Dear Friends,
It seems to me… sooner or later there will be a great snap back. What I mean by snap back, is there will be a point where the Left has gone too far for too long, the average person will be so repulsed by them, the consensus will suddenly change from the liberal society we are now in… to a very conservative one. History shows us this is the case. The Victorian Era was largely a repudiation of the excesses of the Romantic. Society and cultural beliefs can change over night. Whether because of a long tailed event, or an underlying tension, that has built up over decades or even centuries. In complexity theory, such times are often called inflection points. Where a complex system undergoes a phase change… in our case, a phase change from the ascendancy of liberalism to conservatism.
This snap back will not be to the mean but to the extreme. Phase changes act this way. When water goes from a liquid to a solid, that phase change is sudden and complete, there is no jelly phase. One moment it is liquid the next it is solid. Water can even be heated above the phase change under certain circumstances. (Like in a microwave). When this happens, the moment the water is jostled, the phase change is immediate. Like when tension builds up in a society, due to the requirement that people believe and promote lies, yet the society remains stable… until a long tailed event jostles it. Then all bets are off. The snap back could be so sudden and extreme… afterwards even I might be considered a crazy Lefty. That is the nature of complex systems undergoing a phase change.
Many of our great works of literature came from the Romantic era. It was not unlike the times we live in. Coleridge was hopped up on heroine when he wrote The Ancient Mariner. If they had the drugs available to them, that we do today, the Romantics would have indulged every bit as much as we do. Hedonism was all the rage in the Romantic, and indeed provided much of the fodder for the many poems and stories that came out of that age. Today hedonism has been elevated like in few ages before. Caligula would be ashamed at the internet our children see. Lucifer was even lauded as a Promethean figure then… as today. Moloch is better fed by Planned Parenthood than he ever was by Carthage. All showing our culture is going way too far and it is becoming harder and harder to ignore.
Just as the Romantics went too far then… the progressives are going too far today. Cancel culture, political correctness, riots, arbitrary laws arbitrarily applied, people being shot in the streets over politics, police stations on fire and iconoclasm are rife, even as those funding the maelstrom cannot be mentioned on TV. Our kids swim in a sewer of state sponsored racism and hate, which can only make them more prone to racism and hate. Although it is not likely they will turn that racism and hate on themselves, as is expected, but lash out instead. Kids raised with the internet filled with porn at their fingertips, might become revolted by it, instead of captivated. Teenagers rebel against the paradigm as it is, not as it used to be, or as it is not. Making a snap back almost inevitable.
The Sodom and Gomorrah tale is as much about what happens to a people who become utterly hedonistic. Rather than merely live like cows in a field, as they would like… they are ruined completely. Because unlike mindless cows in a field we have the capacity for reason. When that reason is turned on itself, instead of improving our lives and keeping us safe, it becomes our worse enemy. We will continue to descend, reasoning new ways to get ever deeper, until we hit magma or turn away. This is part of our collective unconscious. Once we feel the heat, that truth will spring into the minds of most people, and society will forsake everything progressive. Sadly, not back to the healthy mean, but to the witch burning extreme. Because that is the nature of complex societal systems.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
