When the article 'Why It Seems Everything We Knew Is No Longer True' appeared in the NY Times last week, I thought of Francis Fukayama's work: The End Of History. Therein his core conclusion was (according to one reviewer):
"Human history is moving towards a state of idealized harmony through the mechanisms of liberal democracy,:
But he was unable to foresee that within a decade Western liberal democracy would be thrown off its tracks by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida with the 9/11 attacks. In other words, the world as we see it at any given time is never stable given a geopolitical 'black swan' can strike any time and throw it off kilter. Then all the fine, ideal expectations go by the backboards.
The NY Times piece echoed the radical changes in our current world situation, noting:
"Today's sense of unease is in stark contrast with the heady triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in December, 1991. It was a period when a political theorist could declare that the fall of communism marked 'the end of history' - that liberal democratic ideas not only vanquished rivals but represented 'the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution."
But such expectations, fanciful to the core, took no notice of how human brains are designed for ideological conflict, not harmony. As long ago as 1968, in his marvelous book Chance and Necessity, biochemist Jacques Monod showed how easily "mind viruses" - based on powerful memes - could lay waste to millions of minds. We have seen such manifestations recently with the arrival of QAnon, e.g.
Then one also beheld the malignant spread of all manner of conspiracy ideations, whether about the 2020 elections, the origin of the Covid pandemic, or the MRNA vaccines produced to protect a large segment of humanity. The pandemic itself - a 'black swan' event which cratered minds as it destroyed bodies - and left millions dealing with Long Covid. E.g.
The country saw a monumental spike in deaths, and decline in life expectancy, even as mental illness increased to historic proportions. Let's get back to the Times' delusional expectations, noting:
"Associated economic theories about the inescapable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on a similar sheen of invincibility and inevitability. Open markets, hands-off governments, and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would provide the best route to prosperity."
But this malarkey could only gain wide acceptance in elite circles. And that was because other critical voices were being ignored. For example, author William Grieder, writing in One World, Ready Or Not (p. 401):
It does not require
great political imagination to see that the world system is heading toward a
further dispersion of governing power so the closet dictator of the marketplace
can command things more efficiently, from everywhere and nowhere. The historic paradox
is breathtaking: At the very moment when Western democracies and capitalism have
triumphed over the communist alternative, their own systems of self-government
are being gradually unraveled by the market system.
Like feudal lords, the stateless corporations will make alliances with one another or launch raids against one another's stake. They will play weakening national governments off against each other..... In that event, vast throngs of citizens are reduced to a political position resembling that of the serfs....
And Greider wasn't the only voice expressing concern with what was unfolding under the banner of global capital. Many others, like Ian MacDonald, Charles Reich and yours truly : 'The Elements Of the Corporatocracy' e.g.
warned about placing so much blind faith in an inequitable system. Then it only took a few more black swan events to topple the fantasies.
That started with the Covid pandemic and the inevitable supply chain choke holds resulting - which underscored the fragility of a global-sourced economy. Hell, I can still vividly recall the images of storage containers piled up by the hundreds in Long Beach and other areas - with packed up goods waiting for distribution. Also trucks unable to move supplies to stores because not enough drivers. Meanwhile, prices spiking because of the existing prolonged supply shortage of so many goods - from toilet paper to infant formula- on account of the choke holds.
Add in now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the return of 'great power' Cold war politics and anyone could see how the global harmony and prosperity illusions were built largely on fairy tales and codswallop.
So, to my way of thinking, the transitions haven't been so much about "everything we knew is no longer true", but rather everything we thought we knew was wrong or incomplete from the get go. Had so many millions not been so reckless to believe the baloney that a "new world" was arriving based on global capital we'd not have gotten into the supply chain messes during the pandemic.
Had more people, including politicians, treated the mental dysfunction from the pandemic seriously we'd not now be wondering how mind virus-based conspiracies erupted to such an extent. And if we appreciated more the brain's structure itself - and how it's wired for propaganda - we'd not have been so surprised over the divisions, violence and political eruptions the past three years.
For piercing the veil of ignorance in those themes we have to thank Robert Nagel, who in a Denver Post Perspective piece from a year ago identified the three key elements undermining American quality of life:
1) Deep, divisions and acceptance of differing realities,
2) Addiction to technology and social media to the extent of allowing them to control our thinking, and
3) The degeneration of thought by wayward philosophical memes bordering on a form of nihilism, i.e. that objective truth no longer exists. In its place post-modernism reigns
I agree with all those and have written about some of the adverse influences, like Tik Tok, and why it needs to be limited for the use of kids, young adults, e.g.
Auburn U. Was Right To Ban Tik Tok - Sparing Students From 'Tik Tok Brain'
I still maintain that it's destroying brains like a multitude of other agents (FOX News, hard drugs, too little reading). But in fact, it may also be a multiplicity of coincident crises ("polycrisis") at work - which our finite human brains can no longer process or solve (se top link at bottoms). Far less solve, especially if we succumb to so many other distractions.
In the end, even given the existence of a polycrisis, the failure to figure out that so many things "known" were not true amounted to a failure in critical thinking. We desperately need to get back to teaching that fundamental skill, and not just on its own. But also part of science courses, as well as history, politics and the arts. The sooner we do so the more likely we won't be surprised by things we think we know in the short term, not being so in the long term.
See Also:
by Richard Heinberg | June 23, 2023 - 6:47am | permalink
Excerpt:
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the resulting disruption of multiple global supply chains, policy think tanks have increasingly adopted the term polycrisis to signify humanity’s destabilized status quo. The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Risk Report uses the new-ish word 13 times in 90 pages. Scholars from a range of disciplines (including Columbia University historian Adam Tooze) have written about the polycrisis, and both Cascade Institute and Omega Institute have published papers and reports on it.
The Cascade Institute notes that “a global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.”
And:
by Robert Reich | June 22, 2023 - 6:41am | permalink
And:
The Insidious Danger Of Propaganda And How It Has Infected Brains And Threatened Our Democracy
And:
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