by Crow Qu’appelle

Lately, it feels to me like the world is teetering on the precipice of a tremendous collapse. Really, though, this isn’t a new feeling for me. I have long felt a sense of impending doom, and I know that I am not alone in this.

The idea that industrial civilization is bound to fail in some disastrous way has long been woven into the fabric of my political analysis, and has informed many of the choices that I have made in my life.

Although lately I have embraced the idea of anarchism-without-adjectives, I belong to the green anarchist tradition. I wrote for the Earth First! Journal for years and was their main Canadian distributor. I attended many Earth First! gatherings, and even founded an eco-anarchist collective called Rebel! Rebuild! Rewild!, which was modeled on Earth First!

In the green anarchist tradition, there exists a belief that, for ecological reasons, some kind of catastrophic failure of the capitalist system is inevitable.

Franklin Lopez, one of the most influential green anarchists of the past twenty years, made a documentary called END:CIV, which predicted the imminent collapse of civilization, as well the long-running YouTube show called “It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine”.

We believed that the collapse of industrial civilization was only a matter of time. For this reason, we were scornful of attempts to reform the system. The types of activism that we favoured were those that impeded the expansion of the industrial-capitalist death-machine, and efforts that had the potential to develop into autonomous, self-sufficient communities.

I still believe that our reasoning was sound. If we want to create a free society, we can’t be dependent upon the industrial capitalist system. This means food sovereignty, which cannot exist without an intact land base. So defending the land that will be our future lifeline is of paramount importance. Many of us see this as a sacred responsibility passed down to us from our ancestors, to be stewards of the Earth, and to protect the integrity of the web of life for the benefit of the generations to come.

I still believe this, and in fact this whole COVID coup has only deepened my conviction. True, I have had to accept that much of what I formerly believed about climate change is probably false, but I am still very much convinced that there is a global ecological crisis. Underlying this is a spiritual crisis, stemming from a certain attitude that we have towards the natural world.

A society which sees nature only as a resource to be exploited will behave very differently from one which understands itself as existing in symbiosis with a multiplicity of life-forms, all of whom belong to a super-organism and possess an intrinsic worth.

A society which sees nature only as a resource to be exploited will behave very differently from one which understands itself as existing in symbiosis with a multiplicity of life-forms, all of whom belong to a super-organism and possess an intrinsic worth.

All that to say: the idea that Western civilization is spiritually bankrupt and morally degenerate is not new to me – it is one of my core beliefs. As the world gets crazier and crazier, this belief is becoming more and more common.

Could it be that the mass psychosis currently infecting humanity will lead to the end of industrial civilization?

Luminaries such as James Corbett and Whitney Webb have spoken about the transhumanist fantasy of bio-digital convergence as the end of our species, but I’m not at all convinced that the technology exists to enact such a thing.

I suspect that the transhumanists are delusional, and are choosing to believe what they want to believe, rather than what is true.

Is it really easier to imagine the extinction of our species than of the end of industrial civilization? Why is that? If natural historians are to believed, human beings have been around for six million years. The Industrial Age began less than 300 years ago. Isn’t the end of civilization is much more likely than the end of the human species?

Every civilization has a rise and a fall, and the Fall of the American Empire seems imminent. However, what many analysts seem to think is that America will be overtaken by a new global hegemony, which will rule the age to come in some kind of technocratic dystopia.

What I would like to posit is another possibility: that industrial civilization itself will collapse.

CAPITALISM IS A PONZI SCHEME

Here’s one way of thinking about the current moment: The Ponzi scheme of capitalism is about to collapse. This wasn’t someone’s genius plan. It was the result of greed, usury, and speculation gone mad. It was the result of millions of short-sighted decisions made in the service of corporate profit. Maybe this is was happens when you turn the stock market into a gambling casino.

Capitalism requires continually expanding markets in order to find consumers for the products it produces, and on a finite planet there is a limit to that. The likes of the World Economic Forum now want us to believe that they can keep this going forever by creating new digital markets, such as the metaverse, and financializing the “ecosystem services” of nature itself, but this is just doubling down on an innately flawed paradigm. The more divorced from reality this bizarre form of casino capitalism becomes, the more inevitable its collapse.

The Ponzi scheme of capitalism is about to collapse. This wasn’t someone’s genius plan. It was the result of greed and usury, of speculation gone mad. It was the result of millions of short-sighted, selfish decisions made in the service of corporate profit.

IS THE GREAT RESET AN ATTEMPT TO PRETEND THAT THE LOOMING COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISM WAS INTENTIONAL?

So what if the Great Reset is an attempt to get ahead of the collapse? I know that hypnotists are masters of taking credit for things that would have happened anyway. Could the Great Reset be an attempt by the Predator Class to pretend that the collapse of capitalism was their brilliant plan all along? What if the moves that they are making now mere desperate attempts to turn the catastrophic failure of the financial system into a form of controlled demolition, so that what the dust settles, they still rule the world?

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t doubt that the plans for the Fourth Industrial Revolution are being pursued in earnest. However, that does not mean that they are inevitable.

For one thing, I think that we should take seriously the possibility that our overlords are insane, and that their beliefs may not be reflective of reality.

Let’s keep in mind that these people are transhumanists, and believe immortality in within their grasp through what they call “bio-digital convergence”. In essence, they believe that they will soon become Gods, and live forever as some kind of quasi-omniscient cyborg ubermensch. Are we really to consider this people sane?

What if the moves that they are making now mere desperate attempts to turn the catastrophic failure of the financial system into a form of controlled demolition, so that what the dust settles, they still rule the world?

A MULTITUDE OF CONSPIRACIES CONTEND IN THE NIGHT

Currently, many analysts I admire believe that the powers that be are gearing up for World War Three, wherein both sides are, to a significant degree, controlled by a single ruling elite. In this view, the war will be used to bring in a global totalitarian system under a one world government.

It all makes sense: War is a great way to force people to adapt themselves to drastic changes that they would never have freely chosen. It’s also a great way to make tons of money.

These thinkers tend to subscribe to what you might call “The Conspiratorial View of World History”, which sees world history as being directed by inter-generational criminal organizations.

While I am sure that this is true to an extent, it is not at all clear to me to which extent. To what degree is the world actually controlled? Can really know? The nature of conspiracies is to conceal themselves, and all warfare is based upon deception.

Any idea of “One Big Conspiracy” is probably a gross over-simplification. It is much more likely that “a multitude of conspiracies contend in the night”. Though the WEF is now presenting a united front for globalists, we can be sure that rival factions exist within it.

I suspect that any solidarity amongst them will be short-lived. Soon enough, they will start fighting amongst themselves, and that is why World War Three seems inevitable. Though many conspiracy theorists believe that Russia and the U.S. are beholden to the same globalist overlords, it does not follow that World War Three will be a stage-managed affair that will go according to script. There’s a lot that can go wrong in such a massive operation, and not all variables can be accounted for.

I reject the notion that anyone has control over the future of planet Earth. We shouldn’t give the world’s tyrants more power by believing that they are all-powerful. We shouldn’t believe what they want us to be believe, and they definitely want us to believe that they are more powerful than they actually are.

One possibility is that this whole Fourth Industrial Revolution will end in disaster, and not the kind of disaster envisioned by those who have undertaken it.

Although this isn’t exactly optimistic, I prefer this view to believing that this whole totalitarian coup will go according to plan.

THE END OF AN AGE

What I can say with confidence is that this is the end of an age. The old world’s not coming back. On a spiritual level, Western civilization has already collapsed.

Likewise has it collapsed intellectually – all it took was a huff and a puff from the Big Bad Wolf and the whole Ivory Tower came crashing down.

Academics who have pontificated about human rights for their whole careers quickly betrayed their supposed values, and regressed into unthinking obedience. Some of this can be explained to cowardice and careerism, but the unnecessary zeal of some to demonstrate their loyalty to the asinine narrative being peddled by the corporate media proves that many genuinely believed it.

Neither we nor Klaus Shwab truly knows what the future holds. What we do know is that the future will flow from the past. We would do well to zoom out and to seek to understand the current moment in historical context.

Perhaps what we are seeing is the natural conclusion of forces that were set into motion long ago, at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Perhaps the powers that be are about to lose control of the beast that they have so long used to dominate and subjugate the peoples of the world. Perhaps that machine is about to break. Perhaps its operators are in denial, and have become delusional.

One thing is for sure. If those of us who characterize the current moment as a mass psychosis are correct, we are due for a reckoning. Reality doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. And that means that any radical departure from reality will necessarily be temporary. On a political level, being delusional is a tremendous liability. People who are in touch with reality have an advantage over people who aren’t. So here’s another little silver lining – those of us who are not under the spell of propaganda will be be more able to make intelligent decisions.

I suspect that if we can articulate sane political analysis, our ideas will catch on. Arguably, this is already happening. Many luminaries of the truth movement, such as James Corbett, Derrick Broze, and Iain Davis, are avowed anarchists.

May You Live in Interesting Times

It seems that we were destined to live in interesting times, and though it’s hard to imagine, I think that things are going to get a lot weirder. I do not doubt that many wild curveballs will be thrown our way in the years to come.

I don’t think that we’re going to know what’s really going on with any certainty what’s really going on in the upper echelons of power, and in any case, I don’t think that we need to know all the details in order to formulate wise strategies. I maintain that it’s a better use of energy to focus on the spheres within which we do have influence than obsess about the wizard behind the curtain.

As an animist, I do welcome the paradigm shift that is coming into view. I like to tell people: If the COVID era hasn’t made you question the nature of reality itself, you aren’t thinking hard enough. And you’re unsure as what the actual nature of reality is, does it not follow that unforeseeable variables will play into the equation in ways that the powers that be could not possibly have planned for?

I believe that human consciousness is shaped by stories, and that the reality that we experience is, to a very significant degree, the result of the beliefs that we hold about the nature of that reality. This is true both on the individual on the collective level. We very literally create reality with our beliefs.

This is apparent if you contemplate the role of language in creating the cognitive framework which we tend to think of as reality, but I would take it a step further. Quantum physics has shown that human consciousness alter the ways in which physical energy manifests. Does it not then follow that our beliefs help shape the reality that we experience? Could it be that the world is not made of inanimate matter, but consciousness? Could it be that the Toltec “dream of the planet” is not a metaphor, but literally true? How would we know if it was? How would we know if it wasn’t?

And if we can’t be sure one way or the other, why are secularists often so dismissive towards the existence of magic? Why do people so often default to the materialist paradigm? Are they being logical, or simply echoing a hegemonic construction of reality?

How great is the power of our minds? I don’t claim to know, but it certainly seems that statecraft is all about controlling the minds of the people, so we may infer that free minds pose a considerable threat to the robber barons who rule over us.

All this to say – Don’t believe disempowering narratives. Don’t believe what they want you to believe. Life has always been a choose-your-own-adventure story, and anyone who tells you otherwise is your enemy.

Klaus Shwab wants you to believe that the dystopian nightmare of smart cities, CBDCs and social credit scores are an inevitability, and if you believe it, you are already less free.

Is that not reason enough to doubt this whole wackadoodled dumbfuckery?

ALL WARFARE IS BASED ON DECEPTION

No one knows what the future holds, really. There are certainly powerful people who have evil plans, but there’s nothing new about that. It would serve us well to recall that the Nazi regime proclaimed itself a Thousand Year Reich. In reality, the Third Reich lasted just twelve years.

The foundation of Empire is Conquest. Its history is a catalogue of atrocities. If we earnestly desire for humanity to be free, Babylon must be destroyed. And make no mistake – this is exactly what will occur. Societies suppress truth at their own peril, just as civilizations that attempt to dominate the natural world will in time learn the error of their ways.

Nature is the house, and the house always wins. It seems to me that the winning strategy is to align ourselves with nature. Nature will always triumph, in the end.

In the introduction to Nevermore Volume One, we wrote: We must cast a new spell. This is what we meant. We must sculpt a way of interpreting reality which allows us to navigate it in an intelligent way. This is why we are calling for a political reorientation which addresses the mother of all crises: the spiritual crisis that comes from a failure to understand our place in the universe as part of symbiotic whole.

The antidote to the poison has infected the human species is understanding that we belong to the great circle of life, which is good, and beautiful, and worthy of respect, reverence, and awe. Until we address the fundamental fallacy at the heart of Western civilization, we will be doomed to reproduce its malignancy.

This is why we are calling for a political reorientation which addresses the mother of all crises: the spiritual crisis that comes from a failure to understand our place in the universe as part of symbiotic whole.

Thankfully, it is not too late. There are many indigenous cultures who have this understanding, and there are many knowledge-keepers who will happily share their wisdom when approached in a respectful way.

We can also refer to the legacy bequeathed to us by the many philosophers who understood that the trajectory that civilization was on could only lead to disaster.

Paul Cudenec has provided us a valuable service by compiling a compendium of critics of industrial capitalism on the Organic Radicalism website, where readers will discover a wealth of information about a rich philosophical current which has coursed throughout human history, perennially appearing in every culture and in every age.

And this, dear reader, is what I desire to impart upon you: The truth is always the same. Everything that we need to know, people figured out long ago. The answers to the problems of the current moment are to be found in the traditions of the past.

The truth is always the same. Everything that we need to know, people figured out long ago. The answers to the problems of the current moment are to be found in the traditions of the past.

THERE IS NO NEW THING UNDER THE SUN

What is happening now has occurred many times before over the course of human history.

There is nothing new about people trying to take over the world. There is nothing new about the use of propaganda to terrify the people into submission, or the use of divide-and-rule tactics to pit them against one another.

This is not the first time that the ruling class of an empire has become decadent and depraved. This is not humanity’s first mass psychosis.

Although many will see the coming collapse in apocalyptic terms, it will not be without historical parallels.

Many empires have risen and fallen, and we are still here, still able to think these thoughts, still able to dream and scheme in pursuit of our hearts’ desires.

That, to me, is worth celebrating. Call me an idealist, but I agree with Hemingway when he said: “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”

“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”

THERE WAS A BEFORE, THERE WILL BE AN AFTER

There was a time before the rise of Nazi Germany, and there was a time after Nazi Germany. Likewise, eventually the dark chapter of human history we are now living through will be book-ended by a BEFORE and an AFTER. To me, this is a comforting thought.

My allegiance to not to the country where I was born, nor to the religion that I was raised in. My loyalty is the Supreme Being that we are all apart of, to the planetary super-organism we call Mother Earth, and to the cosmic super-organism of the universe, the vast swirling expanse that will forever remain mysterious.

My allegiance to not to the country where I was born, nor to the religion that I was raised in. My loyalty is the Supreme Being that we are all apart of, to the planetary super-organism we call Mother Earth, and to the cosmic super-organism of the universe, the vast swirling expanse that will forever remain mysterious.

There exists not the faintest shadow of a doubt in my mind that the force to which I belong will triumph over the forces of ignorance, selfishness, and greed. The flowering of the life-force of the universe into myriad new manifestations of heretofore unimaginable splendour will proceed apace, as it has since time began. The nature of the universe is a creative chaos. It is this chaos that created us, and all sense of separation from it is pure illusion. We are that force, and that force will continue to flourish forever.

Understand this, and you understand that there really is nothing to fear. You are immortal, and all-powerful, and free, and nothing can take that away from you. You are not your body, nor your mind, nor your identity. You are the creative life-force of the universe itself. That is the meaning of the Vedic axiom: THOU ART THAT. Realize this, and you are once set free.

NO ONE CAN STOP WHAT HAS BEEN SET IN MOTION

Many of us feel in our bones that the years to come will bring tremendous death and destruction. We should neither deny nor over-indulge these premonitions. Whatever will be will be. We can no more stop what has been set into motion than we can stop a volcanic eruption; things must come to their natural conclusion.

I believe that not even those who control the monetary system are truly in control at this point. I suspect they are bracing themselves for what is coming, and laying plans to make it through to the other side of the chaos. We should do the same.

The end of civilization will be violent; but so was its beginning. The end of civilization the only thing that can bring an end to the ancient war that has waged against the Earth and its people for centuries.

Perhaps we should embrace what is transpiring as an essential part of the restoration of balance on our planet. There’s nothing that we can do to stop the volcano from erupting, but we make strategic moves to increase our chances of survival. And make no mistake – the primary political project in the years to come will not be revolution, or insurrection, but survival.

THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES

We maintain the greatest enemy of humanity is fear, and the cure for fear is faith.

The world looks a lot different in the absence of fear, which is another reason that I advocate for a revolutionary movement rooted in ancient spiritual wisdom.

It is no coincidence that spirituality has existed in all human cultures since the beginning of time. It is because we are conscious of our mortality, and must come to terms with death.

This is the reason that spirituality is indispensable – because human societies which are pathologically death-phobic will behave in insane and foolish ways.

I believe that we have come to the end of the road for secularism. Not only has the materialist paradigm long been debunked by quantum physics, but the corruption of the science-industrial complex also means that science has lost all claim to be the arbiter of truth.

People need to believe in something, and for this reason, the rise of new spiritual movements is inevitable.

Yes, religion has often been used by the ruling class as a tool to subjugate the masses, but now that “Science” has is fulfilling the same role that religion used to, more and more people are realizing that we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

We need a framework for understanding our place in the universe, and this is the domain of religion, mythology, and spirituality. Science is essentially about observation and measurement. It cannot make value judgments. It cannot tell us what is important or how we should behave. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar, a fool, or both.

FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BOLD

True spirituality is an antidote to fear. Once you are freed from the grip of fear, the gargoyles that govern you will turn to stone, and new horizons will reveal themselves, beckoning you forth into a dance with the mysterious force animating the universe.

This is what I propose: That we focus first and foremost on overthrowing the despot reigning within our own minds – the tyrant whose name is fear. To defeat this enemy is to become the master of one’s own destiny, and the key to this mastery is simple: you must conquer the fear of death.

Is this really so hard? To achieve this victory, you need only to accept what you already know: that some day you will die. When you have conquered your fear of death, you will have awakened to the latent heroism that is within you, and you will know what it is that you must do.

When you have conquered your fear of death, you will have awakened to the latent heroism that is within you, and you will know what it is that you must do.

BECOMING THE HERO OF YOUR OWN LIFE’S STORY

We live in epic times. A war is waging between the forces good and evil. What the world needs now is heroes. We must be bold. We must be brave. We must fight for our lives as if everything depends upon it.

We must find the strength within ourselves to meet the challenge of our times. We must believe that we can be the heroes who will accomplish the Great Work. We must understand that no one is coming to save us: we are the ones that we have been waiting for.

Carl Jung believed that the collective unconscious will conjure forth exactly what humanity needs in its hour of greatest need. This is what I believe also – that the Earth is a sentient being, and that she will heal herself. How this will occur, I do not claim to know, but I believe that if we align ourselves with the natural flow of energy of the universe, which is anarchy, we will know exactly what it is that we must do.

A New World Will Rise From the Ashes

There are those of us who feel called to be a part of this healing. We feel that what is occurring in our own lives confirms that mysterious forces are at work, that magic is afoot. We commit ourselves to the desire for the healing of the planet with a faith in the essential goodness of the universe that is at the core of anarchist philosophy.

Anarchism is the belief that anarchy is good; that nature does not need to be controlled, that humanity would be better off if we were to live within harmony with creation, rather than attempting to dominate it.

For me, anarchism is nothing more nor less than faith in the flow of the energy of the universe. Other ideologies, born of modernity, may well collapse along with the Empire that spawned them, but anarchism need not share their fate. Throughout human history, across many cultures, one universal truth has flowered time and time again, and it has been known by many names. Anarchism is one philosophy which has this truth at its core, but that truth does not belong to any one tradition.

In many indigenous cultures, this truth is known as natural law, and wisdom consists of living in accordance with it. Seemingly, it emerges from something innate to human nature, from our instinct towards cooperation, and from the desire for freedom that is born of oppression.

Now, because we need to, we are rediscovering this universal truth, which lies at the heart of all true spiritual traditions. We may call this truth anarchism, or perennialism, or by any other name, but the essence will be the same. The Great Dialectic – the interplay of spiritual forces – necessitates it.

Anarchism is the antithesis to oppression, and for this reason the scourge of totalitarianism will give rise to a new generation of revolutionaries who have their foundation in this truth. Some will call themselves anarchists, and some will not, but they will share a belief in the supreme value of freedom, and this is what matters.

The rise of this movement has already begun, and the rebels of the world are remembering the revolutionary wisdom of the past. The ideologies born of industrialism will share its fate, but anarchism need not. Indeed, if anarchists stay true to their creed, it will grow stronger as more and more people realize the fundamental lie at the heart of statism – that human beings need to be controlled for their own good.

As society descends further into madness, more people will seek sanity outside of its logic, and this search will lead people to similar conclusions – that sanity comes from living in accordance with truth, and that the only immutable truth that exists is the law of nature.

This search for truth will lead to a desire to live in right relationship not only with other human beings, but with the super-organism from which we receive our sustenance, which we may call Mother Earth, or Gaia, or God.

Which words will be used to describe this belief remains to be seen, but its character can already been perceived. Born as the antithesis to oppression, it will be anarchic. It is emerging now because it must, and it will sweep the world because resisting state power is now a matter of life and death.

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Anarchy is the natural order of the universe. It is the mother of all manifestation, because it is the power of life itself. It is the reality from which we emerged, and as surely as the sun will rise after the darkest night, we shall return again to it.

It is exhilarating to live in this era, now that the spell that has so long held humanity in its grasp is fading, for now will the spirit of life again assert itself, and balance will be restored.

Long Live Anarchy!