Our Zeitgeist Culture: A Meditation

The past, present and future of our zeitgeist culture is gleaned in our carbon footprints as free-will thinking evolutionary Homo sapiens.

As the world turns, so does all humanity likewise turn.  We live in an ever-turning turbulent transitory world.  Made of flesh and blood, we are transitory beings.  Never stationary, we are ever in transition.  The ‘permanence’ of this transition takes us in a cycle from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ and back again to the old.

Our zeitgeist culture, described as the prevailing trends,  moods, attitudes, political and religious posturing, and the social and cultural climate of a particular era or moment in the life of a nation or its people, whether the past, the present or the future; whether locally, nationally or internationally situated, is seemingly guided or driven by some metaphysical collective unconscious energy or force, and can be regarded to be evolutionary in nature.  This zeitgeist manifestation is of a dynamic nature and is ever transitioning from a Victorian type of zeitgeist to a Darwinian type of zeitgeist; portraying  outwardly in the interim  intermediate forms of zeitgeist paradigms that demonstrate characteristics of alternating rigidity and adaptability, as our paradigms of experience and expressions shift backwards and forwards in time and in space.

To our human experience, our zeitgeist culture is buffered systemically by what can only be described as a fraudulent zeitgeist of warfare; perceived as an evolutionary ‘fault-line’ that thrives on chaos, both for the purpose of human conquest and survival.

 In this regard, our political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual expressions are ever shifting,  ever adjusting, ever being repeated; ever turning into themselves; and being transmogrified in the making; like the ancient alchemical Greco-Egyptian ouroboros, ever reaching outwardly in the environment in the perhaps deliberately conscious attempt for humankind to experiment with itself outwardly, but  with the unconscious attempt  for humankind to discover and to  ‘know’ itself more intimately inwardly.

Oh, what irony!  The more we turn outwardly to explore the world we inhabit and, as a species, to delve further outwardly to the galaxies, the greater we recognize in ourselves the need to turn inwardly within our innermost beings in order to find our destiny; in order to know more rationally — and intimately so — the purpose for our existence, psychologically and spiritually.

At any moment in time our zeitgeist culture is actively ingesting, digesting and regurgitating what it has heretofore consumed intellectually, morally and culturally as its core ‘Self.’  Upon reflection, there is no absolute hard grained uniqueness to the spirit of our modern era.

 That is to say, surprisingly enough, that there is no absolute uniqueness to us as Homo sapiens.  Our uniqueness as  primate Homo sapiens, upon reflection, must therefore be considered to be relative to that of other primates.

Our relative uniqueness is that we are genetically and historically creatures of habit, modulating our environment; yet ever repeating the past; preserving yet ‘renewing’ our lifestyle in our present lifetimes.  Should we then say that Darwinian evolution is a ‘closed case’ in our human societies?

Consider thus a related question:  Are we today heading towards a utopian world, or perhaps towards one that is Orwellian?  Having previously experienced both, we historically return again and again to both.
That, with indelible emphasis, is our predisposed evolutionary legacy.

  We are indeed creatures of habit.  The paradox of the paradigm shifts we engage in always enables us to maintain residual aspects of the ‘old’ and the ‘new.’
So, with this admission, what then does the future hold for our present-day Millennials; defined as a Generation Y cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z?

This is a savvy generation of international millennials actively engaged and invested in such technologies as robotics and Artificial Intelligence, in covert communications of the World Wide Web, and in such message applications and social media platforms as Messenger, Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, Reddit, Pinterest, WhatsApp and Twitter; the latter now rebranded as ‘X,‘ a sociocultural symbol that targets primarily the new generations of America; and the rest of the world along with it as well.

At a yet deeper psychological level of reality representation or reality formulation, logo X invites its consumers subliminally to ‘tune-in-and-drop-out’ of all social conventions that may appear to be restrictively binding; suggesting instead, or offering a counter argument for a culture consensus that human identity is not genetically fixed, but instead is ever transitioning, ever shifting; ever challenged globally by technological, social media, economic, environmental and political challenges that humans encounter as  decision makers.

 This argument of course begs the question of what is morally or ethically; or even legally sound. Should the concept of ethics and morality responsibilities be legally relativized in accordance with a culture’s zeitgeist?

We must therefore conclude that the past, present and future of our zeitgeist culture is gleaned in our carbon footprints as free-will thinking evolutionary Homo sapiens. We are ultimately the creators and designers of our environment, of who we are and what we become as a species socially, culturally, morally, and intellectually.