Purpose of This Blog

The purpose of this blog is to explore and explain the stresses and strains that are presently distorting and corroding what was until fairly recently a broad consensus of reality. The primary reason for the sense of chaos and confusion that infects the mediasphere and its tendrils in your brain is that we are currently in the midst of not one, but three (3) interregnums (interregni?). The first of these centres on the transition from the 20th to the 21st Century, and the accompanying eclipse of the mass modernity that characterised the century we have recently departed. It is a curious thing that every century likes to murder the one before it in order for it to evolve its own distinct character. For example, at the end of the 19th Century, most Westerners could assume that for the foreseeable future, European monarchism and colonialism would endure, and the only question would be whether the far corners of empire would be most efficiently served by airship or steamship. Any such consensus was shattered in the years 1914 to 1918, and the subsequent content of the 20th Century far exceeded even the wildest prior speculation. A similar situation pertains to today, in which the liberal progressive consensus that the 21st Century would be just like the 20th Century only more so has been shattered in the last four years.

The second interregnum pertains to the gradual collapse of the 400 year reign of scientific rationalism that was birthed by the Enlightenment. This collapse has been ongoing at the margins of the collective consciousness for some time, although it erupted into the public realm when that dialectical juggernaut, Michael Gove, made his most dread pronouncement that "you know Andrew, I think people have had enough of experts". These simple words fried the collective mindspace of the previously imperviously smug Professional Managerial Class, and cloaked what should have been a tediously procedural extrication from a technocratic supranational trade bloc into an imagined gigantomachy between virtuous platonic order and an irruption of nativist atavism. However, a real fissure was in fact revealed, which was the diminishing returns that a linear, rationalistic, godless conception of reality could impart, as scienific discovery tended ever more to obfuscate reality than explain it, descending as it did into the fudge factors and mystical mumbo-jumbo of multiverses, dark matter and dark energy. The control promised by science and technology to its alleged masters has been proving ever less efficacious, as everything from financial management to political polling to disease control has exposed the haplessness of "expertise".

The third and final interregnum has been apparent since the second half of the 19th Century, and concerns the eclipse of the 2000 year ascendency of vertically orientated hierarchalism that was birthed in the Abrahamic religions, and most specifically Christianity. This eclipse was misdiagnosed by Friedrich Nietzsche as "the death of God" but it is in fact the death of institutionalism, it first manifesting in the Church purely because all hierarchical institutions are essentially modelled on, and are miniature versions of, the Catholic Church.

So as can be seen, we are dealing with concentric interregnums which are nested within each other like a Russian doll. Or, rather, we are looking at a Russian doll made of interregnums rather than babushkas. What this cascade of discontinuities effectively indicates is that things will never be the same again. There is no "return to normality" ahead of us, but rather a normalising of what we would previously have conceived of as abnormality. In essence, the protective systems within which we have been nurtured, whether in the form of bureaucracies, institutions, or even systems of thought (i.e. ideologies) are in the process of corroding around us, depriving us of our familiar means of support. We are being prodded into the deep end by means of a long stick at the same time that our armbands are deflating. Can we learn to existentially doggy paddle?

In the political realm, the new world that is emerging will be characterised by extreme eccentricity, as political movements emerge in the van of charismatic individuals who promise to change the world but invariably retire in deflated failure. This will be because (already is because) it will be increasingly difficult to form cohesive, coherent political movements in a world in which the external structures needed to sustain them fall away. The binary dualism of "left" and "right" that crystalised so sharply in the 20th Century will become increasingly difficult to maintain as both sides fracture internally and become distracted by odd and tangential concerns. The political and social unit that will progressively emerge in the 21st Century will be the individual. However, this will not be the economically maximising individual of free market ideology, or the selfish sovereign individual of Libertarianism, but rather the eccentric individual. It will be the individual whose Youtube channel is dedicated to train hopping, or the individual whose Instagram account depicts their attempts to befriend grizzly bears, or the individual who likes to invent new tools or resurrect long lost handicrafts. This in turn implies that the locus of authority will transfer from external structures to internal ones, and the task of the century ahead for each and every one of us will be to build this internal autonomy. Thus the new normality will emerge when a sufficient plurality have built the structures of internal authority that a kind of stability can return. The new paradigm will replace the linear reality of the 20th Century with the fractal one of the 21st, in which the occult will be favoured over the scientific, and the body over the mind. If there is to be a schism in the new reality, it will be between those whose individualism is fully plugged into, and dependent on, the technosphere, and those whose individuality is predicated on escaping it as far as possible. The former will flourish in the short term, and the latter over the long.

As the old Chinese curse had it, may you live in disintegrating times...