I’ve only listened to three of these so far
- Feb 3 Letting Go of Everything We Expected
- Jan 24 2025 Why I remain Optimistic
- Jan 21 Trump Makes it Official: No-one is coming to save us – showing that it “you’re on your own “ using a quote from Jesse Keenan – see also this one.
Steffen, who came up with the term predatory delay, is good at compassionately addressing people’s disorientation and inability to do themselves a sitrep, (though he doesn’t use those phrases.)
And the crucial point is that things are accelerating, and therefore OODA Loops are being hacked, not just by actual enemies, but by events. There’s that famous quote that I use too much from Walt Benjamin about the Klee painting – this wreckage that piles up at our feet, we call it progress.
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
I’m in this sense of disorientation, alienation, things moving too fast has been going on since sort of the joint processes of the massive urbanization and industrialization of the early 19th century, in the coming of “modernity.” See also “the hypertrophy of objective culture” by ol’ Georgie Simmel.
It goes back before then, of course, it’s never as if there wasn’t changes, as Steffen himself very clearly articulates,
These really valuable 10 or 12 minute podcast. It’s a good format (see also Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American). Doesn’t outstay its welcome.
Steffen has useful things to say, and he says them well. He’s good on this question of, you know, being “optimistic”, and distinguishes it from hope and hopium . He points out that he grew up in the 70s and 80s, (as did I), with all of this sense of, you know, “the 100th monkey” bollocks and global change in consciousness.
And Steffen doesn’t think that’s going to happen, but he also doesn’t think we’re all going to die next Tuesday. And he makes an interesting point that in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, there was such massive destruction, dislocation, millions murdered, but life went on and things got better.
Hmmm I mean, you could argue that’s because large parts of the world were physically untouched, especially the United States and Australia, and that food was not or the availability of food globally was not a concern.
We shall see what happens if we make it to the 2030s and 2040s in some kind of shape. But I do think that there is a non-trivial – I’m not saying it’s large – but it’s a non trivial chance of generalized sort of well, for want of a better term, “generalised global societal collapse.”
And then, of course, this question of “What do you mean by that word collapse?” Because it covers everything from the Great Depression through to Mad Max apocalypse.
Anyway, look, these podcasts by Steffen are worth your time.