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Yes, good point - the powers that be want us to be spectators, and not participants. A lot of rewriting/nullifying of history here in the UK too, statues being torn down, syllabuses be rewritten in the name of "decolonizing the curiculuum"

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Colonizers will do what colonizers do. That remains consistent over time.

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Dec 6, 2022·edited Dec 6, 2022Liked by Ed Brenegar

There is certainly quite some upheaval going on right now.

I guess the role of "renovating" culture usually goes to those aged 15-30, who traditionally fight what they do not like around them.

When I was young, the powerbase stood up to us, did not allow us to simply protect our angst outwards and fight shadows.

Nowadays, it seems to have learned to weaponise the mind of that age group and direct it to forward their own aims.

Democratic cultures seem to have this unfortunate aspect of optimising for Machiavellian behaviour over time.

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This is what I believe is the reason for this- https://youtube.com/shorts/VEqpZygP7pc?feature=share

My conversations with young adults tell me that the see it, but do not have the self-awareness to detach themselves from the experience.

In other words , there is nothing transcendent, like historical time, so the present moment is all that they know. It’s tyrannical.

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Yes, I see this happening, and Tristan Harris has commented on it excellently, I think.

But what I'm actually talking about here, with regard to the young, is the degree to which their minds are getting weaponised by the state, via media and social media, to do the geopolitical hard lifting of culture war against Russia, China and Islam.

I've been getting interested in this recently, after coming across Chris Mott's excellent "Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence Between Social Justice and Neoconservatism." Planning a whole piece of how young Western minds are being weaponised.

I mentioned it also in a piece the other day...

"In the wake of the international outcry against the US’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, it became clear to Western powers like America and Britain that a “new way” needed to be found, were they to continue to attack their perceived geopolitical opponents. Enter progressivism. Enter social justice. Enter woke. By adopting and championing the ideals espoused themselves, the West could legitimately use the same values to destabilise the regimes that they considered in opposition to them, especially those of Islamic states, rich in oil, minerals and gas."

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Yes. I see that too.

To me this points to a strange transition, where once political opponents, left and right, are now collaborators. Who are they collaborating against? The people. Us. This is partly where my Two Global Forces finds its rationale. Centralized institutions in opposition to decentralized networks of relationships.

Now here's the question related to your comment. Is it possible to reverse the weaponization of young people? If so, how? Is Elon Musk repurposing of Twitter to be focused on free speech going to have an effect? I don't know. But the mere disruption of the status quo is a very decentralizing strategy.

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Dec 6, 2022·edited Dec 6, 2022Liked by Ed Brenegar

I also think that a lot of the turmoil we're now experiencing is downstream of the realisation that decentralisation may soon be possible. It gets all these old colonialists' backs up, for sure.

I suspect that there's a big learning in the way that the West has pursued short term goals in allowing its most valuable substrates to be weaponised, be it SWIFT, social media, whatever. This seems to have a twofold negative effect. 1) other players see the weaponisation and start to plan alternatives. 2) a weaponised base layer lacks the ability to grow novel, emergent forms.

Musk may understand this. And in seeking to (hopefully) bring Twitter back in line with freedom of speech, he may recognise that unweaponised base layers are intrinsically attractive to the human mind, because they can liberate us.

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Yes, I agree.

The challenge that decentralization faces is for it not to be a strategy for centralization to infiltrate local institutions. This is why I emphasize the Global/Local divide.

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