Conclusion: Visions of the Beginning

Abstract

This book has argued that the contending human dispositions of desire and fear have become more intensely contingent through the rise of agricultural economies and cultures. In particular, the emergence of institutionalized modes of surplus exchange, social hierarchy and an unceasing drive to innovation has propelled human history into conditions of crisis that are amplified through the multiplication of complex communicational and knowledge systems. The prevalence of a crisis consciousness in the developed world, thereby, is directly connected to the evolution of the mediasphere—the space in which these agonistic conditions are formed in language, mediation and the irradiating cultural politics that dominate all knowledge systems.

Fortinbras: This quarry cries on havoc. O proud Death, What feast is toward in thine eternal cell That thou so many princes at a shot So bloodily has struck?

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The courage to be is the ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation … it is the affirmation of one’s essential nature.

Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (pp.3–4)