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To create and maintain peace in the world, we might first have to accept the insistent presence of rebellion.
In rebellion, we find the synthesis between a state of nature and overly-domesticated man. More than a noble savage, the rebel is the one who prophesies the shape of things to come.
This newsletter takes its title from an H.G. Wells story, in which economic calamity and a plague lead to world war.
It sounds all too familiar when reading today’s headlines: a topsy-turvy market; covid variations; Russia rolling into Ukraine.
In Wells’ story, the ravaged world descends into a kind of intellectual Dark Age (which again sounds familiar, in our TikTok-addled era).
It’s up to a vanguard of surviving pilots—perhaps again reflected in today’s Canadian trucker convoy—to instill people with the values of comradery, self-determination and community.
What happens is that the pilots are able to attract people from various nation states, creating a post-national federation of people who are united on the basis of their sincerely-held beliefs.
Dictators, who thrive in times of great fear and confusion, are swept away by this newly-enlightened, post-political class of “superhumans.” Peace prevails. The rebels instate utopia.
Now, if only that storybook ending could be ours…
The Wheel Turns
Grassroots change is not entirely out of the picture, given the energy driving this extremely potent Aquarius New Moon. Again, look at the trucker protest.
Our key phrase now is “turning point.” A Fourth Turning, perhaps, if you’re a fan of that concept.
But the issue preventing the wheel from easily turning is baked right into Wells’ rose-colored conclusion: he sees “superhumanity” as a state achieved, a one and done ordeal, like it was as straightforward as setting a Guiness World Record for number of backflips completed in a minute.
I think this is why so many on social media prophesy a “great change” and then life goes on as usual. And yet, why do we feel that things are more on the brink than ever before?
Like Wells, these prognosticators give birth to a brave new world, but totally skip what comes after: the messy growing pains, the zigzag process of becoming.
As if a rational fully-formed adult has just been popped from an artistic womb.
In Wells’ case, this style of thought is understandable. His story is greatly colored by its time, published in 1933, on the precipice of Hitler’s rise to centralized power. (Hitler argued against the “patchwork nation” ethos of Austria, preferring centralization.)
Fast forward to today, when young people—particularly the woke crowd—complain on social media about blue collar truckers honking too much. “Noooo, this isn’t the diversitopia future we’ve predicted…”
The specter of dictatorship hangs over our digital spaces like a commodified hologram—it is a meme, a thing of gross amusement.
It’s not so much a monster that inspired true disgust, like in Wells’ age. Today, little dictators don’t approach the bully pulpit. They play at being dictator online, like a child who plays house or dress up.
So where does that leave today’s rebels, who are in fact looking for a sense of post-ideological community? Where can they find a sincere opportunity to predict the shape of things to come?
Rebellion simply does not enter a utopian adulthood upon being grasped mentally and then unleashed upon the world. Rebellion, like all things, must progress through a middle stage where it is prone to wander. The know-it-all crowd completely misses this concept.
Rebellion—which seeks to refashion the world—is itself subject to shapeshifting.
Which is the frustrating thing about modern rebellion, which we look upon as if it were a chore, something that must be completed, like a driver’s license exam or the SAT test, so we can progress to woke status as quickly as possible.
Who today hasn’t felt the urge to rage against the machine?
And then, upon posting a black cube meme on Instagram to protest racially-motivated police brutality, who hasn’t felt childish, silly, impotent?
Rebellion has lost its edge, because we’ve decided, in our hyper-rational age, that it will be forced to grow up before we’ve allowed it to become what it can truly be.
This is how you create a generation with arrested development.
Beautiful Forms: Creation Vs Erasure
It’s no wonder that, in an age where we can’t just let rebellion “be” we see a lack of inspired change.
Who would’ve thought that young people would’ve been pro-mandate, pro-statist tattlers? Culture is renewed via youth, but now it feels all gummed up, like an endless traffic jam.
Today’s 20 and 30-somethings are probably the most watched-over generation, in the sense of “What will they produce? What will they become?”
Perhaps they are even their own Watchers, plagued by self-surveillance.
No wonder, then, that in taking up their “chore” of rebellion, they perform in ways that would seek to implode Form.
Not allowing the rebel to wander and explore a capacity for chaos, well, that’s a recipe for the erasure of passion.
Form is the natural counterpart to Content, in artspeak. Content is somewhat of a tainted word here, but prior to the Internet Age, it simply signified the essence of the art.
Form could be the medium, such as the canvas, but more importantly it spoke to genre, lineage, tradition. The form of buildings—or of a rectilinear shape in the visual arts—was defined differently depending on whether you were an Abstract Expressionist, Impressionist or Classical artist.
This was the whole gamble of Modernity in the early 20th-century: tradition, now exploded by horrific war, would be reinstated through the recontextualization of all classical forms.
Which led to an “oh shit” moment in post-modernity, when many realized that simply re-fashioning the world on this basis was a recipe for godless nihilism and endless self-referential narcissism.
The shape of things to come was prophesied by Modernity as a world of man triumphing over the limitations of calcified tradition. It was a generational call to arms, a rallying cry to “make it new” as poet Ezra Pound put it.
What we have now is a dejected youth culture that rebels against “making it new.” In some ways that’s cool, because Modernity is seen now as a failure.
But on the other hand, today’s young generations implode Form, they go too far within. Call it anti-Form. Auto-tuned mumble rap. Vaporwave aesthetic. Dreamy nostalgia for a time that never really existed. Faux-sincerity. Insta-jaded.
None of these Forms has an antecedent to rebel against. It’s pure void, absence. Almost a form of digital jihad. An erasure of the Digital Self.
And yet, at the same time, that pixelated persona offers a sense of creative escapism. Fun, but dark fun.
I caught sight of this tweet the other day, as someone wondered why rebellion today was so strange:
But, in sympathy to the younger generation, the violence here isn’t really against the Form of Beauty, which is sending the “Truth & Beauty” crowd here into a tizzy.
Tradcon reactionaries miss a deeper layer: the rebellion here is against the perception of Form altogether.
At one time, the rebel captured the attention of storytellers because he or she was an archetype that had PASSION—a Joan of Arc, a Robin Hood with a sense of tenderness, of vulnerability towards a Cause, a romantic impulse to prophesy the shape of things to come.
But in an age when passion is seen as a naive possibility in this jaded world, then the rebel finds nothing to rebel against except…himself.
So now we’re at a crossroads: can we dig deep to find the true rebel spirit we dearly need? Maybe we will soon find out, as movements like the trucker protest seek to disrupt our supply chains of meaning.
The status quo cannot hold much longer.
Would you like access to this level of guidance, backed up by the time-honored system of astrology?
I will help you find a unique purpose in this world of change.
Apply for a birth chart reading HERE