In Charles Muses’ work “Destiny and Control in Human Systems” (pages 86-87) we can find a fine and concise diagnosis of current human societies. This text appears to be interpolated in the book, and somewhat separated from the argument, but it nevertheless is coherent with Muses’ theory or the nature of evil. The author does not use the terms post-national or post-cultural, but it is clear he is describing the context of disorientation, displacement and rootlessness of globalised societies.
“The current fate of primary societal buffers will now be considered.
“The imperatives to acquire scientific knowledge that can help the human situation of the late twentieth century are considerable. The buffers that hitherto normally shielded human society from its own possible malignancies and worst manifestations were principally: (1) decentralized small communities in which increased ease of observation and contact engendered enough beneficient social pressures to stabilize behaviour harmoniously to mutual benefit; (2) close-knit families with early fostered and deeply rooted ethical and behavioural norms; (3) widespread belief in organized religions with a key tenet of each being the existence of an intelligent power or powers surpassing our own and thus helping to maintain human societal order; and (4) a steady-state or at least non-exponentiating population rate.
“These stabilizing buffer factors have begun, especially since the mid twentieth century, fast to erode and disappear, with appropriately deteriorating social stability and sharply increasing numbers of police states as results of self-exacerbating positive feedback loops. In consequence of such erosion, competition for any factors contributing to material security and social position and well-being have taken on a rapid rise, so that a stunning mixture of urban cunning and jungle savagery on all social and political levels is being more and more necessarily exposed and dominant, to the point where it tends to become perforce accepted simply as a fact of late twentieth century life.”
These “facts of life” acutely evident decades after Muses’ writings, are nevertheless hidden as the Mind and the Heart turn away from each other.