The world Now is qualitatively different from how it was a few generations ago. The changes themselves were not hard-edged, but the cumulative consequences are qualitative.
The world used to be one in which there were hard-edges outside of us. The task was to work from within one or other category that was made by the hard edges.
But the edges dissolved, or were-dissolved... Some of this dissolving was done by the forces of evil - but other forces of evil were concerned to introduces new hard-edges; especially, the global totalitarian bureaucratic System is all about hard-edges. But the reason that we experience The System as tyranny is that we recognise its categories are arbitrary, not-true. We only stick by them because we are compelled, and we can only be compelled because we cannot conceive of any better alternative.
To my mind, those who wish to reintroduce the old hard-edges are welcome to try; but I think this simply cannot succeed. All attempts have failed, and I think they have failed because Men's minds have changed, in a fundamental fashion.
We experience the world differently, which is as much as to say that our world is different - really different. The edges have gone because - for us - the edges are no longer present.
In a world where there are no edges, or more exactly, no edges that we spontaneously and whole-heartedly recognise as real and 'objective' - we must either live by (what will be experienced as) passive compliance with some arbitrary external source of edges - or else must develop another way of discernment, that comes from within rather than from without.
Yet it is difficult - sometimes impossible - for Men to imagine and believe any inner source of objective reality. The loss of edges is experienced as a loss of all reality, a world of arbitrary, fluid, subjectivity. Imagination is seen as untruth.
The answer, and perhaps the only imaginable answer, can be described; but to believe it, to regard it as real, to regard it as objectively valid... well, that requires a great deal of metaphysical rebuilding, the making of new foundations - which most people are unwilling even to consider embarking upon (perhaps for fear of losing what they already have, but mostly because they think-they-know that the effort would be futile).
In a world without edges, and where edges are not coming back; then that primary task is to derive discernment each from his own resources; but to know that discernment to be objective, and to reference a single and shared reality.
To put it differently, we seek a world where the imagination is true, and where that truth is universal - for all Men.
This has been sought for more than 200 years - but mostly the first and fatal step has been to discard Jesus Christ. Among the minority of Christians who sought this path, there has been a failure to re-imagine Christianity in the necessary, post-edge-world, personal-objective mode.
The consequence is that few have succeeded - yet succeed we must, because an honest and rigorous analysis tells us that there is no alternative.
More exactly, the consequence of failure is that mortal life will be a Waste of Time, because all our lived experience will come to nought of value, because our frame of understanding will negate experience.
Incarnation and death will become the only positive value of mortal life - and everything in-between At Best only a Waste of Time.
And that, I suppose, will be the end of things.
