The Burning Bush Manifesto: Recent Episodes

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Every day, we step into a river of experiences that transcend the limits of language. By default, we treat these departures from comprehensibility with an adaptation of the ‘Vegas Rule’: what happens beyond the limits of language stays beyond the limits of language. That’s what we’d like to believe.

With this bit of sloppy sophistry, we justify leaving the inexpressible not only unexpressed, but also unexamined. This way, we lose. But if we reflect for even a moment, we realize that the Vegas Rule is b**t. Whether we apply it to decadent pursuits or refined enthusiasms, the rule appears false and useless. What happens in ‘Vegas’ never stays there.

The persons who bear witness to the happenings often find their lives re-colored by the memories of this liminal space. In moments of self-honesty, the newlywed husband, now back from Vegas, may remember that his bachelor party revealed or re-ignited his doubts about marriage. His wife may remember the version of herself now concealed by the cloak of sobriety.

The moment of clarity may pass. The echoes of Vegas may fade for some time. The couple may return to the choreographed normalcy of the lives they allow into consciousness. But, to paraphrase the Gladiator, what happens in Vegas echoes in eternity.

Consider, for example, the trip to Vegas that ended as the New Year began. We may reasonably debate whether we landed in Vegas about four years ago on election night (November 8, 2016) or Inauguration Day (January 20, 2017). Historians may also trace the start of this trip to the crash of 2008 or the tragedy of 9/11 or to the 1970s or to another watershed. Regardless of how we construct the chronology of this trip, we know that we can’t deny, suppress, trivialize or disown what this trip has revealed.

Due to the nature of the revelations, we will inevitably resort to denial at times. It’s not necessarily because we lack courage or intelligence. It’s that we lack the symbols to language the revelations.

However, denial and other psychological defenses do not form an impenetrable wall around the limits of language. Instead, they form a semi-permeable membrane. Both in living cells and in the human psyche, this membrane arguably performs the most important function. Forming a filter between the inner and the outer space, the membrane honors the separation without fetishizing it. It absorbs and oozes information, distinguishing the nourishing from the toxic.

The membrane has a wisdom tragically lacking among the red-and-blue participants in the farcical border-wall debate now faded from public discourse. The wisdom of semi-permeability is also absent from all the pseudo-controversies around false dichotomies that energize modern tribalism.

For those with the eyes to see and ears to hear, the membrane forming a filter around the limits of language translates the information flowing in from the other side. The data that survives the crucible of translation trickles into conscious awareness.

For example, all poetry worthy of the name is a way of speaking about the unspeakable. Every tear is a drop of meaning flowing into comprehensibility. Every moment of aesthetic arrest is an intimation of the inexpressible. Every dream is a letter from Self to self begging to be read. Every inspired action is a message from the other side. Every bite of a psilocybin mushroom is a cleansing stroke applied to the doors of perception.

This essay is one man’s record of the messages now flowing across the membrane – messages so fragile, nuclear, equivocal or esoteric that most of them may float in the synaptic cleft for years before we start seeing them acknowledged in blog posts, white papers, opinion columns and political speeches.

Like fragments of a dream, these messages cannot be asserted or debated. They are best spoken and heard through whispers. Turning to Gladiator again, recall the words of Marcus Aurelius addressed to Maximus:

There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper, and it would vanish. It was so fragile. And I fear it will not survive the winter. Maximus, let us whisper now together…you and I.

The ‘Messages’ in Brief

Here’s a summary of the messages I’ve absorbed over the past four years and hope to elucidate in 2021.

MESSAGE #1: Don't “Name it to tame it”. It has no name.

We are living through a Revelation comparable to the revelation on Mount Sinai described in the Hebrew Testament. As an ardent adherent of the religion of no religion, I use the “R” word here in an empirical sense — not to mystify the meaning of this moment in history but to express increasingly self-evident realities. Whether we describe it empirically, metaphorically or in the language of theological doctrine, this revelation is not evenly distributed. Even after the Insurrection of January 6th, the revelation remains obscured by willful blindness.

We are living through an Apocalypse — etymologically, an ‘unveiling’. The veil separating the conscious from the unconscious is thinning and tearing. We are suffering from a forced exposure to the realities we have long feared to confront. This trauma is causing symptoms in the collective psyche for which we don’t have an adequate vocabulary, and probably never will. Rather than just hope to survive the Apocalypse, we can dare to live through this unveiling with our eyes and hearts wide open.

We are living through the collapse of our world. We should not mistake these messages for mere metaphors or a test of the emergency broadcast system. We still debate (or, often, pretend to debate) the reality of the climate catastrophe, but this fake debate excludes the larger context of collapsing institutions, ideologies and shared expectations, not to mention the cataclysmic pollution of our media ecology. Collapse is no longer possible or likely or inevitable; it is already in progress. We are passengers on this “Titanic”.

MESSAGE #2: We are in a war we can't describe.

Our war is permanent and pervasive. We can’t run from its battlefields or find shelter among trusted allies. Our war has breached every border, boundary, semipermeable membrane and security perimeter. It has hacked and hijacked every country and culture, institution and individual, religion and technology. Unlike the epidemiology of a pandemic that merely envelops the entire world, our war can best be described as fractal — i.e., characterized by the ceaseless arising of self-similar patterns that re-enact themselves across scales and dimensions.

Our oldest technology has become incongruous. One of the most easily languageable consequences of War is that it renders language incongruous. But we defy futility; we use language to respond to the revelation of the inadequacy of language. We seek solace in the descriptions of our predicament. At their best, our descriptions serve as the proverbial fingers pointing at the moon. At their worst, our descriptions flow into the tsunami of b**t ceaselessly flooding our epistemic and institutional order. This is a high-stakes game.

Just do it: De-coupling meaning from language. With language rendered incongruous, how does one find and nurture meaning in the fog of the hyper-dimensional war on meaning? Is the search for meaning still feasible in the Mindfuckistan of filter bubbles, weaponized information, structural distrust and the collapse of institutional legitimacy? In Mindfuckistan, we must de-couple meaning from language and seek fulfillment, instead, in enlightened action. In other words, we stop explaining ourselves and follow the idea appropriated by the Nike motto.

MESSAGE #3: This is a different kind of Apocalypse.

We are safer than ever before. Prophets of Progress (e.g., Steven Pinker) have constructed superficially convincing data-driven arguments about the decline of physical violence over the long span of history. At the same time, these prophets trivialize what they call “metaphorical violence”. With this rhetorical sleight of hand, they distract their audience from the epic shift of significance from the Tangible to the Intangible. As long as we ignore this shift, we can justifiably celebrate the present moment as the “Best Apocalypse Ever!”

This is a deeply violent time. Carl von Clausewitz famously observed: “War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.” And Jacques Ellul, as quoted by Marshall McLuhan, argued: “Propaganda begins when dialogue ends.” So, if the eruption of war and propaganda points to the failure of politics and dialogue, then what lies beyond the limits of language is simply a different kind of language, and what lies beyond the struggle for power is a different kind of struggle. We only change the means. In both cases, the change entails a categorical shift from non-violence to violence. But most of the violence is symbolic.

In this petty pace. All wars are exhausting, but this war is exhausting in a different way, a paradoxical way. On the one hand, it conforms to the megatrend of the Great Acceleration, in that our world is spiraling into increasingly terrifying dystopias. On the other hand, this war, as all wars, creeps in this petty pace, lighting fools the way to dusty death. Long after we have depleted our resources, screamed our agonies, grieved our losses, peered into our shadow, and processed our trials and errors, we are still at war, and we are exhausted. Overtime, we discover resources we used to overlook, strengths we used to consider superhuman, and voices in the dungeons of our minds whose pleadings we hear for the first time or in a new way. The war must go on! Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…

MESSAGE #4: Understand what we are fighting for and against.

We are fighting for the vitality of our relational neural networks and against our atomization. We don't want to either build walls or open borders. We want to protect the sensitivity and wisdom of our semi-permeable membranes.

No one wins in the war of Self vs. Self. Reeling from encounters with Chaos, some of us — and a part of each of us — will inevitably turn to the magic of denial to manufacture semblances of Order. That's why, we want to opt out of willful blindness without judging fellow humans who choose to opt in. The politics of denial demands an appreciation of nuance, liminality, and the universality of defense mechanisms. During this Apocalypse, we will need to “thread the needle” — allowing people the space for their denials, on the one hand, and guarding against the ripple effects of their blindness, on the other.

We are fighting against pathocracy, and we do not trust the masks of malevolence. On Wednesday, January 20, 2021, pathocracy is scheduled to formally don a new mask, a much nicer mask, and an army of apologists will prod public opinion in the direction of obeisance. They will assert that we feel relieved by the re-inauguration of decency and institutional order. They will try to edit our memories of Vegas. Judging by historical precedent, most of us will go along to get along. We will give up control of our semi-permeable membrane to allow the manufacturers of consent determine what we remember, think and feel. We will comply because we feel we must. But some of us will remember Vegas.

My Sources

It will take time to develop these messages. For now, I'll leave you with this sampling of the sources that have most helped me articulate the messages above.

Books

Erik Davis's TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information

Erich Fromm's You Shall Be As Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition

Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Carolyn Baker’s Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times

Margaret Heffernan’s Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It…Every Time

Charles Fernyhough’s The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves

Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy

Essays, Articles and Newsletters

Jem Bendell’s viral 35-page essay Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy

Jem Bendell’s Beyond Climate War: Writings on Deep Adaptation to societal collapse

The Climate Psychology Alliance December 2020 Newsletter

Susan B. Glasser’s The Trümperdämmerung Is a Fitting End to 2020

Video

Here are recent lectures by Michael Dowd, the “Pro-future Evangelist”.

Related Essays

Collapse Chronicle: Spiraling into Deep Adaptation

Willful Blindness During the Apocalypse

New Religions at War: Techno-humanism vs. Dataism

Defeated by the Demons We Deny

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Here's this week’s report on:

Willful Blindness During the Apocalypse

The End of the World

The Search for Meaning

Why The Show Must Go On

To summarize this week's message while you stand on one leg: This the best Apocalypse ever! Living through the end of the world we knew and the unveiling of the world now arising, we get to blog about the whole divine comedy. We are blessed!

If this message sounds crazy or incoherent to you, I see a couple of possible explanations. First, you may have a point, and I'd love to hear it. Second, I haven't adequately introduced you to the Burning Bush Manifesto. If so, let's talk. Third, you've come to the wrong place. If so, I wish you well on your journey.

Related News & Links

In A warning on climate and the risk of societal collapse, we see what happens when the onslaught of reality incinerates the armor of denial. In this letter, 248 scientists and academics acknowledge what we have known or intuited for years: the human race has fucked things up so badly that…

“Only if policymakers begin to discuss this threat of societal collapse might we begin to reduce its likelihood, speed, severity, harm to the most vulnerable – and to nature.

Either way, collapse is an important scenario, but just as policymakers, most people I know seem uneasy around the subject. I get it, and I’d never want to trivialize death anxiety. However, I don’t believe in sweeping the subject under the rug, especially since it resonates powerfully not only in the political sphere but also in the equally tricky interpersonal space.

I finally read Jem Bendel’s viral 35-page essay Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Here, Bendel summarizes the climate science, dissects the psychology of denial and provides coping strategies organized around the “four R’s” that follow the “Holy S**t!” moment when one sees the looming end. Specifically, the four R’s:

Resilience - What do I/we most value that we want to keep?

Relinquishment - What can I/we relinquish because it no longer serves us or makes matters worse?

Restoration - What can I/we bring back into our way of life?

Reconciliation - What can I/we learn to accept to minimize suffering?

One of the reasons I value Bendel’s work is that he doesn’t reduce the climate tragedy to the destruction of our physical environment, and instead of anchoring the four R’s in “hope”, he points to a deeper, relational basis for meaning beyond the story about material wellbeing. Hear for yourself in this podcast.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the future of our “Titanic”.

Hugs

LJ

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In this 8-minute “podcast”, I started thinking about the experience of howling in the wilderness of the Attention Economy and about epidemiology of irrelevance. I've been thinking about these themes more and more ever since I came across Yuval Noah Harari’s prediction about the obsolescence of homo sapiens.

New Religions at War: Techno-humanism vs. Dataism

In a 2017 interview with Wired (Sorry, Y’All — Humanity’s Nearing an Upgrade to Irrelevance, February 21, 2017) Yuval Noah Harari dissected a dystopian vision. As Wired put it, referring to Big Tech, we might…

“…become so dependent on these tools that our species will become irrelevant — our value determined only by the data we generate.”

Harari spoke about the rise of two global religions — Techno-humanism and Dataism — whose tug-of-war would push the human race into irrelevance. Even with all the recent cybernetic upgrades, homo sapiens can’t compete with Artificial Intelligence that understands humans better than humans understand themselves. Hence, we’re headed for irrelevance, Harari argued.

In this terrifyingly plausible scenario, we will no longer ascribe meaning to our experience. Meaning will arise from external data processing systems (aka “the cloud”). This shift will feed the urge to upload our experiences into external systems.

Even in 2017, it was hard to judge whether this was a vision of the future or the present. Harari used a relatable example to illustrate the trend:

You go to a Japanese restaurant and have a wonderful dish, and the thing to do is take a picture with your phone, put it on Facebook, and see how many likes you get. If you don’t share your experiences, they don’t become part of the data processing system, and they have no meaning.

But the trend isn’t limited to food porn and pouty-lipped selfies. Perhaps, blogging is no different. It is, after all, another triumph of the urge to put some aspect of our lives and our selves on display. Self-publishing — in any genre and any medium — is emerging as the new battlefield where the struggle for relevance steadily edges out the struggle for survival.

Faced with mounting evidence of the pandemic of irrelevance, we seek out opportunities to assert the significance of the mundane events in our lives, whether a sushi dinner or a thought worthy of a blog post. We try, but 99% of us fail 99% of the time. Indeed, the distribution of scarce economic resources conforms to similar regularities, whether the resource is capital or attention.

I’m not calling for a rebellion against these regularities. Nor do I feel sympathy with denialist critiques of Harari’s vision. I acknowledge that the vision is philosophically and empirically self-evident, especially now nearly four years after Harari’s interview with Wired.

This observation doesn’t have to serve as a slippery slope into a jeremiad about the Society of Spectacle. However, the observation invites a question: How can the 99% of mere mortals in the hyper-Darwinian Attention Economy find meaning in their obsolescence and irrelevance?

Trapped in a meta-crisis that subverts what Viktor Frankel called Man’s Search for Meaning, can the 99% reclaim self-publishing as an instrument of nonviolent resistance? To this end, they would have to disabuse themselves of the conflation of self-publishing with narcissistic self-indulgence.

Today, self-publishing and social reading constitute basic necessities, ways of creating for ourselves what Mark Zuckerberg promised to create for us — a more connected world. Without these tools, we are stuck on the default path toward continuing atomization and anomie.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that BBM subscribers want or need to see a photo of my dinner or my pouty lips. But it does mean that, in the flow of apparently insignificant occurrences of our daily lives, we can find observations, insights and sparks of humor that can spread meaning and joy across our relational neural networks.

There's little doubt that, in the clash of Techno-humanism and Dataism, the latter is winning without much effort. In considering the implications of this outcome for Team Human, I'm not drawn to Dylan Thomas's invitation to “rage against the dying of the light”. Instead, I turn to the passage that Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper's magazine, often cited in his columns:

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." (T.H. White, The Once and Future King, #1–4)

Cleansing the Doors of Perception

To learn to see our world, we can either cleanse the doors of perception, as Blake advised, or we can choose from the menu of “religions” in the pandemic of idolatry consuming our world. Here’s a lecture to help crystallize the meaning of this choice.

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