Wednesday, July 27, 2022

The widening gyre

I believe that in pretty much most eras people have thought they were living in decadent end of times which mostly has basically meant that there had been some actual progress and improvements, and that the young were as young and as insolent as they usually are in the eyes of their preceeding generations.

But it is getting harder and harder to deny that there is something rotten, something rottening, in this global, high tech capitalist system, in this finance capitalist Anglo-Saxon version of the market economy. There is hysteria in the air, a panicky hatred is spreading. The Western democracies are weakening, splitting from the inside. Decadent, hysterical times, aided and abetted by the social media and the irrational, crazed enemies of the West, of liberalism.

The coming challenges are gigantic: the climate changing, threatening the very existence of our high tech civilization and which obviously can't be withstood by thinking and reactions focused on the next quarter. The various technological revolutions and the ever lessening the need for human workforce, the corruptive influence of the global entertainment industry and the ever more toxic social media. We are not confronting any of these: no, we are being carried by a flood stream.

A true cultural fugue, surely.