The awakening is happening already! The only thing is that the parasitic class knows this and since they control the media they bombard us with doom and gloom.
But everyday more and more people are waking up and changing their world — unplugging from the Matrix.
Feudalism lasted roughly a 1000 years. Slavery existed for centuries and was treated, for much of that time, as an ordinary and immutable fact of life. Even after Emancipation, it took nearly another century for the Civil Rights Act to become law. So yes, we may be approaching some kind of awakening, but I doubt it will happen in our lifetimes, or our children’s, or even our grandchildren’s. And I suspect something far darker and more catastrophic will precede it.
Personally, I don’t think humanity stands much of a chance of overcoming itself. Recognizing what is happening and actually being capable of changing it are two entirely different things. We also have a profound tendency to overestimate both our importance and the amount of time we have. Humanity has existed for roughly 300,000 years which is a microscopic span compared with the history of life on this planet. Dinosaurs, by comparison, dominated Earth for more than 160 million years before extinction.
I increasingly see humanity less as the culmination of some inevitable march toward enlightenment and more as a failed experiment that may eventually consume itself. Even the planet seems to be pushing back against us, though whether that is truly the planet “expelling” us or simply the consequence of what we are doing to it is another question.
Either way, I would be very careful about placing too much faith in our species or overestimating our importance in the grand scheme of things. The horrors of these past few years are not some unprecedented rupture in human history. Humanity has spent its entire existence finding new ways to brutalize, exploit, and destroy one another. Our history is littered with it.
There is very little evidence that we are destined to transcend those impulses and become some enlightened, peaceful, benevolent species. That may be an appealing story to tell ourselves, but treating it as inevitable is simply naive.
The energy is with the forces of oppression. They are ruthless and persistent. The Civil Rights Act was a beacon of light but has since been largely extinguished. Yes there are flashes of light, many individuals emerging from the darkness, but the population remains apathetic, distracted by personal challenges. All this can be understood as learned helplessness.
“A time for light, A time for darkness”. Yes there will be change but I agree it might be a few generations.
But intellect aside, I utilize the energy of my emotions to service hope.
In the few years (age 80) I have remaining I aim to choose the path of wishful thinking. Maybe Caitlin has a point. An antidote for despair.
Ginnie, I tend to agree with you and Lars Hanson's reply to you. It is being able to hold two opposing views at the same time.
Humanity has come through ages of colonialism, imperialism, slavery ,wars and many such horrors by a Eurocentric world. And continues to do so to this day. So as Ginnie says "overestimating our importance in the grand scheme of things", certainly looks futile. But maybe we do need as Lars Hanson says Caitlin's "antidote to despair".
Vietnam war radicalised a generation of young Americans - maybe they feared the draft - and went onto radicalise Europeans. But it was the brave Vietnamese who inspired them. The various 'rising up' and protests that followed ( such as Black Lives Matter) were ruthlessly put down.
The indomitable Palestinians have inspired the good people once again. Will there be a reckoning for the oppressors this time around... . But all these movements are being nipped in the bud by the forces of oppression. As all the revolutions and global south decolonising movements were cut short.
The only hope in the horizon is the rise of China and the awareness in the peoples of the global south gaining economic independence (BRICS?).
Will sanity prevail? The outlook is very bleak the way the "high IQ" leaders of the US/West are going on rampaging and pillaging.
Maybe we have to turn to Caitlin's antidote to despair.
I agree that it is already happening. Young people are much more aware of the lies they are being told than people were aware when I was young, although there were a lot of lies back then too. Also, I read an article that talked about how how some WANT the doom to come because they are Christians who believe in Armageddon and the Rapture. Those people will decrease in numbers because it is such an obviously insane way of thinking. Caitlin is right. It will be slow and uneven, but there is a good chance that we will get there IF the climate can wait for us.
I like to think South Africa had it right, "Truth and Reconciliation". Get it all out on the table, address all the elephants in the room, and vow to work together for the good of all from now on. Humans being what they are, it will never be perfect, but as Tom Waits sang, "gotta keep a diamond in your mind".
Whatever part of humanity wakes up in the next decade or two, it's going to be during a global ecosystem change (for the worse) the likes no one has experienced before in human history.
I'm not sure you are correct about the timing, but a "global ecosystem change" is almost certain. A slow one is already underway, poisoning the biosphere with electromagnetic radiation, herbicides, pesticides and "geoengineering". Then we have the richer oligarchs building bunkers either for nuclear war or the next major solar outburst while they arrange conventional wars to cause famine.
Perhaps not the same thing, but two simultaneous things. What looks like Doom for one group could be liberation for the other. The idea being the full manifestation of each —one for the sacred and one for destruction — so no one can question the judgment. “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. When everyone was sleeping, an enemy sowed weeds among the wheat and left. When the seeds sprouted, the man’s servants told him about the weeds and asked if they should pull them out. But he said It might happen that you’ll uproot some of the wheat while pulling the weeds. Let’s let them grow together until the harvest, and then we’ll tell the reapers to pick out the weeds first and bind them into bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barns.” Mercy can be brutal but everything comes around in the end.
Okay, I was pretty much of the “fashionable thing to say” mindset, but not because “we are a rotten people with selfish hearts who… actually like things the way they are.” While I do find succor in Caitlin's description of what’s entailed in a transformational wakening, I’m of the mindset that a) so much has been stolen from us, continues to be stolen from us, and so much wreckage has been done, and continues to be done – environmentally, institutionally, governmentally, otherwise – that soon there won’t be enough to sustain us, and b) Israel. So long as it exists, in combination with a) – quite likely even as a standalone reason – we are fucked.
I always feel uncomfortable when Israel is taken out of the context of the other 4 members of the UNs WEOG that share no border with Western Europe.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Israel have common theological and ideological ties, even if the "official languages" and "official Abrahamic religious denomination" are a little different.
My amateur understanding is that Israel is a result of persecution of Russian and Eastern European Jews, taken up as a cause by Western European Zionists who cultivated and exploited Western European powers, particularly Britain and France, to advance their respective designs on Palestine, until the Zionists ultimately expelled the diminishing British presence – the French having absented themselves after WWI – and then had a ready prepared United States step in and pave the way to the present genocide. And now with the impending melding of the IDF and the Pentagon, an impending geocide.
What you have isn't so much an "amateur understanding", but part of Western European (especially Anglosphere) propaganda. If you grew up within the Anglosphere (I was Assigned Canadian At Birth), what you expressed is what we were all indoctrinated by our governments to believe.
This was a deliberate attempt to misdirect people about the source of the problem, and what ideologies/institutions are in control of the movements.
It has been hard for me emotionally to do deep-dives outside of Anglosphere ideologies, and recognize that much of what I was told growing up about "Canada" was propaganda. This includes all the pointing away from themselves towards Russia during my lifetime, with Russia actually being a British/French ally during WW1 and WW2.
Benjamin Netanyahu could have been thought of as a “useful idiot”, except that he is fully aware of Christian Zionism. He actively courts Evangelical Christians who are wishing for all Jews to be wiped out (death or conversion to Christianity) as part of the Dispensationalist theology that drives what has been contemporarily rebranded as Christian Zionism. Extreme short-term thinking that is dangerous to all remaining Jewish peoples.
BTW: I believe everyone needs to be very careful with thinking that the tiny percentage of Zionists who are Jewish are somehow in control, as that is part of a trope suggesting a tiny population of Jewish people somehow "control the world". The vast majority (some estimate more than 20 to 1) of Zionists are Christian Zionists. One of the earlier branches of the Anglosphere movement to colonize Palestine came to the "North American" continent in the 1600's and are celebrated each year during US Thanksgiving: Pilgrims.
The colonization of Palestine (or recolonization, for those of us who actually read the Bibles and recognize the colonization of Canaan by the followers of Abram) to fulfill Anglo Christian theology replies on and amplifies antisemitism, and we need to all be careful to not fall for this.
Having formerly been a climate warrior, I'm especially sensitive to the time dimension of impending catastrophe. I eventually concluded it all was a psyop to put everyone into anxiety and tension. I'm focused now on being here, in the body...
My advice to fellow appreciators of Caitlin: drop the time dimension and focus on heart.
Throughout history, "mass awakenings" usually came in the form of mass protests or revolutions, as singular authoritarian rulers (monarchs, e.g.) and their ilk were either ousted or maintained their posts with stipulations of change. What we are facing now is a first world full of unworkable democracies that have been overtaken by billionaire oligarchs and corporations who have supplanted the rule of law, as the legal guardrails have acquiesced to said oligarchs and corporations.
The "guardrails" under the aformentioned were the other "royal" or "granter" enablers (barons, dukes, earls, etc. "courts") who needed those protesters and revolters to make life smooth for them. Testing the wind direction, the enablers would tip the balance one way or another.
Our guardrails are gone. The enablers are the new laws of the land. Laws are only as good as the ones enacting good, stable laws and enforcing them. Alas, we have neither.
A revolution it will be. People will not go back to the seemingly quasi-corruption and do-nothing congress of Post-war America, where the middle class, after a 20 year run, succumbed to the financial imperatives of the conservative-driven courts, corporations and, ultimately, the legislature.
They can't go back....not if they know what's good for them.
This is a very necessary message and I agree 100%. You are right: it's long been considered the cool thing to be cynical. But "humanity is stupid" messages are nothing but self-serving, because the person spouting them never includes themselves in the statement.
No, humanity is a child. We are young to the game of consciousness. For Chrissake, we've only had written language for a few thousand years, the printing press for a few hundred, and so on. We think of this as a long time, but if you measure it by the scales necessary to understand the nature of consciousness it's like we just woke up.
Of course it's going to take a while, and that is doubly so when you consider the nature of the problems that we are addressing. I personally put man's high point at about 25,000 BC. Once the goddess worship society propounded by people like Terence McKenna started to wither you can watch the sickness of modern civilization creep into us bit by bit.
This means that if we are going to unearth it, holy hell it's not going to be short and easy. The Kali Yuga system suggests that we have something like 432,000 years left of spiritual degradation before we turn things around. Not everybody agrees with this metric, but I think the exact number is unimportant. What is important is that we recognize that it's not going to be some simplistic Hollywood fix of destroying this or that and then boom, freedom. We are liberating our consciousness from what Wilhelm Reich called the "emotional plague", and that is going to take a long time, and a lot of patience, compassion, and relentless effort.
My most recent article was about what you say. I see in the Macklemore controversy signs that we are finally hitting the breaking point that so many of us have been waiting to see. The "mass man" isn't placated any more by the bread and circuses, because the bread is moldy and expensive and the circus is fake and boring, and in any event we know what's going on outside the tent and can't look away any more.
To say we have a long way to go is a monumental understatement. No one reading these words should be under any illusion that liberation of the human spirit will take place in our lifetime. It's a tree for one generation to plant and the next ones to cultivate. We have to build on the work of those who have gone before us and then add to it for posterity to do the same. There is no single cathartic victory, just little ones like this recent spat which reminds us that as long as the road is, we'll get there as long as we don't give in.
👍 ... my head now at the same place ... waffling... overall, not as sanguine as many commenters here ... the darkness of it all ... and I am definitely NOT into the "hope" thing - not sure how to articulate why ... maybe it's an assumption that something else, someone else, will "save" us ... ? Anyone else out there who recoils a bit when hearing that word? Humans have created an artificial world whose management surpasses our ability to manage it. Hoisted by our own petard?
One must have hope for the sake of future generations. I confess the hardest part of living as a boomer has been watching lifelong friends drift into blind allegiance to Red/Blue machine. I know them from both sides of the same arse, as George Galloway would put it. Hero worship of Zelensky. Loyalty to presidents, no matter how many lies they tell and how many lives they take. Yet I press on in some hope as I see the Macklemores of the world awaken the world around them.
what future generations? if things go on how it goes at the moment, evolution will put humanity into the background. ai will be the next step on the ladder to knowledge of existence. who we are? why do i live? where is sense? we aren't intelligent enough to answer these questions, we will bounce the planet.
This is so true and another prescient column!! The awakening is already happening, all over. The elite are frantically playing whack-a-mole trying to shut down this truth, but like the grace of the Absolute, (which, IMO this mass awakening is), it rains down at all times, everywhere. And it's becoming obvious. Time's up for dark forces.
Yes! It seems that we are headed to a time when our hopes, dreams and expectations will be so small, simple and basic, that we will finally be able to handle them, and find satisfaction in attaining just those simple, few, basic aspirations. In short, our nations, leaders, experts, idols, etc. will fuck up everything that is possible to exist, that we will finally realize that they were all false, silly , unnatural desires , expectations and goals, and will simply give them up and look to the simplest ways and things that will help us to survive.
All of our MAGA heroes and Hollywood super stars, and entrepreneurs and experts will be seen as always having been illusions and false gods. Then we will seek out the simplest, most non-de script brothers and sisters to learn from, protect, and whose knowledge and ways of living will be appreciated.
We will look on the Trumps, and all of his cronies in government, religion and culture as clowns and dangerous idiots to follow. It short, true , simple socialism will be seen as our salvation, and we will all gladly adopt it's principals and laugh at the thought that we ever were able to think that the other ways were anything other that idiocies.
In short, Fuck America and every other "Nation" and fuck our old heroes and exalted ones from politics, entertainment, religion, etc. Survival through helping each other period.
I agree with you Caitlin. As an old bugger and an avid consumer of history I know there have been many times when the trend has been terrible and doom and gloom was the order of the day. And then somehow, be it a sharp point of reflexivity or a gradual pivot, the trend line changed. We have a tendance to extrapolate out to infinity but, like they say, It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. One thing that is indisputably true: it is darkest just before dawn. We may have a couple of years of darkness (say till January 2029?) ahead of us but the dawn is coming.
I would be very careful about placing too much faith in our species or overestimating our importance in the grand scheme of things. The horrors of these past few years are not some unprecedented rupture in human history. Humanity has spent its entire existence finding new ways to brutalize, exploit, and destroy one another. Our history is littered with it. There is very little evidence that we are destined to transcend those impulses and become some enlightened, peaceful, benevolent species. That may be an appealing story to tell ourselves, but treating it as inevitable is simply naive.
In the 2010s I shared this feeling, believing there was no way out of the problem given so-called “human nature”.
In 2020 I started a deep-dive into anti-racism and anti-colonialism, and learned that these horrors aren't about "Humanity" at all but a specific subset of the species that are infected by a specific set of ideologies.
I have optimism today because I see that the problem isn't universal in the species, and there are a wide variety of alternatives. In fact, Western Europe's alleged "Enlightenment" ideologies included universalism, and that is one of many problematic ideologies that require anti-virus to disinfect people of.
Honestly ,I have no optimism that the Controllers of our world today, whose main goal is total control and domination of the world for Material gains cares about anything outside of their lust for Materialism at all and any cost .
Most of these leaders that controls the world today have no Humanity especially the Western ones being led around by "GODS Children.' They are going to be Death of us all
I think we all need to realize that the current capitalist system, driven by an unquenchable greed for more power and money, only promotes a certain type of people to positions of power. We usually call them "psychopaths." And one of the specific traits these kinds of people have is the lack of empathy.
***
Pathocracy is a political term describing a system of government led by individuals with severe personality disorders—typically psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, or Machiavellianism. The term was notably used by psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology (written in the 1960s–70s, published much later).
***
Key characteristics of a pathocracy:
-Leaders are psychopaths or sociopaths who rise to power by exploiting social chaos and normal people's psychological weaknesses.
-Truth is systematically replaced with a controlled, distorted reality.
-Cruelty, paranoia, and corruption become institutionalized.
-Normal, empathetic individuals are weeded out or destroyed.
***
"A society of Altruists being ruled by Psychopaths.":
I wonder if this lack of having "no Humanity" as you say for these uber wealthy and powerful "Controllers" of our world today has anything to do with the current ontological dominate belief that the reality we find ourselves in is a purely mechanical contraption, and the human soul is mostly a figment of our imagination? And that being the case, it makes rational sense to get what you can while you can - because you too will soon perish into the oblivion from whence you came - and this cold reality you have found yourself in?
Historical materialism may in the end be the life of us all, given its universalisation of the practical philosophy of a nutritious diet and adequate shelter, prior to the seedy construction of billionaires and Trump towers, should such nonsense be indicated...
Seems to me we are at a stage where almost everyone everywhere thinks there is something very very wrong with the world, but there is no agreement on in what way. And very hard to sway people from their very personal opinion about the causes or the best way forward. This opinion will be formed and held at a very primal fear/flight depth well below a cortex which can be appealed to by reason or even additional evidence (since people think they know what they see with their own eyes). And of course they will see other takes as delusional. There must be tireless argument to make the case, but I just can’t see a mass awakening without cataclysmic events to dice people up. On the plus side, it seems very likely there is a queue of them lined up on the horizon.
Is this not the question of the requirements for the development of revolutionary consciousness, which indicates the value of an understanding of class war and ruling class ideology? If people aren't recovering an interest in socialism and communism, they should be, because that is where the best explanation for the composition of our current reality remains to be found, and ignorance of this would be testimony to the success of the cognitive war of the ruling cabal, who remain in appropriate dread of the " red" threat.
That would be my view, too. Yes. And getting the analysis out there is crucial…but. Nobody is listening because their eyes and ears are stopped by the anger of their own gut instinct. No doubt the force feeding of propaganda is also a big factor. It will take cataclysms to wipe the slate clear. Or a miracle, as Cat proposes.
John C wrote, "Seems to me we are at a stage where almost everyone everywhere thinks there is something very very wrong with the world, but there is no agreement on in what way."
The mention of Marxist class and socialism is an example of one of those "no agreement" on what the problems are, and thus what direction to be going for potential solutions.
When I do any deep-dive into the systemic problems, I end up being led to Anthropocentrism (which includes Anthropocentric notions of "property"), Androcentrism, Individualism, Universalism, and other ideologies tied up with the unique history of Western Europe.
In my mind there isn't a significant enough difference between Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Communism, etc that were all built on the same core ideologies.
So much of Marx's work was trained by racist Eurocentric thinking, and that is what needs to change : not merely how polite we are (economically or individually) to fellow humans (socialism, marxism, etc).
For me, especially as someone of Scottish, Irish and French descent that was Assigned Canadian At Birth, I don't see the point of movements that are not in some way founded in non-metaphorical decolonial thinking.
I think the Chinese might chuckle over the attempt to marginalise the only accurate perspective on capitalism we have based on the work of Marx and Engels and so many others across the planet who might be healthily suspicious of the "eurocentric" tactic. Marxism is based upon a systematic objective study of the capitalism of the day, and the only ones who want him buried are those whose crimes he exposes.
What I read in your reply was a list of Western Eurocentric "Enlightenment" ideologies used to claim some sort of "system objective study" of a very narrow aspect of Western economic ideologies. This was followed by a typical Western false-binary of claiming that the "only" people who disagree are a specific group, erasing everyone else (including myself).
I am not sure I have the same hope as you do. If you try to comment on the blog in the link below saying that the imperial war machine is the biggest polluter in the world, either you get called "Putinist" or your comment will be deleted without even a response: https://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com
Some people have been completely brainwashed by decades of propaganda and lost forever!
Caitlin doesn't seem to be including the Technofascists in her theory. Or Their plans to use Mass Surveillance to prevent ANY Freedom. I do feel a growing consciousness, but how does everyone becoming more enlightened prevent Digital Currency, which is the Endgame and where we lose most - if not all, of Our ability to live outside the Matrix?
We can all lose our ego and move to a higher spiritual plane, while we are Debanked, Classified by Productivity Worth or Useless Eater, and forced into 15 minute Slave Cities.
Caitlin never seems to address how the Peter Thiels & Sam Altmans of Earth are going to stop becoming Trillionaires and using their money to reduce the World Pop thru poison food, cancer, starvation brought on by the Oil Crisis and Endless War.
What Caitlin is really saying, is IF ANY humans are left, after the Technofascist and Zio Billionaires have deleted and enslaved most of us, destroyed most freshwater sources for Their AI God (it is a religion to them)... after ALL that and worse, since Mizz Izzy has the Samson option of using Her stockpile of stolen nukes... after ALL that is done... FINALLY....
Peace.
We won't be there for any of it, but it will happen.
The awakening is happening already! The only thing is that the parasitic class knows this and since they control the media they bombard us with doom and gloom.
But everyday more and more people are waking up and changing their world — unplugging from the Matrix.
This is the win right here! 🙏❤️💪
Feudalism lasted roughly a 1000 years. Slavery existed for centuries and was treated, for much of that time, as an ordinary and immutable fact of life. Even after Emancipation, it took nearly another century for the Civil Rights Act to become law. So yes, we may be approaching some kind of awakening, but I doubt it will happen in our lifetimes, or our children’s, or even our grandchildren’s. And I suspect something far darker and more catastrophic will precede it.
Personally, I don’t think humanity stands much of a chance of overcoming itself. Recognizing what is happening and actually being capable of changing it are two entirely different things. We also have a profound tendency to overestimate both our importance and the amount of time we have. Humanity has existed for roughly 300,000 years which is a microscopic span compared with the history of life on this planet. Dinosaurs, by comparison, dominated Earth for more than 160 million years before extinction.
I increasingly see humanity less as the culmination of some inevitable march toward enlightenment and more as a failed experiment that may eventually consume itself. Even the planet seems to be pushing back against us, though whether that is truly the planet “expelling” us or simply the consequence of what we are doing to it is another question.
Either way, I would be very careful about placing too much faith in our species or overestimating our importance in the grand scheme of things. The horrors of these past few years are not some unprecedented rupture in human history. Humanity has spent its entire existence finding new ways to brutalize, exploit, and destroy one another. Our history is littered with it.
There is very little evidence that we are destined to transcend those impulses and become some enlightened, peaceful, benevolent species. That may be an appealing story to tell ourselves, but treating it as inevitable is simply naive.
The energy is with the forces of oppression. They are ruthless and persistent. The Civil Rights Act was a beacon of light but has since been largely extinguished. Yes there are flashes of light, many individuals emerging from the darkness, but the population remains apathetic, distracted by personal challenges. All this can be understood as learned helplessness.
“A time for light, A time for darkness”. Yes there will be change but I agree it might be a few generations.
But intellect aside, I utilize the energy of my emotions to service hope.
In the few years (age 80) I have remaining I aim to choose the path of wishful thinking. Maybe Caitlin has a point. An antidote for despair.
Ginnie, I tend to agree with you and Lars Hanson's reply to you. It is being able to hold two opposing views at the same time.
Humanity has come through ages of colonialism, imperialism, slavery ,wars and many such horrors by a Eurocentric world. And continues to do so to this day. So as Ginnie says "overestimating our importance in the grand scheme of things", certainly looks futile. But maybe we do need as Lars Hanson says Caitlin's "antidote to despair".
Vietnam war radicalised a generation of young Americans - maybe they feared the draft - and went onto radicalise Europeans. But it was the brave Vietnamese who inspired them. The various 'rising up' and protests that followed ( such as Black Lives Matter) were ruthlessly put down.
The indomitable Palestinians have inspired the good people once again. Will there be a reckoning for the oppressors this time around... . But all these movements are being nipped in the bud by the forces of oppression. As all the revolutions and global south decolonising movements were cut short.
The only hope in the horizon is the rise of China and the awareness in the peoples of the global south gaining economic independence (BRICS?).
Will sanity prevail? The outlook is very bleak the way the "high IQ" leaders of the US/West are going on rampaging and pillaging.
Maybe we have to turn to Caitlin's antidote to despair.
I agree that it is already happening. Young people are much more aware of the lies they are being told than people were aware when I was young, although there were a lot of lies back then too. Also, I read an article that talked about how how some WANT the doom to come because they are Christians who believe in Armageddon and the Rapture. Those people will decrease in numbers because it is such an obviously insane way of thinking. Caitlin is right. It will be slow and uneven, but there is a good chance that we will get there IF the climate can wait for us.
Dolores Cannon said that some years ago !!!!!!
A mass awakening or a mass reckoning? Or are those the same thing?
I like to think South Africa had it right, "Truth and Reconciliation". Get it all out on the table, address all the elephants in the room, and vow to work together for the good of all from now on. Humans being what they are, it will never be perfect, but as Tom Waits sang, "gotta keep a diamond in your mind".
Whatever part of humanity wakes up in the next decade or two, it's going to be during a global ecosystem change (for the worse) the likes no one has experienced before in human history.
I'm not sure you are correct about the timing, but a "global ecosystem change" is almost certain. A slow one is already underway, poisoning the biosphere with electromagnetic radiation, herbicides, pesticides and "geoengineering". Then we have the richer oligarchs building bunkers either for nuclear war or the next major solar outburst while they arrange conventional wars to cause famine.
The reckoning will follow after the awakening.
Perhaps not the same thing, but two simultaneous things. What looks like Doom for one group could be liberation for the other. The idea being the full manifestation of each —one for the sacred and one for destruction — so no one can question the judgment. “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. When everyone was sleeping, an enemy sowed weeds among the wheat and left. When the seeds sprouted, the man’s servants told him about the weeds and asked if they should pull them out. But he said It might happen that you’ll uproot some of the wheat while pulling the weeds. Let’s let them grow together until the harvest, and then we’ll tell the reapers to pick out the weeds first and bind them into bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barns.” Mercy can be brutal but everything comes around in the end.
The question surely is,Caitlin, not " can we get there?" But can we get there in time?
Okay, I was pretty much of the “fashionable thing to say” mindset, but not because “we are a rotten people with selfish hearts who… actually like things the way they are.” While I do find succor in Caitlin's description of what’s entailed in a transformational wakening, I’m of the mindset that a) so much has been stolen from us, continues to be stolen from us, and so much wreckage has been done, and continues to be done – environmentally, institutionally, governmentally, otherwise – that soon there won’t be enough to sustain us, and b) Israel. So long as it exists, in combination with a) – quite likely even as a standalone reason – we are fucked.
I always feel uncomfortable when Israel is taken out of the context of the other 4 members of the UNs WEOG that share no border with Western Europe.
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Israel have common theological and ideological ties, even if the "official languages" and "official Abrahamic religious denomination" are a little different.
My amateur understanding is that Israel is a result of persecution of Russian and Eastern European Jews, taken up as a cause by Western European Zionists who cultivated and exploited Western European powers, particularly Britain and France, to advance their respective designs on Palestine, until the Zionists ultimately expelled the diminishing British presence – the French having absented themselves after WWI – and then had a ready prepared United States step in and pave the way to the present genocide. And now with the impending melding of the IDF and the Pentagon, an impending geocide.
Check out https://r.flora.ca/p/zionism
What you have isn't so much an "amateur understanding", but part of Western European (especially Anglosphere) propaganda. If you grew up within the Anglosphere (I was Assigned Canadian At Birth), what you expressed is what we were all indoctrinated by our governments to believe.
This was a deliberate attempt to misdirect people about the source of the problem, and what ideologies/institutions are in control of the movements.
It has been hard for me emotionally to do deep-dives outside of Anglosphere ideologies, and recognize that much of what I was told growing up about "Canada" was propaganda. This includes all the pointing away from themselves towards Russia during my lifetime, with Russia actually being a British/French ally during WW1 and WW2.
Benjamin Netanyahu could have been thought of as a “useful idiot”, except that he is fully aware of Christian Zionism. He actively courts Evangelical Christians who are wishing for all Jews to be wiped out (death or conversion to Christianity) as part of the Dispensationalist theology that drives what has been contemporarily rebranded as Christian Zionism. Extreme short-term thinking that is dangerous to all remaining Jewish peoples.
BTW: I believe everyone needs to be very careful with thinking that the tiny percentage of Zionists who are Jewish are somehow in control, as that is part of a trope suggesting a tiny population of Jewish people somehow "control the world". The vast majority (some estimate more than 20 to 1) of Zionists are Christian Zionists. One of the earlier branches of the Anglosphere movement to colonize Palestine came to the "North American" continent in the 1600's and are celebrated each year during US Thanksgiving: Pilgrims.
The colonization of Palestine (or recolonization, for those of us who actually read the Bibles and recognize the colonization of Canaan by the followers of Abram) to fulfill Anglo Christian theology replies on and amplifies antisemitism, and we need to all be careful to not fall for this.
Having formerly been a climate warrior, I'm especially sensitive to the time dimension of impending catastrophe. I eventually concluded it all was a psyop to put everyone into anxiety and tension. I'm focused now on being here, in the body...
My advice to fellow appreciators of Caitlin: drop the time dimension and focus on heart.
Throughout history, "mass awakenings" usually came in the form of mass protests or revolutions, as singular authoritarian rulers (monarchs, e.g.) and their ilk were either ousted or maintained their posts with stipulations of change. What we are facing now is a first world full of unworkable democracies that have been overtaken by billionaire oligarchs and corporations who have supplanted the rule of law, as the legal guardrails have acquiesced to said oligarchs and corporations.
The "guardrails" under the aformentioned were the other "royal" or "granter" enablers (barons, dukes, earls, etc. "courts") who needed those protesters and revolters to make life smooth for them. Testing the wind direction, the enablers would tip the balance one way or another.
Our guardrails are gone. The enablers are the new laws of the land. Laws are only as good as the ones enacting good, stable laws and enforcing them. Alas, we have neither.
A revolution it will be. People will not go back to the seemingly quasi-corruption and do-nothing congress of Post-war America, where the middle class, after a 20 year run, succumbed to the financial imperatives of the conservative-driven courts, corporations and, ultimately, the legislature.
They can't go back....not if they know what's good for them.
This is a very necessary message and I agree 100%. You are right: it's long been considered the cool thing to be cynical. But "humanity is stupid" messages are nothing but self-serving, because the person spouting them never includes themselves in the statement.
No, humanity is a child. We are young to the game of consciousness. For Chrissake, we've only had written language for a few thousand years, the printing press for a few hundred, and so on. We think of this as a long time, but if you measure it by the scales necessary to understand the nature of consciousness it's like we just woke up.
Of course it's going to take a while, and that is doubly so when you consider the nature of the problems that we are addressing. I personally put man's high point at about 25,000 BC. Once the goddess worship society propounded by people like Terence McKenna started to wither you can watch the sickness of modern civilization creep into us bit by bit.
This means that if we are going to unearth it, holy hell it's not going to be short and easy. The Kali Yuga system suggests that we have something like 432,000 years left of spiritual degradation before we turn things around. Not everybody agrees with this metric, but I think the exact number is unimportant. What is important is that we recognize that it's not going to be some simplistic Hollywood fix of destroying this or that and then boom, freedom. We are liberating our consciousness from what Wilhelm Reich called the "emotional plague", and that is going to take a long time, and a lot of patience, compassion, and relentless effort.
My most recent article was about what you say. I see in the Macklemore controversy signs that we are finally hitting the breaking point that so many of us have been waiting to see. The "mass man" isn't placated any more by the bread and circuses, because the bread is moldy and expensive and the circus is fake and boring, and in any event we know what's going on outside the tent and can't look away any more.
To say we have a long way to go is a monumental understatement. No one reading these words should be under any illusion that liberation of the human spirit will take place in our lifetime. It's a tree for one generation to plant and the next ones to cultivate. We have to build on the work of those who have gone before us and then add to it for posterity to do the same. There is no single cathartic victory, just little ones like this recent spat which reminds us that as long as the road is, we'll get there as long as we don't give in.
That is definitely a fair adjustment.
I love your optimism, even if I struggle to share it....
👍 ... my head now at the same place ... waffling... overall, not as sanguine as many commenters here ... the darkness of it all ... and I am definitely NOT into the "hope" thing - not sure how to articulate why ... maybe it's an assumption that something else, someone else, will "save" us ... ? Anyone else out there who recoils a bit when hearing that word? Humans have created an artificial world whose management surpasses our ability to manage it. Hoisted by our own petard?
One must have hope for the sake of future generations. I confess the hardest part of living as a boomer has been watching lifelong friends drift into blind allegiance to Red/Blue machine. I know them from both sides of the same arse, as George Galloway would put it. Hero worship of Zelensky. Loyalty to presidents, no matter how many lies they tell and how many lives they take. Yet I press on in some hope as I see the Macklemores of the world awaken the world around them.
what future generations? if things go on how it goes at the moment, evolution will put humanity into the background. ai will be the next step on the ladder to knowledge of existence. who we are? why do i live? where is sense? we aren't intelligent enough to answer these questions, we will bounce the planet.
This is so true and another prescient column!! The awakening is already happening, all over. The elite are frantically playing whack-a-mole trying to shut down this truth, but like the grace of the Absolute, (which, IMO this mass awakening is), it rains down at all times, everywhere. And it's becoming obvious. Time's up for dark forces.
Yes! It seems that we are headed to a time when our hopes, dreams and expectations will be so small, simple and basic, that we will finally be able to handle them, and find satisfaction in attaining just those simple, few, basic aspirations. In short, our nations, leaders, experts, idols, etc. will fuck up everything that is possible to exist, that we will finally realize that they were all false, silly , unnatural desires , expectations and goals, and will simply give them up and look to the simplest ways and things that will help us to survive.
All of our MAGA heroes and Hollywood super stars, and entrepreneurs and experts will be seen as always having been illusions and false gods. Then we will seek out the simplest, most non-de script brothers and sisters to learn from, protect, and whose knowledge and ways of living will be appreciated.
We will look on the Trumps, and all of his cronies in government, religion and culture as clowns and dangerous idiots to follow. It short, true , simple socialism will be seen as our salvation, and we will all gladly adopt it's principals and laugh at the thought that we ever were able to think that the other ways were anything other that idiocies.
In short, Fuck America and every other "Nation" and fuck our old heroes and exalted ones from politics, entertainment, religion, etc. Survival through helping each other period.
I agree with you Caitlin. As an old bugger and an avid consumer of history I know there have been many times when the trend has been terrible and doom and gloom was the order of the day. And then somehow, be it a sharp point of reflexivity or a gradual pivot, the trend line changed. We have a tendance to extrapolate out to infinity but, like they say, It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. One thing that is indisputably true: it is darkest just before dawn. We may have a couple of years of darkness (say till January 2029?) ahead of us but the dawn is coming.
Great minds say great things. I love this reply.
Thank you
I would be very careful about placing too much faith in our species or overestimating our importance in the grand scheme of things. The horrors of these past few years are not some unprecedented rupture in human history. Humanity has spent its entire existence finding new ways to brutalize, exploit, and destroy one another. Our history is littered with it. There is very little evidence that we are destined to transcend those impulses and become some enlightened, peaceful, benevolent species. That may be an appealing story to tell ourselves, but treating it as inevitable is simply naive.
In the 2010s I shared this feeling, believing there was no way out of the problem given so-called “human nature”.
In 2020 I started a deep-dive into anti-racism and anti-colonialism, and learned that these horrors aren't about "Humanity" at all but a specific subset of the species that are infected by a specific set of ideologies.
I have optimism today because I see that the problem isn't universal in the species, and there are a wide variety of alternatives. In fact, Western Europe's alleged "Enlightenment" ideologies included universalism, and that is one of many problematic ideologies that require anti-virus to disinfect people of.
https://r.flora.ca/p/nice-canadian-racism
I don't consider disinfection inevitable given how powerful Western Eurocentrism(1) has been, but at least I recognize it is possible.
(1) I prefer that term to "White Supremacy" as so many under Western European worldviews believe that relates to individuals and/or melanin.
I tend to agree, but I'm trying to hope as hard as I can that more and more will become enlightened.
Honestly ,I have no optimism that the Controllers of our world today, whose main goal is total control and domination of the world for Material gains cares about anything outside of their lust for Materialism at all and any cost .
Most of these leaders that controls the world today have no Humanity especially the Western ones being led around by "GODS Children.' They are going to be Death of us all
I think we all need to realize that the current capitalist system, driven by an unquenchable greed for more power and money, only promotes a certain type of people to positions of power. We usually call them "psychopaths." And one of the specific traits these kinds of people have is the lack of empathy.
***
Pathocracy is a political term describing a system of government led by individuals with severe personality disorders—typically psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, or Machiavellianism. The term was notably used by psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology (written in the 1960s–70s, published much later).
***
Key characteristics of a pathocracy:
-Leaders are psychopaths or sociopaths who rise to power by exploiting social chaos and normal people's psychological weaknesses.
-Truth is systematically replaced with a controlled, distorted reality.
-Cruelty, paranoia, and corruption become institutionalized.
-Normal, empathetic individuals are weeded out or destroyed.
***
"A society of Altruists being ruled by Psychopaths.":
http://youtu.be/7ucF2IeJTfE?t=802
I wonder if this lack of having "no Humanity" as you say for these uber wealthy and powerful "Controllers" of our world today has anything to do with the current ontological dominate belief that the reality we find ourselves in is a purely mechanical contraption, and the human soul is mostly a figment of our imagination? And that being the case, it makes rational sense to get what you can while you can - because you too will soon perish into the oblivion from whence you came - and this cold reality you have found yourself in?
Just a thought ...
Maybe they're right ?
Historical materialism may in the end be the life of us all, given its universalisation of the practical philosophy of a nutritious diet and adequate shelter, prior to the seedy construction of billionaires and Trump towers, should such nonsense be indicated...
Seems to me we are at a stage where almost everyone everywhere thinks there is something very very wrong with the world, but there is no agreement on in what way. And very hard to sway people from their very personal opinion about the causes or the best way forward. This opinion will be formed and held at a very primal fear/flight depth well below a cortex which can be appealed to by reason or even additional evidence (since people think they know what they see with their own eyes). And of course they will see other takes as delusional. There must be tireless argument to make the case, but I just can’t see a mass awakening without cataclysmic events to dice people up. On the plus side, it seems very likely there is a queue of them lined up on the horizon.
Is this not the question of the requirements for the development of revolutionary consciousness, which indicates the value of an understanding of class war and ruling class ideology? If people aren't recovering an interest in socialism and communism, they should be, because that is where the best explanation for the composition of our current reality remains to be found, and ignorance of this would be testimony to the success of the cognitive war of the ruling cabal, who remain in appropriate dread of the " red" threat.
That would be my view, too. Yes. And getting the analysis out there is crucial…but. Nobody is listening because their eyes and ears are stopped by the anger of their own gut instinct. No doubt the force feeding of propaganda is also a big factor. It will take cataclysms to wipe the slate clear. Or a miracle, as Cat proposes.
John C wrote, "Seems to me we are at a stage where almost everyone everywhere thinks there is something very very wrong with the world, but there is no agreement on in what way."
The mention of Marxist class and socialism is an example of one of those "no agreement" on what the problems are, and thus what direction to be going for potential solutions.
When I do any deep-dive into the systemic problems, I end up being led to Anthropocentrism (which includes Anthropocentric notions of "property"), Androcentrism, Individualism, Universalism, and other ideologies tied up with the unique history of Western Europe.
In my mind there isn't a significant enough difference between Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Communism, etc that were all built on the same core ideologies.
So much of Marx's work was trained by racist Eurocentric thinking, and that is what needs to change : not merely how polite we are (economically or individually) to fellow humans (socialism, marxism, etc).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBFvxkvpi2w
For me, especially as someone of Scottish, Irish and French descent that was Assigned Canadian At Birth, I don't see the point of movements that are not in some way founded in non-metaphorical decolonial thinking.
I think the Chinese might chuckle over the attempt to marginalise the only accurate perspective on capitalism we have based on the work of Marx and Engels and so many others across the planet who might be healthily suspicious of the "eurocentric" tactic. Marxism is based upon a systematic objective study of the capitalism of the day, and the only ones who want him buried are those whose crimes he exposes.
I gather you didn't watch the video. Your choice.
What I read in your reply was a list of Western Eurocentric "Enlightenment" ideologies used to claim some sort of "system objective study" of a very narrow aspect of Western economic ideologies. This was followed by a typical Western false-binary of claiming that the "only" people who disagree are a specific group, erasing everyone else (including myself).
Wonderful , so agree with your truthful words & always look forward to listening to you … Thankyou for your great newsletters … Lainie 🩷xx
I am not sure I have the same hope as you do. If you try to comment on the blog in the link below saying that the imperial war machine is the biggest polluter in the world, either you get called "Putinist" or your comment will be deleted without even a response: https://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com
Some people have been completely brainwashed by decades of propaganda and lost forever!
Caitlin doesn't seem to be including the Technofascists in her theory. Or Their plans to use Mass Surveillance to prevent ANY Freedom. I do feel a growing consciousness, but how does everyone becoming more enlightened prevent Digital Currency, which is the Endgame and where we lose most - if not all, of Our ability to live outside the Matrix?
We can all lose our ego and move to a higher spiritual plane, while we are Debanked, Classified by Productivity Worth or Useless Eater, and forced into 15 minute Slave Cities.
Caitlin never seems to address how the Peter Thiels & Sam Altmans of Earth are going to stop becoming Trillionaires and using their money to reduce the World Pop thru poison food, cancer, starvation brought on by the Oil Crisis and Endless War.
What Caitlin is really saying, is IF ANY humans are left, after the Technofascist and Zio Billionaires have deleted and enslaved most of us, destroyed most freshwater sources for Their AI God (it is a religion to them)... after ALL that and worse, since Mizz Izzy has the Samson option of using Her stockpile of stolen nukes... after ALL that is done... FINALLY....
Peace.
We won't be there for any of it, but it will happen.
🚫ALL DATA CENTERS ✌️
I don't.
All you do is nap all day Feral.
I live by my wits, and as such, i have to live in the real world
I've been trying to live by my wits - but it's hard.
It is hard. It is harder for a mama with a litter to feed and protect.
lol