The truth is, I always loved you.
Oh, you false messiah, what do you have to offer our perpetually flooded, brokedown and generally speaking nonexistent universe—what platitudes and what shopping tips—and what will come of it when it comes—the suburbs turned into a no-man’s land between the scavenging riches of the liquefied and decomposing downtown and what wilds have grown beyond—the family dog murdered for its meat—an eye for an eye—and nothing but silence in between—all wrong place wrong time on account of some of us weren’t built to survive the apocalypse, but you think you’ll do just fine, don’t you?
You and me are you, my false messiah—who sit here pontificating in our cynicism, because—with the apocalypse just around the corner, all your favorite romantic comedies don’t do it for you anymore.
So—who are we? We’re the ones with our feet in two epochs, and our greatest hope is to get to the credits of this madcap comedy of a genocidal romp without being swept up in its killing fields. Many of us believe even now that the annihilation of everything and everyone will only happen on the far side of the globe from us, in the global south of our former vacation spots, but no one panics like a suburbanite, not to mention a mob of panicked suburbanites, armed with rifles and tiki torches.
You think I’m joking, but then again, there is a kind of compromise you are master of. Every year you accept just a little bit more of the madness into your living room hoping to ease yourself into the apocalypse with the gentleness of a pedophile. Point being, it won’t work.
*
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
Doubt is a means to faith, friend. Doubt everything and you’ll step through the backdrop and into the backstage of it all. But you only can do this through an especially courageous form of doubting—where you doubt yourself first and most—even when you are at the same time stepping out into the blizzard or stepping halfway round the world or into the aforementioned killing fields. At moments such as these, you believe in nothing, but you believe in this nothing with such a great intensity that it turns real.
Try your hand at playing the role of the holy atheist and the credulous cynic. We are here at the end of the world after all, and it’s time for us to start making civilization from scratch all over again. Begin with basic precepts. Start with your ideas of right and wrong. How right are they?
You’ve watched the many sitcoms—of four friends and the scrapes they get in—of everyone’s favorite bar—of people working in an office—of the tableau of a society in freefall while—you have stood upon the stairwell of your younger days and made eyes at all the passing girls, but have you made eyes with the darkness when you made eyes in the dark? Have you made peace with what benign terrors you suffer from even as the less benign terrors wait patiently for their turn to play in among your guts? Now it is time to begin.
They say the future will be tribal, but they say a lot of things in the quiet of the back of the room—by the coffee machine and complimentary pretzel sticks—where a person can breathe a little—while the more obnoxious policy-makers continue on with their endless speech-making—on and on about cleaning house and snide digs and dirty chuckles in among the general oratory with the occasional cough and lots of invective—as the audience waits for the punchline—as the waters rise—and the world burns—and the islands vanish—and the atrocities spread.
They say there’s a war in Ukraine. They say the oceans are on the verge of shutting down for the summer. They say the racketeers are on the rise and that it’s turned like there’s nothing but racketeers and the racket’s become something like if survival itself were a racket, and maybe it is. We’ve set in motion the 6th mass extinction and somehow we want to avoid being extinguished ourselves?
Yes, nothing happens but the weather, but oh, what a raucous time’s to be had. Sometimes it mists, sometimes it burns, and sometimes it rains so much that the infrastructure gets washed out to sea while you look on—a hound dog, a car, a toddler—gone spinning past your hillside perch in a violent roiling of muddy waters.
Point being, the blade is already sliding neatly into the gut.
We’ve sat with our friends as they told their tall tales of love and hate, and we’ve entered our various hellscapes disguised as they are in the likeness heaven, but no one seems to have noticed the change in the room. They smile their smiles, announce to each other how there is a kind of compromise you are master of, or that it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine, write pieces about ‘What to Do with Climate Emotions’ like there’s a wrong and a right way to feel at the end of the world, when—the car’s gone over the cliff, bud—and your panic is pointless. Getting out of the car is the only option, but how do you get out of a car that spans the entirety of the globe? I suppose if you’re Elon Musk you could build a spaceship and relocate to Mars, but the only thing the rest of us can do is press our collective faces into the seat cushion and hope that the impact with the rocks below doesn’t overly ruffle the coiffure.
*
Buddha logic, spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby
While all this is going on, somewhere in yourself, you hold the ability to be no longer yourself, not someone else, but no one at all, while still somehow very much being you. Call this Buddhist Logic 101.
In Buddhist logic, possibilities are placed in four corners known as catuskoti. In this particular logical system a thing can be true (corner 1), false (corner 2), both true and false (corner 3), or neither true or false (corner 4), a classical example being the ‘world of the senses’ which is often categorized in corner 3, as in, “When we investigate the ultimate nature of everything, we find it is the absence of independent existence,” but also, “When we look for the flower among its parts, we are confronted with the absence of such a flower. That absence we are confronted with is the flower’s emptiness. But then, is there no flower? Of course there is.” Corner 3.
And corner 4 is like an empty set. Things that are less than false. Nonsense. It’s false to say that I’m Armenian. It’s nonsense to say that I am Tuesday.
While in your Western philosophical mind, dichotomies are all the rage, and it’s our dichotomies that are killing the world because they limit our perspective to a one-dimensional line—between good and evil, right and wrong, Republicans and Democrats—and we cannot see outside this linear thinking when the world of complex relationships and interdependent organizations is more like your favorite sci fi time crystal—always stabilizing towards stasis unless we do something radically divergent, like step out of the box.
Which means… What?
Is it like getting out of the proverbial car as it goes over the cliff? Is it like stepping out of your life even as you’re still living it? Or that you don’t exist when you obviously do?
Because you’re very much of the Corner 3 variety of thing, which is to say that you are clearly a person taking up space and also clearly nothing at all, a nothing, and generally speaking nonexistent. And to step out from behind your blinders and into the blinding uncertainty would require seeing this.
Who wants to look yourself in the face when you could simply die a horrible death in what was a completely preventable apocalypse?
*
You’re so vain, you probably think this apologia is about you
You are a person who takes their Socratic irony to the limit. You’re going to blatantly pretend to be ignorant of the causes behind our current predicament so that humanity can learn the ultimate lesson like a regular MAGA staring hatefully into a reporter’s face: Well I wouldn’t know the first thing about capitalist systems resulting in the end of the world through its dependence upon fossil fuels. Why don’t you illuminate me? When truth of it is this play pretend ignorance you’re always putting on is not a put-on but an ignorance in truth and the play pretend itself is a kind of act—because you are not separate from the capitalist system—you are the system, as is every person who takes part in this game of buy-and-sell—and this ignorance of yours is not an ignorance of facts or figures but a more fundamental ignorance of being. An ignorance we share.
You remember something, but it’s like a song you once learned and you can only hum a few bars now—a melody you’ve always almost not quite got a handle on—when you could be a different person.
Maybe you got an MFA in poetry and now you’re drowning in debt. Maybe you make watercolors of mutilation while studying architecture in Tunisia. But you could be anyone. The rooms you occupied could themselves be occupying you. A person’s not much more than a melody, but it’s a melody that can recreate itself at any moment. The problem with melodies is they tend to repeat, and the same goes for you and your ongoing faith-healing and general speaking charlatanry.
All of which is to say—Socratic irony can be so much more than just a feigning of ignorance to draw out the wrong-headed-ness of others. Take your ignorance to the next level and it will change the melody—allow your irony to become “infinite” in the Kierkegaardian sense—as in, the sense that it is not “directed against this or that particular existing entity but against the entire given actuality at a certain time and under certain conditions”, and—this is the doubt I mentioned before—in this way, you reserve criticism as you react to the environment as needed, being whatever the moment requires of you.
But then again—you’re so vain, your probably think this apologia is about you.
Don’t you?
As for me, I’m also vain, which is in good part how I ended up at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Himalayan foothills, and it’s had a predictable effect. I look nothing like myself anymore. My nervous breakdowns are more picturesque.
“It is held that samsara has a beginning and end, and it is held that samsara is without beginning or end. It is held that minds are of identical nature throughout all samsara and nirvana, and it is held that all minds are of differing natures. It is held that sentient beings are newly produced, and it is held that sentient beings are not newly produced. It is held that in understanding and practicing by means of various reasonings, one definitively establishes [the doctrine] by reasoning, and it is held that one definitively establishes it [without relying on natural reason] through the transmitted precepts spoken by all the buddhas, and it is held that the trio of Buddha, doctrine, and teachings has not been experienced as emerging and thus is not.”
And yadda, yadda, yadda.
Point being, the knowns are unknown and more often then not, they’re “unknown unknowns” as Mr. Rumsfeld liked to say. And this state of unknowing is the state of being alive. And we need to be alive if we are going to find our way anywhere or change anything at all. Doubt is your path forward. Doubt as you stumble into the light.
Civilization is a frame but the picture it frames is empty. It is like that flower that is absent of itself when we search through its parts for it. We clearly see civilization in its totality but when we investigate further, we find that civilization is “the absence of independent existence,” a construct of humanity made of humanity by humanity and for humanity, and humanity could make any other construct in its place if it so chose. We don’t because we are all independent actors being drawn through each our own maze by the interplay of emotion and necessity as contrived and created by ourselves in relation to other people. Civilization is the frame, but the frame is empty, and we need to step out of the frame.
Because it’s true that there is a kind of compromise you are master of, but you need to stop. Compromising only works in the boardroom and the bedroom. It doesn’t work when the car’s gone off the cliff.
*
Socratic irony is a place where some holy spectacle lies
It’s time to take the most radical position. From the analog internet to green anarchists in Oregon in Kenny Rogers rock operas—there are many positions to explore, experiment with, and generally speaking to utilize—but everybody’s waiting for the one perfect one to materialize that will then magically change everything when only you can change the world—all you need to do is choose to let go. Yes, there is nothing we can do to stop the climate crisis, but we can disengage from the thing that’s killing the world. Stop buying, start growing, leave the cities, and learn to live without.
But letting go of society is like a person letting go of their heroin habit. There’s nothing I can do, the junky laments even as he’s sticking the needle in his vein.
Again—this coming from a guy who’s currently living in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Himalayan foothills. Point being. Easy for you to say, fella.
Of course, there are radical plans that have been suggested—Doughnut economics or the internet of things—but these ideas have not been adopted universally or really at anything more than a sporadic and regional scale—even as the super-systems of the world declare how necessary it is for us to continue to work together as a globalized whole—even as the geopolitical universe continues to fracture—along the Sahel and in the Gaza strip—among the former Soviet satellite states and in the halls of Congress—as nationalists take up arms against a sea of troubles in their eagerness to kill off the offending other. All of which is exactly how you’d expect our mammal minds to react to their impending extinction. We were built to function in a tribalized and factional way, and you should too.
Give up, but give up like giving up is a way of life, a way of being in the world where you no longer have any purpose but to live in this place of the dead and to help others because you are now dead, and to see with the eyes of the coming dead. For the dead are coming. And we owe it to them to take up their cause among the current living. We owe it to our massacred children to speak up against the massacring that’s already begun to take root among us.
So yes, I’ve started preaching like your regular false messiah all over again—but all what I’m preaching’s just yesterday’s news. Like a prophet always one day behind in his prophesying and hollering about the coming pandemic while down at the dive bar and buying rounds for all the regulars long after the lockdowns have ended—or warning of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine when the war’s more than a year on. But also like the Jewish messiah who eagerly converts to Islam in his efforts to embrace the most outlandish positions—who becomes a devout Christian while secretly believing he himself is Jesus all along and when he says his catechism, it is directed to his own personal religion of one with himself taking up all the places of importance in any given Passion play. The false messiah takes many forms.
One of these forms being Shabbatai Zevi—who did indeed proclaim himself the messiah of the Jewish people only to convert to Islam, a move that was considered by some to be the ultimate mystical act.
As Gershom Sholem mentions in a section on the Shabbatean Movement in his work on the Kabbalah, “Like the grain that dies in the earth, the deeds of men must become in some way ‘rotten’ in order to bring forth the fruit of redemption.” Our deeds have indeed become in some way ‘rotten’ and we are ripe for redemption, but we just might die first.
Because—in our case the redemption is not spiritual but quite literal—can we redeem our world before it’s annihilated—can some part of it be saved—a single finch or the collected works of Shakespeare? Stop trying to hold on to the precious life you live even as every day the world becomes a little more unstable than the day before. Let yourself become rotten. Let yourself fall off the tree. Let yourself come apart in the ground of it all.
Shabbatai Zevi began his career as a religious figure with wild mood swings—suffering from what modern psychologists might classify as manic-depressive psychosis—periods of profound depression and melancholy followed by maniacal exaltation, and intervals of relative normality. In his manic states, it was common for him to perform acts of transgression—during one such period, he married a woman of “easy virtue” possibly inspired by the prophet Hosea who married a whore—or declaring the abolition of the commandments and pronouncing benediction to “Him who allows the forbidden” on another occasion. After each of these explosions, he would then always slide back into periods of relative calm.
Eventually, he sought the help of a man named Nathan of Gaza—renowned for his skill in bringing peace to troubled souls—only, Nathan himself became convinced that Shabbatai Zevi was indeed the messiah, becoming Zevi’s most devoted follower, and began to spread his message across the Jewish world. For the following year, Shabbatai Zevi wandered through the Ottoman Empire, sometimes relatively calm and pious and sometimes overcome by ecstatic singing and adorning himself like a king to pronounce himself ruler of the world, until, on February 6th, 1666, he was arrested, brought to Constantinople, imprisoned and eventually convinced to give up his faith during a particularly manic state. This final act of transgression would define the so-called “false messiah” in the history books, and it is this idea of being both/and, both the Jewish messiah and the apostatized Jew, a messiah of such deep truth that even renouncing his religion does not touch him—this particular act of the famous false messiah presents us with such a profound irony—both a messiah acting ironically—in the Socratic sense of irony as described by Kierkegaard—as in being “for others” to such an extreme degree that you renounce your most fundamental beliefs for them—or—seen in another way—taking on a new religion in an ironic way, while still sincerely maintaining your previous beliefs.
Perhaps the most surprising development in the story of Shabbatai Zevi is that his movement did not end with his apostasy. It grew. And evolved. A later figure went so far as to convince his entire congregation of followers to convert to Christianity while covertly acknowledging in their hearts during the catechism that he, Jacob Frank, was the actual messiah and not Jesus Christ. This concept of ironic conversion would become central to Shabbateanism and then Frankism. Jacob Frank himself declared religions as simply “stages through which ‘the believers’ had to pass—like a man putting on different suits of clothes—and then to discard as of no worth compared with the true and hidden faith”.
We are not what we say we are. We are not the patterns of neurons in our skulls. We are not helpless in the face of the end times. We can be anything at any moment and still remain ourselves as long as the heart is true. Pass through your many clothes of beliefs and you will find a true and hidden faith that is nothing more than you looking back through the curtains of the brain.
*
The twenty-eight magical devices that are generally necessary
It’s an old standard, but… the modern person is too focused on their minds. Easily lassoed into compliance, utilized to rationalize away any inconvenient truth, to turn every unsettling fact into proof that everyone else is wrong, while—the painful thing—is to listen to your heart instead. Often, you won’t want to. There’ll be times you’ll stubbornly refuse to. But, you should develop the skill of listening to your heart because your heart will guide you in ways a mind cannot.
“To learn to die is to be liberated from it.” Bruce Lee.
Like the character in Silence, the priest Sebastian Rodrigues, who has come to Japan to work as a missionary and ends up apostasizing to save the Japanese peasants from suffering, in our goal to save the world, we must let go of what we believe about the world. Do not try to shift what you see into some paradigm of progress or utopian ideal of post-civilization but simply be in the moment as the moment requires. It may require a lot.
I am about to leave for Nepal because I need to do a visa run, and I haven’t slept well, and I’m having second thoughts about everything, but being the false messiah is not a job you can put aside. We are all cursed by the times we were born into. We can either be complicit or live the most miraculous of lives. There are no other options.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release can be found below. You can read more about him here.
