Ex Occasione Vanitatis

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu teaches us that "in chaos there is also opportunity."  Even objectively, one can only conclude that we live in a time of chaos, thus one must consider that there is also opportunity.

The West is quite obviously in the throes of a great upheaval, unlike anything the world has seen for at least a century, and in scale maybe several centuries.

To my admittedly addled mind, the world is still suffering under the major shift in global power that began in the late 1700s, and manifested itself in the various revolutions and wars of the past 300 years.

It is at heart a shift away from the millennia-old paradigm of gods and goblins running the Universe, and universe which is perfect in nature and operates according to ineffable rules.  It is a universe largely out of control of human hands and our collective Fate is at the whim of a god or gods who dangle Paradise and Damnation in front of us to solicit desired behaviors.

The replacement Universe is cold and random, though no less mystical.  It also created itself out of nothing, but it operates like balls on a billiard table, with particles bouncing around in a serendipitous dance, sometimes clinging, and at other times breaking apart.  Our Fate here is at the whim of so-called physical laws, but they are little different in nature from the stone tablets of the prior age, and instead of Paradise and Perdition, there is only the frozen wastes of nothing to which all things are headed.

It is here that the true chaos of the moment enters the fray.

Objectively, the two universes that are at war are actually the same mindset, but with different trappings.  The magical creation, the hardened laws...they are nothing more than recapitulations of each other.  The real change is fully apart from them and is of a far more fundamental nature, and the chaos comes from both of them fighting the true change in human understanding that is plowing through all of it.

The real change appears to be a return to something very old - rationalism.  Some might argue that Scientific Rationalism has been the rising star of history since the Enlightenment, but if true, then it was derailed by Einstein and his ilk in the early 20th century.

Instead of fact-based observation informing thought and theory, we have labored under a group of pseudo-priests who have used mathematical wizardry to invent a Universe full of phantom dark forces without any basis in reality, and certainly not observable with any instruments humans can devise.

True rationalism, dating back to Aristotle and Plato in Western philosophy, accepts only those things that can be proven by repeated experimentation and observation.  While this may seem logical to most thinking people, it is something that has virtually vanished from modern science.

Where we appear to have gotten derailed was when Big Business and Big Government joined in an unholy alliance (to borrow Peter Levenda's term) with Big Religion to maintain a system of control over the masses through the use of parlor tricks and mystical gobbledy-gook.

Continuing the ancient tradition of controlling the masses with incomprehensible nonsense combined with a few magic tricks has kept humanity enslaved to massive centralized power structures.  These power structures have done nothing but impoverish us, while offering almost nothing in return, other than the promise of some pie-in-the-sky future paradise if we just keep paying and waiting.

The real revolution that is growing underneath the veneer of pseudo-religious institutions is the mass realization that we really don't need these institutions, and that humanity has been held back by centuries because of mystical incantations of a privileged elite that thrives parasitically off the labor of the rest of us.

The great fear of the central power bases is that we are waking up from our conditioning.  It shows in the increasing movement of people to be self-governing.  In their desperation, the control grid has revealed its myriad weaknesses and deceptions.  Increasingly, the masses are shunning the snake oil salesmen of the Establishment in favor of self-rule.

Who needs banks when you can save your cryptocoins on a tiny chip?  Who needs the protection racket called government when we can take care of ourselves?  Who needs universities when we can download our own libraries for free?  Who needs corporate media when we can create our own entertainment and watch it when we want?  Who needs gods when we are gods?

The more people realize how much power they truly have, the more these massive black holes of power and wealth will shrink.  The Gutenberg press brought cheap and available information to the masses, and the internet is that same trend on steroids.

In the chaos of the shift to individual empowerment, there are many opportunities for self-enrichment, both financially and internally.  As we seize more of our personal power back from the usurping elites, the ensuing chaos will present new and dazzling opportunities for those who are clear-minded and rational - not panicking at the swirl of history.

The true test of the new revolution will be whether those seizing the opportunities will be self-aware enough to help others join the fun, or whether they will simply replace the current elite with something darker and more devious.