Motus Mentis

On April 16th I wrote:

It seems to me that there is a sort of ideological “singularity’, somewhere not far off in the distance, that we are accelerating toward. That singularity would represent the Omega point of the concurrent, onrushing streams of liberal opinion; it would be characterized by absolute non-discrimination, and rejection or elimination of all human differences, as well as by the abrogation of all traditional values, and of belief in objective human truths, in favor of a radical subjectivity in which everyone creates his own self, and his own model of reality, entirely ex nihilo, with no higher aim than maximizing the enjoyment of this brief flicker of life.

That singularity was a long way off, not so long ago. But as our world now begins to approach it more closely, the tidal pull between the side facing it and the side farthest away is becoming much stronger indeed, and very quickly. Before much longer the very ground we stand on will begin to break apart. You’ll see.

To extend the metaphor just a little further: the closer you get to a gravitational singularity ”” the deeper you go into the gravity well ”” the faster you have to be moving to fly back out. At some fixed distance from the center, this “escape velocity’ exceeds the speed of light. Once you have crossed that point, there’s no turning back. No light escapes. Anything that passes this horizon is lost forever.

I’m never surprised anymore when I find that I’m not the first to have had some thought or other. In this case, I learned today, by way of Dennis Mangan, that blogger Jim Donald beat me to the punch by two years: he first described what he calls a “Left Singularity” in a post from April 2011, and has returned to the metaphor several times since then. (Nothing about tidal forces, though.)

I hadn’t read Jim’s Blog before, but I will be. Onto the sidebar it goes.