UE5, Part 2: May the Cloud of Unknowing Be Unbroken
The conclusion to the essay series! This one gets into new occult, demonic, and metaphysical terrain, while working to bring the energies of the series to a provisional conclusion for 2021.
Part I: The Confusion is the Revelation
As I try to orient myself in this second summer of the UE project, while we begin to emerge into an era beyond the narratives that gave rise to it, what I notice first is a sense of trembling that combines mourning and relief with regard to the feeling that we’re no longer immersed in the world-historical. Instead, summer 2021 feels, as my friend Justin put it, like many cords of potential significance are bundled together, creating a lull but also a polyphony that’s beginning to vibrate, without it yet being clear—unlike last summer, when the cords of Covid, Chauvin, and Trump 2020 were ringing at a fever pitch, generating an atmosphere of world-historical heaviness that was impossible to escape—which cord will prove to be the significant one, or if this significance will come from their bundled effect, the way they all play off of one another and cause some still unknown future event, rather than the intrinsic nature of any one of them just yet.
Within this energized lull, the edges of reality seem to be vibrating as well, disturbed by what we’ve all been through and by the field of potential that going through it has opened up. Something diffuse and ill-defined feels all-pervasive, within which the Truth about what’s really going on is not only elusive but also conceptually different from what it used to be, or used to seem to be. I feel now, more than ever before, that the facts in any given media narrative are not only mutually inconsistent, but perhaps not even related to what we’ve been seeking under the rubric of Truth. Therefore, as I attempt to wrap up the first phase of this UE project, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that something fundamental has shifted in reality, so much so that the myriad narratives about it no longer make contact with the thing itself, not even enough to obfuscate it. This new state, which is of course also an ancient and perhaps an eternal state, is what I’ll call the cloud of unknowing.
The clearest symptom of this cloud’s arrival, or re-arrival, is that all the (seemingly) world-historical narratives of the past year, to say nothing of the past five years, have burned themselves out. The news doesn’t move me like it did a few months ago. I have no visceral, heart-pounding response to the Delta variant, or the unrest in Cuba and South Africa, or even the assassination of Haiti’s president and whatever’s going on with UFOs. I can recognize, in a sober fashion, that these events may well be important, but there’s some profound, libidinal level of my being that they can’t reach any longer.
Now, all the old dialectics—Republican vs. Democrat, elite vs. populist, CNN vs. Fox, information vs. disinformation, even unworkable vs. equilibrium—feel fused together along a strange new axis, no longer representing the central dichotomy of the present but, rather, collapsing into a single side, opposed to which is something as yet unnamable. This thing, while it may take on dimension and characteristics eventually, is for now lost in the cloud of unknowing, unless it’s more precise to say that it is the cloud, rendering moot all the conflict that used to dominate my attention.
My attention is therefore in a different place this summer, totally unabsorbed rather than totally absorbed. The political podcasts I used to binge on now seem odious, at best inert and at worst maddening, a toxin that I am, at last, free to purge—in this sense, summer 2021 feels like a moment of exhalation, after inhaling to the point of hyperventilation for too long (“I can’t breathe” of course being last summer’s mantra). Crucially, I’m also no longer scared in the way I was throughout the Trump Era. This fear goaded me into trusting certain narratives and certain sources with the desperation of someone groping for a lifeboat, clinging for dear life to whoever could reassure me that I was on the side of tolerance and Democracy, fighting a heroic battle against literal Nazism. Today, nothing seems that clear, so I look back at my earlier hyper-clarity with a growing suspicion. I am still scared today, but of different things, things I can’t quite name yet, but that I can say with some certainty aren’t what they used to be. I’m scared now of something subtler and more endemic, not clearly sortable into one side against another side, and therefore I feel unattached, drifting through murky waters rather than huddled in the lifeboat.
I don’t say this out of any belief that we’re “out of the woods,” nor even any conviction as to what those woods might consist of—I suspect that, no matter what they are, there is no outside—but more from an emotional migration away from the narratives that used to immerse me, coupled with a growing distrust of all sources, not along partisan or even mainstream vs. indie lines, but more a growing intuition—verging onto the metaphysical—that the true story of what’s going on in 2021 can’t be told because it isn’t a story at all: it’s a cloud that, if we look at it honestly, will only grow cloudier.
Being left once again with my own attention in this way feels momentous, and is perhaps thus the perverse but precious gift of the last five years, which, for most of us I think, were the first time in living memory that the present felt truly world-historical, even if earlier events like 911 and the Financial Crisis will prove to have been more significant in the long run. Perhaps we are now finally free to leave the last five years’ deadening, if temporarily comforting “cloud of knowing” behind, and proceed, with our full attention restored, through the portal and into the unknown terrain beyond.
At end of May, I took a road trip with my friend Paul from Austin to Minneapolis. We stopped at the site of the Waco standoff, and stood for an hour in the charged atmosphere of that bizarre and quintessentially American bloodbath, soaking up the silence and ominous haze around the foundations of the buildings that had been burned, with dozens of children inside.
Standing there, and thinking ahead to Oklahoma City, where we’d end up the next day, and then to the George Floyd Memorial in Minneapolis, where we’d find ourselves a few days after that, I ruminated on the specific acts of American violence that, throughout my childhood, seemed to crystallize the otherwise latent, simmering menace of the nation (while also, though I didn’t know it yet, beginning to crystallize the approach to horror and the American mythic that would inform my fiction), before merging into the overarching fanaticism of the new millennium. All of these events—Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, OJ Simpson, the Unabomber—occurred in the 90s, culminating in Columbine and then 911, just over the edge of the Millennium, an ominous transition that figures like David Koresh had warned about a few years earlier.
From there, it seemed, the specific nature of this violence bled into something ubiquitous yet unreachable, just as Bill Clinton’s luridly specific 90s scandals bled out into a more general sense that all presidents were post-Truman-Show pseudo-authorities of dubious power and intent. The cloud of unknowing began to surround the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions abroad, while, at home, the culture metastasized into a carnival of mass shootings and Nazi memes inspired by the Koresh’s, Kaczynski’s, and McVeigh’s of the 90s, but on a much larger scale, beyond the scope of any individual and any manifesto or dramatic framework, at least until Trump appeared to gather those energies back into human form.
What I suspect now is that this diffusion is finally becoming tangible as such. All the vectors of information and disinformation that I desperately absorbed over the past five years, thinking I was grounding my sanity during an insane time, now appear to have served the opposite purpose, that of pushing off the revelation that there was no conclusion to the story, and hence, as I mentioned a moment ago, perhaps no story at all. If I can see this more clearly now, I can begin to interface with the cloud of unknowing itself, rather than casting about in desperation for someone to rescue me from it.
As Paul put it on our trip, while we drove toward George Floyd Square on what would turn out to be the last day before it was dismantled, reality seemed to warp when Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 disappeared in 2014: the sky literally seemed to open up and the edges of what was physically possible groaned outward, swallowing the plane and leaving, in its wake, a queasy sense that just about anything can happen, thereby rendering suspect whatever limits we’d placed on the possible until then.
This summer feels like an echo of that, an amplified version of the same phenomenon, in which the physical and the metaphysical bleed together with us in between, revealing a reality that is both thrillingly and terrifyingly wider than we’d thought it could be. It almost feels like we did die of Covid and ended up in a netherworld on the far side, a replacement version of the pre-Covid world that looks the same but, on some crucial and as-yet undefinable level, isn’t—just as the Biden Administration seems poised to offer the appearance of normalcy without quite convincing us that that’s what it’s actually there to accomplish.
This sense—akin to my constant state, last spring, of maybe having Covid, the long, bleary weeks of feeling woozy and weary without any concrete symptoms to point to—leads me to suspect that there’s no further we can go in the hopes that the fog will clear and show us where it’s been leading. Maybe, then, this is a moment for switching modes and beginning to live, knowingly and even gladly, in the fog, rather than clinging to idols, messiahs, or narratives claiming the ability to lead us out of it.
We Can’t Even Imagine the Present
If so, then this means we’ve finally arrived. If this is the other side of the portal, then our job is to navigate the terrain, no longer to fight our way toward it. As the author B.R. Yeager told me recently, we’ve reached a point where we can’t even imagine the present, let alone see beyond it. If this is true, then this moment requires a fundamental recalibration of the American mindset, away from progress and expansion—mental as well as territorial—and toward the attempt to simply see (and be) where we are. This may be why I feel that one phase of the UE project is wrapping up here, reaching a plateau on which it should rest for a while, willingly exposing itself to whatever germ will set the next phase in motion.
Remaining in this present—and putting our energies toward trying to imagine rather than escape it—is a vulnerable state, because it requires acknowledging that we know as much as we ever will. We have to accept the limitations this implies, and work with rather than against them, while resisting the ever-present grift of those peddling false relief. We’re like crabs without shells whose goal is to remain shell-less—reveling in our vulnerability, welcoming attack in the belief that it will impregnate us with the future, if it doesn’t kill us first—rather than becoming trapped beneath any of the shells that the Koresh’s of the world (to say nothing of the Maddow’s and the Carlson’s) want to put over us, ensconcing us in a sense of security—of being on the right side, beneath a ceiling rather than a sky—that can never be anything but a commercially-motivated delusion.
As a fundamentally uncertain state, the UE still leaves open the question of whether this formulation is correct or if an actual, clarifying revelation is still imminent, but something beneath that question—the level on which suspense either does or does not take root—feels altered. This is the level on which we either would or wouldn’t care about the repercussions of a given narrative, or even a given reality. If Covid comes roaring back, will we care in the same way we did the first time? What about Qanon and the Boogaloo Bois? In both cases, I think the answer is no. There’s something passe about these narratives now, regardless of their recent and potentially recurrent reality, some way in which they no longer scratch the existential itch that, even a few months ago, they very much did. While nothing in the macro narrative has changed since then, this feeling has. Something subterranean has grown more abstract, more removed, so that, even if the drumstick of the narrative swings as wildly as ever, there’s no longer any drum for it to beat.
If pop culture is both a manifestation of and an appeal to our collective unconscious, swelling and subsiding in such a way that one year’s megahit is the next year’s punchline, then perhaps these phenomena are no different: just like, say, Crazy or Call Me Maybe, Trump, Covid, and Qanon functioned in the same way, as hits that galvanized the collective unconscious for a specific moment and a specific set of reasons, before sinking into irrelevance or retro-kitsch. Certainly, whatever comes next, these topics no longer make me spark with dread or hyperactive interest the way they once did.
Now, in an emotional as well as a literal sense, they feel like old news—not only old stories, but old story-forms, examples of a type of narrative that has no place on this new plateau. This may be why we hate the word “content” so much—because it suggests that all human expression is simply filling the same old container with nominally new material, without allowing for the possibility that the container itself needs to be changed. This is precisely what I want to suggest below.
Life on the Plateau
If we accept that no further answer is coming, and thus wean ourselves off the late 2010s’ particular brand of news-induced, future-craving insatiability, then maybe we’ll begin to see that some version of the Apocalypse came instead: we did go through the portal, and here, on the other side, there is no guidebook, no source we can or should trust, no meta-narrative, no intercessor, only ourselves and the sky, with nothing between—a Protestant rather than a Catholic start to the 2020s. This is the distinction I’m trying to draw between the cloud of knowing and the cloud of unknowing, and why I want to argue for a new ideology capable of discarding the former by embracing the latter.
It’s unclear whether this has always been the case but now that we’ve gone through a clarifying crisis we can see it for the first time—the old meaning of Apocalypse as a revelatory rather than a terminal event (it’s called the Book of Revelations for a reason)—or if something seismic has actually changed. Either way, I now believe that our real condition has grown clearer over the past five years, even as the story it told about itself was that of growing more fractious and confused: in this regard, the confusion is the revelation. It’s not a cloud obscuring a secret clarity, the way conspiracy theorists always hope it will prove to be; it’s the actual nature of the situation laid bare. This is not at all to say that no conspiracies are afoot, only that, if they are, no solution or culmination is forthcoming. The mindset of the 2020s, then, as distinct from the late 2010s, has to be that of embracing the flux as the arrived-at present, rather than a fog between an unworkable present and a distant but reachable future.
Nothing is visible up ahead anymore, only life in this state, which, if it’s to be productive, has to consist of something other than stagnation. Stagnation, or seediness, is future-oriented in the sense that the seeds are waiting either to sprout or to go to waste, whereas this new present on the plateau is neither—it’s the state in which the seeds have sprouted, but not in a way we could have anticipated, and perhaps not even in a way we can comprehend. Still, I no longer feel that we can’t access the Truth, but rather that the Truth we were trying to access in 2019 and 2020 is no longer the Truth at all, and therefore something else has to be.
God Let Loose on Earth
As we explore this new present, it feels as though a presence is out here with us, a demon or a God from the previous age that came through the portal with us, turning nature itself toward what we might prefer to call the supernatural. In this condition, all pundits are grifters, hawking the comforting but obsolete mindset of the other side of the portal, back when we believed that passing through would mean entering an age of clarity and reason, to say nothing of victory against our perceived enemies.
At this point, any attempt to reconstitute old forms of faith, whether in the form of pre-portal optimism, or evangelical Christianity, race-based nationalism, or a Reagan/Clinton version of free-market liberalism, is now too late, and thus represents a crazed refusal of the present—a ludicrous pageant of a sane future that never arrived, or a sane past that never ended. The more salient question now is whether a new form of faith can arise as a genuine reaction rather than a conservative counter-reaction, to the destabilizations of this time. Is there a form of faith that can base itself around not-knowing, around living under an open sky, rather than imposing any form of total knowledge that—it should be obvious by now—can only ever be imposed by violence?
This violence comes from the way that systems try to cover themselves with false ceilings, imposing limits where reality refuses them. They claim to be complete (indeed, they sell the feeling of completeness) by denying any vertical axis and attempting to dominate the entirety of horizontal space with whatever worldview they’re putting forth, denying the radical truth of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which argues that any system will necessarily generate problems not solvable using the rules of that system, and therefore will always necessitate the creation or discovery of a higher system (just as every father knows that his child’s mandate is to kill him).
Qanon functioned in this way, sweeping up lost souls from across the horizontal infinitude of the Internet—which flattens all possible knowledge into a side-by-side array of threads and tabs that refuses depth by offering a seductive substitute—and gathering them together under the rubric of a revelation or a Storm, an ultimate upward rapture, off the flat plane at last and into a false cloud of knowing up above, which, as such, could never arrive. This is the contradictory nature of all scams, which promise deliverance from the banal while doubling down on what makes life banal in the first place. In reality, if you want to leave the Earth, you have to be prepared to face the sky as such, not as a higher form of solid ground.
Scapegoats
By this same token, Trump embodied forces that he neither generated nor managed to contain, just as his permanent or temporary defeat will not purge them from the air. All major public figures, whether they take the role of ultimate Good (Mandela) or Evil (Hitler), follow this trajectory and end up as insufficient avatars for something larger. To echo the great theorist Rene Girard, they also become scapegoats, just as they scapegoat others: Hitler scapegoated the Jews as avatars for the diffuse forces ailing Germany in the 1920s and early 30s, claiming their annihilation could restore the nation to greatness, just as, a decade later, Hitler’s own annihilation (along with that of a select group of Nazis) was also presented as the tangible and singular solution to the demonic force of Nazism itself.
This is not to draw a moral equivalence between the two forms of scapegoating, but only a structural one, and to claim that both stem from the same urge to see specific human beings as the total source of aspects of reality that can never be neatly contained, and thus never dealt with in any permanent way—humans, it seems to me, are built to channel forces, not to generate them. Like the dogs that can never look upward in Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” if we continue to demand a closed ceiling, we’ll remain on the horizontal axis, in a space where the air will grow thinner and thinner until we suffocate, if we don’t scam each other to death first.
If, on the other hand, we embrace the queasy but liberating feeling of life beneath an open sky, we may discover not only a means of reaching through the fog toward something that feels more like reality, but also a new frontier—a true upward psychic space in which the American need to roam and wander, long stifled by the closure of the actual Western frontier (and the fact that this land was never free for the taking, no matter how much we might wish it had been), can be nurtured once again in the earnest pursuit of a new evolution of culture, beyond the exhausted cul-de-sac we’ve lately gotten lost in.
A Post-secular Age
As another overdetermined discourse, the reality TV politics that overtook the culture during the Trump Era also looks like a scapegoat in retrospect, an attempt to make tangible that which, in its entirety, will always overflow any container that seeks to contain it (this loops us back to the odiousness of content), steaming back out into the cloud of unknowing. Whether it’s a person, a group, or an entire discourse is ultimately insignificant—the physics, or metaphysics, are the same.
Now, the sense of universal menace that grows when scapegoats cease to function, in which nature itself feels incomprehensibly strange, as in Blackwood’s classic tale “The Willows,” may be pushing us into what I’ve heard described as a “post-secular age,” perhaps the world’s first. This is a rebuke to the Secular Age that Charles Taylor famously described in his 2009 opus, more broadly a rebuke to the New Atheism of the early 2000s, and, more broadly even than that, a rebuke to the entire Enlightenment, whose values have ostensibly determined the course of the past few centuries. It’s as though first God lived in heaven (the pre-modern era), then there was no God (the modern era), and now God lives on the plateau with us (the post-secular age), no longer sequestered in a dogmatic realm, nor subject to the denial of the supposedly enlightened liberal classes.
To sketch a brief history of how we got here, over the course of my lifetime so far, I see it like this: from the 80s until the advent of social media as the commercial center of the Internet, we lived in the Age of Information, in which access to more and more information was seen as a good thing—this was the secular age straining toward its limits, hoping that flooring the accelerator on its own defining tendencies would help it achieve lasting supremacy. Whatever the reality was, the general belief back then was that knowing more (or being able to know more) empowered, grounded, and helped to define the individual.
But the volume of information grew overwhelming, and we recoiled from the vastness of what we’d unleashed, retreating into what James Bridle, quoting Lovecraft, calls a New Dark Age, another attempt to explain how occult forces invaded the secular space that infinite information was supposed to have opened. Around 2010, just as I graduated from college and began to navigate the world as an adult, we began to seek a reprieve from all this information—which had neither prevented the Financial Crisis nor tempered an obviously unworkable response to it—driven by a cultish need for curation, for someone to trust, both to tell us what’s true and, more importantly perhaps, what isn’t (and thus which news sources we must unequivocally denounce, in order to appear stable in our orientation toward reality). Hence the end of the Age of Information and the beginning of the Age of Influence (also an age of denial), yet another attempt to place a ceiling between us and the sky. This age lasted throughout the 2010s, embodied in the twin, if opposite, populist acts of Obama and Trump.
Now, the post-secular age marks the beginning of something yet-newer, eclipsing the Age of Influence a decade after its advent, with Trump himself standing as the strangest and most perversely compelling Influencer of all time. The way in which he’s now melted back into the same swamp he emerged from (and claimed a unique ability to drain), revealing the ominous systems that he briefly embodied, is the perfect event, along with the disembodied, host-seeking virus itself, to mark the onset of something new, an era in which influence itself has come to seem suspect and, though we can’t return to the 90s’ optimism of infinite information producing infinite sanity, perhaps we can surge forward, naked and exposed, into the terror of whatever a post-Influence age might have in store—an age in which, finally, we confront the systems themselves, not the scapegoats they can no longer fit into.
An Emergent Principle of Nature
As we consider the contours of this post-Influence, post-secular age, we should pause for a moment and admit that the past five years have proven, beyond any doubt, that we’re unable to tell each other the Truth. It’s not just that we won’t—to a degree that I hadn’t felt before, it seems like we genuinely can’t. Something has become irreparably corrupted in the networks, both technological and conceptual, in which we might even consider whether a given claim or take is true. Furthermore, I find I’m losing the ability to even wonder.
In a paradoxical sense, then, this is the Truth: that the Influence we’ve tried to steer by has, like the infinitude of information it was called upon to curate, led us into madness. Whether we are unable to be truthful due to human nature—perhaps greed, jealousy, hatred, and the good, old-fashioned trickster principle are simply too compelling to overcome—or because of nature itself—perhaps there’s something innate in language, in the contours of the Internet, and in the structure of culture and government that makes transparency impossible—we should at least accept that this is the situation we’re in now.
The shift toward a post-secular reality is scientifically palpable as well, insofar as advances in every branch of science reveal only more mysteries, never the certainty that the “truly secular” scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries had imagined they were pursuing—a fantasy that a large segment of society doubled down on during the height of Covid, in which their lawns proclaimed that, “In Our America, science is real.” To take neuroscience as one example, in the pre-modern period, people believed in a soul or other ineffable, inexplicable part of the self. Then, in the modern period, they took a hard materialist turn, claiming that consciousness was only chemicals and biological processes. Now, as we move into the post-secular age, they may retain the conviction that it’s chemicals and biological processes, but the “only” has disappeared: the challenge of explaining what chemicals and biological processes really are, and how they coalesce into consciousness, has grown so complex as to verge back into the metaphysical.
If the age of the soul was Level 1 and the age of only matter was Level 2, then we’re now creeping up onto Level 3, which resembles Level 1 but is by no means a return to it. In this regard, we need not speak of re-enchantment—I’m not arguing for a return to the “Level 1” mindset of any previous age, as the Jordan Petersons of the world love to do—but only of ongoing natural revelation, in that our understanding is growing more, not less strange, revealing that the purpose and essence of knowledge is to increase rather than reduce the profundity of the mysteries—the systems, which can appear both occult and scientific at the same time—that we’re immersed in, here on the plateau.
As we leave Level 2 behind, we therefore also have to leave behind Level 2’s understanding of Truth as a fixed account—like a treasure hidden inside a box—and begin to push ourselves toward a much spookier, more dynamic Level 3 orientation, one that sees Truth as an attitude, a mode of production, something to do rather than to know, a means of reacting that isn’t reactionary.
PART 2: Truth vs. Facts
Pretending to Know
As established above, all discussions of mediated fact have become ideological in 2021. A simple proof of this is to ask any given person to name a reliable news source. Their answer, no matter what it is, will be ideological, not factual, insofar as they will have decided to trust that source (and not others, often vehemently so) because it seems truthful to them—one source is heroically defending the legitimacy of the vaccines, while another, for its audience, is just as heroically exposing the massive fraud behind them—or because it reinforces their worldview and that of their peers, not because they have any way of vetting the information therein on a factual basis.
In this regard, all news is now vetted on the basis of style, not content, and one’s taste for a given style over another has to do with class, education, and, most of all, an unexpressed need for ideology—factors entirely separate from any ability to find out, or even honestly wonder, whether a given narrative is true. Does the entire mainstream media apparatus represent a coordinated Regime designed only to protect the rich and powerful from legitimate populist unrest, or is it the last bulwark of genuine information in an ocean of Internet-disseminated lies? Is the Biden Administration, as it attempts to further regulate Facebook, protecting us from deadly falsehoods, or protecting itself from delegitimizing exposure? Which side of this line one falls on has to do with almost every conceivable factor except any tangible awareness of what’s actually the case, which feels like an untouchable category at this point.
This is the essence of the post-Truth age: not just that Trump built a viable brand by telling obvious lies, but that trust in media is either nonexistent or fanatical, and thus always charged with a moral weight that tips it off balance. This means that, in 2021, we need to stop believing that if we could only get the really real facts behind the noise, we’d be able to ground our worldview in externally-conferred legitimacy. We should keep seeking these facts, of course, and supporting the journalists who are willing and able to find them, but we can only do so from an already grounded position that’s based in something more internal and less contingent than any set of reported facts, even if true, can be.
This is the only mindset I can envision that will make living on the plateau bearable, and, I hope, productive. It requires giving up both the upward-tending and the downward-tending compulsions of conspiracy thinking, in the sense of hoping that any trail of facts, no matter how salacious and how hard to come by, will definitively ground or elevate our thinking. Instead, we must remain in this middle state—the present—well aware that much of what we’ve been told is untrue, without ever quite knowing what is, nor, more crucially, what the impact of finding out would be. I want to suggest here that this isn’t the right question anymore, because it doesn’t lead to the mixture of healthy skepticism and grounded ideology that 2021 requires.
A key aspect of the mixture I’m seeking to describe is therefore finding a way to separate Truth, in its Level-3 incarnation, into its own category, beyond the reach of both contingent narrative and violent fanaticism. Otherwise, as it gets harder to know what’s true, it also gets harder to admit to not knowing—the premium on seeming certain continues to rise, as one’s identity becomes ever more bound up with whichever certainty one chooses to project. In this way, the denial around nobody knowing what’s true gets ever deeper, while the penalty for pointing this out gets ever more severe, producing a situation where what makes sense isn’t necessarily true, and what’s true doesn’t necessarily make sense. This dovetails with the ongoing push toward hyper-specialization in every facet of economics, education, science and research, so that people gorge themselves on narratives about topics they can’t possibly understand in depth (hence the infinite horizontality of online “research”), and then lash out in rage and terror if this obvious fact ever arises.
Instead of holding this pose any longer, the time has come to say that, on the one hand, we should remain invested and engaged with the world around us, while, on the other, we must strive to anchor our sanity in a completely different ground.
A Pre-Truth World
This sense of hovering in an indeterminate middle zone extends beyond politics and culture to the level of daily life, and vice versa, because each is a manifestation of the same uncertainty. Just as I don’t know which account of national news to trust, I also don’t know where I’ll be living next year, or working, if anywhere. I don’t even know if the towns and cities that make up the map of my imagined future life will exist next year, or in ten years. This is the nearly universal condition of an age in which the ground, both literally and figuratively, is shaking underfoot, or turning out not to be the real ground at all.
The hustle required to persevere in this condition increases as uncertainty becomes the dominant mode of being (perhaps this is why we hate the super-rich so much: the ironclad, even superfluous security they seem to live within comes as the direct result of our precarity, as two sides of the same coin, so that as we become more contingent, they become more entrenched, at least until the guillotines come out, if they ever do). This can have a maddening dimension, as it comes to seem there’s no bottom, no path to a coherent or secure life, no succor from constant external vicissitudes, except the endless proliferation of scams offering pseudo-relief from the toll that this condition takes on us.
As I see it, cultivating a belief system detached from mediated facts, while not lapsing into a deranged dogma of “alternative facts,” is the only way to stand in this no-man’s-land and move forward, without the traction of solid ground—it feels more like the swim-flying of dreams, in which I often find I can flutter by pushing through the air as if it were water.
This new belief system, however, can’t be a system in the violently self-protective mold of extant systems; it has to be more of a method, an upward-oriented attitude toward the plateau that recognizes both its vast horizontal expanse and also the vast openness of the sky above, the vertiginous fact that the amount we don’t know will always exceed the amount we do. The perversities of this condition, which is inherently masochistic, always eager to be dominated and overwhelmed by the Truth, should be appreciated and investigated insofar as they energize our attention upward, without any hope for the false relief of that upward journey ever ending. To expand the metaphor, the plateau is indeed a moment of pause on the ascent of a mountain, but that mountain has no true summit, only an infinite succession of false ones, which we must approach as such—as if heaven were an endless ascent, not a higher plane.
Accepting this requires embracing the irrational and summoning the courage to say, about ourselves, “I have separated my relation to Truth and to facts in such a way that I’m not trying to have my cake and eat it too. I’m not pretending that I don’t believe in the supernatural or the transcendental, while attaching transcendental value to mediated facts that are debatable and not fully known. I admit that I am, in some ways I maybe didn’t think I was, a religious person.” Here again, the way out of seediness involves making a painful decision to embrace the present as such, rather than seeing it as an intolerable state to be rescued from by a future that’s contingent upon narrative resolution.
If we separate our need for Truth in this way from our inability to get definitive facts, we can say, instead, that we live in a post-fact world, which may itself be a pre-Truth world, a cusp state in which we can declare ourselves ready for a new form of Truth, having accepted that the Enlightenment and its ensuing doctrine of liberalism really are ceding ground to a post-secular age—an age that, as in Gödel’s theorem, the previous age generated out of its own systemic limitations.
Believe in Demons So You Don’t See People That Way
To shift focus to a related aspect of the fact vs. Truth debate, the tenor of conspiracy culture is also changing in relation to a growing perception, even among normal people, that much of what we read can’t be taken at face value. If conspiracy theories are thus resonating more today than at any point in the recent past, it’s crucial to ask what they’re resonating with.
Any given theory may be less important than the underlying nervous energy it accesses and, as a key component of systems horror, gives a plausible if oversimplified shape to. This is the ideology beneath the “facts,” such that a debate about proving or debunking any given theory doesn’t reach the level that makes or breaks that theory as a driver of pop culture: the level on which people either do or don’t want to believe, as the X-Files put it so memorably. This is the level I want to consider here.
UFOs are instructive in this regard: as one of the prime objects of conspiracy thinking in the second half of the twentieth century, the possibility of UFOs and extraterrestrial life was immensely fertile ground. Crop circles, cattle mutilation, government experiments at Area 51, The Mothman Prophecies: all of this was catnip for a certain array of subcultures, especially in the late-80s portal phase, when abduction lore was a key driver of the portal-sensibility, spreading into the mainstream with 90s films like Independence Day and Men in Black. Today, however, as more and more evidence of real UFOs is freely admitted by the Pentagon and mainstream outlets like 60 Minutes and The Guardian, the cultural pull of this topic diminishes. As comedian Nate Bargatze put it recently, “the government admitted that aliens exist, and nobody cared.”
This may seem strange, but it speaks to the fact that what we really hunger for is not the solution to the conspiracy—especially when it deals with the truly incomprehensible, like actual aliens—but rather the sense of being in the midst of it, drawing connections, uncovering secrets, swapping notes with fellow seekers, getting closer to an always-out-of-reach catharsis by “doing our own research,” as Q-types like to put it. This is another threshold mentality, insofar as we find pleasure and purpose in approaching the edge of the portal by uncovering evidence that hints at the otherworldly possibility of alien life, but then recoil from going all the way through. In the schema outlined earlier, it’s a pseudo-verticality that actually serves to keep our thinking on the horizontal axis it was already on.
In this regard, maybe part of what makes us so intensely triggered by conspiracy theories in 2021, to the point of large numbers of tolerant-seeming people calling for conspiratorial-types to be permanently banned from the Internet, unlike in the 90s, when conspiracy culture had more of a low-key, gonzo appeal, is that now the entire mainstream system feels shaky and threadbare: all worldviews feel like conspiracy theories to a new and frightening degree today, when the ironclad hegemony of American life, which perhaps reached its zenith but also began to burn out during the 1989-2021 portal phase, is now on a path toward either toward total ruin or a profound new strangeness, inside the cloud of unknowing.
To visit the territory of Weird fiction for a moment, it’s as if the entire notion of having a worldview at all is growing conspiratorial, as if believing in the very possibility of a coherent reality makes you a de facto conspiracy theorist or cult member, defending a belief system—a cloud of knowing, a dream of sanity—that is, at root, indefensible beneath the cloud of unknowing. From today’s perspective, the notion that reality can be encompassed by anything is another false ceiling attempting to deny the vastness of the open sky. Insofar as the culture at large can’t face this terrifying possibility, there’s no longer any solid edifice for an X-Files to poke holes in, so any X-Files-type thinking must be demonized with a vehemence that, in the 90s, would’ve seemed like overkill.
This overkill is another symptom of the death throes of the secular age, producing a condition in which, if you don’t believe in demons, you start to see other people that way: Qanon sees political elites as literal demons, while much of mainstream society sees Qanon believers the same way. One side of the culture is obsessed with seeing Biden as a puppet, created and used by, as Trump put it, “people in the dark shadows,” while the other side speaks of relatives “lost to Fox News,” as if their brains had literally ceased to function. One side believes the vaccines will turn us into zombies, while the other side believes that anyone questioning those vaccines has already become one.
Overcoming this tendency to dehumanize—and hence to scapegoat—is yet another argument for cultivating an actual relationship with the supernatural in the post-secular age, and to cease ascribing human agency to a strangeness that may be endemic to nature itself. Instead of seeing people as demons, we should all find our own way to satisfy the demonic part of our psyches by actually believing in demons, crazy as that may sound, or at least in a demonic principle latent within the new reality of the plateau.
The problem with people who subscribe too wholeheartedly to meme conspiracies like Qanon, 5G, and Gates/Soros/Davos/Great Reset is that they quickly become zealots of these unverifiable beliefs, insisting that they alone know what’s really true, while everyone else is a brainwashed sheep. At the same time, in what is essentially a counter-reaction driven by the same (very human) mental tendency, mainstream society disavows these beliefs with a fanatical certainty that’s also impossible to verify except on the level of belief. Will we ever know exactly who Jeffrey Epstein was involved with, and exactly how and why he died? Almost certainly not. Will we ever know who exactly was involved with the vaccine development, and what their incentives and blind spots were? I don’t see how we ever could. Will we ever trust the Pentagon if it claims that UFOs exist or that they don’t? Unlikely. At this point, we don’t even know the origin of Covid itself, a fact that should not be as hard to mention as it obviously is.
Given that this is where we stand, the only pose that makes sense is a healthy disbelief for what sounds like bullshit without an automatic refusal to hear people out. This is one major evolution I’ve gone through since 2016, and I think it’s a healthy one: I’ve become less willing to accept the narrative that tens of millions of people are so stupid and misinformed they should just shut up forever, while I’m so correct and well-informed that everyone should listen to me. This mentality provided comfort during the Trump Era, when I could pretend that all the podcasts I listened to were hosted by sane and good people who just happened to be saying what I wanted to hear, while everyone else was a zombie, but today, as the winds begin to change, it’s starting to feel like a fantasyland that we cannot linger too long in without becoming zombies ourselves.
This is not to say that I have to entertain every idea I come across, fringe or mainstream, and I’m as committed as ever to resisting hate when it manifests as such—there may therefore always be millions of people with whom I fundamentally disagree on the level of ideology—but it feels newly important to have the humility to remember that, on a factual level, I know very, very little, which means that I need to own my beliefs for what they are, rather than continuing to pretend that they’re derived from solid, neutral facts. This humility has a communal, and hence utopian aim, in that it seeks to see others as more rather than less human, while also giving the part of me that perceives the reality of demons its due.
Just About Anything Might Be True
As with the vanished Malaysian plane, the very fact that Donald Trump was president should be enough to convince us that reality, both political and metaphysical (a distinction that itself seems suspect), is stranger than we’d like to believe, and therefore just about anything might be true, which doesn’t mean that it is.
Either way, meme conspiracies often end up as cover for true outcomes, like how Covid has financially and logistically improved the lives of many people I know, while being presented as a generational cataclysm. As in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where the feeling of being an insect is turned into literal being, today’s meme conspiracies literalize the subtextual fears that a great many people legitimately feel. Whatever we believe about the facts, we can recognize the deeper Truth of this feeling as a means of expressing the essence of the moment. The question of whether, say, Jeff Bezos is a literal human or a literal demon is less important than the attempt to comprehend, in whatever terms we’re able, what it means to buy yourself a $5-billion-dollar rocket ride while your employees struggle to stay alive. However we comprehend this fact, the attempt to comprehend it is an inevitable part of living sanely in 2021.
Indeed, the predominant meme conspiracies are almost certainly false—perhaps deliberately so, if one entertains the meta-conspiracy that they were seeded to muddy the waters and discredit any grains of truth their adherents might stumble upon—and yet the master narrative that all conspiracies are false is also false, as anyone who grew up after the 60s and 70s must accept.
This is why delineating the extent and nature of conspiracies is so difficult. One cast of mind runs with their nervous energy all the way to everything is a conspiracy, thereby casting all apparent authority in a sinister light, while the other side makes the opposite overreaction, insisting that there are no conspiracies, and that anyone who says there might be is a dangerous liar.
Both paths, tending as they do toward terminal extremes, and to scapegoating their opponents, are passive orientations toward reality, processes of ceding our attention to forces that want to exploit it. Both are also capitulations to power: either the power of the State, asserting that they ought to be believed unquestionably, or to the power of the anti-State, asserting that the State ought to be disbelieved unquestionably—a model of the dynamic that formed around Trump, in which it became a matter of dogma to either believe or disbelieve every word he uttered, thereby “exterminating all rational thought,” as Burroughs once put it.
Lead-Head
What I want to argue for here is a more active and nimble approach, a means of using the paranoid style to imbue excitement and mystery into one’s own inner life and creative work, cultivating mental agility as the crucial means of navigating an extremely tumultuous and alienating moment, where skepticism grows in value the harder it becomes to maintain.
My term for those who’ve bought too fully into any one discourse is “lead-head,” in that their head has been filled to the point of becoming a dead weight, unable to maintain the quality of lightness that Italo Calvino cited as one of the most crucial aspects of literature, and, I’d add, of thought: the ability to leap fleet-footedly among a variety of topics and consider them, with a dose of good humor, from a variety of angles, without getting bogged down along the way. This strikes me as also a viable definition of enlightenment, the only one that is still useful today: a fluid means of retaining mental lightness, rather than a stable body of definite knowledge. Furthermore, if we view the portal on a vertical rather than horizontal axis, lightness is the crucial quality required to go up and up and up, flying out of the wreckage of each inevitably self-annihilating system we encounter, while lead-headedness will keep us mired in that wreckage, defending it like one of those legendary Japanese soldiers who never learned that WWII was over.
To become a lead-head—I’ve seen people during Covid grow so certain that lizard-people are spreading rumors of a fake disease that they can’t even smile at the B-movie campiness of this conceit, just as those on the other side can’t admit that any malfeasance may have occurred within the adults’ response to the pandemic—is also a waste of intelligence. It squanders the mind’s ability to question reality and play with the rules of time and space, flattening paranoid thinking into yet another unacknowledged ideology masquerading as informed fact. On a more poignant level, lead-headedness also offers a false rootedness, binding one’s head to a ground that one’s feet have lost the ability to make contact with. This is yet another refusal of contingency, another vain attempt to back down off the plateau.
As Erik Davis put it during a podcast interview with the Austrian theorist and artist Konrad Becker, while considering the question of how to cultivate doubt without falling into paranoid certainty, if you seriously start exploring these things, you have to accept that “you don’t get to know.” I agree: if you have the courage and the desire to depart from the original cloud of knowing—that of believing only mainstream, approved narratives—and enter the cloud of unknowing that surrounds it on every side, you have to be willing to remain there, lost but not lost, without any hope of entering a new cloud of knowing on the far side.
Part 3: A New Counterculture?
The Deeper Pleasures of Paranoid Thought
As I try to bring these energies to a provisional conclusion, I think the most important point to arrive at is an articulation of the desire to use the conviction that something has become warped in our reality not to repair that warp, but to promote a forward-looking movement that harnesses and runs with it—or, better, runs through it. If there are only pseudo-solutions to whatever is wrong with the present, then the only legitimate recourse is to embrace this wrongness and make it work for us, rather than letting any of 2021’s infinite array of grifters make us work for them. If we are to thrill rather than recoil at the idea that no one’s in control of the systems that are now becoming apparent, then we must first make this true by not ceding control to anyone peddling a false version of who and what these systems are.
Ceding control in this sense is an affront to the creative spirit, as we know that the only path to true art is to risk madness, while remaining just on the edge of sanity. Philip K. Dick, depending on how one understands his late work (maybe he did indeed go too far eventually, becoming a lead-head himself), is a prime example of the fineness of this line, and also of how revelatory the results of mustering the courage to walk it can be.
For me, this type of thinking is also deeply fun, an aspect of life that we’d do well to consciously reclaim in the wake of the past five years. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of sitting on the playground with my best friend, trying to determine which of our teachers were really robots and aliens, cleverly disguised as humans but never to be trusted as such. As a novelist in my thirties now, if I want to deploy cannibals and lizard-people as avatars for the unholy forces afoot in the culture, why should I deny myself the freedom to do so?
At the same time, I’m cognizant of working to maintain this freedom by making these concepts work for me, in the artistic realm I’m trying to flesh out—the entire project of which is predicated on uncertainty—rather than working for them by claiming they’re literally true.
People may think the goal of tracing a conspiracy theory is to eventually render that theory obsolete by knowing for sure what’s true and thus escaping the psychic menace of contingency, but the true pleasure comes from the opposite direction: the pleasure of, say, The Crying of Lot 49, The Name of the Rose, or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch isn’t the possibility of a solution, but the depth of the conspiracy itself, the sense of black magic at the heart of reality, of everything having the potential to be other than it seems, and that possibility only magnifying and ramifying the more one probes it, until it grows clear that, as the crime novelist Ross Macdonald put it, “it’s all one case.”
The quickening sensation of it all coming together, of coincidences bouncing off of one another—this is a rare and special form of pleasure that’s worth cultivating and using as a means of rendering creative expression more vivid, urgent, and playful, especially in a mentally deadened moment like the one we’re living through now. Think about the classic sequence where Kevin Costner meets Donald Sutherland on the bench outside the Capitol and learns of the “real” assassination plot in Oliver Stone’s JFK: I have no way of knowing if all or any what this character says is true, but as a dramatic set piece, few sequences in all of cinema are more viscerally exciting.
Demons to Gods… to Demons?
This is the zone where my interest in outsider art and my interest in paranoia as a narrative mode dovetail, and it’s where I think the possibility for a truly exciting new counterculture lies. It’s a zone that, however fringe it remains, will do its part to move the larger culture in a cooler, more fun, more multifarious direction, away from anger and exhaustion and the kind of leaden paranoia that seeks to resolve itself into certainty. In short, lead-headedness is the paranoia of those who don’t want to be paranoid, while the counterculture I want to be part of welcomes those who do.
To return to the demonic principle, ina previous UE essay I posited a shift in Internet history from “an age of demons,” in the 90s, when the networks were chaotic, decentralized, and hard to govern, rife with perverts and tricksters, to an “age of gods,” from the mid-00’s until now, when the vast majority of the Internet was centralized under the top-down authority of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon.
Now we’re at another turning point, one whose nature is still ambiguous: on the one hand, by banning Trump and so many other “controversial” voices and websites, the godly Internet, in conjunction with the Biden Administration, has asserted its control even more profoundly, so much so that HBO’s recent Q: Into the Storm, with its account of the fetid but queasily exciting subcultures of 8Chan and 8Kun and associated message boards, already feels like a document from an earlier time, a chapter of Internet history that likely ended on 1.6.
On the other hand, and by the same token, these gods may be spurring the invention or reinvention of an even more demonic Internet, in which people create their own apps, their own networks, and perhaps even “their own Internets” (whatever this turns out to mean), in order to carry on the discourses they want to carry on in private—a movement that will dovetail with the already-demonic world of cyberattacks, cryptocurrencies and other decentralized modes of transaction, communication, and warfare, as well as the larger trend I’ve been tracing of the culture’s galvanizing macro-narrative splintering into potentially infinite sub-narratives. One way or another, the age in which everyone, from schoolchildren to the president, was corralled together on the same platform, fighting over the same meat thrown into the ring for them to fight over, seems to be behind us.
As with all the contradictory facets of this moment, maybe we’re entering a hybrid age, in which the strength of the godly Internet will continue to grow, even as an ever more vibrant (for better and worse) demonic Internet begins to thrive around its peripheries, spreading into uncharted territory, as on a medieval map, where the edges of the known world verge into monstrous shadow. If so, then this demonic spread is part of the new counterculture I’m hoping is afoot, a time of re-energized small presses, record labels, art galleries, film festivals, podcasts, alternative schools, and a million other forms of creative expression that must find a way to thrive, and to communicate with one another, outside the terminal heaviness of the mainstream, which has itself melted down with leaden paranoia.
As my friend Avinash put it in response to a draft of this essay, perhaps these new demons are in reality a polyphony of Gods, falsely considered demonic under the hegemony of a monotheistic era that is now ending.
Legacy of Gen-X
Part of my desire to ally myself with the possibility of a new countercultural movement—and, I hope, one less easily reincorporated than the 60s counterculture proved to be—is that I’ve come to realize how far from the mainstream I’ve already ended up, simply by staying true to the values I was raised with.
As a Millennial, I’m a product of the 90s portal, in which I was repeatedly told that I could both follow my dreams and remain in the comfortably middle-class, liberal environment I was born into. This deeply American desire was surely itself a product of the deferred counterculture of the 60s, in which my generation’s parents taught us both to rebel less severely than they had (by providing them with less to rebel against), and thus also to over-correct less drastically—to not veer so sharply away from Woodstock as to elect Reagan a decade later. In short, as a product of the “end of history,” I was taught that things could only get better.
Now, my generation, full though it is of overeducated “superfluous” men and women, trained for a world that probably never existed and certainly doesn’t anymore, also has a unique chance to get right what the 60s got wrong, insofar as we were raised on both the idealism and the failures of that earlier utopian movement. We have the unique ability to look back and see how the dream of a genuine counterculture in the 60s was coopted into the commercialized cyber-culture of the 80s, and perhaps we can therefore—I’m being optimistic here, of course—gird ourselves more consciously against the allure of commercial pseudo-solutions to genuine structural problems. We haven’t arrived at the future we thought we were preparing for, so by trying to identify the future we have arrived at, I hope to help calibrate, if only for myself, how best to proceed from here, using rather than renouncing the values and skills I’ve learned along the way.
On the surface, the 90s seems like a paradoxical era, in that my upbringing, like that of so many Millennials, was relentlessly positive—all the class and racial tensions exploding today were presented as “already solved”—while the concurrent pop culture—Nirvana, Bret Easton Ellis, Tarantino, Donna Tartt, Kevin Smith, Winona Ryder, the whole Reality Bites bounty of Gen-X, the generation between that of our parents and ourselves—was either relentlessly negative or bitterly ironic.
Beneath the surface, however, it was a product of the same mentality, the flipside of the same post-history you can be anything you want optimism of my elementary school, because the entirety of that pop movement presented irony, disaffection, and violence on the level of the individual, never the system. It was thus a manifestation of the despair of too much perceived freedom, the horror of individuals realizing that they’d arrived in a moment, beyond religion and beyond collective social action, where they could do anything they wanted, only to realize either that they didn’t want to do anything at all (as in Linklater’s Slacker and Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World), or that all they wanted was to go on a killing spree (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers… culminating in Columbine and Elephant).
This is the state of affairs that David Foster Wallace tried to critique in Infinite Jest, which I think will stand the test of time as a resonant postmortem on this aspect of the 90s, whether or not it endures as a great novel (its brand of self-lacerating hyper-sincerity may be a failed antidote to the irony it tried to rise above). In the rare instance when a character did truly believe in something—take Kevin Spacey’s religious zealot in Seven, or, indeed, David Koresh, Ted Kaczynski, and Timothy McVeigh—this belief was presented as both a dangerous attempt to shake off the anomie of the era, while also, of course, standing as an equally individualistic, non-systemic example of its dominant ideology.
In retrospect, then, Tarantino’s nihilism is not the same as Mark Fisher’s. After 911, Iraq, the Financial Crisis, and now Trump, Covid, and Chauvin—all mediated by the ever more complex control mechanisms of the Internet—the presence of systems is undeniable, as the bad faith coursing through every corner of our information sphere goes well beyond the disaffection of any individual, and even beyond the capacity for any individual to deceive another. Even boredom is different now: unlike the deadened but charming repetition endured by Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Mallrats—a symptom of too much stasis—boredom today has morphed into anxiety, the all-pervasive sense that we’re missing the story if we look away from our feeds or fail to cultivate an opinion, which is, of course, a symptom not of stasis but of precarity, the fear that, at any moment, we might miss our only chance to make contact with the actual ground, upon which (if we let ourselves dare to hope) it might not be too late to build a viable life, even as the world burns.
Whether or not the future I was raised to expect was ever possible, now it certainly isn’t. In retrospect, the 90s’ idea that the systems of the Internet and deregulated trade would work for us (if us means the majority of people alive today) was another scam, a clarifying but ultimately false ideology, whose exposure as such we must now confront.
A New Interzone
Nevertheless, the present is always the product of the past, and this isn’t altogether a bad thing. Now, as we mark the end of one portal phase and the beginning of another, I’m determined to embrace certain aspects of my upbringing, even if they haven’t led to the kind of dignified stability I was led to expect. Perhaps, instead, they’ve prepared me for life in the flux, on the plateau, as both a part of and a witness to whatever the Truth of this new era turns out to be.
In part due to the sincerity of pursuit I was raised to value above money—the gateway through which I’ve tried to glimpse the infinite has always been imagination, not acquisition—I’ve been lucky enough lately to find my way into a world of immense cooperation, shared goals, and sincere fellow-feeling among other authors in a burgeoning indie literature scene, one that has grown out of but also feels distinct from the so-called “alt lit” scene of the early 2010s. While everyone still wants and needs to sell books, this scene is, so far, largely self-perpetuating, with or without money, to such a degree that I can’t help feeling optimistic about its future. This new interzone is the flipside of systems horror: a system that is mutually thriving on the far side of individualism and competition, motivated by a collective generative energy deeper than narcissism and the thirst for fame, however tenacious these drives may be.
Therefore, this need not be an argument for living as a 90s-style loner-fanatic, nor for living in poverty, nor for submitting to a shitty day job with no hope of ever quitting, and certainly not for the notion that only the independently wealthy can be artists—there are real financial concerns that do need to be solved, and I’m still not sure how they will be—but it is an argument that the art itself is a vivifying, community-building, and sanity-preserving force, and thus, for me, a viable means of engaging fleet-footedly with the paranoid energies of this era.
It’s also an argument for positivity in art: not a propagandistic “everything is fine” positivity, but a sincere commitment to the work of imagining other worlds and listening more closely to the vibrating strands of this one, beyond the too-easy trap of denunciation, which turns art into no more than a tool for pointing out the obvious failures of history and the obviously flawed status quo they’ve produced. There’s clearly a need to reckon with history, but there’s also a need to imagine the present, as Yeager, who’s very much a part of this same world, put it, to entrench in the bizarre minutiae of this moment and accept it as the strange, miraculous gift that it is, or could be if we’re willing to accept it. This, for me, is all that’s non-negotiable: I don’t know which facts are true, but I’m willing to die on the altar of insisting that active creativity is a path toward the Truth.
Here at the end of this essay series, which I’ve worked and reworked over the course of the period it describes, I’ve come to believe that recognizing and embracing your own ideology as such—planting your feet there, and being honest about it—while remaining open to the flux and blur of the outside world, determined to hear whatever the American air has to say, is what going through the portal of 2021 means. It’s not a solution to any of the structural problems facing us, but it is—or at least I pray it could be—a starting position for beginning to consider them, sanely and in earnest, with our feet rather than our heads on the ground.
In a present like this one, it's not surprising that William S. Burroughs, far more than any other figure from the last countercultural swell, has reemerged as an artistic role model for the counterculture I’ve begun to describe. Burroughs’ commitment to fleshing out a visionary heterotopia outside of normal commerce, academia, and even the counterculture he was nominally a part of, ignoring all boundaries of taste, genre and form, while bringing in a wide array of collaborators from many walks of life, resonates in this strange plateau moment, in which a generation that was raised to both establish itself within and rail against the manmade stability and conformity of the 90s is instead trying to navigate an age of manmade instability and, perhaps, a vaster, more terrifying inhuman stability above and beyond it. We feel subject—I do, anyway—to forces beyond any the 90s could have conceived of, and yet I also suspect, in a deliciously paradoxical manner, that these forces were seeded by the 90s just as surely as I was. Facing these forces requires Burroughs’ masochism, his willingness to fetishize his own destruction and humiliation, which is of a piece with his ability to see seediness as a viable endpoint rather than a swollen middle waiting to burst.
In the final reckoning, this must be why we’re so determined to ascribe the disturbance in reality to sinister but knowable human agency, rather than to look upward—beyond the possibility of aliens, even—into the truly unknown reaches of the universe of which we are, whether we like it or not, a tiny but inextricable part. Here at the conclusion of this phase of the UE project, I think we should all pause on this plateau, cast any remaining idols and scapegoats off the edge, back into the world we’ve left behind, and look upward, acknowledging both that we can’t live without ideology, and that the only ideology that won’t turn cultlike is one based on openness to the sky.
Infestation, infection, impurity, and the way in which a hidden yet definitive part of us yearns for these things, even as the conscious parts recoil: the ability to welcome this, both from the last five years and for the next five, or fifty, is the true legacy of Burroughs (and, as a key Burroughs acolyte, of Cronenberg as well), and the only durable mode I can see for continuing on from here, deeper into an era where the pursuit of facts as a portal to Truth has turned so bizarre it’s morphed into something else entirely. Only by merging with whatever this is, and welcoming whatever infection it may cause—a human lifetime only gets, at most, one or two world-historical phases like the one we’ve just been through, so it’s incumbent upon us to recognize this fact and celebrate it as best we can—will we manage to become what we need to become in order to travel on from here. In this way, we submit to a new religion by accepting that something demonic or godly really is out here with us, something that will only reveal its form and purpose in its own good time. Until then, we should take solace in the ominous but undeniable fact that we’ve made it this far.