The End of Century

Modern society and our contemporary era, as we know it today, is taking too many things for granted. Many assumptions about the world should have been questioned. The question is why these questions had rarely been asked and responded appropriately. One of them is the question on the notion of perfect-rational human being which largely a myth. The anti-thesis of such ideology will posits that humans, for the most part, are guided not by rationality and reason, but by conjecture and mimicry of precedent set by their elders. The truth is subverted by the veil of human's subjectivity and the innate desire to follow the old-established norms, rather than pursuing the quest for searching the Ultimate Truth. It could be the case that we might be just like an addict with their own reality, equipped with constant state of dependency, attachment and delusion of specific set of things and it’s really hard and painful to let those things go.?Fast forward, when the Reality hits hard and wants to tell the addicts about their problems, it is when the stake is at the highest, and yet it is also the moment of clarity, the critical juncture, the pivot point and the moment for possible transition that exist not so often where the awareness of?addiction is attained. Finally, the optionality of the questions has changed into inevitability. The questions needed to be asked.

When we observe the last half-of-century of human endeavor, the modern society where Neo-liberalism emerged as one of dominant economic and political ideology in the last 19-20th century, where we also find a world seemingly dominated by the misguided faith in perfect-rationality of human being, the very belief that every individual is capable of making optimal choices, given the right information, has influenced a broad range of domains, from political policy to the design of economic systems and anything in between. Yet, one could argue that it is this axiom which has led to a world that appears to be stagnating and declining.?

One very important aspect is in the realm of intellectual and academia, where one could see that such phenomena has been eroding the original thought and independent reasoning. If Apple used to have slogan?Think Different,?it is perhaps the case that 21st Century slogan is Think the Same.?This has led to an inertia across various domains of human knowledge and endeavor. The last century is leading us to a fixation on fake diversities and trivial issues. As outline by Peter Thiel in his?Diversity Myth, postulates that our modern society's obsession with diversity has actually led us astray, away from substance and towards superficialities. It has not only subverted the objective pursuit of truth but has also engendered a culture of conformity, complacency and degeneracy. The so-called contemporary discourse on human rationality, particularly as glorified by the "new atheists", offers a rather reductionist portrayal of humans as ideally rational entities, driven solely by logic and reason. This perspective, however, is fundamentally flawed. It is a myth that conveniently overlooks and underestimate the intricacy and intrinsic nature of human who guided by a multitude of factors beyond a mere reason, including emotions, desires, social contexts, and cultural norms. Their relentless pursuit of rationality has shaped the discourse in various spheres, notably in science, economics, and politics over last century. However, it seems that this pursuit of 'rationality' has led to a fairly stagnated world, marked by a lack of significant breakthroughs or revolutionary ideas, where the 4th industrial revolution and its implication to Software is Eating the World??is probably one extreme exception. Put that aside, what we can see is only the broken system and meta-crisis, sweeping across the ever-rising-cost of education and healthcare, (natural) resource and cash (saving) depletion, the overwhelmed and more bueraucratic civic infrastructure and supply chain, financial system "bubble-making" and its collapse, authoritarianism and political/geopolitical multi-polar traps. Or in its most abstract and epistemic landscape: the system level-hyperfragility of our current civilization.?

As we are “progressing”, thanks to all those historic industrial revolution moment, it seems that we keep "forgetting". The rise of modern cities, the domesticated living and our globalized world had seemingly increased the distance of the close relationship between human and nature as we’re also getting smarter to manipulate such natural world. This phenomena, couple with the return of Dark Ages set by our superficialities of perfect-rational human being will set the underlying base for most of human’s undertaking. It is the ontological assumption that suggest the world is just the raw material to be exploited and will remain silent about human’s activities. At its metaphysical sense, all of these movement is directed toward human’s subjectivity, the grand project where humanity sits at the center and any other things revolve around it.?

Again, there is no better embodiment than the modern society, acting as the living proof of this grand project. The society with ethical frame that believes everything is permitted and permissible, nothing in the world that human can’t and must not do. This leads to unprecedented extensive resource extraction, exploitation, and expansion to justify human’s needs, the corrupt institutions that serve political and selfish interest, to the death of God. Our economic system argues that we can’t have natural and material world without economy, therefore to focus on expanding and growing at all cost. But, few realizes that we won’t have economy either without the natural and material world. Our science and academia aims for the self-certainty of material world and is even trying to answer moral question, without realizing its own Procrustean Bed and how the reality does not need the model at the first place. Our political agenda for homogenization as the ultimate centralizing power and globalization agenda that argues to enable constant flow of goods and human around the globe, therefore we can get everything we want anytime we want. But, the realization about fragility of interconnectivity and how we can be more resilience with localism is seems to be lacking. Our latest industrial revolution, the internet which claims to democratize information access, only to create medium for propaganda, info-demic and confirmation bias. Indeed, human’s subjectivity is imposing its power and pushing boundaries in every possible direction.

Thus, these prevailing narrative of the perfectly rational human being is not only a myth but also a shackle that restricts our deeper understanding of human nature and real progress-making as Civilization. It is perhaps a strange situation in which the antidote to this situation may lie, paradoxically, not in doubling down the trust to our (corrupted) Science, Technology and Economic-Political Institution, but rather a simple return to more traditional values and beliefs. The return of conservative values and religious principles as a means of grounding human behavior and providing a moral compass in an increasingly chaotic world. Our contemporary world, being too immersed with its ethos of?fake rationality, has been providing us with the illusion of a perfect-rational human being. This illusion, so pervasive and entrenched in our society, has led to a general numbness, a cognitive deafness, and a perceptual dumbness, resulting in a stagnation and declined society that has pervasively permeated our world. Having Ears hearing not, Having Eyes seeing not, and Having Hearts understanding not?is perhaps the appropriate model for our Civilization. In our misguided pursuit of rationality, we have lost touch with our inherent sense of Being, intuitive wisdom and the far more important emotional-intelligence. We have become slaves to a false paradigm, many false gods & idols, one that is based on?Nothing But Conjecture. Instead of invoking the real attempt for critical thinking and learning from our own experiences, we merely mimic our elders, blindly follow societal norms, and remain helpless to the dictates of our cultural conditioning. It might be the case that it is exactly due to this behaviour where we've been seeing the end of progress, where real innovation, creativity, and progress have been suppressed. However, as the blessing in disguise, it is also where we could find an opportunity to introspect, to challenge our assumptions, and to venture for a paradigm shift that acknowledges the holistic nature of the Human-Nature Relationship.

In the end of the day, we might never realize all of these human subjectivities that we’re imposing in our life which is really far away from the natural homeostatis tendency of the human-nature relationship, left unchecked, will leads to our inevitable civilization collapse. It is a complete disconnect from sacred values and traditions, the greed and selfish desire is taking over individual’s mind leaving to the destruction of environment, all meanwhile the power of God that we are accumulating & possessing is channeled in self-defeating and nihilistic fashion. The “Sign” is everywhere for those who have ears and eyes to hear and see, and it is only the question whether or not the human civilization will ever heed those Signs and learn from their ancestor that human being is just the irrelevant speck in the vast universe. The life is here for us, it is our job to live it in accordance to the Way. To live it in accordance to the Law of Nature. To love one’s own fate: Amor Fati, thus spoke Nietzche: “My formula for greatness is that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but to love it”.