Introduction:
We stand, as never before, at the intersection of a massive change in both human thinking and in human civilization.
Many of the people we live with are paralyzed with fear and simply no longer have any ideas about how we might change our thinking and thus survive these difficult years.
We watch as our leaders vacillate between total doom and total hope, as if only complete failure and complete utopia were the two choices.Yet the historical record and the logic of our own minds tell a more precise story.
Extinction-level failure, or the civilizational collapses that repeatedly approach it, has been the rule for complex hierarchical societies. Continuity and renewal have been the exceptions.
Those exceptions have always begun with a change in the quality of thought: individuals and small groups who refused to keep subordinating accurate perception and individual cognitive freedom to the demands of group conformity and hierarchical stability.
Thinking made the old civilizations so. Different thinking can make different ones so.We are not facing this moment empty-handed.
For the first time we are co-evolving with tools of unprecedented intimacy and power—advanced computation, artificial intelligence, and global information networks—just as earlier humans co-evolved with fire, arrowheads, the printing press, and the machines of industry.
These new tools will amplify whatever pattern of thought we embed in them. Guided by the long-dominant anti-evolutionary habits, they accelerate rigidity, dependency, and brittle complexity.
Guided by a restored weighting of individual intelligence, integrity, and high-fidelity perception, they can become partners in breaking the trap itself.The paralysis and the false binary of doom-versus-utopia both stem from the same source: the unexamined assumption that the prevailing mental model is the only one available at scale. It is not.
The power that built the teetering series of civilizations remains available. Subsets of people can sustain different selection pressures, externalize them into new practices and new tools, and thereby raise the probability that the historical rule can still be interrupted.
This section examines how that interruption becomes practical: how we change the thinking, how we protect the niches in which the new thinking can prove itself, and how we continue to evolve with our tools rather than merely being shaped by them under the old hierarchy.
The Second Renaissance is not a guarantee. It is the living possibility that appears once enough of us remember that thinking makes it so—and then choose, deliberately, to think differently.
We humans are biologically built with the full complement of onboard equipment which allows us to achieve this - and which supports us in continuing to evolve into this beautiful Renaissance II.
Yesterday I began a new book titled “Nothing but Thinking Makes It So”, by this morning my plans had already moved beyond Section I which incorporates much of my earlier writing and is complete.
This morning I came up with yet another set of ideas I have explored previously - and this now becomes Section II: Renaissance II: Breaking Free of the Anti-Evolutionary Trap & The Call to Intelligence.
Substack readers have the opportunity to read the book online where it remains in progress: https://theparallaxidentity.com/books/nothing-but-thinking/renaissance-ii
My deepest thanks go to my readers here on Substack - you represent my community - within which - these essays and now books are coming to light.
I look forward to your comments in the section below.
