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Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: LainOfTheWired1984 on July 06, 2012, 06:01 am

Title: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: LainOfTheWired1984 on July 06, 2012, 06:01 am
Just curious. What is everyone's thoughts and feelings on the Arab Spring, in particular with the revolution in Syria.

I for one am firmly in support of Arab people's in their quest to free humanity from evil and tyranny. I truly believe that while these world revolutions may be called the Arab Spring now, these revolutions envisage a truly universal yearning for human beings who demand their dignity, respect, and freedom. Protests around Africa, particularly Muslim African, nations are increasing, including across the Sudan. Hell, 100's of thousands of Russians protested Putin? Gaddafi is dead, Mubarak is essentially dead, and Bashar Al-Assad is all but certain to be dragged through the streets as the people rip his body apart.

I believe that, with the next stage in the internet revolution in swing, the creation of Silk Road, the rise and eventual self-awareness of the "Anonymous" subculture, the absolute lack of heroes and human leadership, the growing global wealth disparities, failures of global financial systems, the general ambivalence towards the future, and the explosion of festival/electronic cultures in this decade (2009-present), that we are in the midst of major shifts in human life and consciousness.

I believe that all of these, and many more, are all harbingers (yeah hence the sig/tag) of a major human revolution. Living through the 2000-2009 it really felt as if the world had stagnated or as if we were experiencing liminality, that period of odd calm, or to me stagnation in the presence of a deeply schismatic near future, of which we live in right now.

I feel humanity is finally (once again?) becoming more self-aware, and thus taking more control over their destinies, as individuals, and collectively as human beings.

----In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they ----will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.
----The concept of liminality was first developed in the early 20th century by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep and later taken up by Victor Turner. More recently, usage of the term has broadened to describe political and cultural change as well as rituals. During liminal periods ----of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables ----new institutions and customs to become established.

I guess my question is this....Do you believe that we are in the midst of a groundbreaking, revolutionary time period? Not just as an individual or just in your particular country, but as a species, as human beings existing on this planet?


Title: Re: The Fate of History: As the Arab Spring Revolutions Spread...
Post by: blackend646 on July 06, 2012, 06:12 am
It's really hard to say. Everything you've said is true, but at the same time, when I walk outside today, I see an age of people glued to their smartphones, making a facebook status for every buck they make and every shit they take. One can only hope it's just a passing fad, but most people today only exist to stroke their own ego. Nowadays the gadgets in peoples pockets are more intelligent and free-thinking than they are.

And as for the Arab spring, the new people taking over those shitholes aren't going to be much better than the last.
Title: Re: The Fate of History: As the Arab Spring Revolutions Spread...
Post by: LainOfTheWired1984 on July 06, 2012, 06:20 am
It's really hard to say. Everything you've said is true, but at the same time, when I walk outside today, I see an age of people glued to their smartphones, making a facebook status for every buck they make and every shit they take. One can only hope it's just a passing fad, but most people today only exist to stroke their own ego. Nowadays the gadgets in peoples pockets are more intelligent and free-thinking than they are.

And as for the Arab spring, the new people taking over those shitholes aren't going to be much better than the last.

I totally agree with you black, except for the Arab Spring part. It tears me up to see so many people slowly kill their spirits off for good with internet narcissism, but there has to be a point where the game, the ego trip, all collapses in on itself.

As for me, I have hope that people will wake up soon, because if we can  be aware and if we can empower ourselves, why can't others?  Thanks for the reply black!
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: Buho on July 06, 2012, 10:26 am
Yeah it sure feels to me that theres going to be some kind of big changes in the future. The Arab world seems as fucked up as before: Mubarak out --> Muslim Brotherhood in. Dunno whos running Libya now, probably some religious fanatics. Well dont really care about them.
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: Kappacino on July 06, 2012, 10:36 am
There's no profound or hidden meaning to any of these events.

We're just a primate species on a rock in space. It's no deep yearning of the unconscious human spirit or anything like that, or the ages coming into alignment and the start of a new age.. It's just people living in shit conditions that want to live in better conditions.

All time periods have some sort of revolutionary period. Look at the founding of the USA. You could say the same thing.. "the yearning for human freedom, the dawn of a new age in locomotion, print, and literature.. where the oppressed threw off the rule of the oppressors and announced a new state guaranteeing freedom for all" etc etc..

The world might change for a bit, but it will just repeat itself in cycles of good and bad. It's human nature. For all this shit to stop, we have to transcend selfishness entirely, all of us, as a species. Not going to happen, if ever, for a very very very long time.
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: Caparino on July 06, 2012, 10:54 am
There's no profound or hidden meaning to any of these events.

We're just a primate species on a rock in space. It's no deep yearning of the unconscious human spirit or anything like that, or the ages coming into alignment and the start of a new age.. It's just people living in shit conditions that want to live in better conditions.

I'd usually share in your cynicism Kappa but I'm gonna propose another possibility. What's going on here is a series of calculated political assassinations influenced by special interests. Gaddafi had twice proposed to distribute all of the national wealth to the citizens of Libya and he was actually close to securing Congress' votes before he was overthrown. Afghanistan's invasion was linked to a mass burning of opium/heroin plants by the previous regime; you guys know Afghanistan is where about 90% of the world's heroin comes from. Iraq, Syria, and now Iran all linked to oil. Do you guys really doubt this endeavor out of certain people's reach? Certain people who've got their income tied to these flow of sources?
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: sselevol on July 06, 2012, 10:58 am
I believe that all of these, and many more, are all harbingers (yeah hence the sig/tag) of a major human revolution. Living through the 2000-2009 it really felt as if the world had stagnated or as if we were experiencing liminality, that period of odd calm, or to me stagnation in the presence of a deeply schismatic near future, of which we live in right now.
Well there was thing in September 2001 you might have heard about in the news or in passing.

I agree with Kappacino, we're just really advanced monkeys who are floating through space on a rock and happen to have some idea of how the universe and our bodies function. There's no great new age, apart from the internet allowing the spreading of ideas to all parts of the world.
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: BanWork on July 06, 2012, 11:02 am
It's really hard to say. Everything you've said is true, but at the same time, when I walk outside today, I see an age of people glued to their smartphones, making a facebook status for every buck they make and every shit they take. One can only hope it's just a passing fad, but most people today only exist to stroke their own ego. Nowadays the gadgets in peoples pockets are more intelligent and free-thinking than they are.

And as for the Arab spring, the new people taking over those shitholes aren't going to be much better than the last.

I think your observations are spot on but I do sense a slow disintegration of the bonds that hold together the current paradigm. Most western people dedicate all their spare energy to narcissism, egotistical pursuits and acquisition of  material things, bizarrely from the outside this seems to fulfill them but when you scratch the surface I think a lot of people have a nagging dissatisfaction (at best) with the way they live, the problem is that they don't equate it to the way they live their lives..

I believe that there is a building momentum of change and increasing awareness, will it amount to anything is the question. I think the internet and other technology will have a massive part to play as we are seeing already. If this momentum builds to a critical point then I think even those who like to keep their eyes shut will have no choice but to wake up, then change will accelerate.

But like Kap said, in all likelihood any effort the people make to change this world for the better will in time be undone by the greed of human nature. Like all animals we are all programmed with instinctive traits that will ensure that things will never be perfect. Maybe in a couple of thousand years when we have virtually unlimited energy and we live as digital beings things will sort themselves out.  :P

Either way, it's an interesting time to be around!
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: Kappacino on July 06, 2012, 11:31 am
But people have been living for egoistical means in every single culture since the dawn of man.

Just cause they aren't watching vacuous reality TV and hitting on girls or playing video games or eating at olive garden doesn't mean they're free of it. Even in places with a deep spiritual tradition like India, people are pretty much the same. They don't spend quite as much time being "entertained" by technology as us westerners but they find different outlets for their selfish instincts. There may well be a lot more "awake" people but it certainly isn't a majority in any culture. On planet Earth, Ego rules.

And if you go back a bit further, people were drinking Gin like it was a day job, taking opium, having banquets and feasts and laughing at the peasants, wearing absurd wigs and all that shit.

And if you go back even further, the Aztecs and these other cultures who were apparently so in tune with the Earth and one with the Universe, were sacrificing babies to the sun God so they wouldn't ruin the crops.. were killing families, raping constantly, taking slaves.. How awake exactly were these people may I ask?

If anything we're less egotistical. We just have different outlets for it, which makes it seem like there's this massive change coming, within the context of this culture.

And there may even be a massive change coming, but to think this is going to be some kind of defining event for a 250,000 year old species is to just focus too much on our own present age, and to place too much importance in it without taking into account the bigger picture and how profoundly different the future will actually be to what we think.

500 years from now, warring factions of the KPAX army and the Brotherhood of humanoids could be fighting for the freedom of technological life forms to have the right to create their own environments within their intelligence, unstifled by the "oppression" of the human creators who have so far stopped the technology from creating self sustaining, self aware, independent organisms.

The future is going to be so absurdly different to anything we can possibly imagine (you try imagining an iPhone in the 1600s and you'll get a picture of how ridiculous things will be).. that the petty happenings of some trivial revolutions in the arab continent and the slight changes in government authority and the follow on effects this will have on human consciousness, appear simply laughable when you take a step back.

It'd be like people during the french revolution saying "this is a defining moment for humanity, the paradigm is changing, the end goal of an awake, open, united species is finally upon us.." And then hundreds of years later, we're moving around in big machines and communicating through invisible signals in the air and no-one gives a shit.

Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: trava on July 06, 2012, 02:28 pm
arab spring = seculars out = Islamists and fundamentalists in  = arab winter
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: Limetless on July 06, 2012, 02:40 pm
Human society isn't changing, the circumstances just are. If you look at human history you find that everything goes in cycles but it just happens in different places and under different circumstances.

For example, if we take it from the Hellenic period.

The Greeks experimented with different types of politics and gave birth to Democracy, this created political wars, this carried on pretty much up until after Christianity spread and then the conflict became religious as it spread that created conflict and this lasted until the medieval period up until say the Enlightenment where there was more political philosophy and that was what created conflict right up through until the end of the Soviet Union collapsed and then the West and Middle East got heated so now the worlds conflict is predominantly religiously motivated. I know this is generalized but it does fit. However what hasn't changed are humans basic nature for our needs and our weaknesses for greed, power and wealth it's just that the circumstances like technology and who we are friends with politically has. That's the only thing that really changes and that change is constant.
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: k3vvlk00n on July 06, 2012, 07:56 pm
I would agree we are in the midst of some kind of ground-breaking/revolutionary time period, but that would be merely along the lines of 'there is change', not necessarily the entire world will be flipped as we know it.

I don't think this has anything to do with humans and human nature, though. I don't know my history that well, because I hate history and other people have already given better examples, but human nature is probably the only thing that stays consistent throughout history.

Rather, I believe this change is more supportive of technology and the lack of. We're reaching the point where our energy demands and technology are exceeding the resources available, and because so we start to see the entire structure of governments collapsing or beginning to collapse because they weren't designed for a society such as ours. As such, we will probably see huge overhauls to government policy, which will include changes to former moral ideals, in order to better fit our needs in a modern, technological world.

There's no point in bothering with actual, specific predictions, but at the very least we're at a point where we might be lucky enough to be a generation to witness an entire, united world government. Also, we might be the generation to see another world war, possibly the largest and deadliest in recorded history. So keep your fingers crossed for whichever, or maybe both.
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: kmfkewm on July 06, 2012, 09:27 pm
I believe that a fundamental shift in human organizational structure is taking place and that it is having a profound effect on all aspects of life. I believe that this shift is happening at an exponentially increasing speed, and that the traditional bastions of power are doing everything they can to prevent it from coming to a peak, because they wish to remain the head of a hierarchy in an increasingly networked world. I think that the inherent structures that their groups must take, in order to allow for the positions of power which they so desperately desire, have fundamental limitations that substantially slow their reaction time. However, they do have a lot of money and a lot of people below them so really who knows what the future holds. I imagine it will either be an Orwellian police state, once the state gets into full gear and puts an end to modern threats to its power, or a libertarian utopia after the concept of the state fades into history (or is at least dramatically modified, in practice).   
Title: Re: The Fate of History: Are we Experiencing Liminality?
Post by: sabteria14 on July 07, 2012, 01:12 am
Km, do you totally reject the work of keynes and the success of Sweeden, Norway, etc.? I cant think of any libertarian states period, let alone a utopia or even one to the standard of northern Europe...Somalia?