Tag: historical cycles

A Game of Musical Chairs

John Michael Greer333 Comments

Some turning points in history are impossible to miss. They involve battle-cries and the clash of weapons, gatherings making decisions that can never be undone, and equally obvious events. Then there are the turning points that slip past unnoticed by most of the people whose lives they will overturn. I’ve come to think that one…

Lords of the Fall

John Michael Greer366 Comments

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…

A Neglected Factor in the Fall of Civilizations

John Michael Greer253 Comments

One of the many reasons I enjoy writing these weekly essays is that they give me the opportunity to look at the world in new ways. Too many writers fall into the trap of saying the same things over and over again in different words—sometimes for a while, sometimes until death taps the author on…

Beyond Thaumatophobia 3: The End of the Age of Reason

John Michael Greer232 Comments

Over the last month, in the course of these biweekly essays, I’ve been exploring the fear of the metaphysical realm well expressed by Naomi Wolf in one of her recent Substack posts. A more recent post by her on the same theme takes the same discussion further, in a way that deserves respect.  She took…

When Nature Gazes Back

John Michael Greer279 Comments

It’s been a month since I last posted on the theme of disenchantment, and a lively month at that. The cracks in America’s global empire have become increasingly visible around the world.  Here at home the mentally challenged resident of the White House continues to blunder through a vague approximation of his constitutional duties while…

Waiting For The Fall

John Michael Greer438 Comments

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, hasn’t it? A Pfizer executive admitted under oath that all those claims that the Covid vaccine would protect you from catching Covid had no data at all backing them.  Inevitably, corporate media flacks are now insisting at the top of their lungs, in the teeth of ample evidence,…

Whispers of the Fall

John Michael Greer354 Comments

It’s been sixteen years now since I first started posting these weekly essays to the internet. Though I didn’t originally intend them to focus on the crisis of industrial society, that theme was impossible for me to evade, and I soon gave up trying; there was too much that had to be said about the…

Tomorrowland Has Fallen!

John Michael Greer472 Comments

Has anyone else noticed just how odd it is that so many people on the progressive end of our cultural landscape are frantically trying to convince everyone that the Omicron variant, the latest mutation of the Covid-19 cold virus, really is the end of the world? I freely grant that a lot of people are…

What We Can Still Accomplish

John Michael Greer356 Comments

One of the unexpected benefits of posting my reflections on the future of industrial society in public is that quite often I get advance warning of events on the horizon that others haven’t anticipated yet.  Sometimes, I’m glad to say, it’s because someone in my commentariat happens to have noticed an obscure news story or…

The Long View

John Michael Greer395 Comments

For more than three years now, the themes of these online essays of mine—here, and in my previous blog The Archdruid Report—have had a relatively tight focus on the events of the present day. That hasn’t been accidental by any means. In 2016, strains that had been building for years within Western industrial civilization burst…