{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019822282980177717, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005468215994531784, 'mean_word_length': 4.8326693227091635, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Yawning Vacuum: A World without Alternatives

There have been many reactions and responses to the changes taking place in the last few years, and most have been concerned with political adjustments to a drastically changed global power structure. By and large, intellectuals have yet to come to grips with the nature of recent transitions and transformations, how these can be related to trends established during the decade of the 1980s (called "the lost decade" by some and celebrated as "the end of history" by others), and what that decade signifies for the larger flow of human history. Not believing in any doctrine of historical determinism, I do not think that what happened during the 1980s was inevitable or inherent in the basic design of the modern world. But, then, I have always had a greater interest in discontinuities than in continuities. As I see it, although the human race has achieved remarkable feats of "success" within the scientific paradigms of modernity, it has undermined its own achievements and eroded the processes and institutions that it had once put in place. In this article, I wish to address discontinuity in the historical process and the accompanying erosion of structures and institutions. I intend to do this by examining the implications of historical events from the point of view of the realm of ideas from the point of view of one intellectual's perception of the changes that, like it or not, have overtaken him.