🎹 Music suggestion to accompany this reading :

Víkingur Ólafsson – Bach: Concerto in D Minor, BWV 974

https://lnkd.in/eps7_xbw

When a head of state is forcibly removed, judged, displaced, or symbolically “captured,” the reflex is immediate: to choose a side, to justify, to condemn, to moralize.

The mind looks for a clean narrative.

History rarely offers one.

Events of this magnitude are never isolated facts. They arise within a larger psychic climate. Power does not appear out of nowhere. It crystallizes where attention, fear, desire, and abdication have already prepared the ground.

In the 1990s, Ram Dass warned that certain figures would emerge as mirrors rather than causes. Not because they were exceptional, but because they embodied what a culture was ready to project outward rather than recognize inward. The figure matters less than the function it serves in the collective imagination.

When a society externalizes its shadow,

it looks for containment through force,

punishment, or spectacle.

Yet shadow integrated becomes wisdom.

Shadow expelled returns as repetition.

There is a temptation to believe in “them” and “us.” It offers relief. It simplifies responsibility. It keeps conscience tidy. Reality remains less accommodating.

Humanity operates as a single field.

What manifests at the level of institutions

reflects what remains unresolved

at the level of individuals.

A civilization that defines itself as evolved while spending most of its intelligence, energy, and resources defending itself against itself reveals something quietly unresolved. Sophistication without inner coherence multiplies tools, not wisdom.

Nothing happening today stands outside law.

The law at work simply exceeds legal frameworks.

Inner abdication precedes outer domination.

Psychological surrender

precedes political capture.

Blame offers temporary discharge.

Understanding offers long-term transformation.

The most consequential shift never announces itself as a revolution. It occurs when individuals choose alignment over projection. When lives quietly begin to reflect the values they claim. When sovereignty returns as an inner posture rather than a demand placed on the world.

History does not ask us to agree.

It asks us to see.

And seeing, when honest,

already changes the field.

📸 The Blind Leading the Blind, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

This painting works with quiet precision.

No heroes. No villains.

No center of moral superiority.

Just a collective movement, lawful, almost inevitable, where each figure follows the previous one with conviction, while the direction itself remains unquestioned. It illustrates how power, blindness, obedience, and responsibility circulate through a system. Not imposed from above, but perpetuated through alignment without awareness. A perfect visual mirror for a moment where the question is less “Who did this?” and more “What inner posture made this possible?”