ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 presents the argument that popular resistance to action on such existential risks as climate change, nuclear weapons, biotechnology and late Technology can be attributed to the cultural predisposition of the brain. That is, the subjection imposed through the core, serial, regeneration dynamics – reinforced by that cultural predisposition and the dominant alliance between the Market and the Market State – remains robust in the face of these risks. Any credible indication that action is being undertaken will involve the combination of corporate strategies to do so and – like the political populism we saw in chapter 3 – a populist reaction against recalcitrant sections of the Market and the Market State. Populism is typically the sign that the core dynamic is losing credibility, requiring a satisfying response from the dominant interests of the magnitudes as the causes of these risks. However, this is not an argument that there is conscious awareness of this dynamic: populism, even in a positive form, stops with a demand that the dominant interests qualify their absolutism with sympathetic conditions of existence. Existential angst, the veiling of which by these same constructed magnitudes is the fulcrum of this landscape, will likely remain veiled – even through the processes of consolidation and transformation by Technology – and even if serious action on existential risk is undertaken.
