Adjusting to the Age of Inversion
New Habits of Mind for an Upside-Down World
In Diagnosis Impossible: Learning to See the Problem, I wrote about inverted fulfillments of the yearning expressed in the Pavamana Mantra:
Om…From the unreal, lead me to the real.
From darkness, lead me to the light.
From death, lead me to immortality.
Om…Peace. Peace. Peace.
In the Age of Inversion, forces we struggle to describe have co-opted and inverted this yearning. We now flee from the real to the unreal, from light to darkness, from life everlasting to shadows and dust.
I first wrote about this shift in 2020 in Self vs. Self: The Age of Inversion and the Nuclear Moment:
In this death cult, war in its many guises is not a necessary evil. War is peace. War is part of the plan.
That’s the meaning of our nuclear moment. It’s Nuclear 2.0. It’s the only thing left to do after you split the atom. You now split the psyche. So ours is a moment of heart break, terror, distrust, disconnection, grief, trauma, alienation and atomization. It’s a moment in which we can’t breathe.1
Krishna’s terrifying eyes and mouths are now in the rear view mirror. So too is the Burning Bush that showed us how to stay ablaze and blossoming. Nuclear moments incinerate everything including our metaphors.
I’m not just saying this because I recently watched The Social Dilemma2, which scratches the surface of some dark subject matter (i.e., the pathocracy of the Attention Economy). I’m saying this because one of my favorite pastimes during nuclear moments is to describe the moments. This practice fixes nothing, but it reveals structure and beauty in everything, even in the three tragic inversions of the Pavamana Mantra.
When I wrote these paragraphs, I responded to “Nuclear Moments” by describing them. This year, I turned to dialogue as a path to nurturing the possibility of a different life, outside self-imposed cages. You can read about this possibility in the latest DaaS post below. I hope it inspires you to join me as a partner in dialogue.
Dialogue as a Service (DaaS): Nurturing the possibility of a different life
Toward a History of Needs, published in 1977, may not be the best angle of entry into the work of Ivan Illich, but having chosen this gateway, I can think of very few books that so laconically depict the cages of fractal falsehood we inhabit.
Yet, here we are, writing Substack posts.
The Social Dilemma feels like ancient history now, even though it's still a current event.