The Great Resignation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation

That’s been talked about within the context of a specific 2020s pandemic-related phenomenon, but I think there’s more to it . . . and we’ll eventually see it as the start of something more general.

A Great Stepping Away. From the world order that has resulted from long-standing developmental trajectories.

In our time: peaks of growth and expansion.

Populations are declining in the over-developed sector (declining in Japan, Italy, Russia, among US WASP “Middle America”). The overall human population will peak at around ten billion during this century.

The industrial capitalist growth machine is now limited by financial and ecological indebtedness. Indicative: the Japanese Nikkei index peaked at 40,000 thirty years ago and has never surpassed it since.

NATO is reaching its peak of expansion and influence. Russia’s geopolitically anti-social behavior shows that it doesn’t care about remaining as a major player within the Global Order.

Aspects of . . .

An end to the idea of “progress.” Within the paradigm of industrial mass society there’s no “higher level” than the liberal welfare state.

Recognition that perfectibility is chimerical. Disease is endemic. Human neurotic behavior is endemic.

There was Hope with the modern nation-states, the democratic republics; with the railroads, the internet; with the likes of Debs, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Obama. Not so much in the age of Twitter, Boris Johnson, Putin, and Biden.

The commodities and the technologies don’t bring satisfaction. So there’s nowhere to go. Which has actually always been the truth of the human condition, but in our time it’s finally being recognized. Felt. Fewer and fewer will want to labor for The System or fight its wars. More and more will resign, refuse, and step back.

A Great Turning. Time to slow down, scale down, decentralize, re-localize, simplify; abandon notions of linear progressive development, domestication of nature.

Earth Day is more profound than tends to be acknowledged. The idea of it leads toward a new paradigm of living. The greening of society. Re-joining the community of life, where the basic reality is cyclical and earth-centered.

A Great Resignation — from the folly and frustration of hyper-modernity, from the dissatisfaction and toxicity of the industrial state — has just begun.