 - Last login: 10 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA.
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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The Archdruid Report: The Age of Salvage Societies
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Oct 25, 2007 11:47am
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•http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co...
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The Age of Salvage Societies
from Archdruid by John Michael Greer
The industrial economy currently lurching toward historyu2019s compost bin, after all, did not rise to global dominance because the people of the world agreed to make that happen. Nor did the worldu2019s elites, if the political classes of the worldu2019s various societies deserve that name, make that decision; of course there were cabals of industrialists who did their level best to further its spread, but there were plenty of leadership groups in other, competing societies who staked everything they had on resisting it, and failed. Industrial civilization had its day in the sun because, in a world where plenty of cheap abundant fossil fuel could be had for the digging or drilling, the industrial mode of production was more efficient than its rivals, and enabled the communities that embraced it to prosper at the expense of those that did not.
In turn, as the industrial system undercuts the environmental conditions that allow it to thrive, new forms better adapted to the new reality will elbow todayu2019s industrialism aside and take its place.
 The Age of Salvage Societies
John Michael Greer's analysis of the present derives from his understanding of the "long haul history". Modernity treated the citizens of tribes as "savages" and now in late-modernity are emerging the roots of our future "savage societies". The core of Greer's argument is that we are entering an area of "resource nationalism". Peak resources is preparing us "a mode of industrial economy u2013 scarcity industrialism u2013 that pursues resource nationalism rather than the mirage of a global economy, and shifts the allocation of energy and other scarce resources from the market to the political sphere".
The present geopolitical maneuverings are essentially early signs of "resource nationalism" as the Western answer to "peak oil" that foreshadows a coming "scarcity industrialism". As Alan Greenspan noted Iraq is all about the oil... as is the posturing towards Iran.
I tend to agree that peak resources shall foster a scarcity industrialism where the market is going to be superseded by central planning. Seen in this light the retrenchment of individual freedoms that we observe presently all around the Western world starts to make sense. This retrenchment of individual freedoms should be understood as early signs of a process of strengthening of the political institutions. But for this to work it should be accompanied by the strengthening of a culture of obedience in a common worldview.
Strong public institutions have always taken the substance of their power over their citizens from the gluing of those citizens behind a common vision of the whole of reality what is otherwise called a common worldview. Animism was the holistic worldview of pre-agricultural tribal societies, religions served to assure the power of kingdoms and empires that grew out of the population growth that followed agriculture, individualism fostered the justification for the spread of the logic of capital that is basically responsible for peak resources and all the side-effects of modernity.
Scarcity industrialism and salvage economies will act like a transitioning from modernity to what comes after, what Greer calls, ecotechnic societies. Such ecotechnic societies (postmodern societies) will answer the necessity to assure their reproduction and, in all likelihood, will foster a postmodern worldview (shared on a worldwide scale) combining elements of animism with elements of technicity.
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