The order which has been taken for granted suddenly appears queer and contingent. There is an appearance of the contingency of order. This is the main value of utopias. At a time when everything is blocked by systems which have failed … Continue reading The Last Fiction – Part 2
Unprecedented. That is the key word in these opening rounds of the Coronavirus pandemic. Just so. And as such, countries will need to apply unprecedented solutions to the crisis. Make no mistake: this is the time for overreaction, especially of … Continue reading The Covid Pivot
It is time to abandon the fantasy that we are above the past and alienated from the rest of life on earth. We truly are a successful species in our own right that lived in harmony with the earth and its other forms for millions of years — a species that has not changed intrinsically. The genome is our Pleistocene treasure that transcends short-term and short-sighted goals. Possibilities lie within us. Our culture must express what the past calls forth in us but leaves us the freedom to shape. — Paul Shepard —————————————————————————————————————————————– In the long run, everything is ecological. As detailed in the … Continue reading The Last Fiction – Part 1
You have heard that it has been said, You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for … Continue reading Winning the Peace in 2020
In Part 1, we confronted the uncomfortable reality that unequal societies like ours do not, unfortunately, fix themselves gradually or peacefully. Instead, conditions ossify and then worsen, until one of the Four Horsemen of violent upheaval comes galloping along to … Continue reading Transparent Trojan Horse – Part 2
The trouble with the eagerness to make a world is that, because the world is already made, what is there must first be destroyed. – Paul Shepard, ‘Nature & Madness’ Modern industrial societies have three fundamental features: they are stupendously … Continue reading Transparent Trojan Horse – Part 1
“It is the nature of a new idea to confound current consensus.” William H. Whyte, Jr. In the previous post, we looked at the most daunting socioeconomic issue facing us today: the decline of labor value. Looking beyond a simple … Continue reading The Cerberus of Surplus Capital
The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor, and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society…. It is a society of laborers which is about to be … Continue reading Something Ain’t Workin’
In the last couple posts (here and here), we established this general framework: our country is being artificially split into two warring factions, mainly due to our electoral machinery (winner-take-all) and the partisan media that feasts on the resulting confrontational style of politics. As economic conditions on the ground deteriorate for regular people, narrative theodicies arise to explain why things are so screwed up, and who is to blame. These stories, which I described as Dreams Dashed (the conservative variant) and Dreams Derailed (liberal version), have several common characteristics: they are emotionally charged, with compelling heroes and villains; they are … Continue reading Setting the Table
Well, 2017 seems like the right time to launch a new blog, so here it is. Hopefully we’ll cover stuff like this: politics, economics, the future of work, popular culture, social collapse, sports, and maybe a bunch of pictures of my lunches and my feet, with the ocean in the background. So many possibilities. Stay tuned to be riveted. Continue reading Launching Entropolitan
