2023, the Apocalypse Continues

I am convinced that we have entered an era when anthropology will become a more relevant tool than political science. We will have to radically change our interpretation of events, stop thinking as products of the Enlightenment, and finally envisage the radical nature of violence; this will produce a quite different kind of rationality as required by events.
—René Girard, Battling to the End

2023 is finally upon us, and it is probably safe to say that never has the human race been so aware of the ills that plague us as it is in this current age.

The continuous batches of Elon Musk’s Twitter files have so far confirmed what we have known all along, namely that the influencer class, government institutions, and large corporatists have all conspired to systematically gaslight the masses and rob them of live-saving information, particularly relating to the COVID pandemic.

Not only were people called “conspiracy theorists” and ridiculed publicly by the legacy media, but they were also silenced and censored by Big Tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Now that the truth has come out, and the corporate media is trying its hardest to be unaware, the question we are left to deal with is, what are we going to do?

Will we sit down and quietly allow the global corporatocracy to concoct more tales, spin more narratives, and ruin countless more lives? And if we are to act at all, do we react in a knee-jerk fashion, and ignore the fact about the current technocracy’s reactionary origins from a dying old world monarchial order?

From the foot of Calvary’s cross two thousand years ago, history has taken a turn unlike any other. Our way of looking at the world has evolved drastically, and with it came revolutions in technology, philosophy, and the arts. What happened at Calvary on that day that caused such a radical shift in world affairs? The answer lies in the Christian understanding of what it calls the “apocalypse.”

The anthropologist René Girard spoke about apocalypse quite a lot in his last book Battling to the End. He says:

Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put in a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation.

We are witnessing this apocalypse before our very eyes. The unraveling of post-enlightenment worldview, government institutions, the medical industry, the food industry, the military-industrial complex, the entertainment industry, and many other legitimized coercive and manipulative agents have unleashed a pandora’s box of skepticism that has led humanity, or at least the sensible portions of it, to question our existence in the world. Perhaps this is not an entirely bad thing.

If anything at all, our current state of apocalypse is far better than the bystander existence we’d been living out for decades prior to the COVID and 9/11 eras. Francis Fukuyama said that the ascendency of the Western liberal order is the end of history. All of the above proves the opposite. We’re at a vital crossroads where we individually and collectively must decide if we want to keep on reviving the dying order of might-makes-right and prolong the birth pangs of the New World Order, or we bypass the stagnation and collude with Jesus’ project of apocalyptic unraveling and the perfection of imitating his approach to creativity, healing, reconciliation, and the recreation of humanity.

Jesus said, do not use evil against evil. Maybe that is the key, to escape the matrix of false choices and let evil fall on itself. The continuous unraveling of how the powers that be operate is showing us that we are past the era of might makes right. The real question is how we imitate Him. For this, we would have to look at His life and the most important event in history that took place in Calvary. Granted, it is a very hard thing to do, almost unbearably inhuman if we consider the amount of pain and suffering that went into the crucifixion of Christ. But we have been taking shortcuts far too long and it has brought us nothing but endless Pavlovian misery.

Perhaps the real struggle in this day and age is to reorient our minds. We’ve been conditioned to think that perpetuating grievances is a noble cause and striving for excellence is a bad thing. And we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves for thinking like this because, after all, our generation and our parent’s generation had been fed narrative after narrative, all of which have turned our brains into mush. So the first step must be to rediscover the thirst for freedom that is so ingrained into our nature.

Once we start valuing true freedom, as opposed to the nihilism-flavored one that’s often trending today, we automatically adopt responsibility for our neighbors. And when we assume responsibility for our neighbors and loved ones, in a way that doesn’t violate their free will and dignity, we take the first step of making violent agencies obsolete. If there is no violence and accusations amongst us, how can entities founded on violence even operate? The corrupt people working in the CIA and Pfizer will have to start looking for new jobs. May that be our goal in the coming year, the abandoning of human sacrifice–the hatred of the body and the soul–and the rediscovery of God’s image in each and every one of us, for when God created the universe He said, “It is good.”

Surit Dasgupta’s new book The Reenchanted is out now, buy it here.