing, which is slowly shifting to bullet throwing (how long until gun-toting Nazi’s and gun-toting Antifas start actually shooting at each other?), or you can acknowledge the truth that the existing system is done. In a system where money translates directly into power, the battles being fought over control of the system have nothing to do with you, and don’t matter, anyway. The person who gets to be at the wheel of the vehicle plunging off the mountain road has no ultimate advantage.
Ok, so it’s hopeless, right? Only if you choose to keep dining on the fare the system is feeding you. There is an open secret, and it’s only a secret because the approved media is invested in the old frame. The new frame is opening right before our eyes, and is even covered by the media, but through intention or ignorance (it’s not important which) it is never placed in perspective.
So here’s some perspective. There is a birthing of a new society, and it’s happening now, it’s unfolding rapidly, and it could give a shit about the old order. The new society has the following flavors:
It honors the feminine, and places women equally beside men. The “#metoo movement” has been portrayed in many ways - as a one-off aberrant happening, doomed to be forgotten, or even overwhelmed by an inevitable backlash; as a mistake, an over-reach, or worse; as angry women over-reacting - as women grasping at “significance.” Forget all this, because the #metoo movement isn’t a movement. It’s just one of the early and most visible manifestations of the new society, and it is an incredibly powerful one at that. Powerful, wealthy, and completely invulnerable men (as per the old order) were steam-rolled over with impunity. Forget about courts and trials and weak, pathetic convictions after dragging the victims through a whole new level of victimization. These men got to suffer real consequences, and where it really counted. They were reviled, their businesses shut down, their influence stomped in the mud, and no place to hide, no appeals to corrupt courts with highly paid attorneys, and no way to turn it all back onto the victims.
If this bothers you, if you want to talk about “due process”, if you are afraid, it’s because you are still living in the old frame – a frame where “due process” means ignoring, or worse, heaping abuse on victims seeking justice. A frame where men can safely and casually dish out massive amounts of abuse KNOWING they are completely safe.
The defining mechanism for change with the new society is that there is no change. Trying to “change” the old system is playing by the old rules, and MUST fail. That’s how the game is rigged. The new society chooses, instead, to create something brand new and simply bypass, and even ignore the old. Relevance shifts in a sort of radical bypass of the old.
We see this in the shifting around race relations. Police brutality and racism is not a new thing. It didn’t just start last year. African Americans have existed in this oppressive environment for generations…when I was born, they were still hanging “negroes” from telephone poles in the south! The difference is that social tolerance for ongoing racism has dissolved, almost overnight. Daily there are new articles and viral shares of people who call the cops because a black person is in a tour group, a college dorm, or in a neighborhood. The fact that many have long believed that blacks “don’t belong here” is now out in the open, and it is being dealt with directly. The people who show up this way, the police departments, even the colleges are being called to account, not by the politicians, administrators or “leaders” who supposedly are in charge. Their strange silence is actually nothing new, but consequences are happening regardless, directly and publicly. Shit really is “getting real.”
Perhaps the most fundamental reality shift is in one place that has always been impervious to bottom up solutions - currency. Bitcoin started it, and the underlying blockchain technology of Bitcoin is creating a true wild-west environment, a massive swirling potentiality that few, if any, can fully comprehend. It has already, in its birth, created a powerful analog to currency and the stock market, and massive wealth has been generated, stolen, lost and sold to herald it’s birth pains. Don’t look at this as tech. Tech is to bitcoin like water is to a fish – necessary for its existence, but having little to do with where it evolves, what it eats, and how it grows. And importantly, it perfectly fits the pattern of the emerging new society – something new that will not overthrow the old – simply bypass it.
The old world is dead, and when you see the insane clown reality stars on the news, suddenly everything makes sense – this is the old world death rattle. What is emerging is still unclear, still evolving, and we are left with many, many questions on what this new dimension, this new society will look like. The good news is, it isn’t too late to make your mark on what it will look like. It’s like the early pioneer settlers to America – so much promise, so much potential, and no clear answers. Maybe this time we will actually get it right, actually answer the siren call to a just and loving society, actually reach the potential that humanity has always held, but never quite attained.
One way or another, hang on - this is going to be a wild ride…
