Political and Economic Organization
End Games of Modern Civilization: false flag scare strategies and global cultural revolutions
Monday, May 10th, 2021Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it… – Santayana
…First as tragedy, then as farce. – Karl Marx
Modern civilization is an interactive and interdependent whole that ties together, however loosely, specific energy drivers, technologies, physical and social structures, ways of living and cultural beliefs and values. Elements distinctive of this whole [...]
Polarization in crisis: Nazi Germany and US today
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021Anna Segher’s short stories and especially her novel of political imprisonment and escape, The Seventh Cross, explore a progressive fracture of German society in the 1930s caused by the rise of the Nazi party. Reading her painstaking descriptions of where the ripple effects of the polarization catch individuals and whole social networks evokes constant parallels [...]
A holistic view of catabolic collapse
Tuesday, December 8th, 2020“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” ~ H.L. Mencken
The graphic view of catabolic collapse as a serpent eating its tail was familiar to the ancients. Descriptions of collapse of industrial society [...]
The quality of peasant life: a scenario for survival
Tuesday, November 17th, 2020Histories of peasant life that characterize it as nasty, brutish and short ignore the vast variety around the world of peasant quality of life and attendant differences in environment, social organization and culture. Differences of degree of overlordship alone range from several layers of overlords to complete autonomy. It is just this great variety, the [...]
The Orange Revolution Comes Home to Roost?
Sunday, August 30th, 2020The orange revolution, sometimes labeled simply ‘color revolution’, is a project of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an organization set up to facilitate the penetration of Western private capital in every part of the world.[1] As such, one of the tasks of the CIA is to destroy revolts against compliant governments, and to destabilize and [...]
Energy and Sustainability in Late Modern Society
Thursday, July 9th, 2020Near the end of the modern age, sustainability assessment of the economic activities of modern society has encountered two problems, one physical, the other cultural. The discovery of a dense, high quality energy source had led to an explosion of human use of the planet’s raw materials and facilitated invention of new technologies, which in [...]
A systems view of Western policy today
Friday, July 12th, 2019Complex systems are resilient, or resistant to change from another viewpoint. Human societies are complex systems. Historically they have exhibited this inertia – a tendency to repeatedly snap back to business as usual or some facsimile of it when faced with a long period of inevitable change. Modern industrial society confronts just this situation – [...]
The Industrial Economy is Ending Forever: an Energy Explanation for Agriculturists and Everyone
Saturday, March 30th, 2019Nothing happens without energy. Howard T. Odum created a framework of energy flow, conversion, storages and feedback that built systems ecology into a general systems theory. That provided ecosystem science with a rigorous disciplinary basis. Odum and his intellectual progeny see that understanding how energy makes everything happen is so important, not only for the [...]
The Age of Modernity and its Discontents
Sunday, January 27th, 2019When the whole world is globalized [read modernized], you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.
—Rene Girard
In human history, every cultural age is more than a collection of disparate elements. It is an interdependent, interactive whole some of whose elements need others to survive, as do species [...]
The prospect of a new Gothic Age in the US during the decline of the industrial era
Sunday, November 18th, 2018Human society faces an unprecedented, irreparable shift away from industrial civilization that ultimately will prove catastrophic for most people. A large part of the global population has a cultural heritage that derives from the age of monotheisms that began about two millennia ago. This heritage persists despite strong secularization trends that began in recent centuries [...]
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