More Than a Coincidence?
I’m actually thinking More Than a Reason but that is another old song that carried more meaning in its creation than it did in its content. It did have a hell of a hook, though. The tenuous link here requires a bit of backstory as a collection of key words and concepts.
Religion have evolved to fulfill basic human mental needs. In the four hundred year scientific run up to our current transition to digital realities (very plural) Western religion failed first but science gave it the gift of survival as long as it stuck to its role. It almost worked. We have gone through several metaphorical scientific realities as we have come to understand the universe of which we are a rather strange part, i.e. sentient. The long but geometrically accelerating rate of change has created a very long tale on human societies. We have people strung between late medieval thinking and post quantum mechanics facing some kind of singularity in our lifetimes (hope, hope). Switching from old to new visualizations of the universe has come to be understood as paradigm shifts and is now the classic definition of hard and confused. It’s hard for the people with some understanding of the front edge now but it’s more than a confusion(!) for people caught two universes back. The only thing it looks like to them is Dante’s Inferno, if they knew what that was, but it is still hell by any other name.
But that’s just the background and foreground to the failure of the neolithic spiritual systems that have finally run almost completely out of steam in the land of the millennials. Because they are more educated than any generation before (not well educated, mind you) but educated to hell and back never the less. Dealing with the death of religion has been brutal and violent but the nature of full world metaphor changes replaces all the rules with a new set. Thomas Kuhn only talked about the basic aspects of the original scientific revolution but hit it so well that people like me have spent forty years distorting the hell out of what he tried to do. But damn, it’s happening big time now. This is intimately tied to politics, economics, social structure, linguistics and the conversion of all art into full virtual reality.
The coincidence is that your call for a new religion comes a day after I called for a new type of government as preliminary to a new religion. My current primary Medium forum is TheOtherLeft that is political simply because that is the major system that is now failing (failed). The problems are now explosive and uncontrollable because of the tension created by the very long intellectual tale that makes a portion of our population prone to violent reaction as they are whipped into a universe that alters its own reality. From another perspective they are being asked, actually told, to jump from a closed world to an infinite universe and from white, grey haired divinities and Newtonian gravity as an absolute to Schrodinger's cat walked into a gay bar. . . except he didn’t.
With all of that the intricacies of free trade and late stage radical capitalism don’t really have a place in the minds of the problem portion of our population. To them the old swindle of the immigrants are stealing your jobs and your women (the women don’t know enough to not get stolen) and all the jobs are coming back, etc. by a TV conman who is easily confused and uses only words they can understand certainly feels wonderful. Nothing else makes any sense. My analysis is that we are in the main phase of a major paradigmatic change and all the nonsensical issues that have polarized the post industrial societies in 2016 are only symptoms.
In essence (I’m trying to cover a lot of ground very briefly here) we are facing the planetary challenge that requires a new, post capitalist, collaborative civilization that can maintain a planetary strategic consciousness with metro regional governmental units. Or something like that . . .
I’m also calling for open planning of where we want this to go or to at least figure out where it is going and begin preparation. We also have a world problem with fascism, racism, and the old monsters that feed on confusion and fear. Except we no longer have time to put up with that. It needs to be managed aggressively but humanely and that may well be the first module in the interstellar civilization test sequence.
I really want us to pass this test. . .
