Tortoise Minuet
From 2020worldpeace
The Tortoise Minuet is a moniker for the last ten thousand years of human history. Social complexification, competition and co-operation, and dream-factoring are the primary themes in the Tortoise Minuet.
The Them-Us distinction, otherwise known as relation to Other, has defined the social grouping throughout the Tortoise Minuet. The grouping of families and clans, bloodfeuds, declensions of royal or divine bloodlines, continues to this day. The stratification of society, grouping by occupation and profession, class and role, have also exacerbated the distinction into conflict (cf africa leads). In the complexification of society, Other has been closer to Enemy than to Friend.
The period is characterised by localised peace. Peace within the village as war rages in the region, peace within a nation as war rages internationally. It is also a characteristic that those occupying the privileged high-end of a power differential, are also plagued by virtual psychosis, the neuroses of self-invention generating psychic tension as the Them-Us boundaries are constantly reinvented and justified. The social theory of competition over limited resources has been reinvented every time there is a shift in evaluations, from food, to pride, to honour, to money, to peace, circulating as values have done in the endless generation of polities, be they families, governments, committees, congregations, collectives. The justification of co-operation is mainly a consequence of status-quo, the acceptance of pecking order, the power-dynamics of the tribe, rather than a subjectivity’s genuine accession to a healthy way of living.
The disparity of what is going on and what people think is going on, is the space filled with dreams, those directed to be realised and those dead-ended to sedate. The endless fascination of gossip obscures the satisfaction of legitimate needs, the dramatisation of politics and war justifies the aggressive economic policies, the naked greed for pleasures drowns out the cries of hunger outside the palace gates (cf Opinion Niches). With the feedback loop of modern technology, the transformation of society has been faster, plateauing the masses in the neuroses of navel-gazing or the imbalance of wanting more. Dream-factoring is the quotient of a culture which isolates subjectivities in subcultures. The greater the number of subjectivities, the greater the number of dreams, and as cultures diversify, the ability to share the same dream also dwindles, enabling a status quo of the society’s economic and political relationships with other cultures. It has been the aggregate of a culture dreaming the same dream which has been the single most significant factor in social change, giving rise to the dynamics of bifurcation, revolution, and collapse.
The period is termed the Tortoise Minuet for the speed of change in contrast with the rate of conscious development in every human child given a nurturing environment, tagged to the technological changes which has proved time and again the determining factor (cf Relative Determinancy). There is also a certain amount of clumsiness in how we have treated the luminaries of the world, misrepresenting their words and deeds (cf the Mass Production of Awareness). There is also something about hibernating, hiding in one’s home and the rather tentative exploration beyond the safety of one’s shell. The Tortoise Minuet comes to an end at the rise of the science of the subjective.
