In the US, there is a weird geographic correlate of narrative destiny: roughly NE to SW. Manifest destiny is part of dustbin of history now, but this tendency still exists. Your story is moving forward to the extent it's moving NE-SW. NW and SE are sideways. SW-NE is regression.
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The American heartland is a trope more than a place. Specific interstices within the city graphs do not have strong identities. At best, you can decompose "heartland" into "Midwest", "Texas", "Prairies" and "Old South", and those are not intrinsic, but artifacts of global history
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By contrast, agrarian heartland of India for instance, is strongly differentiated. Starting with entire mutually unintelligible languages. If you did a narrative-space graph of India, ratio would be reversed. There would be few charismatic cities, many charismatic heartlands.
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This means, as narrative spaces go, the US is peculiarly tractable. Stories that play out on the charismatic-city narrative graph are unusually legible in way old world stories are not. That's why, for instance, a road trip is a better narrative template in the US than elsewhere.
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this is also why attempts to predict the future of the US in response to the Great Weirding by looking at countries that got hit earlier (USSR, Japan, Greece, Britain) are misguided. American exceptionalism in classical terms may be dead, but this is still a weird country.
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Hmm... I'm now thinking of the Great Weirding as a shock wave that unfolded in at least 4 parts: USSR (1989-2000), Islamic sphere (1992-2007), West (starting with Greece, 2009), and finally Asia (China and India, both around 2017-19: Xi elevation and Modi 2nd term)
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Hmm. The Great Weirding in this 4-wave form kinda follows the logic of clash of civilizations huntington model. It didn't go from localized weirding to great weirding until it hit America though. That's when the whole thing came together as a global shitshow.
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A lot of my thinking/ideas now are of the sort that would best suit a sort of sprawling podcast format rather than essay... mainly because I'm getting increasingly lazy about writing up all but the tightest, hardest ideas in longform
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End of conversation
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"But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains." Robinson Jeffers
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