Sunday, December 5, 2021
Coda
I will now be wrapping up this blog, as I've pretty much said everything I wanted to say. Even when I first started blogging with the "Decades" blogs all those years ago I was kind of aware that the mass culture and mass politics of the 20th Century was at an end, and that popular culture was already a historical phenomenon rather than a contemporary one. This suspicion has only been further confirmed in recent years, and has accordingly increased the feeling I have that the kind of socio-cultural and socio-political writing undertaken in this corner of the blogosphere is pretty much redundant.
So just to set out the main points of this blog for the last time:
1. The expansive era of technological and social progress, together with its darker aspects, that dominated the 20th Century, and which I've termed the Plutonian era, is at an end, and the 21st Century will be very different.
2. The last two millenia of hierarchical social organisation and universalist religion and ideology are also at an end, and we are in the early stages of another two millenia which will revolve around eccentric individualism and loosely aggregated non-hierarchical structures (i.e. the transition from Pisces to Aquarius).
3. The next three to four years are going to be particularly chaotic, more so than the last six to ten years, as this transition intensifies and the future in general is going to be considerably different to anything anyone can currently anticipate.
I'll see you on the other side!
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Thanks for this, all the same. Am intrigued by the idea that individuals rather than movements and organisations may have the greatest influence on the coming decades. Though never rule out war as a galvanising unifying happening (not in a good way). As liberalism as we knew it seems more ineffective, hollowed out as every year passes, it looks like the competing forces of reaction may set the scene. Please make me wrong on all these guesses, but...
ReplyDeleteEnda
I don't think reaction is going to become dominant, although the battle between liberalism and reaction is causing the collateral damage that erodes trust in the system. Boris Johnson is a very Aquarian figure in that his sheer uselessness will encourage more and more people to lose faith in government and decide to do things by themselves. The failure of authority is a feature, not a bug, of aquarianism.
ReplyDeleteAs for war, my guess is we won't have the big, organised wars of the past either. The Taliban are a good example here - improvised, fluidly organised, devious. I'm not suggesting things will be better or worse really, just different, and it's better to expect that than to expect that the various senescent systems we've been brought up with are going to recover themselves.