Vibe Shift Part I

This is not a rock.

A warning: over the course of this and I-don’t-yet-know-how-many posts, I’m going to indulge in some wild speculation. Such speculation will be presented with little evidence. Any conclusions I draw will almost certainly be wrong or, at least, horrendously incomplete. My intention is only to keep nibbling, mouse-like, at what I perceive to be a rather large hunk of cheese, but which may turn out, in the end, to be rat poison.

I like the mouse analogy because I sort of feel like a small mammal these days, as I wrote here, and because people can easily compare ourselves to mice in terms of scale and acuity. As I discuss the things I will attempt to be discussing, it will be from the POV of somebody who feels rather like a mouse explaining electricity to Thomas Edison. I have only the barest concept of what I’m talking about, but that will not prevent me from trying. Hubris, you bastard.

To paraphrase Magritte, this is not a rock. And the person looking at is not a person. I, however, remain gorgeous.

Over the past several days (and years), I’ve been trying to untangle the political moment in which we find ourselves, although “political” makes it sound more temporal than I believe it to be, since politics as we commonly speak of them revolve around whichever au currant issues have been spun into existence by the spiders who seek our attention and money. And while I’ve been focusing on that aspect of our politics as we gird ourselves for the new administration about to re-occupy Washington DC, the political moment I’ve been grappling with extends well beyond our nation’s capital. We see it everywhere we look: in South Korea, Syria, Russia, Iran, Israel, the United States and almost certainly anywhere we choose to cast our wary eyes.

At the same time, I remain deeply engaged in my UFO bullshit. If anybody is curious, below is an appearance I made the other night from my sickbed (I’m better now) in which we discuss UFO phenomenology, the New Jersey drone flap, and poltergeists. As I tell the host, Dan Harary, the nuts-and-bolts aspect of the capital p Phenomena is the least interesting part of the entire enterprise. Many people, like myself, who immerse themselves in this topic, eventually end up studying consciousness, which is where my primary interest now lies.

The “hard problem of consciousness,” as philosopher David Chalmers called it, involves the recognition that we have no theory about how consciousness could possibly emerge from physical interactions. The solution to how a bunch of chemicals should somehow combine to create a sense of “I” and “me” remains elusive. Actually, “elusive” is too polite a word. We have no fucking idea, leading many to speculate that consciousness does not arise from the physical, but, rather, the physical arises from consciousness.

Of course, that would flip our current physicalist paradigm on its head. The pyramid of our current understanding goes something like: physics is primary, and the it is the inevitable interaction of molecules which leads to chemistry, which leads to biology, which gives rise to consciousness. What many propose is that we’ve got the pyramid inverted, and that consciousness itself may be the substrate below all the material world which gives rise to the rest.

This idea is very old, indeed, although it’s been expressed in different terms across time and cultures. Our modern technological culture has allowed us to peer ever-further into the subatomic realm, which has revealed the startling fact that the things of which we are made may not be made of stuff at all. In fact, it increasingly appears as though there’s no “there there,” that the ultimate nature of reality is more field than a substance, that we are all expressions of probability rather than anything as definitive as a solid object.

If, for example, you were to peer deeply into a rock, you would discover that there is no rock, only a lot of potentialities somehow “agreeing” to create our perception of a rock. In that way, the rock and our perception of the rock are “entangled” in the sense that the rock can take no definitive form without an observer to “create” that form.

(Quantum physicists or those who know more than I, please explain to everybody in the comments how my layman’s interpretation is mistaken. In the meantime, I’m going to operate as if the above statement is correct enough to continue.)

How this idea should apply to our current political environment is subtle, but I’m starting to believe that it may be important. As I’ve been writing here and here, I think we’re in a moment in which a battle is being waged between those who wish to remain “entangled” and those who would fight against reality with every ounce of strength they possess.

What is globalism, after all, if not a recognition that we are interconnected whether we like it or not? The Butterfly Effect flaps its wings in unexpected ways, as when a novel virus arising in a Chinese market city eventually explodes the cost of used cars in Florida. All earthly activity permeates all other earthly activity, however much we may wish it not to be so. It’s not just that we need each other. In some sense, it’s entirely possible we are each other just as the rock is not a rock without anybody there to make it so. The observer and the observed are linked.

This is what the politics of resentment resents. Consider the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me.” What is it other than a middle finger erected at Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction? Like it or not, all systems are subject to these laws, including you, me, a squirrel, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

What the “fuck your feelings” crowd doesn’t understand is that my feelings affect your feelings, and yours mine. You can fly as many stupid flags as you want, but whether you like it or not, we’re are all treading on each other, without interruption, all the time. If that is the case (and it IS the case), then we are all a single, interdependent system.

When I say “we,” I am not talking about people. I am talking about the greater We, which encapsulates every earthly system: the Amazon rain forest and the magnetosphere and that same stupid butterfly flapping its wings somewhere. How deep, broad, and far that system extends is beyond my understanding. It certainly extends beyond Earth, but for there’s no reason to get all intergalactic about it at the moment.

To get the tiniest sense of the complexity of this system, take a look at this amazing short documentary about peering into the internal workings of a single bacterial cell. If you don’t have sixteen minutes to spare, I’ll give you a quick synopsis: this shit is fucking wild.

The speculatin’ part of this post, and those to come, is wondering whether the current revolts on both sides of the political divide are related to the gradual, and glacial, awakening I suspect we’re undergoing. Confirmation bias may be at play for me here, but I feel as though I’m witnessing a tremendous number of congruent data points all indicating that something profound is emerging in the culture, and that consciousness is a major component of it.

Is such an “awakening” actually happening? If so, what is it’s nature and how will it affect current power structures and social dynamics? My suspicions regarding such an awakening haven’t quite reached the level of belief, but I will proceed as if they have because it’s more fun to write from a place of conviction than from wishy-washiness.

In the next post (or soon after), I will look at the concept of “awakening,” which has special resonance in the context of our current sociological landscape, and how attacking “wokeness” is more than an attack on racial sensitivity - although it is very much also that - and more a panicked rejection of the burgeoning vibe shift I’m sensing.

The rock that isn’t a rock, I want to believe, is getting ready to roll.