This episode, in all honesty, slides rapidly off the rails. If you didn’t expect to hear the term “bronies” on this show, you’re scarcely alone ― I didn’t expect to use it! But it turns out to be relevant to the notion I explored last week, of a yearning for stability and reassurance in the concrete form of a declarative social order. And this seems to be connected to something I have discussed before, the fear of decay and collapse and catastrophic loss. So I spend a while discussing how this affects, and is in turn affected by, our prospects for space settlement. We have reasons for hope, we have the means to endow that hope with materiality, but we have to believe that or it is worthless. And that lack of belief leads to radical and destructive politics, perhaps the greatest threat to our future.
This should be the last I talk about “racism” for a good long while. I try to connect it with what appears to me to be the desire, among many people for a declarative social order. Also, news from Morris, Illinois, and the Moon ; and burning hoverboards, possibly the most futuristic–sounding calamity of the past few months.