LISTEN- 23 minutes

https://www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-entering-a-second-axial-age/

An Excerpt:

The First Axial Age

Roughly 2,500 years ago, something remarkable happened. It occurred not in one place but across the Eurasian continents, largely in parallel. Against the backdrop of Bronze Age civilizations collapsing, empires disintegrating, city-states competing and waves of migration and warfare reshaping social structures, the old mythic orders were failing. Local, myth-based traditions could no longer hold the weight of human experience. And out of that turbulence, new kinds of questions broke through: What does it mean to be human? How shall we live? What is our place in the larger order of things?

Within a few centuries, the responses to these questions crystallized into several of the world’s enduring wisdom traditions. In China, Confucius, Laozi and Zhuangzi explored ethics, harmony and alignment with the Dao. In India, the Upanishadic traditions, the Buddha and Mahavira investigated the nature of consciousness, liberation and nonviolence. In Persia, Zarathustra articulated a cosmic moral struggle between good and evil. In the Hebrew world, the prophets, voices like Isaiah, called for justice and ethical monotheism. And in Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle began a systematic inquiry into ethics, knowledge and the nature of reality.

German philosopher Karl Jaspers named this the Axial Age. What these movements shared, despite their vast differences, was the discovery of a deeper interior dimension of the human being. For the first time, human beings stepped back from the immediacy of mythic experience and turned inward. They developed capacities for moral reflection, compassion and the articulation of universal ethical principles. A new vertical axis opened, linking the inner life of the individual with something transcendent: a universal moral order, a ground of being, a deeper source beyond the self.

Nice try Otto, but your analysis is a humanistic determination of man’s problems through man’s eyes. Man’s problem is and always has been sin against a Holy God. God determines the nations and how far they expand and how long they will last. When nations become too wicked He judges them usually out of existence. Around 4600 years ago He destroyed the earth with an estimated population of about 8 billion people, because the thoughts of men was only wicked all the time. 8 people survived the great flood. Time is approaching where God will judge the world again, but this time He will set His Son as King over all the earth and He will reign in righteousness with a rod of iron for 1000 years.

FTA:

"My father did not force the harvest. He tended the soil. He trusted that if the soil was right, what needed to grow would grow."

I agree. However, that's the rub, isn't it? The soil is degraded and foul now all throughout society, and it doesn't seem to be able to be re-nourished in any real meaningful way. Yes, there are pockets of resistance springing up in certain societal areas. And there's people out there doing their part trying to properly care for and realign societal interests. But not enough pockets remain to be of any real value. Not like what's needed.

The problem is with the organization efforts. These pockets of realignment are too unorganized. Too scattered. And each one doesn't agree with the others in how to realign our society to a better way. These groups are too fearful of utopianism to actually make an attempt at communicating with the others. They're also too fearful of the various governments, corporations, and NGOs to collectively organize in any real long lasting and meaningful way. And, people are too enamored and enthralled with the current system to truly attempt a realignment. They're also too enmeshed.

It's like everyone knows they're in a cave being shown shadows on the wall, and can see the way out and can see the light outside, and they can even see the people behind the veil making the shadow puppets on the wall, but each one is too afraid, too content, or too rooted in place to actually make the effort of stepping into the light. And a lot of them, even though they know, they just don't care enough and are too happy being entertained to try. Myself included.

Even the people that have grouped together are still stuck in the ways that keep themselves at odds with the other groups. So, everyone is still stuck in the cave. Everyone is still stuck trying to cultivate something good out of bad soil. None of it is truly nourishing. And it all has a wierd taste, if it has any flavor at all or isn't outright foul to begin with.

Not that I'm happy, or entertained. I'm not. I'm not too rooted in place to move out. And I'm damn sure not too afraid, or too content. But I will admit that as for right now, I just don't have the capacity to move out of the cave. I don't have enough capital and accumulated and stored resources in my little pocket to actually make a concerted effort. I've actually become quite bored and extremely irritated with all of this. Almost to a black pilled level where I just don't care any more. It's impossible to go back to sleep, yet I also feel as if this society is just not important enough to change or save. And I damned sure don't care enough to try to cultivate so wthing meaningful for anyone outside my family.

I feel that it's time we had a major upheaval and some really terrible calamitous catastrophe that has to take place in order to thin out the herd. The cave has just become way too overcrowded to actually achieve an orderly exit. The soil is too degraded because there's just too many people trying to eat of the land. It's too crowded because there's too many stupid and ignorant people. This planet can harbor and benefit 2-3x as many people as we have now, but ONLY if everyone is elpriperly educated, properly aligned with each other, and properly motivated to stay that way. And right now, we just don't have the numbers needed to do anything about it. So, I say let it all fail, and maybe we should help spur things along on that front.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we can figure out a way to save the majority of the society and can figure out a way to keep most of it relatively unscathed or just with some minor damages. I don't know. But what I do know is that the cable walls are crumbling around us. The cabe's overhead is cracked and continues to crack more and more with each passing day. Eventually there will be a cave-in. This society will either implode under its own weight, or it will become so bloated that it will explode violently. And with each passing day, I become more and more convinced that one of the two has to happen before The People can actually come to their senses and leave.

The soil is foul. It can't grow anything of any real value or substance any more. And there aren't enough people willing to save it in its entirety. The cave and most of its inhabitants are too stupid now to actually want to leave. And the pockets of organized resistance are just too unorganized and too weary of each other to want to come together.

So, maybe it's time to let it all devolve. Let it all escalate to whatever end needs to happen so the survivors can rebuild and renourish the landscape. Maybe they'll be able to seal the cave off to keep humanity from being herded into it again. Maybe they'll find a way to grow society from the soil again. It's just not going to be accomplished by any of the generations currently able to do it. That much I do know.