Success Quote by William Irwin Thompson

Catastrophe, in Thompson's telling, is not just bad luck or mechanical collapse; it's the bill that comes due when a culture's sensing apparatus goes dull. The phrasing "failure to feel the emergence of a domain" is doing heavy lifting. A "domain" here is a new regime of reality: a technological paradigm, an ecological threshold, a social order forming at the edges of the old one. Thompson implies these shifts arrive first as atmosphere, pattern, weak signals. They ask for imagination as an organ of perception, not as escapism.

The sting is in the reversal: what we refuse to register inwardly returns as brute outward fact. If a society can't metabolize change symbolically - through art, theory, political invention, even honest anxiety - the body ends up taking the message. "Embodied sensation" turns abstraction into shock: panic, hunger, displacement, the physical drama of systems failing. It's a critique of modern rationalism that treats imagination as decoration, and of institutions trained to reward certainty over attunement.

Context matters: Thompson comes out of late-20th-century systems thinking, cultural ecology, and "future studies" adjacent to thinkers like McLuhan, where media and myth shape what we can notice. His subtext is almost diagnostic: catastrophe is a perceptual failure before it's an event. The quote isn't moralizing so much as warning that the future announces itself quietly - and that ignoring those announcements doesn't stop them. It just changes the delivery method.