Held Hostage by Progress | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

July 17, 2013 (Archdruid Report) -- The continual recycling of repeatedly failed predictions in the peak oil community, the theme of last week’s post here, is anything but unique these days.

Open a copy of today’s newspaper (or the online equivalent), and it’s a safe bet that you’ll find at least one op-ed piece calling enthusiastically for the adoption of some political, military, or economic policy that’s failed every single time it’s been tried. It’s hard, in fact, to think of any broadly accepted policy in any dimension of public life today that can’t be accurately described in those terms.

Arnold Toynbee, whose sprawling study of historical cycles is among the constellations by which this blog navigates, pointed out quite some time ago that this process of self-inflicted failure is one of the standard ways that civilizations write their own obituaries. In his formulation, societies thrive so long as the creative minority that leads them can keep on coming up with new responses to the challenges the world throws their way -- a process that normally requires the regular replacement of the society’s leadership from below, so that new leaders with new ideas can rise to the top.

When that process of replacement breaks down, and the few people who still rise into the ruling class from lower down the pyramid are selected for their willingness to go along with the status quo rather than for their commitment to new ideas that work, what was once a creative minority degenerates into a dominant minority, which rules by coercion because it can no longer inspire by example. You can tell that this has happened to your society when every crisis gets met with the same stereotyped set of responses, even when those responses clearly don’t work. That happens because dominant minorities identify themselves with certain policies, and with the social roles and narratives that go with those policies, and it takes much more than mere failure to shake those obsessions loose.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/held-hostage-by-progress-john-michael-greer

[bluedeathray]

1. Someone's going to be left holding the bag

Under this (likely) scenario. Education doesn't seem to be working. At whatever limited level it's actually taking place.

I'm up for suggestions. But it really seems we're doing this to ourselves.