The ebook "The Great Turning” is online.

 

I just uploaded the ebook “The Great Turning”. It is a compilation, and edited version, of my series of 10 articles under the same title. “The Great Turning” examines the contemporary through the lens of my recently published book “Modernity”.

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10. A new worldview in After-Modernity

The historical combination of the societal disintegration of the West, with China’s economic rise to the top spot, have initiated the hope in the Global South of a potential liberation from Western hegemony. But, notwithstanding this potential, it is already a mathematical certainty that lifestyles comparable to the present ones in the West will never become available in the Global South !

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9. The Fall of Modernity

At first sight one might think that what is at stake, in these two-thousand twenties, is the rejection of Western hegemony which, the large majority of citizens by now know is entirely geared toward privileging the biggest Western capital owners, their Multi-National corporations, and their armies of servants : — state bureaucracies and their units of force — the intellectuals and scientists — the managerial class — the professionals in charge of those technologies that sustain the systems of state and corporate institutions.

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8. The Russian operation in Ukraine is a rallying cry against uni-polarity (1)

At the image of a train, whose engine has stopped running for lack of energy but that continues to move powered solely by the force of its physical inertia, a society, that is atomized, loses the existential power conferred to her by the initiative of her citizens, but it continues to move forward for some more time powered by the sole force of its societal inertia.

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7. Western resistance to the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia

Over the last decade the center of gravity of the economy-world has been shifting extremely rapidly to east-Asia. But, as the graph hereunder illustrates (1), that shift is in reality no more than a return to the historical normality of these last 2,000 years.

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5. The expansion of the paradigm of Modernity into philosophic rationalism and science

As I wrote in Part 3 “the pragmatic common sense of the long distance merchants ensured the thriving of 'the reason' but this came at the price of subduing its development as a worldview”. This implies that by leaving “the reason” unspoken, in its fundamentalist Christian context, it was given the chance to thrive.

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4. how did Modernity arise ?

 

 

Modernity did arise with the emergence of the paradigm of  “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”.

 

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2. A new lease on life for the unipolar world ?

The prospect of an ending of Western hegemony implies that the days of Western prosperity, by sucking the resources of “the others”, are coming to an end and this means the following : 

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1. How the West created the conditions of its downfall ?

The end of Western hegemony was predicated by the class-war mindset of Western big capital holders, and their institutional servants, who could not fathom that the social-wellness of the nineteen-fifties and sixties was foundational to the Western economic boom of the time.

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This is an introduction to a series of 10 articles in which I describe the contemporary moment through the lens of my just published book “Modernity”. Starting today I’ll publish a new article every Friday until attaining the end of the series.

Western moment of madness at the end of Modernity !

I terminated my last article, dated 2022-03-25, with the following words :

"... to keep your sanity, and to avoid having your mind being captured by Western propaganda, I hope everyone stays as far as possible from the daily news about the fighting in Ukraine. To keep one's sanity one better remember that the daily news is a propaganda ploy to distract from the big picture… "

Humanity's fate will most probably be decided in this first quarter of 2022

The first quarter of 2022 will most probably be remembered, for a long time to come, for having decided humanity's model of collective response to "the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity". If I'm proven right then what happens in this month of January will be determinant for the future of humanity.

So how best can we summarize the situation ?

Art versus propaganda

The difference between propaganda and art resides in the function of their signs.

The first is at the service of individualism while the latter serves the community (1) : 

 

About the societal chaos fostered by the crisis of our times

I was reading an article this morning titled "L’Université et son double" published by Dedefensa a blogging platform in French. The title translates as "The university and its double" or better perhaps "the university and its shadow". My interest was prickled by an insistence on Modernity's excesses at all levels and more particularly by the expression "the  advancement of progress is galloping mad".  I commented the following :

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7.3. the principle of life

The determinant force driving Modernity is capital, or more precisely, it is the insidious ideology proclaiming that “the reason at work within capital” is rationality reigning supreme. Emerging in Early-Modernity “the reason” gave rise to some 6 centuries of commercial capitalism. It forced nations to adapt their political economies to their local context and so its implementation naturally took different forms.

The results, of the adoption of “the reason that is at work within capital” and its adaptation by all nations on earth to their local contexts, are now in. During all these centuries humanity has been blinded, by the illusion of material possessions, while it was savagely trampling the principle of life and unleashing multiple side-effects that are now threatening to extinguish life on earth.

How could humanity be bamboozled to unleash such a devastation on the principle of life ?

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Part 6.   The paradox of humanity’s predicament

6.1. Modernity, is the greatest achievement of humanity but it fosters life extinction

6.2. the shift in the governance-world leads to uncertainties

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5.  A gradual shift from a Western to an Eastern model of society

5.2.5. the rise of the Asian model of governance

Regional Economic Blocks have a decisive governance advantage over the present world institutions. For one they group neighboring countries that have privileged and often long-standing inter-relations. Secondly they are not burdened by the weight of bureaucracy and corruption that characterize present day International Institutions. Thirdly these regional blocs are not torn apart by the ideological divisions between the declining power and the upcoming power.

A painting from 1515 turns a mirror on its Western viewers

Hell Is for White People.

"A painting from 1515 turns a mirror on its viewers" in Cabinet Magazine by Alexander Nagel.

Nagel's commentary is well worth the 5 minutes necessary to read it. Here is how Rumple describes Nagels' commentary on Metafilter :

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Part 5:  The shift from a Western to an Eastern model of society

Economic reality finances the social and cultural endeavors of a society and so the comparative influence of societies in the international sphere is given primarily by their economic power. The following table traces the evolution of economic power between the West and East-Asia over the last 20 years.

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I have been busy these last 4 months making one thousand and twelve digital transformations of painting 2-02 of my 'grand project' series. 

The CoronaVirus outbreak that occurred in China in the beginning of January soon locked me down in Beijing and this eliminated the brouhaha of society that helped me to focus on the technicalities of digital imaging. 

But the extraordinary nature of the epidemic, and the even more extraordinary nature of the language that was accompanying it, kept me coming back to the web. What impressed me most is that while the epidemic transformed in a pandemic the language in use in the West morphed into virulent propaganda; a sign that the pandemic is somehow radically altering the geo-political balance of power. 

My intellectual curiosity was aroused and to get a better grip on the reality I decided that after finishing this series of digital transformations I would restart to write about the societal and geo-political transformations that are taking place under our very eyes. 

What follows is a new series of posts that will form, the first draft material of, a 3rd book about our contemporary circumstances.

Book 1 :  "A growing disconnect between East and West".  Published in October 2018

Book 2 :  "What is going on ? ".  Published on the 06th of December 2019.

Book 3 :  "A first devastating blow in Late-Modernity".

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