The Post-Partisan Emporium

  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 ...

The Real Overpopulation Problem A question unasked by T.P. Wilkinson  Another bureaucratic war criminal, Robert MacNamara, said in Fog of War that he made it a rule “not to answer the question asked but to answer the question I wished they had asked”. He added that it was a good rule. It is a good rule of psychological warfare never to acknowledge the obvious messages and questions and to confine one’s own responses to euphemism and circumlocution while always exaggerating — even with expletives — the positions of one’s targets/victims. MacNamara was not only a master of deception but to judge by Errol Morris’ film also a master of self-deception. 1 Naively many readers and viewers — in part due to their own exercises in self-deception — expect that an interview or testimonial will prove the character of the person interviewed and somehow reveal “truth”. Yet the serial presentation of statements presumes that the listener/reader will thus attach objectivity to the interpretation tr...

This week it is being reported that the human population of our planet has now reached 8 billion.  We should all remember this moment, because soon the population of the globe will start getting much smaller.  In  “End Times” , I explain that we are moving into one of the most chaotic times in all of human history.  There will be wars and rumors of wars, economic collapse, worldwide famines, horrifying pestilences and great natural disasters.  Needless to say, in such a future the global population would fall very rapidly.  But for purposes of this article, let’s imagine that none of those things will happen for the foreseeable future.  For a moment, let’s imagine that conditions will be pretty much like they are today for decades to come.  Unfortunately, even in such a wildly unrealistic scenario the human population of our planet would still plummet dramatically in the years ahead.  In fact, if current trends continue there will be hardly a...

The Malthusian Mind Virus Mathew Crawford " Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy ." -Brian Tracy Early during the summer of 1985, shortly before my eighth birthday, I picked a book off the family bookshelf. I don't recall the author or title (maybe a reader here knows?), but it was a book about practical  meditation . The author included anecdotes about professional athletes, including Jack Nicklaus, and how so many of the greats practiced  positive visualization  en route to achieving success.  A few miles from our home was a Putt-Putt mini-golf and arcade center. On Saturdays, for five dollars, I got a hotdog, a soda, and could play as many rounds of 18 holes as I liked. I'd be there for hours, sometimes playing the same hole over and over to find the right angle or point on a rail to swing at, or working to control stroke impact. On other days, I would sit in my room, or on the ground outside, and imagine the process of putti...