March 29, 2025

Vibes

The animal wonders if it can feed itself by leaping across the chasm.

It does not know if it can make it, because it has never encountered this particular chasm. The animal must make a choice based on a fantasy – the power of visualization.

Sometimes the leap of faith is successful. Sometimes it’s not.

The animal that survives such a leap will pass this lesson on to its descendants. (The animal that does not survive will also pass this learning on to its non-existent descendants.)

But what happens when the animal that takes the leap, and misses the mark, doesn’t pay the price?

Remember the Great War on Terror when:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

Right now, the USA — and much of the planet — is mid-leap across a chasm that cannot, in fact, be crossed.

Broke: running on fumes

Woke: running with renewables

Bespoke: running on vibes

There is no engineering solution that keeps Icarus from dying because it’s not the sun that kills him, it’s hubris.

There is no engineering solution to hubris.

Which is not to say that hubris is an unsolvable problem.

On the contrary, we humans solved this problem tens of thousands of years ago: humility.

Or, as it’s popularly known: religion.

Yesterday, as I was listening to the prayer that began our walk along the stations of the cross (7, 8 and 9), I thought it both funny and joyous that Christianity offers such a dry response to the perennial challenge of tyrants.

“Sure,” Jesus says, “you can kill me, the god of the powerless. But I’ll be back in three days.”

This thought came to me because there was a helicopter flying above us (technically, a ghetto bird) and it reminded me of people in places like El Salvador, who, taking strength from the stations of the Cross, marched out into the streets and were then gunned down.

“Sure, you can kill me,” says Jesus, the god of the powerless. “But I’ll be back in three days.”

The strength of the humble God – the most humble God, the humiliated God – is the strength of reality.

Christianity doesn’t avoid doubt, it embraces it. And in doing so, it created the culture that eventually produced the scientific method.

(Yes, other cultures found their way to the same solution. Consider the pauper Buddha.)

Ironically, as the Continental philosophers have noted, Christianity kept it real.

We, however, live in a time of radical unreality.

My fellow political junkies will recall that the word of the 2024 election cycle was “vibes”.

As in: reality no longer matters.

The triumph of algorithmic, ad-driven media has replaced slow and expensive facts (news) with quick and cheap feelings (propaganda).

And we are “here for it.”

Because the so-called consensus view is a lie.

Faced with a “story of us” that is demonstrably false, a social contract that is clearly already broken, we embrace surrealism.

It’s vibes all the way down.

Everywhere around us are the signs that we have walked off a cliff.

The President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, is not tethered to reality.

The “Prime Minister” of the United States of America, Elon Musk, is also disconnected from reality. (Whether it’s his Ketamine habit or he’s simply “high on his own supply,” the result is the same.)

It matters that we are ruled by men for whom other people do not exist.

But it matters more that the highest ranks of our society are filled with people who are afraid to say so, because it would mean admitting they’ve helped create this fake reality in order to protect their privilege.

Last October 14, I wrote here:

A lot of ink will be spilled electrons will be moved over the “low information voters”, the “voters with false consciousness” who are bringing this country to the brink of absolute ruin, following the footsteps of so many great empires before it. 

But it’s the people who know better we should blame.

It was fashionable several decades ago to talk about moral relativism as a threat to American society. But the greatest relativists of all have been America’s elites.

Because they never paid the price for their privileges, they were shielded from the consequences of their actions. Thus did they become dissociated from reality.

Example: not a single elite was tried, let alone convicted, for the illegal US invasion of Iraq.

Actions without consequences = vibes.

Example: not a single elite was tried, let alone convicted, for the financial crisis of 2008.

Actions without consequences = vibes.

Example: there was an effort, in the wake of the state murder of George Floyd, to hold America’s racist justice system accountable for violating its own stated purpose.

I think all of you reading this will know what the consequences have been.

If you’re fuzzy on the details, here’s a headline and subhead to focus your mind:

“Daniel Penny Is Hired by Venture Capital Firm Whose Founder Backed Trump. Mr. Penny, who was acquitted after choking a [Black] mentally ill subway passenger to death, will work for Andreessen Horowitz.”

You see that [parenthetical]? I had to add it. Because the headline came from the New York Times. They are still playing.

Democracy dies in equivocation.

Because America was the most powerful empire in the history of mankind, it will be a long way down.

America’s elites will fall but most will never hit the ground because they’ll land on top of the millions of bodies that never really mattered to them in the first place.

Why has the right’s blitzkrieg been so effective?

Because they exploited the hypocrisy of America’s elites; their barely disguised disdain for the poor and the outsider.

It was always our weakest link.

MS-13 was produced by the USA. It’s one of America’s most impressive exports.

Again and again, America’s elites leave a trail of destruction in their wake. And everyone else pays the price.

It’s a whole vibe, as the kids say.