Random Non-sense

A Psychedelic Essay on the Current American Circus August 2025 There are two ways to begin this essay. One way is to tell you, solemnly, like an Old Testament prophet, that America is teetering on the edge of collapse, the empire is rotting, the barbarians are at the gate, etc., etc. Another way is to tell you that everything is perfectly fine, the market is humming, democracy is stable, and you can go back to TikTok videos of cats eating spaghetti. Both are lies, both are truths, both are maybe. Robert Anton Wilson liked to remind us that “reality” is what you can get away with, and America has been getting away with quite a lot. But the circus tent is wobbling. In fact, it’s hard to tell anymore if the tent is collapsing or if the funhouse mirrors are just arranged at new angles. Either way, the clowns are running the show. (But then, weren’t they always?) To make sense of the current U.S. political hallucination, let’s use the framework Wilson gave us in Prometheus Rising ...

There is a soft lie that we are told in childhood: that time moves forward like a river, that we are carried on its surface, always downstream. But anyone who has listened closely to the silence between transactions, or stood still in the afterglow of a disappearing lover, knows better. The future leans backwards. It reaches its hand into the present. And some days, it rearranges the past.   In economics they call them derivatives . Options. Futures. Contracts written not on things as they are, but on what they may become. They are not instruments of the present moment. They are promises inscribed on paper, like spells whispered by someone who has never seen the thing they’re describing.   Imagine: a bushel of wheat, not yet planted, is bought and sold. A barrel of oil, still buried in darkness beneath rock and ocean, is assigned a value. That value is not determined by the sun or the soil or the sweat of the farmer, but by a theory. A theory of the future . ...