In the last couple of newsletters we explored how Logos (the Word, or the Truth in language) has been getting thinner and thinner since In the Beginning when The Word created the world until now where it's been reduced to little more than Instagram Memes. Wisdom just ain't what it used to be.
We also wrapped our heads around how Chronos (or Time) has been getting thicker and the frame-rate of information we have to process has grown exponentially...
To the point where the overwhelming burden of awareness of our mortality, the suffering of extended humanity and the overlapping existential crises we all face is threatening our capacity for grief.
(Check David Attenborough's recent video for a sobering update)
And a big part of that overwhelm is because we're trying to process it all through the narrow frame of isolated individual self identities.
When the French Enlightenment gave birth to liberalism, people (actual individuals––not tribes, clans, faiths or nations––but actual singular individuals) were granted inalienable rights, and an increasingly entitled shot at the Good Life.
This was crazy novel. Never been done before.
Most people had never ventured further than fifty miles from the place they were born, and most had lived a life nearly indistinguishable, in faith, in profession, in prospects, than their mothers and fathers before them and their grandparents before that. Their "self identity" was smeared across generations of family, clan and tribe.
So even one's very identity was radically different than how we think of ourselves today. No "anyone can grow up to be president", no "I'm kinda spiritual but not religious" no "I'm just gonna travel for a while after school, give my self time to figure out what I really want," not even "you guys are my real chosen family." None of that. Just a heaping dose of WYSIWYG. What You See Is What You Get.
But for a brief few centuries––as Logos was getting skinnier and Chronos was getting thicker, things lined up in the sweet spot for a rational individual to be able to handle.
It wasn't perfect and it wasn't planned––but it sort of worked. I could read Martin Luther's theses and decide if I wanted to become a protesting Protestant. I could pick up a political pamphlet and learn to identify with Marxist class struggle, or listen to Tony Robbins audio cassettes and NLP my way into unstoppable success.
But now, the frame rate of information has become so intense, the complexities, contradictions and tragedies of unfiltered Reality so dense, that we are breaking our hearts and brains. The era of the Rational Individual might have officially ended, and we're in the throes of the birth pangs of something else, something possibly more. Just nobody told us.
There's a thousand places to mark the beginning of the End of Individualism, but an easy one to timestamp is the advent of MTV. Until that channel debuted, most videos consisted of stable long shots, continuous framing, and storytelling that decently matched reality as we'd experience it through our own eyes. (if you've forgotten, just try sitting down with your kids to watch any classic movie filmed earlier than the mid-80's––the young'uns positively squirm in their seats with impatience!)
Then MTV pioneered jump-cut edits, where every 2 seconds there was a new image, spliced, juxtaposed and slammed together into a pastiche overwhelm of light, sound color and symbol.
We've become so used to this new cadence that our newsprograms––which used to feature a sober trusted voice sitting at their desk reading from a page straight into one camera (the Ultimate Rational Individual), now, are cluttered with graphic overlays, scrolling news chyrons and talking heads that look more like a video game.
Our nervous systems are so hyperstimulated that when most families sit down for "movie night" today every member is also running at least one additional screen that they can flick to to check, comment, scroll just in case the main feature slows too much.
But really, the problem is much deeper than technologically induced collective ADD.