Our Age

As I gaze upon the complete complexity and amorphous ambiguity of the modern world I can't help but ponder what others will call this phase when it is all said and done. For no matter how weird it gets, it is all just a phase, or perhaps a wild tangent, in the evolution of humanity. Perhaps a silly thing to spend my time contemplating, but it just will not leave my brain alone. Thus I try to exorcise the thought unto my blog and into other minds. Now an age can last a very long time, like the Bronze Age (a little over 2,000 years) or a mere decade like the Jazz Age. Historians, like most academics, are shameless hacks that feed off of each others imagination like a tribe of starving cannibals. Not being critical, I hope to some day make contributions to that frenzied orgy of thought. I'm just commenting that for every real thinker, there are about a thousand intellectual leeches. Anyway, a new age certainly began with the fall of Soviet Russia in 1991 and it goes on still to this day. This Age is notable for several rather interesting developments. One is that for the first time since The Age of Discovery a single nation has militarily, culturally and politically dominated the entire planet, with only paltry and pathetic opposition thus far. However, calling it the Age of America would miss the point I feel. For as I see it, America is only the champion, not the creator, of what drives this present epoch. The real foundation of this era resides in the preeminence of something that is commonly called Capitalism. Unfortunately this term has been so completely abused, misused and confused that it really is just an hollow word, and consequently won't do for a name of our age. But what is the basis of this thing called money that rules everything around me? It seems pretty plain that it is the glorification of the individual that it incarnates. That you are #1 and need only look out for your own interests. This is a radical departure from the religious piety and chauvinistic patriotism of previous Ages. Sure, people where opportunists then too, but they at least tried to cloak their intentions. This last week a study was released that stated that the world now has 946 billionaires. This would seem savagely selfish considering that a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, but that isn't the prevalent paradigm of this Age. Sure, most of the world doesn't like it, but then again most of the world is poor and affraid, so the show goes on unabated. Communities and countries are being dissolved a bit more with each passing day as traditional society crumbles amid the chaos of the present. Ruling individuals is fare easier than dominating distinct groups of people (eg Chechens, Basques, Communists, African-Americans, Pashtuns, and just about anybody else with a sense of communal destiny). In recent years we have seen groups struggle for survival as the rest of the world hops on board the global economic movement, in which ones own ambitions must take precedence over all else. I'm not saying that this is the sum total of our Age, merely the trend that seems to dominate all other features of human society in this fascinating chapter in the book of Man- The Age of the Individual