Our times

The 20th century may have been the last era when people were able to create innocently and non-imitatively while remaining true to the gradually constructed stack of human culture. It was still possible to believe in the myth of progress. Ideologies continued to offer hope. Affluence was still based on manufactured goods and hard labour. The earth still had a future. In the current century there is an imitative, phony atmosphere of excess. Creation is born of a cynical exploitation of past forms without inherent belief in them. Economically we have lost our gold standard, culturally there is a constant need to seek reassurance from the fake convictions of peers who are similarly deluded and obsessed. Only in the present era could leaders like Trump emerge, movements like ISIS emerge, socio-economic disparities grow so large, and mass delusion be so prevalent in the presence of available information. Meanwhile we are partying through the apocalypse, blissfully unaware: the decimation of our biosphere.

Creation, as a word is from an old Indo-European root meaning to act. In order to create innocently in the current era we need to stop re-acting, detach ourselves from our culture of imitation and violence, and free our minds from old forms. Our civilization has let us down. We are basing our lives on ways of thinking that have led to the current insanity, modes of behavior that we know to be destructive. Solutions are not to be found within the matrix that has created the problems. We need to free ourselves of the weight of human culture, reevaluate our place in the universe, taking as our measure the entire biosphere. We need to de-condition ourselves from learned thinking and behaviour.
#history

India’s violent history

Yesterday finished Khushwant Singh’s Delhi, which tells the story of the capital from invasion to invasion, massacre to massacre, and concludes with the pogrom on the Sikhs in 1984.  And today I was reading a horrifying story about the Muzzafanagar and Shamli District riots last September. The location of the places where the recent atrocities took place is around 100 km from Delhi.