Waiting For The Wrong Awakening

You might have felt it .. the hope that someone, somewhere, is going to fix this: a politician with principles, a leader with conscience, someone who won't trample your common sense while claiming that your noticing is the problem.

If you have, you're not naive for hoping; it means you still care, but if you've been watching long enough, you'll also have noticed that they don't arrive often, and if they do, they don't last long, before they are assimilated or ejected.

That's not a coincidence. It's a pattern. It's not that all leaders are bad; it's that the system isn't built to support awakening. It isn't … and perhaps cannot be … self-aware. It doesn't reflect; it preserves. It repeats.

The convergence principle:

The more complex and hierarchical a system becomes, the more it prioritises its own survival over its founding mission. We see it in movements that become brands, in institutions that forget their purpose, and in leaders who begin as voices of truth and end as managers of narrative.

The System Has No Mind

This isn't corruption, although it often leads to it; this is convergence. All top-down systems converge toward control, even if they start with clarity, even if they're built by the well-intentioned. Because what matters in a system is not the motive; it's the logic.

And the logic of large-scale systems is almost always this: keep going, keep expanding, protect the core, eliminate friction. You can plug different people into it, change the slogans, and rotate the figureheads, but the deeper machinery doesn't notice, because it doesn't see.

This is the disillusionment many people avoid: the realisation that the system isn't going to wake up, because the system has no mind. It has memory, defence mechanisms, and feedback loops, but it doesn't have consciousness. And so it can't awaken.

It is as if we are waiting for a machine to become a person. It won't, and for some, recognising this is where the trance starts to lift.

The Real Awakening

Maybe you've tried to stay hopeful, to believe change is coming from the top. Perhaps you have argued, voted, donated, protested, and posted, refreshing the headlines in hope of some sign of sanity.

And yet, even if you have done all of those things, you're still here, watching the same cycles play out .. the same betrayals, the same distractions, the same slow erosion. Not because no one cares, but because the structure doesn't allow for anything else.

If this rings true, if nobody is coming to save us, then the awakening isn't coming from the centre; it's coming from the edges, from the margins, from the moments that don't go viral, from the people who aren't 'leaders'.

They're not fighting, fleeing, or playing pretend; they're simply seeing what is .. without filters; no longer full participants in the consensus reality .. the collective simulation we call normal.

The Wile E. Coyote Moment

That dissonance is everywhere. We see it in the debates that go nowhere, the arguments where both sides are technically right, but existentially incompatible. We feel it when we hear news that sounds like fiction.

It's like the moment when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff but keeps going .. his legs spinning in thin air, suspended only by his disbelief. We keep moving forward on assumptions that no longer align with the world around us.

And like the coyote, we're doomed to fall as soon as we look down. The only question is what happens when we hit the ground. Do we break? Or do we wake?

Not Everyone Sees It Yet

Pattern recognisers and truth-seekers are often the first to notice. The early warnings of dissonance might show up as conspiracy theories if we begin connecting dots, or .. if we don't .. as anxiety, burnout, fatigue, or emotional withdrawal.

Many of us assume we are broken, that something is wrong with us, but the deeper truth may be this: The clearer our vision becomes, the harder it is to fit into systems built on illusion.

And that's terrifying, because our society doesn't prepare anyone for what it means to awaken inside an unconscious system. There's no language for it, no onboarding, no integration process, no welcome mat.

The real situation:

A healthy person with a sound mind can feel as though they are going crazy inside a collapsing system that insists everything is fine .. especially when media and institutions attempt to gaslight us into compliance.

The Blind Leading The Blind

This is not just happening at the level of the individual. It's happening at every layer of the hierarchy. The people we look to for guidance; politicians, media figures, CEOs, educators, are often just as confused as anyone else.

The difference is that they're reinforced by their institutions, and more practiced at pretending. They may appear articulate and composed on the surface, but beneath that, they're often just as lost as anyone would be when facing the responsibility of solving serious, complex problems.

We must see this clearly. Most leaders today are not malicious, they are mismatched. Their internal models do not reflect the world we now live in. This is not a judgment of character. It's a mismatch or mental maps.

The fundamental problem:

We are trying to navigate exponential complexity with linear logic. We are treating dynamic, living systems like static ones. We are applying legacy scripts to live conversations. And we are failing.

What About Those Sharks' Teeth?

When systems fail, we instinctively look for the person at the controls .. someone to blame, someone to fix. It's a natural response. But over time, patterns emerge. We replace the players, and the outcomes don't improve.

Yes, there are those with conscious culpability; people who knowingly exploit the system for personal gain, who deceive, distort, or manipulate. But placing the blame solely on 'bad actors' misses the deeper point.

The system they operate within was not designed for wisdom, only for continuity. It rewards those who conform to its logic, regardless of their intent.

Waiting for all the bad people to become good, or all the ignorant ones to become smart, leaves us disempowered. Because the truth is harder .. and more liberating: these patterns persist not just because of them, but because of us.

Legacy Firmware in a Fractal World

The unconscious architecture of our species evolved for a different world. It was tuned for small-group survival, in late Palaeolithic reality. A few dozen faces, a few square miles of territory, a handful of archetypes: threat, kin, rival, elder, stranger.

And that worked beautifully, for what it evolved to do. But today, we are still running that firmware in a world that has gone from tribal to global, from myth to media, from story to algorithm.

The inevitable glitching:

Our environment has changed faster than our unconscious systems can evolve and therefore adapt. And so, things are glitching. We see it in people struggling to reconcile their values with their actions.

We see it in the way certain symbols hijack entire nervous systems: a MAGA hat, the wrong flag, the hammer and sickle, an AR-15. These aren't just ideas, they are tribal signals. They bypass thought and go straight to instinct.

We are asking humans to operate in overlapping moral universes with zero common grounding, and we're shocked when the result is rage, fear, projection, and conflict.

Your Reality is a Description

Reality, as you experience it, is the internal-to-you perception of what's really there. And that perception is not raw .. it's interpreted through learned meaning.

The cultural programming:

From birth, you were trained to see the world in ways compatible with your tribe, your region, your language, your inherited meaning structures. You built your model of reality not on objective truth, but on agreed-upon description.

You and someone from a vastly different culture may walk through the same town square, looking at the same storefronts, hearing the same sounds. But you will not have the same experience.

The survival logic:

"This is how humans once ensured their survival. The tribal mind evolved not to see clearly, but to see usefully for group preservation: who is friend or foe, who belongs or betrays, what is safe and what signals threat."

These models were effective in ancient times, when the world changed slowly. Generations passed in the same valley, hunting the same game, telling the same stories. The firmware of human perception only needed occasional tweaks.

So What Triggers an Update?

The question then becomes: what causes these ancient frameworks to evolve? The unconscious doesn't respond to lecture or logic. It responds to experience .. especially experience that breaks the illusion.

The breakdown process:

"This is the power of cognitive dissonance: when the inner model no longer fits the outer world, the psyche strains to maintain coherence. It bends. It stretches. And then … at some point … it breaks.

Some retreat .. into distraction, numbing-out, or clinging to old patterns in search of familiar ground. Or something else begins .. a shift, a widening of perception."

Not a moment of sudden 'awakening,' but the beginning of a movement: upward, inward, deeper. A change in the pattern of awareness. Not everyone experiences this in the same way. Some rise slowly. Some leap.

The recognition:

But when it happens, it's not superiority; it's alignment. A resonance between energy, experience, and a new kind of seeing. Seeing your old model or belief and understanding it correctly.

What is Freedom?

Real freedom is not the absence of boundaries. It's the presence of shared internal boundaries that align with your unconscious moral structures.

When the frameworks of my shared cultural and spiritual operating system allow me to 'run around' inside a space without bumping into anyone or anything that objects to my being there, or that I find objectionable, I feel free.

But if someone else builds a fence inside that space, something changes. If the fence coincides with my internal boundaries, I may feel insulted .. like the system doesn't trust me, or sees me as dangerous.

Worse still is when that fence cuts through territory that was, until yesterday, well within the domain of my internal permission. Now I feel limited or even imprisoned.

The collective response:

Now imagine that same feeling shared by millions of people at once. You will find those people staring at the fence, looking through the wire at the space they once inhabited.

From The Ends of The Earth

There is a staggering void between the blind elitism of mainstream political thinking and the wisdom we once held, just a few generations ago.

In his 'Ballad of East and West', Kipling wasn't mocking the gap between cultures; he was naming it. Not to widen it, but to reveal the point where two separate systems can bow to one another without collapsing.

When those two individuals, each rooted in their own sacred worldview and symbolic structures, meet with integrity, something rare happens: they recognise the sacred in the other, even if they don't understand it.

It's not unity through sameness. It's mutual reverence across difference. That's the moment Kipling captured. Not two cultures merging into one, but two whole systems locking eyes across the chasm, and bowing.

Integrity

Even in the absence of violence, even in 'peaceful fusion,' a shared structure can easily collapse. As an example: Christians who had made a leap of faith may begin to slide, if they have to live alongside Buddhist concepts.

The shared code begins to degrade, and beliefs that once held together the unconscious or spiritual framework for the individual, lose their metaphysical .. yet functionally real .. Integrity, by degrees.

The emotional barriers:

Yes, bigotry exists. But what if it's not all bigotry? What if a big part of it is the poorly-articulated recognition that previously coherent systems can collapse or fail when modified or interfered with, without a true understanding their architecture?

The deeper need:

Most people don't want to be special. They don't want to lead. They don't want to wage ideological war. They want to feel safe. They want to feel free.

This Is Not About Blame

It's tempting to point at the failures of leadership and blame them for the collapse. But blame is a dead-end. This is about clarity, and no more dead-ends.

Our leaders are not evil masterminds. They are holding stories that no longer reflect truth. They are running on belief systems that no longer match reality, trying to maintain the illusion of control in a world they don't truly understand.

The collective amnesia:

Our suffering isn't caused by bad leadership, but by a collective amnesia about how the human operating system works. And now, as things unravel, most people are still waiting for permission to say what they already feel: This isn't working, and no one knows what to do next.

Becoming Fluent in Our Own Machinery

This is the turning point: when you begin to see yourself as a system nested within systems. You're not just a personality .. you're an emergent structure of inherited patterns, tribal signals, hormonal feedback, ancestral fears, unconscious contracts, and unmet emotional obligations.

The recognition of programming:

You are running software that you didn't write, living patterns shaped long before you could choose them and acting out scripts you never consciously chose. It sounds terrible, but it's human, healthy and completely normal.

The curse is, that; until you see it, you are governed by it. This is what awakening means .. not some cosmic rapture, but the moment you realise that the real power isn't in fixing the world. It's in understanding how our internal models are shaping it as well as our experience of it.

Awakening

If you ask me to take part in an unfamiliar sport or activity, I'll work with the little I know. I'll get things wrong, and miss things you find obvious. Not because I'm stupid, but because I'm working with a small number of poorly understood variables.

If I stay open and persist, I'll observe, experience and encode the pattern-recognition, learn the wider variables. I'll stop thinking and start responding fluently, catching the moves before they're made.

Now replace the activity with life, the media, and the way people influence belief, behaviour, trust, and perception. Awakening, as I mean it, is learning to notice that influence in real-time.

To feel the manipulation landing, before it gets through and write or rewrite a belief, without your noticing. It's not about being smarter, or better. Just developing the ability to notice yourself and your reality at that system-level, and to understand what is happening.

The System Doesn't End .. You Outgrow It

Ultimately, this isn't about tearing it all down. You don't need to destroy the system, fight the machine, or overthrow anything. You just need to see it clearly enough to stop feeding it.

Because when a system stops working, it doesn't die in fire .. it dies in forgetfulness. The headlines stop landing, people stop pretending, stop believing. And something else .. quietly, slowly .. takes its place.

Systems don't need enemies to collapse; they just need to be outgrown .. like childhood beliefs, like last year's antlers, like skin that no longer stretches.

The real transformation:

This isn't a revolution. It's puberty. It's a shift from unconscious inheritance to conscious integration. You don't fix the system by breaking it .. you grow beyond the point where its rules still apply.

There Is No Onboarding Program

When the consensus reality falls apart on you, it doesn't feel like an intellectual shift. It feels like you're losing your mind. Like you're floating, alone, .. watching others, still the people you know, inside the dream you just exited.

The isolation of awakening:

Unlike the Red-Pill awakening sequence in the movie, 'The Matrix', when you wake up, there's no ship waiting. No Morpheus to explain. Just you, floating in the dark, wondering how to get back, or what happens next.

We could really do with an onboarding program. Not a political movement, not a new utopia, not a blueprint. A new lexicon .. a shared way of seeing, naming, and modelling what we are.

And it starts, simply, by seeing through the lie that something is wrong with you. You are not broken. You are not mad. You are not lost. You're waking up in a world that doesn't yet have the language to explain itself.

What This Chapter Reveals

Chapter 8 shows that waiting for external rescue keeps you disempowered. The system isn't going to save itself because it has no consciousness—only momentum and defence mechanisms. The real awakening comes from individuals who stop waiting for salvation and start seeing clearly.

The chapter reveals that most people in positions of authority are just as confused as everyone else, but they're reinforced by institutions that reward the appearance of competence over actual understanding. We're trying to solve 21st-century problems with Stone-Age psychology and 20th-century institutions.

Understanding this isn't cause for despair—it's the beginning of real agency. Once you stop expecting the system to wake up, you can focus on your own awakening. And when enough individuals achieve this clarity, the system changes automatically because it's made of conscious beings, not unconscious mechanisms.

This understanding is essential for Chapter 9's exploration of what happens when the unconscious finally says "no" to systems that demand spiritual compromise.