Secular Damnation
Most Tanner Greer is well worth reading, but I would elevate his latest to the top of the stack.
It’s not his most thorough or most scholarly piece, but it is on a topic that is incredibly important even for people who don’t care about current events and politics (which I hope for your sakes is most of you).
The piece is about stagnation. It’s real, and it has been going strong for decades. https://scholars-stage.org/has-technological-progress-stalled/
Productivity gains have halted. Technology is more and more just digital, which means just better ways to spy on people and move them to scammy subscription models. Which results in lots of social dysfunction.
The closing of the American frontier is a thesis I firmly believe in. But stagnation is part 2 of that thesis. The end to growth is the end to another kind of frontier. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that the frontier meant resources for the grabbing and a way to resolve conflicts over shares of the pie by grabbing more pieces of pie; and growth functions the same way.
The explanations for why we are stagnating are interesting but less important for you personally (for what its worth I think Thiel, Smil, and John Michael Greer all have it wrong). The important thing is knowing the kind of world you live in and the kind of world you and your children are likely to live in. It is no longer enough to be ordinary. Individually and collectively, we will have to be extraordinary.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
Ben Pratt
August 4, 2022
A few months ago I realized that I have this notion of history giving way to the modern world, as if my ancestor Zechariah Decker opening the southern route with the Mormon Battalion and his son Zach Decker making the Hole in the Rock expedition were for some particular purposes, but now those purposes are fulfilled in the realization of the current world order. It’s as if there’s some boundary in my mind somewhere around a century ago dividing history from the modern world. It’s as if frontiers were pushed to their limits, everything was civilized, and history stopped.
But IT’S THE SAME WORLD. I live in the same world of adventure, potential, possibility, and discovery that my ancestors lived in. If anything the potential is greater in this new millennium, because Thinking and creating has become so ripe, ready for Men to just do it, though most don’t. Most instead outsource their thinking and create only within the confines of what that official thinking allows.
The obvious frontiers with their low-hanging fruit are indeed gone. I think my occasional envy of the pioneers comes from recognizing that. But the Zion that was beyond their reach is within ours. They caused the desert to blossom, but our task is to see the entire earth renewed in paradisiacal glory.
Bookslinger
August 5, 2022
“Most instead outsource their thinking and create only within the confines of what that official thinking allows.”
Yes. Most people are outer-directed as opposed to inner-directed. But that has always been true. Explorers, trail-blazers, and pioneers were always the outliers – the exceptions – of their day. They have always played an outsized role in history.
“But the Zion that was beyond their reach is within ours.”
Profound.