I keep hearing from my Woke friends that what 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 end-stage Socialist 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 take over?” (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? And aren’t the social media algorithms and troll farms that keep pushing and pulling this click-bait maelstrom ’round-and-’round financed by those “end-stage Capitalists”? Those at the top of the feeding chain who are the only ones benefit? Who — like their algorithm itself — 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? Well sure, that’s 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 here that we can hope to see quite beyond the whole mess.
When I say this “blame train”, with its many 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; to be dismissed as ultimately futile with well-documented revolutionary precedents as may have occurred in France, in middle North America, in Russia, or more recently in Iran. No, my ‘runaway trains’ here (I’ve mentioned only two familiar ones but yes, there are others, though I think we’ll see they may ALL be related) are meant to symbolise that which what only human brains can do. Animal brains still, yes, for the most part, but with a symbolic 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 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, for it is only here we get to stand way back, and get to see our predicable little mineral-microbial model trains go way off-track into explosively “new” vegetable-animal territory. And here 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 reminiscently “explosive” departure even his symbolically aided animal mind would 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” my friends all find so distracting when insight is overpowered by… much, much older nonsense: which is to say this departure-denying unbelievability that seems bred in the bone — for the vast majority of us.
But yeah, The Human Train has indeed departed for the tracks we have become so familiar with, and what we are seeing now is our inability to find a believable model of the future. What else can explain the totality of this twenty-first century world chaos? Oh, I sympathise with what I imagine to be your desperation to envision some model 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 the models before? And haven’t they all resulted in opposing trains of thought that got us nowhere? It’s almost like the hairless Primate we can see, as we now look deep beyond it’s own unprecedentedly verbal “his-story”, has never actually known “what it is” within that much greater Paleontology.
But how could this be if we’ve tried every believable narrative? Is it finally time, as the Worlds of both Man and Nature burn back to dust around us, 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
