Tag: arnold toynbee

Lenocracy in Extremis: The Case of Publishing

John Michael Greer312 Comments

I really did mean to go on to a different subject this week, rather than talking further about the system of political economy I’ve labeled lenocracy (from Latin leno, a pimp)—that is, a system that treats productive economic activity as a sucker’s game, to be milked dry by the two grasping hands of corporate power…

A Neglected Factor in the Fall of Civilizations

John Michael Greer253 Comments

One of the many reasons I enjoy writing these weekly essays is that they give me the opportunity to look at the world in new ways. Too many writers fall into the trap of saying the same things over and over again in different words—sometimes for a while, sometimes until death taps the author on…

Futures That Work

John Michael Greer317 Comments

Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I’m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in painstaking detail the…

The Twilight of the Intelligentsia

John Michael Greer320 Comments

I promise, I didn’t time this sequence of posts so that this one would come out the morning after one of the most bitterly fought midterm elections in memory.  Nor, of course, did I have advance notice of the outcome, though it wasn’t a surprise to me that the much-ballyhooed “blue wave” would flop as…