Besides having favorite legacy political, economic, philosophical, and literary works to draw upon, I've read, listened to, and in some cases been in conversation with a number of contemporary thinkers and communities whom I respect for quite some time now; at least a decade let's say, and I've had the pleasure of adding more trusted lights as I go. And despite the occasional disagreement, I consistently come back to them because I've come to trust them to be consistently right, given my own predilections, knowledge, experience and worldview.
The notion of being "right" is so loaded with baggage that I just need to draw attention to that respectfully and warily, but then set that aside and move on.
Anyway, what a lot of these people have in common is the vaguely cranky (this is me too) acknowledgement that they've been consistently right, all things considered, but that it has largely been a thankless and mirthless task. The Cassandra archetype comes up a lot if we're talking imagery. You see this a lot actually. So why? How?
There is a whole lot to this, but I just want to explore something we've been addressing: the mechanisms and tools of abstraction. A lot of these people are what I would consider talented craftspeople who have given a lot of careful thought to their own thinking, which implies a much deeper and broader worldview that must be reflected upon as well.
And when you do that you're talking about longer timeframes and timescales. When you are regressing to more and more general abstractions that are covering a larger amount of categories over a longer amount of time, you can get it really right, or really wrong (and we'll get to the wrong side).
Because given a human lifetime, if you are talking about endeavoring to understand whole decades, and then centuries, and then even millenia and beyond, and then if you get a good working model of that stuff and it is serving you in navigating reality given that understanding, well, that understanding is good for your lifetime as long as you are continuously developing and maintaining it, because those arcs that you are describing arc quite a ways, and probably far past the end of your own life.
If you've gotten to the point where you are accurately describing the arc of the US Empire for example, and then by extension the arc of Western civilization, you might miss some details and short term predictions, but you're probably going to be able to call the general direction of a lot of important events.
Which looks like prophecy to a lot of people, and in a certain way it is. But to the archetypal Cassandra, you get a familiar and consistent attitude: big whoop. You've been doing it for long enough, and probably calling enough accurate shots, that you've gotten used to the whole repeated exercise.
At the same time you've probably been in enough bitter arguments and butted heads with enough people, and read and heard enough boneheaded opinions, and then in turn come to the realization that the materially, politically, and economically efficacious world runs on those bad opinions and poor arguments. And no matter how many times you've been right on this or that geopolitical development, it ain't worth a damn, because the same bonehead ghouls are still running the show, failing upwards, and living proud amidst the widening ruins they've been cultivating.
Which brings us to the shadow side of abstract thought. Because again, when you are talking about more and more general categories at greater and greater timeframes, you can go really, really wrong. On an individual level, this might lead to consequences in terms of misapprehending the world and making a mistake that costs you personally. But in relation to others - especially in steep hierarchical structures of power -you can be catapulted to the top with the wrongest opinion possible, oftentimes by virtue of the very wrongness of that opinion, favored by the powerful.
In the end, abstraction is a tool: the mind assigns a simplified symbol to a complex state of affairs to decide what to do with that state of affairs or how to relate to it, which can then be fixed socially with language and written symbol, and so the abstract sign is quite flexible in its usage.
When you map this onto gradations of power, you can have powerful people using these symbols to fix simple determinations onto complex states of affairs, manipulating those they have power over to adhere to those simplified truths, while at the same time having the power to maneuver around the consequences of those truths.
And so you get powerful and sophisticated propaganda that specifies how the world works, how power is to be legitimated and organized, what types of energy should be invested in and used, what types of forces should be used on others for whatever reasons, what means should be worked for and disposed of in pursuit of the good life, and how all of these things effect the world in turn.
And it is precisely the wrongness of these things that gives them their power. It is the mismatch of the symbol and the reality that allows the powerful to remain astride of the confusion and destruction that that mismatch causes. This game can be carried on for quite some time. And this is the nature of living in a general era of decline.
That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to do the work, and that one should just drop what one is doing and try something else. No, I'm just doing a bit of venting and trying to have some fun with it anyway. Right thinking and right living are important ingredients to living decently in a generalized era of decline. You can profit handsomely in playing fast and loose with the faculties of thought, but even that gravy train eventually comes to a stop.
