Our supply of ingenuity, I soon recognized, involves both the generation of good ideas and their implementation within society.
No mere oppression, therefore, but the total and reliable domination of man is necessary if he is to fit into the ideologically determined, factitious world of totalitarianism.
I’m sure people are reacting, at least in part, to the early hints of the enormous social earthquakes our societies will likely undergo in coming decades, as hard-to-see, slow-moving, and diffuse tectonic stresses steadily build in force, cross social boundaries and scales, and combine to multiply their effects. Four* of those stresses seem to be having an outsized impact on people’s moods, especially in the West.
The four stresses of the apocalypse: (1) widening economic inequality and increasing economic insecurity, (2) increasing migration and refugees, (3) climate change & its effects on people's feelings of security, possibilities, and hope, and (4) "normative threat," i.e., changes in culture (norms, beliefs, shared values) caused by rapid urbanization and increased informational connectivity (primarily).
“Well, stress affects sleep and the arousal system, and the arousal system involves the frontal lobes. Sleep deprivation reduces metabolic uptake in the frontal lobes, throwing off one’s ability, not to do common tasks, but to do frontal-lobe-type tasks that involve sequencing and shifting among problems. Amy Arnsten at Yale and other researchers have also found that stress significantly impairs working memory, which is a critical function of the frontal lobes. Working memory is often called ‘scratch-pad’ memory—it’s a bit like the RAM in our personal computers—and it helps us govern our behavior.”
But it’s life’s metaphysical edges that really intrigue me, like those between what we know, more or less, and what we don’t really know at all; between the past, present, and future; between events inside our minds and outside; and between the impossible and the inevitable.
It is a curious situation, and not without interest as illustrating the way in which modern irrationalism, wishing to destroy the spirit of scientific inquiry, but wishing at the same time to go on enjoying the technical benefits conferred by modern natural science, converts the desire for these benefits into a motive for refusing to draw the logical conclusion from its own premisses.
Like the Gnostic demiurge and Iain McGilchrist’s overconfident left brain, it [the deficient mode of rational-mental consciousness (Gebser)] believed it was self-sufficient and ignored any idea that its perspective was only partial, and that, no matter how much it denied it, it was inextricably linked to another perspective, radically other than its own but equally necessary. By the nineteenth century and the triumph of scientific materialism, this deficient mode could lay claim to more or less dominance, with the church ceding more and more ground and with Romantic poets noisily but ineffectively sounding warnings about its debilitating effect on the soul.
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