The Shift is Real
How vibes can turn the probable into the possible
There’s been a palpable shift in the energy. Not just Biden to Kamala, though that’s part of it. Or Trump’s near miss from a bullet - though that was certainly a spectacularly enacted transmutation of life-threatening danger into a reification of his most essential life energy. Even for him, it was a way of hitting bottom and experiencing a turnaround.
The covid crisis is still here, but it’s a little different now. Those of us who remain cautious still mask on the planes and in crowded places and then hope for the best, but we’re no longer in a reality where most people who get it end up on a ventilator. And kids are playing again. They’re going back to school to face their mostly typical challenges.
The Middle East is still a total mess, but I think everyone at least knows it is now? It feels as if fewer people are on the extremes. Fewer voices are arguing that people of one religion or the other must be wiped out or exiled, and seemingly everyone knows the violence is political, unnecessary, and about neither liberation nor security.
On a personal level, a whole lot of people I know — including myself — have undergone a palpable shift over the past few months. A reckoning, a hitting bottom, an acceptance of what we cannot change, but also a realization of what we can. There’s a great Jewish prayer — it’s a Medieval poem, written during the worst of times and rampant oppression and murder, a real hopeless period — called the Unetaneh Tokef. It’s the one that explains that between the two high holy days, God writes down very awful thing that’s going to happen to everyone in the Book of Life. “Who shall live and who shall die…Who shall perish by water and who by fire, Who by sword and who by wild beast…” Awful, hopeless stuff, decreed by God and there’s nothing you can do about it. BUT, at the very end it says, we can lessen the severity of the decree through “teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah,” which they like to translate as prayer and righteousness, but all together it’s really just soulfulness, devotion, and compassion. We can’t change what’s going to happen, but we can change how we experience it if we go through it together, with compassion.
I haven’t been shy about sharing the way I’ve been feeling for the past year or so, and many of you have written to offer your support or to let me know you’re in the same rut. I know I’m not the only one who has been feeling the stress of these times, and on many levels.
• The way the net seems to ask for a certain pace of output. Substack and podcast platforms encourage output at weekly or even greater intervals, and if I churn out enough to match that pace, then they just seem to want more.
• My amplified sense of responsibility for everyone and everything coming at me through email and a myriad of other messaging apps.
• The isolated, community-resistant structure of the nuclear family in America today - amplifying every Freudian dysfunction while shutting out the network of support that could help mitigate or even metabolize all the trauma and confusion.
• The stultifying realities of climate change, economic inequality, hate and war, exile and poverty.
I’ve been producing some good stuff through it all — don’t get me wrong. I’m working on a documentary, something like a “Swimming to Cambodia” monologue, except it’s me trying to talk America (or maybe the world) off its bad trip. We’re working on a fictional movie derived off that first scene of my book Survival of the Richest. There’s a TV show in development based on my graphic novel ADD and another based on Ecstasy Club. And another non-fiction TV show in which I’m supposed to evaluate moonshot projects by tech titans. And Richard Metzgers Magick Show just met its Kickstarter goal! the MA program in Media Studies I’m running at Queens College has finally hit its stride, with some Team Human listeners joining our cohort. And I’m finally back at work on my graphic novel right now (yes - I will be sending a digital copy to all you supporters for free).
But I’ve felt a bit like a kite. Yes, when there was good wind I have been flying around, but it has been grounding in the wrong way. Kind of like a kite, but all string and no flight. I had to make some internal changes — I’ve even done some “internal family systems” work, if you know that modality — to listen to some of the people inside me who haven’t been able to express themselves in a long time. I’ve been good at caring for others, but terrible at caring for myself. And I know it may sound selfish and individualist and American, but I had to do a bit of self care, and this meant being less available to everyone and everything else — if only to emerge even more capable of doing good stuff for and with everyone.
So I’ve gone on a bit of a walkabout — a highly local one, at least geographically — but as far as I’ve ever gone, on an emotional/spiritual/psychological level. I looked square in the face of death — I honestly believe real, physical death — and chose a different path. One of play, and human connection, and respect for my own agency. And, man, the universe has acknowledged this effort. People, opportunities, smiles…everything is just more moist.
But it’s not just me.
I guess what I’m doing is suggesting or acknowledging that we’re undergoing a “vibe shift” of some kind. I don’t know astrology well enough to know if there’s something at play on that level — there always seems to be some “explanation” for things like this, which is why I don’t look for them anymore.
And maybe that’s the point.
Part of the shift is toward the vibe thing, itself. I know Kamala will be talking about policy and specifics at some point — maybe she already has — but the interesting thing about her approach so far is to ride the wave of sentiment. Factless, data-free, positivity.
Now there’s clearly risks in that. It’s what the fascists use. It’s what made Obama actually suck, in some ways, as a president. It was all projection. But as a corrective to a hopelessly literalist culture incapable of imagining anything but conspiracy theories, it’s like healing balm.
By literalist, I mean the flatness of a world in which everything must be exactly what it is, without room for play, interpretation, allegory, metaphor, or magic. For instance, while I appreciate and understand the need to correct for centuries of race and cultural appropriation, I don’t know that I support casting movies and plays with people who are from exactly the same intersection as the parts they are playing. It’s one thing (wrong) to cast a white person as Othello, but do we have to find a person with OCD to play a character with that mental disorder? Can a straight person play a gay person? Can a person raised in a happy home play a person raised in a troubled one? If we cast in an entirely social justice fashion, then it means no one gets to act. Everyone watches reality TV. (Which is totally faked, anyway!)
Without the ability to play, we end up stuck in a culture of literalness. (One that, perhaps fittingly, doesn’t even know how to use the word “literally” correctly. In fact, literally has officially come to mean not literally).
Widespread fascination with AI has been similarly nauseating to me, not because AI’s threaten jobs, but because they seem to make people fetishize verisimilitude — fidelity to “real” life. People celebrate how realistic an AI’s pictures and movies are, which to me is hopelessly Industrial Age. The real value here is like that of early photography, whose ability to represent reality actually unleashed artists to explore impressionism and surrealism. Machines can do the literal. Humans and human culture don’t need to imiate that. We can do the metaphorical, the allegorical, and the magical. The vibe.
Now, the vibe has always been the enemy of the Left. The Left has always focused on “conditions on the ground,” meaning the actual pain and suffering of people. Stats. If anything, the Left tried to make the real into a mythology. Like the covid vaccine campaign, “flatten the curve.” That was actually pretty clever, in that it took the graph of a Covid spike and used it to make an intuitive argument about getting vaccinated so that hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Data became a metaphorical slogan. But it’s usually a pretty boring proposition. The Right, on the other hand, has been trying to make myth into reality — like pro wrestling, or the way Trump migrated from the WWE to the UFC.
Part of my frustration with Marxism and the Left is that by staying with the conditions on the ground, we lose access to the passion and play of vibe. It all feels very Internety. The net is explicit. Literal. It carries data. It only acknowledges what can be specified. Like the Book of Life. Who shall live and who shall die. Yes or no.
Living things, on the other hand, like Mycelial networks or the human touch, carry something more. They seem to be able to carry compassion, the ability to metabolize trauma, or to “lessen the decree.” Digital networks can’t do this. Data can’t do this. Take some mushrooms with your friends, and you’ll experience a connection that you can’t quite get in a Discord. That’s because this is more like vibes: intuitive, touchy-feely, difficult to define, and data-confounding.
This may be at last partly to blame for the FDA’s recent rejection of an application for MDMA/Ecstasy to be used for treatment of PTSD (where it has actually been working). Yes, there were some problems with the organization doing the trials, and a bit of religiosity around the specific styles of talk therapy that were to go along with the MDMA administration. But the underlying incompatibility of ecstasy use with clinical trials may make the normal approval process impossible, anyway. How can you do a double-blind study with a substance as powerful as MDMA? People know when they are tripping vs. when they’ve taken a placebo.
These phenomena, like love and mushrooms and vibes and touch, are closer to the realm of metaphor and magic than they are to cold data. It's really hard to get traditional data on them, because these are technologies and phenomena that are in the realm of metaphor and magic and compassion and intuition. That’s not a cop-out. Many of us are resorting to metaphor and magic now — partly just to feel better because things look grim, but partly to motivate and reconnect and give ourselves the energy and spirit we need to confront the actual challenges before us.
Yes, we are riding and resting a bit on the vibe, and the mood and enthusiasm. It doesn't mean the problems aren't real. Vibes alone won't cure climate change. Climate change is real. The threat to us is real. The ongoing extinction of our friends and partners, it's real. But when we understand these challenges purely through the metrics and the flat machine data, we end up reducing ourselves to probable outcomes. And I hate to say it, but given the data, our probable outcomes are not good. What we need to reach for instead are the possible outcomes.
And the only way to unleash possible outcomes is by unleashing the human. We must break the string of the kite and fly into the magic, the compassion, the allegory, and the approaches that only an unfettered, freely thinking, independent, creative human society can imagine together.
So that's why I'm becoming more positive, more embodied, more vibey, compassionate, connected, and juicy. I feel like I'm doing that on a personal level and that I'm seeing that happen all around me — not as a way of avoiding the problems, but as a way of turning these probable demises into possible explosions and expressions of human compassion and capability against all odds.