Ukrainian Flags & the Expulsion from Eden

Can the West move on from this?

Dateline March 2022.... As the month begins, pretty much all of the 800 million Westerners on the planet are waving their blue & yellow flags and hating on Putin. The logic behind the propaganda seems to be that if we can all just keep our minds pointing in a certain direction, surely the evil Russian regime will fall and we can all jump up and down at the victory of positivity and democracy.

What happened?

Nothing. It made no difference. Even a billion people pointing their minds in one direction did not visibly change the conflict one iota. Putin didn’t give a shit. Didn’t even seem to notice.

“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

And so came about the real end of the West. The fever dream of being able to influence reality with our minds, if not on our own then at least en masse - a dream born in California on the backs of Tony Robbins and The Secret. It visibly came to its end.

No longer could we claim that someone in the back of the room, who hadn’t been down with the positivity and needed to be shamed more, was to blame.

No. The whole plan just didn’t work.

What you think about something just doesn’t really matter. Not that much. That’s reality.

Behaviour matters. What you do matters. What you do can echo in eternity. What you think does not matter.

As a child, I recall being taken to Christmas pantomime with my siblings. Invariably, the tale was Peter Pan. At a critical moment, young female protagonist Tinkerbell falls to the floor, apparently dead. Then follows a lengthy phase where the children in the audience are exhorted numerous times by the onstage narrator to believe as hard as they can that Tinkerbell comes back to life. We inevitably fail a few times until eventually the lifeless young actress begins to stir, to our huge cheers.

Yes, it’s a kids tale and of course fine. But there is a deeper point here. If you are still believing that your thoughts are influencing reality to a meaningful level now, then no matter how old you are, you are actually not an adult yet. You are still a child.

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The biggest lie the Christian church has told people for millennia is that God threw Man out of the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit.

Actually, no.

Man left the Garden of Eden voluntarily, preferring to take his chances as an individual with agency, rather than remain in a bliss state surrendered to a higher will.

Anytime we wish, we can opt out of the deal. It’s clear. Surrender to Christ. Submit to Allah. Go back and they’ll welcome you with open arms. But no. Fuck that. We’ll take our chances. I’ll take my chances.

But that means that now either the West enters a new phase or it will simply die out. The high water mark will remain there outside of Kyiv for tourists from the future to take photos of.

The West has to move on from the fantasy that what you believe matters. The fantasy of manifestation. The fantasy of thinking your own reality.

Are we up to the task?