John Michael Greer

[andrew]

This is as good a summary of our present predicaments that I've read anywhere from anyone: 

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-09-18/dark-age-america-the-e...

 

[andrew]

According to this we get at least 3 minutes in the bardos after death : 

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/breaking-news/people-conscious-a... 

woohoo!

[andrew]

Hey David, how are you? I've moved your query here as my threads are wander prone and can go in myriad tangents without consternation. 

If it was about resource control, why is China the biggest foreign investor in the Iraqi oil industry?

Am not sure of your point here David, You SEEM to be arguing my point for me. Of course China is in the mid east seeking resources. They may be even trying to control them; I do think they have gone about their business there quietly and covertly ( in some instances) unlike the rather loud Bush/ Cheney methods. 

If it was about resource control, why is China the biggest foreign investor in the Iraqi oil industry?

Am not sure of your point here David, You SEEM to be arguing my point for me. Of course China is in the mid east seeking resources. They may be even trying to control them; I do think they have gone about their business there quietly and covertly ( in some instances) unlike the rather loud Bush/ Cheney methods. 

[andrew]

Greer's latest post: 

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca/search?updated-min=2014-01-01...

He outlines the rise of administrative bureaucracy on the ascending arc. Chomsky  said the same thing recently specific to the death of U.S. universities under neoliberal rule. Nepotism rules the day! It was very astute of Chomsky to recognize that the elites reacted to the 60's by taking over the universities and enslaving students into debt bondage for life.

[andrew]

Here is a link to the resource control hypothesis : 

http://www.tomdispatch.com

I suspect that China is using similar strategies; but less the religious component that is  America's trademark. 

A part of this thread is 'coincidence theory'. We should note that since about half a million people marched in N. Y. a few weeks back that there are now only two problems in the world according to mainstream media: ebola and ISIS. Make of it what you will.

BTW., when I was a kid growing up in Toronto I had to leave because the pollution simply choked me. Now, Vancouver is having a carbon-fest that may force me to leave this city. 

[andrew]

The doc. about Snowden is out: 

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/filmfestivals/la-et-m...

Tomdispatch on the state within a state: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175901/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_ent...

I've heard that there are up to 6 million operatives being paid in the 100,000.00 range per year in the US. The numbers would probably be close to 6 hundred thousand in Canada and I know that the new state of the art surveillance building cost a fortune. 

Anyway, great comments section on the Greer blog; from there is no immanent collapse to collapse is right around the corner. To my thinking, collapse will hinge on the economic miracle of the unlimited growth paradigm juxtaposed to life on a rather small sphere in the middle of ___ knows where. I know what it's like to starve and be beaten and broken down; so I do hope the collapse can be avoided .

[andrew]

This is an excellent paper on the 'West'. 

http://www.telospress.com/telos-168-fall-2014-the-west-its-past-and...

I think it touches on some of the OLEG themes, or at least parses them out in a way that isn't cut and dried universalism.

[andrew]

14 muslim countries invaded since 1980: 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175908/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2...

I've recently read that Dawkin's conceded some political/economic root causes to the problem of Islam. Way to go sir! Blaming Islam is and of itself is terrible analysis, imo. 

Greer's new blog post: 

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca/search?updated-min=2014-01-01...

Yup, the war bands . Independent paid mercenary armies are on the rise. They also make it very difficult to really tell who is doing what to who. 

[Layman Pascal]

Integrative philosophy should make the notion of the "West" obsolete.  It roughly indicates societies whose center of gravity is notably modernist -- with the technocratic, individualistic, post-orthodox, non-sectarian oligarchy and rational experimentalist qualities.  It showed up in a few small pools of the ancient world (notably Athens) and flowering most significantly in post-Renaissance Europe where it spread both to the Americas and the rest of the world.

Discussions about Western influence in Middle Eastern affairs, for example, are almost futile when we consider that China & Russia have been doing roughly the same thing in the degree to which their societies have become techno-social modernities.  And we only refer to them as Eastern powers insofar as they are not as Orange-meme as whoever we are comparing them to.

Once pluralistic, Green society arises the significance of the "West" drops also because the shift is away from modernism and toward a planetary (not merely inter-national) ethos. 

The Telos articles, by observing different version of The West deconstruct the notion -- but integrative thought must elucidate the common features which are operating mostly independently of these variations.

andrew said:

This is an excellent paper on the 'West'. 

http://www.telospress.com/telos-168-fall-2014-the-west-its-past-and...

I think it touches on some of the OLEG themes, or at least parses them out in a way that isn't cut and dried universalism.

[andrew]

In general I don't disagree with you lp. I hope i don't come across as naive when posting criticism of liberal foreign policy. I'm well aware that Russia is run by not very nice oligarchs; that we may end up more like China than they ending up more like us; that certain elements of Islam are practicing reverse imperialism, etc.  Having said that, I think where you and I would not see things the same way is on the endless, sure to fail war on terror, and the concomitant CIV / NSA surveillance state. And it's not that I don't think these things shouldn't exist, but more that they are being implemented extremely poorly, imo. How they could be implemented with greater efficacy is not something I have the answer to. I also don't see progress as being an a priori assumption; there is no doctrine, ideology, theory, religion that I know of that precludes retrograde trajectories. 

[DavidM58]

This week's post from Greer is interesting.  Titled "Dark Age America: The End of the Market Economy."

Excerpt - check out his comment about stages of cultural development in relation to Hegel:

"...Your participation in the market, furthermore, doesn’t come cheap. Every exchange you make, whether it’s selling your labor or buying goods and services with the proceeds, takes place within a system that has been subjected to the process of intermediation discussed in last week’s post. Thus, in most cases, you can’t simply sell your labor directly to individuals who want to buy it or its products; instead, you are expected to sell your labor to an employer, who then sells it or its product to others, gives you part of the proceeds, and pockets the rest. Plenty of other people are lined up for their share of the value of your labor: bankers, landlords, government officials, and the list goes on. When you go to exchange money for goods and services, the same principle applies; how much of the value of your labor you get to keep for your own purposes varies from case to case, but it’s always less than the whole sum, and sometimes a great deal less.

Karl Marx performed a valuable service to political economy by pointing out these facts and giving them the stress they deserve, in the teeth of savage opposition from the cheerleaders of the status quo who, then as now, dominated economic thought. His proposed solution to the pervasive problems of the (un)free market was another matter.  Like most of his generation of European intellectuals, Marx was dazzled by the swamp-gas luminescence of Hegelian philosophy, and followed Hegel’s verbose and vaporous trail into a morass of circular reasoning and false prophecy from which few of his remaining followers have yet managed to extract themselves.

It’s from Hegel that Marx got the enticing but mistaken notion that history consists of a sequence of stages that move in a predetermined direction toward some as-perfect-as-possible state: the same idea, please note, that Francis Fukuyama used to justify his risible vision of the first Bush administration as the glorious fulfillment of human history. (To borrow a bit of old-fashioned European political jargon, there are right-Hegelians and left-Hegelians; Fukuyama was an example of the former, Marx of the latter.) I’ll leave such claims and the theories founded on them to the true believers, alongside such equally plausible claims as the Singularity, the Rapture, and the lemonade oceans of Charles Fourier; what history itself shows is something rather different.

What history shows, as already noted, is that the complex systems that emerge during the heyday of a civilization are inevitably scrapped on the way back down. Market economies are among those complex systems. Not all civilizations have market economies—some develop other ways to handle the complicated process of allocating goods and services in a society with many different social classes and occupational specialties—but those that do set up market economies inevitably load them with as many intermediaries as the overall complexity of their economies can support.

It’s when decline sets in and maintaining the existing level of complexity becomes a problem that the trouble begins. Under some conditions, intermediation can benefit the productive economy, but in a complex economy, more and more of the intermediation over time amounts to finding ways to game the system, profiting off economic activity without actually providing any benefit to anyone else.  A complex society at or after its zenith thus typically ends up with a huge burden of unproductive economic activity supported by an increasingly fragile foundation of productive activity..."

andrew said:

BTW., David, have you come across or talked to Greer about any thoughts that he's written or spoken about on IT?

[DavidM58]

Excerpt from JMG's latest column, The Retro Future:

"...Then there’s the current tempest in the media’s teapot, Hillary Clinton’s presidential run. I’ve come to think of Clinton as the Khloe Kardashian of American politics, since she owed her original fame to the mere fact that she’s related to someone else who once caught the public eye. Since then she’s cycled through various roles because, basically, that’s what Famous People do, and the US presidency is just the next reality-TV gig on her bucket list. I grant that there’s a certain wry amusement to be gained from watching this child of privilege, with the help of her multimillionaire friends, posturing as a champion of the downtrodden, but I trust that none of my readers are under the illusion that this rhetoric will amount to anything more than all that chatter about hope and change eight years ago.

Let us please be real: whoever mumbles the oath of office up there on the podium in 2017, whether it’s Clinton or the interchangeably Bozoesque figures currently piling one by one out of the GOP’s clown car to contend with her, we can count on more of the same: more futile wars, more giveaways to the rich at everyone else’s expense, more erosion of civil liberties, more of all the other things Obama’s cheerleaders insisted back in 2008 he would stop as soon as he got into office.  As Arnold Toynbee pointed out a good many years ago, one of the hallmarks of a nation in decline is that the dominant elite sinks into senility, becoming so heavily invested in failed policies and so insulated from the results of its own actions that nothing short of total disaster will break its deathgrip on the body politic.

While we wait for the disaster in question, though, those of us who aren’t part of the dominant elite and aren’t bamboozled by the spectacle du jour might reasonably consider what we might do about it all. By that, of course, I don’t mean that it’s still possible to save industrial civilization in general, and the United States in particular, from the consequences of their history. That possibility went whistling down the wind a long time ago. Back in 2005, the Hirsch Report showed that any attempt to deal with the impending collision with the hard ecological limits of a finite planet had to get under way at least twenty years before the peak of global conventional petroleum reserves, if there was to be any chance of avoiding massive disruptions. As it happens, 2005 also marked the peak of conventional petroleum production worldwide, which may give you some sense of the scale of the current mess.

Consider, though, what happened in the wake of that announcement. Instead of dealing with the hard realities of our predicament, the industrial world panicked and ran the other way, with the United States well in the lead. Strident claims that ethanol—er, solar—um, biodiesel—okay, wind—well, fracking, then—would provide a cornucopia of cheap energy to replace the world’s rapidly depleting reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas took the place of a serious energy policy, while conservation, the one thing that might have made a difference, was as welcome as garlic aioli at a convention of vampires.

That stunningly self-defeating response had a straightforward cause, which was that everyone except a few of us on the fringes treated the whole matter as though the issue was how the privileged classes of the industrial world could maintain their current lifestyles on some other resource base.  Since that question has no meaningful answer, questions that could have been answered—for example, how do we get through the impending mess with at least some of the achievements of the last three centuries intact?—never got asked at all. At this point, as a result, ten more years have been wasted trying to come up with answers to the wrong question, and most of the  doors that were still open in 2005 have been slammed shut by events since that time.

Fortunately, there are still a few possibilities for constructive action open even this late in the game. More fortunate still, the ones that will likely matter most don’t require Hillary Clinton, or any other member of America’s serenely clueless ruling elite, to do something useful for a change. They depend, rather, on personal action, beginning with individuals, families, and local communities and spiraling outward from there to shape the future on wider and wider scales.

I’ve talked about two of these possibilities at some length in posts here. The first can be summed up simply enough in a cheery sentence:  “Collapse now and avoid the rush!”  In an age of economic contraction—and behind the current facade of hallucinatory paper wealth, we’re already in such an age—nothing is quite so deadly as the attempt to prop up extravagant lifestyles that the real economy of goods and services will no longer support. Those who thrive in such times are those who downshift ahead of the economy, take the resources that would otherwise be wasted on attempts to sustain the unsustainable, and apply them to the costs of transition to less absurd ways of living. The acronym L.E.S.S.—“Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation”—provides a good first approximation of the direction in which such efforts at controlled collapse might usefully move..."

[Edward theurj Berge]

I am an avid practitioner of voluntary simplicity. And if enough people participate indeed we could make a difference. The problem though is that those elites in charge will not, and they are the ones consuming our resources at a collapsing pace. We also need to do something about them, and the government is our best chance. We need champions for changing the system running the system. So I disagree that "whoever mumbles the oath of office up there on the podium in 2017 [...] we can count on more of the same." If Clinton, they yes. But not if Senators Warren and/or Sanders. They would make a difference, and already are in their Senatorial capacities.