Thinking About the Liminal War
Tomorrow’s events:
Social Design Club w/ Freyja and Joe Edelman. Every Wednesday @ 1:30 PM ET. RSVP here. Join the club here. 90 mins.
The Philosopher is Present w/ Andrew Taggart and Daniel Kazandjian. July 29th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Also, a must-see event for the week is the launch of The Stoa’s new Postscript series in collaboration with Letter. These will be follow-up debates from exchanges that happened on the Letter platform. The first session will be on “Guns in America” with Buster Benson and BJ Campbell. You can read the original exchange here: https://letter.wiki/conversation/129
Postscript: Guns in America w/ Buster Benson and BJ Campbell. July 30th @ 9:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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July 28, 2020
There will be a break. Meaning will flood in.
There will be holy waves, that deluge the noosphere, our collective mind.
This is the denouement of the liminal war if we can get into the right relationship with reality.
I coined the term liminal war in a tweet after COVID came online: The confusing, disorienting, and hyper-fragmented battle of narratives in our complex ontology. Where memetic violence turns kinetic. The upgrade of Culture War 2.0. Who wins this creates the future.
The word 'liminal' comes from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold." It is the space where you cannot go back, but you do not know exactly where you are going. Arnold van Gennep, who coined the term liminality, used it in the context of rites of passage. The liminal is the middle part of the passage, where you are statusless: you no longer can rely on your old status, and you have not yet obtained your new status.
We are collectively in this liminal state, or at least that is the idea, and a memetic war is happening in its midst; a war for our minds. The memetic tribes, groups of individuals who become tribal around how the world is and ought to be, are trying to capture the metanarrative, the globalizing narrative that orders what is and what ought to be for everyone.
To make things more complex, two things seem to be happening: narratives are fragmenting even more, and these fragmented narratives are entering polarized alliances with one another, as shit increasingly hits the fan. An under viewed Situational Assessment from Jordan Hall back in 2017 provides an idea as to why.
Those who have a temperament for orderliness (“the conservatives”) and a temperament for openness (“the liberals”) respond to fear differently, and fear is what liminality brings forth. The conservatives will become reactionary, and fantasize about an imaginary world of orderliness, and liberals will enter a state of insanity, not in the pejorative sense, but in the sense that it is so open all coherency is lost. Some reactionaries call this “clown world.”
Jordan uses the evolutionary tribal metaphor to explain both approaches: do we stay at the old watering hole despite years of drought or do you leave the old watering hole despite dying en route? These are losing strategies that both polarized extremes take. I am optimistic there is another way, and I do not think it will be found in the “let us double-down on enlightenment values” centrist approach.
We need a space that is not warped and deranged by the current liminal war. I sense we need to think with a daemonic creativity within the liminal, to have breathing room to wildly wonder about what is possible. The Stoa is such a space.
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