ARE WE ON THE CUSP OF A NEW RENAISSANCE?
WHY PESSIMISM IS FOR PUSSIES & WHY KIDS THESE DAYS KNOW SWEET FUCK ALL ABOUT WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BELIEVE IN SOMETHING TRANSCENDENT
HEY FOLKS!
As you know, I’m a proud optimist. Now, I know that they say that pride is a deadly sin and everything, but I figure there’s good pride and bad pride. If you work hard to accomplish a difficult task, you should feel proud of yourself.
So that’s why I’m proud of being an optimist. No one handed me my belief system. I built it myself, and I’m not going to lie; I think it’s the best.
Pessimism is easy. Optimism takes work.
I wrote this post to promote the idea of optimism, because I genuinely believe that my life is much better than it would be if I wasn’t an optimist, and because I think that people don’t realize the extent to which happiness is a choice.
If you want to be happy, know that what you want is to have a good attitude, which allows you to navigate the world without getting too bent out of shape.
Really, optimism is a game that you play with your mind, in which you do your best to trick yourself into believing that things are actually better than you think they are.
If you make a habit of this, your life will improve. People will also like you better.
And that’s why I think that optimists should be proud that they’re an optimist - it means that they have cultivated the garden of their minds.
With the ubiquity of a truly dazzling array of electronic media, much of which seems to want us to focus on the most infuriating and depressing things happening on the planet at any given time, it is easy to fall into hopelessness.
This is something that you’ve really got to guard against if you concern yourself with politics. There are good reasons to be cynical about aspects of human nature, and this can lead to pessimism. But c’mon.
You really telling me you aren’t creative enough to find some kinda way to spin things in a positive way?
I’ll be honest - I kind of think pessimism is for pussies. You know what I mean? If a person tells themself that they are likely to fail, they’re pre-emptively justifying their future failure, thereby providing them an excuse for not risking failure in the first place. That’s some bitch-ass shit.
It’s a loser mentality, you know?
I suppose that I am the youngest of the people who really got a taste of what it felt like to be part of the movement back in good old days before the Towers fell and the New World Order began.
Most young people today have no idea what it feels like to be part of a huge crowd all united in a shared vision of a world that we were committed to bringing into being.
We believed that we would prevail over the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. We believed that the people would prevail over the tiny cabal of globalist overloads using debt trap diplomacy to snake their greasy little fingers into every little corner of the world.
Why did we believe this? Well, because information was spreading together the world, and we believed that people around the world would figure out how they getting screwed. We believed that the free flow of information would lead to general enlightenment. We believed that we had their scam figured out, and that exposing it would destroy it, because deception is an essential part of how it operates.
Statecraft is based on fraud, and fraud requires deception. States employ propaganda and indoctrination through mandatory schools. We are led to believe many different things that all support one general conclusion: that things are the way they are for a reason and therefore that’s the way they should be.
Now, if one assumes that because Western Civilization is now deeply decadent and depraved, that humans are therefore nasty, brutish creatures, I think one will be lead to very pessimistic conclusions about the human condition.
You gotta watch this video, by the way - it’s not what you’re thinking!
How sweet was that?
The truth is that many philosophers have indeed reached very pessimistic conclusions about human beings, but I’m not one of them.
My conclusion is basically that Alan Watts, Bill Hicks, and Joseph Campbell was right, and that this is all just a ride. The point is to participate in the great dance of creation and to add to the blooming chaos of it all something beautiful, something worthy to give back to the Cosmos in return for the gift of life.
That it is all there is to know, really - that you are here to bring forth what is within you, and that you will do so, for better or worse, and so the only thing to do really is to get of your own way and to allow yourself to become a vehicle through which time unfolds. The worst thing that you could do is resist that animating force.
Anyway, I was recently leafing toward a book called The Passion of the Western Mind and I happened to come across a passage that supports a supremely cheerful attitude towards the Apocalypse.
Basically, author Richard Tarnas explains that the Renaissance, which was lit, came hot on the heels of the Black Death, which fucking sucked.
You get where I’m going with this? We’ve been through a lot these past few years. COVID was a nightmare, and we all need to heal from the damage it did to us somehow. Furthermore, things have been getting steadily worse in the Western world since September 11th, 2001. It’s hard not to be pessimistic when things have been deteriorating for years. But guess what? That’s how long some things take to play themselves out. That doesn’t mean that things will keep getting worse forever.
The fact that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift makes me wonder whether we might experience a new Renaissance in the near future. As I’ve said before, the end of one paradigm is the start of another. Nothing ever really ends. It just changes form.
Think about it. What does the word Renaissance mean? It means rebirth. What is a paradigm shift? It’s the birth of a new worldview. If you agree that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift, does it not then follow that we may well be on the cusp of a new Renaissance?
I rest my case.
And remember folks, never rule out the possibility of a miracle.
For all we know, angelic forces are conspiring to liberate us from the shackles of our illusions as we speak. Perhaps they have already begun their counter-offensive against the demonic forces of Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, and Klaus Shwab.
Maybe 2024 will be the year that Quetzalcoatl makes his long-awaited appearance. Perhaps the Hero Twins will show up and kick the Lords of Death right back into the last baktun.
Maybe the people who say that the White Buffalo Calf Woman was born into a human body in 1994 are right.
Maybe the Strophariad will intervene to redirect humanity’s activities towards achieving interstellar travel so that Terence McKenna’s prophecy that THE MONKEYS ARE GOING TO THE STARS will be fulfilled!
Here’s hoping. Stay tuned!
In any case, Henry Kissinger died this year, so I think it’s undeniably true that the world is now objectively a better place than it used to be.
Also, hell just got shittier, so if you’re hellbound you might want to course correct. You really want to spend eternity with Henry Kissinger?
Happy 2024!
for the Wild,
Crow Qu’appelle
FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO THE RENAISSANCE
FROM THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND BY RICHARD TARNAS
The phenomenon of the Renaissance lay as much in the sheer diversity of its expressions as in their unprecedented quality. Within the span of a single generation, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced their masterworks, Columbus discovered the New World, Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church and began the Reformation, and Copernicus hypothesized a heliocentric universe and commenced the Scientific Revolution.
Compared with his medieval predecessors, Renaissance man appeared to have suddenly vaulted into virtually superhuman status.
Man was now capable of penetrating and reflecting nature’s secrets, in art as well as science, with unparalleled mathematical sophistication, empirical precision, and numinous aesthetic power.
He had immensely expanded the known world, discovered new continents, and rounded the globe.
He could defy traditional authorities and assert a truth based on his own judgment.
He could appreciate the riches of classical culture and yet also feel himself breaking beyond the ancient boundaries to reveal entirely new realms.
Polyphonic music, tragedy and comedy, poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture all achieved new levels of complexity and beauty.
Individual genius and independence were widely in evidence.
No domain of knowledge, creativity, or exploration seemed beyond man’s reach.
With the Renaissance, human life in this world seemed to hold an immediate inherent value, an excitement and existential significance, that balanced or even displaced the medieval focus on an afterworldly spiritual destiny.
Man no longer appeared so inconsequential relative to God, the Church, or nature. On many fronts, in diverse realms of human activity, Pico’s proclamation of man’s dignity seemed fulfilled. From its beginnings with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bruni, and Alberti, through Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, to its final expressions in Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bacon, and Galileo, the Renaissance did not cease producing new paragons of human achievement.
Such a prodigious development of human consciousness and culture had not been seen since the ancient Greek miracle at the very birth of Western civilization.
Western man was indeed reborn. Yet it would be a deep misjudgment to perceive the emergence of the Renaissance as all light and splendor, for it arrived in the wake of a series of unmitigated disasters and thrived in the midst of continuous upheaval.
Yet it would be a deep misjudgment to perceive the emergence of the Renaissance as all light and splendor, for it arrived in the wake of a series of unmitigated disasters and thrived in the midst of continuous upheaval.
Beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, the black plague swept through Europe and destroyed a third of the continent’s population, fatally undermining the balance of economic and cultural elements that had sustained the high medieval civilization. Many believed that the wrath of God had come upon the world.
The Hundred Years’ War between England and France was an interminably ruinous conflict, while Italy was ravaged by repeated invasions and internecine struggles. Pirates, bandits, and mercenaries were ubiquitous.
Religious strife grew to international proportions. Severe economic depression was nearly universal for decades. The universities were sclerotic. New diseases entered Europe through its ports and took their toll.
Black magic and devil worship flourished, as did group flagellation, the dance of death in cemeteries, the black mass, the Inquisition, tortures and burnings at the stake.
Ecclesiastical conspiracies were routine, and included such events as a papally backed assassination in front of the Florentine cathedral altar at High Mass on Easter Sunday.
Murder, rape, and pillage were often daily realities, famine and pestilence annual perils.
The Turkish hordes threatened to overwhelm Europe at any moment. Apocalyptic expectations abounded. And the Church itself, the West’s fundamental cultural institution, seemed to many the very center of decadent corruption, its structure and purpose devoid of spiritual integrity.
It was against this backdrop of massive cultural decay, violence, and death that the “rebirth” of the Renaissance took place.
So there you have it, folks - it’s always darkest before dawn.
To be Candide is good. Voltaire would be very pleased.
Excellent. I read it and then went back to bed to experience all the videos. My wife left me. I presume she’ll come back with the groceries. I love your work! Happy. New.