The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Beyond Lenocracy John Michael Greer I think most people have had the experience of watching a jumble of unorganized thoughts sort out all at once into a lattice of meanings, with a single word filling the role of seed crystal. It’s something that happens to me tolerably often.  Much of the direction of my life was set, for example, one day in my early twenties when the word “decline” became such a seed crystal, and helped me see that the future taking shape around me was neither progress nor collapse but the common fate of all civilizations. I’ve recently had another such verbal seed crystal drop into my mind. This one wasn’t anything like as worldshaking as the concept of decline has turned out to be, and it also had a curious feature; I grasped the concept in an instant but I had to invent a word for it. The word I came up with is “lenocracy.” The first part of that word comes from  leno , the Latin term for a pimp. Yes, what the word means is a government of pimps. Let’s unpack th

  Cereal For The Peasants? How The Elites Use “Skimpflation” To Control Our Eating Habits   By Brandon Smith People who have been reading my analysis for a long time are well aware of my expectations on the eventual outcome of the US economic debacle: A stagflationary crisis followed by a massive crash similar to the Great Depression (or worse). I based this prediction on a number of circumstances, but primarily I went back to the history of currency devaluations and central bank policy. These kinds of things have happened before and they tend to follow a pattern that is visible today. Specifically, I studies the 1971-1981 stagflation crisis for reference and I found some startling similarities. It was one of the worst economic declines in American history next to the depression, and it’s an event that almost no one talks about. A lot of people (specifically Gen Z) believe that our current era is the worst financial era of all time and that their generation has been shafted by previous

  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

  Deindustrial Warfare: A First Reconaissance January 31, 2024 John Michael Greer Leave a comment This January has five Wednesdays, and in the usual way of this blog, the fifth Wednesday gets an essay on whatever topic the readers select by vote. As usual, it was a lively contest, but this time one of the perennial underdogs—warfare in the deindustrial age—came out on top. That didn’t surprise me greatly.  The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been on many minds recently, not least because neither of them has been working out the way that our politicians and pundits insisted they would. A genuine revolution in military affairs is taking place right now, and no, it’s not the one that was so loudly ballyhooed in intellectual circles a couple of decades back. The claim in the 1990s was that computer technology had opened the way to a new kind of war, in which information would flow from the battlefield to headquarters and back, giving commanders total control over hypercomplex, hug