It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a venture, as Donald Trump’s bombastic baritone and Kamala Harris’s fingernails-on-blackboard soprano rang out over a bellowing chorus of media pundits and election officials, while billionaires George Soros and Elon Musk frantically conducted competing orchestras of braying donkeys and trumpeting elephants. The only possible word for the cacophony that resulted is “Wagnerian.”
I don’t expect things to get quieter any time soon. Nonetheless, the discussion of Wagner’s ideas finished up two weeks ago, and it’s time to move on to other things. The world didn’t join us in the notional opera house while Wotan et al. worked out their destinies, after all, and the political opera that wrapped up one overblown scene last November and is busy acting out another at top volume is far from the only thing worth discussing just now. In fact, I think this would be a good time to circle all the way back to the beginning of my blogging career almost nineteen years ago and talk again about the decline and fall of industrial civilization.
Yes, that’s still happening. All this while, as the corporate media flogged one set of peripheral issues after another as The Thing That Matters™ and an assortment of dissident subcultures did their level best to gain that coveted label for their own pet obsessions, our civilization has moved patiently through the stages of a cycle that was already old when Babylon was young. It may seem odd that this process, which historians a thousand years from now will consider the one news story that matters from out time, gets so little attention just now. If you’ve studied the fate of past civilizations, though, it’s a familiar oddity. The official voices of every civilization, as the world they know slides down the well-greased chute into history’s dumpster, babble breezily onward, convinced that nothing of the sort can possibly happen to them.
For the sake of clarity, I’m going to cover a few of the basics very quickly for those readers who weren’t here a decade ago. This is a very fast survey of an even more complex subject, and we’ll be going back over each of these points repeatedly in the months ahead. For now, let’s just touch on a few crucial points.
First of all, like human beings and other organic growths, civilizations have a life cycle that runs from birth to death. Sometimes that life cycle doesn’t run all the way to completion—a twenty-year-old gets flattened by a drunk driver, a thriving Aztec civilization gets flattened by Spanish conquistadors whose microbial ecosystems turned out to be far deadlier than their swords—but a person or a civilization that avoids such risks can expect to get old and die in the usual way. Gray hair and wrinkles in individuals have exact equivalents in civilizations, and we’re seeing them now. The only reason any of this is controversial just now is that the official voices of our civilization, in the usual way, have convinced themselves and most of their listeners that we’re special and it’s different this time.
Second, the stages in a civilization’s life cycle are measured in centuries. The process of decline and fall is no exception. From the beginning of decline to the final collapse usually takes one to three centuries, give or take a little. The notion that we can expect a sudden shock that will plunge us straight back into the Stone Age in a matter of days is popular, for straightforward reasons: like most of our supposedly secular credos these days, it’s a borrowed religious myth with the serial numbers filed off, and people cling to it because familiar-sounding myths are always comforting in difficult times like these. A glance at history, however, shows that this isn’t how civilizations fall.
Third, the process of decline is broadly invariant across geographical scales and technological levels. The same trajectory of decline and fall, over the same time scale, has brought down Neolithic civilizations restricted to a single river valley, and it’s also brought down literate, cosmopolitan civilizations with sophisticated technologies and international trade networks that sprawled over much of a continent. Our civilization happens to be larger and more dependent on artificial technologies than any other civilization we know about, and that’s the most common excuse people give for insisting that we’re special and it’s different this time. Meanwhile the usual signs of decline are piling up around us at the usual rate, and the deindustrial dark age a couple of centuries ahead of us is becoming increasingly easy to glimpse.
Finally, the end of a civilization is not the end of the world. Doubtless it will feel that way to some of the people caught up in the most difficult phases of decline, but then that’s another common factor in the process we’re discussing. To begin with, our species will survive the inevitable pruning of global population, and so will most other species; there will be a spike in extinctions, of course, but it will be followed in the usual way by a spike in what biologists call speciation, as tough, resilient generalist species move into vacant niches and start adapting to prosper there. This is already happening now, by the way; all the squawking about “invasive species” is an attempt by the ecologically clueless to insist that this natural and healthy rebalancing of the biosphere shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
It’s not just rats, cockroaches, human beings, and other adaptable generalist species that will get through the bottleneck of decline and fall, however. Communities have differing experiences as a civilization lurches slowly toward ruin; so do cultures and nations, if the civilization is big enough to embrace more than one of each. Some of each are destroyed, others scramble and struggle but pull through, and still others will suffer little impact and be left wondering what all the fuss is about. On average, those furthest from the centers of wealth, power, and technology will suffer the least disruption. If industrial civilization plunges into dark age conditions, to point out only one example, how much difference will that really make to the lives of tribal farm families in the mountains of New Guinea?
And the scientific and technological knowledge that our civilization has pieced together? It’s going to undergo a savage pruning, as its equivalents have in the past. (We still have no clear idea, for example, how the Romans made concrete so much stronger and more resilient than ours.) The sciences and technologies that survive, as usual, will be an odd mix. Some things will get through the bottleneck because they’re highly useful and can be made and maintained in dark age conditions; soap, firearms, and the simpler end of radio technology all fall into this category. Others will survive through the accidental preservation of books, or because some group of people decided for idiosyncratic reasons that they wanted to preserve it. The resulting hodgepodge will then become the foundation on which the successor societies of the future will build their own unique sciences and technologies, which will not be the same as ours.
By this point I know perfectly well that a good-sized chorus of my more recent readers will be ready to belt out some variation on “No, no, this cannot be!” in proper operatic style. That reaction is quite understandable: the schools, the corporate media, and the other official mouthpieces of our civilization have been singing those same lyrics to you in four-part harmony all your lives. They’re wrong, just as their exact equivalents in the twilight years of every other civilization were wrong, but it’s worth taking a moment to talk about why they’re wrong.
Every civilization starts out under the sway of a traditional religion—in our case, Christianity—adapted to the modes of thought that arise in dark age conditions, and uses mythic narratives as a template for thinking. Every civilization eventually moves away from those modes and sets aside the traditional religion in favor of some form of rationalism. Our historians talk about the age of faith giving way to the age of reason around 1650 AD; most of them try to avoid noticing that an earlier age of faith gave way to an age of reason around 450 BC in the classical world, and comparable changes happened in other civilizations as they moved through their own life cycles.
The great irony of these ages of reason is that they’re far less rational than their cheerleaders like to claim. All of the “rational” ideas that play a central role in society during its age of reason are, like the apocalyptic fantasies mentioned earlier, religious ideas with the serial numbers filed off. That’s why, for example, our scientists insist that the universe began at a specific moment in the past with the Big Bang—this is simply a secularized version of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, complete with “Let there be light.” It’s why so many of our allegedly secular ideologies insist that everyone in the world ought to accept a single belief system, adopt its moral rules, and obey its taboos—all this is simply following the template of Christian evangelism.
It’s also why so many people in modern industrial society believe with all their heart in a specific vision of history that, at least in their imaginations, will inevitably lead the faithful to a blessed life somewhere up there in the sky. We call that vision of history “progress.” For all practical purposes, blind faith in progress is the established religion of the modern industrial world. It doesn’t matter in the least that by most measures, progress peaked in the 1880s and has been slowing down since then; it doesn’t matter that for decades now, nearly every technological “improvement” has been a mere cosmetic change when it didn’t make things actively worse; it doesn’t matter that life in the world’s industrial nations is getting bleaker, grimmer, and shabbier with every passing year. We must have faith that sooner or later the great god Progress will lead us to salvation out there among the stars!
In reality, of course, progress—like most other things—is subject to the law of diminishing returns. We’re well into the downside of that law, the point at which each new tranche of technology yields negative results. That’s why every upgrade these days takes away useful functions and places more burdens on the users. It’s why so many musicians have started releasing their new music on vinyl records, and why a bevy of other retro technologies are grabbing increasing market share. That’s one of the great changes under way nowadays, and it’ll play a massive role in shaping the future ahead of us, but most people can’t let themselves notice it. Doing so would mean admitting that progress has shifted into reverse, and that would require them to abandon the pseudosecular belief system that gives their lives meaning and value.
Again, we’re going to talk about all these things in much more detail later on. For now, I want to make a point that gets ignored far too often, and then say a few things about the interface between the big picture just sketched out and the themes that have been central to discussions on this blog for the last nine years or so.
The point I want to make may seem simple enough, but it gets ignored quite reliably. My critics tend to be especially quick to ignore it. Yes, I have critics; it amuses me no end that in recent years, despite all my efforts to position myself here on the outermost fringes of our cultural discourse, some people have been sufficiently ruffled by what I’ve said to post their disagreements with me in various corners of the blogosphere. I have no objection whatever to this. Quite the contrary, the fact that there are people critiquing my ideas—in tones ranging from calm reason to the shrieks of a gutshot banshee—is a sign that in a few circles, at least, those ideas are getting a certain amount of traction. That’s very promising, at least from my perspective; I only wish that the people who leveled critiques at my ideas were a little more careful about paying attention to what those ideas actually are.
During the first few years of my blogging career, peak oil was a hot topic, and I focused a lot of attention in my former blog, The Archdruid Report, on that theme. Peak oil? That’s shorthand for the peak and subsequent decline of global conventional petroleum extraction, which happened twenty years ago. It’s also sometimes used as shorthand for the peak and subsequent decline of global liquid fuels production, which probably hasn’t begun yet. There are reasons why these are both important, and we’ll be talking about them in quite some detail as we proceed, but it’s simply not true—as some of my critics claim—that I’m arguing that peak oil is the sole and exclusive reason why industrial society is on its way down.
Our culture has a weird fixation on finding one and only one cause for every effect. It’s responsible for quite an impressive share of the cascading failures of our time—one of the core reasons that modern medicine does such a poor job of dealing with so many health conditions, for example, is that our medical researchers try to find a single cause for conditions that are the product of many intersecting factors—but it’s hardwired into our sciences, our politics, and our popular culture. Reduce every problem to the effects of a single cause, and (in theory) you can find a single solution for it: that’s the promise, and the mere fact that it fails so often does nothing to budge this deeply rooted prejudice from our minds.
In strict point of fact, the causes of any event embrace the entire universe. Consider a flipped coin. The movement of that coin when it leaves your hand has been shaped by everything that has influenced the muscles of your hand and arm, and that includes your whole life experience as well as the entire evolutionary lineage that gave you those muscles and that kind of forelimb. As it leaves your hand, the coin encounters an environment of air full of subtle movements and variations in pressure, and this can’t be understood perfectly without taking into account the local and continental weather, the tidal forces of moon and sun, and ultimately the entire history of the atmosphere, back to its origins in the slowly collapsing dust cloud that birthed the solar system. All of this comes together to make the coin land on one side or the other.
The fall of a civilization, it should not have to be said, is just a little more complex than the flip of a coin. It has a vast array of causes. The exhaustion of a certain set of fossil fuel resources is an important factor, but it’s only one of many resource issues that beset the modern industrial world, and resource issues are only one set of challenges pushing our civilization along the usual trajectory toward the usual destination. Even if we had access to limitless resources, we’d end up in the same place; it would probably take longer, and involve even more destruction on the way down, but we’d get there one way or another.
All this is more than a little like looking at a group of old men. Some of them are richer and others poorer, some more prudent and others more careless, some put effort into staying healthy and others couldn’t have cared less…but they’re all old, and it’s a safe bet that they’ll all be dead before too many more years have passed. If a physician starts insisting that he can keep them from dying of heart disease—well, that may be so, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll live forever. It simply means that each of them will die, in the not very distant future, of something else.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean that it’s a waste of time to take care of your health. Those old men who took care of themselves are likely to have a longer, happier, and healthier old age than the ones who didn’t. In the same way, there are things that industrial civilization could have done to make its old age longer and less difficult than it would otherwise be, and there are still some things that can still be done even this late in the game to stave off the worst outcomes. I don’t expect any of them to be done, but the possibilities are there.
Far more significantly, there are still plenty of things that nations, cultures, and communities can do to shield themselves against some of the impacts of the ongoing decline. Until quite recently, I was fairly sure that none of those would be done on any scale large enough to matter. At the moment, though, it appears as though one of the most important of those steps is being carried out with considerable verve by the government of the United States. Readers who have been with me since the peak oil days will remember when economic relocalization was a major theme of discussion, and dependence on global resources was recognized as a lethal weakness in the face of decline. Now, to my great surprise, here we are: the global economy is being dismantled and economic relocalization pushed by, of all people, Donald Trump.
I have no reason to think that Trump realizes that he’s fulfilling one of the great hopes of the long-dead peak oil movement. I doubt it has ever occurred to him that industrial civilization is on the downslope of its history; if anything, his singleminded focus on “making America great again” suggests that he’s sure that any problems we face can be overcome with the right mix of legal and regulatory changes, hopeful rhetoric, and bluster. The fact remains that he’s responding to one of the core features of the crisis of our time in a way that might just give the United States a less abrupt decline, and also make room for other constructive changes.
Though I didn’t expect this, a case could be made that I should have. Trump is a type that surfaces tolerably often during the twilight of a civilization: brash, charismatic, ruthless, and ambitious pragmatists who rise to power when the existing order has failed to deal with the challenges of the age. Call them the Lords of the Fall. They quite often become figures of legend in retrospect, grown larger and grander than life in folk memory, though that process also strips away most of their harsher aspects: the few early accounts we have of the Roman-British warlord Artorius, to cite only one famous example, suggest that he was a far more brutal and ambivalent figure than the “King Arthur” that minstrels manufactured from surviving scraps of his legend centuries later.
It’s anyone’s guess whether Trump, once his reputation has been manhandled in the usual way by folk memory and industrious minstrels, will become the center of a cycle of legends in the dark age towns and countryside of deindustrial America; it could as well be some other figure of the same broad type who rises to power fifty or a hundred years from now. For the time being, though, we have a Lord of the Fall to deal with, and quite a few of the apparent certainties of our situation are up for grabs at this point, for good or ill. That, too, we’ll discuss in later posts.
Good day everyone!
Saw a funny story on X (formerly know as Twitter) two days ago. They discovered some oil in the Gulf Of America (formerly know as Gulf Of Mexico).
What’s funny about that? Well nothing really. The amusing part was in the comments section. People cheering as if this is a sign that decline is reversing, some were talking about how oil regenerates in oil rigs. Between the lines I could read the tiresome attitude, “They hide the oil from us!” or “They want us poor, that’s why they lie!”
Went and read the article and it doesn’t look like much, future plans for an oil rig with a depth of over 23000 feet. The article was very boring, felt a lack of energy and enthusiasm.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/news-and-insights/press-releases/bp-announces-oil-discovery-in-the-gulf-of-america.html
Curious to read about the other factors of this decline. Always thought that Peak Oil was like David’s slingshot to Goliath. Ok, not the only factor, but not even the biggest factor?
“Even if we had access to limitless resources, we’d end up in the same place; it would probably take longer, and involve even more destruction on the way down, but we’d get there one way or another.” I imagined with such limitless resources we’d reach the actual stars, seems I have more to learn.
Riveting stuff, JMG – thank you. One extraordinary aspect of our decline is a crazy over-dependence on computers; a theme you haven’t emphasized specifically. I fear that an Internet-destroying solar flare might cause such immediate havoc that the gradual Long Descent would seem rather less gradual. Anyhow, be that as it may: a great essay.
JMG, obviously your critics never read Spengler – which is an author that you mentioned time and time again in your posts. Spengler *never* considered for a single fleeting moment resource depletion as a factor in the decline of western civilization – he didn’t thought about resource depletion at all, the concept didn’t existed in his mind.
BTW, “Lord of the Fall” is a great name for a metal band.
As a long time reader of the Archdruid and many of your books, I am excited to hear more over the months to come!!!!
JMG, I was beginning to fear that you had taken ill today. I hope you are well.
Above you have the following: ” All of the “rational” ideas that play a central role in society during its age of reason are, like the apocalyptic fantasies mentioned earlier, religious ideas with the serial numbers filed off.”
Is it your understanding that the ideas of Greek philosophers, and the later systems, Stoicism, Cynicism et. al. can be so described?
I think you have made the best case that can be made for the present administration. Unfortunately, how you go about a task, building a house, making daughter’s prom dress, reducing a bloated govt. beaurocracy, is no less important than the end goal. I think any good craftsperson can tell us that carelessness, not vice, is the worst enemy of good, enduring work. I have learned that when I enter my sewing room, I had better leave emotional exuberance outside the door if I intend to produce anything worth my time and effort. Mind, I hold no brief for the self-styled ‘resistance’ who have chosen to schedule their next big protest for this coming Sat., which just happens to be Holy Saturday, one of the most important days in the Catholic liturgical calendar. Same old clueless liberal Jewish and secular WASP alliance hasn’t learned a thing.
Furthermore, the heffalump in the room here is Gaza, and ongoing Nuremburg level crimes, which we are financing and enabling, for lo, how many decades now? At some point, someone from either major party or a new party is going to have to say NO to all that lovely dual citizen money, and craft a program that American citizens can support without being bespelled by political advertising.
In the past, some civilizations collapsed while much of the world just kept right on about it’s business. When you say our civilization is collapsing or dying, what exactly does “our civilization” cover? Geographically, socially or politically, who exactly are we referring to?
Or to put it another way, who is not part of our collapsing civilization?
O My Archdruid! Brilliant, gratitude
Your description of the coin toss gives me some new ways to think about my morning I Ching readings!
I love the imagery of a web of connection in place of a single cause for any one instance of vibration along the web causes the whole thing to shake. So many threads in the warp and the weft.
Bravo, JMG. Thanks for the reminder!
Mac
Thanks for the teaser. Looking forward to the upcoming compositional rollercoaster with much eagerness!
It’s great to hear you returning to these themes JMG. After writing a number of excellent books on the decline of industrial civilization–the Ecotechnic Future is a favorite of mine–I hope you continue. Continuing to keep these ideas in circulation is really important!
A few weeks ago a number of readers cited a blog post by Art Berman in which he provocatively called Peak Oil a “failed paradigm”. I was curious and took a look. My interpretation is that I don’t think he capitulated, gave up, or failed to understand EROI or anything like that. The criticism he was leveling was at the way Peak Oil was marketed and, for the most part, ended up in the fast crash/apocalypse category. That mode of thinking has not been a successful predictive model, so he makes a fair point.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/peak-oil-requiem-for-a-failed-paradigm/
Your publications are in the minority for stressing the slow, multifactorial nature of civilizational decline. Most of the Peak Oil writers indulged in an emotionally appealing, but not very useful forecast of imminent mad max followed by a plunge into the stone age. Slow, uneven, creeping decline is much harder to envision but that is the future we are actually going to get.
Hello JMG,
Thank you for the fascinating discussion. I have a couple of follow-up questions. You say, “our civilization has moved patiently through the stages of a cycle that was already old when Babylon was young”. Who/what do you include in “our civilization”? The US? + Canada? + Western Europe? + Australia and New Zealand? Also, when a civilization is dying, there are always “barbarians at the gate”. Who are they, in your opinion? If we are… let’s say… the Egyptians in the Middle Kingdom, who are our Hyksos?
Thank you for this post.
What are one or two major changes you feel confident will happen in the West in tbe next ten years ?
I am so happy to catch a glimpse of the glorious past Archdruid Report. Adding a picture of Trump dressed as the God Emperor of Warhammer 40000 is most definitely the cherry on the cake.
Btw, that fictitious universe is choke-full of symbolic and esoteric references, in the case of this post many of the sons of the Emperor are barely disguised angels and demons of world-wide folklore, heck the emperor himself being kept alive artificially for 10000 years provides the beacon of light (Lux imperator, a very unsubtle reference to Lucifer) necessary for warp navigation/space travel and the functioning of an empire beyond terminal decline, besets on all sides by enemies.
JMG said “On average, those furthest from the centers of wealth, power, and technology will suffer the least disruption…” – ah, the periphery and backwaters and borderlands! This makes total sense. Very interesting, very interesting indeed. This essay will certainly get a lot of negative attention. I had to chuckle at the “old men” analogy, as I’m getting there myself. It’s true – build mortality into your life, and you can focus on living. Suppress it, and all you can think of and be consumed by, is Death. Sigh. I had to think of this F. Alexander Schmemann quote to accompany reading this essay: “It would be useful to teach a course entitled ‘Great Western Errors,’ following approximately this plan: Rousseau and ‘Nature,’ with a capital N; The Enlightenment and ‘Reason,’ capital R; Hegel and ‘History,’ capital H; Marx and ‘Revolution,’ capital R; and finally, Freud and ‘Sex,’ capital S—realizing that the main error of each is precisely the capital letter, which transforms these words into an idol, into a tragic pars pro toto.” https://firstthings.com/alexander-schmemann-a-man-in-full/ I know Rationalism is very old (the Greco-Roman period was super-rationalistic for awhile) but it does feel at least, in texture, that our corresponding Faustian period is just awfully so much more histrionic and rigid at the same time. Perhaps this is just the “wrinkle” in the Faustian makeup – it’s got to go with a Bang. If so, I’m surprised they’ve taken Donald Trump so well! They must be nearing interior exhaustion even now. “Exhausted, but not satiated, they retired.” (Sallust or Livy?). Maybe they’re just warming up. We are definitely in uncharted waters. I’m wondering what you and the commentariat think the opposition is “waiting for”. They should be on a rampage right now. Trump is going berserk, but he still isn’t even close to doing enough. Additionally, he in some areas is trying to maintain a terrible status quo. It all feels very surreal, and I think people must be mentally re-calibrating, right now. At least, that’s my theory. Events may pour in too fast to allow enough re-calibration to reset to the Never Trump mentality, which might be gone forever? That really would be uncharted waters.
It seems like that in addition to the most common causes for collapse such as over production of elites, excess complexity, etc there is another set of factors that are lined up to move the empire ( and the other countries attached to it) down the road to collapse. These factors are things like moving food production offshore. Producing a lower level managerial class ( think dmv not Goldman Sachs) that is based on posturing, manuvering and entitlement. Requiring that almost everything from doctors appointments to utility paying be done on the internet. It seems that nearly everything that we think we have accomplished over the last 30 years has made collapsing easier and more rapid.
As for the longevity of Roman concrete, for a while we have known about how their recipe included both volcanic ash and seawater, which react to form unusually durable compounds.
The latest analysis shows that imperfectly processed chunks of lime included in the mix make the Roman concrete dynamically resilient over time. The “clasts” of raw lime, when exposed by cracks, react with water and dissolve, giving the concrete a limited self-healing property:
https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106
I’ll share this again in case anyone has forgotten how crappy our modern concrete is, and how the steel rebar inside makes it self-destructive: https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-reinforced-concrete-56078
I haven’t seen any evidence that the construction industry is moving toward lime clast mixes or different reinforcing materials.
JMG,
I suspect that a large fraction of the participants in the “Peak Oil Movement” consider the idea that DJT is accomplishing a single constructive thing as literally unthinkable. Pointing out that his policies represent more tangible progress toward economic relocalization than an entire decade’s worth of transition town planning and similar activism might just make their heads explode.
Thanks this is going to be an interesting series… I remember in about 2004 reading a blog called life after the oil crash…. doom porn for sure but you blog was much better 🙂
Thank you. This essay was immense fun to read. (Admittedly, I do disagree on a couple of tangential points: (a) if the Big Bang hypothesis is irrational, then how do we account for the 2.726 Kelvins temperature of the so-cold, so-close-to-uniform, cosmic microwave background radiation? is there, somewhere in mathematical physics, some better explanation for it? (b) if The Donald is charismatic, then why is his applause so thin outside the USA? the 1933-1945 “Fooey” (the notorious Charlie Chaplin lookalike) garnered lots of applause outside Deutschland, at any rate during his initial years in power; if The Donald is charismatic, then why is he not doing the same? As I say, these points of disagreement are merely tangential.) — Fun aside, it is of the first importance that you are returning to our ongoing civilizational death spiral. — As I have said in your Internet space or spaces before, I myself think that we are by now well into the descent, and that future historians – we may picture them as writing in the next civilization, quite a few centuries from now – are liable take a date recently passed out of living memory, 1914-06-28, as a convenient marker for simplifying and schematizing the start of our downward plunge. — A question: What is your assessment of Byzantium? Pundits of a rather superficial and vulgar sort, writing a few decades ago, used to dismiss Byzantium as sterile, in other words as a community from which nothing useful can be learned. I presume that you, like me, take a more favourable view, although without sharing my own specifically Vatican-Catholic viewpoint. Some will go so far as to say that Byzantium, with its so carefully managed centuries-long contraction (infotech engineers like to speak of “graceful degradation”, when developing computer-failure scenarios) is our clearest Western example of an appropriate response to the collapse of Rome. How far in a pro-Byzantine direction are you yourself inclined to go? – (signed) Toomas Karmo, at edge of Tartu Observatory dark-sky campus in south-central Estonia
This sounds more like Shelley’s “Ozymandias” than like James Thomson (BV)’s “City of Dreadful Night.” Oddly enough, I misremembered “Ozymandias” as having been written by Yeats, not Shelley. And, Mary B @#6, how brave of you to draw attention to the hephalump in the room. In paintings, and in a recent Pynchon novel, there’s the term “inherent vice.” I can think of a number of examples of “inherent vice” as it applies to the USA; one is the one you mentioned, and the institution of slavery is one more. I’d like to know if Spengler talked at all about “inherent vice.”
Great post on the decline and fall. Always enjoy hearing about this topic.
On the age of reason: In truth, everyone is unreasonable because humans are just not as rational as we like to think we are. We’ve never been rational creatures and we never will be. But in the age of reason, performative rationalism is a virtue. The bureaucrats pretend to be reasonable people with expertise who are making the rational, logical decisions so they’re above criticism. Of course, that’s not what they’re actually doing at all, and they are actually motivated by irrational manipulative values. It makes me laugh when the rationalist bureaucrats rage over the unreason that people still cling onto, because the bureaucrats can’t see past the beam in their own eye.
@Clay Dennis #16. Good point about the brush you have to cut through just to do simple tasks nowadays. And yes, it is annoying that if I go to a place a business they often tell me to “go online.”
As I’m hitting my middle stride (mid-40s), I’m realizing how little I actually want, which is probably bad for the economy. A few items I owned are charmed and useful (my musical instruments, a rifle my father gave me, a ham radio) but for the most part I don’t want much more to complicate my life. I agree that technology has mostly had diminishing returns for 40 or 50 years and it does make your life more complicated. The things I really want now, after trying to climb the material ladder and modestly succeeding, are community, functional physical strength, a few skills and peace of mind. I wonder if my state of mind is just reflecting the decline of society and if it is a mass idea that everyone has but is afraid to say aloud. I don’t have much of an opinion on the persons in politics now, but if their policies end up turning America back to a largely rural, production-based, and isolationist country, I’ll be happy.
But, it is almost impossible to tell anyone that you want a simpler and even materially poorer or physically harder life. I am lucky that I live on the border of the hinterland and have a family farm that I can return to someday. There are definitely some brush piles to burn, firewood to cut and vegetable to grow in my future.
“Industrial civilization” wouldn’t happen to refer to all of the nations of the world that currently partake in the resource extraction and financial games than make up what we know as the “global economy”, would it? Especially considering that the same principals behind the current idealization of “progress” can more or less be applied to them, especially with how much emphasis has been put on the industrial progress of Southeast Asia, for example. I could be wrong about that of course, especially considering Western Civilization as we know it, and particularly the US, is at the center of all of this, but that’s the impression that I get considering that no matter where I look, everyone’s playing more or less the same game.
I somewhat disagree with the idea that the Big Bang theory is Genesis 1 with the serial numbers filed off. The Big Bang corresponds to “In the beginning…God said ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light.” The modern scientific account does not include the part between the ellipsis (about the primordial waters with winds blowing above them) and the rest of creation is out of order. That account of creation could have been the product of any civilization that once believed that a God created the cosmos out of nothing.
That being said, the current crisis in cosmology on top of the older crisis in cosmology that was explained away using hypothetical dark matter and energy indicates that the Big Bang model of cosmology has reached the end of its usefulness.
I’m glad to see some classic archdruid-style reporting! I’m definitely looking forward to future installments.
As others of said, “the Lords of the Fall” is a great name for the role. I suspect whether Trump is remembered in legend and song may hinge on whether he leaves office in a casket or not.
This promises to be a very interesting and relevant series. Thank you! Do you have any idea when Europe will see its Lord of the Fall? Just asking for a friend…
“progress peaked in the 1880s and has been slowing down since then” – the year 1880 sounds quite early to me, before airplanes en mass-communication systems. Can you say more about it?
I think that’s right – Lords of the Fall, or Fall Caesars. I think where they crop up will be indicative of how much life is left in that particular culture, in the US, there’s a heck of a lot of life left in your culture – Trump may be the first stage of throwing off your pseudo-morphosis, much as Putin is the Russian equivalent. Continental Europe on the other hand, well, the best it has is some form of energy dictatorship.
I don’t like Trump much, but I’ve often explained to people the subtle differences of what these sorts of figures look like on downslopes, versus dictators on upslopes. But that’s in broad aggregate terms, its cold comfort if say, your loved family member has found himself on the wrong side of a chaotic legal system.
I remain hopeful that because of the downslope, that the left/the woke (I prefer to call them the “contrived”) cannot truly establish themselves into the rulers they wish to be – there’s just too much chaos in the world for their brand of brittle theocracy.
None of this is pleasant of course – I don’t want to pick a side.
Rafael, remember the commenters are by and large devout believers in the Great God Progress, and so of course they’re shouting “Hall-oil-luia!” and insisting that the prophecies are all true. That’s what true believers do. Meanwhile, only those of us far out on the fringes are thinking about just how little net energy will be left in that oil by the time you factor in the cost of drilling down more than four miles into the earth’s crust, putting in pipe, and pumping the oil up once whatever initial pressure it happens to have has been exhausted…
Robert G, one of the benefits of relocalization is that computers become less of a guaranteed failure point. If manufacturers and distributors are all present in each geographical reason, cobbling together some way to fill orders becomes a lot less difficult. But we’ll get to that!
Bruno, of course they don’t read Spengler. I’m far from sure they even read me. I like the band name!
Tom, thank you.
Mary, thank you for your concern! No, I was up late writing — I figured out how to handle the climactic scene in the fifth Ariel Moravec novel, piled into it, lost track of time, and went to bed much later than usual — and so I didn’t wake up until fairly late in the morning. Yes, Greek philosophy is also Greek Pagan religion with the serial numbers filed off. As for the current administration, did you think that I was making a case for it? That wasn’t my intention at all. Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
Phil, every nation that has cities that look like this…
…is part of modern industrial society. (That’s Tehran, by the way.)
HankShaw, you’re most welcome.
Justin, it makes a lot of sense of divination, doesn’t it?
Mac, you’re welcome. It’ll be much more than just a reminder. We’re going to go deep into the current state of decline and fall.
Jeremy, climb aboard and enjoy the ride!
Samurai_47, and of course Art’s correct, for reasons we’ll discuss at length. Peak oil is a reality, “OMG we’re going to run out of oil NEXT THURSDAY and then EVERYbody’s gonna DIIIIEEEEE!!!” is just one more dreary example of pop culture apocalonanism.
Inna, we’ll be discussing that at great length in the posts ahead. The short form is that if you drive a car and use a cell phone, you’re part of the civilization I’m talking about.
Tony A, we’ll get to that in due time.
Rashakor, about six months ago I took the time to read some online summaries of the Warhammer 40K universe, and felt about the same way I did last week when I read up on Gene Ray’s Time Cube theory. Fascinating stuff — and yes, it reflects a lot of our current situation through the funhouse mirror of pop culture.
Celadon, that’s also going to have to take quite a bit of discussion in the posts ahead. There’s quite a bit going on under the surface in the Trumposphere; as I see it, the goal of the cascading changes Trump has set in motion isn’t to overturn the status quo, it’s to preserve it with only those changes necessary to keep it from self-immolating in one last blaze of mindless greed and feckless incompetence. The opposition, meanwhile, isn’t “waiting for” anything; lacking the funds to hire rent-a-mobs, and having had control over cultural narratives slip through their fingers with the death spiral of the legacy media, they’re flailing, because not that many people actually support them.
Clay, and not one of those things is new, or even unfamiliar. Those are normal changes as a failing civilization goes sclerotic with age. That, too, we’ll discuss at length.
Samurai_47, bit by bit they’re figuring it out. My guess is that the Romans used some oddball ingredient like crushed mussel shells, which catalyzed some unexpected reaction with the lime or what have you.
Roy, I know. I tried to bring up tariffs and trade barriers as methods of relocalization back in the day, and the shrieks of outrage were probably audible on the Moon. The point I drew from this, and I think it’s still valid, is that in this case — as in so many others — most peak oilers loved to talk about grandiose changes but weren’t willing to inconvenience themselves one iota to bring those changes about. If heads do explode, why, good.
David, I remember LATOC well! Those were innocent days.
Toomas, welcome back! I’ll gladly address your points, (1) For any set of data points whatsoever, it’s possible to come up with an infinite number of explanatory hypotheses; the fact that our physicists have settled on one that happens to copy Genesis 1:1 et seq. is the point I was making. (2) That is to say, Trump isn’t popular in Europe; American politicians rarely are. He’s immensely popular in Asia — have you seen these?
Millions of people across east and south Asia burn incense to them to make their families and businesses great again (3) Byzantium is important enough in this context that it’ll require at least one post all its own. The short form is that it’s a valid model for some regions of the current industrial world, though not for the EU or the US. Again, we’ll get to that.
Phutatorius, that poem of Shelley’s is one of my very favorite pieces of English verse. I have it by heart.
Enjoyer, of course! Rationalism (which is not reason, but the irrational worship of reason) becomes fashionable when rule by bureaucrats replaces rule by landowners, and goes back out of fashion once the bureaucrats become fatally incompetent, as they always do.
N, good. Yes, that’s a decent summary.
Patrick, most religions don’t believe that one god created the cosmos out of nothing. To the ancient Greeks, for example, the cosmos was born, not made, and it wasn’t created by the gods — it gave birth to them. The notion of the cosmos being an artifact created by a god is a peculiarly Abrahamic notion.
Slithy, and that’s also an issue, of course. One way or another, we’re in for a wild ride.
Boccaccio, that’s a topic that’ll get a post of its own in due time.
Peter, the Lords of the Fall are usually products of the borderlands; Trump and Putin are both good examples of the early phases of the type. You won’t start getting them in the European subcontinent until much later in the curve, when the borderlands have spread inward to overwhelm the center.
Lords of the Fall, as a new coinage, has the advantage of not drawing attention to one specific historic precedent, as Spengler’s Caesarism does. C. Iulius Caesar did not deal with globalization and he did not implement relocalization – he tried to end the endless civil war by instituting a monarchy disguised as a republic, which Augustus then managed to finally pull off. The other famous, slightly earlier Caesar figure is Shi Hoang Di, the first Chinese Emperor, who faced a similar challenge of endless war and whose major feat was also bringing it temporarily to an end.
Can you give an example of some other Lord of the Fall who faced a mainly economical or societal, not a military challenge internal to the civilization? If he is remembered nowadays, he must have been at least somewhat successful, though an example of failure would also be interesting.
Hello JMG,
Great piece as usual. I’m curious what is your rationale for placing the peak of modern industrial society in the 1880s?
Best Wishes,
JCP
Phutatorius @ 21, Thank you. Not brave at all, just too old and bad tempered to care. Ancestors of mine fought and bled in the Revolution, Union armies and both World Wars. I hate what is being done in my, and their, names.
In theology there is a phrase, sinful system, which refers to an institution of society which brutalizes and corrupts everyone who comes in contact with it. Slavery is of course one. I think the illicit drug trade is another.
There’s a video game called Dark Souls (I know there aren’t many video game fans around here; it’s a waste of energy).
You can read a bit about the story here (for the first game; there are three games in the series): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Souls_(video_game)#:~:text=on%20their%20actions.-,Plot,distinction%20between%20life%20and%20death. , for those interested, read the wiki a little if you want to understand what I write below or there are a lot of videos on Youtube about the history of dark souls, if you read the wiki, Gwyn (one of the important characters in the story) is currently the United States, Gwyn literally sacrificed himself to keep the flame alive, in our case the United States sacrificed itself in a consumerist frenzy to keep alive the secular faith of progress in any of its 3 heads (technological, economic or social progress). In Dark Souls, the story happens in cycles. Dark Souls 1 happens when the flame begins to fade, Gwyn’s soul no longer strong enough to sustain it.
That has been happening for the past 40 years, now Gwyn (United States) is no longer able to keep the flame (progress) alive, and that is what they are looking for right now, someone who dares to lead the transition, Dark Souls 1 has two endings, where the player chooses between immolating himself and continuing a new age of fire, and the other, extinguishing the flame, obviously today they are looking for a successor to keep the flame of progress burning.
Gwyn was called “Gwyn the Lord of Sunlight”, when the events of Dark Souls 1 happen, Gwyn is called “Gwyn The Lord of Cinder”; with this I propose (if I may) to call the United States “the first lord of cinder”
Yes, I know, I’m a geek 🤓
I forgot to mention that Russia, China and the other rising powers are also lords or heroes (to leave the title of “Lord” available) of Cinder, since if it is necessary for someone to sacrifice themselves to keep the flame alive, this cycle will repeat itself, with which we should already talk about Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3.
Thank you for this brief reminder.
As a long time reader of your thought-provoking books and ideas, I look forward to reading your updated views on the state of the world in these troubled times.
Comments on tariffs and economic indepence by past American leaders.
In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote in his famous Report on Manufactures: “The wealth … independence, and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation … ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These compose the means of subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defense”
Campaigning for Henry Clay, “The Father of the American System,” in 1844, Abe Lincoln issued an impassioned plea, “Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth.”
Battling free trade in the Polk presidency, Congressman Lincoln said, “Abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government must result in the increase of both useless labor and idleness and … must produce want and ruin among our people.”
William McKinley declared, four years before being elected president: “Free trade results in our giving our money … our manufactures and our markets to other nations. … It will bring widespread discontent. It will revolutionize our values.”
Campaigning in 1892, McKinley said, “Open competition between high-paid American labor and poorly paid European labor will either drive out of existence American industry or lower American wages.”
Above taken from https://apnews.com/article/business-global-trade-pat-buchanan-da6397d3155d4a67891c083a7e252c31
More by Pat Buchanan on tariffs and protectionism
https://www.unionleader.com/opinion/columnists/pat-buchanan-tariffs—-the-taxes-that-made-america-great/article_7cc3014d-29d3-5999-add5-7e46c223b37c.html
A quote from the above written in 2019
The problem for President Trump?
Once a nation is hooked on the cheap goods that are the narcotic free trade provides, it is rarely able to break free. The loss of its economic independence is followed by the loss of its political independence, the loss of its greatness and, ultimately, the loss of its national identity.
From the Atlantic, written 1998! Discussing Pat Buchanan’s opposition to the global elite’s support of free trade. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98jul/buchanan.htm Could be written right now, the issues and arguments are the same.
“I have no reason to think that Trump realizes that he’s fulfilling one of the great hopes of the long-dead peak oil movement. I doubt it has ever occurred to him that industrial civilization is on the downslope of its history; if anything, his singleminded focus on “making America great again” suggests that he’s sure that any problems we face can be overcome with the right mix of legal and regulatory changes, hopeful rhetoric, and bluster.”
He does know that the USA has its back to the wall and it’s either do what he’s doing or face national bankruptcy. He knows that the USA can no longer shoulder the burden of globalization, with its deindustialised wastelands and its underemployed and unskilled workforce.
I guess we *do* need a Heldentenor!
How do we tell when one civilization ends, and another begins? For example, the Chinese reckon their civilization to be something like 5000 years old. Should they be counting each dynasty separately, or are those superficial changes that only affect the elites? Same for Egypt.
In one place you sound as though religious changes ought to be the defining factor. While we do have things like (for dynastic China) the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the Empress Wu, or the Yuan-Ming transition; or (for pharaonic Egypt) the theology of Akhenaten, other phases do not seem to have changed much, religion-wise. Lower down, you mention peak oil, but write that “resource issues are only one set of challenges pushing our civilization along the usual trajectory toward the usual destination.” What are some of the others?
Dynasties tend to last a lot longer than presidential terms. Does that make any difference to the cycle? Can we expect our American Caesar to avoid the two-term limit somehow, as Putin regularly does?
The Big Bang and inflation came about because the physicists can’t get from the Planck length to a millimeter using current mathematics.
NASA has a nice web page on the topic that explains why this theory is needed and what it explains.
https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/
However, one of the main requirements “Given the assumption that the matter in the universe is homogeneous and isotropic (The Cosmological Principle)” appears to be wrong. There some truly huge galaxy clusters and equally vast regions of emptiness.
As to “The criticism he was leveling was at the way Peak Oil was marketed and, for the most part, ended up in the fast crash/apocalypse category. That mode of thinking has not been a successful predictive model, ”
I read that and thought of Gail the Actuary from the Oil Drum. Wrong for more than 20 years.
I think Progress peaked later than 1880, but exactly when is a good question.
My take on why JMG placed the peak of innovation at 1880. By 1910 we had radio going, electrification proceeding quickly, industrial chemistry, trains, internal combustion machine use rapidly expanding, movies, recorded music, x-rays, anesthesia, sanitary water and sewage systems, discovery of radioactivity, cameras, artificial drugs, vaccines, microbiology, huge mechanized factories with machinery run by electricity and engines, air planes, telephone and telegraph networks. All this built on discoveries and technology birthed in the 1800’s. What we have now is an expansion and application of what was in at least embryo form by 1930. My great grandmother who lived from 1869 to 1966 saw the real transformation.
Mary Bennet #5: “Furthermore, the heffalump in the room here is Gaza, and ongoing Nuremburg level crimes, which we are financing and enabling, for lo, how many decades now? ”
That is my one, big worry as well. If anything can completely torpedo Trump’s administration, it is his complete unwillingness to make U.S. foreign policy something other than the wholly owned subsidiary of the Israeli Knesset and the Mossad.
Speaking of the latter, I suspect that the reason we have not heard (and will never hear) any more about the Epstein business, is that this whole thing was a Mossad blackmail operation from Day One. If that becomes general knowledge, the American people will conclude that Israel is the enemy. I then fear that every Jew in America would sufficiently be in jeopardy of life and limb to make Hitler and Stalin look like wimps.
I suspect Trump fears the same thing, which is why he will keep the lid on this as much as he can.
Toomas (re: “Eastern” Roman Empire, aka Byzantium)
I wouldn’t consider the collapse as elegant, though it definitely appears as so from a distance (From Top Dog to first among equals to an equal to sick child of The Balkans to road bump). With each drop off there was a lot of issues and civil wars.
Hey JMG
It’s nice to see a return to the themes of your early blog, enriched with your recent developments in social and philosophical awareness and criticism. Looking very forward to this.
Out of curiosity, besides Toynbee, Vico, Tainter and Spengler, have you come across any new historians that offer something of relevance to our civilisation’s decline that you intend to incorporate into your future posts? Maybe Peter Turchin, William Ophul, Vaclav Smil or Annalee Newitz?
@ Lathechuck on Frugal Friday and my dead Kenmore sewing machine.
Bill and I will be in Bowie, MD (about 25 minutes from College Park) on Friday afternoon, 18JUL2025 through Sunday afternoon, 20JUL2025.
We’re participating in Write Women’s Book Festival https://www.thewritewomenbookfest.org/#/
in the Comfort Inn Conference Center on Crain Highway in Bowie.
If we can get together sometime during that weekend, we can give you my dead Kenmore.
You may want to do the handoff in the parking lot. We’d love for you to see our books and everyone else’s but that involves buying a day ticket, which you may not want to do. It depends on how you feel about a pack of strong-minded authoresses and poetesses.
Bill is along as my assistant rather than as an author in his own right. He’s got the wrong equipment for this crowd.
I hadn’t realized how much I missed reading your systems collapse writing until I read this essay. Hard to believe that it’s been 15+ years since I discovered your work via this topic.
Don’t have much interesting to add at the moment, other than it’s a breath of fresh air to read a perspective about what’s coming that isn’t of the “overnight zombie apocalypse” variety. To this day, you and James Howard Kunstler seem to be the only prominent contemporary writers on this subject that I know of who defend the longer term punctuated equilibrium type model for societal collapse, which is surprising because I’ve seen Tainter’s book mentioned a number of times.
Aldarion, I’ll look for some examples when I have the time.
JCP, we’ll get to that.
Zarcayce, er, okay.
Tris, you’re most welcome.
BeardTree, it’s an old argument, and yes, it goes back centuries.
AA, that much does seem to be clear to him.
Ambrose, that’s a good subject for a book. You might consider reading what Toynbee has to say about the divisions between one civilization and the next, for example. (BTW, any comment that includes the cheap snark “citation needed” gets autodeleted, in case you were wondering; it’s nearly always the opening move of the dysfunctional interpersonal game “Prove It To Me.” Do your own research.)
BeardTree, the specific detail I had in mind was the peak in significant technological patents, but that will also do.
J.L.Mc12, not yet, no. I tend to read mostly books by dead people.
Geoffg, oh, Tainter’s book is mentioned all right. It’s just that next to nobody reads him. I’m not at all sure how many people read Jim and I, for that matter!
What role do you envisage all the world’s feral cats playing in the earth’s next songs?
In light of the discussion about the decline of industrial society, here’s an image of a couple houses in Detroit being reclaimed by nature over time:
https://i.postimg.cc/sDsdD97Q/detroit.jpg
I suspect that very little will be left of our cities in 2500. Maybe a handful of skeleton skyscrapers will still stand as rusted wrecks if they aren’t torn down for salvage long before then, but the suburbs are going to disappear almost instantly. Our highway system will become useless pretty fast, and the concrete and metal will be repurposed.
I wonder if there will be a trend of de-suburbanization as peak oil rears its head. Cars and gas will stop being affordable, so suburban sprawl will become impossible to navigate and people will either move back into the urban cores or have to reorganize the suburbs to actually be livable without cars somehow.
JMG
Though I agree that we are looking at a gradual decline and not a sudden collapse, I tend to see it at times more as a staircase where to some people in some places it will appear as sudden when their region/lives decline quite rapidly before temporarily leveling out at a lower level.
With Trumps tariffs I see quite a chance of that happening with the US if they cut themselves off from or make much more expensive most of the materials they would need to re industrialize or even continue existing projects, such as steel piping for oil drilling, steel, aluminum, computers,rare earths, etc. Also re establishing an industrial base takes so long that we will be that much farther down the decline slope by then. oil drilling and mining are at such an advanced and complex and energy intensive state that I doubt much of it could be re started after a prolonged delay.
I also doubt the Chinese are ever again going sell the Americans rare earth and technology that the Americans are quite open about using for military production to attack or threaten China. They are not known as a stupid culture.
Stephen
Aldarion, you might want to look at the career of Tokugawa Iyasu.
JIMG, I am a bit curious about your response to Ambrose. My personal view is that opinions should be clearly labelled as such, and assertions such as all Martian women hate their fathers do require some sort of citation. I do have a strong dislike of being sent down rabbit holes by people who seem to think I have nothing better to do. Especially since the making of unfounded assertions is a frequent tactic used to divert discussions away from matters a person or their handlers don’t want to see mentioned. The spaghetti meets wall technique.
I was planning to save this for the open post, but since the Big Bang came up, I think it’s relevant. I’m teaching myself about astronomy, and one of the things I’m focusing on is how we know what we know. One of the major problems with astronomy is determining distances to objects. For relatively close objects, parallax can be used: depending on where the Earth is in its orbit around the Sun, it’s position differs by close to two hundred million miles. This is enough for the apparent positions of objects to move by a small amount; since the apparent movement depends on distance, this can be enough that distances to objects which are relatively close can be found. Almost everything further relies on what are called “standard candles”: objects which have known brightness. One of these is the cepheid variable star; there is a clear relationship between brightness and period, and so any object with a cepheid variable star can have its distance calculated. because a cepheid variable star with a given period has a known luminosity.
This turns out to be the backbone upon which nearly the entire understanding of the universe is constructed. Without cepheid variables as a standard candle, the further ones are unreliable, as they are all constructed using data that depends directly or indirectly upon the reliability of the cepheid variable. Every model about anything from the distance to galaxies to the expansion of the universe requires them to have a firm relationship between luminosity and period.
It turns out there is a large class of “anomalous cepheids” which have distances which can be measured by means of parallax, or by means of the handful of other measures which can establish distances, which do not fit this period luminosity relationship, calling the entire question of the luminosity period relationship into question. What I find astonishing is that these anomalous cepheids have been known about for decades, but next to no one seems to have thought through the fact that this calls the entire system of astronomical models built on these into question.
Among my favorite example is the papers which prove the cepheid variable star is a reliable standard candle by showing it is compatible with other standard candles; ignoring that those other standard candles were all calibrated directly or indirectly by means of cepheid variables…..
@MaryBennett – I think this is a better place to put the invited exchange than at the start of the book club… what is your info leading to negative impression of Duncan Moench of the hopeful ‘producerist’ revival. Curious because you seemed to have some particular rather than general way to feel this way and I may be engaging w him on this project this summer, not sure. Message me on Substack if that is better. My profile is linked to my name.
JMG what are your views on the Great Year 24,000-odd-year cycle and the idea that we’re slowly coming out of the 6000-year-long kali yuga cycle into a bronze age, building up to a silver age and an eventual golden age that will eventually begin descending down the other side into a silver age, etc etc? What could this mean for a civilisational descent (good bloody riddance) if we’re also on a spiritual ascent of sorts?
It fills me with delight at the possibilities but I do wonder if in the end I’m just cloaking a desire for progress within a circle 🙂
Oddly enough, your novel The Hall of Homeless Gods came to mind. Also, I’d been leafing thru my Astrology notebook, from Sandy Bryan’s class in Albuquerque, the chart she read for me*, and a ton of notes besides. One of them, my on private project, applied Strauss & Howe’s Fourth Turning to project these things into the future (I really got the future of space travel wrong, as did we all, probably) and it came up with “Crisis Era ~2093-2115, moving into the Recovery (a la Augustus), 2115-2116.” And Jerry Shimizu had a ringside seat for that very thing in Shoreside, didn’t he?
Speaking of your fiction, I noticed a fair amount of Retropia in Adocentyn. Just the way they liked it? Or that many of them knew what was coming down the road?
*The chart Sandy did for me hit the “That explains a LOT of things!” button.
My guess is that for the next decade or two it’s likely, despite ups and downs and lurches, a semblance of business as usual will persist but at some point people will know “we’re not in Kansas anymore” and there is a new reality and unlike Dorothy find out there is no leaving the new unpleasant Oz. The hoped for ruby slippers of fusion power, new technologies, nuclear power, renewable energy, hydrogen fuel, lithium batteries, A.I. and careful recycling will fail to reignite the Kansas of what was seen as normalcy in the 20th century and in the first part of the 21st.
Hi JMG. Very glad to see this topic returning, as it’s what initially brought me to your writing years ago.
In future posts I am hoping you will go into detail about immigration policy. I see the big-picture logic of what the current administration is doing and what positive effects it could have, and I am also troubled by the human cost of years of open borders followed suddenly by massive forced repatriation. I strongly suspect you will be able to throw some light on this difficult topic using historical analogues.
Thank you,
Dylan
At this link 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. 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 and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Ron M’s friend Paul, who passed away on April 13, make his transition through the afterlife process with grace and peace.
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 JRuss’s friend David Carruthers quickly find a job of any kind at all that allows him to avoid homelessness, first and foremost; preferably a full time job that makes at least 16 dollars an hour.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Pierre in Minnesota be filled with the health, vitality, and fertility he needs to father a healthy baby with his wife.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
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 1 Wanderer’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, and may she quickly be able to resume a normal life.
May Ron M’s friend Paul fully recover from the debilitating illness that has rendered him bedridden as well as recover from the spiritual malaise/attack that he believes is manifesting the illness.
May Jennifer’s newborn daughter Eleanor be blessed with optimal growth and development; may her tongue tie revision surgery on Wednesday March 12th have been smooth and successful, and be followed by a full recovery.
May Mike Greco, who had a court date on the 14th of March, enjoy a prompt, just, and equitable settlement of the case.
May Cliff’s friend Jessica be blessed and soothed; may she discover the path out of her postpartum depression, and be supported in any of her efforts to progress along it; may the love between her and her child grow ever more profound, and may each day take her closer to an outlook of glad participation in the world, that she may deeply enjoy parenthood.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who passed away on 2/24, make his transition to his soul’s next destination with comfort and grace; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
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 Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
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 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 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.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah and their daughters Joanna and Eleanor be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
* * *
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.
I haven’t checked this blog in years and today was a good day to do so. Your ideas are important. Your analysis is correct. Collapse now get some practice. That’s why I like PA – been dealing with deindustrialization for 70 years thank you very much. And while your signature view of a slow burn into a what should be familiar darkness is playing out just as the Age of Limits said in the 1970s as usual your conclusion seems backward. How do you not see Trump for the opportunistic ultimate casino capitalist Boomer looking to squeeze the last life out of late stage industrial society? The only reason I can come up with is you think his policies will somehow be better than the alternative. And granted the D’s are offering major weak sauce right now but as you well know the game is young. I look forward to your return to the topic you were born to write about.
Hey JMG
Fair enough. I personally have only read a bit of Ophul and Smils work. I also read Newitz’s “Scatter, adapt, remember” which is more about how life or cultures survive and thrive after catastrophic events rather than civilisational decline. She is a devoted worshipper of Progress so “going back” doesn’t really seem to be an option in her view but nevertheless makes some good points and observations. I may publish a review of her book.
Also, I have just published an essay on an aspect of Orwell’s “1984” that has relevance to the current fad for using what the tech priests of WH40K call “Abominable Intelligence” for writing and making art.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/using-chatgpt-to-write-for-you-is?r=e0m1f
“BTW, any comment that includes the cheap snark “citation needed” gets autodeleted.”
So noted. I did not mean to offend, or to start some kind of debunking war–only to express my sincere doubt that very many of these Trump statues are being used for East Asian votive purposes, as opposed to gag items. This article about the statue’s creator interprets the statue humorously–neither the reporter nor the artist ever once suggest that anybody (let alone “millions”) seriously worships it:
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinese-artist-cashes-in-on-buddha-like-trump-statues
However, my own research does turn up a few eccentric Trumpolators. Here’s one from India:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/indian-man-worships-donald-trump-statue-1782381
My East Asian contacts used to greet mention of Trump with smiles, but are now nervous about the tariff war and/or the prospect of an actual war over Taiwan.
@mary bennet: Thanks for bringing up Tokugawa Ieyasu! While he also contributed to bringing civil wars to an end, his lasting legacy was indeed Japan’s internal reorganization. I am just not sure if I would call Japan in 1600 AD a declining society.
@JMG: I have searched through Spengler – the only other two examples of such Caesars he brings up are Alp Arslan and Pharaoh Amosis, both rather military figures, though I don’t really know much about either. Diocletian comes to mind, who like Ieyasu did fight the last battles of a civil war, but then proceeded to a whole-scale reorganization of society and government as a form of retrenchment. Spengler, of course, classifies Diocletian as lying on the upward arc of the Magian civilization, which has always seemed off to me – religiously, he was very conservative in promoting Jupiter and Hercules worship.
Do you really think Trump’s attempt at “relocalization” has any chance of success? I’ll set aside recent indications that his real goal at the moment is using his tariffs to blackmail the world into choosing between the US and China. As the light of our Shinning City on the Hill fades, he thinks he can maintain the world’s worshipful admiration by brute force.
However, taking his narrative at face value, I would say that he’s both too early and too late. To early, because he’s not trying to bring back the production of toilet paper and diversified food production. He’s still focused on computer chips and other shiny toys. Also too early because things aren’t quite bad enough for people to be thankful for a toilet paper mill. Too late because the people longing for 1950’s America are well past middle age and grew up with fathers who were Proud Union Men. I don’t see people in their early twenties clamoring for the chance to sweat and toil in The Plant all day, even if it did give them a *very* modest suburban bungalow and a single family car. Yes, they want the American Dream but it’s a far larger “dream” than it was 50 years ago and they don’t want to get calluses on their hands pursuing it. Not to mention the fact that the horse left the barn twenty years ago and galloped over the hill to SE Asia. We didn’t build mid century prosperity by being self sufficient. We built it by being the world’s “Walmart,” selling them everything they needed, Made in America. Walmart used to brag about that, now Walmart is Made in China, because even Americans can’t afford the price of American labor. None of which is to say we don’t need to be self sufficient, but that word doesn’t mean what Trump thinks it means.
@58 Wannabe Farmer in PA
Like his opponents, Trump is an opportunistic ultimate capitalist Boomer, but unlike them is taking a major measure that could revive the US economy and extend the remaining lifetime of this country. He wrongly thinks it will preserve US superpower status and make America great again, but he is still putting up the tariffs.
Reading this post has been like having gone on a 15-year world tour and finally walking up the steps to one’s home, opening the door, and throwing oneself like a sack of potatoes onto the sofa with a sigh of relief that one is back home again! Not as though the world tour was a distraction or a waste of time; rather, much has been learned in the process. But the funny thing is that the hometown has changed during the intervening years and is definitely worth exploring again. Some of the old buildings have become more decrepit than when we left town, while some mysterious new buildings have gone up. I feel this way because it was in 2010 that I ‘discovered’ your blog and you were just beginning your posts on ‘green wizardry’ and were still discussing peak oil from time to time. Like Dorothy said, “there’s no place like home” (however, I do not have ruby slippers).
Your statement, “On average, those furthest from the centers of wealth, power, and technology will suffer the least disruption” immediately reminded me of a personal experience. Some years back I was stationed in the community of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, huddled in an inlet of western Hudson Bay – the community that is closest to the geographic centre of Canada. No roads in or out of the community. Accessible via ship only a couple months of the year. Hundreds of kilometres to the nearest community. Language spoken by the vast majority of inhabitants: Inuktitut. The locals lived on the land until the 1960s, when the Government of Canada forced them to form a village, live in houses and go to school. Truly perched on the edge of Western civilization. While there I had some good deep chats with a local Inuk, who explained to me that while he enjoys the comforts of living in a climate-controlled house, he was born in a hut made out of scrap out on the tundra and could easily live there again. He goes out hunting with his family several times a year and though they use a gun to kill game, they butcher it using only an ’ulu’ (traditional all-purpose semi-circular knife) and laughs at how the White Man has to bring a huge array of different knives to skin and butcher game. I was glad to hear that he has taught his sons the ‘old ways’ and told him that these skills may become essential in a future when the flights become infrequent, the ships stop, and the imported petroleum peters out.
I really look forward to the up-coming series on peak oil revisited and how things look as we continue our journey on the rough downslope of Hubbert’s Curve.
Way back in the 1980’s my local library had a subscription to Analog magazine. In the April and May issues of 1988 there was a two part essay called “An Introduction to Psychohistory” by Michael F. Flynn. I got those copies from the used book stand for 10 cents each. I still have them. On page 67 of the April 1988 issue it says: “Empires have a Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) of 160 years before the first failure. It takes an average of 70 years to ‘repair’ the system (MTTR), which then survives for an additional MTBF of 185 years.”
Susie, they’re likely to be one of the starting places for several genera of emergent predator species. Just as the big cats emerged from ordinary (small) felids beginning around ten million years ago, I would expect a new round of big cats to emerge from Felis catus over the next few million years. I know Siamese tigers are unlikely, but here’s hoping!
Enjoyer, yep. In my novel Star’s Reach, which is set around 2475 in deindustrial dark age America, chunks of old freeways were cut by hand and used to build defensive city walls.
Stephen, stairstep drops are always a possibility, but so are periods of stability or temporary improvement. I’m far from sure tariffs will have the effect you expect; the reason China dominates world rare earth metal production, for example is not that they’re the only nation that has them, it’s that they produce them more cheaply than anyone else. (I’d also point out that economic isolation hasn’t exactly been a problem for Russia of late!) I note that shares in US Steel and other steel fabricating corporations stayed fairly stable or went up during the recent tariff-driven turmoil in the market…
Mary, equally, “citation needed” is a way that trolls and other commenters treat posters as though they have nothing better to do with their time. You’ll notice that I don’t require footnotes from my commenters; I assume that anyone who feels sufficiently annoyed by a comment to object to it can take a few minutes on the internet to look it up themselves. I also hope that people who post here and want to ask for a source, for reasons other than scoring points, will do it politely.
Anonymoose, yep. The whole thing really is a house of cards.
Susie, it’s an interesting claim but it conflicts with most of the sources I know of. According to the Puranas, for example, the Kali Yuga still has 426,874 years to run. In the old zodiacal system, which uses the 25,950-year cycle of precession, things clear up sooner, but not right away — we’re 146 years into the age of Aquarius, the first of the two ages ruled by Saturn at the bottom of the cycle; that will end in 4039 AD, and we can’t expect really dramatic improvements until 6199 AD, when the Age of Capricorn gives way to the Age of Sagittarius. If you can point me to some of the sources you’re using, on the other hand, I’d be grateful; I may simply not be familiar with the material they’re using.
Patricia M, I have the time of troubles rather earlier in Jerry’s future — it hit in the 2040-2080 window, more or less, with the 2062 eruption of the Kikai caldera as peak crisis — and it’s not followed by an Augustan recovery. As for the Retrotopian aspects of Adocentyn, not really — it’s partly based on Providence, which has a lot of old skyscrapers and very few new ones, and partly just me being outdated. 😉
BeardTree, that’s one way to put it. I’d say, rather, that we’re going to be stuck in Kansas with no Oz in sight…
Dylan, I’ll consider it, though it’ll be interesting to see if I can discuss it at all without causing both sides to melt down.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Wannabe, I think that’s an inaccurate characterization of Trump. He’s far too arrogant to settle for being merely a casino capitalist! Opportunistic, absolutely, but from my perspective, you mistake the nature of the opportunity. I’d encourage you to reflect on the fact that he could be much, much richer than he is, and notice that he’s made a career out of telling people exactly what he’s going to do, and then doing it. More on this as we proceed.
J.L.Mc12, “abominable intelligence” is good, but I’m far from sure I agree that there’s any intelligence to it at all.
Ambrose, thanks for this. I didn’t save the articles that I read on the subject, but those suggested that Trumpolatry is tolerably widespread, though not especially passionate — it’s like the beckoning cat or the three-legged toad that feature so heavily in business shrines in east Asia.
Aldarion, I don’t know enough about Alp Arslan to judge, but Ahmes-sa-Neith aka Amosis is a good example of the type, and his efforts were as much economic as military.
Bruce, au contraire. I hear from a lot of young men who say they would be happy with a factory job, given that the only alternatives society presents them these days are flipping burgers or living in Mom’s basement. It’s a mistake to assume that the prejudices of the managerial caste are shared by the laboring classes! As for mid-century prosperity, that was a temporary fluke made possible only by the fact that the rest of the world had been flattened by the Second World War; the relative prosperity of the US in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, by contrast, was founded on high tariffs. That’s the model a great many people have in mind just now.
Ron, I’m delighted, though not at all surprised, to hear that the Inuit have made an effort to preserve their traditional skills; that’s one more population that will shrug when industrial civilization falls and go on with their lives. As for returning from the world tour, yeah, it’s been a long strange trip, hasn’t it? We have a lot to talk about now that we’re back in the shadow of the Hubbert curve.
Moonwolf, hmm! Interesting. I wonder if Flynn published those anywhere else.
@Moonwolf (#64), JMG (#65):
You can download those two issues of Analog from the wonderful Luminist Archives at:
https://readitfree.org/SF/AN_2.htm
Thanks JMG, pondering the inevitable decline and fall of our civilization is well worth while. I look forward to hearing more from you on this subject. Also, the admonition to localize is both practical and effective.
PS to my previous (#66): See also Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind (2001) for a revision or retrospective on his two articles, per https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?180309
@61 Aldarion
IIRC, Spengler thought that the old Apollonian religious worldview (gods in specific places worshipped by specific people) died around 1 AD but the old forms remained. Late Classical paganiam, he thinks, was developing into a Magian religion.
The last while I’ve been meditating on a comment made by Mary Harrington along the lines of that her working hypothesis was that western culture is tracing its way back to the 17th (18th?) century step by step. In some ways I could see this fitting in well with Peak Oil. Of course, that new ’17th century’ would not be the same as the old one in every respect, but rather analogically.
Toomas:
On Byzantium, I am reminded of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s comment that the future of Britain is as the Greece to America’s Rome. If one were having fun with historical analogies, the American Empire spends a thousand years confined to the British Isles after the collapse of the continental USA, before the city walls of Milton Keynes are finally stormed by invasion in the mid-fourth millennium.
#19 David and JMG, wow, LATOC. Matt Savinar became an astrologer after he burned out reporting doom:
https://hexagoninfulleffect.com/about-matthew-david-savinar/
His ebook The Oil Age Is Over gave me nightmares as a middle manager working in Silicon Valley with zero useful low tech skills. I am happy to say that I took on that challenge back in 2005 and have developed two skillsets I can literally offer anywhere without technology.
It’s also interesting to think about who is still writing from those days in addition to our wonderful host here. Chris Martenson is still at it as is Kunstler who I always find entertaining. Nate Hagens and Gail Tverberg are still at it too. May Mike Ruppert rest in peace. I do miss the Oil Drum and the archives are still available: http://theoildrum.com/special/archives
What a time that was. It was fun to be living in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties in those days in the middle of the relocalization effort when Julian Darley was running the PostCarbon Institute and Willits Economic LocaLization was trying to localize a remote Northern CA town. Transition US was in its infancy then. I particularly enjoyed Richard Heinberg’s talks.
I appreciate speaking of Trump’s efforts as localization on a grand scale. It seems to me this is another case of something that many liberals back in the peak oil days heartily supported and now criticize.
JMG, I look forward to this series very much. Thank you.
“I hear from a lot of young men who say they would be happy with a factory job, given that the only alternatives society presents them these days are flipping burgers or living in Mom’s basement”
The mining operations and chemical plants I worked at had no trouble finding workers. Sometimes they leave quickly when they find out the comfortable jobs in the control rooms are for the senior employees, or when they find out the machinery is just as concerned for their well-being as Cthulhu, but most of them stick around.
I noticed that you specified young MEN. We never succeeded in getting women into ‘the unit’. Driving the fork lift was as close as they were willing to go. And they were entirely competent at driving the forklift. Cancelling out the ‘wage gap’ by changing jobs just didn’t interest the ladies. They were already on rotating shifts so that wasn’t it.
Yeah, it’s 18 years since I stumbled upon your blog when trying to figure out this issue of peak oil I’d just discovered, and your writing stood out above the rest. I think you, Kunstler, Orlov and Charles Hugh Smith are the only writers still active from that period.
Thanks for all your work, and great to see you revisiting these questions, coming full circle in a sense. I hope I’ll be able to add some useful remarks in the weeks and months ahead, carrying the torch forward as it may be
I believe a huge backlash is coming for medical profiteers and insurance types who pushed “treatments” and not cures in order to line their own pockets. This retribution will not happen all at once, but at some point, I believe it is going to be dangerous to affiliate yourself with allopathic medicine or traditional insurance. To grossly oversimplify, the biggest shock wave will come as people realize vaccines cause autism. Before anyone comes at me, I am autistic and so is my husband. It’s not a superpower. Vaccines seem to cause the functional, independent, hold-down-a-job as an adult kind of autism… they also cause the perpetually-diapered, self-harming, drooling non-verbal autism that becomes a fate worse than death when parents get old and pass away. This, combined with greater acquiescence of the damage of Covid MRNA shots, will sink whatever is left of allopathic medicine and insurance schemes, and the hatred and avoidance of both will become an integral part of many religions. I am frightened for autistic adults who are somewhere between the two extremes I mentioned above. There aren’t resources to keep them in the style to which they are accustomed if the parent/parents die. Many will have no place to go and no survival skills at all — like I said, they may be grown, but they will always be children. Another issue is autistic narcissism, which is the tendency of many autists to be self-involved to the point where they become pathologically lazy and dysfunctional. It’s more common than you would think. 1 in 31 babies are becoming autistic (they are not born that way in most cases, debilitation usually happens in tandem with the vaccine schedule) and we already don’t have systems to handle them. The collective agony of families destroyed is going to bring a reckoning that will echo soundly into far future civilizations.
I have followed your blogging for quite a while and because i am both an engineer and a history nerd I was always curious about the question, which technologies will remain in a less complex world and which will go. There are two important ideas I came up with.
The first is to distinguish between the complexity of developing a piece of tech and to produce and use it. Electric motors for example incorporate a lot of complex physical phenomena and the math involved to model and calculate their behavior in detail is difficult. Developing a new electric motor and designing it to have certain desired properties is a difficult task. However from a standpoint of manufacturing it is a very simple product, made of some metal sheets and copper wire. So even if the knowledge of designing electric motors goes away, there is no reason why they could not be produced and used for ages to come.
The second important idea is the question of availability. North Korea is a perfect lab trial of a collapsing industrial society. Once more prosperous then its southern neighbor it collapsed at the end of the cold war and due to total isolation we could observe what happened. While on the one hands they managed to establish a high tech sector and developed advanced rocketry and nuclear power, on the other hand most of its population were basically slaves living a very low standard of living with almost no access to technology at all.
The number of engineers needed to keep high tech knowledge around is actually not that big. I work in the field of energy engineering and only a miniscule fraction of todays engineers is busy keeping our electrical grid running while many STEM graduates go into fun parts and develope consumer products or automate jobs away.
So I think that there is a big chance that future civilizations will carry a lot of our technological knowhow with them. But it will be expensive, produced in low numbers and be reserved for the rich and for the military. For example guided missiles are so vastly more powerful then any weapon system before in sea warfare that sea powers will pay any price for this technology, even if it means starving the population. But due to a lack of resources and productivity the vast majority of people will have a much lower standard of living and much less access to tech, like it was in North Korea.
AliceEm, the comment I objected to was: “Anarchism, syndicalism, and anarcho-syndicalism remain total vagaries, if not absolute pipe dreams.” I have bought seeds, plants and tools from Fedco and flour from King Arthur, both worker owned companies. I don’t think democratic syndicalism is a total vagary. I also wondered where the government of ancient Sparta would fit into his schema. I tend to be rather skeptical of dismissive and sweeping statements. Having said that, I do think he has some good ideas, if a bit overstated. I think we need a mixed economy, large companies, well regulated, for large projects like railroads, regional companies, and political and social support for craftspersons.
Mr. Greer, thank you for this fab post! I’ve been reading you since 2010, the old Archdruid report, which I loved and it was exciting to see this post today! Just like old times. I’m very much looking forward to your future posts on this subject!
And Wannabe Farmer in PA, I so agree with you about PA being a great place to be for our ongoing collapse. I’m moving back to Pittsburgh soon and can’t wait. Though I don’t want to be right in Pittsburgh, but maybe a little ways out. One of my daughters lives in Penn Hills and she’s fed up with all the rules and regs. She just got 4 baby chicks and the hoops she had to jump through to get them!!! She told me she wants to move out to the sticks, WAY less regulations .
Alderion, do none of the late Roman Emperors fit your criteria? Constantine, who established a new state religion and moved the capitol, or Julian as an example of failure?
Only very slightly on-topic, due to your mention of “invasive species,” but I had an interesting observation the other day. In my part of Texas, there’s a native lizard called the Green Anole. They’re about 6-8 inches long (about half of that is tail), usually green, but can turn brown, and like to climb up trees, walls, downspouts and so forth to do push-ups and flash their red throat frills to impress the lady anoles. They also eat lots of bugs, including mosquitos, so I’m a fan.
In the past, oh, decade or two, though, they have been menaced by the dread Brown Anole. Smaller (3-5 inches), always brown (no color changing for them), with stripes running down their spines, the brown anoles are feistier, and even worse, aren’t from round these parts. Apparently, lots of mulch around here is sourced from the Caribbean, and brown anoles love to lay their eggs in the stuff, and so now we have a – gasp! – invasive species on our hands.
It’s true, I see a lot fewer green anoles around than I used to, which makes me a bit sad, as, like I said, I like them, but the brown anoles don’t seem so bad to me – maybe slightly less charismatic-looking, but they engage in most of the same behaviors, if with a slightly “meaner” vibe. It also seems they’ve reached something of a detente, as the aggressive brown anoles have seized most of the good ground-level living space, while the wise and gentle green anoles, being better climbers, have withdrawn into the hinterlands of the trees and bushes (so some of seeing less of them might just be that they don’t go sun themselves on the patio as much as they used to), where the brown anoles can’t follow.
But, my experience the other day indicated there might be something beyond mere detente in the works, a rapprochement of a far more intimate nature. You see, I was in the backyard and looked up on the top of the fence, and what should I see but a medium-sized anole, green in color, but with the distinctive striping of a brown anole. I was struck by this, because 1) brown anoles are never green, and as mentioned, can’t change color like the green ones, and 2) I had been assured in no uncertain terms by no less an august source than Wikipedia that green and brown anoles can’t interbreed. But, well, nature finds a way (the Macrobiology site you pointed me to some time back seems relevant here: https://www.macroevolution.net/index.html).
Maybe there’s some kind of metaphor here relevant to this post or the upcoming series, but mostly it was just a nice, little, hands-on observation of nature that contradicted the official wisdom, and I figured you and the commentariat might enjoy.
Cheers,
Jeff
Perhaps one way to describe the Lords of the Fall is that they see an opportunity for political arbitrage: the existing elites and systems have become so senile and dysfunctional that a clever opportunist can arrange a kind of “heads I win, tails you lose” scenario — the elites can either basically let the Lords of the Fall do what they want, amassing power, status, and wealth to themselves with the full blessing of the masses they’re serving just a little bit better than the current regime, or the elites try to seriously fight back and make the people eager to string them up by their own guts.
@Ecosophy Enjoyer
Around here, the suburbs will go away with *astonishing* alacrity, as soon as home climate control becomes unfeasible. Slab-foundation houses in humid climates were never a good idea, but boy did they build a lot of them! Un-airconditioned, mold renders them uninhabitable very quickly.
Hi all,
Regarding the notion that progress peaked around 1880, I’m inclined to agree. I call the era between 1820 to 1920 or so The Accelerando, a term I borrowed from 1990’s science fiction. The SF writers used the term to mean that in the near future Progress would become so rapid that we would enter an “accelerando” of change that would produce the science fiction world on que. To me that always seemed silly, and I saw it as a barely concealed secondhand nostalgia for the 19th and early 20th centuries when science and materialism did change the existing order of things rapidly. By the back half of the 20th century it was clear the ossification had set in, and that the hope for the thing that wold be the next steam engine was becoming religious. People in the 1980’s and 1990’s for example genuinely believed that networked computers and hypertext links would be as earth shattering as regular hand-washing or the steam engine. Seems so comical now.
One of the big things that gall me, and you can see this reflected in some of my writing, is that there are other futures that could happen but they are very different from our culture’s default Tomorrowland fantasy; Nobody is really interested in following up on the other paths. I think the appropriate technology movement of the 1970’s and some fringes of the 2000’s Steampunk movement were half aware of these possibilities but for a number of reasons didn’t get too far (Honestly JMG, given that you were in the appropriate tech scene of the 70’s I’d love to hear your stories of its rise and fall). These futures would not be Amazing Stories, which is why the mainstream won’t touch them, but it’s a galaxy of interesting possibilities that genuinely excite me.
Looking forward to the series JMG.
Cheers,
JZ
@JMG : any thoughts on the defying of the courts, the bad faith arguments, and the flouting of due process by the Trump administration?
If I were a freedom-loving American (who presently don’t care because all this targets “aliens”), that’s what I would be terrified about, not those tariffs that, as you said, will eventually greatly benefit the US and probably the world at large.
My article this week was similar, but addresses the issue of national karmic culmination now that we are giving up the empire business. Something that occurred to me after the fact is if American was the big bad bully, then why do so so many of the Western European nations seem to be heading down the road for something far worse? I guess we didn’t get the six weeks of paid vacation, free healthcare, and free college like they did. Was it was the fact that our bad management that caused a lot of unnecessary suffering actually prevented us from getting that level of blowback? Or did the multinationals who hijacked our system and used us like their goon squad end up redistributing the stolen loot in a way that overtly favored the nations that they really considered to be their home?
https://naakua.substack.com/p/oh-no-not-our-slaves
Re: Peter # 28
‘I don’t like Trump much, but I’ve often explained to people the subtle differences of what these sorts of figures look like on downslopes, versus dictators on upslopes. But that’s in broad aggregate terms, its cold comfort if say, your loved family member has found himself on the wrong side of a chaotic legal system.’
I’ve watched a loved one w addiction and over the top trauma slog through wrong side of chaotic legal system for trump 1 Biden and now well, just avoiding legal system, in spite of lack of resolution. The amount overwhelmed, soul/ family/ community/ worker-destroying that system has been for at least a decade but certainly getting worse… I don’t see how it will continue nor how it will crumble. Certainly has been profitable (AS HAS REHAB, AND CORRUPT!), and hard to imagine the prison budget going down or the courts being less like an eternal and more-powerful DMV in hell rather than a place where sober wise honest judges made decisions and advocates argued diligently and jurors of peers weighed in.
**
But mostly re: BYZANTIUM. My father passed about ten years back and he had inherited and stashed quite a library from his mother. It has come to me, in boxes packed by sensible and wise Janet (in a better world she would judge), and tonight I took out one bag and it had only four items: 1) ‘Virginia wines’ which includes a chapter about my Italian uncle by marriage coming to create one of the first VA vineyards and subsequently to restore vineyards to Monticello, 2) Nietzsche beyond good and evil from ‘modern library’, preface dated 1885 w a bookplate from a great great grandfather 3) Confucius, The Analects, and 4) a BOXED SET ‘Folio’ of BYZANTIUM w three volumes – the early centuries – the apogee – the decline and fall. I feel like I should bring it to the potluck. Janet definitely packed thats bag special for me. Feeling that signs say I should learn more about Byzantium but also jmg maybe you can use these volumes. I send you a picture but not sure how.
Hi JMG,
I recall this passage from your post on the TADR (The Scheduled Death of God, June 05 2013):
“As for politics, he [Spengler] suggested that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be dominated by a struggle pitting charismatic national dictators against a globalized oligarchy of high finance lightly concealed under a mask of democracy, a struggle that the financiers would eventually lose. Though the jury’s still out on the final outcome, the struggle itself is splashed over the news on a daily basis.”
Twelve years later, it appears that the battle has moved into a decisive phase. I am amused to see the different types of shrieking and wailing from the oligarchy and their lackeys. “Oh no, Trump is making USA a laughingstock in front of the world!”, says one. “All those voted for Trump, enjoy a $500 price hike for iPhones!”, says another. “Trump tariffs will cause inflation, make millions of Americans jobless and push them into poverty”, declares yet another (Why wouldn’t that argument work? It’s not like Americans are already struggling with inflation, unemployment and poverty right? :D).
Leaving the chattering classes aside, I am intrigued to see that ordinary Americans seem onboard with Trump’s program. Many of them think that Trump’s plan is good for the long term, even if it creates pain in the short term. Trump seems to be enjoying the trust and confidence of a large section of people, something that hasn’t been seen in America’s politics for a long time. We don’t know how well his agenda will succeed in pulling America from the brink, but there certainly is hope.
I am also impressed that he has been very ruthless in punishing his adversaries and rewarding his supporters. The funding cuts and layoffs that started with DOGE are mainly impacting the PMC class, the unelected NGO bureaucrats and universities. On the other side, if he succeeds in bringing industrial production back to the country, the working class that forms his support base in the South and the Midwest will benefit.
Dear JMG, I am so glad to see you returning to this vital subject. It is refreshing indeed to read about these issues and, by the way, a discussion of DJT’s policies without the usual narrowness and emotional fireworks. Thank you.
On the topic of falling empires: a while back I mentioned a book in my history collection which has a nicely-arranged chapter summing up various reactions to the fall of Rome in the West. Unfortunately at that time I’d mislaid the book but you expressed an interest in the reference. Now I’ve found it again. So, for the record, it is: R H C Davis, A History of Medieval Europe (1957), Chapters III and IV, focusing on: St Augustine (exemplifying an intellectual response, reinterpreting history); Theodoric the Ostrogoth (a practical adjustment to the situation by collaboration with the barbarians); the Emperor Justinian (defiant attempts at reconquest); St Benedict (turning one’s back to the world); and Pope Gregory the Great (laying the political and administrative foundations of a new order).
Greetings Mr. Greer,
I was recently introduced to your blog. Very interesting to hear about a Western Druid view on industrial civilization.
Greetings from East Asia.
@ JMG re: Moonwolf’s comment: yes, Flynn did publish that; as an addendum to “In the Country of the Blind, I think it was. Went into quite a bit of detail, too.
JMG
I concur with you that the decline of a civilisation is slow and inexorable but lately I have been nagged by a feeling ( hunch..? Intuition?) that we are in for a disruptive jolt in the near future: for thirty five years or more (at least) the world ( not just the west) has borrowed from the future financially and the future is now knocking on the door asking for the loan to be repaid. And there’s no money in the till, so the future will declare us bankrupt. Without resorting to Hemingway’s famous quote about debasing the currency and starting a war the consequences could be dire and disruptive to civil continuity.
PS and somewhat off topic; the weather here in Australia this year has been nothing short of feral!
Splendid post, JMG. “Religion is the glue” and “rationalization is the solvent”. Excellent. The coin flip analogy reminds me of the Butterfly Effect. Hopefully it won’t lead to Greta wanting to ban coins.
“Lords of the Fall”. Hah, good one. It’s been more like “Lord of the Flies” so far, but maybe Orange Man will get on track. His administration has moved forward with some decent proposals, but staying power is still up in the air.
I’ve been aboard the ADR/Ecosophia Express for 15+ years, and you’ve been proven right in almost all of your observations and predictions along the way. The “Big Picture” of Decline does elude most, and the Religion of Progress is a bit sticky. It’s bad enough many cannot see the big picture, but it’s worse when the binary thinking kicks in on the little fragments they do understand.
Fortunately, “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush” has provided some mental fortitude to deal mentally with all this, and it’s good to see there has been some folks – if for no other reason than reduced options – are starting to see the light and adapt. I can’t say I’ve had much traction when discussing Decline, the Religion of Progress or Peak Oil/Peak Cheap Energy with others, but that’s partly due to having migrated from lower upper class to upper lower class in my lifestyle over the last decade. Working on upgrading my acquaintances.
Looking forward to this string of posts, as I’m sure it will shed a clearer light of understanding on The Long Descent.
Hi all,
1. In terms of pop culture discussions of the tariffs, Tim Dillon did a fun, kooky monologue, where he at one point passionately defended the virtues (and inevitability?) of the idea of less possessions, less travel and local social and work networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCf5T5ETRcE&t=2278s
Not groundbreaking I guess but: 1) My brother likes Tim Dillon and generally thinks I’m crazy if I say that kind of thing – this might get through a bit. 2) It was a direct attack on the Myth of Progress by a fairly mainstream figure.
2. A fun bit of synchronicity – just before reading the article and comments, my daughter asked me to tell a story to her toys while she went for a bath. I instead recited “Ozymandias” to them!
>At the moment, though, it appears as though one of the most important of those steps is being carried out with considerable verve by the government of the United States. Readers who have been with me since the peak oil days will remember when economic relocalization was a major theme of discussion, and dependence on global resources was recognized as a lethal weakness in the face of decline. Now, to my great surprise, here we are: the global economy is being dismantled and economic relocalization pushed by, of all people, Donald Trump.
Funny how people come up with the same answer for completely different and disjointed reasons. Trump sees it as bad business, the peak oilers see it as a point of failure – and the military industrial complex has finally woken up to the weakness of having no manufacturing capacity. And its that last one that’s really driving things.
I call it The Castle and The Village. For decades, the navel gazers in The Castle looked on as The Village was sold off piecemeal to foreigners but they felt secure and powerful in The Castle and it didn’t really affect them. “Screw The Village, all those dirt people”, they said. Something changed and they came to the conclusion they need The Village. Not sure what changed or if it matters at this point. So they now care about the plight of The Village down below – but only to the extent that The Village benefits them.
Late is better than never, I guess. You Boomers weren’t responsible for the reserve currency ponzi but all that “free trade” nonsense? That’s all you. Happened on your watch. Ross Perot was right.
>That is my one, big worry as well. If anything can completely torpedo Trump’s administration, it is his complete unwillingness to make U.S. foreign policy something other than the wholly owned subsidiary of the Israeli Knesset and the Mossad.
When has this not been the case? It’s not just Trump.
>Speaking of the latter, I suspect that the reason we have not heard (and will never hear) any more about the Epstein business, is that this whole thing was a Mossad blackmail operation from Day One.
This has been an open secret for years now.
>If that becomes general knowledge, the American people will conclude that Israel is the enemy.
Sooner or later, sooner or later. Who knows when though.
“if you drive a car and use a cell phone, you’re part of the civilization I’m talking about.”
John, I already know you are on the fringe, but I guess since you don’t have a cell phone and don’t drive a car you are not part of industrial civilization ; ) Thanks for showing your example of what we can do…
I have a couple of relevant insights:
First, the people involved in progress come from what can loosely be called the artisanal classes, i.e., they make things. Such people have an incentive to not only make better things but to make things better.
Also, material science is the driving force in almost all progress. Looking back at the new materials introduced in the last 300 years, such as Wedgewood ceramics, cast iron, Bessemer steel, stainless steel, aluminium alloys, synthetic polymers and transistors/silicon, it is obvious that each one was at the root of a whole tree of innovation. This has led to unprecedented progress in both material and social well-being.
Unfortunately, the corollary has been that as production, in both agriculture and manufacturing, has become more efficient, fewer people have been employed, leading to an increase in government-related, regulatory employment, whose sole purpose seems to be to limit any further progress. This is most obvious in the case of nuclear power, which had it not been strangled by regulation, peak oil would have been largely irrelevant.
Hi JMG,
I very much look forward to your return to this topic! Specifically, I’m interested in getting your updated perspective on the timeline of decline, now that we’re several more years down the road. Has anything surprised you about how the process thus far has progressed?
For me, it’s the pace, with the internet being a good example. I recall reading your “pre-mortem for the Internet” essay about ten years ago, and never would have guessed that, in the 10 years since, internet speeds and access would only expand, rather than contract. In my area, one of the poorest states in the U.S., the infrastructure for fiber-optic internet has been significantly expanded. Satellite-based systems have also improved. Based on some quick internet searches, it seems that this is also a worldwide phenomenon–the physical infrastructure of the internet has increased by significant margins in the 2015-2025 timeframe.
Perhaps our particular civilization is on a slower decline trajectory than you first anticipated? Maybe some efficiency gains in internet infrastructure has prevented any decline from starting? Perhaps population contraction via reduced fertility, a factor that I don’t recall being discussed in those Archdruid Report days, is masking some of the more obvious signs of decline, due to reduced demand and consumption of resources?
Thanks!
Well, I just finished re-reading “The Meaning of Trump” by Brian Culkin (sp?), when I read this post. That book was written in 2017 by a “resistor,” who wanted to know why Trump. His thesis is that the world of 2016 was broken beyond repair, and the election of Trump shattered that world. He says that the world of the 1980s no longer works for this world. Then, he discusses Trump as a turning point for change and remaking the world. According to the author, Trump is our last chance to do this. He counsels the resistors to remake the world anew, NOT to recreate the old world.
I guess the resistors did not read the book and did try to bring back the old world. I see that playing out with the anti-Trump folk who are very loud in their objections to the man.
We do need a new world.
On tariffs, etc. I worked on NAFTA back in the day. Yes, I am old. The whole world view of the economists who were promoting NAFTA and the WTO was the dogma of Free Trade being the best of all worlds. Well, NAFTA gutted Mexico and gave rise to the drug cartels, among other things.
I still see that Free Trade dogma being a religion or a cult, not sure which. It seems that everyone is flogging how that is the only way to go. It seems being a consumer is more important than being a producer. Cheap goods at the cost of people is the way to go.
I wonder when did people ignore the pain of others? And when did being a producer become a bad thing? When did people think that cheap goods is their right enshrined by the powers that be? I am not a Free Trader since I have seen the cost of the whole thing destroy whole nations.
I guess Free Trade is another tenant in the religion of progress.
I have read up a bit, and it looks like Amosis’ program could be summed up as “Make Egypt Great Again”, including the building of the last pyramid.
However, I still think the “Caesars” mentioned by Spengler (Caesar himself, Shi Hoang Di, Alp Arslan, Amosis) have in common that they first of all brought civil (or civilization-internal) wars to an end, at least temporarily, and then enacted far-reaching changes in government and society.
So again, your new label Lord of the Fall may be more appropriate for a figure like Trump than to call him a Caesar. This means that the most useful comparison might be with men who tried to change the direction of the state before civil wars broke out – the first I can think of is Gaius Gracchus, very trenchantly discussed on the Pedant’s blog not long ago. Gaius Gracchus, like Trump, had great, but not absolute power.
Hi John Michael,
Man, I worked on a factory line which produced computer floppy discs, and really enjoyed the work. Don’t believe the hype about it being dead-end work, because you’re working with a team to produce a meaningful end product. It beat the daylights out of working with some people who are bored out of their brains in office jobs and acting up like troublemakers.
The other thing worth noting, is that I later worked as a manufacturing accountant, and saw the books. Those businesses made money and produced goods that people purchased. But I don’t know whether your readers want to recall, however, in the 90’s interest rates were jacked up so high, that putting capital into the financial markets became what the elite wanted to do instead. This was all part of a choice of options to move away from manufacturing as far as I can tell. Back then fuel, gas, electricity and property were super cheap. I recall them telling us that we were: ‘the clever country’. Didn’t seem all that bright to me.
Thought you might appreciate the perspectives and memories?
Yes, and it is my observation that claims to ‘rational’ don’t actually live up to the observed reality. But the claims do sound nice don’t you reckon?
Do you have any insight as to whether some manufacturing will get on-shored? From a national security perspective, it’s a good idea.
Oh, and rare Earth minerals. There’s I believe a mine being started over in Western Australia (the land of mines), although I don’t know whether we’ll do the processing down under because I believe that it’s a super dirty job. Dunno.
Cheers
Chris
Hi billb,
Surely you’ve heard of diesel? How do you reckon they dig uranium out of the ground and transport it?
Cheers
Chris
@Mary Bennet: Thanks for those suggestions! Yes, Constantine would fall into a similar category as Diocletian: first a long round of civil wars (again!), then sweeping, authoritarian internal reforms. He was the opposite of conservative in religion, of course. Julian would in fact make a very good model of failure while trying to “Make Rome Great Again” (objectively speaking – I don’t want to judge if he did the best he could or if he made things worse than they need have been).
RE: invasive species
I mean yes, but for the love of Pete, could we maybe consider folding in a few more food producing species? Mugwort and barberry are swell, but I’d much rather have a nut producing version of the cane toad. As humans, we’re supposed to be stewarding these things along. If our species had any one true vocation, it’s that. Up until this century when we got stupid, every native culture did at least some light broadacre horticulture. And I include those of European ancestry in this. You don’t have to be named Stands on Rock with a handful of sweetgrass seeds to tend the wild (though respect to those guys; they held out the longest). Good King Henry, meddlers, skirret, filbert (there are blight resistant species), salsify… I mean, the list goes on… They all work just as well.
It seems like a lot of people were pleased that I was talking about the fall of industrial civilization again, and rightfully so. While there are some new things that could be added, archdruidreport’s posts have generally aged very well, except for the fracking predictions (2012-2014 if I remember correctly) and other things.
As expected, no one knows the lore of the Dark Souls video games 🥲. I’ve never played any Dark Souls games, but their story caught my attention because of the videos of players analyzing their history. I honestly don’t know what the creator of these games had in mind when he created them, but the story of the video game is quite good. All three games are about the decline of a civilization, a civilization that derived its glory and power from a flame of fire. This flame has cycles of turning off and on that are independent of humans or other characters in the game.
The Dark Souls game series are truly tragic story games (one of the things that attracts the most attention to players is that the game is very difficult to finish, it has a high difficulty)
In the game, most of the time what you see around you is decay, from destroyed or cursed cities to characters who have lost their sanity, something that used to be very normal and already is normal today.
Abandoned temples, ruins, all of them are part of the story and gameplay.
Warhammer 40k seems like a modern standard, especially due to the immense amount of books and other things behind it, but Darksouls is no slouch, despite only being 3 games and a few other things. As a curiosity, from my perspective, one of the few video games that compete with Warhammer 40k (in terms of the number of books, comics, etc., the quality of the story and narrative is another matter) would be World of Warcraft, in general all Warcraft video games.
In Dark Souls 1, the story of the Age of Fire is told, and how the fire was prevented from going out. Basically, it involved collecting souls and immolating oneself. The first to do so was Gwyn, Lord of the Sun, the final boss of Dark Souls 1.
Gywn only incinerated himself; his soul was strong enough to rekindle the flame. Gywn (what’s left of him) must be defeated to begin a new cycle of rekindling the fire.
From my perspective, that’s what we’re experiencing today. The United States immolated itself to keep the fire of progress going longer. In practice, this means it lost a large part of its capacity to produce goods (our civilization is called industrial civilization for a reason…) to a society dedicated to services. (Chat GPT doesn’t produce goods, and as far as I understand, most uses of Chat GPT are in the service sector. I’ll leave out the education part; what happens in education is quite painful.)
What was left of the United States after approximately half a century of self-immolation? A hollow imperial shell, I think, is the best description. It’s only a matter of time before the next candidate to self-immolate appears. After all, the questions I’d like to know the answer to are: Is it necessary for China (or another country) to take over as global hegemon (obviously, it won’t be the same as the US)? How much influence will the mental inertia of needing one country’s hegemony over the rest have? The hegemony of one country isn’t necessary (in my opinion).
The idea of progress in China seems quite strong (in its own way). This article is interesting https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/02/technological-progress-in-chinese-political-culture-an-intellectual-genealogy/
Will China be next on the list to burn itself (immolation) at the stake of progress?
Will the mental inertia of millions of people (inside and outside of China) who need hegemony be what precipitates China’s takeover of global hegemony?
Although I have more questions right now, I think I’ll leave them for another occasion.
@Other Owen #97 Yes, Trump needs to do what is best for the USA not Israel in the Middle East. Prayed he and Rubio get that message.
To any Europeon readers here who question and decry Donald Trump’s support within the USA, I can only say “you just don’t get it”.
I am an American living in the USA, and for years now I have been struck by the monolithic and incredibly narrow range of “respectable” political opinion within almost every country in Europe. Your Europeon blind acceptance of socialism as a positive good (and not as the evil that it truly is), and your apparent implicit assumption that your political status-quo is something that cannot be fundamentally challenged or changed, colors your every political opinion and statement, particularly as regards the political scene in the USA, where many people, unlike in Europe, still value freedom over the putative (but illusory) “security” provided by the omnipotent state.
The fact that the leadership of most Europeon countries is engaging in the destruction of democracy in the attempt to prevent nascent and reasonable challengers to the political status-quo (as the usurper ‘Biden’ administration had attempted to do in the USA as well), such as the legal and political attacks on Marine LePen in France or the AfD in Germany, and recent political persecution of the presidential challenger in Romania, only highlights the situation.
To be blunt, I unabashedly have what may be the common American view of Europeons as being brainwashed believers in a very narrow, rigid and straightjacketed statist ideology. Donald Trump, in a number of ways, challenges and refutes that statist ideology, so of COURSE almost every Europeon is going to kneejerkedly reject him. I would aver that the problem is not Donald Trump, it is your own political preconceptions and narrow political views.
Robert, thank you for this! What a blast from the past that is…
Raymond, I suspect it’s precisely because localization is practical and effective that so many people who loved to chatter about it in theory backed away from it in practice.
KAN, hmm! Can you point me to the context in which she said that? I’m not sure in what sense she meant it.
Angelica, I thought Savinar was very smart to do that — astrology is a career that does well in hard times as well as good ones, and if he learned how to do it without a computer he’d be set even in the case of a faster crash than I anticipate. Astrology also teaches you to think in terms of cycles and gradual transformations, and he could have used a dose of that. As for the rest, yes, lots of memories there! I hope we get equally good forums as the next oil crisis comes into sight.
Siliconguy, exactly. It’s a source of bleak amusement to me to listen to people from managerial-class backgrounds flinging their hands up in horror at the thought of factory jobs, when there are millions of working class Americans who would love to get 40 hours a week at decent pay working on an assembly line.
Johan, thank you! It promises to be an adventure.
Kimberly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I hope that autists like you and me who are able to function in the world can find ways to help counter the lure of autistic narcissism; I had brushes with that early in my life, and I imagine most of us had the like. We may be able to offer some help as things proceed.
Deedl, good. There’s also the difference between the complexity needed to build a technology and that needed to maintain it. Cities all over the post-Roman world continued to benefit from Roman aqueducts, for example, long after the capacity to build such a thing had been lost. Along the same lines, I suspect that some computers will be kept in functioning condition well into the deindustrial dark ages to come, even if nobody at that time can make CPUs. All this will go into making the complex patchwork of technologies that our deindustrial descendants will work with.
Heather, thank you for your enthusiasm!
Jeff, no surprises there. Interbreeding between related species is a constant phenomenon in nature. It’s a common mistake to think that none of the results are fertile — quite the contrary, it’s purely a statistical matter, and the more closely related the species, the higher the chance of fertility. (Female mules, for example, are sometimes fertile.) Were you following this blog the last time I mentioned the weird but not unreasonable theory that Homo sapiens is descended from matings between bonobos and swine?
Slithy, yes, exactly. That’s usually how it plays out.
John, oh dear gods, yes. The dreary Tomorrowland future that still gets endlessly rehashed by popular culture is only one imaginable future, and it’s less likely and less interesting than most of the others. I plan on talking about that as we proceed.
Quos Ego, the only thing new about any of that is that it’s currently being directed against the interests of the previously dominant faction of the managerial class. It’s all been going on for decades, on behalf of that faction — no wonder they and their media surrogates are screeching so loudly now that the shoe’s on the other foot.
KVD, yeah, it’s all been very convenient for the European comfortable classes to despise the US while still expecting us to maintain the global system that props up their otherwise unsustainable lifestyles. It’ll be interesting to see how they cope as the US gets out of the goon squad business.
Anonymuz, Trump is a choice example of what Spengler was talking about, and in the usual way he gets most of his support from ordinary people, who’ve been so relentlessly abused and despised by the comfortable classes that they’re willing to rally around anyone that said classes and their official media denounce. It’s been especially interesting to watch the reaction to the chaos in the stock market. Only about 9% of Americans own stocks, and the other 91% aren’t exactly weeping to see their supposed betters losing money — especially when they think there’s a fair chance that the process might yield them the one thing they most want, plenty of full time working class jobs at a decent wage.
Reader, you’re most welcome!
Robert G, thanks for this! I’ll scare up a copy.
Paleo Taoist, thank you and welcome to the conversation.
Patricia M, thank you for this.
Belacqua, that’s very possible; the slow pace of decline is entirely compatible with sudden downward lurches — just ask the residents of Rome about the day in 410 AD when Alaric the Visigoth came calling. The series of drastic resets that will have to take place as the economy of endless debt comes apart at the seams will doubtless count — and of course that’s another subtext about what’s going on here in the US, as DOGE slashes federal expenditures to get ready for our inevitable debt default. As for the weather, that’s what I hear — and we’ll be talking about that in future posts. It amuses me once again to get to point out that both sides in the climate debate, such as it is, are smoking their shorts.
Doctorhooves, thanks for this, and thank you for sharing in the journey! We’ll cover a lot of familiar ground in the posts ahead, but I hope to have some new things to say as well.
Russell, there’s something profoundly moving in the thought of reading “Ozymandias” to a child’s toys, knowing that in a few years they’ll be as abandoned as that statue…
Other Owen, of course Perot was right. He was just right at the wrong time for the interests of an elite fixated solely on the short term.
Justin, oh, I still belong to industrial civilization. I get most of my food from a supermarket and ride buses and trains! I simply chose the two most obvious and most Faustian technologies.
Billb, I agreed with you right up to that last sentence. It amuses me that proponents of nuclear power never do manage to notice that even in countries that don’t have the same regulatory burden as the US, nuclear power still never pays for itself. The problem with nuclear power is economic, not technical; you might look up the history of nuclear-powered commercial freighters and notice why that whole technology ended up mothballed. (Hint: regulations had nothing to do with it.)
Balowulf, no, things are still unfolding at about the pace I expected. The internet is becoming more heavily monetized and more burdened with crime and other inconveniences, as I predicted in the essay you mentioned; it continues to be propped up by governments and major corporations for a variety of reasons; meanwhile other aspects of our national infrastructure are decaying more quickly, as again I predicted. But we’ll talk about all of this as I proceed.
Neptunesdolphins, thank you for this. I keep on having to fight the urge to grab the “resistors” by the shoulders and shake them until their teeth fall out, while shouting, “Then come up with some positive alternative to the status quo, you numbskulls!” The reason people are flocking to Trump is that he offers an alternative to a status quo that has become unbearable to millions of people, and the Left no longer offers anything at all but “resistance” — that is to say, marching around with signs to signal their supposed dislike of the existing state of things, but not even attempting to suggest, much less take action to bring about, anything even slightly different. As every electrician knows, resistance is just a way to turn useful energy into waste heat. As for free trade, yes, exactly — and a very profitable tenet, for those in the privileged classes.
Aldarion, well, our civil strife here in America hasn’t actually broken out into outright warfare, but Trump’s trying to force a resolution to it, so maybe he counts.
Chris, thanks for this. Yes, exactly. As for onshoring, it depends on political institutions — you’ll know that onshoring has started for Australia when your government slaps tariffs on imports from the Land of Stuff. Here’s hoping!
Mark, if you want that to happen, get to work. Food producing species tend to be a little less robust than the average invasive, since (by definition) they lock up so much of the products of their photosynthesis in edible form. That said, we know from pollen distribution that Ice Age hunters used to stick hazelnuts in the ground right up under the shadow of the retreating glaciers, since they knew that a few years further on they’d be able to harvest the nuts while on hunting expeditions. So it’s a grand old tradition. Go for it.
Zarcayce, yes, and I’ve discussed the mistakes I made in talking about fracking rather more than once. As for hegemony, I don’t think that’s the main factor driving it. What drives hegemony is that in the early stages, at least, it’s so very profitable to the country that achieves it!
@Kimberly Steele
Maybe I am not the only one that thinks our rapidly expanding population of autistic young people is going to throw a monkey wrench into industrial society faster than many of our other problems. At current trajectory, 100% of children will be autistic by the mid-22nd century. It is sure to cause major issues far before that.
RFK says he going to find the reason by August. I don’t have much hope, as I know the power of big pharma and big food. Anyway my take is that “antigens” are not responsible for autism – so the accepted wisdom is “right” in this sense – but the combinations of antigens or the schedule at which the antigens are given are primarily driving autism. Probably the biggest culprit is giving MMR and Varicella at the same time, especially the ProQuad MMRV shot.
The response is that there is no scientific evidence that this is harmful. That just means nobody has done the study yet. In any case, for a parent who is willing to get the shots, but just wants them spaced out, isn’t that better than a “rabid anti-vaxxer”? The medical establishment is so damn cock-sure of themselves and “the science” they can’t even be bothered to allow for spaced out vaccination schedules.
The fact remains that vaccines are medical interventions, and deserve more scrutiny and careful consideration than they get. Today it is to the point where getting a vaccine doesn’t involve a doctor at all, go down to the pharmacy and get it, despite the fact that they don’t have your medical history, despite the fact that it the shot tech is just going to jab and shoot, and not think about whether it is going into the muscle or the bloodstream…
I just thought you had a really good sphere of protection.
KAN @ 71, Do you have a link or reference for the remark from Mary Harrington? Do you remember, did she mean 16th or 17thC level of technology–not very much difference, I believe–or political arrangements. I would not like to see a return to the religious wars. I do consider Mary Harrington among the most intelligent of younger writers about social issues.
Kimberly, about vaccines. I don’t doubt your observations. What I do question is that minute amounts of a disease causing organism are responsible. I suspect that the culprit(s) are the chemicals, which us mere patients aren’t supposed to know about, which get added to the vaccine. Heavy metals, I have read, in some vaccines. Then there is the interaction of vaccine ingredients with noxious ingredients in food, water and air, and the effect that has on an undeveloped nervous system.
Quas Ego @ 85, Republican congresspersons have been hearing from irate constituents about Do I also get to defy court orders? The present court majority can hardly be considered “woke”.
Anonymuz, people whom I know who voted for the current president thought they were voting for no more forever wars. It remains to be seen if war with Iran, which just concluded a military alliance with Russia and China, is what Miriam Adelson bought. Sure, I know, the parties to the alliance said loudly in diplospeak that it wasn’t a real military alliance. You can believe that if you want to. Bernie Sanders has already introduced legislation in the Senate to suspend all military aid to Israel; it won’t pass, of course, but after the midterms? It would be irony of ironies if the aging Democratic Socialist from Vermont managed to save the Trump admin from itself.
just to mention two more writers still active in the peak resource, decline, etc: Tim Watkins at consciousness of sheep and B at the honest sorcerer
@kimbery Steele #76 re: collapse of allopathic medicine and @deedle #77 I’m feeling a sort of parallel … something like the failure of allopathic medicine for the broad base of population for the broad base of true public health is near total but some very high tech elements of it remain almost unbelievably useful… so most of the improvements in public health in terms of viral disease came from water and sanitation, and the point of diminishing returns shifting to active harms to little babies and toddlers getting injected with toxins to ‘keep them/us safe’ was passed a generation ago (newborn now scheduled to get like 10x what I was scheduled to get and all the shots have some risk…) meanwhile my daughters jaw is hurting significantly and she plays clarinet and she wants something to do about it. Her orthodontic treatment was denied by WellCare Medicaid against two profesional opinions, doc we asked said ‘TMJ try ibuprofen’ ; I only trust our ‘primary care’ doc to get doctors notes so we don’t get a truancy case if my son wants to stay home with a cold.
I’m taking sajah popham’s Astro-herbalism class online combined with learning in person from a great clinical herbalist in my area so I get best of both worlds by layering the classes and both start April/may and go for a year. This feels like it will be way important.
Meanwhile, my ma got her shoulder replaced and wow the things they can do at the ‘high’ end of the tech. I guess the Regular People likely to lose access to this part of the medical tech industry that we currently have, but a la Deedle’s North Korea comment, losing some of the more broadly available tech in both medical and like phones and the like could be net good for Regular People.
@mary Bennett ok, good, I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t had a bad run in w him in person. I agree the set up to the producerist pitch is not all perfect analysis. Syndicalism will be useful at the right scale, but I’m still interested in the political game he seems to be presenting and do think the Christopher lasch / early American sense that there is a useful divide between producers and siphoners in an economy and producers should be listened to more is right on.
@methylethyl #81: Your comment sent me thinking. I have lived in houses built on concrete slab foundations both in Sierra Leone (7 months rainy season, 5 months dry season) and in southern Brazil (humid all year round, temperatures reaching freezing point in winter, but 40 degrees C in summer), always without any form of air-conditioning. However, windows were always open (except when it was very cold), and ceiling fans were often on.
Maybe the problem is with houses that were built to depend on air-conditioning and then get too humid when it fails?
I have some complicated feelings and thoughts about Trump’s tariffs but didn’t think it was the right time to post too much about it in the Wagner series.
IMO tariffs work as an incentive for consumers to buy domestic products, e.g. I’ve watched a few recent videos on Twitter where American business owners say they prefer importing from China rather than dealing with local manufacturers unless the tariffs really make Chinese goods 200% more expensive. But in themselves, they are necessary but not sufficient for (re-)industrialization. East Asia, first with Meiji Japan, then with post-WW2 Japan again, Taiwan, South Korea, and in the last 40 years, China followed a pretty similar export-driven playbook supported with tariffs. But it was accompanied by tremendous state planning and support for zaibatsus and other enterprises. There’s a book “How Asia Works” that talks about this that you might find interesting.
America had its own equivalents: US Steel, AT&T, Standard Oil and so on back in the day, but anti-trust litigations have dismantled them, there are pros and cons of monopolies, but these ruthless monopolies helped American industry develop and compete against the other industrial powers. Today, it takes an Elon Musk-level entrepreneur to work around the regulations in order for him to create newTesla factories in the US with most of the supply chain handled in-house; people can say what they want about Musk, but the fact that he started a car factory in California, with its byzantine regulations, and then transplanted it to Texas, while keeping most of the supply chain in-house is no mean feat. This was in the middle of the Biden admin when they snubbed him. Besides Tesla, he’s done the same for SpaceX.
For all the East Asian successes, there are nonetheless many failures; South America’s domestic heavy industries are feeble after decades of tariffs.
The question today for the US IMO is whether there is the political and financial will to carry out zaibatsu-style, or at the very least, Tesla-style, reindustrialization again? It’s a decades-long process, and in the meantime, there will be higher prices for many goods. In the meantime, there are layers of ossified regulations that make it hard to build new infrastructure and hardware in the US.
Curtis Yarvin’s post on this is quite interesting: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-trumpian-mercantilism
So the above is about reindustrialization, but about tariffs specifically, I was reading Stephen Miran, who’s heading Trump’s economic advisory team. He published this report before he was nominated: https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/research/638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdf
The Trump admin seems to have slightly changed route from this, in that the plan called for a phased sequence of tariffs but Trump went for huge tariffs across the board right from the start to use it as a negotiating ploy. If they follow the rest of the plan, negotiating for lower/no tariffs in return for restructuring US debt seems in the cards.
If you read this, regarding tariffs specifically, he’s saying that other countries “pay” for tariffs by devaluing their own currency as China did in 2018-2019. Well, that’s the key isn’t it? If other countries decide not to play along, then they won’t be “paying” for the tariffs. China right now seems to be saying no. Consumer demand has been suppressed in China since the beginning of their industrialization and it might be that Xi thinks it’s the right time to stimulate it and increase their internal demand. China seems to be the real target of the tariffs. The Miran plan calls for negotiating with US debt-holders to allow the dollar to depreciate, with China being the main bond-holder, it doesn’t seem like there are any good options for China. They can negotiate to get lower tariffs but in return the dollar value of their bonds will drop and with a weaker dollar they will export less to the US anyway. So why bother? Likely Xi’s advisors have already worked it out which is why they are not going to budge on the mutual tariffs anytime soon.
I’m quite curious about the mundane astrology for China. I just got your book on Mundane Astrology, maybe I will try to work it out myself.
On financial astrology in general, I have been following Merriman Market Analyst. They say that gold has likely already or will soon hit a near-term high, followed by a drop, which might rally into June, which might result in a long low period. They predict T-Bills will soon rise, as well as soybeans, but the DJIA will hit a peak soon. I don’t know if they will be right, but their gold calls have been working out pretty well for me so far. This set of moves together is pretty interesting since gold has historically correlated with “risk-on” in financial markets, i.e. stocks go up, if gold goes down, while stocks also go down, I’m not sure what to make of it. Maybe one scenario is that China and other countries stocking up on gold already have enough and slow down/stop buying, but stocks themselves also drop due to the overall economic climate, meanwhile Trump gets other countries to buy US soybeans.
>Well, NAFTA gutted Mexico and gave rise to the drug cartels, among other things.
I would so love to get a recording of you saying this:
“Relay these words. Prepare for unforseen consequences.”
re: Vaccines and Autism
Once you’ve figured out something’s bad, you can move on to avoidance and mitigation. Asking why is a waste of time.
@JMG #111 re: Human Hybrid Origin Hypotheis
I was indeed – that was the reference I mentioned that pointed me to the Macroevolution link I shared, which was what helped me readily identify the hybrid in front of my eyes and not reject it as “impossible” (“who are you going to believe, Wikipedia or your lying eyes?”).
Cheers,
Jeff
>His thesis is that the world of 2016 was broken beyond repair, and the election of Trump shattered that world
I would say the “breakage” happened in 2008. All Trump did/is doing (not by intent) is to shatter an illusion they spun after 2008 to pretend everything was still OK. I guess not everyone was able to accept their illusion and now it’s coming apart.
Justin, nah, my superpower here is being easily bored by technology. 😉
Stephen, I’m beginning to think I should make and post a set of links somewhere, so people who are new to the field can get immediate access to the different voices.
Alvin, my working guess is that the across-the-board tariffs are primarily there as bargaining chips to force as many other countries as possible to lower the barriers to US imports; that’s one way to start reindustrializing the US, and encouraging multinationals to start manufacturing products here rather than overseas is another. Both these leverage private investment to get the process moving. Whether we see the kind of serious reindustrialization you’ve described is another matter — my guess is that it’s no longer possible due to resource constraints — but anything that begins rebuilding domestic production and distribution chains is a step in the right direction.Thanks for the heads up about financial astrology; I’ve begun learning my way around stock market astrology, so the additional resource is welcome.
Another thought I had while reading about industrialization is that many of the PMC figures back in the 20th century in industry really did have true expertise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming Deming, the American who taught Kaizen to the Japanese.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bunker_Gilbreth an important earlier figure in studying how workers worked in factories.
Much of the WW2 war effort was planned, coordinated, researched by people in the PMC class. Project Manhattan for example was a PMC project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Ladejinsky who worked under MacArthur in Japan and instituted land reforms.
All of these were highly intelligent men with deep expertise in their fields. There are many members of the PMC today who are also highly intelligent, but they are probably the minority, with more and more admin staff, bureaucrats, and other figures coming to dominate the creative minority.
To Susie and John regarding the destiny of de-industrial kitties:
I suspect that over the next thousand to million years, the descendants of house cats will become the apex predator in almost every ecosystem. Because humans are ubiquitous on earth, so are cats. When house cats are introduced to new ecosystems, they tend to out-compete basically every other terrestrial predator. That’s why they’re considered an invasive species, they’re the purrfect predator.
I can imagine a far-future where a neo-human is tracking a stag. He crouches in the brush and readies his pneumatic boltgun, which is composed of ceramic composites. He almost fires, but he feels a chill run down his spine. Before he has the chance to look up to the canopy above, the distant descendant of a certain tabby cat named ‘Snuggles’ lands on him.
@JMG – Re: Invasives
Oh, I’ve started a long time ago. I have about an acre in coppice (hazelnut and chestnuts mostly), god knows how may fruit trees./bushes, and a perennial garden. I’ve also been guerilla gardening a couple of parks near me. I’m still hoping to find some species that will readily propagate outside of human intervention. About the best I’ve got going in my area is autumn olive, kiwi, and some of your more brambly species (e.g. R. phoenicolasius). Moreover, there’s just entirely too many deer to get most species to get their toe in. I’m curious to see how much longer that will be an issue though as CWD blasts its way through my state.
@JMG and @Kimberly Steele
Have you seen the recent study suggesting that flouride exposure in youth significantly increases incidents of autism? It would be an amusing twist of fate if the data RFK has asked for comes back saying the anti-vaxxers were wrong but instead the anti-flouridation folks were right.
I really do hope this turns out to be the case: the argument for flouridation is much weaker than the argument for childhood vaccinations, and it would also be a much easier problem to act on with fewer trade-offs.
I very clearly remember when JMG became one of the people i would read on a regular basis. I had been reading John’s stuff for a little while, then i read a piece by Rob Hopkins criticizing the ideas of Green Wizardry and thought Rob was being a bit snarky. Then i read JMG response https://www.resilience.org/stories/2010-09-02/green-wizardry-response-rob-hopkins/ OMG!!! It was the most polite, yet devastating takedown i have ever read.
(i remember thinking “Dang! i like the cut of his jib.” LOL and that “now that is the way to effectively respond to snarky criticism.”)
Back on topic
The second Christian religiosity might have a more self contained explanation for the rise and fall of industrial civilization. By the 19th century the elites and an increasing proportion of the general public had stopped worshiping God and instead replaced him with Lucifer in the intellectual realm and in the 20 the century the Wendigo was placed in the center of the economic realm.. The great God of Progress is just Lucifers Industrial name and its promises are about as trustworthy. And our economic systems obsession with and need for unending growth was obviously going to end in a monstrous tragedy (only the highly educated Luciferians could think otherwise) . The corner stones of Industrial civilization: Lucifer and the Wendigo must be rejected and replaced .
(yes i know the Wendigo is not currently part of the Christian mythos, but it should be)
An odd place where I’ve seen mainstream Americans being force-fed the facts of decline: a Constitutional Law course, on days discussing certain areas of law with recent developments. You should see the faces of despair and confusion!
The thing is, when the Supreme Court completely abandons analytical rules and instead relies wholly on “History and Traditions” (a washing machine full of random ideas from 1590 – 1962), it really does make the law worse: less predictable, less just, less coherent. The old rules were never perfect, and they changed frequently – but three things you want from your legal system are predictable, coherent, and (hopefully) just.
And so certain decisions in the past 20-ish years are baffling, unless you can admit “oh, this is what decline looks like in the legal sphere.”
Comments in general: to Robert Gibson, Gregory the Great not only sent missionaries to Britain, but told them to let the Britons have their sacred sites and festivals; just baptize them as Christian sacred sites and festivals. Bede (“The Ecclesiastical History of Britain – VERY readable-“) noted that those missionaries were highly respected for walking their talk, refusing wealth and luxury, and helping the poor.
To John Zybourne: love the term “Accelerando” for the 1820s-1920s period. I read the original s/f “Accelerando” and believe me, the term is far better applied to the one we had 200-100 years ago.
@Alice Em: Having been forcibly switched from my Medicare Choice plan with Florida Blue (now disbanded) to Aetna, and been told that “We authorized one (1) visit from an Occupational Therapist (to deal with everything above the waist,) and you had that one – and after sulking for a few days – I left breakfast at our dining hall today (oatmeal – crammed into a small bowl so it would look more abundant) – and through a room where an exercise class was starting. Sat down and joined them, and as long as that instructor was running that class, I’ll try to keep the same early-hours schedule and get my PT/OT/whatever else they call it that way. Realization between now and then:
“One visit, and after that it’s on you.” Ouch!
To JMG – thanks for this blog and this discussion. We really needed that. Though – about the Homeless Gods universe – no, not an Augustan recovery, but the new constitution, and rolling the university system into one national university (without a football team, I’m sure! Talk about expenses), and all that – in my mind, that’s a recovery. Like that of an aristocratic family that goes bankrupt, retreats to the family farm and cuts way, way back on expenses. And survives.
P.S. The fictional heroine/detective Phryne Fisher, in the 23tr novel in the series, was mentioning her investment strategy: Producers of food and beer, houses, and government securities. The person she’s talking to, a Chinese silk merchant, tells her “We won’t be affected. We have our own parallel economy, and do not deal with Occidental brokerss. They are….. unreliable.”
Would that I could do the same, but plowing through my inherited investments with pitiful dividends is not only time-consuming, I took a massive tax bite on the one I dumped last year as ‘unreliable. And all this for, as I said, a fairly small contribution to my actual patchwork income.
Oh, and your view of the nations as a row of old men, some of whom were healthy and some not, but all within each reach of death, did ring a bell. I see that day in and day out, as another one bites the dust, or goes into assisted living, or into memory care, or back to the family home to be looked after.
JMG: Back to the beginnings. Can’t say that I am saddened by this choice of yours.
I am also going through a bit of nostalgia from the olden days (LATOC or Life After the Oil Crash) before you were “discovered”. You have gotten better for the most part. But during those heady days, there were lots of others about to riff off the varied subjects.
I hope that Jim Kunstler shows up here now and again, this place would be brightened with some of his top-shelf spleen-venting. I still read him every week and still enjoy his excellent, excellent rants.
RIP Mike Ruppert
It is too bad that Dmitry Orlov has decided that he hates the US and everything we stand for,
We started blogging at about the same time and I am quite pleased you stuck with it. I am even more pleased that you are revisiting the 00’s. For what it is worth, I think that the piece that worked for me and made me a long-time follower (I did buy too many of your books) was probably one you forgot about.
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/problems-and-predicaments.html
If my memory serves, a lot of folks didn’t like your conclusions then either. It will be interesting to see how it goes this time around
When did Progress peak led me on an interesting path.
Airplanes have gone nowhere since the 1960s. They are more fuel efficient, but no faster.
Refrigeration: Developed in the 1850’s and 1860s. Practical home use was 1911 for a gas adsorption unit, and 1927 for an electric compression unit.
AC power was mostly figured out in the 1880s. Three phase was developed in 1891. Getting power into the countryside in the 1930s made big changes in agriculture and food processing, but that was just evolution of the existing technology.
Now for the current feature of our times, the Cell phone. That has quite the history.
Theory of electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell. 1864.
Radio waves, Heinrich Hertz, 1886.
Radio transmission patented, Marconi, 1897.
Voice transmission, de Forest, 1907.
Amplifiers (vacuum tubes), Fleming and de Forest, about 1925.
Spread spectrum frequency hopping, Hedy Lamar, 1942.
ENIAC, 1945.
Transistor, Shockley, 1947.
Integrated circuit, Noyce, 1959.
LS series integrated logic chips, 1966.
CPU, Intel 8080, 1974.
First personal computer, Altair 8800. 1974. (4096 bytes RAM, $264)
The Internet;
Laser: First theoretical basis was Max Planck (1900) and Einstein (1917).
First Maser (microwave laser) invented 1954.
First optical laser invented 1960.
Fiber optic transmission of laser light shown in 1966.
ARPANET, precursor to internet, 1969.
First semiconductor laser, 1976.
Usenet, 1980.
Optical amplifier, 1987, and the internet is off the phone lines, or will be as soon as they run the fiber, which was completed in this county last year.
It’s hard to come up with a date for the peak of Progress because it depends on what you are considering. But the peak for individual technologies can be found. Modern computers are much faster and use less energy per calculation, but earth-changingly different? Not really.
A couple months ago I did a “ladder-down” review of computer technology wondering where a regression might stop. The current state of the art CPUs come from a single plant in Taiwan. They are frantically trying to clone that plant in the US before China steamrolls Taiwan and might make it. That might be worth posting on a future article on the general decline topic.
JMG and All,
I’m sensing a bit of a more sophisticated version of “Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch” with regards to the new administration’s foreign policy. Like enraging Europe. “Oh, we’re gonna take Greenland.” “Europe has lost its values.” “Spend more on your defense, more tariffs on your goods” with the result being that the US gets kicked out of NATO, or Europe passing more of their own trade restrictions which the US will be forced to react in kind. Is the goal to make the US a more isolated nation? I know that the sentiment of most working class people I know is “Russia is not my enemy.” “It sure would be nice to just to do an honest day’s work and go home and not worry about it.” Someone above mentioned the manipulation of currency and treasury bills WRT China. It’s not something I understand, but are we looking at a bit of bumpkin-inspired trickery a la Benjamin Franklin?
I have come across references to your and JOE’S work in some pretty unexpected places, so I think you are both more widely read than you might guess.
That said, I agree that both of you don’t get nearly as much exposure as you both deserve, in a saner world you would both have mainstream recognition.
I’m beginning to think I should make and post a set of links somewhere, so people who are new to the field can get immediate access to the different voices.
Yes–please!
Alvin, my working guess is that the across-the-board tariffs are primarily there as bargaining chips to force as many other countries as possible to lower the barriers to US imports; that’s one way to start reindustrializing the US, and encouraging multinationals to start manufacturing products here rather than overseas is another
OK, sorry, but I think you are very wrong on this. I try to avoid economic debates because I just get shouted down by shrill voices (sort of like what happens when you bring up peak oil and civilizational collapse, I guess), but in the interests of trying to bring an alternative viewpoint to this, here goes:
The current (mostly balance of trade) account balance and its capital account (financial flows) must balance. This isn’t some random political opinion–it is an economic identity; it is the economic equivalent of saying that sin^2(x)+cos^2(x)=1.
Most of us have been raised to believe that the current account drives the capital account. In other words, when the US trades with Mexico, the US gets cheap Mexican goods and then gives up US dollars, thereby running a capital deficit. This may have been true in the early 1700s, but it is *definitely* not the case today, where the amount of money crossing borders (ie financial markets) dwarf trade flows by literally many orders of magnitudes.
So unless the US prevents foreign capital from entering the country in terms of other countries buying US debt or building factories here (and Trump is actually trying to encourage capital to enter the country via both methods), the deficits will continue. The US can certainly create a set of tariffs to, for example, ensure that auto manufacturing is purely domestic, but that simply means that another sector (for example, semiconductors) will suffer even more than otherwise in order to produce the net balance of flows. But as a whole, these tariffs or building new factories or exhorting people to “buy American” will not renew American manufacturing or anything else–it just changes the winners and losers.
As an aside, Trump’s policies, if they continue, will likely absolutely decimate China, but not for the reasons Trump believes. Rather, China will need to continue exporting because it doesn’t want to (or politically cannot) encourage domestic consumption, and so it will try to dump its goods on the rest of the world. But the rest of the world simply cannot absorb the amount of Chinese goods, and so they won’t. That’s when things really fall apart for China (or, alternatively, Chinese goods will continue to drop in price to counter the US tariffs and the relative trade balance between the two countries will remain more or less the same).
Does a Chinese collapse help the US? Not really–if people continue to buy net amounts of US debt, the US will simply increase its trade deficits with Germany, Japan, etc. But to repeat, it will not bring back US manufacturing as a whole. For that to happen, the US must stop running capital account deficits, and for that, it (practically speaking) must start imposing capital controls in one way or another (bans, taxes, whatever). Everything else–including lowering trade barriers to US goods–is just noise.
As an aside, Michael Pettis does a much better job than I can in explaining this (there are many other people who argue the same thing, but few as articulately or as lucidly). I disagree with him on the end result for China, but that is a different debate–this is just one of many explanations for the same argument: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/trade-intervention-for-freer-trade?lang=en
Anyway, just take it as a “for what it’s worth”
I’ve heard it said that there are 2 extant civilisations that break the rule that all fail over time, China and Egypt. China is a more obvious example; writing first arose there about the same time as it did in Sumer with cuneiform, and its civilisation has been so consistent that people today can still read something written 5000 years ago. Egypt is less obvious, but I think one could make the case that an at least similar culture has prevailed there for millenia. The idea behind what underlies the failing of all civs save these is agricultural; in all cases, agriculture gradually destroys the soil (witness the deserts in what was once the fertile breadbasket of Mesopotamia), and it is this slow process that leads to collapse, simply for want of food. The reason that China has escaped this process is the Loess plateua, where a lot of the wind-born soil from ploughing is finally dumped (hence a renewing source of soil), and similarly the Nile’s annual floods renew Egypt’s soil. This is all taken from ” Dirt : the erosion of civilizations” by David Montgmery (https://archive.org/details/dirterosionofciv0000mont_w9u4).
@Alan, I was actually going to post a mirror image of your comment. Most US politicians known at all to Europeans are (or were, see below) unpopular there because they lie (or lay) far off the right end of the Western European spectrum, at least as it existed from about 1970 to 2020. American presidents popular in Western Europe include John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. None of these were considered particularly left in a European context, but they could at least be located on a European political map.
Of course there is no socialist country in Europe today. What most countries have, or are pretending to still have, is social democracy. Our host gave rather good definitions of social democracy and socialism some time ago. My short definition would be that in social democracies, the factories are privately owned, with some worker participation, while education, health care and rail transport are mostly public (with some variation in the proportion of user paid vs. tax paid) and a considerable part of rented apartments also belong to nonprofit municipal companies.
Has the European political map changed over the last few years? Quite possibly so.
JMG
Your statement on progress peaking in the 1880s was interesting to me. I had always thought of it as the 1970s, but that was probably the peak of the fruition,whereas the 1880s was the peak of the inventive/ creative aspect of it.
My grandmother was born in 1867 in the US, my father in 1890 in England. Both died in the 1950s. They grew up in a very localized world, and lived to see huge changes in transportation, communication, medicine, etc. I don’t think there have been such meaningful changes since their deaths.
As to the discussion about allopathic medicine, I agree about the standard pill pushing for almost all conditions, but some of the surgical procedures are wonderful. I had a hip replacement last year. The pain before it was bad enough that I considered checking out early. Since the surgery I have been pain free and so much more mobile. it has been miraculous..I fear that level of surgery is one thing that will be lost in the deindustrializing world. that will be sad to me.
Stephen
Geoffg @ 134, Who is JOE? I think our host has as much mainstream access as he needs. I would not like to see some statement of his taken out of context and turned into RW or LW talking point of the week we love to hate. Nor would I care to see this civilized and intelligent corner of the internet be invaded by armies of angry reddittors from any ideological direction.
Ursa Minor @ 135, I can’t say I know a lot about China, but I do know that much of the consumer trash they send us, I don’t care who owns the factory, is landfill fodder that should never have been made in the first place. I have read that the Chinese govt. is trying to encourage domestic consumption.
@Aldarion re: slabs
Absolutely.
I have been to Vietnam, humid tropics, and houses there are concrete slabs as well, generally concrete-faced brick walls, tiled floors, and tile halfway up the walls.
But also: the walls end ~six inches short of the roof, which is corrugated metal. There’s a gap to carry away hot air, there is never a shortage of ventilation, and there are zero carpets or upholstered furnishings, zero inaccessible enclosed spaces (attics, ductwork, hollow walls), zero insulation. No drywall either, and when there was plumbing it tended to be outside the house– bathing-stall out back, laundry spigot out back, toilet facilities out back… kitchen might be a semi-enclosed lean-to off the back of the house. Just a very different attitude toward air circulation and water.
Right now, I don’t think you could legally build such a house here. Everything since about 1960 was designed specifically *for* air conditioning, and can’t really be separated from it any more than a living body can be separated from its heart.
The Mary Harrington quote is from her youtube discussion with Jonathon Pageau. It is produced as an intro snippet about 10 seconds in, but is actually from about the 48 min mark (right near the end). It looks like I slightly misremembered it. The overall discussion was mostly around the idea of identity and how it developed from ideas of the soul and the self. (They also discuss whether AI could be used by demons, after deciding that it is not demonic in and of itself.)
Pageau: “We’re going to have to flip the enlightenment adage, you know, when people say that, uh, that magic is just misunderstood technology, I would flip that and say that technology is misunderstood magic.”
Harrington: “My governing theme for pretty much everything which is happening at the moment is that we’re running the 17th century in reverse, so just hang on to your hat.”
Pageau: “Yeah, yeah. yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, listen …”
Harrington: “This is why the puritans are all turning catholic. Because they’re running the 17th century in reverse.”
Pageau: “That is interesting, yeah. JD Vance is kind of a little image of that, of going back to traditional christianity, for sure.”
Harrington: “The republics are turning into monarchies, the puritans are turning into catholics, and all of the nation states are dissolving back into empires. It’s going to be a very bumpy ride.”
@Siliconguy 132: “Airplanes have gone nowhere since the 1960s. They are more fuel efficient, but no faster.” I’d say the new, more efficient fanjets, with their large intakes are also more efficient at ingesting birds, thus shutting down or destroying the engines. I haven’t seen stats, but this seems to happen more often lately.
@UrsaMinor 135: “Most of us have been raised to believe ….This may have been true in the early 1700s, but it is *definitely* not the case today, where the amount of money crossing borders (ie financial markets) dwarf trade flows by literally many orders of magnitudes.” I think this is something David Ricardo missed or failed to consider when he offered up his so-called “theory of comparative advantage,” in Ch.7 (“On Foreign Trade”) of his book, “The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.” He thought that the patriotism of businessmen would prevent mass outsourcing of work from the home country. Uh-huh. I think Ophuls wrote about this in one of his books, “Requiem for Modern Politics,” as well as Wm. Greider writing in “One World, Ready or Not.” I’m working from memory here, so feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken.
Alvin, an excellent point. I see the current entrepreneurial class as a transitional phenomenon; the figures that matter in the generation immediately ahead will rise from among the young men who are turning away from college, getting a technical education or apprenticeship instead, and learning how to deal with the real world.
Enjoyer, cats have a good shot at apex predator status, but I see at least three rival taxa. The first is Canis familiaris; dogs are just as widespread as cats, they’re tough and intelligent, and they adore the taste of fresh meat. Neo-Snuggles is going to have to overcome the fierce and hungry rivalry of pack predators descended from Rover and Fido. The second is Procyon lotor, the raccoon — I see them as the ancestor of an entire family of highly intelligent bear-like predators in the far future. Finally, keep an ear out for the basso-profundo “Caw!” of the descendants of Corvus spp., the crow family. They’re worldwide, resilient, smart, and fierce. I imagine some offshoots of that genus becoming flightless predators who run down their prey in packs, and others becoming potential tyrannosaur rivals, not unlike the phorusrhacids of Cenozoic South America. Here comes one now; it’s twice as tall as you are:
Mark, delighted to hear it. One way or another, any living thing that overpopulates will have something show up to prune the excess, whether a micropredator or a macropredator…
Slithy, well, we’ll see!
Dobbs, thank you! That brings back memories. I wonder if anybody still pays the least attention to all those laboriously constructed Transition Plans; I know for a fact that quite a few people are still busy practicing Green Wizardry. As for your explanation, it has much to recommend it.
Noodles, yep. When a civilization goes into decline, the decline affects everything — including the laws.
Patricia M, oh, granted. Jerry’s time is a period of retrenchment and relative stability; if I write more stories in his future, they’ll be exploring more of that. Who writes the Phryne Fisher novels?
Degringolade, thank you. I’ll keep an eye on Jim’s output and see if anything strikes my fancy.
Siliconguy, it’s hard to assign a specific point to the process. I like to be more general and suggest that people look at the scale of the transition from 1825 to 1925, and then compare that to the much less impressive changes from 1925 to 2025. That’s going to get a post of its own one of these days.
WatchFlinger, it’s by no means impossible that that’s exactly what we’re seeing.
GeoffG, nah, if I got mainstream recognition I’d go out of my way to post some things so wacky that the mainstream would drop me like a hot rock. Mainstream recognition is the kiss of death; it’s out here on the fringes that genuinely new ideas can get traction.
Ursa Minor, okay, let’s do it:
I would like everyone who’s willing to do so to post links to their favorite currently active blogs covering peak oil and the decline of industrial civilization. Please include the URL as well as the name of the blog and the blogger, to save time. I’ll put an edit on the original post to get the word out.
As for the current account and the capital account, of course they balance. That’s not the point. The point is to decrease the production and export of US debt, one of the major contributors to the capital outflow that imports of foreign products must balance. That’s why tariffs are being paired with sharp cuts to federal expenditures. Ending the doom loop of soaring federal debt is the key to the whole process — and very likely at least a technical default on our foreign debt will also be involved as we proceed, which will of course roil the global economy no end and make a decrease in imports even more essential.
Biophile, the problem with that theory is that Egypt and China both had their ages of decline and their dark ages. In Egyptian history, look into the so-called “Intermediate Periods” between the Old and Middle Kingdom, and between the Middle and New Kingdom; in China, look into the Warring States period, the brutal post-Han Dynasty collapse, and the equally brutal post-Tang dynasty collapse. It’s true that stable agriculture and relative geographical isolation meant that the new societies that rose after those collapses borrowed a lot from their precessors, but the collapses and dark ages still happened. Thus it isn’t just agriculture!
Stephen, it’s difficult to give a specific peak date for progress as that varies by definition — is it a matter of peak discovery, peak invention, or peak distribution of useful innovations? As for medical care, I don’t question that at all. The history of modern medicine is the story of how economic and cultural factors turned triumphs into travesties.
KAN, hmm! Okay, I’m going to turn my own favorite adage on myself and say that this deserves serious meditation.
@JMG – The Phryne Fisher novels are written by the Australian author Kerry Greenwood, now dead at the age of 70. The one I quoted was the last one published, but there is another still at the publisher’s to be released late last year. Miss Fisher is quite a character, with some notable flaws that she is well aware of. She is also a veteran of WWI, having run away from school to become an ambulance driver then. Sometimes she seems a but more 1990s than 1920s, but those 2 decades were fairly much alike in many ways. She had another series, set in the 1990s, Corinna Chapman, baker, who is dragged into mysteries one after another.
Ms. Greenwood, according to her bio, was an avid cook, and sews her own clothes, and a Legal Aid Solicitor by profession. And BTW, she apparently takes magic seriously. One of Corinna’s friends is the Melbourne equivalent of Aunt Clarice, though being half-Australian and half Eastern European Gypsy, the woman needs a good course in magical hygiene at times.
ahhh…. the 1990s were, looking back, such an innocent period – Kerry Greenwood, as far as I can tell, never jumped the Wokey-Pokey shark the way another former favorite, Dana Stabenow, author of the Alaska-setting Kate Shugak mysteries, did. You can actually see the Great Divide that hit sometime in the early 20th century in a good many genre-fiction series. And you can always count on murder mysteries to have a plot; a beginning, middle, and end, without being too pretentious. For what all that rambling is worth.
Chris in Australia – the Melbourne of these stories is not what it apparently is now, alas.
Pardon any incoherence. It’s been a zoo around here this week; many changes in the works with a change of ownership now taken place.
“…the weird but not unreasonable theory that Homo sapiens is descended from matings between bonobos and swine?”
Thank you for that image! (My search history is so fracked.)
Hmm… Explains a lot, actually.
PS. I looked around that chimp-pig website, and dear sweet Jesus, the author suggests that human-pig, human-sheep, and human-cow hybrids continue to occur. There are photos–videos, even.
The scientist behind it, Eugene McCarthy: Please set aside your natural reactions and take my theory seriously
Also Eugene McCarthy: attaches a poem imagining the, ah, circumstances leading to said hybrid, titled “The Missing Oink”
@Ambrose: Just a small nitpick. While there have been cities with monumental architecture and fortifications for a long time in what is today China (and for all we know, some of the inhabitants of these cities might have spoken a language related to Chinese), writing is only attested there from ~1200 BCE onwards. One can speculate if it arose earlier, but that’s what we’ve got.
Full-fledged writing appeared simultaneously (as far as our chronology permits to say) in ~3200 BCE in both Sumer and Egypt. This is surprising in itself, since settlements and the use of clay go back to the end of the ice age in some parts of Mesopotamia., while the inhabitants of the Nile valley had been nomadic until about a millennium earlier. State formation happened incredibly fast in Egypt.
So Mesopotamia had about 3000 years of continuous writing, though in several different languages. Egypt had a bit more than 3200 years of continuous writing in its native language and scripts, and China has also had a bit more than 3200 years of continuous writing in its language and script so far. All three were, however, interrupted by ages of political fracturing and decreased literacy, as JMG explained above.
>Before he has the chance to look up to the canopy above, the distant descendant of a certain tabby cat named ‘Snuggles’ lands on him
There are tigers in India. And they sometimes hunt the hoomans. It’s kinda scary but also kinda cute too – once you realize they’re substantially the same thing as a housecat, just scaled up. Scale makes a qualitative difference sometimes. You scale a scary thing down and it turns into the cutest thing. Just needs some scritches, that’s all. Look at those little murder mittens.
So, no need to go look into the future, just book a trip to India today and ask where the tigers are. They’ll tell you.
I mean the intent behind the tariffs is to bring some manufacturing back to Murica. I wonder, have any of them, has anyone actually sat down and examined why all those factories left in the first place? I mean, it is easy to say “Retarded Boomers!” but at some point you have to stop blaming people and go clean up their mess instead, no matter how satisfying it is to blame others for your problems. Must resist the urge.
If the reasons they left in the first place are still there, no amount of tarriffs alone will cause manufacturing to come back. I’d say tarriffs are necessary but not sufficient. And if all we get are tarriffs and nothing else, people will just find ways around them and everything will keep doom looping.
I’d also say something about having the curse of a reserve currency too. You can either eliminate the deficits or you can have the world’s reserve currency – BUT YOU CAN’T HAVE BOTH. If they are serious, really serious about eliminating the deficits, they’re going to need to give up the dollar as a reserve currency. I don’t think they’re serious about it.
I suppose there is another option, piss off the rest of the world and have them invade to put a stop to the chaos? In Germany in 1945, if you were a civilian, you only had two choices at the end of it all – surrender to the Allies or surrender to the Soviets.
JMG: “I would like everyone who’s willing to do so to post links to their favorite currently active blogs covering peak oil and the decline of industrial civilization.”
With pleasure!
Panopticon, “Climate and Economy” (news aggregator):
https://climateandeconomy.com
And from JMG’s Mormon cousin:
Tanner Greer, “The Scholar’s Stage”
https://scholars-stage.org
A sample (from https://scholars-stage.org/lessons-from-and-limitations-of-the-19th-century-experience ):
“Readers of the Scholar’s Stage will be familiar with a thesis I have pursued in multiple essays and posts over the last half decade: America was once a place where institutional capacity was very high. Americans were a people with an extraordinary sense of agency. This is one of the central reasons they transformed the material, cultural, institutional, and political framework of not only the North American continent, but the entire world. That people is gone. The social conditions that gave the Americans their competence and confidence have passed away. Where Americans once asked ‘how do we solve this?’ they now query ‘how do we get management on my side?’ ”
I have read your posts weekly since the early days of The Archdruid Report. I’m really looking forward to revisiting those topics. Thank you tons!!!
Aldarion, oh sure. Whenever I hear “5000 years of Chinese history,” I always wonder why the West can’t count Sumeria, if not Atlantis, as part of ours. China and the USA currently have far more in common than either does with our ancestors from 2000 (or even 200) years ago.
I haven’t commented much for the last few years, but I’ve been reading near as much as ever.
If you are going to do some more posts following from the themes implied here above, I’d like to request a certain aspect get some attention in the mix. Supposing that Trump’s current economic gambits carry forward and we see a realignment of our economic situation, maybe so prognostication about what sorts of things might get most costly to work with, what might be less, where certain career paths might end and where other paths could open up.
I got a few musings to contribute in that general direction. Since I was posting more generally I have gone pretty much full time into a career as a Green Wizard, specifically a Hedge Wizard sort. I haven’t had any regular job, or regular patrons, but have found a niche for my self out of history’s way where I do odd jobs for a bunch of mostly destitute blue collar would bes. The hippie market garden sort of work I am still a little involved with, but margins there got thin, and I realized that I could do much better for myself helping with construction time tasks. I can get on to a construction crew even though I am a bit of a klutz because I can do basic geometry in my head, and some guys like having a guy on the crew who can see something is askew and use Pythagoras (the single most power fact of practical mathematics by a mile) to figure out whats wrong; in between there is always a bunch of easy work needing done to keep the specialist on task. But, natural building, inventing janky greenhouses, making very janky infrastructure for my own garden, I am really doing the life, I doubt there is a section of the Green Wizardry book where I haven’t gone well past the material there contained.
I noticed some consequences of the economy changing, and I am trying to figure out how my patrons can avoid getting clobbered (and by extension my opportunities). One guy did steel buildings, and tariffs are threatening to make that market dry up, both by raising material costs, and by his clients mostly coming from a class that is about to get beat down (“secure” government jobs). He’s a skilled guy, will pivot into something, but pivot he gonna must do, and hard. Another is some kinda electronics wiz, not a green wizard, but a high level wizard of another color, well he had opportunities designing custom circuit boards to fix things where the official circuit boards from the manufacturer are over priced as all heck, but that was reliant on a Chinese company, and might be a problem going forward. I figure an American competitor could open in that market, but the infrastructure for such a fab is non trivial; one can also do home circuit boards with tech that could be affordable for a garage business, but the unit cost there would struggle to compete with a factory, even with imports. I think my Electro Wizard friend has a skill that might play very nicely as there are many valuable machines in need of a simple circuit board to keep $40k out of the scrapyard, but the skill of making that a viable business will push him in other ways. Another Green Wizard I work with is talking with me about us making a tool evolved from electric wheel barrows, designed to fill a niche where digging by brow sweat is brutal, but where bringing in a $25000 piece of machine is not affordable. I honestly think the tool he is working on could be a winner, especially if Earth building and some permaculture practices can find a niche against the rising cost of material imputs for conventional methods; but our idea to make a proto type involved some Chinese components that just stopped being cheap, but where there are not American made products that cover the same niche. Thinking to bite the bullet, buy the Chinese components to proto type, and then start working on a solution that can be made in an American machine shop.
The implications of what I am looking at is that industry as America once knew is dead and gone, but with access to the internet of knowledge, and workshop grade tools that have capabilities which industrial tools of the early 20th century would envy (in many niches, though other niches are gone baby gone) I figure that small shops making clever oddments then sharing the tech for social media credit and marketing could spur a glory age of inovation for Green Wizards. That being said folks wanting a business as lucrative as the old day will have plenty of bitters to help them digest the changes.
I find myself comparing the crash relocalization the US economy is undergoing as comparable to the kind of measures the Nazis put in place just before the MEFO bill scam was going to fail. I do not compare the current American administration to the Nazis in any other way, but they are in a similar situation – defaulting one one’s massive debts is about as unfashionable, and inevitable, as invading Poland after all.
Patricia M, thank you for this. I’ll see what the library has to offer.
Ambrose, I know — but it really makes so much sense of our species, doesn’t it? I think especially of the way that we just don’t seem to fit in the world; religious issues aside — and it’s well within the power of a deity to decide, perhaps with a chuckle, that this should be our origins — if we’re a jumble of genetic material from two species that don’t have much in common with each other, our status as the number one misfits of the Island of Misfit Species would follow from that.
Other Owen, I’m quite sure that the end of the dollar as reserve currency is baked into the cake right now. The challenge is to make that happen in a controlled fashion, with minimal collateral damage, as opposed to sudden panicked dumping of dollar-denominated assets and ensuing hyperinflation. Tariffs and massive federal budget cuts are two crucial steps toward making that happen.
Ambrose, many thanks for this.
Joseph, you’re welcome and thank you.
Ray, glad to hear you’re still along for the ride, and thank you for the many data points! I think that sort of thing is the wave of the future for many people: unique personal niches filling in gaps that nobody else is really suited to fill. (That’s basically how I make my living these days, after all.) I hope other readers are paying attention.
Justin, interesting. Yeah, I can see the point of that.
Found myself exploring the Ruins in the Yucatan recentiy and one thing I was very impressed by was the durability of their lime mortar. Having worked some with our traditional mortars they are not the same animal as the Rome and Mayan Mortars.
Got a kick out of one of the explanations for this- possibly polysaccharides provided by tree bark.
Subtitle on one study was- Organic additives produced plasters with similar properties to sea urchin spines, mollusk shells… so maybe your on to something:)
JMG: “but it really makes so much sense of our species, doesn’t it?”
I admit that it has a certain poetic resonance (think back to those last lines of “Animal Farm”!), but lack the biological knowledge to meaningfully evaluate the theory. To be honest, my first reaction was that this was some kind of jokey hoax by MIT students, like the “Cicada 3301” thing from a few years back. But I’ll try to be open-minded. Has McCarthy gotten any kind of learned response? (Some such remarks are appended to his text.)
I like the commenter who declared his intention to go kosher!
Can I post blogs in Spanish?
for peak oil references.
Thanks.
So from our mixed ancestry we got the sexual proclivities of the bonobo and the social graces of the swine.What a heritage.
Sorry, but I don’t know how to do URLs. Must get someone to teach me sometime. However the sites I follow regularly that cover resource depletion/degradation and societal decline are;
consciousnessofsheep.co.uk by Tim Watkins, a Welshman dealing with these issues primarily in the UK
thehonestsorcerer.medium.com by B, I think Dutch or German (he doesn’t say) dealing with these issues on a very broad basis.
Both of the above quote or reference JMG frequently
oilystuff.com by Mike Shellman, a very abrasive and straight forward Texas oilman dealing specifically with oil and NG issues
peakoilbarrel.com, an American site moderated by Daniel Coyne, content as the name suggests
crudeoilpeak.info by Mike Mushalik, an pretty specifically Australian site
There are two other sites I follow regularly for world events, which are not specifically peak resource or societal decline oriented, but are interesting viewed through the decline lens.
sonar21.com by Larry Johnson, an ex CIA analyst. His site also has a side bar with links to various other similar sites.
moonofalabama.org, a German site by B, a retired Bundeswehr officer. The site name comes from a poem by Bertoldht Brecht.
Hope these help
Stephen
I hope the last comment I posted with all the web sites didn’t disappear
@157 Ambrose
Donald Prothero is considered an authority in mammalian palentology.
Anyway, the evolution of humans over the last six million years is well attested in the fossil record, and if reconstructions of early hominids show apelike features and didn’t yet have human characteristics like the protruding nose or short digits*, the evidence for the ape-pig hybridization theory would evaporate and the human-pig similiarities would be the result of convergent evolution.
*And didn’t suddenly gain them along the way (e.g. in the transition from Homo habilis to Homo erectus)
It’s an amusing coincidence (synchronicity?) to me that you’re returning to the Long Descent theme of your blog just when I was discovering your old Archdruid Report blog (for latecomers like me: https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/). I was wondering, while reading your takes on the political tumult du jour, how you’d summarize the developments in retrospect. To me, it was striking how much really hasn’t changed – and the Biden admin really looks like nothing more than a last attempt to force the timeline into going towards left-“liberal” (is this even a term you use over there? It’s the darling catch-phrase of our media here) utopia. An interlude in the Trumpist/Cesarian era.
I also wonder what your take is on the current rise of rightwing parties all over Europe. In a way, I see our own current regime becoming just as desperate as the Biden/Democrat side to hold the lid down on a pressure cooker that’s about to explode in their faces, and predictably, they’re going about it in the most self-defeating manner imaginable. Just now, there have been timid suggestions by some members of the CDU (a former conservative party that managed to fool loyal voters for over twenty years into voting for them in the belief they’d get conservative politics from them, something that hasn’t been true since Merkel committed regicide on Kohl in a manner that would’ve made Brutus weep with pride) that maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to shun the AfD (the right-populist party that is rapidly rising with every election) via “parliamentary tricks” like denying them the chairs in parliamentary comitees and etc. , or quickly changing regulations before they can benefit them. It’s anyone’s guess how long the currently forming coalition will hold. It’s pretty certain right now that the AfD will get the majority in at least one of the Eastern states in next year’s state elections.
All the while, confrontation with Russia is looming. Things might get lively over here. I’m pondering to learn Russian, provided they don’t drop a bomb on us anyway. If that doesn’t happen, I expect a rise of politicians that are more friendly towards Trump and less condescending than the current woke cliques. See Meloni, who is now touted as “the hope of Europe” in our media (the same media tarred her as a “post-fascist” a year or two ago. I’m struggling not to litter the end of this post with laughing-tears emojis)…
Here is my list of industrial decline references that I find useful:
1) Surplus Energy Economics – Tim Morgan – https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
2) Consciousness of Sheep – Tim Watkins – https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/
3) Our Finite World – Gail Tverberg – https://ourfiniteworld.com/
4) Of Two Minds – Charles Hugh Smith – https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/
5) Low Tech Magazine – https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/posts/
6) Museletters – Richard Heinberg – https://richardheinberg.com/
7) Restoring Mayberry – Brian Kaller – https://restoringmayberry.blogspot.com/
8) Anything by Prof Helen Thompson – https://x.com/HelenHet20
9) The Honest Sorcerer – https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/
Podcasts Worth Listening To (all long-form):
1) These Times – Helen Thompson & Tom McTague – https://unherd.com/these-times-with-tom-mctague-and-helen-thompson/
2) The Great Simplification – Nate Hagens – https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
3) The Fall of Civilizations – Paul Cooper – https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/
4) Hardcore Histories – Dan Carlin – https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
>The challenge is to make that happen in a controlled fashion, with minimal collateral damage, as opposed to sudden panicked dumping of dollar-denominated assets and ensuing hyperinflation. Tariffs and massive federal budget cuts are two crucial steps toward making that happen.
Your optimism is minty and refreshing. I hope he can pull it off.
“Dylan, I’ll consider it, though it’ll be interesting to see if I can discuss it at all without causing both sides to melt down.”
But JMG, when did that ever stop you before? 🙂
Hi JMG,
My favourite still active peak oil/decline blogs
The consciousness of sheep
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk
Uk based by a blogger called Tim Watkins
Do the math
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu
Blogger named Tom Murphy
Our finite world
https://ourfiniteworld.com
Blogger named Gail Tverberg
When my husband rejoined the Methodist church last fall, we participated in “meet the pastors over pizza.” My husband who is reading Revelations, asked the head pastor on any good books on the “final days.” Apparently, a lot of religious Christians are reading up on the “final days.” There is a cottage industry in books on the subject.
The pastor commented, “Everyone thinks that this time is the “final days,” but it is only “the last of days” for them. The “final days” has yet to come.” In regards to the great decline, I believe that is true – it is the last of days for certain groups of people and civilizations.
I didn’t respond to your final essays on Parsifal in your overview of the Ring cycle and Parsifal because I didn’t think I had anything worth saying.
But I will now say this – and wholly appropriate to the post you made above. Act 3 of Parsifal from the prelude through the Transformation Music forms not only as the apex of the entire arc of Western classical music (the West’s supreme art form) but perhaps the apex of Western civilization itself– a sort of luminous summary through incomparable music of what the whole business has been about.
It’s been decline and falll ever since — and I’m hardly the first person to think so. I’d offer you as an example Otto Weinenger’s Sex and Character written in the wake of his visit to Bayreuth where he heard Parsifal, a book that was devoured by Wittgenstein, Freud, Spengler and other prophets of what was going to happen as you outlined above.
(It bears remembering that Weinenger shot himself shortly after finishing the book in the very place where Beethoven died. What a way to go…. and to re-enforce one’s message on the way out.)
From other owen:
>Well, NAFTA gutted Mexico and gave rise to the drug cartels, among other things.
I would so love to get a recording of you saying this:
“Relay these words. Prepare for unforseen consequences.”
—-
Yes.
At the time, hubris of the worst kind reigned. Free traders thought they were the masters of the world. What they decided was true. That is when I learned about delusional thinking especially with the ideas about China becoming a democracy through free trade.
JMG and everyone else:
I guess the decline is what comes from delusional thinking from those who believe they are masters of the universe. A never ending cycle of Fortune’s Wheel.
Hi all,
I saw nuclear power mentioned again in the comments. Nuclear power is one of those curious things, like SSTs (super sonic transports for those of you who didn’t grow up reading mid 20th century futurist books) that has a lot of discussion for and against but that consistently ignores the relevant issue. In the case of SST’s the debate was framed around the sonic boom; With nuclear power the discussion is always about proliferation risks, accident risks or waste. In both cases, the real issue, the important one, is economics. SSTs would never pay for themselves without vast subsidies (see the Anglo-French Concorde or the much shorter lived Soviet Tu-144) as they could not compete with slower but cheaper to operate subsonic jets.
Nuclear power is also one of those things that doesn’t really pay for itself but is subsidized for political reasons. Nuclear deterrent is the political justification, either directly via a stockpile of bombs or more subtly through having a developed nuclear industry that could quickly make bombs if the need arises. This latter approach is the tack countries like Japan and Iran took. The electricity from reactors is a nice side benefit but not the primary reason for their existence.
‘Government regulation’ is not why nuclear power has not taken the world by storm. Even in industrialized countries with non-existent environmental laws like China nuclear power cannot turn a profit and is pursued for geopolitical rather than economic reasons. Note the large number of new ICBM complexes, long range strategic bombers and ballistic missile submarines the People’s Liberation Army has in development or is building. All that plutonium has to be manufactured somewhere and without government support none of it would be possible.
I find that habit of framing a debate about a given technology around something irrelevant to the central issue at the heart of that debate to be a fascinating if common rhetorical flourish. I wonder where it came from?
Cheers,
JZ
Came across this article on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. It really resonated with me, all too timely I suppose. April, the cruelest month…
https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/04/14/lincoln-was-a-threat-to-democracy/
Useless… didn’t know those were Booth’s last words. As if Lincoln’s passing wasn’t tragic enough, there’s such a bitterness, maybe a bitterness we’re still living to this day, seems it just lingers in the national psyche. Woulda, shoulda, coulda… if only. I didn’t understand how Booth was able to get so close, now it makes sense, even if it ended up being senseless, useless and sad.
I was left thinking that if the 55% of a recent survey got their death wish, I for one, would be furious. It could be a gloves come off moment. I’m thankful we’re not there but knowing that this vitriol is in people’s hearts, knowing that I have to move among them daily is exhausting, it is depressing. It’s a big if and I for one see the lesson to be learned, how different the nation would be if it was an extended hand in lieu of a bullet.
Dear JMG, I was here in 2006. I was a fast collapse peak oil doomer, but you walked me back from the edge of the doom cliff to see it is a long decline. It’s been a wild ride down the hill since then. I’ve learned a lot , and feel pretty prepared to whatever is coming. Looking forward to your new essays.
Ray Wharton I am delighted to learn that you are prospering. Best wishes for your future health and happiness.
A caution, if I may. Collapse does not mean that legal realities will go away, only that they will be modified to suit present needs and schemes. Predators gonna predate. That is what they do, and a bunch of them, formerly from govt. and private employment, will be looking to scrounge whatever advantage they can buy or steal which lets them live off other people’s efforts. If your buddy Joe the genius builds the ultimate mousetrap and someone else grabs the opportunity and patents it, genius Joe can no longer sell and possibly not even build for his friends any more of his own invention. So I do hope your friends will carefully document, paper work, I know , I hate it too, their efforts.
I think a niche will open up for honest and diligent persons who are suited for the legal profession, and who would rather be respected than rich, to as it were, stand between productive crafts persons and the predators, not all of whom are toting guns. I don’t fear war bands, who often can be negotiated with, nearly as much as I do the hoard of sociopathic Sams and and Sandys who are about to be unleashed on us.
@Ecosophy Enjoyer #125,
I want to second JMG’s prediction about crows becoming apex predators or something close in the future. I feed the crows in my neighborhood fairly often because they are fun to watch. When I first started putting food out in the yard for them, about a dozen of them watched from nearby trees. They waited until I was safely inside the house and then swooped in. Four crows stood sentinel, one facing each direction, while the others ate and as I watched, they took turns standing guard! One would get its fill and switch places with one of the four guards. Their favorite food seems to be raw meat (followed by cheese). These days, they are more casual about my presence and will come up on the porch — not quite being fed by hand, but I can quietly stand there and a few of them will grab stuff on the porch rail three feet away from me. If those guys were bigger, we would all be in trouble.
There is a suspicion among many observers that the end goal of American isolationism is to replace most of the working hands with AI-driven robots. On one hand, this is in no way a sustainable wave of industrialisation. As oil prices keep going up, I wonder how long this model will remain functional.
On the other hand. I am also not sure of how the working class will find work. Perhaps the factories will produce many items, and most of them will prove to be unaffordable for the newly unemployed working class?
I don’t think that will happen. The American industrial-capitalist class is familiar with the outcome, since this is what happened in the Great Depression. Surely they have a better plan than that. Surely…
JMG,
Once you start to entertain the pig-chimp hypothesis, you cannot unsee it. Usually, upon meeting a person, the first thing I think nowadays is “Is this person more of a chimp or more of a pig?” With regard to Roman concrete, I believe that they manifested it as a result of the strong belief in their own permanence. Given that permanence and perfection (except in an imagined future state to strive for) are not values in Faustian civilization, it makes sense that we never discover how they made that concrete, or if we did, would ignore it.
I think our crisis of faith these days is manifesting in planes and helicopters falling out of the sky as well as occasionally widespread internet/software failures.
From the UK https://conscienciadesheep.co.uk/ Tim Morgan on his blog
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/ Gail Tverberg https://ourfiniteworld.com/
Dmitry Orlov (this is a paid blog, but there are free posts) https://boosty.to/cluborlov
I don’t remember the name of the authors, but as far as I understand one of them is the same author of olduvai.ca (also recommended)
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/
In Spanish (I’m of Central American origin), I read this blog for the updated statistics it publishes, and the analysis of the statistics is also quite good (in my opinion). The author is quark (pseudonym, I think he’s a physicist) and his comments are not bad either. With Google Translate it’s easy to translate and read: https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/?m=1
In Spanish, Javier Vinos writes about peak oil in his blog Game Over, he also writes about the climate, in short, he is quite skeptical about the IPCC’s response and studies on the climate, in easily translatable Spanish, he has interesting publications such as that the warming of 2023 was caused by the Tonga volcano
https://www.rankia.com/blog/game-over
Another Spanish-language blog, originally from Spain, covers the technical details of renewable energy, especially photovoltaics, the intermittency of these energies, distribution networks, and all of this, along with commentary on Spanish politics. If anyone wants to read how badly the EU is doing, this blog might shed some light on that curiosity. https://beamspot.substack.com/
The blog of Antonio Turiel, a physicist who works at an oceanic institute (if I remember correctly, he is currently quite pessimistic about the future of Europe). Translatable with the automatic translator https://crashoil.blogspot.com/?m=1
And finally, David Feria, who sometimes posts comments on this blog, the latest post is about the world population https://dfc-economiahistoria.blogspot.com/?m=1
About the weather, it could be https://judithcurry.com/ Javier Vinos publishes there, in English
Rayi, good heavens. It was a casual wild hare of a guess.
Ambrose, I don’t claim to have the expertise either, but I’m far from sure it’s smart to rely on those who do. I think of all those expert geologists who wasted half a century proving, to their own satisfaction, that continental drift couldn’t possibly happen.
Zarcayce, yes. Since I’m not fluent in Spanish I’ll ask my other Spanish-literate readers to assess them and offer their own opinions.
Stephen, I didn’t mean that you had to include active links — just the text of the URL, which you’ve done. Thanks for this. (As you see, no, my pet black hole Fido didn’t eat your post. He leapt for it as it flew past, grabbed it out of midair, and carried it off in triumph to his doghouse, but I check that daily and there it was, unharmed except for a few tooth marks and whatever black holes produce in place of dog slobber.)
Athaia, an amusing synchronicity indeed! “Left-liberal” is a term solely used by hardcore conservatives over here, and I suspect they get it from Europe. As for your right-wing parties, any time a political establishment arranges for all the acceptable parties to push the same agenda, and that agenda is a disaster for large swathes of the populace, people are going to make a beeline for one or more unacceptable parties, because that’s where they can get their grievances acknowledged. If European elites don’t want people to flock to the extreme right, they need to listen to their own people, get off their backsides, and do something about those grievances, instead of just punishing anyone who mentions the problems in public. More on this as we proceed!
MCB, thanks for this.
Other Owen, “minty and refreshing” has got to be one of the most charming putdowns I’ve fielded yet; thank you. I have no idea whether it’ll work, but it seems clear that that’s what the administration is trying.
Dylan, oh, it won’t stop me either way. It’s purely a matter of idle curiosity as to who screeches the loudest.
Devonlad, thank you for these.
Neptunesdolphins, you’ve got a smart pastor.
Tag, I’m not sure whether I’d consider the first performance of Parsifal or the first performance of Tristan and Isolde as the peak moment of European culture; the first is the apex of achievement, but the second (I’m thinking here especially of the Prelude) is the first faint breath of winter. As for Weininger, good heavens — I’m impressed. Next to nobody these days knows about Sex and Character, though every single one of us has encountered the ideas that it promoted. (If any of my other readers are wondering, no, this isn’t a recommendation. Wittgenstein was right when he said that if you put a minus sign in front of everything Weininger wrote, you’d have an important truth.)
Neptunesdolphins, bingo. Those old science fiction serials where the villain shouts “No, this cannot be! I am invincible!” a moment before his entire planet is vaporized had the basics right.
John, thank you for this. You’d think that this straightforward reality would sink in eventually, wouldn’t you? That’s why I say that faith in progress is a surrogate religion; SSTs and nuclear power are among its promised miracles, and that’s why the faithful can’t pay attention to the obvious fact that neither of them ever pay for themselves.
Jeff, I know. It’s especially bleak to realize that it’s precisely the ones who preened themselves over being the Good People, the people who care, who have plunged themselves so deep into fear, hatred, and rage because they didn’t get the president they wanted.
Karl, glad to hear it!
Rajarshi, we’ll see. My guess is that at least some of them may have some sense of the limits of automation.
Dennis, that makes good sense! It was central to the secular mythos of Rome that the empire, once established, would last forever. It’s central to our secular mythos that everything must always change and the old give way perpetually to the new. That this would be reflected in their respective building materials follows naturally.
(Oink, by the way.)
Zarcayce, thank you for these.
There seems to be a mentality, even sometimes on display here, that we can’t possibly bring factories back to the USA — too expensive! Industry apparently didn’t get the memo: factory construction has been booming in the USA these past few years. How soon we have forgotten that Trump’s first round of tariffs went into effect in 2018, and there was neither persistent inflation at that time, nor did the sky fall generally (nor did the Biden administration do away with them, moreover). However, it appears that the factory boom happened somewhat after that in the beginning of the 2020s. I’m guessing it also took not only tariffs but also the additional shock of supply chain issues during the pandemic era to really drive home the point that some industry needs to be brought back to these shores. I also doubt that all the industries we need will return to the USA; some will go to Mexico or Canada, but in any cases these are still neighboring states and trade with them is more feasible in an age of energy descent than long-distance trade with Asia. I expect some global trade to continue, as it certainly did exist prior to the industrial era in the age of sail, but on a smaller scale.
Taking a broader view, it surprises me that we have signs of decline or stagnation all around us and yet the only two allowed stories remain progress or catastrophe. In some ways, having a situation where 100 years elapse with some meager growth at best, a reversal, and then a slow grinding decline probably seems more horrible to many people than these fantasy scenarios. At least progress and catastrophe offer some kind of resolution for good or ill. The reality is likely to be far messier and longer lasting. As I’ve said, the difficulty for me is taking the longer view — many of the things that we see as social ills today, for example the decline of marriage and family and population, may have positive benefits in the longer term as our “overshoot world” of today is a very crowded and stressful place. Living through such a time of social dislocation is distressing, but it wouldn’t have come about without serious pressures, and ultimately what we call decline represents a balancing out of some enormous excesses.
I have been thinking about the situation in the USA lately. I do not live in the USA of course, but it is fascinating. I remember that you shared a crappy diagnosis by some intellectual, alleging that the reason for the outcome of the last election is that the people have become “racist” by listening to right-wing media, which popularises Trump.
The problem is, this diagnosis is incomplete. After all, if we want to figure out the why of something, we need to keep digging. When an answer is presented to the why, we need to ask why of that answer again, don’t we? So I did that. Specifically, why did the people listen to right-wing media with such fervour when they were the very folk who gave Obama two terms in a row? Also, why did right-wing media brandish Trump as the hero, when they have traditionally been loyal to all the old guard of the Republican Party?
The answer to the first, the way I understand it, is that the people specifically find Obama’s vision and policies indelible at this point. It was all nice when he rose to power, but then it became clear that his method – heavy bureaucracy, lenocratic interference in everything from medicine to business, and constant military expedition to every country from Syria to Yemen – was too burdensome for the people. So they turned away from Obama. And the problem with the two failed Democrat candidates is that they have done everything in their power to vex the people with the assurance that they will replicate Obama’s vision to a T, aside from being women.
The other question is more interesting though. Why did right-wing media switch loyalties from the old guard of the Republican Party – which doubtless enjoys the patronage of titanic lobbies like the Koch Brothers – to Donald Trump? The simplest candidate for an answer is that their loyalties are a commodity on auction and Trump bid higher than the rest. But this does not make sense either when you press on and ask another why.
First, how did Trump – presumably with no backers – bid higher than all the lobby of the old guard of the Republican Party? We are talking about the deep, deep pockets that put the Bushes and others into power. Did Trump amass more money than the Republican lobby combined?
I don’t think so. So either he had new sources of revenue – Elon Musk? – or the existing lobby of the Republican Party switched their support from the same-old faux Christian posturers and chose a new champion in Trump. Quite possibly, a combination of both.
At the end of the day, I believe that a politician’s first and most important ally is the person funding their campaign. So you can tell a lot about a politician based on the businesses that foot most of their campaign bill. They are investing money in a potential law-maker, so the laws will be made that favour them if the lawmaker wins. A democracy, after all, is a plutocracy. Voters decide not which ideology is victorious or which politician is, but which businesses have most influence on law.
So who are the people with power? Elon Musk, obviously. Who else is backing Trump? Big Pharma? Koch Brothers and the Fossil Fuels industry? Inland Marines? I think that is the really important question for a productive diagnosis.
The Animist’s Ramblings substack https://animistsramblings.substack.com/
A german man who on his own account went to Thailand in 2014 aged 21 to never come back since.
There he went to a rural region with a thai woman and does garden culture, earning his returns also by tree climbing, harvesting, pruning.
Since five and a half years at some point he has not slept anywhere else than in his tropical self built home.
There are interesting ramblings on the limits of industrial civilization, agriculture on his blog, a lot of quality content also on his agricultural workings there.
Also heavy reports on pesticides, soil destruction and many things around, with studies of a rapid increase in cancer in many regions around, for example.
A great read of a humble man.
I found it via the Honest Sorcerer Blog someone posted here, with ther numbers and charts on peak steel in the global economy.
I suggest the cumulative effect of historical collective trauma manifests like the biophysical trauma reaction of narrow eye sight – many of us are numb (freeze dorsal vagal nervous system response) or in flight (sympathetic nervous system) ignoring the big picture, the deep time, the complex uncertainty. With dominion practises targeting evolved nest child rearing and declining rites of passage to ensure enough wise Elders to uphold healthy human flourishing, many of us have limited capacity for both holding the current magnitude of loss (to human and nonhumans) as well as the imagination and celebration for what can be possible.
What do we do when Trump fall? Yes we need to mourn, yes we need to support the most affected, yes we need to prevent what we can of social security, democracy, forests and civil rights. And some of us are called to the great turning paradigm shift, the shift in consciousness and creating the alternatives. Preparing the soil, the compost from modernity and dictatorship – what can grow there ?
If you knew that modernity will collapse in 1 year, in 10, in 30 years, what would you do? Knowing it has collapsed already for many of the global majority. Have you read Vanessa Andreotti? Thank you.
JMG, I thought I would do a quick ” top of my head” summary of the progress of collapse since I first started reading ” The Archdruid Report” in 2006.
My hometown of Portland Oregon has had its reputation changed from being one of the best managed cities in America to one of the worst of the West Coast Doom Loop cities.
The medical industrial complex has declined drastically , with actual private practice doctors still available in 2006 to be replaced with HMO run ” care teams” today.
Most middle class people could still afford to own a home in 2006, while that becoming much rarer today.
The US military could still throw middle sized non-western countries ” up against the wall” like what was done in Iraq in 2006 ( not a good thing, but evidence of power). And now we have been kicked out of Afghanistan and are literally being laughed out by Yemen.
The Higher education industrial complex was still on a roll in 2006 with increasing enrollments and ever higher tuitions. But now it is in drastic decline with colleges closing on a weekly basis, and even the most prestigious colleges international reputations in decline.
In 2006, US created music and movies were both significant cultural forces in the world and they have now dwindled to insignificance.
In 2006 most household appliances were still made in the US and had resonable durability, but today they are mostly made offshore ( all microwaves are made in the same factory in China) and are getting the reputation for abysmal durability.
I could go on, but that is just what comes to mind now.
HI JMG and friends,
What a difference a few months makes, eh? I remember before the election that I predicted in one of these comment threads that Trump in his second term would prove to be a “milquetoast conservative” with more bluster than concrete impact. Perhaps that will still end up being true, but in the few months Trump has been in power he has, for better or worse, shaken things to the core. Given how disastrously wrong my predictions have been so far on this front, I am uneager to try my hand at more of them, but I feel Trump will be remembered as the second coming of Herbert Hoover when all is said and done.
Zarcayce (108),
China is governed by a Marxist party, and Marxism is the ultimate form of the “faith of progress.” The Chinese are trying their hardest to push forward, and things like solar panels, biotechnology and recently thorium reactors are being studied there. I don’t know if they will be able to overcome the impending ecological crisis but judging by their actions, they certainly believe that industrial civilization is only headed upwards.
jean 174
Apropos feeding corvids: I have fed scrub jays who would take food from my hand, shoulder, wherever. The problem was that when I had had enough of it, they hadn’t and would still jump up on me looking for more. glad they aren’t twice my size. They chase all the other birds away too.
Stephen
Interesting article on Trump tariffs today @ moonofalabama.org
excellent article today on consciousnessofsheep.co.uk: who will be our Mussolini?
Re “macroevolution”: I read the site a few years back when it was first mentioned here. McCarthy has set his theory up in such a way that it can never be falsified. Any traces of hybridization might become invisible after some time. To my mind, that removes it from the realm of science.
Hey JMG
On the subject of new sources related to themes of peak oil and decline, a very interesting graphic novel came out recently in a few mainstream bookstores called “World without End” by Blain and Jancovici.
I have not read it thoroughly, only skimmed it, but it was immediately clear that it talks about many of the same stuff you do. It was originally published in French, before being recently published in English. The only downside it has is that it does suggest that Nuclear power is a solution.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/457628/world-without-end-by-blain-jean-marc-jancovici-and-christophe/9780241661949
Deneb, I’ve seen the same thing. It’s quite odd, given that — as you’ve noted — factories are being built in the US as I type this, and big multinationals are investing billions of dollars into building more to insure themselves against tariffs. I suspect that here again we’re seeing the impact of the myth of progress: since the “post-industrial economy” got anointed as the next great leap forward in progress by Daniel Bell, the thought that we could go back to an industrial economy gets shrieks of superstitious fear from true believers.
Rajarshi, it’s partly that, but there’s another factor. Unlike either the Democrats or the mainstream Republicans, Trump appeals to a large share of the voters. Until he came on the scene, it was purely a matter of choosing between nearly indistinguishable candidates in the hope of getting one that was a little less worse than the other. Trump, by contrast, broke with the consensus and offered genuine alternatives, and that gave him a mass following the GOP couldn’t risk alienating.
Curt, thanks for this.
Malin, er, did you read a single solitary word of my post? Modernity will not end on a specific date; the transformations now under way are part of a process that will take centuries to unfold. The Great Turning has been predicted over and over again for decades now, and continues to pull a no-show; I suggest that waiting for it to solve our problems is a waste of everyone’s time. As for the fall of Trump, until you understand why he rose, your chances of doing anything useful at this turn of history’s wheel are pretty meager. No, I haven’t read Vanessa Andreotti; if you want to recommend something, I’ll put it on my to-read list.
Clay, that’s a good first sketch; thank you.
Writing, nah, Hoover was the archetypal milquetoast conservative. His response to the Great Depression was exactly the same as Barack Obama’s response to the 2008 crisis — throw lots of money at the big banks and try to convince everyone that things really weren’t as bad as they actually are. I don’t claim to know how all this is going to work out, but Trump — and far more importantly, the interests and power centers backing him — seem to be committed to radical change, which was the antithesis of Hoover’s goal.
Stephen, thanks for this.
Aldarion, no, he’s simply explained why obvious signs of it can’t be found in the genetic code. That leaves many other avenues of research open, if anybody bothers to take them. His site suggests several.
J.L.Mc12, interesting. I was expecting more pro-nucelar propaganda at this point, so this doesn’t greatly surprise me.
Rajarshi: “Did Trump amass more money than the Republican lobby combined?”
No, but what do politicians do with all that money? Spend it on advertising. Trump got free advertising. The media loved him, to the point that mainstream candidates found it hard to whip up interest in their economic plans when Trump was out there saying some outrageous thing that dominated the newsmedia that week.
Clay Dennis: “The Higher education industrial complex was still on a roll in 2006…”
There was a dip in the 1990s with the Dotcom Bubble (MBA programs were particularly affected), and then again with 9-11, which made it harder for foreign students to enroll.
“In 2006, US created music and movies were both significant cultural forces in the world and they have now dwindled to insignificance.”
Objectively false, the usual Hollywood blockbusters still dominate overseas too, along with a few foreign breakouts like the Nezha cartoons (about a popular Chinese deity-hero, a mischievous child). Theater-going is in decline everywhere, though. It will be interesting to see how the new Avengers movies do in 2026 and 2027.
Koch Brothers is down to Koch brother. David Koch died in 2019, it’s just Charles now.
As to why Trump won, in 2016 Hillary called half the country “a basket of deplorables”. In 2024 Biden called half the country “garbage” after he was no longer running. Senile slip or sabotage of his own party for deserting him? Insert shrug.
Similarly Romney in 2012 was caught calling 47% of the country freeloaders because they didn’t pay income taxes. Of course mad dog economic rapists like him (Bain Capital) are why so many people are too poor to pay income taxes. Romney lost of course.
Insulting people you want to vote for you is bad tactics but both sides are doing it.
I’d noticed his absence for several months, and recall he’d been in poor health prior to that… but this topic makes me think of and send good thoughts to Oilman2, wherever he is. I’d hoped to have him here for this conversation.
Hi John Michael,
It’s weird isn’t it? I’ve just seen both sides of that manufacturing story close up and personal, and the things I hear said about that option, just don’t stack up. What the good people perhaps don’t wish to admit, is that off shoring of manufacturing dumped a whole bunch of pollutants in another part of the world, and benefitted from the economics of wage and condition arbitrage. Seemed a dumb move to me, and I recall the glee the political elites had when the last of the car manufacturing industry was shut down. It’s no small skill to be able to produce a vehicle from design to end product, and only a handful of countries on the planet can do that.
The funny thing about limits, is that they apply even if only a few acknowledge them.
Cheers
Chris
Re: animal hybrids and macroevolution.
A dog-fox hybrid, Dogxim, has been found in Brazil. Dog have 37 chromosome pairs and foxes have 39 pairs. Dogxim had 38 pairs of chromosomes:
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/13/15/2505
I haven’t noticed that anyone has mentioned Peak Prosperity yet as a blog/website discussing these issues. Lately there hasn’t been much directly focused on peak oil, though there has been some. Chris Martenson, the founder of the site, mostly looks at what he calls the Three E’s: Economy, Energy, and the Environment, and how they interrelate. Discussions tend to revolve much more around specific things happening in politics and culture right now that relate.
Here’s the address: https://peakprosperity.com/
“Reduce every problem to the effects of a single cause, and (in theory) you can find a single solution for it”
At the risk of stating the obvious, this makes a pretty good description of the response to Trump. So many people believed, or wanted to believe, that he was the cause of the trouble and so behaved as though getting rid of Trump would get rid of the trouble.
Of course we’re in much bigger trouble than just Trump; and the Trump phenomenon is just one effect of that big trouble; and whatever trouble the Trump phenomenon has caused and will cause in turn, we have a constellation of other causes of trouble to cope with as well. Like the old men waiting to see what will be the thing to finally do them in if not heart disease, if the US hadn’t gotten the Trump phenomenon, we would be getting someone or something else like it instead.
Siliconguy, no argument there.
Temporaryreality, I hope we’ll hear from him sometime soon.
Chris, exactly. The whole thing will go down in history as one of the greatest of all dumb stunts.
Team10tim, a fine example! Thank you.
David, thanks for this.
Jonathan, excellent. Yes, exactly — by insisting that everything would be fine if only that awful Orange Man hadn’t shown up, they can pretend that their preferred policies weren’t the utter basket case they turned out to be.