The following is a nice trigger article, as it magnifies our own responsibility in these times of transformation in which we have been accustomed to externalising authority (and thus externalising responsibility). It further magnifies our need to step beyond the duality framework of 'good and bad, those evil ****ers are the source of all our problems'.
Rewriting Modern Mythology
If we are to take a different path, we cannot merely resist the techno-totalitarian agenda; we must offer a different conception of progress, which requires a different story of our origins, purpose, and destiny. That, in turn, rests on a different understanding of our place in the universe and even what the universe is, what is real, how it all works. The ideologies of control are unassailable when we accept that the universe is a soulless automaton of force and mass devoid of any intelligence or consciousness outside our own. Because then, it is surely our destiny to bring our own intelligence to a world that has none. Imposing order onto chaos, we carve out a realm fit for human habitation.
Given that the roots of the technocratic program go so deep, attacking its personalities and specific technologies is at best a stopgap. The task before us is nothing less than to embrace a new (and ancient) mythology.
The reductionism that collapses complex problems into simple narratives (particularly good-versus-evil, hero/villain narratives) shares a deep kinship with the scientific reductionism that is at the heart of the technocratic agenda. Technologies of control depend first on data—the translation and reduction of the world to numbers, to symbols, to bits of information. Suitably measured and catalogued, these fragments of reality can then be arranged in the image of the controller’s design. In scientific thinking, when anything happens it is because some force caused it to happen. Things don’t just happen without cause. Translated into human affairs, the same thinking says that someone must be to blame.
These scientific intuitions are obsolete. Quantum acausality and observer-dependence, followed by system theory’s emergent phenomena, should have put to rest the conceit that we can some day achieve perfect knowledge or perfect control. Meanwhile, the practical results of the astonishing technological progress of the last century have failed to meet its utopian promises. We no longer really believe technology’s cheerleaders when they speak of paradise just around the corner., or even of a restoration of last year’s normal. Heaven is always one more booster away.
Please do not try to understand the transition between mythologies as a contest between a good one and a bad one. The peril of a simplifying narrative lurks here too. It is not that technologies of control are bad. It is that we are growing out of the world-story, the personal and collective state of being, in which they hold primacy. As we learn their appropriate uses and limits, we will look to other conceptions of progress, of humanity’s purpose, and of what is real and possible.
https://charleseisenstein.subs....tack.com/p/reinventi
