Navigating the Storm of Global Change

Part 3a: A New Angle on Conspiracy Theories

Note: If you’ve been following this series and read my recent “Process Check”, you’ll know that writing the third part of this 4-part series has taken considerably longer than anticipated. Rather than delay the process any longer, I’ve decided to break this essay into two sub-sections. Here is part 3a — part 3b will follow shortly (promise!).

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In Part 1 of this 4-part series, Birth of the Aquarian Age, I argued that this time of great change in our world can be broadly understood in astrological terms as the dying of the Piscean Age and the birthing of the Aquarian era. The main difference between these eras, to recap, is that the Piscean Age was structured primarily by top-down vertical hierarchies, whereas the Aquarian Age will be organized mainly through horizontal, peer-to-peer decentralized networks.

In Part 2, Changes in Technology and Spirituality, I looked at how these changes are manifesting in the domains of technology and spirituality, most notably in the form of blockchain technologies and spiritual approaches that emphasize the development of both personal sovereignty and group intelligence. I pointed to the profoundly liberating potentials of these emerging Aquarian structures that are just starting to become visible in these areas, albeit in embryonic form.

When we consider the global crisis we are in the midst of navigating, however, and the widening cultural and political divisions in how we even begin to understand our situation, the vision of an imminent age of creative expansion may seem wildly optimistic. Our passage into the new era, if viable at all, is obviously extremely narrow and fraught with danger. It is as though we are undergoing a collective initiatory crisis that, like all initiations, demands that we pass a crucial test to graduate to our next level of development.

At the heart of this challenge lies the task of recognizing clearly the nature of the dilemma we are in. If we can identify the destructive and dismembering forces at loose in the world, and understand how they relate to the creative energies that are birthing the new forms of the coming era, we may be able to make out the deeper evolutionary pattern trying to unfold amidst the apparent chaos of world events. That is the focus of Part 3.

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Part 3a: A New Angle on Conspiracy Theories

As we approach the end of the Piscean Age of top-down control and transition toward the Aquarian era of decentralization, the asymmetric structure of our current system has become increasingly visible. This awareness has led to an intensified focus on where power lies in the system and whose interests are being served by it. As previously hidden power dynamics have come more to light, and as the (increasingly threatened) centralized authorities at the helm of the (increasingly obsolete) hierarchical systems of the dying age attempt to assert power in ever-more coercive ways, many more people at both ends of the political spectrum have become willing to embrace the idea that there is a coordinated agenda of control behind the outplay of world events.

For most people, conspiracy theories are an uncomfortable topic. They ask us to consider frightening and dystopian possibilities that most of us would rather not think about. We can fear that the conspiracy theorist has become caught in a web of paranoia, seeing patterns of evil well beyond what evidence or intuition suggests, and we may worry about their mental health. Alternatively, if we have become convinced that hidden darker forces are manipulating world events but that most people are blind to this influence, we might feel a great sense of urgency about the topic, as a failure to recognize this threat may seem to us dangerously naive. As difficult as this area may be to explore on neutral emotional terms, I believe that a nuanced understanding of it holds a key to our collective initiation into the dawning era.

The notion that power elites have orchestrated certain historical events behind the scenes for their own ends (such as in the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the Reichstag fire) is well substantiated by evidence and not controversial. We are concerned here with the grand conspiracy worldview, which typically involves the claim that a small “cabal” of global power brokers acts as one to engineer world events in accordance with a sinister long-term plan. In contrast to claims about localized conspiracies, the grand conspiracy interpretation functions more like an article of faith, an overarching theory of everything that is much harder to substantiate or disconfirm.

It is only logical — and readily apparent — that a consequence of the hierarchical structure of society in the Piscean Age has been a consolidation of power in a relatively tiny number of people and organizations at the top of the pyramid. It is empirically verifiable, for example, that three investment managers now have substantial financial interests in almost every significant US public company (see this 2019 Boston University study: Specter of the Giant Three).

Nonetheless, the simplistic notion that the vast, complex world drama is tightly stage-managed at multiple levels of society in accordance with a master plan worked out in a boardroom by a small “cabal” of global power brokers seems extremely implausible. Such a degree of scripted coordination just seems inconsistent with what we know from experience about the limits of human organizational capacities and the complexity and spontaneity of human life. It’s also apparent that members of the corporate and political elite often do genuinely compete with each other for power and influence, which would seem to undercut the idea of a grand unified agenda.

On the other hand, it is growing harder every day to ignore the signs that an ominous centralized global network of control is under development. The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset Initiative, for instance, is a public proposal that openly calls for a radical re-design of global governance in a way that elevates unelected corporations to the role of official stakeholders in global decision-making, while reducing the power of democratic institutions like governments and effectively sidelining civil society. When considered alongside the rise of Internet censorship, the rapidly growing capacities of AI to track our behavior, and the transparent slide into ideological conformity of virtually every significant mainstream institution (journalism, education, academia, art, entertainment, medicine, corporations, etc), it certainly appears as if there is a concerted attempt underway to install a global system of technocratic totalitarian control.

I would like to offer a multi-dimensional perspective to help explain this apparent paradox.

Nearly all of the world’s wisdom traditions have had an understanding of some kind of ‘dark’ metaphysical force that plays a central role in the human and cosmic drama. In shamanic traditions, it has been recognized since ancient times that there are non-physical forces that energetically ‘feed’ on human misery and suffering. It is typically understood that, because these ‘dark’ or ‘demonic’ or ‘anti-evolutionary’ energies are disconnected from Source, they attempt to attach parasitically to humans as a supply of energy. Such forces tend to work through the weakest link in any given system: the weakest or most traumatized individuals in a group, and the most vulnerable parts of our own psyche — our wounds, traumas, addictions, and vices.

These anti-evolutionary forces are seen to exploit our worst impulses — our fear, greed, envy, hatred, etc — to goad us into actions that further their agenda to maximize human suffering and advance tyranny. Because they are innately drawn to our wounds and vices they move spontaneously in and through all of us.

I don’t mean to imply that humans are mere puppets for these forces. They can’t act through us unless we choose on some level to align with them. We typically do so when we want to get something for ourselves even when we know deep down that our choice is not aligned with our deeper wisdom and does not serve the best interests of the whole. In this sense we are both victims and agents of these forces.

In the end, human beings are the ones who take the actions, and we bear the responsibility for our choices. The question is where our ideas come from. We have all heard of artists who say that a great work was ‘given’ to them, as if they were a channel for a source of creative intelligence from the beyond. But if our primary motivation is greed or fear or vengeance or power, we attune to a very different energetic frequency — a different source of intelligence — that feeds us very different kinds of ideas.

The plans and policies of the world’s corporate and political elite are clearly instrumental in setting the course for the rest of us. What I’m suggesting is that (many of) these plans and policies are themselves informed by a dark metaphysical intelligence that functions systemically. The power of any tyrannical leader or system, for example, can only be sustained with the daily cooperation of the people. The forces of oppressive control and fear-based compliance have a complementary frequency; they serve the same master. The ‘intentionality’ that people are sensing behind world events is from this view derived primarily from a non-physical realm, and needs to be understood and addressed on that level.

This perspective offers a more organic way of understanding how so many people at so many levels of power around the world could be contributing (mostly unconsciously) to the development of an oppressive global system of control. The power elite may set the agenda, but these destructive forces work through all of us. Rather than a linear command-and-control mechanism, we can think of it more like a virus (to use a timely metaphor) that infects people and organizations, and is contagious.

Let me add a little intellectual scaffolding to this idea.

Even though the battle between light and dark is a perennial theme of the stories that captivate us in our movies, tv shows, plays, and novels, any notion of a malevolent transpersonal intelligence is obviously anathema to our modern paradigm of rational humanism and scientific materialism. When Nietzsche declared that God was dead, he also implicitly banished any talk of the Devil from intellectually respectable conversation. Yet, as many have noted, the hyper-rational structure of modern consciousness itself may now be undergoing a profound process of breakdown and mutation.

As far back as the mid-twentieth century, German philosopher Jean Gebser felt that the mental-rational structure of consciousness was already in its late-stage decline, and he made a direct link between this development and the crisis of intellectual and social fragmentation engulfing humanity. Gebser saw in the crisis a tremendous spiritual potentiation taking place, preparing the ground for a leap toward a new integral age, in which the healthy or ‘efficient’ dimensions of all previous structures of consciousness — archaic, mythic, magical, and mental-rational — will be recovered and integrated into a new wholeness.

In our times (that are arguably a continuation of Gebser’s), this process of transmutation may be entering a climactic phase. In part 2 of this essay series, referring to the quantum leap in personal autonomy that will likely characterize the coming age, I suggested we think of our moment as humanity’s initiation into spiritual adulthood. But through the globalizing influence of digital technology, it can also be understood as the birth of a truly world-centric or Gaian identity (associated with the probable decline of the era of nation states). Perhaps at some point the new era will also herald our entrance into galactic consciousness, bringing a radically expanded understanding of our place within a wider cosmic drama. And, in connection with these changes, we are being initiated into a much more complex, subtle, integral, and multidimensional awareness.

It is increasingly common, for instance, to hear of the ‘non-human turn’ in the humanities, representing an awareness of the “world without us,” and an acknowledgment that we “cannot quantify the Real in its totality.”¹ Others have pointed out the ‘hidden anthropocentrism’ in the very starting point of the modern worldview: the assumption that all meaning and purposive intelligence in the universe reside solely within the human mind, thus making the human “absolutely unique and special and in this sense superior to the entire cosmos.”² For a growing number, this “absolute privileging” of the human is now beginning to look like an act of modern hubris “literally of cosmic proportions”.³ One of the most profound aspects of our initiation into the coming era, then, may involve our return to a ‘re-enchanted cosmos’ in which multiple forms of intelligence are recognized to exist across many different levels and dimensions.

Not all of these more-than-human forms of intelligence, however, may be benevolent. In the context of the emerging integral awareness, we might start to reconsider the notion of malevolent forms of subtle intelligence not as a regression to pre-rational superstition, but as a trans-rational integration of certain premodern insights and perceptual capacities left behind by modernity’s monocular focus on the material world.

It may seem like a particular affront to the modern ego to suggest that we are being manipulated by larger transpersonal forces at least as intelligent and purposeful as we are. But the mainstream perspective is struggling to account for the basic intuition so many feel that something is off at a deeper level. What is unfolding in the world today seems to many not merely concerning, but bizarre, unnatural, and dystopian. So people turn to simplistic conspiracy theories and extreme political ideologies that at least speak to their instinctive sense of alarm that some kind of tyrannical force seems to be trying to drive humanity into a digital cage.

I am mindful of the provocative nature of this claim and I do not make it lightly. In the next essay (Part 3b of this series), my aim is to de-mystify and normalize the concept of the ‘dark’ force, while suggesting the crucial role it may be playing in a complex evolutionary dance with the forces of creativity or light. In this context, I will explain why I believe that the totalitarian threat we are facing not only is destined to fail, but in fact constitutes precisely the initiatory catalyst needed to galvanize a creative awakening that will propel us into the coming era, the Age of Aquarius.

1. Johnson, J. (2019). Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness. Revelore Press, 76.

2. Tarnas, R. (2006). Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Viking Press, 35.

3. Ibid., 35.