the root of "jihad" "jahada" is "to strive"... and primarily to do with striving with, working on one's self rather than the so-called "holy war" stuff on others; 'war' against others would be a last resort or in self-defense. In context, though not familiar with "Butlerian jihad" i would say that people could look more at how they can get along, be content, rely on intuition, etc. without blindly following, being addicted to technology. And with the devastation or war being inflicted on the Earth, this is a time for choices as to how to best respond.
Absolutely. Butlerian Jihad is a reference to the 1965 science fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert. A major theme in the book is that the development of human intelligence and other skills has been prioritized for thousands of years following the disastrous rise of AI and a resulting "Butlerian Jihad" in which computers and robots were destroyed.
Thx, Max. Read the book back in the 20th c. and don't remember much except the mood of the scenario and some of the action. Not atypical of some sci-fi, amazing how forward-thinking.
Perhaps some of that depends on the author's perspective e.g. in simplified terms, pessimistic or optimistic, and then there's the knack for tuning-in to the future; little did i know watching Star Trek that cell-phones would happen.
Yes. I'm always struck in particular by sci-fi that doesn't mention any other Earth species besides humans. The human supremacism in the genre is deep (as it is in the whole culture).
Very interesting observation, Max. Most of my sci-fi reading phase was decades ago, before i was specifically aware of "human supremacism". One of my biggest influences as a writer and i enjoy his writings, Ray Bradbury. Recently got a collection of short stories so now will see about what you mention. He's known for showing the human side of sci-fi rather than all the techno-machine-etc. aspect. He has wonderful descriptions of the natural world, too, and many stories are more so wildly imaginative than sci-fi. A bit of his writing advice: "For the first thing a writer should be is -- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches. God knows it'd be better for his health." Yard work and gardening help me balance, and i admire how you're both an excellent writer plus with 'activism' you are, in effect, picking peaches and digging ditches.
Your example of a train is good, pointing out the mining and coal needed for smelting. I’m not certain of the EROI for coal, but know for oil estimates are 40 to 60 years. So-called green technology can’t be built, maintained or replaced without fossil fuels. Degrowth has already started without a plan in place. Energy prices will go up causing inflation in every sector. Consumption driven economies will fall into permanent recessions or worse. Degrowth has some solid ideas, but needed to be embarked on 50 years ago. We’re in for a rough ride on numerous fronts.
We're definitely in for a rough ride, Geoffrey. I wrote this piece originally as a homework assignment for my Master's Degree in Degrowth, and I don't think enough people — the movement as a whole — have grappled with the idea of degrowth as a planned method alongside degrowth as an unstoppable ecological consequence that has already begun, or will soon, on a global scale. In other words, the interplay between collapse and deliberate degrowth. Unfortunately, we're still at the nadir of civilization, and so the damage is accelerating for the time being...
The descent is here, IMO. The economy has been a house of cards for years with nothing substantive holding it up, and both personal and national debt increasing wildly. This "administration" is stepping on the gas on every front including further deliberate impoverishment of the working class, eliminating any chance of softening what was already going to be a hard crash.
I agree, Geoffrey. I think it’s been here for a long time. But inequality is baked in, so as ecology and the majority of people are well into collapse, the wealthy and those in the ruling class continue to grow their wealth, power, influence, etc. It creates the illusion of “progress.”
That illusion only exists among the wealthy. The struggling majority have been left out of the unsustainable spoils for decades. I wonder if it's possible to harness that anger and tie it to a sustainable version of the future? Will enough struggling by whites result in an opportunity to change minds and realize our interests align with Indigenous ideas, not billionaires?
I wonder. We're deeply inculcated into the cult of progress. I have a sinking feeling that it will require true hardship for some time before things change. As the saying goes, paradigms don't shift because people change their minds, but usually because people who thought in the old way simply die, and the new way of thinking becomes the norm. That may be some time away...
Hardship is at the doorstep with what the Trump administration is doing. Recognizing the limits of growth and overshoot not. America has been built on capitalism generation after generation. Other than significant individual voices screaming into the abyss, we have yet to realize a new way of thinking and time is of the essence. Unaddressed climate change is now ravaging the world, and I believe the Arctic and the oceans are tipped.
I believe like this is humanity's now or never moment.
Much of this resonates with me and there is no doubt that the concentration of power and wealth will eventually implode leaving something of a black hole that will suck in much of the infrastructure of mass control.
Technology is a very wide term and while your examples are well within the category of net harm the failure of capitalism will quickly lead to a substantial diminution in energy and resources (see Anacasper’s recent post) and we will be more able to take stock. Communications will be important to help coordinate and support community building for instance whether that be internet based or short wave radio.
The real point is that some technology will be needed although the scale may be a good deal smaller than current forms which addresses both the resource and power issues - at least to some extent.
Technology is indeed a broad term, Richard. In the long term, I think technologies which require large scale extraction (such as mining), high-temperature smelting, and international trade are unsustainable and ecologically irredeemable. Of course, this doesn't mean that people won't use technology for some good purposes in the meantime, or that post-collapse certain technologies won't be useful and will inevitably be repurposed from the scraps of techno-industrial-civilization's fall. But again, over the long run, I think there's a big distinction between useful and ecologically sustainable. "Needed" is in the eye of the beholder.
Yes. Few people know that the owner of the LA Times, for example — which often runs editorials and puff pieces about green technology — is himself a green tech billionaire. Similar stories are so common across the political spectrum and across the media, and, as you note, among funders of major green organizations.
Massive human overpopulation/overconsumption has the world "on the brink" of climate collapse. We are now 3,000 more populous than were our migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestors, about 1M of whom still hang onto that ecologically balanced and sustainable lifeway worldwide. The techno state is imploding and will accelerate its own demise with AI, inspite of Tramp's best, most self-serving efforts to the contrary. In the end, ANYTHING that brings down the number of humans and our overconsumption of natural resources is a plus for Mother Nature and the surviving H-G clans/bands worldwide.
Hi Max. Yes it’s “basic overshoot” driven by basic, massive human overpopulation. We are now 3,000 times more numerous and consuming equivalently more natural resources (overshoot) than were our self-sustaining ecologically balanced population stable ancestral Hunter-Gatherers/pastoralists. I’m a retired physician and discovered this reality as the core cause of ALL human “stress diseases”, as laid out in my 2018 book, “Stress R Us”, available for free on the net as a downloadable PDF. Have a blessed day. Gregg
Thanks again, Max, especially for speaking on the Mayan perspective on the need for human restraint in "technological innovation"--consulting with and listening respectfully to Earth first, instead of recklessly taking action. That is generally the way of Indigenous and truly green tech peoples everywhere, and probably our entire species 12,000 or more years ago. "Low-tech" ways are a sign of a different type of intelligence, not a sign of "inferiority," "white supremacy" or "western ingenuity" that so many want to believe or were conditioned to believe. Western concepts of intelligence and "successful" life skills ("high tech"), such as "faster is better than slow," "more material goods is always better than less," "aggression is more practical than cautious or thoughtful passivity," "survival of the fittest," "every man for himself," etc., would be considered products of very low intelligence, or even insanity, to people of the old ways. What is really insane about the dominant, high-tech, over-consumptive prevailing way of these times is that almost nobody can see that it all must be stopped and abandoned for the existence of our species and most other species to continue. The vast majority of our species does not even know how to be an Earthling, living harmoniously with the planet who freely gives us life. We don't even know how to live without electricity!!
As always, very well said George! Thank you. I'm reminded of Chief Caleen Sisk from the Winnemum Wintu, who was raised without electricity, and reminded the crowd in San Francisco that it is "a convenience." She contrasted it with water, which is a true necessity.
Many say more dangerous than nuclear weapons as they access humans directly (selectively).
Also other posts by @ICATOR
Look what was done to a smart, caring Senior Software Engineer (implanting false memories, erasing identity, 24/7 outcast straight into human's brains):
Oh, that pencil, what technology. And the quill pen. Every treaty signed by Uncle Sam and his minions broken with First Nations.
The pen is mightier than the sword, for sure.
Busy busy busy psychotic brains, that old Oppen-Monster-Heimer saw -- "To men like us, the rules need not apply." -- Oppenheimer
:And so the Israelization and Gazafication of the Globe is in high gear, and so there is no green tech, no green movement, as green is the new green, and the overlords and their Eichmann's and family lines will never go gently into the night.
Until we start from the ground up. Seemingly haphazardly Molotovs here and grenades there.
No?
No cookbook for the new anarchist? Jamming those drones with a 200.00 jamming device? No?
It just gets really worse, and the Last American Vagabond with Whitney Webb is telling, as is Alison McDowell's Wrenchinthegears.
You have to know the enemy, and it is this Megalomania White Psychotic royal inbred.
Take a deep breath and watch:
The Palantir Panopticon & Trump's New Big Tech-Led "Private Health Tracking System" w/ 7Sees
The grand narrative is also a meta-narrative. Or usually, and in the post internet culture of the West everything is becoming ‘meta’. As real life recedes, both materially, and cognitively, there is a sense in which institutions come to replace myth. Now the Empire (all empires) have a close relationship to Apocalypse. And they spend some effort to manage apocalypse and to always mediate any insistence on specific dates for end-times. But the myths of the West today, and here science is foremost, have both secularized apocalypse, but also rationalized it and sort of branded it. The entire apparatus of climate propaganda, as an example, is fear mongering but fear mongering always has an implied apocalypse at the end of it. Without apocalypse the threat of rising temperatures just means changing holiday destinations.
I see a correspondence between Apocalypse (however diluted) and the desperation of a declining Empire (those morbid symptoms again). Between (if we are Jungian again for a moment) between archetype and the contemporary symbolic slippage I noted above (fathers without fatherhood). Apocalypse becomes not just diluted by but incorporated into the cult of science, and by extension into the myth of progress. Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity over a hundred years ago. And not really all that much has been added to this idea and theoretical physics has reached an absolute dead end. And this is another source of desperation for the Empire. The new frontier is, of course, digital and all the predictions of android takeover, of AI ruling the world and taking control of everything, etc. This is the new Apocalypse.
The year 1000 was the first prediction for Apocalypse. But it passed without global catastrophe.
“Focillon’s treatment of the year 1000 reflects his interest in the way not only the millennium but the century and other fundamentally arbitrary chronological divisions—we might simply call them saecula—are made to bear the weight of our anxieties and hopes; they are, as he remarks, “intemporal/ but we project them onto history, making it ‘a perpetual calendar of human anxiety.’ They help us to find ends and beginnings. They explain our senescence, our renovations; when we associate them with empire we are celebrating our desire for human kinds of order; when we find rational objections to them we indulge our powers of rational censorship in such matters; and when we refuse to be dejected by disconfirmed predictions we are only asserting a permanent need to live by the pattern rather than the fact, as indeed we must.”
Frank Kermode (Ibid)
Morbid subjectivity, which is inextricably bound up with psychopathic disorders. That deeper psychodynamic register, a term Robert Fletcher,Valerie Puleo and Jan Breitling used in their paper (Barbarian hordes: the overpopulation scapegoat in international development discourse :Third World Quarterly, 2014) is in response to the irrational fear of ‘overpopulation’. Now there is no overpopulation, no threat of it, in fact there is demographic collapse throughout the world. A neat segue back to the fact so few people are reproducing. And all of this is neatly bound up and buoyed by the increasingly sterile western sciences.
And Karp is the representation of all the dirty hell those 130 Jewish Billionaires Are Unleashing on the Palestinians, and thusly, we are all in their sights -- Gazafication of the Planet. ...
The non-native horse was a new technology. George Wuerthner presents the evidence that bison were in serious decline and extirpated in some areas decades before the railroad existed.
Thanks for sharing that link, Heidi. I read that piece back in 2021 when it was written. I don't know enough about the topic to comment intelligently, but there is no doubt that the railroads rolled over the top of an already heavily ecologically and culturally disrupted situation.
It's funny you posted on this topic because last night my husband and I were lamenting what had happened to the majority of environmental and social justice organisations/the entire movement in the last 20-30 years. And here you are documenting the decay even of a group of thought that stood in opposition to the corporatising mainstream environmental movement at its outset. Of course, for your arguments people will call you puritanical and/or eco-fascist — probably already have, since playing the ball long since took a back seat and playing the person is how it's done now...it requires so much less thought and consideration.
Surely "de-growth" people should see that those things discussed are not de-growth, just as "environmental" movements in general should see that (industrial) "green tech" is an oxymoron, and that corporations make compromising bedfellows. But the dominant culture insanity, and its way of organising, end up contaminating everything eventually like a virus. Maybe that's wetiko doing its thing.
We used to be lefties, but the left is so broken, and lately so utterly insane, that we can no longer identify as such, or as anything else when it seems only insanity is on offer.
And how did a movement that began with the commendable idea of not allowing bigotry and bullying towards people with severe gender dysphoria who wanted to live quietly as the opposite of their birth sex become a movement that wants me burnt at the stake for even talking (as a biologist who studied these things in detail) about the biology and embryology of sex determination in animals (and how industrial pollution has impacted these) instead of accepting their groupthink and newspeak that says none of that is real, I'm a bigot for mentioning it and male or female is whatever any human says they feel/want to be (and intersex doesn't exist, quit othering already)? I officially give up on modern people. This is the insanity accompanying the fall of the Roman empire, several magnitudes up. It's good to be off-grid these days.
Thanks for sharing this, Sue. It's definitely clear that we're seeing the decline in discourse and culture — as well as sanity, to be frank — with civilization at its nadir of speed, size, and necro-political development. And you're right about the Wetiko. I think that really is the key to so much of this. Jack Forbes was truly on to something with his analysis.
checkout this piece The Myth of Neutral Technology by Justin McAffee
https://collapsecurriculum.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-neutral-technology/comments
Thanks for sharing! Justin is a friend of mine.
not surprised that you are friends!
the root of "jihad" "jahada" is "to strive"... and primarily to do with striving with, working on one's self rather than the so-called "holy war" stuff on others; 'war' against others would be a last resort or in self-defense. In context, though not familiar with "Butlerian jihad" i would say that people could look more at how they can get along, be content, rely on intuition, etc. without blindly following, being addicted to technology. And with the devastation or war being inflicted on the Earth, this is a time for choices as to how to best respond.
Absolutely. Butlerian Jihad is a reference to the 1965 science fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert. A major theme in the book is that the development of human intelligence and other skills has been prioritized for thousands of years following the disastrous rise of AI and a resulting "Butlerian Jihad" in which computers and robots were destroyed.
Thx, Max. Read the book back in the 20th c. and don't remember much except the mood of the scenario and some of the action. Not atypical of some sci-fi, amazing how forward-thinking.
Yes. As a longtime fan of the genre, it's amazing to me how much of it is consciously (or unintentionally) dystopian in an ecological sense.
Perhaps some of that depends on the author's perspective e.g. in simplified terms, pessimistic or optimistic, and then there's the knack for tuning-in to the future; little did i know watching Star Trek that cell-phones would happen.
Yes. I'm always struck in particular by sci-fi that doesn't mention any other Earth species besides humans. The human supremacism in the genre is deep (as it is in the whole culture).
Very interesting observation, Max. Most of my sci-fi reading phase was decades ago, before i was specifically aware of "human supremacism". One of my biggest influences as a writer and i enjoy his writings, Ray Bradbury. Recently got a collection of short stories so now will see about what you mention. He's known for showing the human side of sci-fi rather than all the techno-machine-etc. aspect. He has wonderful descriptions of the natural world, too, and many stories are more so wildly imaginative than sci-fi. A bit of his writing advice: "For the first thing a writer should be is -- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches. God knows it'd be better for his health." Yard work and gardening help me balance, and i admire how you're both an excellent writer plus with 'activism' you are, in effect, picking peaches and digging ditches.
Anyone who thinks trains can help needs to see what HS2 has done to England.
Definitely.
Your example of a train is good, pointing out the mining and coal needed for smelting. I’m not certain of the EROI for coal, but know for oil estimates are 40 to 60 years. So-called green technology can’t be built, maintained or replaced without fossil fuels. Degrowth has already started without a plan in place. Energy prices will go up causing inflation in every sector. Consumption driven economies will fall into permanent recessions or worse. Degrowth has some solid ideas, but needed to be embarked on 50 years ago. We’re in for a rough ride on numerous fronts.
We're definitely in for a rough ride, Geoffrey. I wrote this piece originally as a homework assignment for my Master's Degree in Degrowth, and I don't think enough people — the movement as a whole — have grappled with the idea of degrowth as a planned method alongside degrowth as an unstoppable ecological consequence that has already begun, or will soon, on a global scale. In other words, the interplay between collapse and deliberate degrowth. Unfortunately, we're still at the nadir of civilization, and so the damage is accelerating for the time being...
The descent is here, IMO. The economy has been a house of cards for years with nothing substantive holding it up, and both personal and national debt increasing wildly. This "administration" is stepping on the gas on every front including further deliberate impoverishment of the working class, eliminating any chance of softening what was already going to be a hard crash.
I agree, Geoffrey. I think it’s been here for a long time. But inequality is baked in, so as ecology and the majority of people are well into collapse, the wealthy and those in the ruling class continue to grow their wealth, power, influence, etc. It creates the illusion of “progress.”
That illusion only exists among the wealthy. The struggling majority have been left out of the unsustainable spoils for decades. I wonder if it's possible to harness that anger and tie it to a sustainable version of the future? Will enough struggling by whites result in an opportunity to change minds and realize our interests align with Indigenous ideas, not billionaires?
I wonder. We're deeply inculcated into the cult of progress. I have a sinking feeling that it will require true hardship for some time before things change. As the saying goes, paradigms don't shift because people change their minds, but usually because people who thought in the old way simply die, and the new way of thinking becomes the norm. That may be some time away...
Hardship is at the doorstep with what the Trump administration is doing. Recognizing the limits of growth and overshoot not. America has been built on capitalism generation after generation. Other than significant individual voices screaming into the abyss, we have yet to realize a new way of thinking and time is of the essence. Unaddressed climate change is now ravaging the world, and I believe the Arctic and the oceans are tipped.
I believe like this is humanity's now or never moment.
Much of this resonates with me and there is no doubt that the concentration of power and wealth will eventually implode leaving something of a black hole that will suck in much of the infrastructure of mass control.
Technology is a very wide term and while your examples are well within the category of net harm the failure of capitalism will quickly lead to a substantial diminution in energy and resources (see Anacasper’s recent post) and we will be more able to take stock. Communications will be important to help coordinate and support community building for instance whether that be internet based or short wave radio.
The real point is that some technology will be needed although the scale may be a good deal smaller than current forms which addresses both the resource and power issues - at least to some extent.
Technology is indeed a broad term, Richard. In the long term, I think technologies which require large scale extraction (such as mining), high-temperature smelting, and international trade are unsustainable and ecologically irredeemable. Of course, this doesn't mean that people won't use technology for some good purposes in the meantime, or that post-collapse certain technologies won't be useful and will inevitably be repurposed from the scraps of techno-industrial-civilization's fall. But again, over the long run, I think there's a big distinction between useful and ecologically sustainable. "Needed" is in the eye of the beholder.
"Needed" should be determined by the ecological laws of Nature, not by the desires and imaginations of degraded modern humans.
Absolutely, George. “Need” is socially and ideologically constructed more often than not, these days.
This is one result of the takeover of opposition efforts by lovers of technology, who want to have their intact ecosystem cake and eat it too.
Yes. Few people know that the owner of the LA Times, for example — which often runs editorials and puff pieces about green technology — is himself a green tech billionaire. Similar stories are so common across the political spectrum and across the media, and, as you note, among funders of major green organizations.
I didn't know that! WOW! Not surprised, the LA Times is a major capitalist media company,
Yeah. It’s not hidden, but they don’t exactly advertise the fact. The illusion of neutrality must be maintained.
Massive human overpopulation/overconsumption has the world "on the brink" of climate collapse. We are now 3,000 more populous than were our migratory Hunter-Gatherer ancestors, about 1M of whom still hang onto that ecologically balanced and sustainable lifeway worldwide. The techno state is imploding and will accelerate its own demise with AI, inspite of Tramp's best, most self-serving efforts to the contrary. In the end, ANYTHING that brings down the number of humans and our overconsumption of natural resources is a plus for Mother Nature and the surviving H-G clans/bands worldwide.
It's basic overshoot, but unfortunately this essential knowledge isn't taught in our culture, let alone to all young people as it should be.
Hi Max. Yes it’s “basic overshoot” driven by basic, massive human overpopulation. We are now 3,000 times more numerous and consuming equivalently more natural resources (overshoot) than were our self-sustaining ecologically balanced population stable ancestral Hunter-Gatherers/pastoralists. I’m a retired physician and discovered this reality as the core cause of ALL human “stress diseases”, as laid out in my 2018 book, “Stress R Us”, available for free on the net as a downloadable PDF. Have a blessed day. Gregg
Thanks again, Max, especially for speaking on the Mayan perspective on the need for human restraint in "technological innovation"--consulting with and listening respectfully to Earth first, instead of recklessly taking action. That is generally the way of Indigenous and truly green tech peoples everywhere, and probably our entire species 12,000 or more years ago. "Low-tech" ways are a sign of a different type of intelligence, not a sign of "inferiority," "white supremacy" or "western ingenuity" that so many want to believe or were conditioned to believe. Western concepts of intelligence and "successful" life skills ("high tech"), such as "faster is better than slow," "more material goods is always better than less," "aggression is more practical than cautious or thoughtful passivity," "survival of the fittest," "every man for himself," etc., would be considered products of very low intelligence, or even insanity, to people of the old ways. What is really insane about the dominant, high-tech, over-consumptive prevailing way of these times is that almost nobody can see that it all must be stopped and abandoned for the existence of our species and most other species to continue. The vast majority of our species does not even know how to be an Earthling, living harmoniously with the planet who freely gives us life. We don't even know how to live without electricity!!
As always, very well said George! Thank you. I'm reminded of Chief Caleen Sisk from the Winnemum Wintu, who was raised without electricity, and reminded the crowd in San Francisco that it is "a convenience." She contrasted it with water, which is a true necessity.
Well put indeed.
Thank you.
Thanks, Max, for this discussion. Here are related pieces I wrote in 2023 and 2022:
A longer-lasting Internet starts with knowing our region’s mineral deposits. https://katiesinger.substack.com/p/longer-lasting-internet
Mining the sacred: questions for a sustainable relationship with the Earth.
https://www.ourwebofinconvenienttruths.com/letter-38/
Thank you very much for sharing these links, Katie! I always appreciate your writing.
Please check this British documentary, Native Tech on NeuroWeapons, Max Wilbert:
=> https://substack.com/home/post/p-167720840
Many say more dangerous than nuclear weapons as they access humans directly (selectively).
Also other posts by @ICATOR
Look what was done to a smart, caring Senior Software Engineer (implanting false memories, erasing identity, 24/7 outcast straight into human's brains):
https://substack.com/@voicuantonalbu/posts :(
Nothing short of Crime against Humanity, most people are not ready to comprehend.
Oh, that pencil, what technology. And the quill pen. Every treaty signed by Uncle Sam and his minions broken with First Nations.
The pen is mightier than the sword, for sure.
Busy busy busy psychotic brains, that old Oppen-Monster-Heimer saw -- "To men like us, the rules need not apply." -- Oppenheimer
:And so the Israelization and Gazafication of the Globe is in high gear, and so there is no green tech, no green movement, as green is the new green, and the overlords and their Eichmann's and family lines will never go gently into the night.
Until we start from the ground up. Seemingly haphazardly Molotovs here and grenades there.
No?
No cookbook for the new anarchist? Jamming those drones with a 200.00 jamming device? No?
It just gets really worse, and the Last American Vagabond with Whitney Webb is telling, as is Alison McDowell's Wrenchinthegears.
You have to know the enemy, and it is this Megalomania White Psychotic royal inbred.
Take a deep breath and watch:
The Palantir Panopticon & Trump's New Big Tech-Led "Private Health Tracking System" w/ 7Sees
No tin foil hat necessary.
https://www.youtube.com/live/UYU3ByiMp0M?si=cIoE_57yOycqRCva
+--+
Will is on my show, KYAQ.org next Wednesday, 6 pm pST August 6.
Or, listen NOW:
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/airs-august-13-podcast-and-substack
+--+
John Steppling: Try him out for size!
The grand narrative is also a meta-narrative. Or usually, and in the post internet culture of the West everything is becoming ‘meta’. As real life recedes, both materially, and cognitively, there is a sense in which institutions come to replace myth. Now the Empire (all empires) have a close relationship to Apocalypse. And they spend some effort to manage apocalypse and to always mediate any insistence on specific dates for end-times. But the myths of the West today, and here science is foremost, have both secularized apocalypse, but also rationalized it and sort of branded it. The entire apparatus of climate propaganda, as an example, is fear mongering but fear mongering always has an implied apocalypse at the end of it. Without apocalypse the threat of rising temperatures just means changing holiday destinations.
I see a correspondence between Apocalypse (however diluted) and the desperation of a declining Empire (those morbid symptoms again). Between (if we are Jungian again for a moment) between archetype and the contemporary symbolic slippage I noted above (fathers without fatherhood). Apocalypse becomes not just diluted by but incorporated into the cult of science, and by extension into the myth of progress. Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity over a hundred years ago. And not really all that much has been added to this idea and theoretical physics has reached an absolute dead end. And this is another source of desperation for the Empire. The new frontier is, of course, digital and all the predictions of android takeover, of AI ruling the world and taking control of everything, etc. This is the new Apocalypse.
The year 1000 was the first prediction for Apocalypse. But it passed without global catastrophe.
“Focillon’s treatment of the year 1000 reflects his interest in the way not only the millennium but the century and other fundamentally arbitrary chronological divisions—we might simply call them saecula—are made to bear the weight of our anxieties and hopes; they are, as he remarks, “intemporal/ but we project them onto history, making it ‘a perpetual calendar of human anxiety.’ They help us to find ends and beginnings. They explain our senescence, our renovations; when we associate them with empire we are celebrating our desire for human kinds of order; when we find rational objections to them we indulge our powers of rational censorship in such matters; and when we refuse to be dejected by disconfirmed predictions we are only asserting a permanent need to live by the pattern rather than the fact, as indeed we must.”
Frank Kermode (Ibid)
Morbid subjectivity, which is inextricably bound up with psychopathic disorders. That deeper psychodynamic register, a term Robert Fletcher,Valerie Puleo and Jan Breitling used in their paper (Barbarian hordes: the overpopulation scapegoat in international development discourse :Third World Quarterly, 2014) is in response to the irrational fear of ‘overpopulation’. Now there is no overpopulation, no threat of it, in fact there is demographic collapse throughout the world. A neat segue back to the fact so few people are reproducing. And all of this is neatly bound up and buoyed by the increasingly sterile western sciences.
https://john-steppling.com/2025/07/going-nowhere-fast/
Palantir is a disaster for the planet, human rights, and oppositional movements. Thanks for reading, and for your work!
And Karp is the representation of all the dirty hell those 130 Jewish Billionaires Are Unleashing on the Palestinians, and thusly, we are all in their sights -- Gazafication of the Planet. ...
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/headlines-will-wilt-anyone-with-hopeium
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/09/what-role-did-native-americans-and-horses-play-in-the-decline-of-bison/
The non-native horse was a new technology. George Wuerthner presents the evidence that bison were in serious decline and extirpated in some areas decades before the railroad existed.
Thanks for sharing that link, Heidi. I read that piece back in 2021 when it was written. I don't know enough about the topic to comment intelligently, but there is no doubt that the railroads rolled over the top of an already heavily ecologically and culturally disrupted situation.
It's funny you posted on this topic because last night my husband and I were lamenting what had happened to the majority of environmental and social justice organisations/the entire movement in the last 20-30 years. And here you are documenting the decay even of a group of thought that stood in opposition to the corporatising mainstream environmental movement at its outset. Of course, for your arguments people will call you puritanical and/or eco-fascist — probably already have, since playing the ball long since took a back seat and playing the person is how it's done now...it requires so much less thought and consideration.
Surely "de-growth" people should see that those things discussed are not de-growth, just as "environmental" movements in general should see that (industrial) "green tech" is an oxymoron, and that corporations make compromising bedfellows. But the dominant culture insanity, and its way of organising, end up contaminating everything eventually like a virus. Maybe that's wetiko doing its thing.
We used to be lefties, but the left is so broken, and lately so utterly insane, that we can no longer identify as such, or as anything else when it seems only insanity is on offer.
And how did a movement that began with the commendable idea of not allowing bigotry and bullying towards people with severe gender dysphoria who wanted to live quietly as the opposite of their birth sex become a movement that wants me burnt at the stake for even talking (as a biologist who studied these things in detail) about the biology and embryology of sex determination in animals (and how industrial pollution has impacted these) instead of accepting their groupthink and newspeak that says none of that is real, I'm a bigot for mentioning it and male or female is whatever any human says they feel/want to be (and intersex doesn't exist, quit othering already)? I officially give up on modern people. This is the insanity accompanying the fall of the Roman empire, several magnitudes up. It's good to be off-grid these days.
Thanks for sharing this, Sue. It's definitely clear that we're seeing the decline in discourse and culture — as well as sanity, to be frank — with civilization at its nadir of speed, size, and necro-political development. And you're right about the Wetiko. I think that really is the key to so much of this. Jack Forbes was truly on to something with his analysis.