Grandmaster of DOOM, John Michael Greer wrote an essay a few years back regarding how societies behave when they come face to face with the Limits to Growth. The Faustian West (unlike other Civilizations of the Past) chose to simply double down. Immanuel Kant delineated the Limits to Reason, and after him Darwin delineated the Limits of Organisms a century later. A century after that, The Limits to Growth delineated the Bionomic Limits of human and nonhuman organizations as such.
Half a century from now (sometime in the 2070s and beyond) the Hard Limits for Demography, Energy, Technology, Materials & Ecology will all be reached outright. Once that happens, with the exception of a few technophiles and cornucopians, I expect the majority of people to shed these ideas and revert back to subsistence lifestyles… because that will be all that they have left. So yes, Tl;dr Thomas Malthus and the priest in this story are both correct… it just took a while for them to get there Pater! 😉 😘
You quoted Kant, Malthus, and the Club of Rome in ONE COMMENT. That is a new World Record for sources I think are terrible! This is like a Mortal Kombat combo that stun locks the opponent into not knowing what to say.
Wait till you read my piece “The Next 75 Years: Predicting 2025—2100: War, Famine, Disease, Scarcity, Poverty, Outage & Death in The Industrial Twilight” 😘 😉
It will be filled with even more such Eminent DOOM-er references and will be exceptionally brutal. I made sure to smelt it at super High temperatures at the Furnace, so there is that aspect as well! 😊 🤭
Malthus was right that there's a limit to the food available, but you should not take liberal values for granted. It is a *choice* that we allow the worst and most useless elements of society to increase in number without limit. It would be extremely easy to reverse that, all that is needed is the will.
Have you been able to read Malthus properly? See, here's the thing:
His Day job was being a Theologian. For him, the nature of the world (Food, resources, etc.) was one in which Satiation increased linearly. Population, meanwhile... has the potential to increase exponentially.
Due to this discrepancy, surpluses of satiety (food, resources, etc.) generate large quantitative population increases, which tend to crash historically after a while. This was simply him doing historiography.
Now, what did he *think* about all this?
He saw it as part of God Almighty's Wisdom and Creative power. By Creating this discrepancy, He made it so that Man must learn temperance and forbearance regarding using resources for satiation.
Likewise, he needs to learn how to focus not just on quantity but also on quality (regarding offspring). So that's the crux of the matter.
He was wrong about the potential for satiation to increase linearly (it can also grow exponentially temporarily). However, his overall thesis was sound. Namely, the thesis is that the Population is bound to the tendency of Satiation to decrease (which we will soon see later in this century and beyond).
And no (unlike what you are implying here), it's not a matter of 'Will,' it's a Matter of God Almighty Creating the World in a certain way... & the Laws of Nature unfolding such that Humanity has Hard Limits on what it can & can't do.
If iron was viable the Egyptians would have invented it by now.
Was Helen of Troy merely a convenient cassis belli, or was she the precursor to the extreme simping engendered by OnlyFans content creators? I used to assume cb, until I read more about the honor-based cultures back then, as well as the retard-based cultures we have now.
Not sure if your question is in jest, but the answer, oddly enough, is kinda both. Helen, in addition to being a total babe, was the daughter of a petty king, and all the important men of the region came to court her. Her father was afraid to alienate any of them, so it was decided that before the choice was made that every suitor had to swear an oath to enforce the marriage. If anyone caused trouble because he wasn't the one chosen, all the others would be bound by oath to make war on the troublemaker. Everyone swore, and Menelaus was chosen. So later, when Paris seduced and abducted her, all the kings of Greece were oathbound to fight to take her back.
That's the story, anyway. We, of course, know it was really because the Trojans were being racists keeping out the global West and hoarding the wealth built upon the exploitation of POH (people of Hellas)
The problem is that all of that could be post-hoc rationalization. Like how the West rationalized exterminating millions of civilians in WW2 by creating the myth of nazi germany being the Greatest Evil of All Time, even though no one can state even one thing the nazis did that was worse than what the allies did before, during, and after the war.
Or it could have been made up by the story tellers cuz it was cooler than the POH just being bored and wanting to war for entertainment. Which was an actual thing back then. The past is a foreign country, and it can be very difficult to figure out actual motivations of people so alien. Like how after Odysseus killed all of his wife's suitors, he made the maids who had sex with them clean the place of execution, then hanged them. Which from contexts in the story made him the Good Guy.
Where is this estimate for 'millions of civilians being exterminated' by the allies coming from? Are you just including all civilian casualties of war?
Even allied estimates put Euro bombing casualties at 600k, with Japan adding in at least 400k for the 2 nukes, and other cities each had 100k+ deaths.
Could also add in the Rhein Meadows death camps, but that wasn't civilians. We were planning on killing 10s of millions of Germans through starvation (see: Morgenthau Plan) but then realized we needed West Germany as a counter to the Soviets.
> Even allied estimates put Euro bombing casualties at 600k, with Japan adding in at least 400k for the 2 nukes, and other cities each had 100k+ deaths.
Sure, but that's still an order of magnitude lower than the number of people who died in German and Japanese prison camps, setting aside that the Axis weren't really known for their tender treatment of enemy civilians either.
I think you're defaulting to the most cynical potential explanation for why the Morgenthau Plan was dropped, and the most dramatic possible counter-factual- it's not like X million Germans dropped dead from hunger between '45 and '47 before the Marshall Plan was introduced, and the Bundeswehr wasn't even founded until 1955.
I'm not sure what the relevance of Axis prison camps is, as we were only talking about one of the reasons the Allies needed a post-hoc excuse for intentionally murdering civilians.
The comparison to Axis prison camps would be to British concentration camps in the 2nd Boer War, where they rounded up women and children then stopped feeding them.
Or Soviet gulags, or America's internment of the japanese, or indian reservations. Or what France did in some of it's colonial wars. Rounding up problem populations and waiting for them to die is hardly an invention of the nazis.
I believe that the legend starts with Hera, Athena and Aphrodite arguing over which of them is prettier. They couldn’t get any of the gods to weigh in, so they asked the mortal Paris of Troy.
Paris, because he was an IDIOT, actually answered instead of trying to get out of it, and chose Aphrodite, who promised him the most beautiful woman in the world in return.
This earned Paris, and by extension Troy, the undying enmity of both Hera and Athena. And unfortunately for all involved, the most beautiful woman in the world was Helen of Sparta, who was married to King Menelaus. So when Paris seduced her with Aphrodite’s help and took her back to Troy (along with a large chunk of Menelaus’s treasure, because hey, he’s going to be pissed regardless), he breached sacred hospitality AND antagonized the king of Sparta and all his allies.
"Tree of Woe: votes best substack author for a literary description of an ideological view and dream of the future for 2024. With reader comments that he needs must consider changing his name to 'Tree of Hope' should he keep this up!"
Whoa! Not so fast. There's still plenty of doom that must come upon us before the Aenean Age begins. Remeber, you can't make an Iliad without killing a few Trojans.
It's why one must be weary both about nom de plumes as well as about what one writes. Otherwise one might find... spandex.... in the closet.
We can't have that. It wouldn't match those marble columnades. We must find the right ones, with good, red veins, able to be crafted in a twisting arc to match the spiralation of the soul through eternity while creating the proper doom inspiration in our enemies under red lighting.
We must have outfits with style. Maybe a cape, just some slight frill if properly offset with masculine cuts of fabric, jackets, and proper military accoutrements.
But I can be a little bit of a... rule breaker, when it comes to these things. One must catch the attention of the crowd, after all.
I'm not sure whether I should be proud of myself or not, seeing how it might have been my response to the previous post that inspired this rather hilarious diatribe here. (Basically, I had said that I agreed with Mr. Greer's prediction of a "deindustrial dark age" and thought that the idea of skipping over this stage, straight to the next high culture - "Aenean Civilization" = "Faustian Civilization without the bad parts" was fantastical).
But here's the deal - even though I agree with JMG on this one thing ("A Dark Age Is Coming!") - and it's a big thing - I don't agree with everything he says. For instance, I am not nearly as pessimistic as he is about future technological progress (i.e. his ethnocentric assumption that all useful innovation ceased circa 1980, and his insulting dismissal as "handwaving" of anyone else's belief that anything of importance will be invented during the remaining millennia of the human species' existence). But I think his attempts to apply the cyclical historical theories of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee to our own declining civilization are mostly correct, and that if we take the history of past civilizations as a guide for the present and future, then there's plenty of reasons to believe that decline and fall, a dark age lasting about three centuries, and the rebirth of a number of new high cultures is what we are going to get. (And this is true even if you don't think fossil fuel exhaustion is the central story of our age - after all neither the Hittites, Egyptians, Romans, Han Dynasty, Classical Maya, Mughal Empire, or any of the other societies that Toynbee and Spengler based their theories on had fossil fuels... but they still found ways to decline and fall.)
Though if you measure Mr. Greer's personal claims against the actual facts regarding things like solar photovoltaics (which JMG has spent his entire career insisting can't possibly matter, yet now they're the cheapest way to make electricity while the sun is shining, to the point that Texas of all places is investing heavily in them) or the rapid infrastructure growth in present day China (which in JMG's theories should be impossible, since China uses less oil than the USA - and way less on a per capita basis! - and JMG blames the stagnation of post-1970s US infrastructure primarily on fossil fuel depletion while ignoring human and political factors) then it's clear that there are big holes in the man's worldview and that he should not be treated as any sort of oracle.
And yet... Greer is still right about the One Big Thing. A dark age is indeed coming. We cannot skip over it, and while Donald Trump's recent election win is a good thing, there are just too many problems - starting with the record low fertility rates and the fact that hardly anybody in either party wants to do anything about the entitlement spending that's on the verge of crashing the currency - that Trump has no realistic chance of solving. I wrote about the limits to my post-election optimism at my own Substack here: https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/move-over-grover-cleveland - though maybe I should follow it up with another post entitled "A Dark Age Is Coming" just to hammer the point home?
And it's worth remembering that, in actual Mediterranean history, Aeneas doesn't escape the dark age. From the fall of Troy to the earliest reliable records of the Roman Republic is a gap of some seven or eight hundred years. So indeed it is possible for forward-thinking people to mitigate the effects of the Dark Age on their own posterity... indeed even to preserve much of their culture through the Dark Age (and Greer agrees with me on that). All that I am arguing against is the idea that we can skip over the Dark Age entirely. (Or invent a religion for the rising culture ahead of time, though I think I've already critiqued that idea enough in my comment on "Liminal Religion.")
If we imagine "doom" on an axis with far-left being techno-optimists and far-right being doomsayers like Ahnaf, Texas Arcane, and so on who predict roaming cannibal gangs tearing the United States apart with 80% population loss.... I'm moderate right.
I don't think we can entirely skip over the Dark Age. There's too much debt, too much loss of human capital, too poor demographics, too much social and infrastructural decay. But there are "dark ages" and there are "DARK AGES". Rome fell into a true Dark Age and for Western Europe it was a thousand-year downturn. Constantinople endured and if you were a Roman living in Constantinople the Dark Age wasn't nearly as dark as it was if you were a Roman in Britain wondering what happened to the toilets. Constantinople was, in fact, still THE superpower of the era for many centuries.
So where I part ways with the utter doomsayers is while I think it's possible that we might have roaming cannibal gangs and nuclear holocaust and mass die-off and all that, I think it's also possible we have instead fragmentation, some areas of chaos, but some redoubts of high civilization that continue to advance. People forget that technology *improved* under the Byzantines relative to the Romans, as they developed better ships (dromons), better siege weapons (trebuchets), secret weapons (greek fire), heavier cavalry (cataphracts), and more. Imagine a Byzantium that doesn't fall to the Turks and that would be my happy outcome for our future.
Assuming we do suffer a true "fall of Rome" Dark Age, what then? I think we can *guarantee* it will last forever if we take the attitude of JMG, for all of the reasons you've stated above.
So I don't think we're all that far apart, really, after all; perhaps I'm a bit more optimistic about our ability to mitigate the DARK AGE into a dark age.
OK, that makes it all a lot clearer - and of course I agree with you about there being different levels of "dark age," and societies having a degree of choice about how deep they go. It would not surprise me at all if parts of the US end up tracing the path of the Eastern Roman Empire, which in our day would mean holding onto things like grid electricity and powered flight and mass spectator sports all through the collapse and future rebuilding.
Though personally I think that, on balance, the Byzantines were a stagnant and weak civilization and the Frankish civilization that arose in the ruins of the Western Empire had bigger accomplishments in the long run - after all it was the Franks and Spaniards who stopped the Moorish incursions into Europe and reconquered Iberia, while the Byzantines, after losing most of their empire to the initial Muslim conquests and never quite turning things around, eventually capitulated entirely in 1453. (And I think that religious attitudes toward war and the military had a lot to do with it - the whole crusader mentality was a western thing; the Eastern Church - as I think you've mentioned before - considered the soldiery a rather dirty profession, and even soldiers who killed in "just wars" were banned from taking communion for three years afterwards. And so it can't be that much of a surprise that the Byzantines had a much harder time recovering from their defeats and fighting on in the face of a stronger foe.)
So there is actually a part of me that wants to see the Dark Age come good and hard, so that the survivors will be revitalized and forced to adopt a martial ethos that will allow them to build even greater civilizations in the long run. To me, the worst dystopia is not a society of nomadic goat herders, but a stagnant, half-collapsed urban society where DEI committees, parasitical bureaucracy, extreme wealth concentration, and child castrations continue for hundreds or thousands of years, while the masses are distracted by bread and circuses and the intellectuals at the top spin ideological arguments that the whole thing is a continuation of the society that people like George Washington founded. Give me the barbarians over that any day.
I can understand that viewpoint. I agree that a perpetual totalitarian dystopia is a highly plausible and truly awful outcome and can understand the desire to accelerate through it. If nothing else I would enjoy the shrieks and wails when all of their pretty lies are destroyed.
That said, my real answer to the question whether to wish for an acceleration to the Dark Age depends on whether by accelerating it we make a later Aenean Rise more or less likely.
For instance, if we get to nomadic goat herders because we destroy ourselves utterly with thermonuclear warfare and our civilization is reduced back to the stone age like the Atlanteans were by the Younger Dryas, I'd say that's the wrong plan.
But if it's similar to the result of the An Lushan Rebellion or Huang Chao Rebellion that ends the Tang Dynasty and paves the way for the Song Dynasty to begin in 70 years? Those were terrible, terrible events with millions of casualties and massive destructive-- but probably preferable to a thousand years of rule by Nineteen-Eighty Soy.
> For instance, if we get to nomadic goat herders because we destroy ourselves utterly with thermonuclear warfare and our civilization is reduced back to the stone age
Even thermonuclear warfare wouldn't reduce us to the stone age.
Stone age goat herding, even in a nuclear wasteland, is a human activity and not at all the worst outcome. A perpetual totalitarian dystopia populated by enslaved transhumans is the goal of the current enemy. The Great Reset. This is the fundamental difference with all previous threats to human civilization and it is vital we appreciate this.
Orwell's vision of the future was a boot stamping on a human face *forever,* not just a few hundred years. That ain't no dark age, that's the end of history in every sense - of the very notion of history, of the word itself. But even Orwell's vision was optimistic - at least the face being stamped on was still human.
The intent of the wannabe World Controllers is to utilize technology to make all future rebellion impossible and I see no reason why they should not succeed. For example, CBDC's (good behavior tokens) will alter our concept of money beyond recognition such that in future wealth will merely be synonymous with one's utility in enforcing Party diktats on others. Some folk have observed that CBDC's (in combination with facial recognition & smartphone QR codes) are a pretty good fit with Revelation 13:16-17. IMO this is the closest analog for the situation we are currently faced with - not an American Eschaton, *the* Eschaton.
John, that is S-tier pessimism and I respect it. I agree that the prospect of transhumanism makes future dystopia into something worse. I haven’t really discussed that particular threat much because I suspect it’s much further off and harder than we think, but I could be guilty of the same thing I think others are guilty of re: energy and travel, not anticipating tech innovation. Much to think on.
It is worth remembering that when Troy fell, civilization was already well-planted in other places -- Egypt, Mesopotamia, China. Yes, Western Civilization is doomed to endure a Dark Age; but the West is not the world. The human race will move forward in other parts of the world while the Europeans and North Americans slide backwards.
China will be the obvious near-term winner while the West disassembles itself, since China has a real productive (non-financialized) economy and a serious educational system. But no-one's day in the sun lasts forever. A hundred years from now, Brazil may be the world's leader. The issue for us in the West is whether the future world leaders will take pity on us and do their own versions of the Marshall Plan ... or whether they will simply build a wall around our primitive diseased societies.
Right. I would add that I think it is also possible that we (the West) could section off our own diseased portions and "sauve qui peut" what remains, much as the Eastern Empire wrote off the West but sustained Constantinople.
As far as China, I just don't know what to expect as the narratives that emerge out of there are so widely variant. I don't feel like I have a real picture at all.
A very witty piece and although I very much admire Aeneas' attack on defeatism, I feel I must challenge the linguistic sleight of hand he uses to promote his positive spin: The [we] not needing to humbly submit to a pathetic existence is of course not the same [we] who may benefit from the coming new technological age.
"Actually that kind of is what it means" says Jayemgeus. Yup, I'm surprised he didn't seize upon Aeneas' non-sequitur and point out that in the event of Troy's defeat the theorized beneficiaries of the Iron Age will be humanity ex the exterminated and enslaved citizens of Ilium. Now I would not venture to suggest that Aeneas is deliberately trying to present defeat in a positive light in order to undermine the Trojans' will to resist. I would however argue that the Trojans may be better served at this time by a speaker who tells it to them straight; losing this war means the annihilation of Troy, its people and all it stands for - possibly forever.
The fundamental factor which breaks this amusing historical analogy in the fact that our present enemy does not share even the most basic notions of honor, heroism, virtue (Alastair MacIntyre) or any of the other moral concepts we consider fundamental to Western (or any other) civilization. The planners of the bright new technological age consider these outmoded concepts, entirely unnecessary for 'progress'. The new age will be so beneficial to mankind in fact that 90% of us will simply not be required (Yuval Harari).
"Better to die struggling for a better future then to live accepting a shitty one" - I'm with Aeneas on this one. Defeat means an unimaginably shitty future, beyond even the imaginings of Huxley and Orwell. Every ounce of our tin must be used to make bronze weapons in order to defeat the anti-humanists at the gates of our city. Furthermore we must recognize their equine-based insurgent forces running amok inside the city walls, so as to defeat them.
One certain Karl Popper empirically demonstrated that the future cannot be predicted based on past events or, autrement dit, the fact that shit went down like that before doesn't mean that it will go down like that the same way in the future.
Also, after the hyper-materialistic binge of whatever the present fucking age is called, maybe people could give a thought to doing something else for a change, something that doesn't involve bronze, iron, stone, or concrete and hauling their fat gluttonous asses around this planet needlessly. Probably naive to think they will.
Voicing an opinion that might not coincide with yours and being critical of some or many facets of human existence does not amount to not seeming to like mankind very much. That being said, there sure are aspects of human behavior I'm not crazy about.
If I were to mention one of such aspects, it would be the fact that humans use their intellectual capacity to devise technologies (in the general sense, not tech in the narrow sense of digital shit) to go through life, as opposed to focusing on perfecting themselves, both physically and mentally. Look at the random fucker - instead of exercise, he pops pills, instead of mastering a subject, he gets a fucking phone app, and so on so forth.
Sure, technologies make sense to an extent. But we're at a point where they're grossly overused and where they atrophy human natural abilities to an extreme degree. People wouldn't survive in their natural habitat without technologies. They have become the natural habitat. Well, not really, we still need the natural nature and always will. Technologies are destroying it.
A part of that is myopic short-termism, where people are unable, or unwilling, to see the essentially self-destructive consequences of their actions.
So, in my vision of the future, people will be less of the gluttonous fuckheads they presently are, focused on perfecting themselves rather than devising perfect machines.
I meant no offense in saying you don't seem to like mankind very much. I don't blame anyone who is misanthropic in light of our condition today. I was just genuinely curious as to whether you had a generally critical view of mankind or did see a better way of life to aim at.
Your desire to see people self-improve rather than succumb to the degeneration of our time actually aligns well with a lot of things I've espoused a lot on this blog. I think I just frame my thinking less harshly ("random fucker" "gluttonous fuckheads" etc) so I read your POV wrongly. Thanks for clarifying and explaining.
I like to avail myself of all of what the lexis has to offer, and I find no better words to designate the random fucker who's pushing a shopping buggy overflowing with shit out of the supermarket on his daily trip thereto than gluttonous fuckhead. Let's call a spade a spade.
Better way of life? Yeah. Start using intellectual ability in a way that makes sense, that is not ultimately self-destructive.
BTW, I don't get offended easily and I prefer being openly confronted to the obsequious ways in which conversations take place nowadays, if people exchange opinions at all.
Grandmaster of DOOM, John Michael Greer wrote an essay a few years back regarding how societies behave when they come face to face with the Limits to Growth. The Faustian West (unlike other Civilizations of the Past) chose to simply double down. Immanuel Kant delineated the Limits to Reason, and after him Darwin delineated the Limits of Organisms a century later. A century after that, The Limits to Growth delineated the Bionomic Limits of human and nonhuman organizations as such.
Half a century from now (sometime in the 2070s and beyond) the Hard Limits for Demography, Energy, Technology, Materials & Ecology will all be reached outright. Once that happens, with the exception of a few technophiles and cornucopians, I expect the majority of people to shed these ideas and revert back to subsistence lifestyles… because that will be all that they have left. So yes, Tl;dr Thomas Malthus and the priest in this story are both correct… it just took a while for them to get there Pater! 😉 😘
You quoted Kant, Malthus, and the Club of Rome in ONE COMMENT. That is a new World Record for sources I think are terrible! This is like a Mortal Kombat combo that stun locks the opponent into not knowing what to say.
Wait till you read my piece “The Next 75 Years: Predicting 2025—2100: War, Famine, Disease, Scarcity, Poverty, Outage & Death in The Industrial Twilight” 😘 😉
It will be filled with even more such Eminent DOOM-er references and will be exceptionally brutal. I made sure to smelt it at super High temperatures at the Furnace, so there is that aspect as well! 😊 🤭
Malthus was right that there's a limit to the food available, but you should not take liberal values for granted. It is a *choice* that we allow the worst and most useless elements of society to increase in number without limit. It would be extremely easy to reverse that, all that is needed is the will.
Have you been able to read Malthus properly? See, here's the thing:
His Day job was being a Theologian. For him, the nature of the world (Food, resources, etc.) was one in which Satiation increased linearly. Population, meanwhile... has the potential to increase exponentially.
Due to this discrepancy, surpluses of satiety (food, resources, etc.) generate large quantitative population increases, which tend to crash historically after a while. This was simply him doing historiography.
Now, what did he *think* about all this?
He saw it as part of God Almighty's Wisdom and Creative power. By Creating this discrepancy, He made it so that Man must learn temperance and forbearance regarding using resources for satiation.
Likewise, he needs to learn how to focus not just on quantity but also on quality (regarding offspring). So that's the crux of the matter.
He was wrong about the potential for satiation to increase linearly (it can also grow exponentially temporarily). However, his overall thesis was sound. Namely, the thesis is that the Population is bound to the tendency of Satiation to decrease (which we will soon see later in this century and beyond).
And no (unlike what you are implying here), it's not a matter of 'Will,' it's a Matter of God Almighty Creating the World in a certain way... & the Laws of Nature unfolding such that Humanity has Hard Limits on what it can & can't do.
Thank you DR DOOM for another doom post seemingly pulled out of the depths of my own mind.
If iron was viable the Egyptians would have invented it by now.
Was Helen of Troy merely a convenient cassis belli, or was she the precursor to the extreme simping engendered by OnlyFans content creators? I used to assume cb, until I read more about the honor-based cultures back then, as well as the retard-based cultures we have now.
"Retard-based culture" is hilariously accurate.
Not sure if your question is in jest, but the answer, oddly enough, is kinda both. Helen, in addition to being a total babe, was the daughter of a petty king, and all the important men of the region came to court her. Her father was afraid to alienate any of them, so it was decided that before the choice was made that every suitor had to swear an oath to enforce the marriage. If anyone caused trouble because he wasn't the one chosen, all the others would be bound by oath to make war on the troublemaker. Everyone swore, and Menelaus was chosen. So later, when Paris seduced and abducted her, all the kings of Greece were oathbound to fight to take her back.
That's the story, anyway. We, of course, know it was really because the Trojans were being racists keeping out the global West and hoarding the wealth built upon the exploitation of POH (people of Hellas)
The problem is that all of that could be post-hoc rationalization. Like how the West rationalized exterminating millions of civilians in WW2 by creating the myth of nazi germany being the Greatest Evil of All Time, even though no one can state even one thing the nazis did that was worse than what the allies did before, during, and after the war.
Or it could have been made up by the story tellers cuz it was cooler than the POH just being bored and wanting to war for entertainment. Which was an actual thing back then. The past is a foreign country, and it can be very difficult to figure out actual motivations of people so alien. Like how after Odysseus killed all of his wife's suitors, he made the maids who had sex with them clean the place of execution, then hanged them. Which from contexts in the story made him the Good Guy.
Where is this estimate for 'millions of civilians being exterminated' by the allies coming from? Are you just including all civilian casualties of war?
Even allied estimates put Euro bombing casualties at 600k, with Japan adding in at least 400k for the 2 nukes, and other cities each had 100k+ deaths.
Could also add in the Rhein Meadows death camps, but that wasn't civilians. We were planning on killing 10s of millions of Germans through starvation (see: Morgenthau Plan) but then realized we needed West Germany as a counter to the Soviets.
We weren't the good guys.
> Even allied estimates put Euro bombing casualties at 600k, with Japan adding in at least 400k for the 2 nukes, and other cities each had 100k+ deaths.
Sure, but that's still an order of magnitude lower than the number of people who died in German and Japanese prison camps, setting aside that the Axis weren't really known for their tender treatment of enemy civilians either.
I think you're defaulting to the most cynical potential explanation for why the Morgenthau Plan was dropped, and the most dramatic possible counter-factual- it's not like X million Germans dropped dead from hunger between '45 and '47 before the Marshall Plan was introduced, and the Bundeswehr wasn't even founded until 1955.
I'm not sure what the relevance of Axis prison camps is, as we were only talking about one of the reasons the Allies needed a post-hoc excuse for intentionally murdering civilians.
The comparison to Axis prison camps would be to British concentration camps in the 2nd Boer War, where they rounded up women and children then stopped feeding them.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/boer-war#3
Or Soviet gulags, or America's internment of the japanese, or indian reservations. Or what France did in some of it's colonial wars. Rounding up problem populations and waiting for them to die is hardly an invention of the nazis.
Frankly even the Morgenthau Plan wasn't as bad as the German plan for the Slavs in the territories they conquered.
I believe that the legend starts with Hera, Athena and Aphrodite arguing over which of them is prettier. They couldn’t get any of the gods to weigh in, so they asked the mortal Paris of Troy.
Paris, because he was an IDIOT, actually answered instead of trying to get out of it, and chose Aphrodite, who promised him the most beautiful woman in the world in return.
This earned Paris, and by extension Troy, the undying enmity of both Hera and Athena. And unfortunately for all involved, the most beautiful woman in the world was Helen of Sparta, who was married to King Menelaus. So when Paris seduced her with Aphrodite’s help and took her back to Troy (along with a large chunk of Menelaus’s treasure, because hey, he’s going to be pissed regardless), he breached sacred hospitality AND antagonized the king of Sparta and all his allies.
That’s what you get for letting Paris put a ho before his bro.
It's a deep metaphor for the suicidalism of Western culture and the impact of simping!
If the Trojans represent the West, who do the Greeks represent? Because I'll just avoid those women.
The Greeks are Democrats
(see what I did there)
Wunderbar
Fassbender as Aeneas please
Cast the die high, Aeneas.
This was so good. Made my day. Thankyou
In order for Rome to rise, Troy must fall.
Rebirth requires Death.
Spring requires Winter.
Pure gold
😎Well done.
Great Translation...and Literature.
“The Assembly: *muttered silence*” 🤣
Hahaha.
"Tree of Woe: votes best substack author for a literary description of an ideological view and dream of the future for 2024. With reader comments that he needs must consider changing his name to 'Tree of Hope' should he keep this up!"
Maybe so! It's not as catchy though and Thulsa Doom would have to wear white and gold!
Whoa! Not so fast. There's still plenty of doom that must come upon us before the Aenean Age begins. Remeber, you can't make an Iliad without killing a few Trojans.
Very true!
Yes.
It's why one must be weary both about nom de plumes as well as about what one writes. Otherwise one might find... spandex.... in the closet.
We can't have that. It wouldn't match those marble columnades. We must find the right ones, with good, red veins, able to be crafted in a twisting arc to match the spiralation of the soul through eternity while creating the proper doom inspiration in our enemies under red lighting.
We must have outfits with style. Maybe a cape, just some slight frill if properly offset with masculine cuts of fabric, jackets, and proper military accoutrements.
But I can be a little bit of a... rule breaker, when it comes to these things. One must catch the attention of the crowd, after all.
I'm not sure whether I should be proud of myself or not, seeing how it might have been my response to the previous post that inspired this rather hilarious diatribe here. (Basically, I had said that I agreed with Mr. Greer's prediction of a "deindustrial dark age" and thought that the idea of skipping over this stage, straight to the next high culture - "Aenean Civilization" = "Faustian Civilization without the bad parts" was fantastical).
But here's the deal - even though I agree with JMG on this one thing ("A Dark Age Is Coming!") - and it's a big thing - I don't agree with everything he says. For instance, I am not nearly as pessimistic as he is about future technological progress (i.e. his ethnocentric assumption that all useful innovation ceased circa 1980, and his insulting dismissal as "handwaving" of anyone else's belief that anything of importance will be invented during the remaining millennia of the human species' existence). But I think his attempts to apply the cyclical historical theories of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee to our own declining civilization are mostly correct, and that if we take the history of past civilizations as a guide for the present and future, then there's plenty of reasons to believe that decline and fall, a dark age lasting about three centuries, and the rebirth of a number of new high cultures is what we are going to get. (And this is true even if you don't think fossil fuel exhaustion is the central story of our age - after all neither the Hittites, Egyptians, Romans, Han Dynasty, Classical Maya, Mughal Empire, or any of the other societies that Toynbee and Spengler based their theories on had fossil fuels... but they still found ways to decline and fall.)
Though if you measure Mr. Greer's personal claims against the actual facts regarding things like solar photovoltaics (which JMG has spent his entire career insisting can't possibly matter, yet now they're the cheapest way to make electricity while the sun is shining, to the point that Texas of all places is investing heavily in them) or the rapid infrastructure growth in present day China (which in JMG's theories should be impossible, since China uses less oil than the USA - and way less on a per capita basis! - and JMG blames the stagnation of post-1970s US infrastructure primarily on fossil fuel depletion while ignoring human and political factors) then it's clear that there are big holes in the man's worldview and that he should not be treated as any sort of oracle.
And yet... Greer is still right about the One Big Thing. A dark age is indeed coming. We cannot skip over it, and while Donald Trump's recent election win is a good thing, there are just too many problems - starting with the record low fertility rates and the fact that hardly anybody in either party wants to do anything about the entitlement spending that's on the verge of crashing the currency - that Trump has no realistic chance of solving. I wrote about the limits to my post-election optimism at my own Substack here: https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/move-over-grover-cleveland - though maybe I should follow it up with another post entitled "A Dark Age Is Coming" just to hammer the point home?
And it's worth remembering that, in actual Mediterranean history, Aeneas doesn't escape the dark age. From the fall of Troy to the earliest reliable records of the Roman Republic is a gap of some seven or eight hundred years. So indeed it is possible for forward-thinking people to mitigate the effects of the Dark Age on their own posterity... indeed even to preserve much of their culture through the Dark Age (and Greer agrees with me on that). All that I am arguing against is the idea that we can skip over the Dark Age entirely. (Or invent a religion for the rising culture ahead of time, though I think I've already critiqued that idea enough in my comment on "Liminal Religion.")
Yes your post motivated this, hehe!
If we imagine "doom" on an axis with far-left being techno-optimists and far-right being doomsayers like Ahnaf, Texas Arcane, and so on who predict roaming cannibal gangs tearing the United States apart with 80% population loss.... I'm moderate right.
I don't think we can entirely skip over the Dark Age. There's too much debt, too much loss of human capital, too poor demographics, too much social and infrastructural decay. But there are "dark ages" and there are "DARK AGES". Rome fell into a true Dark Age and for Western Europe it was a thousand-year downturn. Constantinople endured and if you were a Roman living in Constantinople the Dark Age wasn't nearly as dark as it was if you were a Roman in Britain wondering what happened to the toilets. Constantinople was, in fact, still THE superpower of the era for many centuries.
So where I part ways with the utter doomsayers is while I think it's possible that we might have roaming cannibal gangs and nuclear holocaust and mass die-off and all that, I think it's also possible we have instead fragmentation, some areas of chaos, but some redoubts of high civilization that continue to advance. People forget that technology *improved* under the Byzantines relative to the Romans, as they developed better ships (dromons), better siege weapons (trebuchets), secret weapons (greek fire), heavier cavalry (cataphracts), and more. Imagine a Byzantium that doesn't fall to the Turks and that would be my happy outcome for our future.
Assuming we do suffer a true "fall of Rome" Dark Age, what then? I think we can *guarantee* it will last forever if we take the attitude of JMG, for all of the reasons you've stated above.
So I don't think we're all that far apart, really, after all; perhaps I'm a bit more optimistic about our ability to mitigate the DARK AGE into a dark age.
*95+% population loss over the next millennia Pater, which bottoms out sometime in the 31st century CE. 😊🤭
OK, that makes it all a lot clearer - and of course I agree with you about there being different levels of "dark age," and societies having a degree of choice about how deep they go. It would not surprise me at all if parts of the US end up tracing the path of the Eastern Roman Empire, which in our day would mean holding onto things like grid electricity and powered flight and mass spectator sports all through the collapse and future rebuilding.
Though personally I think that, on balance, the Byzantines were a stagnant and weak civilization and the Frankish civilization that arose in the ruins of the Western Empire had bigger accomplishments in the long run - after all it was the Franks and Spaniards who stopped the Moorish incursions into Europe and reconquered Iberia, while the Byzantines, after losing most of their empire to the initial Muslim conquests and never quite turning things around, eventually capitulated entirely in 1453. (And I think that religious attitudes toward war and the military had a lot to do with it - the whole crusader mentality was a western thing; the Eastern Church - as I think you've mentioned before - considered the soldiery a rather dirty profession, and even soldiers who killed in "just wars" were banned from taking communion for three years afterwards. And so it can't be that much of a surprise that the Byzantines had a much harder time recovering from their defeats and fighting on in the face of a stronger foe.)
So there is actually a part of me that wants to see the Dark Age come good and hard, so that the survivors will be revitalized and forced to adopt a martial ethos that will allow them to build even greater civilizations in the long run. To me, the worst dystopia is not a society of nomadic goat herders, but a stagnant, half-collapsed urban society where DEI committees, parasitical bureaucracy, extreme wealth concentration, and child castrations continue for hundreds or thousands of years, while the masses are distracted by bread and circuses and the intellectuals at the top spin ideological arguments that the whole thing is a continuation of the society that people like George Washington founded. Give me the barbarians over that any day.
I can understand that viewpoint. I agree that a perpetual totalitarian dystopia is a highly plausible and truly awful outcome and can understand the desire to accelerate through it. If nothing else I would enjoy the shrieks and wails when all of their pretty lies are destroyed.
That said, my real answer to the question whether to wish for an acceleration to the Dark Age depends on whether by accelerating it we make a later Aenean Rise more or less likely.
For instance, if we get to nomadic goat herders because we destroy ourselves utterly with thermonuclear warfare and our civilization is reduced back to the stone age like the Atlanteans were by the Younger Dryas, I'd say that's the wrong plan.
But if it's similar to the result of the An Lushan Rebellion or Huang Chao Rebellion that ends the Tang Dynasty and paves the way for the Song Dynasty to begin in 70 years? Those were terrible, terrible events with millions of casualties and massive destructive-- but probably preferable to a thousand years of rule by Nineteen-Eighty Soy.
> For instance, if we get to nomadic goat herders because we destroy ourselves utterly with thermonuclear warfare and our civilization is reduced back to the stone age
Even thermonuclear warfare wouldn't reduce us to the stone age.
Stone age goat herding, even in a nuclear wasteland, is a human activity and not at all the worst outcome. A perpetual totalitarian dystopia populated by enslaved transhumans is the goal of the current enemy. The Great Reset. This is the fundamental difference with all previous threats to human civilization and it is vital we appreciate this.
Orwell's vision of the future was a boot stamping on a human face *forever,* not just a few hundred years. That ain't no dark age, that's the end of history in every sense - of the very notion of history, of the word itself. But even Orwell's vision was optimistic - at least the face being stamped on was still human.
The intent of the wannabe World Controllers is to utilize technology to make all future rebellion impossible and I see no reason why they should not succeed. For example, CBDC's (good behavior tokens) will alter our concept of money beyond recognition such that in future wealth will merely be synonymous with one's utility in enforcing Party diktats on others. Some folk have observed that CBDC's (in combination with facial recognition & smartphone QR codes) are a pretty good fit with Revelation 13:16-17. IMO this is the closest analog for the situation we are currently faced with - not an American Eschaton, *the* Eschaton.
Best wishes, John.
John, that is S-tier pessimism and I respect it. I agree that the prospect of transhumanism makes future dystopia into something worse. I haven’t really discussed that particular threat much because I suspect it’s much further off and harder than we think, but I could be guilty of the same thing I think others are guilty of re: energy and travel, not anticipating tech innovation. Much to think on.
It is worth remembering that when Troy fell, civilization was already well-planted in other places -- Egypt, Mesopotamia, China. Yes, Western Civilization is doomed to endure a Dark Age; but the West is not the world. The human race will move forward in other parts of the world while the Europeans and North Americans slide backwards.
China will be the obvious near-term winner while the West disassembles itself, since China has a real productive (non-financialized) economy and a serious educational system. But no-one's day in the sun lasts forever. A hundred years from now, Brazil may be the world's leader. The issue for us in the West is whether the future world leaders will take pity on us and do their own versions of the Marshall Plan ... or whether they will simply build a wall around our primitive diseased societies.
Right. I would add that I think it is also possible that we (the West) could section off our own diseased portions and "sauve qui peut" what remains, much as the Eastern Empire wrote off the West but sustained Constantinople.
As far as China, I just don't know what to expect as the narratives that emerge out of there are so widely variant. I don't feel like I have a real picture at all.
Oh fools and their optimism
A very witty piece and although I very much admire Aeneas' attack on defeatism, I feel I must challenge the linguistic sleight of hand he uses to promote his positive spin: The [we] not needing to humbly submit to a pathetic existence is of course not the same [we] who may benefit from the coming new technological age.
"Actually that kind of is what it means" says Jayemgeus. Yup, I'm surprised he didn't seize upon Aeneas' non-sequitur and point out that in the event of Troy's defeat the theorized beneficiaries of the Iron Age will be humanity ex the exterminated and enslaved citizens of Ilium. Now I would not venture to suggest that Aeneas is deliberately trying to present defeat in a positive light in order to undermine the Trojans' will to resist. I would however argue that the Trojans may be better served at this time by a speaker who tells it to them straight; losing this war means the annihilation of Troy, its people and all it stands for - possibly forever.
The fundamental factor which breaks this amusing historical analogy in the fact that our present enemy does not share even the most basic notions of honor, heroism, virtue (Alastair MacIntyre) or any of the other moral concepts we consider fundamental to Western (or any other) civilization. The planners of the bright new technological age consider these outmoded concepts, entirely unnecessary for 'progress'. The new age will be so beneficial to mankind in fact that 90% of us will simply not be required (Yuval Harari).
"Better to die struggling for a better future then to live accepting a shitty one" - I'm with Aeneas on this one. Defeat means an unimaginably shitty future, beyond even the imaginings of Huxley and Orwell. Every ounce of our tin must be used to make bronze weapons in order to defeat the anti-humanists at the gates of our city. Furthermore we must recognize their equine-based insurgent forces running amok inside the city walls, so as to defeat them.
A happy New Year to you and all readers.
American Eschaton: The retard-based culture
One certain Karl Popper empirically demonstrated that the future cannot be predicted based on past events or, autrement dit, the fact that shit went down like that before doesn't mean that it will go down like that the same way in the future.
Also, after the hyper-materialistic binge of whatever the present fucking age is called, maybe people could give a thought to doing something else for a change, something that doesn't involve bronze, iron, stone, or concrete and hauling their fat gluttonous asses around this planet needlessly. Probably naive to think they will.
What exactly is the future you want for mankind, Paul? From your posts you don't seem to like mankind very much at all.
Voicing an opinion that might not coincide with yours and being critical of some or many facets of human existence does not amount to not seeming to like mankind very much. That being said, there sure are aspects of human behavior I'm not crazy about.
If I were to mention one of such aspects, it would be the fact that humans use their intellectual capacity to devise technologies (in the general sense, not tech in the narrow sense of digital shit) to go through life, as opposed to focusing on perfecting themselves, both physically and mentally. Look at the random fucker - instead of exercise, he pops pills, instead of mastering a subject, he gets a fucking phone app, and so on so forth.
Sure, technologies make sense to an extent. But we're at a point where they're grossly overused and where they atrophy human natural abilities to an extreme degree. People wouldn't survive in their natural habitat without technologies. They have become the natural habitat. Well, not really, we still need the natural nature and always will. Technologies are destroying it.
A part of that is myopic short-termism, where people are unable, or unwilling, to see the essentially self-destructive consequences of their actions.
So, in my vision of the future, people will be less of the gluttonous fuckheads they presently are, focused on perfecting themselves rather than devising perfect machines.
Hope that answers your question.
I meant no offense in saying you don't seem to like mankind very much. I don't blame anyone who is misanthropic in light of our condition today. I was just genuinely curious as to whether you had a generally critical view of mankind or did see a better way of life to aim at.
Your desire to see people self-improve rather than succumb to the degeneration of our time actually aligns well with a lot of things I've espoused a lot on this blog. I think I just frame my thinking less harshly ("random fucker" "gluttonous fuckheads" etc) so I read your POV wrongly. Thanks for clarifying and explaining.
I like to avail myself of all of what the lexis has to offer, and I find no better words to designate the random fucker who's pushing a shopping buggy overflowing with shit out of the supermarket on his daily trip thereto than gluttonous fuckhead. Let's call a spade a spade.
Better way of life? Yeah. Start using intellectual ability in a way that makes sense, that is not ultimately self-destructive.
BTW, I don't get offended easily and I prefer being openly confronted to the obsequious ways in which conversations take place nowadays, if people exchange opinions at all.