What has been before us — all that was beautiful and alluring to some inner place that Love talks to — has become a place of ugliness and rage.
A foreboding poverty is settling over the Western world. It appears like the first fall frost, shimmering like diamonds covering the still-green grass. But it’s actually the first warning of the coming season of a hard, barren winter.
Unlike the Great Depression that swept the world nearly a hundred years ago, this new poverty will be one of both the spirit and economy. It will be colder and last longer than the former – because losing both spirit and affluence at once will open the doorway to the worst among us, calling out the darkest parts of all of us.
The great questions of modern times will crumble away to expediency and violence. Reason – already exiled from so much of public life – will give way entirely to the expedient, the emotional, and the most primitive impulses of human nature.
Today’s questions are about ourselves. Are we more than an economy? Are we more than consumers? Do we have any lasting value if we are mere commodities in a consumption cycle? Will we be useful? Can we be individuals with an inherent value that transcends yet complements the value of the whole?
Can autonomy exist side by side with a new world order assembled around clever, thinking algorithms – that we made – poised to dominate, perhaps even determine our future?
Will our personhood be embedded on a chip, nothing more than a data point? Can we be erased from reality by a delete function?
The nation-states themselves grabble with the same questions. Who shall govern whom? Can we co-exist as equals when we are not equal? How do we manage interdependence when we have not yet learned to live with ourselves?
Yet none of these questions are the real issue of our time. They are the symptoms of our loss. Something is missing. It was the most valuable thing we possessed. It was not misplaced, lost, or taken. It was frittered away. And now we live with the consequences of the new poverty tightening around our societies. The great Love that has counseled our ways long ago told us that we would wander aimlessly if we lost the Ageless faith and its eternal Truth.
And so, it is coming to pass.
Men and women have come to see themselves as their own gods. And each, in their turn, has come to talk about personal moral authority and of inborn goodness. They sit in judgment of personal right and wrong. So, guided by their own moral reckoning, each has found themselves in a different place.
The great Love would not, could not be there. And without that Love, men and women become ever more lonely.
With the great Love fallen away, the emptiness has been given over to perversions and senselessness. The timeless Truth has been ridiculed and subverted in public and private speech, while self-love has murdered charity, sacrifice, and duty.
What is right has become wrong — and wrong will be celebrated above all else as a token of undefined fairness, equity, and other irrationalities. The door of Love closes, and another opens – of dispirited lostness. It is an era to be marked forever for its dark and terrifying emptiness, bookmarked by pills and drugs, impersonal violence, shallow relationships, self-pitying psychoanalysis, and self-absorption.
The crusade to bury the story of Love once and for all will grow even more vicious. It will be violent and manic. To speak of the reality of Truth will be banned and tightly measured. The great Love has been the sharp edge of the human experience since our time began. On one side is the Moral Order of all things and its character of order. The other side of the blade is the chaos of lostness that dares not be exposed.
Love will mourn. Hate will rejoice. Bizarre, irreverent, and foul speech has replaced reasoned discourse. What has been before us — all that was beautiful and alluring to some inner place that Love talks to — has become a place of ugliness and rage. Art won’t rejoice, it will die a death of a thousand cuts, and those who mourn its passing will be ridiculed. Language won’t speak of that Love, and writers will find none to report. Its books won’t reflect the noble and virtuous life, but the spent ones. Love stories have abandoned commitment for a mere moment’s thrill.
Even science knells before the New Age, while those building our cities merely erect reflections of the times — characterless, cold glass, and monotonous sameness.
Instead of a Moral Order, the bidding future has a technological order. It has been decided that it will be controlled by experts, technocrats, and vast bureaucracies. Its values will be wealth, power, control, and humanist philosophies dressed up as reason. But none have Love or value in themselves, so there will never be rest because of that valuelessness.
We can’t know when or what specific events will break this gathering of poverty – the lostness of our societies. We can only know that the great Love must be welcome again – and that the Ageless Truth will never lose the way. For those of us who still hear that whisper of Love, we must never stop reminding the world of what is missing.
