The flow of the universe is always creative, though it has order, and is not random or chaotic; the world is always a matter of responsiveness, though it is equally not a free-for-all. It is a process of creative collaboration, of co-creation.
Whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever-it-is. By this I do not only mean the common sense view that I have an impact on the world, as the world has an impact on me: that I leave my footprints. That would lead immediately to the reflection that I am very small in relation to the world, and so effectively my impact is so small that for all intents and purposes it can be ignored. There is, it might seem, an inexpressibly vast universe and an inexpressibly tiny individual consciousness (I’d say that this is the left hemisphere’s attempt to represent spatially and quantify something that is experiential and developed in time, but I hope that will be more comprehensible when we come to the discussion of time and space in Part III). Such a reflection seems to posit an objective position – the view outside of history or geography, time or space – a view from nowhere, in which all can be measured and compared. It implies a Measurer of all the measurers, measuring the other scales and putting each part in its place according to its overall worth. But though that cannot be, the alternative is not just a merely subjective position, either: this very polarity – subjective/ objective – is misleading. In the fado, in the raga, in jazz, it is what it is because of me, and I am what I am because of it. I will have much more to say about the crucial issue of the subjective/ objective ‘divide’ throughout this book.
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time,
for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
[Don Beck of Spiral Dynamics fame] realized a surprising truth—one that might have seemed nonsensical to the uninitiated but represented a radically different perspective on the political tensions of the country [South Africa]. “Oh my God,” he realized. “This is not about race.” To most South Africans, the societal fault lines were clear. It was black versus white, African versus European. But for Beck, it wasn’t so simple. This struggle really masked a deeper conflict, one between value systems.
Xi’s panopticon is actually more akin to the dystopia imagined in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1920s novel We.
IN FACT, the entire New Deal period, lasting until the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, reflects an unremitting sense of fragility. From the Great Depression to the blood-filled battlefields in Korea, persistent, nearly unremitting anxiety conditioned the era’s “normal politics” of voting, public opinion, pressure groups, federalism, and the separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.
When people subconsciously begin to associate you with positive moods and emotions, you are going to be the bell that makes people smile without realizing why.
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