I don’t pretend to be a prophet or seer.
I wouldn’t even want to; I know too much about how miserable the lives of most prophets and seers throughout History were for that.
Speaking of the long view, I originally wrote this piece back in 2016. I was reminded of it when I was pulling old posts down from the old blog—mostly to keep my work away from the literal thousands of AIs scraping Blogspot every single day—and was rather taken aback by how well it had anticipated 2026.
As in, I could have written it this morning and it would totally apply.
But again, there’s no magic here. Just patterns and cycles repeating over the aeons, only this time with the wild card of Lucifer’s Technologies.
Speaking of which, the series is coming back online this month in a revised, remixed, and remastered form. I had wanted to do it as a graphic novel (similar to the classic Big Book of Conspiracies from the 90s) but I think the current need for understanding requires a more immediate review of the material.
With that in mind, here’s an appetizer for the main course…
The Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians—perhaps more than anyone in history, they all thought they enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven.
Until they didn’t.
Rome was the Eternal City. Until it wasn’t.
Then, as now, the enigmatic complexity of the Trickster archetype suits the complexity of the world, no matter how hard ideologues across the spectrum try to pretend complexity away. It suits the difficult choices many of us will find ourselves having to make in the days ahead. As much as some might look for simple answers, they’ll be faced instead with increasingly complex questions.
Indeed, many now believe that the current political, social, and economic arrangements are not only unsustainable; I think most intelligent people agree that if we continue on the roads we are on, all these social and political trends are leading us to wide-scale civil conflict. And possibly worse.
This is especially relevant in the wake of Brexit, which too many people seem to think was a populist uprising and not in fact the brutal calculation of business elites chafing under the yoke of the EU’s Byzantine regulatory regime. Either way, the Rubicon has been crossed, and Europe’s troubles have only just begun.
Not to mention NATO’s, which fester in the shadow of Russia and China’s rise as serious military powerhouses (and the subsequent collapse of most of Europe’s military capabilities). This at a time when serious questions are being raised about the rolling porkfest that we call the American defense budget.
There are a lot of people predicting the dawn of a new Dark Age anyway, for many parts of the world at least, that systems are always inherently finite and subject to collapse and that there are simply too many pressures on them already, that breakdown is inevitable.
