The Shadow of Aquarius

There's a fascinating (although annoyingly advertisement-heavy) interview by Aris Roussinos with the Cornish hotelier and QAnon advocate John Mappin below:

Mappin, a character I had never previously heard of, is one of a plethora of charismatic individuals from both right and left that seem to be constellating around a genuinely novel and perplexing worldview that not only refutes established political conventions, but also the consensus of what constitutes reality. Other figures either embedded, or being drawn into, this field include the likes of James Delingpole, Jordan Peterson, Piers Corbyn, Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald and Joe Rogan. Perhaps the two great fathers of this tendency (I hesitate to use the word "movement") are David Icke and Julian Assange, while both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are the nearest it comes to having a political wing.

The most striking aspect of the interview from my perspective is Mappin's allusions to spiritual forces guiding his work. This tends to confirm my suspicion that we are witnessing the early stages of the breakdown of the materialist-rationalist-atheist model of reality that has guided politics for at least the last century, and it is fringe figures like Mappin who are leading the attack. One of the reasons the "radical" left are struggling so much nowadays is that their claim to be the ultimate refutation of the status quo is undermined by the fact that they are fully immersed in the current, but fragile, materialist consensus reality. This makes them particularly incapable of processing the weirdening that the collective Western worldview is currently experiencing, their only recourse being to plunge into ever more fanatical and abstract forms of identitarianism.

So what's going on? I've been meaning to explain this for a while, but alas I am very busy these days, and have not been able to devote the time to this blog that I had hoped. The short form, however, is that a 2000 year old pattern defined by the twin forces of hierarchy and universalism is coming to an end, and we are entering an Aquarian realm defined by individualism, eccentricity and synchronicity. That is to say that figures like Mappin, and the worldviews they espouse, are likely to become the norm, and that politics will become less about contested values and more about incompatible realities. This ultimately means that politics as we have known it, in which there are at least some shared assumptions that we all accept as a basis for contest and debate, will become impossible, with the result that it becomes increasingly ad hoc and geographically limited.