If you had logged on to X.com from January to June of 2024 and posted any assertion of hope for the future, an overwhelming majority of the replies received would almost certainly have been:
“Nothing ever happens.”

In light of recent events, the people saying that were wrong. However, there was something directionally correct in their doom-minded assertions. For the better part of a century, very little did, in fact happen—at least when compared to prior periods stretching backward from WWII to the rise of the Greek city state.

And—as the more astute of the naysayers would likely be able to articulate—a prime reason nothing happened was because power had been diffused among various cabals of goblins and idiots. Reality itself suffered from a lack of concentrated will sufficient to make anything big and sudden happen according to plan and on purpose—substantial, positive changes were thus impossible. The gears of history lacked motive power.

What the naysayers would have been incapable of telling you—but what they’re learning at the moment—is that the necessary power to place those gears in motion, the cosmic mechanism by which the diffuse becomes concentrated, is a Great Man. The explanation of “nothing ever happens”—as well as why it’s begun happening once more—involves why the Great Man went missing from the historical record in the first place and how he has once more appeared on the world stage.

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“When men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison. – C.S. Lewis

In his 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel J. Boorstin explains how, working hand in glove, the state and media buried the Great Man alive to eliminate the most capable and prominent individuals within society that possessed the capacity for swaying the hearts and minds of the public at scale. To do this, they took a naturally occurring cultural phenomenon that had begun in earnest during the explosion of print media in the 19^th century and (in conjunction with a willing if ignorant public) reliably distilled that organic trend it into a formula for neutralizing the hero—that ultimate category of human excellence of which Great Men are the apex designation.

The almost haphazard process by which this initially unfolded—and which provided the raw material for it to eventually become weaponized into a formula for eliminating individual rivals to the State’s narrative control—involved: 1) the public organically conflating the words “hero” and “celebrity” into synonyms, and 2) utilizing the resulting semantic confusion to reroute hardwired psychospiritual needs.

An entire chapter of Boorstin’s book—”From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-Event”—lays out this process. Between a fifth to a third of that chapter is given over to disentangling the definitions of the once distinct terms “hero” and “celebrity.”

Heroes: embody standards that antedate modern civilization in the way the cornerstones of a house antedate its doors, boards, beams, windows, and walls. Heroes undertake and achieve tasks which rank them among the ancients—of whom they are direct spiritual if not genetic descendants. They’re gestated over the minimum span of the single generation required to assess whether their deeds were born of the heroic tradition that stretches back to time immemorial—a necessary span of time that enables the populace to see whether these deeds will add to and advance that same tradition.

Celebrities: exist “inside” time, are contemporary, are made and distributed by the media, and can be sustained independent of any criteria of achievement—and sometimes by any criteria of any sort—only by that same media. Consequently, they are primarily “known for being well-known,” and exist as a sort of tautological solid-state hologram. As the human mind has an archetypal category stretching back tens of thousands of years for “a hero” and “royalty”—but few if any other categories of far-flung notoriety—in order that they may resonate with the public, the celebrity is cast in the mold of greatness. This despite often being nothing more than a better publicized version of any given unit of the public.

Boorstin’s clearest statement of the difference:
“The hero is distinguished by his achievement. He created himself. He is a big man. The celebrity is distinguished by his image or trademark. He is created by the media. He is a big name…We can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero. In a now almost-forgotten-sense, all heroes are self-made.”

There is, however, a point of contact between these terms that accounts for the public’s confusion and the state and media’s ability to render them as synonyms in the public consciousness—the public’s urge to imitate both heroes and celebrities.  But while both invoke that urge, they do so in distinctly different ways.

Hero imitation has an inspirational bent of an essentially spiritual character. What creates the hero’s renown is the accomplishment of some extraordinary feat.  Exactly replicating a substantial achievement that was practically, or literally, superhuman makes precise replication of them difficult to impossible.

Given the celebrity’s fundamentally insubstantial nature, the public’s imitation of them is a sort of shallow, material-based aspiration which is much easier to precisely replicate—for example, by reliably aping some movie star’s speech, dress, mannerisms, or political opinions.

Having outlined his case, Boorstin then drives home a sharp point. Since celebrities lack the substance (verifiable, extraordinary achievements that inspire) of heroes, they can quickly and easily be spun out of thin air by the media and dissolved back into it just the same vapor. The press can then go “negative” on them in coverage, then (after a period of protracted reputational assault) strategically cut off the flow of salacious gossip and puff pieces—both of which are the source of the public’s fixation with celebrities—and the societal attention that sustains them psychologically and financially vanishes.

With the public already undergoing a categorical confusion between celebrities and heroes that was being driven by a profit hungry media, this held out a tantalizing  solution for a substantial problem.

The problem: As lightning speed, far-reaching mass media achieved post-adolescence across the West in the 1930s, established governments witnessed the power of the willful, charismatic man of vision and achievement to capture the hearts and imaginations of the public—and to usurp elite control over their understanding of “sense-making” social narratives in the process. While the persuasive power of nascent or fully developed Great Men had always existed, the fact it was no longer dependent on spreading by the slow but steady, and reliably exaggerated, means of word of mouth—or through carefully edited, printed recounting—created a tremendous threat to herding the population. Beaming into the intimate spaces of their living rooms and automobiles, one man could challenge the entire narrative control structure of the State.

But if the ongoing process by which Heroes were being absorbed into celebrities could be formalized and accelerated, then, hypothetically, all nascent Great Men could be dissolved entirely into figures as insubstantial as sport stars—and done away with just as quickly.

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“Today, no one bestrides our narrow world like a Colossus.” – Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

In the context of America, Boorstin makes the case that one man was responsible for the government’s decision to harness this conflation of hero and celebrity into a hero- neutralization-formula: Charles Lindbergh.

His solo flight across the Atlantic captivated the world that created the commercial aviation industry—in which Lindbergh was a central figure—and altered the flow of people and goods across the planet. Alone, those two accomplishments serve to make him a hero. But he was also the six foot three, square jawed, co-inventor of life-saving technology like the perfusion pump, a skilled and successful writer, a talented public speaker, an advanced student of mystical philosophy, and the son of a US congressman.

From the instant he gained public recognition, the hyper-magnetic effect he exerted on the public reaped windfalls for the press. Lindbergh stories did tremendous numbers for years, so the press kept running them—and when there wasn’t a heroic accomplishment, they gave him the celebrity treatment and the record-breaking numbers held regardless.

How he dressed, who he associated with, dated, and married, how much money he made, what car he drove—to keep the till overflowing they turned the American hero into a klieg-lit Hollywood star. As a consequence, for the first time in mass media’s history a genuine hero was successfully crammed into a much more recognizable “celebrity” mold of public recognition that was in greater supply. The culmination of this—at that point still informal and organic—process of transfiguration came with the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Lindbergh’s son.

The press’s treatment of this personal tragedy—a horrific event that was arguably a knock-on-effect of the media’s incessant reporting on every aspect of his life, including where he lived—marked the progression of the by-then commonplace “celebrity coverage cycle.” The internal logic of this cycle dictated that, eventually coverage shifts from adoring to salacious before culminating in explicitly derogatory “reportage” required to dispose of the individual in question. When those derogatory stories eventually came, they marked the formalization and weaponization of this  soft-power process of hero neutralization—a meticulous reputational hit-job directed by none other than the then sitting U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

For both personal and political reasons, it was imperative FDR utterly destroy the “Lone Eagle.” On the personal front, Lindbergh was the only man more well-known and liked than himself by the electorate. Had Lindbergh run he would have presented the greatest threat to FDR’s continued hold on power. On the political front writ-large, Lindbergh held the singular position of being both pro-US military and pro-isolationist—making him a considerable obstacle to an FDR-helmed bureaucratic class obsessed with onboarding a highly opposed American public to their implicit goal of building  a “morally defensible empire” through intervention in a Europe that was priming for war.

One reason Lindbergh was such a substantial obstacle to FDR and company’s aims is that he possessed a type of unceasing, world spanning press coverage that was generally only commanded by political leaders of international standing or granted to media-created celebrities that could be easily checked or erased. Another was that he was still imbued in the eyes of the majority of the public with the self-made, substantial, inspirational notoriety which coded him societally as that apex category of hero, the Great Man.

That the media was called forth by Western political elites to fix the problem they’d created (their profit lust being chiefly responsible for having supercharged his notoriety) was inevitable. To do so, they rolled up their sleeves and enacted a brutal program of misinformation, misrepresentation, and slander, followed by a starving of attention to grind down, sweep up, and dispose of the hard to kill Lindbergh.

Their efforts succeeded, and in working out just how to discredit and destroy Lindbergh in the press—a trial and error process that involved calling him a coward, framing him as a Nazi, a spy, a traitor, a has-been—they created a formula for identifying and neutralizing not just all Great Men, but every sort of “nascent” hero.

In practical terms, the formula was applied in the following manner:

• Before they could solidify financial or psychological independence through accomplishments that made them inspirational, men of singular achievement were identified and turned into celebrities.
• Targets were fed an intoxicating amount of adoration that stoked their ego and fostered their dependence on the media for continued access to the public attention
• That attention (if the process worked) then quickly supplanted their individual achievements as the basis of self-worth.
• If done with the utmost finesse, this “celebrity-based attention” frequently became the primary or sole source of their income, compounding psychological dependence with financial dependence.

Carried off to completion, any one-time hero or potential Great Man that took the “King’s shilling” of celebrity could be psychologically, reputational, and/or financially destroyed with the same ease as some uppity starlet.

This formula was so effective that by his death in the 1970s Lindbergh was almost entirely scrubbed from American popular consciousness. Each subsequent decade would produce candidates for “Great Men,” and in almost every case—if applied with precision—that formula proved just as successful.  For 80 years it worked almost without fail—and in the rare instances where it did fall short, hard-power neutralizations were effectively applied through the barrel of a gun or the snipping of break cables.

But then, as tends to be the case in an active universe, something happened.

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“Celebrities are differentiated by the trivia of their personality, Heroes assimilated to one another by the great, simple virtues of their character.” – Daniel J. Boorstin

Whether in spite or because of intense evolutionary pressure, the Taoist-ic, Schopenhauerian Will finds a way to manifest itself within, and to propel forward, the fundamental processes of Nature. With 80 years being little more than a blink to it, this Cosmic Will adapted to the bureaucratic obstacle that blocked its full instantiation. Pressing up quietly through the blood force of the population, it did what it had done countless times before in human history.

It steadily evolved a new breed of Great Man adapted to a hostile environment. The two individuals it selected for this task were Donald Trump and Elon Musk—both of whom, in their own unique ways, would go on to shatter the soft-power formula designed to remove the Great Man from history.

In the spirit of Boorstin, understanding how they accomplished this involves both a clarification of categories and a delineation of the trajectories of each.

TRUMP – The Tycoon

Donald Trump initially captured public attention through shrewd, far-sighted, and often daring to the point of swashbuckling, real-estate moves that transformed him into one of the richest men on earth. In the American mind, he occupied the space of tycoons like Carnegie and Morgan, but with a dash of P.T. Barnum. As such, the public loved him and the media moved units and stuffed bank accounts by applying the de facto state-approved formula for turning Great Men into celebrities.

But from the start, Trump deftly manipulated the time-tested hero-neutralization process in two ways. The first was that, in the heroic mold, he never stopped accomplishing—turning risky acquisitions into towering successes, building opulent structures, and repeatedly surviving in and thriving after societal and personal economic crises. The second was that he absorbed the salacious, trivial, and insubstantial press spotlight trained on him and refracted that beam to generate his own, seemingly non-threatening narrative of power.

Mixing a personal charisma that was practically supernatural with a P.T. Barnum-esque skill at self-promotion into the media’s thirst for sales and ratings, Trump conjured himself into the living embodiment of American success. Every ginned-up story of love affairs, tirades, and his Caesar-esque tastes and spending was carefully bent by him to suit the image he’d crafted and projected with the help of a crack P.R. team.

Entirely intentional or not, the genius of this two-part approach was that by making himself the living embodiment of success in popular culture, he circumvented the occasional media attempts to slander him. He accomplished this by merely continuing to be successful and—like his skyscrapers—larger than life. Additionally, as he continued to curry the overall favor of the media in the 1980s by driving up their profits with every story about him, at no point did he fall into the trap of “being well-known for being well-known.”

Trump sublimated this hero-neutralizing trick by making himself well-known for being an incredibly successful man that built one casino and skyscraper after another through determination, shrewdness, and grit—and looking unbothered and unbeatable while doing it.

After a major bankruptcy in the early 90s, the media soured on and mocked him, setting him up for a characteristic disposal that typically marks the end of “celebrity.” But due in no small part to never having succumbed to hollow celebrity and maintaining as central to his self-conception the heroic quality of achievement, Trump bounced back to even great heights—both financially and reputationally.

In the early 2000s, however, his ability to “bounce back”—which would become a commonly accepted attribute during the 90s—evolved into something greater. The start of the 21^st century would see Trump wrench media control of notoriety into his own hands when he launched his hyper successful “reality” T.V. show The Apprentice. Trump collaborated with the entertainment industry to present himself to the world on a weekly basis as a powerful, decisive man of action. The show was a phenomenal success and in the process it enabled him to dial down (though leave intact in a form that was more to his liking) previous salacious and gaudy depictions in the “celebrity” mold and to boost his image as a “Great Man.”

As comical as it may sound, The Apprentice represents the first serious stride at reversing the hero-neutralization formula that anyone had made since the 1930s—tentatively indicating that it was possible to absorb the “celebrity” into the “hero” and not vice-versa. When Trump launched his even more successful “Celebrity Apprentice” spinoff, the concrete had firmed up entirely, so to speak. In its configuration and set up, this show maximally implied to the edge of explicitly stating that Trump was in a position above not just any of the celebrities participating in the contest he was officiating, but above any celebrities, anywhere.

In a move that should be studied by future generations, he engineered a way to manipulate a wholly oblivious media into placing him into a category above “celebrity” (which, by default leads quite naturally to the utmost category of hero, the Great Man) within the context of a show that emphasized the “reality” of the entire arrangement.

One night a week from September to May, a major media network presented Trump as the Greatest Man in America.

Concurrently, Trump began using, and quickly mastered, Twitter during the first half decade of its existence. His mastery of social media empowered him to further manipulate and shape his public image without reliance on the media or a P.R. machine. While a seemingly novel if not entirely trivial (and always entertaining) habit at the time, his mastery of the platform ultimately provided him with the “wrench” he would need to reconfigure the very apparatus of “public visibility” and, once done with his adjustments, fling that wrench into the spanners of the media and entertainment machine when a situation of open warfare arose between them.

MUSK – The Lone Genius Inventor

While Musk also broke through public consciousness with heroic achievements, unlike Trump he did so not purely as a businessman. In the blended realm of tech/finance with Paypal, then with the bold move of purchasing Tesla, followed by the even bolder moves of Space X, Starlink, and X—Musk embodied the equally American Great Man subcategory of “the businessman inventor” best personified by his predecessor Thomas Edison.

Whereas Trump bent and reshaped the media apparatus in way that undermined the neutralization formula’s efficacy, Musk exploded it. Not only that, but in a truly bizarre twist, his acomplishments fractally replicated the trajectory of technological achievement in the West over the past half millennium. He went from innovation (if not invention) in the realm of currency with Paypal to inventions and improvements that advanced human locomotion, communication, warfare, mining, and combined the human instinct to colonize uninhabited landscapes with the ancient, essentially spiritual aspiration of ascending to, and ultimately inhabiting, the heavens themselves.

By itself, this phenomenal string of heroic achievements would have made—and to an extent did make—applying the Lindbergh formula to Musk difficult. But something even more incredible occurred between half and two-thirds of the way through Musk’s titanic string of accomplishments.

Musk captured the attention of powerful people in the entertainment industry that had an avowed, uncowed admiration of heroes of mythic proportions. So much so that Musk was explicitly used as the model for one of the largest and most lucrative mythmaking/myth amplification endeavors ever undertaken by the global entertainment industry—he became the real-world blueprint for Tony Stark.

That initial film catalyzed the all-time, box office bursting “expanded Marvel universe” franchise. And with every subsequent film where Robert Downey Jr. channeled Musk’s personality traits into the already mythical American hero of Iron Man, he more deeply engraved an unconscious understanding of himself as THE Great Man for hundreds of millions if not billions worldwide—a process that went on for just over a decade.

With regard to Musk’s aforementioned achievements in the field of tech and engineering, there was also another layer to them that inspired the American public. In a way that spoke to the heroic period of American invention that was the 19^th century, Musk’s achievements were not conceived of or driven by characterless corporations staffed with (at best) competent technicians. Nor were they helmed by anonymous, replaceable CEOs and boards that have nothing to do with the founding or cornerstone successes of the company.

That was never going to happen with Musk. Because—as a consequence of his entire life-history—he demonstrably despises cowardly, stupid, and talentless people. That no segment of society embodies these loathsome tendencies more than the federal government and the media made the collision Musk would wind up having with them inevitable.

But when that head-on crash finally happened, the State found themselves pinned in the logistical wreckage. By virtue of his ability to do things no one else could, Musk had embedded himself deeply into the national security apparatus through both Starlink and SpaceX. Removing him unceremoniously would amount to crippling their ability to address and execute core security functions at the international level.

This made their best remaining option for bringing him to heel a combination of intimidation-based government investigations and the deployment of the corporate media to hound and slander him. When Musk eventually struck back, he did so by purchasing his own press outlet. While not an unprecedented move in the history of business and politics, the media outlet he chose had unique dimensions that produced unanticipated problems for the state and media.

In purchasing X, Elon immediately came into a possession of a container ship’s worth of dirt on US intelligence agencies that had been creating organized “free speech suppression” campaigns—at least one such incident of which manipulated the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. More importantly—and unlike, for instance,  Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post—Musk bought a “news outlet” that enabled not merely him to amplify his opinions, but the whole world to amplify theirs.

With X, Musk gained a weapon with which to explode the very formula designed to destroy Great Men, and also an instant, worldwide army with which to fight the state and media on the battlefield of intelligence gathering and propaganda dissemination. Millions of “faces and anons” distributed through the app’s user base shared the exact same loathing Musk felt for the talentless, petty, scheming, lying goblins that would deny and distort reality as they simultaneously attacked those of merit and ability. As such, these people were instantly disposed to favor the man who’d just freed them to speak their minds on this very subject.

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Variations in their individual character and specific tactical approaches aside, two strategic insights enabled Trump and Musk to deploy tactics that shattered the soft-power hero-neutralization formula that went a long way to ensuring “nothing ever happens.”

Firstly, neither ever abandoned a heroic self-conception as the fundamental basis of their worth. Both consistently remain men of will and vision. At the foundational spiritual level, no man of that sort will ever permit a class of faceless, talentless, do-nothing, “credentialed” birthday party magicians posing as the fifth estate to arbitrarily confer or revoke a designation of greatness—especially when they’ve earned that distinction from the people through enacting feats of practically superhuman concentration, determination, and courage.

Secondly, after witnessing several of their peers and countrymen get reputationally beat to death over trifles, each man came to accurately recognize the media as correctional officers in a narrative prison run by the state. When each eventually pushed back against that once-friendly media in opposition to this injustice, they were savagely set upon with truncheons.

At which point, each treated the tremendous wealth he’d attained through personal feats and victories as his “right hand” and the “notoriety amplifying” celebrity status the media had conferred (but was by that point incapable of revoking) as his “left hand.” Independently of one another, they then wrapped each hand around the handle of a hammer called Twitter/X and then threw their entire back into using it to beat permanent holes and dents into the reputations and psyches of the press and entertainment industry.

It was a thrashing that immediately re-enforced the long-recognized (if sometimes “celebrity” obscured) heroic status of each man in the hearts and minds of the substantial portion of Americans that felt the mainstream media should be loaded into one of Musk’s rockets and fired into the sun.

But “making the dragon bleed,” so to speak, was not the sole or even main quality that encouraged a majority of Americans to subconsciously identify Trump and Musk as the manifestation of the long-thought-extinct Great Man. The trait responsible for that was one foundational to every form of heroism throughout the whole of human history: endurance.

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The labors of Hercules, the torture of Samson, the trials of Parsifal, the wounds of Siegfried—every hero of legend and myth across world culture endures pain and punishment that would spell the obliteration of a normal human.  In no small part, it is this characteristic that ensures when the time comes to land the killing-blow, no power in the universe will be capable of obstructing the hero’s success.

As the most powerful institutions on earth hurled lightning bolt after boulder at both Trump and Musk, each man shook them off. And with each deflection, every American that still possessed a soul felt something deep inside it stir.
On July 13 in Butler Pennsylvania, as Donald J. Trump rose from the stage with blood on his face and bit of his head torn off by the modern equivalent of a dragon’s tooth, that designation became undeniable. Before the world stood a Great Man, the likes of which had not been seen in almost a century.

Trump’s survival of that initial assassination attempt is now widely, if not universally, recognized as miraculous. That was only a single aspect of the miracle, however, because when Trump rose up from floor of that stage, a feat that had been impossible for almost a century was accomplished. In a total inversion of that soft-power formula, the aspects of “celebrity” attached to Trump were dissolved into the foundational, heroic aspect of his character.

The shout that cut the air and the fist that punctured it announced the rebirth of the Great Man. It represented a particular category of miracle that the Japanese designate a “kiseki”—a miraculous occurrence that, whatever specific laws of physics or probability it momentarily demolishes, identifies a particular person not merely as having received the aid of divine forces but as having received them on the basis of being one chosen by God himself to enact His Will in human history.

Before the world stood a Great Man who would accomplish the Will of God despite all obstacles, even at the cost of his own life if necessary. And in that moment, what this Supercolossus chose to communicate—or what God used him as a vehicle for communicating—was for the public to tap into their own capacity for heroism. Blood streaming down his face, he declaimed to the righteous of America to “FIGHT!”
Whatever else they understood that call to mean in practical terms, those with the hearts to hear it saw with their own eyes that what would secure the victory Trump was urging them towards was endurance.

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Since January 20, it’s fair to say that the agent by which “something can happen” has reemerged into history. The Gulf of Mexico has been renamed. Federal agencies have been ravaged for waste, with scores of employees fired and dumptrucks of money raked back into government coffers. Deportations of illegal immigrants commenced immediately and have continued apace.

But putting aside what will or won’t be added to these achievements—or shot down in legal conflicts that are ongoing at the time of this article’s publication—what does all this mean at the psychospiritual level for the citizens of America as well as the West?

In light of everything that’s happened from July to the present, I suspect that the  American and Western mind will continue reorienting from the “aspirational” to the “inspirational.” As this happens, the basis for bestowing worth at the social level will shift away from tautologies and towards the heroic criteria of achievement and endurance.

And with this, the reborn Great Man will have set into motion the most crucial process since the first half of the 20^th century. Not only in the material and social world, but in the minds and hearts of men the Great Man will have removed the tremendous managerial obstruction that has blocked path of human endeavor.

At which point the very substance of self-regard will once again be the successful exertion of Will and implementation of Vision—and the quantity and quality of what can happen in history will return to being directly proportional to the amount of people that seek greatness by the only criteria that have ever mattered.

The topsy-turvy Saturnalia of the last 80 years—where Jester and Knight swapped places under orders of some bureaucratic council of elders—will be dead and buried. And whatever else is done or undone by scheming bugmen that Trump and Musk are currently locked in battle with, that’s not nothing. It is, in fact, the fundamental something which sets the gears of history in motion.