i have been waiting for this year for a long time, since 1998, when i started entertaining a model that said, what if the period 1970-2022 is structurally analogous to the period from 1470-1522, which contained the renaissance, the reformation, and the circumnavigation of the globe. what had started me looking at this model was that from 1980 on, our institutions have been defined as in crisis, starting with schooling in 1980 and the family soon after. the last time structuring institutions of a similar nature were in crisis was at the beginning of modernity, the church and the king are the reference structuring institutions, they structured everything until they were remaindered by the advent of the modern world.
there is a revolution going on, right now, in the life sciences, that makes the renaissance look like a sandlot, and the applications in the medical pipeline alone make our current interventions look medieval, which they are.
there has also been a revolution between the individual and their structuring institutions, and that revolution in social architectures is called the people’s republic of china.
the circumnavigation made the globe finite, in a new way, as soon as it was completed. the transformational dynamics of the other two precipitating events are already in play. what would make the world more finite, enough to trigger a postmodern horizon by the end of 2022?
we are at a point on global climate impacts where many structural thresholds in large scale systems are approaching their breaking point. so even though i don’t know where to look within climate impacts for an event that would make us see the world as more finite, there are many candidates, and their transformational power could come when they interact and overlap.
young people need to understand that the game changes completely in a postmodern world, and not just from urgency, everything has always been urgent and usually on one or more knife’s edge.
i lived to see western philosophy float by on the river, sometimes i can’t believe what i’ve lived to see. and if you are looking for help from western institutions in terms of how to turn a corner on how we live on the earth, forget it.
but the chinese have a different model of what it means to be a human being, what we are capable of, and they understand you can engineer social achievement at scale without dampening individual achievement in the slightest, quite the contrary, you can orchestrate them together to optimize their mutual effects.
in the west, we have one asset the chinese can’t manufacture, and our dimwit governments can’t even capitalize on, but we make shit up, and we’re experienced, modernity was a knock down drag out fight.
you are surrounded by veterans of that fight, modernity was contested at every step.
the experience of everything that ever lived is in your DNA, but there’s something even cooler that holds it together. try seeing yourself from that perspective, you might see yourself in the mirror.
don’t believe everything you’ve heard about yourself.
householder zen 