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Watching the birth of an autocracy and a global shift in Civilization
Everything in life is patterns, cycles, eternal spirals of repeating events with similar energy, causes and consequences.
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That is why I love History: you can learn from the past, see the patterns repeating and – hopefully – change the present events enough that you can avert a past negative outcome.
Of course that is what is possible when you’re dealing with emotionally intelligent and community driven beings. Since we’re talking about us humans… well, History is repeating itself and the pattern has not yet been broken.
Forest for the Trees
We multipods usually have enough broadness of interests and knowledge that we can see the bigger picture while noticing the “minor” events that shift the timeline and take us down a different (or not) civilizational route.
Something like the attack on Pearl Harbor allowing for almost 8 decades of freedom in World War 2’s winning countries.
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It is sometimes hard to see the individual trees in the forest when the train is going many miles per hour, and your attention keeps being distracted by lots of noise, lights and other demands. And every time you’re almost focusing, something pops up and you’re distracted again.
Can anyone easily find Wally/Waldo in the middle of a loud party with lots of fireworks? Every time you almost blocked the noise out and are near to finding him, another firework explodes, you shudder with the loud sudden noise, the hued light changes the colors and you miss the stripped prize.
So how can you recognize the pattern, and especially see when the pivotal moments are happening, if you’re lost amidst a big multistage circus where the magician is dressed as a clown and every silly move hides a slight of hand? How can you understand the plot twist if you’re lost in the movie’s action sequences, explosions and large amounts of skin showing?
Multi-Focus
Easy: call in the multipotentialites!
In a specialist world, multitasking is viewed as a hard task that makes your brain loose time when refocusing, because specialists’ brains are not used to dividing their attention.
However, focusing on multiple things – a.k.a. Multi-Focus – is actually one of our polymaths’ superpowers: we Renaissance people manage to divide our focus into different subjects, and integrate different knowledge from different sources and fields.
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“Why is this a superpower?”, you may ask.
Because we end up being able to “foresee” things coming, simply from paying enough attention to observe and understand at least some of the implications of what is happening.
Cassandra’s curse
As Cassandra was cursed to not be believed by those around her, so many times our foresight is not understood nor accepted in this distractedly expert and expertly distracted world.
People look for experts to give them answers to questions that are too complex for a single approached answer.
People expect simple single-layered answers to multi-tiered complex challenges.
People forget that complexity cannot be algorithmed into a chatbot.
People ignore that predicative models imply that those who designed them knew all the variables and how they interact, and not even a multipod knows that, let alone a specialist in one single subject.
People say they want to know, yet they ignore the truth when it is right in front of them.
So, when we saw the Present coming for months, it is still baffling how everyone else missed it (purposefully or not) and thought we were wrong.
Modern History
I have to confess that the part I disliked the most in History class was Modern History, namely from the Industrial Revolution onward, particularly the 20th century.
It made no sense to me why killing an Archduke would bring about an international war, why governments saw the Financial Crash coming and made it even worst, and especially why people would allow nationalist racist homophobic and overall discriminatory regimes to take power and plunge us all into a worldwide war again so soon after the first one…
Even though the saying goes “Hindsight is 20/20”, I did not have all the facts to understand it then.
Now, with all the TV and media coverage of the situation in the United States, a lot of things become clearer, as if I had embarked on the TARDIS and could witness the fall of the Roman Empire or the creation of any autocratic regime in History.
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Although, honestly, it feels more like being stuck in the phone booth with Bill & Ted in a not so excellent adventure…
Global Shift
With a birds’ eyed-view (or drone’s cam-view for the more technological readers out there), you can see Humanity is on the verge of a global shift of similar frequency and bigger proportions as to what was happening before World War II.
Globalization of (mis)information, global trade, and lack of a global human conscience is spreading discrimination and other damaging ideas and attitudes all around the Globe.
At the same time, Hope and Resistance are also globalized and people get inspired by their fellow humans on the other side of the planet.
Still there are differences from the 1930’s:
- the most diverse and powerful western country has descended into Nero’s circus;
- the most powerful eastern country is spreading its influence swiftly worldwide;
- east and west are using the same playbook…
Adding to that, Humanity has the common challenge of climate collapse to overcome that should and still can be the uniting factor of our times.
Rise to the challenge
Everybody knows that warring humans come together to stand against a common threat and towards a common goal.
History has proved it multiple times, and we’ve all seen it in story arcs for movies, the most amazing Universe ever and even kids’ fiction:
We need to unite again as we were doing before COVID: share correct information, meet and discuss problems, turning them into challenges and figuring out steps to begin overcoming them, uniting as Humans and showing the Universe how awesome we are.
Integrating different approaches and knowledge, inviting multipods to the table so we can share our multilayered and overarching view, and recognizing that we are all valuable actors in this play.
We are all One and need to act more like Humane Humans instead of Power-Hungry Villains.
Let us (re)write History that our descendants can be proud of, so we can avoid the Age of Stupid and co-create the Age of Imagination!
