Update from the Archdruid Greer

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/a-dangerous-year/

Greer's latest.

[Little John]

Excellent, as usual. Duly shared on Facebook and beyond

[Lord Beria3]

Greer on...

https://www.ecosophia.net/january-2018-open-post/

Trump

"Dylan, my impression hasn’t changed at all. Trump has built a career out of convincing his rivals to underestimate him, and he’s doing it to the Democrats and the Republican mainstream alike right now. Notice how, whenever he wants to get something done under the radar, he launches a twitterstorm on some unrelated subject; the media go yapping after the bait, and while they’re otherwise occupied he appoints a bunch more federal judges or issues an executive order or whatever it s. Now that he’s figured out how to work with Congress to advance his agenda — that takes most first-time presidents a year or so, so his learning curve is about average — we can expect red meat to start landing on the plates of his core constituencies pretty regularly from here until the 2020 election, which I expect him to win — not least because the Democrats seem utterly fixated on not learning any of the lessons of their 2016 defeat. More on this in a future post!"

Russia/media

Rita, the people in the discussion group apparently haven’t noticed that Russia doesn’t stand alone. Russia plus China plus Iran makes for a massive economic as well as political-military power bloc. For good news sources, avoid anything from the US or western Europe — they’re basically Disneyfied pap these days. News media elsewhere in the world still occasionally practice worthwhile journalism.

Obamacare

Mister N., I think it’ll die a slow death over the next few years. Once the medical industry can no longer force people to buy insurance they can’t afford to pay for and can’t afford to use, on the other hand, we may be looking at massive economic consequences.

Steady state economics

Degringolade, I don’t expect steady-state economics, because we can’t maintain the economy we’ve built on the resources we have left. That means an economics of contraction and decline, and the replacement of existing economic arrangements with something closer to subsistence economics. SSDD? Sure, but subsistence actually takes a lot less work than maintaining the baroque complexity of today’s economy. Remember that medieval peasants worked shorter hours, got more days off, and got to keep a larger share of the value of their labor than you do…

Investments

Chris, I’m far from sure what to say. On the broadest scale, in a zero-growth economy every investment on average breaks even, so the natural rate of profit is zero; in a negative-growth economy, every investment on average loses money, so there is no natural rate of profit — only a natural rate of loss. (Profit is only normal in a growing economy.) How that would work out on the microeconomic basis of an investment club, though, is a question I don’t know how to answer.

Peak oil

Jacques, right now where peak oil is concerned we’re still in the situation we were in toward the end of The Archdruid Report, where liquid fuels production is being kept close to its all-time high by throwing more and more of the world’s total economic output into the task of keeping the fuel tanks full. Watch what’s happening to our infrastructure and our retail sector in the US to see how the hidden costs of that strategy are surfacing. As for what you can do, planting trees is always a good plan; you might also see if you can turn part of your yard into a sanctuary for birds and insects, by planting things that provide them with food, and making sure there’s a water source and other habitat needs. .

Fusion power

Zendexor, the reason I discount fusion power as a commercially viable option is economic, not technical. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of these days somebody does manage to get a sustained fusion reaction — but look at the price tag of the current generation of experimental fusion reactors. They cost that much because all the cheaper options have already been tried. An energy source that would set you back, say, fifteen thousand pounds a month just to keep the lights burning in your home isn’t going to be able to power industrial civilization, no matter how technically nifty it happens to be!

PV systems

Greg, not really. Solar photovoltaic power is a boutique item, not a viable power source outside of certain specialized applications; cut the government subsidies propping up PV and a lot of it will go away in a hurry.

US empire and the elite left

David, the thing that nobody on the privileged end of the left likes to talk about is that they know perfectly well their status and their standard of living depends on the maintenance of US empire. They’re happy to denounce empire in the abstract, and to criticize it whenever there’s a Republican in the White House, but the suggestion that we really ought to bring the troops home and retreat from empire gets instant pushback. I may be doing a post on that soon.

North American history

Chuck, the scholars are provably wrong. Mitochondrial evidence, as well as a range of archeological sites US scholars don’t want to talk about, shows that humans have been here for at least 25,000 years, and that roughly a quarter of the mitochondrial DNA among Native American populations came not via the Bering Straits but from western Europe, (I discuss these points in my book on Atlantis.) The human history of the Americas is extremely complex, and the attempts by academics to erase that complexity are embarrassing at bet.

Dollar reserve system

Austin, the dollar’s time as reserve currency is nearly over anyway; my working guess is that the government has been planning for years to default on its debts and issue some kind of new currency once the bills really come due. Whether cryptocurrency is involved or not is a good question, but we’ll see.

[kenneal - lagger]

I pay attention to what happened when the same conditions occurred in previous historical epochs, and predict that the same consequences are going to follow.

If Biff is reading this might I suggest that he has not done the above with the problems of mass migration. Ask the Neanderthals, any number of African civilisations, the Vikings of Greenland, the Celts of old England, the American indigenous peoples or the Palestinians what they have learned from their history of being overrun by migrants, if there are any of them left to comment.

Biff would probably answer with "ringing cries of “But it’s different this time!�"

[Lord Beria3]

Greer on Europe:

Matthias, sure — for example, it’s entirely possible that a Muslim conquest of Europe could be followed by a Reconquista on the Spanish model, with Russia and Scandinavia filling the roles of the northern provinces of Spain. That still leaves some fairly harsh centuries to get through, if you don’t happen to like living under Shari’a.

Karim, I expect mass migrations on the very large scale once climate change goes beyond certain levels, as warm periods in the past have caused extreme droughts in what’s now the Muslim middle east. If people have a choice between migration and death, they’ll migrate — and so we’re talking about entire national populations on the move, more likely than not armed with everything the armies of their former nations had to hand. Europe is utterly unprepared to deal with such a thing — due to many decades of blind trust in the United States for their defense, most European countries have feeble, poorly trained, poorly equipped militaries that have no experience in actual combat conditions. I see phenomena such as Daesh and Boko Haram as the first stirrings of the tsunami to come. Will there be fighting? You bet, just as there was fighting when Islam first expanded across the Middle East, but by the time the fighting ends, I expect the borders of the EU to change in roughly the same way that the borders of the Byzantine Empire changed in the wake of the great Muslim invasions — and as usual in such situations, woe to the vanquished…

Middle East and gold

Forecastingintelligence, yes, I’m watching the Turkish move on Afrin very closely. The US strategy in Syria is nearing complete collapse, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens as that sinks in. As for gold, well, if it does become an international reserve currency, we’ll be looking at decades of economic crisis — I like to encourage people who think a gold-backed currency brings stability to look at the smoking moonscape of crises and depressions that gold-backed currencies brought the world in the second half of the nineteenth century…

Future religions in North America

Erik, that’s a remarkably Judeo-Christian view of history. Outside of that very narrow lens, sexual morality doesn’t correspond at all with position in the historical cycle. For just one example, consider England in the time of Queen Elizabeth I with England in the time of Queen Victoria: which of these came at the beginning of an empire and which came near the end, and which one was the more sexually uninhibited? Now in fact I disagree with MmelvinK about the future religion of North America; I think Islam’s role here is rather more like, say, the role of the worship of Isis in late Roman Western Europe — popular for a time, but too late to naturalize sufficiently to survive the downslope — and I see the Mormon church as sinking into institutional rigor mortis and collective indifference over the next century or so. It’s the new religious movements, and especially those rooted in Hispanic cultures, that are likely to take the lead going forward.

Mmelvink, I ain’t arguing with your main point; that’s exactly the point I made in my book After Progress, which set out to explore the aftermath of the dominant religion of our time, the religion of Progress. The new religious sensibility that’s beginning to stir in the United States, and more generally in the Western industrial nations, doesn’t fit well into any of the big established faiths, though we can expect a substantial period of what Spengler called “pseudomorphosis� — the condition in which a rising culture or sensibility takes on outward forms borrowed from an older one, the way that a hermit crab borrows a cast-off shell. Thus it’s exactly traditions such as the Moorish Science Temple, with their creative borrowings from older faiths in service to an idiosyncratic vision, that are likely to give rise to the next great religious movement.

Debt

Chris, debt’s a complicated thing. Yes, in a sane economy, debt is a way to even out variations in cash flow by claiming some of a future cash flow in advance. Outside of certain relatively narrow contexts, in other words, it’s a bad idea to use it more than very occasionally. In today’s industrial nations, though, debt is the way that we paper over economic decline: instead of living on our actual income, as individuals and communities, we run up ever-increasing debts, which then function as a form of fictive wealth in the economy of hallucinatory IOUs that dominates economic life today.

Like all something-for-nothing gimmicks, the attempt to fund an unsustainable level of consumption via debt has a limited shelf life. The recent publicity for “Modern Monetary Theory� — that is, a set of policies by which governments pay for their expenditures by spinning the printing presses, rather than by collecting taxes — is an attempt to find another way to keep getting something for nothing. There will be others, each with a brief shelf life and cascading negative consequences, as the industrial economy slides down the greased chute of decline. The Romans, being far more materialistic than we will ever be, did it by mixing base metals into their gold and silver coins; we’re doing exactly the same thing by debasing the connection between money and wealth.

[Lord Beria3]

Sweden and the backlash against Islam

As for Scandinavia, it’s early days yet. I expect to see the backlash building in Sweden very forcefully in the decade or so ahead.

Catholic Church

CR, unfortunately, the changes made as a result of Vatican II were insufficient in terms of ritual and symbolism; the Novus Ordo mass has all the old symbolism but combines it in a way that, according to several esoterically minded Catholics with whom I’ve discussed the matter, has a much weaker magical dimension than the old Tridentine mass. (The mass has many other aspects, to be sure, but its magical function is important in purifying and energizing the sphere of the church.) Dropping a few old saints and bringing in guitar masses emphatically won’t do the trick! Crucially, though, any such change has to be combined with a thorough housecleaning in which whatever problems have become pervasive in an institution are rooted out with zero leniency, and that hasn’t happened yet.

The shortage of priests being what it is — and that’s not going to change until and unless the rule of clerical celibacy gets dropped — most dioceses here in the US, at least, continued their habit of covering up the abuses of the clergy (of which pedophilia is only one, though it’s arguably the most appalling) and treating the misbehavior of clergy and other religious as a public relations problem rather than a burning moral and spiritual issue. I’ve noted here that as the former head of an alternative religious organization, I’ve spoken to a great many people who left the religions of their childhood; Protestants and Jews leave their religions behind for a wide range of reasons — but every single person I talked to, when I was Grand Archdruid, who quit the Catholic Church to become a Druid did so because of repeated, serious abuses of power on the part of priests, monks, nuns, or all of the above, which were condoned and covered up by the hierarchy. Every. Single. One..

I don’t claim to know what conditions are like elsewhere, but here in the US, the Catholic Church is drowning in a swamp it has created for itself by the unwillingness of the hierarchy to hold its members accountable for acts that are as repellent to traditional Catholic morality as they are violations of the civil law and of the principles of ordinary decency. I know that’s harsh, and it’s an outsider’s judgment, but that’s what I see around me. I hope that the Catholic Church can find the strength to break out of the downward spiral before the tide of public opinion sets hard against it, and politicians begin using conspiracy and racketeering charges to go after its assets — but unless something changes soon, that latter’s probably not too many decades away.

[Lord Beria3]

Greer's latest...

https://www.ecosophia.net/dream-perfect-diet/

[Lord Beria3]

https://www.ecosophia.net/zenos-laughter/

Greer's latest...

[Little John]

Greer is one of very few writers who genuinely make me question everything i think I believe.

[kenneal - lagger]

Greer's latest...

https://www.ecosophia.net/dream-perfect-diet/

I shall be putting this quote from the article in my thread on militant vegans, much to the disgust of some of the other contributors, I should think.

Greer’s Law of Evangelism: the more forcefully someone insists that you have to adopt some behavior or belief—be it a diet, a religion, a political stance, or what have you—the less satisfactory that behavior or belief is to the person who’s pushing it on you.

[Lord Beria3]

Two updates, Greer's latest...

https://www.ecosophia.net/babbitt-fallacy-ways-lose/

And my latest blog post on the future of Europe, referencing Greer a lot...

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... wanderung/

[kenneal - lagger]

I was taken by this very apt sentence -

Has anyone else noticed that most of our Democrats seem to be channeling McCarthy-era Republicans, babbling about sinister Russian agents hiding under every bed, while Republicans insist with a straight face that Jesus really does want them to punish the poor for being poor?

and about how to conduct an argument. Something many contributing to this forum and formerly contributing to it, me included, need to absorb.

[vtsnowedin]

Yes a good sentence. But how he runs on though. A good editor would trim his work by at least half. Said by a deplorable clinging to his guns and religion.

[kenneal - lagger]

.......And my latest blog post on the future of Europe, referencing Greer a lot...

https://forecastingintelligence.org/201 ... wanderung/

Any Islamic invasion is unlikely to stay in Spain and Southern Italy as that area is likely to become as desertified as North Africa and the population move, which would likely include the West and East Africans who are included in the current migration, would swamp the areas ability to support the migrants.

Who's to say what would happen in a century's time as we can't even agree on Hansen's prediction of seven metres sea level rise by the end of the century.

All in all a little of an underestimation by my book.

[Potemkin Villager]

Yes a good sentence. But how he runs on though. A good editor would trim his work by at least half. Said by a deplorable clinging to his guns and religion.

Yes he is incredibly verbose for some reason. According to a writer friend his fiction is even more turgid. Bags of self confidence though.