Category: Not the Monthly Post

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rhinegold I

John Michael Greer266 Comments

In this and the posts to come I’m going to be presenting a social, political, and economic interpretation of what’s going on in the operas composing Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. Now of course the usual reaction to such interpretations is to back away from the crazy person as quickly as possible, and…

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Early Philosophy

John Michael Greer255 Comments

One of the constant themes of middle class thought in modern times is the insistence that it’s possible to have one’s cake and eat it too. It’s for this reason that middle class activists demand world peace while also demanding lifestyles that can only be maintained at the cost of constant war, and middle class…

The Nibelung’s Ring: The Rediscovery

John Michael Greer218 Comments

At the conclusion of the last thrilling episode of our exploration of Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring, we watched bards and minstrels across the European world from Iceland to Austria keeping themselves fed and their patrons entertained by retelling traditional stories about the magic hoard of gold that Siegfried won by slaying the…

The Nibelung’s Ring: Prelude

John Michael Greer365 Comments

(Theme music:  “Vorspiel” from Das Rheingold) Some years ago, back when I was blogging on The Archdruid Report, I mentioned in passing that if I ever got tired of having a large readership, I would do a series of posts on Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. That was partly a joke, but only…

The Flight from Prediction

John Michael Greer274 Comments

I think most of my readers know that my academic background, such as it is, is in the history of ideas. To some extent that was simply the best option I could find when I returned to college in 1991 to complete my degree.  Then as now, the University of Washington didn’t offer a major…

Lenocracy in Extremis: The Case of Publishing

John Michael Greer312 Comments

I really did mean to go on to a different subject this week, rather than talking further about the system of political economy I’ve labeled lenocracy (from Latin leno, a pimp)—that is, a system that treats productive economic activity as a sucker’s game, to be milked dry by the two grasping hands of corporate power…

Beyond Lenocracy

John Michael Greer369 Comments

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

An Unfamiliar World

John Michael Greer397 Comments

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

The Three Stigmata of J.R.R. Tolkien

John Michael Greer390 Comments

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

The Return of Religion

John Michael Greer300 Comments

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