We are living in a superficial, fearful society

Alan Kazlev, responds to our earlier entry, The Great Cosmic Mash-Up 1st March 2006

As i see it, what is happening in the world today is that on the one hand there is an emphasis on superficiality, youth culture (the MTV generation) hedonism and consumerism etc, along with a return to traditional/conservative values (Feminism no longer appeals to young women), and also - perhaps as a reaction against a sense of insecurity) - the rise of neoconservativism in the west. Neoconservatism is also tied in with religious fundamentalism (all these things go together). And the current meme of a “clash of civilizations” (west vs islamic world) is actually a misconception; it is actually extremism/conservatism verses progressives in both the west and the moslem world (in this context, Wilber and Beck’s take on spiral dynamics seems to contain insights of value).

So we are living in a superficial, fearful society in which - at least in both America and here in Australia (where conservative political parties and agendas have likewise been very successful; maybe this will change in the future…) in the West, religion and traditional values are becoming increasingly prominent. The same is also happening in the Islamic World in the Middle East and 3rd World but much more so, with Islamic extremism (which oppresses progressive moslems - see the excellent Ray Harris essay on the Integral World website) and attacks on the west (as a result of clumsy neocon policies against them) fueling paranoia and xenophobia in the west Jung said somewhere that the division in the human psyche resulted in the Cold War as an external manifestation of that. In years past I used to wonder what would happen after the Soviet Block fell, if man’s psyche is still divided. Well, here’s the answer. It’s world affairs, but its synchronicity too.

I’ve rambled on a bit here, and drifted from the topic at hand, but my essential point is that talk of postmodernity and so on is pretty irrelevant, because this particular movement in philosophy, literature and art is not one of the driving forces in the world today. So what we have the divided psyche (shadow and ego) and (once again!) a divided world Add to all this the information age (which has also made possible the P2P revolution; indeed given human informational interconnectivity, P2P is inevitable!), more on which in a moment, and the increasing environmental breakdown - with growth of environmental awareness, but probably still much too slow - and you have the state of the world today. Alan Kazlev responds to the great Cosmic Mash-Up P2P Foundation