My typical posts look at current events through my Psychoanalytic lens. This series will be much more speculative and will attempt to integrate a number of themes I have been noticing in the last few years.
I have been thinking for quite some time that there are poorly understood forces at work in the world which are likely to reshape our environment in fundamental and unpredictable ways within the space of our lifetimes. This is a relatively new development in human history. People have always had to negotiate change but until the Industrial Revolution, it was common for young men to do what their fathers did, often in the exact same ways using the exact same tools, and common for young girls to grow up to do what their mothers did, in the exact same ways and using the exact same tools. This really only began to change in recent historical time and the pace of such change is accelerating such that the future has become not only unknowable, but unrecognizable. Now, not only does a young person not expect to do the same things as their parents, but they expect to be using tools and doing work that doesn't even exist yet!
Throughout human history, during times of stress, when people are facing disruptive and massive upheaval, it creates tremendous anxiety within the body politic; attempts to manage the anxieties and terrors of the times take certain predictable forms. We are living in such times. Ray Kurzweil describes the acceleration of the accelerating pace of technological change and suggests we will hit a Biological-Technological Singularity sometime in the next three or four decades, and for the first time in recorded history, the disruptions are universal rather than local.
One response to disruptive upheaval has traditionally involved the magical wish for the Hand of God to rescue his people. This is a derivative of the infantile wish to be rescued by the all-powerful parent.
Fantasies of Ecstatic Union, or Reunion, are ubiquitous and probably universal. They involve the wish to have all one's desires gratified, forever. While Childhood development represents a series of moves forward, it also includes losses; every step forward increases the distance from the blissful union that once existed within the Mother's womb, the last time such wishes were realized.
[Please note I am using "fantasy" in the Psychoanalytic sense, meaning a persistent mental structure, often unconscious, which affects or controls overt behavior. When I write about its derivatives in religion or politics, I am not suggesting this has any implications for the validity of the religion or ideology involved, simply looking at the place of the unconscious fantasy in the lives of those whose actions are affected by it.]
The religious form of the fantasy involves Union with God, in Judaism when the Messiah comes, in Christianity, when He returns. The Secular version, which typically involves an overt or oftentimes implied, atheism, includes those Utopian political ideologies that suggests if only people were led to practice a pure enough Communism/Capitalism/Libertarianism/Anarchism, no one would any longer suffer from material privations, and peace and love would prevail.
Islam currently seems to have two major forms of such an operative fantasy. If I am understanding correctly, the Sunni, exemplified by al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, believe that by bringing the entire world into the Umma, they will recreate the Utopian Caliphate they look back on, and all will live in peace and harmony under Allah's benevolent eye.
The Shia have a more Apocalyptic version in which, out of chaos, the 12th Imam will return and bring back the Utopian Caliphate.
There are, of course, Apocalyptic strains in Christianity and peaceful strains within Islam, but for current purposes, my major concern is with those who see it as their mission to create the conditions for ushering in the Ecstatic Reunion.
It has long been recognized among the Mental Health Professionals that the most common times for Psychiatric illness to appear are around developmental milestones. First Psychotic breaks are most common at the time the Adolescent has to make the transition to Young Adulthood; their mental apparatus is essentially complete and they are, for the first time, expected to support themselves and become part of adult society. Young people who do not have the constitutional predisposition for psychotic illnesses, yet feel (or are) unprepared to enter the adult world, often give in to the false promise of drugs and alcohol, become depressed, or withdraw into the apathetic pose of the "slacker" who essentially surrenders his future while managing his dysphoria with nonchalance.
The Human race is young and the various siblings have developed at different paces. Until fairly recently, the failure or success of a particular civilization was relatively inconsequential for the ongoing perpetuation of the species. That began to change with the advent of technology. The first technological civilization peeked in Roman times and when it fell into senescence, the young barbarians destroyed it. It took a thousand years for Europe to recover from the Middle Ages.
The human race is on the brink of Adulthood, ie understanding and accepting the need to manage our appetites and impulses in ways which will allow us to grow and thrive; we will very soon have the potential for a small group of people to destroy all human life on our planet. We must act as if there is no one (or no thing) else who can save us if we cannot learn to survive on our own. And at this time of an approaching developmental milestone, once again, we have barbarian hordes, not only at the gates but within our own borders, but this time with a significant difference. If Civilization fails again, it could well mean not only a new Dark Ages, with the deaths of billions, but the beginning of the decline of homo sapiens as a functioning natural experiment.
We have always been able to muddle through and many think we can continue to do so, but I would submit that if we stall in our technological development, decline and fall will be inevitable. Further, if the West fails, the "carrying capacity" of the Earth will be severely curtailed.
In my estimation, although we are facing a "Long War" with Islamic fascism, the next 5 years will be absolutely crucial. It starts with Oil.
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