War with Iran: Putting the 'Boom' in Boomer
Sleepwalking into WW3
The Cosmic Imperative and Man’s Abdication
The fundamental law remains unaltered since Gurdjieff first articulated it in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: humanity exists not for itself, but as a transformer of energies required by Great Nature.
This being-partktdolg duty constitutes our primary cosmic function - to transmute the raw material of earthly existence into finer substances required by ‘Great Nature’ and the Megalacosmos. When this duty is fulfilled consciously, through intentional suffering and conscious labor, civilizations flourish in harmony with cosmic law (This is the proper aim of an actual civilization). When abandoned, the imbalance must be corrected through what Gurdjieff termed "periodic reciprocal destruction."
This is not a metaphor but metaphysical mechanics. Just as a neglected engine eventually seizes, so too does a humanity that fails in its sacred obligation invite catastrophic rebalancing. The 20th century stands as the most devastating demonstration of this principle in action - a hundred-year crescendo of violence that began with industrialized trench warfare and which may very well culminate in nuclear annihilation.
As the world is perched on the brink of another World War, we witness the latest and potentially final chapter in this saga of abandoned duty.
The First Great Failure: World War I and the Death of Sacred War
The bloody trenches of the Western Front represented far more than a military stalemate - they marked the definitive end of war as a sacred undertaking and its rebirth as a purely mechanical process. Where ancient warriors had fought with a conscious awareness of higher principles (one need only read Homer's Iliad or the Bhagavad Gita to understand war's traditional spiritual dimension), the soldiers of 1914 marched to their deaths with no such understanding or purpose. Their lives were demanded in payment for the debt accumulated by man’s failure to engage in genuine being duty.
The result was four years of unprecedented mechanized killing that devastated a generation of young men but solved nothing spiritually. The Versailles settlement merely set the stage for greater catastrophes because the fundamental imbalance - humanity's refusal of its cosmic duty - remained uncorrected.
The Second Correction: World War II as Nature's Full Fury
If the Great War was nature's warning shot across humanity's bow, the Second World War was its full broadside. The numbers still defy comprehension - sixty million dead, entire cities erased in firestorms, mass murder on all sides on a scale never before imagined. This was annihilation elevated to an art form, destruction as a way of life.
Gurdjieff's "psychopathy" reached its full flowering in this period - entire nations committing unspeakable atrocities - firebombing cities like Dresden and Tokyo, countless deaths in the gulags and concentration camps, unprecedented slaughter on the battlefields - while remaining convinced of their own righteousness. The substances nature required were not being produced through conscious labor, so they were extracted through unprecedented destruction.
The Great Refusal: Postwar Spiritual Bankruptcy
After such horrors, one might expect some great awakening. Instead came the great refusal, a systematic abdication of responsibility that would make future catastrophes inevitable.
The Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse provided the intellectual framework for this refusal.
Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) created a set of criteria by which to define certain personality traits, ranked according to what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist)." These dangerous traits targeted by Adorno were the very impulses identified by Gudjieff as essential for the basic functioning of a normal society, namely patriarchality and piety. According to Adorno, the family, church, and traditional societies were all breeding grounds for fascism, and the virtues that upheld them were now seen as dangerous, fascist tendencies.
The abandonment of being duty now emerged as a being-impulse, what Gurdjieff would call a ‘being-Kalkali.’
Marcuse went further in Eros and Civilization (1955), declaring that all repression was pathological. His concept of "repressive desublimation" encouraged the abandonment of discipline in favor of instant gratification. Where traditional societies understood that sexual energy could be transformed into spiritual power, Marcuse taught that liberation meant indulging every impulse. Restraint and responsibility were seen as the root cause of all social ills.
Gurdjieff discusses the misuse of sexual energy for titillation championed by Marcuse and the foot soldiers of the sexual revolution:
“I repeat, my boy, besides the fact that these favorites of yours, particularly the contemporary, ceased to use these sacred substances inevitably formed in them, consciously for the coating and perfection of their ‘higher-parts’ as well as for the fulfillment of their being-duty foreseen by Nature herself, which consists in the continuation of their species, yet even when this latter does accidentally proceed, they already accept it and regard it as a very great misfortune for themselves, chiefly because the consequences which must proceed from it must for a certain time hinder the free gratification of the multitudinous and multiform vices fixed in their essence.
“And in consequence of this, they—particularly the contemporary beings—strive in these cases by every means to prevent with their whole presence the actualization of such an accidental and on their part unintentional sacred manifestation foreseen by Great Nature.
“In the last centuries there, very many among them, in whom data for all kinds of Hasnamussian properties were more strongly crystallized, even became specialists in aiding the destruction of such accidentally actualized sacred being-fulfillments and these specialists they call there ‘makers of angels.’”
- GI Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Chapter 39
The baby boomers, raised on this spiritual and intellectual poison, became the first generation to fully embody and publicly embrace the outright refusal of genuine being-duty. Their rebellion wasn't the spiritual seeking of traditional mystics, but adolescent petulance masquerading as enlightenment. The 1960s counterculture replaced conscious labor with LSD, voluntary suffering with sexual license, and sacred duty with slogans about "doing your own thing."
The Frankfurt School's intellectual revolution did not occur in a vacuum. Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse crystallized and gave new focus to a process of spiritual degeneration that had been unfolding for millennia, according to Gurdjieff. What was uniquely destructive about their work was that it provided the philosophical scaffolding for what would become the boomers' great refusal of being-duty. An attitude that ancient cultures would have found shocking, shameful, and subhuman, was now repackaged as the liberation of the ‘Age of Aquarius.’
The baby boomers became the first generation to fully embody this corrupted ideal of freedom. Their rebellion against the "establishment" contained no higher positive vision - only rejection. Consider the devastating results:
In the realm of education, the last remants of a traditional model of transmitting wisdom gave way to what Bloom would later call "the closing of the American mind." Universities became factories producing skilled barbarians, technically proficient but spiritually illiterate. The 1968 student protests that swept Europe and America didn't seek to recover lost wisdom; they sought to destroy the very idea of authoritative knowledge.
The consequences manifested with terrifying speed in the 1960s counterculture. What appeared as spiritual seeking was often just spiritual tourism, the use of psychedelics as shortcuts to states that traditionally required years of discipline, the appropriation of Eastern symbols stripped of their transformative context. The Haight-Ashbury hippies produced no askokin through their experiments, only the pathetic spectacle of privileged Westerners playing at enlightenment while avoiding real work.
Family structures collapsed as marriage became optional and children became unwanted inconveniences rather than sacred responsibilities. The stable family unit, which had survived the trenches and gulags, dissolved under the assault of radical feminism and the sexual revolution. Marriage rates plummeted while divorce rates soared - between 1960 and 1980, divorce rates in America more than doubled. The substances traditionally produced through family life, the subtle energies generated through sacrifice and commitment, ceased to flow.
The possibility for the production of higher substances essentially ceased. A civilization that had survived the Somme, Dresden, and Hiroshima now threatened to perish from spiritual malnutrition.
The Mechanics of Reciprocal Destruction: From Vietnam to Tehran
As being-duty was abandoned, the periodic reciprocal destruction Gurdjieff described grew increasingly severe. Each major conflict of the postwar era reveals the same pattern:
The Vietnam War (1955-1975) demonstrated what happens when a society fights without conviction. American soldiers - many drafted against their will - fought for abstract "containment" policies while their countrymen protested at home. The result was the most psychologically devastating war in U.S. history, producing not higher substances but only trauma and social division.
The Gulf Wars (1990-1991, 2003-2011) revealed the hollowness of fighting for "democracy" and "freedom" defined in purely material terms. The spectacle of shock-and-awe bombing campaigns followed by brutal torture and nation-building failures showed a civilization that had lost all connection to the sacred dimensions of conflict.
Beneath the surface explanations and justifications for these wars, there was the stark fact of Nature’s unpaid bill, a result of the great refusal and the abdication of genuine being duty.
Now, the escalating conflict with Iran threatens to surpass all previous disasters in scale. This is reciprocal destruction in its purest form - nations sleepwalking toward catastrophe, utterly unaware of their cosmic responsibilities.
The boomers have run up quite a tab, and the bill is coming due.
The Civilizational Imperative: Why The Work Matters Now More Than Ever
Gurdjieff's teaching is not some private self-improvement hobby for the bored and self-satisfied. It is an emergency protocol for a dying and self-destructive civilization.
The substances required by Great Nature must be produced, whether through conscious labor or catastrophic violence. This is not metaphor. This is cosmic law.
We stand at the precipice where individual and collective work merge into one desperate necessity. Your personal efforts at self-remembering, your moments of intentional suffering, your struggles against mechanicalness—these are not just about your petty salvation. They are the last-ditch effort to balance scales that are tipping toward annihilation.
The Final Choice: Become a Worker or Become Ash
Let me be brutally clear:
The missiles are already pointed. The drones are already programmed. The decision to launch will be made by sleeping men who think they're awake. Your meditation cushions, work weekends, and feel-good ‘mindfulness’ practice won't save you when the sirens wail.
There are only two kinds of people now:
1) Those producing the substances through conscious labor—who understand that every moment of authentic inner work is literally fighting against the coming destruction
2) Those who are the causing the destruction —whose accumulated mechanicalness fuels the very forces that will burn their children's future
This is not poetry. This is physics. Every time you choose distraction over attention, comfort over effort, lies over truth, you are casting a vote for Armageddon.
The alarms are screaming. The missiles are fueled. The decision to burn the world will be made by hollow, sleepwalking men in air-conditioned rooms who mistake their power for consciousness. And you-yes, you reading these words-are complicit through every moment of continued sleep.
This isn't spiritual theater. This is the endgame of a cosmic equation we've been failing to solve for millennia, most particularly in the last century. Gurdjieff didn't give us a philosophy - he gave us a war manual for what might be a last stand. Every second you spend identified with your petty dramas, every hour lost in mechanical reactions, every day you delay your Work - you're not just failing yourself. You're actively starving Great Nature of the substances that could prevent catastrophe.
The coming fire won't discriminate between initiates and sleepwalkers. But those who have done the Work will face it differently - not as victims, but as conscious participants in whatever comes next. They'll be the ones maintaining a human presence when the systems fail, remembering what matters when the world forgets, generating the substances that might - just might - tip the balance.