In pithy quotes and hopeful prophecies I have heard it said that the human world is awakening. Yet, I fear this perspective is not only deeply mistaken, but oxymoronic. For the sleepers continue to prosecute their marriage to unconsciousness, and, thinking their cults the very beacons of awakening, move with great momentum and purpose in the opposite direction.

Instead of power, they have submission; instead of intelligence? Mimicry, duplication, and too often, the empty rhetoric of fashionable favor. Instead of conversation, they fervently exchange the viral contagions of their mediated subcultures; their basic intelligence effectively numbed by intoxication with fantasies, privilege, habit, ignorance, and myopia dressed in insight’s costumes.

These are not soon-to-be victorious activists, as they confusedly imagine themselves, but the peculiarly modernized victims of a kind of information-based narcolepsy who have long ago buried the foundations of their capacity to exceed the hubristic certainties they worship through the application of insight and the constant awakening of actual intelligence.

That the sleepers must awaken is a fact. That this process is already catalyzed is largely a fantasy of the pernicious species generally accepted in lieu of the work, care, and deep attention required to bring it to contagious fruition.

We must become both this discovery and the answers.