Postcard from the ledge

It’s a mess out there. – Me.

Maybe that’s a good thing. – Me.

Introduction

It’s been a while. There has been much for me to do in too little time. 

Today is Sunday. I’m alone in the house, and my project work is done, for now. Though insanely busy these last three months or so, I’ve been deep in thought whenever space and quiet allowed, and while in that quiet noticing further elements of the body of my thought disintegrating with the disintegration of the Western world.

This is a lengthy postcard from that windy ledge.

A breakdown of categories

Charles Eisenstein’s career is aimed at inviting as many of us as possible to notice and then advance “the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible”. It is a romantic line, and a romantic vector, one that attracts me deeply. Lately though … less and less. I spy many ‘problems’ beneath its pretty surface.

The first has been visible to me for a while: “more beautiful” on whose definition? Beauty lies infamously in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps this is not a problem, perhaps this is in fact part of the solution, a strength. Diversity is the spice of life, right? But don’t we have that already, anyway, and in abundance? Yes, there is homogeneity and groupthink aplenty, but not to the point of an outright grey-washing of everything Out There. The tensions, the disagreements, the endless cultural fault lines speak of a very spicy, very interesting period of history. Multiple ideas of what we find beautiful are in ‘competition’ right now. Some favour safety, others risk. Some favour escape from limitation into who knows what digital utopia, others yearn for a return to tradition and immutable categories. I am drawn to love as it relates to wisdom and health while others enjoy the creature comforts modernity provides. Some are engineers, some accountants, some are corporate career folk, others mavericks. On and on the diversity goes. There is enough diversity in evidence to occupy whole oceans. To argue otherwise is to wilfully overlook the obvious.

And yes, of course there are terrible, terrible problems, and, yes, it’s very hard to deny that humanity stands trembling and afraid before a mighty historical crossroads – or mighty historical spaghetti junction – but this is not an unprecedented state of affairs.

These simple observations eat at me. They always have. I am by nature a doubter who doubts the very ideas I doubt into temporary existence. There are certain certainties in me – there is nothing but God, for example – but how to honour them, which constellation of ‘solutions’ is practical and fitting to the times … these are different challenges entirely to identifying Good Principles. And while there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, nothing is more impotent than one whose time lies far in the future.

Categories are indeed in breakdown, and yet our past is riddled with such turbulence. This is nothing new. Well, not 100% new; history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes, as the saying goes. There are, despite such emollient platitudes, very reasonable grounds for concern This Time, such as the complex supply chains and just-in-time delivery processes that, in the event of a broad collapse, would present unprecedented societal challenges. But perhaps this very risk keeps things tied securely together? Perhaps this existentially important complexity – deadly over-complication? – is our best insurance against collapse?

Furthermore, civilisational collapse is a misunderstood creature. Imagination has space to blossom in the dearth of information civilisational breakdown leaves in its wake. Apparently, “collapse” is now seen as too dramatic a word. Affairs simply transition to less documented times in which new ways of doing things have a greater chance of winning out than during more stable periods.

Or perhaps this time will indeed be different, who can say.

Catastrophists enjoy imagined (or real) approaching doom. Which mostly never comes. We have all watched countless dread predictions come and go unfulfilled. Who remembers the buzz around Y2K? Not only does catastrophism sell books and papers and movies, we humans are often darkly fascinated by catastrophe and can magic ourselves into a bewitching array of collective hysteria, when mood and moment permit.

Categories are breaking down once again, but nobody knows where this particular iteration will take us, nor how turbulent it will be, nor how much of humanity is bound up in it, nor how deeply. Some folks love to pontificate – I’m one of them –, but an embarrassingly high percentage of our output is just excited chatter on the wind.

To pontificate, or not to pontificate

The answer is yes. Yes, I shall pontificate. It is my wont.

To recap the core thesis as it once tottered about in my mind:

Money is a cultural technology required by the dissolution of trust that is but one consequence of civilisation-scale ‘communities’. When communities are sufficiently small, when specialisation has not taken hold, when social affairs are intimate and all-including, money (as unit of account and store/measure of value) is not needed. 

But things change. Societal evolution of a civilisational stripe includes the establishment of technologies such as private property and a state of some kind to protect it. This in turn produces class hierarchies, the consequent need for statecraft, and the need for money to glue it all together. As such, money effects trust among a community of strangers where far earlier there were no day-to-day strangers to speak of.

But things change. It just so happens money requires scarcity. This is a technological artefact of money in my view, not an immutable consequence of so-called ‘infinite’ wants dismally abutting finite resources to produce tedious supply-demand-price intersections so beloved of economists.

Things change. Scarcity appears to become ‘solvable’, slowly loses its dark charisma. Meanwhile, consumerism’s charms age and wither. And yet money remains the glue that holds all things together. What to do?

Things change. Digital technologies make (potentially all) information available to everyone at all times. This punches the dark arts of statecraft right in the solar plexus. When your chances of success at a Very Difficult Job Indeed require almost watertight and perpetual control of The Narrative, and that now at virtually global scale, the internet is a beast you must tame, pronto. But how? Censorship is what nazis do, and nobody likes those guys.

Things change. People dumb down because dumbness breeds further dumbness as society iterates forwards generationally. Wisdom cannot be handed over neatly to our progeny. To make matters worse, the danger and adventure humans need to grow in wisdom recedes inexorably as the hunger for ‘safety’ and Predictable Outcomes radiates ever outwards like a slow storm. The human crop harvested to produce the ‘leaders’ needed to usher in the glittering dystopian technotopia that will solve all ills via Change You Can Believe In is not remotely of sufficient quality. The human crop is now almost wholly infected by the narcissism that has been running rampant for decades. Those unaffected are unwanted, and anyway want nothing less than leading us dumbed-down oiks to some New Jerusalem.

What to do?

Communities R Us?

What is community? I don’t know, but what it once was and what it might be in future are likely two very different things. 

We need each other differently now. In days of yore, we needed each other existentially. Today, it’s as if we need each other as consumer items. Is this a bad thing? I’ve argued repeatedly that it is, that “meaning” is what humans need, not shallow, throw-away pleasures. 

Humans need humans, this is certain, but how? Meaningfully, and in unchanging ways? To raise barns for each other? To harvest each other’s crops? Stitch each other’s wounds? Rear each other’s young?

Or play online computer games together and have endless fun, with robot slaves cleaning up after us?

In a rain forest, the animals and vegetation take care of each other’s waste. One entity’s waste is another entity’s food. There is in fact no waste. By stark contrast, the domestic world brings with it, unintended, the need to clean up after ourselves. This is kind of against the grain, biologically speaking. No other animal does this. So why should we want to? Self-discipline? Maybe, but forever? Foreverever?? Aren’t we always striving to head back to our ‘perfect’ (idealised) jungle-forest home where our mess was cleaned up after us by other beings, whom we often thanked by gratefully eating them? Only this time around, we aim to recreate that ‘paradise’ with robot slaves, and gaze out across forests of mechanised vertical farms from our climate-controlled, sky-high apartments…

So what is the true character of the community humans must have? Play, or self-discipline? Both?

Much of civilisational effort is the manufacture of solutions to this irksome issue of waste and work, from animal and human slaves to mechanical and robot slaves. What’s wrong with that vector? I see a certain beauty in the minimalism of a disciplined life of low waste and simple living, but I’m not ethically against robot slaves. I’m not against ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of ‘waste’. I’m not against technology, at all. I’m not against ‘sloth’ either, except in the context of a civilisational phase that requires its opposite as a matter of survival. After all, the animal sloths that live well enough are not immoral creatures. They’re just doing their thing. And there is a place for their thing.

Another ‘problem’ of civilisation that dovetails with the above is one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’. Because communities that take care of each other disappear as states grow in skill and size, intimate knowledge of each and every citizen disappears, and each citizen grows increasingly dependent on the state. At some point, case-by-case remedies for each and every unique injury are utterly unaffordable. Thousands, millions, pay a bitter price for this harsh reality, which is also the soil of much corruption and nihilism. Bureaucratic, form-based, statistics-based ‘solutions’ predominate. We become Kafka cogs in a dystopian machine, anonymous, meaningless, quietly desperate. As this progresses, so we dumb down, increasingly dependent on remote ‘experts’ who know the best ‘solutions’ to our (infantile) ‘problems’. And it’s horrible. But also not really. We seep into our situation like spilled coffee into an old sofa, to get stuck there forever, too timid to dare anything different. For the most part.

This is the price we pay for the richly complex journey civilisation is. Except “we” is a very wide scattering of outcomes that is far from ‘fair’ to most. But who really knows what “fair” means? And those who claim they do, can they deliver their ‘fairness’ without accidentally spawning yet another dystopia, as the dream-crushing momenta of civilisation’s autonomic behaviours reassert themselves?

And can we really insist on a deliberate return to a context in which we need each other existentially, just so as to recreate the communities that are our healthiest social context? If indeed they are our healthiest social context.

Or can we become mature enough to produce graceful responses to these dull and terrible horrors, this overly mechanical time that is the post-modern era? Is this, my romantic prayer, simply too much to ask?

The more things change, the more they stay the same

And yet and yet and yet…

I am a man who for ultimately unknowable reasons chose a ‘spiritual’ set of ambitions over those on offer from the world of corporate careerism. At least, that’s how it seems to me at the moment; I’m increasingly unsure the dichotomy just implied really exists anywhere but in my labyrinthine reasoning. I am also a man with a family, four cats, and a dog. This rare combination of factors is not without its considerable stresses. So much so, I find myself wondering too much what’s what, repeatedly reassessing everything as the world around me decays. The answers I produce may be logically and rhetorically sound, but they are also wildly at odds with Life Out There. This practical dissonance appears to strip them of (functional) validity. Who’s right here? Yours Truly The Weirdo, or, in the ‘opposite’ corner, The Great They?

Like everyone else, I do not know how to measure success. In the absence of clear feedback, I plod on, do what I can, and struggle manfully to learn from my repeat-pattern ‘mistakes’. All to grow in grace and wisdom. On the whole, I’d give myself maybe a 4 out of 10 so far.

In my eyes, there can be nothing more ugly, more terrible, than the Russia-Ukraine war, nothing more darkly moribund than the WEF’s plans, the WHO’s pandemic treaty, the “safetyism” and compulsive virtue signalling that characterise the burgeoning totalitarianism that is corporatism’s Frankenstein monster. For the love of God I cannot make my peace with any of it! Why not? Have I correctly reasoned and intuited myself to the wiser, healthier take on all this, or am I but a stubborn old goat?

I have a memory that I now believe was one of my first dreams. I used to think it really happened, but my mother never mentioned the event while alive, so I think it must have been a dream. That I had it is incredible, considering who I am and these times the adult me is living through.

I am a toddler at a party, in a room playing with other toddlers. We ‘telepathically’ agree to go downstairs to visit our parents. We toddle and crawl to the stairs in our seeming multitude, but can’t descend them with skill. A small waterfall of screaming toddlers tumbles down the stairs and piles up at the bottom. I am the only one who manages to hold on to a bannister spindle. I hold on for dear life as if clinging to the edge of a cliff. From this vantage point, I see the shadowy shapes of our parents hurrying to the smoked-glass door of the room they are in, and let go. As I start to fall, the memory/dream ends.

Obviously, the tumbling toddlers represent those who just go along with societal moral decay, incapable of mounting any resistance. I am a lone but pointless exception holding on grimly against the flow of events. When I see authority figures about to remedy the situation, I yield and go with the flow, though I think I wanted to hold on until rescued, as if that would have been a noble accomplishment worthy of their praise. 

Am I about to yield ‘in real life’? The pressure of the flow of events is mighty. Resisting it, when you are essentially a lone wolf, as I am, is quite thankless, and draining. For me, there is no community out there that holds any lasting attraction. I have looked around, volunteer all my spare hours to those who want my technical help (IT skills), but am not attracted to fully join up. And it seems to me that no one is. We all like our customised creature comforts too much. We don’t need each other all that much. A little, perhaps, but not much. Aren’t we faking it?

More and more, this does not bother me. But one outcome of this cool observation that people, generally, are happy enough in their own four walls, is a growing conviction that my spiritual endeavours are misplaced, or misapplied, that I have misunderstood their character. Does this mean that I have likewise misunderstood the character of this historical moment? I suspect so.

I suspect that events are going to morph in unexpected ways that are both wildly anticlimactic and yet powerfully subversive, with a mix of contradictory ‘returns’ to several traditions, though as altered by evolved perceptions thereof. At the same time, these changes will produce, almost stealthily, new technologies and solutions that will bring about deep change. Much of what is ‘needed’ to effect all this is likely already embedded, but the wisdom of those ushering all this in is gravely limited, so limited in fact that their expectations will be dashed. Here I’m thinking of AI and its many Kafkaesque applications. 

I am one of those whose wisdom is simply not up to the task of seeing how things are about to play out. There may well be much turbulence across all societies on earth, but also perhaps not. There will be, I suspect, a re-separation of cultures, but one that mysteriously fosters renewed and deeper communications. Our lost youth will want to learn, and be able to do so, the new skills and social-governance methodologies required by changing circumstances. There will be incredible technological breakthroughs that seem par for the course: revolutionary, but oddly seamless. 

Some mix of these and other such things. Our many cultural soils are growing fertile just beneath our perception, their features and cracks opening to new germination and seeding that will prove Just So for how they have evolved, for the wounds that have enriched them.

“Have I not guided you to where you need to be?”

God said that. To me, when I was at my most desperately angry, when I raised my fist against Him like a spear. By “you”, I think He meant us all. And I could feel His deeply disarming smile course through me like a river.

(Note he said “need”, not “want”!)