The world is in the grip of a spiritual crisis (ie a crisis of meaning & self-understanding) which eclipses the frenzy of any one electoral or news cycle.

What do you think are its symptoms, their causes; additionally, is there a common knot capable of being untangled? Symptoms I see:

-An economy which thrives on inducing distraction
-A culture which demands overstimulation & noise to feel anything
-A philosophical sense of meaningless which induces despair while saying nothing matters and anything goes

Between summer visits to some of the "nicest" bookstores and half the libraries in a 30-mile radius, I can say what remains of literature is only in the library used-book sale corner. It's really bad. My long-favorite bookstore this summer, imperfect but still interested in ideas, now is fully ideologically captured and had 3 graphic novels w/ sexually-explicit content at toddler eye level, literally a few inches from the finger puppets.

Our managerial and oligarch class make depictions like Veep & Succession seem sweetly naive. My cynical guess: a timeline, unbeknown to more than a few participants, was laid-out a while ago. Biden will be officially out b/t July 4-July 20. In all this there is a pressing need to preserve the illusion of "democracy" while managing it into irrelevance. It needs a few weeks to get the base to move from Biden! to Biden must go! So that they feel relieved when he is gone; not shocked if it happens too quick, or duped.

People are healthier and happier when they are making things. They are unhealthier and unhappier when they are dragged into passivity, disengaged from Creation. It is a tragedy so much schooling and so many creative vocations have been mechanized into variations of paperwork. Everywhere my children go they are stuffed, laden down, with junk. Things they didn’t make, paperwork to be immediately discarded. A society of revolving institutions can’t (won’t?) give the attention needed to impart genuine skills.

Apple computers entered classrooms in the 1980s. Since then, tech has captured education at the same time schools are consolidated into factory sizes. After 40 years, even the institutions which relentlessly pushed the gadget-ificiation of education know it's not working: "Although computer use during class may create the illusion of enhanced engagement with course content, it more often reflects engagement with social media, YouTube videos, instant messaging, and other nonacademic content...

scientificamerican.com/article/studen…

Half a lifetime ago I was on the antiwar left. Never did I feel afraid or uncomfortable sharing my beliefs with hawks. One of the greatest amazements of my life is watching that movement willingly dissolve itself to join the very same neoliberal warmongers. Today it is not easy to speak. The neoliberals hawks have applied their own versions of Just War theory excuses to compel the former anti-war movements to betray their cause. Now the world sits upon the brink of a far more terrible disaster, and the doves are shamed or anonymous.

Things I would like our society to stop doing:
-Saying "children are resilient"
-Treating infants like lumps of clay without their own dignity or needs
-Mass institutionalizing infants with strangers a mere 6 weeks after birth.

https://twitter.com/moveincircles/status/1567822356223037440

A few bits from @moveincircles's piece first:

"Are we looking at a mass outbreak of disordered attachment? Perhaps; for the other generational change that swept across the West around the same time as the internet was increased uptake of institutional childcare."

It's a nightmare, but it's important to step back and look at the big picture. There is a class of professionals in this country, largely upper middle class women, with enormous platforms, strong social clout, are adept at weaponizing administrations, and who are quite sick

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1557775959217950725

This group of women have been highly divorced from reality and their bodies since adolescence. They were taught feminine things were bad and power was good. They were encouraged to use their verbal skills to expand the administrative state, and offered no teachings in the virtues

A story about a major review ran this week which should bring about a long overdue Medical Reformation. Will it?

"Major review suggests low serotonin levels are not a factor and the condition is more likely to be linked to stressful life events"

telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/2… The collapse of the chemical imbalance theory of mental health has vital significance for our understanding of our environment, our mental health, the domination of advertisers, our relationship to doctors and drug companies, and our tolerance for establishment heretics.

It's painful to hear parents struggle with raising children and blaming their kids or blaming themselves.

Of my 4 great-grandmothers, at least 3 spent years living with their children & helping raise their grandkids. Seems to hold true in other families I've asked. The Depression-WWII era (plus the Industrial Revolution!) changed our society so radically and it's not appreciated. Many of the people who've monetarily benefited from the changes are also the quickest to express disgust that it wasn't even faster.

"To want to rid the world of all limits is not only to destroy understanding; it is to destroy the world itself, themselves along with it."

Another excellent piece from @duncanreyburn

duncanreyburn.substack.com/p/the-society-… "In a society of excess positivity, the chief function of the social realm is to lubricate everything, to transform a world of hesitations and questions into absolute immediacy and life into a mere impersonal process."

"What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?"

Of course they are.
unherd.com/2022/07/how-th… These are developments of materialism. Utopians, who have enough money to disengage from the actual needs of the land, fantasize about managing a new order, one determined to focus solely on lowest common denominator hegemonies: economic, political, and scientific-materialist.