In From The Fringes
Aug. 17th, 2022 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
I was highly amused to see the following piece from Chris Hedges the other day, thanks to several readers who forwarded links:https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/15/chris-hedges-the-final-collapse/
My readers will find quite a bit of it very, very familiar. Hedges, a former New York Times correspondent, author of books, and on-and-off media darling, argues that modern industrial society is in decline and faces imminent collapse, following patterns that differ in scale but not in kind from the fates of past civilizations. He quotes Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History and Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, and cites quite a range of facts and figures of a sort that I've discussed repeatedly here and on my blogs for the last sixteen years.
That said, I have no idea whether Hedges got the idea for this essay from blog posts of mine. It may be that he simply noticed what's happening right in front of everyone, drew the logical conclusions, and did a little research to fill in the details. Nor am I in the least perturbed to find my ideas being echoed in so much more widely read a forum -- quite the contrary.
That's the secret power of the fringe intellectual, after all. If you happen to live in a society in decline, as I do, and you want to talk freely about what's wrong and why the official solutions being hawked about by tame intellectuals won't work, all you have to do is find some venue for your ideas where you won't be censored. Keep at it, and so long as your ideas are at least marginally less stupid than those you're critiquing, they will begin to exert a weird gravitational attraction on the collective consciousness of your time. Eventually the official pundits will be mouthing your words without the least consciousness that they're doing so. Entertaining? You bet; certainly I'm entertained...
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-18 10:30 pm (UTC)In my experience, the major common feature of coflu skeptics is the distancing/alienation from the daily non-thinking way of living.
This distance is shared by people that think in terms of civilization cycles (like you), people that are trying to live "outside of the maddening world" (like some christians) and people that went into some rabbit hole or another regarding the current economic system (some libertarians, some leftists).
And then we have the posers - just like in the AGW debate we have the people that pretended to "fight the power" but they were actually just following a trend for personal gain. The moment the "trend" changed they became corporate cheerleaders for cash.