Something incomprehensible is happening to us.
It is happening to all of us, all at once, and each of us, personally.
It is happening so rapidly, so pervasively and so totally that the change is, as yet, incomprehensible.
It is happening immanently, in every minute detail of our individual and collective lives, but it is obviously also happening transcendently: something portentous is going on elsewhere, beyond, and manifesting here, now, personally.
The whole itself is disturbed, and life is saturated with signs of the disturbance.
Some read the signs as the creaks and groans of decaying institutions, preceding total collapse. Some read them as clues of secret scheming of a malevolent totalitarian cabal, while others diagnose this reading as precisely the kind of paranoid theories concocted and propagated by totalitarian populists. Some read the signs as Gaia making final preparations to heal herself of the destructive parasite we have become. Some interpret these signs as an approaching futureshock of exponential proportion. A post-singularity artificial god will purge us from the planet. Some read the signs as the harvest of evil seeds planted centuries ago — a long overdue reckoning — a humanist ultio dei. Others see it all as prophesied trials and tribulations finally coming to pass.
Different faiths, different metaphysics, different elsewheres, different beyonds — different accounts, different explanations. But for all their differences, they all point to a common phenomenon: our shared sense that the fabric of reality is unraveling.
It manifests as uncanniness. We are all collectively and individually anxious about everything-all-at-once. Most of us fixate on one or several particular foci. But the themes and things upon which we focus our angst are just condensations of something in the air. That something defies focus. It demands something else.
The something-in-the-air that everything-all-at-once is not calling us to action.
It is calling us to a reorientation to subjectivity.
We can no longer be naively objective. Mere objectivity will no longer deliver us.
We must learn to comprehend our own subjectivity, and the supersubjectivities in which we participate.
Who are your supersubjects? Or rather, to which supersubjects do you belong?
And do your supersubjects answer to anyone higher than themselves?
Some do, some don’t.
Most don’t.