Post Idea World
Selingkuh Tak Sampai - 2004 - Agus Suwage
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For millennia, human civilization has been flush with a succession of paradigm shifting, big ideas. Modernity's Hegelian world spirit, Nietzschean death of God and Heideggerian Being gave way in postmodernity to Foucault's dispositif, Fukuyama's end of history, Derrida's deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome. And yet, while we all assumed that big ideas would keep flowing hard and fast forever, in the last few years it seems that the wells of inspiration are running dry. There is a dawning realization that truly novel, creative ideas have suddenly stopped coming. Nobody knows why.
The conceptual drought couldn't be happening at a more inopportune moment. Seven billion of us are struggling through the most severe ecological, financial, political and spiritual crisis in our history. This time the catastrophe we face doesn't affect a single nation or region or continent … it is all the more terrifying because it is global and simultaneous. Odds are that if we can't pull ourselves out of this decline then we just might descend into a horrifying thousand year long dark age … an age of scorched earth authoritarian-capitalism, brutalism and mayhem which will make the genocides and holocausts of the previous century feel like foreplay. We've not only run out of ideas; we're running out of time.
Now more than ever we need the creative breakthroughs and outlier brainstorms that can shift the terrain of thought, revealing exits, opening possibilities, potentially saving us all. We need mavericks of indie media who can kill the commercial virus that infects our information flows. We need a brilliant new crop of economics students who can stand up to their professors, topple the neoclassical paradigm and replace it with a new, true cost model. We need potent new ways of dismantling corporate rule and killing corporate personhood. And then there is the biggest challenge of them all: how to spark a social revolution, an insurrection of everyday life that sweeps across the globe just in time to avert the final catastrophe?
It may be that our abandonment of the natural world and wholesale migration into cyberspace has cut our roots and scrambled our neurons beyond repair. We may be in the midst of an irreversible mental breakdown of the human race that parallels the irreversible collapse of our planet's ecosystems. This eco-psycho spiral may do us in. Maybe it is already too late?
But issue #99 of Adbusters is not about despair, it is about hope and revolution and living without dead time … it's about testing the waters and discerning whether we can muster the psychic energy for an almighty turnaround.
for the wild,
Kalle Lasn and Micah White
124 comments on the article “Post Idea World”
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Chris Honeycutt
I don't think that Stockholm is driven by mistaking a lack of abuse for kindness, but in a way, yes, I do think that the absence of free thought is attached to Stockholm.
[Wow, I just looked it up. You copy-pasted that from Wikipedia. That's pretty poetic. (Also note that Wikipedia says that it's because the captives think that the absene of abuse is due to kindness. Looked it up because I couldn't remember the name of the robbery.)]
I could go into a long explaination of how and why I think Stockholm happens, but if you think that the hostages were suffering under Stockholm syndrome by society, and they simply switched objects of authority, then yes it's related.
People don't generally reason. They simply repeat what was heard from authority. Now, however, the problem is that the communication system is so vast and the power structure so small that there's really no diversity. Thoughts, opinions, viewpoints, are global in a way they've never been in history.
Chris Honeycutt
I don't think that Stockholm is driven by mistaking a lack of abuse for kindness, but in a way, yes, I do think that the absence of free thought is attached to Stockholm.
[Wow, I just looked it up. You copy-pasted that from Wikipedia. That's pretty poetic. (Also note that Wikipedia says that it's because the captives think that the absene of abuse is due to kindness. Looked it up because I couldn't remember the name of the robbery.)]
I could go into a long explaination of how and why I think Stockholm happens, but if you think that the hostages were suffering under Stockholm syndrome by society, and they simply switched objects of authority, then yes it's related.
People don't generally reason. They simply repeat what was heard from authority. Now, however, the problem is that the communication system is so vast and the power structure so small that there's really no diversity. Thoughts, opinions, viewpoints, are global in a way they've never been in history.
Dear
In psychology, Stockholm Syndrome is an apparently paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages (mental or otherwise) express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake (apparent) lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.
Dear
In psychology, Stockholm Syndrome is an apparently paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages (mental or otherwise) express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake (apparent) lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.
Anonymous
Huh?
Anonymous
Huh?
pepe le pue
This innovative drought you refer to is, in part, caused by the artificial segregation of societies. For many years tribes were able to satisfy their needs by living within their means, by providing for their own necessities confined to a relatively small regional scale. In this tribal culture, innovations were unnecessary, and the fleeting nature of life was understood - gender roles were naturally assumed and death was an inevitable part of the hunt, climate cycles were incorporated into folklore and in many societies floral metabolites were imbibed in order to alter perception to achieve and understand the animus.
For a long time following the neolithic and later industrial revolutions, the massive gains in innovation ultimately influenced the exponential growth / bell curve graph that every peak-oil and global climate shift proponent embraces. Like any k-selected species, we will colonize the ecosphere in the later stages of succession and eliminate the pioneer species on which we have come to depend. Once the marginal cost of the 'Innovation' is no longer an advantage to society, we will see less of it. Natural gas may well postpone our oil woes, but what is to be said of peak phosphorus, or worse "peak fresh water availability". The globalization of our planet allowed us to see a the state of the planet that transcends ecology or economics. We have the ability to segregate ourselves, as we always have, into groups based on ideology rather than spatial or linguistic geography.
For that reason your prediction of authoritarian-capitalism brutality really struck a chord with me. The power of the community is only growing; grassroots organizations are encouraging a nation of consumers to become self sufficient, DIY producers. I believe that, maybe not within my lifetime, but soon, the survivors of the collapse will embrace a sort of neo-tribalism. Hopefully those 'fried neurons' have the ability to revert from internet surfers whining about true-cost economics into a species that once again espouses cultural knowledge.
Where do we turn when the wells of inspiration run dry: back to the mother who taught us how to sow the field and feel, back to the father who taught us how to hunt and lead.
pepe le pue
This innovative drought you refer to is, in part, caused by the artificial segregation of societies. For many years tribes were able to satisfy their needs by living within their means, by providing for their own necessities confined to a relatively small regional scale. In this tribal culture, innovations were unnecessary, and the fleeting nature of life was understood - gender roles were naturally assumed and death was an inevitable part of the hunt, climate cycles were incorporated into folklore and in many societies floral metabolites were imbibed in order to alter perception to achieve and understand the animus.
For a long time following the neolithic and later industrial revolutions, the massive gains in innovation ultimately influenced the exponential growth / bell curve graph that every peak-oil and global climate shift proponent embraces. Like any k-selected species, we will colonize the ecosphere in the later stages of succession and eliminate the pioneer species on which we have come to depend. Once the marginal cost of the 'Innovation' is no longer an advantage to society, we will see less of it. Natural gas may well postpone our oil woes, but what is to be said of peak phosphorus, or worse "peak fresh water availability". The globalization of our planet allowed us to see a the state of the planet that transcends ecology or economics. We have the ability to segregate ourselves, as we always have, into groups based on ideology rather than spatial or linguistic geography.
For that reason your prediction of authoritarian-capitalism brutality really struck a chord with me. The power of the community is only growing; grassroots organizations are encouraging a nation of consumers to become self sufficient, DIY producers. I believe that, maybe not within my lifetime, but soon, the survivors of the collapse will embrace a sort of neo-tribalism. Hopefully those 'fried neurons' have the ability to revert from internet surfers whining about true-cost economics into a species that once again espouses cultural knowledge.
Where do we turn when the wells of inspiration run dry: back to the mother who taught us how to sow the field and feel, back to the father who taught us how to hunt and lead.
Chris Honeycutt
Wow, awesome thoughts, but I have to point out that we have somewhat more immediate problems than running out of oil or other resources.
While the attenuation of resource availability is definately a problem - and is probably exacerbating the current situation, as oil production is leveling off right as third-world consumption is skyrocketing - we also have the problems of massive debt and that ultimate denarii devaluation, fiat currency.
On tribalism: that depends. I definately think that there is a re-emergence of tribalism after the collapse of empires - the rise of the early Christian churches during and immediately after the fall of Rome, for example.
On the "where do we turn": now that is the fundemental problem of my generation. Because families are disconnected, and we never learned what Adler refered to as "social interest." We're very poor at forming social bonds; we don't place value on family. Erich Fromm has some interesting writings on this (actually in support of this sort of behavior, which he terms "individualism," and calls a virtue), but it's a serious problem and a force stifling social change and unique social solutions (imho.)
Chris Honeycutt
Wow, awesome thoughts, but I have to point out that we have somewhat more immediate problems than running out of oil or other resources.
While the attenuation of resource availability is definately a problem - and is probably exacerbating the current situation, as oil production is leveling off right as third-world consumption is skyrocketing - we also have the problems of massive debt and that ultimate denarii devaluation, fiat currency.
On tribalism: that depends. I definately think that there is a re-emergence of tribalism after the collapse of empires - the rise of the early Christian churches during and immediately after the fall of Rome, for example.
On the "where do we turn": now that is the fundemental problem of my generation. Because families are disconnected, and we never learned what Adler refered to as "social interest." We're very poor at forming social bonds; we don't place value on family. Erich Fromm has some interesting writings on this (actually in support of this sort of behavior, which he terms "individualism," and calls a virtue), but it's a serious problem and a force stifling social change and unique social solutions (imho.)
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