Inevitable Crash of Progress

Most of my readers will be able to call examples of this trajectory easily to mind, and a fair number will have experienced at least a small part of it themselves. I’ve come to think, though, that in the years immediately ahead of us, it’s going to be almost impossible to miss. Plenty of belief systems will have to deal with repeated disconfirmation, but the one that’s likely to get hit the hardest, and may well produce the biggest crop of pathological behavior, is the established religion of the modern industrial world, the belief in the inevitability and goodness of progress. I suspect, rather, that the refusal to recognize and deal with the end of progress will become a massive social force in the decade or so ahead of us, and that the great divide in American society during those years will not be the one between left and right, or between rich and poor, but between those who have accepted history’s verdict on our fantasy of perpetual progress, on the one hand, and those who cling to the fantasy despite all disconfirmations, on the other. Since refusing to recognize the fact of decline is a good way to get clobbered over the head by one or another of that fact’s manifestations—a point that the inhabitants of coastal North Carolina are likely to find out the hard way one of these days—those who choose the path of denial may be in for a very rough road indeed.
Archdruid Report

Curse of Hagsgate

Worth reading. For what it's worth, I've always been a closet environmentalist, & now am starting to see how right that instinct is. I think whoever can learn to "do it themselves" and buy "old fashioned" ought to get busy doing that right now. Fish tanks, refrigerators, & air compressors are going to be luxuries that one picks from very gingerly, in the not far distant future. Then again, maybe God will matter then.

Dark Ages A'Comin' & No Middle Age

Source
The author here seems to think that we are in a period of transition & chaos, of the kind which saw the rise of city-states and feudal connections. What is left out is any sense that we are entering this at the END of a long period of consumption, rather than attempting to harness resources with limited technology. Remember, this was during a time period in which parts of North Africa were still "green". On the contrary, today, we are living with far more people, people with more technology, but a technology in decline, and with people who are far less adaptable personally and morally to the conditions of a Dark Age. And is it a "Dark Age" or a "Middle Age" that is coming? I'd prefer a "Middle Age", preferably. The author cheerfully elides the coming suffering & decline by proclaiming a new era, something that our elite has grown rather good at doing these days. A better analysis is found here.

And the repeated predictions that the situation can’t go on? I’ve come to think that what motivates such predictions, and gives them their present popularity, is the growing sense of apprehension that it can go on—that the troubles currently pressing in on the industrial world could just keep on getting worse, day after day, year after year, for decades to come, following the same gradual curve that the industrial world followed in the days of its growth, but in reverse: descending into impoverishment and relocalization along some broad equivalent of the same bumpy course that brought the ascent to prosperity and global integration back in the day.

When you think about it—and in the back of their minds, I suspect, most people have thought about it—that’s really a terrifying prospect. What makes it most unnerving is that it’s not simply a matter of, say, having your standard of living ratchet down by five per cent every year, though there will be a fair amount of that. It’s far more a matter of never knowing when your number’s going to come up and land you out of work, out of money and out on the street, next to the others who landed there before you. How much of the popular sport of blaming the poor for their poverty, I wonder, and how much of the current pseudoconservative fad of insisting that the poor aren’t actually poor, comes from people who are desperately trying to convince themselves that their jobs are irreplaceable, their retirement funds secure, and the sudden dizzying fall into the ranks of the impoverished can’t possibly happen to them?