Bush was right when he exclaimed, “getting hammered is what happends when you take a principled stand.” I often think of this in contrast to the ubiquity of ‘thought leadership’ and other catch-phrases indicative of branding.
The problem is this: when you live in a society that remains as insecure as ours, you fight any and all immediate competitors. Just watch the legions of those unfortunate souls caught in the death trap of wading through a knowledge based economy with only a mediocre hold of what they were taught from institutions whose framework, curriculi was shaped from an early 20th century political economy. The west is only now wading through the debris field of entering a nomadic digital based civilization, something a center-margin based political economy cannot handle. The social vortices of power are really seen aesthetically. Watch the value, the ethics of the ‘body’, and the reception that philosophies of immance hold for the crowd. Steve Jobs meets the Ayatollah Khoemini. The return of McLuhan’s tribal night is now playing out politically.
I continue to see social, psychological vestiges of why Erik Erikson, Erik Fromm, Marshall McLuhan, Arnold Toynbee, Eric Voegelin, John Paul II and Peter Drucker were right. The ethics of leadership is only found in trained perception.
That cannot happen without profound identify development and exertion.
The prerequisites: being born into a loving family. The moral norms guiding western civilization ‘from the beginning’ was the sanctity of conjugal act’. Its coming into view now that the culture of militant autonomy, secularism is eclipsing the created order. There are symmetries here to discern regarding affinities between the ground underwriting postmodern thought and Islamic theology. More on that another day. . .
The lack of economic growth dosen’t help either. Neither does a disastrous falling currency. The choking, faltering economies throughout the world reveal something ignored by most pundits; the fault line is here, embodied in fiscal, monetary relations.
Why isn’t this talked of? Because the vorticies of power are animated along lines of abstract thought. Unless you possess an affinity for thinking anagogically, the enemy passes through un-noticed.
Don’t worry. The west still possesses profound reserves to encounter and encircle this threat. But first, the clash must come.
Remember Lincoln after being informed that the great contest had begun? The tug has got to come, better now.
. . . and the war came. . .
William Holland
William Holland 