In this time of crisis where everything is falling apart it is worth considering what is enough. What is that right amount of life that is optimal. How much wealth should we have? Should we embrace less wealth to achieve more value? These days wealth is a trap just as much as poverty. Is there a middle path?
We are in a society that is incapable of knowing limits. The best society can do is financial limits. How much money you have available is not a good “limit” metric in a time of excesses. Time of excess heading into a crisis is a bad time to be in a wealth trap. Poverty in these times is precarious too because safety nets will be failing. We again get back to a middle road.
In some ways we are stuck in our lives as they are. Economically all will be under stress to maintain the comforts and security which we have grown up with. Increasingly it will be essentials we focus on. Discretionary enjoyments will be in decline. This will not only be because there is not enough money to indulge but also because increasingly, discretionaries won’t be available. In economics this is called stagflation.
Components of this stalling are the degree of delocalization and transhumanism in our lives. These are structural dependencies. How many of us could give up our cars or our digital devices? How many of us can remain in a 30 mi local area? These conditions of affluence prevent maneuver. This is both internal and external. These basics of modern life contribute to a feeling of affluence that is scary to consider doing without.
Progressive investments in this delocalized and transhuman life of machines has been unstoppable. It is set to undergo a deceleration as prosperity takes a haircut. Numbers I have seen show that a gradual decline of 40% is ahead over a decade. This is systematic but net energy decline is the most important aspect. This kind of gradual decline leads to sudden decline in localized situations. Unfortunately, such breakdowns can have little to do with how strong people or places are.
This is the nature of chaotic breakdown. Abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational infect systems. It is best to plan and implement efforts at mitigation to the gradual decline that is easier to identify. The threat of the unknown of sudden collapses requires fortitude. Fortitude requires a physical defense of being strong. It is also important to have a spiritual strength that comes with finding meaning.
These are the primary starting points for preparation for the coming storm. Downsizing with dignity is a good strategy. Downsize now and beat the rush. Dignity comes with being honest with the science and thereby finding the truth. It also requires a wisdom of what knowledge and tech to keep and what to reject. In these times of a knowledge and tech prosperity hitting a brick wall of limits, this means making an effort at less most of the time.
What is “enough” of less. This is going to be an individual effort. Society will not get there until a crisis and once in crisis it is too late. The myth of progress is too strong for a society to voluntarily decline. It does not have a common and accepted spiritual theme for it. In the late stages of prosperity corruption is rampant so the rule of law, fairness, and proper principals of value are lost in the noise of affluence.
The reflection on having less and being less relevant is difficult. It goes against the grain. We are told to reach our potential. This is influenced by our peer group too making it that much harder to resist. In some ways it is so easy it is hard. Yet, for those who embrace this strategy of aligning with the times it will likely pay off.
I say likely because there are no refuges in a storm like what is ahead. There is just good judgment and hard work. Luck will play a part in this process. Yet, it would be unwise to trust in luck only. The best starting policy, if you do choose to believe this is a time of breakdown is a spiritual embrace of humility and acceptance. This will give you the courage to make tough physical choices needed for defense.
A significant amount of the population is not even capable of addressing this thought process. They are too young, old, uneducated, overeducated, and ideological. I would say this leaves 10% of the population that can be potential leaders or critical staff so to speak. Of this 10% only a portion will buy into the idea. This might be only around 2% at least in the begging of the process.
I am speaking to those ready for this journey. Have clear vision and see that prosperity is ending. No amount of tech will save this. In fact, this is the problem now. The law of diminishing returns is now being manifested. The more we embrace powerful tech and knowledge-based abilities the less value there is. In many ways there is negative value. Important strengths are being squandered in the name of progress.
The idea of enough is spiritual and physical. It is for a few who are honest and capable. For these it is a trait of leadership. These people will have the courage to lead their significant others to places of safety. These days enough is almost always less but there is an important caveat. Often times less requires more. Degrowth requires growth.
When complex systems breakdown it frees up opportunity for niches. We are mostly in the gradual part of this complex system breaking down so there is time to grow into degrowth. Time is running out and at this point, time is the most important variable. This means get started now because the ability to change will quickly decline.
There are places with no future. There are careers with no use in a world forced out of prosperity. There are people and communities that are dead ends. Honestly evaluate your situation. If you need to move then do it. If you can’t then hunker down. Having a good location to build up your fortress to decline is one of the top variables to safety just like in warfare.
A spirituality is needed that is generally lacking today. Religions are corrupted by affluence. The secular world is becoming a religion of lies. When science becomes a religion like it is today very dangerous outcomes occur. Artificial intelligence, automation, and efficiencies are a highway to hell.
Spiritually adapt your existing higher power. Many people are religious and that religion needs to be adapted to this coming storm. Religions are community-based spirituality. This means community will limit your spiritual efforts. Show quiet strength and people will follow when SHTF.
In your trap start your journey to strength and value. Be more stoic and practice ascetic living but relative and realistic to your people and place. Remember you are trapped so knowing your limitations is very important. Practice a wisdom of less. Be ready to triage out baggage. Be ready to salvage the good from the age of affluence. Merge this with the old ways when life was more simple and less affluent.
This is a hybridization. This hybridization is with science and the spiritual because it is the science in our life that has encroached on the spiritual by offering those values that can only be found spiritually. If you can scale properly in a life of enough which is almost always about having less then you can find a balance of science and spirit in your life.
These are crazy days and if you don’t see this then you are very much in denial. I am spending more time than I like explaining this ominous shift in life. I am doing this because of how quick and dramatic this change is. In just the last three years normality is no more. What I have been studying and planning for is now reality. The forces of chaos are now loose. Break out of denial and embrace acceptance. This chaos is what happens when a complex system breaks down.
I have been on a journey of discovery for 20 years now. 20 years ago, I saw how the foundation of civilization did not make sense scientifically. I started a journey exploring the absurdities of a life with no future that I was living in. I was honest about the science and questioned the myth of progress. It didn’t add up.
This journey has been both spiritual and scientific. I am an academic doomer so in this aspect of my REAL Green I am a scientist. This is also spiritual journey because it is about life and meaning. This is where I admire shamanism. Combine the two poles of human duality. Science and the spiritual if properly combined allows for a powerful life system to navigate this systematic breakdown.
Things didn’t make sense 20 years ago but there was hope. I don’t have hope anymore in the sense of there being a macro solution. These are times when reality is breaking down the wall of denial. There is no refuge from what is ahead. Instead, I focus on a life boat and hospice mentality. This is grounded in the humility of acceptance.
I have been doing what I call green prepping now for 10 years of my 20-year journey of discovery. This is basically embracing permaculture farming scientifically and spiritually. The first 10 years were a researching of the why and how. I educated myself on homesteading and living a permaculture life. The last 10 years has been the application of what I learned.
The permaculture I am living is mainly an attempt to simplify to a rural agricultural life to better fit the reality of net energy decline. We are a late-stage civilization where affluence has hit a brick wall this requires different strategies. Yet, this is a modern global society I am required to live in so what must be done is a hybridization. This hybridization is physically and spiritually which makes it more complex. You just don’ buy this way of life it must also be spiritually embraced.
I am struggling to remain middle class and be a permacultures farmer attempting green prepping. I want my labor and imputes to produce value but they also have to show a small profit. I am trying to be good to the land and animals in a green spirituality. I am doing this relatively and realistically because I have family and friends to consider many of whom are very much part of the myth of progress in this age of affluence.
My green prepping produces lots of indirect value but little profit to live on. The value produced is a strategy to adapt to decline and decay with the goal of relative resilience and sustainability. This effort is a mixed bag of results because society is built upon a foundation that seeks more affluence. I have been in the purgatory between these worlds for much of these 20 years of discovery.
I preach embracing less because this is the force now in control but civilization is doing the opposite. I am using this decaying affluence to leave it. I accept the reasons civilization continues in denial and have humility because everyone is trapped in its consequences including myself. It is those who embrace the reality of this complex system breaking down who have the best chance to navigate its consequences.
A compression of affordability is now upon the world. Essentials are increasing in price at the same time economic conditions are contracting. This twin force of decline means mitigation is the only solution. This is systematic and not cyclical meaning there will be no return to peak affluence. 2019 was the peak and its downhill from here on out. This is a gradual process but increasingly it will be sudden slaps in the face as thresholds of stability are breached.
That was a macro view. The micro view is one of difficult choices. Catch 22 of choices is the best term for it. Significant sacrifices are at hand. I am living on investments to pay for my middle-class life. My farm roughly pays for itself but does not pay my labor. Do you see the conflict here? The proper future for the average man is small farming yet this is not affordable. The solution is hybridization.
You can’t very well be a middle-class farmer and properly sustainable and resilient. The baggage of affluence is too heavy a load. Farming properly does not support middle class lifestyles. The proper way of living considering systematic breakdown is moving towards the turn of the 20th century in the rural areas. There was no electricity in rural areas and horses dominated the farm. The cities had electricity and there were trains but rural people did most of their work the traditional way pre-industrial revolution. The benefits of the cities trickling down with useful products.
I am trapped in carbon and path dependencies. I am trapped in an economy and social system. I have no option but to use fossil fuels and electricity. I rely on consumerism, financialization, and the car culture. I can’t very well leave this completely but I can reduce it. Real Green is about being relative and realistic in the attempt to be less trapped. I am still trapped so this is the reason for an equally important spirituality of humility and acceptance.
I am prepped better than most people. I am even better prepped than many of the rich who have lots of money to get sophisticated with their efforts. What I have found is the more money you have the more baggage dragging you down. You need enough money. Enough is about balance and balance is about scale. What I mean by enough is an art of living. These days enough is almost always less than we are currently living.
A conclusion on being prepped is sadly you need to be middle class to afford the investments to build a permaculture homestead. Yet, a permaculture homestead will not support your middle-class life. This homestead project I am living is a must for resilience and sustainability. To make faming profitable you have to go big but then you are just back to where you started with being unprepped and not green. This is where a hybridization is required.
My definition of green is being connected to nature which only a rural life can attain. Urban areas are poisonous to life. Modern affluence is a waste stream of consequences with no future. Technology is destroying humans and there is no wisdom to stop it. Urban areas are attempting more of this by growing. They are doubling down on centralization and technology and thereby digging the hole deeper. What is worse is the globalist are pushing more of this from the top.
This is a time of crisis so you are already late to the game. I started 10 years ago with a clear vision. It takes several years to properly prepare. You can get started on the basics immediately. Stop digging your hole deeper is the most important step and much of this is just getting out of denial.
Prepping is a straight forward program although my way of prepping is not the popular way. Mine is about sustainability and resilience in a crisis situation. A Mad Max fortification mentality is not going to save you for long and can be an impediment to community. Security is necessary but community is the most important. Migrate physically and mentally to strong communities. The smaller the better.
Stocking up on essentials is a basic of prepping but this also means managing an inventory which is not easy. You can buy stuff and store it but it degrades with time. The equipment you buy wears out. Your knowledge degrades too. I still think a basic prep plan is essential but I will caution those who want to do more. It is a tough and expensive with time and money.
The green part is spiritual. This spirtuality is about finding meaning in less. Simplification must be done if you are going to negotiate this breakdown of a complex system. Simplification means a lowering of affluence. Getting closer spiritually to the land, the seasons, and localism is essential. This green angle is essential to combining the spiritual with the scientific.
If these two human poles are to be properly balanced, scaling is required. This scale is smaller, simpler, and rural. Get out of urban areas now while you can. Orbiting an urban area is a solution because that is where the resources are but further away is better. Two hour drive from a major urban area is a good start.
Offloading baggage that society loads on your back is very difficult. You will find the baggage you load on yourself is just as problematic. Comforts are hard to do without because they are part of human nature. Your social settings where you live and interact likewise makes this change difficult. Family dynamics tend to focus on more affluence because most people have not been awakened to the paradigm of decline the entire planet is in on every level.
This is where the spiritual part comes into play. If you can discover meaning with a life of less, then you can maintain morale in a time of crisis. Getting your family and immediate community on board means demonstrating this meaning in your daily life. Be able to explain your actions but be careful and don’t sound too radical. Green prepping is a radical departure from growth to decline but you will find your significant others can only handle so much. Remember this is about enough and enough is an art.
Our myths don’t work anymore because a systematic shift has occurred. This is why everywhere the irrational is popping up. This is leading to abandonment and dysfunction. These are the classic signs of the breakdown of a complex system with chaos.
An interesting aspect to a complex system breaking down in succession is the opportunities for niche growth. Yet, this is another difficult path because of the corruption of status-quo growth. A significant amount of Growth these days is really just malinvestment is lifestyles and things with no future. Worse decline is the reality of this growth. These niches of growth have to focus on how you can use existing complexity to find microclimes of security that involve less but still enough.
Your efforts at growth must be made to leave growth. This means very targeted investments in a rapidly declining ability to grow. A powerful wisdom must be applied to guide this effort or it just becomes more corrupted growth. You will need consumerism, car culture, and money but this will be used to leave it.
It is here where raw spirituality is essential. I am not speaking of reinventing your spirituality but instead modifying it. Modify it back to earlier times when life was simpler with less affluence. I talk about green mainly because so many urbanites will have to return to the land from the urban wastelands. These wastelands includes the delocalized world of the car and digital culture that affect the rural areas too.
Raw spirituality is the place where the most opportunity for growth is possible. In a complex system in decline, meaning is of the highest value. Meaning, which comes with the awakening to decline and collapse is essential. This is also another weight to carry on your already mentally burdened shoulders. You will have to live within the failed myths that drive civilization onward. Your awakening will be cloaked in the surreal but if properly fortified with humility and acceptance you can maintain your burden.
Ride the wave of irrational and destructive change. Live in the here and now by getting out of the myth of progress that is rooted in a future of more not less. This myth is really just an absurd life of perpetually goal seeking. Negotiate meaning in paradoxes, incongruous juxtapositions, and surreal flashbacks by connecting with the paradigm of decline.
Here I am 20 years later. How time flies. I feel like I have come a long way but really, I have not got very far. This realization is because life is a journey. The destination is death. If you live for destinations, you will not live much. It is the journey to meaning which is the real reward and that can only be in the here and now.
I have been a prophet of doom for years now. I am not a typical doomer. I am intellectual doomer. There is a big difference because emotions need to be properly siloed when dealing with doom. Yet, this does not mean ignoring the emotions of fear and concern. I look around and see evidence everywhere that a new world is close at hand. I am experiencing fear too.
The reality of doom is a process with sudden and gradual manifestations. Set aside your emotions and start quantifying risk. Educate yourself on what risks are gradual and where sudden change can happen. Combine the threat assessments and have a plan for negotiating what will be a challenging undertaking.
The gradual is currently manifested in a process of overshoot on our physical realities with resources and environment. The earth has been changing quickly and this is resulting in dramatic changes. Much of the best resources have been consumed in this process. What is left is of lower value at a time when civilization is requiring more value to maintain complexity.
The myth of progress has entered the zone of diminishing returns whereby technology and efficiency are creating problems instead of solving them. Competition between nations cements the process of tipping over into a destructive phase.
This myth is extremely dangerous and embedded in almost everything we do. Very few people would agree to turn back our affluent world. This means giving up comforts and life saving products and services. It is that simple but complicated by our desire for affluence.
This process of progressivism will instead be forced into systematic changes that are beyond control. These are self-organizing and self-adaptive in nature meaning even if we had a collective awakening it is now too late to avoid consequences. We are not educated on living with less. We are not emotionally ready to be poorer and experience hardship.
This denial and inability to accept these destructive gradual changes is where a look at sudden change is warranted. When this planetary system is looked at as a whole then system thresholds can be determined. There are multiple thresholds being bumped up against and some already broken through. It is the breakthroughs where sudden change will be manifested.
Many are negatively converging causing a reinforcing process. The forces of chaos are found in these places. It is important to realize chaos is not completely random but instead follows patterns but unlike growth changes are often sudden and cascading. This means that proper action needs to be recognized when addressing the breakdown of a complex system. The forces of chaos are a guide to actions.
The forces of chaos that need to be watched in the macro view are abandonment, dysfunction, and irrational. These are physical and metaphysical forces that are intertwined. In an ascending level of abstraction processes within a complete planetary process are operating.
The subset of processes operates at different time frames. The intersections are markers of things to come. It very difficult to determine where sudden failure will occur. If we take the easier to pinpoint gradual forces and predict intersections then threat assessment can be implemented.
Being able to shed complexity is vital. The previous paradigm is to apply complexity. This is a new age of decline so this path dependency of applying more complexity is now out of date. Shedding complexity involves predictive triage.
Start now ridding yourself of baggage. Be ready to utilize salvage to combine existing value of complexity with older ways of living. We are not ready for the older ways of living but we can start the process of returning to them with a hybridization. Returning to localism and biomass is what is needed. These are the older ways in our history books. Apply existing value to this tougher way of living.
This hybridization will assist the stair steep down nature of gradual decline. Sudden decline is more difficult to adapt to but if you have steps in place for gradual decline, then these will help mitigate what can’t be prepared for with sudden change.
It is important to see the gradual breakdown of a complex system speeds up when it nears thresholds of bifurcation. Bifurcations is a fancy word for rapid change resulting in a new physical regime. This is a breaking and a dip to a new stasis.
Stability will return eventually so plan for a new level of living now. Beat the stampede get there proactively. We are likely not going very far down initially so go to that point now. Yet, realize the true nature of the unwinding process in human time frames means this dropping process will be for now on. There is no turning back.
Stability is breaking all along a front of complexity. This time frame compression means the gradual buildups which are easier to quantify are pointing to sudden changes ahead. At lower levels sudden changes are happening already. The greater levels have yet to break. This is why we are still in a frog boil unaware of the impending changes.
This is a tipping over humans have not experienced in our species history. This does not mean humans have not seen earlier bottlenecks but not like this. I say this because the special aspect of the current bottleneck is the global nature of change. Important to this global nature is our technology and knowledge levels that allowed globalism. Globalism with its transhuman and delocalized nature mean our huge population can’t gradually undo what has been grown into. Our civilization was built linearly not circular.
Path dependencies and carbon traps are everywhere. We are now brittle to change and determined to attempt more of the same. This means society will continue to solve problems with tools at hand but those tools are now the problem. This is when you know a break is approaching. It is when paradoxes appear. When incongruous juxtapositions are all around. This is the surreal world of non-linear change.
It could be different but it is not. We unconsciously chose expansion over the wisdom of living within limitations. It seems that our species is not different from other species in this regard despite our intellectual abilities. In fact, it points to the limitations of intellectual abilities we hold in such high esteem. It is these abilities that are now crushing our world because these abilities can’t be controlled.
A collective inability to embrace a maladaptive condition of a “denial of death” must be recognized to be awakened. This denial for civilization is more the denial of failure. Very few civilizations can embrace failure. This is why none survive.
Some previous ones lived with a cyclical view of change. The Maya is an example but few others embraced the cyclic of change. It appears the Maya chose to degrowth because it was central to their spirituality and science. They were scaled and balanced.
We are now a global civilization breaking down with nowhere to go. Yet, this is only part of the story because we must look at our global civilization as an ecosystem. Ecosystems behave in succession. In the succession of complexity to less complexity there are places where breakdown frees up new places of growth. The rigidity of stable states of a climax system that break down open up opportunities for new species to grow in niches. These are micro-climes of growth.
With this in mind you the individual if you accept this greater process and embrace the new reality, can find places of relative growth if available. Many have no hope for this adaptation because they do not have what it takes. It takes time, money, and education and time is now running out.
I have explained these conditions over the last few years of postings. The outline is simple but the simplicity of it is where the difficulty is. A process of collapse means collapsing in place. Paradoxically, at this time in history collapsing allows growth.
If you do embrace this collapse process then you will do it with humility and acceptance. This spiritual act will allow you to embrace growth when it is allowed and properly presented. Keep in mind very little growth will happen but what does occur will be of very high value.
This will mostly be about an unwind of complexity. This means less affluence and comforts. Deeper yet it may mean hardship and death because loosing discretionary products and services is one thing but loosing necessities means dramatic changes.
Nobody will escape this. It will happen. It is those who live in humility and acceptance who have the chance to survive the changes better. Yes, even the most prepared and adapted will face consequences. The key difference is wisdom. Wisdom can only properly occur with scale and balance. This is why civilization will not provide proper wisdom. It is out of scale and without balance.
Now is the time for the individual to embrace proper scale and balance. This is the wisdom of localism and degrowth with personal applications. The wisdom that is required today is one that is relative and realistic to the traps and dependencies of the greater civilization that determine our lives. Since there is no where to hide like previous times when migration could occur, now it is about choosing better within the cauldron of change.
There are relative migration possibilities within this complexity breakdown. One such action is leaving locations that can’t be supported where complexity is high. Leave activities with no future in a world in decline. You can position yourself differently. You can avoid worse by proper living in better places. Change irrational lifestyles for what is occurring.
Not everyone can do this and even those who can, the degree of positioning is limited. It is here the next step is embraced. This is the spiritual. It is a spiritual positioning that will strengthen your being for the drop to a new level of stability. The entire planetary system including the human ecosystem are now facing this. Spiritually fortify yourself. This paradoxically is the one area of solid growth. “Meaning” itself is what maters now.
Your spirituality is unique so I am not going to advise you on that. Yet, I will advise you to apply a balanced wisdom to your spirituality. Today there are ideologies that are being turned into a spirituality. This is unsound and should be avoided at all cost.
The most unsound is Scientism. Science is the opposite pole to spirituality. One engages in reductionism and the other in embracing oneness. It is this usurping of spiritual elements by science that will cause cascading failures. The cult of Scientism that is pursuing the myth of progress of ever greater intelligence and physical performance is actually a spiritual blackhole of self-consciousness individualism can descend into. This descent is a collective dysfunction and appearing as irrational policy.
Blasphemy of the spirit is the greatest sin of self-consciousness. Try not to look at this sin religiously but instead systematically. If we as a people elevate our science to God like status then consequences will be the result from the resulting irrational polices. This is where a Petri dish of consequences results. Science and spirit are on opposite poles of our duality. Respect for this is lost collectively but you the individual can find a proper balance.
In conclusion, you the individual can properly scale and a balance can be found. This is the science of seeing decline with the spiritual of acceptance. This is what my REAL Green seeks. This is green prepping. What is green is more prepped. This is not the techno green of our social justice warriors but instead the green of biomass and localism embracing simplicity relatively and realistically based upon your traps and dependencies.
This will allow a wisdom of insecurity. This wisdom of insecurity allows proper action relatively and realistically. When considering the breakdown of a planetary system into a new state a different disposition is required. This gradual and sudden process of decline and failure can only be negotiated. It cannot be stopped with more of what got us here.
The rapid breakdown of globalization and financialization is upon us. Yet, the real economy, the one of food, energy, and shelter can decline gradually. The degree of decline of the real economy is contingent on the decline of the financial one.
This is currently very important because of all the areas of human agency against the decline of prosperity it is here where proper management can make a difference. This means rejecting the myth of progress that is firmly in place with global leadership.
This decline is involuntary but it is negotiable but it requires admission by the ruling elites of failure. This admission is sustainable growth is over. This includes the green version trumpeted by the progressive left. What is ahead is a much smaller economy. The process of gradual decline is manageable. The threat is doubling down on the status quo of sustainable growth.
This asymmetric process of the financial economy growing irrationally with the real economy contracting will play out for a time. This is the nature of elite governance. The elites will continue to socialize decline and privatize their gains. The system is now geared toward this incongruity with elite capture of all major institutions. Moral hazard is off the charts.
This means you the individual will have to adapt without help from the government. In fact the government is now your adversary in the process of rational mitigation of your personal decline.
I have been discussing this coming decline on this blog for 3 years. The buildup is over we are in the neighborhood of tipping. The key action is strategically get smaller and more simple. I say strategically because tactically this may mean growing. As a complex system breaks down it frees up niches of growth.
There will be places to grow. There still is an enormous amount of resources to support tactical growth within a macro decline process but this requires proper orientation. It requires acceptance and courage.
I am not going to go into these strategic and tactical steps because many of my previous posts have covered what can be done. Keep in mind many of you are urban. My message I focused on rural living that is green prepping. This means embracing biomass and localism. My message applies only marginally to the bulk of the population that is urban.
My message to urbanites is get out of cities or at least move to an orbit. Cities will not be sustainable but instead will double down on growth and centralization. This is a huge mistake but one that is preprogrammed. Yet, cities are where concentrated goods and services are that you will need to draw on.
I am referencing two great article from “The Surplus Energy Economy” I challenge you to read the latest posts because it intelligently explains what is now happening in the world economy. The current banking inflation crisis is explained by this discussion.
This site has very accurately framed the financial decline process. It also shows what is happening to the real economy and what is the real issues within both. It is all about energy value decline and the breakdown of the myth of progress.
The following is a discussion of notes I took from part 3 and part 5.
“prosperity. The conclusions set out here are that, whilst aggregate prosperity has gone into decline, the real costs of energy-intensive necessities will continue to increase. This creates leveraged downside in the scope for both capital investment and the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services.”
Here the asymmetry is negative. Costs of essentials will rise as discretionary and investments follow gradually lower in size. Keep in mind many discretionaries are responsible for affordability of essentials. Declining economies of scale and decreasing velocity of money will further lower essentials affordability. It will not always be the case that prices become unaffordable but also there will be the case of lower availability and smaller portions. Leveraged here means the process is reinforcing.
“This idea – that innovation in the immaterial field of monetary policy can restore expansion to the delivery of material prosperity – has been tried, and has failed spectacularly, over a quarter of a century of futile financial gimmickry.”
Financial gimmicky is a manifestation of centralization and its wealth transfer to the powerful. It is an effort to maintain the prosperity of the few. It is a socialization of the downside and privatization of gains. It is essentially an indicator of late-stage social developments where the elites divorce from the real economy into a Ponzi Scheme that is essentially a private casino.
“Another claim is that technology can provide us with abundant, low-cost energy from renewables. As we saw in part two, this argument isn’t credible, because it overlooks the reality that the potential of technology is bounded by the laws of physics. Renewables cannot replicate the characteristics – including the density, portability and flexibility – of fossil fuels.”
This leaves us with the third, least palatable conclusion, which is that prosperity is deteriorating because we have no complete replacement for the fading dynamic of fossil fuels.”
It is important to realize the real economy and the financial one. The real economy is essentially energy driven. It is important to understand energy value is in decline and technology will not change this. It can slow the decline but not stem it. The real economies decline means the financial economy will become even more unstable and irrational.
“The outlook for prosperity itself is stark. Until recently, the global economy has carried on expanding, but at a decelerating rate. Now, prior growth in prosperity has gone into reverse. At the same time, the costs of energy-intensive necessities are increasing, not just as absolutes, but as a proportion of available resources. The resulting affordability compression undermines the scope both for discretionary consumption and for capital investment.”
Globalism and financialization are in terminal decline. This decline is rapid whereas the real economy’s decline is gradual. There is still lots of stuff and lots of skilled people. Systems are still in place but increasingly the real economy will suffer from abandonment, dysfunction, and irrational policy.
The rapid decline of globalism and financialization is uncontrollable because it is not sustainable and in many cases not real, the real economy’s decline can be managed or better mitigated. The important point that must be embraced this decline of our real economy can be managed but not without failure.
“value destruction’ has become unavoidable. This points towards disorderly degradation within the interconnected liabilities which are the ‘money as claim’ basis of the financial system.”
Two kinds of value destruction are now in play. One is gradual and one sudden. Those aspects of globalism and financialization that create excessive wealth from the leverage of interconnected activity will see a sudden drop in value. Globalism where parts are shipped over distances and assembled with dispersed origins will see significant failure.
Financialization that relies on free-flowing liquidity will decline rapidly as confidence falters. Liquidity at these scales is essentially confidence. Negative confidence will sever the link of financialization from the real economy.
“The basics, at the aggregate level and in per capita terms, are summarized in Fig. 8. Between 2021 and 2040, both energy consumption and underlying output (C-GDP) are projected to decline by -8%. With ECoE likely to rise from 9.4% in 2021 to over 17% by 2040, the fall in aggregate prosperity is leveraged from -8% to -16%. Further (though decelerating) increases in global population numbers indicate that prosperity per capita is likely to be 27% lower in 2040 than it was in 2021.”
These numbers are dramatic but deceptively because most people can imagine living with less. We can all imagine an 8% drop in our standard of living. This kind of drop would be tough but we would just have less discretionaries like leisure and comforts. There would be more work as we find second jobs.
In the real economy of things this is not the end of the world. In the world of globalism and financialization it is the end. In fact, sustained declines of very small amounts spell the end of globalism and financialization. It is this reality that needs to sink in to you the individual. The world as we know it will change rapidly in a forced decentralization that is the unwind of globalism and financialization.
“secular stagnation”, meaning a non-cyclical deterioration in the rate of economic expansion.”
“Between 2007 and pre-pandemic 2019, real GDP expanded by 48%, but debt increased by 81%. Each dollar of reported growth now required the creation of more than $3 of net new debt. Fully 64% of all the “growth” recorded between 2007 and 2019 was cosmetic.”
“We can best describe the period since the second half of the 1990s as a quarter-century “precursor zone” to the involuntary economic de-growth that has now arrived.”
“During this long period, economic output and prosperity have followed a process of deceleration, stagnation and contraction. In denying this, and trying to fix a material problem with financial tools, we have created an asset bubble”
It is important to realize this will not be like the great depression. This decline will not be followed by a rebound. This will be a drop to a new level of stability that systems go through when stable thresholds are breached. In the case of human civilizations this means a new order. The old order will be no more. Since we have the real economy that is in gradual decline this process has the potential to have value inertia. It is in our hands how dramatic and swift this decline will be when globalism and financialization end.
“comparative complexity. The high levels of complexity in the Advanced Economies result in upkeep expenses which increase these economies’ sensitivities to rising ECoEs.”
“Based on SEEDS analysis, aggregate global prosperity is likely to have peaked last year, at $88tn and will, by 2030, have fallen by a seemingly-modest 3%, though even this will equate to a 10% decrease in per capita terms. By 2040, aggregate prosperity is expected to have fallen by 16%, and its per capita equivalent by 27%, from their 2022 levels.”
Comparative complexity in globalism is really transnational. Upkeep expenses are more related to supply chains then national economies. That said once globalism breaks down it will be the comparative complexity of the nation state that will take on increasing importance. Real components to those economies like food, energy, water, and infrastructure will matter much more as supply chains shrink. Where you live is going to matter much more soon.
“What we are watching is a two-stage process in which, just as top-line prosperity is falling, the real costs of energy-intensive necessities are rising. This creates a process of affordability compression which has far-reaching implications.”
“In essence, affordability compression doesn’t only mean that consumers are going to have to adjust to a decreasing ability to make non-essential purchases. It also means that households will find it an ever-greater struggle to ‘keep up the payments’ on everything from secured and unsecured credit to staged-payment purchases and subscriptions.”
This affordability compression will be a two track one. Anything that is not of real value will deteriorate rapidly. Unsustainable activities and value that is not based on the real economy of physical value will quickly be destroyed. This destruction will take real value with it because this is what abandonment, dysfunction, and irrational responses do. This value destruction is essentially systematic on one hand and physical on the other. How you position for this is critical.
This is why REAL Green focuses on green prepping. What is green is more prepped. This means embrace biomass, physical labor, and localism. Prepping means using the system to leave it. Lots of resources will be available. Many will be stranded but through triage and salvage can be repurposed. Most importantly if you can relocate out of the most vulnerable places. Stop believing in the myth of progress.
“On the one hand, the economy itself is subject to trends which, whilst adverse, are essentially gradual. On the other, the financial system has been managed (meaning mis-managed) in ways which seem to eliminate any possibility of managed decline.”
“two, seemingly-contradictory conditions, and then turn to what some of the implications of this asymmetry might be.”
In this next segment Surplus Energy blog gets more specific. Gradual and sudden decline is looked at to see what is ahead.
“This favorable outcome is, in fact, extremely implausible, for two main reasons. First, scale expansion of the magnitude required would demand vast quantities of concrete, steel, copper, lithium, cobalt and many other inputs which, even where they do exist in the requisite quantities, could only be accessed and put to use using correspondingly vast amounts of energy. Since this could only come from fossil fuels, there is an ‘umbilical link’ between the ECoEs of renewables and those of fossil fuels.”
“The second obstacle is even more fundamental. It is that renewable energy is less dense than fossil fuels. The economy operates by using energy to convert raw materials into products, a process whose thermal counterpart is the conversion of energy from dense into diffuse forms, the latter being waste heat. The lesser density of renewables lies at the heart of the practical obstacles to transition – these obstacles include conversion efficiency limitations, intermittency, and the problem of storage.”
“These considerations mean that, whilst a sustainable economy might be possible, it would be smaller than the economy that we have now. Simply stated, “sustainability” is feasible, but “sustainable growth” is a pipe-dream.”
One of the most dramatic dismissals of the myth of progress that the globalist and their progressive allies fail at is the projections of the scaling up of renewables. While renewables are vital to the coming energy value decline, they will not support growth. They will only dampen decline and this will only be the case if they are properly embraced and applied. This is not the case currently.
They are being embraced as an energy transition paradigm by the techno-green left. They are being applied wrong in a centralized effort to replace a higher density energy paradigm. Renewables should be applied in a decentralized effort that takes into account their deficiencies.
Intermittency and lack of long-term storage are prime factors to adapt to. The other issue is fossil fuels will have to be maintained relatively at current levels as decline lowers their availability and energy value. In coordination with fossil fuels renewable applications can make up for value loss. This means zero carbon policy is a dangerous and one that could cause a dirty cascading decline that will be worse than living with fossil fuels that are already in decline.
“material leverage. Essentially, the economic resources made available by the use of energy are deployed in three ways. The first of these is the provision of essentials. The second and third, which are the residuals in this equation, are investment in new and replacement productive capacity, and the provision of discretionary (non-essential) products and services to consumers.”
“the economy has already entered a contractionary process, and it’s important to emphasize that visible trends in the material economy, whilst adverse, and even daunting, are essentially gradual.”
“ECoEs haven’t jumped from 2% to 10% overnight, but over four decades. Energy supply itself is likely to be driven downwards by deteriorating economics”
“the overall decrease in energy availability can be mitigated, though not reversed, by increases in supply from other sources, including wind, solar, nuclear and hydroelectric power.”
“There are two problems, though, with any possibility of gradual or managed economic decline. One of these is the financial system, and the other is a collective and absolute refusal to accept and plan for any possibility other than the mythical (and utterly illogical) prospect of ‘infinite growth on a finite planet”
Here we see the importance of proper policy and the danger of the myth of progress that is really a secular religion complete with priests and scribes. This science-based spirituality means honest objective science is no longer followed if it is contrary to the narrative of progress.
This has resulted in a tendency towards fascism with the centralization of corporate and statist stakeholder governance. Marxist power projection policies of lying, cheating and stealing for an “ends justify the means” approach.
While we can mitigate this decline with decentralized approaches and proper policies this will not be the case with the current global leadership in the west and China. Here we see a move towards centralization, technocracy, and human control. This will result in increased malinvestment at a time of rapidly declining resources both physical and abstract.
“A case can be made that, under the shot and shell of the GFC, the authorities were justified in using QE, ZIRP and NIRP to steady the ship. These, though, did not turn out to be the “temporary” expedients claimed at the time of their introduction. Even conventional economics would have counselled that negative real rates, reckless credit expansion and the creation of a gigantic “everything bubble” in asset prices could only end badly.”
“We can, in the meantime, attach high levels of probability to two processes. One of these is contraction in discretionary sectors, and the other is cascading defaults, commencing at the outer perimeters of the financial system and then travelling inwards towards the regulated banking sector.”
“ we face an inflationary rather than – or rather, as well as – a hard default resolution to over-inflated capital markets and ludicrously unsupportable levels of liabilities.”
This concludes his analysis and amazingly just ahead of the banking sector implosion we are seeing in the news. What we are seeing in real time is the defaults traveling inwards. The results will be inflationary with higher prices but also deflationary with less available resources which to the individual is similar to what inflation does. Things will cost more with less available.
I have been discussing many conditions that point to a peak and a tipping into an alternative regime of all aspects of life on this planet. I am talking about a macro change from growth to decline and stability to instability. This is happening within humanism too with the cult of progress driving humans into a mechanization that is anti-life. Ultimately this is a problem with physical and metaphysical scale. The planet is reacting with system transitions from a species disrupting a complex system. In metaphysics humans are delocalized and increasingly transhuman. This prevents the proper wisdom of restraint. There is now nothing in the way of progressive self-destruction.
It is vital to understand the underlying force that is driving these conditions. Exploring this abstractly with some nonscientific methods is useful because science is unable to. Science is the problem so we can’t expect science to admit its failure. These abstract notions need not be precise like a weather report but instead an overview of a climate of reality. We are now entering an alternative climate so to speak. In climate studies this is called an abrupt shift. This requires us to think and react differently. Many seemingly unrelated occurrences are instead related. This condition of a systematic change is present everywhere and within systems. This all points to chaos and its paradox of deterministic chaos.
This paradox is important to humans now because of our moral and ethical situation. We have a modern secular scientific view that is firmly in charge of human progress. This dominating view asserts that moral and scientific certainty are one. Science was never meant to be moral. This certainty is seen as the best way to further progress. This progress is seen as a perpetually better world regardless of limits. This is actually just a myth of a better world. Science is now mythical. It is a belief system governed by an ideology. This is faith based and manifested politically with a state and corporate fusion. The elite are now the priests and the technocrats the scribes.
Politically this is classic fascism but a fascism that is driven by the Marxist urge to power. This power urge is ultimately luciferin. In ascending levels of abstraction there is a class of spiritual predators called Luciferians who consume power for their sustenance. They are seeking to engineer failure out of life’s equations in a quest for immortality. The quest for the power of immortality is the ultimate blasphemy to the life force. Lying, cheating, and stealing are condoned in the ends justify the means morality because a better world is not possible without total control.
This is deeper yet but in abstraction. It is about the tensions of life itself where self-consciousness enters its final cycle of circular thinking that manifests systematic chaos. This opening up of the forces of chaos is vicious and deadly when it assumes mythical proportions. Current science-based reality is self-destructing because of this deceptive myth. Knowledge and technology have taken on a life of their own driving relentless destructive change. Systems are compressing in complexity. Everyday life is more and more encumbered by complications making survival increasingly precarious.
This urge to power is now bifurcating through the myth of progress. Technology is rapidly stripping away stability as the system approaches limits and tips over into diminishing returns where technology no longer is a force of good. As breakdown occurs more technology is applied. This destruction is planet wide in the sea, on the land, and in the air. It is within life itself where DNA is now being manipulated. We can personify the machine like it is life-like but this is actually within the soul of man and further yet, an impulse of life itself.
This abstraction can be seen physically once dots are connected. Our human myth of progress has metastasized. This is now a cancer to life. It is a mechanization that is alien to life’s symbiosis. Further, it will run its course. Human intervention is no longer possible because scale and balance were lost long ago. Somehow this process represents life’s deeper nature so passing judgment on this as evil is self-deception. Instead, it represents the ultimate paradox of consciousness with oneness and isolation.
Alan Watts describes this condition with a religious allegory. Allegories are often the best educators to hidden meanings. They are also the only way to understand the highest levels of abstraction where dualism merges into singularity:
“Someone or something beyond conscious control must overthrow the Devil at the right moment, for, being an archangel, he can read thoughts and is always aware of the intention that precedes the act. He can be defeated only by an act without prior intent. “let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth.” Now in Christian terminology this “someone or something beyond conscious control” is called the grace of God, and grace is held to be the only means of overcoming the machinations of the Devil, that is, of the vicious circle into which self-consciousness can lead us.”
The paradox of deterministic chaos is important to you the individual in this time of tipping into alternative regimes. The heart of this paradox for you is determinism and free will. It is about choice which involves moral responsibility. We live with virtue and sin in our hearts. Ultimately our dualistic condition of good and evil requires grace or naturalness to heal our rift from life that is a bi-product of the isolation the ego leads us into with self-conciouness.
These seemingly unrelated conditions and circumstances are manifesting in randomness and disorder when the case is more a dynamical system becoming highly sensitive to conditions. In an ecological view it is the breakdown of a complex system in succession. In system thought it is the bifurcation of a complex system that has broken through thresholds to alternative states.
In the micro world of the individual, it is living in decline with the possible collapse of society. Collapse is a taboo subject in the myth of progress so individuals who entertain the idea are rejected. This process need not be disastrous to you the individual. If approached properly it can be an opportunity for more meaning which is ultimately the greatest of attainments for the individual. This will not be without pain and suffering but it does present the opportunity for the heroic where the human value of love and altruism trump death and destruction. This is what is spoken about as the Kingdom of Heaven.
If you want to approach what is really happening intellectually you must make this approach in enjoyment and wonderment. This means setting judgment aside. It means laughing and crying because in the world of dualism these juxtapositions go hand in hand in the approach to the sacred. Humans can approach the sacred but only in this condition can you avoid being overwhelmed in existential anxiety. Any other approach is quickly absorbed back into the vicious circle of dualism. The sacred has the appearance of a singularity composed of dualism. It is determined free will. It is above all unapproachable to those who seek to know. The more we know the less we understand and we know quite a lot these days.
Wonderment and enjoyment that is the basis of life can delve into this drama in ascending levels of abstraction. On the level of everyday living this observation will appear like conspiracies, quackery, and pseudoscience. This is to be understood and enjoyed but by no means diminishes the wisdom. When I say wisdom what I mean is judgement of what should be retained and what should be discarded. I just told you judgment must be put aside on this mental journey and this is true when gazing into the sacred. Where wisdom must apply judgment is when we return to our everyday world of making a living.
In this everyday world a vital requirement is scale and balance. Scale requires you to live within your limitations both mentally and physically. Balance requires a proper mix of science and spirituality. This balance is the keystone of wisdom and the reason our human myth of progress is out of control without a transcendental wisdom that both connects and survives. The secular has taken on spiritual roles and the result is corruption of the secular in science and humanism. We are worshiping ourselves and the results are destructive. This is species dysfunction.
These days scale is at its worst and balance is skewed towards the secular and science. Even our religions have been corrupted by this. It is called progress and modern life is infected with this condition at all levels. This progress is unstoppable because it has mechanized. The machine is taking over our lives. Without the machine we are naked and alone.
At higher levels of abstraction the progress myth dominates the collective self-consciousness. At higher levels yet, it is life itself reflecting on itself. At this level then we are approaching the sacred and no more reduction can be achieved. Somehow this is where determinism and free will combine. It is where we must leave off in mysticism. Aldous Huxley said “For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective method has been discovered –that of the mystics.”
In a sense the collective must experience a mystical conversion. This is the nature of self-destruction with death giving forth life. Life is now barreling into the destructive phase of one species mechanizing the basis of life on a planet. Science and technology will destroy itself along with the socio-political apparatus constructed around it. Yet, the vital aspect of time value to mortal humans means this is more about a journey and less about the destination. The destination is death regardless but rebirth is there too. In between these two juxtapositions is life of the individual.
The three conditions of this new age most important for you the individual are abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational. These three conditions are markers for the breakdown of the ecosystem that your life is part of. These are interrelated and self-adapting, meaning they cause a response from each other.
Abandonment leads to dysfunction and the irrational. Dysfunction causes abandonment and irrationality. Irrationality causes dysfunction and abandonment. These conditions are in convergence now as a complex system breaks down. These forces of chaos are combining in a negative reinforcing way. This will likely involve symmetric results that can be expected but also asymmetric results that can’t be understood beforehand. Keep in mind the world has never been here before to degree and extent. The planet is occupied and transformed by human progress. Feedbacks are now being felt after a system inertia finally releases into rapid physical change.
It is worth reviewing some defining aspects of chaos theory. This period of peaking and tipping is described well by chaos theory. In previous years since the start of the industrial revolution there was the buildup phase of relatively stable growth now the cusp of chaotic decline is before us. The personality of these two historic regimes must be respected if adaptation and mitigation is desired. What is more difficult is they are now in overlap in a way that your world will be surreal if you do attain an awakening.
Chaos theory:
“is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities.”
“in mechanics and mathematics, the study of apparently random or unpredictable behavior in systems governed by deterministic laws. A more accurate term, deterministic chaos, suggests a paradox because it connects two notions that are familiar and commonly regarded as incompatible.”
“describes the qualities of the point at which stability moves to instability or order moves to disorder. For example, unlike the behavior of a pendulum, which adheres to a predictable pattern a chaotic system does not settle into a predictable pattern due to its nonlinear processes.”
There is so much happening so quickly. These examples will seem unrelated and juxtaposed and often incongruous but that is the nature of the paradox of the times. Simply put what is right is wrong and what is wrong is right. This is not so much morally speaking but instead the difference between on and off. In other words, binary expressions both true and wrong.
I speak to you the individual because ultimately REAL Green concerns localism. It is grounded in the simplicity of people and place. Scaling and balance is of the upmost importance at these levels. Lower your delocalization and moderate the transhumanism of the machine that is corrupting your life. Do this appropriately for the rapidly changing times. Relatively and realistically change according to this shift. Since it is a process, you will need to live in both worlds.
Pay attention to this graph from the included article. The key feature to digest is decline is likely if you understand honest science and economics. Graph A is very likely because globalism is ending. The economy will not be able to ram up the huge investments needed in everything. Graph B is possible but unlikely until it is too late if both fossil fuels and renewables have huge investments. Graph C is the techno optimism the globalist technocrats are pushing with the ESG green agendas. This scenario is a pie in the sky lie. Graph D is less likely than A but still possible. This is a modest rise in renewables including nuclear and hydro which can happen if net zero is not embraced.
The issue is when not if. Honest science makes clear what is ahead. Honest economics is just as clear. It is the governing narrative that will not ever admit we are in decline. Problems are admitted to but there are always fixes to ease people’s fears. This reassurance is both political and through business marketing. The central message is solutions are possible. Your choosing the correct narrative now will be the difference between accelerated decline for you or one with much more inertia to decline. This message is about you the individual not our civilization. Civilization is now a retirement party.
Decline that is embrace and adapted to allows a smoother mitigation. Become viscous which is a combination of resilience and sustainability combined with courage. The reason courage is needed is the tough decisions that are required. This is proper wisdom and these days proper wisdom is “less is more”. It is about simple and small combined with humility from acceptance.
The reason this is so hard is the narrative runs opposite to this with “more is less”. “More is less” is basically a techno efficiency driving ever greater delocalization and transhumanism of the machine. Centralization is more efficient until it suffers diminishing returns. Modern governance is increasingly centralized and technocratic. The results is a bloated administrative state that is parasitic. The specialization required for centralization is a two-edge sword. It is great when growth is increasing but dangerous in decline.
Systems studies bring to the table a viewpoint that decline operates differently than growth. This view point highlights the nature of systems that push their thresholds. Degree and duration magnify when thresholds are breached.
Systems studies involves the study of cyclic change. Change oscillates within patterns. When patterns are expressed, we need to take notice. Instead, today, mankind is embracing exceptionalism as if we are different from any other species because of our high intelligence. We think we can engineer our way out of problems but instead are digging the hole deeper.
These views of exceptionalism are important in the near term because currently we are in the neighborhood of a tipping over from peak growth into a decline phase. What makes this even more dramatic is this is not only with the human ecosystem but also with the natural ecosystem. Destabilizing planetary systems from this decline are affecting both in negative convergence. Our exceptionalism is doubling down on science and tech to fix this threat to humanity when this fixing is furthering the problem.
This peaking of human influence has destabilized planetary systems that allowed human civilization. It was the relatively stable Holocene with a robust natural ecosystem that allowed human growth in the first place otherwise we would still be seminomadic hunter gathers navigating narrow bands of habitability. I would argue this is the optimum human condition in regards to scale and balance with life on our wonderful blue planet. No human arrangement can match the complexity of nature. What we are today is the furthest from harmony.
It is important to understand the elites have doubled down on growth and centralization through technology and economics. Technocratic globalism is being embraced. This is further corrupted with stakeholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is fascism and fascism is elite domination. It is elite corruption that brings down civilizations. Currently we have an oligarchy of elites merging with government, industry, and security apparatuses. This merger is increasingly authoritarian and transhuman.
This merger of the political with the corporate is now a secular religion. Science is now a religion. This Scientism is the politicizing of science to fit narratives. The reason this is so dangerous is it does not allow honest scientific discussions that go contrary to the accepted narrative. Proper science is clear on the decline ahead. Scientism talks about a manifest destiny of human and artificial intelligence growing abruptly in performance and affluence.
This elite merger in a technocratic centralization is juxtaposed to reality. Reality is calling for decentralization, simpler, and smaller. This is the nature of action in a decline phase. Reality is now a reality of decline on all planes. Every physical and metaphysical dimension shows a pattern of decline or approaching decline. Diminishing returns and cumulative negative convergences of problems are becoming the new reality. This is now a period of stalling and stagnation.
Science and technology have hit their physical limits although there will be modest gains on the margins until the global economy declines and can’t support the needs of technology. Technology needs economies of scale and comparative advantage with global reach. It above all needs high quality energy delivering surplus value. All these vital ingredients are peaking or already in decline.
Vital resources and high-quality energy are not only in decline they have huge waste streams driving decline elsewhere. The disruptive results of gaining and applying these resources are not only creating unmanageable waste streams but also degenerative land use changes. This is important because the combination is deadly. More pollution of forever chemicals and untreatable waste streams combined with diversity loss of vital ecosystems. Today we have localized ecosystem failures because of this human activity along with general ecosystem decline that is accelerating.
This has initiated the 6th great extinction which has resulted in the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. The stability from a planetary ecosystem that has allowed mass production of goods and monocultures of food has disrupted planet systems and most profoundly the fabric of life that is made rich with species diversity.
Digging deeper we need to look at human nature. The elites are entertaining the so-called singularity which is the merging of man with his machines. This seductive quest for machine assisted immortality is now anti-life. It is anti-human by seeking to destroy culture that offers the meaning individuals need to survive.
It is the actually tinkering with the language of life that is DNA. It is metaphysical with the dehumanization of family and community by transhumanism and delocalization. Culture is being destroyed by machine traits of efficiency and automation. Culture that provides courage from meaning is being diminished by the reliance on machine algos combined with their automation. Our culture has weakened to doing hard things at the same time hard things are increasing from the decline phase we are entering.
This singularity of a combined man and machine culture is pushing the envelope of our technology into a world of algorithms and control mechanisms which are making living structures cogs in a system that is completely unnatural. It is unstable and unsustainable. This powerful force is eliminating resilience both within life and the relationships life leverages complexity with. Human culture and species diversity is now secondary to machine domination.
This peaking and tipping will create a surreal world of overlap with forces of both decline and growth. If you are experiencing the surreal then you are not ill you are actually very healthy. If you admit to “when” and reject the bargaining of “if” then you can get on with adapting and mitigating our human world that is not ready for total decline.
The key point I am making is the individual through family and small community can change positively. Civilization can’t change because it is hardwired in self-organized growth through science and technology growth. Civilization can’t embrace decline without failing. Failure or better cyclic decline is part of the fabric of life on this planet. All ecosystems are subject to this but our human ecosystem rejects cyclic decline because of our exceptionalism now entrenched with scientism. Scientism is a religion now. It rejects honest science if it goes against the narrative of manifest destiny of intelligence both human and machine..
It is important to dig deeper into the “when” of this cyclic decline for two reasons. The first reason is time value. Time has a particularly important value to individuals because we are self-conscious of the future. We know we have shelf lives and our activities need investments requiring time. The other issue is delocalization. Delocalization has allowed affluence but at the cost of resilience.
This delocalization is more than space it is also metaphysical. Here we have degraded human relationships too through digital devices similar to what the car culture has done physically. Family and community are being distance from the individual with activities and lifestyles that lower connections. This degradation of relationships combined with families being separated by great distances is not truly appreciated. When decline gains momentum it will be localized community that makes the difference. Now is the time to get closer together.
Human scale is now disproportionate. The machine has taken the place of human relationships. Distance has disrupted this further. We depend on a web of things and this is global. It is physical and with relationships. This means without this complex machine spanning the globe our gutted local communities will not be able to mitigate crisis.
Decline will destroy this complex global machine. Since decline can be abrupt this could happen earlier than we appreciate. Growth has numbed us to this systematic phenomenon because growth is slow and incremental.
Time value offers opportunity also. There is so much economic potential still left that can be harnessed to mitigate what is ahead but this must be done quickly because soon deglobalization will accelerate destroying economies of scale. Economies of scale is what makes economic potential affordable.
If you focus on the inevitability of the “when” of decline then its effects can be better managed. Stop the delusional bargaining with “if” decline will happen. Several difficult steps down the decline ladder can be avoided by this honest embrace of reality. Time is of the essence. The problems of delocalization and transhumanism require time to mitigate. Vital efforts should begin now not later.
Delocalization has some advantages too. There are locations and lifestyles that are dead ends. You may be located in the many mega urban areas across the globe. These will be where the worst of decline both temporal and in degree will occur. These places will decline quickly when resources are reduced. The decline will be dramatic with the degree of dependence these places have on surrounding areas. Many of you have the ability to relocate or change your career trajectories.
In REAL Green it is about finding microclimes of resilience just like the ecosystem operates when complexity goes into succession. Leave these dangerous urban areas now while economics allow it. If you can get out of occupations with no future in a world of decline. Honest science is clear on what is and what is not survivable. Reject the false utopia of techno optimism.
The key systematic view of this phase change into decline is abruptness. The difference in rates of changes between decline and growth phases needs to be factored into your place. Growth is relatively averaged over time whereas decline is sudden and abrupt changes downward as connections breakdown and reestablish. Key conditions of abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational become dominant in decline.
Abandonment is with the physical of our infrastructure. Dysfunction is with our systems and networks. The irrational is with our wisdom of what knowledge to embrace and what we should discard. We have built up infrastructure that is not sustainable in a world of decline. Our systems and networks will become dysfunctional when infrastructure breaks down. Dysfunctional systems will cause further physical abandonment. Our wisdom to make proper choices becomes more irrational when we fight decline by continuing to live in the world of growth.
You the individual in many cases have the opportunity to adapt and mitigate this decline. You first must stop believing failure is not an option. Realize safe places and proper ways of life in decline now matter more than ever. Evaluate where you are and what you are doing. Embrace decline and its reality and you may find opportunity. Do what species do when ecosystems decline which is adapt. They find niches that free up when complexity declines.
There are viscosities to decline in places that have the right ingredients. There are locals that are like eddies that will spin out of the current of decline and prosper relatively. There are microclimes you can seek that offer stability. This is not secret wisdom it is what nature does. Look to the way ecosystems breakdown and embrace opportunities.
I am highlighting an article that debunks renewables as our energy transition. Renewables won’t save us but they can moderate decline. They can do this in combination with fossil fuels. Both are needed. The reason this is so important is this won’t happen until it is too late and failure is realized. Everything now at the top of the hierarchy is focused on growth through energy transition combined with technocratic centralization. Renewables and digital are central to this. Fossil fuels are being eliminated when this will instead cause a worse outcome.
The cult of technology must be ended but it won’t. You the individual can get out of this delusional cult. We can’t expect to use technology to solve the problems technology created. Technology will still be needed but technology that is rationed by a wisdom embracing decline. What needs to be done is to decouple and dematerialize into simple and smaller living arrangements. Civilization can’t do this but you the individuals can. You can’t save the world but you can make your local of people and place more secure.
The notes to this article I am including are vital to take to heart because without an energy transition the much-trumpeted 4th industrial revolution of modern marvels will fail miserably. Take this to heart now and change where you can. The top will double down on a delusional narrative that growth can be maintained. If you embrace this narrative, you risk being a victim of collapse. Remember collapse is a varied condition locally and over time. It governs all but with different expressions locally. It is here where you can make a difference.
“we cannot “de-couple” the economy from energy use. This conclusion is wholly logical, given that nothing which has any economic value whatsoever can be supplied without the use of energy.”
“We conclude that, despite their unquestionable importance, alternative energy sources cannot provide a complete or like-for-like replacement for the energy value hitherto sourced from oil, natural gas and coal.”
“First, as the energy industries expanded, they reaped continuing economies of scale. The relationship between fixed and variable costs dictates that a large oil, gas or coal field is less expensive to develop and operate in unit terms than a smaller one, and this applies to processing and distribution systems as well.”
“At the same time, the global search for lowest-cost energy supplies reduced ECoEs through the process of geographic reach. A notable milestone in this progression was the discovery and development of the vast petroleum resources of the Middle East. Despite the hopes that have been vested in various basins in more recent times, the industry has never found anything on a scale which compares with the enormous oil wealth of the Middle East.”
“The third factor which has driven fossil fuel ECoEs downwards over time has been technical progress, at every stage of the chain from extraction to processing and distribution. This process has been gradual and, in an era in which excessive faith is often vested in technology, we need to remind ourselves that the capabilities of technology are limited by the laws of physics.”
“Once the benefits of scale and reach had been exhausted, a new factor became the driver of ECoEs. This factor is depletion, a term which describes the natural process whereby lowest-cost resources are used first, leaving costlier alternatives for later. Unlike reach and scale, depletion pushes trend ECoEs upwards rather than downwards.”
“We need to be clear that we are not going to ‘run out of’ oil, or, for that matter, gas or coal. Rather, what we are experiencing is a relentless increase in costs, as older (and generally larger and simpler) deposits are exhausted, and are replaced by resources which are higher-cost, and are often smaller, more remote and more technically challenging than previous sources.”
“Here, then, is the point of contention. In stark contrast to the perpetual growth promised by orthodox economics, energy-based analysis informs us that prosperity can only expand, or even be maintained at current levels, if two conditions can be satisfied. If aggregate prosperity is to be maintained, aggregate energy supply must not decrease, and we must find a way to stop further increases in trend ECoEs. Unless both conditions can be met, the economy gets smaller”
“For simplicity, it is assumed in all scenarios that fossil fuel supply declines by 18% between 2021 and 2040, and that there are modest increases in the availability of energy from nuclear and hydroelectric power. On this basis, and despite incremental contributions from nuclear and hydro, total primary energy availability is 12% lower in 2040 than it was in 2021.”
“If prosperity is to stand any chance of being maintained at current levels – taking into account rising ECoEs – aggregate energy supply needs to grow by at least 1.5% annually (Fig. 7C). For this to happen, we would need a 900% increase in the supply of energy from wind and solar power. This is roughly the set of projections which corresponds to the lower end of consensus expectations, and we’re not jumping too far ahead if we state here and now that this is extremely improbable.”
“The final scenario (Fig. 7D) is the one actually used in SEEDS analysis. By 2040, fossil fuel supplies are 18% lower than they were in 2021. Wind and solar power, taken together, have increased by 90%. There has been a 21% rise in the combined contribution of nuclear and hydroelectricity, and a modest increase from renewable sources other than wind and solar.”
“The limits to transition. Simply stated, the consensus view is that the supply of energy from wind and solar power will increase so dramatically in the coming decades that we can reduce or even eliminate the use of climate-damaging fossil fuels without experiencing any contraction in the economy. There can be no question about the importance of the environmental imperative contained in this view.”
“But the orthodox line doesn’t just postulate the attainment of environmental sustainability through like-for-like transition to renewables, let alone suggest that we can attain sustainability by making some economic sacrifices, which might be a reasonable point of view. Rather, it holds out the bold promise of “sustainable growth”.”
“We’re told, for instance, that most of the world’s vehicles – totalling close to 2 billion, and including 1.1 billion cars – can be replaced with electric vehicles (EVs). The aggregate of global prosperity will carry on growing indefinitely, perhaps by between 3% and 3.5% annually, meaning that the economy will be somewhere between 75% and 90% bigger, in real terms, in 2040 than it was in 2021. Needless to say, there won’t have to be significant sacrifices made by the public, who will carry on driving, flying and consuming at ever-increasing rates.”
“Where efficiency is concerned, the harnessing of energy is subject to the laws of physics, which set limits to what is possible. This is certainly true of renewables. The potential efficiency of wind power is determined by Betz’ Law, which states that a maximum of 60% of the kinetic energy of wind can be captured by a turbine. The equivalent for solar is the Shockley-Queisser Limit, which is 34%.”
“For practical purposes, two observations need to be made here. First, we cannot expect to lift conversion efficiency all the way to the Betz and Shockley-Queisser maxima, because no technology can attain perfect theoretical efficiency.”
“Second, and more importantly, current best practice is already close to theoretical maxima. The conversion ratios of solar panels (where the limit is 34%) already exceeds 26%. The efficiency of wind energy conversion, where the maximum is 60%, is already above 40%.”
In short, and whilst technical progress is likely to continue, there can be no quantum leap in conversion efficiencies, a conclusion well stated here.”
“If we are to attain very large increases in the supply of wind and solar power, the heavy lifting will have to be done by capacity expansion.”
“Both of these considerations leverage the necessary quantities of material inputs. Battery weight is about 60X higher than the weight required for the storage of an energy-equivalent quantity of fossil fuels, and between 50 and 100 tonnes of raw materials are needed for each tonne of batteries produced.”
“A rocky road ahead. The situation, in summary, is that (a) fossil fuel supplies can be expected to decrease more rapidly than alternatives can be expanded, and (b) that the material connection between renewables and fossil fuels makes it implausible that the relentless rise in ECoEs can be stemmed, still less reversed, by renewables expansion.”
“As we have seen, decreasing energy availability reduces economic output, whilst rising ECoEs leverage the adverse consequences for prosperity.”
“The Surplus Energy Economics project concentrates on the analytical rather than the prescriptive, and the foregoing should not be taken as disputing the imperative of transition to renewables.”
“On the contrary, renewables offer our best chance of mitigating economic decline. If we decided to stick with fossil fuel energy and back-pedal on renewables, the economy would contract under the combined pressures of decreasing energy supply and relentlessly rising ECoEs.”
“There is not, as is so often assumed, any necessary contradiction between our economic and our environmental best interests, which means that transition is imperative for economic as well as environmental reasons. If we tried to carry on with reliance on fossil fuels, we might wreck the environment but would definitely wreck the economy, as supplies of fossil energy decline, and their ECoEs soar.”
“But there really is no justification for techno-optimism around transition, and claims that “sustainable growth” is assured are starkly at odds with reality. The fact of the matter is that fossil fuels offer energy density, flexibility and portability that no other source of primary energy can match.”
“We cannot circumvent the laws of physics, nor sever the necessary connection between energy use and economic output. Neither can we reverse the rise in ECoEs by switching to lower-density sources of energy supply.”
Connect the dots to see the tipping point that represents an entire planet in flux. Civilization is economics and energy. Modern economics is essentially driven by globalism and financialization. Technology which has been so important to growth is economics and energy but driven by the quest for greater affluence. Affluence drives power.
Everything else is a subset of these equations in the realm of man’s dualistic pole of science. I call this the scientific pole because it is our activities of survival that goes all the way back to our beginnings as hunter gathers. Once our basic survival is achieved then we start to see a hierarchy of affluence develop. This continues with the right variables until a power structure is created. Civilization develops when the leverage of networks of people specializing combine to produce a centralization of power.
This is a very simple view and it is important to keep it simplistic because it is only with a generalized view one can step back and see the whole picture. The cyclic of growth and decline found in nature is just as important to the human ecosystem. Visualize human growth in its civilization structures. This is an increasing flow of affluence and power into centralized cores. This is our patterning instinct because we are a subset of nature’s ecosystem. This means civilization can’t be linear as the orthodoxy likes to portray as a manifest destiny and the expansion to the stars. It is instead no different than all other species that have come before locked in the cyclic pattern of life that is growth and decline.
The modern cyclic is currently staged in a carbon trap and path dependencies no different than a cyanobacteria in its basic urge to combat entropy. This is a macro systematic condition with variables that interact. There are thresholds civilization has managed to push and extend through technology and fossil energy. The affluence we have today is a product of ascending convergence of growth variables. There has never been such a convergence in human history. The combination of these factors in the equation of growth has taken human activity to a peak.
I would argue we are now in the neighborhood of that peak in an overlapping condition that is like a froth. This froth is a mixture of growth and decline. This froth has a surreal expression. It is growth variables that have been pushed into diminishing returns which means their power is waning. It is the combination of individual variables that are waning or declining combining to create a total system that is waning. It has forces that have inertia forcing change even though that change is now destructive.
Technology is now creating more problems than it solves but humans keep embracing its power to change. This destructive change will not be like the past where new technologies were constructive even with their destructive change to previous lifestyles. This is now a combination of destructive forces and technology is included adding to the overall force of decline.
We have nonrenewable resources that are depleting. Traditionally this has been dealt with through substitution with economics and technological adaptation. Economics and technology are reaching diminishing returns. In many ways they have tipped over into destructive change. Economics is now financialized and global meaning a delocalization that damages local economies which are the bedrock of our civilization.
Financializations eventually becomes parasitic feeding off real production without a positive return. It takes valuable resources for private use at the expense of the productive systems. Our globalized world is now hyper financialized. Excessive debt is an indicator of this. Debt currently does not reflect reality except as a warning of excesses of financialization.
The non-renewable resources of high-quality energy and minerals have matured in most all cases and now are declining in concentrated value. Living resources are in decline from exploitation. These ingredients can’t be substituted anymore. Fossil fuels are no longer high quality and cheap to get. There are lots left but not of the kind that drives economic value that returns useful growth that it once did. Recycling of minerals has matured and, in many cases, actually downcycling. We are spending more in recovery than the resulting resource recovered.
Renewable energy and lab grown meat are just more of the same condition of the maturing of technology that is no longer effective at value creation. AI and the centralization of networks is increasingly a situation a tipping over of diminishing returns where the benefits are destructive. The administrative state is now bloated and its tools of digitation parasitic. Technology has now taken our globalized world to a point of being rigid to shocks. Technology has allowed risk to be dispersed making the whole system risky. It has also allowed a peak in globalization that has concentrated huge amounts of affluence.
I want to keep the mental math here simple because complexity is the problem. Complexity is what is clouding the wisdom of enough. This wisdom is knowing when to make proper choices of more and less. There has been almost no effort to restrict power and affluence. Trying to limit fossil fuels by using technology of renewables to do the same thing fossil fuels have been doing is not limiting. This is just an attempt at substitution that science and math indicate is not possible. Ideology is being used to say it is a transition energy system.
It is economically deadly to limit growth because the system is growth based. The system has no pathway to degrowth unlike previous civilizations like the Maya that lived by a cyclic system that shaped their ideology. They lived growth and decline their science saw in the stars and natural phenomena. This inability of our civilization to embrace a cyclic period of decline is seen even with people who believe in degrowth as the way forward. These people still try to find ways to decouple and dematerialize but achieve the same results of affluence. The problem that results is engineering an affluent system to maintain affluence without the destructive side effects is limiting affluence.
Limiting affluence in an affluence-based system is the problem. This is especially true in a financialized global system where power has centralized. These power centers are not going to willingly let go of this power for the benefit of the overall system’s health. This is the period of denial where these oligarchic nodes of power will double down on the same activities. The same ingredients will be used even when they try different applications.
The top can’t do it by the bottom can but first the bottom must realize the current nature of the cyclic in a peak of growth and entering a decline period. In this time of overlap of growth and decline it is easy because of path dependencies to be fooled into thinking growth will continue. Some growth will continue but the overall force soon to be fully in charge is decline. Decline as a different nature that must be adapted to. The bottom can adapt and still find adequate affluence.
We can now reasonably say we are at the peak with overlapping forces of decline and growth. This surreal place is difficult to navigate and manage. For the top where leadership and networks combine it is no longer manageable except maybe to sabotage and even that is difficult because the controls to this system are so dispersed that sabotage is difficult. In some ways the system has taken on a life of its own of unstoppable change in path dependent growth. This is unstoppable because the impulse to power and affluence are maintained by billions of choices and multiple power nodes. It is programmed into the system and its networks. Increasingly it is transhuman with technology taking on human characteristics. The machine will want more because that is its programming.
This is compounded by the dislocation of the spiritual by the extremes of science. Science has now taken on spiritual dimensions. This is no longer pure science. It is now taking on ideological characteristics and being used politically. It is socially being employed to control and centralize power with a system technologically based with technocratic control. Even talking about the spiritual makes people uncomfortable because science has painted the spiritual as superstitious and primitive. In many ways human spirituality has been these things but don’t be fooled because science is just as bad when it tries to be spiritual. What a properly grounded spirituality does is acceptance and humility which are limiting forces that allow a satisfaction of the vital condition of a wisdom of enough affluence.
Proper wisdom comes with the siloing of spirt and science in their proper realms. These dualistic elements of human nature must be scaled and balanced. This condition goes deep into our being with our desire to connect to something greater. Our isolated and vulnerable ego desires the salvation of connection. Our ego also seeks power and control to survive. When the wisdom to balance this condition is disrupted one or the other pole becomes destructive. They will always be in flux because the cyclic is in motion so any wisdom at any time in human history has been a moving target.
At this time in history the extremes of science are so great that science is now driving collapse. See the peak and see the overlap. If you do this then you can make individual choices in microclimes that will make your survival chances better. You will find more meaning which will give you the courage to do hard things. We think we have made life prosperous but what we have done is pushed prosperity to an unsupportable condition subject to loss far worse than less prosperity may have resulted in.
Just imagine a world that did not embrace fossil fuels and kept its population much lower relying on natures systems to supply our needs. Contrast this with our system of today barreling into a world where resources are inadequate and a huge population consuming far too much. Some how if a wisdom could have been employed this might have been prevented. I would argue as systems in crease in size they lose the ability to apply wisdom. They self-organize into systems that are uncontrollable and seek power and affluence without reflections.
You can shape your local even though the top is gone in an unstoppable effort at more power and affluence. The system at the top will take care of itself in self-organization which is increasingly the devolution of the system in the elements of abandonment, dysfunction, and the irrational. You can’t change this. Even the greatest of leaders can only change things on the margins. This force is unstoppable. Affluence is limited on a finite planet. Beyond a point affluence is cannibalization. Yet, at the bottom change is possible. This destructive tendency can be mitigated.
I am speaking to a few here. My message is not for those of you in the increasingly urbanized world. I am talking to those who have resources and education. This narrows the list even more. I am speaking to those who can move to rural areas and build a homestead and practice the wisdom of less in permaculture. This does not mean you will not be growing. You will be building things and assembling things but with a new wisdom of the view of a world heading into the succession of decline. Your choices will be focused on less is more. Consolidation and the cleaning out of the deadwood of destructive affluence will be one of your biggest efforts. We have too many things and opportunities at this peak point. Now is the time for a wisdom of less is more in what I would call enough.
This is green prepping. What is green is more prepped. This is about a new spirituality that rejects the ideology of scientism and seeks to properly scale science in localism. This localism is still dependent and within the world that science has taken over. Yet, it seeks to parasitically use this destructive world to leave it. Use salvage to hybridize tech towards appropriate applications that are scaled to nature at its slower pace. Connect with the ecosystem better by utilizing biomass that is the real renewable energy. Use exceptional technology to help manage the gathering and harvesting of energy to survive. Do it with a wisdom of less is more.
Spiritually seek enough affluence instead of always more. Technology with its power and efficiency constantly seeks to increase even when we already have enough. Avoid delocalization that the transport culture makes so easy. Arguably a primary choice that brings the greatest return is reduce travel. Stop unnecessary travel and focus your discretionary time and money on your immediate surroundings. There is a simple equation to this wisdom. This is the wisdom of enough. Even though this idea of enough is a moving target within a surreal world. When making choices downsize and restrict. You will almost always be correct event though this world is surreal and nebulous.
Develop a wisdom that sees the peak and the overlap so you can navigate the surreal of modern life. Driving down the road to a grocery store and paying for food with plastic or paper is surreal. If you don’t feel this then you are lost in the system. The surreal is also seeing it and wondering how you can leave this unsustainable situation. The sad reality is all you can do is adapt it with a wisdom that seeks to minimize this situation.
It is very important to have a spirituality that is less corrupted by this world of science and affluence. Most religions are now businesses. It is not necessarily that the religious messages are wrong it is they are corrupted by affluence and science. Update your religion and your unique spirituality to the reality of peak and overlap. Seek less and try to find enough. Embrace the surreal so you can find real meaning. Accept the trap that is only manageable on the margins. This is about lifeboats of things and a spirituality of palliative care. This is a hospice which is a place of humility and acceptance.
Treat your world like an ecosystem in decline. A declining ecosystem breaks down established structures and, in this process, frees up places of growth for species that adapt. Be that adaptable species to this breakdown of modern civilization such that you will create a situation where you can get enough. This is a relative situation and you must be realistic but at least chart a proper course that is less prone to unsustainability. This is the only pathway to more resilience to the severe shocks ahead. There is meaning available in this wisdom of enough that will transform your existing spirituality.
I practice green prepping. The truth is I am trapped in a fossil fuel culture with people that are dependent on a modern way of life. I call this a carbon trap in path dependencies. My goal as a green prepper is to live in this other world to leave it. Since a trap can’t be left this is a matter of how far I can distance myself from a world that is dirty and unsustainable. To make matters worse it is a world of comforts and affluence. These seductive benefits make green prepping even more difficult psychologically.
REAL Green is a relative and realistic permaculture and homesteading. It is rural and local. Conservation is a fundamental. There is a spiritual aspect that is quite important. Without the spirituality of a green mysticism this effort is difficult. It is difficult because you are going against the current of social and economic realities. Simplicity and appropriate tech have tradeoffs. This is a life of less affluence. This type of life is ascetic and stoic. A spiritual strength is needed to maintain this juxtaposition. A green connection allows life and the land to support you through the tradeoffs.
Green living is the key. You connect to the land and its life. You see the beauty and beautify. This is not something to replace your spirituality or religion. Green is something to add to that. This is not an urban effort. The modern city is not the place to practice REAL Green. You must have a homestead and practice permaculture. What REAL Green tries to do is bridge these worlds that are in contrast. By doing this you will enhance your preparations for decline and collapse. Green means more secure.
Prepping is about the honest recognition of a world in decline on all levels. This carbon trapped world that is overpopulated and consumes too much can’t be maintained. Technology is rapidly making this worse especially with automation and artificial intelligence. The digital revolution is degrading human strengths and virtues. The problem is the world is dependent on this now such that to end this way of life will destroy it. There is no going back for civilization but there is some room to adapt the life of the individual. Prepping attempts to scale back or reverse some of this risk. Prepping attempts to get back to the basics of food and shelter with less fossil fuels and technology.
This means triage of tech and comforts. It means the salvage of the old ways in a hybridization of new and old. Biomass which is the direct connection to sun, soil, and water is embraced. It is embraced with technology and energy to leverage it. A fossil fuel life is difficult to leave. To do it requires a living most can’t adapt to. Yet, animal and human labor can be introduced relatively and realistically. This hybridization means a combination of the two in simplicity with appropriate applications. You will have to grow things and forage. You will need to gather things like firewood. You will need to give up modern pleasures to do this. This is a tradeoff.
I am reflecting on what I have done. This is my reconciliation. I have a 23-year conversion effort with the last 10 years dedicated to the creation of a permaculture homestead. It is permaculture because it is rural and growing things. Permaculture requires getting more circular meaning wasting less. It is more local because delocalization lowers resilience. Yet, we are dependent on the car culture so this dependency must be respected. The digital world is likewise a delocalization that has to be mitigated. The idea of triaging out what you can then through salvage combining what is left in a hybridization is the key. Make the old ways easier through modern knowledge and technology.
My reconciliation is on how far I have come and how little I have achieved as far as sustainability. In the world of the machine, I have not come very far. I have machines and gadgets that make up the majority of what I do. I adapted them towards more simplicity and lower performance but I am still dependent. I have spent a lot of money with little in return. What I have had is a fantastic journey of enlightenment but with the experience of just how trapped I am in affluence of the machine. I see how dirty my life is and how I am trapped in this affluence especially as I age and require more assistance.
If the world falls apart, I will have time to adjust but not much. My prep portfolio will last a few months or years depending on the type of collapse. I have mental preparations and experience to know what I need to do but this can’t make up for the lack of sustainability in my community. The word I live in is not ready to leave electricity and fuel. Groceries and basics of health care are essential to life for most. Without electricity my world becomes very difficult. Without fossil fuels much of what I do grinds to a halt. It is not practical or possible for me to do all this with animal and human labor. What I do is some of it.
Psychologically I am prepared but as prepared as one can get. There is no way to fully prepare for pain, suffering and maybe death. There is just acceptance and humility. So, what this comes down to is an honest scientific approach of creating a lifeboat for a world in a collapse process. This is made more difficult by the time frame of this process. I may die before these results are needed. This is why the spiritual side is so important. You will do this effort because it is good for the land and life. You are doing less harm and feel meaning in this.
This is what I call the hospice of REAL Green. You are doing palliative care of acceptance for a world that can’t last and faces pain, suffering, and death. Even though you are prepped it still is not enough so this is mental care for yourself as well as others. The humility of just how exposed we are to a world where electricity, fuel, and machinery quits is truly frightening. The hospice of this is facing this head on thereby normalizing the fear. What this does is lowers the anxiety of the fear so you can live properly in the here and now.
This hospice mentality is important for your community relationships. It will be the case you feel a superiority to others because you are awakened and transformed. Your prepping means it is less likely you will panic when the world shuts down. You will see through the lies and absurdities of this world of affluence. This hospice mentality means you will be humble about this and accepting for when people judge you as a green prepper. You will try to avoid looking down on others who are oblivious and uneducated to reality. You will see sheep living to be slaughtered but with understanding you are the shepherd.
This life is an effort to reduce affluence within a realistic and relative approach to your family and community. It is a journey of discovery of a new way of life that modern man left with the advent of industrialization. It is a spiritual effort to address the fear and anxiety of just how exposed we all are to a world that is unravelling. This is a more stoic and ascetic life requiring a proper mix of science and spirit. The result is more spiritual rewards, better preparations, and beauty. The tradeoff is less affluence. You will have to give up pleasures because this is a life of tradeoffs.
You will live in the surreal driving down the road and understanding just how quickly this can end. There is the hard work involved with hand labor with less return on your investment. Modern pleasures will seduce you. Your family will want them making you feel guilty not giving them happiness. The best you can do is bend this way and that but with strength and courage that you are doing what is right. What you are doing is an ancient human effort that was lost with industrialization.
I am a doomer who specializes in green prepping. Green prepping is prepping for what I hope is only accelerated decline but unfortunately in this unsustainable overextended world there could be at any time a cascading collapse. The green part is a combination of physical and metaphysical permaculture. Physical permaculture in this age of carbon traps is for me a middle-class westerner the attempt at more sustainable agriculture with less energy input and corresponding waste streams. A more circular system and one with reverence for the wild is the goal not more production. This is very hard to do and remain middle class. This is why REAL Green is realistic towards people and place and relative in degree of what can be done.
Metaphysical permaculture is less understood. Metaphysical permaculture is the spiritual side of green. It is direct connection to the land and life. This requires rural living. This is cannot be understood in an urban setting. It may be partly understood through the manual of words but not complete unless embraced. This is the walking of the talk. A minority of people are rural and even fewer are engaged in agriculture. Fewer yet are concerned with prepping. This leaves a few percentages of the population as candidates. The world has turned upside-down and this is why it is so at risk to cascading collapse. Those who can do physical and spiritual permaculture should and they will be the seeds of the future. When urbanism breaks down as it will. The old ways of life that have been bred out of society must be returned to.
This discussion will step on the toes of religion. My approach is as a mystic and an enjoyer of comparative religions east and west but also the deep nature culture of the Native American. I am a Christian because my family, tribe and community are. It is my spiritual upbringing. I have not rejected this. I am a mystic and a shaman so to treat my religion differently. I am not going to embrace the belief system in the same way as the faithful. I do this without judgement. I am simply living my revelation. I see the body of Christ as the community of family and tribe. The kingdom of Heaven is the salvation that comes through love and humility to a higher power within the body of Christ. Yet, I take this further by incorporating green spirituality. If you can’t embrace nature also then in my opinion your spirituality will lack authenticity because you will be distanced from the planet and living in the theory of being not in direct experience.
As a doomer I am on the edge of society as a shaman. REAL Green shamanism is the expression of spiritual permaculture. It is direct experience to the land and its life. Doom is not mainstream and considered taboo so this is another aspect of REAL Green shamanism. You live outside mainstream society on the fringes much as shamans of old. If you are part of the establishment, doom becomes a tool of repression and ideology like what the climate movement has become. I believe the climate has destabilized but I do not believe we can manage this with a fake green zero carbon programs. Affluent living means carbon and most fake greens are affluent. Climate doom is a propaganda tool of the globalist. It is dishonest and manipulative.
I speak to you not as an authority because shamanism is not about authority. Shamanism is about allowing life and the land to live through you. I am just repeating what has been revealed to me through direct connection. I have no special powers because of this. I am part of a special power instead. I am not always in this direct connection state and I am often in a surreal state of seeing the absurdity of man’s creations in relation to life’s creations. Somehow this is life’s plan because I see no evidence man is exceptional or separate from life either physically or spiritually. So somehow, we are doing the bidding of the universe. This is somehow the way or the Tao. This sacred can’t be understood only accepted.
Part of REAL Green is also honest science. REAL Green transmutation is the proper scale and balance of science and spirituality. Once found there is an awakening and transformation. Today science is dishonest and hijacked by evil forces. Scientism is the result. Real Green science is the embrace of our natural inclinations to do reductivism to increase our ability to survive but also to enjoy comfort. A proper science is general and combined with a specialization. This is similar to a prepper homesteader who is a jack of all trades and specialized in one activity. A proper science is guided by wisdom and most importantly a wisdom that is humble and accepting of a higher power. Today science is seeking godhead status which is blasphemous to the sacred. In a sense science and its priests are evil. This evil I speak of is in a REAL Green sense of being anti-life and anti-human.
I am speaking to you around the fire in enjoyment. This is your life, your local of people and place. If I am able to speak to you and you understand then this is my gift of wisdom. This is your journey so make of it what you wish. I am not a writer so if you pass judgment on my discussions in regards to prose and grammar you are missing the point. I am just speaking freely as shamans do. Nature asks me to do this so I complying with respect. The sacred will call and if awakened you follow.
What I am going to discuss with you today is abstract. It concerns spiritual permaculture which I have been speaking about so much lately. I am sorry that most of my latest posts have been dark and foreboding. This is an honest take on the times. We are in truly dangerous times on all levels but at the same time we are in times of renewed meaning. Meaning and loss of meaning go together and when one gets extreme the result is an extreme reaction. Decades of history are being manifested in months. This is because the forces of evil as in anti-life, have made their move. This is the globalist transhumanism of technocratic scientism combining with global governance of stakeholder elites. They are leading us into a new epoch. This is the final age of the machine. This is the age of death.
The anti-life forces of scientism and transhumanism are taking life in the wrong direction. Techno-green is not green it is anti-life but it is being marketed as good, clean, and altruistic. This lie is important to understand because you are having your rights conned away by deception. The recognition of these fake green lies is also important to green prepping efforts of permaculture. These forces are evil in the sense of being anti-life but also predators seeking to enslave you in their two-tier society of elites and serfs. Your efforts at building a homestead and spiritual monastery are at risk. The elites will impoverish you under the guise it is what is best for you. My doomerism says decline and collapse is coming anyway but this anti-life ideology means it will come much quicker and be much more devastating.
The Anti-Christ is among us and it is part of us. Let me explain because really Anti-Christ in REAL Green mysticism is simply anti-life. Our system of governance and economy is now becoming anti-life. In the direct spiritual experience of mysticism, one must let go of religious concepts which is confined to the limits of linear and dualistic ability of language. In the non-linear of direct experience this anti-life in the cyclic is the extreme embrace of self-consciousness. Collectively it is now an isolated ego lost in dysfunction with all the neurosis of a mentally illness. The end game of this is self-destruction because it is only through scale and balance of the spiritual and the physical that there is transmutation. Transmutation is the embrace of the pulse of life. Life is constant change without it the universe is paralyzed. In a metaphysical sense then self-consciousness leads to eventual paralysis only to be awakened in the grace of naturalness. Put simply the hubris of self-consciousness is forced back to the humility of acceptance in the grand process of the cyclic.
The following discussion highlights the people you should consider your adversaries not your benefactors. This discussion is supported by notes from three posts you should read. I took the notes at the end of the discussion and formed them into my view of the current evil taking hold of civilization. I am not a writer so I crudely wove them together to express my revelation of this evil. This is meant for enjoyment not fear. We are all going to die. Civilization will turn to dust. In fact, life is so short we are already dead. This realization is the renewal in life thus the cyclic.
The reason abstraction is needed here is the subject is as old as civilized man. It has appeared before and it is always among us. It gains strength as the cyclic shifts though its phases. It is now at an extreme level mainly because of the incredible powers of energy and technology to usurp and destroy life. It will destroy itself but you will be collateral damage and this is why you should be green prepping. You can find a relative shelter from the coming storm but you must know what and where these nefarious forces are. This is more than just human it is the system itself that is now transhuman and nihilist. Yet this is a human system within a greater system that is in charge. This is why those who seek godhead power will be consumed by their own desires for the immortality that power falsely gives.
Our technological creation connecting the earth in a morphic field of the machine is now advanced to the internet of things. This is the terminator and we are helpless without it. We cannot live without technology anymore so this is why this force is so deadly. This Anti-life force is a spiritual predator in the systematic form too. It is the mechanization of forces that kill life through consumption and waste streams. This is now ubiquitous in our lives and we can no longer survive without it. It is advancing into scientism of the reductive materialism of transhumanism (1). This quad of techno-utopianism today has morphed into AI, technocracy and fully automated luxury communism (2). Here communism is the two tier system of elites and serfs.
Techno-utopianism is a Luciferian construct. Not necessarily literally Lucifer, but the aspiration to “usurp God” with Luciferian characteristics (3). This theorized class of spiritual predators called Luciferians consume power for their sustenance. Satanists are lower order predators consumed by their unrestrained ego and impulse gratification. Luciferians play the longest game of them all, and seek to attain Godhood itself. Pure power (4).
The transhuman declaration is a self-organizing force both predatory and the continuously adaptive nature of technology. Man seeks to control and technology seeks constant innovation with more efficiency and more performance. Combine these two and you have the deadliest power man has ever created. This declaration envisions the broadening human potential of overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering from our confinement to a planet (5). Yet, this is just a ruse. This is actually a predatory pathway to power. The tone is one of a serious bid for immortality. There is no spiritual in this pathway it’s all about solving technical problems. Glitches kill so death can be engineered out of the equation (6). The singularity of a personalized universe with our consciousness uploaded to a cloud of pure intelligence is their kingdom (7).
Scientism has ushered in a final era of material reductionism that transcends religion and spirituality. Any non-material aspect of reality that can’t be quantified will be made irrelevant in their technocratic manual (8). Techno-utopianian systems and expert technocratic management believe they can engineer solutions for all undesirable outcomes (9). Scientism considers the conscious phenomena as nothing over and above the neural level, thus it can be reduced to that level (1). This means morality and ethics are subjective and relative. This is a black hole that once entered can’t be returned from without destruction.
As we move into a more algorithmically controlled society, technocratic social credit systems will supplant conventional moral structures, and the prospect of having your mind uploaded into an everlasting paradise will be the quasi-religious payoff for conforming to the rules (10). When we seek to shape the world through technocracy – not to mention reality itself through transhumanism and AI – we are pursuing a uniquely eschatological event known as “The Singularity”: a point in time when our technology becomes the base layer of reality (11).
Who and what is part of this luciferin field? They are among us and we are within their system. We are workers in this system whether we like it or not. We helped in its construction. We purchased its products. We did not realize what we were doing until it was too late. Now the fruits of our labor are being employed to destroy and enslave us deceptively. These networks and systems once connected make your internet devices and automobiles capillaries of a great machine. Its priests are the worlds elites but more precisely the .01% of the 1%. It is this group who are seeking the pure power this vast machine field offers. These groups are the globalist both east and west. I will discuss the Davos crowed but the Chinese CCP is even more evil and the blueprint for the current Davos efforts. The Davos man envy’s the tyranny of the CCP. That should be a warning to you if you are freedom loving.
The Davos Club are at their core, Malthusians, Marxists and technocratic globalist. The Malthusian element sees the masses taking up space and resources. The masses must instead be hived as workers and methodically reduced by the attrition of automation that is a stealth disenfranchisement. The Marxist element is the outcome of the dominance of the elites in a two-tier society. Marxism is about class struggle and equality for all in theory but never in practice. In this new algorithm, the reality is about eliminating the middle class and the reduction of the class structure to only two (12). This is the technocratic lords and the serfs controlled by the machine. Technocratic globalism is required for the necessary economies of scale and control apparatuses.
Every technological quantum leap also bifurcates society into a breakaway civilization (16). Systematically, a bifurcation can be described as the change in the number of equilibrium points or periodic orbits. The stability of a dynamical system if a parameter is varied have the potential to bifurcate if pushed beyond thresholds. This is what technology does as it revolutionizes life. In the real world of a person what we have is the stability of a life system of energy, food, shelter, and travel being constantly adapted to more efficiency and performance in a technological society. This leads to new technologies being embraced that are eventually unsupportable individually and societally. Bifurcation results and it is the collective sum of bifurcations that lead to collapse. We collapse one family at a time until a cascade of failure ripples through society from communities to nations and then finally one day the global system.
The Davos club has many noble sounding initiatives. Words like clean, sustainable, and altruistic are the catch words. This result is the economically revolutionary aspects of ESG in business which combined with governance is statism. Technocratic statism is an advanced form of the public private cooperation in a command control system that is now enhanced and includes autonomous technology as a pillar. The Woke of social justice and inclusion is transforming social norms. This is a veneer to reduce the bedrock of society that is the family and small community to serfs in a technocratic system. This is being done through the destructive confrontational politics of identity politics. It is advertised to be for their own good (13). These internal inconsistencies, when taken hold at a societal level lead to a type of hyper-normalization or what spiritual philosopher Ken Wilbur calls “aperspectival madness”. Aperspectival – lacking perspective – madness(15).
This is the modus of technocratic consolidation of economic, social, and political power under the roof of the administrative state. Urbanization will be maximized and the exterior starved. The rural areas will be impoverished into drive through places. Shiny autonomous EVs will whisk through these vast open areas into the urban areas of support. This lebensraum for urbanism will be inhabited by vast fake-green energy farms. Wind and solar are not green and never will be but the technocrats will embrace this techno-green as their sacrament. Agriculture will be transformed away from the traditional agriculture of our ancestors already unrecognizable even further unsustainable with a micro managed nutrition business of mechanical and chemical processes. Food will become a reward for proper behavior. Those that disobey will be starved like Stalin’s USSR.
Central planning is futile once systematic limits are breached. The three Body Problem suggests that there are simply too many moving parts in the world to be able to plan and control macro-outcomes. What can happen though, and frequently does, is you can cause a lot of damage via central planning (20). We are at that point where the non-linear of diminishing returns breaks over into problem creations not problem solving. Global central planning is now embracing transhumanism in such a way that this process will do orders of magnitude damage to an already damaged system.
The ideological framework of “Davos Man” is intellectual. This replaces spiritualism. This elite ontology rests upon radical material reductionism. Materialism, at its core, is pure nihilism. There is no spirit. We have no souls. There is only matter, and lower humans are merely hackable animals (14). Animals and plants are feedstock ingredients. Green and clean is a mirage for further technological development. Carbon free and climate neutral are labels for the latest lies. Covid failed to force their desired change so now it is climate. Habitability of a transhuman civilization is their only concern not nature. It is not the original Gaian way of earlier true greens. A new techno green of an ordered civilization where eventually even planetary systems can be properly geoengineered is the goal (14).
Luciferian metaphysics is predation. Their reality is layered from the physical to the spiritual. Pure power thrums only in the higher reaches of the spiritual domains. The higher dominates the lower. Spirit determines matter, not the reverse. Elitism is of the essence here; only powerful spiritual adepts and Luciferian masters deserve to occupy the higher realms and to enjoy the benefits found only there (17). Matter and spirit are not in balance in this regime so there is no stability. This regime eventually consumes itself as planetary systems and life systems seek stasis sweeping away their unnatural constructions.
We can liken these forces to a pendulum that is self-perpetuating with a single imperative: to draw as much energy into itself as possible. More importantly, it is agnostic about the energy charge – it doesn’t matter if people are in harmony with the pendulum or opposed to it. Both poles create the energy that the pendulum craves (18). This is why Marxism is so effective for Luciferians. The destructive nature of technological development combines with the social destruction from color revolution tools of identity politics and economic disruption are so effective. A small number of people can control large populations when they are in a state of disunity. The elites exploit the social and economic vacuum to be able to administer. Chaos serves their political objectives.
These predators have no morality only what perpetuates their increase in power. Technology has now allowed a kind of Luciferian perdition never seen before in human history. It is likely an expression of the end of the process of human history because in the cyclic centralization gives way to decentralization. Bifurcations caused by unsupportive technology will end the energy this Luciferian perdition requires. Net energy decline will starve the Luciferian of their transhuman power. Physics limits technology. Economies depend on both and economies are needed for surplus energy and technological innovation.
The machine requires prodigious amounts of energy increasingly in net energy decline. The physical limits of technology will exhaust this systems ability to substitute for depletion These limiting forces will break down this final human system. Revolutionary technological advancements eventually feed upon themselves as the body does in starvation. Death, is the result physically and metaphysically. The danger of this force is the breaching of sustainability and resilience for a global civilization already beyond stability. This is setting modern man up for a global Armageddon.
Pure materialism. Pure reductionism. Pure Harari. Steiner warns that: “The consciousness of those human beings whom I have called devourers of soul and spirit is in a condition of dimness…; for by not accepting the spiritual into their human nature, they drive straight into the Luciferic stream everything they introduce … What men eat and drink without spirituality goes straight to Lucifer!” Here Steiner is talking about spiritual predation and warning those who think they’re the predators, are actually the prey for the egregores they serve (19).
The Party at Davos is under the impression that they are the vanguard of neo-Darwinist evolution – when it’s looking instead like they are functionaries of a larger morphic field that is distinctly Luciferian or Ahrimanic in character. This field encapsulates transhumanism, techno-Marxism, technocracy and social credit (20). When you consider the positioning and branding of the WEF, with their certitude and paternalism, it all makes a lot more sense when viewed as a cult instead of a cabal (22). Participants in a cabal will abandon it the moment it ceases to serve their interests but cultists will double-down. They will burn themselves alive and eat their children. They are ideological berserkers (23).
In order to be able to live your life irrespective of how Davos Man thinks you should, you have to be independently wealthy. That may not be ideal or fair, but that’s how it is. If you aren’t independently wealthy as we go through this Fourth Turning of history, then there’s high likelihood you’ll be a neo-Feudal serf, trapped within a social credit system, living on stimmies (CDBCs), and doing what you’re told. By independently wealthy, I mean not reliant on single external entities, and especially not on government entitlements. If you live in a trailer on a plot of land that you own free and clear and have a viable niche in your community, you’re independent. You’re in better shape than the mid-level investment banker whose bonus is $750K but he’s several million in debt over and above his assets (21).
(5)Transhumanist Declaration “We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering and our confinement to planet Earth.”
(6)Noah Harari, in his Homo Deus sets the tone early on by declaring: In the twenty-first century, humans are likely to make a serious bid for immortality….Humans always die due to some technical glitch….Nothing metaphysical about it. It is all technical problems.
(7)Ray Kurzweil, who posits a “technological singularity” which would provide for a personalized and totally controlled universe for every human, one where they would be in complete control to experience whatever they desired, for all eternity, once we all upload our consciousnesses into the cloud.
(8)Scientism (as distinct from exploration and discovery using the scientfic method) has ushered in a new era of material reductionism so that religion, spirituality, or any other non-material aspect of reality that cannot be readily quantified have been stripped of relevance and meaning in our Brave New World.
(9)techno-utopian thinking, the idea that systems and expert management can control for all undesirable outcomes
(12) The Davos Club are at their core, Malthusians and Marxists. By Malthusian I mean that they think there are too many useless eaters in the world taking up space and resources. You’re one of them. They’re not. By Marxist I mean the true outcome of socialism: a two tier society. Ostensibly, Marxism is about class struggle and equality for all, but in reality it’s about about eliminating the middle class and the reduction of the class structure to only two
(13) Anything that comes out of Davos, no matter how noble it sounds is really just veneer to get enough useful idiots to convince enough useless eaters to accept the narrative that what is being done to them is for their own good. This year took aim at individual carbon footprints.”
(22)In order to be able to live your life irrespective of how Davos Man thinks you should, you have to be independently wealthy. That may not be ideal or fair, but that’s how it is. If you aren’t independently wealthy as we go through this Fourth Turning of history, then there’s high likelihood you’ll be a neo-Feudal serf, trapped within a social credit system, living on stimmies (CDBCs), and doing what you’re told. By independently wealthy, I mean not reliant on single external entities, and especially not on government entitlements. If you live in a trailer on a plot of land that you own free and clear and have a viable niche in your community, you’re independent. You’re in better shape than the mid-level investment banker whose bonus is $750K but he’s several million in debt over and above his assets.”
“John Maynard Keynes, from whose work the modern economic system is derived, was a Marxist.
The super-wealthy 0.1% of the 1% who coagulate into supra-national policy organizations are Malthusians. The core premise driving their ideology is a radical reductionist materialism.”
(1)“Reductive materialism (Identity theory) claims that there is no independent, autonomous level of phenomena in the world that would correspond to the level of conscious mental states. It also states that the level of conscious phenomena is identical with some level of purely neurological description. Conscious phenomena are nothing over and above the neural level, thus it can be reduced to that level.”
(22)When you consider the positioning and branding of the WEF, with their certitude and paternalism, it all makes a lot more sense when viewed as a cult instead of a cabal.”
(14) If we replace all instances of “spiritual” in the above passage with “intellectual”, then we have an accurate model for the ideological framework of “Davos Man”, because the entire elite ontology (or what passes for it) rests upon radical material reductionism. And materialism, at its core, is pure nihilism. There is no spirit. We have no souls. There is only matter, and lower humans are merely “hackable animals”.”
(23)Participants in a cabal will abandon it the moment it ceases to serve their interests… but cultists will double-down. They will burn themselves alive and eat their children. They are ideological berserkers.”
(19)Pure materialism. Pure reductionism. Pure Harari. Steiner warns that: “The consciousness of those human beings whom I have called devourers of soul and spirit is in a condition of dimness…; for by not accepting the spiritual into their human nature, they drive straight into the Luciferic stream everything they introduce … What men eat and drink without spirituality goes straight to Lucifer!” Here Steiner is talking about spiritual predation and warning those who think they’re the predators, are actually the prey for the egregores they serve.
I highly recommend a visit to this site for insight into the deadly serious game self-consciousness is engage in these days through modern civilization. Below is a comment I left there.
There appears to be a fractal force within reality which is cyclic. The Maya dug into this phenomenon deeply and offer wisdom on the process. J.J. Montagnier in his thought-provoking work https://energyshifts.net/the-cyclic-reordering-of-civilizations/ elaborates on this ancient wisdom of the stars and nature. The Mayan calendars offer insight to the cyclic influence to man and his organizations. This is worth reflecting on because it appears humanity is near a point of departure.
Carl Schmidt said “A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology.” Alan Watts said “Someone or something beyond conscious control must overthrow the Devil at the right moment, for, being an archangel he can read thoughts and is always aware of the intention that precedes the act. He can be defeated only by an act without prior intent. “let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth.” Now in Christian terminology this “someone or something beyond conscious control” is called the grace of God, and grace is held to be the only means of overcoming the machinations of the Devil, that is, of the vicious circle into which self-consciousness can lead us.” This is, put simply, being natural. Let go of fear which drives man to control his environment. Fearing fear somehow leads to the attempted mechanization of the very beat heart of life.
The cyclic expresses determinism and free manifested in play for only nature can enjoy itself and overcome. In an ascending level of abstraction naked intelligence embraces itself in self love only to die and be reborn in connection to the sacred. Aldous Huxley said “For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective method has been discovered –that of the mystics.” Mysticism is the only means to live this process but mysticism is itself cyclic so one can’t remain awakened nor can one remain in the self-reflected ego. Civilization in abstraction has its own fractal expression of this mystic cycle. It appears the end of the process is the age of the machine which is the age of death. Currently one can imagine we are at that very furthest point of paralysis that comes with mechanization when the machine runs away with itself.
I am a naturalist based upon the connectivity of the Native American with oral culture and the real science of living. I am a mystic with our vast spirituality of consciousness respecting comparative thought. I am an enjoyer of Taoism because its deepness is beyond me. I seek to emulate the natural process that governs man. Be natural and nature will support you. Unfortunately, man is now mostly urban and organized. Nature is to be controlled and manipulated in the service of intelligence. Some how this is nature and its process because exceptionalism does not apply to nature except within nature. Man is just an expression of this process.
The rebirth will likely be post civilization because like the mechanization of intelligence, civilization will destroy itself. Abstractions aside, we the individual go on living among the dinosaurs of these abstractions with needs of the flesh. If awakened and transformed then humility and acceptance call on one to build a life boat and embrace a disposition of palliative care. The denial of death is difficult until the journey is embraced. It is then we can embrace the cyclic and live. This results in optimistic pessimism of living the journey and dying a good death.
REAL Green Adaptation 