The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Laughter of Wolves John Michael Greer As I write these words, lean gray wolves are pacing through a rain-soaked landscape in eastern Europe.  Dim rumbling sounds in the far distance, like summer thunder that’s strayed into the wrong season, don’t bother them. Nor does it trouble them that the forest around them is dotted with the decaying ruins of buildings abandoned half a century ago. Something else doesn’t disturb them, either, but we’ll get to that. Keep the wolves in mind as we proceed. Keep them in mind. It may seem like an improbable leap from wolves running through the forest to a flustered speech by one of the pampered darlings of the Western world’s corporate aristocracy, but there’s a connection. The pampered darling is Yuval Noah Harari, the chief intellectual of  the Davos set these days. I hope I won’t be accused of setting up a straw man if I mention that he’s a gay vegan atheist who practices mindfulness meditation and writes the kind of big-picture history books

  An Unfamiliar World John Michael Greer Last month’s post  on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers worldwide.  Nearly everyone alive today grew up hearing about the population boom; it requires a major shift in mental gears to adjust to the imminence of the population bust. A twentieth century problem. It fascinates me that so few people have grasped that this is happening, and even fewer have any sense of what it implies.  I still field comments tolerably often from readers who are convinced that overpopulation is the biggest threat our species faces. (Admittedly most of those readers belong to my generation, and we grew up in a media culture saturated with such ideas.)  That human population is near a peak and will be declini

  All Their Stupid Ideas Can be Reversed and We Will Make the Deserts Bloom We will restore the very ground of our being ELIZABETH NICKSON Did none of the Masters of the Universe take Marketing 101? I know it’s a quasi-discipline, much  déclassé , for the peons in flyover country who sell widgets to live, but it does determine the world. What do you want to buy with your disposable income? What food, what house, what car, what do your children lust after?  Shopping decisions determine the shape of the real world, where real things happen. For some people, it’s their only opportunity for self-determination, and take it they will. This fundamental human characteristic is described perfectly by a graph, a chart. The  Marketing Curve  has been around for fifty years, and its one assumption is that human desire is the primary driver of the economy. We are divided into forerunners, innovators, early adopters and late adopters and it holds true for digital products, politics, vacations, and h