The sinkhole is a metaphor for a collapsing civilization. Will the US Empire collapse? Or will it simply decline and melt away, to be replaced by the emerging institutions stirring in our creative imagination? What are the processes behind the rise and fall of civilizations, or to put them into technical terms, systems of socioeconomic organization (civilizations are much more complex, but that works for now), and how do they shape our own ideas and philosophies? And isn’t it interesting that these processes occur in other parts of the world across time? We will discuss such processes in this blog, primarily through the lens of ideology, metacognition, and culture.
I find the sinkhole metaphor apt in that the conscious experience of this process of decline personally seems to me to have the sensation of sinking: social relations melting away, social alienation setting in, oscillations of anxiety and depression, low energy levels, short-term thinking and hedonism, the widening of narcotic sinks, mental disorder, economic deterioration, all of it contributing to a general loss of subjective/social buoyancy and an air of darkness and isolation.
However, despite the initial negativity implied by analyzing social disintegration and the subjective experience of such a process, we can also encourage ourselves to remain optimistic, since it does seem that this culture of cynicism and resignation is shifting in quality. Cultural and political movements in the US
This blog will seek to address those themes and more, while attempting to maintain more balanced power relations between writers and readers. I myself do not have all the answers, nor do I wish to attempt to know all of them. I want a conversation with others on the big issues of our time, not a soapbox to dictate ideas that I didn’t really create all by myself in the first place.
Practicing in microcosms in which we vie for more equal power relations could be quite vital. We should practice it everywhere we can: on the street, in our families, with our friends, talking online, making music with people, etc. Perhaps understanding power and achieving more even power relations, we could translate the findings and even compress them into artifacts we can share with others.
Because let's face it, our individualist and ego-driven culture reaches down to the roots. It finds expression even among the egalitarians, since it seems that these tendencies become amplified as power relations become unbalanced, especially when we try to organize. We haven't quite gotten the hang of this yet. In these trying times, nothing less than radical solutions, radical definitions of what we are and how we should treat each other and how we should organize will be enough.
Practicing in microcosms in which we vie for more equal power relations could be quite vital. We should practice it everywhere we can: on the street, in our families, with our friends, talking online, making music with people, etc. Perhaps understanding power and achieving more even power relations, we could translate the findings and even compress them into artifacts we can share with others.
Because let's face it, our individualist and ego-driven culture reaches down to the roots. It finds expression even among the egalitarians, since it seems that these tendencies become amplified as power relations become unbalanced, especially when we try to organize. We haven't quite gotten the hang of this yet. In these trying times, nothing less than radical solutions, radical definitions of what we are and how we should treat each other and how we should organize will be enough.
We are now swimming with information, much of it chaotic in a sense, and it will take more than individuals to organize and make sense of the information and generate new ideas in the process. So this blog will also be an instance of experimentation with collaboration and collective thought and a repudiation of dogmatic individualist thinking, a theme that figures prominently in this new cultural cycle, which takes its inspiration from strands of thought that reach far into human history.
Additionally, this blog will be an expression of practical philosophy which has a long, proud tradition in analyzing ideas and their relation to practical action. This is due to an urgency for action, it is due to the necessity for active material change as opposed to passive, disconnected analysis. Practical philosophy contains analysis within, but its primary purpose is that of action, of active revision of our human reality. It is the need to alter or even rebuild a social organizing system in time and space, due in large part to the instability of the current one.
Anyways. Welcome.
Additionally, this blog will be an expression of practical philosophy which has a long, proud tradition in analyzing ideas and their relation to practical action. This is due to an urgency for action, it is due to the necessity for active material change as opposed to passive, disconnected analysis. Practical philosophy contains analysis within, but its primary purpose is that of action, of active revision of our human reality. It is the need to alter or even rebuild a social organizing system in time and space, due in large part to the instability of the current one.
Anyways. Welcome.
