Society

Crippling Intellects

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People can be individually smart and collectively dumb. Or some may argue that people can be individually dumb yet collectively smart. When it comes to plotting a future path, I think we often get the worst of both worlds. In this post, I’ll look at the role that mental horsepower plays in our societal narratives, for better or for worse. We’ll explore two aspects to the problem: people who are so smart that they have dumb ideas; and smart people who are held captive by the manufactured “dumb” of society.

Occupy Sandy, from relief to resistance

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Two weeks ago I was in my hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey, wading waist deep in a murky combination of floodwater, oil and sewage. More than a week later, after finally getting unstuck from New Jersey (even the deepest Jersey pride has its limits…), I found myself in a van full of Occupy Sandy activists delivering hot meals to housing-project high rises in Coney Island during a Nor’easter.

The sufficiency economy: envisioning a prosperous way down

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If a society does not have some vision of where it wants to be or what it wants to become, it cannot know whether it is heading in the right direction – it cannot even know whether it is lost. This is the confused position of consumer capitalism today, which has a fetish for economic growth but no answer to the question of what that growth is supposed to be for.

European movements share strategies in Madrid ahead of general strike

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Shared problems need shared solutions. That’s why, last May, members of various European social movements met in Frankfurt to protest the European Central Bank in three days of action under the name “Blockupy.” There, they decided that they needed to do more to create joint strategies for fighting the excessive power of the financial sector and the resulting policies of austerity.

deconstructing the beast

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We like to think, as Transitioners, we are classless, but we are not…We are constructed socially to fit into tiers. No matter what class we are born into, there are always people above us and people below us. And every transaction we make or thought we have is tempered by our conditioning: to keep ourselves on that rung, or climb the ladder, and for that we have to push others down. Them, Her, that district, those people.

The Post-American Future

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The twilight of America’s global empire, the theme of most of a year of posts on The Archdruid Report, is in a real sense simply one more roadbump along the route of the Long Descent. Still, the lessons of history suggest that some such implosion waits in the near future, no matter how frantically today’s politicians insist that the status quo will be fixed in place forever. The archdruid explains…