Philosophical monologue on societal change with no concrete allegations

the military cars whipping in and out all day. “He asked me what books | could recommend to understand this period we are living in. I said, ‘I could give you some books, but you wouldn’t understand them.” Nan laughed. The iron spike. “This can’t be understood by reading!” Nan was trying to educate his students in the original principles of Ch’an: a set of psychological and physical tools to reveal deeper patterns in the world. 4, After wearing his guests down with relentless dinner-time questioning that first night | was at Lake Tai, Master Nan began to offer his views of our age. What he saw, he explained, was a world pressing too hard on a fault line. We faced, he said, choosing his word carefully, an “ephocal” quake. We were at a moment when the river of change he had spent a lifetime feeling out was about to shift its course over the landscape, drowning many of the reliable, old routes. The origins of this change were buried in the very things we hoped might, in fact, save us from shock: money, information, speed. “People are now constantly connected to computers and machines, and this is changing the way they think. People just cannot make sense of what is happening,” he said. “There is no respite. The world is going to go faster and faster in this regard.” “In the 19 century the biggest threat to humanity was pneumonia,” he continued. “In the 20 century it was cancer. The illness that will mark our era, and particularly the start of the 215t century, is insanity. Or we can say, spiritual disease.” He paused. “This next century is going to be especially turbulent. It has already begun. And when I say insanity and spiritual disease, I don’t only mean inside the minds of individuals. Politics, military, economics, education, culture and medicine - all these will be affected.” I could sense the logic behind Master Nan’s argument. The industrialization and urbanization of the 19 century had packed much of the world into Dickensian urban pits. These became petri dishes for pneumonia. Too much industry and urbanization, too fast. The 20‘ century of plastics and artificial, untested, unsafe materials had torn away at our genetic base and worsened cancers. Too much science, too fast. In our age, in the 215t century he felt a wasting disease would be carried by information, by cell phones, by packets of data, by every bitstream we jacked into our lives - and it would go right for our brains. Our institutions and our ideas about power and stability would fall apart. The remapping of force that the information revolution represented was a profound, destructive shift - what Nan called a jieshu, the Chinese word for a rupture in the fabric of human history. In such an era, the once reliable old habits would become useless, even dangerous. All that would matter were your instincts. Frankly, all you would have would be your instincts because no existing map could guide you through a completely new landscape. In fact, the existing maps, should you stubbornly continue to use them, would lead you along dangerous paths towards catastrophes you could not even imagine. 10 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018242