The Center Did Not Hold
About 100 years ago, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called “The Second Coming” which has become one of the most well known and oft quoted poems of the 20th and 21st centuries.(1) In the first section of the poem there’s a line that reads, “Things Fall Apart; the centre cannot hold”. Over the course of the last few years, this line has continued to pop up in my mind as I’ve watched the clashes between the so-called “right” and the so-called “left” in the US become more and more contentious.
Paradoxically, as these hostilities have been growing and evolving there has been a notable parallel occurance ensuing beneath the more publicized domestic differences between the two factions. Although it’s rarely if ever spoken about in the Western legacy media news, in actuality, the core economic and military agendas among the political class’s traditional “left” and “right” in the US have become basically indistinguishable. (2)
De-democratization via Donor Deregulation
In other words, below the polarized surface, aside from a group of differences on the domestic front such as a woman’s right to choose, gun control, etc., there’s no longer a locatable, meaningful difference between the traditional political left and right when it comes to their shared dedication to programs such the continuation of perpetual war and neo-colonial expansion, exorbitant military spending at the expense of 90% of the American public and the unwavering commitment of politicians from both major political parties to the dictates of their multi-billionaire donors.
The needs and mandates of the voting public have become thoroughly secondary considerations to these careerist servants of power. As of 2024, there are no mentionably consistent exceptions to the donor owned model among the politicians in either major political party. Sadly, the US electoral process has been completely hijacked by the multibillionaire donor class over the course of the last 15 years as a result of massive campaign finance deregulation. (3) At this point, candidates’ careers are bought and paid for by individual multibillionaires and organizations of super-wealthy donors like Aipac, Space X, Koch Inc., Democracy PAC, etc. All of these orgs contributed 100s of millions of dollars to political candidates in both parties from 2020 – 2024.(4)
Punch and Judy in Plato’s Cave
It’s this underlying, overlooked, under-reported fusion of what were formerly two measureably separate core political agendas that has left us without a “center”. This loss of our “center”, this disappearance of long relied upon points of reference, has generated an anxiety, an uneasiness and, sadly, a tendency among many of us to hunker down more and more determinately in our respective red and blue fighting corners.
We’d rather stew in circular media generated Punch and Judy-like arguments, focusing solely on characters like Donald Trump and/or Joe Biden, than take the time to look outside of the corporately curated Western news media bubble. As Plato once put it in his “Allegory of the Cave”, we’d rather “watch shadows on the wall” than venture beyond the mere reflections we’ve grown so accustomed to spending our precious energy focused on.(5)
What Rough Beast? What Drugged Sheep?!
Over the course of the last 8 or 9 years, I’ve seen several writers quote another line in “The Second Coming” that reads, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”. These writers were somewhat playfully, though in one or two cases quite seriously, implying that Donald Trump is the equivalent of the “rough beast” that, in their view, is coming to destroy democracy and civilization itself.
I’ve also heard Republican friends of mine insinuate or outright say that the Democratic Party, specifically the Biden administration, is “evil”, or something akin to the rough beast in Yeats’ poem. To be perfectly honest, on a few occasions over the course of the last eight years, I’ve had thoughts along these lines about both the Republican and the current Democratic parties.
If our political activity and opinions are centered around this sort of mental activity, without realizing it we’re engaging in counter-productive self-distraction. it’s simply a self-deceptive form of denial. Again, I speak not from on-high here but rather as one who has partaken of this debilitating and addictive drug. When we do this we’re behaving like sheep wandering around in circles in a narrow, fenced-off corporate media made pen. A pen that is soul-squashingly “comfortable” in its familiarity. Even more interestingly, this pen, the seeming limitations on what we believe our options for action are, is ultimately illusory. I’m digressing though. We’ll have to discuss possible exit routes from these illusory limitations in a future article.
An Interpretation of Yeats’ Poem
I’m now going to take a shot at coming up with a succinct interpretation of W.B.Yeats’ poem. I’m going to attempt this little analysis of “The Second Coming” through a somewhat provincially tinted social-historical lens that takes into consideration what has transpired during the 104 years since the poem was written. No sources other than my own thoughts and feelings will be used to come up with this interpretation. Scouts honor.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer”: As we, collective humanity, move through the ever expanding circling cycles of history, somewhere along the way in our journey, perhaps not terribly long ago, relatively speaking, we (The Falcon) lost contact with the one who (or that which) formerly represented terra firma, safety, and/or “home” to us (The Falconer). This loss of connection with where we came from has generated psychic conditions that have “loosed” a “blood-dimmed tide” of confusion, of conflict, of violence among us.
The individual and collective trauma generated by this era of alienation, violence and despair has produced a forgetfulness of our true “nature”. This forgetfulness has “drowned” what was formerly a “ceremony of innocence”, of interconnection and interdependence among our human species, and turned it into a sectioned off world of competing, warring factions focused on the acquisition of power and wealth.
The poem then moves into a description of a “revelation” that is at hand, a “Second Coming” that calls forth powerful, quasi-apocalyptic images which signal the activity of “Spiritus Mundi” or the collective World Spirit, the Source of all universal creativity and power. After “twenty centuries of stoney sleep”, of forgetfulness of Self, what has come forth and is headed toward us during this particular historical turn within the ever-widening cycles of time, has appeared as something that is, at least on its surface, terrifying.
What of The Second Coming?
Regarding the question of whether Yeats’ world renowned, century old poem contains any sort of useful message or warning for 21st century humanity is something that you, if you wish to, will have to decide for yourself.
As for myself, I think that the poem packs a pretty solid occult punch that can be taken in a few different ways. One fairly popular interpretation is that we’re all on a highway straight to the pit of hell. I think this is a pretty shallow reading though, personally. I tend toward believing that the poem is hinting at the inevitability of a long overdue “house cleaning” that’ll be initiated by a particularly audible alarm clock with an appropriately scary ringtone. Something loud and powerful enough to wake us from “twenty centuries of stony sleep”.
Sooner or Later
In previous articles I’ve written in detail about massive global changes that are currently effecting our present day to day lives without our (yet) knowing about them. These newly developing events are rarely spoken about in any depth in corporate Western media. I’ve included links to what I view to be two of the most relevant articles I’ve penned within the context of what’s been alluded to and/or spoken of so far in this piece of writing.(6),(7) I strongly encourage anyone who’s interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the massive changes that are happening and that are about to happen on a global scale, to read these articles, which can be linked to in the citations section below at numbers six and seven.
Whatever is approaching on our horizon, however startling and/or frightening it might appear to be at first blush, I believe we’re going get through it. Heck, we might even end up better off as a result of encountering it and learning from it, whatever “it” is.
What is certain though, is that the legitimacy of our being divided amongst ourselves due to allegiances to the traditional political factions known as “left” and “right” is a thing of the past. There is one core coherent objective left for 99% of this country, and for that matter, for 99% of this world to align with now: Sooner of later the democratic process must be taken back from the small contingent of greed-propelled globalist oligarchs that have usurped it via manipulation and bad faith.
Until power rests in the hands of the social whole as opposed to it being wielded by a wealthy few, the march of Human history will remain enchained, “turning and turning in the widening gyre”, cycling through historical era after historical era of violence.
CITATIONS:
1) “The Second Coming” (link to the poem) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
2) https://theglitteringeye.com/the-unipartys-rush-to-world-war-iii/
3) https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/02/how-citizens-united-changed-campaign-finance/
4) https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizations
5) https://interestingliterature.com/2023/03/plato-allegory-of-the-cave-summary-analysis/
6) https://www.pressenza.com/2024/11/the-biggest-world-news-item-of-2024-was-not-the-recent-us-election/
7) https://www.pressenza.com/2024/03/the-birth-of-the-american-uniparty-and-the-rise-of-the-multi-polar-world-order/
