Tag: decline and fall

An Unfamiliar World

John Michael Greer397 Comments

Last month’s post on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers…

Deindustrial Warfare: A First Reconaissance

John Michael Greer301 Comments

This January has five Wednesdays, and in the usual way of this blog, the fifth Wednesday gets an essay on whatever topic the readers select by vote. As usual, it was a lively contest, but this time one of the perennial underdogs—warfare in the deindustrial age—came out on top. That didn’t surprise me greatly.  The…

The Three Stigmata of J.R.R. Tolkien

John Michael Greer390 Comments

Understand the thoughts that a person or a nation won’t allow itself to think and you grasp something crucial about that person or nation. Find the source of the barrier that keeps either one from entertaining those forbidden thoughts and you know something even more important. As America stumbles blindly forward into an unwelcome future,…

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

John Michael Greer283 Comments

These days I hear a lot of people talking about whether it’s possible to change the world, and if so, how to go about it. It’s understandable that this should be so, since the world around us is such a steaming mess.  Nor, despite the bleatings of true believers in progress, is it getting better. …

The Return of Religion

John Michael Greer300 Comments

Somalian-born author and erstwhile New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali caused quite a flutter in several dovecotes the other day when she published an essay announcing that she had given up atheism and converted to Christianity.  The Christian writers I’ve read who discussed her essay were of course pleased by it, while most of the others…

Surviving Catabolic Collapse: A Case Study

John Michael Greer278 Comments

One of the longstanding traditions on this blog is that when there are five Wednesdays in a month, my commentariat gets to propose topics for the fifth Wednesday post, and whichever topic gets the most votes ends up becoming the theme I write about for that post. That’s landed me in a pickle or two…

Bracing for Impact

John Michael Greer310 Comments

I think it was Lenin who said that there are decades in which nothing happens, and then there are months in which decades happen. It’s a useful reminder that the pace of historic change is not smooth. We’ve all seen immense changes take place over the last few decades, but in the industrial world, at…

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…

Dancing on the Brink

John Michael Greer452 Comments

Back when I was sketching out posts for the first half of this year, I planned to go on this week to talk further about enchantment, exploring the way that the ebb and flow of enchantment seems to track the rise and fall of civilizations and sketching out a tentative hypothesis about why that is.…

The Reign of Quantity

John Michael Greer171 Comments

English princes should not take American brides. The experiment has been tried twice now and the results are in:  the princes become whiny and petulant, while the brides become arrogant and shrill. Since the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Sussex had very little in common before their respective marriages, and their duchesses had…