I keep hearing from my Woke friends that the chaos we’re experiencing in this early twenty-first century is end-stage Capitalism; but then my Capitalist friends of course have a very different view: No! they say, what we’re seeing now is full-blown Bolshevik Wokeism! (Can you guess which friends are still saying “follow the money”?)
Anyway, which “side” are you on my reading friend? Which runaway blame-train sidetracks you from your more, shall we say, ‘stationary’ insights? Neither? Then let’s you and I take a little walk away from the station and try to look beyond all this choo-choo-going-’round-and-’round busyness.
I know in my heart of hearts that all my friends are dealing with a very very old human brainteaser: “Where does my individual being end and my social being begin?” (Or vise-versa if you like but same thing really.) And isn’t that the central quandary all this Right vs Left social media warfare amounts to? Of course it must be said the social media algorithms and troll farms that keep pushing and pulling this click-bait maelstrom ’round-and-’round are financed by those “end-stage Capitalists” aren’t they? Certainly those at the top of the feeding chain are the only ones who benefit, and — like their algorithm itself — they don’t have the slightest “interest” in arriving anywhere near what we all know to be a healthy human balance.
Did I mention that a maelstrom is a “water vortex with a hollow in the centre”? And, sure enough, that hole is a good place to sit for a while, but let’s keep in mind we’re standing outside the station itself here! For it is only from the outside that we can hope to see quite beyond the whole mess.
When I say this “blame train” with its many waring sidetracks is “running away”, this is meant to alert you that these are not just more of those cyclical excursions into well-established political territory; running “away” is not another “cyclical excursion” to be dismissed as ultimately futile with well-documented revolutionary precedents such as have occurred in France, in middle North America, in Russia, or more recently in Iran. No, my ‘runaway train’ here (I’ve mentioned only the obvious political one but yes, there are others, human caused mass-extinction of species comes to mind, but I think we’ll see there’s a lot of blame going ’round and ’round here too) are meant to symbolise something only our human brains can do: animal brains still, yes, for the most part, but humans have this very ‘new” symbolic language function that uniquely manifests technological powers for both creativity and destruction which seem to have no natural end.
Some of us have read McLuhan, and later scholars, who have written about technology’s power to bring about truly novel changes in human cultures, and even human natures (Hahn, Assaad and Schoppl’s 2025 Cognitive Science Society paper ‘Flooding the Zone: An Agent-based Exploration’ comes to mind. Computers today make it possible to propagandise way beyond Hitler’s feverish dreams. This is truly new.)[1]; but for most of us the notion of cyclic political and cultural regime changes, and even extinction events, is an animal expectation that we keep falling back on when our humanness, and the reality of ‘evolutionary endlessness’, gets scary!
Political and cultural cycles can be big or small, and so any historical “newness” can be hard to recognise when the human nature that unpacks it stays so much the same. Stays so primitive. But I am a student of pre-history, and it is only here that we get to stand way back; where and get to see our predicable little mineral-microbial model trains go way off-track into explosively “new” vegetable-animal territory. And it is here that a relatively new hairless Primate (product of a somewhat more predictable looping within behavioural sociability and transient enculturation) might look back on an even more recent, but likewise “explosive”, departure that even his symbolically aided animal mind could not have anticipated. Most “unbelievably”, a whole new evolutionary process of runaway culture that can, intrinsically, wield irresistible power over the far older genetic process!
And this is why I can find little comfort in taking up with any of the proffered “sides” many of my friends find so distracting when their insight is overpowered by… what? By much, much older nonsense? Ok, I’ll say it: this departure-fearing unbelievability that seems bred in the bone — for the vast majority of us.
But yeah, The Human Train has indeed departed from the tracks we have become so familiar with. Maybe what we are seeing now is our inability to find a “believable” model of the future; how else to explain the seeming totality of this twenty-first century world chaos we are helpless witnesses to? Can you make good decisions, and carry them out effectively, if you don’t believe you have a future? Oh, I sympathise with what I imagine to be your desperation to envision some model of the future we can all agree on (after all, if you’ve read this far, we must still be friends in that we are both seeking to find a healthy human balance whereby we can escape this social media “click-bait maelstrom” that enriches only it’s owners). But haven’t we tried ALL credible models before? And haven’t they all resulted in some war between opposing trains of thought that got us nowhere? It’s almost like the hairless Primate we can see, now that we’re looking far beyond the Primate’s own unprecedentedly verbal “his-story”, has never truly “known what it is” within that much greater Paleontology. It’s almost like he has no self-confidence, what forward motion is there in that?
How did we get to this level of uncertainty and ineffectuality if we’ve really tried every believable narrative about who we are and where we’re going? As the Worlds of both Man and Nature burn back to dust around us now, is it finally time, to look at the “unbelievable” narratives??
Which brings us too https://www.extremophilechoice.com/about-extremophile-choice/
Notes:
- Hahn, Assaad and Schoppl’s 2025 Cognitive Science Society paper ‘Flooding the Zone: An Agent-based Exploration’ https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z32x661
