Netflix’s Kaos: A Modern Parable

I have watched the first three episodes of the Netflix series Kaos, based on Greek Mythology, and while it takes some creative liberties with the stories, it still has an interesting plot.

Kaos

In this series, Zeus, played by Jeff Goldblum, receives a prophecy warning of his downfall. It reads, “A Line appears, the Order wanes, the Family falls, and Kaos reigns.” No such prophecy exists in Greek Mythology, but it is intriguing nonetheless.

In pre-modern cultures, creation stories have paramount importance. Not only did they explain the creation of the universe and humans, they also inform them who they are, where they come from, and what their purpose is. They explain how everything fits together, including humans.

The Greek creation story is no different and establishes Zeus as the major power in ancient Greece.

When this Netflix series begins, Zeus’s power is waning, as the prophecy highlights. Zeus notices people no longer respect the gods, desecrating his statues and others. He decides to teach humans a lesson by instigating a series of environmental catastrophes, wiping out a large portion of humanity, and instilling the remainder with hatred for each other.

The collapse of Zeus’s established order should resonate with us today, since we are also witnessing such a collapse.

The Modern Kaos

The evolution of this collapse from ancient Greece to the present is revealing. Western religions emerged out of these ancient polytheistic ones and established the one God who created the universe in the same way Michelangelo sculpted his David, as a creation outside himself.

Where the Greeks worshipped Zeus and other Greek gods, religious people today worship the one true God who exists outside of his creation.

Since these creation stories were mythological, and thus not verifiable, the modern world began to reject them.

People had difficulty believing that snakes could talk, that evil began from biting an apple, and that the universe was created in seven days. So, humans began investigating the true origin of the universe and themselves, and ended up with our current Big Bang theory that states the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago and evolved over time to what we have today.

While this change increased our knowledge of the universe, it banished the gods from the story, removing meaning and purpose. Our modern creation story tells us it was all an accident, a product of random events.

If our creation story is supposed to situate humans in the universe and tell us who we are, the modern creation story fails miserably. It might accurately portray how everything evolved, but doesn’t explain why.

Because science can’t deal with “why” questions, they are dismissed as irrelevant, leaving us with meaningless lives in an incomprehensible universe.

Just as the system was breaking down in Kaos, it is breaking down today. And just as Zeus is trying to hang on to power in any way possible, those in power today are doing the same.

How Evolution Works

Science, the Big Bang, and evolution destroyed the old myths, but that is not how evolution should work. Evolution should destroy the worst aspects of the old order, keep its positive ones, like meaning and purpose, and embed them in a new worldview.

In the same way, evolution must now evolve beyond the modern creation story, while including the vast knowledge of the modern Big Bang story in its new worldview.

In the new worldview the old world gods are taken from their perches on Mt. Olympus and placed in the hearts of men and women. The gods are not outside, but inside. Heaven is not up in the sky, but in our hearts. Unfortunately, modern humans have lost touch.

We have become so enamored and hypnotized by the outer world that we are no longer aware of our inner world.

Just as the ancient Greeks lost touch with their gods, leading to their downfall, modern humans have also lost touch with the sacred inside themselves. Without that grounding, humans are controlled by their egos, focusing only on what’s good for them or their tribe.

Nietzsche Explains Our Dilemma

We need a new creation story that combines the Big Bang’s science with the ancient myths’ meaning and purpose. As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it in his Parable of the Madman, exclaiming the fate of modern humans in the face of the Death of God:

“How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?”

These are the consequences of tearing down the old order that gave people meaning and purpose. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t time for it to go, but while something was gained, much was lost.

To understand this new creation story, we must shift our world focus from the outer to the inner, where divinity lies.

When we do this, we will discover a more profound wisdom and intelligence. We will also realize this deeper intelligence in us pervades the whole universe and informs its creation and subsequent evolution, showing that unlike the meaningless and purposeless modern story, we have a new story that embraces the science of the modern world while giving the universe and its people the meaning and purpose they so desperately need.

The New Worldview

You can get a synopsis of this story and its meaning by reading my book, The Magical Universe: Answering the Call of Climate Change for Personal and Global Transformation.

My premise is that just as Zeus threatens climate disasters, in our modern world, climate change threatens to end life as we know it.

I believe climate change is the Universe’s way of waking us up. The longer we stay disconnected from who we are, the more catastrophic our situation will become.

Climate change is our last warning, a last call to action, and if we don’t hear our own personal call, it’s because we have lost the ability to listen to the sacred and the urgent message the universe is trying to convey to us.