Category: Not the Monthly Post

The Kek Wars, Part Three: Triumph of the Frog God

John Michael Greer304 Comments

In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we saw how thousands of disaffected young people who’d been shut out of our society’s circles of privilege and denied the ordinary routes to adult independence turned to magic, for the same reasons that their equivalents have always turned to magic. As we discussed in the…

The Kek Wars, Part Two: In the Shadow of the Cathedral

John Michael Greer376 Comments

In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America’s managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies—the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses…

The Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Left, and the Esc-Center

John Michael Greer420 Comments

When I predicted back in January of 2016 that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, I suggested that his candidacy would mark a sea change in American politics and public life. That’s turned out to be even more true than I’d expected. It’s not just that Trump’s presidency challenges the…

Bad Faith and Worse Hairstyles

John Michael Greer244 Comments

For the last few weeks I’ve been making my way through the dense prose of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the most important work to come out of the existentialist school of philosophy. Why? Partly for no better reason than that a cheap paperback copy happened to turn up in the philosophy section of a…

On Occult Literature: A Diversion of Sorts

John Michael Greer144 Comments

It so happens that last week’s post on reading books by dead people had a curious echo. In a forum I frequent where occultism is the subject of discussion, an earnest young person put up a plaintive post, asking why so much classic occult literature is so boring to read. As usual in such forums,…

The Choice of a Canon

John Michael Greer201 Comments

Last week’s post on the spooky dimensions of reading—the one-on-one encounter, in the silent places of the mind, with another person’s thinking—sparked a lively discussion on the comments page, and no shortage of interesting questions. One of the points that was brought up repeatedly, though, focused on one of the points that I didn’t address…

A Tune for Mountain Dulcimer

John Michael Greer270 Comments

For some time now I’ve been thinking about one of the core patterns underlying recent history here in the United States.  It’s a pattern that can be traced from colonial times onward, and it offers unexpected insights into the mess the United States is in just now; the one difficulty with it is that nearly…

The Truths We Have In Common

John Michael Greer289 Comments

In recent posts here on Ecosophia.net, I’ve sketched out the way that the era of abstraction in which we’ve all grown up has foundered, following patterns that were old before our civilization was born. We’ve talked about the way that the abstract generalizations that started out helping to make sense of on-the-ground realities have been…

An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2018

John Michael Greer166 Comments

This fourth Wednesday of the month would normally be an open post for readers’ questions, but I’ve been asked by quite a few people at this point to cast and delineate a chart for the 2018 Aries ingress, and this is as good a time as any. Aries ingress? That’s the technical term for the…

A Rhetorical Education

John Michael Greer261 Comments

Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick.  Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided.  Ours is an age riven by disputes, in which debate…