The Illusion of Stability

August 25, 2025

It’s late August—summer’s ending, school is starting. It’s tempting to believe everything is fine, fresh, new again. But look closer—does it really feel that way?

We pretend it is just another ordinary day in another ordinary year. But beneath the surface, the world is anything but ordinary. Everywhere, instability hums like a low-grade fever—sometimes spiking, sometimes subsiding, but never truly gone.

We have learned to live inside this fever. We scroll, we consume, we distract ourselves. Yet the cracks widen. Sometimes truth seeps through. Other times it slips back into the fractures, disappearing from awareness as if it were never there.

Carl Jung once warned that ignorance is the greatest evil. Only humans can ignore the obvious—turning a blind eye to suffering, a deaf ear to reason, shutting out both common sense and compassion.

Only man is capable of doing this for only man has grown the ability to scan his inner world and meld the areas of inner illumination with his outer reality, creating something new, something in-between both realms of being.

This ability allowed Homo sapiens to surpass every other being on the planet—a marvelous triumph of consciousness. But every gift carries its shadow. The price of awareness is responsibility, and humanity’s refusal to shoulder that responsibility—for self, for others, for the Earth—threatens to become our undoing.

Meanwhile, our collective ignorance fractures the very reality we depend on to survive. The Earth groans, societies splinter, and yet we look away.

Here are four signs of the instability we are trained not to see:

1. The Climate Clock Keeps Ticking.
Wildfires rage in regions once thought untouchable, while floods submerge towns that had no time to recover from the last disaster. Heat records fall, not one by one but in clusters, like dominoes tipping toward collapse. Scientists no longer speak of prevention—only adaptation. And yet adaptation itself is rationed: those with wealth can buy higher ground and air-conditioned bubbles, while the poor are left to suffocate.

2. Democracy in Name Only.
The machinery of democracy grinds on—debates, rallies, soundbites—while its spirit withers. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and judicial overreach hollow out the promise of representation. Citizens go through the motions of voting, but the choices are narrowed, the outcomes predetermined. It is democracy as theater, staged to reassure, not to empower.

3. War as a Weaponized Distraction.
While much of the public’s attention is turned inward toward partisan spectacle, war grinds on with devastating persistence. Ukraine is still under relentless attack by Putin, and in the wake of Trump’s hollow claim that he would end the conflict on “day one,” more Ukrainians have died than the total number of Gazans killed since October 7. Both wars are sustained by extremist perpetrators who wrap their brutality in flags, each side fueling destruction while claiming legitimacy. These conflicts are not isolated—they are global shockwaves, reminders that authoritarian power thrives on perpetual violence and distraction.

4. Truth Under Siege.
In this climate, truth itself erodes. Facts are not debated but discarded. Entire populations live inside alternative realities, curated by algorithms that prioritize outrage over understanding. Books vanish from schools, journalists are silenced, and propaganda spreads faster than fire. A society that cannot agree on what is real becomes easy prey for those who would weaponize the lie.

Conclusion

We are told this instability is temporary, that “normal” will return if only we wait. But what if instability is the new normal? What if the illusion of stability is itself the most dangerous lie of all?

History teaches us that empires rarely collapse in a single day. They erode slowly, quietly, until one morning the scaffolding of belief gives way—and everyone insists they never saw it coming.

The fever is not breaking. The fever is the condition. The question is whether we keep sleepwalking into collapse—or whether we awaken in time to remember what it means to be human: to protect each other, to defend truth, to honor the living earth that sustains us. Collapse is not inevitable—it is accelerated by our apathy, our surrender, our refusal to see. The ground is shifting beneath our feet.

The only real question is whether we will keep drifting with it into ruin, or finally take responsibility for turning toward life.

Archetypal Animation

Music: Xtal — Aphex Twin

Final Note

If this topic intrigues you, I write about these ideas and other in depth in my book Sapience: The Moment Is Now–man’s mythic balance between his gifts and his shadow. Also, check out my new graphic novel: Sapient Survival Guide.

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