It’s almost amusing how ramped up the efforts have become regarding the silencing, censoring, blocking, erasing and banning of dissenting, contradicting, “alternative” voices. Are you at all concerned?
Notable shows and hosts with significant numbers of followers and audience members are suddenly disappearing, or being otherwise penalized and limited. Brian Rose (London Real), Del Bigtree (The Highwire), Matt Belair, Joe Martino (Collective Evolution), Ben Swann, Mikki Willis, and on and on. Those with smaller audiences are apparently not as threatening.
Many are scrambling to set up their own media and streaming services, but as you can imagine this is an uphill and expensive battle. Twitter, Facebook/Instagram and YouTube/Google (also Amazon and Apple) are massive, influential, profitable, and clearly the gatekeepers of all that is right and good and safe. They — their board members, CEOs, and other key operators) know very well that we, the billions of people around the world now plugged in and online, have come to depend on the services they provide. Currently, they are seemingly untouchable, and yet, are simultaneously, evidently, critical in the effort to maintain the narrative of the few.
Journalists at demonstrations are now adversaries. Environmental defenders and indigenous leaders are being murdered in record numbers. Celebrities are all drinking the same liberal-is-righteous potions, spouting the same rhetoric — well, except Madonna.
The first symptom of being infected by an ideology is an insistence that longstanding social problems have obvious solutions instead of painful tradeoffs. If such problems actually had obvious solutions, they would have been solved a long time ago.
A coronavirus continues to be a force for massive change. Let the sun shine on! Perhaps, if there weren’t such an overwhelming level of infantilism, narcissism, self-righteousness and hubris, if there weren’t all the financial and political incentives to maintaining the status quo, maybe we’d be making some actual progress. But it looks more like regression, when logic, reason, and sensemaking have been so widely distorted, suppressed, and otherwise derailed.
It is a crazy time, to be sure. Our low-level madness eventually had to find a way to explode into the world and shatter our delusions. We can’t simply push truths down and away anymore. We can’t defer to the heads of state, churches, industries, and corporations. We just can’t.
Your world is mirroring your intensity of change, growth, and uncertainty. Reality is showing its cracks, quite vividly. Take responsibility of your thoughts, your beliefs, and your impulses. Following along and feeding on the ceaseless media frenzy will drive you mad… but maybe a touch of madness is what you need.
There is no safety to be found in all this. None. Let that idea go, or you’ll twist and knot up your guts. We have to continue the wanton destruction of the old stories; we are in the moment of a grand remaking. You are here, now, as an essential element of the wave of shifts and changes unlike any we’ve experienced before. It’s tricky because there are no bombs, no missiles, no tanks, and no physical weapons of any kind. Our battlefield is in the mind, the heart, and the soul of the world.
Exciting, isn’t it?
Solvitur ambulando