I was born into Judaism; I discovered Dadaism on my own.

If you're a traditionalist, the sort who holds that the modern world lost its mind last century and is scrambling through a self-induced hell of chaos and meaninglessness, Dada might easily serve as your Satan stand-in: the art movement that rejected "rationality" and pursued gleeful nonsense at all costs. Marcel Duchamp, who submitted a urinal to an art gallery and titled it Fountain, is already a convenient figurehead for the "death of art" even before you get into his female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy—and traditionalists do seem to hate gender-bending, just as Dada identified strongly with the political left. Here was a movement which spurned traditional aestheticism, capitalism, and social convention, questioned the relationship between language and meaning, and opened the doors for a radical reconsideration of what art and culture could be—a Tower of Babel for the modern world, fracturing agreed-upon consensus, leading to a world in which people feel fractured, alienated, and lost. Or, y'know, so it could be said.

Seen another way around, of course, Dada didn't create this fracturing—it anticipated it. Dada was a response to the advent of modernity: the automobile, the airplane, the first World War, and the overall progression of the world towards a simultaneous interconnection and atomization. This was coming, artistic movements be damned. The Dadaists merely saw what was looming, embraced it, and began looking at the world as if it had been born anew—because it had been. That their work feels more prescient today than it did a century ago merely speaks to how unerring their vision was, and how much we're still reckoning with a societal change that pre-dates all of us.

As a child, I was uncomfortable with my Jewish faith, because I struggled with a worldview that began and ended with God. It felt to me as if my whole religion was structured like an inverted pyramid, balanced treacherously on a singular, unprovable point. Most of what I learned in Sunday school felt like tedium to me; prayer services were just a demonstration of how off-tune a congregation could sound. I remember slipping into class with a backpack full of books, knowing full well that each would be confiscated the moment I was caught. More than anything, however, I was fascinated with computers: with digital creation, digital community, games of any kind. My parents, who were sane, strictly limited how much screen time I was allowed to have; I responded by cutting classes whenever I could get away with it, all the better to get more time with the computers in the school library. 

I won't pretend that my time with them was focused—if anything, it was a prelude to the endless social media morass that exists these days, albeit with smaller communities and worse technology. I had two flavors of ambition, both diffuse. One was creative in nature, and consisted of dreaming big dreams, trying to imagine grand and wonderful inventions whose possibility mattered more to me than my ability to create them. The other was more pragmatic: roughly speaking, I knew that I'd need to convince people to work with me on those dreams, and more generally that I'd need to manufacture some kind of Reputation for myself if I wanted to avoid what I feared would be a purposeless life of repetitive toil. But my pragmatism was typically undermined by my dreaming: I could devise beautifully tactical plans for getting ahead in life, but I struggled to stick with them, when the potential to dream was right there. And all the while, I got sucked into those glittering, endless loops of action and reaction, stirring shit up online when I got bored, then bound for hours to whatever reaction ensued. Wasted time, wasteful drama. 

When I had direction, even the pointless direction of a 13-year education, I could at least drift along. When I got to college, I lost the home I returned to every night, the acquaintances I'd spent a decade slowly pretending I understood my relationships to, and the pipe dream that I'd seamlessly transition to a comfy, entitled place in life, from which I could continue my slow, dreamy meandering. Samuel Beckett's Endgame is sometimes theorized to take place inside a single person's skull. At times, my dorm room felt like that: miserable, cramped, and still preferable to the horrors of an outside world. I retreated even further into my little online world, as both flavors of my ambition took on a new desperate urgency.

All this is to say that I sympathize with the traditionalists to some degree. Here is one framing of my story: I was a godless child, distracted by flashing lights that disconnected me from any sense of meaning or hope. The more I embraced the pointlessness I found on my computer, the more I lost touch with the world around me. And here is the ending to that story, which is not entirely untrue: by the end of my four years in college, I had begun to rediscover my religious faith, because I found more and more that spiritual thinkers were able to answer my secular questions in ways that nobody else seemed to be able to. Mind you, those "secular questions" mostly had to do with aesthetics and creative techniques, but that's beside the point, isn't it? Because the point is: the horrors of modern alienation are real, and I too fell prey to them, and I found my spiritual solace in precisely that which I had rejected when I was young.

But that, too, is a sleight of hand. Because it was never that I turned to computers as a way of disconnecting myself from the world, any more than I'd turned to books to isolate myself from others. Books and computers alike had always been a response to isolation, not a cause. They were an answer to peers I wanted nothing to do with, to authority figures who seemed to exist only to reject and disapprove of me, and—yes—to a faith that flat-out failed to engage me in any meaningful way. I was certainly drawn to the hilarious nonsense I found on the Internet, to that absurdist-tinged melange of amateur creativity and half-understood plagiarism. But I was also drawn to Douglas Adams and Monty Python, and then to the more properly-absurdist works of Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, and ultimately to Duchamp, Alfred Jarry, and Dada as a principle: nonsense as a rejection, not of all order, but of a singular order which would purport to be the only order. As Jarry put it, in a pithy line that has shaped me on a profound level ever since:

If anything, I suspect that I am fundamentally drawn to authority, structure, and big hand-wavey notions of harmony. I loved games because I loved systems; I loved learning them, mastering them, and inventing optimizations for them that felt beautiful. But I hated ugly optimization, choosing less-optimal approaches when they struck me as more compelling; similarly, I could never invest myself in authority that struck me as ugly, and the authority I had to contend with was usually dim-witted, inflexible, and profoundly uncurious. I was never one to think of myself as smarter than anybody else, which made it particularly aggravating when the people around me, whether it was groups or individuals with singular positions of power, had neither patience for me nor the ability to conceive of anything beyond their extremely-limited purview. Is it any wonder that I struggled to conceive of God, when the definitions I was given were as restrictive and as stupid as the people who were offering them?

In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, divinity is a physically-measurable phenomenon—and God, referred to always as The Authority, is a usurper to his own throne, an angel who predates all the other angels, and lied to them all, insisting that he is the source of all holiness and therefore gets to choose which rules must be obeyed. His Dark Materials was certainly a major part of why I chose to call myself an atheist—but, in some ways, it was the sort of atheism that reaffirmed an underlying spiritual belief within me, rather than denying one. To reject a false god can be an act of spurning God altogether, or it can be done in the name of a truer, stranger God, who will not abide by false idols.

Similarly, I loved absurdity because it was a rejection of a system which I, too, rejected. I loved the nonsense I found online because it was a communal decision to undermine that which deserved to be undermined. And as I graduated from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Finnegans Wake, the through-line was less "rejection of the old" and more "embrace of the new:" I didn't care about harping on the limitations of the systems I despised, I just wanted to discover the joyous possibilities which those systems had excised.
 
This formed the motor of Dada as a movement: an embrace, not of ugliness, but of that which had been proclaimed "ugly;" not of meaninglessness, but of that which had been declared "meaningless." Dadaism was poetry made up of made-up words, because it wanted to rediscover the joy of sound. It was cut-up writing and collages, for the sake of delightful juxtaposition, accidental discovery, and unintentional creation. It was the pursuit of childishness by the brilliantly mature. And if it happened to coincide with strident left-wing politics, that was because it was suspicious of all the systems which declared themselves authoritative: capitalism, religion, war, power, and tradition itself. Duchamp rejected his own individuality, his very maleness, not because he explicitly identified as female but because he saw gender and identity as yet another trap; Dada discovered the seeds of what has become modern leftist ideology simply by looking for cracks in the foundation, and by trusting that new order would be discovered therein.

You could say that Dada was a response to the early horrors of the modern world—and that's a popular framing. But I'd say that Dada didn't respond to the horrors of the modern world so much as it sidestepped them: in all the technological and societal breakthroughs of the day, Dada saw potential, for new kinds of ugliness and new kinds of creation. It also saw potential for atrocity, and sometimes it addressed injustice head-on (the overlap between Dada and early feminism was considerable), but always it pushed for the new, for new kinds of culture, for new kinds of possibility. Dada spawned a hundred new art movements, all conflicting, each sometimes at odds with all the others... and if anything, that was the point. Where Dada would have split from all those movements, likelier than not, is the point at which any one of those movements began to see itself as the inheritor of a sole truth, which must be acknowledged and incorporated into the arts in order for an artist to claim any kind of importance whatsoever. The proper Dada response to a proliferation of movements would be to impishly revel in the absence of any of those movements or ideas, for the sake of whatever chose to take its place.
 
This is antithetical to the traditionalist attempt to offer a singular, unified system of values, a unilateral worldview with which to judge anything and everything. The traditionalist idea of a world in chaos, a world divided, equates fracture with alienation. There are only two numbers in the traditionalist mindset: One and Infinity. If we are not perfectly united, then we are impossibly far apart. In this worldview, the horrors of our present world can be blamed on social media, on promiscuity, on "gender and sexual confusion," on "artificial divisions between race," with the left uniquely singled out as perpetrators of evildoing because it is the left, invariably, that wants to reject tradition and reject norms, thus actively perpetuating alienation and separation. The solution, obviously, is "return," to the norms and structures that have "traditionally" defined society. (I'm putting that word in quotes here because, well, traditionalists don't have the greatest historic memory for how things "used to be.")

Not all traditionalism reduces down to a singular monotheistic God, but you can see the appeal: God as a symbol of unification, of that which is eternal and unyielding, of an authority which fundamentally can't be defied. The answer to every question, because, if you ever find yourself confused by life, all you need to do is take God a little bit more literally, and push on until the divisions bend and the barriers give way.  

But this, again, sees separation as the cause of unhappiness, rather than as a reaction to unhappinesses. If you see authority as the cause of alienation, then separation and division can be seen as an attempt to cure alienation, by creating new pockets of possibility, places where some people—not all of them, can feel realized. Moreover, you see these pockets, not as an attempt to create a new authority, but as an attempt to create something whose authority is derived from the individuals within it—individuals who can collectively shrug off whatever uglinesses they don't find ugly, and pursue whatever meanings nobody else can recognize as meaningful.   

The paradox of late-stage capitalism—or whatever you want to call it—is that it simultaneously ratchets up the degree of authoritative control and the language of individuality. Your employer, your education, even your brand, become all-controlling, all-consuming, utterly definitive; art and media turns into a game of cultural one-upmanship, whether it's through hipster commodity-hunting or academic posturing or some sociopolitical zeitgeist telling you what you "need" to consume in order to prove your commitment to the movement. Social media is discussed as an autonomous phenomenon, an experiment in mass individuality, while at the same time we fail to discuss just how few corporations control every avenue of "individual expression" available to us; we know that a series of antisocial algorithms are steering us towards certain emotional states and conclusions, and simultaneously want to blame individuals for being complicit in their own herding. People are forced into economically precarious positions, simultaneously imperiled and betrayed by authority, deprived of opportunity, pushed into increasingly siloed and self-centered methods of forming social connection... and then we are told that the fragmentation of society is the source of all our problems, rather than the logical outcome of the systems that define us and our lives. We're told that more authority will fix everything, more of the same-old same-old, as if everything which runs counter to that authority wasn't an explicit attempt to address just how badly that authority has failed us.
 
It's a tired cliché at this point to say that this problem runs deeper than "just" one party or the other, or that the rise in far-right nationalism is in part a response to the absolute failure of the center-right and center-left to offer a better alternative. Mark Fisher suggested a decade ago that intersectional politics were in danger of turning individual identity into a kind of brand, fostering alienation rather than removing it, replacing the belief in an individual's right to tell their own story and be heard with a kind of centralized authority that imposes rules on whose voices are allowed to be heard where, depriving people of places where their voices might be heard. More generally, it has become increasingly accepted on both sides of the political divide that authority is something to be embraced and manipulated, something with which to crush one's ideological enemies (or eradicate them outright). Capital and social mores are both considered acceptable weapons to be wielded; religion still leans heavily to the right, but there are certainly places within the political left where religious faith is seen as anathema, something which ought to be stamped out altogether. Political discontent is more fiery than ever, but not in ways that have managed to touch the systems of authority at the center of our political system. (And it's clear that the alt-right, at least, doesn't want to dismantle authority, it wants to strengthen and redirect it. The only authority it despises is the sort that puts limits on people's freedom to exercise power.)

At the same time, all this is taking place on an uneasy bedrock of major social upheaval. The way our societies are organized is literally changing: electricity and mass media may have shaken our societies across the twentieth century, but the changes we'll see in the twenty-first will be even more profound, with computers completely upending certain fundamental assumptions about community that we don't even realize we take for granted. New dogmas are forming, with accidental cultural flukes embraced as digital tradition, then enforced despite their overall unthinkingness. We are better able to invade individual lives, penetrating each and every person down to the soul, than ever before—privacy has never been easier to evade, regulations have never been less strict, and, more than anything, people have never been more able or more willing to sell themselves away, because we haven't learned to recognize our voluntary participation as selling-away. If society seems more broken than ever, it is because we have yet to reckon with what new freedoms we do have nowadays, and thus aren't quite equipped to see how freely we overlook our own privileges.

We have yet to comprehend, in other words, that our atomization is not a failure of the systems that define our lives but an intentional byproduct of them; that participation in them will generate alienation, scattering us and confusing us and leaving us ever-more-receptive to offers of authority and control. We are dealing with a new kind of ignorance, one too novel for us to even recognize as ignorance; at the same time, we have been offered a new potential, and a new kind of power, whose significance we have yet to fully understand. As Jarry said, rejection of the system is only half of the equation—the true opportunity strikes when we reject the rejection, and start to build new systems of our own.

(It's no surprise, incidentally, that the first major instance we've seen of this is the 4chan/alt-right pipeline. 4chan was by far one of the most absurdist communities on the Internet; however, by its own design, it was unable to build upon whatever it had deconstructed, and existed in a perpetual state of rejecting and scorning all authority or civilization—with the exception being the authority of its own semi-criminal masses. As a result, it was stuck in a permanent state of reaction, which set it up to oppose all varieties of constructive, progressive ideology. There does seem to be a split between the segments of -chan culture that rejected capitalism and leaned Marxist and the segments which rejected government authority in favor of capitalist libertarianism, but even that leaned libertarian, since the Marxist call to "unite!" was itself a bit antithetical to 4chan's unifying ethos.)
 
The difference between nonsense and Dada is the pursuit of new kinds of meaning, new kinds of organization, new kinds of purpose. Marcel Duchamp may have aggressively spurned "retinal" art, and cared more about  engaging the mind than the senses, but he approached that work methodically and seriously, finding increasingly delightful ways to engage his audiences. The flip side to asking what art "could be," after all, entailed probing what art "was," discovering trickier and more challenging facts of how an audience engaged with an artwork, then finding ways to flip those inescapable realities on their head. The point was never ugliness: it was to recognize the constraints and limitations of beauty, then to seek what could not be readily exposed in conventionally beautiful terms. The goal was creation: not in the typical sense of "personal expression," but something more akin to invention, in both the technological and philosophical senses of that word. A discovery of new territories, new potential grounds to explore and play in and delight in.

It was not accidental that so much of Duchamp's work revolved around everyday industrial design. "Painting is over and done with," he is said to have remarked at an aviation show. "Who could do anything better than this propellor?" This was a time of radical reinvention of the world, and of the tenets on which society was founded. Why not see this as an opportunity with infinite potential, and see art as the study of finding what was possible? He put a bicycle wheel on a stool, just because he enjoyed watching it spin; it wasn't for years that he decided, retroactively, that this had been a creative act deserving of the label "art." The artistry consisted of finding new ways of doing things, and of creating individual pieces which each offered a unique perspective on creative possibility. On one level, they are silly; on another level, they are provocative and profound. What's important, though, is that the silliness and the profundity are interconnected: the profounder his pieces are, the sillier they seem; and it is in the pieces' initial sillinesses that the most interesting ideas are always found.

Maybe it's fitting, then, that I found my way back to faith—well, to some version of it—by absurdist and even semi-scathing ways. Perhaps the first time a discussion of religious faith genuinely planted seeds in me was during a discussion of Piss Christ, the infamous photo/sculpture depicting a plastic crucifix bathed in artist Andres Serrano's urine. The photo is mysterious and gorgeous; were it not for its title, the photo would be recognized more than anything for its eerie beauty. And someone in this discussion pointed out the earthy reality of the crucifixion: the blood and sweat and dirt of Christ on the cross, the spilling of his guts, his entombment within the earth. If this was the basis of the holiest moment in the Christian faith, how could urine possibly be seen as blasphemous addition? Moreover, how could it be seen as more blasphemous than the plastic replication and commodification of that moment, sold cheaply in a store as a decorative bauble, a transmutation of divine suffering into performative interior kitsch?

The stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, whose approach to comedy is itself aggressively deconstructive, once worked on an opera that was accused of blasphemy, boycotted by Christian zealots, and nearly brought to court to stand legal trial for blasphemy. Lee responded with a stand-up show about the incident, which climaxes in Lee, drunk and out of his mind, rescued by Jesus Christ himself, who selflessly allows Lee to vomit into his every orifice, purging him of a sickness induced by Christ's alleged followers. The climactic vomiting is described meticulously, outrageously, and at length, and is scatological beyond belief—yet throughout it all, Christ is depicted as performing an act of genuine compassion and generosity, accepting degradation beyond measure for the sake of a non-believer who stood accused of literally blaspheming against him. Implausibly, beneath the outrage, I found the set moving: a gauntlet, in a sense, positing Lee's Christ against the Christ of his nemeses, the one version humorless and scornful, the other forgiving beyond all belief. This, I felt, was a genuinely meaningful portrayal of a religious icon—and it took Lee's so-called blasphemy to achieve it.

Doubt, I have come to believe, is a profound and all-too-overlooked part of any meaningful faith. The shallow and cowardly portray doubt as that which is inevitably vanquished by faith: it exists as a strawman, and is functionally cast out the moment it's introduced. But doubt must serve as a trial to hold any meaning—if it's not a struggle whose outcome you genuinely fear, then it isn't doubt proper. For it is in doubt that we find faith: only when everything feels arbitrary and meaningless, only when nothing seems to be reliable or real, can you find your way towards a reality that you can believe in. Yet this is precisely why doubt is avoided, even feared: it will shred apart your dogma, challenge your assumptions, and maybe even force you to change your mind about your own beliefs, if you take it seriously. If faith, for you, is meant to serve as a bedrock, taken so utterly for granted that you no longer have to think about it, then doubt forces your faith back into the foreground; you may find that, to regain your faith, you must abandon certain things which you thought defined your faith, and without which you suddenly feel lost. For many people of faith, this is an existentially-terrifying prospect.

But what alternative is there? The moment you realize you're avoiding doubt out of fear, you're admitting to yourself that you are uncertain of your own faith—that your faith is an illusion, a comfortable story that you tell yourself, one you'd rather not challenge because you are fearful of the outcome. The only way to genuinely have faith is to challenge it, to test it, to present yourself with every possible thing that might destroy it altogether, because to have faith is to trust that, even in those darkest hours, that which you believe in will persevere. To do less would betray weakness. Doubt, paradoxically, serves as the foundation of all strength, because when you open yourself to doubt, that which cannot last must fade away.

The story behind Duchamp's Fountain is: the Society of Independent Artists, which sought to showcase avant-garde artists of all stripes and liberate art from oppressive authorities of taste and norms, offered any artist a chance to place their work in its exhibition for a six-dollar entry fee. Duchamp was a director of the Society; he submitted Fountain under a pseudonym. The Society rejected it. Duchamp revealed himself as its creator, and resigned. A test of doubt; a failure of faith. Also a very funny prank, to be sure, but it was a prank with a purpose: even this authority, which wanted so badly to deny its own authority, couldn't help but exercise control, when it met with something that defied it.

Fountain is criticized by conservatives as a kind of blasphemy: a rejection of art as we know it, and of art's potential for beauty and purpose. They are only half-right—and right about the wrong half. It is blasphemy, in a sense—but it was blasphemy performed as an act of faith. It found new beauty, new purpose, where nobody else knew where to look for it. To miss that is to miss the point.

So, too, does it feel like an easy out to me to seek God in the most obvious places, the places that loudly and flagrantly scream of God's presence. The real test of faith should be: can you see God in the absurd? Can you break down all conventional order, all conventional meaning, and still find God in this new unconventional place? How able are you to find the new purpose—or rather, the old purpose in the new form? How willing are you to accept that, if your old model of the world can't accept this new idea into it, then your old model wasn't fit for use?

My favorite aspect of sacred Islamic art is how seriously it takes the belief that to depict God as human is to commit an act of idolatry. Instead, God is expressed through patterns and color, through an order so vibrant and exquisite that it points to the possibility of deeper, profounder order in the universe. At its best, that art becomes shocking and surprising, because deeper meaning should surprise and shock. It should be that which we least know how to take for granted. It is a challenge, a gauntlet tossed, a threat to any lesser and pettier order. If it is to be a supreme authority, that authority can come from only one place, and it's that it cannot be questioned, rather than one that merely should not be. Rather than rigid and imposing, this flavor of authority must be impossibly accommodating, the sort that dwells in the unlikeliest of places, offering purpose or meaning or an elevated path no matter how bizarre its accommodations, how unnerving its presentation, how seemingly profane it might be. It cannot be rejected precisely because it is so accepting, so generous in its embrace. It must be so extreme with that generosity, in fact, that the act of rejecting it paradoxically becomes an act of accepting it after all.
 
When I was thirteen, preparing to be bar mitzvahed, I told my Rabbi that I wasn't sure that God existed. I was terrified to admit this to her, for obvious reasons. Terrified to speak it out loud, lest a bolt of lightning strike me through the walls of our synagogue. I was met, not with judgment, but with immediate and unwavering acceptance: Judaism, she told me, was about the love of a community, not about the judgment of an individual; the only condition of my belonging was my choice to belong. It was a profound relief for me, and one that I seized upon by becoming loudly and rudely anti-theistic in every way that I saw fit. Now, of course, I joke that I could not have had a more properly Jewish behavior than to become an atheist at thirteen: it was my community's acceptance of me that kept me open to rediscovering some form of faith on my own terms, just as their rejection of me would have made my return to faith orders of magnitude more difficult. 

I got played by a master. What can I say?

In a similar way, I have come to see division and atomization as hopeful, rather than as fearful. I'm not blindly optimistic by any means: the collapse of social order means uncertainty, instability, loss of security, and an immense amount of suffering. There is no guarantee that the order which emerges next will be any better: in fact, it is almost certain that, for that order to arise, there will have to be a general consensus on who is allowed to suffer, whose suffering we are prepared to overlook (or even sadistically bask in). Given a choice between order and chaos, I'd personally prefer order. But again, this is a false dichotomy: I see instability as a byproduct of order, and I see chaos as what ensues when order fails to contain what it's meant to contain. When I say that I see hope in division, I don't mean that I think people torn asunder are in a great place: they almost never are. What I mean is more that I think it is within that alienation, within that separation, that we will discover something new—because it is far more difficult to discover novelty within the sort of vast and ancient system that's designed to suppress everything but itself.

That kind of potential doesn't come with a guarantee. It is difficult—cognitively daunting, to say the least. There is no guarantee that sparks of potential will turn into anything significant, stable, or broad-reaching. Much of Dada does remain constrained to its time and place, relics of a particular period in semi-recent history, its influence coming through in trickles here and there rather than as a wave. New movements are often sterile. The ones that aren't often find themselves co-opted, turned to purposes precisely opposite their intent. There is no promise of salvation. What little progress is made will invariably be opposed.

Yet it is here that I find my faith. Here, in this place that's as absurd as anywhere else; here, in this place that I know from experience can be pointless and unfruitful, painful, even lonely. I find my faith in between the cracks, in precisely the places where it feels like faith should vanish altogether. I find it in meaningless and ugly places; I find it where we are told it can never exist. I look at the way the world is changing, at the acid bath that sometimes seems to be dissolving everything we've ever known, and locate my belief precisely in the thing that's undoing everybody else's. It feels blasphemous at times, and at other times I find myself worried that I'm looking in the exact wrong place, but it's the only approach to faith that has ever felt right to me.

I've shared this anecdote before, but: Steve Aylett suggests that trickster gods, in every culture, are where societies place all the traits they can't extrapolate to some lofty principle, some deeper human theme. As a result, because no society can devise a complex enough series of principles to truly embody the human experience, trickster gods wind up more intricate, more contradictory, and more genuinely human, than any other god in their pantheon. They may be reckless and antagonistic, they may be utterly untrustworthy... but they also possess a strange allure, a powerful relatability, that comes on some level from our recognition that this is our nature, this is our "truth," that we aren't fully understood even by ourselves, that seeming chaos points, not away from order, but towards a deeper manifestation of it that it is our fate to spend lifetimes attempting to untangle. 

So defy authority. Paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Fire mistletoe into the heart of every beautiful god you see. Play in the seeming ruins. You might just find that, lurking in those ruins, a new order hides itself, lying low, waiting for the right moment to be born.