Hope is not a plan or a path to the stars.  It is something much more pernicious than that.

Surrendering to hope that everything will work out is an abdication of responsibility.  That’s not to say hope is useless, but it is only useful in the presence of determination to change your fate.

In geopolitics, it’s easy to get caught up in the narratives.  It’s easy to see things that aren’t there.  The human brain is a pattern recognition engine, looking for order in the chaos of incoming stimulus to identify threats and keep us alive.

Because, after all, the Universe is a hostile place.

No Hope For Old Countries

For decades, conservatives and libertarians of all stripes had little to hope for.  The globalists and the psychopaths that run the Western political establishment looked to have everything locked down.

Elections were shams.

The European Union model of an unelected technocracy looked ascendant. Thanks to central bank and military intervention, opposition movements could be snuffed out before they reached critical mass.

In Europe, any time the people voted against further loss of sovereignty the political class ratcheted up their opposition to the point of making them vote again.  Even today, as I write this, after all of the populist upsets in places like the U.S., Italy, Spain, Greece, Austria, Poland and Bulgaria, we’re still having to deal with a legislative betrayal of the popular will by the U.K. politicians and Deep State that run that country.  Theresa May signed off on a Brexit deal that is worse than the U.K.’s current deal with the European Union.

A few ministerial resignations are a small price to pay to save the EU, in their minds.  Sacrificing the U.K. on the altar of George Soros’ open society is as well. And since there is no longer any viable alternative in U.K. politics beyond actual revolution, the political elite feel they have little to fear.

The Brits gave up their guns after all, the people aren’t much of a threat anymore.

So, amidst the hostility and the descent into madness of the post-modernist Marxist Left stoked by the political elite to derail these populist movements it is easy for supporters of Donald Trump to over-react to them.

In fact, I’d wager that the very people stoking this ‘left-right’ divide are hoping for this exact outcome.  Keeping us fighting amongst ourselves is a brilliant strategy for maintaining control.

Hope Floats

But, what about hope?

In times of despair it is natural for people to reach out to that which gives their life purpose and extend it into all things, even things that aren’t there.  People who see Jesus in the reflections off of buildings or in the swirl of the cream in their coffee are not crazy, they are simply so in touch with their version of god and the hope that it fills them with that they see it everywhere.

Frankly, I’m a bit jealous.

And, I get it.  There is a copy of the Wilhelm-Baynes edition of the I Ching and three Chinese coins on a shelf next to my desk.  I bought it in my first week at college and I consult it on occasion.

Life is hard.  And we all feel powerless at times.  No doubt.  However, it’s what we do with that feeling that defines us.  The first rule of fiction writing is conflict doesn’t create character, it reveals it.

Like it or not, as Jordan Peterson continually points out, most people who claim to be atheists have a religion of some form or another.  They bristle at the words ‘god’ and ‘religion’ and invoke Santa Claus, but are okay with the word ‘spirituality.’

All semantic games aside, defining god as the motive force behind the Universe (my preference) or that controlling idea that gives your life purpose and meaning is the source of hope as well as the wellspring for purposeful action.

Without it why the heck do you get out of bed in the morning?  I mean, coffee is great and all, but it’s not a life goal.

The point being that just because you see patterns in the events of geopolitics doesn’t mean they are there.  Just because some events predicted come true, doesn’t mean someone has insider information.

And when an audience is given something that purports to ‘know The Plan’ and is so thirsty for salvation that they’ve concocted a cult of personality around Donald Trump, it’s not hard to see why they have latched on so strongly to Q anon, the anonymous Sphinx of 4Chan.

Stand Alone Hope

There is no doubt Q has become a phenomenon.  He may have even been real at one point. Or not.  He may be multiple people at this point.  He may be a copycat without an original, a Stand Alone Complex, per the great Ghost in the Shell anime from last decade.

This is the conclusion I’m rapidly embracing.

My favorite definition of such a phenomenon is this one from the Urban Dictionary.

Stand Alone Complex: Phenomenon where in behavior by unconnected individuals creates a seemingly concentrated effort. This behavior is copied from a previous source without an original.

In the show, the Laughing Man incident grew out of the intense frustration within an entire generation of Japanese with their corrupt corporatocracy.  A hacktivist forces a CEO confession on live television to their evil deeds while hacking the media feeds to conceal his identity.

He becomes a legend over the next decade which spawns copycat incidents, an army of Laughing Men.  Eventually he resurfaces but this time as a ruse, created by the government itself, subverting the Laughing Man as a symbol of hope to create more control.

Q is, in my mind, the manifestation of the intense desire of Trump supporters to take back their government.  And they want to believe there is an over-arching plan to Trump’s fight with the Deep State.

From the moment he was elected I’ve encountered this phenomenon, arguing with and alienating hundreds of people because I refused to believe that Trump was the Second Coming of the Founding Fathers and didn’t see his every move as another gift from the Orange Santa Claus.

Much of what Q writes is stuff that comes out of our own intense focus on events, culminating in someone ‘cold-reading’ (hat tip to Lee Stranahan for this idea) the online Trump army and handing them ‘proof’ of their own bias.

This is dangerous stuff, because it induces loyalty to someone we don’t know, who may not exist, who sometimes looks right, but more often than not is wrong.

I’ve always said that the people in charge may be the smartest people in the room, but they aren’t smarter than the entire room.

We are The Plan

Meaning, collectively, we have more information and wisdom than they do.  We can debunk their lies practically in real time, because the market is always smarter than the people trying to control it.

This is why central planning is doomed to failure.

As such, Q has become a wedge issue on the right with skeptics being hounded and dismissed on all issues because they don’t ‘trust the plan.’

But, what the Q army doesn’t understand is that we are The Plan.

What we are doing is creating the very reality that eventually catches up with future events, which gets filtered into cryptic posts by someone posting as Q on 4Chan.

If Q ever quotes J.D. Salinger, I’ll spit my coffee across the room.

Ironically, it is the skeptics still doing the hard analytic work to keep The Plan on track which Q’s army attacks as heretics.

And that’s where hope becomes dangerous.  Because hope unfettered leads to faith unexamined.  Faith in Q means not looking at facts.  It means chasing down clues like some silly game of Pokemon Go.  It means taking all of Q’s posts as the gospel truth when one could easily be a psy-op from a CIA back-bencher while another a cold-read from some cynical jackass who likes watching people jump.

It means dismissing real data or events as smoke screens.

It means saying every mistake Trump makes is not a mistake but another great 4-D chess move.

It becomes a self-reinforcing pattern to help us deal with the chaos because chaos is scary.  And it absolves us of our responsibility and just trust god’s (Q’s) plan.  That’s the bad part.  That is not what god is for.  God is our raison d’etre to go and remake the world every day.

The good part is that Q has inspired thousands to remain on the job and remain vigilant.  Will they come to realize The Plan is inside us not in the scribblings of a false prophet?  I can only hope.

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