Sublime

This should give us pause. History, which for a time seemed to be running from west to east, now seems to be moving from east to west. Everything that happens here seems to happen there first.

Junger reflected, “humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.”⁠11 Junger argues that “modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall was more than just a visible symbol of the death of Communism. It was a defeat for the entire world system of nation-states and a triumph of efficiency and markets. The fulcrum of power underlying history has shifted. We believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 culminates the era of the nation-state, a peculiar t

believe that these changes require us to revisit the paradigm of historical sociology deriving from the nineteenth century which essentially seeks to explain the rise of the West.

Ortega held the process to be the driving force of history. The “reciprocal action between the masses and select minorities,” he wrote, “is the fundamental fact of every society and the agent of its evolution for good or evil.” Ortega’s masses we now call the public. By “select minorities” he meant the admirable few: elites who, at their best, lavi

When our ancestors, Rousseau wrote, made the fatal decision to divide the earth into individually owned plots, creating legal structures to protect their property, then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined they were creating the means to preserve their liberty. In fact, they ‘ran headlong to their chains’.

the notion of perpetual growth is just a social construct, initiated as a transition strategy to reboot the economy after World War II. It has now run its course.

As Rawls put it, “Lacking a sense of longterm security and the opportunity for meaningful work and occupation is not only destructive of citizens’ self-respect but of their sense that they are members of society and not simply caught in it.”