There is so much latent energy beading up right beneath the surface of Western civilization.  Everybody can feel it.  Every day people read the news with the expectation that some as yet unknown event will trigger something bigger, which will ignite something horrifically combustible, which will put into motion a rapidly shifting set of complex variables that finally turn the world upside-down.  Every public announcement is a potential spark.  Every new emergency is a wobbly domino that could crash into another and cascade until everything falls apart.  We’ve all been sitting uncomfortably on pins and needles for so long that we practically eject out of our chairs every time a television, computer, or phone screen blares, “Breaking Alert.”

Speaking of phones, the other day, a few hundred thousand mobile subscribers lost connection to their cellular networks, and amateur sleuths jumped into action — scrutinizing which carriers and cities were most affected in hopes of isolating some nefarious intent behind the inconvenience.  Was it a Chinese cyber-attack?  A series of small electromagnetic pulses set off by some terrorist cell inside the United States?  A CIA/NSA test run for the Intelligence Community before it instigates information blackouts in the run-up to the 2024 election?  Or could it have simply been the result of a particularly strong solar flare?  Nobody knew for sure, but everybody had a theory.  For what it’s worth, AT&T blamed the outage on an improperly executed software update, but that clarification didn’t answer every question or quell suspicions that something more serious had occurred.  When everyone is anxiously awaiting the end of the world, there is little room left over for mundane explanations.

Nobody believes anybody right now.  That makes sense.  Distrust of institutions and authority figures has skyrocketed.  News reporters have essentially become the public relations arm of the Intelligence Community.  They repeat risible lies without even the pretense of journalistic incredulity.  For instance, how could Hunter Biden’s laptop — filled with videos documenting his own debaucherous and criminal activities — have been “Russian disinformation”?  Only corporate news mouthpieces paid to deliver the I.C.’s talking points know.  Because they refuse to ask obvious questions, the public has learned to distrust their point of view.  

In the old days, political operatives got paid to construct convenient “narratives,” while reporters got paid to distill hidden truths.  As the distinction between “operative” and “reporter” disappeared, ordinary people learned that fictitious “narratives” completely replaced any representation of objective reality.  Because a free press has always been instrumental in containing institutional corruption, the implosion of professional journalism should be understood as a late-stage symptom of our present system’s impending death.  Reporters who spend more time explaining why boys should dominate girls’ sports than investigating how mail-in ballot fraud subverts democratic elections cannot be taken seriously as factual custodians or arbiters of truth.  

While citizens have adjusted to journalism’s irrelevancy, they have held out hope that science — a philosophy dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge — would be more resilient.  However, science, too, has abandoned rigorous discipline for the ease of regurgitating unscrutinized “narratives.”  

Perhaps the most consequential upside of COVID was its exposure of most medical doctors as unscientific bureaucrats willing to parrot absolute nonsense if it meant they got paid.  Why would a physician prescribe an experimental “vaccine” in lieu of available over-the-counter remedies that have been around for fifty or more years?  Because pharmaceutical companies can’t make money from generic medicines with expired patents, and medical doctors can’t procure financial benefits from pharmaceutical companies if they don’t first push their newest drugs.  Why would any physician coerce patients (even healthy ones) to undergo experimental treatments without their informed consent (including explicit warnings of known side effects and the impossibility of knowing potential long-term harms) in blatant disregard of the Nuremberg Code’s well established principles for preventing crimes against humanity?  Because white coats who uninquisitively follow government orders have sold their ethical obligations to the highest bidder.  

As with journalism, the scientific pursuit of knowledge has become a hustle.  The World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum have made it abundantly clear that global pandemics and man-made “climate change” are existential threats that coincidentally require more intrusive public surveillance and greater government control over the economy.  It should be no surprise that the prospect of future apocalypse tends to short-circuit the human mind and convince otherwise rational people to hand over their freedoms to doom-and-gloom charlatans and fear-peddling carnival barkers.  It should be a surprise, however, when handsomely paid “scientists” manipulate research and punish academic dissent in order to fraudulently support bureaucrats’ self-serving conclusions.  When “scientific consensus” arrives in advance of scientific corroboration, researchers aren’t seeking objective knowledge but rather selling snake oil for professional aggrandizement and monetary gain.

With the deaths of journalism and science laid bare before the public, a salubrious shift in social consciousness has occurred.  People are once again asking critical questions in search of basic truths.  For too long, professional disciplines have insisted on doing society’s thinking.  Whenever significant public policy debates have arisen, common people have been condescendingly told, “Leave that to the experts.”  With busy lives filled with other obligations, most people have been okay with this arrangement.  Caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) and other fundamental notions of personal responsibility have been traded for the modern conveniences of letting the Food and Drug Administration, the White House press corps, and (SMDH) the Central Intelligence Agency decide what is true.  If processing information and making wise decisions is part of what it means to be alive, then the effect of transferring these responsibilities to third-party institutions is a bit like lobotomizing a population.  You end up with a highly dependent society beholden to the mercies of designated “experts.”

For a while, a lobotomized population might find relative happiness within this arrangement — so long as the “experts” continue to share the population’s general worldview and can be trusted to pursue policy goals that consistently advance the population’s priorities.  However, if the “experts” are guided by beliefs divergent from those of society, or worse, if they reveal themselves as a privileged class filled with rapacious liars and frauds, then common people have no other choice but to reclaim their natural authority by exercising their own brains.

That latent energy beading up right now beneath the surface of Western civilization is what happens when a slumbering society begins powering up its long-dormant capacity for self-government.  As old brain cells are put back into proper use, the body politic is trying to remember how to do things it once took for granted.  In trying to separate lies from truths, it has begun to remember why virtuous character establishes mutual trust.  And as it recalibrates its moral compass, society is a little unsteady on its feet.  Cellular networks go down, and nobody knows what to believe.

Lack of trust in government, news media, and science has produced something far more extraordinary: a spiritual awakening.  Why?  Because the illusion that government-run institutions have our best interests at heart has shattered into a million pieces, and it is impossible to glue those pieces back together into some kind of reconstructed “truth.”  If government and its vassals in science and journalism can no longer stand in as secular priests, then people desperate for authentic truth are forced to ask tough questions of themselves.  

In my experience, the tougher those questions become, the more likely that people find their way to God.  And once they find their way to God, they tend to realize that they were meant to govern themselves.  As freedom is God’s gift to every soul, spiritual revolutions always precede political ones.  That inalienable truth ought to give every true believer some needed peace of mind.

Hat tip to MtnClimber.

Image: Carsten Tolkmit via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.