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Amidst the growing uncertainty of the world around us and the erosion of public trust and good faith dialogue, I was drawn to several thinkers and …

Sensemaking in the 21st Century: A Conversation with Noetic Nomads Founder Albert Kim

—– This is interesting for a number of reasons. I’m gonna just focus on one.

The first and i think most significant is found in the beginning of the “Rebel Wisdom” video. 

Basically he says that all empires decline, but in the past all these empires were local, and so other empires arose. The implication, I gather, is that these empires were local manifestations and so the rest of the globe could absorb their dissolution, meaning, other civilizations or other developing empires could incorporate what had “Been left to the winds”. Basically that there were enough other humans across the globe who are not part of that empire who could, kind of, cushion the blow of the disintegrating empire.  Then he goes on to say that the issue that we have now is that we have a global empire and the assumption in the rest of his video, indeed the rest of his “wise rebellion” point, is that there’s nothing left to absorb the collapse of this global empire.

That’s my quick synopsis of the first 30 seconds or less of his opening statements.

Now, I’m going to introduce what I feel is probably some very controversial views upon things.

Immediately when I started watching this video — because I pushed play in the video before I started reading into the rest of the post–  I was struck by his introduction of fear. It appears from the whole layout of the blog post but then even kind of in the imagery of the beginning of the video and including himself and the office that he is sitting in, it feels to me as if some sort of spiritual message is going to be conveyed. I don’t really know if this is intentional, but this is the feeling that I get when I first open the post and started watching the video. Maybe you all get a different impression.

Nevertheless, I got this feeling that there was going to be some sort of spiritual message, some sort of message that we need to grow spiritually as a human creature if we are going to survive as a species.

The first point of contention toward which my remark aims it’s exactly that he presents the assumption of fear as if it is something true and common knowledge. Even as he talks about history and our present condition, he conveys it in a way that sounds very intelligent and kind of matter of fact, as though everyone automatically agrees that there is a major problem happening right now that is different than what has happened in history or before our times. and for sure, I am fairly positive that most people would agree with him that we are facing problems nowadays that are entirely different in degree and seriousness than we ever have before in human history. So, he draws from this assumption and then offers his solution.

What is controversy all about my view is that I do not believe that our particular problematic condition now is any more or less serious than any other problem that we’ve had throughout history.

My position is that at every moment in history, all human beings, at least in aggregate of them, view the situation as impending catastrophe. And this is to say, that not “all” human beings see the world in this way, but that human beings that are invested and involved with that particular ideological formation that is “civilization” and or “Empire”, as this guy calls it, understand the world as on the verge of falling apart.

I feel that it is a function of “being civilized” to understand that there is a massive catastrophe close on the horizon.

And I feel that this “rebel wisdom” is caught in this kind of civilized ideology.: that the rebellion is that aspect of being “the civilized” which maintains the ideology of that empire. He has been groomed to justify the present markings of civilization in the context of “the global spirit”, for a term, what we could very well equate to what he sees as “humanity”. This grooming is so complete, and draws upon the human functioning towards ideological investment so thoroughly, that’s the point he makes does less to move towards some sort of “wisdom” and more towards consolidating the sense of the civilized identity in the localized context.

My point is that the localized contexts constitute the global context at every moment. But also, that every localized context views itself with global concern.

We see this always and everywhere in history, no matter where we look, no matter what civilization we look into, no matter what time We focusing on, no matter what culture we decide is “local” as opposed to our global and true view of things.

More later… 
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