Brave Noö World preview - Part 3
Each bloc now recognizes the manipulation of the many, by the few. Tellingly, the extreme factions of Right and Left appear more similar than different… to the extent of appearing as ideological twins. Where the two extremes diverge however, is in their response… in the countermeasures and tactics they deploy. Like ideologies, magical thinking also manifests in a dichotomy… a right-hand and left-hand path, if you will.
Back out on the frontier of the fringe… flickering at the outer limits of reason (where logic has never really had that strong of a hold), age-old thought streams re-emerge, their time come ‘round once again. Those of us who frequent these wilds, have intuited, realized, and consequently come to describe this rise in magical thinking, with the cultic adage: “We are living in Gnostic times.”
Such a notion may seem foreign to some, however, using the heretical, biblical-era Gnostic world view… as an analogy to our own time… allows for a perspective where worldly and spiritual domains operate simultaneously. The Gnostics of antiquity saw their daily struggle as a reflection of their spiritual struggle. Today, within this time-scape, logic takes a back seat to intuition, where those ancient tricksters, The Fates… once again spin their web of synchronicity.
Crucially, Gnostic thought never relied on an ordered, clockwork universe… preferring a more chaotic, overriding matrix of a-temporal, a-causal interconnections. Such archaic thought rode upon a wave of meaningful coincidence, and sought understanding through gnosis (ancient Greek: γνῶσις) or intuitively derived knowledge. In these strange days where our consensus reality splinters into multiple, alt realities… gnostic sensibilities become useful once again, in navigating a world where reason has failed us.
Times such as these call for an authoritative pundit, a masterful expert of the High and the Strange to walk us through what we have all just experienced and continue to experience. Alas, no concise punditry, no conclusive expertise exists for the crazy shenanigans we all have just lived through. There is no definitive work, no go-to body of knowledge to turn to… unless one knows where to look.
Here, a word to the wise… do not look to normal pillars of learning and punditry for such answers… for these are not normal times. For the curious, for the adventurous… knowing where to look requires the reader to embark upon a weird & wondrous journey to the very heart of what has been called: High Strangeness. A journey that promises to uncover the most obscure and unlikely of historical events that, nevertheless, have greatly influenced, and in some cases, shaped and guided our collective cultural near-past, to our unsettling, unhinged and unforeseen present day.
Brave Noö World – A Guerilla Ethnography of High Strangeness is an exploration into half-forgotten, little-traveled, Fortean realms of thought (so named in honor of the pioneer researcher of anomalous phenomena: Charles H. Fort). Collected and collated from decades of field studies on such strange, fortean topics as parapolitical & paranormal research, occult & new age philosophies, psychedelic & alternate reality studies, and, of course, conspiracy theory in its many forms… this collection examines these anomalies from an insider’s perspective.
In reporting on such cultural rarities, Brave Noö World takes the form of an Ethnography, or an anthropological study of a nebulous, new culture that rises from decades of cultural uncertainty. Just as in the motto of the United States of Amerika: E pluribus unum, (out of many, one)… so too, out of the many, seemingly different sub-cultures, comes the one, overarching, uber-cult culture described herein as High Strangeness.
This field study examines the myriad, obscure cultural components that are merging to form our new paradigm of the weird. Together, we shall observe the seemingly disparate components such as sci-fi prophecy, cults & cabals, algorithmic artificial intelligence, crypto technology, and what the spiritual forecasters of the new age have called: Earth Changes. Specific components are organized by chapter, to fully explore various aspects of each element, before examining their combined influence and interconnectedness.
Central to this study, is the impact that science fiction as a speculative medium has had in shaping our brave noö world. In its critical function as cautionary tale, science fiction has had far more impact on our evolving realities, than is generally understood. The awareness that today’s fiction shapes tomorrow’s fact… that today’s imagination shapes tomorrow’s reality… is an essential, formative factor in understanding what influences contrive and control our present day.
In this respect, and contrary to popular belief, today’s zeitgeist is driven less by George Orwell’s 1949 science fictional, cautionary tale: Nineteen Eighty Four than it is by Aldous Huxley’s 1932: Brave New World. Orwell’s Big Brother Police State, as pervasive as it appears in modern society, pales in comparison to Huxley’s prescient vision of instant gratification consumerism and sensory overload.
Media theorist and cultural critic, Neil Postman once said: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” This grim reality is so influential, that Huxley’s work became a partial namesake of this ethnography.
Speaking of grim reality, the science fiction sub-genre: Cyberpunk makes recurring appearances throughout this work. Cyberpunk’s dystopian themes of gritty cityscapes, climate collapse, unbridled corporatocracy and unleashed AI, have proven especially prophetic in today’s dystopian reality.
Editor's note: the cyberpunk genre continues to shape our world as all things dystopia continues to climb up the charts of our pop culturally mediated world...
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