The Blood of the Earth Quotes

“There’s a rich irony, in other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“The symbolic and ritual tools of magical practice can be used to set off the same set of reactions that allow a child, or for that matter a baby baboon, to stock its social self with the nonverbal and emotionally charged patterns of its social group. In a capable initiation ritual, this is done in a careful and controlled way, with patterns that further the process of magical training, and the candidate – the person going through the initiation – is taught nonverbal signals that allow him or her to activate the new patterns when it’s time to use them, and deactivate them when it’s time to deal with the nonmagical world. In the short term, this makes it possible to practice magic without too much psychological strain; in the long term, the experience of shifting from one set of arbitrary social patterns and emotional charges to another teaches the reasoning mind to get some distance from the social self, and think its own thoughts rather than those it has been spoonfed by its society.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“the sociology of deviance – specifically, the way that human groups use seeming statements of fact the way baboons use bared teeth and threat postures, to stake out territory and drive off outsiders. As far as we know, baboons don’t try to use their territorial displays to make sense of their world, and this is to their credit. Human beings, alas, are not always so clever, and the resulting confusions play a massive though rarely recognized role in mangling communication in any complex society.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“Social primates like you and I have a strong and wholly nonrational propensity to force-fit our problems into a social mode – no matter what’s happening, we want to put a face on it, which in practice amounts to blaming it on the troop over there, or the baboons at the top of our troop’s hierarchy, or maybe the ones at the bottom. We also like to define any problem so that its apparent solution doesn’t make us feel that the fulfillment of such basic biological appetites as food, sex, status, and security are put in question. Add to those distorting factors a widespread ignorance of logic and history, and a great deal of straightforward dishonesty on all sides of the political continuum, and you’ve got a pretty fair mess. Thus we’ve arrived as a society, and at a very late stage in the game, at the same point that classical philosophy reached as the Roman Empire began to falter, when it became uncomfortably clear that having a small minority of people passionately interested in asking and answering the right questions was no guarantee against catastrophic levels of collective stupidity. The answer that theurgic Neoplatonism offered was a personal answer, rooted in the systematic practice of a set of magical disciplines meant to make clear thinking and decisive action possible for anyone with the self-discipline, patience, and persistence to do the necessary work.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“Plato compared the whole self to a chariot in which reason was the driver and two irrational parts, the biological appetites and the social reactions, were two very unruly horses. The challenge that had to be solved, to him and to the Neoplatonists, was how to train these horses so that they would accept the guidance of the reins and take the chariot the way the charioteer wanted to go. Several centuries of work went into finding the best ways to meet that challenge, and the toolkit that became central to Neoplatonism from the third century CE on – well, that’s where magic comes in.7 In the writings of Neoplatonist philosophers such as Iamblichus and Proclus, the word used was theurgy or divine work, which they distinguished from thaumaturgy, working wonders, the common or garden variety magical practice that went on in classical society in much the same way that it goes on in ours. The practice of theurgy was exactly the unpopular kind of magic I introduced in the previous chapter; in the technical language of the time, it was practiced to purify the vehicles of consciousness; in the terms I have been using, it was intended to see to it that the baboonery of biological drives and social reactions didn’t interfere with the reason and the will.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“using incantation as a nonchemical tranquilizer to ward off stress, and to assure yourself that everything is fine when everything is emphatically not fine, is much more problematic. In a time of crisis when keeping a level head and going on with life is crucial, it can have a valid place, but if it’s being used to drown out the still small voice that warns of approaching danger, it’s an invitation to disaster.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“the more egalitarian a group claims to be, the more it depends on baboon politics to maintain group cohesion and direction”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“What happens when world petroleum production plateaus, as it has done for nearly a decade, and begins to decline, as it will do for the rest of our lives, has very little to do with physical questions. The forces that are taking the lead in the opening phases of the deindustrial age will be political, cultural, and psychological, not physical. About these issues the methods of the scientist and the engineer have very little useful to say, and most of that was drowned out decades ago by the louder voices of political opportunism and middle-class privilege.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“the appalling awareness that the contemporary industrial world has bet its future on the absurd notion that ever larger amounts of a nonrenewable resource can be extracted indefinitely from a finite planet.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“As the blood of the Earth runs dry, a great many assumptions at the core of the modern project are going to have to be discarded. The toolkit of magic is one of the few available options we’ve got to make that difficult transition a little easier, and to begin making sense of a future that has not yet even begun to darken the dreams of most of today’s humanity.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“Somewhere behind the bland emotionless labels favored by contemporary culture lies a tangled realm of unmentioned motives and murky passions, where petroleum – the black blood of the earth, as shamans and loremasters in a surprisingly large number of cultures call it – has become an anchor for fantasies of omnipotence and dreams of destiny, and that realm must be confronted directly in order make sense of where our civilization is headed.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“a man named Aristocles, whose very broad shoulders got him the nickname Plato. One of the most influential minds in human history – Alfred North Whitehead, himself no intellectual slouch, characterized all of Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato8 – he played a central role in redirecting philosophy away from arbitrary speculations about the nature of existence, and toward close attention to how human beings know what exists and what doesn’t. Even if you’ve never read a word Plato wrote, you use concepts he invented practically every time you think.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“the failure of the established order of industrial society, and of the political classes who manage it, is becoming hard to ignore. Consider the way that the world’s leaders have reacted to the ongoing implosion of the global economy, or nearly any other recent crisis you care to name: in each case, it’s a broken-record sequence of understating the problem, trying to manage appearances, getting caught flatfooted by events, and struggling to load the blame for yet another round of failures onto anybody within reach. Rinse and repeat a few times, and even the most diehard supporters of the status quo start wishing that somebody, somewhere, would stand up and demonstrate some actual leadership.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“What makes this natural process a fertile source of problems is that we apply these nonrational cues to words that also denote rational concepts, and then confuse the two. Watch the way people talk about a political concept central to their society’s self-image: for example, the concept of democracy. The social self, that unruly horse, insists that democracy – real democracy – ought to live up to standards that no real political system can achieve. What ought to be called real democracy is the cumbersome, corrupt, flawed, but functional system that emerges when real human beings have the right to elect officials and vote on issues. Still, that’s not how the horse sees it; to the horse, democracy is an emotionally charged symbol rich with warm feelings, and real democracy means that symbol in some impossibly perfect manifestation on the plane of everyday life.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“Unfortunately, Stoicism proved impossible to teach to anyone who didn’t already find its ideas and practices emotionally appealing. Anyone else trained along Stoic lines simply ended up learning how to pursue irrational ends with a Stoic’s focused will and utter disregard for popular opinion. The Roman emperor Claudius, for example, arranged to give his stepson the best available Stoic training at the hands of Seneca the Younger, one of the great Roman Stoic philosophers. The young man’s name was Nero; you may have heard of him, but probably not as a model of Stoic virtue. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, himself a Stoic philosopher of no mean skill, tried the same thing with his son Commodus, and the results were nearly as bad.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“One of the most popular of those schools early on was Stoicism, which was launched by Zeno of Citium around 300 BCE. The Stoics – the name comes from the stoa poikile or Painted Porch in Athens, where Zeno used to meet with his students – argued that what kept people from living in accordance with reason was, on the one hand, misguided opinions about what was and wasn’t important, and on the other, simple lack of courage. Along the lines of some modern systems of thought, they insisted that if people studied logic and gained an accurate sense of their very modest place in the universe, they would respond to life’s events in a sane and constructive manner, rather than being batted around at random by the forces of passion and prejudice.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil

“could be accomplished by a shift in priorities that involves accepting less prosperous lifestyles, and embraces rich personal, intellectual, and social lives as substitutes for, or even improvements on, the material extravagance that the industrial nations currently offer their more favored inmates.”
― John Michael Greer, The Blood of the Earth: An essay on magic and peak oil