Behold our descent into collective madness – this sense of a rights-mongering, entitlement-oriented, politically-dysfunctional, militarily-overextended, environmental-despoiling, anxiety-ridden, bankrupt era of societal Unraveling – and rejoice. It sets us free

It opens the mind to the very possibility of renewal as a corrective to our civilizational ills as foretold by various indigenous cosmologies (click: No Better Time To Wake Up). Beware of hubris. The paradox of modernity is the reflexive eye-rolling dismissal of insights from outside thinking. Maybe there is, after all, some collective wisdom tuned into the rhythms of civilization and culture that is relevant to the madness we are addressing in the secular world today. Only in the depths of our perceived madness do we have the freedom to entertain perspectives beyond that which brought us here in the first place.

Take spirituality. One of our earliest sessions addressed the softening of the hostile distinction between religion and science as two different conceptions of the universe, the subject of MM 12/12/16 God And Science with the embedded Lance Morrow essay. We discussed the way each became self-consciously aware of their excesses, even of their capacity for evil, as they found themselves “jostled into a strange metaphysical intimacy.”

It is with such forbearance we pay tribute to some of the indigenous prophecies – e.g. that of the Hopi Powateoni, Hinduism’s Kali Yuga, Amazonian’s Eagle and Condor, Bunjil’s Wings from Aboriginal Australia – with their predictions around spiritual sickness and collective insanity. While the exercise may stretch the imagination, so too does any attempt to otherwise address such matters as the struggle among the four dueling factions that consumes our nation today (MM 7/12/21 The Four Americas). Or, for that matter, coming to terms with something so basic as our national debt.

The noise of our hyperkinetic culture has simply drowned out what the prophecies had foreseen i.e. that inner turmoil is rooted in a spiritual crisis or, as seen today, a meaning crisis shouted down by the global information war. We’re in a battle of narratives, a contest for dominance over information and minds. What has been lost is our capacity to make sense of the world, engage with diverse perspectives, and see ourselves in the “other.” In short, empathy.

Any prospect for collective awakening, as we’re advised in the focus article, starts with respective individuals seeing themselves as dynamic beings leaning into the ambiguity of the unknown. We’ll discuss what that means in the context of the further insight that our everyday reality is a product of the mind, the subject of the earlier MM 12/6/21 Ego Is The Enemy.

Enter, then, the promise and threat of AI. Promise, in that it further enables and extends the reach of the digital world into every nook and cranny of our existence. Threat, for the same reason. It all comes down to the authenticity of the connections in the spiritual sense i.e. the difference between the pseudo-connection within a self-serving loop and one in service to what those indigenous prophecies had in mind i.e. empathy, the potential for which was the subject of MM 1/29/24 AI Shared Consciousness.

The danger lies in its power to distort, invent, and weaponize that which was once known as the truth. There’s nothing new with that phenomenon, of course, having long predated AI and even the postmodern digital world. The difference is in the prospect of marrying the immense potential power of AI with the looming reach of the digital world into “every nook and cranny of our existence“ such that human connection is reduced to little more than interacting avatars.

Madness indeed.