Sociopolitical sand dunes

One of the under appreciated secrets the Great Covid Debacle revealed was the extent to which there is no one, no cabal, no master planner driving the larger scale societal events. Some have utterly mistakenly concluded the opposite, that the Great Covid Debacle unveiled the identities of the evil puppeteers behind the curtain, and have thus have failed to learn the greatest moral of all, one that humankind knows well, but one that each generation must be taught anew.

That societies are sand dunes at all moments alive with landslides large and small, and hit very occasionally with massive avalanches with reverberations affecting nearly every stone. Slides that shake the surface and cause more slides in an ever continuing loop. New winds blow and a dune might grow, filled with ever more potential for great shifts. And each of the slides at all scales slowly moves the dune to new spots, shifts that are imperceptible to the stones.

Covid was the one so big it woke a good share of the grains, but those same forces are buffeting us now and every moment, day, month and decade. Forces no one controls. Forces no one can predict. And not merely because we can’t predict the future, but because even if God handed us a list of all the sociopolitical events that will occur in the future and their exact timing, that’s not nearly enough to be able to predict which of those events, if any, the dune will actually be “sliding about” when those futures arrive.

As you read this a million new memes were birthed. Most will leave little impact, but some will leave a mark. And a handful might even drive what we’re all talking about a year from now. None of us individually know which, nor does any group. Even the whole dune itself doesn’t possess that information.

Sociopolitical events are ever buffeting, but not primarily by the winds and rain, but by the memeslides which were themselves due to ones before, as far back as history goes.

We are the dune that shapes itself but is without a shaper.