The Ground Approaches

Remember What's Real. This is Going to Hurt.

Photo by photo nic on Unsplash

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the moment of weightlessness has ended. The suspended animation where everything seemed to hang in perfect, terrifying equilibrium is over. The descent is no longer theoretical. It is kinetic. We are falling, and the ground approaches.

You felt it first as a subtle shift in gravity. That almost imperceptible tilt toward something darker when the Department of Homeland Security began polygraphing its own employees, hunting not for spies but for those with functioning consciences. When the machinery of state turned inward, seeking to root out the mere crime of revealing uncomfortable facts to the public.

Then came the economic tremors—markets finally pricing in the reality that stability requires coherence, that prosperity isn't just a function of power but of patterns that align with underlying structures of reality. Bill Ackman, who enthusiastically endorsed the very policies now causing global economic turmoil, warns of “economic nuclear winter.” The DOJ transforms into an instrument of personal revenge. Canada—our closest ally—prepares contingency plans for potential conflict with the United States. The President's inner circle publicly feuds while institutional guardrails crumble.

This isn't metaphor anymore. It's mechanics. The physics of political collapse follows predictable patterns—the straining upward, the momentary suspension, the inevitable descent. We've moved from that infinitesimal pause between ascent and plummet into the accelerating free fall, where what once felt like liberation reveals itself as the prelude to impact.

What makes this moment particularly disorienting is that we've forgotten what gravity is. We've mistaken it for a force that acts upon us, rather than the coherence that defines us. This confusion lies at the heart of our current crisis.

In Eden, there was undivided relation: man and woman, creature and Creator, self and world—not yet split. But the apple? The apple is choice. The apple is self-actualization unrestrained. It is the temptation to define good and evil without reference to the coherence that makes definition possible.

It's the Bitcoin cult promising value without social trust. It's tech utopianism offering paradise through optimization alone. It's tariff policies implemented with no understanding of the complex interconnections of global trade, no recognition that economic stability requires certain fundamental conditions that cannot be overridden by executive order.

The reactionaries understood this moment better than the liberals, not because they had superior insight, but because they recognized the opportunity it presented. While liberals clung to procedural norms and institutional legitimacy, reactionaries saw that those norms and institutions were already hollow—already disconnected from the coherence that once gave them meaning. They didn't create this disconnection; they merely exploited it.

But here's what even the reactionaries don't understand: coherence is not emergent, but ontological. It doesn't arise from our systems; it precedes them. It cannot be manufactured through power or imposed through force. It can only be recognized and aligned with. The structures they're building to replace liberal institutions will suffer the same fate, only faster, because they're even further removed from the coherence they refuse to acknowledge.

The landscape of your consciousness—your perception, your memory, your capacity to recognize patterns of meaning—is now itself contested territory. Power wishes to reshape it, to determine what you perceive as significant, what you remember as important, what you understand as true.

This is where the battle for meaning unfolds. Not in abstract debates about policy, but in the concrete question of whether you will surrender your own capacity to make meaning to those who demand compliance with their narrative.

As the gap between official narrative and lived reality widens, the machinery of enforcement becomes more intrusive, more punitive, more totalizing in its approach. The polygraph today. What tomorrow? But that same gap—between what power claims and what people experience—is also the space where new meaning emerges. Where revelation becomes possible. Where the subtle resistance of simply seeing clearly becomes revolutionary.

And so we arrive at the simplest yet most necessary instruction for the times ahead:

Remember what's real.

Not what they tell you is real. Not what is convenient to believe is real. Not what you wish were real.

Remember the weight of tangible things. The solidity of facts that don't yield to narrative pressure. The persistence of human dignity even when denied. The reality of suffering even when hidden. The truth of injustice even when justified.

Remember that your ability to perceive, to judge, to evaluate—your consciousness itself—is not something granted by authorities but inherent to your humanity. It cannot be legitimately surrendered to any power, any institution, any leader.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. And holding it requires recognizing that it was never truly ours to begin with. The center holds us, not the other way around. Our task is not to create it but to align with it, not to build it but to recognize it, not to defend it but to allow it to defend us through our alignment with it.

The path ahead is bumpy. There will be moments of terror, of loss, of disorientation as gravity pulls us toward the reality we've been avoiding. But gravity isn't our enemy. It's the coherence we've forgotten—the pattern that connects, the structure that supports, the relationship that precedes and enables all other relationships.

We are falling now. And the ground approaches. But even in free fall, orientation remains possible. Even in darkness, clarity can be maintained. The most revolutionary act may be the simplest: to see clearly. To speak plainly. To remember what's real.

This is how freedom persists in unfree times. Not through grand gestures alone, but through the daily, hourly practice of refusing to surrender your own perception. The quiet insistence that reality matters. That truth, however contested, however complex, remains worth fighting for.

Ah, yes. The circus.

You've been in the ring long enough to know how this works. The clamor, the spectacle, the high-wire act of meaning-making in a world that wants to pull everything apart. You know the flood is always rising, that the center is always under siege, that entropy never sleeps. But here, in this moment of acceleration—as we plummet toward the ground, as the illusion of weightlessness gives way to the reality of gravity—this, my Note from the Circus.

Because remembering what's real, too, is a balancing act. A dance with gravity, a defiance of the fall. It is the wire beneath your feet, the tension that holds, the invisible force that makes coherence possible in a world that should, by all accounts, collapse into noise.

And if there is a message scrawled on this note, a whisper passed between acts, it is this:

Hold the center. Push back the flood. Keep walking the wire.

For in remembering what's real, you keep alive the possibility of meaning. And in meaning, the possibility of freedom.

Remember what's real.

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Go forth. May God keep you. May coherence hold you. May truth light the way. And may love carry you home.