Filling the Metaphysical Vacuum

The mass madness of QAnon has spread beyond America, the factory of reams of memes for a globalized culture. Neo-Nazi Germans believe Donald Trump will invade and save them from Angela Merkel. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying.

On the more benign side, “Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have been flooded with QAnon-related false information about Covid-19, the Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 election.”

On the bizarre, beelzebub side, the “Q” crazies believe “the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.”

As has been reported, “QAnon followers believe that this clique includes top Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, as well as a number of entertainers and Hollywood celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama.” Tell me it ain’t so Dalai Lama!

It gets worse: “Many of them also believe that, in addition to molesting children, members of this group kill and eat their victims in order to extract a life-extending chemical from their blood.”

QAnon has thus become a black hole of the Western mind, sucking in every piece of crap that comes anywhere near it and spewing quasar-like jets of shit out both ends.

“In Britain, QAnon-themed protests under the banner of ‘Save Our Children’ have taken place in more than 20 cities and towns, attracting a more female and less right-wing demographic.”

In Germany, Patrick Sensburg, a lawmaker in Ms. Merkel’s conservative party and member of the intelligence oversight committee, said, “I was astonished that QAnon is gaining such momentum here. It seemed like such an American thing. But it’s falling on fertile ground.”

What is going on here and there? Not at the political level, which frightens the bejesus out of the old media, but at the philosophical and metaphysical level that QAnon represents for the West.

At this point, the Q virus does not appear to have infected Asians. Besides Germany and Britain however, large stampedes of QAnon herds can be heard in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand and Brazil.

What’s the endgame? QAnon promises salvation from tyranny at the end of a struggle dubbed “The Storm,” when President Trump will save the world from the evil global network of the aforementioned blood-sucking pedophiles. If it’s true that the one thing the devil cannot stand is laughter, then let’s laugh until it hurts, or stops hurting. 

Q followers come from every walk of life, and cannot be written off as some marginal social media craze. As many have noted, Q “has jumped from the virtual world into the real world.”

Then again, the virtual world and the real world had become a distinction without a difference years before QAnon exploded onto to the scene in 2017.

“World War Z,” starring Brad Pitt fighting a planet overrun by zombies infected with a lot more difficulty than Covid-19, was a prophetic allegory for the QAnon movement.

Take inwardly dead people anywhere in the imploded West that have lost the capacity to empathize and retain only the worst impulses of human nature (especially herd mentality); continually project hate and prime the pump of fear, and ipso facto, you get QAnon.

On the other side of the world, the herd mentality of Communist China, and to an even greater degree North Korea, have contained the Covid virus and immunized against the Q virus. After all, why do a people need to become Borg if they are already Borg?

It’s often said that civilization is a thin veneer. That does not mean however, that humans are inherently animalistic underneath the surface, as conservatives believe. It simply means that what we call human nature remains a mystery to us because we remain a mystery to ourselves.

The antidote to QAnon is what “Q” actually stands for: Questioning with the honest intent to understand, not make oneself feel comfortably part of some group.

The ancient Greek aphorism inscribed on the Temple of Apollo, “Nosce te ipsum” (Know thyself) remains as true today as it was then. It seems even more unheeded in our age however.

QAnon is filling a vacuum of spiritual, philosophical and metaphysical insight with meaningless garbage, which satisfies the unfelt hunger of ignorant people to make sense of the world.

This mad movement is not going to blow over. It must be blown away by strong winds of insight sweeping the toxic smoke and haze from the Western mind. It’s not too late.

After months, the skies are finally clear and the air is clean in northern California. 

Martin LeFevre

The post Filling the Metaphysical Vacuum first appeared on The Costa Rican Times.