The paper will likely be more of a memorandum, looking back over a period of more than forty years, and ahead into a future that seems to be darkening further and further every day. How did we get there? Where were the historical turning points where history failed to turn? The crossroads where we took the wrong exit? Can anything be done to redeem the situation, and get back on track? Or do we have to reinvent ourselves all over again – rather than being reinvented in the service of a dystopian system our own hybris helped to bring about? We are caught in a variety of conflicts that merge in a hybrid war. Which is partly even of our own making, and which it won’t help to ignore, pretending we are just the cultural side-show.