Rage and Serenity

The Road to Peace is the Threat of War

“Peace was never an option.”

By now, it should be no surprise to this audience that I tend to imprint onto iconic stories—rather, that iconic stories tend to imprint onto me.

I see stories and the characters that inhabit them as cyphers through which we might explore not the baseline truths of our waking reality, but more so the underlying, foundational experiences that make up the human spirit that powers the whole infernal—and sometimes glorious—engine that is creation, even if we weren’t the ones who gave birth to it.

In fact, I’ve argued with frequency that many of the political, cultural and media figures we tend to follow on both sides of the Game Theory Game Board can be reduced (or, depending on your perspective, elevated) to the level of ‘characters,’ as they are themselves Cognitive Cyphers at the least and Mind-Movers at the most working either FOR or AGAINST the Great Awakening, which is the unified reality projection—if not destiny—that binds us together in the Strange War.

This particular standout quote comes from Erik Lehnsherr, better known by his fictional comic book alias, Magneto, perhaps the most infamous villain in Marvel Comics, sometimes-enemy and sometimes-ally of the X-Men and a figure who’s been adapted in many forms and mediums over the decades.

Herein, I borrow from a scene in Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class, in which a young Lehnsherr is finishing a game of chess with his friend-turned-rival, Charles Xavier, both of whom have been gifted or cursed with abilities most could only dream of, resulting in a world that hates and fears them due to its failure to attempt to understand them, which might sound familiar.

Magneto is played expertly by Michael Fassbender, whose performance is captivating and threatening enough to separate itself from the inaugural film portrayal of an older version of the character by Sir Ian McKellen, perhaps one of the most accomplished actors still working, and the performance is nicely balanced by a subtle, calming turn by James McAvoy.

In an other-wise calm mundane in which the two play a friendly, competitive game of chess, Lehnsherr calmly informs Xavier that, while the two recognize the same problem, he’s quite made up his mind regarding the solution to it, which is a touch more direct and seemingly permanent than Xavier is comfortable with.

Though it’s one of the quieter moments of a series known for its larger-than-life characters, major sci-fi set pieces and sometimes on-the-nose commentary, it has always struck me for the core truths it unearths within its protagonist and antagonist, though neither knows which is which at this point in the story.

Watching it now, in the context of the Info War and the Great Awakening that will result from it, it’s easy to imagine the two as Anons and Truthers engaged in a back-and-forth most around these parts have witnessed or participated in themselves in the various digital battlefields over the course of these last few years. The fact that the dialogue, which takes place in an alternate version of the 1960s, makes references to a near mirror-image of the geopolitical situation we find ourselves in now is less a happy coincidence and more confirmation that there truly is nothing new under the sun where it concerns the War of Stories.

While the scene stands on its own within the context of the story, the reason I’ve had it top of mind over the course of the last few days is owing to its Bicameral nature.

As we’ve explored in recent pieces, from ‘Everything is Fake & Fine’ to ‘Dread Carnival,’ rarely has the Collective Mind dealt with such a steady and dizzying blitz of Narratives masquerading as Actuals and Actuals kicking off contrary Narratives as it is right now—so much so, in fact, that even a community founded and trained according to its heterodox, elastic mindset and powers of discernment has been more given to reacting rather than understanding of late.

Of course, the Israel Chaos that threatens to escalate on both an Actual and Narrative level over the course of the coming hours, days and weeks is more immediate, but if you get nothing else out of this writing, I would implore you to remember the last time the ‘Current Thing’ was the MOST IMPORTANT, most dramatic, most traumatic and by extension … most effective Narrative torpedo aimed squarely at the Collective Mind … aimed squarely at your mind in an attempt to move it so that IT might move the reality any and all sides on the Game Theory Game Board wish to control so as to usher in its own vision for the future.

One that is not set, is never set but for our mandate.

As it turns out, there’s been quite a few ‘Current Things’ that become ‘Current Narratives,’ and while this pattern of mass psychological escalation and acceleration can be stressful to weather and confusing to parse, it is ultimately resulting in the RIGHT kind of tension in the Collective Mind … the sort of tension that could crack through increasingly more stubborn cognitive dissonance walls where the deepest forms of cynicism, fear and ignorance have taken root.

While many of my friends and peers focus on parsing the Actuals—the detailed, nuanced and bedrock realities seeping out of a chaotic and kaleidoscopic malaise of exhaustive deployments by an embattled Globalist Collective and the counters deployed or seeded by the Sovereign Alliance I believe stands against them, and of which we are a part—I tend to focus on the Narratives, on the Stories, as I find them more immediate and, contrary to some, more powerful and lasting when it comes to the progression or regression of our shared reality.

Lately, however, it seems that, not only are we witnessing a war OF Actuals and Narratives, but even one BETWEEN the two, which has had the alternating, unfortunate and yet, possibly beneficial effect of triggering a series of Ouroboros mass psychological reactions from virtually every Narrative Layer within the observing Collective Mind of American society, from the Marxist Communists marching to the beat of a new dystopian drum, to the America First patriots looking to forge a new Republic out of the remembered ashes of the old.

The ‘Current Narrative’ has even managed to ensnare a good portion of the sleepers that make up the vast bulk of the reachable American Mind—the one the Globalist Collective has coerced or mollified into the passive acquiescence to their System of Systems, and the one that Patriots have the unenviable task of compelling into the direct endorsement of a sovereign, free, bold and beautiful alternative while competing with generations of institutionalized sociopolitical and cultural Hegelian programming.

Which brings us back to the intro line of this piece, and the core, revealing foundation of Erik Lehnsherr’s philosophy, which ultimately becomes Magneto’s philosophy, and that of the most earnest—and by extension, damaging—psychological combatants on the game board, and those ironically most in need of saving.

“Peace was never an option.”

When Magneto—Lehnsherr—delivers this quote in the context of the film, he’s doing so to the man he recognizes as his oldest—and perhaps his only—friend, and also one he projects as his greatest enemy, long before the man sitting on the other side of the literal game board accepts himself as such.

Lehnsherr, a gifted mutant in keeping with the bombastic American comic book tradition, is reacting to a human-dominated world in which the powers that be—namely, the US Administrative State—will not suffer his kind to live without harassment; instead of adopting an altruistic, humanist viewpoint that his fellow gifted friend Xavier adopts, seeing a vision for mutual cooperation between humans and mutants, Lehnsherr sees only inevitable conflict and thus, on a long enough timeline, inevitable victory for the one side, and defeat for the other.

He recognizes the lay of the land, so to speak, and seeks to put himself in the role of the active player; he is playing a Finite Game, unbeknownst to himself, while Charles Xavier is given to an Infinite mindset.

Due to a pragmatism owing to a traumatic childhood in which he survived the literal Holocaust while witnessing those around him executed by the Nazis, Lehnsherr doesn’t just find Xavier’s optimism to be misplaced, but rather insulting.

Lehnsherr sees a second Holocaust as inevitable, and considers it irresponsible to let gifts such as theirs be wasted waiting for the day when perceived lessers masquerading as superiors decide to wipe their ilk off the game board entirely. In this respect, he is an extremist, even if a logical one, but he is also something of a Doomer, an archetype that has—for better, but mostly worse come to define the modern antihero that has become ubiquitous within American fiction in the modern age.

Characters are a reflection of the times in which they were written, and while Magneto’s fictional origins trace back to the 1940s, his relevance took on renewed prominence at the turn of the century, with viewers more likely to identify with him over the de facto hero of the saga, that being Xavier, who would go on to found the School for Gifted Youngsters which, aside from allowing for the cartoonish framing that results in the entertaining and colorful X-Men superhero team to be founded, also represents the sort of hope and optimism the American Mind was once given toward.

While Xavier is moved toward bringing together, building and unifying, Magneto is directed toward revenge, actualization and segregation, an ironic parallel to his origins, and a prime example of the sort of Ouroboros inevitability that defines victims of the Hegelian Dialectic, the prime Actual-Psychological fusion of the Deep State’s infernal engine of reality influence, projection and control.

Xavier seeks to erect a bridge to the future, while Magneto endeavors to raise a bloody totem to the past, thus dooming him to repeat it.

He is the perfect product of the Deep State’s Ouroboros pattern that results in the successful implementation of a generational Hegelian Dialectic, himself caught in a loop of problem-reaction-engineered solution that, for all his power, he cannot see the beginning or end of; on the other hand, his closest friend—the one he sees as weak and naive—sees the wheel laid out before him and the hold it has on his friend, and is powerless to stop.

To a mind caught in this loop, altruism, optimism and hope represent the posture of a weak mind, with peace taking on the complexion of compromise at best, and abject surrender at worst.

If you stop and think, you might recognize many Erik Lehnsherr’s in both your personal life and within the matrix of the greater Info War we track and wage simultaneously. Within the engineered chaos of dueling Narratives, black pills abound, and while understandable, the consumption of them also represents the easy path, contrary to the belief of those who’ve stared into the abyss so long it hath become them.

Revenge is the easy path. Anger is the easy path. Fear itself is the easy path, and it also happens to be the Mind-Killer, as discussed in one of the most popular features I’ve penned.

And fear is also the most deadly and insidious poison to ingest, which is itself representative of the ultimate irony of existence and mortality married: to fear is to die, and to fear death is to court it, to beckon it and to bait it. For the death of the mind precludes and precedes the death of the self.

While fictional, Erik Lehnsherr’s Magneto represents generational trauma, the ultimate formation of the Hegelian Dialectic, and one that keeps fear and its resultant anger and reaction loop in perpetual motion.

Magneto is a victim, and victims ultimately make the best villains, especially when they consider themselves heroes.

This is the functional and formed ‘WHY’ that makes up the foundation of the enemy’s propensity to target not just the individual mind, but the Collective One, and the generational, as their Hegelian tentacles seek to traverse time by breaking it, collapsing it … dissolving the barriers between past and future until there only exists an ever-present and ever-predictable now, as predicted by Orwell himself.

While both Erik and Charles seem to recognize this pattern, Erik believes that, in order to break the wheel, one must act upon it, while Charles believes that the wheel will ultimately consume itself, if given the right series of pushes at the right time, and with the right intent.

Erik believes that to act is to conquer fear by default, while Charles recognizes that, to act IN fear and OUT of fear is to reinforce its grip on you, and to ensure its grip on the next generation; he sees that, sometimes, the best way to conquer fear is to let it conquer itself, to see it exposed and rendered mortal and combustible.

We’ve seen this in our sleeping fellows, and perhaps even some among the powers that would be are so warped that they no longer recognize the evils they wrought, if they ever did.

What Magneto fails to consider is what the young man within him—the boy, Erik Lehnsherr chose to forget—and that is that there is ALWAYS hope, and that the longer path, and less direct path is not always the one trodden by the weak, but rather the wise.

This contradiction is not a contradiction, and sometimes, it takes a fusion, a mind-meld in order to recognize it.

To wit, my favorite scene in the film represents a perfect complement to the intro to this piece:

A surface-level reading of the relationship between Charles and Erik might come away with the feeling that Erik has lived the harder life, and chosen the harder path, but over the long run, it is Charles who sacrifices the most, all in service of a dream of hope, and ultimately, a dream of peace and coexistence, albeit one informed by Erik’s strength, and the realism he inspires that, sometimes you must be willing to fight, and able to fight, even if the fight is the last thing you want.

Erik may be right that, for him at least, and maybe even for Charles, peace was never an option … but which man, which mindset could forge the better world?

Is there a path to hope, then? Could peace be an option, after all?

I believe so, and before we pave the way there, I think the Collective Mind is being shown in no uncertain terms what NOT to do, and by an infinitely more cartoonish version of the comic book villains than we’ve ever seen in the pages or reels of X-Men adaptations.

True focus, as Charles Xavier says, lies between rage and serenity.

This philosophical, intellectual and even spiritual clash between hope and doom rules the hearts of men, and may ultimately prove our salvation, or damnation.

To prevent the darkest path, we must first recognize it. To stop the darkest future, we must confront it.

The road to peace begins with the threat of war.

Ultimately, we must fuse the directed mindset of Magneto—a focus on the Actual—with the directed hope of Xavier—a focus on the Potential. Together, these seemingly dichotomous motivations and perspectives merge into a heavy and yet, freeing sense of purpose, and its resultant confidence.

So harness your power in these chaotic, rage-inducing times.

But tether it to hope, and I promise you, you’ll unlock a power you could hardly imagine.

And we’ll unlock a future we could only have dreamed of.

Until next time, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.

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