Our Collapsing Civilisation

John Michael Greer offers a fascinating and intelligent view of our decline.

If you’re interested in the future (and fearing our fall), I urge you to read John Michael Greer’s essay, ‘The Long Road Down: Decline and the Deindustrial Future’. Here’s a snippet to entice you:

“Believers in apocalypse, for their part, insist that our civilization’s end will be sudden, catastrophic, and total. As shown earlier in this essay, history doesn’t support that claim.

Civilizations take time to fall, the resource base of industrial society is shrinking but it’s far from exhausted, the impact of global warming and other ecological disruptions build slowly over time, and ruling elites and ordinary citizens alike have every reason to hold things together as long as possible.

The history of the last century shows that industrial societies can endure tremendous disruption without dissolving into a Hobbesian war of all against all, and people in hard times are far more likely to follow orders and hope for the best than to join the rampaging mobs that play so large a role in survivalist fantasies.

Of course it’s possible that some ultra-catastrophe is waiting to wipe us all out, just as it’s possible that scientists might pull a technological rabbit out of a hat and give industrial society a new lease on life. It’s also possible that aliens from space might go zipping through our atmosphere in flying teacups next Tuesday, dropping radioactive vegetables on everyone named Fred. The fact that this last possibility can’t be ruled out doesn’t make it reasonable to gamble our future on being able to power factories with glow-in-the-dark cabbages!”

SANE POLITICS

Greer is dexterous, also writing fiction and occult non-fiction. I’m skipping that for politics and pragmatism. Here are a few of his comments on society and politics:

The West’s Failing Strategy Against the East:

“This is an existential struggle for all parties involved. The overtly stated goal of US elites for years now, since our attempt to conquer the Mid East failed so abjectly, has been to break Russia apart into a collection of weak states that could be stripped of wealth.”

“The one essential geopolitical task of US & NATO strategy since 1949 has been to drive as big a wedge as possible between Russia & China, so that the two don’t unite and create a Eurasian power with its own access to the world-ocean.”

“The cretinous US foreign policy that forged an alliance between Russia and China, and then threw Iran into the mix, will go down in history as an unparalleled display of utter slack-jawed idiocy.”

“I’m very concerned about Europe ... Between anomalously high death rates, accelerating economic decline, increasing lawlessness, and major demographic trends going hard against the survival of historic Europe, the European subcontinent has a very rough road ahead of it.”

Society and Self:

“I’m a Boomer and I agree with the critics of my generation. Sure, they were out there protesting injustice in the 1960s, until the draft got discontinued — at which point a very, very large number of them rushed to joined the system they claimed to hate.”

“What our would-be lords and masters want to have instead is a system in which everyone is loyal and obedient to them, but they don’t owe anyone anything.”

“The entire field of psychology, like that of medicine, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry these days. Nobody in either field wants to cure or heal people any more; it's all 'management,' meaning they keep you sick but able to function.”

“One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.”

“We have all grown up, one might say, thinking of nature as an
adorable, helpless bunny that some people want to protect and
others, motivated by the will to power that is the unmentionable
force behind so much of contemporary culture, want to stomp into
a bloody pulp just to show that they can. Both sides are mistaken, for what they have misidentified as a bunny is one paw of a sleeping grizzly bear who, if roused, is quite capable of tearing both sides limb from limb and feasting on their carcasses. The bear, it must be remembered, is bigger than we are, and stronger. We forget this at our desperate peril.”

“It’s about economic implosion—meaning that your salary will probably go away, your savings almost certainly won’t keep its value, and if you have gold bars hidden in your home, you’d better hope to Hannah that nobody ever finds out.”

“More than anything else, it’s about loss. Things that you value—things you think of as important, meaningful, even necessary—are going to go away forever in the years immediately ahead of us, and there will be nothing you can do about it.”

THE CATABOLIC COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION

As follow-up to his ‘Long Road Down’ essay, listen to these interviews with Greer called ‘The Catabolic Collapse of Civilization’.

ARTICLES AT UNHERD

Includes ‘America’s Empire is Bankrupt’ and ‘Is Donald Trump a Werewolf?’.

BOOK

Read ‘Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead’.

For his writings on the occult, visit Ecosophia.

Shout-out: Thanks to Shagbark for recommending that essay to me. It punched me off schedule, but led to hours of fascination.

Credit: Header image by Alexa.