On the death of the story that held our world stage hostage, the actor who replaced it, and the revolution of where we look
THE LONGEST RUNNING SHOW
I first encountered the Middle East conflict in Standard 7, somewhere in the mid-eighties. I can still feel the weight of the textbook – it was actually called The Middle East Conflict – and I remember my history teacher doing their best to explain the layers of history behind what seemed even then like an ancient, unresolvable war. Already at that point, to a thirteen-year-old in a South African classroom in the middle of our own political nightmare of Apartheid, the words “World War 3” were part of the conversation. It was already a possibility being named out loud.
That was forty years ago. Forty years. And the show is still running.
But forty years is only when I joined the audience – this show has been running through Crusades, empires, and colonial mandates for three thousand years, each new generation handed the same unresolved script and told it was breaking news.
That is what I want you to sit with first. Not the geopolitics. Not the latest footage. Just that simple, staggering fact: for most of our living memory – and long before it – the Middle East has occupied our world stage like a television series that never resolves. New episodes. New escalations. New atrocities. New ceasefires that collapse. New peace processes that fail at the same point. New generations inheriting the same war. Always on the verge of the explosion that will change everything. Always pulling us back in.
Think about the show Lost. Millions of people riveted for years by a story that kept multiplying its mysteries, kept promising revelation, kept adding new layers of complexity – written by people who had no real plan for resolution, because resolution was never the point. The point was the audience. The point was the attention.
The Middle East has been our Lost. And we have been the audience, season after season, decade after decade, generation after generation.
The question worth asking – the one we have been carefully discouraged from asking – is: who are the writers?
THE REVELATION
Something shifted recently. Not gradually. Brazenly.
The world watched Israel wage a devastating assault on Gaza – a conflict that, however horrifying, at least came dressed in the familiar costume. Ancient grievance. Holy land. Chosen people. Two peoples, one city, a God invoked by both sides. The story was broken and bloody, but it was still a story. It had the architecture of the conflicts we had been taught to understand: religious, tribal, ideological. Something you could frame an argument around. Something that demanded you take a side.
And then, almost without pause, came the attack on Iran. And something in the costume tore.
Because this – whatever this is – is not about God. It is not about chosen people or holy geography or ancient scripture. Nobody in Washington is animated by theology. Nobody in Beijing is losing sleep over the Quran. The governments now manoeuvring in the Gulf could not care less about the spiritual heritage of the region they are fighting over.
What they care about is the Straits of Hormuz. The oil price. The petrodollar. The leverage. The chokepoint through which the global economy breathes – and who controls it.
And Israel in this frame is not acting as the guardian of Judaism. It is positioning itself as a new regional power – executing a strategic agenda that uses the language and history of a religion as justification while pursuing goals that are straightforwardly geopolitical: permanent control of territory, Iran neutralised as a regional rival, a seat at the table of the emerging world order. Many Jewish people around the world – including within Israel itself – see this clearly and oppose it categorically. The conflation of this political project with Judaism is itself a strategic move, because it makes criticism of the agenda seem like something it is not.
Ask yourself the simplest question: if there were no oil in the Middle East, would any of these powers be remotely interested in what happens there?
Consider only the timing. Oil was first struck in the region in 1908. Nine years later – while fighting the first mechanised, oil-powered war in human history – Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, planting the promise of a religious homeland directly on top of the most strategically valuable geology the industrial world had ever found. The mythology did not precede the oil. It arrived with it. That is not coincidence. That is policy.
God was never in it. Democracy was never in it. Liberation was never in it. It was always the oil. Always the money. Always the leverage. The story was the costume, and the costume has now been discarded – because those wearing it have simply stopped caring whether we believe them.
THE DEATH KNELL
We are witnessing the public death of the Abrahamic mythology as the organising story of our world stage.
Not the death of personal faith. Not the death of genuine spiritual seeking within any tradition. The mystics within every Abrahamic lineage touched something real and luminous – that remains. But the mythology as power’s preferred costume – the story of holy war, of civilisations in cosmic conflict, of God’s chosen people and their divine mandate – that story is being abandoned. Not because those in power have found something more truthful, but because they have found something more convenient.
Raw force. Unadorned economic interest. The language of the boardroom and the gunship, without the hymn.
Something about that needs to be grieved before it can be transcended. Something is genuinely dying here. The post-war world order. The pretense of democratic moral authority. The idea that these institutions, however flawed, exist primarily to serve the people within them. These are real deaths, and they deserve to be acknowledged as such – with honesty, with grief, with the courage to sit in the not-knowing of what comes after.
We cannot go back. And something in that needs to be said plainly.
Tucker Carlson – not a left-wing critic, but a man who had spent years inside the performance – noted publicly that when Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, he did not place his hand on the Bible. The gesture performed by every previous president, the ritual invocation of God’s blessing over political power, was simply skipped. Not protested. Not challenged. Not even noticed by most of the people in the room.
That is the moment the costume came off in public, with every camera rolling, and almost no one flinched.
Because the show had moved on. The religious mythology was no longer required as justification. The power was now performing itself – naked, unadorned, in plain sight. And the audience, accustomed to forty years, to three thousand years of the story, sat and watched and reached for their phones.
THE BUFFOON AND THE STAGE
Into the vacuum left by the collapsed mythology, a new archetype has walked onto the world stage. Not statesmen with ideology. Not visionaries with conviction. Not even cynics with the decency to maintain appearances.
Buffoons.
The raging, egomaniacal buffoon who governs by chaos. Who has abandoned all pretense of reason, temperance, or moral ground – not accidentally, not as a slip, but as a strategy. Who moves the lines of what is normal with each new outrage, each new cruelty, each new violation of the norms everyone once agreed were the floor. Who fills the space left by the dead mythology not with a new story, but with noise. Pure spectacle. The sheer force of audacity.
Do not mistake this for stupidity. It is a precise and effective form of domination.
The chaos is not random. It is directional. Crisis after crisis consistently produces the same result: the consolidation of financial and technological power into fewer hands, the dismantling of institutional structures that once provided at least some friction against that consolidation, the normalisation of control infrastructure that would have been politically impossible to introduce in stable times. You do not need a conspiracy theory to see this. You need only to watch who benefits, consistently, from the disruption.
Trump emerged from the stage of reality television. This is just another broadcast, and he has landed himself the lead role. The chaos is his character. The outrage is his script. And he would not be behaving the way he is if all the cameras and all the lights were not on him. His insanity is the insanity of the inflated actor’s ego – and an actor is nothing without an audience.
Why are these events playing out on our public media platforms with such relentless, manufactured intensity? Because the screen you are looking at is not just a keyhole into what is going on. It is the stage itself.
The wars we believe are being fought over the currency of oil and energy? There is a higher currency at play.
The currency is your attention.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The social media circus, the constant outrage cycle, the manufactured suspense – they exist because your attention is the most valuable resource on the planet right now. More valuable than the petrodollar. More valuable than the oil it denominates. Because without your attention – your eyes, your cortisol, your helplessness, your tribalism, your desperate need for a hero and a villain – the performance has no audience, and the actor has no power.
The entire machine runs on your nervous system.
When you understand that, the question stops being “what is Trump doing?” and starts being: what am I doing by watching?
WHAT WE HAVE BEEN CO_OPTED INTO
Before we talk about withdrawal, we need to talk about co-option. Because you cannot consciously leave something you don’t know you’re inside of.
But here we need to be honest about something first. This was not a story that worked solely through deception. It worked because it was real.
The children being blown up by bombs were real children. The families losing their homes were real families. The suicide bomber who strapped explosives to their body for what they genuinely believed was a sacred cause was a real human being – made of the same longing, love, and desperation as any of us – who had been given a story so total, so all-consuming, that it overrode the survival instinct itself. The grief of a mother in Gaza and the grief of a mother in Tel Aviv are the same grief. That is not propaganda. That is the bedrock of our humanity.
And the stories that drove all of it – Armageddon, the Promised Land, the End of Days, the final battle between good and evil – these did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from the same desert now being bombed. They carry thousands of years of human longing for meaning, for justice, for a God who sees and intervenes. The Abrahamic traditions have been the moral operating system of the Western world for two millennia. The source of its greatest art, its deepest philosophy, its most radical ethical innovations.
And also the justification for its most catastrophic violence. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The colonial project dressed as mission. The ethnic cleansing performed in the name of divine promise. The paradise promised to the man willing to detonate himself in a crowded market.
The co-option worked because it hijacked something real. It took our genuine compassion for genuine suffering and directed it toward a drama that had been running for three thousand years – a drama that, it turns out, had writers we never saw. Our compassion was the cover. Our outrage was the fuel. Our taking of sides was proof of concept that the story still worked.
And we cannot interrupt a game we don’t know we’re playing.
A PERSONAL RECKONING
I live in a country where the Abrahamic religions are all around me. Church bells ring loudly on Sunday mornings. The call to prayer echoes across my valley during Ramadan before the sun rises. The synagogues are woven into the fabric of the city I live in. These are not abstract institutions to me – they are the sound of my landscape.
I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church. I wrestled, as a young man, with the narratives of good and evil, heaven and hell that I had been indoctrinated with before I was old enough to evaluate them. I passed through angry atheism – the stage where you have seen enough to be furious but not yet enough to be free. Then a long neutral agnosticism – the shrug of a man who has stopped fighting a battle he no longer believes in. And from there, slowly, into something I can only describe as a deeply spiritual path – the way of the elder, the priest of nature, the one who holds space for the sacred without needing an institution to validate it.
I know this journey from the inside. I know what it costs.
And what I know – with everything that journey has taught me – is this: the Abrahamic mythology, in its institutional form, is one of the most profoundly narcissistic structures the human mind has ever produced. Not in every individual who carries it. Not in the mystics and the genuinely awakened souls within every tradition. But in its architecture. In its claim to be the singular, exclusive truth. In the zero-sum cosmology it creates: one God, one chosen people, one path to salvation – which means every other path is either wrong, inferior, or an enemy.
A belief structure built on that foundation does not share the planet gracefully. It never has.
And now someone has their finger on the red button. Israel. Iran. The United States. Three actors, all shaped in some fundamental way by this mythology, all armed with weapons that do not discriminate between the chosen and the unchosen. The violence in the Middle East – the blind, relentless, multigenerational atrocity of it – is not a diplomatic failure. It is what happens when you build a world on a story that cannot be shared. It is the logical endpoint of a mythology that was always, at its core, prepared to take the whole planet down with it rather than concede that God might be bigger than its doctrine.
We got sucked into an unwinnable debate. Whose God is real. Whose claim is legitimate. Whose suffering counts more. We argued it in living rooms and university seminars and United Nations chambers for decades – and it was never going to resolve, because it was never designed to resolve. An unresolvable debate is a perfect distraction.
You do not feel the divine in the chambers where wars are justified by scripture. You do not feel it in the mosques where hatred is preached, or in the televised spectacle of politicians invoking God’s blessing over destruction. God is not in that room. Whatever is in that room has another name entirely.
Conscience does not come from a book. It does not come from a doctrine or a decree. It comes from a felt sense of relatedness – the bone-deep understanding that what I do to you, I do to myself. That there are no chosen people because we are all chosen. That there is no singular path to the sacred because the sacred is the ground we are all already standing on.
It was never about God. It was never about bringing goodness into the world.
Never.
And perhaps – this is the thought I keep returning to – the costume coming off is actually the gift disguised as catastrophe. Because while the mythology was still dressed as morality, we could not see it clearly. We kept engaging with it on its own terms, kept trying to reform it, humanise it, find the good in it. Now that the mask is gone – now that the power is performing itself naked, without even the pretense of divine sanction – we can finally see what was underneath it all along.
And knowing that, truly knowing it in your bones, is the beginning of something real.
THE WAR ON PERCEPTION
Here is where something must be named that is almost never spoken in these terms.
There is a reason why the powers that be have historically sought to suppress the rise of consciousness. There is a reason why psychedelic plant medicines – tools that dissolve conditioned narratives and return a person to their own sovereign perception – have been banned, criminalised, and stigmatised as dangerous. While alcohol, which numbs and stupefies, is sold on every corner. While pharmaceutical sedatives and antidepressants are prescribed by the billion. While the social media platforms that hijack your dopamine system are allowed to grow without constraint.
It is not inconsistency. It is policy.
A person who has genuinely examined the stories running their nervous system is not available to be manipulated by those stories. A population that has reclaimed the sovereignty of its own perception is ungovernable by those who depend on the manipulation.
The suppression of consciousness-expanding practices is not about protecting people from harm. It is about protecting the machinery of manufactured consent from the one thing it cannot survive: a person who has come home to themselves. Who sees clearly. Who can feel the full weight of what is happening without losing their centre. Who asks the uncomfortable question and does not reach for a numbing agent to silence it.
This is the war on perception. And it is older than social media, older than the petrodollar, older than the current cast of buffoons on the world stage. It is the foundational war. The one beneath all the others.
Historically, monarchs and empires have not been toppled solely by opposing armies. They fall when enough of the population simply says: enough. When the spell breaks. When the audience walks out of the theatre.
The sacred revolution is not waiting for some future political event. It lies right in our view – in the choice we make, right now, about where we look and what we choose to believe.
THE FORGE
Here is where I want to speak directly to those of us who have dedicated ourselves to a spiritual path – in whatever form that takes. Those who meditate, who pray, who gather in circles, who seek something deeper than what the world stage is offering.
Because when fear rises and the world contracts, I have noticed what happens. People withdraw from their practice. They go back into their houses, back into their screens, back into the noise. As if inner work requires peace as a precondition. As if the practice is a fair-weather vessel.
I want to say with everything in me: the opposite is true.
Now is the time to go deeper. Now is the time to face ourselves fully – not to escape what is happening, but to develop the capacity to be fully present to it without being destroyed by it.
I have heard the counter-voice, and it deserves a straight answer:
How does sitting in meditation stop a government from dismantling democracy? How does inner work stop the Straits of Hormuz from becoming the flashpoint of a global war? How does spiritual practice stop the economic shocks from landing on real people’s lives?
Straight answer: it doesn’t stop those things from happening. Let’s be completely honest about that.
What it changes is who is responding to the world.
Every system of control runs on one fuel source: a population that cannot self-regulate. That reacts before it thinks. That collapses into tribalism under pressure. That reaches for the comfort of a simple story – heroes and villains, us and them – because holding complexity requires a nervous system that is not on fire.
The entire machine runs on your cortisol. On your helplessness. On your desperate need for a villain and a hero. Take that away – genuinely, not performatively – and you have withdrawn something the system cannot manufacture itself.
Martin Luther King Jr. sat in prayer before every march. Gandhi’s entire political strategy was rooted in contemplative discipline. Mandela spent twenty-seven years on Robben Island in conditions designed to destroy a man – and came out with the equanimity to lead a negotiated miracle instead of a bloodbath. The interior work was not separate from their political consequence. It was the source of it.
The spiritual path is not a retreat from the world. It never was.
It is the forge. And this moment is exactly what it was built for.
SACRED REBBELION
This is not a call to passivity. This is not an invitation to tend your inner garden while the world burns and call that spirituality.
What I am calling for is something far more demanding.
A sacred rebellion. One that begins in the interior and radiates outward with a force that no algorithm, no demagogue, no manufactured crisis can contain.
The rebellion looks like this.
You stop. You examine the stories running your nervous system. You ask, honestly and without flinching, which of your beliefs about the world were given to you by systems that benefit from your believing them. You grieve what is dying – the old order, the familiar mythologies, the idea that the institutions were ever really on your side. You sit in that grief long enough for it to be real. And then you act. Not from reaction. From root.
You withdraw your attention from the stupification machine – not because nothing matters, but because your attention is the most precious resource you own, and you will not hand it to systems whose only interest is keeping you fragmented and afraid. You refuse to perform your outrage for an audience that profits from it. You refuse to take a side in a game whose rules guarantee your loss regardless of which side you choose.
You build local – real community, real relationships, real mutual support that exists independently of any centralised structure. You speak truth in the rooms you are actually in. You become the person who does not lose their centre – and you let that be visible, because visibility in a time of mass stupification is its own form of leadership.
The spiritual path must rise. Not loudly, not politically, not by aligning itself with any flag or faction. But by being visibly, stubbornly, contagiously different – in how it thinks, how it speaks, how it builds, how it refuses.
We are living through the collapse of the grand narrative. The masks are off. The stories that justified the violence are spent. And in the vacuum they leave, one of two things will grow: the micro-stories of tribalism and fear that the machine is already seeding – or something genuinely new. Rooted in direct experience. In real community. In the kind of knowing that doesn’t require a world stage to validate it.
The mythology is dying. The actor is on the stage. The noise is at full volume.
And in the middle of all of it, something is being asked of those of us who have done the real work:
Be the thing that cannot be stupefied.
The sacred revolution lies right in our view.
It begins the moment we decide where to look.
Now go.
Written by Hymnj – Medicine Worker, Elder, World-Builder