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On dynamism, spontaneous order and quantum politics...

Our struggle, and the fall of ideology in our time.
Miles Wilkerson

During my parent's lifetime, the world was beset by extreme ideologies of every sort: authoritarian Communism; nationalism; liberal capitalism; political Islam. My father was born only months after the end of World War Two, and my mother was a child at the time of the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis. The twenty-first century was a century of ideology. Millions of people died on the Eastern Front of the Great War, and many more died in numerous proxy wars just prior to my birth. One of my first memories is one of the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers... the first widely acknowledged act of Islamism against liberal capitalism.Now, though, we are imbibing the backwash of our ancestor's fixation on ideology.As millions die of disease, famine, war, dehydration, many still cling to the hope that some stable, easily understood 'solution' can be worked towards and achieved. I will be the first to say that I have been guilty of this; I have often looked towards radical Socialism as a buoy for my life.And I will be first to say that my attempts to package the world were naïve and, ultimately, doomed to failure. I will be the first to admit that a new paradigm is needed... a paradigm that I alone cannot produce.We live in a confusing, chaotic time, where answers are difficult to find and believe in. Humanity has pushed ourselves into a daunting trilema; do we relinquish our hope in this time of woe? Do we look starry-eyed into the sky, hoping for some rapturous event like communism, utopia, or heaven? Or do we grapple with our mistakes, accept our shortcomings, and search for a just, pragmatic solution?The ideologies, religions and idyllic worlds of the people are, in the words of Marx, our opiates. Our manifestoes, holy tomes and national standards are our security blankets. We are comforted by them, as we often have been comforted by them. But when our rotten structure becomes our moldy tomb, our security blankets will fail to save us.No matter the guise, our attempts at regulating reality will nearly always fall flat on their faces.When we transition from one phase of life to another, our quantum world often requires us to break from our past. This is one of those times.Our new paradigm must be both stable enough to provide a stable socioeconomic framework, and secure individual voice and freedom. Also, it must be both sustainable, and open to protovation. Our paradigm must arise spontaneously amongst the people as a whole, rather than from the needs of a small class of people.In just a few mellenia, nearly every corner of the globe has been touched by the five fingers of the human hand. Our strength as a species lies not in our strength, nor our speed, nor our agility… Our strength lies in our ability to persevere through even the most adverse conditions; to innovatively change the way we grow, act and learn; our ability to shape our world in a way no other species is capable of doing. Our strength, moreover, is our unhealthy hope for a better life for our progeny and global kin.Losing that would be the greatest Superthreat of all.This phrase, for me, sums up the ethos of what we need:We’re not doomed… if we work together!

Nov 18
ideology,dynamism,spontaneous order,quantum politics


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