A New Kind of Story

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ January 2, 2021

Our stories have changed. The changes are multifaceted and easy to miss in the normal rush of 21st-century disasters but disorienting and disturbing. They deal with science as magic and people as struggling to survive.

Beginnings are arbitrary, and endings are incomplete. It is as if the endings are lost in beginnings and, usually, too awful to accept. Discovering small successes and avoiding personal disasters have replaced discovery and conquest for the greater good.

The successes may be failures, but we are not sure as we no longer know how to judge such things. Any rules for success may produce only failures, and rules guaranteeing failure may produce something like success. So our stories are overwhelmed with itemized listings of the rules for success even though they no longer work.

But who wants to admit that success is lost and no longer to be found? Small personal successes are the only ones available such as selling failed rules for success to those without a clue. Keeping our eyes on the small success and refusing to see the shoddy failures that underlie them is one such rule. We are getting very good at that.

Sadly that kind of culture has weak legs and is no good at any distance. There have become too many things that we must ignore and too many places that we must not allow ourselves to see. The major problem is that different people are given different sets of nonfunctional rules about what cannot be seen or admitted to exist.

Ignorance is the critical thing to be protected for many, but that does not sound right. Our educational systems did not teach us that we must hold onto ignorance. That sounds like a rule for failure that has become a success for reasons that no one can understand.

If failure has become a success, then the greatest and most tragic failures are our heroes. But an endless quest for failure is not sustainable. Too much of that success is a failure too large to survive. So we are learning not to think about the ending of our stories.

Magic is the answer. Chant the magical spell and keep your eyes closed. If you believe hard enough, perhaps you can convince yourself that it works. As reality often refuses to comply, we have another area that must be ignored until we have trained ourselves to no longer see it.

The consequences of our failures disappear as our blind areas expand. But we lose the good with the bad as everything is interconnected. Nothing is pure as all the definitions are blurred. But evil is being refined and distilled by those most committed to blindness who spread that blindness.

We are watching the consequences of that as greed and power are the easiest to understand and the easiest targets for the very shortsighted. Who can argue as failure has been declared a success? Greed is not about success but about making other people fail—another harmonic wave reinforcing an endless story of something that we don’t want to admit. The only choice is to lie.

Our story continues to evolve and is leaving this weak legged and short-lived period of failure as success. The scientific contradictions end up as life or death for us all, and that focuses the attention of people. Death is not something that can be ignored and made invisible.

The magic of refusing to see reality is weak compared to the accelerating paths to new knowledge that give us what we need. Everyone having what they need is not a failure unless endless human suffering is your goal. This tangle is beginning to become clearer as we begin to escape the fog of authoritarian chaos that fills the vacuum when old paradigms fail.

Magic is a large part of our lives as none of us have adequate knowledge of our paradigmatic transformation driven by the scientific process. We allowed those most frightened by this to project their fears on all of us. That should not have happened.

This is a failure of a governmental system allowing unrepresentative minority rule dedicated to denying people what they need for no good reason. That is a monstrous blind area in too many places.

We know the answers: universal rights and universal suffrage with objective and completely transparent democracy. Tiny elites must never come to power at any level of planetary administration. Our dangers are too great to leave this to chance. That is the plot that is returning to our stories.

There is good magic that opens up our imagination to changes we cannot fully understand, but that magic is no secret. That magic is learning to use pending knowledge. That is different from chaotic magic used to hide reality and deny knowledge for greed and control.

Our stories start to reclaim this ground lost to the dark and those who refuse to see. The stories are new and difficult to understand, but we were never guaranteed complete understanding—anyone who claims that understanding is willfully blind. We are starting to have confidence in refusing to allow the blind to lead. Allowing the blind to lead is never a good story.

For those far gone in darkness and willful ignorance, this will be a very cruel story. They have tried to get what they want by denying everyone else what they need, and now that story must end. The chickens must come home to roost.

This is not a return to any older story, and it will be strange and scary some of the time. But there is magic in that. The good magic that brings the right things to everyone in a future of universal culture, protecting all life in its endless diversity. That will replace the dark magic if ignorance and confusion.