The Breakdown Before the Breakthrough

When the muse strikes, it’s time to write.

The world feels like it’s shifted again. We’re in the middle of a land war in Europe, 40-year highs in inflation, massive global protests, and a pending double-dip recession.

Then again, the world is exactly the same. 

Politicians continue to gaslight us, the public hops from one crisis to the next, yet people still go to work every day attempting to provide a better life for their family.

I haven’t published online in almost a year. I ran out of steam right around this same time last year. But I feel called again today to publish my thoughts online. 

I feel a compulsion to provide a voice of reason among all of the chaos. Maybe that’s a self-aggrandizing thought, that I can even make a difference, maybe not. I feel the desire to try. 

I desire to be part of a solution, and my contribution can be wrestling with the complex and nuanced topics that unsettle us as a community, nation, and even species, doing my best to weave some context and optimism through it all. 

I’m fascinated by our culture that we’ve formed today and that we’re molding for our future. 

Culture, as I define it, is the tapestry of beliefs, behaviors, social norms, and traits of different social groups of humans. Your culture is one of the strongest influences on what you believe, how you act, and what you value. And recently, I’ve been incubating an idea around culture, how culture is formed and what influences culture the most. 

If I can understand how culture is formed and what creates the largest cultural impact, maybe I can decipher how we (my “royal we” almost exclusively refers to a US-centric or western-culture POV) got to this current place in history. 

A time where, when I think back 45 years into our history, I struggle to come up with a short list of three great things my government has done, but I can quickly list five terrible things we’ve done. 

A time where, as a nation, our belief in ourselves and our belief in our own exceptionalism has wavered, especially in what I consider to be the most privileged of social groups (suburban white America). 

We’re experiencing a crisis of ideals and morals. We’re finally recognizing and accepting the shadow in our past. Our founding on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has a large, bold asterisk on it. It should’ve read “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for white males of European descent who own land.” 

So, how does our culture handle such a difficult truth? How do we move forward while integrating the messiest, most embarrassing, and ugliest parts of our past? 

Culture is a fractal. It’s an infinitely repeating cycle where each iteration is tangential, connected, a derivative of the beginning yet still remaining distinct, unique, and novel. 

What’s the saying? History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. 

Culture breaks apart into smaller and smaller chunks that are related and then when we zoom all the way into those chunks they reform into something large again. We inherit a culture from our parents and grandparents. Then as we age we shatter that culture (usually for the first time in young adulthood) then reform it into our own unique blend that’s a mixture from our peer group. 

Today, however, it feels like we’re experiencing our culture as a nation begin to fragment and split apart. We’re being squeezed to fit into a radically new 3D space, but our cultural body does not fit. We must strike off the parts that no longer serve us and create something new, related but still new. 

It feels like the culture of our world is splintering. The moral and behavioral fabric of our culture is fraying. 

But, just like the fractal image, the individual tendrils of our culture must break apart and break down before they can start reforming and rebuilding again.  

We’re at that point in history right now, the breakdown before the break through, the unbundling before the rebundling, the dark end right before the bright beginning. 

Culture fractures, it splits apart. Then, it reforms again into a new whole that resembles the past that we thought we left behind. 

It’s a messy, dangerous, and volatile process. One western culture hasn’t experienced on such a scale since World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, or Vietnam War. 

But, we humans, we can’t escape nature, as much as we think we can. We are of nature, and nature’s defining feature is the infinite loop of seasons and cycles. The tide comes in and then goes out. Winter always moves into Spring. The sun always rises in the East and sets in the West. 

We’re in the bright flame of transformation now. And, I believe my duty is to enter this period with an open mind and an open heart. I must trust the chaos serves a higher purpose. It allows us to reexamine and realign our values. 

As I begin to publish again, I’d like to focus on inviting you, my reader, to help me sharpen my thoughts and opinions. I’m going to write about topics that have no right or wrong answer. Topics that require us to collaborate and join perspectives together to create something new, related but new.