From what I've read so far, the book comes in handy with my latest WIP. It captures a certain "Zeitgeist" that I was looking for to understand the main character.
Thanks...
I downloaded the sample of the ebook as well. The Author Preface is interesting.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
For my entire life a foreboding of doom has lapped at the edge of my attention. Growing up during the last throes of the Cold War in the 1970s and ’80s, my perceptions were colored not only by the threat of nuclear cataclysm, but also by the books on my father’s shelf that I began reading as a preteen: The Population Bomb, 1984, Silent Spring, Gulag Archipelago, A People’s History of the United States. These books added gloom to the doom, a feeling of a deep wrongness in the world.
Perhaps this is why I experience such an odd mix of emotions whenever the latest symptom of financial, political, or ecological collapse comes onto my radar screen. On the one hand I feel dread; on the other, a kind of gratification or even gleeful excitement. I hope you will not think ill of me if I confess that sometimes, when a promising catastrophe fails to materialize, I feel a little disappointed.
Such contradictory feelings are common among those working to create a more beautiful world. We want the same thing that we fear: the end of our world and the beginning of a new. We realize that rebirth cannot come without death preceding it, that renewal comes only after loss. We are, quite naturally, afraid of that loss; we are afraid as well of the empty space in between loss and rebirth, when all that was familiar has fallen away and we know not what to do.
Those are the times of chaos, of unknowing, and of the breakdown of conventions so long-standing as to have taken on the status of reality. Today, even more than in 2007 when The Ascent of Humanity first appeared, it is obvious that such a time is drawing near. In the face of an ecological, financial, social, and health crisis that isn’t going away, our tools—political, technological, and cognitive—are revealing themselves as impotent. As that happens, the belief systems that embed those tools lose the gloss we call “reality.” Our defining narratives are coming apart at the seams. This dissolution reaches to the deepest imaginable level. Not only our social institutions, not only our ecosystems are collapsing, but along with them our answers to the basic questions of life: “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “Where did we come from and where are we going?” “What is the purpose of life?” In my travels over the past five years I’ve found that more and more people are entering that space of unknowing as the old answers become obsolete. On a mass level, the shell of the old normal still remains, albeit hollowed of its substance. Here and there a crack appears—the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados—and is covered with a temporary, makeshift patch.
With each crack a light shines through from the outside, and we catch a glimpse of what the world can and will be. Our seemingly perverse desire for the world to end is more than just a Freudian death wish; it is the yearning to be born. I hope that this book will frame that yearning in intellectually cogent terms so that the mind, apprehending today’s dark extremes of the human journey of Separation, needn’t hold despair as the inevitable terminus of its logic. With the defining mythos that I call Ascent nearly bankrupt, with the pace of dissolution accelerating and that empty, pregnant in-between time drawing near, we need a new metanarrative of cultural evolution, new interpretive constructs upon which to build a civilization. I offer you this book as my small contribution to this emerging story.
—CHARLES EISENSTEIN
October 2012