John Michael Greer's Blog

Part Two: Weishaupt's Fallacy

Nostalgia's a funny thing; you never know what's going to fill the place of Proust's madeleine and catapult you back to memories of some other time. A little over a year ago, I had a reminder of that while visiting the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center in Oakland County, Michigan. The path from the parking lot wandered through a lovely autumn woodland, then turned a corner and deposited me back in 1980.

In those days I was passionately interested in the ap...

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Part One: Failure is the Only Option

The old legend of the Holy Grail has a plot twist that's oddly relevant to the predicament of industrial civilization. A knight who went searching for the Grail, so the story has it, if he was brave and pure, would sooner or later reach an isolated castle in the midst of the desolate Waste Land. There the Grail could be found and the Waste Land made green again, but only if the knight asked the right question. Failing that, he would wake the next morning...

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The dubious statistical measures that were the theme of last week's Archdruid Report post have had a massive impact on the even more dubious decisions that have backed the United States, and the industrial world more broadly, into its present predicament. When choices are guided by numbers, and the numbers are all going the right way, it takes a degree of insight unusual in contemporary life to remember that the numbers may not reflect what is actually going on in the real world.

You might th...

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Plenty of difficulties stand in the way of making sense of the economic realities we face at the end of the age of cheap abundant energy. Some of those difficulties are inevitable, to be sure. Our methods of producing goods and services are orders of magnitude more complex than those of previous civilizations, for example, and our economy relies on treating borrowing as wealth to an extent no other society has been harebrained enough to try before; these and other differences make the task ...

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One of the points that I've tried to make repeatedly in these essays is the place of history as a guide to what works. It's a point that deserves repetition. A good many worldsaving plans now in circulation, however new the rhetoric that surrounds them, simply rehash proposals that were tried in the past and failed repeatedly; trying them yet again may thus not be the best use of our limited resources and time.

Of course there's another side to history that's more hopeful: something that wo...

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It's been a long road, but we've finally reached the point in these essays at which it's possible to start talking about some of the consequences of the primary economic fact of our time, the arrival of geological limits to increasing fossil fuel production. That's as challenging a topic to discuss as it will be to live through, because it cannot be understood effectively from within the presuppositions that structure most of today's economic thinking.

It's common, for example, to hear well-i...

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One of the more interesting aspects of writing these essays is that I can never predict in advance what will get me a flurry of outraged responses each week. It's a fair bet that something always does; the collective conversation of the modern industrial world has become so overheated in the last decade or so that it's difficult to say much of anything without getting somebody in a swivet; still, what it is that sets off the swiveteers routinely catches me by surprise.

Last week was no except...

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It's a safe bet that any public comment on the politics of peak oil, unless it sticks closely to one of a very few widely accepted opinions, will provide a good demonstration of the laws of thermodynamics by turning plenty of energy into waste heat. Last week's Archdruid Report post was no exception. Between those who thought I was too hard on Cuba, those who thought I was too soft on Cuba, those who insisted America is already a fascist dictatorship, those who thought America would be bett...

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The transformation of money from a pragmatic measure of wealth to a metastatic abstraction that threatens to devour the economy of real wealth that created it – the theme of the last three posts here – has, as my readers have been quick to point out, political implications. The conventional wisdom these days ignores those implications; the consensus among alternative thinkers, which I suppose could be called the unconventional wisdom, deals with them in a stereotyped manner. I find it incre...

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I've commented before in these essays that one of the least constructive habits of contemporary thought is its insistence on the uniqueness of the modern experience. It's true, of course, that fossil fuels have allowed the world's industrial societies to pursue their follies on a more grandiose scale than any past empire has managed, but the follies themselves closely parallel those of previous societies, and tracking the trajectories of these past examples is one of our few useful sources o...

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