My journey towards understanding that I now live in a liminal time was slow and I arrived late.

"One of the things that marks out this writing, then, is a willingness to enter territory that we could call ‘liminal’. It’s a term that comes from the study of ritual, given to the middle phase of a right of passage: the preliminaries are over, you have shed the skin of an old reality, but not yet acquired the new skin that would allow you to return to the everyday world. The liminal is the space of the threshold, with all the vulnerability and potential of transition: the costliness of letting go, with no guarantee of what will come after. The liminal phase of a ritual is the moment of greatest danger – or rather, ritual is a safety apparatus built around the liminal. Whichever, the liminal is where the work gets done, where the change happens."

I discovered The Dark Mountain Project sometimes towards the end of 2019. The above quote is from 2016: You Want It Darker by Dougald Hine, co-author of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, published in 2009. I was impressed by what this group understood deeply long before any of this had entered my mind. From time to time I continue to visit the Dark Mountain.

In hindsight, my thinking began to change in 2016. The triggering event is clear in my mind. In a campaign speech delivered by Hillary Clinton on September 9, 2016 she described half the supporters of Donald Trump as a "basket of deplorables" and that utterance became a factor in her defeat. Without fully understanding why, I was very troubled by this condesending choice of words. I am a Canadian but had I been American I could not have voted for Clinton. I was no longer comfortable in the world she personified.

In his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, published in 2018, Yuval Noah Harari captures what I was beginning to see.

At the close of the twentieth century it appeared that the great ideological battles between fascism, communism, and liberalism had resulted in the overwhelming victory of liberalism. Democratic politics, human rights, and free-market capitalism seemed destined to conquer the entire world. But as usual, history took an unexpected turn, and after fascism and communism collapsed, now liberalism is in trouble.

In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt led an initiative, the New Deal, which established a new social contract between the government and the people. In the 1940s, during WWII, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill designed a new world order as documented in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the Declarations by United Nations in 1942. This describes the world into which I was born in 1951 and in which I have lived my whole life, until now. 

I realized that the world I lived in faced many big challenges, such as global warming, polarization, and the growth of deaths of despair. But, all things considered, I believed that the world would continue to make incremental progress. However, with the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and many other disruptive developments, such as the Me Too movement, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and others, it dawned on me that something unprecedented was happening. Yet I remained hopeful that life would continue to be quite good for most people most of the time. But now the coronavirus crisis has accelerated and magnified many negative trends.

Seven years ago, the Annual Question asked by Edge was 2013: What Should We be Worried About? In response, Randolph Nesse wrote a short essay entitled The Fragility Of Complex Systems. In five paragraphs he captures why our current civilization is at risk of collapse.

The larger dangers come from the hidden fragility of complex systems... few are paying attention... We need to shift our focus from this threat and that, to the vulnerabilities of modern complex systems to any number of threats.

An article published on July 16, 2019, RISE OF THE EMERGENTSIA: FEELING ‘GOBSCHMACHT’ YET? by Brent Cooper, picks up the same theme.

Heading for collapse, we are not only carrying rivalrous baggage of the past, but exponential technology is multiplying the existential risk - the various human sourced threats to civilisation (climate change, war, AI, etc). However, we have a specific choice before us, between extinction and going through a phase shift. The choice begins with the critical insight that ignorance of existential risk (x-risk) is a multiplier and generator of x-risk. The more we turn a blind eye as a society, the worse it gets.

In his excellent essay, The Coronation, published in March, 2020, Charles Eisenstein writes:

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is... We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation... I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths.

With my mind opened to a new view of the world, I have spent many hours researching and reading, struggling to understand this moment in history. I am convinced that there will be no return to normal, no going back. The world we have lived in for the past seventy years is gone and a new world has not yet emerged. We truly are in a liminal time, but only a few people seem to understand this deeply. And only a very few understand that what we are experiencing exceeds the capacity of a single person to fully grasp.

A key characteristic of a liminal time is uncertainty. Will the future be a breakthrough, a grand awakening, the emergence of a higher level of consciousness in homo sapiens? Perhaps. Will the future be a breakdown, a collapse, a retreat to a new Dark Age? Perhaps. I see the possibilities and I see the peril. I also see the opportunity to personally participate in a meaningful way.

Umair Haque, who I think is well worth following, seems to dwell mostly in darkness. His personal story is interesting and surprising, including survivng a diagnosis of terminal cancer. In a July 3, 2020 article entitled If Life Feels Bleak, It’s Because Our Civilization is Beginning to Collapse, he writes,

The end of human civilization is now easy enough to see, over the next three to five decades. It’s made of climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse, and the economic depressions, financial implosions, political upheavals, pandemics, plagues, floods, fires, and social breakdowns all those will ignite.

Coronavirus is a foreshadowing, a taste of a dismal future, a warning, and a portrait, too. Life as we know it is falling apart. Life as we know it will continue to fall apart, for the rest of our lives. How do you live through that?

At the other extreme are those who believe that that homo sapiens are on the verge of solving every major challenge, as is obvious in the self-promotion of Singularity University.

At Singularity University, we believe that leveraging the convergence of exponential technologies will set us on the path to solve our global grand challenges and shift from an era of scarcity to abundance. There are twelve global grand challenges (GGCs).

In addressing each GGC, we solve for the following three perspectives:

  • Ensuring basic needs are met for all people
  • Sustaining and improving quality of life
  • Mitigating future risks

The GGCs are interrelated and interdependent. For example, as we solve for the water challenge, we are also helping to address the health challenge. As we make progress against the learning challenge, we also help address the prosperity challenge.

The views of Ray Kurzweil, Co-Founder of Singularity University, as stated in his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, are summarized as follows:

Kurzweil defines the spiritual experience as "a feeling of transcending one's everyday physical and mortal bounds to sense a deeper reality". He elaborates that "just being—experiencing, being conscious—is spiritual, and reflects the essence of spirituality". In the future, Kurzweil believes, computers will "claim to be conscious, and thus to be spiritual" and concludes "twenty-first-century machines" will go to church, meditate, and pray to connect with this spirituality.

The world of the past seventy years was built by the elites. With the benefit of hindsight, it now seems that that world inevitability disproportionately benefited the elite. To get a different outcome will require a different approach. A new world that benefits everyone will need to be built by everyone. One exciting possibility emerging in this liminal time is the attempt to gather the collective wisdom of average and ordinary people. What needs to change? Everything! Who needs to change? Everyone! Only an effort by a very large group of transformed people can match the magnitude of the task at hand.

It is not that what was built over the past seventy years was wrong. It delivered much progress. But it built a world that was unsustainable and therefore radical change became inevitable, either breakthrough or breakdown. As an exaggerated example, global warming presents an unsolvable problem. Save the planet and destroy the economy or save the economy and destroy the planet. Likewise with the coronavirus crisis. Save lives and destroy the economy or save the economy and kill people. A solution that saves the planet, saves the economy, saves lives and fixes everything at once is not apparent.

When I think about the world I have lived in and the magnitude of change needed, I cannot wrap my mind around it. What would a different political system not serving the elite look like? What would a different economic system not serving the elite look like? What would a different educational system not serving the interests of the elite look like? And this is just scratching the surface. And very importantly, what new narratives must be created to make sense of it all? I marvel at thought leaders who can think on this scale. 

Then, as I gained some insight into a radically redesigned world, I found some people who were thinking even bigger.

History describes the world from 500 CE to 1500 CE as the Dark Ages. Then came the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. We could call the time from 1500 CE to 2000 CE the Modern Age. There are reasonable people imagining the next transition at a magnitude of change similar to the transition from the Dark Ages to the Modern Age. That blows my mind.

My worldview has changed. Until a few years ago I saw current events generally supporting continued incremental progress through liberalism as practised in western democracies. Now I view current events through the possibilities of either breakdown or breakthrough, a liminal time. I am well aware of the power of confirmation bais which I try to manage as best I can by not seeing only one path forward. However, intuitively, I have a sense of how this story will end.