The Long Descent

# C-Realm Podcast 120: The Long Descent Released September 17, 2008. Host: KMO. Guest: John Michael Greer. Automatic transcript generated locally from the preserved episode audio using Whisper large-v3. Speaker turns are not labeled. Timestamps refer to the original MP3. Names, overlapping speech, and music may contain recognition errors; this is a draft for review. **[00:00:02]** And after these things, I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power, and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, **[00:00:49]** and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her, double according to her works. In the cups which she hath filled, fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her. For she hath said in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine, and she shall **[00:01:35]** be utterly burned with fire, for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, the great city Babylon, that mighty city, for in one hour is thy judgment come. **[00:02:29]** Hello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I'm your host, KMO, and this is episode number 120, The Long Descent. Prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008. Now, I say this episode is called The Long Descent, and it is because I will be interviewing the author of a book called The Long Descent. His name is John Michael Greer. But I was really tempted to call this episode Old Myths in Secular Drag. But for the sake of Google and the other search engines and for the sake of people who are searching for a podcast interview with John Michael Greer on the topic of his book, The Long Descent, I've gone ahead and called this episode The Long Descent. **[00:03:15]** But I will make sure that the phrase old myths and secular drag appears somewhere in print associated with this episode, because I just like that phrase. And as I like to do at the top of every episode, I want to thank those people who clicked on the PayPal donation link and sent some money my way to help offset the cost of producing the C-Realm podcast. Now, there's two ways to do this now. You can send a donation, which is what Larry T. did, and it was a very generous donation indeed, or you can click on the subscribe button. This is only on the c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com page. On the right-hand side, about a third of the way down the page, right next to or below the C-Realm Amazon bookstore icon. And if you subscribe to the C-Realm podcast, **[00:04:01]** then Podomatic will automatically send me $3 each month from your PayPal account. That comes to $0.75 per episode. And the new subscribers via this service are Richard G. and Toucan Sanctuary. So thank you to Toucan and to Richard. And thanks again to Larry T. for your very generous donation. well last week i did my well what will be the first of my annual 9-11 shows and there was some response but i'm not going to get into any of that response you can find a roundup of my interactions with people on the topic of 9-11 last week on my blog it's kmo.livejournal.com and that is a topic that could act as a black hole for this show and for my mind it could suck me into the exclusion **[00:04:49]** of everything else, and I just have to sort of draw a line in the sand and say, no farther than that. I will not think about this topic. I will not let myself be dragged ever deeper into this topic. I have a set amount of time that I have allowed myself to think and talk about it, and that time has elapsed. So, no more 9-11 until this time next year. The biblical-sounding angry words that you heard at the beginning of this episode of the C-Realm podcast come from the book of Revelations. I was reading from an online version of the King James Bible that was Revelations chapter 18, verses 1 through 10. And I will be talking with John Michael Greer about how the stories embedded in the book of Revelations have structured so many **[00:05:37]** of the narratives that we use to plan our futures and view ourselves and our civilization against against the backdrop of the larger world. We don't really... Well, I don't want to steal John Michael's thunder, so I will elaborate no further. And I have something that I want to share with you at the end of the episode, so to make sure that I have time for it, I will say no more here at the beginning and just get right into my conversation that I recorded yesterday with John Michael Greer, the author of The Long Descent. **[00:06:11]** You're listening to the C-Realm Podcast and getting it all reconnected. And getting it all reconnected. **[00:06:20]** You are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I'm your host, KMO, and joining me on the phone from his home in Oregon is author John Michael Greer. John Michael is an author, a historian of ideas, and a hermeticist and druid who resides in Ashland, Oregon. He currently serves as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, a position he has held since 2002. In his forthcoming book, The Long Descent, he explores his interest in oil and other resource depletion issues, and he believes that we are entering into a fundamental global change in the structure of our societies, one that will last for centuries to come. John Michael Greer, welcome to the C-Realm Podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. **[00:07:06]** Well, the introduction that I gave to you, which I cribbed from your Wikipedia entry, It gives a pretty good introduction into what it was I wanted to talk to you about. That is your new book, The Long Descent. Now, most C-Realm listeners are familiar with James Howard Kunstler, who has written a book called The Long Emergency. The Long Emergency, yes. And James Howard Kunstler, as well as many other folks whose words you will find in places like the Energy Bulletin or the Oil Drum, think that we are in for a rather sudden shift, a breakdown of sorts that will leave us sort of bereft materially and not living anywhere near the standards that we're used to. You don't really subscribe to that. You think that we're in for more of a gradual decline. **[00:07:52]** And if you would, talk about your reasons for thinking so. Well, I want to draw a distinction, first of all. We are certainly in for some discontinuities and some periods of crisis, some economic, political, unfortunately probably also military difficulties, shall we say. Periods of, I mean, history is full of situations where things get really crunchy for a time. And we will unquestionably see a lot of those. We may just be moving into one of them right now with the recent turmoil on Wall Street. The issue that I'm trying to discuss here is that these things need to be set into a broader context. A lot of people have the idea that, say, the end of a historical period or even on a broader level, **[00:08:37]** the end of a civilization is this kind of sudden, bam, you know, everything falls to pieces and, you know, all of a sudden there's nothing left but smoking ruins or, you know, small bands of survivors or roaming mobs of starving survivors rampaging across the landscape being gunned down with automatic weapons in the usual survivalist fantasy. This isn't actually what happens, historically speaking. I mean, plenty of historical periods have ended in the past. Plenty of civilizations have ended in the past. We've actually got a fair idea of what happens. And although it's very comforting to our own sense of cultural self-importance To assume that we are somehow different from every other civilization that ever lived, I don't find that argument convincing, at least in this case. **[00:09:24]** What I suspect we are facing instead is a process rather like falling down a staircase instead of a single crunch, and then it's all over with. I don't know how many of our listeners grew up reading Winnie the Pooh, but in the opening scene of that book, Christopher Robin is dragging his toy bear down the stairs. **[00:09:50]** That, in a kind of comic form, is rather the future that I envisage, and it's certainly the way that civilizations in the past have wound down. One crisis after another, one period of breakdown after another, separated by brief intervals of stabilization, sometimes partial recovery. It's a long process. It's not something that can be packaged in a nice Hollywood format, you know, giving the usual exciting, you know, crisis and then the survivors dust themselves off and go on with whatever they go on with. Well, I love the colorful language and metaphors that you used to describe your ideas. I read earlier this year a book by Jared Diamond called Collapse, How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail. **[00:10:36]** And a lot of what Jared Diamond had to say in that book runs somewhat counter to what you've just said, that he described many civilizations that, yes, there were signs that the end was looming, But those societies carried on with their standard modus and really continued operating in the accustomed way long after it was tenable to do so. And many of them did seem to suffer a dramatic crash, a collapse. Well, I've also read Diamond's book, and it's a good book worth reading. You'll notice, however, that most of his examples that he gave in any kind of detail were very small, very marginal societies on the edge of survival. the Greenland, the Norse colony in Greenland was really one, and of course the Easter Island, were his two central examples. **[00:11:22]** He didn't discuss the fall of Rome. He didn't discuss the multiple breakdowns of the Chinese Empire in the course of its 5,000 year history. He kind of skimmed over, frankly, the declining fall of the Maya. And I don't believe he mentioned at all their northern neighbors, the Teotihuacan civilization and so on. There are many different examples of historical collapse and breakdown, and as a general rule, once you get beyond the sort of highly marginal, highly vulnerable, geographically very tightly located societies on the Easter Island and North Greenland colony basis, you have a much slower process. The Maya are a classic example. It took them about 150 years to go from thriving city-states throughout the Yucatan to moldering ruins in the jungle. **[00:12:11]** And 150 years, that's fairly close to average for a civilization of any size. Well, I know that there are a great many people, and sometimes I have to count myself among their ranks, who in fits of frustration are rather looking forward to the crash. And then the idea that it's going to take 150 years and that none of us will really see it happen or unfold. It's very, very depressing. Yeah, it sure is. Now, okay, at this point, we're actually getting into some of the deeper issues here. Because talking about a crash, talking about the end of industrial civilization, which is what we're addressing here, is that there are two things going on here. On the one hand, there's the actual facts on the ground. **[00:12:58]** The problem with the overuse of non-renewable resources, the building up of pollution effects such as global warming, generally the collision with the limits to growth that we were all warned about in the 1970s and we all forgot in the 1980s, and guess what, here we are. That's one side of it. The other side, and the side that I think has been pretty thoroughly ignored, in both among people who are very much into such theories and their opponents is the role of cultural narratives. I suppose one might actually think cultural mythologies in how we think about the future. Now, we've basically got two ways of thinking about the future in modern America. **[00:13:45]** On the one hand, we tend to think that the future will necessarily involve this onward and upward forward spiral of progress leading out to some Star Trek future, dancing among the galaxies or something like that. The idea is that, left to itself, that's inevitably what's going to happen. On the other hand, you have the claim that that would happen except we're about to run into a brick wall and collapse. All the cities abandoned and roving hordes of starving marauders heading across the landscape, all the usual survivalist stuff. Those are the only two futures most Americans are willing to envision. And if you poke those images enough, what you find is that they're actually a rehash of imagery out of the Book of Revelations in the Bible. **[00:14:34]** I don't know how many people outside of the fundamentalist Christians these days even read the Book of Revelations, but it has had a profound impact on Western culture. It's had a profound impact on American culture. And it basically sets out a mythic vision of the future in which, first of all, things get really, really, really bad. We get the tribulation, we get the great beast, we get, you know, plagues and warfare and monsters roaming the landscape and all kinds of ghastly things. And then the second coming happens and you get the millennium and everything's wonderful forever and ever. And sociologist Philip Lemme pointed out a little while ago that in recent decades, this complicated vision with, you know, first the bad, then the good, **[00:15:22]** and all this various mythic richness has been splintered into two narratives of the future. There's the bad future, and there's the good future. We have our future of perpetual progress, the onward and upward to the stars. We have our future of imminent apocalypse, the down in flames version. And even those of us who think of ourselves as post-Christian or non-Christian or rabidly anti-religious, we've all grown up in a society profoundly shaped by these narratives, and those are the furnishings, the ordinary furnishings of our imaginations. And it takes a great deal of introspection and a great deal of mythological literacy to see past them **[00:16:07]** And to look at that and say, oh, these views of the future that we've received from our culture, that we all pick up from the media, that we all pick up from the cultural context we all grew up in, are a set of old myths that have been rehashed and have the serial numbers filed off and are being retailed now as, you know, in the kind of secular drag. **[00:16:35]** Well, you mentioned a couple of things that are a little dangerous. The first is that you mentioned Star Trek. Yes. And when anyone mentions Star Trek, then I take that as license to talk about Star Trek. Now, I should warn you, if you talk about anything other than the original series, I'm pretty much lost. I haven't owned a television since 1979. Well, the original series is interesting because in that series, there were predictions made. It was history in the context of the series, but there were all sorts of things happening in the 80s and 90s and the turn of the century that obviously have not come to pass. Yeah. So the Star Trek timeline has had to sort of adjust itself to account for the fact that it has lived so long. **[00:17:22]** The eugenics wars just never got around to happening, as I recall. No, no, they didn't. Yeah, just as well. Yes, and the genetic supermen didn't actually climb into their cryoship and zip off out into space. Also just as well. But no matter which version of the Star Trek timeline you're talking about, the onward and upward progress into the lovely Star Trek universe with holodecks and replicators and such does not progress smoothly. And there is an enormous crash and an enormous die-off of humanity, and there is a really ugly period. And I think many people have their stories that they live by, by which they frame the events around them, informed not only by Star Trek, but by the forces and the traditions that shaped Star Trek itself, probably going back to the Book of Revelation and the other sources that you mentioned. **[00:18:15]** Well, in fact, the future you've just sketched out is, again, the book of Revelations in a kind of filtered through Gene Roddenberry's imagination. You have the time of tribulation followed by the second coming of technology and the rise, you know, the ascent of humanity into the heavens. Well, there are a good many people, I think, who welcome the onset of the trials and the tribulations of the dark period because they know that is a necessary step. In fact, there is a group of Christians here in the United States, I think they're based in Texas, and they are looking to breed this one perfect red calf, which they think will help bring about the second temple in Jerusalem and move us into, you know, fast forward in terms of fulfilling biblical prophecies. And it never occurs to them that what they are praying for is the mass murder of most of humanity, because that's what the book of Revelations prophesies. **[00:19:14]** One of the things that has to be teased out from within these speculations about imminent catastrophe and all these people who are very eager for the prospect of a collapse in which billions of people will die, is that there's a great deal of rage and a great deal of very ugly emotions about a quarter of an inch below the surface. A lot of people who feel themselves disadvantaged, who feel that they don't have the privileges that they think they deserve, who feel that, you know, they get the short end of the stick and they ought to have the whole stick, have taken these apocalyptic prophecies, whether religious or allegedly secular, and used those as a dumping ground for some of these very ugly feelings. **[00:20:06]** And, unfortunately, when you poke at those feelings too much, or you poke at those prophecies too much, you tend to get the backlash from those feelings, as I've discovered the hard way a few times. Certainly. You know, you've described the mainstream visions of what the future can hold. Here on the Sea Rome podcast, I frequently delve into a couple of sort of esoteric visions. These are both visions that involve radical transformation in the near future. One is the sort of psychedelic Terence McKenna end-of-the-Mayan-calendar-2012 event, and the other is the Ray Kurzweil-Werner-Vinji technological singularity. And when you mention the singularity to peak oil enthusiasts, they get enraged frequently. They react with far more emotional content than the topic seems to justify, and it seems as though you are touching a nerve and violating something that they hold sacred. **[00:21:06]** Now, mind you, I consider the singularity to be a singularly unconvincing argument. It's simply proof that if you extend any exponential curve far enough, the result is absurdity. But you're quite right that the people who want a crash do not want, you know, it's more than just an opinion. It's a faith. And equally, people who want a singularity, who want that technological ascension, the technological rapture, if you will, again, it's not just an opinion, it's faith. And as faiths, on the one hand, they're basically not subject to rational disproof, and equally, they pack a lot of emotional power, and you challenge them at your peril. **[00:21:58]** the peak oil aficionados they tend to respond with uh with anger when you mention any potential technological fix that will keep the cars running and keep everything from falling apart the uh the singularitarians tend to respond with incredible disdain to anybody who doubts their vision of the future because they themselves are incredibly smart and if you don't agree I agree with what they have to say, that obviously you are not so smart. I mean, people, we have this pleasant superstition in our society these days that people sit down and rationally decide what they're going to think about the future. And, of course, that's hogwash. We decide what we're going to think about the future based on our emotional lives, based on typically unstated and often unconscious factors, and then we go looking for the facts to back them. **[00:22:52]** I mean, we're human beings, which means we are not little bubbles of intellect floating along in some Kurzweilian post-singularity electrocosmos. We have a lot of the irrational is very powerful in our lives. And that, of course, makes it very difficult to plan for the future when so many of us have learned to use it as the dumping ground for our fears, our fantasies, our hopes, sometimes our extremely nasty hopes about what's going on it is kind of interesting that our society has fixated on the future that way many societies do it with the past the idea there's a golden age back in the past and everything that is of any importance a real value comes down to us from the **[00:23:37]** ancients and all that was very typical in many cultures but we our heaven is the future our paradise is the future and so our different secular religions have their various different visions of what the future is going to hold, whether it's going to be a wholesale slaughter of everyone that disagrees, the technological rapture of the Kurzweilians, and so on. You know, of course, the singularitarians are not all of a single mind on every issue. Oh, of course. But they tend to get a little sensitive when you compare their vision to a religious expectation. I think it was Ambrose Bierce who defined superstition as your irrational belief, not mine. **[00:24:27]** Yeah, exactly. Most of our religions in the modern world are secular religions. They don't actually have overt gods or afterlives. In fact, singularitarians are rather closer to the sort of orthodox religious thing in that they do have this kind of rapturous ascent into heaven. where it's just they project into outer space and imagine, instead of their souls being raptured to Jesus, their minds are being uploaded into computers. It's basically the same thing. But, again, you can't tell them that because it's hard to. It looks like so many religions. The idea is that there are religions and then there's the truth. And among our modern secular religions, there are religions and then there's a scientific fact. The faith in progress is the great religion of our time. **[00:25:16]** It's the established religion of the modern world. Progress is our God It's our paradise Our hope of salvation Everybody piles, well not everybody But a huge percentage of modern people Put the same kind of faith in progress That medieval peasants put in You know, heaven with God and his saints It is, I think Perhaps the most difficult thing That I've had to communicate to people In the course of writing my blog In the course of working on my books that, first of all, this is a narrative, it's not simply fact on the ground. And second of all, that I don't believe in it. I mean, yes, there has been significant improvement of technology over the last 300 years. **[00:26:01]** Okay, we'll grant that. I don't believe the modern myth that pictures all of human history as this arc of ascension from the caves to the stars. That's the myth. And that's the religious belief of the religion of progress, and I don't buy it. I'm a heretic, if you will, an unbeliever, a howling heathen or something like that. Ray Kurzweil calls that the law of accelerating returns. And Terence McKenna also had a similar rap. He said that nature is a novelty-conserving engine, that it builds upon complexity and does so faster and faster and faster. which is very much the message that Ray Kurzweil is preaching. **[00:26:48]** Except that that only happens in specific, narrowly defined sections of time. It's very easy to show over the course of the evolutionary sequence, for example, that there are periods of increasing novelty and then there are periods of great stability, and there are also periods of decrease in contraction. Equally, in the history of human societies, there are periods of, you know, there's the societies rise, they reach a stable plateau, toe, they break down and they collapse, and a great deal is lost. So, you know, yes, one can come up with attractive-sounding laws that are basically modeled on the petroleum age and the beliefs of the petroleum age. One of the things that I think is very poorly understood is just how weird the last century or so have been within human history. We think **[00:27:41]** normal to have for every man, woman, child in America to have the equivalent of a hundred slaves working for them night and day. That's the energy equivalent of the fossil fuels we burn. And it's produced a bizarre outlook on life. You know, we assume that not only is it perfectly normal for us to have this extravagant outpouring of energy shaping our entire lives, but that there will be even more of it in the future just because we got got pretty blue eyes or something. You know, you've mentioned that we tend to look at our own society and put on special exceptional lenses to view our exceptional selves. And you try to disabuse people of that, but at the same time, you have just given an example of how this **[00:28:32]** current situation is, in fact, quite different from anything that has existed in the past. I'm saying that it's unusual I'm not saying that it's unique our situation is identical to that of yeast that's you know when you drop yeast into sugar water okay the yeast go nuts they can breed to capacity they can live the yeast equivalent of extravagant lifestyles because there's plenty of sugar when they finish processing the sugar into alcohol they die that's you know that's kind of the extreme case but it has happened a few other other times in human history that human beings have gotten into some aspect of the environment where they did not have access to in the past, where they've had access to more energy, **[00:29:17]** and the result has been a great deal of expense and often completely unsustainable modes of living that ends up dragging them down the long, rough road to a much more impoverished future. Now, as far as I can, and as far as anyone knows, we've only got about, what, 6,000 years of human history to work with, and human beings have been around for most of a million years, so we're just going to have to go with the sample we've got. As far as we know, this is the first time in history that human beings have figured out the trick of extracting the Earth's carbon reserves. And we've extracted them, astonishingly extravagant volumes. **[00:30:07]** We burned through them. We burned through 500 million years. of stored photosynthesis in a couple of centuries. And, yes, it's enabled us to do some really remarkable, really extravagant things. You know? Yes, that's a difference. Every civilization is different. **[00:30:41]** You're listening to the C-Realm Podcast. Blowing your mind one week at a time. Welcome back to the C-Realm Podcast. I'm your host, Camo, and I'm speaking with John Michael Greer. We're talking about, well, we started to talk about peak oil, But then we've slipped off into the realm of consciousness, which is, in fact, the topic, or the meta-topic, anyway, of the C-Realm podcast from week to week. We've been talking about the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories by which we live our lives and how the same stories pop up again in different clothing, be it the clothing of the peaknik, the peak oil aficionado, or the singularitarian, or the traditional conservative religious fundamentalist. These stories come up again and again **[00:31:27]** And another thing that comes up again and again Is people viewing themselves as exceptional When in fact they are behaving in ways that are rather mundane and predictable According to a long historical view And I read something that you wrote recently In which you compared societies to the succession of plants That grow in a lot that has been cleared, say And you first get some pioneer-type weeds which give way to grasses, which give way to shrubs, each one preparing the ground and the plot for the plants that will succeed it. And you say this proceeds in a rather predictable fashion and that there is a parallel to the way societies progress. **[00:32:16]** And if you would spell out that parallel and say what it is, how it is that it is relevant to us. Okay. Well, first of all, of course, the parallel candle was betaken. There are limits to borrowing any biological metaphor and applying it to human societies, but there's a point to the situation. We know on several previous occasions in human history, a new mode of getting a living, if you will, a new mode of supporting a society has emerged out of some previous somewhat simpler system. The development of agriculture is the classic example. As far as we know, agriculture first emerged in the Middle East right during the millennium or so after the end of the last ice age, **[00:33:04]** when areas of the Middle East that used to be basically forest and grassland got a lot drier. And the human populations in those areas had to figure out something to do or starve to death. and instead of simply gathering the the edible grass seeds from the uplands where they've been doing it for you know a thousand generations or so um some bright person had the idea of deliberately planting those seeds and from that step by step an agricultural society arose now the first agricultural societies tended to crash and burn in fairly quick or fairly short Because nobody had yet figured out issues like maintaining soil fertility, it was very much the kind of lifestyle of a dandelion or some other early successional plant on a vacant lot. **[00:33:54]** The weeds that grow first in a vacant lot, they maximize their use of resources, they reproduce themselves, produce lots of seeds, they don't cycle. They tend to just burn through the available cheap and easy resources and then get squeezed up by something else, which is slower and more efficient. And it goes stage by stage with increasing efficiency, more cycling, more concern for durability, less concern for maximum production in the immediate period. And the history of agricultural societies follows that trend. We look at the very early agricultural societies, which tended to rise and fall with pretty fair regularity. We look at the slow transformation of agriculture as better methods were used to end up with situations like modern Chinese rice culture, for example, or pre-modern, pre-chemical Chinese or Japanese rice culture, which in some places has been going on continuously in the same field for 2,000 years with no loss of soil fertility. **[00:34:54]** fertility. Now, of course, they're taking manure from animals and human beings. They're composting and returning it back to the soil. They've got the cycle worked out in great detail just as trees in a climax forest. The leaves fall on the ground. The nutrients wash out of the leaves. They go into the roots and up they go again. So this is a process that has happened in the history of agriculture from the very early, very linear extract the soil fertility and crash of the Neolithic periods. I'm of the most sophisticated and most ecologically sensitive agricultures of pre-modern and early modern periods before the coming of chemical agriculture. **[00:35:41]** Now, one of the things that I've been suggesting is that we may be in the same kind of situation with the emergence of what I'm calling a technic society. Industrialism as we see it is kind of the dandelion version of a technic society. It's based on resource extraction. It burns through the easy pickings, picks all the low-hanging fruit, and crashes. There will be other techniques. These will gradually evolve in a direction of more and more efficiency and more just keeping the cycles within itself **[00:36:29]** as a tree will keep most of its nutrient content within it. **[00:36:36]** It doesn't lead to a Star Trek feature. This isn't a fast process. We have no idea what's going on. **[00:37:04]** And so that, I think, is the hope that I would like to hold out to people as we face the declining curve. That doesn't mean we're going to – it does mean that the way we have been managing the technical court, okay, in some kind of technical society, but in harmony with nature. Well, when you describe that society, which does sound much kinder than the one in which we live and certainly more sustainable, although I'm trying to find a different way to say sustainable as it's been said so many times that it no longer has much meaning or impact. **[00:37:52]** That's true. I think back to a conversation that I had recently with Dennis M. Bushnell. He is the chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Institute. And his vision for the near future and his proposed solution for coping with peak oil and associated problems is to start to use biofuels, but to use biofuels that are grown from algae and from salt-tolerant plants so that we're not taking agricultural land, which is now feeding people, and using it to feed cars instead. And he also prescribes tele-everything, which is telepresence, telecommuting, telemedicine, just using the infrastructure of the Internet and the skills that we've all acquired, you know, **[00:38:39]** using email and playing our massively multiplayer online games and having avatars in Second Life, and just extending that and traveling less and making our society one that is physically distributed but very mobile in terms of mind-to-mind communication and commerce and whatnot. And that sounds pretty good to me, and it also sounds rather like technological and cultural progress. Well, I think that it's not implausible that such a thing would be imagined by people in a society like ours, which basically produces very little and simply lives off the production of the third world. **[00:39:24]** But I don't know that it's realistic. First of all, we have to remember that the Internet was created during a period when energy was cheaper than it has ever been. During the 80s and 90s and the first five years of the 21st century, we went through a quarter of a century where a barrel of oil routinely bumped around right above $10 a barrel. For the most important fuel, the most important substance in the modern world, $10 a barrel. Energy was basically free. It apparently made sense. It certainly looked as though it made sense to ignore distance as a factor in the economy to, you know, to offshore everything. One of the things that has come up in discussions fairly often in this whole topic is the idea that we don't have to worry about peak oil or anything like that because we're a post-industrial society. **[00:40:20]** We don't have any industry. Well, no, we're totally dependent on industry. It's just we've shifted off to China and to other countries of the non-developed world because we don't want to deal, on the one hand, we don't want to deal with the pollution directly. On the other hand, we don't want to pay U.S. wages. We don't want to pay the prices that would be necessary to support people at U.S. wages. I have my doubts that the Internet will prove viable over the middle to long term simply because its server farms and its infrastructure both embody and require some. I mean, a medium-sized server farm can use more electricity than a decent-sized town, and there are a lot of them to keep the Internet up and running. I don't know that that's going to be viable over the long term. What I would look for, first of all, I mean, I think it's a good idea to explore such options, **[00:41:12]** but the first thing to look at, instead of saying, how can we fuel our present lifestyles, or how can we, you know, tell a what-have-you our current lifestyles, One of the things we really need to look at is what do we need to change in our current lifestyles? Instead of trying to figure out something else to pour into the gas tank, maybe it's time to ditch the car. Maybe it's time to start reshaping the way we live and the way we ghettoize residences and businesses and jobs and so on so that people actually live where they work, where they get educated, where they have entertainment and shop and things like that. Most people actually have met, you know, there have been many surveys of people who indicated they actually enjoy neighborhoods like that, but try getting one built. **[00:42:01]** And so we have a need to revisit the basic decisions we've made about our lifestyles. We need to look at whether it actually makes sense for us to use this much energy. In America especially, this is especially the case. Anyways, Americans right now, we're 5% of the world's population. We use 30% of the world's natural resources. There is more waste in this country, more energy wasted in this one country than most other countries use. We could cut a huge amount without significantly impacting our lifestyle. I mean, you go over to Europe, for example. The average European uses one-third the energy per capita that we use here in America. And, you know, I've been there. It's civilized over there. In many ways, they have a better lifestyle than we do. **[00:42:46]** Maybe we need to learn from them. And so rather than starting by saying, well, you know, here's our non-negotiable lifestyle. How are we going to keep doing it? Let's start by saying, okay, what do we need to change? It's like the Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet, who looked at, I forget if he was visiting a museum or something, and happened to see a statue of Apollo. And what that statue of Apollo basically said to him, this Greek statue, But you must change your life. That's the lesson I think the peak oil has for us more than anything else. We must change our lives. We've come to live in ways that are hopelessly unsustainable, that aren't actually that satisfying, that are ravaging the planet on which we depend moment by moment for our survival. **[00:43:34]** And, you know, there's a better way. There's many better ways. Maybe we need to start with that. I certainly agree that the amount that we consume does not equate to the quality of life that we enjoy. In fact, one of the things that I like to do on this program is to introduce people to the distinction between standard of living and quality of life, because those two are used rather interchangeably. And this last summer, I made my fourth trip to the Peruvian Amazon. And I spent the first week in Peru in the jungle at a lodge that had no electricity, and that was marvelous, absolutely marvelous experience, and I was consuming almost nothing and using very, very little energy. **[00:44:26]** And then for the next week and a half, I was in a city called Iquitos, which is a bustling city in the heart of the Amazon. on there. You can't get to it by road. You have to go by river or by plane. But once you're there, it's loud, it's polluted, it's congested, and it's really distractingly loud because there are thousands of these rickshaw taxis, which are converted motorcycles that make a lot of noise. And it sounds kind of chaotic and stressful, but at the same time, you don't need a car. Most people don't have them. Most people get around on foot. It's It's a very walkable sort of city, and, you know, when you do have to travel long distances, cheap transportation is available. It's not really sustainable in that they're, you know, they're burning gasoline still. But in that environment, I was still consuming far less than I do here, still using a lot less energy than I do here, **[00:45:16]** and still having a much better time than I typically do here. Well, there you go. I've lived without electricity, running water, central heat, and flush toilets. Okay. Okay, I've lived that way, and it was, you know, I had no particular difficulty with it. Just now I do have electricity. I don't have central heating where I live. I don't own a car. Somehow my quality of life is pretty good, despite the fact that, you know, my standard of living probably puts me down fairly close to the poverty line. You know, it's crucial to differentiate. There was a, somebody stuck a sticker on a sign in the parking lot of one of the big box stores in the town, the larger town just north of where I live. **[00:46:05]** And the sign, the little sticker said, if you had enough, how would you know? And I think most Americans have lost the ability to answer that question. We don't know what the word enough means. And we distract ourselves from ourselves, we distract ourselves from the fact that our lives aren't actually that satisfying, aren't actually that interesting. With all of these technological gimmicks, all these noisemakers and all these distractors that serve mostly to keep us from noticing that we're not actually having a very good time. So, you know, painful though it is, I think one of the things that would do many of us in this country a lot of good is just turn off the noisemakers, **[00:46:55]** woe back on the distractions, and take stock. And say, you know, is the life that I'm living actually something that I enjoy? Is it actually meeting my needs? Is it actually fulfilling? fulfilling. When I was younger, is this where I wanted to end up? And I think a lot of us can look at ourselves and go, wow, no, it isn't. Maybe it's time for a change. And one of the possibilities, one of the things that's always opened up by the decline of a civilization and the breakdown in its narratives, its myths, the stories that it tells, that people tell to themselves, is that it opens up the possibility of turning inward and moving away from an **[00:47:40]** an outer-directed life directed toward accumulating the largest possible amount of stuff or whatever our culture's outward goal is, and actually paying attention to what's going on inside the game. That brings me around to how I had intended to close, because I'm sure that there are some people listening to this who are thinking, gosh, you've had John Michael Greer on the phone for nearly an hour now, and you've talked about peak oil and the technological singularity, you never even mentioned Druidry or Earth-centric religions or anything of the sort. And it's, I can see, not very difficult to equate the two or to demonstrate some relevance between them. So if you would, just take a few minutes, and this will have to be the end of the interview, **[00:48:30]** but talk a little bit about your role as Archdruid and how this relates to the interests that we've been talking about for the past 50 minutes. Well, I had no particular intention of becoming an archdruid. I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so to speak. But the druid tradition, I mean, you have to start, please start by being aware, we don't claim to be descended from the ancient Celtic druids. It would be nice, but, you know, the modern druid movement was recreated beginning of the 18th century, right around the time the Industrial Revolution was really getting underway. And all through the almost 300 years now of its history, it has been very much focused on presenting a principle of alternative **[00:49:16]** to the sort of industrial ideology of onward and upward, more is better and screw than the living earth that has dominated Western culture through most. And now we're really moving into the time for which Druidry came into being, the time that Druid's been talking about for a long time, when the limits to growth would be reached. And it's not as though we don't have a canned solution. We don't have an ideological program, sign on to the Druid five-year plan and we'll save the world. The world, I mean, the Earth is old and strong and smart, and she will save herself, especially if we get out of her way. but one thing that I think we can offer **[00:50:02]** and of course many other earth-centered traditions can offer the same thing but one of the things we offer is a sense of the sacredness of nature a sense of the centrality of nature to human experience we have this delusion in the modern world that we are apart from nature that nature is this little cute green thing over in a corner somewhere where we can go and look and go ooh, aw, isn't he nice We survive moment by moment because the natural world produces the oxygen and the water and most of our economy is dependent in one way or another on nature. The study that was done a couple of decades ago about what was the total economic contribution of nature to the world economy, **[00:50:49]** it turns out that out of every dollar of economic value produced in the world, three-quarters of that 75 cents is actually produced free of charge by nature. We're totally dependent on nature, yet we act like a bunch of spoiled three-year-olds who think they don't need. And, you know, we could find out the hard way, or we could actually get a clue. And the druid tradition is simply suggesting that maybe we should get a clue. Maybe there's a gentler way to come to this realization than by running headfirst into a brick wall. So that's basically what I'd say. I mean, we could get into druid traditions and philosophy and funny white robes and golden sickles and all that kind of stuff. But what it comes down to is recognizing that it is nature in which we live and move and have our being, and maybe we should pay attention to that. **[00:51:41]** You will find the CRL audience a very receptive audience for that particular message. I'm glad to hear that. Just before you go, tell us a little bit about your book that's coming out. Is it available already, and if not, when will it be available? It's available. You can get it online any place you want. The title is The Long Descent, A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, published by New Society Publications. And it covers a lot of the issues that we've talked about here, as well as a great deal more. And I hope it starts some interesting conversations. I will be adding it to the C-Realm Amazon bookstore, and I will be looking for a copy. And I'm interested in learning more about what you have to say, because everything you've said thus far has fit very nicely into the sort of loose worldview that I've been assembling over the past few years. **[00:52:27]** And I like to have surprises that fit in with what I have already accepted, because I think that's pretty much the only way that anybody ever really comes to anything new. You're probably right. Well, John Michael Greer, thank you very much for appearing on the C-Realm Podcast. Well, thank you for having me here. I've enjoyed it. You're listening to the C-Realm Podcast. Sea stands for consciousness. **[00:52:55]** That was John Michael Greer. He's the author of a book called The Long Descent, which you can find in various places, including the C-Realm Amazon bookstore. Just go and click on the link that says C-Realm Podcast Guests. And if you like what you heard from John Michael, you'll be glad to know that he is a prolific blogger. And I will have a link to his blog in the show notes for this episode, which of course you can find on my blog. It's kmo.livejournal.com. Normally I read some piece of email on the C-Realm podcast, unless I just absolutely don't have time. I did have time this week, but I opted not to, although I would like to mention one email that I received. It was from Serpacody, or Cody of Sancho and Cody. **[00:53:42]** He is the main force behind the post-production over at Blacklight in the Attic, and he shared a very personal story that isn't necessarily about him in a recent episode, which I found, well, very compelling. So I wanted to thank Cody for his letter, which I'm not going to read because it is so unabashedly positive and glowing in its praise for the C-Realm podcast that I would actually be embarrassed to read it. And I've read some pretty glowing things from listeners on this show, so that's saying quite a bit. So, Cody, thank you for that, and thank you for doing the show that you're doing. I know, I really know, that it takes a lot out of you and demands a lot, But, well, for my part, I would say keep with it. It returns as much as you give it. **[00:54:29]** Well, I talked with John Michael Greer about the stories that we tell ourselves. And one story that is popular among a tribe that I used to be a full-fledged member of and am now sort of a satellite member, that's the tribe of the Singularitarians. And I do make fun of their seriousness from time to time, but don't take that to mean that I think that they're full of excrement. I do take seriously the possibility that advances, and I can use that word without quotes, advances in artificial intelligence technology could rapidly and radically reshape the world that we experience. And there's something that I wanted to read. I won't read it in its entirety, but I'll read you a select bit from it. It is an excerpt or two from a blog post by Stephen Smithy. **[00:55:20]** It's called Rapture of the Nerds, not. And Stephen Smithy writes, The idea of a technological singularity is sometimes derided as the rapture of the nerds. I can take a joke, even a boring old joke that implies I'm a robot cultist, but it irks me when jokes become a substitute for thinking. There's always someone in discussions on the topic who uses the comparison to fringe Christian beliefs about the end days as if it's some sort of argument. A reason why all the developments postulated by those who do take the singularity seriously will fail to materialize. Although the parallel, like any appeal to authority, positive or negative, might work as a heuristic, a hint to look harder for more direct and technical criticisms, **[00:56:06]** it of course fails as such a criticism itself. itself. When computing atom trajectories in a supercomputer or in nanotechnological devices, Mother Nature doesn't check the consequences against a list of ridiculous beliefs, rejecting any outcomes too similar to those expected by the uncool and the stupid. Now it could be, if there's a close similarity between the singularity and the rapture, this points at some sort of psychological flaw shared by believers in both, a seductive but but irrational attractor of the human mind that sucks people in, with those raised religiously dressing it up in terms of God, and us technologically-oriented atheists imagining a human-made God-substitute. But that image of a shared psychological flaw is itself so seductive **[00:56:53]** that it has distorted people's view of what the singularity is about into a kind of geek, Bible-wielding strawman. Singularitarian ideas are assumed to parallel fundamentalist Christian ideas even where they don't, just because the comparison is apparently so much fun. And then Stephen Smithy goes on to list a number of ways in which the geek rapture, otherwise known as the singularity, is not an exact parallel for the Christian rapture. And I won't read all of those differences verbatim, I'll just summarize them. The first, of course, is rationalism, because singularitarians are scientific in their thinking and not susceptible, of course, to the sort of biases that trap the rest of us. The second is naturalism. **[00:57:38]** The singularitarian vision is not one that depends on any god stepping in from the outside and changing the way the world otherwise works. Next is uncertainty. There is not a carved-in-stone version of how the singularity will unfold or when, unless, of course, you're reading a book by Ray Kurzweil, in which case it's pretty close to being carved in stone. Next, it's human-caused. It's something that results from human action, and this is definitely not the case with the revelation and end times and apocalypse described in the Book of Revelations. Next, there's no in-group perks. In the end-of-the-world scenario described in Revelation, of course, the righteous are judged to be righteous, and everybody else, well, they get the very, very short and hot end of the stick **[00:58:27]** in a very uncomfortable place. Next is the idea that there are no religious trappings, No rituals, worship, or holy writings. I don't think that he can make a very strong case for that one, actually, but I'll go ahead and list it. Next is no revenge. There is no notion of the unleashed AI genie coming around and tormenting those who did not believe in the singularity story from the beginning. And finally, there's no anthropomorphism. Now, what I wanted to go back and talk about, in fact, I'm going to read verbatim what Stephen Smithy has to say, is this no-in-group-perks point. He writes, In the singularity-as-rapture-for-nerds analogies that I've seen, it's claimed that the nerds expect only themselves to benefit, with the rest left behind **[00:59:12]** left behind is capitalized as a reference to the Left Behind book series left behind in their misery in the same way that only Christian true believers are supposed to benefit from the rapture. This seems like a clear example of fitting reality to your analogy when it should be the other way around. I haven't seen any predictions by singularity advocates that restrict the effects to some elite group of techno-savvy westerners, nor have I seen anyone advocate that this should happen. The singularity is supposed to benefit humanity, and not some particular group, and singularity activists understand this. The AI would almost certainly be enough of a humanitarian to help all of us, and with maybe thousands of years of progress in a short time, it would have the resources to make this easy. **[00:59:57]** so there was a bit of singularitarian bashing in the interview with john michael greer and i offer these words from stephen smithy to sort of soothe that irritation and i soothe the feelings of the singularitarians a bit because i'm hoping to get some singularitarians here on the C-Realm podcast in the not too distant future to talk about the topics discussed at the singularity summit that that is either happening now or coming up very soon. Well, I'm sure I have talked away all of the time available to me, so let me close by reminding you that this episode of the C-Realm Podcast, and every episode, is distributed under a Creative Commons license, the Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license, and is available for your use. **[01:00:44]** I hope that you'll join me next Wednesday for episode number 121 of the C-Realm Podcast. I don't know who I'll be talking to, but it should be interesting. I hope that you'll join me, and until that time, I hope that you will stay well.