NASA’s stunning Apollo photos are a reminder of a time when societies still had big, exciting, collective…

NASA’s stunning Apollo photos are a reminder of a time when societies still had big, exciting, collective aims. Name even one ambition societies currently have, of this magnitude? Short 🧵 /1 https://t.co/ShW1F6Cqkj

One of the most telling things for those who lived through those times and into today, is the disappearance of that sense of collective ambition. It’s hard to even imagine now the excitement of the idea of going to the moon, how extraordinary that was. /2 https://t.co/rxBmbPr4xG

When Charles Duke from the Apollo 16 mission left a signed family photo on the moon, it was an expression of an outward-facing humanity, confronting the unknown and daring to confront it, together. Today we’d be more likely to hear about it being some sort of individual…/3 https://t.co/Vv5WowImKQ

…triumph against adversity, for Duke. Some part of his life story. As it is hardly any of us have heard of Duke, and that’s not an accident, because the main focus of those missions was collective, not individual. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. QED. /4 https://t.co/WYXW4GlH8R

Today even saying that would most likely attract criticism on the gendered language and assumptions, about all of the millions of individual grievances that could have been soothed by those billions of dollars instead. That’s the big shift of those past decades, to individual…/5

…culture and politics. I’m not sure we see the link, between a politics of individual aspiration, and a culture of endlessly proliferating identity. Identity politics across the entire Left-Right spectrum sucks every last bit of oxygen out of that reach for the stars ethos…/6

…and buries us all in a carping culture of complaint and individual grievance. If you don’t give people something to strive for collectively, they’ll take those energies and focus them on finding and inventing ever more granular forms of identity, to promote and defend. /7

A humanity focused more and more obsessively upon itself, gazing inwards and going nowhere. We could for example have made Covid a moonshot, or climate change. Some great challenge for humanity to face and overcome, together. We know we didn’t do that. /8

What a dreary world, that we created in those intervening decades. Obsessed with gossip and bitching about one another, and finding new ways every day to polish our precious egos even further into new identity facets. There’s a wonderful episode of Utopia where the…/9 https://t.co/vARyNvpmK6

…office is looking for a motivational speaker. Every person considered wants to talk only about themselves, about their grievances and personal struggles, about their identity. It’s hard not to think that going to the moon today would excite people only if they were allowed…/10

…to take a selfie there to post to their social media feeds. Our politics drove this shift, and there’s very little immunity to the social and cultural manifestations of it. All parts of the social and political spectrum are deeply in love with individual identity. /11

The irony is it’s not individual. It’s social. We curate these identities to fit the social niche we want to occupy. Going to the moon bypassed the distinction between individual and social. It was about individual striving for collective achievement. No binary between them. /end https://t.co/e4zM802IUE