19 Comments
Feb 10, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)

Ours is an age of great pessimism, and with good reason. The last decades have not been kind. Yet I suspect this is at least as much historically contingent as materially determined. Ehrlich's predictions have not born out; we always underestimate our own ingenuity, and project the limitations of current capabilities into the future. Those limitations seem all the more inescapable when technological innovation seems to have stalled. But how much of this is necessary, and how much a result of deliberate policy by Malthusian oligarchs who have seized the wealth of society? The great decoupling of productivity and wages in 1971 was not a result of resource limitations. How many scientific discoveries were not made, due to institutional science being diverted into grant applications, biased towards refinement of existing theories, tied up in pursuit of dead end technologies by careerists for whom publishing papers rather than solving hard problems is the salient goal? How many technologies have been stillborn, strangled in the crib by monopolists eager to protect their market positions?

We see this great stagnation, and it becomes the source of our great depression, spiritual as much as economic. As with clinical depression, in its depths we assume it will last forever.

That's why I wrote this:

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/2043

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Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 10, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)

There were revolutions, meaningful, and reactions. There was the rise of the Wehrmacht and its spectacular defeat. Following from this there was aristocracy in retreat to the extent that we all experienced what was made by that retreat: the expansive middle class.

The aristocracy had to retire for awhile the full vision of its ambitions and regroup. Over the decades since it certainly has regrouped. Its current form though stinks of the lowest quality of an already degenerate breed anyone’s ever seen. it pretends, sort of, to be something else, but just look at it. Look at Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, and the thousands of other utterly incompetent random stooges elevated to such positions these days. Has anyone seen a single coherent thought about anything formulated by any of them or any of them in combination?

One doubt in your piece. You say, ‘never to return”. This the day after Sy Hersch’s report on US Navy divers blowing up Nordstream 1 and 2. There was no shortage of fossil fuel flowing through 1 nor twice as much slated through 2. And no shortage of such energy anywhere on earth the aforementioned degenerates are not sabotaging supply.

And why are they doing it?

Easy. Look at them. Listen.

Why did Hitler’s army invade Russia in 1941.

Why are Nazi grandchildren on an anti-Russia crusade today?

The outcome will be worse this time. Because they’re stupider now. Quoting from The Big Lebowski:

“Nihilists. Wow. Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism. At least it was an ethos”.

Something else. At least you can say that the Germans 80 years ago had plausible belief they’d succeed (in destroying Russia). No they didn’t, but the failure was legitimately surprising.

TODAY these incompetents are picking a fight without any of the necessary preparations, and without any of the requisite means to prepare even if they thought to do so.

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Feb 10, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)

Beautifully put, Johan. Also moving. My mother would have been 101 today, which put her in that generation. My father was born in 1913 and was part of the North African campaign as a member of the Royal Engineers. Their toil, suffering and sacrifice was not for nothing. I agree, we need to find this impulse, this forging of a new world together. It's going to take a huge act of inner strength when we're encouraged to give up and resign to apathy and Netflix and dependency on a deceptive system that is effectively killing us.

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Feb 11, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)

It seems to me that older generations had another sort of windfall, too: a sort of exuberance for life that's hard for me to even understand. I may have felt something of it when I was in college, but rarely since then. Was the exuberance due to cultural factors? Psychological? Spiritual?

Humanity will get there again.* We didn't evolve to subsist on antidepressants, Netflix and high fructose corn syrup.

But for now, I think we're playing a defensive game. I'm not in debt, I'm not addicted to a smartphone, I've got a strong spiritual practice, and I'm only mildly depressed, and that's pretty fucking good for 2023.

*This doesn't mean I think we're going to be colonizing space some day. That shit ain't happening. The future is deindustrial.

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Feb 13, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)

Fine ruminations

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deletedFeb 10, 2023Liked by laughlyn (johan eddebo)
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