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ionelvPaul Mason and Yuval Harari underscore in their own way the West’s century-long crisis and its inevitable downfall. Paul mentions the right’s rise due in part to a deteriorating self-confidence and also hints at what Yuval is talking about too: the failure to produce an easily digestible counter-narrative to the monsters of the right’s fear-feeding ascension and multi-headed hydra: racism, xenophobia, mysogyny. If you combine their ideas with Hitchens’ or Chomsky’s charge that the West and capitalism was built mainly on the vicious exploitation of others and the extraction of the other’s wealth (while often self-deluding as the world’s benevolent saviour) , the picture is consolidating even further.
In a way, this predatory drive that humans have is nothing but the existential insecurity of a relatively slow weak mid-sized animal that emerged from a crepuscular existence (when the long shadow of the Cretaceous giants went poof) into a limelight and a caretaker role that it was never built for, never accepted (even when told by its “maker”), nor ever rose to the challenge that the role prompted. Humanity has always vacillated between its pre-agriculture (magic mushroom) “hunter”-scavenger-gatherer past, Sparta (militarism/slavery), Athens (democracy where some are more equal than others) and Rome (imperialism) fractional personalities and unfortunately for us, all are deeply flawed and highly inadequate for a society of billion humans and a planet of orders of magnitude more life that is equally deserving in sharing its bounties.
PS: China is not a saviour as it is merely a Frankenstein of Western unmoored greed and Eastern semi-detached vogon paternalism.
PPS: AI ain’t the saviour either.
PPPS: Jebus second coming, Mahdi, Kalki, Saoshyant or Ragnarok are but cute fanciful bedtime stories.
PPPPS: It is fascinating to observe how the West’s transition out the dark ages (on its path to ever more glorious peaks) overlaps with the Reconquista, the Crusades, vengeful/messianic Protestantism, and the start of the pillaging of the rest of the World under a “civilizing”/bludgeoning/“righteous”/procrustean cross, and conversely, its sunset starts with its internecine World Wars, (partially) discarding its Abrahamic delusions, peak capitalism and the unshackling of the rest of humanity.
PPPPPS: It is equally fascinating to observe that the West’s ruthlessness drive is itself nothing more than the cargo-cultist malevolent self-designated importance overlaying on top of the “sacrifice” by suicide-by-Sanhedrin of a false Messiah overlayed on top of a rudimentary shepherd mythology overlayed on top of tragicomically misunderstood older myths.
In a way, this predatory drive that humans have is nothing but the existential insecurity of a relatively slow weak mid-sized animal that emerged from a crepuscular existence (when the long shadow of the Cretaceous giants went poof) into a limelight and a caretaker role that it was never built for, never accepted (even when told by its “maker”), nor ever rose to the challenge that the role prompted. Humanity has always vacillated between its pre-agriculture (magic mushroom) “hunter”-scavenger-gatherer past, Sparta (militarism/slavery), Athens (democracy where some are more equal than others) and Rome (imperialism) fractional personalities and unfortunately for us, all are deeply flawed and highly inadequate for a society of billion humans and a planet of orders of magnitude more life that is equally deserving in sharing its bounties.
PS: China is not a saviour as it is merely a Frankenstein of Western unmoored greed and Eastern semi-detached vogon paternalism.
PPS: AI ain’t the saviour either.
PPPS: Jebus second coming, Mahdi, Kalki, Saoshyant or Ragnarok are but cute fanciful bedtime stories.
PPPPS: It is fascinating to observe how the West’s transition out the dark ages (on its path to ever more glorious peaks) overlaps with the Reconquista, the Crusades, vengeful/messianic Protestantism, and the start of the pillaging of the rest of the World under a “civilizing”/bludgeoning/“righteous”/procrustean cross, and conversely, its sunset starts with its internecine World Wars, (partially) discarding its Abrahamic delusions, peak capitalism and the unshackling of the rest of humanity.
PPPPPS: It is equally fascinating to observe that the West’s ruthlessness drive is itself nothing more than the cargo-cultist malevolent self-designated importance overlaying on top of the “sacrifice” by suicide-by-Sanhedrin of a false Messiah overlayed on top of a rudimentary shepherd mythology overlayed on top of tragicomically misunderstood older myths.
