Uniting in Universal Weirdness

It’s time for the greatest crossover plot in the history of Western civilization.

Photo by Steven Weeks on Unsplash

Okay, everyone’s freaking out.

My inboxes - all of them - are overflowing with friends and readers and strangers asking what I think about the elimination of DEI, DOGE’s cutting of government budgets and elimination of agencies, the tariffs and their economic impacts, rounding up of immigrants and foreign students, detention of tourists, the firing of military leaders and their replacement with loyalists, the firing of anyone in the government charged with investigating corruption, firing health department employees and then realizing they need to be hired to fight bird flu and then not being able to find the records of who they even are….

And then there are the more troubling social implications of all this - the way that citizens are being incentivized to call out any examples of fraud or waste in government spending, the first of what feels sure to be many efforts by government to reward people for ratting out their neighbors - on suspicion that they have done something against the Musk-Trump agenda. (That’s going to be good old-fashioned Stasi fun.)

And most freaked out of all, are the people who are already envisioning death camps or Guantanamo in their futures for having maybe liked a defiant YouTube video, donated to a particular candidate, or published a Marxist diatribe on Medium.

I agree, everything is weird and fucked and upside down. Things are feeling not just wrong, but WEIRD. We are becoming estranged from the reality in which we live - and not just those of us who may have more progressive, “Bernie” values, but those who have what could be called conservative or red state values. In my, albeit limited, experience those values are largely the same anyway: let people do what they want to do in the privacy of their own homes, and leave me the fuck alone. We want to be able to earn a living wage, create value, move about safely, and not live in a perpetual state of extraction by billionaires from above. That’s the great shame in Left’s rejection of Bernie Sanders, largely because he agreed to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2016. Joe Rogan was a supporter, and could have brought all those angry boys into the tent. Instead of welcoming and engaging with the bros on common ground, the left sent them off to Q-Anon and worse.

But we have a lot in common all the same. We all know that there’s a layer of financialization sucking the majority of value out of everything we do. The bank, the landlord, the shareholders, the private equity firms who seize the financial gain from the work that we do.

We may have different names for that abstracted entity, but we suffer under it all the same, and we recognize the way it is being administrated and enforced by technology. Maybe buying a Dogecoin gives us some sense of ground floor participation in Musk’s billions, right? But how has that really worked out?

These bizarre and ineffective interventions, firings, replacements, and institutional collapses precipitated by today’s policies will not go over well in Peoria, tomorrow. People are simply not afraid enough of transgender athletes to justify this level of societal breakdown and paranoia. I’ve spent time with the farmers of South Dakota, and they’re not mean people. They’re environmentalists, and know more than most left-leaning climate activists about no-till agriculture, reducing chemical inputs, liberating from the AI’s in their John Deere tractors, competing with Big Agra conglomerates, and breaking themselves out of the downward spiral of GMOs and Roundup from Monsanto. They are just as smart as we are, and equally capable of evaluating what’s coming down to them under the guise of deregulation.

Maybe our most important job now is to have faith that rest of humanity - the apparently “other” side - is seeing the same horror show we are. We have the most important thing in common: a disgust for people’s inhumanity to other people. We just see it in different places, and interpret events differently.

But right now, even before most of us feel the impact of all this tomfoolery, we all know that what’s happening is WEIRD. This doesn’t feel right to anyone. It’s strange. It’s strange. It’s strange. This is weird in the way ethnobotanist and philosopher Terence McKenna predicted. The rate of novelty - of strangeness - has increased exponentially. We are becoming estranged from the world in which we live, and this not-rightness is palpable by everyone. Even those who were hoping for positive change through the dismantling of the administrative state don’t like so much change all at once. Even the change is changing.

No, I’m sure you can feel it. Not just the Trump/Musk weirdness, but the weirdness all around. Something is up, and I know my fellow humans are feeling the juju, the synchronicities. This concrescence of novelty and almost forced perspective on history. Like looking down an infinite spiral staircase. And then up. Where are we, really? What moment of the story is this?

I keep hearing on TV how quickly the nazis took over once they were in power, how Trump is following the playbook of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and how these descents into right-wing control tend to last a few decades. Forty years, is the expert estimate of this next cycle. But this doesn’t feel so much like the beginning of something than an end. A concrescence. The peak of the bad trip. Popping the global zit off Gaia’s face.

What if the forty year cycle of right-wing ideological rule is what we’ve actually been living through? It started with the election of Ronald Reagan - the original movie star president, promising to Make America Great Again. That was his slogan in his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter (the last gasp of the hippy left, who pardoned draft dodgers and hung out with Bob Dylan at the governor’s mansion and had pot-smoking Willie Nelson over to the solar paneled White House.) Reagan was the beginning of a Neo-liberal, pro-corporate swing that included not only George Bush, but the Democrats. Bill Clinton was no George McGovern, but a welfare reformer and proponent of global markets - not to mention womanizer and intern fondler. The WTO protests of Seattle were during his presidency. Barak Obama jokingly but readily admitted his policies were close to those of Ronald Reagan. And he proved it by calling on Goldman Sachs to fix the mortgage and banking crisis of 2008. Biden was the closest thing to to a reprieve from neoliberalism, but that’s only because the country was nearly collapsed from the Covid pandemic and needed some old-fashioned government intervention to jumpstart the economy and keep people, like, alive. Now we’re back to the trajectory we were on. And it’s peaking in the most obvious way it could, with the richest corporatist in America (Putin is actually richer Musk) running the country.

So what if the Musk/Trump anti-administration is actually the peak of that neoliberal phase - the exponential limit - rather than the beginning of something worse? What if they create such a cascade of weirdness that the seemingly tepid liberal response to this authoritarian drag show actually pales in comparison to the imminent revolt by red state America against a digital pyramid scheme that they know will not include them?

It’s plain to anyone watching that the new order imposed by the tech elite does not value or even include human beings. Just as farmers don’t want to be replaced by AI-tractors, human beings want to have roles and lives even after their presence is no longer required to provide billionaires with the services they need to maintain insulation from the earth they have poisoned and left for dead. I keep finding out about AI panels online with titles like “what are humans for?” Really? That sounds like the kind of question ask at the end of a forty year cycle to me, not one at the beginning.

We can even think of it as a bigger cycle than the past 40 years. Let’s take the past 400 years - since the establishment of the chartered monopolies that turned craftspeople into wage laborers, indigenous lands into colonial territories, and redefined our social reality as a marketplace. 400 years. Does that ring any bells?

Maybe not for most of us folks, but for our brothers and sisters in the Bible-belt — the ones our national media would convince us are our adversaries — they will recognize that 400-year cycle as the length of time the Hebrews spent as slaves in Egypt, what in Hebrew (Mitzrayim) translates as “the narrow place” — not just for its geographically slender shape along the Nile, but the narrow state of mind that a society based on pyramids induces. The whole project — those 400 years of slavery — were the unintentional consequences of the invention of debt. In the mythical story, Joseph tells the Pharaoh to save grain during the seven abundant years he dreamed about, so that people will have to borrow it in the seven lean years to follow. And when they can’t pay with money, they will become indentured servants - slaves.

400 years of that later it reaches a peak with genocide, and that’s the moment God itself enters the story, and all that weird shit starts to happen. Plagues like we’re going through today. Only in Bible lore, each of those plagues is actually the desecration of a false God. Blood desecrates Hapi the god of the Nile; death of the cattle desecrates the calf-headed god Hathor; locusts desecrate the sky god Seth, and so on. What plagues will desecrate our false gods? Will they crash modern idols like the Dow Jones? Money? The nation states?

I promise, Bible readers will make sense of all this just as fast as Marxists.

I think what we’ve got to do right now, in addition to making noise and caring for those dispossessed by the current changes, is recognize the weirdness. Breathe it in, metabolize it, and come to see it as the last gasp of a 400-year reign of terror executed in our name but in no one’s best interests. It’s not a matter of us and them. It’s really about us together against “it.” Like a corporation, this program, this abstracted magical sigil of oppression has been masquerading as a living being. But just a corporation is not person (no matter the rights of personhood they have been granted), neither are the AI’s that today’s Pharaohs hope will control and eventually replace us.

We must denaturalize all this activity. It’s okay to feel weird about it. It’s not we who are strange, it’s all this shit. And estrangement is the first step toward achieving some agency over the situation. It’s the same four steps I’ve been talking about for the past year or so:

- First is denaturalize power. That just means learning to see things as strange - as social constructions. Like when you stare at a dollar bill for a long time and realize, this is just a piece of paper.

- Once you’ve done that, you realize there are lots of different kinds of moneys we could be using, with many different traits - money that doesn’t create debt, but generates prosperity. You gain the agency to do things differently.

- Third, comes reclaiming our social reality. We may have agency, but we can only accomplish things together.

- And that group dynamic creates the fourth and last step: cultivating awe. The divine state of which we’re all capable, when we see ourselves as part of something greater than ourselves.

This really can work out okay. We can make it through this thing, together.

There’s a reason so many of our friends got red-pilled, and those reasons come from the same original source, the same primary force of subjugation and dehumanization. They just fell for a different origin story. Marvel instead of DC.

Well, it’s time for the greatest cross-over plot in the history of western civilization. And I think the way we’ll get there is our mutual recognition of the weirdness — the strangeness the inventedness of the reality show in which we’ve all be cast — and our mutual unwillingness to play along.