Tag: economics

Beyond Lenocracy

John Michael Greer369 Comments

I think most people have had the experience of watching a jumble of unorganized thoughts sort out all at once into a lattice of meanings, with a single word filling the role of seed crystal. It’s something that happens to me tolerably often.  Much of the direction of my life was set, for example, one…

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…

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.…

Writing as Microcosm 4: A Conversation with the Reader

John Michael Greer141 Comments

I wish I could say that the spontaneity trap we discussed two weeks ago was the only pitfall that has to be avoided on the way to a successful career as a writer—or, for that matter, on the way to a successful life. Here as elsewhere, the writing business offers a convenient microcosm of life…

Writing as Microcosm 2: A Door Will Open

John Michael Greer312 Comments

Two weeks ago we talked about the writing business as a microcosm of today’s economy.  Like nearly everyone else in the modern world, writers have to deal with a barrage of advice—no, let’s be honest and call it propaganda—that’s meant to lure them into choices that benefit the corporate system at their expense. Like nearly…

Writing as Microcosm, Part One: Publish and Perish

John Michael Greer225 Comments

I’m not sure how many of my readers have noticed the massive realignment going on right now at the foundations of the industrial economy. Venture below the towering abstractions of notional wealth that fill business websites, all the way to the base, and you’ll find that the whole gargantuan structure rests on certain relationships between…

The Great Rehash, Part One: The Best and the Brightest

John Michael Greer305 Comments

July seems to be a good time for explosions, and not just in Fourth of July fireworks displays in the US.  Already this month, a bomb blew up a controversial monument in rural Georgia, while on the other side of the world in Sri Lanka an angry mob stormed the presidential palace and drove the…

The Twilight of Empire

John Michael Greer484 Comments

The third of the topics I’ve discussed at length in my blogs over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of America’s global empire, is especially timely just now.  I noted in a post last year, while discussing the debacle of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the remaining scraps of America’s global hegemony…

Running On Empty

John Michael Greer389 Comments

Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change.  Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count…

Slack! An Irreverent Proposal

John Michael Greer324 Comments

For quite some time now, utterances from the elite classes of the industrial world have had a sidelong relationship at best to the reality that most of us inhabit.  Recent weeks have seen the surreal quality of official pronouncements slam into overdrive, however. I first noted some time ago that the most difficult job in…