I narrate key points in my post “Cultural Revolution: From Impossible to Possible to Likely to Inevitable”
We're so accustomed to "revolutions" being technological / financial / political that we've collectively forgotten that revolutions can also be social / cultural. We're also accustomed to reducing "revolutions" to dynamics that fit the "scientism" requirement of being measurable and therefore quantifiable and "understandable" by collecting and analyzing data.
Social / cultural revolutions don't lend themselves to conventional metrics and data collection / analysis. They arise in mysterious ways over long time spans and from multiple sources. They don't lend themselves to simplistic, tidy explanations that manifest as data in spreadsheets.
They are inherently unpredictable and therefore surprising. They are understood in one way by participants in the moment, and understood (or misunderstood) in different ways by each succeeding generation who interprets them through the current cultural lens.
I've been asked to address what sorts of extremes I anticipate become possible once the pendulum of social-cultural revolution reaches the opposite extreme of today's excesses of self-interest, greed, artifice, corruption, speculation, centralization of power, financial manipulation, sociopathologies of exploitation and extraction, Anti-Progress and the manic mythologizing of technological "Progress."
To answer this question, I see the pendulum as a useful analogy / model.
Cultural Revolution: From Impossible to Possible to Likely to Inevitable
We’re so accustomed to “revolutions” being technological / financial / political that we’ve collectively forgotten that revolutions can also be social / cultural. We’re also accustomed to reducing “revolutions” to dynamics that fit the “scientism” requirement of being measurable and therefore quantifiable and “understandable” by collecting and analyzing data.
