You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Franz Kafka
“American intellectuals were happy because, as Michele Federico Sciacca pointed out with remarkable foresight in 1954, “even if society in the United States calls itself Christian, American philosophy is essentially all atheistic. Not only that: it is marked by the idolatry of science, the tool that will radically change humanity by producing technical development, and will bring to mankind all the happiness that man by his ‘nature’ can desire.” In this way, the gap in America between a progressive culture and a reactionary political world was filled.”
Excerpt FromThe Crisis of Modernity//Noce, Augusto Del; Carlo Lancellotti;
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/you-dont-need-weatherman-know-which-way-wind-blows
Post literate. Post Covid. Post linear. Post Pop Post Modern. Post your wildest imagination and Post Human. 2024 is a hell bound train at high speed. Peter Turchin, a complexity scientist studying the dynamics of historical societies, wrote the non-fiction – End Times – which was published in 2023. He and his team created a quantitative model that analyzed complex societies across thousands of years and discovered predictable waves of political instability brought about by the same forces in a predictable pattern. Based upon this model, in 2010 Peter went on record predicting major instability in the U.S. in the early 2020s. The basis for his prediction was as follows:
“When a state, such as the United States, has stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, declining public trust, and exploding public debt, these seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability. In the United States, all of these factors started to turn in an ominous direction in the 1970s. The data pointed to the years around 2020 when the confluence of these trends was expected to trigger a spike in political instability.” – End Times – Peter Turchin
So then Mr. Turchin has a quasi-Vichian scholastic view. I have not read him. Nor Strauss and Howe. I would say and not flippantly this study was my 1970’s, my interests, my misery knowing class in every sense of the idea had to prevent a better future. Vico stresses that "the world of nations" is made by men merely with respect to their sense of certainty (certamente), though not fundamentally, insofar as the world is guided by the human mind "metaphysically" independent of its makings and though to Vico is often attributed the expression "corsi e ricorsi" (cycles and counter cycles of growth and decay of "history",) he never speaks in the plural of "the cycle" or of "the counter-cycle" (ricorso) of "human things", suggesting that political life and order, or human creations, are oriented "backward," as it were, or called back to their constitutive "metaphysical" principle. Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely on metaphor to compare, and thus comprehend, human and natural phenomena. In the heroic age, metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures. The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era. Taken together, the recurring cycle of three ages – common to every nation – constitutes for Vico a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history. Therefore, it can be said that all history is the history of the rise and fall of civilizations, for which Vico provides evidence (up until, and including the Graeco-Roman historians).
This Surrealist is supported both by your attention and interest and any contribution to encourage free speech.
The Kafka quote is worth the price of admission. It moves inward towards non-thought. Turchin looks outward and assesses the world via observations consisting of abstract measures. I am reminded of an Indonesian philosopher, Bapak Subuh, who characterized conceptual though as having the same nature as the material world.
https://youtu.be/tbtoXRFOwEc?si=XOs70B-etzO_L7MO