Allow me to suggest something shocking, obvious, and powerful enough to transform the world and human history.

All those stupid, headstrong idiots that you see all around you? The sleepers, the rich, the famous, the dejected, the lost, the insane, the criminals… the addicts… the consumers… the horribly confused… the sheep and the masters?

They aren’t stupid. And they aren’t even the things you think them to be. What they do is reflect the contexts in which they arise and develop. What you see in them is the living visage of our social policies, ideals, and actual behavior as individuals, groups, cultures, and supercultures.

They become what society demands, and usually, this is a horrifying sacrifice that many of them are not even consciously aware they ever made.

What this means is that if, even in a small, isolated domain, they (or we) can experience participation in -meaningful- cultures that recognize, activate, call forth, and empower us to develop our intelligence and relational excellence… we will, in nearly every case transform.

Butterflies are not made for the desert sandstorms where the very atmosphere will regularly become a shotgun of particulate obliteration. In the desert, one needs a hardy, tough shell. One has to hide by day. The astonishing capacities we bring to human birth cannot properly emerge in cultures that attack, despise, and otherwise revile them. They must, like an underground network, await the proper moment to act in transformative unity.

And that is what we are really seeing when we see widespread stupidity. We are not seeing human nature, we are seeing the facet of it that understands how to retract our creativity and intelligence in order to protect them from hostile cultures that have and continue to punish or co opt their emergence in our persons and lives.

We must become that moment of experiential and experimental unity together, and create small, tightly-knit cultures that can recognize, remember, activate and nurture the prodigy we are born to experience. It won’t happen in the cultures we’re immersed in, and if we have to wait until those change… we’ve got it backwards.