It happens that I am old enough to remember a counter culture with its challenge to accepted authority and its energetic creativity. It seems that we are on a course that will lead us to another rejection of the established order. Its about a world view. On the frontier, in the early days of America – our hunter/gatherer days – our vision was limited to the rifle sight and the knifepoint. We ate what we killed. Next came the sodbusters rooted to the land and thriving through husbandry. A short stay in the natural resources economy of timber and minerals pushed us directly to the industrial revolution of ginned cotton, steel and iron. With amazing speed we became the world’s leader in the area of consumer goods and cars, radios, and televisions came in waves. Lately we have entered a digital world where we do not sell goods per se…we sell ideas and concepts that we refer to as, “intellectual property.” Each of these stages produced a particular type of wealth personified by the tidewater elite, the plantation owner, the tycoon and finally the Silicon Valley bazillionaire.
Today conditions are ripe for another dramatic change. Many can dimly perceive a post-racist, post-xenophobic, post-nationalist world community. Others want the status quo and others actually want to regress to the architecture of earlier times. What is certain is the fact that our current politics mixed with a deadly pandemic will make us find new values, new art, new music and revised urban planning to name a few old ways that no longer work. It is going to get interesting.
I see a new mix of trends that are both old and new. Bartering is returning (yeast for sourdough starter; TP for disinfecting wipes etc. ) collectivism is available on zoom and “belonging” also has a new meaning. Tribes are forming and dualities are dying. It is very difficult to think in dualities anymore. We humans are slowly morphing into something unprecedented.
We are slowly birthing an alternative culture as movies go direct to streaming and our music becomes more diverse. Geurilla art and “art actions;” are on the rise. Universities are less and less viable for those who seek education and we see a huge growth in the self taught. Density and congregation are suddenly deadly. Our cities, and our ways of worship will not work in their current conception. Albert Einstein reminds us “the world as we have created it is a process of our thinking, it can not be changed without changing our thinking.”
Everything will need to be made new.
I feel the change coming.
Olio Folio 