Daily reality and the news about it. Part 1.

The present is the outcome of long haul evolutionary processes + the development of their latest structures

With my recent upload of "Societal knowledge formation" I put a stop to more than one full year focusing on the presentation of the key role that knowledge formation has played in the emergence of societal evolution and its further determination in shaping this evolution. And since the upload, of this 3rd volume of the series about “the transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”, I have been eagerly surfing the web for the media’s description, in the present moment, of the unfolding of the shape of our future.

As I write in “Societal knowledge formation” the present contains the seeds of the future and the most precocious among them are starting to germinate under our noses. But the eyes of nearly all of us still fail to register their signals and without signals from the eyes the brain can’t start to process the implications of those early shoots on the formation of the future. Without brain processing the future implications of these shoots do not flare up in the subconscious and conscious mind which means that nearly all of us are future blind !

The rare ancient sages, who possessed the faculty to see the seeds of the future, and the germination of the most precocious ones among them, informed their fellow (wo)men of knowledge about the implications of these early shoots and proposed an adequate adaptation of the societal worldview to these implications. This is how “traditional societal knowledge formation” adapted the presently shared societal worldview to the emergence of the future. Unfortunately for our species Western-Modernity buried these traditional systems under the massive flow of noise that got gradually produced by the rationality of Western-Modernity in its deep silos of specialization.

Not only has Western-Modernity dispensed, of the “traditional societal knowledge formation”, its paradigm has also fostered a system of societal logic that forces forces societies in a frenzy of productions. In the field of societal communication this resulted in a towering noise that complicates the people’s faculty to separate the chaff from the grain. The powers that be instrumentalize the difficulty, of distinguishing truth from fiction, in order to fill the minds of their citizens with information that justifies their actions.

Those of us who try to evade this power manipulation and are thirsty to discover the reality, of what is going on under the mountain of towering noise generated by a societal logic of frenzied productions, eventually discover media content creators that satisfy our thirst and we trust their reporting to help us navigate further through the troubled seas to the future. But our trust is conditional.

The media content creators we reed have the responsibility of reporting, as accurate as possible, an image of the implications of the germinating seeds of the future. So I was gobsmacked by a multitude of individual opinions that surf on the vibrations of the skin of our present reality. Unfortunately most of these opinions failed to describe the deeper currents that shape its emergent substance.

The present is the latest evolutionary iteration, of the biological nature of life and of the societal nature of its organization, develops into their latest structural forms. And the present germinating seeds, of the future, is what fosters the development of their future structural forms by gradually and constantly evolving the emerging present.

In other words the horizontal contextualization of the interrelatedness of the parts, in their ensemble and in the whole, constitutes the substance of our present moment while the vertical contextualization of the chain of causes and effects that emerged along the path of the long haul history of our species, is de-facto enfolding, or causing the particular unfolding, of the horizontal contextualization of our present moment.

An absence of contextualization inevitably leads us down the rabbit hole of an illusory path that is merely generating noise. And I warned in a blog post from 2022-03-25, titled "Ukraine : the local eruption of a shifting global order", that a constant focus on daily noise, about trouble spots as Ukraine, comes at a price and I advised how to stay clear of this price in the following terms :

"...to keep one's sanity, and to avoid having one's mind captured by propaganda, it is wise to stay as far as possible from the daily news about the fighting in Ukraine.

To keep one's sanity one better remember that daily news is instrumental, to the ploy of the men of power, to distract their fellow citizens from the big picture of their presently unfolding games of power that are meant to shape the future of humanity".

Since the upload of “Societal knowledge formation” I have silently watched many of my favorite commentators losing touch with the big picture. One notorious example is the normally prescient Pepe Escobar who got lost momentarily in "the field of ideological certainty" and only found back contact with the firm ground of daily reality a few months before the conclusion of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg when statements by member countries indicated that his ideological certainties had pulled his readers astray.

One of those readers was the excellent monetary commentator Alasdair Macleod who indulged for a few months in Pepe’s illusions. Here is what Alasdair wrote, a few days after the conclusion of the last BRICS summit in "A brief history of the gold standard”, to land back on the ground of daily reality :

“Russian proposals for a new trade settlement currency between BRICS members acting as a gold substitute should be causing widespread interest. By being a trade settlement currency, it does not interfere with individual nations’ prerogatives to manage their own currencies, thereby making its introduction politically feasible. 

For now, these proposals have been put on ice, in favour of using national currencies in place of the dollar. But since these national currencies have a history of losing value measured in goods and services, in some cases extremely rapidly, it is not a solution. It is likely that energy and commodity exporters in the group will turn to the historical and legal relationship between credit and gold, in accordance with Russian wishes. 

… Putin is in military and economic conflict with American-led NATO, and it is in his interests to undermine US finances. A plan to stabilise the rouble and protect it from monetary and economic attack, while undermining the US dollar’s credibility makes enormous sense. These objectives could be quickly achieved by putting the rouble on a credible gold standard.

Putin’s problem is his partnership with China, and their joint plans to wean emerging nations and others away from the western alliance. Precipitative action to undermine the dollar and the fiat euro goes against China’s trade interests at a time when she is managing her own crisis in residential property development, which threatens to widen into other areas. Furthermore, India in particular has come under considerable pressure from America to not continue its trade with Russian oil and is treading carefully. 

But Saudi Arabia is perhaps more prepared to accept a new gold substitute for trade settlement. And in Iran, it has a new ally in this respect. The BRICS trade settlement currency scheme is far from dead. And anyway, there will come a point when the collapse of the dollar-based western currency system forces China to accept that it must protect its currency, its partnership with Russia, and its hegemonic ambitions by accepting gold as the basis of its own currency values."

To avoid unnecessary stress and anxiety I personally focus all my attention on trying to comprehend the substance of what animates the big picture of our present reality. And so my series about "the transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity”, concentrates on the ingredients of this substance. 

 

The following series of posts expands on the most important such ingredients :

1. Post 2 : The nature of Western Christianity has until recently shaped the united stance of the 3 Western power estates 
2. Post 3 : The consecration, of the rationality of Modernity, by the Western Enlightenment, ordained the eviction of the traditional model of knowledge formation
3. Post 4 : Science has been instrumental in generating the great convergence, of the multiple side-effects of Western-Modernity, that initiated the contemporary mass extinction event.
4. Post 5 : I'll finally conclude this series with a post about Peter Lee's interesting approach of China's entry into the era of Western-Modernity.
   

I’ll upload these posts in the following days. Their sketches are rapid summaries of the content of the series "The transition from Western-Modernity to After-Modernity".