Quite a few of my best friends are getting uncomfortable whenever I’m going to start saying this word once again: “multi-perspective”.
Because this is what I call what I have been seeing more and more and everywhere for a few years now, like a little plant that is slowly spreading more and more in all kinds of places. But my friends don’t want to talk about leaves as much (as I do), and how could you blame them? After all, my friends are interested in other things too, like art and culture, or which wardrobe to buy, or where to get the best. (“Thanks for the tip, Jim, we found one!”)
I still live in this world, after all, and I know and appreciate the value of such conversations. We live in the city, so the stuff that grows there isn’t that important after all. My friends are not botanists who could engage in my attention to detail, which is what it takes when you want (or need) to examine leaf structures. I have to, I can’t help it. “Damn, this is important! Yes, even that one particular little plant growing there between the cracks in the road.” And so my friends flinch slightly when I point again to a leaf of a plant and exclaim: “multiperspective!”.
My friends don’t seem to see for the city how a plant is becoming dominant right now that will probably have completely reshaped our thinking in a few years (and I suspect that this very thinking will be necessary to turn the trolley around once again, and so maybe, like in a computer game, get to the next level. As I said, I suspect that, but nobody can know that yet. Just as you can never know how the future will develop. But there are weather forecasts. And I am something like a weatherman. Because as fate would have it, that’s exactly what I’ve been studying for more than 20 years. What exactly? That little plant.
Weed, i.e. cannabis, i.e. the plant that at least a few more people are interested in, is: absolutely nothing compared to it. I can see how what is emerging is already colossally changing our thinking. “Yes, yours too! Just look, then you can see it. And don’t think that it’s normal, just because all your friends feel more or less the same way.
How can I say? You can clearly see it if you look in the other direction than most are used to. The view of the universe is dark, if one has the sun in the back. On earth, this phenomenon is called “night”. But the night is coming to an end. And you can already perceive the dawn. If you look in the right direction, of course. If you look anywhere, then you very likely don’t get that it’s dawn.
The plant is getting bigger from day to day, here is a particularly beautiful specimen I have now come across: Can you please take a look at it? Listen to the this podcast, and every 30 seconds recall the word “multiperspective”, imagine in your mind my voice and what I have been saying for years about the structure of the leaves. Can you see it now?
For those of you who don’t know WTF I’m talking about – this plant, of course, has also been noticed by others. People who put it differently. More and more people are describing the same phenomenon, it’s just not so easy to tell because they describe it from many different angles and give it different names.
Judith Aston pointed me to the term metamodernism, I would think it is the same thing:
Of course, one could now ask: “Okay, this thing, this little plant, metamodernism, multi-perspective or whatever, it’s coming anyway. Why should we intervene somehow (and how at all?), it’s nothing bad, isn’t it? So why spend so much energy on something now, when there are other things at least as important?”
This question is very justified and I would answer quite soberly: “Because you want to educate your children well today, in order to prepare them well for the future. So you have to teach them today, how to recognize the plant, how to understand its effects in order to be able to work with the plant and not against it. On the other side are then at best those who later constantly get tangled in the branches of the plant because they have never learned to see it.