Black Swan: an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences.
When I experienced yet ANOTHER black swan event this Sunday, I was disoriented and just wanted to disassociate.
No, I'm not primarily talking about Grandpa Joe getting kicked to the curb by the party.
Before that, I got sick. Here’s what happened:
Saturday had been a long, full day, and my beautiful wife and I had just put our son down for bed. She wanted to shut down, enjoy some quality time together, and go to sleep. Instead, I forced a planning conversation about our day the next day.
She, of course, was nonplused. But I'd gotten what I wanted: a rock-solid hour-by-hour game plan for Sunday.
Then I woke up the next morning with a fever.
So much for my rock-solid plan.
And then Biden "dropped out of the race" by a screenshot of a letter with the wrong signature posted on [X], only seven days after a failed assassination attempt on DJT and five days after Crowdstrike shut down 8.5 million Microsoft devices grounding over 5000 flights.
That’s three major black Swan events in a row on top of my illness.
I was confused and disoriented. It took everything in me not to lose myself in the endless scroll all day long.
Confusion and disorientation are very effective tools for getting you stuck in action, which is exactly where Satan wants me.
Thankfully, I have better tools for this mental state than what I had in 2020 when my life fell apart, I was constantly on the news trying to figure out what the hell was happening. I didn't know who to listen to (not the government) or who to trust (not QANON), and the disorientation I experienced was so profound that I couldn’t function for weeks at a time.
I went from believing in "the idea of America," "democracy is the worst form of government except all of the others," and “everything is always getting better" to "I live in 1984" in a matter of weeks.
I remember scrolling forums, news aggregators, and X all day, every day for weeks, trying to figure out what was real. I prepped hard but very ineffectively for the apocalypse. At one point, I told my wife that we needed to leave the country.
I was crazy.
There is a word for what I was going through. It was called Demoralization.
A former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov described the process in a video that aired in 1984.
“What it Demoralization basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”
I'm not going to weigh in on whether there are a few individuals in some dimly lit mansion filled with satanic images who are pulling the strings behind all of this.
I'm also not going to comment on whether these are the end times, foretold by portents from the heavens.
But what I can absolutely say is that lucifer and his minions are real, are active, and ARE trying to take us out.
We are at war, and we always have been.
As the military conflict handbook states:
"Psychological warfare extends beyond the physical battlefield, aiming to manipulate the perceptions and behaviors of the enemy. Through strategies that target the adversary’s morale, confidence, and decision-making processes, this form of warfare seeks to undermine their willingness to fight."
In other words, Demoralization attacks your mental model of the world to stop you from taking positive action.
Your mental model of the world is primarily a narrative. That narrative is about what happened in the past and what that means for the future.
If you're a tech bro, it might be something like, "My country gave the world the telephone, the lightbulb, the moon landing, and the internet (past.) I will build the next technological marvel, a decentralized Web 3 AI bathtub (future).
But the problem is that our mental models of the world are so radically flawed it's downright hilarious if you have the humility to laugh at yourself.
"Your model of the world is at best only coincidentally accurate, since the process that generates the model has almost nothing to do with the truth.
Besides which, no existent form of media has the bandwidth to convey reality at the scale of global events — and even if Elon made it, your brain would be helpless to process it. The World can only be pulled through your mortal eyeballs at a catastrophic loss of resolution.
Whatever picture ends up in your mind, even if it isn’t a deliberate lie, cannot possibly be the truth."
When I said to my wife "tomorrow, we're going to go to the beach in the morning, get back, do breakfast, mass, and then clean the house...etc," What I was really saying was:
"no major catastrophes happened today, so it's safe to assume tomorrow will be the same, therefore, we can do all the things we want to do as long as we are disciplined and commit to our schedule."
My mental model of the world turned out to be wrong, and when that happens, you face the core truth of our humanity: We are not in control.
God and I had a good laugh about that when I realized just how wrong I'd been.
Our mental models of the world will undergo tremendous strain over the next four months.
We thought we were going to see Orange man vs Grandpa Poopie pants this fall, instead Orange man almost went down and the kids took away grandpa's drivers license.
We thought we could count on all of our technology working, but now we have to add that to the list of infrastructure we can't count on along with trains, bridges, and airlines.
So, the reminder for me in all of this is that I don't have any control over tomorrow. All I have is my day today.
As the 12 steppers say, all I can do is "the next right thing."
For me, the next right thing to do is delete X from my phone and go to the beach with my family.
By renouncing, finally and completely, all control of my life and future destiny, I was relieved as a consequence of all responsibility. I was freed thereby from anxiety and worry, from every tension, and could float serenely upon the tide of God's sustaining providence in perfect peace of soul.”
― Walter J. Ciszek, He Leadeth Me
I like the article you linked to because you shared some of your background. Thanks for sharing your experience.