Age of the MindMuch distress is felt by rational minds at the advent of a ‘post-truth’ explosion in the last few decades. This treatise is towards dispelling that distress. I advocate that, in the West, what we today call materialism, was kickstarted by the Industrial Revolution in the 16th century. It had to have a gradual preliminary development, but it burst from the starting blocks in the West at that time and launched a trajectory of human evolution which culminated in the Mont Pelerin Society’s Neo-Liberalism of 1947.
What happened, was that the age of materialism, predominantly manifested as mercantilism, or plainly speaking – the love of money – really ended just prior to the 20th century, but the forces activated thereby were galvanised as a rear-end manifestation of that age, presenting to humankind their solution to the utter devastation and inhumanity of the two World Wars. It could not have been other – Neo-Liberalism was the love child of centuries of focus on reality instead of religious word-views. The beauty of those centuries, including the advent of science, was its fierce determination to cast off prejudice and look the material world straight in the eye.
This is why I use that outdated term ‘the West’, because in this instance, it was the influence of Europe’s evolution, amplified through the British East India Company and the Joint-Stock Company format, that speared its new-found pragmatism into the colonies that, along with Europe, today, let’s admit it, rule the world.
But what happened? The evolution of humanity, as always, moved on. Commensurate with this flagship, the love-child of the era of hard-facts in the West, Neo-Liberalism, around the beginnings of the 20th century, a new force was quietly building: the era of the mind.
The old religious era struggled to sustain, and the best of those remnants worked hard to bring together the deepest truths inherent from that age, as a gift to human evolution. The material era rampaged across the planet and destroyed everything that stood between it and profit. But silently, quietly, a new force developed, whereby the capacity to think freely and widely was being fostered. One child of the material age lent its energy directly to this process: education. But the teaching profession can be excused for being utterly bewildered by what humanity did with the educational gift.
Nothing arrives without extended periods of capacity building. We tend to notice the horses exploding from the starting gun, but secretly, out of sight, the capacity for that explosion is always long in preparation. We didn’t realise the advent of the dawn of this new evolutionary epoch of the mind, until only relatively recently. But it is as though mysterious and strenuous efforts were being applied for a long time to prepare in the brains of humans, a vast new room. With the turn of the 21st century, it was as if, in the West especially, humanity burst through the doors of that room and frankly, went berserk! Chaos and madness cascaded into a mental illness that swept the globe, West and East.
No reference points, no tethering posts, no reverence for past wisdom or institutional frameworks upon which civilisation is founded. This free-for-all has only been vouchsafed to humanity upon the labours and insights of centuries of material wealth – those without resources can never afford to play mind games. But there is a reason. We, humanity, have now a new toy that we must learn to turn into a tool: the power of the mind. We are like a youth with his or her first driving license, behind the seat of dad’s Mustang, without the sobriety to keep our powder dry. Many of us have launched into this new room with adolescent arrogance and rudderless vanity.
Vanity, is not the subject of this treatise, but the evolution of human ego is a parallel force which interweaves with the mind, which is for another treatise. Yet certainly, the force of self-consciousness has merged with the new-found freedoms of the mind, producing a brinkmanship that truly could destroy the whole human experiment. But thus, is the way of evolution – those who lose their heads in the early rush are expendable by that holy being, Homosapien.
It is only to be expected that those addicted to YouTube and Facebook will become collateral damage in what is an exciting new age of the mind. Due to the convergence of the evolution of self-consciousness, emotion, and the mind, some poor souls have fallen for the confusion of self and glamour. The species cares little for individual life, and is seeking an evolutionary path for itself, within which we, as passenger monads, are able to profit if we can but keep our heads.
Truly, a fabulous new dawn is breaking for those with the sobriety to strike a living path away from the ruthless greed of materialism, open our minds to winds from beyond the physical world, without going insane in vainglory.
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