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Present Shock

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As Case Western Reserve University researcher Mark Turner concluded: “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining.” — location: 202 ^ref-54832

“When the storytelling in a culture goes bad the result is decadence.” — location: 340 ^ref-54308

They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.” — location: 785 ^ref-11955

We may not know where we’re going anymore, but we’re going to get there a whole lot faster. Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we’re simply too busy to notice. — location: 1043 ^ref-59560

“To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.” — location: 3165 ^ref-43543

emergence—the spontaneous achievement of order and intelligence through the interaction of a myriad of freely acting individuals. — location: 3217 ^ref-59565

Fractalnoia of this sort is less dangerous for the individually incorrect predictions it suggests to its practitioners and their customers than for the reductionist outlook on humanity that it requires. Machines, math equations, molecules, bacteria, and humans are often similar but hardly equivalent. Yet the overriding urge to connect everything to everything pushes those who should know better to make such leaps of logic. To ignore the special peculiarities, idiosyncrasies, and paradoxes of activity occurring on the human and cultural level is to ignore one’s own experience of the moment in order to connect with a computer simulation. — location: 3255 ^ref-27924

The arts may be touchy-feely and intuitive, but in eras of rapid change such as our own, they often bring more discipline to the table than do the sciences. — location: 3262 ^ref-21625

Formal logic is not much used and instead a variety of dialectic reasoning types are common, including synthesis, transcendence and convergence.”19 — location: 3337 ^ref-23610

We stop getting dizzy following the path of every feedback loop and pull back to see the patterns those loops create. — location: 3344 ^ref-19548

We couldn’t empathize. That is a fatal mistake. If I were running American foreign policy, I would want to focus on empathizing.” — location: 3361 ^ref-65142

Human progress has been a sham—a painful, costly, and destructive detour, or, at best, a necessary stage in our release from the shackles of matter altogether. — location: 3571 ^ref-4535

“Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made.” — location: 3623 ^ref-43896

However, I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. — location: 3636 ^ref-63885

the universe itself is merely information reaching toward greater states of complexity. — location: 3650 ^ref-31851

And the extent to which we believe the harbingers of doom and rebirth has generally depended on the extent to which we feel dislocated from meaning and context. — location: 3671 ^ref-34002

Repression and extremism are two sides of the same coin. — location: 3702 ^ref-44748

For humans, order usually means something that looks like ourselves. — location: 3712 ^ref-51673

It could mean making sure we understand the difference between a marketplace that has been designed to accelerate no matter what and a reality that may or may not share this embedded agenda. — location: 3725 ^ref-62618

as when confronting any of the many faces of present shock, it means accepting responsibility and dominion over the moment in which we are living right now. — location: 3727 ^ref-35768

Thanks also to my mother, Sheila, who passed away before I started this one but always thought it was “a good idea.” — location: 3780 ^ref-48967