Reimagining Political Economy
Reimagining Political Economy John Michael Greer Over the last couple of months I’ve discussed the way that contemporary industrial societies struggle under the weight of a disastrous failure of imagination. That’s among the most potent and disturbing political facts of our time. Even though the existing order of society has proven to be a miserable failure in terms of every human value, and is cracking apart around us as we watch, an astonishing number of people have lost the ability to imagine any alternative to it that doesn’t duplicate all its worst features. Now of course there are reasons for this. I’m thinking here, to begin with, of a thoughtful recent essay by Eve Ettinger challenging the current popular notion of “burnout.” Ettinger spent twenty years in an abusive religious environment and, like many survivors of experiences of that kind, came out of it with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Her essay notes that many of the people she knows wh...