James Howard Kunstler: Who knew that these mid-cycle days of the long emergency (i.e. the collapse of techno-industrial economies) would feature the willful abandonment of reason by the thinking class of Western Civ, and America extra-specially? Reminder: the basic catalyst for collapse is over-investments in complexity with diminishing returns. The rest follows from there.
Another name for diminishing returns is blowback. The Internet is certainly the most complex assembly of human thought in human history and it is blowing back ferociously on humanity in ways that are far from obvious. It has set in motion countless recursive feedback loops of misinformation, disinformation, and ideas that are simply bad in the sense that they don’t comport with reality. Hence, the new elastic meaning of the concept known as “truth.”
Capital T Truth used to be mankind’s conduit to reality. To even state it that way now may invite censure for sexism, since the word “man” has lately been burdened with toxic overtones; while the concept of sexism itself is tinged with the unreal notion that the hard-wired tensions between men and women should not be allowed to exist and must be abolished. That’s how hopelessly complex it’s getting. The divorce between truth and reality is nearly complete now that everybody has his/her/zhe’s own truth, and the facts are just ornaments subject to rearrangement within anyone’s own story.
The stupendous failures of authority driving America to political collapse are one manifestation of these dynamics, and one that might concern the thinking class, if it wasn’t so busy mind-fucking itself and everybody else.
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