New Year’s Greeting To A Friend — 2024

Thank you for sharing your ideas, thoughts, and feelings with me.

We inhabit the same world, my friend. You are generous to let me know what you think. I am tired of guessing what my friends think. I miss the days when we met weekly and talked for hours. If we had performed less and listened more, those times would have been even better.

I am figuring out how not to notice 2025. Many brilliant people know our challenges, but their work doesn’t translate into action. What’s the point of my chiming in? I write about The Great Game because it interests me, and writing helps me think more clearly. Why share it? I could write a private diary. Sharing less and writing more might be the best thing.

I must focus on my work, read books, walk, exercise, spend more time with friends, eat and sleep well, and watch movies. It’s so simple. Xtina and I want to spend more time on short “staycations.” I want to train myself to wallow in the moment more deeply than ever. Eat slowly. Enjoy random interactions more lovingly. Also, I need to create a meetup group in Caldas with a few friends to share some activities and chat. I don’t want to make it formal, like Skeptics in the Pub or Doomsday Afternoons with Cleg. There are some very nice people here. I need to make an effort to socialize more.

I get isolated while studying, writing, and doing preproduction planning for various segments of my film, not to mention editing. I will hire an editor soon, but everything isn’t “in the can” yet. I’ve also been writing episodes for “Black and White,” the series I’m punting, and it disturbs me to think people won’t see it. I want to see it.

We are entering an era of peak apathy before panic strikes sometime in the near future. America is still prosperous enough to have a relatively deluded population, with its Delusions in Chief (they all are) and the “sinners” that run them. Those who came before paved the way for the penultimate Delusions in Chief, Donald J. Trump.

The USA will continue its slow burn; the cancer is in there; it’s been in there for many decades, but there are no blatant symptoms yet, nothing ordinary people pay attention to.

Uncle Sam is the most terrifying mob boss ever. The U.S. is an evil Empire. I see it more clearly living in Europe. I wish, sometimes, that I hadn’t learned this. Uncle Sam reminds me of the monster in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” a Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner. “There is something on the wing. Some…Thing!” The monster rips at the cowling plates and throws objects into the engine. Shatner is sitting there watching in horror and unable to do anything. The dialogue perfectly characterizes peak denial before peak panic sets in when people finally realize modernity is crashing.

Are we insane if we think the USA is the evil Empire? If someone had assassinated Hitler back in the day, his only possible defense could have been innocent by reason of insanity. Like Hitler, only Uncle Sam can kill Uncle Sam. What more will burn before Sam finally takes his own life? Uncle Sam is like a child molester and serial killer who is the head preacher in a traveling evangelical show. No one, not even his victims, thinks he’s evil, and so he gets away with his crimes, lives to be one hundred, and dies of pneumonia. Sam will only shoot himself if he knows he’s going to be caught after his final, desperate rampage. Uncle Sam is on his final rampage, which should motivate people to do something, but they still haven’t noticed, despite the experiences we’ve all had since the 1960s.

I am tired of keeping track. Uncle Sam represents the mythological proto-religious ideologies forming the ruling class’s mental/emotional operating system. All Americans suffer to some extent from prevailing cultural pathologies, but that is not to say Americans are, in general, evil people. One must judge individuals and communities by their actions (sometimes inaction). Adults are only innocent if they never grow up, so many Americans don’t want to (Peter Pan syndrome). The idea of being complicit with omnicidal madness is too painful to contemplate, so we inhabit childish fantasies and activities to hang on to our innocence. Our addictions also help in this regard.

Uncle Sam isn’t a scapegoat either; you can’t blame Sam for everything wrong with modern techno-industrial financialized neoliberal fossil-fueled late-stage civilization. During early modernity, Europeans started the end times rolling with their imperial ambition, conquests for resources, and colonial projects to secure trade routes and access to commodities (enslaved peoples transmogrified into liquid gold). Uncle Sam will end Western Civilization, though, because growth means more war and wasting more of our limited fossil fuel resources on omnicidal competition rather than on building a healthier culture for posterity.

What hurts me most is that Sam has the power and resources to transform civilization into something habitable, healthier, and more just, but people’s lust for profit or the stress of survival blinds them. The propaganda machine has domesticated Americans. “Buy this!” “Sell that!” “Just Believe.” “Watch this!”

Proverbs 14:23

In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty.

1 Timothy 6:10

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.

Mark 8:36

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

Do what you enjoy doing, and never let up on that. Love your loved ones in new and different ways. It doesn’t hurt to know that today is the best day, and it won’t get any better than this. The only thing that helps one contribute to making the future better is the herculean effort to learn from Big Nature. Listen to Big Nature. Spend less time dissecting stories of Big Gods and Big Belief Systems. Reality sets you free and builds agency. (Read Dostoevsky.) Learning from Big Nature won’t keep you from doing what you love. We don’t need hopium; we need to nurture our purpose, do what we love, and do what we can.

Have a loving 2025. Stay safe and healthy, and nurture your wonderful sense of humor.