The Great Awakening is a departure, not a destination

What those who arrived early learned the hard way, so you don’t have to make our mistakes

Assume, for a moment, that there is a clear and unmistakable global signal that the world is resetting — financially, politically, and culturally. It doesn’t particularly matter what the trigger is. Emergency broadcasts, tribunals on TV, a debt jubilee, miraculous medical cures, martial law, an Internet shutdown, or even little green men on the White House lawn — any of these could signal that the old order has lapsed.

My purpose is not to prognosticate, but to establish a baseline hypothesis: suddenly, millions of people are trying to make sense of what has really been going on over the last decade or so. We are dealing with a rupture in shared reality, an epistemic breakdown. Cultural assumptions long taken for granted are abruptly called into question. People previously ridiculed and dismissed as delusional or extremist are being re-evaluated. Some will remain deluded and extreme!

But others may turn out to have noticed something important that the rest of society refused even to examine.

This is my off-the-cuff attempt to help those newly recognising that the anomalies demand reconsideration. I claim no special understanding, and have no insider information. This is simply what I wish I had known earlier, and had to internalise slowly, often through embarrassing mistakes made in public.

Reality is whatever it is, regardless of who believes what. I claim neither privileged access to it nor any special gift of discernment. I have simply been living with the schism for longer than most, and have accumulated a few scars worth explaining.

Being early doesn’t make you right. But it does give you more time to discover how you can be wrong.

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Lesson 1: You are not late

The first point, and perhaps the most important, is that you are not late.

Yes, the public as a whole may have been complacent about many of the world’s ills. But the problems we are confronting may have histories stretching back centuries, if not millennia. The starting point isn’t necessarily modern politics, or conventional organised crime. Even after a quarter of a century of research, I cannot definitively tell you how large the “universe of debate” ought to be, or reliably distinguish every psyop from hard truth. I am not even certain where the boundaries of the inquiry lie.

You can be right that something is wrong without being right about what is wrong. Moreover, you can be wholly wrong about what is right!

Recognising an anomaly does not confer authority over its explanation. And once you begin questioning inherited assumptions, you may find yourself confronting claims about the cosmos that seem fantastical, yet demand some kind of evaluation.

The Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the planets, the stars — could there be more to learn than we have been told? How did humans really get here? What, if anything, is true in ancient tales of non-human visitors, giants, floods, demons and dragons?

The point is not to believe every extraordinary claim, but to stop confusing familiarity with proof and unfamiliarity with falsehood.

To have “arrived” is not to have answers.

Nor is it really to have questions.

It is to begin developing a method for distinguishing self-deception, intentional manipulation, honest error, convenient narratives, and genuine facts.

The “awakening” is not fundamentally about discovering that some particular belief was wrong, but about learning how to reattach ourselves to reality, as best we can. And that method must be capable of overturning our favourite alternative explanations just as readily as the orthodoxies we abandoned.

Popularity does not establish truth, and unpopularity does not confer it.

The crux is more spiritual than intellectual: can we overcome the pride that binds us to our former identities, relinquish beliefs in which we have invested our reputations, and withstand the social opprobrium of entertaining ideas deemed unfashionable or impolite? And can we summon that same courage when the belief we must abandon is one that made us feel brave, special, or awake?

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Lesson 2: You do not have to know

So you cannot be late arriving, because there is no real “arrival”, only a departure. Indeed, the real problem is that you keep on having to depart!

We sense something is “off”, and begin researching alternative explanations, only to stumble into propaganda, controlled opposition, dead ends, or seductive falsehoods that tell us precisely what we want to hear. Escaping one false narrative is no guarantee that the next one will be true. Sometimes we merely exchange one set of comforting illusions for another.

If anyone talks of the “awake” versus the “asleep”, they have missed the point. There is only an ongoing process of awakening, with endless relapses, reversals, and restarts. Others may have started earlier. That doesn’t mean they will get further than you. Indeed, some of the earliest arrivals may have become the most firmly entrenched in their own alternative orthodoxies.

It isn’t a competitive sport. There is no leaderboard for proximity to truth.

We know that public events can be shaped by decades of planning, covert operations, propaganda, and institutional coordination. What looks like spontaneous political or cultural change may sometimes be engineered, or at least steered. How much of the world is scripted, and by whom, I cannot tell you. But neither should we assume that what appears spontaneous is necessarily so.

It’s a bit like trying to understand a simulated reality from inside it: you cannot always tell whether you’re interacting with the application, the operating system, the virtual machine, or whoever has administrator privileges. Nor can you necessarily distinguish deliberate intervention from the system simply behaving as designed.

All you can do is attach your debugger and step through the malfunctioning social code, one instruction at a time.

So the first reaction to the shock of discovering that you’ve been lied to, perhaps on a vast scale, is to demand answers. How? Why? By whom? And what else have they concealed? We mistake certainty for safety, rushing towards whichever explanation offers the reassuring sensation of finally knowing. The relief can be intoxicating.

Unfortunately, emotional satisfaction is a terrible substitute for evidence, and the stories that make us feel safest may be precisely those we should examine most carefully.

The real challenge is learning to remain safe, sane, and functional without having to know. To tolerate unresolved questions while those around you polarise into competing camps, each convinced it has decoded the machinery of the world. You do not have to choose between competing certainties merely because everyone else is demanding allegiance.

Not knowing is uncomfortable. Pretending to know is dangerous.

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Lesson 3: You cannot know everything

The stakes are, however, almost incomprehensible.

There is a war of narratives, interests, and competing visions of humanity, and some of the conflicts underlying it may have ancient origins. What, ultimately, are we fighting against? Ancient rogue AI nano-goo isn’t even excluded from the catalogue of possibilities people entertain! What forces are actually in operation, how far they extend, and whether anything off-planet is involved are questions no isolated civilian, without access to classified intelligence, can confidently resolve.

There is real evil in the world, and plenty happens out of sight. But the nature, organisation, and ultimate ambitions of any hidden actors remain matters for investigation. At the furthest reaches of speculation lies the possibility of an attempt to re-engineer what it means to be human — or whether humanity continues to exist at all.

If we ever establish the full picture, it may take decades, even generations, with successive waves of discovery and disclosure. Some information may have to remain classified indefinitely, if only because certain revelations could be so destabilising that their uncontrolled disclosure threatens the very society receiving them. There is already plenty to confront without pretending to possess the ultimate explanation.

Any institution claiming a monopoly on truth deserves immediate scrutiny. Corruption, infiltration, and institutional capture are real phenomena; their extent in any particular case must still be established. What we may be witnessing is a prolonged struggle between competing paradigms of what human civilisation is, and what it is for.

Some accounts portray this as a near-miss with extinction, with the danger far from over. There are real threats to human flourishing, but claims of imminent cataclysms, engineered upheavals, and existential catastrophe require discrimination. Some may be warnings. Others may be fear-mongering, misinterpretations, or fantasies. I cannot tell you which extraordinary scenarios, if any, will materialise.

The longer I am involved in this “awakening” process, the less I am sure of. My list of potentialities keeps growing. My list of uncertainties grows even faster. That is not necessarily a failure of understanding. It may be what happens when you begin to appreciate the difference between the scale of reality and the tiny fraction of it you can personally verify.

The search for truth is the invariant. The only thing you can really control is the quality of your own inquiry.

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If I had to boil everything I have learned down to a single takeaway, it would be this: the success of our inquiry depends on a handful of primitive functions of sense-making. Get these wrong, and even the most intelligent investigator can construct an elaborate understanding of reality that is fundamentally mistaken.

The three most important are arguably attribution, recognition, and corrigibility.

Can we correctly attribute what we observe to its actual cause, rather than merely the most convenient suspect?

Can we recognise and categorise what is in front of our eyes, especially when it doesn’t fit our existing expectations?

And when the evidence contradicts our understanding, can we correct ourselves — even when doing so costs us our identity, reputation, or sense of belonging?

It sounds deceptively simple. In practice, it is deviously hard.

We can misidentify the cause, fail to recognise the phenomenon, and then refuse to correct either mistake. Worse, each failure mode can conceal the others.

Many of us spent our education and careers being rewarded for being right according to the criteria of the society we inhabited. We learned how to produce the approved answers, satisfy the accepted authorities, and demonstrate competence within the prevailing system of knowledge.

People get PhDs by contributing to the body of knowledge. But the rigorous preservation of uncertainty and doubt rarely earns you a degree certificate on its own. There is prestige in adding to what we claim to know, but precious little in preventing us from claiming to know what we don’t.

Being “competently wrong” is not something we are systematically taught. We are rarely rewarded for recognising our own errors, relinquishing cherished beliefs, or remaining functional while our understanding of reality falls apart.

The Great Awakening is not necessarily pioneered by people who are better at being right.

It is led by those who are more adept at being wrong.

Not all beaches are created equal. For sure. Right?