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John Carter's avatar

Perhaps it's the empiricist in me, but I try to distinguish between reality and hyperreality. There are innumerable ways that we can perceive the world, some more and some less informative, and while in practice these are the only conceptual contact we can have with reality (at least insofar as the rational mind goes), ultimately reality is unitary - we all inhabit the same world, we just perceive it differently.

Eisenstein is a fascinating and profound thinker, and a great deal of what he writes resonates with me. The main point of departure for me is in a sense aesthetic. His vision ultimately seems to resemble a world of peaceful, bucolic villages where everyone lives in harmony with their gardens and sings songs while holding hands around the fire at night. This is very appealing at one level, but it doesn't seem to leave much room for adventure and excitement. The energy is very feminine, very Mother Earth - there's little of the Sky Father in it. Where do energetic and ambitious young men fit into this vision?

Now, Eisenstein himself is a remarkably nuanced and careful thinker, so he'd probably have a very good answer to that. The audience he attracts, however (judging by the tenor of his comments section) is very much dominated by irredentist 70s hippy feminist women, to whom the central vision he articulates is particularly appealing. I suspect this audience colors his presentation via the usual parasocial feedback loop between readers and authors, which in turn leads to certain neglected topics in his vision.

What does that vision look like, in other words, when we include violence, crime, and war as eternal and quite possibly essential elements of the human experience?

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Fat Rabbit Iron's avatar

We might even witness a sort of reality split, where one part of humanity will go one way, while the other will attract a different future.

I think this is the most likely scenario. Covid split Western society in two. The division between those who accepted the narrative and those who rejected it will only be amplified in the coming years. I don’t think we’ll see a violent civil war (that requires too much effort), but unless some kind of massive disaster occurs, I think we will eventually end up with two distinct cultures.

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