Source: Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest
“man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights.”
“Such is the would-be emperor’s encounter with the cosmos. A singular triumph that sets one apart from the rest. Yet space is so much bigger than this. As Walter Benjamin explained in “To the Planetarium ,” his remarkable two-page essay on the invention of telescopes, “The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance.” Writing shortly after he witnessed the applied technological horrors of World War II, he explained how “it is in this (collective) experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us, and never of one without the other. This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights.”
“At the time, Benjamin was thinking about the way that telescopes and star charts had turned space into something “out there.” With technology in hand, he argues, the temptation is less to encounter nature than to master it—and to do so individually, rather than engaging with it collectively. In other words, the truest, deepest experience of space—of our relationship to the cosmos—may be more richly accessible to a group of people dancing together in a field than to a billionaire in a remote-controlled vehicle floating on the Kármán line at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. Or, as the Grateful Dead’s tour publicist Dennis McNally once reminded me when I lost my backstage pass, “Relax, man, the real show’s out there in the crowd.”
→ humans in habitat
“Tyson himself calls “indigenous” a “stupid word.” He says it’s “inadequate because really what we mean is human. Everything that we described as indigenous ways of being, these are human ways of being because we’re humans and we have a habitat and we’re supposed to be a habitat member.”
no individual discovery, only systems
“The great navigators of those centuries who did journey to “new” continents were not discovering places at all, but revealing the circularity of the fixed sphere on which we live. Besides, there were already people here.”
collective coherence
“To the extent that we have any goals at all, we should not strive for The Mindset’s individual achievements, discrete wins, or profitable exits, but rather seek to make more incremental progress toward collective coherence. There’s no “solution ” to our woes other than maintaining a softer, more open, and more responsible comportment toward one another. ”
how can i cohere more with the world? how can i shed my individualism?