Technological Superstitions | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

Sept. 10, 2014 (Archdruid Report) -- I'd meant to go straight on from last week’s post about völkerwanderung and the dissolution and birth of ethnic identities in dark age societies, and start talking about the mechanisms by which societies destroy themselves -- with an eye, of course, to the present example.

Still, as I’ve noted here more than once, there are certain complexities involved in the project of discussing the decline and fall of civilizations in a civilization that’s hard at work on its own decline and fall, and one of those complexities is the way that tempting examples of the process keep popping up as we go.

The last week or so has been unusually full of those. The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has continued to spread at an exponential rate as hopelessly underfunded attempts to contain it crumple, while the leaders of the world’s industrial nations distract themselves playing geopolitics in blithe disregard of the very real possibility that their inattention may be helping to launch the next great global pandemic.

In other news -- tip of the archdruidical hat here to The Daily Impact -- companies and investors who have been involved in the fracking bubble are quietly bailing out. If things continue on their current trajectory, as I’ve noted before, this autumn could very well see the fracking boom go bust; it’s anyone’s guess how heavily that will hit the global economy, but fracking-related loans and investments have accounted for a sufficiently large fraction of Wall Street profits in recent years that the crater left by a fracking bust will likely be large and deep.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/technological-superstitions-john-michael-greer

[AverageJoe90]

1. "Superstitions"? Coming from this guy.....that's just rich!

After all, this is a guy who takes stock in what is essentially "faith-based&quot yes, I am using his own terminology against him) extreme pessimism, and a belief in inevitable permanent human decline. How is one such as J.M. Greer to be taken seriously, which such things in mind?

I will say this: I am not, myself, a rose-colored glasses super-optimist. I am, in fact, a realist; no, I don't think we'll all have flying cars in 2050. Yes, there will still be wars, disease, etc. And yes, climate change will still be a problem. But then again, we need not get into just how many even totally believable doomsday predictions have been proven wrong.....