Adam Curtis is well known for espousing the notion that modern society (especially the West) has no notion of where it is heading, or even of how it could be heading somewhere or even what it would mean for it to head anywhere. Western societies cannot imagine anything other than more of the same — more capitalism, maybe slightly stranger capitalism, with AI augmentations, but still weirdly the same. As Nietzsche understood, this doesn’t actually satisfy the the spiritual(a new word is probably needed but it will have to do) nature of the human. Christianity — brutal as it was — offered structure and purpose. Without that scaffolding, we are adrift. Individually, we seem to bear the existence of staring into the void and keep going. Collectively, it tears us apart.

Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism: the pervasive sense that “there is no alternative.” Capitalism presents itself not as one system among others, but as the only imaginable frame. We may dislike aspects of it, even hate it, but we can’t picture a coherent beyond. The future, if we dare to imagine it at all, looks like a more intensified version of the present — just stranger, faster, weirder. Jean Baudrillard gestured in a similar direction: culture untethered from any ground, spinning in loops of simulation, losing orientation.

The problem, though, is even worse. Pneuminous theory, or chaos magick (they are similar projects), doesn’t rescue us from this malaise. It extends the nihilism. It shows that not only rational structures, but even magickal, symbolic, and esoteric frameworks are contingent accretions — pneuma infecting vectors, conscious doubles arising by intention. The abyss doesn’t shrink when one embraces occultism; it expands. There is no final ground, only shifting layers of contingency.

Which leaves us with a somewhat grim recognition: powerful people who manufacture myths and control structures are, in a sense, right to do so. Without myth, societies collapse into conspiracy, nostalgia, or despair. The real question is: can there be an ethical control myth — one that binds without domination, one that acknowledges the possibility of paranormaityl without relegating it to fringe counterculture or totalising it into religion?

Maybe this is where a new myth must be conceived — the Myth of Ur. Ur not as an ancient city, but as a beginning, a foundation that knows itself as contingent. It would say: we are something like multidimensional pneuminous beings, layered, accreted, entangled in vectors of meaning and possibility. We cannot (at least in regular consciousness, know if paranormality actually obtains, but we cannot deny the possibility either. We live inside the disjunction, thus rather than being opposing agents we should dwellers on the threshold so to speak.

Furthermore, the possibility of the actuality is what we should bet on. Even in recognising the agnostic disjunction, we should act as if the fluid-paranormality were real, as it is this side that makes reality truly interconnected hand invokes our responsibility. Like Pascal’s wager: live as if God exists, because it is the safer bet. Our wager is ontological: live as if we are pneuminous beings. Not because it is proven, but because this orientation does the least violence to the complexity of our condition.

These kinds of rules could be examples that might be part of such an ethical ontology:

• Live as if the world is layered and multidimensional in the most literal sense.
• Direct power toward preserving openness, not closing it down.
• Treat technology and capital as the contingent manifestations of the second centre they are: new accretions, not ultimate horizons or grounds.
• Play seriously with meaning: enact, invent, but never deny fragility.
• Care for others as beings whose pneuma you inevitably entangle.

This horizon entails the understanding of the accretions as process in a more active sense. This is the wager, the new Myth of Ur: a transparent myth that everyone knows is made (contingently accreted), but which we agree to live inside because it is better than the void. Not salvation, not certainty, but a collective as if — a horizon we can orient toward, even knowing it may be provisional. It doesn’t solve things in the way we might think of a solution, because thinking in that way cannot give an answer. However the acceptance of the radical nature of reality coupled with a deeper understanding of its impermanence may be part of our ability to overcome the place we have become stuck.