When I commented two weeks ago that we had strayed into a Wagnerian period of history, I wasn’t anticipating events like those of the Saturday just past. Nonetheless, here we are, with an apparent fluke of circumstance only an opera composer could get away with being acted out in broad daylight, sending the destiny of…
Tag: decline and fall
The Nibelung’s Ring: Prelude
(Theme music: “Vorspiel” from Das Rheingold) Some years ago, back when I was blogging on The Archdruid Report, I mentioned in passing that if I ever got tired of having a large readership, I would do a series of posts on Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. That was partly a joke, but only…
Walking Away From The Marketplace
The recent sequence of posts here on lenocracy (from Latin leno, a pimp)—that is, the form of political economy in which productive economic activity gets squeezed dry by various kinds of legally mandated pimping—has fielded a response I find interesting. Next to nobody has tried to argue that lenocracy is an unfair description of the…
Lenocracy in Extremis: The Case of Publishing
I really did mean to go on to a different subject this week, rather than talking further about the system of political economy I’ve labeled lenocracy (from Latin leno, a pimp)—that is, a system that treats productive economic activity as a sucker’s game, to be milked dry by the two grasping hands of corporate power…
The Secret of the Sages
Two weeks ago we talked about the way that life throughout the modern industrial world has fallen into the grip of lenocracy—that is, a system in which pimping of one kind or another is the most common feature of economic life, or in less idiosyncratic language, a system in which every economic exchange is exploited…
Beyond Lenocracy
I think most people have had the experience of watching a jumble of unorganized thoughts sort out all at once into a lattice of meanings, with a single word filling the role of seed crystal. It’s something that happens to me tolerably often. Much of the direction of my life was set, for example, one…
The Laughter of Wolves
As I write these words, lean gray wolves are pacing through a rain-soaked landscape in eastern Europe. Dim rumbling sounds in the far distance, like summer thunder that’s strayed into the wrong season, don’t bother them. Nor does it trouble them that the forest around them is dotted with the decaying ruins of buildings abandoned…
An Unfamiliar World
Last month’s post on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers…
Deindustrial Warfare: A First Reconaissance
This January has five Wednesdays, and in the usual way of this blog, the fifth Wednesday gets an essay on whatever topic the readers select by vote. As usual, it was a lively contest, but this time one of the perennial underdogs—warfare in the deindustrial age—came out on top. That didn’t surprise me greatly. The…
The Three Stigmata of J.R.R. Tolkien
Understand the thoughts that a person or a nation won’t allow itself to think and you grasp something crucial about that person or nation. Find the source of the barrier that keeps either one from entertaining those forbidden thoughts and you know something even more important. As America stumbles blindly forward into an unwelcome future,…