I wanted to take a minute to set aside a few posts here and elaborate briefly on a couple of points I was trying to make in a previous post. I can only claim to understand and anticipate the longer term movements of our prevailing world order. I have confidence to claim that because I have spent a lot of time studying a wide range of subjects that help to elucidate those longer term movements, such as political, economic, military, and social histories, histories of thought and technology and technique and tradition, natural and geologic histories, and then of course the shorter range political, economic, social, etc. histories that help situate those longer term movements in our present timeline, backed up of course with scientific, sociological, mystical, and experiential understandings of how human thought, greater ecologies, thermodynamics, natural necessities, spiritual considerations, subjectivity, and so on all interact to structure and influence those movements.
I'm much less confident about anticipating the shorter term movements, at least in terms of nailing down any sort of definitive timing or finality with any sort of precision, because as I'll also briefly elaborate in an accompanying post, these things are complex and take quite a bit of time. In terms of really historically significant shifts such as changing world regimes or even changing empires, these things can take centuries, and the breadth and depth of my own personal experience is limited to less than a century, assuming I make it to old age.
Why would this matter? Why not relax and stick with contemplating longer and more stable timelines and then throwing one's hands up about precisely nailing down the subjective experience of the turbulent and uncertain present? For me some of the most interesting and compelling subjects have to do with the immediate present and the ensuing short term movements: for a limited living being, I have a temporary but very vivid access to a first-hand apprehension of world events as they unfold, and those events have a direct bearing on the course of my life and what that life looks like, and how I ultimately should attempt to live it. So of course it feels compelling and worthwhile to attempt some kind of comprehension and anticipation of current events.
Of course the longer term understanding itself is refracted through our current historical accumulation of facts and data, structured by the prevailing ideologies and cognitive tools of understanding, but at least with an understanding like that you can set aside a perpetual work in progress and refine and revise it as you wish, whereas it seems to me a trickier task to live well, on the run, as a once stable order begins to shift and to lurch and to shudder.
