Are you brave enough to take a deep dive into the solutions and strategies that humanity should try to employ to avoid that kind of future? =) I hope you are working on it. More people should. We still have time. Unfortunately, all the proposed solutions I have seen so far, from protests, voting, living off-grid, running away, and growing own food to reliance on the law, judiciary, or the idea of creating a parallel society, are exactly what The Party wants people to pursue and rely on. This is The Ultimate Trap, but people in our camp cannot see it. Hope you are not falling for the same trap most people in our camp/dissent movement have fallen into. If people really want to understand the long game of The Party, they need to research the psychological phenomena of self-deception, self-delusion, and self-sabotage. These are the invisible and self-inflicted chains of humanity that prevent them from understanding what is really happening. Without realizing that, we have no chance of winning.
Apr 25, 2022·edited Apr 25, 2022Liked by Spartacus
"This is why it’s so laughable to hear people talk of protecting democracy in this day and age. Democracy is utterly meaningless under these conditions of life. It doesn’t matter who you vote for if nothing fundamentally changes."
Maybe too much Pollyanna in me but it seems globalist efforts to make a technocratic leap under the guise of Covid emergency has alerted & engaged enough of the global population to derail their Orwellian plan.
While all the nefarious planning is undeniable it also relies on the participation of underlings to build and maintain the surveillance systems. Massive resistance to compliance and efforts to re-imagine another way must have some possibility to succeed, if only because human hearts inherently crave freedom and we as humans find our best selves when we are faced with disaster and fight together to save ourselves.
It may seem like a stretch but for me 9-11 not only showed the hand of the globalists but also the hearts of the masses who can do more spontaneously than military planners, once we recognize it's up to us to save ourselves. Let's keep waking the heroes within; it's in there. :~)
Yes, for the first time in millennia the identification of the true enemy has been made perfectly clear. No enemy in ourselves or without can be defeated unless we can accurately identify them. The lightbearers must work together.
The last part of this article deals with neo-Malthusianism, with a brief comparison to "cornucopianism", which is the opposing belief system that technological
advancement (like using coal, oil and gas to create industry, fertilizers, electricity and infrastructure) will provide more and more support for humanity without limits.
Thomas Malthus (employed by the British East India Company) wrote in 1799 that human population growth was exponential, whereas growth of support systems was linear at best, so population would always tend to outstrip resources, except as mitigated by war, pestilence, famine and death. He did not account for the industrialization of agriculture, which was about to shift the baseline of support much higher with fertilizers, irrigation and big machines to plant, harvest, process, transport and store.
That appears to be a one-time event. Limits to fossil fuels, mined resources and well water are real, as are pollution and climate change. He briefly disparages The Limits To Growth, published in 1972, and goes on to the advance of global capitalism and offshoring of American industry, to weaken the US, and to weaken the position of American workers.
Personally, I do believe that we are seeing the downturn of growth, already. I personally see the pandemic control-narrative and WAR! control-narrative as being reactions to the inflection point of global-real-economy into a downtrend, which appears to have happened in late 2018 or early 2019.
The "repo-crisis" in August-September 2019 is thought to reflect that by some. The biggest banks could no longer trust each other overnight for loans based on T-bills, so the Fed had to take over the operation.
Therefore, I do see the enemy as global financial capitalist neo-feudalism (Own Nothing: Be Happy), but this article does not present a sustainable or low-carbon path into the future.
Real-adaptation-to-less-energy is a hard-sell, and not really worked out yet. The end of growth, going into "de-growth" is very complicated. 90% of the energy going into our food calories (including fertilizers, planting, harvesting, storage and transport) comes from inputs of fuel and electricity, not from sunshine, as in the past.
We do not see that. It is invisible to most of us. We cannot rapidly change that, but we can eat more local produce, grow vegetables, and learn from this process, so as to work the problem together going forward.
We are at a certain disadvantage to financial and power elites in the near term, in our lifetimes. Their control-narrative is weakening. They have had to go from climate-change (financialized solutions) to pandemic-response, to WAR! All of these are dishonest and manipulative, but the truth is difficult. It is not clear what the timeline of the next 20 years might hold. Elite measures to covertly reduce our population numbers appear to include pestilence, now advancing into famine, which usually proceeds to war.
We are able to improve our positions going forward if we become less reliant on centralized systems for our food, water, electricity, fuel and other necessities. That is a tall order, and we will be more vulnerable where climates are harsher, food comes from farther away, water is hard to get independently, and human populations are very high and dense.
None of these preparations are "the solution", but they buy time and freedom to work on smaller, more local, more efficient economic support systems for us and our descendants.
I hate to sound too partisan on the issue of resource depletion and environmental degradation, and there were things I wanted to cover in this very article, but I feared it would detract from the forcefulness of the overall message, which is that the wealth of the working class is tied to GDP, and that GDP is tied to energy. Deliberate depopulation, aside from its shocking immorality, is, in practical terms, little more than GDP-hoarding by the rich. I've largely given up on trying to warn people about overpopulation and resource depletion unless they want to discuss that specifically; the automatic response for many people is to deny and rebuke it, and understandably so.
What disappoints me the most about the way the media reports on environmental degradation is how they always go on about climate change and "carbon footprints", giving people the false impression that CO2 levels and sea level rise are the only issues they should be concerned about. There are many pressing concerns that they don't even get into in their reports. Depletion of rare earths and other metal ores, aquifer depletion and droughts, widespread desertification of the soil (12 million hectares a year, in fact), depletion of phosphorus that's mined for fertilizer, destruction of coral reefs, the list goes on and on.
If we keep using current agricultural technology, then in a few short decades, we will, absolutely, without a doubt, see starvation on an unimaginable scale. It is a reality that few are prepared to accept, and which I have spent considerable energy warning people about in the past, only to meet with denial after denial. We absolutely need to rework our infrastructure, but the insane, psychopathic hyper-capitalists socking money in offshore accounts don't want to fund that. They want to pocket the proceeds from GDP growth, fund astroturfing and influence groups to divide the public, and starve and poison us to death. Then, they intend to frolic in the playground of an empty world that they have created, with robots waiting on them hand and foot.
Thank You. There's not much distance between our views, it seems.
I really do grow vegetable gardens in the moderate climates of central Texas and the coastal plains.
To my view this is a contest between the distributed problem-solving of many lives in many places, against the centralized control , resource hoarding and herd-culling of the "owners", who maintain "ownership" by the consent of society.
Breaking society up into fragments, turning them against each other with identity politics, and thwarting "populism", protect their "ownership", but keep the life-support-system spiraling down into degradation.
We need to have open conversation, not war and censorship, but that threatens the positions of the "owners", so the best we can do right now is have our "victory gardens", be friends and neighbors, and explore living with less by-choice, not in forced "austerity".
It's really hard to sell that. Even people who get-it won't actually take action much of the time.
Yes. That is exactly the problem. Any time there is a bipartisan revolt against the psychopathic Owner class, like Occupy Wall Street, the ultra-wealthy are keen to divide it with identity politics immediately. The rich blubber on about CO2 and the environment and green jobs, while they base all of their wealth-hoarding on a foundation of consumerism and insane pollution. The population have been cajoled into thinking that this is a problem of communism versus capitalism, when actually, it's a problem of psychopathic neoliberalism versus everyone else. Why do the Right think they're capitalists when they work skilled trades with their hands and own no stocks? Why do the Left think they're communists when left-wing activist groups are funded by donations from huge banks, retail companies, and silicon valley giants? Nobody likes to think they've been duped so thoroughly, and yet, here we are.
This is the proverbial nail. We’ve been so played & recognising this & acceptance of it is key. The relationship is one of abusers/abused. The way out is through. The abused must nearly always break the chain.
Are there any indicators that the identity politics divide was planned by the elite over the past several decades as a tool to prevent united resistance? Most people assume it's a sign of a society that simply became naturally more progressive
The huge identity politics push directly coincided with Occupy Wall Street and contributed directly to its downfall, with "progressive stack" policies that drove a lot of the original organizers away. Idpol as it currently exists is a Neo-COINTELPRO psyop aimed at weaponizing activists and making them useful to the Deep State. The goal is to interfere with class consciousness and class warfare by balkanizing the lower and middle classes into a multitude of competing and divided interests.
I have subscribed to your Substack, and will keep reading Spartacus', having been directed to Iceni by Robert Barnes. My husband, also a doctor (radiologist), saw many of these things also and taught himself organic vegetable gardening. He knew there would be collapse, but didn't know means. We followed the Peak Oil ideas for some time. It is so rare to find anyone who talks about devolution, even among those alert to "stakeholder capitalism" - I was a fan of Leopold Kohr way back when. But there now are zero people in my life who understand any of this. The war frenzy has captivated them.
There is certainly a blind spot in all this theorising which you touch on. That is the ultimate failure to recognise that it is our sun which is one of the most powerful interconnecting forces on Planet Earth. Understanding the sun’s role in all this is fundamental.
This is the best newsletter on Substack right now.
As Spartacus says in the comments below, medieval serfs were much freer than inhabitants of a 21st century smart city would be. Custom strictly limited their duties to their lord; the rest of their time was their own. They had their own courts which established village regulations and adjudicated breaches thereof. The isolation of their villages protected them from outside interference. Above all, they shared a faith with their lord—Catholic Christianity—which constrained his powers over them. When abuses occurred, the Church stood as an alternate authority they could appeal to by virtue of that shared faith.
Catholic Christianity saved us from the last era of global slavery (late antiquity). I believe it can save us again. Sure don’t see any other salvation on the horizon, anyway.
Your post develops with greater accuracy my point. Most people have no idea what medieval life really was like and everything is done by the educational system to keep it that way.
Moreover the journey does involve a deep spirituality beyond any one monotheistic religion. The tenets are found in all religions but there is a more fundamental awareness. Spiritual wars are no less dangerous than other kinds.
This is the kind of of non-sense that is pushed by the globalists who want to create a worldwide "inclusive" religion called noachism. . First, the tenets of all religion are not the same: only Christianity recognizes the divinity of Christ (true man and true God - the hypostatic union) and his role as the Messiah. Second, spiritual wars are indeed dangerous but the only one being waged right now is the one againt all Humanity by the servants of the Devil who are hell bent on destroying traditional faiths. New Age "spirituality" is a sucker's trap and can be traced back to Satan himself.
A minor point but worth correcting: what globalists want has nothing to do with the social order of the Middle Ages. The chief reason, among many others, being that the Middle Ages were religious times where people were Christians with a faith so deep that we can barely imagine it today. Even the most powerful kings were devout Christians and lived in mortal fear of God's judgment. Plus, the Middle Ages was structured by unbreakable bonds of loyalty between all parts of society, a bond that implied privileges but also responsibilities. As I have shown in my own work, what globalists want is actually technocracy + a return to the primitive pre-Christian state characterized by: matriarchy, indifferentiation, earth/cosmic religion/ collective over the individual and where the elite can rule over the people like cattle. The Middle Ages are actually the opposite of this nightmare and can be regarded, in France at least, as the apex of Western Christian civilization. It's in French but I have written a popular essay on the subject with some references for those wo would like to dig deeper. http://stanislasberton.com/index.php/2019/10/30/du-moyen-age/
This is true. However, it's also true that, in a sense, the modern secular clerisy of experts and unelected bureaucrats is standing in for religion. It is, in short, the primitive pre-Christian state of knuckle-dragging, shame-based mobocracy, but with a false veneer of authority, hierarchy, and structure. Most people don't see the barbarism standing in the shadows right behind today's clerisy. It's literally like a 700s steppe bandit holding up cardboard puppets of kings and priests.
You are correct. This a religious conflict and a religious war against humanity, except that they do not worship God but the devil, litteraly. On that point, I have translated to English my essay which explains, through the work of René Girard, the sacrificial logic at work today and how Christianity broke through with it. It might interest you and your readers. https://stanislasberton.substack.com/p/the-triumph-of-the-cross?s=w
Nice article. I subscribed! Agree, the world cannot literally return to the pre-Christian age of bloody innocence. We cannot “unsee” the Christian revelation. So the elites mimic it with their clerisy of experts and their cult of the victim who must be “saved” by compulsory compassion. Empty, fraudulent, universalist, all this pseudo-religion is missing is a leader. Now that I think about it, Christians have a word for that particular person ...
A magisterial synopsis of what the private jet parasitical elite are planning for us... all those post war dystopian novels and films coming true like some kind of Bill Gates wet dream. I don't really know what I can do about it, but that won't stop me fighting it every inch of the way.
Spartacus, I hate to swell your head. But I read many, many Substacks and an endless amount of other material. This is some of the most well thought through, deep, incisive material out there and you are to be commended. Each piece expands my mind...sometimes to the point of pain, but that is the point.
Maybe there are none, but some pieces dealing with potential solutions for some of this, coming from your deep well of knowledge, would be more-than-interesting.
Thanks for the compliment. It took me a little while to gather my thoughts and think about what I wanted to say in response. The thing is, the reason why people find this stuff so mind-blowing is because it deals with areas of science, politics, economics, philosophy, and meta-ethics that popular discourse does very little to touch upon in any meaningful way. Sure, there are lots of works of science fiction that deal with cyborgs and post-scarcity (or post-apocalyptic) societies, but most people are not acquainted with scholarly works on transhumanism, technocracy, Malthusianism, logical positivism, and so on.
There is a lot of ground to cover here. It actually all begins with a single, all-important question. "What are qualia?" Why do people experience, well, experiences? Look at popular discourse right now. Look at the things people complain about. The reason why identity politics are so divisive is not because they're a Left-Right problem, but because they're an Idealism-Realism problem.
The world is being divided into two camps; Realists who believe that knowledge is representative of an external reality, and Idealists who believe that knowledge is merely a collection of sense data inside one's brain. Look at the constant arguing about gender identity, for instance. One camp believes that gender and sex are representative of a physical, mind-independent reality, and the other camp believes that gender is merely a mutable idea.
This is not a trifling problem at all. It's a very big problem.
What happens when we extend this to various unobservables, like morality? How do rationality and the scientific method account for things like beliefs, values, et cetera? A dualist might say something like, beliefs come from the soul. A monist might argue that beliefs come from synapses firing, and that we can detect a belief bouncing around in someone's brain by monitoring their brain cells.
Because we don't actually have a complete theory of the human mind and consciousness, and how such a thing could arise from a brain, we don't actually know what values are. Some philosophical traditions, such as moral non-cognitivism (for more on this, look up AJ Ayer and the Vienna Circle), treat moral propositions like "stealing is wrong" as unknowable, vacuous statements which are neither true nor false. If we extrapolate this to every aspect of society, then much of human activity can be reduced to an utter absurdity. For instance, money only exists as a social norm, having no reality outside the human mind. Without the mind and the consciousness to assign value to things, then money is simply paper and gold is just a lump of metal. If money is meaningless, why work for money? Why do anything at all?
This is the position that the technocrat starts from; one of extreme nihilism where nothing is meaningful due to the intractability of the mind-body problem. This, of course, necessitates that the technocrat become a godlike being, a Nietzschean Ubermensch, simply to gain the capacity to assign meaning and value to things, hence the interest in transhumanism. Transhumanism promises to solve the mind-body problem by dismantling, reassembling, and reifying the body and stripping the mind naked, to increase the depth of sensory experience, and to allow one to objectively perceive concepts as they are.
Transhumanism isn't about making people live forever, or curing disease, or any of that; those are just bonuses. The true terror and magnificence of transhumanism is in transcending the boundaries of human intelligence, sensory experience, knowledge, and subjectivity.
There's an interesting collaborative fiction project that's been on the web for a long time called Orion's Arm, and in it, they have the concept of something called Toposophic Levels, which signify the problem-solving and correlative abilities of a transsapient mind:
The common conception of a cyborg as "someone with metal limbs and glowing eyes" is wrong. The true goal is to shed the human body entirely, to become a Substrate-Independent Mind, or SIM. To a SIM, bodies are just tools. The mind itself is housed in a substrate that can be seamlessly upgraded over time, enhancing their cognitive capabilities, expanding the mind, and giving it greater powers of reflection, philosophy, scientific understanding, mathematical prowess, and other cognitive attributes. What transhumanists actually desire is an "intelligence explosion", where we, as a species, surpass the limits of meat brains entirely, allowing us to understand nature and manipulate it with ever-higher precision.
A transsapient being might be able to do things like develop metamaterials with impossible tensile strengths, or design whole life forms from scratch. Imagine doing that with your current brain. Imagine trying to define an entire set of genes and proteins for an organism and their interactions. You can't. You can't keep all that in your head. A transsapient might.
I know this gets way off into the weeds for a lot of people, and it involves a lot of hypothetical technologies that haven't even been invented yet. However, it is also a fact that these things have been brainstormed for decades and decades, now, and millions of dollars of funding are being poured into foundational technologies to accomplish exactly this.
How far of a leap is it from developing a direct neural interface, to developing substrate-independent minds? Not too far. And then, once you have a person's mind housed in a SIM, how much longer will it take for that person, who now works in their mind with quaternions and higher-dimensional manifolds as easily as you might do arithmetic, to develop a better substrate for their own mind?
Our GDP is intrinsically linked to our rate of technological innovation. Scientific advancement is stalling. Moore's Law can only hold for so long. To survive resource shortages, we have to get better at squeezing blood from a stone, so to speak.
These people are trying to make living demigods, in order to do that.
Wow. This analysis is as incisive as the article upon which I was commenting. This almost deserves its own article...you have much to say. Thanks for putting this much time into this. I am drinking deep from this particular Pierien spring and finding it refreshing although taking me close to drowning...Your life raft is most appreciated.
I could take this analysis even further than that. Say you're a substrate-independent mind of immense cognitive and computational power. How would you tell the difference between a simulation of something, and reality? What if you split yourself into a multitude of "people" inhabiting an inner universe inside your mind? What if we are in one such universe? This is one variation on the Simulation Hypothesis.
This also touches more mundane things. Say you had the ability to inhabit a "Metaverse" and experience it with the same fidelity that you have with sensory experiences in the real world. Any conceivable luxury could be simulated. Anything at all. You could own a private submarine, a private skyscraper, it doesn't matter. None of it would use any real, physical resources. Scarcity would become meaningless. Any hedonistic desire, no matter how extreme or injurious, could be satisfied. Extreme base jumping without parachutes. Feeling what it's like to be torn apart by a hungry lion like fifty or a hundred times. Anything at all. Even sensory experiences that would ordinarily be physically impossible.
Under such conditions, morality would cease to have any meaning. We only have laws and morals because these things codify harm. How do you commit a crime against a being that is super-intelligent and incapable of being harmed? A being that could simulate every conceivable harm being done to itself in a masochistic frenzy, and come out of the experience perfectly fine?
So, that's law and morality and the concept of sin and vice out the window. Throw them in the trash, they're no longer needed.
"immanentize the eschaton" , love it. i am too, by way of prayer.
and as long as i am complimenting one phrase creation i may as well add another: "wisdom of the crowd". medieval catholic christianity called it "sensus fidelium" or the sense of the faithful, and it referred to the fact that we little ones sometimes knew better within our deep whole that which the clerics would attempt to deny or change. you probably knew that already.
But surely the resources required to create such a universe and the entities that inhabit it would be way more than those required by individuals participating in the digital sphere. It sounds extremely elitist and would have to be protected from the (remaining hungry masses) who might very likely wish to pull the plug out the socket?
"...What the Elites aim to bring into being is a system of full-spectrum control and naked tyranny never before seen on this planet.........//.........They believe this will result in a more resilient society, more capable of absorbing unexpected shocks and surprises...."
The last sentence, from "They believe" is a mischaracterisation of the truth. This should read: "...They PURPORT TO believe this will result in a more resilient society, more capable of absorbing unexpected shocks and surprises...."
They 'believe' no such thing! They want US to believe that this is their benign view, so that we can be persuaded to follow their lead into tyranny and slavery, disguised as a 'better future'...
'Better' - not for us - but better for those who would now own OUR property, and be happy doing so...
We are not that easily fooled - but are enough of us aware of this sculduggery of those (among our our 'leaders') making their annual pilgrimage to DAVOS 'on our behalf'
This is true. In a way, medieval-era citizens had more leisure time and a reasonably high quality of life, albeit lower life expectancy due to inferior medical technology. The point here is not to say that Feudalism was bad, or draw a comparison between a simple pastoral lifestyle and living in pods and eating bugs. The point I'm trying to make is that the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Smart Cities represent, in a way, a return to pre-industrialized class arrangements, with zero class mobility and a small number of aristocrats controlling all the wealth and demanding rent for its use.
Oh well my comment was written tongue in cheek! I got your point don't worry. From a historical point of view I would argue that Ze Fourss Intustrial Refoluchion (Industrie 4.0 in German --because it is a German concept wrought by SAP) sends us back at the very origins of the Industrial Revolution, notably at the time when Enclosure was implemented on a large scale in the XVIIIth century (and even earlier!). When peasants were robbed of their common land by landowners. The latter were a new model of aristocracy very different to their ancestors, the medieval feudal lords...
I'm subscribing. Which means someone on my list has to get cut. I am at maximum substack reading. It wont be el gato malo or Dr John, but you have put me in a real pickle as this writing is good enough to make me let one precious soldier go.
Congratulations on such an amazing series. I have read 1 - 4… and now VII. I seem to have missed 5 & 6 - are you able to send me the links to my email please? berylsellick@icloud.com
“It has been my observation that this collapse has actually been engineered on purpose, over many decades.” Re the Club of Rome Limits to Growth chart...I recently came to the same conclusion. It wasn’t a prediction. It was a plan.
Among every other way they have used this event to get to the next step in the plan it's been a fantastic way to get rid of money by sending billions of dollars of military hardware over, there is going to be more equipment than men to use it soon me thinks. What they really need are more selfie sticks.
You made a mistake using the term peasant as you did. The Free Tenant Peasants of France, for instance, back in their day did the opposite of what the modern day nobles wanted. Those lifestyles had people who knew how to take care of themselves. They didn't pay homage to anyone.
That's why the Bolsheviks were sicked on the peasants of *gasp* Ukraine, to kill them off. Then the World Wars to break apart the small holders so the fascists could consolidate land production. And now they have food control over you and your readers.
You are only dissing what perhaps is the lifestyle that would avoid smart cities.
You are so locked in you can't wait to buy the next smart phone upgrade I'm sure.
If you go back and read that passage again, what you'll see is that I did not say anything negative about peasants. I said, quite literally, the "time" of peasants and nobles. Emphasis on time. It is an incontrovertible fact that medieval peasants and serfs had more leisure time than we do today, and definitely more rights than an inhabitant of a technocracy would have.
The point I was trying to make was that we are witnessing, in essence, a cyclical political process. People seem to have this false expectation of history to proceed in one direction, from the benighted ignorance of the paleolithic, to the Bronze Age and classical antiquity, to Medievalism, to the Enlightenment, and then the Industrial Revolution, the Internet Age, and presumably, at some undefined point after this, reality turns into Star Trek and people somehow miraculously stop experiencing scarcity and want. On the contrary, we can find ourselves reverting to medievalism at any time, except it would be augmented by modern technology, which appears to be aimed at engineering a kind of inescapable tyranny.
These tyrants won't have the energy resources available to fuel this imaginative techno prison for long. Research the word finite.
Biological resources can be sustainable if not abused, but I don't know what this system isn't over using right now. Again, you are trapped in the narrative.
Humans require far less energy than the machines this system and you rely on. Its not funny, but I laugh at all attempts of those who use money to provide for all of their needs think they can just keep on with the charade. Its ridiculous, there is far money money issued around the planet now than there are resources.
Apr 29, 2022·edited Apr 29, 2022Liked by Spartacus
"...but I laugh at all attempts of those who use money to provide for all of their needs think they can just keep on with the charade."
You don't use money?
I agree with the sentiment but unless you're John Colter or Jim Bridger living off the land with your skills most people literally have no choice. They don't have the ability to navigate the alternative and have to exist in the world that they live in.
I admire John Day who posts here and elsewhere, he grows his own food and is doing a lot more than the average person to extricate himself from the status quo. Most people, including me, would be extremely hard pressed to do this for numerous reasons.
The sentence you reference is an off hand attempt to highlight the fact this monetary/economic system has an expire date. Too many chiefs now and not enough Indians as a metaphor. To think, humans really require very little energy to exist compared to machines, yet we are replacing humans as the providing force. Not going to last long in my opinion (research EROEI). I am growing food, hunting and fishing for meat, and foraging - I do write about these activities once and awhile. I am also using money because there are no other choices as to how I can trade with other people I don't know. This economic system was all a set up to skim the surpluses into the coffers of the fascists for some nefarious reason I'm sure. Start your journey towards becoming just a little independent by starting a garden. Start now and avoid the rush.
Thank you. The author of this article is an excellent thinker, describes the situation extensively, with a slip up that I pointed out, but he had a thoughtful reply. I appreciate your and his comments and encourage more thinking about how to get out of the matrix.
Brilliant article. From the early understanding of these deceptions I thought of writing on self-sabotage. Those who have criticised our society as a “culture of death” are not so far off. We’ve collectively (the operative word) like a colony of insects fearing death are blindly driven by this fear to pursue destruction. Quite obviously this is wrong headed and a comparison to lemmings isn’t far off.
Are you brave enough to take a deep dive into the solutions and strategies that humanity should try to employ to avoid that kind of future? =) I hope you are working on it. More people should. We still have time. Unfortunately, all the proposed solutions I have seen so far, from protests, voting, living off-grid, running away, and growing own food to reliance on the law, judiciary, or the idea of creating a parallel society, are exactly what The Party wants people to pursue and rely on. This is The Ultimate Trap, but people in our camp cannot see it. Hope you are not falling for the same trap most people in our camp/dissent movement have fallen into. If people really want to understand the long game of The Party, they need to research the psychological phenomena of self-deception, self-delusion, and self-sabotage. These are the invisible and self-inflicted chains of humanity that prevent them from understanding what is really happening. Without realizing that, we have no chance of winning.
"This is why it’s so laughable to hear people talk of protecting democracy in this day and age. Democracy is utterly meaningless under these conditions of life. It doesn’t matter who you vote for if nothing fundamentally changes."
Maybe too much Pollyanna in me but it seems globalist efforts to make a technocratic leap under the guise of Covid emergency has alerted & engaged enough of the global population to derail their Orwellian plan.
While all the nefarious planning is undeniable it also relies on the participation of underlings to build and maintain the surveillance systems. Massive resistance to compliance and efforts to re-imagine another way must have some possibility to succeed, if only because human hearts inherently crave freedom and we as humans find our best selves when we are faced with disaster and fight together to save ourselves.
It may seem like a stretch but for me 9-11 not only showed the hand of the globalists but also the hearts of the masses who can do more spontaneously than military planners, once we recognize it's up to us to save ourselves. Let's keep waking the heroes within; it's in there. :~)
Boatlift -NYC 9-11 Rescue Op https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDOrzF7B2Kg
Yes, for the first time in millennia the identification of the true enemy has been made perfectly clear. No enemy in ourselves or without can be defeated unless we can accurately identify them. The lightbearers must work together.
The last part of this article deals with neo-Malthusianism, with a brief comparison to "cornucopianism", which is the opposing belief system that technological
advancement (like using coal, oil and gas to create industry, fertilizers, electricity and infrastructure) will provide more and more support for humanity without limits.
Thomas Malthus (employed by the British East India Company) wrote in 1799 that human population growth was exponential, whereas growth of support systems was linear at best, so population would always tend to outstrip resources, except as mitigated by war, pestilence, famine and death. He did not account for the industrialization of agriculture, which was about to shift the baseline of support much higher with fertilizers, irrigation and big machines to plant, harvest, process, transport and store.
That appears to be a one-time event. Limits to fossil fuels, mined resources and well water are real, as are pollution and climate change. He briefly disparages The Limits To Growth, published in 1972, and goes on to the advance of global capitalism and offshoring of American industry, to weaken the US, and to weaken the position of American workers.
Personally, I do believe that we are seeing the downturn of growth, already. I personally see the pandemic control-narrative and WAR! control-narrative as being reactions to the inflection point of global-real-economy into a downtrend, which appears to have happened in late 2018 or early 2019.
The "repo-crisis" in August-September 2019 is thought to reflect that by some. The biggest banks could no longer trust each other overnight for loans based on T-bills, so the Fed had to take over the operation.
Therefore, I do see the enemy as global financial capitalist neo-feudalism (Own Nothing: Be Happy), but this article does not present a sustainable or low-carbon path into the future.
Real-adaptation-to-less-energy is a hard-sell, and not really worked out yet. The end of growth, going into "de-growth" is very complicated. 90% of the energy going into our food calories (including fertilizers, planting, harvesting, storage and transport) comes from inputs of fuel and electricity, not from sunshine, as in the past.
We do not see that. It is invisible to most of us. We cannot rapidly change that, but we can eat more local produce, grow vegetables, and learn from this process, so as to work the problem together going forward.
We are at a certain disadvantage to financial and power elites in the near term, in our lifetimes. Their control-narrative is weakening. They have had to go from climate-change (financialized solutions) to pandemic-response, to WAR! All of these are dishonest and manipulative, but the truth is difficult. It is not clear what the timeline of the next 20 years might hold. Elite measures to covertly reduce our population numbers appear to include pestilence, now advancing into famine, which usually proceeds to war.
We are able to improve our positions going forward if we become less reliant on centralized systems for our food, water, electricity, fuel and other necessities. That is a tall order, and we will be more vulnerable where climates are harsher, food comes from farther away, water is hard to get independently, and human populations are very high and dense.
None of these preparations are "the solution", but they buy time and freedom to work on smaller, more local, more efficient economic support systems for us and our descendants.
I hate to sound too partisan on the issue of resource depletion and environmental degradation, and there were things I wanted to cover in this very article, but I feared it would detract from the forcefulness of the overall message, which is that the wealth of the working class is tied to GDP, and that GDP is tied to energy. Deliberate depopulation, aside from its shocking immorality, is, in practical terms, little more than GDP-hoarding by the rich. I've largely given up on trying to warn people about overpopulation and resource depletion unless they want to discuss that specifically; the automatic response for many people is to deny and rebuke it, and understandably so.
What disappoints me the most about the way the media reports on environmental degradation is how they always go on about climate change and "carbon footprints", giving people the false impression that CO2 levels and sea level rise are the only issues they should be concerned about. There are many pressing concerns that they don't even get into in their reports. Depletion of rare earths and other metal ores, aquifer depletion and droughts, widespread desertification of the soil (12 million hectares a year, in fact), depletion of phosphorus that's mined for fertilizer, destruction of coral reefs, the list goes on and on.
If we keep using current agricultural technology, then in a few short decades, we will, absolutely, without a doubt, see starvation on an unimaginable scale. It is a reality that few are prepared to accept, and which I have spent considerable energy warning people about in the past, only to meet with denial after denial. We absolutely need to rework our infrastructure, but the insane, psychopathic hyper-capitalists socking money in offshore accounts don't want to fund that. They want to pocket the proceeds from GDP growth, fund astroturfing and influence groups to divide the public, and starve and poison us to death. Then, they intend to frolic in the playground of an empty world that they have created, with robots waiting on them hand and foot.
Thank You. There's not much distance between our views, it seems.
I really do grow vegetable gardens in the moderate climates of central Texas and the coastal plains.
To my view this is a contest between the distributed problem-solving of many lives in many places, against the centralized control , resource hoarding and herd-culling of the "owners", who maintain "ownership" by the consent of society.
Breaking society up into fragments, turning them against each other with identity politics, and thwarting "populism", protect their "ownership", but keep the life-support-system spiraling down into degradation.
We need to have open conversation, not war and censorship, but that threatens the positions of the "owners", so the best we can do right now is have our "victory gardens", be friends and neighbors, and explore living with less by-choice, not in forced "austerity".
It's really hard to sell that. Even people who get-it won't actually take action much of the time.
drjohnsblog.substack.com
Yes. That is exactly the problem. Any time there is a bipartisan revolt against the psychopathic Owner class, like Occupy Wall Street, the ultra-wealthy are keen to divide it with identity politics immediately. The rich blubber on about CO2 and the environment and green jobs, while they base all of their wealth-hoarding on a foundation of consumerism and insane pollution. The population have been cajoled into thinking that this is a problem of communism versus capitalism, when actually, it's a problem of psychopathic neoliberalism versus everyone else. Why do the Right think they're capitalists when they work skilled trades with their hands and own no stocks? Why do the Left think they're communists when left-wing activist groups are funded by donations from huge banks, retail companies, and silicon valley giants? Nobody likes to think they've been duped so thoroughly, and yet, here we are.
I have led with your essay on my blog today, not the first time for a Spartacus (leading slave-rebellion) article.
"Free Bait" (pay later)
https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/free-bait?s=w
I hope you like it , Brother(s)/(Sisters)
This is the proverbial nail. We’ve been so played & recognising this & acceptance of it is key. The relationship is one of abusers/abused. The way out is through. The abused must nearly always break the chain.
Are there any indicators that the identity politics divide was planned by the elite over the past several decades as a tool to prevent united resistance? Most people assume it's a sign of a society that simply became naturally more progressive
The huge identity politics push directly coincided with Occupy Wall Street and contributed directly to its downfall, with "progressive stack" policies that drove a lot of the original organizers away. Idpol as it currently exists is a Neo-COINTELPRO psyop aimed at weaponizing activists and making them useful to the Deep State. The goal is to interfere with class consciousness and class warfare by balkanizing the lower and middle classes into a multitude of competing and divided interests.
This exactly what happened with the yellow vests in France. Same techniques.
I have subscribed to your Substack, and will keep reading Spartacus', having been directed to Iceni by Robert Barnes. My husband, also a doctor (radiologist), saw many of these things also and taught himself organic vegetable gardening. He knew there would be collapse, but didn't know means. We followed the Peak Oil ideas for some time. It is so rare to find anyone who talks about devolution, even among those alert to "stakeholder capitalism" - I was a fan of Leopold Kohr way back when. But there now are zero people in my life who understand any of this. The war frenzy has captivated them.
Thanks for the explanation, this is spot on. You could write an addendum to your article to explain your view because it was not really clear.
You are right to limit the information to that best explained by this article. It is by accepting limitations that we are able to understand together.
There is certainly a blind spot in all this theorising which you touch on. That is the ultimate failure to recognise that it is our sun which is one of the most powerful interconnecting forces on Planet Earth. Understanding the sun’s role in all this is fundamental.
This is the best newsletter on Substack right now.
As Spartacus says in the comments below, medieval serfs were much freer than inhabitants of a 21st century smart city would be. Custom strictly limited their duties to their lord; the rest of their time was their own. They had their own courts which established village regulations and adjudicated breaches thereof. The isolation of their villages protected them from outside interference. Above all, they shared a faith with their lord—Catholic Christianity—which constrained his powers over them. When abuses occurred, the Church stood as an alternate authority they could appeal to by virtue of that shared faith.
Catholic Christianity saved us from the last era of global slavery (late antiquity). I believe it can save us again. Sure don’t see any other salvation on the horizon, anyway.
Your post develops with greater accuracy my point. Most people have no idea what medieval life really was like and everything is done by the educational system to keep it that way.
Moreover the journey does involve a deep spirituality beyond any one monotheistic religion. The tenets are found in all religions but there is a more fundamental awareness. Spiritual wars are no less dangerous than other kinds.
This is the kind of of non-sense that is pushed by the globalists who want to create a worldwide "inclusive" religion called noachism. . First, the tenets of all religion are not the same: only Christianity recognizes the divinity of Christ (true man and true God - the hypostatic union) and his role as the Messiah. Second, spiritual wars are indeed dangerous but the only one being waged right now is the one againt all Humanity by the servants of the Devil who are hell bent on destroying traditional faiths. New Age "spirituality" is a sucker's trap and can be traced back to Satan himself.
And who said anything about “New Age Spirituality”? A huge problem is sheer ignorance and bad assumptions. These are endemic in spiritual wars.
Oh well then….
https://youtu.be/rqR1cjuPXUg
A minor point but worth correcting: what globalists want has nothing to do with the social order of the Middle Ages. The chief reason, among many others, being that the Middle Ages were religious times where people were Christians with a faith so deep that we can barely imagine it today. Even the most powerful kings were devout Christians and lived in mortal fear of God's judgment. Plus, the Middle Ages was structured by unbreakable bonds of loyalty between all parts of society, a bond that implied privileges but also responsibilities. As I have shown in my own work, what globalists want is actually technocracy + a return to the primitive pre-Christian state characterized by: matriarchy, indifferentiation, earth/cosmic religion/ collective over the individual and where the elite can rule over the people like cattle. The Middle Ages are actually the opposite of this nightmare and can be regarded, in France at least, as the apex of Western Christian civilization. It's in French but I have written a popular essay on the subject with some references for those wo would like to dig deeper. http://stanislasberton.com/index.php/2019/10/30/du-moyen-age/
This is true. However, it's also true that, in a sense, the modern secular clerisy of experts and unelected bureaucrats is standing in for religion. It is, in short, the primitive pre-Christian state of knuckle-dragging, shame-based mobocracy, but with a false veneer of authority, hierarchy, and structure. Most people don't see the barbarism standing in the shadows right behind today's clerisy. It's literally like a 700s steppe bandit holding up cardboard puppets of kings and priests.
You are correct. This a religious conflict and a religious war against humanity, except that they do not worship God but the devil, litteraly. On that point, I have translated to English my essay which explains, through the work of René Girard, the sacrificial logic at work today and how Christianity broke through with it. It might interest you and your readers. https://stanislasberton.substack.com/p/the-triumph-of-the-cross?s=w
Nice article. I subscribed! Agree, the world cannot literally return to the pre-Christian age of bloody innocence. We cannot “unsee” the Christian revelation. So the elites mimic it with their clerisy of experts and their cult of the victim who must be “saved” by compulsory compassion. Empty, fraudulent, universalist, all this pseudo-religion is missing is a leader. Now that I think about it, Christians have a word for that particular person ...
A magisterial synopsis of what the private jet parasitical elite are planning for us... all those post war dystopian novels and films coming true like some kind of Bill Gates wet dream. I don't really know what I can do about it, but that won't stop me fighting it every inch of the way.
Spartacus, I hate to swell your head. But I read many, many Substacks and an endless amount of other material. This is some of the most well thought through, deep, incisive material out there and you are to be commended. Each piece expands my mind...sometimes to the point of pain, but that is the point.
Maybe there are none, but some pieces dealing with potential solutions for some of this, coming from your deep well of knowledge, would be more-than-interesting.
In any case, thanks for doing this.
Thanks for the compliment. It took me a little while to gather my thoughts and think about what I wanted to say in response. The thing is, the reason why people find this stuff so mind-blowing is because it deals with areas of science, politics, economics, philosophy, and meta-ethics that popular discourse does very little to touch upon in any meaningful way. Sure, there are lots of works of science fiction that deal with cyborgs and post-scarcity (or post-apocalyptic) societies, but most people are not acquainted with scholarly works on transhumanism, technocracy, Malthusianism, logical positivism, and so on.
There is a lot of ground to cover here. It actually all begins with a single, all-important question. "What are qualia?" Why do people experience, well, experiences? Look at popular discourse right now. Look at the things people complain about. The reason why identity politics are so divisive is not because they're a Left-Right problem, but because they're an Idealism-Realism problem.
The world is being divided into two camps; Realists who believe that knowledge is representative of an external reality, and Idealists who believe that knowledge is merely a collection of sense data inside one's brain. Look at the constant arguing about gender identity, for instance. One camp believes that gender and sex are representative of a physical, mind-independent reality, and the other camp believes that gender is merely a mutable idea.
This is not a trifling problem at all. It's a very big problem.
What happens when we extend this to various unobservables, like morality? How do rationality and the scientific method account for things like beliefs, values, et cetera? A dualist might say something like, beliefs come from the soul. A monist might argue that beliefs come from synapses firing, and that we can detect a belief bouncing around in someone's brain by monitoring their brain cells.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/discovery-mind-body-problem/
Because we don't actually have a complete theory of the human mind and consciousness, and how such a thing could arise from a brain, we don't actually know what values are. Some philosophical traditions, such as moral non-cognitivism (for more on this, look up AJ Ayer and the Vienna Circle), treat moral propositions like "stealing is wrong" as unknowable, vacuous statements which are neither true nor false. If we extrapolate this to every aspect of society, then much of human activity can be reduced to an utter absurdity. For instance, money only exists as a social norm, having no reality outside the human mind. Without the mind and the consciousness to assign value to things, then money is simply paper and gold is just a lump of metal. If money is meaningless, why work for money? Why do anything at all?
This is the position that the technocrat starts from; one of extreme nihilism where nothing is meaningful due to the intractability of the mind-body problem. This, of course, necessitates that the technocrat become a godlike being, a Nietzschean Ubermensch, simply to gain the capacity to assign meaning and value to things, hence the interest in transhumanism. Transhumanism promises to solve the mind-body problem by dismantling, reassembling, and reifying the body and stripping the mind naked, to increase the depth of sensory experience, and to allow one to objectively perceive concepts as they are.
Transhumanism isn't about making people live forever, or curing disease, or any of that; those are just bonuses. The true terror and magnificence of transhumanism is in transcending the boundaries of human intelligence, sensory experience, knowledge, and subjectivity.
There's an interesting collaborative fiction project that's been on the web for a long time called Orion's Arm, and in it, they have the concept of something called Toposophic Levels, which signify the problem-solving and correlative abilities of a transsapient mind:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4b9f2a844034a
The common conception of a cyborg as "someone with metal limbs and glowing eyes" is wrong. The true goal is to shed the human body entirely, to become a Substrate-Independent Mind, or SIM. To a SIM, bodies are just tools. The mind itself is housed in a substrate that can be seamlessly upgraded over time, enhancing their cognitive capabilities, expanding the mind, and giving it greater powers of reflection, philosophy, scientific understanding, mathematical prowess, and other cognitive attributes. What transhumanists actually desire is an "intelligence explosion", where we, as a species, surpass the limits of meat brains entirely, allowing us to understand nature and manipulate it with ever-higher precision.
A transsapient being might be able to do things like develop metamaterials with impossible tensile strengths, or design whole life forms from scratch. Imagine doing that with your current brain. Imagine trying to define an entire set of genes and proteins for an organism and their interactions. You can't. You can't keep all that in your head. A transsapient might.
I know this gets way off into the weeds for a lot of people, and it involves a lot of hypothetical technologies that haven't even been invented yet. However, it is also a fact that these things have been brainstormed for decades and decades, now, and millions of dollars of funding are being poured into foundational technologies to accomplish exactly this.
How far of a leap is it from developing a direct neural interface, to developing substrate-independent minds? Not too far. And then, once you have a person's mind housed in a SIM, how much longer will it take for that person, who now works in their mind with quaternions and higher-dimensional manifolds as easily as you might do arithmetic, to develop a better substrate for their own mind?
Our GDP is intrinsically linked to our rate of technological innovation. Scientific advancement is stalling. Moore's Law can only hold for so long. To survive resource shortages, we have to get better at squeezing blood from a stone, so to speak.
These people are trying to make living demigods, in order to do that.
Wow. This analysis is as incisive as the article upon which I was commenting. This almost deserves its own article...you have much to say. Thanks for putting this much time into this. I am drinking deep from this particular Pierien spring and finding it refreshing although taking me close to drowning...Your life raft is most appreciated.
I could take this analysis even further than that. Say you're a substrate-independent mind of immense cognitive and computational power. How would you tell the difference between a simulation of something, and reality? What if you split yourself into a multitude of "people" inhabiting an inner universe inside your mind? What if we are in one such universe? This is one variation on the Simulation Hypothesis.
This also touches more mundane things. Say you had the ability to inhabit a "Metaverse" and experience it with the same fidelity that you have with sensory experiences in the real world. Any conceivable luxury could be simulated. Anything at all. You could own a private submarine, a private skyscraper, it doesn't matter. None of it would use any real, physical resources. Scarcity would become meaningless. Any hedonistic desire, no matter how extreme or injurious, could be satisfied. Extreme base jumping without parachutes. Feeling what it's like to be torn apart by a hungry lion like fifty or a hundred times. Anything at all. Even sensory experiences that would ordinarily be physically impossible.
Under such conditions, morality would cease to have any meaning. We only have laws and morals because these things codify harm. How do you commit a crime against a being that is super-intelligent and incapable of being harmed? A being that could simulate every conceivable harm being done to itself in a masochistic frenzy, and come out of the experience perfectly fine?
So, that's law and morality and the concept of sin and vice out the window. Throw them in the trash, they're no longer needed.
They're trying to immanentize the eschaton.
"immanentize the eschaton" , love it. i am too, by way of prayer.
and as long as i am complimenting one phrase creation i may as well add another: "wisdom of the crowd". medieval catholic christianity called it "sensus fidelium" or the sense of the faithful, and it referred to the fact that we little ones sometimes knew better within our deep whole that which the clerics would attempt to deny or change. you probably knew that already.
But surely the resources required to create such a universe and the entities that inhabit it would be way more than those required by individuals participating in the digital sphere. It sounds extremely elitist and would have to be protected from the (remaining hungry masses) who might very likely wish to pull the plug out the socket?
this sounds like WestWorld
"...What the Elites aim to bring into being is a system of full-spectrum control and naked tyranny never before seen on this planet.........//.........They believe this will result in a more resilient society, more capable of absorbing unexpected shocks and surprises...."
The last sentence, from "They believe" is a mischaracterisation of the truth. This should read: "...They PURPORT TO believe this will result in a more resilient society, more capable of absorbing unexpected shocks and surprises...."
They 'believe' no such thing! They want US to believe that this is their benign view, so that we can be persuaded to follow their lead into tyranny and slavery, disguised as a 'better future'...
'Better' - not for us - but better for those who would now own OUR property, and be happy doing so...
We are not that easily fooled - but are enough of us aware of this sculduggery of those (among our our 'leaders') making their annual pilgrimage to DAVOS 'on our behalf'
You're right, I should edit that. I can't see how they could have any good intentions at all, when what they're doing is so blatantly immoral.
You are very very unfair with feudal lords and medieval times. They do not compare at all with the smart cities template our Power that be dream of.
This is true. In a way, medieval-era citizens had more leisure time and a reasonably high quality of life, albeit lower life expectancy due to inferior medical technology. The point here is not to say that Feudalism was bad, or draw a comparison between a simple pastoral lifestyle and living in pods and eating bugs. The point I'm trying to make is that the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Smart Cities represent, in a way, a return to pre-industrialized class arrangements, with zero class mobility and a small number of aristocrats controlling all the wealth and demanding rent for its use.
Oh well my comment was written tongue in cheek! I got your point don't worry. From a historical point of view I would argue that Ze Fourss Intustrial Refoluchion (Industrie 4.0 in German --because it is a German concept wrought by SAP) sends us back at the very origins of the Industrial Revolution, notably at the time when Enclosure was implemented on a large scale in the XVIIIth century (and even earlier!). When peasants were robbed of their common land by landowners. The latter were a new model of aristocracy very different to their ancestors, the medieval feudal lords...
Where is the Spartacus? These slaves aren't going to free themselves...
Took a little break. Got the creative juices flowing today. New article, soon. It's a bit of a doozy.
I'm subscribing. Which means someone on my list has to get cut. I am at maximum substack reading. It wont be el gato malo or Dr John, but you have put me in a real pickle as this writing is good enough to make me let one precious soldier go.
Here's my hip hop rant if anyone likes politi-hop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmAhPm8deMs
This is a big hug for humanity.
Congratulations on such an amazing series. I have read 1 - 4… and now VII. I seem to have missed 5 & 6 - are you able to send me the links to my email please? berylsellick@icloud.com
Pretty sure the full archive is accessible to everyone.
https://iceni.substack.com/archive?sort=new
Many thanks 😊
“It has been my observation that this collapse has actually been engineered on purpose, over many decades.” Re the Club of Rome Limits to Growth chart...I recently came to the same conclusion. It wasn’t a prediction. It was a plan.
https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/p/legal-walls-of-the-covid-19-kill?s=w
This might give some perspective of the real goals of the UN and WEF - and their aims of deliberate destruction of Western society:<https://canadafreepress.com/article/covid-19-the-answer-to-maurice-strongs-autobiographical-question-where-on-e>
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/t8b58n/russia_sanctions_actually_a_trigger_for_great/
Among every other way they have used this event to get to the next step in the plan it's been a fantastic way to get rid of money by sending billions of dollars of military hardware over, there is going to be more equipment than men to use it soon me thinks. What they really need are more selfie sticks.
You made a mistake using the term peasant as you did. The Free Tenant Peasants of France, for instance, back in their day did the opposite of what the modern day nobles wanted. Those lifestyles had people who knew how to take care of themselves. They didn't pay homage to anyone.
That's why the Bolsheviks were sicked on the peasants of *gasp* Ukraine, to kill them off. Then the World Wars to break apart the small holders so the fascists could consolidate land production. And now they have food control over you and your readers.
You are only dissing what perhaps is the lifestyle that would avoid smart cities.
You are so locked in you can't wait to buy the next smart phone upgrade I'm sure.
If you go back and read that passage again, what you'll see is that I did not say anything negative about peasants. I said, quite literally, the "time" of peasants and nobles. Emphasis on time. It is an incontrovertible fact that medieval peasants and serfs had more leisure time than we do today, and definitely more rights than an inhabitant of a technocracy would have.
The point I was trying to make was that we are witnessing, in essence, a cyclical political process. People seem to have this false expectation of history to proceed in one direction, from the benighted ignorance of the paleolithic, to the Bronze Age and classical antiquity, to Medievalism, to the Enlightenment, and then the Industrial Revolution, the Internet Age, and presumably, at some undefined point after this, reality turns into Star Trek and people somehow miraculously stop experiencing scarcity and want. On the contrary, we can find ourselves reverting to medievalism at any time, except it would be augmented by modern technology, which appears to be aimed at engineering a kind of inescapable tyranny.
These tyrants won't have the energy resources available to fuel this imaginative techno prison for long. Research the word finite.
Biological resources can be sustainable if not abused, but I don't know what this system isn't over using right now. Again, you are trapped in the narrative.
Humans require far less energy than the machines this system and you rely on. Its not funny, but I laugh at all attempts of those who use money to provide for all of their needs think they can just keep on with the charade. Its ridiculous, there is far money money issued around the planet now than there are resources.
I stand by my statement.
"...but I laugh at all attempts of those who use money to provide for all of their needs think they can just keep on with the charade."
You don't use money?
I agree with the sentiment but unless you're John Colter or Jim Bridger living off the land with your skills most people literally have no choice. They don't have the ability to navigate the alternative and have to exist in the world that they live in.
I admire John Day who posts here and elsewhere, he grows his own food and is doing a lot more than the average person to extricate himself from the status quo. Most people, including me, would be extremely hard pressed to do this for numerous reasons.
The sentence you reference is an off hand attempt to highlight the fact this monetary/economic system has an expire date. Too many chiefs now and not enough Indians as a metaphor. To think, humans really require very little energy to exist compared to machines, yet we are replacing humans as the providing force. Not going to last long in my opinion (research EROEI). I am growing food, hunting and fishing for meat, and foraging - I do write about these activities once and awhile. I am also using money because there are no other choices as to how I can trade with other people I don't know. This economic system was all a set up to skim the surpluses into the coffers of the fascists for some nefarious reason I'm sure. Start your journey towards becoming just a little independent by starting a garden. Start now and avoid the rush.
Great points. I think you're on thinking on the right lines.
Thank you. The author of this article is an excellent thinker, describes the situation extensively, with a slip up that I pointed out, but he had a thoughtful reply. I appreciate your and his comments and encourage more thinking about how to get out of the matrix.
So true Spartacus , so true . Great discussion, thank you for your writings. Priceless awareness.
Brilliant article. From the early understanding of these deceptions I thought of writing on self-sabotage. Those who have criticised our society as a “culture of death” are not so far off. We’ve collectively (the operative word) like a colony of insects fearing death are blindly driven by this fear to pursue destruction. Quite obviously this is wrong headed and a comparison to lemmings isn’t far off.