Believe the Black Sheep

Warp Speed Through Existential Crisis

We’ll call this a halfway point; somewhere in the vast space between ideas.

I’ve been here a lot lately, which is odd because at this stage in the human timeline there’s no shortage of bewildering events to untangle. Every morning we wake up to another series of staggering crises: corruption, sex rings, war, aliens, more leaps toward artificial general intelligence. Just a few weeks ago a third assassination attempt was made on the sitting president, yet the gunman and his mad dash through the White House disappeared from the news cycle within forty eight hours. To be alive during this time is like riding a wobbly skateboard while clinging to a rope behind a rocket. We have to keep our eyes focused on the horizon—looking down or in any other direction will cause us to realize the speed at which we are traveling, and will inevitably lead to a devastating wipeout that will pulverize our bones into gelatin. Keep your eyes forward, fixed on something stationary to lessen the sensation of gravitational forces scrambling your brain. Hold your focus or lose control and let go.

Let go.

Nobody has the courage to let go—at least not completely. We’re all adrenaline junkies now, pumping our last shreds of intellectual autonomy into the slop machine. Pull the lever, the machine lights up. Every hit is a jackpot. Another narrative appears on the screen, inviting us to speculate on what it all means.

Narratives and speculation, that’s all we have now. It’s a chicken or the egg scenario—which came first? Was the narrative created to generate a vast sequence of theories, or is the narrative a product of conjecture that came before it?

Avatars scream into the digital ether. Jackpots all around. A new narrative forms the battlefield, the avatars take their positions. The same event is analyzed, dissected and reinterpreted to advance a throng of competing agendas. The avatars are the foot soldiers for their ruling orthodoxy. A simulated civil war rages in perpetuity. Neither the Yankees nor the Confederates understand the basis for their arguments. They were deployed to defend and die for their cause; cannon fodder for the commanders of mass formation psychosis. Don’t question the reasoning, you wouldn’t understand it anyway. Ready, aim, fire.

Pick a cult, pledge allegiance. Neutrality makes you a traitor on all sides. It’s not ok to not know—even though nobody really does. Survival under heavy assault is dependent upon your ability to feign expertise on every terrain. To admit ignorance is to wave the white flag of defeat. The talking points are your ammunition. The influencers are the divine wind beneath your wings. Let them carry you nose down into the enemy destroyers. May the flames deliver your avatar to digital glory.

It’s a difficult time for the black sheep. In previous decades we were the weirdos who strayed from the status quo; the few who dared to swim against the current into dangerous swells. We were ignored until we justified our value—either through our creativity or an ability to illuminate hidden truths. We were necessary as outsiders who could observe the human condition in ways those on the inside couldn’t. Most of the black sheep drifted in and out of the physical world unnoticed, but every so often one would land on something prescient, transforming the political and cultural landscape, sending ripples across the furthest reaches of the mainstream.

The Covid pandemic was a special moment when legacy media self-destructed and the outsiders shattered the glass ceiling. It was a repeat of the hippie explosion; an era where traditions were inverted and the counterculture influenced the dominant ethos. New ideas emerged in rapid succession, new frontiers were explored and humanity progressed toward a higher state of being—or so it appeared.

But the hippies were bullshit. Peace and love was cover for sex and drugs—as we came to learn in the following years when the boomers and younger members of the silent generation entered adulthood. Civil rights and aversion to the Vietnam War was, for most white liberals at the time, a fun game to play while in pursuit of the true objective: a skirting of societal responsibilities in favor of narcissism and excessive self-indulgence. It was a movement of opportunists; a convenient rejection of social standards masquerading as a strive for greater purpose. The 60s produced some of the most iconic American cultural artifacts, but aside from the writers, artists and civil rights leaders who truly believed in their mission, the average flower child was fighting for a right to complete passivity; a dashing of all obligations to the world their parents built through two world wars and a great depression. The hippies wandered through the 70s and sold out to the corporations in the 80s, culminating in a decade of processed, synthetic decadence that ended on September 11th, 2001.

It could be argued that the years following 2001 were another period of bleak superficiality. “Fuck George Bush” was the calling card for every rapper and Nu Metal band vying for instant success. I was there at ground level and wrote prolifically through all of it. I was as young and naive as anyone during that time. Rage Against the Machine could jump around a stage screaming about revolution under a giant Pepsi banner and all of us watching were either oblivious to or casually ignored their hypocrisy. It wasn’t until the global financial collapse of 2008 and the proceeding Occupy Wall Street protest that I, and many of the other newly enlightened black sheep, finally admitted to ourselves that the anti-war, Obama-fueled “Hope and Change” campaign was another steaming pile of putrid bullshit.

The difference between now and then is that our war is no longer in parallel universes like Vietnam or Iraq. We’ve become the targets—and we’ve come to learn we always were. The psychedelic counterculture movement of the 60s was largely a product of the CIA, as was the cocaine boom of the 70s and the crack epidemic in the 80s that destroyed most of what survived the civil rights era. By the 90s the slate had been wiped clean, and the “revolution” was a glossed over marketing campaign led by an orgy of corporations and intelligence agencies. The prevalence of these agencies in shaping popular American culture was one of the big revelations in recent years, and what has contributed to an existential crisis of truth in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

When the glass ceiling shattered everything fell out. The outsiders unleashed a torrent of information so overwhelming we were all swept away before we could process any of it. Reality fractured and the natural reaction was to form groups around the pieces that constructed entirely new versions of the world we understood. The groups became packs, the packs became cults. The ruling classes and their intelligence agencies initially tried to suppress the flood, but quickly realized the genie was too grandiose to squeeze back in the bottle so they reversed course to an opposite strategy: pouring poison into the tidal wave and eroding confidence in all of it.

Every event of major or minor consequence is now either a legitimate happening or a psychological operation designed to shape public opinion around some insidious hidden agenda—and the interpretation of events you ascribe to depends on who is in power, their relationship to the event, and the event’s connection to the version of reality you inhabit. There is no guiding principle; no voice of authority on any matter. Politicians argue in legislative chambers around two opposing datasets—facts that are facts, but aren’t facts, but are facts if the source of information is considered credible within the group and the wider cult they represent. It’s stunning to watch one party leader distressingly declare a state of emergency while the other proudly assures their constituents that they are actually experiencing unprecedented prosperity, with both groups referencing robust studies and statistics to support their argument. It appears, even at the foundational levels of governance, our elected representatives live inside of these opposing dimensions and are unable to agree on a baseline reality—which spirals out into very real crises as citizens are forced to suffer through the ramifications of their ideological delusions.

The black sheep are somewhere in the middle, digging through the aftermath of the flood, pelted with stones from both sides as we try to locate the real world. Occasionally one of us will abandon the search and climb up the embankment to join a group when they can no longer tolerate the abuse. The interest in baseline reality continues to wane as the cults and their sub-cults grow more comfortable in the artificial universes they’ve created. They don’t want to go back and all are convinced they know the way forward. The politicians are invested in maintaining the narratives because speculation is easier to manipulate than fact, and they can convert the cults into true believers simply by loosely aligning themselves with ideas sprouting from the hivemind. What this produces is a further fragmentation of reality; a place of total stagnation where progress in all forms grinds to halt while the tethers tighten between a tug-of-war that never ends.

The hippie era died in December 1969 after the Manson Family went on a murder spree that killed anywhere from nine to thirty three people. Charles Manson was the logical conclusion of the dionysian spirit invoked by the hippie movement: a state of unrestricted liberation that ultimately veered into the most primitive impulses of our nature—impulses that were inflamed both culturally and in Manson himself by the intelligence agencies that sought new methods of control over the public. Now we’re back in that place again with those impulses expressed mostly in digital form, but with increasing frequency through various incidents of mass violence that bleed into the material world, prompted by a constant inundation of propaganda that is always present—buzzing, flashing, demanding our attention from devices that have become extensions of ourselves. Where the Manson murders paused a cultural revolution before it could drag an entire civilization over a cliff, ours rolls on, careening over precipice after precipice, slamming into mountain faces and rocky bottoms, eager to redefine what suicidality means.

And somewhere in the rubble the black sheep keep searching, for a rope or a hope or a chain—any way to pull us back before it’s too late.