The Transition

This is the chapter that has to do something different.

The previous eleven chapters have made an argument. They have been analytical, structural, constructive. They have described what coherence is, what extraction has done to it, what infrastructure could begin to rebuild it, what intelligence could become in right relationship with life, and who is doing the work. The argument is, by this point in the book, made.

To describe an institution only in the language of its architecture is to describe a house only by its blueprints. One must also say what it is to wake within its walls. What it has not yet done is sit with the actual experience of being a human being alive at this particular threshold. The destabilization people are feeling. The grief that arrives when the institutions one was supposed to inherit begin to lose legitimacy in real time. The strange psychological texture of living through a period in which what comes next is not yet visible and what is ending has not yet finished ending. This chapter is the one that has to acknowledge that experience honestly, because the argument the book has been making will not land for readers who are also being asked to manage a kind of civilizational disorientation that most of them have not been given vocabulary for.

It will not land because the human nervous system, which the book has spent significant time describing, cannot integrate an argument while it is still processing the conditions the argument is responding to.