We’re Entering A Time Of Quick And Unprecedented Change No One Is Ready For
Transformation and change will drive mankind and not the other way around
“Genies are not easily persuaded to return to their bottles. Progress is not going away, and change is not going to slow because humanity would like a mental health break.”
— Walter Russel Mead, You Are Not Destined To Live In Quiet Times
About twenty-five hundred years ago a grouchy philosopher named Heraclitus is credited with saying Panta Rhei, or “life is flux.”
By this he meant the only constant for humanity is change. Obviously, this ancient Greek was wise beyond his years. But even the far-thinking Heraclitus could only picture change in the form of his time: slow.
It was an age where for thousands of years, the fastest you could travel was by horse or the oars of a trireme. Social change moved slowly as well. The skills of your grandfather passed on to you, and they were still useful when passed on to your own grandkids.
While political power could wax and wane quickly, the economic, cultural, and scientific life of the community was relatively static.
When change did come, the meal could be digested slowly. Our version is cooked and swallowed like something from McDonald’s. It’s Panta Rhei fast-food style, and we suffer an equal spiritual heartburn from the speed.
Wall Street Journal columnist and Hudson Institute Fellow Walter Russell Mead attributes this phenomenon to a graph called the Adams Curve (above). It shows change over time. Henry Adams created it after noticing great change over his lifetime (1838 to 1918.)
Likewise, it wasn’t hard for Adams to see that humanity’s knowledge and culture had always changed, but as time moved forward, technology was building upon itself at an exponential rate. Mead believes this increase is now hitting a turning point.
He sees a new age — the Age of Information — where change will come so fast, it will be like a nonstop revolution. What’s this look like? Well, Mead points to humanity’s last large-scale revolutions as an indicator.
The Three Great Revolutions Of Mankind
“…We happen to be caught up in one of the three great waves of change that most historians dignify with capital letters and associate with revolutions. The Neolithic, Industrial, and Information Revolutions all mark major milestones in the human story.”
—Walter Russel Mead, You Are Not Destined To Live In Quiet Times
The first “great wave” humanity experienced was the Neolithic Revolution. Mead calls this “the dawn of history” because so many staggering developments occurred during this revolution.
Settled agriculture
First writing systems, record keeping, and trade
The development of cities, social class systems, governments, armies, and professional soldiers.
Creation of the first organized religions
Eckart Frahm, in his book Assyria: the Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire notes by 3000BC, Uruk possibly had sixty thousand people living within its walls. The first written language cuneiform likely developed there too.
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According to Frahm, the eventual kings of the Assyrian Empire created massive infrastructure projects, trade networks, and their society could send speedy messages baked in clay in a way thought “revolutionary” for their time. In fact, “libraries” containing these messages have been found.
While the Neolithic Age lasted about six thousand years, the Industrial Revolution was a blip at two hundred fifty. However, its results were as profound. Mead says:
“At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, cavalry officers still charged across battlefields sword in hand. The last great war of the industrial era concluded with the detonation of nuclear bombs. From the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the rise of Marxism and the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the intellectual and political movements of the last 250 years have transformed the face of the world…”
Transportation, energy generation, infrastructure, mass production, cheap goods, communication, culture, and entertainment have changed so dramatically, a person from a thousand years before our time wouldn’t recognize the world. Baked clay tablets gave way to telephones.
Massive nation-states, “industrial working classes,” public education, and the ability of science to answer most questions are a foundation to this much different time. Moreover, so is speed. Our technology compressed all this change from six thousand, into two hundred fifty years.
But this is nothing. The archaic Industrial Revolution is being replaced with the Information Revolution which Mead says will be both an exhilarating and terrifying time to be alive: Panta Rhei on steroids.
The Speed Of The Information Revolution
“With advances in genetics and the science of the brain coming so quickly, it looks as if we are entering an age of permanent revolution in which radical technological and social changes cascade across the world largely nonstop. For people in our time, rapid and accelerating change is the norm; we hardly know anymore what stability feels like.”
— Walter Russel Mead, You Are Not Destined To Live In Quiet Times
Bruce Lee famously advised his students to “be like water,” telling them the medium can take any form, move through any obstacle, and take any blow. Information is like water; its corresponding ones and zeros share all those characteristics.
Whereas the previous revolution prized steel, information — like water — has no limitations. So, it’ll kick down boundaries we thought immovable. Mead reminds us, “the average person with a cellphone has faster access to more information than anybody in the history of the world.”
But governments can use that same power of information to track us in ways not even the ancient Assyrian gods were capable of. They can even enter our minds through clever headsets manipulating those all-powerful ones and zeros.
For instance, EMotive makes several EEG wireless headsets that work through Bluetooth for about $900. They say it can measure six different cognitive states in real time — excitement, interest, stress, engagement, boredom, and relaxation. China also claims they can use similar devices to monitor citizens’ thoughts.
Moreover, you’ll put these headsets on willingly when they enable you to conveniently control devices with your mind instead of moving a finger.
We’ve also experienced the surprising growth of AI. Right now, it can do anything from answering questions, drawing pictures, and even coding. But this is still in its infancy.
In January 2023, Google subsidiary Deepmind claimed to have created an AI called “AdA” that can learn on its own from trial and error, like a human without data sets. If true, what could that do inside of a robotic body?
And speaking of bodies, computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil even believes the Information Revolution could conquer death. To elaborate, he thinks humans could someday upload their minds into computers and artificial bodies.
Gene therapies and biotech will allow for customized medicine which can eliminate ailments that shorten the lifespan of many. The next stage will be nanotechnology that creates machines small enough to monitor, fix, and control our bodies from the inside.
In comparison, there’s also the miniscule — like what happens when most can work at home? Do we need cities and all the associated industries that build off the daily travel of commuters? As Mead mentions, things will change so quickly, stability could become an unfamiliar feeling.
He also warns about culture.
We’re Materialist And Idealists
Mead says one of the major ideological battles in the Industrial Revolution was whether technology drives culture and ideas, or the reverse. But he thinks both are true. He calls us “amphibians,” that are “intellectual and spiritual beings” which also navigate a physical-material world.
But the speed of technological change causes us to get out of synch with our institutions and the surrounding culture. So, people look for fillers. In Mead’s interview on Bari Weiss’ podcast, he says politics are a terrible replacement for religion.
This extends to many of the other fillers we try to stuff into the void.
While spirituality, philosophy, and religion were created in the Neolithic Revolution, they’re desperately needed in our current age of permanent revolution. We’re way beyond the clay tablets, but the meaning they purvey is still necessary.
As Panta Rhei hits a chain reaction stage that turns all we know into a blur and the Adams Curve heads to infinity, humanity needs something stable to hold on to. Inevitably, genies can’t be coaxed back into bottles, but we can slow our minds during this technological blitz.
We’re entering a time of quick and unprecedented change no one is ready for, but our ancestors gave us the tools to ride the wave.
-Originally published on Medium 8/4/23
As history shows, our powerful rulers use these advances to have greater power over our lives and minds, to shape and cripple our ability to think clearly or judge morally, to reduce or liberties and opportunities for choices that are more than picking from two options - neather good, to oppress and when desire to torture or genocide us 'little-people', increase suffering, reduce quality of life, loss of community & family, increase isolation and psychological-financial-medical and other enslavement, etc.
Before we allow these advancements to harm us further - headsets required at work that count what percentage of your 68 hr workweek you were focused and concentrating of tasks, and paid based on that, when 100% is required to break even for a living-wage at minimal levels - for example - we must change our rulers and our own goals.
One way is to see clearly through all the levels of false Theater pretend Dog-Pony Shows that you and your voting they pretend influences anything but provide a false sense of influence in rulers and policies.
And realize that perhaps only 15 interconnected international families are the real rulers and immune from responsibility for any evil through the Puppets they place before us and those puppets and everyone in those powerful rulers 'Club' is protected and serve them, while being the focus of anger, frustrations, planning, supporting, voting, ...
Next is to learn who and where those families are, the NSA and other 5-eyes (5-Interlegent organizations) contact meta-data would contain the information that can be ferreted out, along with NSA, etc. on wealth ownership and control, influences on most significant control institutions, and such, so those 15 or so families can be mapped influences and control between each other and through others - control of the world - and those families rated from most powerful to least.
And systematically as needed the most powerful family to be made public, and forced to Rule the world through those other families and all those connections, and any and all support the rest of us can provide as can be justified, and every 6 months improvements for the least of us to all of us world-wide will be measured and if improvements not good enough 2 periods in a row, every older (post menopause age) is publicly hanged, and their wealth and access to control systems transferred to the 2nd most powerful - then advanced to the first, and same again.
Until the least of us and all of us are not needlessly suffering, with lives of Meaning and Joy, Love, Hope, and better all around, then advancements in technology may be allowed that is not focused specifically for betterment of us all.
And perhaps we will have trained or demanded our most intelligent effective motivated top families into having souls, to reject Satan as their Master, and to Love mankind and want to sacrifice and serve us all.
We also get a monarchy and-or governing system that does well - or dies screaming in public.
Suggestions for a better way?
God Bless., Steve