Situational Assessment 2019: AOC Edition

In contrast to the above article, Jordan Hall’s Situational Assessment series offers a multi-perspectival, sober, disciplined and hopeful assessment of the critical juncture that Western Civilization finds itself in. Over a series of essays, Hall discusses what his colleague Jeffrey Quackenbush has called the crisis in sense-making and the emergence of decentralized, collective intelligence as the way forward through the “new culture war”, the Trump Insurgency, and the rise of alternative media. The Assessment series also challenges individuals to participate consciously in the process of change that is occurring from the perspective of liminality rather than ideology.

EXCERPT: “From my perspective, then, the resolution of Culture War 2.0, and the broader War for Collective Intelligence, settles into a simple choice. We either endeavor to make sense and choices on the basis of our existing cultural toolkit and, ultimately, battle into self-extinguishing chaos as lived reality accelerates beyond the bounds of those tools. Or we listen to our deepest humanness and allow ourselves to become sensitive to creative liminality. From here (and, I propose, only from here) we are capable of a coherent collective intelligence that is fully adequate to the novelty and magnitude of our present reality… We already have what we need. We only need to step away from that which doesn’t serve the future and re-member that which does.”