—From EF—

I don’t want my head to explode. Limiting time on the web isn’t helping, because the lunacy is expanding daily on an exponential basis. I am seeing an army of women with long blonde hair curled fetchingly over their shoulders in identical hairdos and am thinking, where were they all ten years ago? Did they just get cloned? I never saw anything like it before, and these ladies are all spouting the same very strange things. Who turned on what faucet?

It’s not exactly comforting to read history. It seems abundantly clear that whatever shit we’re cranking out at the present moment has been cranked out again and again over the recorded centuries, but every time the wheel turns it’s like, “Oh, this is awful, this never happened before.” I’ve been remembering a concept that flew over my transom a few decades ago, an interesting filter for looking at these events..

A popular genre author wrote a whole series of speculative fiction that I liked, and I have a bunch of his paperbacks. Central in his plots was a different dyad than the Christian one. It wasn’t good versus evil, it was the Maker versus the Unmaker. No value judgement implied, just that one force connects and creates, and the other dismantles and decomposes.

I’m having a hard time comprehending the hideous division that is parting our population like the Red Sea. Calling one side a cult is one way of describing it, but it still leaves the underlying question: what’s the magnet? What energizes the cult? My rational mind can’t grasp it, because its effect is counterproductive to a functional life for all of us, including the cult members.

So I think about the Maker and the Unmaker. The Maker is a force of connection and creation, the idea of a web that connects us all. The Unmaker devotes itself to dismantling the web, severing connection, isolating humans into units competing for survival.

There is a word for a thought-form, an entity that rises from a focused human collective and then becomes an independent force: egregore. It isn’t hard for me to picture the Unmaker as an egregore that feeds on things like the torch-bearers in Charlottesville or any number of the right-wing rallies, an egregore that has been around for millennia. If there is such a thing, it is being well fed today, nursing on the rich milk of the amygdala.

Rage and fear kick the amygdala into overdrive, and the Unmaker is on a roll. What feeds the Maker? Individual acts of kindness and support don’t have that flash-bang quality, but it’s useful to recall what has happened when a child falls in a well, or kids get stranded in a cave with the water rising, or Manhattan suffers a total blackout. People tune in to the frequency of the Maker and pull together. I don’t know how we can make that happen, but we must.  

###