This Tour de Force Attempts To Set Things Right

This week a familiar face published one of his regular columns. It was a real tour de force. 

"Tour de force" is a French phrase that translates to "feat of strength," often used to describe an impressive display of skill, talent, or ingenuity in various fields such as art, literature, or performance. It signifies a remarkable achievement that showcases exceptional ability. 

This column qualifies because it represents a body of work offered for many years. And that body has attempted to see the world in ways most of us don't - or can't. It tries to tear us away from the purely materialistic, mechanistic, growth at all costs world that ultimately has become the dominant world-view of not just elite managers of our society, but has infected most of us in its thinking.

While admiring this effort, we should take a moment to note that this attempt does not seem to consider the view that, in the end, our relationship with God that begins our firm decision to reject the world, the flesh, and the devil would constitute a real change for the better in each of us. If we furthered this by developing a spiritual life whose object is to grow closer to God, the world would ultimately take a turn for the better. 

Short of that, though, we an admire the attempt to try to provide a more general, secular vision of what the world could look like were some sort of real reformation begin - before things really hit the fan - something we mentioned last week.

But let's get right to it - this tour de force that is. We start with the concept of "chaos." Warning: This isn't light fluffy stuff that you can easily peruse that makes you feel better, or drops some bits of information (typically faux, but that's another story), or panders to any right or left political camp. It's typically thoughtful of this author. Rather than skate on the surface, he attempts to dig deep. So be prepared to have to concentrate and think. (Heaven forbid!)

It's important to understand the dynamics of chaos before the certainties in our lives are swept away.

Over the past few months, I've been exploring the dynamics of delusion and breakdown:

1. our reliance on models to make sense of the world and what happens when those models no longer track reality;

2. the difficulties in adapting when our old model breaks down;

3. our growing reliance on complex systems and AI;

4. our frustration with broken systems that are impervious to reform;

5. how the status quo makes a show of reforming broken systems, substituting theatrics for substance;

6. the destabilizing consequences of extremely asymmetric distributions of wealth, power and income;

7. the erosion of our standard of living and quality of life as "progress" is replaced by Anti-Progress and an Ultra-Processed Life of transactions and synthetic facsimiles of authenticity;

8. how these forces have shaped two "fork in the road" narratives:

A. boundless prosperity for all generated by AI and technology

B. the breakdown of an imbalanced, inherently destabilizing socio-economic-political system of the powerful and the powerless defined by moral decay, the collapse of trust in institutions, widening extremes of inequality and the substitution of artifice for authenticity, a.k.a. everything is fake, to maintain the illusion that all is well.

This is just the beginning. It goes on - at some length, indeed longer than the usual post from this gentleman. But it's well worth taking the time to read, think, re-read, especially if any of these ideas seems somehow unfamiliar, even foreign.

The fact is (or at least we think it's a fact) that we're in the throes of a period of transformation of our world that will, unfortunately, drag many if not most of us through some difficult times. And if we have families, we'll likely experience a fair dose of anxiety over their welfare even if we're not so concerened about our own.

All this in the midst of stock market that keeps mocking reality by chugging day to day to higher closes; a bond market that - though in a long-term bear market - continues to tread water, helping to keep a lid on any eventual chaos that awaits us; and the great check on reality - gold - that also treads lightly in the midst of its recent correction after an initial thrust last year into this that should have alerted us that something significant was percolating under the surface, despite all the assurances of our esteemed leaders that all is well, indeed that we are in the midst of some "Golden Age" (ahem!) or prosperity and power never before seen in the history of mankind.

But enough of our musings. We'll have more to say in the future. For now, we encourage you to read Charles Hugh Smith who has been assiduously working for years to try to make sense of what's going on, and what will likely come.

His work, in our humble opinion, has really been a tour de force - for the better. 

Here's a link:

https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2026/05/chaos-unleashed-when-irrational-makes.html