Tag: politics

Dancers at the End of Time, Part Two: “Facts are the Enemies of Truth”

John Michael Greer385 Comments

Last week, in Part One of this post, we explored the strange way that many people these days seem to have lost the ability to think clearly, or at all, about certain political questions.  Insights from philosopher Alan Jacobs and a thoughtful blogger who goes by “Jane” helped us close in on the mental dysfunction…

Dancers at the End of Time, Part One: The Flight from Reason

John Michael Greer369 Comments

For quite some time now I’ve been mulling over how to talk about one of the strangest features of our era—the way that certain very simple kinds of reasoning have abruptly dropped out of use among precisely those prosperous, well-educated, well-informed people whom you might expect to cling to them no matter what. Fortunately a…

Heating Up The Political Climate

John Michael Greer352 Comments

Yes, we need to talk about climate change again, and it’s probably necessary to start with a point I’ve made on this blog several times already: anthropogenic climate change is real and serious, and it’s being exploited by political and corporate interests to push a dubious agenda on the public. Many people these days don’t…

Waiting for the Next Panic

John Michael Greer293 Comments

When I first started blogging more than thirteen years ago, the main focus of my online essays was peak oil. It was a good time to discuss such things. The price of crude oil, which had been rattling around a little above its all-time lows for more than a decade, started rising not long after…

An Astrological Interlude: Libra Ingress 2019

John Michael Greer208 Comments

A few days from now we’ll have arrived at the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring spring to my readers in Australia and fall to me and my neighbors here in North America. The equinox is an important holy day to Druids and members of various other nature-centered…

The Fall of the Chosen Ones

John Michael Greer359 Comments

I’ve long since stopped trying to second-guess where to look for insights into the crisis of our time and the first stirrings of the future ahead. I read a lot of news and a lot of blogs, covering a non-Euclidean landscape in which the conventional categories of Right and Left are temporary agglomerations at most,…

The Dream of a Managed Society

John Michael Greer391 Comments

My essay here two weeks ago on the way that the industrial world’s elites are beginning to back away from environmentalism, using chatter about “ecofascism” as a convenient excuse, got the lively response I expected. To be fair, there was also a certain amount of noise, and a certain number of exasperated demands that I…

The Next Twilight of Environmentalism

John Michael Greer478 Comments

Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, and now we’ve seen one of the typical warning signs of that impending breach. Those of my readers who are concerned about environmental issues—actually concerned, that is, and not…

The Flight To The Fringes, And What Waits There

John Michael Greer280 Comments

Several of my readers alerted me over the last week to an online essay by Christian writer Rod Dreher on the rising popularity of malevolent magic and demonolatry (the worship of malign spirits) on the leftward end of the US political scene. For so loaded a topic, Dreher’s essay is thoughtful and admirably measured; what’s…

A Conversation with the World

John Michael Greer389 Comments

Over the last three and a half months, I’ve spent most of my writing time on this blog tracing a series of trajectories that all spiral in toward a common center. Each of those explorations started with some feature of contemporary culture and followed it back to its roots in a very odd set of…