No other theme in popular culture combines such enduring popularity with so unbroken a record of failure. Of course, cataclysmic events do happen from time to time — as I type these words, the people of Venezuela are struggling with the aftermath of a major earthquake. But there’s a crucial difference between real events of this kind and the gaudy dreams of universal destruction that cluster around apocalyptic claims, like so many wasps round a jam jar.

In Venezuela, after all, the survivors are picking up the pieces of their lives and preparing for a slow return to business as usual. The core premise of the apocalyptic faith, by contrast, is that business as usual will never return. An apocalypse places a full stop at the end of everything familiar, and if anyone survives to witness the aftermath, they will inhabit a world wholly unlike the one that was destroyed. The mere fact that destructions so total don’t happen in the real world does nothing to dent the devout faith that some time soon it will happen to us all.

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The predictive power of dreams

By John Michael Greer

A contribution from the odder end of postmodern philosophy may be useful here. You will rarely catch me quoting Jacques Derrida, but just this once he has something useful to contribute: hauntology. The word is a portmanteau of “haunt” and “ontology” (or in Derrida’s own language, of their exact French cognates “hant” and “ontologie”). The concept is the recognition that something which has never existed, does not exist, and will never exist, can still affect human culture and thought in much the same way as something that possesses a less phantasmal mode of being.

Derrida coined the word during a famous discussion of Marxism. That was wholly appropriate, of course. The entire apparatus of Marxist historical mythology — all the way from primitive communism through the arrival of the Workers’ Paradise, for all the world like the New Jerusalem descending from the clouds — is a 19th-century construct pieced together from scraps of inaccurate anthropology and random pieces of Christian apocalypticism with the serial numbers filed off. Such oddly assorted raw materials are common enough in the backstories of popular movements.

Nonetheless, Marx and Engels were quite correct when they claimed, in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, that the specter of Communism was haunting Europe. While the ghost in question was chased out of its familiar European haunts by the events of 1989, it still hovers unbanished in Russia, where the Communist Party is the second-largest political party in the country, and in the United States, where a resurgent socialist faction is battling the mainstream Democrats for control of the party. Given the massive unpopularity of socialist ideas in the US, outside a handful of huge and very liberal cities, that struggle may yet succeed in handing the midterm elections to Donald Trump: a reminder, if one were needed, that when idealists go charging into the political sphere, the outcome of their actions may not be what they hope.

The specter of apocalypse has less immediate political impact than that of the ghost just studied, since believers in imminent cataclysm are much less likely than their Marxist peers to join political movements and try to overthrow governments. Even so, belief in the impending end of the world can have considerable indirect impacts on politics, economics, and society. Consider the prepper movement in the United States — a complex phenomenon poorly understood by most of its critics. On one end, you have people who have reasonably decided, after watching the remarkably inept responses to recent natural disasters by state and federal agencies, that having food and other necessities stashed in safe places might just be a good idea. On the other, you have believers in full-blown apocalyptic ideologies insisting that this time for sure the Antichrist or some other figure of dread will show up and give red-blooded Americans the long-awaited chance to blaze away with automatic weapons. There are, of course, many other options between these two extremes.

While the prepper scene in any of its variations inspires and supports a certain skepticism toward government, it has little direct impact on politics. Yet its indirect impact is considerable. Prepper networks routinely become informal conduits for political ideas, as well as rules for storing powdered milk and recipes using dried beans. Since the networks exist outside the accepted channels of information flow in American society, and make a point of not being too conspicuous in the mainstream culture, pundits and politicians alike can end up blindsided when large numbers of their constituents take up ideas that the talking heads of the establishment media never thought to push on them. It was thus by way of prepper networks, among other channels, that the ideas that paved the way for Trump’s victories — notably the rejection of the bipartisan consensus on immigration and economic globalization — found their way well in advance to a considerable share of the US electorate.

Paying attention to upsurges in apocalyptic belief is, therefore, one way to gauge when such conduits for alternative ideas may be forming, and perhaps yield clues about which ideas are likely to flow. Apocalyptic beliefs are important in another way, however, which they share with other beliefs at odds with the consensus reality of their society. Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, to borrow the title of Charles Mackay’s famous book on the subject, form a sensitive indicator of social stress. Notice where, when, and among whom strange beliefs find a substantial foothold, and you have some chance of guessing where stresses are rising toward crisis.

This was why imperial China had an entire government department dedicated to keeping track of omens, and required local mandarins to send in reports of any strange events from local people. That gave the central government a back-channel view into the collective thoughts and passions of people even in the most remote provinces. The power of strange beliefs and rumor panics to flag unrest before it breaks out has not diminished in modern times. It’s hardly an accident, for example, that the same regions of the rural United States that were seized by the cattle mutilation rumor panic in the Seventies became hotbeds of anti-government sentiment a decade or two later.

The cattle-mutilation panic evolved into the centerpiece of a flurry of competing conspiracy theories: was it government agents who were mysteriously slaughtering cattle in the rural West, or was it Satanists doing those evil deeds, or were aliens in flying saucers responsible? The lack of a single focus didn’t make the signal less important. When conspiracy theories flourish, whether or not they reach consensus on the plot’s supposed nature, that tells the attentive watcher that large numbers of people have lost faith in the government that rules them. By the time conspiracy theories arise, it’s too late to resolve the situation with propaganda or the suppression of free speech — the government needs to change its policies in response to public pressure, and the punishment of a few high-ranking scapegoats is usually needed as well.

Apocalyptic beliefs have a different message to communicate, though one no less explosive. People place their faith in an imminent end of the world when society as it exists refuses to meet their needs, and gives them no hope of better times ahead. Think for a moment of the state of mind that would make you regard the prospect of huddling in a burnt-out basement, eating rats if you’re lucky enough to catch them, as a less daunting option than waking up tomorrow morning and going on with the life you lived today. Plenty of people have reached that state. While it’s certainly true that few of them genuinely grasp what life would be like if they got the collapse that anchors their dreams, the prevalence of such fantasies shows how little faith they place in the future toward which their societies appear to be heading.

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Nor will that disaffection remain safely locked away in the realm of fringe beliefs. It bears reminding how short a time passed between the first great wave of apocalyptic frenzy in the American colonies, the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the outbreak of the American Revolution — or how an even shorter interval passed between the second such wave, the one that culminated in the so-called “Great Disappointment of 1844”, when tens of thousands of Americans waited vainly on hilltops for Jesus to appear, and the outbreak of the American Civil War. British readers may draw a comparable lesson from the way that Puritan apocalyptic beliefs in the first half of the 17th century helped drive the rising spiral of political and religious passions that sent the New Model Army marching across the British landscape and brought Charles I to the headsman’s block.

It’s possible and, I suggest, useful, to generalize from these examples. The strange popular beliefs and rumor panics of a society are its collective dreams, and they can be interpreted in much the same symbolic manner as the dreams of individuals. In a very real sense, conspiracy theories, apocalyptic beliefs, and other forms of popular rejected knowledge are the ways ordinary people say the unsayable, and communicate in veiled form those realities of their lives that can’t be mentioned in public.

I’ve mentioned above some examples of where these trends can lead. In the United States and Britain alike, we may be closer to a repetition of such scenes than the respectable thinkers of our time are willing to recognize. For this reason, if no other, close observation of the specters haunting the collective imagination of our time is an urgent necessity.

In the United States, especially, church membership is soaring among the young. The assassination of Christian evangelist Charlie Kirk poured fuel on the fire, but the spark kindled well before that horrific event, and it’s the more conservative churches that have welcomed the bulk of the newcomers. It’s not accidental that young men make up the vanguard in this movement back towards traditionalism. Every social movement with a future worth watching starts by attracting young men, who always seem to be the vanguards of enduring social change.

Why, though, is this shift benefiting conservative Christian denominations? There are plenty of other options for disaffected young men, some of them far more threatening to the status quo than attending Mass, finding Jesus by way of Wednesday night Bible classes, or indeed watching Charlie Kirk videos. Very few of them are making bombs, for example, or shooting at politicians they dislike — in the United States, at least, that has been far more common on the Left in the last few years. I can see several reasons for this state of affairs.

The first, put simply, is that these days conservative Christianity is perhaps the best available way for a teenage boy to shock his mother. I don’t mean this as a joke. A core part of the process by which teenagers define their own identities in contrast to the expectations of their parents is the quest for new and enticing ways to spark parental outrage. Young people half a century ago could still do that by moving further out toward the notional cutting edge than their parents were willing to go. This they accordingly did, and cultures thus lurched Leftward generation after generation.

Now? If a teenage boy says “Mom, I think I’m gay,” he’s likely to be told, “That’s nice, dear.” The same is almost as often true if he says that he thinks he’s transgender, while if he announces that he’s decided to worship some strange pagan cult, his mother may just invite him to the local Wiccan circle next time there’s a full moon. It’s hard to imagine anything more crushing to the teenage ego than being patted on the head and told that your mother approves of your attempted act of rebellion.

By contrast, imagine what happens if that same teenage boy comes home wearing a MAGA hat and announces that he’s just found Jesus. In most of today’s middle-class households, that would evoke a truly satisfying display of parental hysterics. Meanwhile, those teenagers who aren’t quite willing to face so epic a tirade from their liberal parents can pursue a less overt version of the same rebellion, swapping conservative Christian memes with their friends online in much the same spirit that led their parents to smoke cannabis with their friends after school. Cannabis itself and the other erstwhile trappings of Leftist radicalism are now too socially acceptable to fill that role. In our present culture, radicalism has become the conventional wisdom, and so the conservative has become the transgressive.

There’s a second dimension of this shift, which inevitably gets left out of simplistic linear notions of “progress”. Glance back over the history of the Anglophone world and what emerges is a curious alternation of public morals over the course of roughly a century. After the rollicking Elizabethan bawdiness of the 16th century came the Puritanism of the 17th, with its Roundheads and its colonizing Pilgrims. After that came a return to looser morals in the Georgian era of the 18th century, which was among other things a golden age of pornography and saw London get a reputation as Europe’s capital of prostitution; following that, the 19th century made “Victorian” a byword for strident moralizing, and this was reversed in the usual way by the exuberant decadence of the 20th.

Now the 21st century has arrived. The moral license of the 1900s has already undergone sharp restrictions at the hands of feminists, while conservative Christians are taking things further. None of this is accidental. Moral rigidity and moral laxity, in sexual and other contexts, both have their pathologies; there is a middle path of balance between them that avoids the problems of both, but humanity being what it is, this is rarely reached except as a transient stage between one extreme and the other. People of good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of Victorian morality, set the process in motion that led to the Sexual Revolution; people of equally good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of that revolution, are setting processes in motion that are giving the pendulum a good hard push the other way.

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Donald Trump’s ascent to myth

By John Michael Greer

Conservative Christian churches have a great deal to offer those who see the value in moral restrictions, partly because they have so long a history of aggressive puritanism, and partly because they are among the few institutions in the modern world that have consistently pushed back against the liberal moral tides of the last century. It thus makes perfect sense that, as public attitudes swing back toward puritanicalism, conservative churches should become attractive again.

Yet there may be another process at work in all this, one playing out over a far greater timespan. Over a century ago, it was anatomized with mordant clarity by Oswald Spengler, the most accurate and therefore the most angrily dismissed of the 20th century’s students of historical cycles. What we are seeing is the early stages of what Spengler called die zweite Religiosität. The usual translation of this phrase is “the Second Religiousness”, but for reasons I will explain shortly “the Second Religiosity” is a better fit. To understand the way this is taking shape behind today’s headlines, it’s necessary to trace the outlines of Spengler’s unfashionably perceptive theory of history.

It’s crucial, in approaching Spengler, to realize that he was discussing morphology, not causality. Like Newton, he “feigned no hypotheses” to explain why history unfolds the way it does; his quest was simply to show what happens, and to seek a comparative morphology of great cultures that can be used as a basis for prediction, in much the same way that Newton’s theory allowed the accurate prediction of planetary motions. Spengler sought to line up history’s great cultures side by side, and look for the common patterns, in the same way that a comparative anatomist puts the bones of a bat’s wing, a dog’s forelimb, and a porpoise’s paddle side by side, to show that each has the same underlying structure as a human arm. Did he succeed? The jury’s still out, but his predictions so far have proved accurate, while those of his critics have generally flopped.

The Second Religiosity is a core element in both Spengler’s theory and his predictions. Every great culture starts out under the sway of a distinctive religious vision, one that embodies and frames the culture’s understanding of the cosmos. As the culture moves out of its springtime era into maturity, the mythological language of its religious vision gives way to a secularizing trend. The result is an age of reason, in which the old vision is pried loose from its religious setting and turned into an assortment of rationalist ideologies.

The pathbreakers and cheerleaders of the age of reason inevitably convince themselves that society has put its superstitious past behind it, but their ideologies turn out to be far more fragile than the faith they supplanted. Eventually, as the age of reason crashes to ruin around them, people find themselves confronted by chaos, and flee for refuge to the one resource that remains: the traditional religious forms of their culture’s springtime. This is the Second Religiosity, the return to religion that marks the fading of every great culture. The revival of Confucianism as a religious ideology in imperial China after 1100 and the return of India to Hindu faith around the same time are examples well documented in the history books. As for the Western world, Spengler expected the Second Religiosity to arrive sometime soon after the year 2000.

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Whatever the culture, the Second Religiosity always presents itself as a return to the source of a culture’s early greatness. In a crucial sense, however, it’s nothing of the kind. The religion of a culture’s springtime is forged of the shattering impact of transcendent realities on individual human prophets and visionaries. It is accordingly rough-hewn, unruly, and comfortable with contradictions that look like absurdities to the later, more logical consciousness of a later era.

The religion of the Second Religiosity, by contrast, is ordered, formal, and reasoned: all the hallmarks of religiosity, as distinct from religion in any deeper sense. Its goal is to provide a bulwark against inward and outward chaos, and it does this by relying on history rather than on the terrifying transrational shock of direct religious experience. Where the original religious impulse faces the future, the Second Religiosity is always oriented toward the past. The winds of autumn can always be heard whistling through it. Eventually they will tear it to tatters, leaving the ground cleared for the newborn religious vision of some future great culture, but that time is still far off for us.

Just now, by contrast, there are good reasons why the flight from chaos into the Second Religiosity is in the ascendant. The most important of these is the accelerating failure of faith in progress, the unacknowledged pseudosecular religion of our time. Barbed jokes of the “I believe I was promised a jetpack” variety are merely the cutting edge of a broader collapse of faith in progress. This doesn’t merely impact what we may as well call the “Tomorrowland future”: that world of fading daydreams in which flying cars, fusion power and interplanetary colonization all have their natural habitat. Rather, it embraces the entire belief that history must move in whatever direction we think we want it to go.

At the moment, that faltering faith is being propped up by the overblown hype surrounding large language models (LLMs), which are currently being marketed under the misleading label of “artificial intelligence”. This label is a misnomer: LLMs aren’t intelligent. All they do is string together statistically likely sequences of words or other symbols in response to a prompt. Computer scientist Emily Bender has described LLMs as “stochastic parrots”. The phrase isn’t quite apt, because parrots are highly intelligent birds, but the metaphor still has value. LLMs, like unusually stupid parrots, repeat strings of words without any connection to the realms of meaning, purpose, and value that underlie the phenomenon of intelligence.

Yet right now, blind faith in LLMs is propping up more than the mythology of progress. Rather, these overhyped programs are propping up one of history’s great speculative delusions, with the usual concomitants of wildly inflated stock prices and equally distorted investment decisions. Readers who don’t yet know how this ends may find it useful to consult John Kenneth Galbraith’s wry history The Great Crash, 1929, or Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

We are already starting to see close equivalents of Irving Fisher’s famous insistence, nine days before the 1929 crash, that stocks had reached “a permanently high plateau”. While it’s true that the market can stay insane longer than most investors can stay solvent, a speculative bubble on this scale has only one possible outcome. It’s just a matter of when the crash finally hits.

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The future is barbarian

By John Michael Greer

Here again, though, it’s not just the technological side of progress that has crumpled in recent years. One of the odder features of contemporary political life is the way that so few political parties on the Left offer proposals for the future that differ in any noticeable way from the present, and the ones that do — Marxist parties come to mind here — harken fondly back to the dreams of a past era just as enthusiastically as any conservative. More clearly than anything else, perhaps, this shows the twilight of an age of reason that once put grand dreams of the future at the center of its cognitive universe.

The opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States just now is a case in point. The Democratic Party has stopped talking about anything but their opposition to the Trump administration and its policies — this at a time when a huge share of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the state of the country and the government policies that shape their lives. “Vote For Us So Life Will Continue To Suck” isn’t exactly a compelling election slogan, but it’s a fairly good summary of the Democratic platform these days. Trump’s populist movement, by contrast, has specific proposals for change, and is enacting them at a respectable pace despite the concerted opposition of the Washington establishment. This likely accounts for a good share of Trump’s popularity, even among those who don’t necessarily share his opinions.

The same weird sense of stasis appears throughout today’s industrial Western cultures. Consider our popular movies, dominated by remakes of decades-old franchises and dreary morality plays. As another example of the same exhaustion, there was a time when the goal of activists working on racial and gender issues was to heal once and for all the social wounds inflicted by various bigotries. Martin Luther King Jr. was far from the only one to speak movingly of a future in which people of all colors would live together in peace, harmony and equality. That sense of a potential for change has all but vanished from the rhetoric of today’s activists. What they offer instead resembles nothing so much as an unusually dour sort of secular Calvinism, in which the Original Sins of racism and sexism bear down immovably on humanity.

At least Calvinism offered the promise of redemption; today’s activist culture does not. Eternally cursed with the burden of privilege, due to the actions of some few of their ancestors, those who happen to belong to the wrong race, gender, and on and on through an ever-proliferating swarm of categories, can look forward to nothing but endless humiliation and repentance, with no hope of any change to their sinful condition. Thus it’s hardly surprising that a growing number of people so stigmatized are backing away from ideologies of this sort and seeking out a different setting — that of the nearest conservative church — where, whatever else they may find, they can at least hope to encounter a Redeemer.

As this suggests, there is a very real sense in which the vagaries of popular culture in recent years, unbeknownst to their creators, have been setting the stage for the coming of the Second Religiosity. This comes as no surprise to readers of Spengler, or for that matter to anyone familiar with the phenomenon of the return of the repressed. Religion — not in the sense of ideology, but in its deeper and truer sense as the confrontation of human consciousness with transcendent experience — was for several centuries rigidly repressed by the mainstream currents of Western industrial society. Now it is back in force.

Yet it bears remembering that the coming of the Second Religiosity is to a very great extent a leading symptom of that return, not its full expression. In the heyday of the Roman Empire, as the age of reason set in motion by the rise of Greek philosophy imploded in a shower of failed dreams of the world made rational, people across the empire turned back to the established religions of their time, making the traditional offerings to Jupiter, Juno, and the rest of the polyglot pantheon of the ancient world. That was their Second Religiosity, their refuge from the tremendous chaos of their age, and it played an important role in maintaining classical society during its latter centuries.

It did not last, however. While incense billowed upwards to the gorgeous marble statues of the gods and goddesses, new beliefs wholly alien to classical polytheism spread through the crawlspaces of Roman society. A few centuries on, one of them would rise up to overthrow the temples and clear the ground for cultures yet unborn. From the rise of the cult of Osiris in Egypt’s First Intermediate Period to the predominance of Amidist Buddhism in early modern east Asia, it’s a familiar story.

The first stirrings of the same process are doubtless under way, though it would be just as impossible to point to the faiths of the future now as it would have been for a Roman intellectual to pick Christianity out of the turbulent religious underworld of the Roman world and identify it as the inheritor and destroyer of the classical world. It will be a century or more yet before it becomes clear which beliefs seize the imaginations of the dispossessed and disaffected, overthrowing the institutions of our Second Religiosity in their turn. Dealing with that is a task for future generations. What we face now is the resurgence of traditional religion in Western societies that had dismissed it as an outdated relic of a barbarous past. Dramatic changes for good and ill can be expected as that process continues, and the future in which so many thought we would spend the rest of our lives goes whistling down the wind.

“Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote those words, he didn’t have the theories of his contemporary Carl Jung in mind, but the Swiss psychologist’s insights are relevant here. If your every effort to get rid of an enemy simply makes him stronger, it’s a safe bet that he isn’t merely an annoying intrusion from outside your comfortable world, but rather the inevitable consequence of your own attitudes and actions. What Jung called “the Shadow”, the sum total of everything about yourself you refuse to acknowledge, can be a political reality as well as a psychological one. Thus it’s essential to recognize, along with the hard political and economic realities that have lent strength to Trump’s movement, the inner dimension of myth that gives him his extraordinary grip on the collective imagination of our time.

It says something for the acumen of Trump’s opponents that they almost grasp this. The efforts to equate Trump to Hitler aren’t simply shrill propaganda, meant to tar him by association with the most famous name in the political demonology of our age, though of course that has always been part of it. As Jung pointed out in his prescient 1936 essay “Wotan”, much of Hitler’s power over the collective mind of Europe came boiling up out of the realms of myth and archetype. Rationalists in Hitler’s day were consistently confounded by the way he brushed aside obstacles and followed his trajectory to the bitter end. That the trajectory itself could have been anticipated by a glance at the relevant myths simply adds piquance to the result.

Of course, to speak about myth nowadays is to court thoughtless dismissal. According to one of the popular canards of our time, myths were all well and good for the crude, primitive minds of people before the modern age, but we have outgrown them. We don’t have myths, so the theory goes: we have facts. This is a very comfortable belief to those who can make themselves cling to it. Its only downside is that it’s flatly contradicted by the most basic realities of our collective life.

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The death of Progress

By John Michael Greer

Human rationality is a thin and recently added veneer, perched unsteadily over the top of a tangled mass of drives, instincts, and inborn reactions that we share with other social primates. With fewer exceptions than we like to think about, our behavior is governed by the same motives that guide baboons and bonobos; the great difference is that these relatives of ours don’t hide behind layers of self-justifying verbiage. Yet the capacity for conceptual thought that distinguishes our species isn’t just there to generate rationalizations. It also provides one of the handful of useful tools we have for seeing beneath the surface.

The ancient Greek word muthos originally meant “narration” or “story”. Later on it came to mean the stories that matter. This doesn’t require such stories to be factual in the evening-news sense. As the philosopher Sallust wrote, myths are things that never happened but always are. They communicate truths rather than facts. Grasp the underlying myth, as Jung did in making sense of the Hitler phenomenon, and you can get a much clearer sense of where things are headed than you would from the collective chatter of your time.

Nowadays, though, there’s a significant obstacle in the way of such insights — the presence and popularity of pseudomyths. A pseudomyth is a fashionable narrative manufactured by the popular culture of a given era, rather than rising from the deep places of the mind as genuine myths do. One great difference between pseudomyths and the real article is that pseudomyths don’t wear well; a few generations, maybe a century at most, and they land in history’s rubbish tip. Another great difference, which goes far to explain the first one, is that predictions based on pseudomyths are inevitably wrong.

I could parade any number of pseudomyths to address the point that needs making here. Let’s cut to the chase, though, and talk about the pseudomyth that frames too many discussions of Donald Trump. It’s especially easy to do this, because the pseudomyth in question has been given one of its classic forms in the pages of J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter novels.

Consider the basic framing story of the Potterverse. There are certain people, you see, who are special. They have marvelous talents the rest of us don’t have, and so they get to live in a wonderful, magical world from which the rest of us are excluded. Most of them come from families that already belong to that world, but a few are recruited into it from outside. The core of the recruitment process is an educational system from which, again, everyone else is shut out.

There are people who don’t support this state of affairs, to be sure. Some are outside it and some within. The outsiders who dislike and distrust it are crass Philistine thugs like the Dursleys. It’s the dissidents from inside the system who come in for the real vilification, though. In the eyes of the pseudomyth, they’re evil — knowingly, deliberately evil. They call themselves Death Eaters; for all practical purposes, they might as well don t-shirts saying “GENUINE CERTIFIED BAD PERSON”. The very thought that any one of them might have a reasonable motive or an honest disagreement with the system as it exists is excluded utterly by the pseudomyth.

All this is to say that the Harry Potter stories echo, with remarkable precision, the self-aggrandizing ideology of what we may as well call the laptop class, the overeducated and overprivileged caste that monopolizes the levers of managerial power across today’s Western. Members of that caste see themselves as special in the full Potteresque sense, set apart from mere Muggles by their talents and training. Anyone from outside their ranks who dares to question their superiority can count on being treated like a Dursley — if you want to hear genuine hate speech these days, one of the best ways to do it is to get a group of laptop-class inmates talking about working class culture — but their real hatred is directed toward those who challenge their authority from within the system. I trust I don’t have to point out who they identify as Death Eaters — or as Lord Voldemort.

Central to narratives of this type is a habit I call moral masturbation. This far-from-solitary vice involves the repetitive stroking of sensitive moral clichés to produce sensations of shuddering delight at one’s own goodness and virtue. It’s a very common habit these days; Hollywood has done very little else for a decade. It has plenty of expressions in today’s official culture, but the one that matters most for our present purposes is the insistence that one side in any collective controversy can only be motivated by pure deliberate evil, and so every decent person must inevitably fall into the ranks of the other side.

In the real world, that’s never true. No matter how obviously hateful a regime appears to its enemies, it will contrive to convince a good share of its populace that it really is the morally superior option. If it fails in that task, it won’t last a week. In genuine myths, by exactly the same token, the strident moral dualism that fills so many modern pseudomyths is notably absent. The gods who contend with giants or titans or asuras to keep the cosmos from crumbling back into chaos are, by and large, no more moral than the powers against which they do battle. In the legends that reflect mythic thinking down onto the human plane, this is even more obviously true: Achilles defeats Hector, and Arjuna defeats Karna, but neither the Iliad nor the Mahabharata vilifies the champion of the losing side as evil incarnate.

This matters for several reasons, but one in particular matters just now, for a reason already hinted at. Pseudomyths lead to bad predictions and thus to failed strategies. The pseudomyth we’ve been discussing is an excellent example here. In all its endless, dreary iterations, once one side has been identified as the “Bad People”, their defeat follows with mechanical inevitability. No matter how overwhelming the power of the Bad People, no matter how absurdly small the chance that they will be defeated by whatever inadequate force the Good People can muster against them, the Good People are guaranteed total victory. The fantasies that empower moral masturbation, like those associated with the other kind, all move with mechanical predictability toward their inevitable climax.

Both these types of fantasy do very poorly when taken as descriptions of the real world. That, in turn, goes far towards explaining the flailing of Trump’s opponents during the last six months or so. They convinced themselves that events had to copy their preferred pseudomyth, and that Trump and his minions would surely be defeated once and for all. It apparently never occurred to them that the electorate would have its own view on the matter, or that Trump and his circle might have used their four-year exile to figure out how best to target the other side’s weaknesses and win one victory after another.

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Donald Trump is not Lord Voldemort, and the pseudomyth his opponents deployed so repetitively and uselessly against him thus deserves a rest, if not a decent burial. The question that needs to be addressed, once pseudomyths are set aside, is what sort of mythic figure he actually is, and thus what we can expect as his myth unfolds.

It must be said here that Donald Trump the man is in no way mythic. He’s an ordinary American oligarch with lowbrow tastes and an unusually robust ego. Like similar figures throughout history, he realized that it was possible to snatch power out of the hands of a senile kleptocracy by championing the concerns of those whose voices had been excluded from the collective conversation for too long. Oswald Spengler, who wrote extensively on this process a century ago, referred to it as Caesarism after one of its most famous practitioners, and the implied comparison is worth noting. Caius Julius Caesar was an ordinary Roman oligarch before he took power and made his family name a potent force in the realm of myth.

The man is not the myth. There’s a world of difference between the hardbitten Romano-British warlord who fought against Saxon invaders, and the noble King Arthur whom we created from folk memories of his career. In the same way, the mythic pattern that swept up a banal American real-estate magnate and reality TV star, and turned him into the vehicle for sweeping political and cultural transformations, has nothing to do with his personality. It comes out of the deep places of the collective psyche of our time.

The United States is still a very young culture, and many of its underlying myths still await the poets and storytellers who will give them lasting form. One pattern, though, stands out clearly in the narrative structure of our national history. Three times already, a decaying and dysfunctional governing class has been swept aside in an era of traumatic convulsions, and in each case a single figure rose through the turbulence to become the figurehead of change. None of these men were especially remarkable human beings, but you won’t learn that from their contemporary or posthumous reputations: all three were vilified in extreme terms during their lives and exalted to a secular sainthood after their deaths. I’m talking, of course, about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

No doubt mentioning those hallowed names will cause outrage among readers. That simply emphasizes the point I’m trying to make. These three men were not pulled out of their historic contexts and raised to mythic status in the collective imagination by any unique virtue of their own. They happened to be at the right place and the right time to spearhead one of the major transformations of American history. After they were safely dead, their heirs scrubbed their reputations clean of any suspicion of mere humanity, and turned them into plaster saints. You have to go back to contemporary media to find out just how many Americans saw Washington as an ambitious scoundrel, mocked Lincoln as an ignorant bumpkin — newspaper cartoonists loved to portray him as a baboon — and savaged Roosevelt as a traitor to his nation and his class.

The thought that some similar process of posthumous sanitizing will shape Donald Trump’s legacy will doubtless upset a great many people. Nonetheless, it’s far and away the most likely outcome of the current turmoil. The laptop class — less colorfully, the professional-managerial caste that took power with Roosevelt’s New Deal — has gone the way of its predecessors, sinking into the usual morass of greed and dysfunction, and it’s being shoved aside by a rising entrepreneurial class that has no respect for credentials and no time for moral masturbation. That transformation is well under way, and Trump happens to be its political figurehead.

Trump’s posthumous canonization, probably including a gold-plated Trump Memorial in Washington DC and another face on the side of Mount Rushmore, is fairly likely at this point. As an old man holding down one of the world’s most stressful jobs, he’s also likely to die in office. This will offer cold consolation to his enemies, who will have to endure the rise of a posthumous cult freed from the often awkward realities of the man’s personality and actions. But it’s a worthwhile reminder that we don’t choose our myths. They choose us, and whether we appreciate the results or not is no concern of theirs.

It’s important to note what is and isn’t being said here. When Roszak wrote the line quoted above, there were still many millions of people kneeling in churches every Sunday, and some of them were having powerful spiritual experiences. In the same way, the death of progress does not mean that new discoveries will no longer be made in laboratories or that new technologies will stop finding their way to the marketplace.

What it means, rather, is that these, and the rest of the odd assortment of things currently lumped together under the label of “progress”, will no longer benefit from the aura of inevitability that popular culture assigned them in the past century. The once-widespread faith that what is newer must be better, just because it is newer, is already looking decidedly shopworn.

A newborn skepticism shows up in many contexts. Calvin Trillin got a nervous laugh a few years back when he pointed out that “upgrade” has become the most frightening word in the English language. We all know from bitter personal experience what evoked that laugh. Nowadays, far more often than not, a software upgrade means that the program becomes less convenient, less effective, and more burdensome for the user. There are good reasons why Microsoft, for example, has to give away its latest version of Windows for free.

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In fields where complexity for its own sake can be more obviously fatal, the same process has led to an even more striking set of outcomes. Consider the bomber fleets of the United States and the Russian Federation, the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Both nations rely on strategic bombers that first entered service in the Fifties: the B-52 Stratofortress and the Tu-95 Bear. Both nations have built and tested other strategic bombers since that time, but the B-52 and the Tu-95 remain in service three-quarters of a century later, because no more recent aircraft does the same job with the same effectiveness for the same or lower cost.

More broadly, it can be fascinating to compare the changes that swept over the industrial nations between 1825 and 1925 with the changes that followed between 1925 and 2025. The earlier century saw the introduction of nearly all the technologies that still shape modern life, from indoor plumbing and electric lights to telephones, automobiles, diesel shipping, airplanes, radio communication, and the list goes on. The century since then, by contrast, has seen only one new technology on the same revolutionary scale — the digital computer. We may get another, or we may not; the jury’s still out on whether AI will turn out to be a revolution or one more flash in the pan like nuclear power. The rate of technological change has turned out to be much slower than most people expected.

Granted, our telephones no longer have wires, our automobiles and airplanes are faster, and a variety of other incremental changes have taken place. Someone who went into suspended animation in 1925 and was thawed out this year, however, would be shocked by our social customs but would find it easy to adapt to the updated versions of familiar technologies. Compare this to the utter bafflement of a person who spent the period from 1825 to 1925 in a similar state, and had to make the leap from horsedrawn carriages and sailing ships to air travel, radio broadcasts, movie theaters, and the cultural impact of the automobile.

What makes the difference in the rate of change so difficult for many people to grasp is that by and large, the slowdown hasn’t been caused by technical difficulty. Consider the revolutionary changes that were supposed to happen by now: space travel, nuclear power, flying cars, and the rest of it. Most of these things are well within our technological grasp. The problem is that none of them are affordable. Fission power makes a good poster child for this problem. Nuclear power plants have been technically viable since the Forties; the difficulty is that they never pay for themselves, and a society that builds them has to choose between making electricity unaffordable for most people and paying out lavish government subsidies forever.

Space travel, the obsessive focus of so many daydreams about the future since the time of H.G. Wells, is another case in point. It’s technically feasible to get human beings to the Moon, or Mars, or even the moons of Jupiter. The problem is that it’s insanely expensive. The United States had to pour 15% of its national budget for a decade or so just to send a handful of men across what, in interplanetary terms, is the whisker-thin gap between the earth and the moon. A nation that set out to build a permanent settlement on the moon, or put a manned lander on Mars, could very easily bankrupt itself in the process. Nor is the financial return on any such investment commensurate with the more than sky-high costs.

This, in turn, points up the great and unmentionable problem we face. That progress is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

The classic metaphor of the apple tree is useful here. If you only want one apple from a tree, nothing could be easier: you walk up to the tree, reach up for the lowest apple that is ripe, pull it down and take a bite. If you want more than one, up to a point, it’s just as easy, because there is (quite literally) a certain amount of low-hanging fruit. Once you’ve picked all the apples within easy reach, however, getting more becomes more difficult — and getting the apples at the very top of the tree may be so difficult that it is no longer worth the effort.

The same thing, it turns out, is true of technology. The great inventions that revolutionized life in the industrial world were made with tools and instruments that seem impossibly simple these days. Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers who invented the airplane, did it in their spare time with the tools they happened to have in the bicycle shop that paid their bills. Compare that with the gargantuan sums governments had to spend in order to put human beings into orbit and you have a good first approximation of the way that the law of diminishing returns is tightening its grip on the throat of technological progress.

Whenever the law of diminishing returns comes into play, the only rational strategy is to find the point at which the returns are still large enough to justify the outlay. That’s what our civilization needs to start doing at this point: backtracking to the last point at which the results still justify the investment. Most of our technology is either near or already past the point at which diminishing returns give way to negative returns.

The stakes involved may be quite a bit higher than most people realize. In his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter argued that one of the things that the failed civilizations of the past all have in common is that they pushed the complexity of their societies and technologies past the point where further complexity made any sense at all. Then, just as we are doing, they kept on pushing — and collapse followed promptly. It’s quite believable that our civilization could end up in the same predicament, pouring so much of its available wealth, talent, and resources into technologies that will never pay for themselves that it becomes unable to maintain essential infrastructure or provide adequate food, housing, and other needs to its citizens. A case could be made, in fact, that this is already beginning to happen.

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Thus, it may not be any kind of accident that so many people, in so many fields, are backing away from the latest hypercomplex technogimmickry and turning instead to simpler technologies that do a better job of meeting their needs. Most of us still recall, for example, when ebooks first hit the market, and corporate media was bursting with confident predictions that books printed on paper would soon be as obsolete as Babylonian clay tablets. Since then, millions of readers have defied the predictions and kept on buying printed books. At this point ebooks have claimed a handful of market niches, but sales are stagnant and only the most incremental improvements in ebook technology are forthcoming, while printed books still hold the place among readers that they won in Gutenberg’s time.

In exactly the same way, but even more dramatically, vinyl records are staging a comeback decades after they were consigned to the dustbin. The issue here is simple enough: analogue recordings have a richness of sound that digital formats can’t match. As a result, classic albums are being produced again and sold at premium prices, while more musicians every year are releasing their new albums on vinyl. Now that direct and indirect subsidies for the internet are starting to fall away, and web-based music services have to find some way to monetize themselves and pay for their share of the internet’s vast infrastructure, it is by no means certain that digital formats will hold onto their temporary dominance. The supposedly outmoded analogue stereo LP may turn out to be the wave of the future after all.

If we were rational about the future of our societies, applying this same principle generally would be the obvious choice. Across the board, from cars and planes to household appliances, it would be easy enough to replace complex devices that don’t work well with older, simpler, and more reliable technologies that do. Microsoft, for example, could regain some of the reputation it’s thrown away in recent years by taking one of the older and more reliable versions of Windows, and reworking it just enough to make it handle current computers and programs. (Although I doubt they’ll do anything of the kind — the myth of progress is particularly strong in the computer-geek subculture.) Among its other advantages, that strategy would lower consumer prices, raising the standard of living measurably for many people, and especially for the poorer and more vulnerable among us. For that matter, since none of those older technologies would have to be invented, and all their strengths and weaknesses are already well known, such a project would encounter few if any technical challenges.

The difficulties are cultural in nature, not technical or economic. Comparing the death of progress to the death of God, as I did earlier, is far from absurd, for progress has taken on the same kind of cultural aura in our time that religions have in ages dominated by more obviously theological faiths. A great many modern people have taken their hopes of salvation and their dreams of a utopian future out of their natural habitat in theology and applied them to progress instead. You can see this clearly enough in the way that advocates for space travel insist that if humanity never settles other worlds, our species will have failed in its “cosmic mission”. The stealth theology underlying claims like these is clear for all to see.

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So the revival of God tells us something about the death of progress, and also about the slow, unwelcome dawning of public recognition that we really have gone far down the rathole of diminishing returns in response to that crumbling secular faith. It does seem to be true, after all, that people cannot live without a religion. If they abandon one, they’ll find or make another, even if they have to build it out of so absurdly untheological a theme as infinite technical complexity. The turn back to more obviously theological forms of religion is part of that same story; it’s the normal response when secular pseudofaiths falter.

Of course the ersatz religion of progress is far from the only example of this type. Marxism is another. It used even more unprepossessing material to create an even more exact imitation of Christian theology, with the eventual utopia of true Communism hovering in the air like a mirage, filling the same role that the Second Coming plays in so many Christian sects.

Yet the god of dialectical materialism fell over and died once he too obviously failed to make good on his promises. The god of progress is clearly headed the same way. The sooner we reshape our technological choices on reasonable grounds instead of forcing them to conform to the failed pseudoreligion of progress, the better for everyone.

I’d also discovered, on the past occasions when I’d kept a notebook by my bed and recorded my dreams, that the books on dream interpretation I’d found made zero sense out of them. Maybe I’m just weird — unsurprisingly that suggestion has been made tolerably often — but my dreams didn’t seem to fit into any of the usual patterns. I read Freud, of course, and Jung, and also some of the literature on dreams that came into fashion in the late 20th century. But I ended up wondering whether I was dreaming in Martian or something. So, I temporarily filed the whole thing away.

Recently, though, since the passing of my wife Sara, I’ve had more time to fill than usual. After a series of vivid dreams, I decided to give dreamwork another try. So I put a notepad and a pen on the nightstand, and started collecting my dreams. But they were just as odd as before, and the dream books just as unhelpful. Then — ah, then! — came a dream I could actually interpret.

No, it wasn’t one of those big life-changing dreams that Jungian theorists like to write about. I was sitting at a table with three women, two of them older and one young. They were talking about craft projects. One of the older women explained to the younger one that, if she wanted her project to succeed, she would have to be ready to give presentations to audiences on the ninth day of each month. The young woman replied that this meant she would have to start collecting information right away. The older woman smiled and said, yes, exactly.

That was the dream. The context was that, the day before, I’d agreed to give a presentation towards the end of June about Masonic history to a local group of Freemasons, who, one must add, like to refer to their organisation as “the Craft”. I realised as I reflected on the dream that it was offering specific advice about my project: I needed to have my presentation finished by the ninth of June, and that I’d better get busy collecting information for it.

That is to say, it was making a prediction. That was when doors started swinging open, because until the late 19th century dreams were understood as omens, predictions, and warnings. Whilst most cultures acknowledged that dreams sometimes gave false predictions (in Homer’s Iliad, Zeus deliberately sent the Greek king Agamemnon a “lying dream” to help the Trojans), oneiromancy, or divination through dreams, was shared by nearly all the world’s cultures, from Mesopotamia to mediaeval Japan. When the Egyptian pharaoh had a dream about seven plump and seven scrawny cows, Joseph didn’t interpret it psychologically as a reflection of the pharaoh’s relationship with his mother, or an effusion from the collective unconscious. He read it as a prediction — and, at least according to Genesis, he was right.

Yet in late 19th-century Europe, among the educated classes, opinion on dream interpretation started swinging away from those familiar positions and towards new theories of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud’s the most important figure here, though there were influential writers before him who laid the foundations for his work, and plenty of others after him that took his basic insight and ran with it, as often as not in directions that horrified him. Freud’s central claim was that dreams offered privileged access to the dreamer’s unconscious thoughts and feelings, and thus to the psyche with all its quirks and foibles. Most dreamwork has gone in that direction since: it’s about personality, not prediction.

Let’s change tracks here for a moment. It so happens that one of the other things I’ve been doing with my unwanted supply of spare time brought me face to face with a parallel shift, this time in the field of astrology. While I have a second career as a political astrologer, reading ingress and eclipse charts for entire nations, I’m also interested in natal astrology, the astrology of individual horoscopes. And one of the things I’ve been doing lately is studying the seven hefty volumes of astrological instruction written by Alan Leo, a pen name which referenced the author’s astrological sun sign at a time when astrology was still illegal in Britain. Leo’s series of books, with their focus on personality rather than prediction, can be taken as the starting point for most of modern astrology. The long history of astrology underlines how drastic this shift was. The entire science of astrology, born in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, had prediction at the very heart of its whole enterprise — but it sought to answer political, not individual, questions.

What happened on earth the last time something happened in the skies? That was the empirical question that intrigued those early astrologers. Over several millennia of careful recordkeeping, tentative hypotheses, failures, and successes, astrology as we know it came into being out of that research project. Personal horoscopes were only a side effect of that programme — the discovery that a king’s birth chart might offer some guidance about his behaviour and his impact on his kingdom helped to birth what we call natal astrology, but it was only until Alan Leo that a discernible shift can be observed.

While Leo set the movement in motion, his successors, Dane Rudhyar and Marc Edmund Jones, went even further, redefining astrology as a study of personality and downplaying the entire tradition of astrological prediction. This attitude spread into other methods of divination. I’m old enough that I can recall the angry denunciations of “fortune telling” flung by tarot readers who focused on personality at the older generation of readers who focused on prediction. I also recall well, and profited from, the first ebbing of that particular tide. Early in my writing career, I used to go to various Neopagan events to make presentations and try to interest readers in my books; I didn’t have a lot of money in those days, and so I helped pay my way by doing geomancy readings for other attendees.

Geomancy, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is more or less a Western equivalent of the I Ching, using randomly generated four-digit binary numbers where the I Ching uses six-digits. What sets geomancy apart from most other ways of divination is precisely that it’s a method of prediction. You ask it a question and it gives you the answer, and by and large it’s right.

So I would settle at a table in the divination room and do readings. My rule was that I’d cast and interpret the readings and then the clients would pay me whatever they thought it was worth. I cautioned everyone who sat down for a reading that they shouldn’t ask a question if they didn’t want to know the answer, because geomancy doesn’t provide wiggle room; if you ask it “Will I achieve my fondest dream?” it’s perfectly capable of answering “No”. Of course there were people who didn’t believe me, asked questions like that, tried to get me to take back a negative answer, and ended up flinging a handful of loose change in my face and stalking away in a rage.

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While I remember such encounters, they weren’t the ones I found interesting. I was drawn to the people who wanted a straight answer even if it was negative. One woman in particular comes to mind. She sat down at the table, listened to my spiel, and asked about a grandiose and not very marketable business project. I cast the chart and it was a very strongly negative one. The woman burst into tears and thanked me, because she’d had a bad feeling about it all along, but she couldn’t get anyone — not her friends, her advisers, nor the other diviners she’d asked — to give her any response other than some mindless cheerleading. She then opened her purse, got out some bills with noticeably large numbers on them, and handed them to me, before getting up and letting the next person sit down for a reading.

My political astrology these days follows the same principle. I’m in the business of offering the most accurate predictions I can. While I’m certainly not infallible, my predictions are reliably better than, say, those of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. (Admittedly this is shooting fish in a barrel; if an economist tells you the sky is blue, go look.) As a result, I make a decent share of my income from the subscriptions I ask for in return.

My point here, however, is not to preen myself on my far from unmixed success as a prophet. It’s to point out that there’s a market niche for something that most astrologers aren’t providing: predictions, as accurate as possible, instead of personality-obsessed navel-gazing. The flight from prediction that gripped dream interpretation and astrology alike in the late 19th century has deprived a great many people of a resource they want.

That, I’ve come to think, points at the heart of the flight from prediction. The years that Leo was turning away from astrological prediction, and Freud was redefining dreams as a means of psychological introspection rather than advice about the future, were also the years when Jules Verne was inventing science fiction, and technological change was first becoming a steady process rather than a matter of occasional fits and starts. Furthermore, it was also the zenith of Europe’s rise to global empire.

It was during these years that the modern mythology of progress was invented. Victorian futuristic novels such as Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) and John Ames Mitchell’s The Last American (1889) took it for granted that Western civilisation would suffer the usual fate. By contrast, Leo was among the early adopters of a very different view: the notion that the world stood poised on the brink of a new golden age in which all the miseries of the past would be laid to rest forever.

While that belief had been in circulation in its original religious form for a very long time, what distinguished the myth of progress was how it decked out the Christian belief of the Second Coming in secular drag, proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Millennium without any supernatural justification. Much of the intellectual history of the Western world over the long 20th century was shaped by the transformation of this secondhand mythology from a belief of fringe groups to the cultural mainstream Much of the intellectual history of the Western world since 1990, in turn, has been shaped by the gradual unravelling of the failed progressivist faith.

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What gives all this a bitter irony is that the world of the late 19th century was not on the doorstep of Utopia. Rather, it stood poised on the brink of utter horror. Imagine for a moment that Leo had been interested in prediction rather than personality, and that he’d been able to get a good clear look at the next century or so of world history. He would have had the chance to preview two horrific world wars, waves of genocide sweeping across much of Eurasia from Armenia in 1915-1920 to Cambodia in 1976-1978, the total collapse of European empires in a chaos of insurgencies and failed wars, the rise and fall of the Communist and Fascist movements, and much, much more of the same kind, with poison gas, aerial bombardment, and a couple of mushroom clouds in there just to add a little additional piquance.

As it happens, there were people who foresaw some of the horror in advance. One of the occultists of that era I find most appealing, the colourful Joséphin Péladan, proclaimed to a bemused Paris in 1891 that European civilisation had passed its peak. A leading figure of the Decadent movement which was also home to the now more famous Joris-Karl Huysmans, he predicted that eventually Chinese troops would conquer France and parade down the Champs Elysées —a prediction that seems far more likely right now than it must have done in his day. More generally, the entire point of the Decadent movement was the recognition that the West was in decline.

I suspect, for what it’s worth, that this awareness was behind the flight from prediction. Too many people saw or sensed what was coming and so fled into a fantasy of a shining future. It’s understandable that they did so: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot noted in his interwar poem Burnt Norton. Yet there comes a point at which fleeing from the facts becomes too dangerous.

We’re arguably well past that point now. That’s why I could pay most of my travel expenses back in the day by doing geomancy readings that gave people the bad news nobody else would tell them. Outside of the airtight bubbles where our political classes spend their time many people have come to grips with the fact that the future is going to be more difficult than the past — the mirage of Utopia projected by our corporate pseudoculture will never be more than a slickly packaged daydream.

I’m not sure how long it will be before that realisation starts to affect the practice of astrology, or for that matter the interpretation of dreams. Nonetheless I’d encourage people to consider their predictive possibilities of either of these. As the long road down to the deindustrial dark ages stretches out before us, we can use all the guidance we can get.

It may seem like an improbable leap from Chernobyl wolves to a flustered speech by Yuval Noah Harari, the pampered darling of the Western world’s corporate aristocracy, but if you bear with me, I’ll show you the connection. Harari, the chief intellectual of the Davos set, is a vegan atheist who practices mindfulness meditation and writes the kind of big-picture history books that evoke adoring swoons from the corporate media and eyerolls from real scholars. In his most famous book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future,  he takes it for granted that even the stickiest wet dreams of today’s internet-addled tech bros must surely come to pass. Intellectual hubris? His picture should be next to the entry in your dictionary.

The guy put on a fine display of pearl-clutching in an interview earlier this year, insisting that if Donald Trump is re-elected it will be “the death blow to what remains of the global order”. It wasn’t simply the King in Orange who had Harari fainting on the couch in the best Victorian style. What really seems to have shaken his world is that Trump and his supporters don’t just disagree with the specific institutions and ideals that Harari’s friends at the World Economic Forum are pushing these days. They reject the entire concept of a planned global order.

Reading about Harari’s outburst, I found myself nodding and muttering, “he almost gets it”. For all the mockery I’ve directed at him, the man deserves credit for an intellectual leap that most people of his class seem incapable of making. This inability to grasp the rejection of global order is quite a recent phenomenon, especially considering that the entire project of an international order planned and managed behind the scenes by an economic and political elite only dates back a little more than a century.

Before that point, efforts to impose some permanent structure on the seething chaos of human affairs mostly took the form of imperial conquest on the one hand, or treaties woven via careful compromises between major political and military powers on the other. It took the gargantuan carnage of the First World War to convince a great many people in the wealthy classes that these two traditional options wouldn’t make the world safe for plutocracy. That led to the creation of paired non-profits in Britain and the United States — the Royal Institute for International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations — and thence to similar organisations, of which the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum are perhaps the best known today.

One consequence of this common heredity is that no matter what the problem is, the only solution these organisations can recognise is going further in the same direction they’ve been pushing all along. The one remedy they have to offer is global coordination by vast bureaucratic structures that erase the lines between government, corporate, and non-profit sectors. The mere fact that it hasn’t worked yet does nothing to slow them down.

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The Club of Rome is a good example. The one Club of Rome publication everybody’s heard of, The Limits to Growth, posed a set of problems that global bureaucrats have tried to solve in a flood of publications since. What’s fascinating about this obsession is that the problems discussed in The Limits to Growth can’t be solved through global coordination by vast bureaucracies. They can’t actually be solved at all.

What The Limits to Growth showed is that if economic growth is pursued far enough, the costs of growth rise faster than the benefits and force the global economy to its knees. Global bureaucracies can no more change that than they can amend the law of gravity. In fact, as the costs of growth begin to bite, one of the few options that offers any hope for improving conditions is to cut back sharply on bureaucracies of all kinds, since bureaucracy consumes resources and energy, and produces remarkably little in return.

A viable world on the far side of peak growth is not, therefore, a world of global managers. It’s a world where local, community-scale politics and economics replace the hugely expensive global systems that sprang up during the last extravagant blowoff of the age of unchecked growth. Yet you can read all those studies churned out by the Club of Rome and never see a word about this.

That the world of the future will inevitably have less room for global management is something that would-be global managers can’t even begin to conceive. Yet the system they dream of running is stunningly incompetent. Take climate change, for instance. For decades now, doing something about climate change has been one of the central projects of the Davos set. But none of their conferences and loudly praised international agreements have had any measurable effect on the rate at which CO₂ gets dumped into the atmosphere. If this is the best that global management can do, the world is better off without them.

It’s become popular in some circles to insist that the panoply of cascading failures set in motion by the Davos set prove that our global managers are evil masterminds who deliberately intend to cause the dismal outcomes their pet policies have so reliably brought about. A somewhat less popular opinion, though arguably a more accurate one, holds that global managers belong to a decadent aristocracy so sheltered from the consequences of its own actions and so caught up in a world of vapid abstractions that it’s a marvel they haven’t caused even worse disasters. I’d like to suggest a third interpretation: our world is far too complex for global management to be a viable option.

This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, from the perspective of modern scientific materialism, human intelligence is not some kind of nature-transcending superpower; it is simply the set of cognitive processes our ancestors evolved as they sought to find food and mates and avoid predators — important tasks, to be sure, but not especially intellectually demanding ones. By contrast, from the religious perspective, humans are simply one class of created beings, irremediably finite and fallible. It’s only in the hubristic delusions typified by Harari’s book Homo Deus, which jumble misunderstood scientific and religious ideas together into a kind of crackpot anthropolatry, that these obvious realities get mislaid. The fact that our current caste of global managers has fallen into such stupidities goes a long way, I think, to explaining their failure to manage the world.

This is where the wolves come loping back into sight. When the Chernobyl exclusion zone was first evacuated, people speculated that it would become a radioactive desert, devoid of life or populated solely by a scattering of hideously crippled mutant life forms. As we now know, that didn’t happen. Instead, the eastern European forest of an earlier time promptly grew back, coping easily with the increased radiation flux. Deer found their way there promptly; horses abandoned by their owners shook off centuries of domestication, found mates and gave rise to herds of wild horses. Wolves soon followed in pursuit of tasty prey.

At the top of the food chain, the wolves of Chernobyl absorb more radionuclides than anything else in the area. Under ordinary circumstances, this would make them horribly vulnerable to cancer. But wildlife biologists researching the wolf packs recently discovered that the wolves had evolved a robust resistance to cancer. Nobody understands the biochemistry yet, and it’s possible that nobody ever will. In their quiet way, the wolves have achieved something that modern medicine has tried to do for more than a century, without any noticeable success.

Impressive though this is, it is by no means unique. Nature outwits science all the time. There are bacteria and algae that thrive in the water that circulates through nuclear reactors, basking in streams of high-intensity gamma rays that would fry you and me on the spot. There are living things that grow on the outside of spacecraft in orbit, handling the hard vacuum, lethal cold and sizzling radiation of outer space with perfect aplomb. There are fungi that eat carcinogen-laced toxic waste and go back for second helpings. We can’t do any of these things. Nature chuckles at our incompetence and shows us how it’s done.

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Then there’s Ascension Island. Nearly two centuries ago, when HMS Beagle dropped anchor there, it was a barren little cinder of volcanic rock in the middle of the South Atlantic, so far from any other scrap of land and so devoid of water that the only living things on it were sea birds and a few species of fern whose spores were light enough to blow there across the ocean. On board the Beagle was the ship’s naturalist, a young man named Charles Darwin, then at the beginning of his career. While he’s most famous for his theory of natural selection, Darwin was also the only person in history to invent a tropical forest, and he did it more or less by accident.

It’s a remarkable story. After his visit to Ascension Island, Darwin wrote to the British Admiralty suggesting that if somebody planted trees on the island, the increased water vapour arising from the trees would make the local climate suitable for a naval base. The Admiralty, with the sort of bluff, blundering enthusiasm for which Britain has long been famous, took him up on it in the stupidest possible way: they ordered any ship that meant to pass Ascension Island to pick up some plants at the last harbour they left and plant them once they got there. As a result, the island ended up with a dog’s breakfast of invasive species scooped up from half the world’s coastal ecosystems.

In theory, that should have produced ecological chaos. In practice, in just a few decades, much of Ascension Island turned into a green tropic paradise with lush upland forests. Current theory insists that this is impossible, and that a stable tropical forest requires millions of years to adapt and grow. Nobody told the plants about current theory, though, so they just went ahead and did it. Not only did Ascension Island get a tropical forest in an eyeblink of geological time, it got one of the more delicately balanced forms — a cloud forest, which thrives on water vapour condensing on the leaves of trees at high elevation. Oh, and Darwin was quite correct: the forest changed the local climate, yielding adequate water, and Ascension Island became an important naval base.

Rather than letting plants work things out for themselves, however, scientists have tried repeatedly to plan and create ecosystems. Those attempts reliably fail because ecosystems are too complex to plan rationally.

The same principle can be applied more generally to explain the cascading failures of the managerial elite. Those failures continue to happen because the world is too complex: it is so full of unpredictable variables and intricate feedback loops that no degree of human expertise, no set of abstract principles, no concept of world order can provide accurate predictions and allow the creation of a viable and productive order on a global scale.

That doesn’t mean that human beings can’t co-create a relatively stable, successful, thriving order in the world. It just means that this project is best pursued on a local level, relying on personal experience, folk wisdom, and close attention to local conditions. That’s exactly what the managerial aristocracy can’t provide — and why world domination keeps slipping through their fingers.

All this partly explains why Yuval Noah Harari is shrieking like an overwrought six-year-old. The world isn’t just refusing to follow the abstract models he brings to it, it’s refusing to follow any abstract models at all. Educated to think of the world as a passive medium that privileged intellectuals can shape at will, he’s being confronted with the terrifying discovery that the world literally couldn’t care less about him, his credentials or his ideas. Admittedly, he’s not handling it very well, but then few people can deal gracefully with the flat disconfirmation of their most precious beliefs.

The fact is that a great many ordinary people are sick and tired of the pompous pretensions of the class for which Harari speaks. They know that when Harari talks about global order, what he means is that he wants them to be ordered around by his rich friends, according to some set of fashionable abstractions detached from local realities. They believe that letting ordinary people live their lives and pursue their own self-defined goals — like Chernobyl wolves or Ascension Island plants — will have better results than leaving the world in the hands of an incompetent elite. And the evidence suggests that they’re right.

A great many of these people are prepared to take matters into their own hands. As Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have said, wars happen when the government tells you who the enemy is; revolutions happen when you figure it out for yourselves. Quite a few people in the United States have figured things out for themselves, and many of them seem quite willing to use Donald Trump’s monumental ego as a battering ram to knock some sense into a system that’s given them nothing but misery for too many decades. If that fails, they’ll simply reach for some other instrument, and it’s worth keeping in mind that their next choice may be even less welcome to Harari and his rich friends.

Meanwhile, the wolves of the Chernobyl zone roam unharmed through a radioactive landscape. Those wolves are laughing at us.  We may want to listen to them.

During the Nineties, there was much excitement about computer technology opening the way to a new kind of warfare. Information, we were told, would flow from the battlefield to headquarters and back, giving commanders total control over hypercomplex, hugely expensive militaries that would overwhelm more poorly equipped forces with ease. That has, however, not come to pass.

On the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, the single most effective force the Ukrainian army has consisted of little independent units huddled in bunkers just behind the lines, equipped with cheap drones. Right now, Russia has the upper hand by every conventional measure; it has more troops, more tanks, more artillery, more ammunition and other expendables, and a vastly superior air force. Its missiles pound Ukrainian targets hundreds of miles behind the lines — and yet, it is also restricted to slow, gruelling, trench-by-trench advances, because any attempt at a general assault in open country gets chopped to pieces by drones.

The same thing mediated by a different set of technologies is also taking place in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military is so much larger and better armed than Hamas that, in a conventional struggle, there would be no contest at all. But the Hamas commanders aren’t stupid enough to meet the Israelis in a conventional struggle. Instead, their network of tunnels allows Hamas forces to pop up, ambush Israeli detachments, and vanish again. It’s the same strategy Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon used against the Israeli army in 2006, and it’s proving just as effective this time around.

Then there’s the Ansarullah militia in Yemen, drawn mostly from the Houthi ethnic group. Their approach to messing with the industrial West is just as cheap and effective. You don’t need a permanent installation to launch a drone against a ship passing through the Red Sea — the back of a truck is quite adequate — and so the US and British forces on the scene have nothing useful to bomb. Yes, some Ansarullah drones get shot down. But so what? It takes a missile costing $2 million to down a drone that only costs $2,000.

The Ansarullah strategy is particularly clever because they don’t have to defeat the US and British navies. All they have to do is make the Red Sea too costly for commercial shipping to Israel and its allies, and they can do that by adding the risk of a drone strike (and the insurance premiums that follow from that risk) to the other costs and dangers shipping companies have to face. If Israel and its allies produced most of their goods and services at home, that wouldn’t be any kind of problem. But it turns out that one of the many downsides to economic globalisation is that it holds every nation’s economy hostage to shipping disruptions in the major sea lanes.

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In all three cases, then, what has happened can be described very simply: the spectacularly overpriced armed services of the industrial world have passed their expiry date. They no longer yield military power commensurate with their overwhelming expense: quite the contrary, cheaper ways of fighting wars can now overwhelm them. And as history shows, this is something that happens routinely in the declining years of a civilisation.

The example I have in mind is the battle of Adrianople in 378, when seven Roman legions led by Valens, emperor of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, faced a somewhat smaller force of barbarians led by the Gothic king Fritigern. The Romans lost catastrophically — two-thirds of the Roman force was slaughtered on the battlefield and the rest fled. Valens was among the dead. Before Adrianople, there was still some hope that the Empire could recover from its 4th-century crisis; afterwards, the barbarians had the upper hand and kept it.

There has been a vast amount of speculation about what happened at Adrianople. None of it matters for our present purpose, however. The point that’s relevant is the crucial difference between the two armies that defined the consequences once one of them lost. The difference in question? The cost of fielding an army.

The late Roman military was a sprawling, top-heavy bureaucratic structure divided into many specialised units. Training, equipping, supplying and commanding the ordinary Roman legionary was a complex process demanding huge amounts of money and resources. Much of that cost came from the pervasive corruption and bureaucratisation of late Roman society, in which all economic activity was loaded to breaking point with fees and regulations, and a vast amount of graft also bled every economic sector white. But there was also the simple fact that a complex, specialised, and hierarchically structured army is always going to cost a lot.

The barbarian force, by contrast, wasn’t even an army. Instead, it comprised all the able-bodied men of a couple of Gothic tribes and a few other allied barbarian peoples. Every “soldier” provided his own weapons and armour, and had learned how to use them as a child. They were flexible and resilient precisely because it was unspecialised.

The Roman army was appallingly brittle by contrast. Until Adrianople, the tremendous costs of maintaining the military had been met by raising taxes to sky-high levels, But by 378, the tax burden in the empire was so crushing that economic activity was breaking down under the strain. Thus the destruction of two-thirds of Valens’s army, and an even larger fraction of its officers and staff, was a financial blow from which Rome never really recovered. The barbarians didn’t have that problem, because Fritigern didn’t have to raise money to train, equip, pay and manage his force — he just had to lead it to plunder and be reasonably successful as a general. This was well within his abilities, and equally within the reach of later barbarian kings. The fall of Rome followed in just under a century.

We haven’t yet had an equivalent of the battle of Adrianople. The fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East echoes the struggles of the decades before Adrianople, when Roman politicians and military officers could still convince themselves that the military machine they had inherited from their ancestors was still the most powerful in the world. The US military is in that condition now, lumbering around the planet with its aircraft carriers and high-tech weapons systems, flailing helplessly at drone strikes and trying to pretend that the carnage in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip hasn’t just shown that the entire American way of war is hopelessly obsolete.

There is, of course, an alternative to Adrianople. The United States could withdraw its troops from the 100-odd foreign countries where it has military bases, focus on defending its own borders, and retool its military to adapt to the ongoing revolution in military affairs. That would, among other things, save billions of dollars a year. Yet given the billions would no longer be flowing into the pockets of defence corporations, with a good bit sticking to various fingers on the way, such a change would sure be unpopular with a number of powerful individuals, and probably won’t get put into place until some ghastly military debacle or other forces it. Still, the option’s worth mentioning.

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One way or another, however, over the next half century, the massive military forces and hugely expensive defence technologies that have ruled the world’s battlefields since 1939 will be replaced by leaner, less expensive, and less centralised forces. Then that process will go further — propelled forward by two principal compulsions.

The first of those forces is the economic impact of resource depletion. Today’s high-tech weapons systems require fantastically complex and precise inputs of energy and materials, many of which have to be sourced from abroad and then processed in extraordinarily complex ways. Consider the microprocessors that make an ordinary drone capable of doing its job. Silicon is one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust, but silicon pure enough to make into computer chips has to be refined at considerable cost, and then doped with monoatomic layers of rare-earth elements and etched in almost unimaginably fine patterns. Huge factories full of expensive gear, using gargantuan amounts of energy and an equally huge list of raw materials have to be built, powered and maintained so that microprocessors can be produced.

So complex a system won’t be sustainable indefinitely. More to the point, so complex a system won’t be affordable indefinitely. As easily accessible deposits of the raw materials get used up, the price of chips will rise. Rising energy costs will have the same effect, and as microprocessors get more expensive, the economies of scale that briefly made them cheap will work in reverse, and simpler technologies will outcompete them. If it costs less to hire a file clerk than it does to buy and operate a computer, most businesses will hire the file clerk — and as this same equation works through society as a whole, the economic basis for computer industries will shrivel away.

That’s one factor. The other, closely related to it, is the economic impact of population decline. Today, every continent but Africa is producing children at a rate too slow to sustain its current population, and African population curves are moving in the same direction. There’s still a little population increase in the pipeline, in the form of young people who haven’t yet reached reproductive age, but sometime in the next decade or two, the earth will reach its peak human population and begin to see sustained demographic contraction.

Next to nobody seems to have thought through what this implies. Economic growth depends ultimately on population growth; it’s because nobody alive today has ever experienced sustained demographic contraction that we all assume as a matter of course that businesses will increase their sales, real estate prices will go up, and investments will earn profits. In an era of population contraction, none of this is true. Once demographic decline sets in, each business will on average have fewer customers than the year before, each property will have fewer people to bid on it, each investment vehicle will have fewer people investing in it. Thus, the average business, the average asset, and the average investment vehicle will all lose money.

This is one of the unnoticed factors driving the decline of civilisations. If businesses, assets, and investments yield losses rather than profits, few people will be interested in owning them, and economic activity will contract even faster than the population. You can see this dynamic play out in the history of every falling civilisation. A radical simplification of the economy sets in. Market-based economies collapse and are replaced by customary economies, in which money drops out of use and the basis for economic activity is a handful of productive assets that meet real human needs: above all else, farmland capable of raising food crops.

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All this makes a convoluted military establishment impossible to sustain. That’s why feudalism is the default setting for human society after the collapse of complex societies. In a feudal system, productive farmland is parcelled out among local warlords, who pass it on to their vassals in exchange for military service. It’s the same system Fritigern knew, adapted to the needs of a settled population: every able-bodied man in a feudal society is a warrior, and can expect to be called out to defend his village from the warriors of rival communities at any moment. It’s only when a feudal system becomes decadent that peasants no longer fight in the infantry.

Some similar system is likely to play a significant role in the deindustrial age. It won’t be identical to the feudal systems of the last 3,000 years, though, for a simple reason: those systems were all shaped profoundly by the revolution in military affairs that followed the domestication of the horse by Indo-European tribes on the sweeping plains where Russian and Ukrainian troops are currently doing battle. From that point on, the feudal aristocrat was a master of horses — on a chariot early on, before horses had been bred large enough to carry riders in battle, and mounted on horseback thereafter. That gave warlords immense advantages over the people they ruled, resulting in a deep schism dividing society into noble and peasant classes.

That age is over, because a different revolution in military affairs swept the planet in the 16th century. During this period, gunpowder became as overwhelming a force in military affairs as horses were, not least because an armoured warrior on horseback is dead meat in a pitched battle involving firearms; a spray of bullets fired by half-trained peasants can easily kill his horse and punch holes in his armour. That’s why cavalry after the 16th century ended up repurposed as a force for scouting and raiding, while infantry took over the hard work of winning pitched battles. It’s also why aristocrats turned into a disposable commodity in most societies.

Yes, archery can also limit the effectiveness of cavalry — the French found that out the hard way at Crecy and Agincourt — but it takes many years of practice to master the longbow, and even so, it’s not as lethal as a gun. An untrained recruit can learn to use a firearm effectively in a matter of weeks. Firearms are also no great challenge to make with hand tools; the famous Kentucky rifle of the early American frontier was made by hand. Doubtless famous gunsmiths in the deindustrial future will be just as legendary as famous swordsmiths in the past, but most guns in the future will be turned out by ordinary craftspeople, just as most swords were back in the day.

With this in mind, it’s not hard to glimpse the warriors of the deindustrial dark ages 400 years from now. They’ll be armed with guns, probably semiautomatic rifles like the ones carried in the two World Wars — and if they have any armour, it’ll be steel helmets. Some of them will ride horses, but most won’t, for the reasons just described. They’ll be a good deal less subservient to the local warlord than their equivalents 1,000 years previously, because of the equalising effect of firearms. But they’ll doubtless have some version of the classic feudal ethic of loyalty and courage to guide them in the rough-and-tumble of an age of chaos.

They may have some unexpected technologies to help them out. Shortwave radios aren’t hard to make by hand — there’s a whole subculture of amateur radio enthusiasts these days who make their own vacuum tubes from mason jars and the like — and having the ability to communicate at a distance is worth an extra army in wartime. It’s also far from impossible that ultralight aircraft made of wood and fabric, powered by alcohol-burning engines will be available in at least a few of the more prosperous areas for aerial scouting. (Larger and more complex aircraft will probably be off-limits for centuries due to hard limits on resources.)

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Thus, I imagine an army on the march somewhere in the Ohio valley in 2400 or so, a long column of infantry with little detachments of cavalry scouting ahead and on the flanks, using bulky but functional radios to keep in touch with their commanders, while a couple of ultralights circle overhead to scout at a greater distance. There will doubtless be cannon drawn by horses in the column, too, and just possibly a few simple machine guns as well, but most of the fighting power will consist of young men shouldering rifles. Aside from a few bits of technology, it’s not that different from the armies that marched through that same region six centuries earlier.

That’s the army of a relatively large and stable dark age state, of course. Far more common will be smaller and poorer communities, in which warfare is carried out by relatively small groups of young men without the benefit of cavalry, canon or ultralight planes. In mountainous areas they’ll be all but unconquerable — firearms make guerrilla warfare far more powerful than other weapons systems — so we can expect the political structures of the deindustrial dark ages to feature relatively large states in the lowland river basins and small, defiantly independent communities up in the hills. It’s an old song, given new verses by gunpowder.

Naval power, however, is another matter. Wooden ships became instantly obsolete once explosive shells replaced solid shot in naval cannon, but steel armour in any quantity is only an option if you’ve got ample supplies of cheap coal to turn into coke; our descendants won’t have that. (For the same reason, they won’t have railroads, since you can’t make steel in sufficient volume for rails without coke, and we’re burning the last scraps of the necessary coal reserves right now.) Since shells aren’t difficult to make, and rockets with explosive warheads are even easier, naval flteets of any size may be a thing of the past until some other form of naval armour becomes possible. Piracy will doubtless flourish on the high seas of the deindustrial future, and it will be very hard for maritime nations to control it the way the British navy did.

And beyond the deindustrial dark ages? That’s impossible to predict, because the successor cultures that build on our ruins will have their own ideals, goals, and dreams, which will not be ours. They will favour some technologies and reject others for reasons we can’t anticipate and probably can’t even understand. Our civilisation invented clockwork and steam power and used them to reshape the planet, while the Roman world also invented both these things and did essentially nothing with them. Why? Because there is no one route to the future. Every civilisation follows its own path, and what we call “progress” is simply the temporary trajectory that our civilisation took in pursuit of its dreams.

That trajectory is winding up around us right now, having gone as far as it can. It’s a safe bet that future civilisations will choose their own paths instead. What goals they will seek, and how those will shape their ways of making war, we cannot know.

The same ease that allowed him and his Christian contemporaries to move at will between Pagan and Christian religious visions was just as common in the nascent Pagan scene of the time. Eliot’s contemporary Dion Fortune, whose writings played a central role in the birth of modern Pagan spirituality, also wrote a work of Christian devotional literature — Mystical Meditations on the Collects — without sensing, or being accused of, the least inconsistency. To Fortune, and in a different sense to Eliot as well, Christianity and Paganism were simply different ways of talking about spiritual realities and relationships that could not be reduced to a single symbolic formula.

Those times are unhappily long past. During the second half of the 20th century, most Christian denominations in the Western world responded to the re-emergence of Pagan religion by reviving centuries-old stereotypes of devil worship or, at best, restricting their efforts at interreligious dialogue to a narrow circle of “world religions” hedged in by definitions that exclude today’s reborn Pagan faiths. Today, it’s almost impossible to imagine an Anglican poet anywhere this side of heresy wielding Pagan religious metaphors with Eliot’s aplomb. The same narrowing of options can be found on the other side of the newly raised barrier, for that matter; Pagan writers nowadays are far more likely to craft extended diatribes about the misbehaviour of Christian churches in the past than to explore, as Dion Fortune did, the interpenetration of Pagan and Christian religious experience.

It’s anyone’s guess when, or whether, this sorry state of affairs will end. Still, there are exceptions to the generalisations just made. Some Christians have made serious efforts to grasp the nature of Pagan religious consciousness, just as some Pagans have tried to understand Christianity as a valid religious expression that doesn’t happen to be theirs. There are also those who feel called to a faith that blends Pagan and Christian traditions, and despite the hostility such ventures too often receive, their number is growing. From such initiatives, with luck and the blessing of the gods, a wider context of mutual tolerance and acceptance may someday arise.

My own background places me in a complex relationship to this hope. I am a Pagan even in the strictest Christian sense of the word; that is, I have not been baptised, nor have I ever belonged to a Christian church of any kind. I grew up in a comfortably secular milieu in one of the least religious parts of the United States; among the families on the block where I lived for much of my childhood, for example, only one went to church on Sundays.

When Christianity finally came to my attention, it was by way of the strident evangelical revival that swept over America in the late Seventies. Instead, like much of my generation, I explored other paths — atheism, Asian religions, a handful of the new religious movements — before finding my spiritual home; in my case this was on the far end of the religious spectrum, in that branch of the alternative spiritual scene that embraces the name and draws on the inspiration of the ancient Druids.

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The modern Druid movement has a complex and quirky history of its own, reaching back to the 18th century, when it evolved out of a collision between liberal Anglicanism, nature worship, and fragments of Celtic tradition. It inherits from its origins a distrust of dogmatism that has made it a haven for eccentrics and a nightmare for would-be systematisers. Even so simple a question as the number of deities Druids worship — one, two, many, none — finds nearly as many answers as there are Druids. At the core of most visions of the contemporary Druid way, though, lies a sense that living nature is the least murky expression of the divine accessible to human beings. We may not agree about much else, but the shorthand creed drafted by one Druid tradition wins almost universal assent: “Nature is good.”

This apparent platitude has depths that may not appear to a casual glance. It’s not a statement of fact, since nature routinely violates most conventional human ideas of goodness. Rather, it’s the first postulate in a system of values. By taking living nature as our basic measure of the good, the qualities expressed by nature — wholeness, flow, spontaneity, elegance, and the like — become core values that can be expressed in the life of each Druid. Equally, the central role of nature in Druid thought makes symbols and imagery derived from nature equally central in contemporary Druid myth, ritual and practice.

This may appear worlds apart from Christianity in its modern forms. In the hands of an almost forgotten tradition of 19th-century Pagan thought, however, it forms an unexpected bridge crossing the chasm that now separates the religious visions of Paganism and Christianity.

Very few of today’s Pagans, and even fewer contemporary Christians, have ever heard of the redoubtable Welsh author and Druid Owen Morgan. In his day, though, Morgan — Archdruid Morien of Pontypridd, to use his religious title — was a prominent figure on the far end of British spirituality, with a substantial following in Great Britain and the United States. Those who like to imagine the Victorian era as a glacial landscape of conformity and sexual repression should stay far away from Morgan’s writings, and especially his 1887 textbook of Druid philosophy and theology, The Light in Britannia, which argued that Christianity was a Pagan fertility cult.

Morgan himself did not put the matter quite so baldly. He argued, rather, that the core of all true religion was the worship of the life force; that the most prominent emblems of the life force — in the macrocosm, Sun and Earth; in the microcosm, the male and female genitals — were the foundation of all religious symbolism, in Pagan as well as Christian traditions; and that Christianity was simply a restatement of the old Pagan gnosis of fertility and new life. He considered himself a good Christian as well as a Druid, and saw nothing inappropriate in attending church regularly. For him, after all, the church was a stone representation of the vagina of the Earth goddess, its portal facing east to welcome the virile and penetrating rays of the rising Sun: the Bride of Christ, in another symbolism, eagerly awaiting her heavenly bridegroom.

Ideas such as these were far from unique to Morgan, or for that matter to the Druidry of his time. Behind his book lay more than a century of pioneering explorations of the origins of human religion, and the rise of two major schools of thought — one arguing for an astrological and seasonal origin to religion and myth, the other tracing all religion and myth back to what was primly called “the worship of the generative powers” — that many alternative thinkers of his time were trying to reconcile. Some of these had already taken the final, daring step of including Christianity in their syntheses, though none ever quite managed to equal Morgan’s flair or his genius for deadpan humour. Despite this, Morgan’s own cultural impact has gone surprisingly unnoticed. You can read any number of histories of the rise of modern Neopaganism, for example, and never learn that The Light in Britannia was the first modern expression of a fertility religion that places a single god, a single goddess, and their sexual relationship at the centre of its spiritual vision — a pattern that became popular after its publication, and eventually took definitive form with Gerald Gardner’s invention of Wicca.

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The broader tradition of seasonal and sexual religious interpretation has had a little more visibility in recent times, not least because it helped shape important works of scholarship such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Still, such interpretations have been unfashionable in scholarly circles for some decades now. This is unfortunate, for however overblown some of the old analyses may have been — and Morgan’s were among the most colourful, it must be admitted — they capture a crucial factor in ancient Pagan religions that is also amply present in the origins of Christianity.

The “strong brown god” in Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, for instance, offers a useful starting place. To any Pagan in ancient times, Eliot’s recognition was so obvious that it scarcely required mentioning. Of course, rivers were deities — gods to the ancient Greeks, for example, and goddesses to the ancient Celts. Other natural phenomena were equally full of divinity. An ancient Greek who wanted to comment on wet weather would as likely as not say “Zeus is raining”.

Whatever else Zeus was in classical Greek religion, in other words, he was always, in part, the sky as a conscious and potent divine being. Poseidon was similarly the ocean, Demeter the fertile earth, Aphrodite sexuality in all its forms, Pan the raw unhuman presence of wilderness, and so on. Even through the elegant literary constructions of late classical myth, it’s not difficult to see each god and goddess as a distinct force of nature with its own power to shape the weaving of the fabric of human life.

The same principle applies in a different way to a class of beings the Greeks carefully distinguished from the gods — the heroes or demigods, who were born of loves between a god or goddess and a mortal. Each of these embodied one of the realms where the human and natural worlds fused into unity. The twelve labours of Heracles, for instance, echo precisely the seasonal movement of the Sun through the signs of the Zodiac as reflected in the agricultural cycle — compare Heracles’s labours to the tasks of the Greek farmer as outlined, say, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and it’s not too hard to make sense of the myth.

There was, of course, another god whose cult thrived in the late classical world, and the parallels linking the myth of Jesus with the seasonal cycle of agriculture are at least as precise as those that can be traced in the myth of Heracles. Just as Heracles had his 12 labours, for instance, Jesus had his 12 disciples, whose connection with the signs of the zodiac has been a commonplace of Christian symbolism for many centuries.

Yet the mythic narratives that surround Jesus have the greater richness one would expect from the classical Levant, where fertility deities who die and rise again had been a commonplace of Pagan religious thought for thousands of years before the rise of ancient Greece. It’s for this reason that Jesus is paired throughout his myth with his alter ego John the Baptist. The two mirror each other seasonally; Jesus is born at the winter solstice and dies in the spring, the harvest time in the eastern Mediterranean, suspended above the earth like the ripe grain on the stalk; John is born at the summer solstice and dies in the autumn, the planting time, beheaded in a prison beneath the earth, like the seed that goes to its burial behind the ploughshare’s iron blade. “He must increase,” John says of Jesus, “while I must decrease.”

Evidence for this interpretation of Christian myth is abundant in the Bible and other early Christian sources. Jesus’s traditional birthplace is in Bethlehem, for example, a town whose name literally means “house of bread” in Hebrew, and the central act of traditional Christian ritual centres on eating the bread that is Jesus’s body and drinking the wine that is his blood. (John has no similar ritual attributed to him, since one does not eat the seed corn or the rootstock of the grapevine.) “I have come that they might have life,” Jesus says in the Bible, “and that they might have it more abundantly.” Any other fertility deity could have said as much, and it’s only the intellectual distance that separates us from the context of early Christianity that makes so many people nowadays think that the “life” Jesus spoke of is a spiritual abstraction.

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Christianity, it must be remembered, had its birth in the bustling spiritual marketplace of the classical Mediterranean world, where religious metaphors of this sort were commonplaces of contemporary thought. The mystery religions, which offered salvation to those who sought union with a god or a goddess through rituals of initiation and communion, were among the most powerful religious forces of the time, and nearly all of them focused on exactly this kind of agricultural symbolism. Thus it’s hardly a leap to suggest, as so many scholars of myth have suggested, that the precise parallels between Christianity and the other mystery religions, and the rich agricultural symbolism of Christianity itself, show that the original Christian faith may well have been something not far from what Owen Morgan claimed it to be: a mystery cult venerating the life force in nature, expressed through a rich mythic symbolism, that became associated through a complex historical process with the events of the life and death of an otherwise obscure Jewish religious reformer.

The relationship between the mythic role assigned to Jesus and the sparse historical traces left by his life is a challenging issue for many modern versions of Christianity. Some theologies refuse to draw any distinction between myth and history — if the Bible says that Jesus rose into heaven, according to these interpretations, then that’s what happened, and if television reporters had been there, they could have filmed it for the five o’clock news. Others draw a distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith”, though data on the former is so sparse that it can be, and has been, redefined to fit any of a dizzying assortment of modern agendas. Still others have come to reject the idea that a historical Jesus existed in the first place.

If Christianity was originally a mystery cult focused on the life force, though, these confusions evaporate. Whatever historical reality might have formed the kernel around which the Jesus myth emerged — and in all probability no one will ever know what that reality was — the spiritual meaning of the myth is not dependent on that reality. In Morgan’s sense, there is no question as to the factual nature of the resurrection of Jesus, since it takes place in every sunrise and in the sprouting of every seed. The historical figure around which the myth coalesced is simply not that important; there was doubtless some dimly remembered historical figure at the root of the myth of Heracles, too.

The claim that Christianity’s dying and resurrected god was a historical person who lived in the very recent past, rather than a wholly mythic figure, played an important role historically in giving the new-born Christian church an edge over its competitors. When the fall of Rome dragged the classical world to ruin, however, the elegant mythic metaphors that had made Christianity the most successful of the Pagan mystery religions were reinterpreted in blindly literal terms. Later on, in the Reformation and afterward, these metaphors lost the last of their original meaning, and were transformed into bloodless ideologies completely detached from the seasonal and vegetative context that once gave them their power.

Nowadays, the obscure historical figure of Jesus lies in the distant past, and attempts to force a literal meaning out of those narratives have long since crossed over into absurdity. The widespread modern notion of the Rapture, in which believing Christians will soon be beamed up to heaven by some miraculous equivalent of Star Trek’s transporter beams, is a troubling case in point. It’s a lightly disguised fantasy of mass suicide — when someone tells their children that Grandma has gone to heaven to be with Jesus, most people understand what that means — and its popularity suggests that the conflict between overly literal interpretations of Christianity’s exuberant seasonal myths and the awkward solidity of a world that refuses to fit those interpretations may finally have become too great for many Christians to bear.

Efforts to reconnect Christianity with its origins as a mystery religion of life and fertility have been going on for more than two centuries now, and might have succeeded in revitalising the old myths and rituals, except for one detail: Nearly all these attempts aimed at discrediting Christianity as just another Pagan fertility cult, and therefore unworthy of respect. It took a believer in a different Pagan fertility cult, Owen Morgan, to realise that the equation could be worked the other way. He saw, as a handful of visionaries since his time have seen, that the ancient worship of the life force is a potent and valid spiritual option in its own right, and that Christian ritual and symbols can readily carry this primal constellation of meanings.

It is only fair to say that many other interpretations of Christianity are possible; many people will find some other way of approach to the Christian faith more relevant to their own spiritual lives, and many others will find no need to approach the Christian faith at all. Central to the old Paganism was the realisation that different people are called to worship different deities, and the corresponding sense that each person has the right and the duty to pursue his or her own religious path within a context of respect and toleration for the deities of others. Still, for those who feel drawn to the rituals and symbolism of Christianity, the vision of Jesus as an image of the ever-returning life force, and of Christianity as a mystery cult that need not conflict with a wider reverence for the divine presence in the world, may offer unexpected possibilities.

***

A version of this essay appeared in Beyond the Narratives: Essays on Occultism and the Future (Aeon Books),

Of course, that’s not how things work out because the universe, with its usual serene indifference to all things human, refuses to play along. Crisis arrives when too many failed predictions turn rationalism into a laughing stock, and the whole enterprise grinds to a halt as people abandon it. That’s what happened in ancient China, in the twilight of the Chou dynasty, when its rationalist schools failed to bring good government; it’s what happened in ancient Greece in the twilight of the classical age, when its rationalist philosophy failed to inspire moral virtue. It is happening now, in the twilight of the industrial era, as our rationalist sciences fail to provide the Tomorrowland future we’ve been promised.

One of the ways you can tell that an age of reason is coming to an end is that magic comes back into fashion. Here again, we’re following the usual path at the usual pace. The revival of magic that began in a very quiet way in the 1850s, and first found a wider public in the 1890s, went into overdrive in the Seventies and hasn’t looked back. Earlier this week, the University of Exeter in Britain announced a new degree in “Magic and Occult Science” to reflect a “recent surge in interest in magic” among young Brits.

However, the popular revival of magic does nothing to guarantee that it will be done with any degree of competence. Quite the contrary, most of the people who take up magic in the twilight of an age of reason are still far too influenced by the ideologies of the departing era, and so they generally make a hash of things. This is especially visible in the realm of political magic.

Yes, there is such a thing as political magic. We saw quite a bit of it thrown about on both sides during the 2016 US presidential election, as I argue in my recent book, The King in Orange. A modest amount was competent, but most of it was either the fumbling of enthusiastic beginners or the blunders of people who thought they knew much more about magic than they did. This not only risks bringing the ancient and honourable art of magic into disrepute, but also has the potential to create a lot of collateral damage.

Doubtless, there will be plenty of magic deployed in next year’s presidential election too. With this in mind, I’m going to offer some instruction in the art of magical combat on the off chance that both sides in the upcoming electoral squabble might listen — rather than flailing around like drunken halfwits, trying to bash each other with weapons they don’t know how to use.

Let’s start with some necessary clarifications. If your exposure to magic consists of reading denunciations of it by ranting sceptics, you know nothing about it. If it consists of fantasy novels and Hollywood spectacles, you know even less. Let’s be even more specific and formulate a rule, which I hereby name Rowling’s Law: if it looks like the sort of schlock you’d see in a Harry Potter movie, it’s not real magic.

Magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will. It doesn’t affect matter directly, and it can’t be used to overturn the laws of nature. Within those limits, it can accomplish astounding things. If you examine your experience of the world, you’ll find that only a modest portion of it depends on the material realities that surround you: much more depends on what you perceive, feel and think about those realities and the subtler social, psychological and spiritual realities that also surround you.

These latter elements are the raw materials of magic. The tools of magic are will and imagination, whose power can come from many sources, of which human emotion is generally the easiest to access. The forms that give it direction and effect are symbols and symbolic action. Here, the basic principle can be stated simply enough: a symbol held in one mind, charged with will and desire, can affect another mind even when there’s no obvious way for the effect to take place. What this implies, of course, is that individual human minds are not as isolated from one another as most current ideologies like to insist.

Before we get into the rules for effective magical combat, however, I’m going to have to give two warnings. I’ve learned from long experience that I can say these things in so many words and people will blow right by them in their quest to misunderstand magic, but the effort has to be made. Here goes:

Warning No. 1: The rules that follow apply only to magic. They don’t apply to military or political strategy, say, or anything else that takes place principally in the material world.

Warning No. 2: The rules that follow have nothing to do with ethics or morals or who’s more virtuous than the other guy. I’m talking about what works.

With those in mind — and please do keep them in mind — we can proceed to the central principle of effective magical combat in the political sphere: “You win a magical struggle by formulating an ideal as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible, while completely ignoring the other guy.”

Did you keep my two warnings in mind? To judge from my repeated experience, the moment they read those words, people immediately try to apply them to military and political strategy, probably having to do with the Nazis, who exert a weird gravitational attraction on people’s imaginations. What goes through their minds is this: that’s very sweet and moral and pure, but Churchill couldn’t have stopped the Nazis if they’d just formulated an ideal, blah blah blah. If you thought this, please re-read the two warnings above, and this time pay attention.

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How do you win by formulating an ideal as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible? It’s quite simple. Magic can’t win a political or military struggle all by itself. What it can do is give a good hard boost to the more practical side of the struggle. It does this by generating energy, enthusiasm, loyalty, and love among your side’s supporters — by attracting allies rather than making enemies, and by making people on the other side start to wonder if maybe your side has a point. By doing that, magic can quite readily provide the edge that makes victory happen.

As it happens, the Nazis are a great example of how not to approach political magic. They were heavily into the notion that the rules of magic also applied to the material world, and they were just as into the idea that flinging high-intensity nastiness at their enemies was their ticket to victory. Adolf Hitler spends page after dreary page in Mein Kampf ranting about hatred as a source of power. That’s why he launched an invasion of Russia without issuing winter uniforms to the Wehrmacht: he hated and despised Russians so much that he didn’t believe they could resist his magic and his armies long enough to make that an issue. We all know how that worked out.

On the other side of the struggle was English occultist Violet Firth Evans, aka Dion Fortune, who put together a network of British magical practitioners to mess with the Nazis. One of the things that made the Wehrmacht so successful at first was that the leadership of the nations it invaded tended to suffer a sudden collapse in morale. Fortune, who recognised the role of magic in causing that collapse, set out to monkey-wrench that process and keep Britain from suffering the same fate. She firmly rejected the notion that they should attack the Nazis with magic; instead, her network ignored the Nazis and concentrated on formulating an ideal at home as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible. Again, we all know how that worked out. (You can find the details of her method in The Magical Battle of Britain, edited by Gareth Knight.)

The same principle applies to any magical struggle involving groups of people. Say you support a political party, and you want to encourage other people to do so. Obviously that’s going to take activity on the material plane, which follows its own rules — but it also has a magical dimension. If you want other people to flock to your party, you need to formulate an ideal and make it as strong, precise and vivid as you can. That will catch people’s attention, inspire them, and encourage them to listen to your party’s speakers and vote for its candidates.

Those words “strong, precise, and vivid” are the key to the process. It emphatically will not work to focus all your attention on a vague buzzword — “justice”, say, or “freedom”. You need to formulate exactly what you mean by the concept: justice for whom, at whose expense? Freedom for whom, at whose expense? You need to know exactly what you’re trying to achieve, what it will cost, and who will pay the price for it, or you will not achieve it.

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Nor is it enough to leave that knowledge in abstract terms. In magic, an image is worth a thousand vague words; a “concrete thought form”, to use the technical term, is necessary to provide the energies with a pattern around which to coalesce. What do you want your party to achieve? What do you want your country to become? To practise effective political magic, you need to be able to give that answer in terms of vivid imaginative experiences. When you walk down the street in the future you want to achieve, what does it look like, sound like, smell like? When you happen to see your future mayor or president at work, what exactly are they doing? And is the image something that will attract the enthusiasm and idealism of a lot of people, or just of your little special interest group?

But what if you don’t want to do any of that, and spend your time instead focusing on how evil the other party and its candidates are, and flinging nasty magic at them? Your results will not be what you want, because the the principle given above has a hidden catch: the ideal you formulate doesn’t need to be appealing to you. In fact, it can be utterly loathsome to you. So long as you formulate it as strongly, precisely, and vividly as you can, you give it strength and encourage other people to flock to it.

The most obvious example here involves Donald Trump. The main reason he was able to come charging out of the political fringes to seize the Republican nomination, and then the White House, and the main reason he still dominates the American political landscape, was that so many people threw so much energy into hating him. They formulated a good clear image, all right, and they did it strongly, precisely, and vividly, charging it with every ounce of hatred and rage they had. It was an extraordinarily potent spell. Unfortunately for them, it had the opposite effect of the one they wanted: for many, it made Trump’s own spell more appealing.

Of course, Trump also had the help of a Western habit I call “the tyranny of mandatory niceness”. In the upper reaches of our societies, expressing negative emotions is taboo, and will get you the same kind of reaction that expressing sexual desire would have gotten you in Victorian England. As a result, there are a great many people seething with negative emotions who desperately want some way to vent them — some excuse to shriek their hatred and rage right out there in public. Donald Trump provided them with that service. In effect, they thanked him for it by pouring emotional energy into his image, and he proceeded to make good use of it.

The point to keep in mind is that fixations of this sort have practical consequences. For that matter, if something keeps Trump from winning the GOP nomination this year, the Democrats will be caught flatfooted. Blinded by their own animosity, they have yet to formulate an ideal of their own that can catch the imagination, the aspirations and the hopes of the voters.

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Old-fashioned occultists like me are wearily familiar with this effect. When we teach magic, we’re constantly having to remind people to focus on the thing they want, not the thing they hate or fear or want to get rid of. Of course, there’s a reason for that, which is that so few people figure out what they actually want. Nearly always, people want to think instead, “If only X happens” — and X, of course, can be anything from winning the lottery or losing £20 to marrying the right person — “my life will be wonderful”. Then they spend all their time thinking about the money or the spouse they don’t have, or the weight or the spouse that they do, and fail to focus their will and imagination on exactly what kind of changes they want in their lives. In this way, they cement themselves even further into their current misery.

As in the personal microcosm, so in the political mesocosm. For the last half-century or so, the main US political parties have spent all their time and energy ranting about the bad things that the bad people in the other party are doing, and neglected to offer any positive vision of their own. There are unpleasant reasons for that habit. Until the rise of the populist movement, both parties were pushing the same set of policies on most issues, while cultivating a handful of hot-button issues to keep their captive constituencies in line. Avoiding a positive vision was essential to that approach.

Democrats loved to preen themselves on their environmentalism, though somehow they never did much to benefit the environment, while Republicans loved to preen themselves on their support for Christian morality, though somehow they never did much to further that cause, either. For both parties, these and other niche issues allowed them to pretend to be idealistic and distract their constituencies from the fact that much more important issues were being ignored. Meanwhile, the politicians of both parties pandered to big corporations, fell neatly in line behind one clueless imperial misadventure after another, and lined their own pockets in a frenzy of kleptocratic greed. Holding up an ideal that meant anything to most Americans would have been a major misstep for either party, as the gap between even the most modest ideal and the sleazy realities of life among Washington DC’s political parasites would have quickly become a severe liability for all sides.

Yet the absence of any such ideal helps to explain the spreading cynicism and contempt that so many Americans feel for the people that govern them, as well as their willingness to turn to political outsiders such as Trump. To judge from the evidence of history, that’s just going to accelerate until somebody formulates a positive and appealing ideal strongly, precisely and vividly enough to seize the collective imagination of the American public. That could be done by a politician — but it could also be done by an ordinary person. It could even be you. As the political machinery of our failing republic clanks and lumbers deeper into what could become its terminal crisis, you might want to consider it.

Anyone who knows anything about actual firefights involving professional soldiers will know that this isn’t what happens. (First-timers in combat, sure, but Stormtroopers are supposed to be competent.) In other words, Stormtroopers aren’t there to do anything useful. They’re there to provide the illusion of deadly peril so that the fake heroics of the protagonists look a little less unconvincing to movie audiences. 

There’s a reason for this kind of absurdity, of course. Popular entertainment in Western industrial nations today is as thickly larded with moral posturing of this sort as anything Victorian parents inflicted on their children. In most popular genres, the basic premise is that the Good People always win, and the Bad People always lose.

That colossus of the modern imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, has some responsibility for all this. In his programmatic essay “On Fairy-Stories”, he discussed one of the central plot schemes of fairy tales, which he called “eucatastrophe”: in plainer English, a sudden improbable turn for the better that saves the day when all is lost. As you’d expect from a devout conservative Christian like Tolkien, this theme is ultimately religious in nature — he described the resurrection of Jesus as the ultimate eucatastrophe — and it provided the frame for his two gargantuan fairy tales, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

To give him due credit, Tolkien went out of his way to make his eucatastrophes as plausible as he could. Most of the ninth-rate Tolkien imitators whose fetid output bathes the brains of today’s mass-media consumers stopped worrying about such petty concerns a long time ago. It doesn’t matter how much stronger and smarter and better armed the Bad People are; they have to lose because they’re the Bad People. Nor does it matter how idiotic the plan the Good People decide on, the Bad People are required to make the mistakes that will enable it to succeed. When the chips are down, you know that Harry Potter will always manage to drop the One Ring from his X-wing into the cooling port of Mount Doom.

This sort of silliness makes for dreary storytelling, but I’m convinced that it can also cause serious cognitive disabilities. Children who are raised on a steady diet of this kind of schlock are apt to end up thinking that this is how the world works. If they get out into the real world and bloody their noses a few times, they generally learn better, but if they live in a society that doesn’t let them fail, they may well reach adulthood without ever encountering that salutary lesson. Instead, they are seduced by Stormtrooper Syndrome: the conviction that no matter what, you’ll inevitably win because you think you’re morally superior to your enemies.

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There’s no shortage of examples of Stormtrooper Syndrome these days, but I’m going to focus on the most important of the lot, the one that bids fair to transform the world’s political and economic landscape in the years immediately ahead. Yes, we need to talk about Ukraine. Now, this emphatically does not mean that we need to talk about who gets to claim the roles of Good People and Bad People. The unwelcome truth is that the outcome of this war does not depend on which side is morally better than the other. In the real world, in terms of military victory and defeat, who’s right and who’s wrong don’t matter once the cannon start to roar. 

The roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war go back a very long time, but for present purposes we can begin in 2014 — when a coup overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian government and replaced it with a pro-Nato one. With the new regime in place, and following the Russian military incursion into eastern Ukraine, the US and its allies began funding a build-up that gave Ukraine the second-largest army in Europe. That army was armed and trained with an eye toward a massive shift in military affairs that was then underway.

In 2006, the Israelis launched one of their periodic incursions into Lebanon. To the surprise of many, the Hezbollah militia dealt the Israelis a bloody nose and forced them to withdraw with their main goals unachieved. The Israelis, like every other modern army at that time, used the tactics that had been pioneered by the Wehrmacht in 1939 and 1940, and perfected by Soviet and US militaries in the years immediately following: massive assaults by tanks and mobile infantry supported by air superiority, driving deep into enemy territory to get behind the defenders’ lines. 

What Hezbollah demonstrated is that those tactics had passed their sell-by date. Having built a network of underground shelters and urban strongholds, they lay low while the Israeli vanguard moved past, then popped up and started clobbering Israeli units with sudden ambushes using state-of-the-art weapons. A decade later, the Ukrainian military imitated these tactics, building a massive network of defensive works just west of the Russian-held areas of the Donbas.

These defences were useful when the full-scale invasion came, denying Russia a swift victory and tying them into a gruelling stalemate. As strategies go, this was fairly good, but it had two serious weak points. The first was that it needed to be twinned with an economic sanctions package from the West that would succeed in breaking Russia’s domestic economy and forcing them to withdraw. The second was that it assumed the Russians would stick to pre-2006 military doctrine no matter how badly things went. That’s where Stormtrooper Syndrome first showed up. The decision-makers in Washington, Brussels, and Kyiv had convinced themselves that those weak points didn’t matter because the Ukrainians were the Good People and the Russians were the Bad People.

Then, last February, war broke out. At first, events seemed to play into the West’s hands. The Russians launched a classic Blitzkrieg operation, driving deep into Ukrainian territory, only to find that the Ukrainians fell back on prepared defences and urban strongholds. Some Russian units suffered embarrassing defeats; others found themselves overextended in hostile territory and retreated. Meanwhile, the US and the EU slapped sanctions on the Russian economy. 

But that’s when the plan ran straight off the rails. The first difficulty was that most of the world’s nations didn’t cooperate with the sanctions. Some, such as Iran and China, that are hostile to the US saw the situation as an opportunity to extend a middle finger to their enemies. Others, such as India and Brazil that are non-aligned powers, saw the situation as a chance to demonstrate their independence. Still other nations wanted Russian oil and grain and weren’t willing to forgo them, so they acted in accordance with their interests rather than ours.

Yet there was another difficulty with the sanctions’ efficacy. Do you remember all those big corporations that loudly announced that they were leaving the Russian market? They couldn’t take their outlets and infrastructure with them, and so the Russians simply rebranded those and kept going. A soft-drink bottling company partially owned by Coca-Cola, for example, now produces something called Dobry-Cola in Russia. It tastes very similar to Coca-Cola, and it’s in a very slightly different red can. The crucial point is that the profits from sales of Dobry-Cola and similar products and services aren’t flowing out to stockholders in the US, they’re staying in Russia, where they’ve given a timely boost to the Russian economy. This presumably wasn’t what US and Nato elites had in mind.

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But the worst news for Nato came from the battlefields. What happened there has an odd personal dimension for me. Some years ago I wrote an essay, “Asymmetric tactical shock: a first reconnaissance”, about what happens when an army becomes too dependent on complex technologies and its enemies figure out how to monkey-wrench those. The example I used came from the end of the Bronze Age, but the lesson applies more broadly: the monkey-wrenched army faces total disaster unless it does something most people these days can’t even conceive of doing. My essay circulated quietly among people interested in such things, and I have no reason to think that anybody in the Russian General Staff pays the least attention to obscure American fringe intellectuals like me. Yet the fact remains that when the Ukrainians monkey-wrenched the Russian version of Blitzkrieg, the Russians did exactly what I suggested an army in that situation should do: they fell back on an older form of warfare that wasn’t vulnerable to the monkey-wrenching tactics.

This is why the Russians abandoned their deep thrusts into Ukrainian territory, retreated from vulnerable areas around Kharkiv and Kherson, launched a mass-mobilisation of troops and a major expansion of their already large munitions industry, and got to work building entrenched defensive lines to guard the territory they had seized. Meanwhile, the Russian government strengthened ties with Iran and North Korea — two nations that have large munitions industries autonomous from Western technology and capital. 

That is to say, since the new Ukrainian tactics made it impossible for the Russians to refight the Second World War, the Russians switched to First World War tactics. The defensive lines and urban strongholds on which the Ukrainians relied to defeat Russian tank columns didn’t provide anything like the same defence against massed Russian artillery bombardment. While the Russian Army was retooling for the new (or rather old) mode of war, mercenary units — Wagner PMC most famously, but there were others — took over the brunt of the fighting, tested out First World War tactics against entrenched Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, and won.

This put Ukraine and its Nato backers into a very difficult position. In First World War-style combat, the winner is the side with the largest munitions industry and the biggest pool of recruits to draw on. Russia has a huge advantage on both counts. First, Nato countries no longer have a political consensus supporting mass military conscription, while Russia does. Second, while the US and its allies dismantled most of their munitions factories at the end of the Cold War, Russia did not, and it also has those good friends in Tehran and Pyongyang. All these give the Russians an edge the Nato nations can’t match in the near term.

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This wasn’t a message that Nato was willing to hear. To a very real extent, it was a message they weren’t capable of hearing. It’s been 70 years — since the end of the Korean War — since the United States and its allies last fought a land war against a major power. The entire Nato officer corps got its training and experience in an era when they had overwhelming superiority over their enemies, and they have no idea how to fight without it. (Even then — Afghanistan comes to mind — they aren’t too good at winning.) That’s when Stormtrooper Syndrome really came into play, because it never occurred to Nato that Ukraine could lose — defined as they were as the war’s Good People.

And so the elites in Washington, Brussels, and Kyiv convinced themselves that the Russians couldn’t possibly ramp up their munitions industry to a pitch that would permit them to carry on trench warfare for years at a time. (Remember all those confident reports that insisted the Russians were about to run out of shells and rockets?) They told themselves that the Russians were using mercenaries because their army was too demoralised and brittle to stand up to the rigours of combat. They drew up plans for a grand Ukrainian offensive to turn the tide of the war, and funnelled more arms to Ukraine..

The counteroffensive began on 4 June. Two months on, it is clear that it has failed. A successful assault against fortified positions in modern war requires a three-to-one advantage in soldiers on that region of the battlefield, a large advantage in artillery, and air superiority. Ukraine has none of these things, and somehow or other no eucatastrophe showed up to save the day. 

The Russo-Ukraine war isn’t over yet, and the fortunes of war may yet favour the Ukrainian side — though this looks very improbable just now. Meanwhile, history is not waiting around for the details to be settled. Towards the end of last month, the heads of state of 40 African nations gathered in St. Petersburg to sign agreements giving Russia a leading position in the economic and military affairs of the world’s second largest continent, while Russia’s defence minister was in North Korea negotiating further arms deals. It seems the Russians know better than to wait for miracles to save them from the consequences of their own actions.

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None of this is to say that the mess in Ukraine is the only way that Stormtrooper Syndrome has shaped recent history; it’s just the most obvious example right now. It was because of Stormtrooper Syndrome, for instance, that so many people suffered nervous breakdowns when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, their reaction amounting to: “He’s a Bad Person, he’s not supposed to win!”. Afterwards, the same factor also kept them from wondering why so many disillusioned voters were willing to settle for Trump, of all people, as an alternative. Nor, to be fair, is Stormtrooper Syndrome in short supply on the Right, where shrill moral dualism is far more common than thoughtful discussion about how to deal constructively with the cascading crises overwhelming America today.

Really, it’s hard to name anything in contemporary Western life that hasn’t been twisted bizarrely out of shape by the efforts of our privileged classes to pretend to be the heroes of their own Star Wars sequels. Yet the lesson being whispered by the winds from Ukraine is that nobody and nothing else is required to play along. That lesson may end up costing a great many people bitterly in the not too distant future.

Critical theory was born in Germany between the two world wars. It was founded by a clique of Marxist academics in Frankfurt who were horrified that the grand march toward the communist utopia predicted by Marx wasn’t happening on schedule. On the one hand, communism in the Soviet Union had devolved into a totalitarian nightmare with a reliable habit of mass murder. On the other, the working people of one of the most educated and cultured nations of Europe, who according to Marxist theory should have been flocking to the banners of proletarian revolution, were instead rallying around a weird little man with a toothbrush moustache and an unhealthy obsession with an archaic, bloodthirsty mysticism of race and soil.

Obviously, something had gone wrong, not just with Marxism but with the entire enterprise of Western rationality summed up in the phrase “the Enlightenment”. Consider what that phrase means for a moment. One of the basic credos of the cultural mainstream in Western countries is the rather odd notion that, at a certain point not that many centuries ago, for the very first time in human history, intellectuals in Western Europe saw the universe as it actually is. Before then, despite fumbling attempts in the right direction by ancient Greek philosophers, humanity was hopelessly mired in superstitious ignorance; afterwards, Western intellectuals led a rapid ascent towards true knowledge of humanity and the universe. People still speak of that period using such far-from-neutral terms as “the Age of Reason” and “the Enlightenment”; in Germany, the term is die Aufklärung, literally “the Clearing-Off”.

It is to the credit of the founders of critical theory — Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse — that they didn’t just go on believing in the secular mythology of progress. They grasped that the Enlightenment had failed to accomplish what everyone expected of it, and they set out to understand what had gone wrong. Since they were Marxists, of course, they still framed things in terms of the march toward a utopian society of the future, and critical theory thus set out not just to understand society but to change it. It sought, in Horkheimer’s words, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” — but it tried to do that by understanding the entire panoply of reasons why those circumstances happen to exist at a given place and time.

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This is what makes critical theory useful. Treat a belief as though it’s timeless and context-free and all you can do is accept or reject it; recognise that every belief has a history and a cultural context and you can understand it instead. Critical theory attempts to do this with the core beliefs of Western society. The first major book to come out of the movement, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, sought to make sense of the way that Enlightenment rationalism had led to the twin tyrannies of Stalin and Hitler. It’s still worth reading today, even though much of what passes for critical theory now is little more than empty propaganda.

In the opening lines of his Guide to Kulchur, Ezra Pound wrote: “In attacking a doctrine, a doxy, or a form of stupidity, it might be remembered that one isn’t of necessity attacking the man, or say ‘founder,’ to whom the doctrine is attributed or on whom is it blamed.” Similarly today, in circles unsympathetic to what critical theory has become, it is common to assail Adorno, Benjamin, et al., because of the current antics of their followers. This is unfair. The founders of critical theory did in fact make a massive mistake, but it’s one that pretty much everyone made in those days and too many people still make today.

That mistake? The failure to recognise that the academic circles to which Adorno and Benjamin belonged — and to which their followers by and large belong today — form a privileged class with an interest in furthering its own influence and grabbing more than its share of wealth and privilege. Critical theory by and large avoids talking about this. A genuine critical race theory would interrogate the discourses concerning race used by Left-wing activists in today’s society, and show how those discourses are used as instruments of hegemony by those activists and the people who pay them. A genuine critical theory would also interrogate the implications of “liberating human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and talk about how that rhetoric of liberation is used to replace one set of enslaving circumstances with another. You can read a whole lot of critical theory and never catch the least whisper of this sort of thinking.

This is what makes Jason Josephson-Storm’s work so fascinating. He tiptoes very close to the edge of that forbidden territory, by suggesting that one of the most fundamental assumptions of modern thought — the notion that we modern people are disenchanted, freed from the superstitious burdens of the past and venturing heroically forward into a new world free of myth and magic — is simply another myth. He has applied the tools of critical theory to one of the basic assumptions underlying critical theory, and showed that belief in disenchantment is just another narrative employed to advantage certain people over others. It is an impressive project.

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One of Josephson-Storm’s greatest influences, a scholar he frequently cites, did much the same thing on a bigger scale and to an even more vulnerable set of narratives. This is Bruno Latour, one of the first scholars to study “the social construction of scientific facts”. What does this mean? Well, it’s part of the mythology of science that claims that scientists in their research are simply following where nature leads. In practice, it’s very nearly the other way around.

Consider the steps you’d need to take if you wanted to do some research into any branch of science: reading the relevant literature, crafting a hypothesis, considering the available equipment, designing an experiment, and, of course, finding funding for it. It’s common for such steps to be dismissed as mere details, but in fact they are more significant than that.

For instance, the literature you’ve read is the product of peer review and the evolution of scientific opinion, which has at least as much to do with academic politics as with nature. The hypothesis is a product of your education, and also of current fashions in academia (anyone who thinks that scientists are immune to the blandishments of intellectual fashion has never met a scientist). The equipment available depends on who has invested money into developing certain kinds of experimental gear, and also on what gear is popular and readily available. The experimental design is just as subject to fashion, and it also has to appeal to funding sources. And finally, the decision to grant or withhold funding for an experiment depends entirely on the behaviour of human beings.

On top of this, after conducting an experiment, you’d have to interpret the results, write a paper, get a prestigious co-author or two to sign on, submit it to a journal, wait nervously while it goes through the peer-review process, and revise the paper at least once in response to comments by the anonymous peer reviewers. Then, once the paper is finally published, other researchers will respond to it and potentially adapt their own research projects in light of what you’ve found. All these, again, are social processes.

The end result of such a research project — a half sentence and footnote, say, in some future textbook — is thus almost entirely a product of social interactions among human beings. At the centre of those interactions, the flake of grit at the heart of the pearl, is the fact that you asked nature a specific question and got an equally specific answer. That process of question and answer is the thing that makes science as effective a way of making sense of the world as it is, but it does not erase the effect of social processes on the result — it just means that the result has to have some contact somewhere with nature.

Now take that and multiply it by four centuries or so of scientific effort, and the result is a vast social process built atop a relatively narrow foundation of natural facts. Those facts are carefully selected, curated, and assembled by the social process into a model of the world. Ask different questions, use different equipment, give the results a different theoretical spin, and you can quite easily end up with a completely different model of the world. That’s not something most people want to talk about in the scientific community, because it would weaken their claims to influence, wealth and privilege. That’s why so many scientists were shouting “Believe the science!” at the tops of their lungs not so long ago: maintaining the cultural prestige of science, and thus their own social status and its perks, took precedence over nearly everything else.

If you want another glimpse at just how far the social enterprise of science veers from its imagined ideal, look up the phrase “replication crisis”. One of the essential principles of science is that any scientifically valid finding has to be replicable; it can’t be some kind of fluke. These days, for an astounding number of studies in a very wide range of sciences, that’s no longer true. Very few people in the sciences want to talk about how much of this is caused by experimental and statistical fraud, both of which are pervasive in those branches of science where corporate profits are involved and far from rare even in less lucrative fields of research.

If science were really a matter of following nature wherever it leads, the emergence of the replication crisis would have caused a sudden, frantic search for the causes. We’re talking, after all, about something that challenges the act of faith at the centre of the scientific enterprise. By and large, though, that search hasn’t happened. Instead, scientists have chosen either to ignore the problem or to denounce anyone who dares to draw attention to it — typical behaviour of any elite group faced with a challenge to their legitimacy.

This is the kind of thing Bruno Latour wrote about. In We Have Never Been Modern, he proposed that most people are convinced, or at least act as though they’re convinced, that the modern world is something new and unique in human history because, unlike all others, our sciences really do tell us the objective truth about nature. These people also appear to be convinced that the same thing is true of everything else in our culture.

This is the heart of modernity — the conviction that keeps people today from making use of any of the hard-won lessons of past civilisations, or even learning from our own civilisation’s catastrophic mistakes. It is a fond, false, foolish belief — and Latour and Josephson-Storm have both shown that it can’t be justified except by the most absurd sorts of special pleading and circular logic.

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What does it mean if we give up the myth of modernity, the conviction that we — alone of all the human beings who have ever lived — see the world truly? Surprisingly enough, we don’t have to give up science. That our scientific worldview is not given by nature, but assembled out of data points drawn from nature, does not make science meaningless or false. It simply makes the work of the scientist a product of human society and culture, rather than a revelation handed down from on high.

In a very real sense, science stripped of the myth of modernity takes on the same shape as the study of history. It is absurd to think that history is simply an account of what happened; “what happened” in a month in any small town would fill entire libraries. The historian’s task is to craft a narrative which illuminates some part of the past, using actual incidents as building blocks. A scientist without modernist pretensions, similarly, crafts a narrative that illuminates some part of nature, using replicable experimental results as building blocks. Theories along these lines are useful rather than true; they start by accepting the reality that the human mind is not complex enough to understand the infinite sweep of the cosmos, and then goes on to say, “but as far as we are capable of making sense of things, this story seems to reflect what happens”.

This sort of thinking is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow for those who have founded their own identities on the notion that humanity is or should be the conqueror of nature. Here again, though, the failure of those notions to create a world fit for human habitation is increasingly clear to many of us. And the sooner we accept that the stories told by today’s industrial societies are just another set of mythologies, and that the technologies they’ve created to manipulate the world are just another set of clever gimmicks — why, the sooner we can get to work discarding those aspects of modernity that have failed abjectly, and picking up those older habits and stories and technologies that are better suited to the world we find ourselves facing. Only then, can we begin to do something less inept and foredoomed with our time on Earth.

Connoisseurs of werewolf lore will doubtless remember that Stumpf, also known as Peter Stubbe, was tortured on the rack until he confessed to murder, cannibalism, rape, incest, bestiality, and pretty much every other crime the local inquisitors could think of. He was then broken on the wheel, beheaded, and burnt at the stake in Cologne on 31 October 1589. His daughter and a woman named Katharina Trump, both of whom were accused of having affairs with him, were also burnt at the same time. The latter, Pittle and Hopkins note, may well have been the same Katharina Trump who features in the family tree of Donald Trump. If this is true — and again, this is a speculative hypothesis — Donald Trump is descended from a werewolf’s love child.

By now, those readers who don’t happen to be connoisseurs of werewolf lore may be scratching their heads, so let me explain. Yes, there were werewolf trials in 16th-century Europe — quite a few of them, in fact, and more in the centuries immediately before and after. They were conducted in the same dubious fashion as the witch trials of those same years: that is to say, once an accusation was made, the accused was presumed to be guilty, tortured savagely in order to extract a confession, and then put to death, preferably after he’d implicated several other people who could then be subjected to the same treatment. It was an ugly chapter of history, though there are plenty of equivalents before and since.

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Follow the track of the werewolf back into the mists of Eurasian antiquity and it’s possible to trace the outlines of an archaic set of traditions of the Indo-European peoples back when they were cattle-herding tribes on the plains of what are now Ukraine and southern Russia. In those days, boys who reached puberty left their home villages to dwell in the forest under the tutelage of elder shamans. For a period of several years, they spent the summers living like wild things, eating raw meat, sleeping in the open, and raiding neighbouring tribes to steal cattle. The winters, in turn, were devoted to harsh austerities and rituals of initiation.

The most important of those rituals centred on the mythic theme of casting off the participants’ identity as boys and becoming wolves: fierce, predatory, loyal, tough, attuned to the wilderness. Then, once their period in the forest was finished, they cast off their wolf-identity through another ritual process, became men, and returned to their villages to take up their social roles as husbands, fathers, providers, and warriors. For thousands of years, that was how the Indo-European tribes handled the turbulent transition from boyhood to manhood, and mythic echoes of these same customs remained in Indo-European societies from India to Ireland long after the original tradition had faded out.

Did these boys in the wilderness actually turn into wolves? Not in any biological sense, surely. That said, human consciousness is capable of strange things. Certain bands of Norse warriors in historic times were called Úlfhednar, “wolf coat wearers”; like their close equivalents the Berserkir, “bear shirt wearers”, they could enter into a battle-frenzy in which they behaved like wild beasts, possessing superhuman strength, insensibility to pain, and the ability to walk over burning coals unscathed. (A priestly clan among the Faliscans, an Italian people absorbed by the Romans, had the same firewalking reputation; they were called hirpi Sorani, “wolves of the god Soranus”.) Certain kinds of out-of-body experience, in which the participants experience themselves as taking on animal form, also seem to be caught up in the same tradition. It’s a heady mix of practices, more than enough to make its initiates fierce and effective warriors in an age of hand-to-hand combat.

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The initiation rituals referenced above aren’t simply a matter of speculation. Archaeologists have dug up at least one site where they were performed: an isolated structure at Krasnosamarskoe in Russia, dating from around 1800BC, where dogs were ceremonially sacrificed and eaten in the midst of other ritual activities. Dogs are considered good eating in many cultures, but in societies descended from the Indo-European tribes, the thought of eating dog meat gets an immediate reaction of repulsion. That’s the last dim echo of an archaic taboo that once restricted eating the flesh of canids to the wolf-boys in the forests. The dog sacrifices took place during the winter ritual season — you can tell such things these days from skeletal remains. Combine that evidence with input from myth, legend, and folk tradition and you can glimpse a little of the ancient wolf-magic as it once existed.

That, to sum up decades of scholarly research, is what lies behind the legendary image of the werewolf in European folklore. After the great Indo-European migrations and conquests, the bands of boys-become-wolves in the forests gradually changed into permanent warbands under the command of local chieftains, and then morphed further into the feudal system of medieval Europe, with each young generation of warriors absorbed into the retinues of barons and kings, and so no longer a threat to the status quo. The old traditions clung to shadowy life here and there, mostly in isolated areas, and gave rise to bands of outlaws: in several old Indo-European languages, as a result, the word for “wolf” is also the word for “outlaw”. (In Old Norse, that word is vargr, which is where Tolkien got the word “warg”.)

As medieval European society settled down after the era of mass migrations, and Christianity became more centralised and dogmatic, surviving traces of the old shamanistic traditions got squeezed out a little at a time. Whether or not Peter Stumpf was involved in one of the last flickering traces of the old wolf-cult will probably never be known, but it is at least possible. It’s also possible that a few scraps of the old tradition still survive, either in Europe or in some corners of the European diaspora.

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Whether any remnant of the archaic wolf-cult endured, however, it’s safe to say that its archetype certainly did, and it remains a living and potent force today. Imagine for a moment how the reputation of the ancient wolf-initiates changed as the tribal cultures of Indo-European antiquity gave way to the settled societies of medieval Europe, as warriors were expected to become the loyal servants of feudal magnates and the new ideology of Christianity put its own spin on the legacies of the distant past. Here and there, as in the legends of Robin Hood, outlaws seized the popular imagination as an emblem of resistance to the status quo, but far more often the fierce, lonely men who had been driven out of polite society and dwelt in deep forests and mountainous regions were feared and despised by the respectable people of their time. It was proverbial in medieval England that outlaws “had a wolf’s head” — that is to say, like the wolf that was their ancient emblem, they could be killed out of hand by anyone tough enough for the job, and their deaths would be met with general rejoicing.

This, of course, is where we circle back to Donald Trump. Well before a jury found him liable for sexual abuse this week, the man had made an enduring mark on American culture by violating all the rules that polite society had erected to maintain the grip of today’s privileged classes on the levers of political and social power. It’s a piece of synchronicity that Carl Jung would have appreciated that Trump may be descended from a famous werewolf, because he’s the outlaw of today’s American politics, sporting a wolf’s head in the best medieval style, refusing to play by the rules that keep power in the hands of a failed managerial aristocracy that can’t lead but won’t get out of the way. That’s why he fields the same kind of blind hatred that Peter Stumpf got from the German authorities of his time. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are plenty of people who would gladly see Donald Trump broken on the wheel, beheaded, and burnt at the stake if they thought they could get away with it.

There’s more to the archetypal pattern than this, however. Of all the many people who rallied around Trump’s banner in 2015 and haven’t abandoned it yet, what’s the group that’s made the biggest mark? It’s primarily young men, the same group that would be out there in the forests learning how to be wolves if we still followed the folkways of Indo-European antiquity.

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This is a bleak and bitter time to be a young man in America. Outside the narrowing circles of the well-to-do, boys and girls alike face a world in which every option pushed on them by their society — employment, college education, you name it — is a mug’s game rigged to make others rich at their expense. Boys, however, face the additional burden that maleness has been pathologised in our schools, so that boys are systematically punished and penalised for the crime of not acting more like girls. Those boys who can’t handle the demands for passivity and obedience can count on being drugged into submission — if they aren’t simply arrested and put into what has been usefully labelled the school-to-prison pipeline.

The military used to be the great escape hatch for young men who couldn’t find a place in civil society, but that door’s been slammed shut in recent years as Pentagon bureaucrats push an increasingly strident woke ideology on the rank and file, and the benefits of military service have become increasingly limited when they’re not wholly imaginary. The salary you get as an enlisted man these days won’t keep your family fed and housed, and the Veterans Administration medical system has turned into a sick joke. These days a rapidly growing fraction of the young men from working-class backgrounds who used to keep the US military well-supplied with recruits are walking away from military service, and they’re doing it with the encouragement of their elders; many of these latter, after all, are military vets who know exactly what the score is.

Rejected by the cultural mainstream, and as often as not condemned by woke ideologues as personally guilty of every wrong ever inflicted by their ancestors, a great many young men have been driven to the fringes of our society. The folk knowledge, the traditional customs and the largely intact ecosystems that would enable them to live in the forest, gnawing on raw meat and carrying out cattle raids on neighbouring tribes? Those no longer exist, so the young men in question are finding refuges in the wilderness of the internet and cobbling together traditions of their own. That the raw material for those traditions comes from the things our mainstream society rejects is hardly a surprise.

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Yes, I know that there have been various attempts to create models of male initiation in our time. All of the ones I’m familiar with — well, let’s just say that you can tell easily that they were invented by middle-class suburbanites. They provide a weak simulacrum of the tribal initiations of the past, lacking the terrifying intensity of those initiations’ head-on confrontation with the realities of death, violence, fear, and pain. It was because the military provided that intensity through combat that it so often served as an initiatory experience. Lacking that, it’s no surprise that so many young men make a beeline for gangs, or find some other socially unacceptable way to define themselves in opposition to a society that so obviously hates and fears them.

Exactly how all this will play out is impossible to say. One of the core insights of depth psychology, though, is that you can’t get rid of something you don’t like by repressing it. All you’ll get by piling on the punishment is a more serious blowback. That’s a lesson both sides in today’s culture wars could stand to learn. Another such lesson is the reminder that the thing you hate most in other people is by and large the thing you refuse to see in yourself.

The first round of blowback from this repression of American masculinity helped to put Donald Trump in the White House. The second round could quite possibly repeat that, or it may lead in directions even more unpalatable to today’s status quo. Nor will a silver bullet solve the problem. (Why silver? The Moon’s metal, emblematic of feminine energy, represents the longing for marriage, family, and a settled life that once transformed the wolf into a man.) Look instead into the silvered mirror. The wolf’s face that stares back at you may be your own.

There’s nothing new about this sort of arrangement. In its day, the British Empire controlled an even larger share of the planet’s wealth, and the Spanish Empire played a comparable role further back. Before then, there were other empires, though limits to transport technologies meant that their reach wasn’t as large. Nor, by the way, was any of this an invention of people with light-coloured skin. Mighty empires flourished in Asia and Africa when the peoples of Europe lived in thatched-roofed mud huts. Empires rise whenever a nation becomes powerful enough to dominate other nations and drain them of wealth. They’ve thrived as far back as records go and they’ll doubtless thrive for as long as human civilisations exist.

America’s empire came into being in the wake of the collapse of the British Empire, during the fratricidal European wars of the early 20th century. Throughout those bitter years, the role of global hegemon was up for grabs, and by 1930 or so it was pretty clear that Germany, the Soviet Union or the US would end up taking the prize. In the usual way, two contenders joined forces to squeeze out the third, and then the victors went at each other, carving out competing spheres of influence until one collapsed. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the US emerged as the last empire standing.

Francis Fukuyama insisted in a 1989 essay that having won the top slot, the US was destined to stay there forever. He was, of course, wrong, but then he was a Hegelian and couldn’t help it. (If a follower of Hegel tells you the sky is blue, go look.) The ascendancy of one empire guarantees that other aspirants for the same status will begin sharpening their knives. They’ll get to use them, too, because empires invariably wreck themselves: over time, the economic and social consequences of empire destroy the conditions that make empire possible. That can happen quickly or slowly, depending on the mechanism that each empire uses to extract wealth from its subject nations.

The mechanism the US used for this latter purpose was ingenious but even more short-term than most. In simple terms, the US imposed a series of arrangements on most other nations that guaranteed the lion’s share of international trade would use US dollars as the medium of exchange, and saw to it that an ever-expanding share of world economic activity required international trade. (That’s what all that gabble about “globalisation” meant in practice.) This allowed the US government to manufacture dollars out of thin air by way of gargantuan budget deficits, so that US interests could use those dollars to buy up vast amounts of the world’s wealth. Since the excess dollars got scooped up by overseas central banks and business firms, which needed them for their own foreign trade, inflation stayed under control while the wealthy classes in the US profited mightily.

The problem with this scheme is the same difficulty faced by all Ponzi schemes, which is that, sooner or later, you run out of suckers to draw in. This happened not long after the turn of the millennium, and along with other factors — notably the peaking of global conventional petroleum production — it led to the financial crisis of 2008-2010. Since 2010 the US has been lurching from one crisis to another. This is not accidental. The wealth pump that kept the US at the top of the global pyramid has been sputtering as a growing number of nations have found ways to keep a larger share of their own wealth by expanding their domestic markets and raising the kind of trade barriers the US used before 1945 to build its own economy. The one question left is how soon the pump will start to fail altogether.

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its allies responded not with military force but with punitive economic sanctions, which were expected to cripple the Russian economy and force Russia to its knees. Apparently, nobody in Washington considered the possibility that other nations with an interest in undercutting the US empire might have something to say about that. Of course, that’s what happened. China, which has the largest economy on Earth in purchasing-power terms, extended a middle finger in the direction of Washington and upped its imports of Russian oil, gas, grain and other products. So did India, currently the third-largest economy on Earth in the same terms; as did more than 100 other countries.

Then there’s Iran, which most Americans are impressively stupid about. Iran is the 17th largest nation in the world, more than twice the size of Texas and even more richly stocked with oil and natural gas. It’s also a booming industrial power. It has a thriving automobile industry, for example, and builds and launches its own orbital satellites. It’s been dealing with severe US sanctions since not long after the Shah fell in 1978, so it’s a safe bet that the Iranian government and industrial sector know every imaginable trick for getting around those sanctions.

Right after the start of the Ukraine war, Russia and Iran suddenly started inking trade deals to Iran’s great benefit. Clearly, one part of the quid pro quo was that the Iranians passed on their hard-earned knowledge about how to dodge sanctions to an attentive audience of Russian officials. With a little help from China, India and most of the rest of humanity, the total failure of the sanctions followed in short order. Today, the sanctions are hurting the US and Europe, not Russia, but the US leadership has wedged itself into a position from which it can’t back down. This may go a long way towards explaining why the Russian campaign in Ukraine has been so leisurely. The Russians have no reason to hurry. They know that time is not on the side of the US.

For many decades now, the threat of being cut out of international trade by US sanctions was the big stick Washington used to threaten unruly nations that weren’t small enough for a US invasion or fragile enough for a CIA-backed regime-change operation. Over the last year, that big stick turned out to be made of balsa wood and snapped off in Joe Biden’s hand. As a result, all over the world, nations that thought they had no choice but to use dollars in their foreign trade are switching over to their own currencies, or to the currencies of rising powers. The US dollar’s day as the global medium of exchange is thus ending.

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It’s been interesting to watch economic pundits reacting to this. As you might expect, quite a few of them simply deny that it’s happening — after all, economic statistics from previous years don’t show it yet, Some others have pointed out that no other currency is ready to take on the dollar’s role; this is true, but irrelevant. When the British pound lost a similar role in the early years of the Great Depression, no other currency was ready to take on its role either. It wasn’t until 1970 or so that the US dollar finished settling into place as the currency of global trade. In the interval, international trade lurched along awkwardly using whatever currencies or commodity swaps the trading partners could settle on: that is to say, the same situation that’s taking shape around us in the free-for-all of global trade that will define the post-dollar era.

One of the interesting consequences of the shift now under way is a reversion to the mean of global wealth distribution. Until the era of European global empire, the economic heart of the world was in east and south Asia. India and China were the richest countries on the planet, and a glittering necklace of other wealthy states from Iran to Japan filled in the picture. To this day, most of the human population is found in the same part of the world. The great age of European conquest temporarily diverted much of that wealth to Europe, impoverishing Asia in the process. That condition began to break down with the collapse of European colonial empires in the decade following the Second World War, but some of the same arrangements were propped up by the US thereafter. Now those are coming apart, and Asia is rising. By next year, four of the five largest economies on the planet in terms of purchasing power parity will be Asian. The fifth is the US, and it may not be in that list for much longer.

In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

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The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

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This is not going to be a fast process. The US dollar is losing its place as the universal medium of foreign trade, but it will still be used by some countries for years to come. The unravelling of the arrangements that direct unearned wealth to the US will go a little faster, but that will still take time. The collapse of the cubicle class and the gutting of the suburbs will unfold over decades. That’s the way changes of this kind play out.

As for what people can do in response this late in the game, I refer to a post I made on The Archdruid Report in 2012 titled “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”. In that post I pointed out that the unravelling of the American economy, and the broader project of industrial civilisation, was picking up speed around us, and those who wanted to get ready for it needed to start preparing soon by cutting their expenses, getting out of debt, and picking up the skills needed to produce goods and services for people rather than the corporate machine. I’m glad to say that some people did these things, but a great many others rolled their eyes, or made earnest resolutions to do something as soon as things were more convenient, which they never were.

Over the years that followed I repeated that warning and then moved on to other themes, since there really wasn’t much point to harping on about the approaching mess when the time to act had slipped away. Those who made preparations in time will weather the approaching mess as well as anyone can. Those who didn’t? The rush is here. I’m sorry to say that whatever you try, it’s likely that there’ll be plenty of other frantic people trying to do the same thing. You might still get lucky, but it’s going to be a hard row to hoe.

Mind you, I expect some people to take a different tack. In the months before a prediction of mine comes true, I reliably field a flurry of comments insisting that I’m too rigid and dogmatic in my views about the future, that I need to be more open-minded about alternative possibilities, that wonderful futures are still in reach, and so on. I got that in 2008 just before the real estate bubble started to go bust, as I’d predicted, and I also got it in 2010 just before the price of oil peaked and started to slide, as I’d also predicted, taking the peak oil movement with it. I’ve started to field the same sort of criticism once again.

We are dancing on the brink of a long slippery slope into an unwelcome new reality. I’d encourage readers in America and its close allies to brace themselves for a couple of decades of wrenching economic, social, and political turmoil. Those elsewhere will have an easier time of it, but it’s still going to be a wild ride before the rubble stops bouncing, and new social, economic, and political arrangements get patched together out of the wreckage.

I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind’s pondering,
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;

He had his own reasons for evoking a spirit of that kind. Even so, it remains good advice today, when comparable discords press toward what promises to be an equally explosive resolution. As 2022 stumbles blindly to its close, the clarity of mind Yeats sought is a condition worth cultivating. Listen past the barnyard gabble of the mass media and the porcine gruntings of politicians rooting at the public trough, and you might just hear the events of the last year sounding the notes of an ancient melody.

Books published in the midst of today’s clatter lack the distance from current contentions to make that melody audible. This is why the book that comes first to mind as I reflect on 2022 is Yeats’s longest and strangest prose work, A Vision. There are several good editions of this work available; those that take the second (1937) edition as the basis for their text are best, since Yeats revised the work substantially after the first edition of 1925.

It used to be fashionable to ignore the massive role that occultism played in Yeats’s life and poetry. Like many other creative minds of his era — D.H. Lawrence and Hilda Doolittle among them — Yeats found in the teachings of occultism a potent source of inspiration. He and his wife Georgie were both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential occult organisation of their time, and both achieved the rank of Adeptus Exemptus, the highest level of initiation the order offered. Georgie Yeats herself was responsible for the core ideas and imagery in A Vision. Working out the details of the system and putting it in vivid prose was her husband’s task.

A connection between occultism and the creative arts may seem improbable to those who lack exposure to the occult traditions of the Western world. To those not so hindered, it is obvious. Occult training teaches the ability to recognise in the seemingly prosaic events of daily life the presence of myth and symbol. The chattering classes of Yeats’s time thought of progress, as ours think of it today, as a simple objective reality out there in the world. Occultists like the Yeatses recognised (and their equivalents today still recognise) progress as a deeply ambivalent mythic narrative that may or may not have anything to do with the facts on the ground.

A Vision is, among other things, an antidote to the mindless acceptance of that myth. Like the hexagrams of the I Ching or the cards of the tarot, it presents a sequence of archetypal patterns as a model for the events of human life. Yeats’s sequence comprises 28 stages modeled on the symbolic 28 days of the lunar cycle, from new moon to full moon and back to new. Each stage is defined by the two fundamental relationships of the human spirit; that between the will and the object of its desire, on the one hand, and that between the mind and the objects of its understanding, on the other. The first two are Will and Mask in Yeats’s terminology, the latter two Creative Mind and Body of Fate. These paired faculties move in complementary cycles around the wheel of the 28 phases, giving each phase its distinctive character.

Each human life completes the cycle of the phases between birth and death. Each human soul completes the same cycle on a broader timescale as it passes from life to life — the Yeatses, like occultists generally, accepted reincarnation as a matter of plain fact as well as a source of mythic symbols. Each political, cultural, literary, or artistic movement follows the same course, and so does each civilisation as it rises and falls.

Always there are the first inchoate fumblings, drawing toward coherence as the person, the soul, the movement, or the civilisation passes through childhood and approaches its coming of age. Always there is the struggle to achieve unity of being around some half-understood theme. Always, once the full moon is past, the struggle to bring the theme into manifestation descends into pantomime, going through the motions replaces meaningful effort, and words that once set minds and hearts aflame turn into meaningless catchphrases. The inner life trickles away into empty form, and the outworn form dissolves into a void from which some new phenomenon of opposite tendency will emerge.

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All this doubtless sounds very abstract. In Yeats’s hands, it is anything but. The book begins with an introduction, “A Packet for Ezra Pound”, a lively prose poem that weaves together the surroundings of Yeats’s last years with an account of the book’s conception and writing. There follows “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends”, which presents the entire structure of ideas in the form of a lively fiction with comic elements. (It really is a pity that Yeats never did anything else with comic prose; he was very good at it.) In the chapters that follow he outlines the structure of ideas underlying the 28 phases, and then proceeds through the phases one at a time, using as examples biographies well known in his time.

From there, another philosophical chapter puts the phases in context. Afterwards comes a chapter on the soul’s journey from death to rebirth, and then the two chapters that speak most precisely and unforgivingly to our condition in the waning days of 2022: “The Great Year of the Ancients” and “Dove or Swan”. Here he sets out the way of looking at historical change implicit in A Vision in uncompromising terms.

Today’s popular thought likes to imagine history as a straight line, either ascending from the primitive squalor of the past to some Hollywood destiny or other out there among the stars, or descending from a vanished Golden Age toward some equally cinematic doom that is always about to arrive but never quite manages the feat. Now and again someone suggests instead that history moves in cycles, and is promptly shouted down by all right-thinking people. Yeats also recognised the cyclical nature of history, but saw it as a process that moves one way and then the opposite way, driven back and forth by contending forces.

As Yeats knew well, the Greek philosopher Empedocles got there more than two millennia ahead of him, and William Blake put the same vision into his Mental Traveller and his prophetic books. Yet the insight still has power to shock. “What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Siena and Michelangelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw?” Yeats wrote. “What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish?”

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Yeats remembered that Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex was written and performed for one of the most sacred religious festivals of the Athenian year, received in much the same spirit that European audiences a century ago directed toward the Passion Play at Oberammergau. He knew just how great a reversal of religious feeling took place when Christianity and Islam in the western half of Eurasia and Buddhism in the eastern half supplanted the faiths of the two millennia preceding them. A reversal of a similar kind awaits every movement in human society, politics, and the arts, just as it awaits our civilisation in due time. The supposedly straight line of history does not just bend, it curves around and heads in the other direction.

That way of thinking allowed Yeats moments of startling prescience. He wrote, “What discords will drive Europe into that artificial unity — only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle — which is the decadence of every civilisation?” Those discords are a matter of history now, and the bundle will join them in due time. More generally, the blank incomprehension shown by today’s privileged classes as they face a world that refuses to behave according to plan comes as no surprise to readers of A Vision. Those baffled looks show up reliably in the very late phases of a civilisation, as the last sliver of moonlight gives way to a fertile darkness where something new and very different will be born.

Our position in the wheel of the phases was no mystery to Yeats, for that matter. He identified 1927 as the beginning of the 26th phase, and sketched out briefly what lay ahead. The dissolution of our collective discourse into furious bellowing of empty slogans is as typical of the last phases of the cycle as it is familiar to us today. Yet the great difficulty readers will have in approaching A Vision is precisely that it flies in the face of all our modern assumptions about history and change. Yeats was under no illusions here:

Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
A certain marvelous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

The volume was the result of a research project funded by the Club of Rome and carried out at MIT, which at the time had some of the world’s most sophisticated computers. It was translated into 30 languages and sold somewhere in excess of 30 million copies. Robert C. Townsend, author of the then-famous book Up the Organization, summed up the general reaction in a neat sentence: “If this book doesn’t blow everybody’s mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput.”

Of course there was pushback. Within days of its publication, articles denouncing its conclusions started popping up in the media. Books followed, claiming to prove that there was nothing to worry about and infinite growth really could continue forever. Two things made the pushback fascinating to students of human folly. The first is that it so systematically misstated everything that the scientists behind The Limits to Growth were saying. The second was that it succeeded in drowning out what the scientists were saying and replacing it with a caricature that was easy to dismiss.

The same caricature remains glued in place today. Listen to defenders of the conventional wisdom, and you’ll find any number of supposedly serious thinkers insisting that The Limits to Growth claimed that the world would run out of petroleum by the end of the 20th century, or that some other catastrophe would arrive long before now.

It requires no more than a casual reading of the book to discover that these statements are quite simply wrong: The Limits to Growth said no such thing. Yet the lie continues to circulate, because it makes it easier for most of us to avoid asking hard questions about the future of the industrial world.

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It is thus worth taking a moment to understand exactly what the book was trying to say. To begin with, it wasn’t offering predictions. It was exploring principles. The World3 computer model used to generate the famous graphs went through dozens of different runs, each with its own set of initial assumptions. The goal of the project was to show how the complex system we call human industrial civilisation unfolds over time. It showed that two crucial factors, both of which behave in counterintuitive ways, set the stage for disaster.

The first of these is exponential growth. Most people have encountered the old story about the Indian sage who challenged a king to a game of chess and asked for a simple gift if he won: one grain of rice for the first square on the board, two for the second, four for the third, and so on through all 64 squares, with each square getting double the number of rice grains as the one before it.

When the king lost the game, he discovered that he had offered the sage an impossible boon: the total amount of rice he owed the sage amounted to more than 210 billion tonnes, enough to cover the entire nation of India with a meter-thick layer of rice.

Most people, when they encounter this story, insist that there has to be something wrong with the maths — that there’s no way a mere 64 doublings could amount to that much rice. There’s something wrong, all right, but it’s not the maths. The human mind instinctively imagines growth in linear rather than exponential terms. There’s probably good evolutionary reason for that — in the world our tribal ancestors inhabited for all those millennia, linear growth was the rule and exponential growth the almost unheard-of exception. But it’s a lethal liability now, when technology has unleashed a whole cascade of exponential growth curves that our minds can’t even begin to grasp without a serious struggle.

That’s one of the two crucial issues that The Limits to Growth anatomised. The other is the impact of delaying factors on the ability of human societies to adjust to change. To borrow a helpful analogy from the book, one of the things that drivers have to take into account is the delay between when they see a problem in the road ahead and when the car can respond to it. That’s why good drivers slow down when visibility is low, or when they are driving in residential neighbourhoods where a child might dart out into the street without warning. The bigger the vehicle is and the faster it’s moving, the more time it takes to swerve or stop.

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Delaying factors play an equally challenging role in steering or braking modern industrial civilisation, the biggest and fastest vehicle of all. Anthropogenic climate change makes a good example. Billions of tonnes of heat-trapping greenhouse gases were dumped into the atmosphere from smokestacks and car exhausts before anyone noticed that the planet was warming and climate belts were shifting unpredictably. Most of the climate impacts of the pollution already absorbed by the atmosphere have not yet happened, since the sheer mass of atmosphere and oceans imposes a big delaying factor on them.

In other words, even if we slammed on the brakes now, skidding to a halt is going to take a while — and since it’s still politically possible to ignore the consequences, most nations are still paying lip service to the climate change crisis and continuing to burn fossil fuels as though there’s no tomorrow.

In the real world, exponential growth leads to crisis far sooner than our intuitive models lead us to expect. In the real world, delaying factors make it a lethal mistake to wait until crisis arrives before enacting countermeasures. Combine those two principles and you end up with a stark warning of impending trouble— and that’s exactly what The Limits to Growth provided.

The warning, as we all know, was not heeded in any meaningful way. Talking heads pontificated for a few years, before other topics seized the collective imagination of the chattering classes, and the environmental movement struggled on gamely for another decade or so, before selling out to moneyed interests and turning into yet another set of slick corporate enablers. Most people dismissed the environmental prophecies of the Seventies out of hand, and embraced the conviction that the danger was past because it had not yet arrived. Meanwhile every variable tracked by the MIT study did exactly what the World3 model predicted it would, setting us up for our present predicament.

The close fit between the model and the reality didn’t quite go unnoticed. In 2000, investment guru Matthew R. Simmons published a paper titled “Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?” Simmons assessed the predictions from the MIT study, compared them to nearly three decades of evidence, and pointed out that the World3 model stood up much better than the predictions of its critics: “For a work that has been derisively attacked by so many energy economists, a group whose own forecasting record has not stood the test of time very well, there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated.”

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In 2014, a study published by researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia, headed by Graham Turner, factored in another decade and a half of data and got the same results. Last year, in turn, a study by Gaya Herrington compared the World3 model with empirical data and once again found the model to be impressively accurate. Did any of these findings influence public policy, or even start to clear away the fog of misinformation that surrounds The Limits to Growth half a century after its publication? Not to any extent that matters.

Thus it’s probably wise to assume that a model that yielded accurate predictions of the last 50 years can be expected to yield equally accurate predictions of the 50 years ahead. Here again, misstatements about, so it is worth reviewing what The Limits to Growth actually said about the future:

“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

The growth trends of 1972 did in fact continue unchanged, and so here we are.

In most of the World3 runs that assumed realistic resource limits and unaltered public attitudes, crunch time arrives sometime around 2015-2030. That’s when pollution begins to cause significant global disruptions, global food supply falters, global industrial output starts a prolonged contraction, and global population peaks and begins to decline as well. If this doesn’t sound familiar, you might want to get out more often.

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It’s crucial here to avoid that bizarre astigmatism of the imagination that convinces so many people nowadays that the only possible alternative to business as usual is apocalyptic collapse. Most of the World3 runs, including the ones that match the real world most closely, don’t predict collapse. They predict decline. That’s the future The Limits to Growth traces out ahead of us: a long era of unstoppable contraction in which the exponential growth of the last two centuries or so slams into reverse, and global population and industrial output contract steadily, year after year and decade after decade, until these and other variables finally reach a level that can be sustained over the long term.

From within the conventional wisdom of our time, that long arc of decline is unthinkable. That’s why the warning of The Limits to Growth went unheeded. What too few people were willing to consider back in 1972 is that the future is under no obligation to behave in thinkable ways. Now that the limits to growth are rising up all around us, as global population peaks, industrial output falters, the point at which crisis can be averted is long past. All we can do is try to brace ourselves for a future that will leave the fake certainties of our age in tatters.

Flying cars are a great example. They’re anything but new; US aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss built and tested the first flying car in 1917. There have been many others since then, and some of them worked, after a fashion. The problem is that the engineering compromises needed to make a vehicle that’s both roadworthy and airworthy guarantee that your flying car will have lousy performance in either role. It will also cost so much that for the same price, you could buy a good car, a good plane, and put a down payment on a midsized yacht. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. They’ve been tried, they’ve failed, and only the fact that people won’t let go of the fantasy keeps engineers perpetually pushing on a door marked “Pull”.

Take any other iconic technogimmick that popular culture assigns to the future and you’ll find that it was a familiar notion a century ago. Fusion power? Jules Verne wrote about that in 1869. Replacement of human labour by robots? Introduced in 1921 by Karel Capek, the writer who invented the word “robot”. 24/7 internet connectivity for all? It’s a major plot point in E.M. Forster’s 1909 tale The Machine Stops. Space travel? Already done to death before the pulp magazines of the Twenties got to it. All of them, interestingly enough, turned out to have the same problem that doomed the flying car: sure, they’re possible — well, except for fusion power; the jury’s still out on whether that can be done on a scale smaller than a star — but the limited benefits don’t begin to cover the sky-high costs.

Yet the same old futures, grey with decades of dust, remain stuck in place in the popular imagination. Take Star Trek, the show that still defines the future for an embarrassingly large number of people. It premiered in 1966. In that year cars still had tailfins, surfer movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were all the rage, books on space travel had chapters beginning “When man lands on the Moon,” and slide rules were the standard calculating device because computers were fragile contraptions the size of warehouses. That was the year when Ronald Reagan began his political career. Star Trek isn’t our future. It’s the embalmed corpse of a future that fell over dead a long time ago.

There’s an ugly political subtext behind this act of mummification. The rebels of the 1960s and 1970s framed their challenges to the status quo in visionary terms, portraying futures dramatically different from the present. Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1978) were among the most widely read of the literature that resulted. Those challenges caused stark panic among the comfortable classes. When the backlash hit in the 1980s, the corporate establishment set out to erase the idea that the future could differ from the present in any way that mattered.

Those who lived through those years will recall how environmental action groups were bought out and neutered, the scruffy radicals who founded them abruptly replaced by slick corporate enablers. The same thing happened to every other movement that threatened the existing order of things: that’s when feminism gave up on changing society, for example, and settled instead for giving middle-class women prestige jobs within the system. Stuffing the visionary futures of the previous decades down the nearest available memory hole was part of the same process.

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That’s how we spent forty years spent parading around the crumbling mummy of a failed future under the delusion that we were doing something innovative. At this point even true believers are beginning to have doubts. Every year we get told by the lab-coated cheerleaders of progress as usual that fusion power is only twenty more years in the future, that we’ll be going back to the Moon sometime soon, and so on through a litany of broken promises. Meanwhile creeping dysfunction spreads through the world’s industrial nations, marked by the accelerating decay of the built environment and the ongoing crapification of everyday life.

The result has been a paralysis of the imagination with dismal political consequences. Have you noticed how many of the political crusades of the last forty years have been against something rather than for something? It’s all about fighting this or stopping that, not about envisioning constructive change and then setting out to make it happen. Political parties pitch themselves to their captive constituencies by insisting that the other side will make things worse, without offering a scrap of hope that things might get better. It’s no wonder that so many people cherish apocalyptic fantasies. Compared to a future that’s never any better than the wretched mess of the present, global annihilation has a certain charm.

Anyone who wants a future different from the present thus needs to start by ditching the faux-future we’ve been sold by the corporate media for the last forty years, and envisioning something genuinely different. That’s harder than it looks. Most of the supposedly innovative futures these days abandon the Star Trek future in order to chase something even more antiquated.

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Consider Klaus Schwab and his loudly ballyhooed “Great Reset.” In the future Schwab and his fellow plutocrats are promoting, you will own nothing, vast intrusive bureaucracies will monitor every detail of your life, and you will be happy. You’d better be happy, because it’s clear what will happen to you if you’re not: the future Schwab is proposing, after all, is a carbon copy of the Soviet Union under Stalin with a few technology upgrades, and the only question he hasn’t discussed in print is where he plans on putting the gulags and mass graves. That sort of future was fresh and new in the late nineteenth century. At this point it’s roughly as fresh as Lenin’s corpse, and we all know how well it worked in practice.

How about the future that begins with young enthusiastic people moving out to communes in the countryside to lay the foundations of a new society? That’s even older than the futures we’ve already discussed. Nathaniel Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter fame wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romance, which was published in 1852; it’s set on a commune in rural Massachusetts, with a cast of characters you could have found in rural northern California just after the Summer of Love. By the time Hawthorne penned that story, communes had been a familiar presence in the United States since colonial times. Nor did the communes of early nineteenth century America last longer or accomplish more than their lineal descendants in the 1920s or the 1960s.

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The moral of the story? If you’re going to borrow a future from the past, find one that worked. If you’re going to invent one from scratch, don’t repeat the failed gimmicks of futures that are already long past their pull date. Don’t make your future depend on some infinitely abundant source of energy that doesn’t happen to exist: that was the fatal flaw of the Star Trek future. Don’t hand unchecked power to a bureaucratic system under the fond illusion that it won’t be abused: that was the problem with the allegedly glorious socialist future that turned Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia into abattoirs. Don’t assume that you can run away from society and create a utopia on fifty acres in the country: it’s been tried countless times, with a success rate best counted in imaginary numbers.

The futures that matter at this point are those that don’t simply rehash the failures of the past. They don’t extrapolate from the failed present in a straight line, for that matter. A glance back at the visionary futures proposed in the 1960s and 1970s might be useful; a glance at the strange alternative histories being dreamed up on the fringes right now might also help.

The exotic visions of past and present being promoted in conspiracy culture these days show that there is still a collective imagination out there. It’s just that the people involved in creating and circulating those visions have somehow managed to convince themselves that the bumbling stooges who run our political and economic institutions are monomaniacal masterminds obsessed with conquering the world they already mismanage. If the conspiracy-minded can shake themselves out of that dysfunctional notion, they can put their imaginative gifts to better use and start conspiring to bring about more interesting futures.

It’s a challenge that all of us would be well advised to face. One great lesson that can be learned from the total failure of the Tomorrowland future is that the world ahead of us won’t look like anything churned out by today’s corporate media. Nor, it probably needs to be said, will it follow any of the various linear extrapolations being hawked about by the single-minded these days. We need to be prepared to deal with technological progress and technological unraveling, sudden jolts and slow transitions, new opportunities and hard limits — all of these, all at once. That’s the way history happens. The sooner we grasp that, and ditch the outdated futures that clutter up the collective imagination these days like so much Victorian bric-a-brac, the more likely we will be to imagine a future worth having — and then to go out there and create it.

There are times when asking questions is more useful than offering answers, and this is one of them. Set aside the decrepit futures pushed at you by the corporate media, and ask yourself what you want in a future.

The first step towards an understanding of the political dimensions of magic, then, is to remember that Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein has to do with real science. Dion Fortune, one of the 20th century’s leading theoreticians of magic (and a crackerjack practitioner), is a better source of insight here. She defined magic as the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. That definition is trickier than it looks. Whose consciousness? Whose will? Those are crucial questions, and they are political in nature.

Let’s start with a straightforward example. At some point during the last 24 hours you probably saw an advertisement for fizzy brown sugar water. That’s not what the ad called it, of course, and that distraction — think of it as a spell of invisibility — is an important part of the sorcery we’re discussing. Notice that the ad didn’t try to convince you of the alleged merits of the syrupy goo it was pushing at you, nor did it aim anything else at your rational mind.

No, the ad deployed imagery meant to set off emotional reactions that have nothing to do with the product. Here’s a group of people on a billboard. They’re young, they’re attractive, they look healthy, they’re wearing clothes that tell you they have plenty of money, they’re having a great time, and they’re all clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar water. If I tried to convince you that guzzling the contents of one of those cans will make you young, attractive, and the rest of it, you’d roll your eyes. Yet that’s the message the deep levels of your mind absorb, and your behaviour shifts in response. In magical terms, the ad cast a spell on you: that is, it caused change in your consciousness in accordance with the advertiser’s will.

This works because the rational mind is a thin veneer on the surface of a standard primate nervous system. Scratch that veneer, and you’ll find all the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown. Repeated exposure to a spell — that is, a set of emotionally charged images and words designed in accordance with the rules of magic — punches straight through the veneer and speaks to the archaic primate-mind underneath it. Unless you’re aware of the effect and adjust for it, the images affect you, and you reach for that can of fizzy brown sugar water, even though you know perfectly well that the only thing you’ll get from it is tooth decay.

This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic. The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in modern societies.

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By Suzannah Lipscomb

Not all of the magic that surrounds us, after all, focuses on goals as straightforwardly mercenary as the example just discussed. Consider the vacuous slogans brandished by the three most recent presidents of the United States: “Yes We Can”, “Make America Great Again”, “Build Back Better”. All three incantations are meant to manipulate voters using the same kind of magic applied by manufacturers of fizzy brown sugar water. They target a different set of emotions, those that work on the contrast between dreams of a better future and the increasingly miserable conditions of life in today’s America, but they use the same strategy of exploiting non-rational emotions to market an unappealing product.

Widespread as it is, this approach to magic is far from omnipotent. Sometimes it fails because the spell is badly designed: Hillary Clinton’s impressively clueless slogan “I’m With Her” flopped, for example, because she lacked the charisma to make the prospect of identifying with her appeal to the emotions of enough voters. Sometimes it fails because a competing spell is stronger: “I’m With Her” also had to contend with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which drew on much more powerful emotional drives.

Yet the mass-produced sorcery of advertising suffers from another critical weakness. No two people have exactly the same structures and content in the deep places of their mind, and their responses to magic varies unpredictably. Advertisers try to get around this by targeting a handful of simple biological drives linked to sex, safety, and status, which are common to all social primates and affect most people in something like the same way. Magic aimed at these drives, using suitably crass stimuli, tends to be successful enough to push products and sway elections, and so long as that’s all that matters, no more focused magic is needed.

But pushing products and swaying elections is not always enough. Here we need to draw a distinction between the political class of a society — the people who have a significant and privileged voice in public decisions — and the rest of the population. The political class is always a minority, and often a very small minority, however enthusiastically it may wrap itself in rhetoric of majority rule. Its hold on power depends on its ability to come up with reasonably effective responses to pressing social problems. So long as it fulfils this problem-solving function, the rest of the population shrugs and goes on with life.

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2020: the year the elites failed upwards

By Jacob Siegel

Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant minority, and the society it manages tips into decline.

Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity — and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that individuals practise on themselves, using rituals, meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems that are not being addressed.

In the United States, for example, occultism had its first golden age between the end of the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. During those years the robber barons of Wall Street treated the federal government as their wholly owned subsidiary and the majority of the population knew from hard experience that their concerns would go unheard and their needs unmet. That helped drive a widespread interest in magical workings of all kinds, ranging from rootwork spells for prosperity to magical lodge initiations aimed at higher states of consciousness. When the Great Depression and the New Deal brought that era of blatant kleptocracy to a close, interest in magic and occultism dropped off sharply.

Thereafter, magic stayed unfashionable until the late Sixties, when the managerial aristocracy that rules the United States today started treating the issues that mattered to most people as annoyances to be brushed aside. A second golden age of American magic followed promptly, partly drawn from the legacy of older American occultism and partly inspired by half-understood imports from other culture. Yes, it’s still ongoing. Magic will thrive in the United States despite the fulminations of rationalists until the managerial state either learns how to listen to the people it claims the right to lead, or has the levers of power wrenched from its hands.

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How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew B Crawford

Two significant social forces drive the rise of magic in a society ruled by a failing political class: one affecting the population as a whole, the other affecting the political class. Among the underprivileged majority, magic becomes popular because it offers a way of bettering your life when all other options have been slammed shut. Even when you can’t change anything else, after all, you can change your consciousness in accordance with your own will.

That has several advantages. First, using magic allows you to evade the effects of sorceries directed at you by institutions controlled by the political class, so that you can pursue your own goals rather than being subservient to theirs. Second, because human consciousness isn’t as tightly confined to the insides of individual skulls as currently fashionable philosophies like to claim, changes in your consciousness can affect how other people react to you, and that offers various avenues for improving your own life. Third, magic — like its more respectable twin, religion — also offers the possibility of attuning consciousness to sources of energy and meaning that transcend humanity. Discussing these sources and their implications would take us far afield from the present theme, but the higher and deeper dimensions of occult tradition are central enough to magic that it’s worth acknowledging them here.

So the underprivileged have good reasons to embrace magic. So do the overprivileged. Here the problem is simply that no political class wants to face the reality of its own decadence. Central to the self-image of every political class is the notion that its members deserve their privilege by some combination of practical competence and moral virtue. Even — or especially — when this isn’t actually the case, members of the political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good people, the capable and compassionate people, whose wealth and privilege are nothing more than they deserve. Magic, in turn, is one of the ways they prop up that illusion.

Some of the spells in question are charmingly simple. It’s standard practice, for example, for a dominant minority to pretend to fill their ostensible role as society’s problem-solvers by going through the motions of solving problems, choosing for this purpose problems that matter to no one outside the political class itself. (The antics of today’s corporate wokesters offer plenty of examples here.) Yet this sort of expedient rarely does an adequate job of shielding members of a decadent political class from an uncomfortable awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice.

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Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

American society today offers a bumper crop of examples. Consider the various forms of watered-down Buddhism, carefully stripped of the robust moral self-examination and ascetic habits that play such important roles in traditional Buddhist teaching, which are marketed so assiduously to corporate clients as non-chemical tranquillisers. Consider the cult of positive thinking so neatly eviscerated by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided, which serves the function of convincing the comfortable that all is well with the world, especially when it’s not. There are plenty of other examples, from weekend-workshop shamanism to the more lucrative ends of goddess spirituality and the New Age movement.

It’s easy to make fun of the embarrassing features of these social phenomena, but they serve a serious purpose. Most members of the political class in today’s America would be appalled if they let themselves realise just what the policies they support have inflicted on working people and the poor. Half a century ago, it bears remembering, a family of four in the United States with one working class income could afford a home, three square meals a day, and all the other necessities of life, with a little left over for luxuries now and then. Today a family of four in the United States with one working class income is probably living on the street.

That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American political class: the offshoring of America’s industries, the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages and working conditions, and the metastatic growth of government regulations that crushed small business for the benefit of huge multinational corporations, among others. That is a thought that the American political class cannot allow itself to think. Magic — the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is an essential tool for keeping that realisation at bay.

That said, there are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember what happened thereafter in each of these cases.