“When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other.

Originally shared by Transition21

“When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other. Village people aren’t that much in love with each other.”

————————

Try as we might to keep up, we’ve felt increasingly uncertain about our command of the technology that lurches us ever faster into a future so heavy on the activity and light on the agency.

Amid such velocity anxiety, it’s small wonder so many seek refuge in the pathos of selfhood and identitarianism.

Delinked relationally from our fellow humans and wired into a decentered and disembodied realm of constant motion, we cry out for purchase on what Tocqueville called a “fixed point in the human heart,” and we increasingly surmise that today that point can only be found within the protective, prideful shell of our chosen and unchosen identities.

As McLuhan warned, under these pressures, the global village of “We Are the World” quickly and inevitably gives way.

In a painful reversal, all the world becomes a stage and each villager becomes a little Macbeth— thundering “I am the world.”

http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/03/marshall-mcluhan-can-save-us-destroying-humanity-technology///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js