A New, Kosmocentric Paradigm

In a New-Age Emersonian rant, the narrator of "Cosmopolitical Thoughts on Leaving for Black Rock City, Nevada" (attached) raises recurrent questions about the survivability of humankind as a species (along with the survival of all other species) under our current socio-political paradigms. An advocate of a new "kosmocentric" understanding of life, the narrator of this great video clip offers a glimpse of an alternative to the industrial-productive, money-centered way we live now.

Of course, Black Rock City is the home of the Burning Man Festival, an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self-expression and self-reliance, and leaving for such a destination is bound to focus one's mind on what can be done to advance through change our increasingly sclerotic and seemingly moribund post-modern society. This is accomplished in spades in the attached clip.

"Isn't apocalypse," our narrator asks, "the best-selling plot in today's mass media market?  Everybody knows the old world is coming to an end," he notes, "but because the horror of this reality is too much to take responsibility for the majority of us sit on the couch and pretend it is all just another form of entertainment. Fantasy has replaced forthrightness," he observes, "and imagination has withered to make way for shallow ideological affiliation with merely symbolic causes."

"Of course, symbolism is no mere trifle, and our sense of meaning is precisely what is at stake," he notes. And, thus, he asks:

"How are we to conceive of the human presence on the planet? Are we a cancerous growth or the incarnation of God on Earth? Are we to become once again a spiritual instead of a consumptive and pleasure-driven species? Are we to replace industrial with initiatory cosmology? Is our goal to worship, celebrate, and create, or to use, abuse, and destroy?"

"These are questions of the ultimate meaning of the universe," according to this New-Age Emerson, "and their answers," he points out, "determine how we inhabit the Earth."