storge

Long, long ago, in a land far, far away, some asshole decided to divide the world up into the have and have-not countries. He called his own country the leader of the First World, those countries struggling and coming close to achieving that level of development--as measured by the yardstick he made up--the Second World, and the rest of the poor fuckers on planet Earth the Third World.

Sometime in the 1970s the CIA came up with a Fourth World, ethnic and national groups striving for statehood but not allowed for various reasons to form their own countries. The CIA was very interested in such movements, because they provided the CIA with a wedge to insert itself in the domestic affairs of First, Second and Third World countries, not least the Soviet Union and China. Appropriate back-channel funding mechanisms were created to keep CIA in that game.

Somewhat before and during this CIA-sponsored Fourth World movement--not to be confused with but neither to be considered completely distinct from the so-called Non-Aligned movement--the US military and intelligence agencies started playing around with hallucinogenic drugs. Former J P Morgan vice president Wasson discovered mushrooms for the CIA among shamans in Mexico. Ex-Yugoslav Andrija Puharich, when he wasn't channeling ancient Egyptian ETs for members of America's most elite families or doing mind-control experiments on unconsenting children, even wrote a book about his mushroom adventures, called The Sacred Mushroom--not to be confused with, but neither considered completely separate from, Dead Sea Scrolls commission commissioner Joh Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Somewhere in Puharich's plagiarism of Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu, between cameo appearances by Wasson, Aldous Huxley and whomever else, one of his test subject's mushroom-induced visions concerns a blue world seen in the sky. Another vision is a thinly-veiled visual pun on the title: The Sacred Mushroom Cloud.

The Hopi have a prophecy--you have to be careful here because according to the internet the Hopi have a prophecy to cover just about anything that might happen on planet Earth--about a "blue star" or blue kachina that appears in the sky before the end of this age.

There is some overlap between Hopi and Mayan prophecies concerning the ages, or worlds--in the Western tradition these are called simply enough the aeons--and the turning of the calendar. It's been a while since I cracked a Jose Arguelles book on the subject, but if memory serves, we are either in the Fifth World now, or are about to enter it.

Given that the intelligence communities always like to appropriate words, ideas and myths with any currency at all, I'd like to jump their shark-gun here and propose a Fifth World in keeping with the traditional culturally chauvinist idea of a First, Second and Third, aided and abetted by the Fourth. In my Fifth World, we don't want to achieve the level of development of Country X, the self-proclaimed leader of the First World. We are not struggling to catch up. Neither are we locked into poverty in the same manner that the First World imposes it on the Third. Neither do we even want our own state, an imaginary construct. We just want to be left the fuck alone and to survive on our own, without a totalitarian government, without a set of laws imposed by violence, without any state at all. It's also known as the no-state solution.

Next: an open letter to the director of the NSA tentatively called "If you're not guilty, you have nothing to fear and nothing to hide from us."