Mother as a Political Symbol

Our old ideologies are disasters, what comes next?

A few thoughts on how I see the world today…

Statue of Freedom from the dome of the US Capitol, a goddess blending Roman and Native American motifs

Today’s political discourse has not caught up to the rapid changes global civilization is going through. We have left the Iron Age and now find ourselves in the Space Age with no guarantee that we survive the transition. Our political leaders are hopeless and our cultural ideologies have not caught up yet either.

I think that the political frameworks of Left-Right, and Capitalism-Socialism, are outmoded 20th Century models that are increasingly irrelevant in the 21st Century.

The way I see it, there are two dominant ideologies in the West competing for power and authority over truth itself. Both ideologies are deeply flawed and are leading us toward disaster. Fortunately, there are other ideas out there.

On the political right, you have traditional conservative social and religious authorities, namely Christianity, whose reactionary Iron Age ideologies are rooted in patriarchy and social dominance hierarchies.

Let's call them the Flat-Earthers. Their trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

On the political left, you have the Enlightenment Globalist forces preaching scientific materialism and secular humanism. This group is committed to minimizing spirituality in the public square and can be outright hostile to religion. These folks fundamentally believe in centralized technocratic government, big government is a virtue in their mind.

These forces have been rising for over two hundred years since the French Revolution and have generally been winning public debates with orthodox religion. Their politics manifest as Marxism, Maoism, Socialism, and Globalism, and scientific materialism is explicit in their worldview. 

The problem is these folks are not getting the big existential questions correct, their political and educational structures are corrupt, and their policies are terrible and destructive. But they are also incredibly arrogant, increasingly close-minded, and generally occupy the driver's seat in most of our important intellectual institutions; academia, media, and government.

Let's call these folks the Geocentrists. Their trinity is No God, No Soul, and No Truth, but Yes to big intrusive imperial government.

Both of these groups have power, money, and agendas, and are organized at the highest echelons of society. Both groups have authoritarian tendencies and are actively undermining democracy. If either group wins it is a disaster for everyone else. 

The Flat-Earthers are hell-bent on fulfilling their eschatological storyline by moving on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and completing their prophetic Biblical journies, and to hell with all the dead and the horrified bystanders. I don't think the toothpaste is going back in the tube in Israel and the warmongers will get the wider Middle East war they desire. Radical Christian, Jewish, and Islamic holy warriors have been in a dark alliance for decades because they need each other as foils.

Meanwhile, the Godless Maoist Globalists are using traditional divide-and-conquer strategies to sow confusion, conflict, and division and actively undermine the ethics of global cooperation and individual agency.

There are dark political machinations that exploit people's goodwill and good intentions to create corrupt structures of technocratic control. Look no further than the disastrous COVID response and the top-down push for renewable energy for examples. They may speak of eco-socialism and public good but their behavior is all about centralized power.

I believe the 21st century is going to be a battlefield of the gods, i.e. ideological warfare. I think the Globalists are going to overreach and fail and the Flat-Earthers are going to revolt against liberalism.

The Flat-Earthers will win in the short run and seize control of the government because they are armed and organized and have a coherent worldview while the political left is neither organized nor philosophically coherent.

Sadly, solutions-oriented environmentalism has been pushed aside as the climate activist community has fallen victim to a nihilistic Malthusian worldview that believes we are running out of resources and that civilizational collapse is imminent unless we take dramatic action to shut down fossil fuel industries even though this will crash civilization and plunge billions of poor people into catastrophe.

In their vain attempts to shut down energy infrastructure, climate activists have become the narcissistic agents of the destruction they claim to fear.

I agree with all ecologists who believe we are facing a global five-alarm environmental fire, but I completely disagree with the zeitgeist on climate solutions. Climate activists have been putting ideology ahead of science for years. They are more concerned with maintaining their fundraising narratives and defeating their political opponents than they are with offering workable solutions that genuinely help the planet and the people.

I don’t want to be on either Team Flat-Earth or Team Geocentrist.

I want to be on team Heliocentrist.

Team Mother, Father, Son.

Team 21st century solutions.

I laid out my clean energy vision in my piece, Towards an Ecological Civilization.

Rather than promoting an economics of scarcity and politics of dominance, let's promote abundance and cooperation. For this, we need a new ideology and rallying cry that does not currently exist in the public mind. 

We need to recognize that the ecological threat we are facing is not that we are going to run out of resources like oil or minerals. The real threat is that industrialization has given us the power to accidentally destroy the web of life that sustains us through our own ignorance.

But destruction is the flip side of creation, and we also have the power to create a new Garden of Eden here on Earth if we choose to.

So let’s try and be on the side of cooperation and creation, and not on the side of division and destruction.

First, let's drop the arrogant Western scientific pretension that we live in a purely material world, and accept that consciousness is the underlying substrate of material reality. This universal consciousness is the Divine, the intelligence that put the universe in order, and which our souls are derived from.

We can bridge the gaps that plague physics today by simply admitting that Eastern mystical worldviews have insight and wisdom. We can harmonize quantum mechanics with classical physics by recognizing that consciousness is pervasive, just as Max Planck and Erwin Schroedinger, the inventors of quantum mechanics were always trying to explain, but no one would listen. 

We need to reinject spirituality and morality into the public conversation and recognize that mysticism and science do not contradict unless you are doing them wrong.

When I talk about Mother, I am talking about spirituality but I am not talking about starting a new religion. I am not a religious leader and religions take a long time to form while we need a political catalyst for people to rally around today.

I am talking about using the Mother of God as a political symbol for a global populist movement that just so happens to have the theological heft to go toe-to-toe with the Bible and Koran and challenge their patriarchal morality on sex and gender roles. And there are incredible stories and art that can feed the popular imagination.

The Heavenly Father is the highest authority, but the Mother of God is the final authority.

Mother as a political symbol enables us to frame a populist ideology that is rooted in ecological first principles, feminism, spirituality, beauty, joy, abundance, and cooperation, while also enabling an opening to renegotiate sex and gender roles, a process that society is going through already.

The Divine Mother, like Isis and the Virgin Mary, was always at the heart of popular culture and was always open to all people transcending race, class, and culture. She celebrates the pleasures of life and is inherently popular and universal, everyone loves her except those misogynists that hate her. 

The Divine Mother is also seen as the living web of life on planet Earth. Native Americans do not worship Mother Earth as a deity, but they do recognize the biological reality that humans are micro-organisms in a larger macro-organism, and that we are on the same moral plane as plants and animals. This morality has long been rejected by both the Flat-Earthers and the Geocentrists, but it can be revived.

We need some kind of first principles and symbolism that a new mass movement can rally around that leaves these old 20th-century ideologies in the past.

Why not Mother as a political symbol?