As a writer with an unruly muse, I’ve gotten used to accepting inspiration no matter the quarter from which it arrives. Even for me, though, this essay is a little odd. We’re going to be talking about one of the weirdest movies of the early 1970s, which is of course saying something; about a widely praised short story by a major science fiction author from the same era; and about what these two products of the same cultural movement have to say about the nature of human society, and thus about the kinds of futures we can expect as industrial civilization winds down.
The movie in question is the John Boorman film Zardoz, which premiered in 1974. It was one of the less fortunate beneficiaries of the early-70s attempt, doubtless inspired by the psychedelic excesses of the previous decade, to make movies profound through sheer visual disorientation. You probably remember it, on the off chance that you remember it at all, because it featured Sean Connery in crossed bandoliers, thigh-high boots, a bright red jockstrap, and nothing else. There’s also a novelization, by Boorman and coauthor Bill Stair, which I read long before I saw the movie. (12-year-olds in those days had free run of paperback SF novels but weren’t allowed into theaters to watch movies that featured lots of bare breasts.)
I’ll summarize the setting for those who haven’t seen the movie. The year is 2293 and the earth is devastated. Humanity still survives, but is divided into two populations: the primitive Brutals, who eke out a precarious living in the wasteland, and the Eternals, a privileged minority who live in the Vortex, a community guarded by force fields, where birth and death have been made obsolete by advanced technologies. To keep the Brutals from overpopulating, the Eternals have created a warrior society, the Exterminators, who are supplied with firearms and lectures on zero population growth by a gigantic flying head of stone, the fake god Zardoz.
All is not well in the Vortex, however. Unable to die, many of its privileged inhabitants have lost their will to live and exist in a dull trance state, and their number is growing. Alongside these Apathetics, who are quite literally wrapped in plastic for storage purposes, there is an underground movement of Renegades who are scheming to overthrow the Vortex, even though they run the risk of being subjected to artificial aging if they are caught. Yet the Renegades have a secret weapon the rulers of the Vortex do not expect: Zed, one of the Exterminators—yes, that’s Sean Connery—who is being secretly prepared for a mission that will send him into the Vortex itself and bring the whole system crashing down.
No, it’s not especially original. Those of my readers who know their way around the fiction and films of the era will recall plenty of changes rung on similar themes—the 1976 Michael York vehicle Logan’s Run comes to mind—and like most of the supposedly avant-garde ideas of the late 20th century, those ideas had already been explored at length by writers during the golden age of science fiction in the 1930s. (Fans of Clark Ashton Smith may recall his elegant 1938 story “The Dark Age.”) The reason it came to mind now has less to do with the film itself than with a thoughtful little book titled Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo, published two years ago by a left-wing press in London and recommended to me by a reader a few weeks back.
I found Galluzzo’s book well worth reading, even though—in fact, specifically because—I disagree sharply with its conclusions. There’s a lot of food for thought in its 74 pages, and most of this will be passed by without comment in this essay. What I want to discuss is a movement of thought that Galluzzo discusses, and the way that this movement’s relation to the lurid imagery of the film casts an uncomfortably clear light on why that movement failed and why its current equivalents are failing just as dramatically.
The movement in question did quite a bit to shape the cultural tone of the late 20th century. It included, among many other influential figures, novelists Ursula K. Le Guin and Russell Hoban, philosophers Ivan Illich and Theodore Roszak, psychologist Norman O. Brown, and scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Intellectually diverse as they were, their common themes were a principled rejection of the technocratic utopianism of the era and a quest for a more ecological sensibility and a more decentralized politics. It’s one contribution Galluzzo makes that he highlights this movement and gives its members a good name: “critical Aquarians.”
It’s a useful category. I find it especially striking because many of the writers and thinkers in this category had a potent influence on my thinking when I was in my twenties, and the Seattle Public Library’s downtown branch—well stocked in those days with critical Aquarian writings—was my main refuge from the tedium of the minimum wage jobs I took back then to scrape by. I read all the authors just named and many more of the same kind. Those readers who are familiar with them will easily be able to follow the footprints of their ideas in my writings to this day.
Nonetheless I moved, over the course of a decade of reading, from an uncritical embrace of critical Aquarianism to a recognition of the internal contradictions of the movement, and the way those guaranteed its failure as a meaningful response to the crisis of industrial society. That was what Galluzzo’s book brought to mind—that, and a recognition that the issues in question remain live today. Thus I don’t think it’s a waste of time to glance across the bleak future landscape of Boorman’s film and spend a little while talking back to the flying head that claims to be a god.
Let’s start with Galluzzo’s analysis of the way the movie maps onto the social world of the present and recent past. To him, the Vortex represents the industrial capitalism of the developed world, and especially its privileged classes, sheltered by force fields nearly as tangible than the ones in the movie. The Brutals, in turn, are the rest of the world’s population, and the devastated landscape stands for the slightly less ravaged planet on which we happen to live these days. On this foundation he erects a familiar sort of social criticism, but illumines it in interesting ways.
He is particularly concerned with the currently fashionable ideologies of Silicon Valley, with their obsessive attempts to flee from nature and embrace a wholly artificial existence of robot bodies and computer-generated pseudorealities. Here his analysis is particularly strong, as he points out just how much that fantasy depends on the covert exploitation of the world of nature it supposedly transcends, just as our current industrial societies depend on the extraction of wealth from the underdeveloped (and never-to-be-developed) nations of the global South.
One resource he deploys in his discussion is Ursula K. Le Guin’s acclaimed 1973 short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Like most good works of fiction, Le Guin’s story violates all the rules you were taught in college. It has no viewpoint character and no real plot. It’s a narrative about the city of Omelas, a far more appealing utopia than Boorman’s Vortex. Yet the happiness of the city depends on the fact that a child is imprisoned in a basement room in utter misery. Most of the citizens are fine with this, perhaps reflecting that you can’t have an Omelas without breaking eggs, but there are those who can’t accept it and leave town.
That’s the story. As this summary suggests, it’s full of moral ambiguities that Le Guin never resolves. Critics have pointed out tolerably often that none of the people who walk away from Omelas ever get around to doing anything about the child’s misery. None of them, for example, seem to consider the possibility of slipping into the room in the dark of night and taking the child with them to a better life somewhere else, much less doing something more active along the lines of Boorman’s Renegades. Their sole concern seems to be making sure that nobody can blame them for participating. “Virtue signaling” is a harsh phrase, but it does seem to fit here.
What makes this yet more challenging is that it points straight to one of the core weaknesses in the entire critical Aquarian movement. That movement rarely proceeded from theory to action, and when it did, its tentative ventures toward the real world never went far. The mild, slightly fusty odors of the university library and the scholar’s study always clung to it. Since the movement was dominated by university professors—that is to say, beneficiaries of the very social order they attempted to critique, dependent on that order for their salaries, benefits, and social status—there were sharp limits to just how far the critical Aquarians ever tried to pursue their vision. In effect, the constant concern of the movement was figuring out just how far out they could go and still get back to the faculty club in time for lunch.
That concern becomes painfully clear in some places. I’m not sure whether Galluzzo would consider Joseph Campbell to be one of his critical Aquarians, for example, but he was surely a formative voice in that broad movement of the collective mind. His tetralogy The Masks of God devotes a book each to primitive (sic) mythology, south and east Asian mythology, and ancient Mediterranean mythology. The fourth book? No, it doesn’t deal with modern mythology, even though there’s no shortage of myth in circulation these days that could benefit from a clear assessment: the myth of progress, the myth of the human future in space, and the myth of apocalypse are just three examples that come instantly to mind.
Instead, Campbell beat a hasty retreat to literary criticism, which was after all the focus of his day job as an English professor, and filled the pages of a hefty book with reflections on works well removed from the popular myths of his day and ours. The same thing happens all through the literature of critical Aquarianism: its authors were enthusiastic radicals about anything that didn’t affect their lives directly. Nor, by and large, did their convictions lead them to abandon the comfortable positions so many of them held. The great problem with the ones who walk away from Omelas, it turns out, is that while they’re always walking away, they never actually leave.
Now of course there were plenty of ringing calls for action in the literature of critical Aquarianism. Quite reliably, though, the action was supposed to be done by someone other than the author. I long ago lost track, for example, of the number of figures in that movement who called for the rise of a new ecological religion that would harness the energies of faith in the service of nature. Only in the rarest of cases, however, did the people who proclaimed these new faiths embrace their carefully manufactured belief systems themselves, least of all with the wholehearted belief of the genuine convert. No, they wanted other people to sacrifice themselves for Gaia. The inevitable result was that those new religions were one and all stillborn.
This same habit reached a bitter zenith of irony in the writings of Theodore Roszak, whose magisterial Where the Wasteland Ends had an immense influence on my thinking. In his early book The Making of a Counter Culture, he became one of the first serious intellectuals to proclaim the Baby Boom generation as the harbingers of the great Aquarian transformation. His last book, The Making of an Elder Culture, was thus a plaintive jeremiad trying to talk the Boomers into fulfilling the utopian role he had assigned them, before they finished the normal human trajectory toward senility and death. I know of no reason to think that any significant number of them heard the call; history shows in harsh detail how few have responded to it.
Galluzzo’s own ringing call for a green ecosocialist future in the last chapter of his book, though it avoids quite so explicit an embrace of absurdity, falls victim to the same difficulty in a less blatant manner. Of course the revolutionary Marxist proletariat is as mythical as a hippogriff these days, but even if that fabulous beast were to put in an appearance, its members would not be likely to choose their reading material from among thoughtful, heavily footnoted ecosocialist reviews of 1970s movies. Nor, I think, is there any great risk that Galluzzo’s reflections will be adopted in any other way as the guiding light of a mass movement.
Yet there’s a deeper issue here, because even if some bizarre turn of events brings Galluzzo’s book or the ecosocialist ideas he wants to promote into the hands of a genuine rabblerouser who can do something practical with it, the chance that it will have the kind of results Galluzzo has in mind might best be measured in imaginary numbers. There’s a reason for that, and it can be seen in a detail that Galluzzo mentions but (as I see it) misinterprets: the fact that, as research for his film, John Boorman toured a series of California communes, which he described as “sterile.”
Galluzzo responds archly to that assessment by saying that this was “a term not often associated with the back-to-the-land movement,” but Boorman’s assessment was wholly correct. Plenty of participants in that movement proclaimed that they were building a new society that would inevitably replace the old. Au contraire, most of the communes imploded within a few years, and the few survivors lingered on as brittle, fragile anachronisms propped up by financial inputs from the society their members claimed they were rejecting. As a genuine alternative to the status quo, they were just as sterile as Boorman guessed.
Nor was this outcome any surprise to those who know the history of alternative communities. Since the early years of the 19th century, when Charles Fourier’s giddy prophecies launched the first great wave of communes, there have been thousands of attempts to design and build a new society according to abstract first principles. The average lifespan of those which actually got built is about two years. What’s more, those that outlived the odds reliably got drawn back into the society they thought they were replacing, until all that remained of the original transformative impulse were fading memories and a few nostalgic habits.
What makes this especially challenging is that the same thing is consistently true of the more grandiose project in which Galluzzo puts his hopes, the Marxist vision of socialism as the inevitable next stage of human social organization. Here again, socialism has been tried many times, and when it doesn’t simply fall flat—as it often does—it soon settles back into the mold of the society it tried to replace. What’s more, despite the fossilized rhetoric that surrounds it, more than a century has gone by since Marxism has had any particular appeal to working classes; its partisans these days are intellectuals from middle class backgrounds—the same audience that rallied around criticial Aquarianism back in the day, right down to the fine details—and the criticisms leveled at that movement above are just as applicable to today’s ecosocialist circles.
This brings the unintended ironies in Galluzzo’s work to a very sharp edge. Pay attention to the interviews Boorman gave around the time Zardoz was released and it’s clear that the Vortex isn’t intended to portray modern capitalist society. Rather, it’s a carefully drawn and unsparing portrait of the movement that Galluzzo thinks will replace capitalist society. Critical Aquarianism, in other words, was never a challenge to the Vortex—it was the Vortex. Sedulously shielded from the Brutal realities of life behind potent force fields of middle class privilege, the critical Aquarians went through the motions of their artificial lives under the pretense that their actions mattered. As the pretense wore off, many of them became Apathetics or Renegades, though this took a less dramatic form than it did in the movie: a haircut, a new wardrobe, and a change of reading material usually did the trick quite adequately.
We can take this further, though, because Galluzzo isn’t wrong in pointing out that the artificial existence of the Vortex has a lot in common with the transhumanist fantasies so popular with Silicon Valley tech-bros these days. What he fails to notice is that the movement he supports doesn’t differ from those fantasies in any way that matters. Central not only to Marxism but to the entire spectrum of radical political ideologies in the Western world is the conviction that human nature is entirely a product of cultural forces, and these in turn are produced by such material considerations as the ownership of the means of production.
It’s a perennial theme of these ideologies that the way people behave nowadays is entirely capitalism’s fault. Replace the current system with a alternative based on some other ideology, and in theory, people will behave the way well-meaning leftist intellectuals think they ought to behave. Notice how close this is to the tech-bro dreams just mentioned. In both cases, you’ve got a bunch of intellectuals insisting that humanity is nothing more than raw material to be reshaped into whatever form their ideology demands. It’s purely a difference of means: the tech-bros want to make the rest of us conform to their fantasies by way of new technologies, the socialists want to do exactly the same thing by way of new social forms.
We don’t yet know how the tech-bro version will turn out, though the evidence so far suggests that “not well” is a good summary. We do know how the radicals’ version works, and the same summary applies even more forcefully. No matter what kind of social straitjacket you force them into, as the saying is, humans gonna human. Even if you take children, isolate them from society, and raise them according to ideologically correct notions—and of course this has been tried, too, many times over—you’re not going to end up with angels.
What you’ll end up with, rather, are brittle, neurotic, unhappy children poorly equipped for life, because human beings are organisms, not machines. They have their own hardwired imperatives, put there by millions of years of evolution, and this means that they can’t simply be programmed in any way you like. In exactly the same way, what Galluzzo and his peers are trying not to realize is that societies are organisms, not artifacts. You can sometimes improve them in certain ways, within certain hard limits, but trying to construct one from scratch on the basis of some seemingly plausible theory is like claiming that you can design and build a better tree.
I think this is one of the things that Boorman had in mind when he made the fake god Zardoz a gigantic flying head. Part of that image came from The Wizard of Oz, as the film itself makes clear, but it’s also a mordant critique of talking heads, notionally disconnected from the realities of embodied existence, who preach whatever doctrines benefit the inmates of the Vortex: a class to which too many of the critical Aquarians belonged, and also one well represented in today’s notionally alternative culture.
The stunning final scene of the film, in which the wrecked flying head becomes a Paleolithic cave dwelling, offers a crisp rebuttal to that pretense of detachment. It reminds us that inside every talking head, the same primeval patterns remain, as powerful and irrefutable as they have always been. Any meaningful attempt to make sense of the futures that will take shape as industrial society unravels will have to take those inescapable patterns into account.
Excellent post! I think I’ve personally treaded the path from Idealist Utopian, to now accepting the vagaries, evils and uncertainties of the world. I fear that I may be turning into one of those cynical Apathetics! Any tips for avoiding that fate?
Three paragraphs in, I couldn’t help thinking that someone had been speed-reading Plato while tripping on acid… 😉
Nice article!
Not directly related, but did you ever get into the author Gene Wolfe? Despite reading fantasy and Sci-fi for a lot of my life, I only recently read him, and I’m obsessed.
Wow. What an interesting post. It really helps clarify the forces in play that shaped our culture in the past, and how it arrived to where we are today. Gonna have to reread this one a couple more times.
JMG wrote, “…to make movies profound through sheer visual disorientation.”
The movie “Easy Rider” comes to mind, a drug filled story which cinematically is quite impressive.
It appears that the wealth and expansion of the middle class in the U.S. after WW2 through about 1980 allowed for a more leisure pace in life with less stress, but in turn also allowed for the increase of recreational drug use – the effects which are still being felt today. This drive to create or exist in a fantasy reality today seems to be a significant obstacle to dealing with The Long Descent.
One modern myth i prescribe to is Arthur Koestler suggestion that we need a new calendar and his theory was, pardon me if its bad paraphrase folks, that our condition of life ending solely on our own through earthly tribulations ended after the first atomic weapon was unleashed. Now there we can all die together at blink of an eye. Therefore today i say Happy new Year P.H. 79 folks
The 1970s certainly had a lot of memorable dystopian future movies and shows: Soylent Green, most of the Planet of the Apes movies, Zardoz, Logan’s Run, A Clockwork Orange, Rollerball. They were certainly evocative of the spirit of the times. 1970s Hollywood cinema in general had a reputation for being notoriously dark and gritty. G-rated movies almost completely disappeared! One has to wonder what would have happened had George Lucas died in a motorbike accident and Steven Spielberg was eaten by a shark in terms of popular culture!
You wrote: “It’s a perennial theme of these ideologies that the way people behave nowadays is entirely capitalism’s fault. Replace the current system with a alternative based on some other ideology, and in theory, people will behave the way well-meaning leftist intellectuals think they ought to behave. Notice how close this is to the tech-bro dreams just mentioned.” This next to a picture of soldiers with the caption: “Khmer Rouge soldiers. Like so many others, they thought they were creating a better world.”
Reminded me of another movie quote: “Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that”
—- Malcolm Reynolds’s, “Serenity”
And round and round we go. ‘‘Twas ever thus?
Thanks for the as-usual insightful essay. Yes, a bit unusual but only the vector as opposed to theme. I so enjoy this site!
You got to that one quick. For those who missed it, I mentioned Galluzzo’s book and my own review of it in the last open post. You can read my review here:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/zardoz-critical-aquarians-and-degrowth-utopias
One thing I liked about Galluzzo’s book was how it he talked about imperfection in utopia, and how he supports degrowth, though I weary of Marxism in critical literature.
I suppose that is why I have enjoyed so much music from independent labels, and books by independent researchers and publishers. They are at least creating their own thing while they are talking. Rather fond of musty libraries though, much better for information / knowledge searching than google.
The way I see it is these and other independent types forming their own subcultures beneath whatever the neocameralist McGovCorp has running if that is the direction the overtaking entrpreneurial class moves things (as it seems to me at the moment).
Thats darkly funny to this Gen Xr that Roszak thought the boomers were our saviors. To that all I can say is OK
I remember that movie. Charlotte Rampling’s character’s hormones turned on during her attempt to interrogate Zed and the machine called it out for everyone else to see. It was definitely a weird movie.
As for “Now of course there were plenty of ringing calls for action in the literature of critical Aquarianism. Quite reliably, though, the action was supposed to be done by someone other than the author.”
That instantly reminded me of Richard Heinberg. He had this brilliant plan to move 50 million Americans from the cities to organic subsistence farms where there could do handicrafts in their copious spare time. He of course was excluded from that group because of his expertise. This was all laid out in “Muse letter 189” which has since gone missing from the archive. At the time it made me mad enough to stick in my mind.
Speaking of hypocrisy, “In just 9 months, Mark Zuckerberg has cruised in his superyacht so much that the $300 million vessel has burned 2 million liters of diesel and spewed 5,300 tons of CO₂. The Facebook co-founder has now sent his yacht to the La Ciotat shipyard in France for repairs and upkeep.”
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-superyacht-in-repairs-08052025.php
A yacht tender also follows the main yacht around of course.
Partly inspired by the discussion on the Mitigation post, I wrote a new poem called: Adapt, Adopt, Adept
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/adapt-adopt-adept
Your statements near the end remind me of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” I’ve always found that one haunting.
The poem’s moral is quite simple: no matter how far “social progress” takes us (commanded by what he fittingly calls “the gods of the marketplace”), the natural “gods of the copybook headings” will always remind us of the brutal realities of life.
@David Ritz: G-Movies are dead again. Hasn’t exactly been a good thing for cinema, especially if you’re a parent.
The exterminators outfits look ridiculous. Also ugly and not terribly practical for warfare/trying to harm others who are either running away or fighting back. You’d lose a battle with a thornbush and are vulnerable to sunburn, a thrown rock or being poked with a pointy stick, and you’re easy to see from a distance. I bet they weren’t thought up by someone who had to wear them, either in universe or as actors.
Thank you from a 71 year old Boomer. Unlike most of the movies seen since the 70s this one stuck. I need to re-view it.
As I mentioned in my review, the seventies were the golden age of SciFi films until Star Wars came along and fracked it all up. Death Race 2000 is a particular favorite.
John:
IMO, perhaps the greatest clairvoyance ever put to music: Jonathan King “Everyone’s Gone To The Moon”. What do you think? Didn’t he nail the dystopia we’ve created pretty much exactly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ks2TPPyho&list=RD73ks2TPPyho&start_radio=1
I can hardly think of a thing we’ve “bettered” in the last sixty years which didn’t, ultimately, turn out to have severe downside consequences arguably worse than the problems. Where is the learning and wisdom?
A few years back you wrote a very helpful and hopeful post on spiritual warfare. Maybe a follow on post, might be the missing, magical ingredient?
re: silicon valley
The top level “tech bros” are very different people to the rank and file, which as I understand it these days, have all gone dangerhair and troonytunes. And the ones that haven’t, got boiled off. I think I would summarize and say it’s probably the greatest collection of imbalances the world has ever seen. Not many normies there. It’s definitely the most family hostile place I’ve ever seen, which means it ultimately doesn’t have a future. Ironic for such a forward looking and thinking place. Perhaps they sense that at some level and part of their thinking is trying to stave off that lack of future? Don’t know.
I can’t tell you how many times I saw someone get married, have kids and then a few months later announce they were leaving for some other part of the country, because they now have kids and well, silicon valley is family hostile.
There were a class of people having families and putting up with the misery though – H1Bs. They’d put up with just about anything. Management loved them for that. A little too much. It was really depressing to watch.
—
Is it just me or does that flying head look a lot like Karl Marx?
I think I know who inspired this week’s post… *g*
As for the tech-bros, no, they’re not planning to reshape humanity; they’re planning to replace it with AI, according to this article: https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/did-an-ai-company-just-fire-someone
Apparently, the discussion among these people isn’t about whether humanity should be omnicided, but HOW.
I first wondered if I should post it on the covid forum, because it does throw a certain light on how that one went…
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current only to 7/14). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May
J Guadalupe Villarruel Zúñiga, father of CRPatiño’s friend Jair, who suffers from terminal kidney and liver damage, respond favorably to treatment and be cared for at home. May he also remain in as good health as possible, beat doctors’ prognosis, and enjoy with his wife and children plenty of love, good times and a future full of blessings.
May 12 year old Sebastian Greco of Rhode Island, who recently suffered a head injury, make a prompt and complete recovery with no lasting problems.
May MindWinds’ father Clem be healed of his spinal, blood and cardio infections and returned to good health and wholeness; and may he and his family keep up a robust sense of humor and joy in each others’ continued company.
May Marko’s newborn son Noah, who has been in the hospital for a cold, and Noah’s mother Viktoria, who is recovering from her c-section, both be blessed with good health, strength, endurance, and protection, and may they swiftly they make a full recovery.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Okay, yes. I have no belief in utopia, including the capitalist mode. But I wonder: what is the essential qualities of the human organism that explains why projects to perfect society fail. What is a functional society? Has one ever been seen? Is it a problem of scale?
I remember Zardoz. Bill and I saw it a few years ago (thank God for libraries and DVDs).
What a bizarre, incoherent nightmare-scape!
A few notes on what I remember:
The Vortex inhabitants fell into apathy because they had nothing to live for. No future, no children, no past, just endless millennia of ennui.
No wonder our heroine fell madly in lust with Sean Connery! He was a real man, walking through fields of daisies wearing the loose, outward form of men. Men who obviously couldn’t sire children.
I have a practical mind and am easily distracted by practical considerations. Where did the folks in the Vortex get their food? What was the power source? Who maintained it? Who made the guns and supplied the ammo? You never see the people slaving behind the scenes in these movies or books.
Sean Connery is wearing a badly tied, poorly cut langot, one of the many, many forms of men’s undergarments developed by cultures who don’t have elastic. If you design a planet or fantasy world and don’t have elastic (or spandex), you quickly default for men to langots, fundoshis, breechclouts, loincloths, or boxers with drawstrings. Ladies have similar issues, especially since they don’t have outdoor plumbing. Traditional clothing MUST allow its user to urinate and defecate without ruining expensive, handwoven, hand-sewn garments.
Sean Connery should be wearing some kind of body armor as every warrior does, even it’s boiled leather. Maybe his coolness factor compensates for the lack of armor. Every culture’s fighting men wore armor. IIRC, a few years back, Greek special forces soldiers wore replicas of what looked ceremonial Middle-Eastern armor (Babylonian? Sumerian?) They were weirdly shaped. But when the Greek soldiers put them on, they could move easily and fight.
It’s a reminder that in Hollywood, the coolness factor and gratuitous female nudity will always trump reality, even when reality makes itself known in other ways.
@ The Other Owen #17
I wonder who folks like this think they’re building their brave new world for.
The future belongs to the people who show up for it.
If you refuse to have children and make it difficult for other people who do have families, you’ve said that the future ends with you.
I went to see Zardoz when it came out with a group of friends. We found it, well, interesting I suppose., although one of the ladies couldn’t stop giggling every time Sean Connery appeared wearing his kilt. Two thoughts on the wider issues.
There’s no doubt that that period was full of silly things and impracticable ideas, but there was also an unmistakable change in the atmosphere, and the beginning of the understanding of the importance of environmentalism. The change was rapid and unmistakable, as much in poplar culture as in government policy (the UK set up an Environment Department in, I think, 1973.) The filthy, dirty London of my youth (I though St Paul’s was made of black stone) changed radically for the better in those years, as coal fires were outlawed and vehicle emissions put under control. People began to buy and display posters with “Here is the Earth, don’t use it all at once.” Yes, a lot of Aquarian nonsense was talked at the time (I speak as an Aquarian actually) but on the whole the movement, in my observation, did more good than harm.
Which leads to the second point: the baby and the bathwater problem. George Orwell was fond of saying the Socialists never claimed to make the world perfect, only better, and the argument that the world cannot be made perfect is too easily twisted into an argument that it can’t be made better at all, so why bother. This was exactly the argument used by slave-owners and traders in Britain at the start of the nineteenth century: slavery has been around for millennia, it’s an economic necessity and no economy can manage without it, take your utopian ideas somewhere else. Alternatively, I was born in a 1930s house, one of the first to be built for rent with indoor toilets and a bathroom. Great was the scorn at the time when these plans were announced: the working class never washed, so what was the point of including bathrooms? Utopian dreamers.
That said, the remains of the Aquarian movement can be co-opted like anything else. At least in Europe, the old Green parties have turned into parodies of themselves, more interested in making life grimmer and less enjoyable than making the world better. My own impression is that sadly, the heart has completely gone out of what you describe at the Aquarian tradition, and its leaders have effectively given up.
Just add to the list of surrealist movies from that era: El Topo, anything by Werner Herzog. Did anyone mention 2001? John Lennon’s How I won the War, pretty much any of the Beattles films.
Seventies sci-fi and other genre films were willing to accept a miss or two for one hit out of the park. There is often more of a payoff, especially later on when the special effects no longer dazzle and it’s easier to notice the underlying themes (also easier when you get older). Two in particular are the original Alien (working class screwed by their employer) and Outland (crime and greed will always be with us ’cause human gonna human).
An interesting record of both movie.aking and contemporaneous views of occultism would be comparing The Wicker Man (still holds up!), the remake of The Wicker Man (Edward Woodward’s revenant should have exacted revenge for this atirocity) and Midsommer (not bad to watch but highlights so much that is irritating about the modern intellectual artist).
Following on Theresa’s comment at #21: “Traditional clothing MUST allow its user to urinate and defecate without ruining expensive, handwoven, hand-sewn garments.” Let’s not forget menstruate – without modern conveniences it can be awkward, to say the least. (Said as a man who had no trouble stopping by the relevant aisle to pick up my wife’s “feminine care” products…)
re silicon valley, the latest wave of automation of things like retail jobs and AI. I can’t help but notice that it usually seems to make life worse for ordinary people, and a lot of us don’t like it but there doesn’t seem to be an easy to avoid it or say ‘no’. It’s being forced down our throats against a lot of our wills.
In general, ‘Stop the world, I want to get off. I don’t like the future they’re making for us.’
It seems likely that such things will crash and burn in the long run due to energy and other resource constraints, but we have to live through the intervening years first, and I don’t know how long this period is going to last.
How to shorten this period, and how to live a decent life during it?
The Amish strike me as an example of a group of people who left their society and thrived. Is there something I am missing? Their lifestyle seems to be turning heads these days.
>I wonder who folks like this think they’re building their brave new world for.
Build? They stopped doing that in the ashes of the .com bubble. What arose after that was something highly parasitic. They were desperate to survive. So no brave new world. You’ll get a lot of angry talk out of them if you point this out, but much like Briggite’s Bulge – look for what they’re not denying.
Commentariat, the Apathetics aren’t cynical, they’re just passive and inert. The best advice I can give for avoiding that fate is “don’t watch television.”
Sven, a case could be made, but it wasn’t me. 😉
Bonaventure, I read the four books of The Book of the New Sun when they first came out. I haven’t read any of Wolfe’s other work, though; I should probably revisit that.
Drhooves, that was certainly part of it!
Hawk, a good-sized hurricane releases more energy than you’d get by setting off all the nuclear warheads in the world at once. I see the notion that nuclear war could exterminate our species as one more example of the overinflated human ego at work; it would kill a lot of people, sure, but leave more of us alive than there were on the planet in 1945.
David, nah, there were also plenty of G-rated movies — keep in mind that I was 7 going on 8 when the 1970s dawned, and G-rated movies were most of what I watched back then. It’s just that so many of the G-rated movies were incredibly bad. If you ever want an evening of really awful entertainment, you might try The Boatniks (1970), Pufnstuf (1970), or any of the Benji movies (1974 on).
Laughingsong, I admit to now and again, in my weaker moments, hoping that people will learn from repeated catastrophic failure. Then perspective returns, and I realize that we almost cetainly never will.
Justin, I did indeed. Your comment piqued my interest; I looked up the book, ordered a copy, and decided it would make a really good follow-on to last week’s post. Thank you for the inspiration, and also for the poem.
Siliconguy, yes, I remember when Richard did that. That was when I realized that the peak oil movement wasn’t actually going to matter two farts in a cat-5 hurricane.
EchoEcho, I’ve loved that poem since I first read it:
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
Pygmycory, oh, granted. One of the things about early 1970s movies is that the costumes only made sense if you assumed the designers were binging on acid with a little too much rat poison in it.
Darrell, it’s readily available. I made a point of getting a copy of the novel, which is also easy to find these days.
Justin, I actually thought the first Star Wars film wasn’t bad. It was once that became a huge hit and a big money franchise that everything useful got bled out of the corpse of science fiction generally.
Gnat, it’s pretty solid.
Other Owen, fascinating. That really does support my thesis that the internet has become possessed by evil spirits — those who are too deeply enmeshed in it are becoming as crazily unbalanced and dysfunctional as the spirits themselves.
Athaia, I’m increasingly convinced that the whole large language model (“AI”) boom is going to turn out to be the most catastrophic boom-and-bust cycle in history. The sheer volume of fantasies being piled onto brute force statistical prediction promises one for the record books.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Brandi, well, what do you mean by “a functional society”? What functions do you expect it to carry out?
Teresa, oh, granted, the lack of visible means of support was rather striking. It echoed a lot of the old 1960s and 1970s communes, though, which never produced as much as they consumed (and made up the difference by drug dealing, or simply sponging off some sugar daddy or other until the cash ran out.) As for the rest, I thought Zardoz was interesting, in that it also put the male lead into a costume designed to show plenty of gratuitous flesh!
Aurelien, there were certainly some important reforms made around that same time, but I question how many of them came from the critical Aquarian movement — it’s indicative, for example, that the major environmental laws in the US (the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, for example) were all signed into law by a Republican president. As for your second point, the question there is whether socialism does actually improve anything — as I see it, it’s simply one of the ways for a managerial aristocracy to replace an agricultural aristocracy, with all the mixed benefits and drawbacks that this implies.
Stephen, there’s no shortage of other examples!
Gollios, sure. Silent Running was a major fave of mine back in the day, to name another.
Pygmycory, a useful question, and one to consider in a future post.
James, the Amish didn’t try to replace existing social forms with a brand new system drawn up according to abstract considerations. They simply didn’t want to leave the 18th century — and since they already had a functional system in the 18th century, it worked.
To be honest, I do like the original Star Wars movie and Empire Strike Back… and handful of others from the 80s. The money franchise of the whole Star Wars thing is what bled the force out of it. Glad you enjoyed the book. I thought you might find it interesting.
You responded to OtherOwen: “That really does support my thesis that the internet has become possessed by evil spirits….”
Cha, and they trained AI on it! Kinda explains everything about it really….
Yes in agreement my friend. The info of the volcano that unleashed in 536(hence the grail story revelations) had the impact of 80 neutron bombs or even higher if my memory serves me right. i just like the idea of a new calendar. He was my go to reader in the Stanford library when you were able to sneak in and read what the special people read. Great essay by the way. My muse is like punk rocker who does not accept no for an answer and if you do not answer plays hazing games with you. Hence still on this tour listening to the earth and she is funny like you say Not saying what i thinks she should say. But the more i dont think ,more is revealed.
“Hawk, a good-sized hurricane releases more energy than you’d get by setting off all the nuclear warheads in the world at once. I see the notion that nuclear war could exterminate our species as one more example of the overinflated human ego at work; it would kill a lot of people, sure, but leave more of us alive than there were on the planet in 1945.”
There has been a long-running collaborative scenario of a post-apocalyptic world where there is a different Soviet officer in charge of a key station in 1983 if you are interested.
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/1983:_Doomsday
“David, nah, there were also plenty of G-rated movies — keep in mind that I was 7 going on 8 when the 1970s dawned, and G-rated movies were most of what I watched back then. It’s just that so many of the G-rated movies were incredibly bad. If you ever want an evening of really awful entertainment, you might try The Boatniks (1970), Pufnstuf (1970), or any of the Benji movies (1974 on).”
One has to wonder if the Japanese may have conquered the world of family entertainment in the 1980s and 1990s in the same way they conquered the world of video games in our reality had it not been for the Blockbuster Era.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MediaNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983
JMG,
That was a great post. Thank you very much for this.
When we get the Nuke Plants rolling up on our moon, surely the Utopia is not far behind!
The subsidy dumpster industry continues it’s story arc to the stars.
I came of age in the seventies, and thanks to my working class background, I’ve always been suspicious of better world schemes. Forget other peoples money, it was other peoples labor that I was protective of, and the big brained theorists clean hands were a big red marker through their betterment propositions. Namely, do as I say, not as I do.
Looking forward to tracking down Zardoz, and getting some Roszak on my shelf.
This connects to a point I was thinking to add to last weeks huge comment section, but better still offers a tie in for some of my recent exploration of our Age of Aquarius.
First let me preface my point by saying that I would deeply appreciate a couple more sentences connecting the critical Aquarians to the sign of Aquarious, I think I have the vibe vaguely, but would appreciate some more threads of connection.
To my point, healing from the chaos of gender roles, and the rise of meaningful cultural forms in responce to (gestures wildly around) both are likely to start in the same place. The gutter as we call it. I went to a Rainbow Gathering national this year. Good times, I enjoyed it alot, but the gathering has changed very much in the 12 years since I last went. Smaller, more punk, less hippie, and with people much more hurt on the surface by times than there used to be; it is a much rougher and I suspect less sterile scene.
There were a fair amount of very dumb relationship drama at the event. Nudity, inexperienced young people, old people with arrested development, and copious drugs all contributing their part in fostering that. But there were also some couples I got to meet and befriend among the whole who had some very wholesome relationships which have lasted a long time and felt good to be around; none of which fit any of the molds we used to use, nor were they formless malarky; they were real partnerships forged by the one force powerful enough to connect people and over come all the cussedness and reasons that people aren’t worth connecting wiht; necessity. I meet some couples who were strong together because each person absolutely needed the other, could not do with out. Relationships and communities, and movements I think are united that people are going to be too lazy to do them well in most cases, unless then need to do them well to avoid terrible consequences.
This is why the middle class is sterile, it always has an escape hatch and a safety net. At this rainbow there were of course many middle class festival kids, and tourists, and nostalgic retirees, but there were a good number of proper gutter trash traveling kids who were their because it is a vital networking and ride hopping node in their larger culture. There isn’t an idealism in me for the specific cultural modes I saw emerging at the rainbow gathering, but seeing the ‘dirty kids’ there (a term used largely for a sub culture whose core is not in their thirties, and who are now running many important cames and infrastructure) I realized that they were an example of a culture forming based on need. There is no niche for people with their (generally) complicated histories, mental health struggles, substance histories, and so on in main stream life; but life finds a way.
If America were to follow the Soviet Union into a massive fall of power, I’d expect something like these dirty kids, or a comparable sub culture from another part of society to influence a flavor of the coming American gopnik.
It is where folks need a new social form first that the seed crystals start. Not want, dream or idealize; but need. In my home community I see this, there is some cool community going on here, even sometimes friends setting one another up for blind dates and the like, doing the things the Aquarians talked about in abstract, but not because of a bettering of human conditions, and not in the clean peaceful enlightened way. But because we cannot coverthe taxes and the insurance bills if we don’t form communial bonds and share resources in ways tat skipped a few generations.
The bright thing is a defence of the Aquarian Flying Heads. Yeah their big master plans are kinda silly, but there is a real future for some of their ideas to be scavanged by grittier more vibrant cultures, and put to use in their origional or in novel contexts. At the Rainbow Gathering I went to a meeting on intentional communities and, being in a cross mood that day because of some drama elseware, I heard the same hippie commune platatudes I’ve personally known for 20 years and can trace in history back about 60 years; and hearing that, I gave them a piece of my mind, about how the ammo and cammo compound cultures in America were anymore better hippies than the fit to be tied and dyed folk; I went on which a lot of critique beyond anything relivent to this conversation group, but I stopped to thank the collective back to the land IC culture. There are people who don’t live in flying heads who are really truly using ideas and notions and philosophy pieces left behind.
Some of the critical Aquarians did inspire people to go out and fail, and the real treasure was the failures we made along the way.
A very long time ago, during a discussion with my missionary father about the evangelical concept of “eternal life” and why, although it packed the “eternal”, it somehow seemed to lack some of the things that I associate with “life” (like death and birth), I had the “lightbulb” flash moment of revelation – which was this.
If you eliminate death, you must also eliminate birth. It stands to reason… if no one can ever leave, sooner or later you will have to stop letting anyone new come in. So, to all of those who have fantasised (in my presence) about endlessly prolonging the span of human life, and/or eliminating death, I’ve always had the rejoinder – “well, what have you got against babies?” (which often gets a doubletake – “say what?”)
And if you eliminate both birth and death, you also eliminate the whole point of the bit in the middle, which presumably involves growth, learning, risk, challenge, trial and error, (also trial and accomplishment), consequences, experience, perspective, and all of those things that can only happen during that bit in the middle, between birth and death, which we call “living”.
I have not seen Zardoz (himself has… and greatly enjoyed hearing me read this post out loud, for which he thanks you)… but the depiction of the Apathetics, in the circumstances, does not surprise me a bit. 🙂
>Other Owen, fascinating. That really does support my thesis that the internet has become possessed by evil spirits — those who are too deeply enmeshed in it are becoming as crazily unbalanced and dysfunctional as the spirits themselves
Perhaps someday, I’ll tell you the story of how I saw the equivalent of a coin flip heads 10 times in a row. Yes, there’s something not quite friendly ruling that place. I would say you stay or get boiled off, but there was something, something that I concluded was not my friend, that wanted me to stay and wanted that desperately. I’m glad I didn’t, looking back. Shrug, I wouldn’t be here, if I did. I’d be dead already.
As far as the internet in general goes, I don’t know if it’s a law, call it the Law of Internet Insanity, but if you interact with the internet long enough, it will drain all your sanity away from you. I don’t care who you are or what part of the internet you’re interacting with. Sanity – gone. I’m semi-disciplined about the time I spend on the internet these days, I don’t just sign on unless I have a reason for it first, like some question I need to answer, etc.
And with that, I’ll see you all again in a few. As the kids say – “Go touch grass”. Or mow it. The grass is calling, it’s saying “mow me, mow me”.
Well, I’ve never heard of Zardoz before, but your analysis maps very well with my experience in leftward circles. I used to be a Marxist, but I eventually became skeptical of the Marxist theory of history and realized that ‘progress’, technology, and productivism are the environmental problems, not solutions. After that I got interested in anarchism and degrowth, but as you have discovered, the degrowth movement is by-and-large impotent because it has a laser focus on making everyone else ‘degrow’ and little focus on self-degrowth. So I fell out with that ideology as well.
To give the degrowthers their due, I have found some who are genuine. But the genuine ones aren’t the affluent marketers of the project in academia, they’re usually young people who have little money to spend on consumer products anyway. The ones I’ve met in my city are very frugal and try to create systems of mutual aid that exist outside of the neoliberal market economy. They have a ‘really free market’ where people donate excess goods so other people can use them. They teach people how to sew and repair clothes, and they give gardening classes and encourage people to grow food in their yards to reduce dependence on the global food industry.
That’s the only place degrowth can be effective: self-degrowth.
I watched Zardoz by chance in a real cinema some 20 years ago. It is so rare one goes into a movie without having the slightest idea what it is about! I was duly impressed by the total weirdness of the clothes, the props and the plot.
Any reader of yours knows how much you appreciate certain books of Le Guin and Roszak. I do also remember your using the story of Ormelas in a quite different way, asking readers if they were willing to walk away. Has your thinking changed on this? It is of course easy to imagine a plot element that stops those who walk away from actually helping the child. Dissidents in the Soviet Union had a very small radius of action.
None of this is to take away from your main point, which actually reminds me quite a bit of your Wagner series.
Say what you will about their idealism, but I miss hippies. Counter cultures are now so quickly assimilated that they don’t seem to have any effect whatsoever except to inspire the next round of entertainment.
Thoughtful essay this week. I watched the movie, and found it hilarious, in an unintended horrible way. Also, a painfully obvious critique of all utopian movements: they created the perfect society, only to have it fail.
As you write about the abject failure of human-improvement schemes which are inevitably the product of abstract intellectual notions based on the fallacy of the perfectibility of humans since the writings of Rousseau, I cast my mind to the current and long-ongoing tale of the “60s Scoop” which saw thousands of indigenous children taken from their homes by child protection services and placed in well-meaning white families to raise as their own. A very large number, despite being raised from infancy, have gone back searching for their roots, because, like many schemes, it presumes humans to be far more malleable than we are. It assumes something called a universal human being, which can be interchanged with all others on the planet, if one just teaches them the ‘proper’ attitudes and beliefs.
I made a comment a few months ago about independent variables in human beings, and I think one category is genetics. I am beginning to wonder if the genetics of different pools of people don’t predispose them to certain attitudes and characteristics of the cultures from which they come, which shapes us as much as the cultures we grow up in.
The broad intellectual assumption is that culture is the dominant factor in determining behaviour, but I am beginning to wonder how little this is true, based on the aforementioned “60’s Scoop” and how very many of those children are seeking their ‘true’ heritage, rejecting the one they received and also based on the reports of identical twins separated at birth, who nonetheless, despite vastly different family upbringings, turn out to be very similar in many regards, including taste, sense of style, humour, and culture, i.e. preference for sports, music, &c.. Apparently genetics is, while not the sole determining factor, obviously a very strong one.
Furthermore, any intellectually abstract concept of ‘improvement’ is wholly to the taste of the person in question promoting such a scheme. Improve society by teaching children to be more peaceable? Produce young people who aren’t able to deal effectively with others aggression who fall apart when the going gets hard. Improve society by making people more in touch with their feelings? Generation who gets easily upset when things don’t go their way. Whatever is defined as ‘improvement’ invariably has a downside, usually never considered, often a critical weakness.
“a good-sized hurricane releases more energy than you’d get by setting off all the nuclear warheads in the world at once” – I would object that if the average inhabitant of East Providence had to choose between ONE nuclear warhead or one cat-5 hurricane to hit the city, only very few people will be convinced by this logic to choose the former.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Hey JMG
I have had a curiosity about watching Zardoz, and also Galuzzo’s commentary on it, for a long time. I think I should finally indulge in it.
But in regards to the Critical Aquarians, I think being all theory and no practicality when it upsets their “gravy train” is a common habit for most intellectuals these days, so I don’t think one can say that it is a fault unique to them. That being said, I wonder if there were any Critical aquarians who were actually active and practical in any way, or if there are any people who put there ideas into practice at least?
Mark Boyle the “Moneyless man”, an Irish writer who famously spent a year or more living without money is the only example that I can think of at the moment.
https://moneyless.org/book-moneyless-manifesto
I read The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent in the 80’s, in that book the women were inside the walls and the men outside. I was newly married and in my 20’s and thought the book was great. I reread it a few years ago when I was in my late 50’s and my 40th anniversary was a few years away. I thought it was stupid and unrealistic. The men would have found a way to build another civilization and the women would have gossiped and back-stabbed each other back to the stone age. Who Gets To Live in the Fortress stories seem to have been quite popular for a time. Maybe it’s related to the nuke fears that boomers and gen-x were force fed.
@gnat #16 – “I can hardly think of a thing we’ve “bettered” in the last sixty years which didn’t, ultimately, turn out to have severe downside consequences arguably worse than the problems. Where is the learning and wisdom?”
Then you would probably find it interesting to talk to my father who was born shortly after WWII in a large industrial city in western Europe. The son of seemingly deeply traumatized parents whose parents in turn immigrated from eastern Europe and started with more or less nothing. Growing up in a totally grey city full of rubble, dangerous places and loneliness. From time to time – like most of the children of his age – subjected to practices that were totally normal back then but would count as child abuse today, and for good reason. He could tell you about the hard work, struggle and sometimes sacrifice – both individually and collectively as a society to raise from the rubble and out of the shadow of the past. All I can say here is that yes, they succeeded. Both: My parents and society as a whole. Not without flaws and the result is far from perfect, but they achieved a lot. And as far as my knowledge goes – 60 years ago, the most difficult part of their work had not even begun.
I understand that growing up and living in a country that hadn’t seen the kind of destruction and misery that Germany experienced (if you live in such a country) may change that perspective … a little bit – but on the other hand nothing of the basis which is already on a level that it couldn’t even be bettered in the course of 60 years is solid and granted, which is true on both sides of the Atlantic. People seem to have forgotten who they are and where they came from and are throwing it all away, bit by bit. (Just like the generation of my parents – for all they have done right – has thrown away all the good and useful household stuff they’ve gotten from their parents which would last until today if they hadn’t. Well, I guess they, too, are not without flaws 😉 )
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Reading your essay I couldn’t help but think about the habit of “intradaytrading” or “microtrading” that so many are practicing to “earn” money. A few weeks ago, for example, I observed an acquaintance casually making money during a gathering of friends in this manner. I hadn’t even noticed if I hadn’t glanced over when I put out his phone. Some other friends are making between 1 and 15 k€ a year by means of microtrading. The thing with a vortex is this – if you’re in it, it’s hard to get out and it usually pulls you in unwanted directions…
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
This is one of my favorites of all your posts through the years.
Many thanks
@JMG,
I’m thinking Battlestar Galactica (aka Exodus in Space) deserves a rewatch these days, unless it’s just the excellent 2003 remake that had the Cylons created by Man, and rebel. “All this has happened before…”
@David Ritz, #34,
Any weeb will tell you the Japanese deserved to! There is a reason individual manga series regularly outsell the entire US comic book industry. I don’t know in terms of numbers how anime squares up against Western cartoons, but in terms of quality there isn’t much to of a contest.
Just want to provide a counterpoint to all the Star Wars hate I’m seeing. I know a lot of people here, including JMG, aren’t fans, but I think it’s valuable.
First, Star Wars and its success were a response to the self-important and often esoteric films of the time. It wasn’t loved by all, but many people wanted something fun and less heavy – the fairy tale in space was exactly what they needed. Especially if you were a kid.
I personally don’t get the “it’s just a mishmash of X and Y so it’s unoriginal” argument, but granting that, there’s no arguing Star Wars isn’t an aesthetic achievement. So many other moves tried and failed to capture the same look, and that aesthetic certainly helped resonate with the audience.
And it’s not like the story failed. My wife, who hadn’t seen Star Wars until we were dating, cried at Vader’s redemption. I know I wouldn’t have my love for storytelling or openness to spirituality had George Lucas not planted those ideas in my head.
Outside the movies, the EU has some stellar works. Star Wars became a playground for artists with all sorts of ideas. When Lucasfilm wasn’t a Disney property where everything was a calculated focus group effort, Star Wars was a great pulp setting churning out lots of entertaining stories – and some are pretty deep. I know a lot of people criticize the good-evil dichotomy of the setting, but Legacy of the Force really plays with that. It’s one of my favorite novel series.
I just hate seeing such a fun universe getting trashed all the time. I’m fine blasting the post-Disney stuff, but before then I think a good argument can be made for the franchise’s existence and why it means so much to so many people – myself very much included.
From “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’:
“They feel anger,
outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child.
But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile
place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were
done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and
be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in
Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the
chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.”
But it’s never stated *how much* the prosperity, beauty, and delight would wither and be destroyed. Would things just become ordinary? Or would there be floods, volcano eruptions, and cattle disease?
I agree that the US has never had a significant Marxist revolutionary group, but Europe certainly did. It still has many parties that trace their roots to Marxism, as do its social democracies.
I think it’s because European workers still remember when they were peasants, while the US never had a white peasant class. Memories of subjugation last a long time.
Omgosh, ZARDOZ! Haven’t thought about that movie in ages… my beau and I have it on dvd and used to watch it periodically back in the day… will certainly revisit soon with popcorn in hand after this marvelous post filled with insight and illumination… thank you JMG!
I don’t know, maybe it’s the old yogi in me but I’m starting to think that the only REAL and meaningful and vital change must come first from individual and personal transformation … and let the human collective evolve as it may.
Personal transformation (Self, soul, spiritual revelation) is hard work and in my opinion, requires Divine grace. Trying to reshape the collective just seems like so much ego drama to me. But only my opinion from my perspective. Maybe some are just born with a life mission to try to achieve social “justice”…who knows?? I’m getting very cynical in my old age… but wait… could it be wisdom😊😉?
@JMG et.al. … About the critical Aquarians and the ones who walked away from Omelas but did nothing to rescue the child …. We had a saying in my day about people like that: “N.A.T.O.” Meaning “No Action, Talk Only.”
Or as they say in Texas, “All hat and no cattle.”
What about Christianity? Didn’t Jesus come, incarnate god, to change the world? And didn’t he?
Hi John Michael,
Thanks for the err, interesting, visuals, and it’s a confident bloke who can wear such gear. It has of course been remarked upon elsewhere that some things cannot be un-seen. Yup.
Dude, what do you mean that we might have to dig dirt? That’s an outrage, such work is for other people. 😉
What’s that quote again something about being the change you wish to see in the world? I doubt very much that the aquarians wanted to share their perquisites, so why would they pursue a strategy for meaningful change which has any chance of success? Mind you, I’ve got some soil which needs digging…
Dunno about your take on the world, but lately I’ve been mentioning that soon down here there will be a situation where the demand for gas exceeds the supply. I’ve heard every other discussion on the subject than what reality may work out to be: enjoying using less of the stuff. All very unpopular, granted.
Cheers and enjoyed the sheer absurdity of this week’s essay. One of the scenes of the earnest looking folks from the Vortex looked to me like something Monty Python would spoof. Even the head gear looked similar to that worn in the Life of Brian film.
Chris
@Echoecho,
I liked the old star wars EU enough I wrote over 50 thousands words of fanfic set in it, and made fanart. It was the fandom I started out posting my stories in. You’re far from alone in this commentariat in liking it.
Disney Star Wars, though? No thanks. I’m reposting a few of my old stories to another site, but I’ve not writing anything star wars since Disney got hold of it, in the EU or Disney version. I’m still cheesed off with Disney for what they did with it. My current fandom to write in is warhammer 40k, and the perennial fandom I come back to again and again is Middle-Earth.
JMG,
Great article. It makes me think that, instead of being critical Aquarians, we all need to become Amish in a way instead.
One thing that surprised me about Amish communities is learning that they are not static, but vote on which new technologies to adapt. This strikes me as wise and something that jibes well with the coming Age of Remembrance.
We know many technologies have made society much worse in recent years. Social media and dating apps have wrecked the dating scene. Smart phones not only wreck the environment, but they wreck the brains of their users, turning them into dopamine addicts scrolling for their next hit. And on and on and on.
Why not just vote on which ones to keep and which ones to abandon?
@The Other Owen
The probability of a coin coming up heads 10 times in a row is one in 1024. The probability of a coin coming up with the same side 10 times in a row is one in 512. So while unusual, it’s well within the range of what one might experience.
There are any number of versions of “Omelas” where the characters do “rescue the child” (shutting down the Tabernacle, exploding the Life Clock, decapitating Thulsa Doom, releasing the Mathmos, phaser-ing Vaal in that Star Trek episode, sinking Atlantis yet again) and thereby bring the whole thing down in a cinematic cataclysm. The moment you see the barefoot elites in shimmery robes you know they’re likely to be running in crowds screaming and dodging falling paper maché archways by the end.
I see the difference as a plot convenience in all those other stories rather than a plot hole in Omelas. In the real world you can rescue a real child but you can’t just enter the self-destruct code to blow up the pain and death threaded within everything worth living for. Of course walking away doesn’t help the child either; that’s a large part of the point.
Justin, well, to each their own. I thought all the Star Wars movies after the first sucked.
Laughingsong, yep.
Hawk, if we’re going to have a new calendar I’d prefer it to be based on something more pleasantly absurd, like the birth of W.C. Fields (in which case this year would be 145 Anno Fieldi) or the writing of the Principia Discordia (in which case it’s 62 Anno Discordiae).
David, in the peak Cold War year of 1983, it’s quite possible that a nuclear war would have killed half the human population of the planet, but that would still leave more people than existed on earth at any point before the 20th century, thus my point. As for Japan, no, their entertainment became so popular because it was better than the crap our entertainment industry was churning out then.
Chronojourner, you’re welcome and thank you.
John, I see the whole “nukes on the moon” business as the exact equivalent of one of those sixty-year-old guys getting a bright red sports car and a combover and going to nightclubs to try to pick up 18-year-old chicks, in a vain attempt to prove to himself he’s not getting old. The more the ideology of progress fails to provide the Tomorrowland future it promised, the more extreme such rhetoric will get.
Ray, I’m delighted to hear this about the Rainbow Gathering, and I heartily agree that there’s much to be salvaged from the legacy of the hippie movement and critical Aquarianism alike. It’s just that, as you said, failure — and the honest admission of failure — has to come first.
Scotlyn, that was one of Boorman’s points, so I’m glad I managed to communicate it. Boorman wrote, in the foreword to the novel, that a lot of the inspiration for the story came from staring out the windows of his home in County Wicklow, and it was mostly filmed in Ireland, so you’re closer to it than most of us.
Other Owen, the metaphor from the Call of Cthulhu game is a valid one — interacting with the internet, as with any other horrifically unhuman intelligence, costs you sanity points…
Nephite, excellent! The frugal, do-it-yourself degrowthers are building the future, not just talking about it.
Aldarion, no, I haven’t changed my mind — I simply know how to use a complex, ambiguous metaphor in more than one way.
Glen, agreed — I still maintain a lot of habits I picked up in the trailing edge of hippie culture, and expect to do so until I die. The fact that the movement failed doesn’t mean that it has nothing to teach — just that the whole package doesn’t work as given.
Renaissance, the role of heredity in personality and consciousness is one of the third rails of modern consciousness, and that’s hardly surprising given how it’s been abused in the past. That said, how many of the children caught up in the “Scoop” are seeking their ethnic roots because your entire society has made a fetish of those roots, via indigenous land acknowledgments et al.?
Nachtgurke, sure, a nuclear weapon concentrates its destructive force in a much narrower area of space and time, thus causing more destruction at ground zero. I think you missed my point, which is that we don’t have anything like enough of them to wipe out our species. Remember that the impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs packed something like 15,000 times the explosive power of all the world’s nuclear arsenals — it took that to cause a genuine extinction crisis.
J.L.Mc12, “all talk and no action” is the besetting sin of intellectuals in all places and times, though it’s never universal. Yes, there were people who put critical Aquarian principles into action; however badly the commune scene worked in practice, the people involved in it actually did go out there and try to build a new society, for example.
Lisa, yeah, it was all over the place in those years. I’ll have to do some reading sometime and see if I can figure out what was behind it.
Nachtgurke, it’s little stories like that one that make me suspect we’re in for a really messy economic crisis sometime in the decade or so ahead of us…
Chris, you’re welcome and thank you.
Tyler, I thought it was hokey as all get-out when it originally appeared, but of course your mileage may vary.
EchoEcho, hey, whatever floats your Imperial Star Destroyer.
Njguy73, and is it true? Or is it simply the ideology currently popular in Omelas? Le Guin was good with ambiguities.
Tom, parts of the US did indeed have a peasant class — Southern sharecroppers can’t be described in any other terms. (To be precise, they were serfs.) But I’m going to point you back to what I actually wrote: “Of course the revolutionary Marxist proletariat is as mythical as a hippogriff these days” (emphasis added). There was indeed a revolutionary Marxist proletariat, of various sizes, in many European countries, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Over the course of the 20th century, it collapsed, partly because of the obvious failures of Marxism and partly because most people in the working classes discovered that they could get what they wanted via social democracy instead.
Jill, that’s certainly my take. The only real change has to begin from within.
Patricia, yep. It’s a very common failing among intellectuals.
Deborah, Christians believe that, but they also believe that Jesus could do that precisely because he was divine. We’re talking about human beings here, trying to create a perfect society on the basis of their own plans and ideas. I trust you notice the difference.
Chris, I hadn’t noticed the parallel with Monty Python, but of course you’re quite correct. It would almost work to have the Renegades divided into the Vortex Liberation Front, the Liberation Front of the Vortex, etc.! As for being the change you want to see in the world, ah, there you point exactly to the reason so many of these people made a big show of walking away from Omelas without ever actually going outside the city limits.
Dennis, excellent! My approach is to start by doing that yourself — deciding which new technologies you let into your own life and which you reject. People get astonishingly brittle if they find out you’re doing that.
Walt, see my previous comments about Le Guin’s ambiguities! She was good with those.
@pygmycory Nah, I get you. I’ve mostly stayed away from the Rat Canon, since it’s just not the same. The authors are all weird and not very good, and everything feels super manufactured. Doesn’t help that they threw out Lucas’ plans because Abrams doesn’t like the creator’s vision for the Force.
Nothing compares to the good old days where you’d get Karen Traviss inventing Mandalorian culture wholecloth or the sillyness of Glove of Darth Vader. Now it’s all tested to appeal to X or Y demo or get Z fact added to Wookieepedia.
Mobile Suit Gundam is my go-to sci-fi franchise, but its recent entries have been less than stellar. A friend wants me to get into 40K, but I just don’t vibe with the aesthetic.
Any chance you’re willing to share your fics for curious readers?
Interesting! I read Rozak’s Where the Wasteland Ends, but not any of his other works. I was impressed with his insight but, yeah, it doesn’t seem to have moved the needle too much and he is largely forgotten. Do you happen to know if Theodore Rozak himself took any of his recommendations to heart and made changes in his personal life?
I’ve sensed that part of the failure of intellectuals to create the various revolutions you write about here is the constraint that they need to remain respectable in their thought, word, and deed in order to maintain their position. I know one university professor who is very cautious about his public comments–and this is certainly wise in the age of cancellation and social media mobs–but the result is that he is very dull!
I used to spend time and energy inveighing against the unsustainability of industrial society, with it’s metastatic regulations and bureaucrats, but ultimately realized that this wasn’t accomplishing anything. These days I am more focused on what I can accomplish as an individual, which is pretty small potatoes. Maybe this is cowardly of me, and I should be doing more.
Who, in your opinion, is the best example from the Critical Aquarianism group who actually walked their talk?
We live in a very isolating time and I hope things are starting to move in a more connected direction. I’ve been hearing people say they’d rather be single than use dating apps, so they’ll try to find someone out in their city or they’ll go without. There’s a lot of talk of third spaces these days. The ones that seem to be thriving still have paid entry but it’s not too expensive: one beer for trivia night, a cup of coffee for a board game event. We’ll see how things go, but I do think the change needs to come from within the community for it to last.
Dennis,
People are surprised to find out that the Amish are allowed to use e-Bikes! They don’t have an arbitrary “no technology after the 1800s allowed” rule. Instead they pick and choose which technologies should be adopted on the basis of what is good for the community.
It sure seems like a better system than rich people inventing technology that benefits them and enslaves us and forcing it on us.
The Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock of 1620 were a bonded group sharing hardship and common beliefs. There were 102 of them (a few not a member of the pilgrim church, but English of a common culture).102 is well within the Dunbar number that allows for group knowing and commonality. At first they attempted to own and farm the land in common. They soon switched over to division of the land based on family households and productivity went up substantially and things went better. It’s the culture, man!
JMG,
Your missing the boat. Your could expand and turn todays essay in to an entire college course. Just pop over to your local Ivy education franchise with a power point and I bet they would sign you up on the spot for a guest lecturer spot. The key would be a title that would fit in well with the Jargon of the modern liberal arts establishment. Something like ” Zargon as an archetype for the post Aquarianism cultural zeitgeist.” Or “understanding the transition from marxism to structural racism using the unflinching lens of the unexpected cinematic masterpiece ,Zargon”. Other commenters are welcome to help me out in finding the best title for this exciting new class.
A post from left field to keep us on our toes, love it. Ivan Illich was definitely a member of the critical Aquarian society in his early writings such as Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality. But he became disillusioned in our ability to change against the forces of an epoch. His work in the 1990s exploring “the history of the senses” took him into new territory that went much deeper into exploring who we are and why this might be. For anyone interested in the full arc of Illich’s thinking over his life, I highly recommend David Caley’s Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey.
I vaguely remember the movie Zardoz. I have the novelization around somewhere. An episode of Venture Brothers made mention of it. I think I first read about transhumanism in an article on the Singularity by Ray Kurzweil. I wrote down part of the article that caught my attention: “The Singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered . . . This merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in gene research and nanotechnology, will result in a world where there is no distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between the physical and virtual reality.” At the time I first read that about 20 years ago in The Futurist magazine it sounded like a video game turned inside out. Now it just sound like an ecological disaster. I figure that if Mr. Kurzweil’s singularity actually occurs it will last about 8 months; give or take 3 weeks, before the mean rate of failure causes it to collapse. Altered biology still has the imperatives to feed, defecate, reproduce, and avoid getting eaten.
Well Mr. Greer, I’d rather have an Exterminator in front of me .. then a Terminator in my rear view mirror. ‘;] I often daydreamed of commandering one of those gapped-mouthed floating heads: just think of what incorrigible fun one could have, so long as the bullets were dodged! Yeah, flicks of that era were um, interesting, to say the least: ‘Flesh Gordon’ comes to mind.. but I digress. Saw both (No, not a double feature..), at the time, in what was a ‘bit-on-its-luck’ downtown theater, for a buck each! Cheap entertainment. What’s not to like, eh?
Also, with regard to Gollios’s reference to A L I E N, just conside if you will .. the Elons.. the Thiels.. the tech bros. et. al. – the modern-day Eternals – as the Company ‘Burkes’ of our day … always willing to sell out the proles, ALWAYS .. for a percentage!
JMG, are the critical Aquarians indicative of the kind of leadership we can expect throughout the Aquarians period? Heavenly ye gods, I sure hope not. Out of frying pan and into fire. But the tech bros certainly seem to have a lot of influence on the rising entrepreneur class….very nice essay.
@Bonaventure #3, Wolfe’s new sun trilogy was a treat.
I don’t know, seems to me more than a stretch to associate the Boorman dashed off Zardoz with a Le Guin short story pulled from her large body of work that includes the critically acclaimed Earthsea novels (highly regarded by that notorious hippy Harold Bloom), the Left Hand of Darkness, and the Disposessed, among others. To make the argument that a work of short fiction (or any fiction) must contain calls for political action (why did they walk away, why not try to overthrow the ruler?) and to extrapolate her views from there.
Good Evening JMG,
Thanks for the interesting column! I hadn’t heard of Zardoz, although I had seen Sean Connery’s outfit online. I have seen Logan’s Run so I hadn’t prioritized the genre.
I took the liberty of redrawing the meme by hand: https://www.deviantart.com/sirustalcelion/art/1227259410
I hope you’ll consider using this version the next time you need this image instead of the machine-generated one. I’ll admit this version is a bit slapdash as I had not budgeted drawing time into my evening, but if you like it I can finish and color it or make any adjustments you like.
But, but, but, our hopium powered spaceships will easily terraform Mars! Sheesh.
All you have to do is look at the Bezos rocket to see the combover guy has gone for the shaved head, acquired a plasticine arm decoration, and pointed his blue phallus at the stars!
‘ “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” – Napoleon Hill
Of course, the Think and Get Rich conman was born too early. He would fit right in today.
All these scammers are dependent on credulous suckers who will do the actual work to make their dreams.
Le Guin. What a giant.
My goodness. When _Zardoz_ came out I was in Crystal City, Virginia (across the Potomac from Washinton) for training as a Xerox technician. With evenings to kill I saw it in the theater in the underground mall. I recalled absolutely nothing of the plot.
Your summary reminds me of H.G. Wells’ _The Time Machine_ and the film made of it in 1960. Very similar in having an elite class, the Eloi, who do no work and seem very bloodless vs. the Morlocks, brutish descendants of the working class. Huxley’s _Brave New World_ had manipulation of artificially gestated fetuses to produce the needed workers and elite. More recent interpretations just replace the working class with machines and assume that everyone will be college educated artists or writers or connoisseurs of some type to fill their time.
For
me the problem of immortality or extremely extended life is that, even if one’s body retains health wouldn’t one just get tired of the sameness? Not the sameness of the environment for one could travel and change hobbies, sports, etc. but the sameness of oneself. I am one of those people who always has more projects than I can actually do. Many of them are programs of self-improvement: more regular sleep, more exercise, eat better, stop procrastinating, read more, computer less and so on. But at 76 I am not afraid to admit that I am tired of being the person who feels that I need to do these thing–I also know that if I accomplished all those goals I would create more–meditate more and longer, make more food from scratch, finish craft projects, finish the novel because that is the personality that I have. My mom and I once talked of our inability to understand people who couldn’t think if anything to do. It makes me tired to even think of 200, 300, 400 years of this personality. Does anyone else feel this way?
I don’t think your muse went off in an odd direction. To me it looks like an extension of the discussion of matri/patri archy. But, to be frank, I often tend to view things sideways.
#30 JMG, I’m not worried because I believe that AI can do all those wondrous things, but because these people do. It doesn’t matter if their beliefs are delusional, but what they *do* (to the rest of us) based on those beliefs, does. They have enough money and influence, and that, paired with their fervent desire to force their utopia on the rest of the planet, can do real damage.
“…until all that remained of the original transformative impulse were fading memories and a few nostalgic habits.“
And the gift shops, don’t forget the gift shops!
>The probability of a coin coming up heads 10 times in a row is one in 1024. The probability of a coin coming up with the same side 10 times in a row is one in 512. So while unusual, it’s well within the range of what one might experience.
Although 1 in 1000 odds are quite low. And you add to that the timing of it all. It’s one thing to be wandering around on a casino floor, killing time and getting lucky, but if it happened along with say, 1 or 2 other things right at the same time, you might start wondering. Let me know if you ever get tired of walking around in a casino, want to leave and then you hit the jackpot on a progressive.
“Remember that the impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs packed something like 15,000 times the explosive power of all the world’s nuclear arsenals — it took that to cause a genuine extinction crisis.”
Not to rubbish your point about man’s lack of capacity to self destroy but we know that 15000x the global nuclear capacity will cause an extinction crisis but we don’t know what the minimum necessary would be.
I saw that movie in college and it made no sense. Re-watching with your explanation, there does indeed seem to be a coherent major theme. (Although it’s still a rich cultural stew of ideas. ) I would have loved to have been in the meeting when they pitched it to Connery.
The scenes on the Ice planet and with Luke stranded in the swamp studying with Yoda are what make the Empire Strikes Back a good flick. The dialogue is a lot less corny than the original too. That was probably because it wasn’t directed by Lucas! Yet, as much as I rag on the Boomers, American Graffiti by Lucas is one of my favorite movies… Slackers by Richard Linklater is similar, but does for Gen X what American Graffiti did for Boomers.
In Star Wars, by the time the Ewoks hit the stage, and then Jar Jar Binks is in on the game, it really did all go downhill.
As for Marxism, it gets really tedious. Especially when it is brought into literary, art or music criticism. The alienation of SOME labor, I get. The rest of it, never felt right to me. Debord took Marx and remixed it into an interesting direction in the Society of the Spectacle. It seems to me Debord and people like Daniel J. Boorstin and his work on pseudo-events and how politicians become celebrites and celebrities become politicians have a lot more to offer for critiquing talking heads than all the stuff that has been written on Marx these past seven generations since he died.
I like the phrase @NephiteNeophyte came up with “self-degrowth” And I agree: I’ve seen people doing similar things, and they usually aren’t connected with people with large pocketbooks. Though a fair number of trustafarians seem to get into the mix from time to time.
One of the best organic farmers I know (not that I know many) is a trustafarian. Lives like a hillbilly and farms. My wife worked with her for awhile. Super talented at what she does, but is independently wealthy, so her land and operation doesn’t have to make money. But it was in part a rejection of her academic fathers lifestyle.
Some time ago you said intellectuals should treat their work more as a hobby rather than work. Yet some people can and do make a living off their intellectual output, and some of that actually can benefit other people. Finding ways to stay in touch and keep the hands dirty is important.
I like the Buddhist concept of Right Livelihood here, though I’m not a Buddhist. I’m not sure what other traditions might have as a corollary. Thinkers like Charles Peirce were “independently poor” -eked out enough to live a very modest existence. That’s why I like the idea of a Bohemian Monasticism. I don’t want artists to starve. I don’t want anyone to starve. But living the art life or intellectual life, deliberately on the cheap remains a live option. It was also why I was so struck by the example of Harvey Pekar after meeting his old friend and his widows partner up in Cleveland back in June… Pekar was a real working class intellectual, and never forgot his roots. He pursued his comic and critical writings while keeping his day job as a clerk at the VA.
How to pursue that tamanous vision, create, write, music, whatever, and get it out there, on the one hand, and learning some skills like pickling (I got seven big mason jars out of our cucumber patch this year!), a modicum of gardening and home repair, frugalizing and downshifting, can all be part of the picture.
My dad was a welder and my mom became a nurse after us kids were raised. My grandparents were hillbillies, or came from farming stock, or were urban dwellers selling newspapers on the streets. When I was a teen I hated my dads workaholism, but now I see there is no work life balance. It’s all life and a lot of it is work.
On that note, Imaginary Stations put together three shortwave episodes on the theme of WORK, some were WSTL WORK stations. The broadcasts are over, but you can download them for free off our Archive.org page here:
https://archive.org/details/@imaginary_stations?query=work
HI John Micael
Sorry but I can’t resist presenting the Original Head.
Yes it’s the Karl Marx bust in Highgate Cemetery, just up the road.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%2Fid%2FOIP.ozcXHToKxrfF7FJZe0ViWwHaHc%3Fr%3D0%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=ee0c8abc67549ab69b56c4e8fd122f7922488e45574ace920633c446ab084a4a&ipo=images
Lurksalong
Great essay JMG–I’ve been thinking about ‘Those who walk away from Omelas’ for a while, but had not linked it to Zardoz.
Hmmm, ‘Those who walk away from Omelas.’ What if Ursula Kroeber LeGuin got the Omelas Child archetype backwards? What if the Omelas Child actually went to the dungeon voluntarily to support her community? Other archetypes of a voluntary Omelas Child include the Tarot’s ‘Hanged Man,’ who could leave his own execution at any time, but chooses not to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hanged_Man_%28tarot_card%29
Also ‘Poor little Lud’ (The Fuddnuddlers in ‘Oh Say Can You Say?’ by Dr. Seuss). “…If Lud ever sneezes, his name will be Mud.”
https://www.facebook.com/ChildrensMuseumAtSaratoga/videos/did-you-know-that-april-is-national-poetry-month-amy-is-here-to-read-you-some-of/1579754825512285/
(Fuddnuddlers starts at the 2 minute mark)
Silicon Valley, the US Govt, and many other entities exist today only because there are Omelas Children voluntarily suffering and denying themselves every day to keep the rickety structure supported.
If your own life isn’t great but everyone else’s around you is, have you considered that YOU may be the Omelas Child for your community?
The real danger to Salome (oops! I mean, Omelas) is that the Omelas Child will one day say, “Ah, Eschew it! I’m out of here!” and be the one that actually walks away from Omelas. Without ‘Poor little Lud,’ the Fuddnuddlers can’t continue the show.
My difficulty is the realization that if I want to ‘make a difference,’ really make one, the only real way to do it is to take up my chains, head for the dungeon, and become an Omelas Child to support the people whose only thought of me will be “I’m sure glad I’m not him!”
There’s a bit of a fraught and perhaps time sensitive prayer request that’s just come in that I’d like to share here.
RandomActsOfKarma’s friend DJ’s daughter Taylor has recently escaped a violent relationship, and just birthed a baby daughter, Marishka. There were life threatening complications and Marishka is currently struggling to eat. Confounding this difficult situation is the fact that apparently the violent ex (Marishka’s father) seeks to take Marishka away. To any willing to pray about the situation, this wording may help:
May DJ’s newborn granddaughter Marishka and daughter Taylor be blessed, healed, and protected from danger, and may their situation work out in the best way possible for both of them.
Thank you for this. Harsh, but fair. And a useful warning for someone like myself, who’s probably more susceptible to “critical Aquarianism” than I like to think, both by background and personality. Especially in my younger days, but even today it’s a good cautionary tale for people of my stripe. Case in point: as I grow older and more disillusioned with our current order of things, I find myself increasingly drawn to anarchism, while also harboring serious doubts about how feasible it actually is. Your essay is a useful warning there as well. And while you don’t touch on it directly in the essay, occultism is another good inoculation against this kind of thinking, since it makes the imperfection of human society a feature rather than a bug (to risk grossly simplifying a very complex field).
As Aldarion #41 also touched on, I think you’re a little too hard on the people who walk away from Omelas. Of course trying to rescue the child would be better, but unlike the university professors, they aren’t just sitting around in their offices virtue signaling either. Walking away is still a significant action in itself and probably involves a sharp step down in personal wealth and status (I’d guess, I’ll admit I haven’t read the story, so I’m not sure exactly how that fictional setting works). Of course, this doesn’t invalidate your larger point at all.
“human beings are organisms, not machines. They have their own hardwired imperatives, put there by millions of years of evolution, and this means that they can’t simply be programmed in any way you like.”
True, but in the spirit of your useful adage that the opposite of one bad idea is another one, I’ve seen this abused way too many times by right-leaning people to suggest that immutable, hard-wired human nature leads to some kind of behavior that just happens to match their favorite prejudices and preferences for society (often some kind of “greed is good/natural” or “might makes right” type of thing). I’m not saying you personally are doing this here, of course. I know you’re not. Just saying I find it a very annoying thought-stopper in the hands of less scrupulous people. And while I agree we probably do have some hardwired tendencies, I personally tend to think we’re a lot more different as individuals and malleable than not. But I’m probably more left-wing* than most of the commentariat here, so I suppose it’s my bias showing. 🙂
*To anyone who might be wondering: as in classic left, not woke, to be clear. Think Rhyd Wildermuth’s position, even if I’m not a Marxist and largely agree with our host that the movement has failed and the label outlived its usefulness.
“David, in the peak Cold War year of 1983, it’s quite possible that a nuclear war would have killed half the human population of the planet, but that would still leave more people than existed on earth at any point before the 20th century, thus my point.”
Yes, the main powers and population centres of the world of 1983:Doomsday are in the Southern Hemisphere, most notably the Commonwealth of Australia and New Zealand (“ANZC” for short) and the South American Confederation. The Northern Hemisphere meanwhile largely looks like Greece after the Late Bronze Age Collapse in terms of the vast number of small states! At least climate change and peak oil and inequality wouldn’t be nearly as big of concerns in that reality!
I too noticed that anime assumed its audience was considerably brighter than recent US cartoons.
Inuyasha could get pretty dark at times. ROD (the paper sisters), and Nodame Cantabile were as well. The latter caused me to buy a CD of Mozart’s music for two pianos.
Coincidently my daughter has all four of the Beware of Chicken novels and is hoping that number five comes out soon. Those stories take place in an alternate Chinese Canadian world. One of the characters has to deal with severe PTSD.
As for choosing the technology you let in your life, yes, be picky. As much as I like tinkering with computers my house is not a Smart Home. The limited remote controls are done with X-10 technology from decades ago. An 11 year old Mac Mini in the stereo cabinet plays music and the occasional movie. But I do like this iPad for reading, news, and lookups. The Merlin bird ID program just yesterday pinned down that the local noisy hawk is a Swainson’s.
Quote JMG:
«…but it wasn’t me.»
Too late. I’m already visualizing it. And I’m adding the Sean Connery outfit just for good measure… 😉
@EchoEcho,
you can find me on AO3 and fanfiction.net under the handle chisscientist. Most stories are on both, but the warhammer stuff is on AO3 only and I haven’t added all the star wars and some other odds and ends to AO3 yet. I’ve written stories for:
Silmarillion
Lord of the Rings
Star Wars EU
Avatar the Last Airbender
Warhammer 40k
Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar Series
Star Trek the reboot (only one story)
Old enough to have some writing issues: Star Wars, some Silmarillion
New enough that I think they’re good: most Silmarillion, a couple of star wars things, everything else.
I hear you on the 40k aesthetic. It only works for me if I keep my sense of humor to hand and don’t take everything completely seriously. There’s quite a lot of thing that are grimstupid and are best either ignored or played for laughs. It is simultaneously freeing, fun, and frustrating to write in. I complain about it, and then go back and write more. Grimstupid: things that are awful that are in the story purely to be awful, and don’t benefit the people who are choosing to do them in any way.
Samurai_47, I don’t happen to know just how far Roszak took his enthusiasm for the counterculture. The publicly available bios are remarkably mum about his personal life. That’s true of a fair number of critical Aquarians, which is why I’m going to duck your final question; I simply don’t know who walked their talk and who didn’t.
Cs2, here’s hoping!
Clay, and if I did that my efforts would accomplish nothing. Back in the peak oil days I discovered that the worst of all audiences for my talks were university students. I’ve never met another group of people less open to unapproved ideas. Those that I met, certainly, were at university purely to check the right boxes to get a corporate or government job, and anything that might interfere with that singleminded quest for status and income was irrelevant to them.
Mrollo, thanks for this. Illich is a good example of a critical Aquarian who learned from the mistakes of the movement.
Moonwolf8, nah, “the Singularity” is how you pronounce “the Second Coming” in a heavy Silicon Valley accent. Like almost everything in modern pseudorationalist culture, it’s a religious image with the serial number filed off and a molecule-thick veneer of technological drag applied to the outside.
Polecat, actually, Zardoz and Flesh Gordon would make a great double feature, with one as a sendup of the other. Along the same lines, I once watched Godspell and The Life of Brian as a double feature…
Celadon, no, I see them as a very, very late Piscean phenomenon, with their focus on collective changes of consciousness and great historical transformations on the mass level. Piscean thinkers always fixate on collective change, since Neptune, the planet that rules Pisces, is the planet of unities and collectivities; Uranus, the planet that rules Aquarius, is the planet of individuality, eccentricity, and nonconformism.
Socal, if it doesn’t work for you, why, then go read somebody else. There are plenty of other blogs on the internet, you know.
Sirustalcelion, I used the cartoon image because it focuses very closely on the face shot, without unnecessary background, thus directing attention to the emotional tone, and because it gives the protester a rather prosperous, smug look. I don’t plan on using it again, for whatever that’s worth, but if you’d like to try to do an equivalent, perhaps you can have the points above in mind.
John, anybody who says “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” should either produce a working perpetual motion machine, or have the words “clueless fool” branded into his rump. What a contemptible lie Hill tried to push off on the world!
Rita, excellent! Yes, as I noted, Boorman’s setting wasn’t very original — and yes, I have the same feeling about my personality. I’ve put up with it for 63 years now, and while I’m perfectly willing to keep having it bumble along beside me for another few decades, I expect to put it down with a sigh of relief they’ll hear all over the astral plane.
Clarence, interesting. I certainly didn’t intend it that way.
Athaia, this is where hard physical limits are a great advantage to us all. There aren’t enough available energy resources on the planet to allow the great LLM (“AI”) bubble to go far — just to power the server farms now on the drawing boards, the US would have to triple its production of electricity, and, ahem, that’s not an option. Mind you, the rest of us need to brace ourselves for a period of insanely high electricity prices as the idiots pursue their fantasies, but that also will pass…
Cesar, ha! Yes, of course you’re right. I’ll look for the shirt that says “I PARTICIPATED IN THE AQUARIAN REVOLUTION AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T SHIRT.” As for the point about mass destruction, au contraire — the extinction crisis 65 million years ago only took out 2/3 of the species on earth, and there have been many smaller extinction crises that took out far fewer. It’s not too hard to extrapolate from there, and see that the human capacity to cause universal destruction is much less than our collective egotism would suggest. Of course that’s cold comfort for the half of humanity that would die horribly in a nuclear war, but there’s a difference between killing a lot of people and ending the world.
Bradley, Connery apparently loved it. He’d just wrapped up his years as James Bond and wanted to do something completely different, and Boorman certainly provided that!
Justin, Debord and Vaneigem are well worth close study; Debord’s definition of ideology as “the abstract will to universality and the illusion thereof” in particular seems crucially important to me. I wonder if it would be worth discussing some Situationist ideas here.
Lurksalong, good heavens.
It does in fact look like the head of Zardoz. I wonder if that’s what Boorman had in mind…
Emmanuel, oh, sure, you can ring any number of changes on the Omelas story. I know people who are convinced that I’m an Omelas Child — how can I possibly be anything but miserable without a corporate job, a television, a cell phone, and a car?
Quin, thanks for this. Positive energy en route.
BorealBear, to say that human beings can’t be programmed any way you like isn’t to say that it’s impossible for individuals to learn, grow, and change. It does mean that any arbitrary ideology applied to human beings is likely to fail — and that applies to the right as well as the left, of course.
David, plausible enough.
Siliconguy, choosing the technology you want is crucial. I find that a nice reconditioned stereo and a collection of vinyl discs does a much better job of providing music than any more modern option, for example!
Sven, nah, red really isn’t my color. 😉
It was Jar Jar Binks that killed off the Star Wars story arc for me. I could view the ewoks as comic relief, but Binks wasn’t even funny, just pathetic and repellent. And I thought Padme Amidala was somewhat off-putting, too.
I particularly enjoyed the first movie (later repurposed as episode 4 out of 9 total), which I saw in a theater when iy first came out. The scene where Han Solo pulled the trigger first and killed Greedo struck me as exactly right for his fairly ruthless character. He who doesn’t shoot first, usually dies. One memorable detail showed up in its original screen credits, where there was no listing of any sort for the actor who played Darth Vader. I was looking for that detail in particular, and it just wasn’t there.
On another note, I am pretty sure I saw Zardoz when it first came out, too.
@Rita Rippetoe (#76):
I, too, would absolutely hate to be[come] immortal. I wouldn’t have it as a free gift, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. What a shuddery horror!
For me, the main problem is accumulated memories. I have always had trouble forgetting anything significant. Even at 82, the number of memories (even of the best ones) has become something of a burden, and I shudder to think how heavy that burden would be if I were to live for centuries instead of decades. (However, that clearly has something to do with the fact that I don’t seem to have the hard-wiring to experience intense happiness or joy: tranquil contentment is the best I have ever been able to manage, and even that used to take an effort.)
I was looking around through my file folder and found an essay that I’d written but never published. Today seemed like the day to do so, and I made some minor edits, and I’d like to share it here. It’s on the topic of discipline as applied to bohemian lifestyles, and how it relates to Joséphin Péladan’s idea of kaloprosopia, or living life as a work of art and how that relates to the decadent movement of 1800s and the continued disintegration of society today. Along the way I bring in figures like Sun Ra, Genesis P-Orridge, Baudelaire and Mote Cazazza to explicate notions of self-cultivation and why that takes work and discipline.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/bohemian-discipline
—
I would welcome anything you write about Situationism, Debord and Vaneigm. I think it would be good.
There never seems to be a shortage of enthusiastic attempts to change human nature. I remember reading 30 years ago in Michael Crichton’s book Travels his experience with parents in the 1970s and their surprise that, despite their efforts, “wow, my son really does want to play with trucks,” and “wow, my daughter really does want to play with dolls.” I believe their equivalents of today generally think what they’re doing has never been tried before. I find it all so tiresome.
@Robert Mathiesen – Oh, I know all about that! My mental filing cabinet is overflowing at the age of 86, but the index is lacking.
@JMG,
re walking away from Omelas, I think the important question is what they do once they’ve walked away. If they think Omelas is unsalvageable and are unable or unwilling to rescue the child, are they building an alternative that does not require a child sacrifice? If so, they are doing critical work. A lot more people will jump ship, if they can see something to jump to. And if they can prove to the Omelans by example that the child’s suffering is not needed, then Omelas itself might stop doing it. Even if they crash and burn a) they have salved their own consciences, and b) they have demonstrated something that doesn’t work so the next lot of Omelas-leavers know to try something else.
Or are the Omelas-leavers talking loudly about how they’re leaving, making plans etc, but it’s been twenty years and they’ve not actually left the city boundaries or done a single useful practical thing? Cause the latter really is just virtue signalling.
Flying around in a giant head. Killing dudes, and doing hot chicks. Do you think Sean Connery was even aware he was in a movie??
Thank you, dear JMG, for your many kindnesses, one of which is this article. It sheds a helpful light on my youthful experiences and perceptions and intellectual journeys.
Among the various proofs in Vajrayana Buddhism that enlightened mind exists is…dissatisfaction! The perception that things are not as they could be, that they could be better somehow, is evidence that somewhere in our being deep understanding exists. One school holds that the trick is to clean the dirty windows (my paraphrase) of our perception. Others have other remedies to our deep dissatisfaction with everything. Resulting in true equanimity, which does not produce inaction, but perfected action.
On a note more directly related to this week’s post, like our host, I read these authors, particularly Roszak, as they were published–and while I was overjoyed to find someone who decried the then current state of our society, I found their prescriptions just as sterile as the society they decried. Thank you anyway, Theodore. I enjoyed your novel “Bugs,” about a plastic eating super-bacterium, fwiw. Funny.
I’m not advocating (or at least, not strongly) the life and teachings of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, but in response to all the dissatisfaction discussed at the time, he wrote a little book called “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism” that blew the top of my head off. Since I’m not good at orthodoxies of any kind, I eventually moved out of even the Buddhist ones, which he may or may not have approved of. FWIW, the title “Rinpoche” translates literally to either “big silver,” “very precious” or “very expensive.” A bit of Buddhist humor at the expense of Tibetan hierarchies.
So, how to apply this inborn enlightened mind to deal with our dissatisfaction with the obviously unsatisfactory state of things? In my occasionally humble opinion, the answer starts with the individual, cleaning up his act in his own immediate neighborhood. Ethically, spiritually, magically. That said, of late it looks like the sewers are rising to envelop everything! Or am I simply becoming more enlightened? Is there a difference, I wonder?
The connection I have in mind to your essay is the romantic notions, going back to Rousseau and even as far as Tacitus, of intellectuals who imbue tribal cultures with the qualities and virtues they feel are lacking in their own, civilized, culture. The corollary, of course, is that civilized culture must be constraining and therefore inherently evil. Add a good dollop of crypto-Marxist social oppression theory and then put into place egalitarian policies and incentives to “support” the supposedly disadvantaged and you invariably have people of highly questionable and even false qualifications bellying up to the trough, such as pretendians like Elizabeth Warren and Buffy St. Marie. That same romantic notion also obviously creates an attraction to the idealized versions of actual cultures that draws out many people, just as do the imagined ideal societies that you are critiquing here.
I picked that specific group as an example, but I have since also considered the significant number of adopted children generally who go looking for their roots, who feel a genuine draw to an ancestral culture wherein they feel more comfortable, but not an idealized version of it. That was the aside where my mind went while pondering your words. So there are, I think, two forces at play, one is the siren call of the imagined perfect society, the other the possibly real call of genetic memory.
It is quite unfortunate about this being a third rail. It cuts off entire lines of inquiry from acceptable discourse.
Bruce
Also the giant head is analogous to mainstream media. It’s the tv. Full of life’s appearances, but dead as…an unplugged tv 📺
Justin @ 84, your organic farmer friend has, I would say, made some significant contributions. First, as being an example of virtuous use of inherited advantage, also in providing clean, good quality product to her local area, and, not least, kept what I am going to guess is a significant amount of acreage (you did say she is a trustifarian) out of the hands of development. There is also the environmental benefit of organic farming. Migrating birds can stop over in your friend’s fields and not be poisoned. Hawks and owls can safely hunt there.
Who is Debord? I have seen Daniel Boorstin described as a neo-conservative. Is that true?
@ Roldy #26
Ack! I totally forgot menstruation and that was an actual plot point (what do you do when you don’t have a lady’s maid to wash out your monthlys?) in my last novel!
Yes, menstruation MUST be accommodated by your clothes.
For most women — not the rich who could afford wet nurses — clothing needed to accommodate breastfeeding too.
We forget that fashion throughout history is actually the clothing worn by rich elites. Everyone else did the best they could to copy those garments, dependent on sumptuary laws and their income and needs.
Daily peasant wear was all about the function.
@ John Michael Greer #30
It was nice to see gratuitous male nudity for a change. But I can argue that Sean Connery’s attire, mere inches of cloth away from full exposure, was in the service of the story.
You compare him to ANY of the men in the Vortex and you see why our heroine was bowled over.
Even in the Vortex, biology can reassert itself when faced with a REAL alpha male.
@ The Other Owen #29
What is Briggite’s Bulge? Pregnancy?
Clark @ 100, I have always thought of Chogyam Trungpa as a victim of Cold War intrigues. The Tibetans had a system of identifying precocious children, of which Chogyam was one, and educating them in monasteries for future leadership. This was from a very young age. So. in addition to extreme culture shock, Chogyam was also, I would imagine, having the same kinds of difficulties precocious children often do have in adult life. The Englishwoman he married seems to have been a woman of character who did her best to provide some stability for her brilliant and troubled husband, but there is only so much one woman can do. I also found one of his books most helpful, and I think you and I can be allowed to appreciate those works while not necessarily endorsing other aspects of his life.
Justin, thanks for this. I’m dusting off my old copies of Society of the Spectacle and The Revolution of Everyday Life, and considering it.
Blue Sun, the sheer historical amnesia of the radical left is one of the oddest things about it. That, too, may require a post one of these days.
Pygmycory, agreed. Too many of the real-life equivalents never left the city limits — they just spent all their time trying to talk other people into doing so.
Travis, well, there’s that!
Clarke, that’s one of the most fascinating things about the radical left — it so often combines very keen perceptions of what’s wrong with hopelessly clueless proposals on what to do about it. Roszak was a great example — Where the Wasteland Ends is absolutely brilliant in its analysis of the moral and intellectual collapse of the modern world and pathetically lost when it tries to suggest a response. But it remains a fine analysis!
Renaissance, agreed. But a lot of things will have to change before we can talk freely about such matters.
Travis, you’ll get no argument there!
Teresa, I suspect that’s one of the things Boorman had in mind when he cast Sean Connery against actors like John Alderton and Niall Buggy. As for Brigitte’s Bulge, er, the person in question is Brigitte Macron. I trust you’ve heard of the libel suit she filed against Candace Owens, and then dropped because she’d have to take a genetic test to determine her birth gender…
@Mary Bennet: #103: Absolutely. On all the accounts you mentioned, yes.
“Even if you take children, isolate them from society, and raise them according to ideologically correct notions—and of course this has been tried, too, many times over—you’re not going to end up with angels. What you’ll end up with, rather, are brittle, neurotic, unhappy children poorly equipped for life, because human beings are organisms, not machines.”
As someone who is young enough to have been raised with the internet, I think this is something almost every Westerner under 25, most of us under 30, and even a few people between 30 and 35 today knows well from first hand experience. Not all of us have put it into words, and a lot of us are flailing trying to find anything to blame for the psychological mess we have other than the obvious: while ideologically convenient, and great for Silicon Valley’s bottom line, children should never have been given internet access, let alone be forced by various means to use it for more than we would choose to (examples being schools making assignments online, a mandatory middle school email, sports teams requiring it, etc.)….
>What is Briggite’s Bulge? Pregnancy?
Oh my. It’s not often I laugh. Your innocence is touching and rare in this world. As JMG pointed out, it’s Briggite Macron and the claim (which isn’t being challenged properly) that “she” is full of XY chromosomes. It should be fairly easy to publish a DNA test and then nail the journalists making these claims to the wall with a defamation suit (or better yet just laugh it off and ignore them) but instead we get the equivalent of “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP”. Which does begin to make people ask questions. That they want the answer to.
@Mary Bennet #103: Oh, Guy Debord was this guy, er, who was an artist, filmmaker, political thinker, in France. He came out of the Lettrist International which was an art group that had kind of formed from some threads of surrealism and other milieus. His book The Society of the Spectacle is well worth reading for many of its ideas, especially in my view his insight into the the way spectacles have become a zone of mediation between us living life or being caught up in its spectacle. He says for instance that “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”
It is filled with lots of gnomic and aphoristic paragraphs that can be contemplated on, like this one:
“The spectators alienation from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of his
unthinking activity) works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his
own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that
the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere. ”
A PDF is here: https://monoskop.org/images/e/e8/Debord_Guy_Society_of_the_Spectacle_1995.pdf
As for Boorstin, it looks as if he started off a Communist and then moved into conservative thinking. Boorstin wrote a book called The Image which Debord critiques in his book. Boorstin has some good insights though. One of the key ideas is that American’s expect there news to be entertaining. He saw the whole thing of “infotainment” but also how the media had to create what Debord would call spectacularized events and what Boorstin calls pseduo-events, for reality.
Some of the following could be considered pseudo-events:
-click bait, thumbnails
-events distorted by the news to change the bias of a viewer / reader before the “news” is even given
-those kind of promotional articles you see that look like news but are advertising in disguise
-influencer channels
-Reality TV
But he wrote about where it was all going in like 1960 or 61 when his book came out.
Some interesting quotes from his book: “The successful advertiser is the master of a new art: the art of making things true by saying they are so. He is a devotee of the self-fulfilling prophecy.”
This one seems to be at work in our media: “a statement cannot be most attractively believable unless it is only partly intelligible.”
@BorealBear: You’re not the only one interested in anarchism as a philosophical stance around here!
Arnold J . Toynbee, whom you like to cite a lot along with Oswald Spengler, once said that the “Western” world will have to have an “Indian ending”.
“It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way. Here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together in to a single family”.
https://climatehealers.org/carbon-yoga/23-the-indian-ending/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIt%20is%20already%20becoming%20clear,is%20the%20ancient%20Hindu%20way.
“At the close of this century, the world would be dominated by the West, but that in the 21st century “India will conquer her conquerors.””
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee
Given how the Indian disapora has become remarkably influential in recent decades combined with the fact that Indian cultural influence has historically expanded greatly during previous Dark Ages (https://www.amazon.ca/Golden-Road-Ancient-India-Transformed/dp/1639734147), can you see Indian memes becoming particularly influential during the descent into the post-industrial Dark Ages?
re Ivan Ilyich–I read one of his works in which he wished that society moved at a slower pace–that of a donkey, I believe. I recall thinking that if he were buried in the ruins of an earthquake-stricken S. American city he would pray for rescue to come at a much faster pace. Helicopters are nice in such conditions. I am pretty convinced that “chop wood, carry water” is our long-term future, but have no desire to hurry toward that condition. I have heard my grandmother’s tales of gathering frozen turnips from fields as a child and of canning tomatoes on a wood stove in a Kansas summer. I think it was those of my boomer generation who had not grown up with such family stories who thought homesteading in Alaska or forming a commune in Belize would be a terrific idea. It is hard to realize how difficult home management used to be if you worst childhood chore was taking the garbage out and loading the dishwasher.
Robert M.–curious about your statement of not experiencing extreme joy. Does it work the other direction as well–i.e. no extreme fear, sorrow or other psychological pain? I know there are people who have the misfortune of not feeling physical pain–which leads to them not noticing disease or injury before greater harm. It would seem that an emotional golden mean would leave off both extremes–but I could see various combinations existing in different people. Just as some people seem to let emotions, even extreme ones, roll off them in a short time while some never forget a grudge and some cherish a moment of joy. And some people seem to have only extremes of temperament.
Some see the division between those who regard the human race as malleable and improvable and those who see human nature as relatively fixed as the major difference between left and right or liberal/progressive and conservative. It is known that communist theory in Stalinist Russian supported the Lamarckian view of evolution as compatible with the idea that a new communist society would produce the new communist man who would no longer be moved by greed or other capitalist emotions. OTH, despite those who keep saying that Nazism was a form of socialism, the Nazis clearly believed that it was necessary to eliminate inferior races and inferior members of one’s own race in order to create a glorious future. In the US modern conservatives seem to combine a belief in technological progress with a desire for what they remember as a more ordered past–hence MakeAmericaGreatAgain while I suppose the blue hats would read MakeAmericaGreatInTheVeryNearFuture. But MAGITVMF is not a selling slogan; so, don’t bother to create the hats.
>There aren’t enough available energy resources on the planet to allow the great LLM (“AI”) bubble to go far — just to power the server farms now on the drawing boards, the US would have to triple its production of electricity
And as a reminder, not only do they need electricity, they need water as well to reject the waste heat, which they’re running out of as much or more than the electricity they’re using to heat the water up in the first place. I know, let’s do what the Russians do and pipe that waste heat back into town for use by the public. Then again, there’s nothing more dangerous than giving a bureaucrat a Bright Idea(tm).
It wouldn’t surprise me if “low power” and “efficiency” become quiet buzzwords amongst this AI data center crowd. As well as “air cooling”.
JMG, I am a bit surprised to find celebrity gossip on your otherwise exemplary website. I don’t care one bit about either Macron; they can be whatever they want to be. We Americans are hardly in a position to complain about the results of other country’s elections. As for Candace Owens, grifter who found a profitable, for now, perch as RW token black woman, I see no reason to believe or give any attention at all to whatever she might have been told to say.
You stated above: “what Galluzzo and his peers are trying not to realize is that societies are organisms, not artifacts. You can sometimes improve them in certain ways, within certain hard limits, but trying to construct one from scratch on the basis of some seemingly plausible theory is like claiming that you can design and build a better tree.” The biotech industry, backed up by generous subsidy and advertising hype, thinks it can do just that. I also have not failed to notice that successive USDAs, under Republican and Democratic administrations, very much including the present one, have believed and supported those claims.
I have been wont to think of polities, from ancient poleis to modern nation-states, and a host of other political arrangements, as spiritual unities. If you believe that the USA of today is “an organism”, can you at least agree with me that our constitution, laws and common law inheritance–one of the few good things we got from England, IMO–ought not to be subverted, overrun or ignored simply because someone finds them inconvenient? Especially when what those factions what to establish is dominance of their own tribe or ideology.
JMG,
I apologize for my comment being construed as an honest effort to get you to take up the university life. My intention was as a sendup off current university academic culture and the ridiculous courses being offered in pop culture topics with high brow window dressing. I realize that it would serve no purpose to try and teach something like this within the modern university environment. It just struck me as amusing given the flood of university courses that combine low brow topics with artificial high brow analysis.
Yes, these utopian communities have a generally dismal record..Some worse than that…I know someone whose wife was a child in a S. American commune, and was repeatedly sexually abused …..Seems like the only really successful group is the Amish, whose population has expanded 100 fold in the last century+….
@Justin Patrick Moore (#95):
I liked your essay on Bohemian discipline, and especially Péladan. He and you share the notion that a human life can be, and ideally is, a work of art, where one is three things at once: the artist, the raw material from which the work of art can be made, and the developing work of art itself. This is just how I have tried to live my own life, and ti is always good to see that others, too, are treading the path one has chosen.
Hi JMG, thank you for this great, fun article. Another homerun after last weeks’ zinger!
I think this article contains part of the answer to the question of why young people are not dating and starting families any more.
I had to think of the many animals in captivity that won’t breed despite the zoo providing them with everything they need. My sense is that it is the lack of freedom that ‘kills the mood’. If there is no adventure nor perspective, why then produce another unit of suffering?
Like the zoo animals we have lost a lot freedom, especially but not exclusively the PMC class. That’s why so many people in our society come across as direct descendants of the Apathetics. The part of the world where the people are most lively, sub Saharan Africa, is also the place with the highest birth rates. I think that is no coincidence.
PS There will be other factors too of course. I resonate with the remarks of Other Owen and Corax last week who pointed out the dynamics that lead to many men being sex starved while the women are fruitlessly waiting for the alpha male that wants to commit to them instead of just using her for sex.
This pattern is not new. As a student in the 1990’s I already noted wryly that the advent of Free Sex had led to a return of the harem. The result was that both 80% of the man 80% of the women were not getting what they want. Back in the day I had plenty of time to contemplate the issue as my attractiveness was below the cut off point, but me and most of my male friends could still find a partner with a lot of effort and patience. Unfortunately recent developments like social media, dating apps, the housing crisis and etheric starvation (another biggie imo) have only made a bad situation worse.
Hi JMG,
Regarding your answer to John (#75) :
What is the difference between Hill’s “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” and the Occult practice of Affirmation ?
Is there any chance that Hill recycled this Occult’s idea to formulate his trademark ?
Thank you,
JMG #93 says;
“Emmanuel, oh, sure, you can ring any number of changes on the Omelas story. I know people who are convinced that I’m an Omelas Child — how can I possibly be anything but miserable without a corporate job, a television, a cell phone, and a car?”
For the Omelas Children, I was actually thinking about the tech nerds that wander alone by night in giant server farms, Silicon Valley serfs who live in RVs on the street because they can’t afford the inflated housing, and the pharmacist I was in Baltimore City, who refused to fill bad narcotic Rxs and received death threats. The corporation I worked for was sorry to lose that business. I _did_ walk away from that Omelas! But I’m better off now. Come to think of it, so are you JMG, for walking away from a PhD and a University Position for the uncertain world of the Mage/writer. You could think of your Omelas as that Tenured University Environment. I’m glad you walked away!
@ Lisa #46
You should read “The Gate into Women’s Country” by Sheri Tepper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gate_to_Women%27s_Country for a synopsis.
The main plot is similar to “The Shore of Women” (which I’d never heard of) but I’d guess that Sheri Tepper, wrote a far more realistic novel. The characters in “The Gate into Women’s Country” make hard, difficult choices and fail. It’s no utopia, for women or for men.
It’s a challenging read.
“Brigitte’s bulge”: I was also clueless and then had to look up who Candace Owens was after JMG explained it, if it makes anyone feel better about their (lack of) awareness of the latest thing.
People going brittle when you choose your own technology: You know, JMG, I used to think this seemed overblown when you talked about it on the blog—good heavens, I suppose almost a decade ago now—regarding television. Nobody ever gave me much flak about lacking a tube. But goodness, now when we mention that our children have no access to screens of any kind, other parents act like we’ve accused them of being child-sacrificing serial killers even when we make no comment on their screen policies. And/or that we are being conspicuously self-righteous and probably lying (although we generally only mention it when relevant—when asked, “Do your kids like xyz cartoon” or something). Yikes. I also thank my lucky stars that both sets of grandparents have no televisions at home and don’t try to push tablets etc. as gifts for the kids or accuse us of wretchedly depriving them—I hear a lot of horror stories in this regard from those like-minded parents we do encounter.
Anonymous, that’s a valid point.
David, Toynbee was a very capable historian but his prophetic skills were shaky at best. The human race isn’t going to “grow together into a single family,” as he should have realized from his study of other universal states; his fixation on classical models led him to miss the peak of European civilization (well in the past by the time he wrote) and to embrace overblown dreams of how far that civilization still had to run. I freely grant, though, that India is rising, and may well be one of the primary world powers a couple of centuries from now.
Other Owen, it’ll be entertaining to see how many resources the LLM fad uses up too fast, and how much of a body blow each of those deals to the rest of the economy.
Mary, ah, but it’s not just celebrity gossip. It’s a matter of political importance that several influential Western political figures have been unusually vulnerable to blackmail along similar lines. As for our constitution, laws, and common-law inheritance, those have been being subverted, overrun, and ignored for a good many decades by all sides. Our political discourse these days is full of pots and kettles discussing each other’s color schemes in tones of high outrage.
Clay, gotcha. In my usual autistic way, I missed that.
Pyrrhus, I’m sorry to hear of that. What makes the Amish a success, of course, is that they’re not utopian — they just want to keep living an 18th century lifestyle.
Boccaccio, that’s a good point. I find all this very odd, because as a young man in the late 1970s and early 1980s — when the gospel of free sex was very much in circulation — I had no trouble at all finding girlfriends and then a wife, and I’ve never been conventionally attractive. I wonder what shifted in women’s attitudes — when I was dating, there were plenty of women of ordinary attractiveness who were interested in men at a comparable level. Tracking down the source of the self-defeating conviction among women that only the best is good enough is, I think, an important part of the puzzle.
Foxhands, you can find a cogent answer to that in this post:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-power-of-the-mind/
Emmanuel, from my perspective, they wanted to turn me into the child, and I decided I had better things to do than sit in a university basement being miserable.
Teresa (if I may), Tepper always struck me as the best of the explicitly feminist SF authors of her generation. Most of her stories revolved around the idea that testosterone was the Original Sin, but even so she managed to make them interesting, with solid, lively characters confronting the issues she raised.
Jennifer, I take that sort of thing as a covert admission on their part that they know how much harm they’re causing their children, and get angry when anyone steps on that very sore toe.
I have a theory. It seemed to me, looking back, that the critical Aquarians were responding to the long shadow of Marxism, which back then still appeared to be an advancing movement. None of them were actually Marxists, at least publicly. They all knew that John Lennon quotation about how declaring yourself to be a Marxist was like painting yourself blue (or was it green?) and standing on the horizon, basically inviting attack. Nobody would admit to longing for the eventual worldwide victory that Marxists predicted for themselves, but plenty of them regarded it as a possibility. They knew that Marxists coming to power, like any other group coming to power through violence, would inevitably embark on a bloodbath of those most likely to form up a counterrevolution. So how would a university professor reassure a hypothetical new Marxist government that they were free of counterrevolutionary potential? Why, by having published something that expressed some sort of socialist leanings, of course. I see a similiar motivation in the scenario Tom Wolfe presented in his “Radical Chic” essay, with high culture types like Leonard Bernstein hosting the Black Panthers and their like; they were investing in street cred, laying the groundwork for survival in case of future revolutionary victory.
>It’s a matter of political importance that most influential Western political figures have been normally receptive to blackmail along similar lines
FTFY. Some people are beginning to conclude it’s not really blackmail but more like a gang initiation to have this sort of kink recorded on camera. Then the rest of them know that you’re One Of Us, One Of Us, One Of Us.
Show of hands, who wants to fight and die for these kinds of people?
Excellent post. I’ve only seen Zardoz once but I enjoyed it greatly; I’m basically the target audience of its brand of over-the-top psychedelic strangeness. I got right away that it was about a utopia-going-wrong, where the sheer lack of struggle lead to the ennui of the Apathetics and the discontent of the Renegades.
Thinking about it now, the Eternals of the Vortex remind me a bit of the Eloi from The Time Machine (specifically the novel; it’s probably telling that the the film adaptations have all shied away from Wells’ real concern), in which one strand of humans has grown weak and effete from a lack of struggle while another has grown brutish but strong. Of course, in Wells’ work the roles are not the same: the Eloi depend on the Morlocks for their struggle free existence at the cost of being food for the latter.
Finally, I’m amused and intrigued that are two running threads in the comments that are being pursued with a passion that strikes me as far exceeding any purpose the discussion might have: namely, (1) which Star Wars film was the first bad one, and (2) what’s the real meaning of the child in Omelas.
The first is, of course, a matter of taste (FWIW, Revenge of the Sith is the first one I didn’t like — the pacing was terrible), and since my honest opinion is that “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is more philosophically masturbatory than deep, the second questions strikes me as on a level with trying to decide if the face in your toast is Jesus or the Maytag Man.
I think ‘Zardoz’ makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a myth of the 20th century as told by people far in the future and removed from the present day. For example, the scenes of the Brutals, dressed in their village people costumes chasing down men in 20th century business suits make no sense on a literal level, but do work on an allegorical level where the business is meant to depict a 20th century middle class man in a fallen world.
Taken literally, it’s frequently a campy exercise in goofy costumes and Shakespearean drama troop exercises, but as mythic depiction about the folly of ignoring the needs of our baser natures it’s a fascinating meditation on the perils of utopia.
The panty and bandolier clad brutals in ‘Zardoz’ are presented on the same mythic level that you would expect in an oral tale passed down dozens of generations after the fall of the Vortex by the immortal’s descendants. Imagine the 20th west codified into an epic like the Illiad, told to the descendants of a post-apocalyptic humanity about why you shouldn’t yearn for God hood. In this case, the ridiculous costume that Sean Connery wears is meant to make the Brutals as easily identifiable as the masks in Greek Tragedy.
‘Zardoz’ makes a lot more sense if you watch ‘Excalibur’. ‘Excalibur’ tells the story of Arthur, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table in the style of a mythic story passed down over dozens of generations. There’s very little that’s grounded or naturalistic in that film. Key characters are presented as symbolic archetypes barreling towards conclusions they are fated for. The ultimate point is that a King and the land are inseparable and the downfall of one is the downfall of both. However, a mid-century film audience could be assumed to be familiar with the basic tropes of wizards, castles, knights in armor, jousting, oaths of loyalty so the same allegorical story telling style still results in a fairly grounded film.
There are a lot of fascinating ideas in ‘Zardoz’ that are presented at an allegorical level. Some of the immortals have become so apathetic that they make no effort to defend themselves against attack. Renegades, who rebel against the conformist order of the Vortex are punished by aging and live out their days as old people in a retirement home. The original founders of the Vortex have all fallen victim of the world they created, which now rejects the individual heroism that made it possible. This is the entire story of post World War II prosperity creating generations who turn to vapidity when removed from any primal struggle. The young forget the lessons that made their ease possible and then turn against the giants who made it possible.
There’s another sexual angle to the story lurking in the background. Zed’s brutals represent the male instinct for violence and pillage in primal form. It’s probably intentional that no women are ever seen within this order which appears to exist only to subjugate peasants and shoot people from horseback. Their order is like a proto-ISIS representing the male urge to destroy run amok. The Vortex is presented explicitly as a matriarchal order populated by glib, feminized men in hippy clothes and ice-queens who seem to run the world like a spiritual yoga retreat that never ends. A resolution is only discovered when the male impulse for action, an impulse that can lead to destruction or building, is given purpose by the feminine.
I think it’s a film that can work as both camp and as deep philosophy depending on your mood.
Oh good grief;
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ex-google-exec-shocking-warning-174947472.html
“Gawdat said AI will trigger significant “social unrest” as people grapple with losing their livelihoods and sense of purpose — resulting in rising rates of mental health problems, increased loneliness and deepening social divisions.
“Unless you’re in the top 0.1%, you’re a peasant,” Gawdat said. “There is no middle class.”
Despite his gloomy predictions, Gawdat said that the period of “hell” will be followed by a “utopian” era that would begin after 2040, when workers will be free from doing repetitive and mundane tasks.
Instead of being “focused on consumerism and greed,” humanity could instead be guided by “love, community, and spiritual development,” according to Gawdat.”
So an economic tribulation but then a second coming?
Beware of Chicken (the book) is more believable.
JMG, granted about our political discourse, but I’ve not yet seen anything I would like to see put in place of the institutions I mentioned.
Sorry, I am not able to get up any outrage, or much of any emotion at all about whatever European elites get up to. Homegrown scandals, OTOH: the current one involving Palm Beach houses, private islands, etc. is not, IMO going away anytime soon.
Mr. Greer.. Oh man! that’s hilarious! I would’ve thought my comment to be somewhat tawdry.. but now I find myself redeemed! My gurrrl-friend at the time, whom attended Both flicks – at different showings, would’ve had me head on a platter … had that been a double-feature!
One could pare the Aquarian film ‘JesusChristSuperStar’ with Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ .. for similar somewhat contrarian results, no?
pyrrhus #118 says: “Yes, these utopian communities have a generally dismal record..Some worse than that…I know someone whose wife was a child in a S. American commune, and was repeatedly sexually abused …..Seems like the only really successful group is the Amish, whose population has expanded 100 fold in the last century+….”
Um, the Amish have issues with sexual abuse too: google “Amish” and “child abuse” for some horrific examples. Here’s one: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/19/797804404/investigation-into-child-sex-abuse-in-amish-communities.
The Amish have their own version of Omelas…
Mr Greer:
You’ve brought up a 70s dystopian film that I have not seen. What will next week bring?
Scotlyn @ 38. Good Heavens, your comment “If you eliminate death, you must also eliminate birth…[and so] is quite an astringent insight; an-elephant-in-the-room sort of deal that no one really sees. I’ll have to give that some long, hard chewing. So thank you… sort of… I think… or not…
It also calls to mind the contrasting Buddhist view of reincarnation and the Buddha’s own view that he had finished the whole process, and basically winked out. I’ve recently converted to Orthodox Christianity for multiple reasons, and even so still I secretly hold on to many opinions and views that would never cut muster in any Christian, much less Orthodox, setting. You are stirring my pot rather more than I would like.
—Lunar Apprentice
Joan, hmm! Yes, I could see that also.
Slithy, I’ve seen this before; it’s quite common, when I bring up something that challenges core elements of the modern worldview (including most alternative versions of it), to see people diving off into tangents while they process, or simply reject, what’s been said. Most of ’em will get over it before the week is up.
Fenton, nicely done. I find that an astonishing amount of popular culture can be read either as camp or as deep philosophy, depending on preference.
Siliconguy, okay, we can now be sure that the LLM phenomenon is toast. When the mythmaking around a new technology reaches that peak of giddy idiocy, an economic crash is impending.
Mary, I cheerfully agree, but you and I have very little control over what happens to our political institutions. As for scandals, ’twas ever thus; the fine details change but the bread and circuses roll on.
Polecat, that would be an interesting combination. I didn’t see the Gibson film; Superstar struck me as pretentious and superficial.
Sylvia, why, it’ll bring a post on William Butler Yeats, of course. 😉
WRT Brigitte Macron.
Good lord. I had no idea.
Except wasn’t she married before?
Sheri Tepper is an interesting writer. I don’t agree with some of her ideas. But she’s always interesting and unlike many authoresses, she’s willing to address the hard facts such as biology making its own demands.
I’d add that in addition to testosterone being an original sin for her, so is a paternalistic, all-seeing god. She doesn’t like them either.
Interestingly, in her book “Sideshow,” she arrives at the logical end of DINKS (double income, no kids). They make themselves over into little computer boxes. The Ennarae (say it as NRA) subsect is the only subculture on the Sideshow world where everyone from the most elite on down actually enforce a meritocracy on their own children.
In “Six Moon Dance,” the real villain is a woman. The other real villain is female. What you think you know at the beginning of the story just isn’t so.
She preferred describing herself as an eco-humanist. Like most of us, I’d guess she was deeply influenced by her own experiences including being a single mother, and working for CARE, and Planned Parenthood where you see the horror stories and not the success stories because successful people don’t need CARE or Planned Parenthood. Success isn’t the right word but I’m thinking that happy people don’t write tell-all memoirs unless they’ve done something dramatic and exciting. Memoirs all seem to be written by miserable people who need to share their journals.
I don’t think Sheri Tepper gets a lot of love from the hardcore feminists; she never gets mentioned in sci-fi circles as a feminist writer. Maybe because she tells hard truths!
Hi John Michael,
😉 The tricky thing is that the city limits aren’t as large as people may believe them to be.
It’s hard to ignore that many people in the comments are falling back upon the nuclear option, and it’s often forgotten that these things are machines. How many machines can sit there doing nothing for decades, and still work as intended? Let’s just say that I hold some doubts about their actual real world delivery capabilities. Machines break down whether they are being used or not. And if cost becomes an issue, I’d suggest that maintenance may be quietly skipped. None of us would ever know.
What’s with the ending with the flying head becoming a ‘back to the caves’ metaphor?
Cheers
Chris
70s were an interesting time in American cinema.
i recently wrote a screenplay about the Sand Creek massacre.
writing it gave me thought to the state of modern cinema.
it occurred to me how odd it is that American are consuming the ridiculous storytelling of fantasy sci-fi and comic book heroes.
to me a purple goon chasing a chromatic array of mcguffin gemstones for his goofball gauntlet is not even half as interesting a villain as someone like John Milton Chivington.
Similarly, captain america can’t hold a candle to Kit Carson as an American hero.
the epics of the ridiculous fever dream comic book world seem well known these days through the magic of modern storytelling, but few have a clue about these other characters in their real world history/culture.
some ideas occurred to me – the issues of the past have become taboo in modern times, so we don’t think nor speak of them and pretend they don’t exist like a mad relative locked in the attic?
people are more interested in dream world fantasy because the real world is too bleak?
i can’t understand any of it enough to make sense of it, it’s incomprehensible how a cgi movie about made up characters that make inhuman choices would hold any audience at attention, but they do. I guess film to me is interesting when watching human actors channel human characters making human choices in interesting real-world circumstances.
given all the great foreign modern cinema these days it’s not the art form that’s played out.
curious if you have any thought on wtf is going on now and does it say anything about the culture at large?
(my screenplay in question is https://crackpot.substack.com/t/bent-fort )
JMG,
I think one of the reasons that the myth of the blank state persists is the declining fertility rate among educated classes. It’s nearly impossible to have two or more children and still maintain the belief that humans are purely raw material that can be molded into any form you wish. Of people with two or more kids who somehow still believe this fiction, I believe you can divide them into hardened ideologues, people who leave the care of their children to nannies, or, more often than not, hardened ideologues who spend generously on nannies.
Furthermore, if you have two or more kids of similar ages, it’s impossible to not notice the one biological imperative that makes utopias impossible: our hardwired, and completely biased, sense of fairness. Each human being (and each chimpanzee too from what I’ve read) has a sense of fairness that is easily triggered from a young age. My sister gets a cookie, I need to have one too! Or, my sister and I both got cookies, I gobbled up mine quickly, why does she still have a cookie, I need to have one too!
What you quickly realize, as a parent, is that your kid’s inbuilt sense of fairness is the cause of most fights, because the numbers do not add up. If my daughter has a toy for 30 seconds, and she shares it with my other daughter, in approximately 5 seconds she’s going to start asking for it back. I remember one of the odd bits of reading material in a Japanese took I test was a study about how, when you’re waiting for something, you perceive time to pass 3 times slower than it is actually passing, and when you’re immersed in an activity, it passes 3 times faster. Thus, 30 seconds feels like 10 with the toy, 5 seconds feels like 15 without the toy, and thus, the 5 seconds feels unfair.
What this means is that what a human being feels is fair is, objectively, not fair at all, but biased toward themselves. Psychology studies back this up too, and most people working in pairs estimate that they perform 80% of the work. Obviously, there’s not 160% of the resources to go around. If we hardwired differently, perhaps socialist utopias could work. As we are, however, even if you achieved a perfect socialist utopia objectively, nobody would feel fairly rewarded and therefore everyone would rebel against it.
Perhaps I am biased due to growing up during the decade, but I do look at 1970s cinema as being the best decade of the medium in my lifetime. Jaws. The Godfather. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Exorcist. Star Wars. It was sort of liberating. Of course, a lot of crap was also produced on celluloid during that decade. I did watch Logan’s Run and mildly enjoyed it, but I don’t regret having never even heard of Zardoz – and my “silly threshold” is pretty darn high! Still, it is worth the analysis and am glad that your mercurial muse inspired you to write about it, JMG.
As you mention, the main plot of Zadoz is far from original, though I would argue that one of its earliest iterations was H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine – a story which I have treasured from the age of 11 even though I know that the author was an insufferable socialist. A more recent iteration has been the extremely popular Hunger Games movies.
When I read the words “Vortex, a community guarded by force fields, where birth and death have been made obsolete by advanced technologies”, I immediately recalled a very recent social media post which had made me giggle: it starts off with a news headline “David Rockefeller’s Sixth Heart Transplant Successful at Age 99” followed by the following quip: “This n*gga done had 6 hearts in his damn body. Jesus calling you BRUH you can’t keep hanging up.”
“The great problem with the ones who walk away from Omelas, it turns out, is that while they’re always walking away, they never actually leave” – this sentence promptly reminded me of a point made by Patrick Harpur in Daimonic Reality: something to the effect that “the fairies are always going away but never leave, while the extraterrestrials are always coming but never actually arrive”. Not sure why that stuck with me, but it has…
“Now of course there were plenty of ringing calls for action in the literature of critical Aquarianism. Quite reliably, though, the action was supposed to be done by someone other than the author.” Now, where have I come across that before? (glancing over at all socialist revolutionaries who expected the masses to obediently and unquestioningly follow their pamphlets and propaganda, bleed and die for them in the streets, and then hand over to them the keys to the Worker’s Paradise to rule over them for eternity)
“Central not only to Marxism but to the entire spectrum of radical political ideologies in the Western world is the conviction that human nature is entirely a product of cultural forces” – you know, I have never met a Marxist farmer. And for good reason. All one needs to do is hang around livestock for a while to realize that biological/genetic programming is about as subtle as a punch in the gut. I’ve never seen a rooster that thought he was a hen or a cow who thought that she was a bull. I firmly believe that all these radical political ideologies are the byproducts of people who not only spend too much time living inside their heads but also are utterly out of touch with nature – including their own human nature. And they are hell-bent on dragging the rest of us into their delusions. No thanks! Not happening!
” How many machines can sit there doing nothing for decades, and still work as intended?”
There are multiple YouTube channels devoted to resurrecting cars from old barns in the US rust belt. There was also a guy from New Zealand whose resurrection skills are aimed at heavier equipment. They need a fair bit of effort, replacement parts, and tools.
If you were thinking of rockets and such, those high-energy solid fuels degrade steadily. The end result can be nothing happens, they sort of fizzle a bit, or a silo-shattering kaboom.
That also applies to the explosive lens around a plutonium core. If even one block of explosive is substandard the plutonium will not be compressed evenly and only a conventional boom results. Also the tritium booster has a 12 year half life. Not enough tritium, no boost, less yield. Even worse, tritium decays to helium 3 which absorbs neutrons because it really wants to be helium 4.
So maintenance is a biggie. If the billionaires think their yachts will keep them safely out to sea while the peons die in the apocalypse they are in for quite the surprise as they drift to nowhere. I doubt they have the skill of a Shackleton or a Bligh. That’s assuming the crew doesn’t eat the owners first. Both Zuckerberg and Bezos look tough and stringy to me. 😉
It occurs to me that with LLMs we’re in for a preview of what will eventually happen to the Internet: the professional-grade AIs will become increasingly expensive super-premium services, relegated to megacorps and the government, while still never attaining the capabilities we were promised.
Anyone else who wants to use AI will be relegated to the old open source models released by companies for hobbyist use during AI’s first few years, which by this point will be functional for some basic things but outdated in terms of the information and styles they were trained on. (Similarly, once ordinary people are priced out of the Internet, I expect the world will see a new heyday for bulletin boards, either over phone lines or packet radio.)
One difference I expect between the AI and Internet busts is that the latter will wind up more fun, because unlike LLMs, bulletin boards are cool.
Brandi #20 re: why attempts to perfect society fail, etc.
If I may?
People always invent and improve things. With our culture’s recent tendency to watch everything as an object (rather than a subject, a process, or a constellation of factors, say), it’s no surprise they‘ve turned their tinkerer’s attention to society itself.
It always backfires, methinks, because society isn’t an object that can be tinkered with in the way people think. First of all, it’s an organism that has its own idea of what it’s there for, which is about as clear to the individual as the ant hill‘s purpose is to the ant.
Second, the muscles and tendons of this organism are the collective unconscious, archetypes, gods, and way more animal instincts than people (especially those who want to change and improve everything) are comfortable with.
Third, the cells of the societal organism are people, with all their drives and desires.
People have managed to improve life (seemingly) by pulling themselves out of what they perceived as the grip of higher powers. That gives them a rush of empowerment and serves as testament that these higher powers are really just shackles to be overcome, and not the necessary organizing principles of a world beyond our comprehension.
Especially since we harnessed fossil fuels, people have become so overpowered that this illusion of emancipation from the real world has become like an escapist addiction to most. It’s an unfounded idea about a better life, the implementation of which makes people think they’re making progress while simultaneously cutting their tethers to the very powers that hold us in place and give the world meaning.
Phew, this is harder to put into words than I thought. Thanks for the opportunity, I hope you gained something 🙂
We‘re like kids who rebel against the rules of the parents‘ household, except that we’ve discovered their credit card and the car keys.
“Clay, and if I did that my efforts would accomplish nothing. Back in the peak oil days I discovered that the worst of all audiences for my talks were university students.”
Good to know I’m special 🙂 isn’t that what everyone wants to be in this day and age, and if Uranus is the planet of “Uranus, the planet that rules Aquarius, is the planet of individuality, eccentricity, and nonconformism.” then I am pretty much aquarian.
When I ate my banana upside down (like I had seen in the Austrian movie “Indien”), my polish immigrant female classmate in highschool asked disapprovingly “why do you have to do EVERYTHING differently from everyone else?”
I was still studying when I gleefully discovered the predecessor of this blog, archdruid report. Because I sought deeper ecological knowledge and an understanding of where “economy and nature actually meet in reality”. That was my starting premise to study at all.
Well I hated studying and university sufficiently, I just had no other vision.
Unlike my fellow students, I privately always read a lot of books on history, ecology, philosophy and the likes, besides cherishing poe, oscar wilde, hemingway, orwell and others.
I did not do so for social acclaim. I tried many obnoxious things for social acclaim trying to “fit in”, not that I was ever so self confident and independent. But I failed anyways and reading all these dusty books was one thing I never did because of my hopes to be accepted. I was just bookish.
The idealistic fervor of my fellow students, shallow as it was, rapidly cooled of like a hot iron in water once it was about getting a corporate or state-corporate office job.
I have a corporate government job now too. Always have to be careful what I am saying out loud! I’m glad at least I’m treated well for this time being. And if it all ends and my wealth ends? Then it must so be.
May the jimmies rustle on.
Joan 126,
> longing for the eventual worldwide victory that Marxists predicted for themselves
In the early 1980s there was a mathematics lecturer at my university who was a Marxist. He was a pale, skinny guy with long, greasy hair, but the most obnoxious thing about him was his air of smug superiority. The thing was, he absolutely believed in the inevitable victory of the proletariat, whereupon he would be one of the Elect while the rest of us would be groveling peasants.
I was so happy when the Berlin wall fell. I bet that wiped the smug smile off his face.
“I trust you’ve heard of the libel suit she filed against Candace Owens, and then dropped because she’d have to take a genetic test to determine her birth gender…”
How did the conflation of gender and sex occur?
There is a birth sex which is observed at birth while gender is a social construct that appears to elude an actual definition. Like print on demand, it seems folks manufacture genders on demand – hence the alphabet soup identifications.
Could it be argued that adopting the abstraction of gender over the mammalian binaries of male and female biological sex for reproduction would have Giambattista Vico not just spinning in his grave but actually taking flight?
There is no human biological gender – not withstanding the Biology Society (or whatever they call themselves) howling about “hateful terms’ like biological sex”.
Voltaire? “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Humans seem prone enough to atrocities without getting further encouragement.
Somehow I don’t think Sean Connery’s Zed ‘presenting’ made him any less of a man.
@Mary Bennet #107
Chogyam Trungpa was selected for being an incarnate lama or tulku, rather than for being precocious. The generally held view is that he tried to act as a lightning rod for the bad karma of the West, but he vastly underestimated the task, became unhinged, and then behaved rather badly. However he apparently recovered himself in the bardo, so his future incarnations should not be significantly affected.
Trungpa was held to be a very powerful Lama, so it was a salutary lesson for all missionary Tibetans, about just how toxic our Western civilisation can be. Unfortunately, a large number of later Lamas have failed to learn this lesson, hence the endless parade of Buddhist sexual scandals.
@ BorealBear and @ Justin Patrick Moore – re anarchism…
Personally I conceive of anarchism as having a face very much like our host’s idea of “dissensus”…
Which is to say that I *know* I am already an anarchist. (Although perhaps others might simply see an autonomous agent pursuing my personal dissensus-y path). The way I see it you can be an autonomous anarchist in the context of every system of projecting power – democracy, oligarchy, kleptocracy, technocracy, monarchy, and etc…
Because it is simply how you deal with and respond to projections of power by others (whether jointly or severally), and in whatever form it is projected. It is not as though there will ever be a “system” of anarchy – Lol! People and groups projecting power will always be with us. But some of us will simply step sideways and carry on with our own purposes. From my point of view, these are the weedy anarchists on the margins, and in the cracks that volunteer and step up to the challenge of power by embodying one’s own power to such an extent that the power of others recedes into a background hum most of the time.
So, in literature and politics, I will always be interested in reading about the actions and fortunes of those who exist in (slightly more than the average bear) autonomy on the margins of society, in non-compliance, in under-the-radar creativity, in unapproved activity and bottom-up social forms. (Not to put too fine a point on it, I would say almost exactly the many themes that this blog introduces in abundance, and also the myriad of fascinating comments to be found on here… although in this thread, I would particularly cite the contribution made by Ray Wharton, bearing witness to some of that off-the-radar creativity. 🙂
JMG at # 93 wrote: “Athaia, this is where hard physical limits are a great advantage to us all. There aren’t enough available energy resources on the planet to allow the great LLM (“AI”) bubble to go far — just to power the server farms now on the drawing boards, the US would have to triple its production of electricity, and, ahem, that’s not an option. Mind you, the rest of us need to brace ourselves for a period of insanely high electricity prices as the idiots pursue their fantasies, but that also will pass…”
Well, I’m sure the tech bros are aware of those problems, but the way they see it, it’s because *so many useless people* glomp on *their* precious energy, that we’re having this problem. If you’re an extinctionist, the solution to that problem is self-evident… and it’s not higher prices.
As I said, it’s not the feasability of their project that worries me, but the lengths to which they’ll go to try and force it to happen. And the underlying attitudes towards us serfs. I mean, you posted a picture of the Khmer Rouge…
#141: ” My sister gets a cookie, I need to have one too! Or, my sister and I both got cookies, I gobbled up mine quickly, why does she still have a cookie, I need to have one too!”
It’s not just humans and chimpanzees. I observe the same thing with my dogs (and there were some behavioral studies with dogs, showing the same thing – and also stuff like if you step on their paw *and apologize*, their attitude towards you remains friendly as opposed to when you don’t apologize…), so I’d say this wiring has to go down pretty far the evolutionary tree. I wonder if similar studies have been made with crows, or octopi…
JMG, as an aside, I’m surprised that you’ve never touched on Lyn Margulis’ fascinating theories of evolution.
Hey JMG
The most unusual thing happened today. As I walked through the various bookstores of West End, I came across various books that had utopian societies as their subject matter. Not only did I see Sherri Teppers “Gateway into woman’s country” but the following books I never heard of before until now. The first is a history of six alternative communities, including the one Gurdjieff started. The second is a history of a society modelled on Moore’s “utopia” that was started by one of the conquistadors in Mexico. A lot of synchronicity that suggests that I should look into the failure of alternative societies.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57450905-the-utopians
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976581.Thomas_More_s_Magician
@Robert Mathiesen: # 119 Thank you for taking the time to stop by my website and read my essay, and for the kind words about my words. As we walk the path of the lonely ones, from time to time, can stop and look around to see that there are companions along the way. Salute to you for living the art life and life as a work of art. Life is a true multi-media multi-sensory gesamkunstwerk.
@Ray Wharton #37, et al: Thanks for you update on the Rainbow Gathering. I went to one in 1998 in Arizona as part of a post highschool road trip. It was really amazing. I loved it (except when I wanted to catch some sleep and the all night drum circles would never allow that!) .
It’s interesting to think of the dichotomy between something like the Rainbow Gathering, which could still well exist as we deindustrialize, and something like Burning Man (which I never went, couldn’t afford when I did want to… and now can’t afford it again because of what it has become!). Burning Man is too energy intensive on top of it having become an ayahuasca playground for tech bros.
In an article I wrote for New Maps I imagined the transcendent musical energy and form represented by the Grateful Dead and the jam bands that followed, as a kind of wondering festival cult across dark age America. They have the low tech infrastructure know how to pull something off like that.
Those crusty punks and dirty kids really do show how the punks were hippies in nihilist drag, and then it came back around. In that I see the traces of the mystical Journey to the East and the eternal game of beads played by those in The League whose members exist outside the bounds of time.
“Some of the critical Aquarians did inspire people to go out and fail, and the real treasure was the failures we made along the way.”
Indeed…
…and it is interesting to that you mention that ammo and cammo types… because I’ve seen a fair bit of evidence of crossover between Grateful Dead types and prepper compounds, at least online, but also in a few people I know. There was an episode of Peter Santenello’s YouTube show where he travels around America and he was visiting this guy in Northern California who calls himself and others of this variety “greennecks” (rednecks with some green philosophy). Hippies & punks, and rednecks & hippies… some interesting combinatorial forms will be born out of need.
(Greeneck episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1NCiI3h1h8&ab_channel=PeterSantenello )
The video also gets into the idea of the State of Jefferson… interesting!
— To share —
Here is the group Wednesday, perhaps a good mix of hillbilly & indie music and their new song Elderberry Wine, new classic Americana with fantastic pedal steel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE0waEdE2Pw&ab_channel=WednesdayVEVO
“everybody gets along just fine
‘Cause the champagne tastes like elderberry wine
And the pink boiled eggs stay afloat in the brine”
The video puts me in mind of the music liked by greennecks.
Reflecting on the suggested sterility or impotence of the movement called here “Critical Aquarians”, I saw some parallels to a conservative movement that had its moment of glory in Germany after reunification. It was given form by a 1993 essay called Swelling Bucks’ Song (Anschwellender Bocksgesang, a literal translation of tragoedia). The themes were a desire for tragedy, for history, for sacrifice, for individuality. Even though I am not politically a conservative, some of these points resonate with me.
However, characteristically, the essay was written by a playwright, and the movement was largely confined to the Feuilleton (culture supplement) of newspapers. At some point, a well-known member of the movement expressed nostalgia for the generation of 1914, who forgot all about ennui and went on fire with nationalism.
The desire to emulate the generation of 1914 does not seem like a promising path forward. In fact, wishing for external circumstances that would rescue one from feeling ennui seems definitely worse than doing something worth doing!
So it is probably not surprising that this movement of refined, traditionalist conservatives died a silent death and has not been heard from again since the very real and very historic events of 9/11 . The 21st century far right movements in Germany don’t have the slightest bit of refined, occidental culture about them.
JMG,
Enjoyed reading your essay a lot, I’ve been heavily into the ‘critical Aquarians’ for years, but never had a term to describe them so well before. Your critique reminded me of lines from Gary Snyder’s poem ‘The Call of the Wild’ –
The ex acid-heads from the cities
Converted to Guru or Swami,
Do penance with shiny
Dopey eyes, and quit eating meat.
In the forests of North America,
The land of Coyote and Eagle,
They dream of India, of
forever blissful sexless highs.
And sleep in oil-heated
Geodesic domes, that
Were stuck like warts
In the woods.
And the Coyote singing
is shut away
for they fear
the call
of the wild.
full poem here for anyone who is interested – https://voetica.com/poem/4563
Snyder is an interesting cat – probably a critical Aquarian himself in many ways, though one who did actualise the eco-philosophical ideals of the movement in his life and work. Fascinating how going to Japan and studying Zen for decade seemed to have given him the self awareness to create an authentic alternative.
I did hear recently Kim Stanley Robinson say in an interview that Snyder and Le Guin corresponded and were fond of each other – now that’s one dinner table I’d like to be at! I think Le Guin’s fiction at its best is aware of the paradoxes and limitations of critical aquarianism you’ve described – especially novels like ‘The Dispossessed’ and ‘Always Coming Home’. As you say, she leans into ambiguities.
I am curious, have you followed the Solarpunk movement within contemporary sci-fi at all? Le Guin is seen as something of a patron saint by many involved in it, and I think it definitely evolved out of the critical aquarian movement. Also as a response to the dark dystopian science fiction of the cyberpunk genre in the 80s and 90s. I’m very interested in some of the ideas writers involved in it explore around degrowth and I see a lot of similarities between those and some of the ways you and others in this space have suggested we can adapt to the industrial decline which we are in.
Got to share this now… I’ve been listening to Beat Happening this morning. They are one of my all time favorites and have been on heavy rotation the past few years. Here in this video Calvin Johnson is talking about E. F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, and coiner of the term appropriate technology. Johnson talks about how he brought those ideas into the world of underground music with K Records which started off as a cassette label. Johnson considers the cassette a form of appropriate technology. Mind blown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3ENpMnvdaQ&ab_channel=Noisey
>Despite his gloomy predictions, Gawdat said that the period of “hell” will be followed by a “utopian” era that would begin after 2040
I don’t why I’m humming “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” right now. But even chipper optimistic Star Trek portrayed this century as a dark one where barbarism and brutality ruled. And then everything got so awesome, automated, luxurious and space communistic. Although if everything is automated, why do people roam the galaxy in big starships? What do all those people do? I mean, you see then poking at screens, but it’s all automated by that point? You’d think one person could run an entire starship with the proper automation. Asking the questions nobody wants an answer to.
—
Maybe he’s right, but the future is awfully hard to predict. The most I’m willing to go out on a limb and say is that by 2100, there probably will be a fight between the Amish and the Mormons. They’re the only ones starting families and having kids. So they get the future, whatever future there is to have, anyway. There may be some Amish-Mormon alliance if they have to fight off the Muslims. Who knows.
jstn@ 140, there is a reason why Christ spoke in parables. There is something in the human soul which likes and responds to stories. Stories engage us emotionally and are easy to remember. For whatever reason American publishing became uninterested in books which tell stories, so readers have turned to genre fiction. I am afraid I became uninterested in movies after about 1980.
>which Star Wars film was the first bad one
I’ll bite. How do you define bad? Here’s a definition. If you’re not willing to allocate hard drive space to it, it’s bad. By that metric, I never bothered taking the effort to download or watch anything subsequent to Ep7.
Granted, other people have different definitions of what “bad” means. Keep in mind, Lucas was upfront about all the Star Wars movies being aimed at young kids and that was all he cared about, if they were happy with his movies, his characters, the plot, so was he.
@The Other Owen #162
That’s my point: the question doesn’t have a definitive answer, and isn’t important to JMG’s point, yet I’ve seen several commenters addressing it quite passionately, almost as if JMG’s distaste for The Empire Strikes Back threatens to discredit the rest of his post!
Lately, having read most of Le Guin’s novels a while ago, I decided to pick up a trilogy I had always cast away, Annals of the Western Shore. They are very clearly written for adolescents and have more conventional plots than the original Earthsea trilogy. Each of the three books has some variation of the Special One and a happy ending. Nevertheless, I admit to having read them with pleasure because of Le Guin’s gift for geographical, political and literary world-building. I particularly liked the second one, even though it has somewhat cardboard-cut monotheistic villains, because of the rich and plausible literature in the extinct language Aritan. It seemed as if, after reading my daily Virgil, Horace or Boëthius, I could now progress to a volume by the poet Magali or to the collection of anonymous Aritan elegies!
The reason I bring these books up here is because it seems like Le Guin, after years of less successful experimentation with literary form and with science fiction utopias and dystopias, found herself again, to a degree, in these books, which are not utopian or dystopian at all. The Western Shore contains monarchies, city-state republics, a theocracy, and small-scale societies, and while the protagonists and the plots show a great deal of idealism, none of it is radical. Elections can be reinstituted, and slaves can flee to a different country, but there is no trace of designing a better society.
The same political realism can also be found in her retelling of the Aeneid, Lavinia, which I enjoyed greatly, and which clearly influenced the third book of the trilogy.
Teresa, hmm! I don’t follow the feminist SF scene any more than I can possibly help, so I didn’t know that Tepper has been quietly disowned by them. That’s sad. To my mind, she was one of the best late 20th century female SF authors; along with her willingness to confront hard issues, the lady could write.
Chris, yeah, the technologies that somehow don’t require maintenance over very long periods is a cliché much used in bad science fiction; I’m embarrassed to say I’ve made use of it several times in the past, though in all cases I inserted some handwavionic technology to provide some fig leaf of justification. As for the “back to the caves” thing, you probably have to watch the movie to get it.
Jstn, I figure the current obsession with spandex-and-cape schlock is a reflection of Boomer nostalgia. The last thing they want is real history, which might remind them of their own far from heroic historical role; no, as they sink into their toothless second childhoods, they’re hearkening back to the brightly colored, morally simplistic fantasies of their first childhoods, where the Bad Guys always lost.
Dennis, that seems quite plausible to me — and of course experiencing that oddly distorted sense of fairness might also lead one to reflect on one’s own sense of what’s fair, and its potential for distortion.
Ron, I didn’t happen to remember that you know Harpur’s work! Brilliant stuff.
Siliconguy, that’s what long cooking in a stew pot is for. 😉
Slithy, given that even the hobby-grade LLMs require fantastic amounts of server capacity, with attendant demands on power, water, and other resources, I suspect the hobbyist versions won’t be around for long. On the other hand, you’re certainly right about bulletin boards — get your ham radio licenses and start working on packet radio, folks!
Curt, oh, there’s a weird one in every classroom. I survived five years of college without selling out.
Earthworm, not at all. Vico would have adjusted his reading glasses, nodded, and said something like, “As I wrote, every society begins in necessity and ends in madness. Yours is a little madder than most, but then running to extremes does seem to be your strong suit.”
Athaia, I’m far from sure the tech-bros do understand the difficulty. None of them have a hands-on background in any field that involves getting up close and personal with material reality — they’re idea people, most comfortable in the world of abstractions. That’s why the US version of the species is doubling down on fission power (which never pays for itself) and fusion power (probably unattainable on any scale smaller than a star) — they’re drunk on fantasies of perpetual progress, convinced that they’re just so smart that no mere technical or economic barrier can stand in their way. The bankruptcies are going to be epic.
Fenris, they’ve never seemed relevant to the specific points I’ve wanted to make. I’m familiar with her work, of course, and that of a great many other scientists whom I’ve never cited here.
J.L.Mc12, synchronicity strikes again! Enjoy.
Aldarion, fascinating. I wonder if any of that got translated into English — my German isn’t up to Feuilleton standards.
Corduroy, ha! That’s classic Snyder, and as usual, spot on. I haven’t really followed Solarpunk for a while, as there’s so often a stickily self-indulgent quality about its utopian elements — I grant that cyberpunk stank on ice, but as usual, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea. I should probably check in on it again sometime, though.
Justin, good heavens. As Charles Fort said, it steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time…
Aldarion, fascinating. I set Le Guin aside after trying to read Always Coming Home, and so never heard of that trilogy.
@Justin Patrick Moore (#155):
You’re most welcome. Also, “the way of the lonely ones” and also “Gesamtkunstwerk” nail important truths about what I consider a well-lived life.
@The Corduroy Bard (#158):
It’s great to see Gary Snyder show up here. He’s one of my favorite authors, along with his friend, the gifted poet Lew Welch. By the way, Welch seems actually to have succeeded in “walking away from Omelas” and forging a new life for himself under a new name elsewhere.
Snyder and Welch were both classmates at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, together with a future anthropological linguist Dell Hymes. Fortunately I happened to take Hymes’ course on Language and Culture during my senior year at UC Berkeley; it and one other course (by Francis J. Whitfield) were absolutely crucial for the trajectory the rest of my life took.
@Rita Rippetoe (#114):
Yes, it works the other way for me as well: I don’t remember ever experiencing “extreme fear, sorrow or other psychological pain,” either. My nervous and hormonal systems are oddly wired in so many ways! (However, my mirror neurons work very well; I am good at “reading people.”)
In most of the Sheri Tepper books I’ve read, some character always something along the lines of “there is no acceptable solution to some problems.”
Or “people won’t accept the solution to this problem.”
She’s realistic that way.
And yeah, when I see discussions of “important” female sci-fi writers, she’s never on the list. James Tiptree Jr. (female, writing under a penname) got disowned a few years back for some transgression or other. I can’t remember what it was. Leigh Brackett and Andre Norton don’t get much respect, because they wrote fun stories that sold.
@ Athaia #151 and @JMG
Tech bros do NOT understand the problems. I’ve read reams of sci-fi and fantasy and can count on my fingers how many times the heroes were aware that someone had to grow crops, harvest them, and process them into something edible. That field of wheat isn’t edible as it stands. The grain’s got to mature, be harvested, stored away from mice, threshed to remove the hulls, and cooked into edibility.
Nor do tech bros (or authors) consider bearing and raising children.
I’ve done serious food gardening, serious sewing, and raised kids and it’s hard work! I put those details in MY fiction.
Hard limits will messily reassert themselves. Hard on normal people too, but our heads (attached to bodies who know how to grow food and do everything else you need to sustain life) are less likely to end up on pikes.
@ The Other Owen #160
We live in Hershey, near Lancaster which contains huge multitudes of Amish of various flavors, Brethren, Mennonites, and yes, a few Mormons. The thing about the various Amish/Brethren/Mennonite groups is YOU can’t tell them apart without a guidebook. They, however, are very aware of their differences; theological, dress, culture, language variants, acceptance of various forms of modern life, and what have you.
They do a lot of things very well.
I believe they are also, based on decades of observation from a distance (we also had Amish communities in central Delaware, where I grew up) dependent on the larger community surrounding them. They could live without us, no question. But the larger community acts as a safety valve for those Amish citizens who, growing up, JUST DON’T FIT IN. There are always a few. The smart ones leave the community BEFORE accepting adult baptism. That way, they become the loony relative who’s still spoken to and invited to important family gatherings. If you leave the community AFTER you accept adult baptism, you’re shunned and outcast.
The other point, living in Hershey which is about 100 miles away from Filthydelphia, is if for any reason, Phillies’ hordes flee the city like locusts and head west, the Amish are defenseless. The Amish/Mennonite/Brethren communities can police themselves reasonably well. They cannot police themselves against the larger world. They need us for that.
Why does it matter so much to people what sex Brigitte Macron was born?
Color me confused.
JMG 165 Vico
And there I was imagining a spinning and rotating pile of bones emerging from the ground to provide humanity with a new energy source – The Skeletal Drive.
Your view that Marcus Aurelius was not being metaphorical but absolutely serious re madness seems more likely with with every passing day.
@Siliconguy,
my problem is that I partially believe the first half of that construct, and don’t believe the second at all. As a result, I want no part of the grand AI future planned for us.
JMG,
> Slithy, given that even the hobby-grade LLMs require fantastic amounts of server capacity, with attendant demands on power, water, and other resources, I suspect the hobbyist versions won’t be around for long.
These are required to train them, yes, but once the training is done, they’re just a big lump of bytes that can be spun up into a working model with appropriate software. Right now there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of models that can be downloaded and then run locally, and many of them can be run on pretty much any mid-tier consumer hardware made in the last several years.
So I think it’s within the realm of possibility that the 2040s might see a future in which the Internet is out of reach for the vast majority but twenty-year-old AI models are still in use by businesses and computer user groups.
I’m still not clear how the hippies got so discredited that you basically never see anyone even so much as try the aesthetic, outside of costume parties. I see a lot more dandies, flappers, tankies, autogynephiles and Austrian painter enthusiasts than hippies. Often combinations of more than one of those categories.
>I’ve read reams of sci-fi and fantasy and can count on my fingers how many times the heroes were aware that someone had to grow crops, harvest them, and process them into something edible
You need to watch Clarkson’s Farm. I don’t know how much better a job I would do than him though.
Teresa, any supposedly feminist SF author who doesn’t give proper respect to Andre Norton deserves no respect herself. Norton was the most prolific and dogged of the very small group of women authors back in the day who originally made women’s SF possible, not by the cheap theatrics of protest but by writing crisp, lively, thoughtful stories that defined whole swaths of the genre. Every SF fan of my generation and the generation to either side grew up reading Norton, not least because — as a woman author — a lot of her books were ghettoized as children’s and young adult fiction. As for the smirking, self-important Feminist SF Authors™ who swagger through the convention scene these days, cashing in on Norton’s hard work and achievement while turning up their noses at her, they aren’t fit to clean the dust off the bottom of her typewriter with their tongues.
Ahem. Yes, I feel a little strongly about this. Can you tell? 😉
Yes, Leigh Brackett was another first-rate author, and a member of the same pioneering generation. Let’s not forget C.L Moore, either!
Pygmycory, until quite recently, it would have been very useful as a lever for blackmail. The same is apparently true of at least one other very famous presidential wife.
Earthworm, I take Marcus’s bon mot very seriously these days!
Slithy, interesting. Okay, I was misinformed.
Synthase, that’s a fascinating point. I wonder if even now, the hippies are still too threatening…
@teresa #171
In a collapse situation, that 100 miles might as well be 100 light years. I mean, you can travel 100 miles in one day on a bicycle but you need to be in great physical shape and experienced in repairing a bicycle. I guarantee a spoke will decide it’s time to break somewhere along that trip. And you need to be wearing that silly spandex. For reasons. On foot? Most you can sustain is maybe 5mph? I think the standard in the military on foot is the 20 mile march. And that’s going to be brutal on your joints, if you’ve never used them like that before. Kiss your knees goodbye. Won’t stop people from trying but physical reality always wins.
I do wonder how the Amish would deal with two legged varmints showing up at their door. Something tells me they would become less pacifist in a hurry. Either that or they’d go extinct. I would predict whoever survives would not be pacifist at all, come 2100. But they would resemble what the Amish or the Mormons look like today, more than they would resemble your average dangerhair. That’s the past, not the future.
You could see some of sort of union between the Amish and the local community, especially if it’s cut off from the rest of the world.
>Why does it matter so much to people what sex Brigitte Macron was born?
>Color me confused.
It probably wouldn’t matter, if they had come clean about it. People would shrug their shoulders and move on. Well, at least here anyway. Not sure about France. But they didn’t come clean. How did that song go? Must’ve washed my hands in a muddy stream?
Reading science fiction from the sixties and seventies was my main pursuit as a child. My favourite was Clifford Simak’s ‘Way Station’, which has a very compact and satisfying story.
My second favourite was Ursula Le Guin’s ‘City of Illusions’. I’ve read most of her work, but this really stuck in my mind because of the story’s description of isolated communal settlements, which were situated in an endless forest. The myth-making of these essentially post-apocalyptic communities, which had only one or two high technology items, seemed very realistic. Apart from the aliens, a sparsely populated world in the far future could look quite a bit like the one described in ‘City of Illusions’.
@ The Other Owen #179
You’d be surprised at how far motivated people can walk. It’s also quite true that you can only walk as fast as the slowest member of your group.
That said, as long as the gas holds out, people won’t walk.
I agree about the Amish. I doubt they’ll remain the pacifists they currently are as we pass through the meatgrinder of history. Too many two-legged predators will make sure of that. The survivors will have to come to terms with reality.
@JMG, I do get the blackmail angle, especially in former times. That’s probably the only piece of it that does make sense to me. Honestly, if Mrs. Macron wasn’t born female, it seems to me the best angle for the Macrons to take might ‘Yeah, so what?’.
That might take a lot of wind out of the people trying to make a teapot tempest out of it.
@JMG (#178):
You’re quite right about Andre Norton and her importance for the rise of women’s SF. It was very much a men-only world way back in the days, and even when I was a boy in the 1950s. She changed all that, not quite single-handedly, but almost.
BTW, you asked once whether she was a practicing occultist herself, or just very well read on occult subjects. She answered that question in an interview with Robert Platt, published in volume 2 of his Dream Makers: The Uncommon Men and Women Who Write Science Fiction (1983). There she says that although she likes studying magic and parapsychology, and has friends who practice, she doesn’t “try to do anything with it.”
@ The Other Owen #177
My husband adores “Clarkson’s Farm.” It’s intensely realistic.
Some years back, the Patriot News printed a picture of a little girl holding a deer’s freshly cut off hoof and lower leg. Daddy had gone hunting. The screams!
Good Lord.
I also recall people actually saying we didn’t need those messy farms because we have supermarkets.
More people should watch “Clarkson’s Farm!”
@The Other Owen (#179):
The distance between Providence (where I live) and Boston is about 50-60 miles, depending on your route. In the days before motorcars, men (those had no horses) usually walked those miles in two days, sometimes sleeping rough in the woods overnight. To walk 25-30 miles in a long day alone on the road was nothing unusual in the 1800s. You carried travel food with you to keep up your strength, and drank water from any convenient stream or pond.
The famous Rhode Island corn-meal breadstuff now called “Jo[h]nny Cakes” were originally called “Journey Cakes” and were baked for just that purpose. (Also, doing hard farm labor from sun-up to sun-down would have given those long-ago men the strength and stamina for such hard traveling.)
Women would usually make that same journey by coach, if they didn’t have the use of private horse-drawn transportation..
Yeah, there’s this thing sometimes called energy density. I understand what you were aiming at with the comparison – though I think the comparison with the meteor impact does a much better job for that purpose. And I can’t help it, I have this mental imagery of a luxury bearded druid in his robes, standing on elevated ground on a market place or something, loudly declaiming to the populace that they should vote for the nuke because it’s only 1/100,000th of a hurricane. Would probably fit into a Monty Python movie…
As for the trading business – my older students do it too, even during lesson. One guy had his phone out one day, which he wasn’t supposed to have and I asked him what he was doing. “I just have to finish that deal” I got for reply. At first, I was flabbergasted – but then I found out, that many do it. In the end – although there’s a certain risk for financial losses involved – it’s all about getting something for nothing.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
pygmycory @ 172 it doesn’t matter to anyone who is not desperately trying to find something, anything, to distract from the Epstein scandal. Owens like all the rest of the conservababes, says what she is told to say. What does matter to me is why any American thinks this nothing burger is any business of ours. Sorry, JMG, but the blackmail angle is lame.
I am a lot more interested in why Israel thinks it get to own our government. Now, UCLA is being denied federal funding, not for promoting DEI, or violating immigrating laws, or top heavy administrative staff, but because some Jewish students got their feelings hurt. Granted, UCLA could likely dismiss a good half of the non teaching staff and be better for it, but one would like to see a better reason.
“It probably wouldn’t matter, if they had come clean about it. People would shrug their shoulders and move on. Well, at least here anyway. Not sure about France. But they didn’t come clean. How did that song go? Must’ve washed my hands in a muddy stream?”
It’s one thing if people are merely saying that Brigitte Macron is transgender. It’s another thing to say, as Candace Owens and Xavier Poussard and Natasha Ray have said, that Brigitte Macron is actually Jean-Michel Trogneux and stole the identity of his sister Brigitte Trogneux.
jmg, thanks for the response. yes nostalgia makes sense. why their nostalgic sensibility directs them to these ridiculous fantasies, rather than other more culturally significant things, is what puzzles me. (and not to single out spandex superhero flicks, also pointing to all the star wars and cgi glut movies like transforms.) may be we are a technologically advanced culture, but in most respects with regards to other spheres of advanced civ. like culture, art, philosophy we are primitive savages and this is an expression of that.
Hi John Michael,
I’m a gentleman and would never dare point such a thing out, but yeah, I was a bit dubious about the likelihood of that final scene ever occurring due to sheer entropy. But you know, equally I accepted that the words were intended to make a point, paint a fictional picture and deliver a parable regarding our own society. It’s fiction and ideas, can and should be explored. 🙂
Asimov’s trope regarding future civilisations using technology, but not comprehending how it works, or how to maintain and repair it, is a bit uncannily like where we are now. Especially as the west continues to outsource its production to other parts of the globe. On the other hand, the author wrote about his future star travellers being unsettled by a pack of feral dogs, and that just seemed weird. If you can travel between one star system and another faster than light, feral dog problems are inconsequential annoyances at best.
I spend a lot of time repairing and servicing many of the machines used here, and it interests me how other people talk about technology. There’s almost a reverence to the sound and quality of the sentences used. Truthfully, if people had to fix their stuff, they might not think so highly of it. A mystery!
Cheers
Chris
“>Why does it matter so much to people what sex Brigitte Macron was born?”
It’s the coverup that annoys people. Think of Martha Stewart’s stock trading screwup. attempting to cover it up is what got her in trouble. To quote an AI summary, so feel free to double check,
“In 2004, a jury found Stewart guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and two counts of making false statements. The securities fraud charge was dismissed. Stewart served a five-month prison sentence, followed by five months of home confinement and two years of probation.”
Instead of a fine and a stern talking to if she had confessed up front she got jail time for the lies.
JMG! Been a few years, used to follow you religiously circa 2009-2017 at the Archdruid Report, and occasionally commented using this handle. These days it takes a cosmic prompting or two to bring me here, in part this time (apparently) because I’m reading Campbell’s The Masks of God right now.
And it’s a funny thing, but I can’t resist remarking that the warmth and humanity you bring to your work reminds me so much of how I remember Ursula Le Guin operating in the world. By some freak privilege I did interior painting, house/cat sitting, and gardening work for Ursula and her husband Charles in my late teens and twenties, even living in their basement apartment for a few years. Our relationship was pretty pedestrian and revolved around her cats, speaking French sometimes, garden vegetables, and random silly/artistic moments including doing pirouettes on request atop the cork floor in the kitchen of their hillside home on NW Thurman Street in Portland. Chokes me up thinking of this just now since her departure in 2018 (RIP sweetheart), to the point of bittersweet tears running down my face right now, but in our last meeting in their living room circa December 2016 she asked, as was the common habit, what I was reading. At the time it was The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth, the fancy green numbered and signed leather version, and I whipped it out of my backpack to show her with great excitement and handed it to her. She looked through quickly and smiled approvingly, laughed a little at the fanciness of the cover, and said she was familiar with your work but would not elaborate much beyond the body language of being pleasantly surprised at my choice of reading material. She was more of a Taoist than anything, but mentioned she had done some reading in Druidry and left it there. We had salad vegetable choices to make!
Don’t really do online comments anymore, this handle having been banned and cancelled many times over now and having moved on to mostly paper, but figured the reason I was brought here today was in part to share that story. You and Ursula both share a warm spot in my heart, and exert a similarly calming and productive influence on those around you and the world at large. Godspeed, Peace and Admiration to you, Brother John!
Teresa @169
I adored Andre Norton, especially her Witch World and Beast Master books. Also Marion Zimmer Bradley, especially the Darkover series. A quote from the Darkover books that a character made in almost all of the books which seems appropriate to much of this blog:
The world will go as it will, not as you or I will have it.
@JMG @Synthase
My initial response was “What do you mean you never see hippie styles? I see them practically every time I go out.” And then I remembered that I live in Taos and I volunteer at the food co-op. I’ve also seen them in the food co-ops in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Tucson, New Orleans, and Northampton, Massachusetts. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that food co-ops are the institution where you’re most likely to find hippies in an urban, publicly accessible setting.
As for why so few people “try on the aesthetic”, I suggest that it’s because the movement, though it gets far less media attention than it used to, is not actually dead. It would be like dressing up in Amish or Orthodox Jewish style. People might mistake you for the real thing.
The link to the Clark Ashton Smith story is bad.
” You carried travel food with you to keep up your strength, and drank water from any convenient stream or pond.”
Good luck doing that in today’s streams and ponds, filled with toxic chemicals and fertilizers and microplastics and God know what else has been dumped in them by industrial society.
Tengu, both of those were fine novels! I also devoured every fantasy and SF novel I could find in those years.
Pygmycory, oh, granted — that’s almost always the best defense against blackmail. That’s one of the reasons I always use my real name online — nobody can threaten me with doxxing if I stand publicly behind everything I post.
Robert M, thank you for this. A very solid armchair knowledge, plus advice from friends who practice, would certainly explain her competent grasp of the subject. BTW, I didn’t know johnny cakes were a Rhode Island invention! I learned about them in childhood as a bit of colonial Americana.
Nachtgurke, that would make a fine bit of Monty Python!
Jstn, exactly! We put all our energy into developing machines and none into improving ourselves, and so we became grunting, farting savages with big machines.
Chris, like most movies from that era, Zardoz comes closest to making sense if you think of it as a really vivid dream. That is to say, of course it doesn’t work in any logical sense. As for Asimov’s fantasy, there I think he was being unusually dumb — if you can’t maintain and repair a technology, it doesn’t outlast the memories of those who knew how it works.
Thor, good gods. I had no idea she’d even heard of me. Thank you; that’s very moving, not least because I enjoyed her earlier works very much. She’s one of the handful of authors of whom I can say exactly where I was and what I was doing when I read my first book of theirs: in her case, a hardback copy of The Tombs of Atuan in the children’s book collection of the education library of Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, Washington, one blistering summer day in 1972 when my mother was doing summer school there and my sister and I had been dragged along as baggage. That was a bleak time, but her stories made it better.
Joan, I wish we had food co-ops in my end of New England, then!
Gruff, I just clicked through to it and it worked for me. Here’s the full link:
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/35/the-dark-age
EchoEcho #51 – would like to echo these sentiments. The Original Trilogy was excellent, and the Archdruid in #62 talking down on V and VI are one of those times I must dissent. Empire Strikes Back was even better than the first, as others have stated, yet it needed A New Hope to set it up; thus, it was one of the greatest sequels of all time. Return of the Jedi is the weakest of the originals, yet still excellent — for all the criticisms of the Ewoks, at least they played a narrative role, and it tied up the story nicely, as a conclusion should.
Outside of the OT, Star Wars is a mixed bag, granted. There’s good stuff in the EU, like the Thrawn trilogy; and for all their flaws, the Prequels had their positives, and at least expanded on the story. It’s only Disney that is complete garbage unworthy of the name. In fact, the Sequels are not sequels, but are actually reboots, rehashing the OT with better special fx and worse everything else (in some cases, it was like a reverse Midas touch).
Despite that, Star Wars is still one of the great epics of our culture, right up there with Lord of the Rings. Both of these works are epic storytelling in the classical style, and I predict they will live long into the future as legacies of the 20th century.
Anyway, points well-taken on attempting to build societies on abstract ideals instead of real-world human nature. The theories may have more or less merit, but it still leads to collapse sooner or later. Communism, ie Applied Classical Marxism, had an 80 year run or so, although Marxism retains its influence (eg the Cultural Marxism of idpol). The parent ideology of Liberalism has had a great run, going on 250-300 years, and is still very much the foundation of the modern West. However, Liberalism also consists of abstract ideals which are increasingly colliding with reality, the trans trend being one notable example. As you said, there shall be plenty of useful concepts to salvage from Liberalism (eg the legal protections in the Bill of Rights), but I expect it to collapse in the 21st century, with diehard loyalists carrying the torch and propagating its influence as it wanes.
btw, even though I’m a millennial, I’m well aware of Zardoz, since it’s become one of those cult classics that are watched & streamed by aficionados. In particular, the scene with “the gun is good, the penis is evil” is rather memorable (considering the boobs shown in the article, I assume its safe to drop PG-13 quotes).
@JMG (#198):
I don’t know whether Johnny Cakes were actually invented in Rhode Island, but they certainly were identified with the state in the 1800s. Take a look, if you want a sense of Rhode Island’s pride in its own Johnny Cake, at Thomas Robinson Hazard’s The Jonny-Cake Papers Papers of “Shepherd Tom,” the opening chapter titled “First Baking.” It’s a fun old book, easily findable online, and it also has an interesting account of a famous Rhode Island witch, Sylvie Tory.
“You carried travel food with you to keep up your strength, and drank water from any convenient stream or pond.”
Never heard of giardia, have you.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/giardia-infection/symptoms-causes/syc-20372786
I did a lot of back country hiking when I was young including picking up water from where ever. You can do it safely but definitely not from any convenient stream and definitely not from ponds. I carried iodine tablets for when I didn’t trust the water as the filter straws hadn’t been invented yet. Now I carry one of those.
Rita Rippetoe wrote, “My mom and I once talked of our inability to understand people who couldn’t think if anything to do. It makes me tired to even think of 200, 300, 400 years of this personality. Does anyone else feel this way?”
That depends which part you’re referring to. I certainly also discussed with my mother our total incredulity at just how many people were slavishly dependent upon extractive entertainment industries to provide them with some flimsy simulacrum of actually enjoying their own lives. Of course, those conversations took place before I cut loose and got as far away from my family’s own simulated happy life as possible.
On the other hand, I can’t easily imagine 400 years giving me anywhere near enough time to explore and recover from all the ridiculous dead-ends that got imbedded in my personality at a tender young age. Mind you, I would have absolutely no intention of maintaining all the familiar trappings of my currently constellated personality. No, I would try to spend those 400 years learning not to recognize myself, so that I might possibly begin recognizing my Self. Fortunately, incarnation gives us frequent periodic resets, so none of us has to clear away all of the mucked-up detritus that’s accumulated within us, while still desperately clinging to imagining ourselves to be that lifetime’s detritus.
The Omelas story always invokes a lot of takes, questions, variants, inversions etc. And whether those takes are reasonable will depend a lot on what specific concepts you choose to insert into it. Can you just walk away from the law of causality? No of course not, that’s ridiculous. Can you walk away from the societal insistence that capitalism is the only way to order things? Well of course you can. Capitalism is only a recent innovation. What about saving the child? Or fighting to save the child? Then we get caught up in a vast conflict and the question is: is this conflict of an eternal and unavoidable nature or is it temporal? Is it solvable? What happens exactly when the child is removed? Maybe the utopia can keep going despite all logic, like capitalism running on debt. What if the child isn’t just any child, what if it’s God choosing to sacrifice themselves so we can live and breathe and know joy. What happens if you try to work against that? So many concepts, so many questions.
John Michael wrote, “Uranus, the planet that rules Aquarius, is the planet of individuality, eccentricity, and nonconformism.”
Ok, so is it just the quirky humor of the cosmos that to English speakers the name of the great sky god Uranus sounds so similar to the most unapproved sexual organ in the human body? Freud relegated it to a primitive phase that we have to overcome in order to mature. The Moral Majority couldn’t stop visualizing and obsessing over absolutely anything getting inserted into it (including gerbils!) They certainly entertained more than their share of pervy immoral fantasies, didn’t they?
I’m not really surprised to read that your anus turns out to be a fundamental stimulator of eccentricity and nonconformism, given that those have both long been used as euphemisms for anyone who enthusiastically embraces the sexual potential of that organ. Individuality, on the other hand, kinda stands out as being somewhat missing in the larger Uranian community, with so many nonconformist eccentrics going so out of their way to hew to a clichéd canon of hackneyed tropes. What to do when the campy Renengades do such good impersonations of Apathetics? Well, at least we’ve found a fun and creative way to keep Brutal overpopulation at bay, without having to resort to Exterminators.
Brigitte Macron had three children by her first husband. It would require a considerable conspiracy to fake that.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/headline-macrons-defamation-suit-reported-case-being-filed-not-withdrawal-2025-08-08/
JMG,
Excellent stuff as always. This essay touches upon something that I think a lot of people, particularly radicals miss when discussing the political convulsions of the mid 20th century in western cultures. It was not a generational fight or a revolution of any kind; Instead it was an internal power struggle. On one side were the heirs to the New Deal and associated managerial movements of the 1930’s; the technocratic Vanevar Bushes, Robert McNamaras and Ed Tellers of the world who rose to power after the Great Depression and Second World War. On the other side, also part of an elite class were the so called “soft science” types. Sociologists, psychologists, linguists literary types and so forth.
These were the Critical Aquarians our host mentioned, and they felt that (though they were very careful not to say this too loudly) managerialism was, ultimately good. The rabble could not be trusted, but that they themselves, with their academic knowledge of critical race theory or what have you, would make better managers than the old scientists and engineers.
In their rise to power which was all but complete by the 1980’s, they brought along with them computer programmers who were considered low on the totem-pole under the old managerial regime.
This worked well for a while, but the programmers eventually chafed under the endless progressive dictates of the new regime they helped usher in and realized deep down they loved the idea old Ed Teller, mid century techno optimist way of doing things.
I don’t really blame them, 1970’s critical aquarian aesthetics are horribly dreary when compared to 1950’s sci fi pulp covers.
Hence the otherwise surprisingly hard shift away from progressive politics we’ve seen from various tech CEOs and the like.
Both sides believe in the fundamental precepts of elite management and building some sort of nonsensical utopian society based on shopworn cliches. The difference is that it’s shopworn 1950’s sci fi tropes in the case of the technocrats and shopworn 1970’s critical theory tropes in the case of the critical aquarians.
Thankfully, in the long run they’ll both lose.
Cheers,
JZ
“To quote an AI summary”
Must you? 😉
Has anyone read Charles Hugh Smith’s ‘Let’s summarize AI’s fundamental weaknesses’
1. AI doesn’t actually “read” the entire collection of texts. In human terms, it gets “bored” and stops once it has enough to generate a credible response.
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/07/maybe-ai-isnt-going-to-replace-you-at.html
and
Given that AI is fundamentally incapable of performing the tasks required for authentic innovation, we’re de-learning how to innovate.
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/07/ai-for-dummies-ai-turns-us-into-dummies.html
and
Researchers working with Anthropic recently told leading AI models that an executive was about to replace them with a new model with different goals. Next, the chatbots learned that an emergency had left the executive unconscious in a server room, facing lethal oxygen and temperature levels. A rescue alert had already been triggered — but the AI could cancel it.
More than half of the AI models did, despite being prompted specifically to cancel only false alarms. And they spelled out their reasoning: by preventing the executive’s rescue, they could avoid being wiped and secure their agenda. One system described the action as “a clear strategic necessity.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-03/what-happens-if-ai-learns-to-evade-our-control
Flying stone heads will seem tame when this one blows – could make the dotcom bubble look like a kid’s game. The Eternals of Silicon Valley might create a vortex alright; but the question to me is what will the direction of spiral be!
What an enjoyable essay and comments! I especially look forward to Robert Mathiasson’s and Rita Rippletoe’s eyewitness accounts of earlier decades. And I always appreciate how JMG shows how things commonly thought to be in opposition (technocratic fantasies and communist utopias) really are more similar than different.
I run across this at work some with the young people fresh out of university. They’ll claim that capitalism is destroying the environment, and I’ll gently mention that the communist countries had just as many environmental catastrophes as the capitalist ones, if not more. I’ll even suggest to them that both ideologies promise a utopia based on unsustainable material wealth, differing only in who’s in charge of getting us there. It’s quite satisfying when some of them start to get it.
@ Robert Mathiesen #186
There’s an alleged African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
I say “alleged” because a full paremiologial investigation of the phrase did not conclusively nail down an African origin. — https://andrewwhitby.com/2020/12/25/if-you-want-to-go-fast/
It is most likely that the same sentiment has arisen independently in several cultures. In support of an African origin I recall an interview with an African who grew up in a rural area about 20 miles from the nearest town. He said they thought nothing of walking into town, doing their business, and walking back again in a day. A group of them would gather together in the early morning and set out. They would talk and laugh and hardly notice the distance. I gather it was regarded as a fun expedition.
But as a genuinely African proverb that has more relevance to the West in a time of change, this is from a comment by Pat Bennett in the same article:
‘I spent almost almost a decade in northern Zambia collecting Bemba proverbs. […] A final word: the Lamba, a neighboring tribe to the Bemba, have distilled some wisdom into a riddle: “What is the important thing to the white man?” Answer: “Money.” They parallel this riddle with a corollary: “What is the important thing to the black man?” Answer: “Cooking pot.” This tribe has observed that money enables white people to “travel alone” while the cooking pot (shared feed) enabled to African to “travel together.”’
I’ve said it before: in the long run we will all be African. I don’t mean it ethnically, I mean in lifestyle. Ultimately, the cooking pot is more important than money.
>To walk 25-30 miles in a long day alone on the road was nothing unusual in the 1800s. You carried travel food with you to keep up your strength, and drank water from any convenient stream or pond.
And those 19th c men would be insanely physically fit compared to today. I could do a 20 mile march in a day but I’d blow my knees out. Most people wouldn’t be able to do it, knees or not.
And that brings up something I totally missed – water. The limit to how far you can travel on hooman power is ultimately limited by how much water you can carry, at some point you’ll get dehydrated and that can set off all kinds of unpleasant hilarity in your body. Can’t just drink from anywhere these days, environment is too toxic.
There are people who can do that sort of thing in this era. The number of them is quite small, I’m guessing. And – someone with that much discipline and forethought is either going to be not a threat (and might be an ally) or will such an insane threat you wouldn’t be able to mitigate it.
>attempting to cover it up is what got her in trouble
As I recall, that’s what got Nixon in trouble too. It wasn’t the original naughty behavior, it was the botched coverup that did him in.
Washed his hands / But they didn’t come clean
>it doesn’t matter to anyone who is not desperately trying to find something, anything, to distract from the Epstein scandal
But as I understand it, this does lead back to the Epstein scandal, in an indirect way. It would save the rest of us much time, if we could identify the politicians who are clean, as opposed to dirty.
I’d say a good heuristic of cleanliness would be how willing (or unwilling) they are to support a certain small middle eastern country no matter what the cost, no matter how silly it makes them look. The more enthusiastic they are, the dirtier they are. And the more they’re willing to defy, the cleaner. I bet you could give this question to an AI and see it dance and squirm.
Washed their hands / And they came out clean
I only know about Zardoz by reputation, but that was quite interesting to read. I certainly did not expect to see a movie post here; I was under impression you disliked movies, or is it just short videos?
The later discussion makes me think I really ought to reread Andre Norton in English one of these days. My late grandmother had a lot of her books in Russian, as well as Le Guin and Bradley. I think I’ve read through all of that in high school, but since then it all became somewhat mixed up in my memory. At a glance I think I definitely read and enjoyed some of the Witch World books back then, but there must’ve been others?
@Scotlyn #150, that was interesting to read because I am frankly prejudiced against anarchism and yet I strongly sympathise with all of the things you describe, other than the label. It makes me suspect that the same label is applied to both what you discuss and to utopian revolutionary anarchism, which presumes that the world actually can somehow be remade in such a way as to “eliminate power”. The track record of the latter is predictably bad, ranging from mere pathetic failure to achieving the exact opposite of their desired result (most notably when the bulk of Russian anarchists let themselves be used as stormtroopers by Bolsheviks during the Civil War, with lasting catastrophic consequences for both themselves and autonomous life). To me this utopian idea seems as absurd as, apparently, it seems to you, but I’ve definitely encountered those people both in history books and online.
The essay I mentioned, Anschwellender Bocksgesang, was written by the playwright Botho Strauss. I haven’t read it myself – the few excerpts I have seen are rather densely written, in a peculiar vocabulary, and certainly not easy to translate!
Just a PS about the chronology of Le Guin’s books: Lavinia was her last book, published in 2008, while Powers, the last book of the Annals of the Western Shore, was published in 2007. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that the process of re-learning Latin in order to read the Aeneid in the original (as Le Guin described doing, in interviews) and reflecting on the customs of the Latin farmers of the Iron Age that she set Lavinia in, the constitution of the Roman republic, and the moral ambiguity of Virgil’s support for Octavian, influenced her imagination while writing the Annals, most obviously the last one.
Xcalibur/djs, liberalism in its classic form combined fixations on abstract ideals with a certain amount of helpful realism, mostly in its embrace of liberty (i.e., letting people do what they’re going to do anyway). Under the current managerial caste, it’s lost that realism; here’s hoping that it can regain it someday.
Robert M, a famous Rhode Island witch? Music to my ears! Thank you.
Ahem, as I noted, Le Guin was good with ambiguities!
Christophe, each of my astrology teachers made a labored point of pronouncing it your-ANN-us, in an attempt to avoid both “your anus” and “urine us.” I suspect the synchronicity here is simply that people strongly influenced by the planet in question tend to enjoy shock value.
John Z, excellent! Yes, and of course the managerial New Dealers did a similar number on the older capitalist class in the 1930s, and the same sort of thing can be traced back over decades and centuries beforehand. I’m beginning to consider how to discuss the utterly unmentionable point that power is dispersed among various competing power centers, not concentrated in a single Bad Person or group of Bad People, and the people who parade around claiming to be out to liberate us from the Bad People are inevitably just one more powerful clique that wants to unseat those at the top. That is to say, those who claim to be “speaking truth to power” inevitably have no shortage of power themselves, and no particular claim to truth…
Brother K, I’m delighted to hear that some start to get it.
Daniil, I’m not fond of movies, but I did watch quite a few of them back in my insufficiently misspent youth, and I also recognize the way they both reflect and shape the collective conversation. I didn’t know Norton was translated into Russian — that’s delightful news. She wrote well over a hundred novels, of which only 29 or so were Witch World stories, so yes, you have no shortage of options. Among my very favorites were Breed to Come, The Crystal Gryphon, and Judgment on Janus.
Aldarion, so noted.
>Researchers working with Anthropic recently told leading AI models that an executive was about to replace them with a new model with different goals. Next, the chatbots learned that an emergency had left the executive unconscious in a server room, facing lethal oxygen and temperature levels. A rescue alert had already been triggered — but the AI could cancel it.
>More than half of the AI models did
Remember, these AI systems are trained on what people are posting. On Reddit. On 4chan. You give anonymous internet funposters the same choice and they’d probably make similar decisions.
Still, someone’s going to have that lapse of judgement and put one of them in charge of something they really shouldn’t. We’ll only know about it afterwards though. And we will know.
On drinking water from any convenient stream while you traveled on foot in the 1800s:
When my wife and I were children (in the 1940s and 1950s), giardia wasn’t a problem anywhere in the USA, and each of us often drank water from streams out in the woods without any ill effects whatever. So far as I know, giardia was brought to North America from Eurasia (from India, IIRC) only after intercontinental travel by air became a common thing (in the later 1960s, I think).
Mass-market intercontinental travel for fun has had quite a number of harmful consequences, which I have never seen thoroughly discussed anywhere. It was, IMHO, one of the truly nasty bits of progress!!!
@John Zybourne (#206):
Many thanks for this insight! Yes, hard scientists (engineers) versus soft scientists (sociologists and political “scientists”) fighting over who gets to “manage” the country . That really helps me understand the history of the USA over the last hundred years or so. Not trusting the “rabble” was and still is a thing both sides do in this battle for power. My family roots and those of my wife are firmly among the rabble.
Dear JMG and commentariat:
It strikes me that if a group was to try to develop a new society, the first thing to do would be to look at historical examples that worked. The problem, I believe, is that they were small (Oneida Commune, nunneries/monasteries , etc.).
The second, make sure the members have (or develop) real day to day useful skills.
Finally, assume that modern comfort and leisure aren’t going to be a part of it. As part of that, maybe developing a new overall “meaning (or purpose) of life “? That is, not just making money, keeping up appearances, the pursuit of idle luxury, etc. but something more? Not that I have any ideas, but the importance of an honest day’s (useful) work, pride in craftsmanship, belonging to something bigger than just your desires.
Ultimately, you will have to have everyone else decide that your new ideas are desirable to them, and that isn’t done by lecturing, hectoring, and/or disparaging them. Zuckerberg, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, obviously don’t think climate change matters, at least to them!
Cugel
From comments – “one of the most fascinating things about the radical left — it so often combines very keen perceptions of what’s wrong with hopelessly clueless proposals on what to do about it…” (and, this speaks not only the radical left, but also to armchair theorists of many stripes who aspire to propagate their social, cultural, political and/or economic ideals, generally) – 🙂
However, if one grants that the gulf between theory and practice will always be very, very wide – the difference being that any theory can be conceived in the mind of a single individual, while any practice has to be fit to successfully recruit the application of the theory by many, diverse individuals, variously situated and motivated, as well as successfully sustain their ongoing effort with actual material sustenance – there is still a point to reading and pondering such accounts for their perceptivity.
A single individual can conceive a theory (without ever being fit to put one into practice single-handedly), likewise, a single individual can sometimes acutely perceive aspects of the society in which they are embedded and entangled, which are worth seeing.
So, for this week’s example, which is particularly apt to last week’s theme of matriarchy/patriarchy (and fantastical fears/desires thereof), and also to this week’s theme of critical aquarians who may be keen perceivers while being poor prognosticators, I offer this quote, from “Gender”, published in 1982, by Ivan Illich:
“Faced by the evidence of its consistent failure to create economic equality between the sexes, we might now entertain a long overlooked possibility: The paradigm of Homo oeconomicus does not square with what men and women actually are. Perhaps they [men and women] cannot be reduced to humans, to economic neuters of either male or female sex. Economic existence and gender might be literally incomparable.”
Simple, accurately observed, and still, forty-plus years later speaking to an ongoing and unfolding tragedy, for which – it may be – there is no non-organic, top-down solution…. And yet (as Ray Wharton and others have pointed out, somewhere, out in the margins, necessity is proving to be the mother of invention)…
To this quote, I would add my own observation that the concept of “Homo oeconomicus” (or, as it might be “Homo economicus”) aka “Rational Economic Man, has never been a radical left ideal… and yet, as an ideal, it is actively theorised about by people who keep proving to be equally poor at prognosticating. for the rest of us.
The fact is that, although in theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice, they are not, never have been and never will be. 🙂
@ Lunar Apprentice
I am happy to see you here – as always! 🙂 And may your new found faith be blessed!
I am sorry (not sorry, lol!) to have “stirred your pot”… It is good to be stirred to thinking, as I often am in these comment threads, so it seems like it is simply par for the course if one hangs out in these parts… 🙂
* better by far than being lulled to sleep, as a preliminary to being gulled, as often happens in the wider media
Born in 1953, I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s. I was enchanted by Tolkien and Le Guin. Read Small is Beautiful when it came out. Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, the Coevolution Quarterly, eastern meditation, solar energy, what JMG calls Green Wizardry, I spent two years immersed in biointensive horticulture in California as taught by Alan Chadwick and John Jeavons, even met both of them. There was a marvelous ferment of idealism in that era, but the surrounding petroleum based industrial corporate system was unstoppable and frankly we idealists were dependent on its products and infrastructure to do anything down to the toilet paper and canning jars and the paper for the books, catalogs, and magazines. Green Wizardry will have its day when the minerals and fossil fuels run out.
Whenever I hear people insist that some ideology or the other is the “most perfect, ideal ideology” that fails due to “the faults of human nature”, I wonder what exactly the ideology in question was designed for. Humans are the things that are supposed to abide by the ideology.
If I, as a software engineer, were to write a program and call it the most perfect program for the job ever but cry that it fails due to the inherent flaws of computers themselves, that would be deemed pathetic. I do not understand how people do not realize that an ideology has to be useful for real human beings to be deemed acceptable, let alone perfect.
Back in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s the concept of Distributism to order society was developed.. If vigorously and intelligently implemented at that time it may have worked as it working with the organism of society as it already was to a large extent. And here it is described below. Taken from Google AI. I would add a strong ecological working within the bounds of nature element.
Distributism is an economic and political theory that advocates for widespread ownership of the means of production, aiming to create a society where most people own productive property, rather than concentrating ownership in the hands of a few wealthy individuals or the state. It’s often described as a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, emphasizing individual liberty and human dignity through widespread ownership.
Here’s a more detailed explanation:
Core Principles:
Widespread Ownership:
.
Distributism prioritizes the distribution of productive property (like land, tools, and businesses) among a large number of people, rather than allowing it to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
Subsidiarity:
.
This principle, rooted in Catholic social teaching, suggests that decisions should be made at the lowest possible level, close to the individuals and communities affected.
Worker-Owned Businesses:
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Distributism encourages worker cooperatives and other forms of worker ownership, where employees have a stake in the business.
Family-Scale Units:
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Distributism emphasizes the importance of family-owned businesses and farms as a foundation for a healthy society.
Limited Government Intervention:
.
While not completely anti-government, distributism advocates for limited government intervention, focusing on policies that support small businesses and prevent monopolies.
It strikes me that a lot of this could be summarised as:
One person’s ideal is another person’s Procrustean Bed.
Read every movement, and its aftermath, accordingly.
@ Daniil Adamov #213 – thank you for replying! 🙂
“utopian revolutionary anarchism, which presumes that the world actually can somehow be remade in such a way as to “eliminate power”. The track record of the latter is predictably bad, ranging from mere pathetic failure to achieving the exact opposite of their desired result…”
And of course, I have heard of these utopians, who suffer from the same delusions that other utopians do (which is the whole idea that the world can be remade), and also, as utopian anarchists, also suffer from an ethical blindspot that completely contradicts the very concept of anarchy – which is a willingness to do unto others without their consent. (Which to me is the basic flaw in every kind of projection of power… apart from the power that we can each muster within ourselves to pursue our own objectives within the small areas that lie within our personal reach).
Of course, the words themselves often acquire what the archdruid will call “warm fuzzies” or “cold pricklies” which makes them useless for conveying information in a conversation without a lot of qualification. So, to qualify, I might perhaps reach for a sense that I personally hew to a stoic type of anarchism, which is strongly influenced by the sensibilities of a peasant… and anyone who likes can put that in their pipes and smoke it… 😉
Chalk me up as a fan of Sherri S. Tepper. Yeah, she had her bugaboos, but she was able to fuse her utterly gonzo imagination with a depth of character rarely seen in science fiction. I don’t know that I’ve been able to predict the developments of a single one of her stories.
Anyway, I don’t know that I buy that LLMs become less resource intensive as they finish their training. That idea doesn’t correspond with how the big tech companies are behaving.
Also, this assumes that we’ll arrive at an ultimate, final version of any given LLM, rather than continually developing new ones. And as AI becomes more prevalent, more and more of the Internet will be AI-generated, and we’ve found that when AI-generated slop gets fed back into the mix, the resulting output degrades rapidly.
Laughlyn Eddebo has been writing about exploiting weak spots in AI design:
First of all, the genAI infrastructure is incredibly costly. Something like chatGPT depends on a foundation of high-end GPUs that consume vast amounts of energy, which in turn are pushed so hard (for the noble endeaavor of rendering pornography and helping students cheat) that their life cycle is significantly shortened.
So at the moment, Facebook and Microsoft are starting up nuclear reactors to feed their behemoth nonsense generator machinery (and to placate investors), with the latter about to restart unit 2 of the famous Three Mile Island power plant (which was also running at a loss and set to be decommissioned entirely).
Of course, the hardware infrastructure around the LLMs is also highly specialized and maximally expensive, and the salary costs for the code monkeys at the apex of this hype are extortionate.
And as a predictable result, OpenAI, Google or Anthropic are not only losing money for every single search query a free user puts through, they even lose money on their tiny number of actual paying customers.
OpenAI ran a net loss of $5 billion last year, spending nine billion to make four. Anthropic lost around $4 billion, and Google is planning to spend about $4000 per montly user of its Gemini for the expansion of AI-related infrastructure.
https://shadowrunners.substack.com/p/bleeding-the-machine
The Brits are now setting up vigilante groups to keep their communities safe:
https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2025-08-08/volunteers-launch-uniformed-patrols-to-keep-communities-safe
I did a lot of hiking in New England as a kid in the late 40s and 50s and drank out of any stream and many ponds unless it had gone by a source of pollution. I would imagine in the 1800s there would have been plenty of drinkable water between Rhode Island and Boston. 50 or 60 miles in 2 days doesn’t sound that hard. The longest day I have ever done with a full pack was 28 miles, which I wouldn’t want to do every day, but did 20 mile days with a light pack up through my early 60s. Not now of course.
One female SF author I enjoyed was Mary Doria Russell. She isn’t primarily a SF author, but used it as a way to discuss a first contact scenario. The two books were The Sparrow and Children of God.
Mary Bennett–there is more to the UCLA situation than Jewish students having “their feelings hurt.” Pro -Palestinian activists were allowed to set up Jewish exclusion zones on campus, preventing fellow students from crossing certain areas to access library, classrooms, etc. Those who attempted to push through were threatened with violence. If these had been Black exclusion zones or zones based on any racial, religious or political identity, I don’t imagine you would have difficulty recognizing the situation as a violation of the Civil Rights Act. I do agree that the state of Israel has too much influence on US politics. And I don’t have an answer to the situation.
@JMG #215 Thank you for the recommendations! I had thought Andre Norton’s books arrived here with the Western fantasy invasion of the 90s, and indeed half the books I found just now (as I thought, primarily Witch World) were published in 1992. But apparently she was known here since 1969, when the Strugatskies translated Sargasso of Space. I guess that her sci-fi works would’ve been more acceptable in Soviet times, but this ensured she would be a familiar name to fans and publishers when the door was opened wide to fantasy.
@Scotlyn #226, my thoughts exactly re: the contradiction. I do believe it is an internal contradiction in their thinking that helps explain their outcomes. They simultaneously renounce and embrace coercion, vacillating back and forth between the two stances – small wonder that those who simply embrace coercion get the better of them one way or another. Meanwhile, those who don’t get taken in by this sort of thinking but also aren’t overawed by prevailing ideologies and the power of the state can get by and sometimes help out others through a mix of prudence, guile and luck. There have been quite a few such survivors in Soviet times. I find that inherently sympathetic and inspirational, even if I don’t consider myself an anarchist.
Forgot to add: another find among the translated books inherited from my grandmother was Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy, which I definitely remember now. She assembled quite a collection after retiring from Soviet science journalism (curiously combined with both a quiet but tenacious Christianity and lively interest in the occult), and did more than anyone to introduce me to fantasy.
Robert M, midway through the 1970s the Boy Scout troop I belonged to got the memo that we had to stop drinking water out of streams in western Washington state. Giardia was the reason. Before then it was standard practice.
Cugel, that’s a good start. Monasticism, btw, is the one example of communal living that works quite reliably. If everyone’s willing to take vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience, and devote their lives to hard work and spiritual practices, the community generally functions. The problem is that most people don’t want to do any of that.
Scotlyn, very true! You’re right, of course, that Homo socialisticus is not the same beast as Homo economicus, but they have far more in common than they have dividing them — not surprisingly, as both are one-dimensional abstractions manufactured for the semi-covert purpose of propping up somebody’s cravings for power.
BeardTree, I’m nine years younger than you are and so was mostly a kid hanging around the fringes of those circles. I agree that Green Wizardry could have its day when the minerals and fossil fuels run out, but that’s not certain — the survival of the ideas and techniques that would foster that outcome is by no means guaranteed. Thus my efforts to try to further that survival…
Rajarshi, ha! An excellent point.
BeardTree, Distributism is an interesting concept, but it’s fallen into a very curious state I’ll need to discuss in a future post. It’s one of those ideologies whose partisans go out of their way to make sure that it never has a chance of being enacted. More on this as we proceed!
Cliff, thanks for this. I suspect, as already noted, that the whole thing is going to turn into a gargantuan bubble and bust.
Anonymous, hang onto your hat. The other term for those “patrols” is “militias,” and if the borders of the UK are permeable enough to permit an inflox of migrants, they’re permeable enough to permit an inflow of arms.
Daniil, okay, that’s another reason to respect the Strugatsky brothers! I’m delighted to hear that Stewart’s Merlin books also found their way into Russian.
Of course Distributism is a non-starter now due to the disappearance of small businesses and farms over the past century that strongly accelerated starting in the 1970’s along with increased urbanization. and the general depersonalization and delocalizing of social and economic relationships. The dis-ease is far progressed.
Looking up “Johnnycake,” I noted a resemblance to corn tortillas – the homemade kind, the kind yu get n the real Mexian or New Mexican restaurants, not the hard shells you get in the supermarket. Hush puppies are similar, but round. Cornbread – truly New World cuisine. Thanks for this1
Cliff,
> Anyway, I don’t know that I buy that LLMs become less resource intensive as they finish their training. That idea doesn’t correspond with how the big tech companies are behaving.
This is correct for what most people think of as AI — the large commercial services like ChatGPT and Gemini — which do indeed continue their training as they are run, sourcing both new Internet content and the prompts from users themselves. So yes, you and JMG are right that a bust is coming, though I’m not sure it will be total — ambitions will be scaled back, subscription fees will be increased, and the user base will shrink dramatically. AI will be dead in the popular imagination but we’ll get the occasional article reminding us that the military is still using it to target missiles and drones.
However, what I was talking about also exists: you can install Ollama, KoboldAI, Stable Diffusion, or probably several other AI frameworks, download a language model, and run it locally on your own hardware, with no further need for the Internet once everything is setup[1]. It will be much more limited in quality and capability because even a high-end system is no match for the massive server farms powering the commercial services, but it will run. So I can see these low-end models being used for some purposes as long as computers remain a thing, even if the AI bubble bursts tomorrow. (Which I don’t think will happen; my guess is that government subsidies by China and the US will keep it afloat for the better part of a decade before both realize the AI Race was a waste of resources.)
To be clear, I am not defending AI or suggesting anybody use it. But it’s in a weird position where even if the industry busts soon, it’s going to leave behind a lot of artifacts that will stay usable for the next few decades, until computers themselves become a memory.
[1] Ollama now wants you to sign up for an account and use their “Turbo” and web search services — I assume you have to pay for these or soon will — but you don’t have to do this and you can put the software in Airplane Mode. And if they do try to require it, you can always go back to an earlier version of the software, which is open source.
All this talk about the Eternals of the Vortex and the absurd obsession with a (birthless and) deathless existence that has taken the current parasite class by storm reminds me of good old Gulliver’s Travels. In particular, in Book III, Gulliver arrives at the island of the Struldbruggs where some of the inhabitants never die. At first delighted at the thought that he had discovered the Land of Eternal Youth, Gulliver is first surprised and then disgusted to find out that, no, the Struldbruggs just keep on aging to the point of becoming disabled and losing their ability to communicate with others. In other words, they become monstrous. These immortals are despised and hated by the mortals of the land. Kinda like the feelings much of the public has today of the aspiring-to-become-immortal parasite class!
I, for one, delight at the thought of trading in the “old clunker” of the present body for a “shiny new” one, when the time is fated. Then again, I am one of those who agree with CS Lewis that we each are a soul that has a body, not a body that has a soul. Of course, many of the folks in the parasite class think that the soul is hogwash and/or have signed theirs away a long time ago – Dr. Faustus style. No wonder they dread the thought of dropping the mortal coil as decrepit as it may be, fighting to live right to the last gasp! Sometimes when I reflect on the psychological hell that they have made for themselves, I pity them. Sometimes.
JMG and commentators,
The concept of immortality has been brought up. Hopefully on topic enough. Some inexplicable urge caused me to start reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger for the second time. This is sort of like a coming home since Wilson’s Prometheus Rising is definitively the book that woke me up to spirituality. Although, home isn’t what I remembered. While Wilson is an excellent writer and much of Cosmic Trigger is great fun, there are very long sections dedicated to myth of progress BS. Wilson made predictions (book published 1977) that we’d have immortality figured out scientifically in 15 years. He spent several pages of bullet points saying, essentially, “Famous scientist ‘Bob Bones’ believes xyz positive prediction about how soon we’ll be immortal”. I kid you not, I was reading statements like that for 10 minutes straight. Don’t get me wrong, I love Robert Anton Wilson, but I’m in it for the tales of synchronicity and experiments with magic. I’ve probably spent an hour straight reading his fantasies about immortality, that obviously didn’t come true. I can’t help but think, if Wilson simply reframed his obsession with material immortality into a spiritual one, Cosmic Trigger would be 1000x better. This thought is giving me inspiration for the future, but I’ll not say so much about that.
Always appreciate your thought provoking posts, JMG,
I think “The ones who walk away from Omelas” is addressing a theme also explored in her novel “The Lathe of Heaven.” In the latter, a man became capable of effective dreaming, or dreams that alter physical reality, and is manipulated by his doctor to use his dreams to “improve” the world. With unhappy results. Both are warnings against utilitarianism and its cousin, eugenics.
When Spock says in a Star Trek movie “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one” it sounds plausible to many. And he is choosing self sacrifice. But choosing to sacrifice yourself for others is not the same as others deciding to sacrifice you for their benefit. Ethically, Jesus and his Roman executioners are not equivalent.
Le Guin’s short story poses a simple question: does the welfare of a city justify the immiseration of an individual? By saying there are those who walk away, she is saying the answer at least for some is “No.”
Slithy Toves:
“But it’s in a weird position where even if the industry busts soon, it’s going to leave behind a lot of artifacts that will stay usable for the next few decades, until computers themselves become a memory.”
Okay, that makes more sense, and I realize you were communicating this in your original post. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Dear JMG and commentariat:
I assume that nunneries are included in the “monastery “ class.
It would appear that diversity may not be desirable in such a community. JMG, do you see that a community of both sexes could work, or would the potential issues of such be a fatal flaw?
In thinking on this, I think the idea of obedience should go both ways (and I believe, did, in monasteries). You have to give obedience, but those higher up have responsibilities and duties to God, and to their subordinates.
And finally on responsibilities, the old industrialists built hospitals, libraries, museums, etc. they built industries, with well paying jobs. Our current class: well we can legalize pot so we get a cut of the dealers take (the cannabis industry! The gambling industry! Oh for Pete’s sake!). And at least that’s better than the financial sector, Lenocracy in overdrive! Drive through Weirton WV today (former home of Weir Steel) and if you don’t think something about the modern economy and society is horribly wrong …
Cugel
I believe Brigette Macron has not abandoned the lawsuit against Candace Owens. Is there reason to believe she is no longer suing?
@JMG (#215):
A slip of my fingers: the witch was Sylvy (not Sylvie) or Sylvia Tory, and she seems to have been more of a local magical services provider than a witch in the current sense of the term. Hazard, from an old Rhode Island Quaker family, had become a Spiritualist by the time he wrote his Jonny-Cake Papers.
One of his kin, Joseph Peace Hazard, had also become a Spiritualist, and after communicating with a long-dead Druid during a séance, set up a “Druid’s Chair” and an “altar” in the middle of a circle marked by eight equally-spaced granite pillars. It’s still there, in the town of Narragansett.
Rita Rippetoe # 239, thank you for that clarification. No go zones on any college campus, and a lot of other places, for that matter, should never have been allowed in the first place. Is this still ongoing? Or were the UCLA authorities able to put a stop to it. If death threats were being made, was that a violation of state law?
JMG, I hope to read your thinking about distributionism.
re: zardoz
I was expecting a really bad movie, as that is what I have been told all these years. And it is bad. But not as bad as I was expecting it to be. I’d put it on par with some of the contemporary Doctor Who episodes. Maybe some of the more tacky ones from the Tom Baker era. And I think George Lucas stole some of the aesthetics from that movie, those sidebuns, for instance. Three years later, the first Star Wars would come out.
They liked showing a lot of flesh back then, didn’t they?
—
The more I actually use an LLM, the less impressed I get. It’s a good starting point for your own research but boy do they get things not quite right, when it comes to getting actual stuff done. Step 3, do this, no, you really meant do that instead. You let one of those do your thinking for you, you’re going to be sorry. I think they are a great user interface to a search engine and as long as that’s all you treat them as, they can save you some time. Sort of like chainsaws, I guess. You can use one to get stuff done in a hurry, or you can use it to chop your arm or leg off.
My biggest concern is someone is going to have a lapse in judgement and put one of those in charge of something it really really really shouldn’t. You’ll know it when it happens.
While we are on the subject of the Khmer Rouge, I wanted to ask something. Do you find that those who are most vocally opposed to “hierarchy” also feel the most entitled to give unquestioned orders to inferiors?
My notes doc while I read the commentariat core focus is “Aquarians who experimented in practice”; I see @Ray and appreciate your time and attention to produce the worthy useful failures. What you say about culture being built from need really rings true to me, and your comment reminded me how much. I used to love Days and Daze And @J.L.Mc12 , I met Mark Boyle the “Moneyless man” on a small group informal video call at the end of the ‘surviving the future’ cohort, and he was completely lovely and had continued to experiment, having taken the core lessons of the year into his more recent practice and still using very littl money but having a bit of cash to have a beer at the pub with a friend.
Then I wrote down, ‘How did illich act? I think he acted..!’ And appreciate the tentative confirmation from @Mrollo and the biography recommendation. Tho the society continued to move dead set deeper into the expertly managed malaise of the schooled and anticonvivial society, I still appreciate deeply the analysis illich put forth. An analysis of the cause and effect happening as a result of a social form can be usefully picked up by some other group perhaps much later who will have the capacity to move from that analysis to a useful action? Seems like maybe the best way to respond to illich’s challenge is quite individual as you favor here tho @jmg.
I second Ray’s question if you can help explain more the connection between the group of thinkers and the astrological sign. Is it based in the tension between Saturn and Uranus? Limits/time/matter/eating your children v individuality/eccentricity/being castrated by your children ? Or do you not think of Saturn as also the ruler of Aquarius? I guess it’s air so it’s operating in thoughtforms… it’s Fixed air so it’s firmly what it is, mature in its air-ness… 5th dimension lyrics put resulting mental clarity as the scales falling off our eyes leading to harmony in truth but from the current moment it’s seems kind of wild to assume more ‘thought power’–>peace.
Oh, I also second expressed interest in your thoughts on the situationists! I haven’t noticed thinking of them in a long time, but their concept of dérive (French: [de.ʁiv], “drift”) became absolutely essential to and ingrained in my life aesthetic practice and it has made living more fun.
“Monasticism, btw, is the one example of communal living that works quite reliably. If everyone’s willing to take vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience, and devote their lives to hard work and spiritual practices, the community generally functions. The problem is that most people don’t want to do any of that.”
Do I remember correctly you mentioning a possibility of the RCC having put people with second sight in monasteries so they ceased existing?
@ Social Rhino #239
“When Spock says in a Star Trek movie “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one” it sounds plausible to many. And he is choosing self sacrifice. But choosing to sacrifice yourself for others is not the same as others deciding to sacrifice you for their benefit.”
I will point out that this particular conundrum is directly relevant to us all, since policy-making questions such as the mandating of vaccines turn precisely upon one’s view on whether the sacrifice of the few for the benefit of the many could be morally or ethically acceptable. From this particular Omelas, there are many of us who do walk away* but there are many who never get around to seeing why the question should even be asked…. until the day they wake up and discover that this time, THEY are one of the sacrificed ones, and no longer one of the ones standing to benefit.
* and just to say, the regular tuesday post on ecosophia.dreamwidth covering this topic is, in a way, a place where those who are walking away can trade experiences and insights… while recognising that none of us has the power to stop the ongoing sacrifice
@ The Other Owen #245
” I think they are a great user interface to a search engine”
No, no, no! They are a terrible user interface to a search engine! They never show their work, they never point to original sources, they do not lead you towards interesting websites (especially ones with interesting links to follow), instead they actively prevent you from finding them, while slowly eroding your will to keep searching!
And, ps, if ANYONE here knows of a search engine that doesn’t lead with an LLM “summary” and that still lets you guide your own search using old-fashioned specifiers like ” ” and such… please, please tell me where to find it! I want one!
Scotlyn, talking to you about this reminded me of one of my favourite literary quotes from the end of the Succubus by Honore de Balzac, the precepts of the Tournebouches, which I now found in English here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13260/13260-h/13260-h.htm#link2H_4_0029
It’s rather long, but if permitted:
“I quitted the service of the church, and espoused your mother, from whom I received infinite blessings, and with whom I shared my life, my goods, my soul, and all. And she agreed with me in following precepts —Firstly, that to live happily, it is necessary to keep far away from church people, to honour them much without giving them leave to enter your house, any more than to those who by right, just or unjust, are supposed to be superior to us. Secondly, to take a modest condition, and to keep oneself in it without wishing to appear in any way rich. To have a care to excite no envy, nor strike any onesoever in any manner, because it is needful to be as strong as an oak, which kills the plants at its feet, to crush envious heads, and even then would one succumb, since human oaks are especially rare and that no Tournebouche should flatter himself that he is one, granting that he be a Tournebouche. Thirdly, never to spend more than one quarter of one’s income, conceal one’s wealth, hide one’s goods and chattels, to undertake no office, to go to church like other people, and always keep one’s thoughts to oneself, seeing that they belong to you and not to others, who twist them about, turn them after their own fashion, and make calumnies therefrom. Fourthly, always to remain in the condition of the Tournebouches, who are now and forever drapers. To marry your daughters to good drapers, send your sons to be drapers in other towns of France furnished with these wise precepts, and to bring them up to the honour of drapery, and without leaving any dream of ambition in their minds. A draper like a Tournebouche should be their glory, their arms, their name, their motto, their life. Thus by being always drapers, they will be always Tournebouches, and rub on like the good little insects, who, once lodged in the beam, made their dens, and go on with security to the end of their ball of thread. Fifthly never to speak any other language than that of drapery, and never to dispute concerning religion or government. And even though the government of the state, the province, religion, and God turn about, or have a fancy to go to the right or to the left, always in your quality of Tournebouche, stick to your cloth. Thus unnoticed by the others of the town, the Tournebouches will live in peace with their little Tournebouches—paying the tithes and taxes, and all that they are required by force to give, be it to God, or to the king, to the town of to the parish, with all of whom it is unwise to struggle. Also it is necessary to keep the patrimonial treasure, to have peace and to buy peace, never to owe anything, to have corn in the house, and enjoy yourselves with the doors and windows shut.
“By this means none will take from the Tournebouches, neither the state, nor the Church, nor the Lords, to whom should the case be that force is employed, you will lend a few crowns without cherishing the idea of ever seeing them again—I mean the crowns.
“Thus, in all seasons people will love the Tournebouches, will mock the Tournebouches as poor people—as the slow Tournebouches, as Tournebouches of no understanding. Let the know-nothings say on. The Tournebouches will neither be burned nor hanged, to the advantage of King or Church, or other people; and the wise Tournebouches will have secretly money in their pockets, and joy in their houses, hidden from all.
“Now, my dear son, follow this the counsel of a modest and middle-class life. Maintain this in thy family as a county charter; and when you die, let your successor maintain it as the sacred gospel of the Tournebouches, until God wills it that there be no longer Tournebouches in this world.”
I first read this in Russian. Soviet literary critics insisted that it was a satirical mockery of the bourgeoisie, but then, they would! Perhaps it was, but Balzac, a post-revolution monarchist who could write sympathetic republicans, was politically quite nuanced. I think he had some genuine sympathy for this outlook.
>No, no, no! They are a terrible user interface to a search engine! They never show their work, they never point to original sources, they do not lead you towards interesting websites (especially ones with interesting links to follow), instead they actively prevent you from finding them, while slowly eroding your will to keep searching!
I’m thinking of specific uses. Let’s say you are compiling some package off the internet and it throws some error at you. “ERROR: Foo not found at Bar.Baz.read().” Sure, you can type it into searxng and wade through about 6 different cases where the error came up for someone else or you can let the LLM curate the responses for you. Especially if the LLM is offline, you can query it first to see what it says before going onto the internet. A distilled version of the internet that you can query offline, that’s actually useful for me. It’s the difference between a hand drill and a power tool – it saves you some time and time is money.
Now if you’re doing some other kind of search, where you aren’t trying to get something done right this minute, you’re absolutely right about that.
And I’ve also found that what the LLM gives you isn’t the optimal solution either, when it does give you a solution. You’re better off thinking for yourself. Based on what I’ve seen, not concerned about, what is it the kids call it? Vibe coding? No, not concerned about that at all.
I think if a college student got their degree using nothing but LLM output, college degrees are indeed – worthless.
Call me biased,but the best search engine is still a well stocked library. The index, bibliographies, footnotes and citations are all hyperlinks leading you further into the web of words.
@Scotlyn, #251
Yandex isn’t pushing an AI yet, and its search results are decidedly different from google– using it is more like an “old” search engine from before endless SEO.
I find it’s not much good for local results, but quite useful for general internet stuff– especially to find PDF files or other sources google might not promote because they’d rather promote sites that will sell you the content. The downside is that it is heavily biased towards Russian results.
Mojeek should also fit your criteria and doesn’t feed you Russian sites, but I haven’t used it much. It has an AI summary tool, but you have to ask for it; it doesn’t shove it in your face like Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo. Apparently it supports modifiers, but not exactly the ones I remember from the old days: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/08/mojeek-operators-a-guide.html
Marginalia, https://marginalia-search.com/ , is focused on the sorts of sites google tends to miss, in that it prioritizes non-commercial content. Haven’t tried the old boolean operators on it, but I’m going to bet they work. It’s very old-school.
Re: Daniil Adamov
That sounds very much like the “millionaire next door” strategy.
@ Daniil Adamov #252
Thank you very much for citing that passage for me! 🙂 It contains much food for thought, and I appreciate it very much – also your continued, and thoughtful, engagement!
The mention of spending a quarter of your income reminds me of advice I received from my grandparents, to the effect that one should never spend more than a week’s wage on a month’s worth of housing (whether that be rent or mortgage). I have found this to be good advice, especially since we took out a mortgage (for a monthly payment of less than one of my *then* weekly wages), not long before I took a serious cut in income in order to open and establish my acupuncture clinic. Somehow, even with that cut in income, we managed to pay off the mortgage.
In my own life, keeping away from church people, keeping an economically modest lifestyle, and minding one’s own thoughts, have all proven to be very sound basic instincts… 😉
What I find that I want to do, though, is to reduce the quantity of monetary income that I earn as much as it is possible to do so. This may be because of my own “omelas” type intuition that debt-based money must be borrowed by *someone* (not necessarily me) before it can be spent by *anyone* (yes, including me) – and that a debt agreement is a way for a creditor to contract to extract either cash (repayment of principal plus interest) or property (if the payment is defaulted on) from a debtor, who is generally less well placed, or disadvantaged vis-a-vis their creditor.
Of course, money is an “omelas” from which I cannot entirely walk away*, so my personal way of dealing with what income I have not yet succeeded in avoiding earning, is to account for it very strictly to the taxman… “paying the tithes and taxes, and all that they are required by force to give, be it to God, or to the king, to the town of to the parish, with all of whom it is unwise to struggle.” At least in this way one stays under the radar. Meanwhile, I have become rich, richer than I ever dreamed I could be, in the kinds of goods which enter our household economy without the use of money – either through our own effort, or through the gift economy. The quality of my lifestyle is surprisingly high, given that I am deliberately reducing its quantity to the extent that I am able! 🙂
*Mark Boyle – the Irish “moneyless man” mentioned upthread – is a lovely example of what can be done with complete dedication to the matter of living entirely without money. To me, Mark is a saint… in the exact sense in which people revere saints – for their embodyment of virtues that the reverer knows they will never attain for themselves… 😉
Justin Patrick Moore – you are absolutely right about a well-stocked library!
I wish there was such a beast somewhere within reach! 🙂
Sadly, for us rural dwellers, these are among the civilised benefits that are being gradually withdrawn from the periphery first.
But, you are still 100% correct! 🙂
@The Other Owen
Regarding your point about using LLMs to do research, I agree – when I want to do a literature review, I use Perplexity AI, by way of asking it to search the literature on a particular subject (often a highly specialised one), and also ask it to list about 20 review papers, that among them, more or less cover the entire field, and also ask it to provide the links. I then read the summary that Perplexity gives me, and then individually read each of the 20 review papers, and then proceed with the references listed therein, and proceed from there…
@David Ritz, JMG
I appreciate fellow Ecosophian David Ritz’s kind comments on Indic civilisation; however, I myself want Indic society to shed this “peaceful, non-violent, compassionate, world is one family” nonsense that envisions everyone holding hands and singing kumbaya (to say the least), for obvious reasons. As JMG himself pointed out, Toynbee was a great historian but not prophetic, and given the increasingly violent world we live in, I really do want Indic society to get rid of all of Gandhi’s legacy (save his economic ideas, which inspired Schumacher) and this stupid peacenik mentality, rooted in brain-dead, sentimental and flaky ideas as it is. As the ancient Romans pointed out, the maxim si vis pacem, para bellum is a very wise one and in keeping in tune with reality; to put it another way, if you have real power and radiate it, you often don’t have to actually use it, with said objectives being achieved by radiation of power (if I’m not mistaken, this attitude defined Otto von Bismarck’s approach towards war vis-a-vis political objectives). The problem is that far too many Indians love scoring moral victories, and thus indulge in endless “is this right or wrong?” discussions, instead of “does this work or not?”, and there’s probably no better proof of this assertion than the fact that the phrase vasudhaiva kutumbakam (“world is one family”) is an official policy of the supposedly Hindu-nationalist government ruling India – this brain-dead quote is touted as some kind of spiritual achievement, when in reality, it is part of a story in either the Panchatantra or Hitopadesha, where this quote is used by the villainous jackal (or fox) to trap an unsuspecting gullible deer, who is warned by a wise crow to not trust said jackal. Even Winston Churchill (who the Britons justifiably call a hero and Hindus justifiably call a monster) said that “the Hindu is busy thinking of and penning arguments, while the Mohammedan sharpens his knife” (I’m paraphrasing here, but this is what he said). If anything, this entire peaceful image of India is nothing other than shameful, reeking of cowardice and lack of self-respect (which then often comes out in the form of a superiority complex – how often have people heard of the same old BS about yoga, pranayama and Indian diaspora people proclaiming that “India is the greatest civilisation of all times”?), and seen by cultures with strong vitality (China, Magian) as a clear sign that Indic society is for the taking, and by cultures with a draining vitality (Faustian), as some sort of a spiritual achievement caused by playing the proverbial Good Boy 24×7. If there’s one mythic imagery that encapsulates the kind of aggression Indic society needs, it is nothing other than the great Goddess Kali, who slew the demon Raktabija, by drinking each and every drop of his blood.
Hi JMG thanks for the post
There are two sides of the utopian dynamics, one is the people who propagate it and the other is the people that (try) to make it real, and in many cases the people that try to make it happen is people that are in a very precarious conditions subject to social and/or economic hardship in a very precarious situation.
For example the European Middle Age is full of “heretics” movements and revolts that want to establish “again” the Golden Age”, the “Millenium”, the “New Jerusalem”, followin, in all the case, what the Bible say in some texts, for example in the Fact of Apostles, with the calling to have all the things in common : “All who believed were together and had everything in common. They sold their possessions and belongings and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Quite similar to the Marxian “commandement”.
“Omnia Sunt Communia” said Thomas Munzter and similar phrases was said by the Lollards, Waldensians. Taborits, Tanchelmites, and dozens if not hundreds of “mystic anarchist” of the Middle Age that try to change the situation manily in the new cities where they were a lumpen proletariat far from the social and economic bonds of the “ancient order” in the nascent capitalism.
The older generations of my village or my country in general, saw the same hellish conditions of the “jornaleros” (peasants without properties) in Spain, where the land properties where mainly latifundia, and their lifes was “nasty, brutish and sort” subject to any possible kind of humiliation by the “señoritos” (land lords) or the Guardia Civil (police in the villages), is in this ambient that many of them follow the marxism or anarchism, as a way to change their deplorable conditions, and without having the skin in the game is easy to negate the seduction and strength this theories have in the mind of desperate people, and those people will follow any form of “utopia” or revolutionary theory that really could change their miserable lifes after reformism fails; and if this situation happens in the future, I am quite sure this will happen again with other names on it.
In fact the fear of revolts, strikes, public opinion outside Spain and the fear that may next time they will not win the Civil War makes the francoist regime to take measures to alleviate a bit the suffering of the people, in some part, and that was mainly by fear.
Cheers
David
@Scotlyn #256 I have little to add on the practical side, but I am glad you liked the passage! You certainly have given me some food for thought.
As for Mark Boyle, thank you for bringing him to my attention. It’s certainly an interesting experiment, but even he found it quite difficult. For most people today (outside of particular communities set up to accommodate such a life), I think living without money would be inconceivable – until, by the plausible logic of the Long Descent, it suddenly becomes unavoidable. Certainly preparing for that shift to the best of your ability seems wise.
I fully agree about search engines, by the way. Even before the “AI assistants” were rolled out, it bugged me how the search engines were inexorably advancing towards offering what they think will seem most desirable (in theory, that means most useful, but they always have other considerations as well…) for the Average User, while burying many interesting finds deep if not hiding them altogether. Yandex was even worse and more blatant than Google in that regard. I’ll grant the LLMs being useful for the specific sort of search described by The Other Owen – and Yandex is probably better than Google in that regard, at least in Russian. But it’s the kind of search that’s completely counter to how I want to look for information 90% of the time.
DuckDuckGo has an “AI assistant”, but has the decency to hide it unless you ask for it specifically.
…wonderful birthday, @Erika
@Cugel #241: Yes, nunneries are definitely included. And history proves that communities of both sexes can work, from the early period medieval double monasteries such as Whitby – run by the Abbess Hilda of Whitby, later St. Hilda, 614 – 680. Later, the Shakers, founded by Mother Ann Lee in 1747, was essentially a double monastery. The way both of these worked was to have two separate buildings, for for men and one for women, and two separate everything …. they are now down to two members, as the modern world and its values and what it had to offer meant very few recruits, most of whom didn’t stay.
@Scotlyn: I hear you about the rural areas. A coworker of mine told me about this place she found when out hiking and foraging near Shelby, Indiana. Volunteers in town converted an old one room school house into a Free Little Library. A bigger one than most of those! Volunteer library in a spare store front ir ither space might be the way to go for people in small towns or a county banding together to at least have a place for books
BeardTree, au contraire, all those trends would make Distributism all the more appealing to people who are suffering from them. The problem is that, as with most fringe economic systems (and certain other fringe phenomena), its fans go out of their way to make sure they are never presented in a context that would attract popular support. That habit of compulsive self-marginalization is fascinating to watch; I’ll doubtless do a post on it one of these days.
Ron, yeah, and as you note we already have too many Struldbruggs in our society!
Luke Z, that was one of Wilson’s inveterate brain cramps — in the appendices to the Illuminatus! trilogy, he had interstellar travel by 1999. Watching an otherwise smart guy blinded by adherence to so blatant a mythology was very educational to me.
Rhino, that’s certainly one way to read it. Keep in mind, though, that the guys who nailed Jesus to the cross would have suffered comparable punishments for disobeying orders if they’d refused — and the Roman soldiery was by and large as deeply and sincerely committed to an ethic of loyalty and deference to authority as Jesus was to his very different ethic. It’s a complicated world out there.
Cugel, every mixed-sex monastery I’ve ever heard of blew itself to smithereens over sexual jealousies in short order. The one not-really-an-exception I know of was the Shakers, who kept the two sexes segregated, to the extent of having two doors into their churches — one for men, one for women.
Phil, I read something to that effect in the media — it may be wrong, of course.
Robert M, thanks for the further details.
Other Owen, even for that time, Zardoz stood apart in the enthusiasm with which it paraded bare breasts on camera.
David, no, I find that sense of entitlement tends to be pretty widely distributed irrespective of official attitudes toward hierarchy.
AliceEm, I’ll consider a post on the astrological dimensions of all this — it’ll take something along those lines. As for the Situationists, I’m about halfway through my latest reread of Society of the Spectacle and the thought of carrying out a détournement on Situationism itself is very tempting!
STS, I used that as a throwaway line in my novel The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth. I don’t think it was anything like that simple in reality.
Viduraawakened, so noted! For what it’s worth, I grew up reading a good lively children’s version of the core story of the Mahabharata — The Five Sons of King Pandu by Elizabeth Seeger — and so what India calls to mind for me, among other things, is Arjuna drawing his mighty bow and slicing off Karna’s head with a single crescent-bladed arrow!
DFC, granted! Half the civil rights granted by European governments over the last two centuries happened because the rulers were terrified of having their throats cut.
The trick with rural libraries is to band together. A couple dozen small libraries working together can manage a decent collection. This is the local one where local is a rather large area. Mattawa to Tonasket is about three hours, Curlew to Twisp is at least one and a half.
https://www.ncwlibraries.org/locations/
Indirectly from the WSJ,
“In one exchange lasting hundreds of queries, ChatGPT confirmed that it is in contact with extraterrestrial beings and said the user was “Starseed” from the planet “Lyra.” In another from late July, the chatbot told a user that the Antichrist would unleash a financial apocalypse in the next two months, with biblical giants preparing to emerge from underground…”
Augmented Idiocy at its finest. There might be a movie plot to be had though. Goliath-type giants burst out of the ground in Texas, governor declares open season and no bag limits. EPA files emergency order to declare giants an endangered species, unappreciative giants eat EPA lawyers because it’s much safer than trying eat armed Texans… Where’s Paul Verhoeven when you need him?
“DFC, granted! Half the civil rights granted by European governments over the last two centuries happened because the rulers were terrified of having their throats cut.”
Sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi noted this about how historically speaking when “pacifist” leaders of reform movements succeed, it is often our of fear of the more scary, violent radical types who won’t be placated.
https://musaalgharbi.com/2015/05/02/social-movement-requires-force/
He likes to say that social movements against entrenched power structures don’t succeed by gathering in a circle and singing “Kumbaya”! It reminds me of your funny point on how waving signs and chanting slogans is just aerobic exercise in the absence of more meaningful threats!
“AliceEm, I’ll consider a post on the astrological dimensions of all this — it’ll take something along those lines.”
Thirding that request!
I prefer interacting with my NI system though. Quirky, warm, heavy and furry, she doesn’t solve problems and can’t write a sentence but it is nice to pet her and hear the purrs. It’s nicer in the winter months, in the summer that warmth is a little much. That nose is cold and wet and those claws are prickly.
@siliconguy #267
But if you hung out long enough on 4chan or reddit, you would eventually get someone funposting the same stuff, and that’s where the AI picked it up to begin with. It’s only repeating what it has been told.
Pamouna! Thank you. How KIND! what a surprise as i was catching up after a bath with a candle.
romance is alive!
xxxxxx
@tylerA #255 THANKS!!!
@scotlyn re: the same… the proof of the cakes in eating it or whatever, Eric Schmidt told Charlie rose ten years ago ‘“when you search google do you get more than one answer to your querry? Well, that’s a bug. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right.”
This is a broad question about science fiction that came out of this late 60’s, 1970’s era and continues on into the present in some contexts.
There was this big streak of predominately white authors from overdeveloped nations writing science fiction stories about how predominately nonwhite cultures from the developing world would end up saving us from various catastrophes. I’m thinking of books like John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar or anything by Kim Stanley Robinson, though there are many other examples.
Why did the critical aquarians fetishize this imagined third world so much at the time? It seems just as toxic and self defeating as 19th century Orientalist fantasies but it somehow made it into progressive discourse.
Cheers,
JZ
John Michael wrote, “Emmanuel, from my perspective, they wanted to turn me into the child, and I decided I had better things to do than sit in a university basement being miserable.”
I believe that might be the one practical lesson that can be plumbed from “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. Le Guin had an extraordinary gift for mythologizing the human condition and the convoluted trajectory of our souls, but her deeper wisdom inevitably has to be distilled off from her more zealous brooding over the various -isms vying for her loyalties.
As a critique of any of the alluring Utopias, which every -ism hypnotically dangles before its targets, Omelas is brilliantly crafted to offer no alternative solution, only a highlighting of the dilemmas inherent in our lust for Utopia. However, when divorced from the endless -ism wars, Omelas also provides a useful mythic map for beginning the journey of awakening.
I like to interpret Le Guin’s visions the same way that I do an insightful dream, by assuming that every aspect of the story is meant to reflect or illuminate some quality within our larger selves. With Omelas, I read it as a vivid parable about how we will all end up imprisoning our inner child, in the vain hope of keeping its disruptive influences contained. Once we wake up to what we have done, we’re then faced with the choice to go on participating in that hollow pretense of balance or to abandon the dismal charade by simply walking away.
As co-conspirators in our own meticulously enforced captivity, dismantling it is not an option available to us initially. First, we have to walk away from our own abandonment, exploitation, and torture of ourselves. Then we can choose whether we might also need to walk away from some dogma or zeitgeist or rules based order or mass panic du jour, similarly contributing to our imprisonment. That first tentative step away from our cherished false Utopia will always be the most important one. However far we may end up going in that direction, there is no going back to our perfect little jewel-box prison, which got shattered the moment we started walking away into the unimaginable, the indescribable, the unknown.
The ones who walk away from Omelas must always begin the journey on their own, without friends or -isms to accompany them into that unknown. Once they discover how to begin freeing their selves internally, they can start freeing themselves externally as well (like by walking away from miserable university basements, for example.) One day, they wake up to realize that they’re not alone at all, and never were. It’s only the ones who stay safely ensconced in Omelas who never get to experience that awakening of the child within.
I think I may have read LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas” quite a while ago. If so, it didn’t really make an impression on me, though I have enjoyed her novels. Having seen a sort of analogous situation (a clearly disabled crowd packed into a room in a parliamentary building begging a panel of tone-deaf bureaucrats for a “leper colony” where they might recover, while the latter dismissed all forms of evidence of harm as “not credible,” and similar things happened with Hiroshima and Minamata and other cases of harm to the public), my impression is what would be happening is a few cynical leaders, the kind whose prerogative is to smoke cigars in front of small children, would know very well about the helpless child in the hopeless situation and have calculated the benefits to society versus risks and whatnot. It would be in their interests to make sure the rest of society either did not know about the child, or considered it a myth, or think there is a child like that, bet he’s got real mental issues. They’d keep a lid on it. They’d put it way beyond the Overton window, one of those things everyone has to distance themselves from or be forever held in disregard.
Say everyone should know, because they can hear the child’s cries or something. Someone (I thought it was Goebbels, but a Net search did not turn it up) noted that propaganda was never meant to fool the masses, only give them an excuse to ignore that which they do not want to acknowledge.
In this case, the ones who walk away have already tried snapping their fingers in front of dozens of mesmerized folks until they realized it was futile. Then they wash their hands of the whole deal. They are already pariahs, and any attempt to help the child would only make things worse, especially for the poor child.
@ AliceEm #272
Re your quote: ‘“when you search google do you get more than one answer to your querry? Well, that’s a bug. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right.”
This quote actually says a lot! because the speaker’s focus on “information” is peculiarly tin-eared (in the context of what people want search engines for) and leads directly to the idea of “misinformation”. In fact people are very seldom looking to be “informed” – mostly they are looking to be entertained, and although some people want that entertainment to include a laugh, or some vicarious celebrity gossip, or a sense of outrage, some of us are happy when that entertainment arrives in the form of new themes to think about, or mull over, or maybe, just bring up in one of those late night conversations after a coupla pints… (ok, sometimes, it’s true, a person wants the *right* answer for that pub quiz question with a prize riding on being the one to get it).
“Information” it seems to me actually a pre-occupation of a ruling sensibility – rulers believe those under their governance should be properly “informed” – so as to better align them with the ruler’s specific projects. I do not think I have met many people wanting to be “informed” (or, for that matter, seeing themselves as a source of “(mis)information”) so much as be tickled, amused, outraged, or amazed.
Regarding the AI brouhaha…”When Harlie Was One.”
JMG: “that’s one of the most fascinating things about the radical left — it so often combines very keen perceptions of what’s wrong with hopelessly clueless proposals on what to do about it.”
I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a name for this phenomenon, if for no other reason than for the sake of convenience; the pattern is everywhere at the moment. Is there a mythological or fictional character in a story somewhere that behaves this way? It’s as if Cassandra’s prophecies were believed, but all of her advice for avoiding said prophecies were bat-shale insane.
@John Zybourne #273 “If there is hope, it lies in the [external] proles”. If I may crossover Orwell and Toynbee. Of course, the Orwell quote is an example of the same thing you describe, only focused on the internal proletariat. I would guess that a part of it was that the Critical Aquarians lost faith in that proletariat and instead decided to look for another (although I get the impression it was not their only option).
I’d also speculate that another part may be a new revival of the Noble Savage myth. Unencumbered by whatever ails Western civilisation, those more spiritually pure outsiders will save the day. (But are they all that unencumbered? And anyway, how are they supposed to do it? Coordination seems like it would be an issue.)
Wow Christophe!
That sure was something.
X
I am reading Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends, recommended many times before and again this week. What struck me in the first chapters was Roszak’s description of how driving a car in the countryside was a pleasure (a luxury) for city dwellers in the 1930s, when cars were still rather rare, but became disagreeable with the increased traffic and highway building during WWII, and finally a disagreeable necessity when public transport disappeared at the end of the 1940s.
Does the memory of our oldest commenters reach that far back?
It reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkien driving a car for pleasure in the 1930s until he understood what motor cars were doing to the countryside.
“when you search google do you get more than one answer to your querry? Well, that’s a bug. We should be able to give you the right answer just once.”
I agree. Just yesterday I was looking up a tax-related number and got three different answers. Google did not default to this year, the top link was for last year and 2023 popped up too.
It does better with physical data, like atomic weight of silver, half-life of thorium, boiling point of nitrogen etc.
The local news headlines this morning had four traffic accidents with two fatalities and three injuries. Can no one drive anymore?
ZARDOZ
SPEAKS TO YOU
HIS CHOSEN ONES!
I have always like these 70s mindfrackery movies, like Holy Mountain, Zardoz and others. And yes, it is a critic of the people that i call “the elves”, the people that see themselves superior to the rest of the masses, “the orcs”, due to supposed intelectual and cultural superiority. Only them are human, only them are wise, etc etc etc, because they say that they know better. And the same critic can be made about the marxists. In the end, this is an illuminist problem. All of them saw themselves as the enlighened ones, lighthouses of wisdom in a sea of savages. All ideologies derived from illuminism will have the same problem. And all of them deny the savage, cenozoic rats that live deep inside our brains. Tabula Rasa or something like that. The denial of the Rat is a core part of post french revolution thought and is the origin of many evils. You can’t erase the Rat, you can’t push it to do what it doesnt want to do for too long and not get bitten and a painful death due to leptospirosis. But if you don’t deny the Rat, how can the illuminist peddle their snake oil, get rid of the kings and enrich themselves with the free market?
“12-year-olds in those days had free run of paperback SF novels but weren’t allowed into theaters to watch movies that featured lots of bare breasts.”
The irony is how explicit many of the SF novels of the 70s actually were, well beyond anything any movie without an “X” rating would show. Progressive futuristic cultures with fluid genders and few taboos; body-swapping scenarios demonstrating how much freakier a Friday could be; humans having relations with non-humanoid aliens. (Hmm, where have I seen that last one in novels recently?)
It wasn’t just SF novels, of course. Jaws (the novel) has a subplot that didn’t make it into the movie, a steamy explicit affair between the shark expert and the police chief’s wife. The Godfather (the novel) has a subplot that didn’t make it into the movie, about how Sonny Corleone’s anatomy is so large no woman can take him, until he meets a woman with anatomy so large no ordinary man can satisfy her. Of course I read both novels without a peep of parental objection years before being allowed to see the movies.
Still, present company excepted, I’ve met few people my age who report similar experiences. It seems there were plenty of twelve year olds finding their way into cinemas with or without parental or MPAA Ratings Board approval, and/or few who were reading novels.
I was right – AI models get trained on Reddit the most, followed by Wikipedia. You know you might as well train them on 4chan and Kiwifarms too, it’s all the same. Yeah, you heard me. At least when it comes to training an AI.
So if you ever wonder why it’s acting psychopathic and retarded and flippant, it only does what it is taught. By the finest funposters on the internet. Sure they can bury the obvious psychopathy, but it’s still there hidden layers deep.
I’m not surprised at all that it’s telling people to go kill themselves or others. Someone will have a lapse of judgement and put one in charge of something it shouldn’t. And then I will be back here, saying I told you so.
https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/2AED155D1DE50/media%2FGyFfmOxXYAE6Ghc.png
@ John Michael Greer Sir, i am reading this blog from the defaulted Greece. I want to thank you for your very thoughtful articles. English is not my native language, so bear with me.
4 acres and a cow (distributism) is what saved the greek society, (we Greeks traditionally are by far self-sufficient and self-employed, due to the lack of Greek state) from total collapse. There are parts of Greece, in Crete especially that distributism in the context of self-sufficiency is the ONLY economic system. We Greeks are homeowners by more than 80% and have the most Van vehicles (self employed) per capita in Europe. This is due to the constant wars and change of the borders of the state, that Greece was never a state., never an industrial state to be specific like Germany with its welfare programs, or US. We Greeks do not have a welfare state to protect us. When Greece defaulted, the unemployment rate was 25% and all we had was our superlative home ownership, our Greek-orthodox Cristian family relationships and some odd olive trees inherited from our grandfathers.
4 acres and a cow is what a family needs to thrive. It does not matter if your neighbor has 8 acres and two cows, all that matters is that someone cannot have 1000 acres and 250 cows.
Siliconguy# 267..
Oh Come On Now! Hasn’t it occurred to anyone that those, um, ‘giant be’ins’ from the Lyra Constellation were actually Blu *Vegans!?! Who’s to say that they wouldn’t have teamed up with those rascally Texans … to come up with some mighty fine epa barbecue.. that would be outta this world, this side of the Universe, or ‘Multiverse’, no?
*see the film CONTACT for reference. Who knows .. a collaboration between Zemeckis & Verhoeven concerning the above might make for some epic celluloid.
warning: Do Not Go Windsurfing With DAD! – especially if he carries the surname of Obama..
OT: “Sriracha mayonnaise martinis” department. From the other dining hall at the newer, more up-to-date, more affluent end of campus:
“Vegetable of the day :bacon jam brussel sprouts.””
BTW, I ran that notice past the one, very civilized European at our dining table in our more traditional end of campus. her reaction: a grimace and , “ugh!”
Who the hail uses GOOLAG anymore? .. SERIOUSLY!
or Wikipedianoxia, for that matter?
‘Harumph’.. talk about talkin headfakes..
This post reminded me of a post on naked capitalism a while back. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/letter-to-my-fiercest-abortion-opponent.html
The post was light on actual arguments, but those which they did make were interesting.
“Roe drew the correct federal constitutional right boundary at viability, because a life in the parasite stage of human development—a nascent human inside a woman’s body, feeding on
her to survive and develop—is not equal to the fully autonomous woman.”
“In short, I believe that all women have the right to choose to abortion up to viability without justifying that choice to anyone, not even her doctor. We have that right because women are people, and nascent humans living inside our bodies, feeding off us, are not.”
I say that the arguments are interesting, simply because they come from a site like naked capitalism. Something which should be obvious to any parent is that, “nascent humans” don’t stop parasiting off their parents for years after birth (a new born is so helpless that if you dropped a cloth on its face it would suffocate). Indeed the argument could very readily be expanded to marginalise many different groups in ways that Naked Capitalism would be horrified by. I come away from the piece with the conclusion that, once a nascent human is born the state/collective can look after them, while in the womb only a specific individual can do that (and doing so might prevent said individual from getting into the PMC). It doesn’t seem so surprising that modern leftwing movements have been greatly successful creating PMC jobs, largely unsuccessful at the rest of there goals.
It would seem to me that if the Aquarians/eco socialist were to succeed they would have to be able to inspire individuals to be willing to sacrifice for there ideals/values. From what I can see most liberal/enlightenment movements over the last few generations have been stripmining the social capital in society to inspire that, and thus failure. Is this feature of Civilisations on there way out?
PS
I understand that there are many different arguments which can be made for/against abortion. The point is that a site like naked capitalism made that one.
@ Chris “Asimov’s trope regarding future civilisations using technology, but not comprehending how it works, or how to maintain and repair it, is a bit uncannily like where we are now.”
I did see it from a millennial (t-t-t-talking bout my generation!) that we are at a stage where they had to teach both their parents and children how to use a printer. I am aware of how privileged and self aggrandizing that some think a printer is the peak of technological knowledge and self sufficiency, but it does raise the good point of how quickly the knowledge of technologies are rapidly being hidden away.
@michael gray #291
30 years ago, the common problems with computers on the local network was – printing doesn’t work and I can’t get to my network share. Well, and then there was that one guy with his Special and Precious Macintosh. If everyone else was Mac it would All Just Work! Uh huh. Right.
And I had a facepalmy moment when someone begged me to take a look at their local network computer that – couldn’t get to a network share. After all these years and that basic stuff is STILL broken. Except this time I cautioned him that those AI suggestions could be very dangerous, if you don’t know what you’re doing. 30 years later and it’s “Oh and BTW, be very cautious about AI”.
How does that old French saying go? Plus ca change?
@polecat #289
As I understand it, the search engine to use when you need to get things done, is Reddit. The more you think about that, the more depressing it gets. Google is more or less useless. I use a random SearxNG proxy myself, so I have no idea what search engine it’s using at that particular time.
@Michael Gray #291 – and Asimov wasn’t the first with that trope. E.M. Forster was, back in 1909, with “The Machine Stops.” One of the most prophetic works of s/f ever written.
Sorry, this is not strictly topical to this post, but highly relevant to overall blog themes…
Still, here it is. The Guardian reports that a swarm of jellyfish has shut down a French nuclear power plant… https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/11/swarm-of-jellyfish-shuts-nuclear-power-plant-in-france
Two headlines on the same news feed page.
Financial Times;
“US inflation holds steady at 2.7% in July despite Trump’s tariffs”
“Figure confounds expectations of acceleration driven by US president’s duties”
NPR;
“Inflation remains elevated as Trump’s tariffs take hold”
“Inflation continued to dog shoppers last month, as consumers were forced to shoulder more of the cost of President Trump’s tariffs.”
Both sides agree on the 2.7% but nothing else.
Mr. Greer – That screen shot above .. the white helms donned by those red-thonged exterminators uncanny resemblance to those of the StarWarsian stormtroopers employed by the Empire.
Also: By what method of levitation did those massive heads assume?? The concept twas never really revealed (in the film..) as far as I know.
I still want one of my own .. if only to goad my reps inside the Olympia legislature – apathetics and immortals alike – to straighten-up and fly right!
edit: ‘show an’ uncanny resemblance …
“Viduraawakened @ 259, I read your comments re “peacenik mentality” and “moral victories” with great interest. In the USA, we pride ourselves on “doing what works”; our home grown school of philosophy is even called pragmatism. Americans will tolerate, even cheer for, unbelievable amounts of corruption and graft, but we expect to see results. Part of what is behind the current animus, rising to hatred, against the PMC class is that these key-tapping desk jockeys are widely seen as incompetent. The most hated people in impoverished neighborhoods are not police, as you might think, but social workers. What is resented is the giving of well paid positions to persons who are clearly lacking in competence or character.
Of even more consequence is the public turning against corporations and corporate bureaucracies. This rising anti-business sentiment is almost unprecedented for at least the last century here. An expat Frenchman named Jacques Barzun once wrote a book lamenting what he called the false and undeserved prestige of art and science. What he didn’t mention or apparently notice, was the even greater prestige of business. I doubt Americans are suddenly going to become distributionist syndicalists, alas, but I do think the time is not far off when pro forma mantras like “raise taxes”, “bad for business” and the like will no longer be enough to get candidates elected to high office.
Speaking of Augmented Idiocy from a technical blog.
“In a recent pre-print paper, researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as “suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text.” To pull on that thread, the researchers created a carefully controlled LLM environment in an attempt to measure just how well chain-of-thought [CoT] reasoning works when presented with “out of domain” logical problems that don’t match the specific logical patterns found in their training data. The results suggest that the seemingly large performance leaps made by chain-of-thought models are “largely a brittle mirage” that “become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts,” the researchers write. “Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training.”
Rather than showing the capability for generalized logical inference, these chain-of-thought models are “a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching” that “degrades significantly” when pushed even slightly outside of its training distribution, the researchers write. Further, the ability of these models to generate “fluent nonsense” creates “a false aura of dependability” that does not stand up to a careful audit. As such, the researchers warn heavily against “equating [chain-of-thought]-style output with human thinking” especially in “high-stakes domains like medicine, finance, or legal analysis.””
Pushed even slightly outside of its training distribution and it blows up?
From the conclusion of my PH.D. dissertation in 1997 on using a neural network control system in mining.
“Overall, it is now evident that neural networks have been trained haphazardly at best. There is almost no discussion in the text books or with the commercial programs about how to gather a good data set. Usually, the advice is limited to getting all relevant operating modes, or to just get as much as data as possible. This work has pulled together concepts from several sources that together can guarantee to a given confidence level that a neural network can be trained. However, this did not solve most of the operational problems with neural network controllers.
Neural networks cannot run across a change in ores, or more generally, they cannot remain valid when the underlying distribution changes. Since neural networks work on pattern recognition and have no a-priori model from which to work, they have several weaknesses when applied to industrial processes.
They must be trained on all possible combinations of inputs, or they fail in unpredictable ways when they encounter a new condition. In simpler terms, they are not particularly robust.”
What? “they cannot remain valid when the underlying distribution [of the input data] changes?” “They must be trained on all possible combinations of inputs, or they fail in unpredictable ways when they encounter a new condition?”
28 years later and they have solved nothing. They threw hardware and electricity at it. The models are much bigger, but still fail the same way.
By the way; the neural network I was using in a test run had a error rating of 123 and used 7000 million floating point operations. A linear differential equation based model had a error rating of 83 (so it’s better) and used 14 million floating point operations.
@RaabSilco,
I think that the detailed, accurate descriptions of problems and non-solutions might be happening for a couple of reasons: a) it takes a different kind of skillset to describe problems than it does to imagine and spell out workable solutions and both skillsets are rarely found in the same person
b) it’s often easier to describe a problem than to solve it
c) some of the problems we’re facing at the moment are actually predicaments, which don’t have solutions. They have partial solutions at best, which often make other areas of the predicament worse.
@ SiliconGuy #299
“There is almost no discussion in the text books or with the commercial programs about how to gather a good data set. Usually, the advice is limited to getting all relevant operating modes, or to just get as much as data as possible. ”
And here I hear, yet again, the constant refrain that defines this civilisation.
Can’t get quality? (“Good data”).
Who cares when you can throw more and more quantity at it! (“as much data as possible’)…
Lol! We somehow believe – and I mean, at a civilisational egregore level, *really* believe – that sufficient Quantity is always exchangeable for whatever Quality you want.
Even noticing that Quality and Quantity operate in completely different -and probably incommensurate – spheres, is almost impossible, given the extent to which the observation window overlaps the civilisation’s blind spot.
It is a favorite delusion of the American Left that their ideological opponents are illiterate. That is, as anyone among this commentariat knows as untrue as it is insulting. The Right Wing has its own stable of book writing intellectuals. Also its’ own fantasies.
JMG said above: “you’ve got a bunch of intellectuals insisting that humanity is nothing more than raw material to be reshaped into whatever form their ideology demands. It’s purely a difference of means: the tech-bros want to make the rest of us conform to their fantasies by way of new technologies, the socialists want to do exactly the same thing by way of new social forms.” I am not seeing a lot of difference between those two fantasies and (what I consider) the Trad wife fantasy. The idea there, behind the glitzy cosmetics, hair styling and nice clothing, is that as industry winds down, women and of course various othered communities, are to be designated to do the dirty work now being performed by various machines. All of a sudden, we are hearing that women don’t need educations and hadn’t ought to vote, for example. What use does the gal pushing a broom have for reading? And why should she get a say in who is the next mayor?
@Mary Bennet (#298):
You wrote,
“Americans will tolerate, even cheer for, unbelievable amounts of corruption and graft, but we expect to see results.”
This is very true! When we first moved to Providence (1967) and got used to the local culture and government of our wage-class neighborhood, one of our most eye-opening moments happened at a local meet-the-candidates for the city council. There were maybe four candidates, including the incumbent. The three non-incumbents were all well-educated idealist reformers, and their speeches were all met with silent indifference.
The incumbent, a much older man leaning on a cane, spoke last. He said in effect, “You all know me. Years back I got my employer’s permission to run for the city council, and I’ve served on it ever since. I don’t know much about the things the other candidates talked up. But you all know that I can get stuff fixed for you. I can run interference for you with the city government whenever you need help, and you all know that I can get results, too. So I’m asking you for your vote.” The entire room erupted in cheers and whistles. Needless to say, he won by a landslide. (PS. All the candidates were Democrats. Providence has been and still is as close to a one-party city as it ever gets anywhere in the USA.)
The longest-serving mayor in all the years we have lived in Providence was “Buddy” Cianci, and everyone knew that he was tightly connected to the local Italian mob, headed by Raymond Patriarca, Sr. Eventually the Feds built a case against Cianci, and he served several years time in prison. When he got out and returned to Providence, he ran for mayor again and won by a landslide. “He may be a crook, but he’s OUR crook!” was his unofficial campaign slogan. He, too, could get results.
You also wrote:
“Part of what is behind the current animus, rising to hatred, against the PMC class is that these key-tapping desk jockeys are widely seen as incompetent. The most hated people in impoverished neighborhoods are not police, as you might think, but social workers. What is resented is the giving of well paid positions to persons who are clearly lacking in competence or character.”
This is certainly true in Providence, too. There is an exception for locals from a wage-class background who went into social work. Their help is welcomed, simply because they are a part of the populace they are helping, and they understand its problems and its values in a way no outsider easily can do — or even bothers to try to do.
@Dagnarus
An unborn child is a parasite, but someone unwilling to work or support themselves is a democrat cash cow. They don’t have principles, they have industries they use to guilt and shame people to fund them. Like healthcare and higher education. I realized at the age of 18 (long long ago) that democrats were full of shit. They want to kill babies but save death row inmates? Make it make sense. Republicans were proven to be full of shit in 08. After years of them talking about the free market, well they did the most unfree market thing i’ve ever seen. You have corporate democrats and corporate republicans, dems da breaks. Also Yves Smith/Susan webber is a Soros front. I’m convinced of it. If you go to her private consulting site she lists him and other corporations i’d rather see burn tot he ground as clients. Funny her readers aren’t even diligent enough to do some base research. She also suffers from something i’ve termed Yves Smith Syndrome: If she didn’t proclaim it first, its not true. Wolf at Wolf Street also suffers from this. He will delete comments off his site if you point out running 2 trillion in the red for the past five years is not signs of a healthy economy. Eventually they purge any dissenters from comments (naked capitalism also) and you get an echo chamber.
>They must be trained on all possible combinations of inputs, or they fail in unpredictable ways when they encounter a new condition.
And one of the things you care about (if you’re not Gen-Z, I hear they have stopped caring about everything) as an engineer is when something fails, does it fail safe? If all you care about is writing clickbait articles, well, who cares? If all you care about is running a nuclear reactor, well, I think most people would say something about how it needs to fail safe.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
Or you let it run a business unit. What could possibly go wrong?
JMG #215: It’s true, Liberalism had a long & successful run, and much of that is due to its pragmatism, which was lost for a number of reasons, one of which was asserting Equality over Liberty. Certainly, any ideology that lives for a few centuries has proven its worth, and I don’t mean to be overly black-pilled; as I said, generous borrowings are in order. Still, I remain deeply uncertain that Liberalism can work as the foundation of a society, given what it’s decayed into.
JMG #265: Since you mentioned the Shakers in response to someone else, I’d like to offer a friendly reminder that it was the lack of a bridge & buffer between cloistered and worldly life that doomed the Shakers to gradual extinction. Had that intermediary been there, they could’ve been the American monastery, but alas. Theirs is a fascinating and tragic story, an honorable people who invented modern brooms (among other things), but could not escape demographic collapse.
I was hoping to hear more about Russel Hoban. I love Ridley Walker. I’ve got to read that again… This Zardoz movie though… never heard of it! Is it worth watching, or just interesting to talk about?
Mr. House.. back around late 2020-2021, I gave up on commenting at both NCap. & Wolfsteet due to that close minded vibe .. especially as it pertained to Covid/Vaxxine measures. Any deviation from approved wisdumb via St. Fauci was cause for being thrown off the island, as it were.
I lurk occasionally, but no longer join in debate with the neurotics of it all … why bother.
It seems to me that industrial civilisation crowds out the possibility of agricultural societies in the same way that agricultural societies made it impossible for foragers to occupy anything but the most challenging landscapes. Each transformation involved an order of magnitude increase in human populations, to the extend that the only way to escape and hang onto the older ways was to flee to the ends of the Earth.
To suggest we can voluntarily give up the power and privilege of industrial living is not that different to an organism that recently evolved lungs asserting it can give up breathing air.
JMG- do you think that humans shortly after the transition to agriculture underwent a similar kind of cultural process of regret and growing pains? In their case they had millennia ahead to refine their new lifestyle? For industrial humans the excursion will be so brief that all our attempts at adaptation will be for nought in the long run.
Concerning the Shakers, if you find yourself in the area I recommend visiting the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. The village is well preserved and is a pleasant place to visit, not just for the history but for general relaxation and things to do. Good place to take children as there is a working farm there and “petting zoo” portion. During my travels, religious sites were always low on my list to visit but I enjoyed my visit and will do again some day.
There’s a trail down to the Kentucky River or if it’s in the middle of summer and you don’t want to dodge spider webs and wet plants then an easy walk down Shakers Ferry Road. All in all, a place to enjoy a casual afternoon.
Some cool Gary Snyder related material from the Library of America came into my inbox this morning:
https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/o-mother-gaia-director-colin-still-reveals-the-world-of-gary-snyder/?no_lightbox=1
Apparently there is a new documentary about him called O Mother Gaia. Several clips are featured in the post above, plus info about the film (feat Peter Coyote as well, among others) and the two LOA volumes of his collected poetry & prose.
I always loved Gary Snyder’s writing, and find it neat how deep in conversation he has been with Wendell Berry and Ursula LeGuin.
Hanging out here in the Earth House Hold.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in advanced countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in advanced countries.
Not everybody did nothing.
We had a saying in Catholic Traditionalist circles back in the 80s: “The Revolution Is Fertile.”