There is a war between the rich and poor, a war between the man and the woman

Look, guys, this might be the most important thing I've written here in a long time. Are you listening closely? Right.

Forget all your labels. Forget all your words. Forget all your ideas and your images and your godforms and your shorthand and your colour-codes for the pieces on the global chessboard. It's all just froth on the surface. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao," and the true "tide in men's affairs" that is really shifting things around in this world is far, far deeper than any abstraction that you can come up with.

This is not about two teams of human egos, the Illuminati vs the Discordians, the liberals vs the conservatives, the pure vs the infidels. That's because human egos are not real. The world changes and shifts because of real forces - real physical forces, which express themselves in ideologies and consciousness.

This is why the Muslims will say "there is no power or strength but in God". Or a Marxist might put it: "the history of currently existing society is the history of class struggle". It is really, REALLY not about good guys and bad guys, of nice vs nasty, of a clash of ideologies, because all of that is a tiny, tiny tip on an iceberg, and the real things that moves are forces far more fundamental to reality than the individual human ego.

If Chaos Marxism has any point, and perhaps the jury is still out on that one, it's that your ego is not only unimportant in the grander scheme of things, it is lying to you. Your ego developed to help you play the game of personalities and ideologies and images. Your ego grew to help you navigate the Matrix. But the Matrix cannot tell you who you really are.

The whole point of everything we do on this blog has been attempting to cut through all the words in the world and bring us face to face with messy reality, a reality far, far deeper than the Real World of Horrible Jobs. Everything that happens to you might as well not be real if you only look at it with the eyes you've developed to play "the Game" of our current consumerist-capitalist society. You have to lean to look under the surface. It is possible for an individual to do this, with a lot of extremely hard and painful work. Easier to do it in a group, magickal order, political party, whatever, but you'll have to find a good one.

All human culture and ideology and language is simply a manifestation of deeper tides within Humanity as a collective entity, and at this point in history, that means the Class Struggle. Class struggle is how Humanity as an entity is coming to manifest itself - or kill itself off, if everything goes wrong. The forces of Waking Up as a planet or - well, not just staying asleep forever, but possibly even choking on our own vomit in our sleep, like John Bonham.

Things only REALLY change in the real world because a class - i.e. a current of humanity united by its place in the system of material production - makes things happen. Those foolish hippies in 1967 thought things were going to change because they took a bunch of acid, had more sex than was considered seemly and wore weird clothes. But of course the system took all that and commodified it and sold it back to them.

No, things really changed in the 1960s and 1970s because a new class - the middle-class managers and cultural technicians - became aware of themselves as a class and started agitating for the things important to it - consumption freedoms, for the most part, but among them important freedoms such as abortion, birth control, non-traditional sexuality, the breakdown of the classical family unit, and removal of censorship over expression. And they got all that, eventually, after fighting the Thatchers and Reagans who wanted to roll it back, simply because they were important to capitalism, and the system could grow much better and more efficiently if they got what they want.

A similar revolution is brewing around things like the Pirate Party and open-source. A new generation of cultural and infotech professionals simply want zero-priced digital content. And it will happen because if the corporate world doesn't give this new class force what it wants, that force will take what it wants. The whole question is: can corporate capitalism actually give the Intarwebz its liberty and still make profit? Because if not, we are coming up against a socio-economic convulsion that will dwarf the late 60's in importance.

But truly, truly, all this is for nothing if the majority class doesn't get into action and change things. Because up until that point, this is just the elite squabbling with the next bunch down the totem pole of history. A new chapter in history, but not a new volume. We really do need a class force which will crush corporate capitalism altogether - and that has to be a force which rallies the majority of the currently powerless, not just a small middle layer.

Anyway. *ahem* Nothing happens because of great men or women, their great egos, their abilities to manipulate memes, etc. That's just an ideology which reflects the cultural-techician class masturbating to its own cooklness. No, to use religious language again - if it looks like you just kicked a door down, God already opened the door for you and you happened to be in the right place at the right time. This kind of humility isn't popular, though, because it goes against the reward structure of the Matrix - viz., if great individuals aren't the ones who cause change, if they are actually only expressions of broader forces within human society as a whole, then the whole basis of intellectual property and authoritarian leadership goes down the drain.

Polish your mirror. You can't individually change the world. But you can perhaps see where change is coming, and be in the right place at the right time at the right frame of mind so that the positive currents within humanity - the forces of Waking Up rather than Choking In Our Sleep - can use you as their gateway into the world. This means really realising that you don't own anything, you don't have any rights, that your ego is an artefact of the Matrix, that you are froth on the surface of crashing waves, but that if you know all this you can surrender yourself to the real forces which move everything, and make yourself a useful part of evolving, awakening Humanity.

This is perhaps easier for those of you who don't have advanced egos which are admirably placed to earn privileges in the "Real" World of Horrible Jobs - those who have nothing to lose but their chains, in other words. But the industrial proletariat of Marx's time weren't just revolutionary because they had nothing to lose, it was because "without their strength and labour, not a single wheel would turn". The industrial proletariat are still the most vitally important class on the planet, but we cultural technicians in the advanced West also have our part to play. Will you play it, or will you play around in the Matrix until the whole thing shorts out?

I think I'm starting to understand the Hidden Mystery.