The United States will not break apart, not so long as people of influence and authority continue to see the country as more valuable as a going concern.
Rather, what we are seeing now is the United States is dropping any pretense of being anything other than an empire. Think of this as the period when the Roman Republic was being cast aside. Even until the very end of the Western Empire and beyond, the old forms remained, just increasingly meaningless, just as today's politicians continue to utter the old platitudes and shopworn pieties about freedom and democracy.
Right. The sole analogy between us and roma is the lag between severe punishment for what we are associated with abroad and wha happens in RomeGA rome indiana. I do wish we gave to our home grown prognosticators the respect they deserve. What would a shattered polity look like( nothing personal. No personalities involved, in the event we chose to close the pits in Alberta or chose to stop fracking for example. I mean if we chose to decelerate or if in addition to graduating to idiocracy that one third of the Yellowstone blew instead of all of it?)? Palahniuk develloped our current theme into a book, Adjustment Day. Revisiting Brave New World is perrenial, H was here when he wrote it wasn, t he?
I wrote something in the spirit of this post in January 2018, just thinking about the meaning of Trump and spirals of technology and polarization. I had my first truly psychotic break about a month later. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Because I think this moment we're in, interpreted from within what Nick Land calls Secular History, is uninterpretable as anything other than The End even while everything that happens keeps on surprising us - for a moment, before it's seen as what was always going to happen. But no one saw any of it coming! So why wouldn't we expect to be surprised again? And if that surprise lasts but a moment - while objectively devastating what was our understanding of the future - maybe we should attend more to how we've already changed. Who has actually been living our lives? Certainly not us, as we are now.
Psychosis is then, or was for me, about stepping outside History such that History is seen as subordinate to Meaning. It's a real encounter with God's Plan as something that Time - understood as partiality and opacity - serves and within which Time will end. I wouldn't have much hope at all for the future if I thought Time was God but I've been granted the revelation that it's not and so have quite a lot of hope that we're all on the cusp of an unimaginable deliverance.
I agree with the religious takes and these are interesting perspectives to keep in mind. Religion will continue to grow in importance and weirdness as the U.S. Civil religion collapses.
That being said, I don't agree that a devolution into violence and constant infighting is inevitable or even imminent. We as a populace are incredibly wealthy and comfortable, have been for a while, and all signs point to us continuing to be so for at least a few decades. These things take time, and the amount of comfort and distraction we have today is incredibly unparalleled.
If or when it comes to actual violence, I suspect the majority will be terrified, especially since we live in a very feminized society. Plus, people don't want to lose their comforts.
a feminized society - i suspect that outside the ahistorical aggrieved white male silos this assertion has no objective basis. this entire essay is a fabulation flush to the man standard characterized by inherently violent and extractive enterprises - from minority persecution to data centers - its all pretty masculine
That was a fantastic read! I've been struggling to justify my vague sentiment that "America", considered as a memeplex, will reverberate throughout many millennia of global (or interplanetary, or interstellar) history to come. I am well aware of the notion of chronocentric bias, that everyone throughout all of history assumed they were personally living through the end times, that their particular gods or culture carry eschatological levels of significance. Well...
I was wondering if you've heard of the hard sci-fi writing project Orion's Arm. Its premise is to document the history, culture, technology, and "galactography" of the area of the Milky Way, ~10,000 light-years in radius, that has been colonized by our descendants (collectively known as Terragens) via the diegetic Encyclopaedia Galactica. Orion's Arm was what first introduced me to the idea that our species may very well be the seed for a coming Cambrian explosion of mind architectures, and that the present age is a critical inflection point for determining the fate of our entire light-cone – whether that be us getting Great Filtered and puttering out anticlimactically, or whether the Singularity will come and go and our galactic neighborhood ends up being home to quintillions of sentient beings. Basically it completely sold me on panpsychism; Orion's Arm takes the ball of panpsychism and runs with it in hard sci-fi fashion, if the amount of prose they've written about memetics is any indication. But I digress.
I ask this because, the Orion's Arm Encyclopaedia Galactica entry on the United States of America (written retrospectively from a point in time ten-thousand years into the future) seems to basically confirm your predictions:
"America, in its founding, was very unusual for its time in the emphasis placed on a unifying memetic set of ideals rather than shared descent or linguistic or ethnic commonalities ... this focus on ideals proved influential, spreading to a number of other nation-states, and was followed by the formation of new polities based on new ideals and ways of life starting in the Interplanetary Age... America's heavy influence during this crucial period of Terragen history can be felt to this day."
I am only human, and that means I desire to latch onto grand narratives in the pursuit of existential meaning. Or alternatively, I seek to sublimate my death anxiety by engaging in immortality projects. Whatever the case may be, it seems to me more likely than not that, being an American today means I may very well be playing a role in permanently imprinting into our light-cone, the ideals of "individual liberty and initiative, unity with diversity, and 'creative destruction,' the notion that it is good to experiment and take risks, even if these may disrupt the status quo" (which, as per the Encyclopaedia Galactica, will prove to be the legacy of Americanism on Terragen society). Just like how "men think about the Roman Empire" today, transapient minds of god-like power may be thinking about the United States of America millennia into the future. If nothing else this perspective (of the potential cosmological stakes of our actions in this day and age) sure makes the mundanities of my life in the US much more interesting.
Wonderful. Perhaps the presence of the Mother(s) will also play a future role in expressing the contemporary rise of the feminine, on top of the already ancient practice of worship of the great and terrible mother.
The United States will not break apart, not so long as people of influence and authority continue to see the country as more valuable as a going concern.
Rather, what we are seeing now is the United States is dropping any pretense of being anything other than an empire. Think of this as the period when the Roman Republic was being cast aside. Even until the very end of the Western Empire and beyond, the old forms remained, just increasingly meaningless, just as today's politicians continue to utter the old platitudes and shopworn pieties about freedom and democracy.
Right. The sole analogy between us and roma is the lag between severe punishment for what we are associated with abroad and wha happens in RomeGA rome indiana. I do wish we gave to our home grown prognosticators the respect they deserve. What would a shattered polity look like( nothing personal. No personalities involved, in the event we chose to close the pits in Alberta or chose to stop fracking for example. I mean if we chose to decelerate or if in addition to graduating to idiocracy that one third of the Yellowstone blew instead of all of it?)? Palahniuk develloped our current theme into a book, Adjustment Day. Revisiting Brave New World is perrenial, H was here when he wrote it wasn, t he?
I wrote something in the spirit of this post in January 2018, just thinking about the meaning of Trump and spirals of technology and polarization. I had my first truly psychotic break about a month later. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Because I think this moment we're in, interpreted from within what Nick Land calls Secular History, is uninterpretable as anything other than The End even while everything that happens keeps on surprising us - for a moment, before it's seen as what was always going to happen. But no one saw any of it coming! So why wouldn't we expect to be surprised again? And if that surprise lasts but a moment - while objectively devastating what was our understanding of the future - maybe we should attend more to how we've already changed. Who has actually been living our lives? Certainly not us, as we are now.
Psychosis is then, or was for me, about stepping outside History such that History is seen as subordinate to Meaning. It's a real encounter with God's Plan as something that Time - understood as partiality and opacity - serves and within which Time will end. I wouldn't have much hope at all for the future if I thought Time was God but I've been granted the revelation that it's not and so have quite a lot of hope that we're all on the cusp of an unimaginable deliverance.
me too :)
I agree with the religious takes and these are interesting perspectives to keep in mind. Religion will continue to grow in importance and weirdness as the U.S. Civil religion collapses.
That being said, I don't agree that a devolution into violence and constant infighting is inevitable or even imminent. We as a populace are incredibly wealthy and comfortable, have been for a while, and all signs point to us continuing to be so for at least a few decades. These things take time, and the amount of comfort and distraction we have today is incredibly unparalleled.
If or when it comes to actual violence, I suspect the majority will be terrified, especially since we live in a very feminized society. Plus, people don't want to lose their comforts.
a feminized society - i suspect that outside the ahistorical aggrieved white male silos this assertion has no objective basis. this entire essay is a fabulation flush to the man standard characterized by inherently violent and extractive enterprises - from minority persecution to data centers - its all pretty masculine
That was a fantastic read! I've been struggling to justify my vague sentiment that "America", considered as a memeplex, will reverberate throughout many millennia of global (or interplanetary, or interstellar) history to come. I am well aware of the notion of chronocentric bias, that everyone throughout all of history assumed they were personally living through the end times, that their particular gods or culture carry eschatological levels of significance. Well...
I was wondering if you've heard of the hard sci-fi writing project Orion's Arm. Its premise is to document the history, culture, technology, and "galactography" of the area of the Milky Way, ~10,000 light-years in radius, that has been colonized by our descendants (collectively known as Terragens) via the diegetic Encyclopaedia Galactica. Orion's Arm was what first introduced me to the idea that our species may very well be the seed for a coming Cambrian explosion of mind architectures, and that the present age is a critical inflection point for determining the fate of our entire light-cone – whether that be us getting Great Filtered and puttering out anticlimactically, or whether the Singularity will come and go and our galactic neighborhood ends up being home to quintillions of sentient beings. Basically it completely sold me on panpsychism; Orion's Arm takes the ball of panpsychism and runs with it in hard sci-fi fashion, if the amount of prose they've written about memetics is any indication. But I digress.
I ask this because, the Orion's Arm Encyclopaedia Galactica entry on the United States of America (written retrospectively from a point in time ten-thousand years into the future) seems to basically confirm your predictions:
"America, in its founding, was very unusual for its time in the emphasis placed on a unifying memetic set of ideals rather than shared descent or linguistic or ethnic commonalities ... this focus on ideals proved influential, spreading to a number of other nation-states, and was followed by the formation of new polities based on new ideals and ways of life starting in the Interplanetary Age... America's heavy influence during this crucial period of Terragen history can be felt to this day."
I am only human, and that means I desire to latch onto grand narratives in the pursuit of existential meaning. Or alternatively, I seek to sublimate my death anxiety by engaging in immortality projects. Whatever the case may be, it seems to me more likely than not that, being an American today means I may very well be playing a role in permanently imprinting into our light-cone, the ideals of "individual liberty and initiative, unity with diversity, and 'creative destruction,' the notion that it is good to experiment and take risks, even if these may disrupt the status quo" (which, as per the Encyclopaedia Galactica, will prove to be the legacy of Americanism on Terragen society). Just like how "men think about the Roman Empire" today, transapient minds of god-like power may be thinking about the United States of America millennia into the future. If nothing else this perspective (of the potential cosmological stakes of our actions in this day and age) sure makes the mundanities of my life in the US much more interesting.
beautifully said! Very interesting re: Orion's Arm, definitely some convergent thinking there.
Wonderful. Perhaps the presence of the Mother(s) will also play a future role in expressing the contemporary rise of the feminine, on top of the already ancient practice of worship of the great and terrible mother.
some further analogies to warring states in noema:
https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-new-warring-states/