Navigating the Maelstrom
In case you may have missed my link to Brad Stulberg’s “A Brief Guide to Navigating Periods of Disorder“, here it is again. I find it to be very sound advice for getting through this period of transition and not succumbing ourselves to Pogany’s transitional “havoc” or to what Gebser calls the “maelstrom of blind anxiety” attendant upon this transitional era.
I might mention in passing that one of the signal features of this period of havoc is the erosion of public esteem for many of the conventional institutions of the modern nation state, what political scientists call “prestige” associated with “legitimation”. Deligimitation is the loss of prestige, and one is seeing that (especially in America) for such institutions as the Supreme Court, Congress, and so on. For large swaths of the public, these institutions are no longer seen as serving the authentic vital interests of society as a whole and have become merely pro forma — self-absorbed and self-perpetuating. This is quite a dangerous aspect of the transitional period we are in.
2 responses to “Navigating the Maelstrom”
Leave a Reply
The Chrysalis 
I dare say it’s a frightening position to find ourselves in….
Some wit once remarked that living through ages of transition was about as comfortable as sitting on the edge of a razor. Funny but serious at the same time — you could get sliced in two, which is the schizoid state of the deficient mental-rational mind that we refer to as “cognitive dissonance”, which is epidemic. So it is a very apt metaphor for transitional ages.