I didn't use to like Isaac Asimov's Foundation so much but I have turned completely round on that. I still think that Asimov has his defects as a writer but his ideas are sound, and I've come to believe that there's validity in "psychohistory", the full integration of history with an understanding of collective human psychology.
Conservative Western thought, dedicated to upholding selfishness as a core value, scoffs at the notion of collective...anything. Obviously that's political: they're trying to protect individual wealth-hoarding while disrupting any move towards independent human organization, anything outside the organization of selfish human beings around more powerful selfish human beings. Nothing else exists, they say. They're being malicious and deceitful, of course, but thanks to their own doublethink they're also sincere: they really don't know any other way to live.
As a result there's only one form of collective they can understand: a mob, a collection of human beings around a single powerful leader whose moods and whims dictate the behavior of the entire mob. That's not really "organization" per se but at least it's a grouping. But even with the best available mass communication it's difficult for a single mob leader to organize people on a large scale, and we've seen what happens in practice. In the 6 January insurrection, a huge number of reactionaries interconnected by high-speed Internet convinced themselves they were a powerfully united force poised to take revenge for Trump's humiliation, and all we got was a wet fart. They tried, they wanted it so much, and the result was an aimless crowd of violently rowdy tourists.
Back to the "Seldon crisis", which I used to think was a convenient fictional device. Coincidence is the key to a Seldon crisis and that's a difficult thing to write well because we're so used to coincidence as a mere literary device, a sign that the writer or playwright was running short on inspiration. I think perhaps I needed to see it for myself until I could fully believe it. Beyond doubt, however, the Earth is in the midst of a proper "Seldon crisis", a confluence of political and social conflicts which are reinforcing each other in a positive-feedback cycle. Luck is only part of the story: a series of (un)lucky breaks precipitated the crisis perhaps but now all the various social tensions in play are coöperating with each other, adding force to each other, and we're all caught up in one vast wave coming to a peak. A Seldon crisis. That old man was right.
I feel like now I better understand why "Foundation" and its successors seem to wobble uncertainly between greatness and clumsy artifice: Asimov was struggling to depict, realistically and convincingly, the idea that perhaps we really are all in the hands of Providence, striving as hard as possible to be wise and knowing and foreseeing, trying to get out ahead of events and master the fates only to be humiliated by the intricate and inscrutable workings of the Creator. Asimov was among the great Jewish writers of the world and many of his writings show that he struggled with fundamental issues of existence: what is creation? can we create life? why does anything happen as it does? These are tough things to write about without seeming facile, tinny and contrived. Asimov's stories sometimes feel that way. He must surely have felt it himself, and knew the taste of humility.
~Chara of Pnictogen