Category: Monthly Post

The No-Ego Ego Trip: An Interlude

John Michael Greer179 Comments

Every year or two I field an earnest message from someone who’s just discovered that the human ego is the cause of all the world’s problems. The sender’s invariably a relatively young man, and he’s usually sure that he’s discovered something that no one has ever thought of before. His preparation for his great discovery…

Situationism: Understanding the Spectacle

John Michael Greer416 Comments

Two weeks ago we started a discussion of the Situationists, an obscure movement spawned by fringe Marxism in 1950s Europe. As I commented at the time, that’s an unimpressive pedigree for any set of ideas, and it’s been rendered even more distasteful to a great many people worldwide just now by the recent demonstration of…

The Narrative Trap

John Michael Greer409 Comments

One of the experiences I’ve had tolerably often, over the more than nineteen years that I’ve been writing these weekly essays, is the discovery that a series of apparently disconnected posts I’ve written were all talking about the same thing. Yes, that’s happened again. It’s going to take some work to trace out the connection…

Mitigation and Other Unspeakable Horrors

John Michael Greer305 Comments

In two recent posts (here and here) I’ve discussed the steaming mess of confusion, hypocrisy, and genuine trouble that goes under the label “global climate change.” As I pointed out in those essays, yes, the climate is changing. Yes, emissions from our smokestacks and tailpipes are part, though only part, of the reason. No, we’re…

A Brief Guide to Status Panic

John Michael Greer356 Comments

Yes, I know I said I was going to return to the theme of climate change as soon as I got back from my working trip to England. Regular readers will know that my muse is an unpredictable lady, however, and what she decides to talk about is not always what I had in mind.…

Climate Change: The Crisis Management Model

John Michael Greer293 Comments

These days we live in a hyperpolarized political environment where most people assume that if you’re not all the way over to one extreme, you must be all the way over to the other. That’s a major cause of the collective stupidities that afflict the world today, since the opposite of one bad idea is…

Lords of the Fall

John Michael Greer366 Comments

It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a…

Parsifal: The Problem Restated

John Michael Greer72 Comments

By the time Richard Wagner got to work on Parsifal, his last opera, the conditions of his life had changed utterly from what they had been when he’d started work on The Nibelung’s Ring. A composer of romantic operas who’d set out to make some point in his libretto as inescapable as possible couldn’t have…

Intermezzo: The Ring and the Grail I

John Michael Greer155 Comments

The end of The Twilight of the Gods, dramatically satisfying as it is, leaves the core questions raised by the tetralogy hanging in midair. The grand hope that motivated Wagner and his fellow radicals when he first sketched out the Nibelung myth as a scheme for a drama—the hope that a mighty upsurge of revolutionary…

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Twilight of the Gods 1

John Michael Greer111 Comments

As the orchestra warms up for the final opera of the Ring cycle, the great conflict in Richard Wagner’s mind has been settled at last. Gone is the giddy utopian fantasy Wagner took from Ludwig Feuerbach, which led him to the brink of disaster in 1849, and forced him to flee for his life to…