Reality is Breaking
The Epstein files do not represent a scandal to be managed. They represent a structural revelation: that the post-World War II liberal international order, with its claims to moral authority and universal justice, has completely collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. What remains is raw power, operating without ideological justification, without institutional accountability, without even the pretense of equal justice.
— Dr. Zarqa Parvez
I hope everyone understands the we are in the midst of the most significant political event since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. In fact, the release of the Epstein files is even more significant. The 1963 coup was a consolidation and intensification of a system of power that goes back centuries (at least). The Epstein files are its undoing.
I say that in the spirit of prophecy, not prediction. Predictions relegate us to the role of passive observers of likelihoods; prophecies come true only if we make them true. A prophecy comes true only if we recognize the possibility it illuminates, and participate in its fulfillment.
The material in the Epstein Files so severely violates the stories that scaffold our society that there is no way to accept it and keep those stories intact.
Yet there is no way to reject it either. The material is too public, too accessible, too horrifying, and too credible. The dark reality the files portray has escaped its exile to the hinterlands of “conspiracy” to run amok in the general public mind. It is like a herd of feral pigs that have burst through a hole in the manor walls and are now rampaging through the gardens, uprooting the shrubbery, tearing down the trellises, defecating on the croquet lawns, and wallowing in the flowerbeds.
They cannot be contained. The taint of corruption leaves no institution untouched. Not academia. Not the media. Not the FBI or the intelligence services. Not Congress. Not global NGOs. Not the justice system. Not the transnational corporations and banks. Not the Trump administration (it will fall) nor any of its predecessors. The entire elite establishment is implicated in Epstein’s depravity—some through direct association with him, and the rest by letting it happen and then covering it up.
The situation is much like that of an abusive family. It appears normal from the outside, but it carries a dark secret, a hell behind its closed doors. Everyone in the family knows what’s going on, at least half-consciously, but no one speaks of it. It cannot be spoken because it is unspeakable. To speak it would be to destroy the story of the family. It would violate agreed-upon reality. Some pretend not to know. Some know and do not speak.
That has been true of our media, law enforcement, and most of those within or adjacent to the circles of power. Many did not speak because they believed—with good reason—they would be dismissed as crazy, or silenced even more drastically. It is the very definition of insanity to deny what everyone agrees is real. So it is in a family, and so it is in the larger human family.
In neither case, though, is any healing, any real change, possible unless the secrets come to light. No new reality can be built while the old one still stands. That is where authentic hope lies, in the voicing of the unspeakable. What the Epstein files reveal in the elite echelons of society is not confined there. It is rife throughout, in any situation where the operation of power is hidden from view.
What is disintegrating now is much bigger than institutions and systems. It is their fundamental legitimacy, the credibility of those authorities who tell us what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is not, what is crazy and what is sane. The collapse goes deeper still: normalcy itself is disintegrating, the basic mythology that defines what normal even is, and the mythology of modernity, of progress, of a society that has risen above medieval barbarism toward enlightened values and democratic ethics—the mythology of “the West.” All of these are crashing down. It is as if reality itself were breaking.
Art credit: Cary Eisenstein. Charcoal on paper.
Thus we are entering what I call “the space between stories.” The old story that told us who and what to trust, that narrated past and future, that told us how to conduct ourselves as responsible members of society, that defined what is real and who we are, is collapsing. “I don’t know what’s real anymore” is the hallmark of this space between.
A new and true story may arise from the wreckage of the old, but that will take time, and we must be available to receive it. Right now we are vulnerable to hasty substitutes for the collapsing old story that offer temporary relief from the bewilderment and vertigo of the space between. These substitutes beguile us with tidy explanations of what is happening, a new story-of-the-world to replace the old, but n fact they are the old, in disguise. If we allow them to seduce us, humanity will endure another cycle of horror. We must resist ready explanations until more of the unspeakable has been spoken.
We have been here before, my friends. The example that comes most readily to mind is the French Revolution. Then as now, an elite that ranged from the out-of-touch, to the decadent, to the downright depraved presided over a society that was groaning under the weight of its incompetence and corruption. To the guillotine! For a brief golden moment, it seemed that a new era had dawned. Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Certainly these ideals were worth chopping off a few heads for. Yet once awakened, the guillotine’s thirst knew no limit. The streets ran with blood. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. Scarcely a decade later, Napoleon took power and put an end to it, instituting the bureaucratic system in which new elites (and many of the old ones) enacted the same inevitable dramas.
The French Revolution was a rehearsal, a trial run, whose failure to achieve its noblest ideals can inform humanity at our present crossroads. The stakes are higher this time. If we reenact the same old story, removing the occupants of the roles but not the roles themselves, switching the actors in the drama but preserving the drama itself, removing the corrupt from power but preserving the mindsets and habits of power itself, then our species will have made an irrevocable choice. The technologies of control are so powerful that there will be no more breakouts. Surveillance technology, digital currency, and AI will lock us in a totalitarian nightmare from which there is no escape.
If, on the other hand, we pass this initiatory threshold, we will enter a new era of civilization. For one thing, the same elites who raped and tortured children also presided over a global system of war, genocide, and exploitation whose victims are no less pitiable. Is it really so different, to sacrifice a child in a Satanic ritual to further one’s personal power, as it is to sacrifice whole populations for geopolitical power? Both are outcroppings of the same mindset, the same dehumanization and instrumentalization of human beings. The lies that shroud each draw on a common source: the legitimacy of the elites, their institutions, and the story-of-the-world that elevates them. When one crumbles, so will the other.
Secondly and more importantly, waiting just outside of the carefully-guarded borders of official reality is knowledge that can revitalize humanity and all life on earth. The same breach in the wall through which the feral pigs of pedophilia, human trafficking, rape, murder, satanic ritual, and financial and political corruption are invading public awareness will also allow more welcome exiles to enter. What will this world become when we bring in all that has been suppressed? Circular economy money systems. Mind-body technologies. UAP technologies. Psychedelic therapies. Indigenous practices of ritual, dream, sound, story, and ceremony. Over-unity energy devices? What happens when “alternative” healing modalities come into their own? Regenerative agriculture? Bioremediation of waste? Ecosystem healing? And social technologies too, of inquiry and listening, conflict resolution, compassionate dialog. And what happens when we fully countenance the reality of extraterrestrial civilizations, of telepathy and ESP, of the continuity of consciousness after death? We will be able to create together the more beautiful world our hearts have always known is possible.
I’m quite tired of holding knowledge of all of the above against the assault of “impractical,” “Impossible,” “delusional,” “fake,” “fraud,” and “debunked.” From personal experience and decades of study I know they are real, yet we have lived in a reality-story-agreement field in which they are not. That is starting to change.
It’s not only that the guardians of official reality suppressed research and even eliminated researchers who challenged the interests of the energy industry, the medical industry, the chemical industry, and so forth. They also enforced the paradigms in which such technologies were impossible. They dictated not only what was real, but what could be real. Some of this suppression was conscious and deliberate, but much was unconscious, instinctive, driven by mythic and archetypal forces. When we understand this we can avoid one of the most dangerous traps that would shunt us back into a new iteration of the old story. The trap is to confuse symptom and cause; in this case, to believe that evil individuals are the cause of humanity’s present degradation and suffering. They are not. They too are symptoms.
The old story, the Story of Separation, narrates human progress as an ascent toward greater and greater control—over nature, the body, society, the genes, the brain, biology, matter. Control is the solution to every problem. Find the culprit. Find the pathogen. Find the cause, preferably the single cause, of a problem, and then you know how to solve it. Spray those bugs, kill those weeds, quarantine the contagious, eliminate the pathogen, lock up the criminals, bomb the enemy into oblivion. Problem solved. This is the habit that allows the public to be so easily manipulated into fighting against itself—just define two sides and tell each that the cause of their problems is the other. Shall we unite and turn that same habit against the manipulators themselves? Better that than incinerate our energy in civil warfare. But it is still the same habit, the same reflex. It never asks, What are the conditions that breed weeds and pests, criminals and enemies? Leaving those conditions unchanged, it leads to endless war, always a new superbug, a new crop of criminals or terrorists. So also will it ensure someday, and probably sooner than we think, a new crop of elite monsters.
Please understand—of course those who have violated trust should be removed from power. That will indeed require a revolution, since we cannot rely on the very institutions that protected them, the institutions they influenced and controlled, to do the removing for us. What kind of revolution shall it be though? Lynch mobs, or truth & reconciliation committees? Punishment, or redress? A revolution of hate, or a revolution of love?
When we the people seize power, will we be ready to hold it responsibly? Doubtless, some on the Epstein list were born psychopaths, but as the saying goes, power corrupts. Do you imagine yourself to be incorruptible? Do you think you are just made of better stuff than the global elites? (Just as they believed themselves to be made of better stuff—a better quality of being—than their victims?)
When we see the perpetrators of the Epstein files as inhuman, what shadowy parts of our own humanity do we deny? Reading some of the material, hearing the stories of victims, sometimes I am ashamed to be a member of this species. Within that shame lies a deep recognition that perpetrator, victim, rescuer, and bystander are not as separate as we would like to think. A revolution that denies this will bring us back in the end to where we are today.
Denial has been the problem. It is in secrecy that evil thrives, behind closed doors, out of sight, behind veils of pretense, buried beneath our vanity, beyond the fences of acceptable reality.
There may be something of Jeffrey Epstein in all of us, but let us not shield our gaze with spiritual platitudes. Let us not minimize the depravity of the elites who populate the Epstein files, nor the complicity of our institutions in allowing them. Here is what one man said after viewing some videos in the files: “Bloody hell. We are living in bloody hell…. I had to stop because I can’t unsee what I saw... Blood-curdling screams of young kids. The fear in these children. These people are the Devil walking.” We must take in this data point: that world movers-and-shakers, elite figures whom you might see on CNN, were circulating child torture videos. We must face the fact that our political institutions such as the FBI and Department of Justice did nothing for decades despite having access to the information because, as Attorney-general Pam Bondi explained, the people in Epstein’s black book were too important and revealing them would bring down the whole system. (She was right. It would, and it is.) We must not flinch from the revelations that continue to pour in through the widening gap in the fence. Apparently, nothing less than abject horror suffices to shake us from the hypnosis of normalcy. The revelations will continue. A lot of “conspiracy theories” will become agreed-upon fact; others will continue to dance in and out of the flickering borderlands of reality, until our very notion of objectivity will dissolve into a quantum superposition of narratives. Yes, the collapse of sense, meaning, and identity will reach that deep.
Reading the Epstein files and adjacent materials, it is hard for many of us to believe anyone could be that evil. This disbelief is partly why the fence cordoning off most of reality has held for so long. However, even as we face the depravity squarely, we must not allow our horror to divert us onto false diagnoses and false solutions. If we are to end the depravity we must understand it. We must understand power. And we must understand ourselves. The next essay in this series will be titled, Power and Depravity.
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