Every skillful illusionist, magician, and hypnotist — every con artist — understands that a single principle underlies the capacity to pull off an illusion. Illusion is, here, another name for a deception… however, in magic, the audience has effectively ‘signed up’ to be deceived for the sake of ‘entertainment’.

But there’s another domain where misdirection of attention is profoundly useful to a person or animal who intends to do harm: predation.

Consider a group of gazelles, suddenly distracted by a lightningstrike nearby. Or a falling tree. This is an opportunity for the cougar. While their attention is directed elsewhere, they become vulnerable.

Right now, humanity as a whole is subject to a variety of misdirections, and this has long been our habit. We’re used to being distracted, in fact, we often prefer it.

But while many people are looking at a single, actually real threat, they are distracted by it. And every good predator knows that this is precisely the opportunity they were waiting for… to steal … everything.

The history of life on Earth. The future of life on Earth. All the money. The ‘resources’ that are derived from places that are themselves alive — until they are fracked, mined, poisoned, and otherwise converted into commodities.

Right now, everyone is looking at one threat. But there are a thousand threats, and perhaps 10% of these are significant enough to obliterate our nations (which might be a good thing, generally, since they are lethal fictions), 35% of these are significant enough to destabliize the remaining ecologies to such an extent that widespread disease, war, famine, and sudden catastrophic shifts in ecological stability must result.

Humanity is witnessing the opposite of a magic trick. It’s an apocalypse gambit. And while I suggest we pay careful attention to the specific threat on the table, we must learn to realize… together… with and for each other… that the actual threat is being employed as misdirection. With the intent, by those involved, to steal and obliterate everything they can possibly convert to commodities.

Because when the future becomes implicitly uncertain, scarcity causes those in power to consolidate and protect that power… by every means imaginable.

Behind the scenes, right now, this is precisely what is happening. And some of those forces are so committed to this agenda that they will gleefully obliterate the history and future of life on Earth, and humanity… for the sake of their self-interest — which inflates explosively during crises like those we now, as an entire species, face.