Is it the end of days?
Do the rest of you feel it?
I’ve not really been able to get into the essay I’d planned to publish this week, instead finding myself inexcusably fixated on the latest season of what has already become the most eventful year in recent memory. I went out and touched grass, so I’m better now, but last week I was in a furious dither and spent all of my writing hours ranting into my online journal. Now resigned to the fact that the essay will be finished when it is, I’ve instead decided to publish a couple of those rants on here this week. This one is dated 19th June 2025.
Something is changing. Well, it has been changing for a while, but now it’s accelerated in ways that are undeniable. Do you feel things changing? The crumbling of old narratives, and the chaos following in its wake, the moment the post-truth era has been building up to. The collapse of meaning, truth now a puerile distraction. It’s the best thing that could have happened, because it is now all out in the open. The cynical varnish of legitimacy has been scrubbed off. All the show ponies are out here strutting with their best hypocrisy on display. There is no longer a need to lie, to pretend. It’s too hard. As the kids might say, it’s a ‘mask off moment’.
I might say it feels like the world is falling apart, but really, it’s only reordering itself, and in the chaos of the in between, old realities become untethered.
And so everything seems to be getting crazier, more intense - intense events, intense opinions, intense polarisation - violence, innocent people all over the world suffering under the actions of a few, bloated disconnected morons with a God complex. The injustice tears me up, the cruelty, the wanton ignorance, glaring, blinding. So in the wake of the negativity, with the anger throbbing my temples, it’s an effort to remember that the beast always fights hardest in the moments right before its death. The ones calling the shots at the moment, have all the wealth, the scariest weapons, the most cynical form of hate. But the story they’ve been pushing is just too exhausting to keep up, and they’ve now stopped trying.
They still have brute strength on their side, but they don’t realise strength is useless when you’ve lost the story. Now the military might that was used to control the global order, maintain the status quo - will become a tool of self preservation. Because under the suits and bravado they are selfish, fearful little men, so full of self-loathing that they’d rather be feared than loved. They will lash out in an attempt to protect themselves, and that will be their own undoing. When you abandon your principles and your own people, you have nowhere left to run. It happened to Hitler. It’s happening to Netanyahu and Putin. It will happen to Trump and his coterie of daylight vampires.
The first sign of an Empire’s fall, is that all the myths holding it up start to collapse, one by one, and it is only through extraordinary contortions of logic that one continues to justify their position. But it’s a trap. They’ve been pushed into a corner by their own deceit. They have nowhere to go except double down, no off ramp, and the more they double down, the more they’re forced to contort, until they no longer resemble thinking, reasoning human beings. Their inner beast is exposed, fearful and baying for blood. Here the game is up, but the mangled creatures will insist they keep playing. And if you don’t play you’re next. Blood, as much blood as possible, to wash away the curses of all they have oppressed and left to die in the far corners of the Earth. They ring out in their waking, in their sleeping, in their dreams, and they scream out and go for runs and take collagen baths and breathe pure Himalayan oxygen to clear their minds for the Great Awakening or whatever the fuck they’re calling it this week. But they can’t escape the stench of their own downfall. All we need to do is step back and let these piranhas eat each other. Let their blindness and hubris guide them. Protect yourself, and watch it unfold from a distance.
And as they eat each other, they will bring down the whole established order. Chaos will reign for a time within the husk of Empire. All manner of vultures will come to feast on its entrails. But humanity knows what it wants, what it needs to survive. New structures will emerge, new ways of thinking and being. A new order will emerge, and if we do it right, we could come out of it wiser and more grateful for the miracle of life on this planet.