Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will, said Dion Fortune. I have long appreciated that quote. The title of this piece is a quote from the conclusion of my last post. Nobody on substack challenges my consciousness quite like John Carter, at Postcards from Barsoom. This post of his in particular, is one of the most inspiring things I have read in a long time, and forces me to elaborate on what I mean by staying grounded, and changing consciousness.
In it he challenges us to go to the stars. The last time I actually felt inspired that way was in 2000, when Bush the Lesser in a speech tasked NASA and challenged Americans to go to Mars. The media was interested for about three days, Americans mostly shrugged, and then 9/11 happened and it has been all about war ever since.
I haven’t much been inspired by Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Richard Branson or James Cameron, though sometimes I wish Bill Gates would get the bug (pardon the multiple pun) and eject himself into space and stay there. I don’t much care for billionaire vanity projects, or the idea that space (or vaxx policy) should be about the egos of the ultra wealthy, but then they are more inspiring I suppose than the empty postmodern bureaucratic shell NASA has become, pitching out an occasional mars rover to do science that doesn’t inspire or produce much of anything worthwhile or push any actual boundaries.
This piece and John’s thinking challenges me because it challenges many of the assumptions I have long held, based on the work of John Michael Greer mainly, but also the work of Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler and Joseph Tainter; the idea that civilizations rise and fall like any living thing, that they fall in similar patterns and it is inexorable. I have held to the basic conclusions of William R. Catton’s ecological overshoot, that the population grew exactly according to available fossil energy, and when fossil energy availability declines, so will population. I have long predicted this process would be messy, and that is a gross mis-understatement. The West is showing symptoms of a death cult; postmodern social justice ideology intends on closing out the light of Western civilization, like militant jihad. Fossil energy is constrained by war and by deliberate policy, and people are dying because of it.
I find it increasingly untenable to talk about ecological overshoot, or the rise and fall of civilizations, that I might begin to be associated with globalist woke forces seeking to institute global totalitarianism and a eugenicist inspired, controlled covert population decline to “save the earth.” The earth isn’t in need of saving and certainly not for that.
Increasingly the future promised by globalists, corporatists, transhumanists, the woke and their ideological climate crisis, is a bleak, dystopic nightmare of ever increasing, forced deprivation, total surveillance, a global prison.
I would rather be optimistic. Why can’t America work with Europeans and Russia and China to figure out the technical details to mine asteroids, with a plan to terra-form Mars? Is there really anything standing in the way of that, other than the decrepit expert mal-tocracy hollowing out America and Europe?
I guess I have never assumed we couldn’t mine asteroids or terra-form mars, I think I just assumed we wouldn’t try, that increasing resource constraints would drive society slowly insane (of which we have abundant evidence already), civilization as we have known it would eventually collapse, until there isn’t much left of modern civilization but ruins 200 years from now.
I’ve always said though, we have a choice. If we are conscious of the processes at work, we can change consciousness. I for one would rather humans spend the money we spend on military, banks and government, on tech to expand available resources without ruining the planet that is our home. (Or the moon. The moon in it’s current composition is essential to a stable trip around the sun, enough to support life on earth. The moon should be off limits to mining.)
Both John and another writer on substack I admire, Mathew Crawford @ Rounding the Earth, are keen supporters of nuclear. We of course are not going to get to the stars without nuclear. Mathew wrote a satirical “Modest Proposal” about nuclear this week.
Nuclear is obviously the only way we maintain anything like the electrical modernism we have grown accustomed to, long term. Make no mistake, the transhumanist, globalist cyborgian utopia prison planet is fossil fuels and red meat for the few and bikes, processed insects and pods and intermittent “renewable” electrical credits for the many. My concern about the peaceful proliferation of nuclear has been, we are very good at leaving a mess for future generations to clean up, the boomers haven’t cleaned up a lot of the mess their parents made (superfund sites), they inspired a hell of mess they have no intention of cleaning up, and nuclear power is a lot of potential mess future generations might not be capable of cleaning up.
I’m no expert on such matters. That is not my wheelhouse, as the old saying goes, nuclear and space travel. I’m more interested in maintaining old traditions that have stood the test of millennia, that are about being comfortable here on earth while we are here. I would like to inspire young people to embrace such traditions, while I would be happy too if young people could be inspired to travel space, instead of embracing bleak woke humorless transhumanist upheaval, or fake space programs that are about a space force (more war) and devolving into rightthnk climate justice and geoengineering.
I don’t know if we are capable of mining asteroids or terra-forming mars, or even figuring out the safe tech required to peacefully proliferate nuclear. I do know we are mostly focused on anything but…and to be honest, that link paul scott posted in the comments of the last post, I’m not even sure we made it to the moon, or even past the Van Allan belts. Can we really get off this rock? Maybe we could if we actually tried. Could we go nuclear without it being a boondoggle? We can’t if we aren’t serious about it, and heretofore we have seemed all toooooo serious a people.
So I think you should stay grounded on the earth, to plant your feet and stand tall with dignity, Human, in whatever you do and whatever you think. It is ok to inspire to the stars. It is ok to believe nuclear energy is still possible.
I am not going to the stars except in my imagination, or death maybe? I am content while I am here to plant a garden, plant an orchard, ferment things, hunt, fish, build simple structures to make life more pleasant and write. I like being human right here. I think we would all benefit though, if we could believe in going to the stars again, believe in something other than grievance and doom.
This is a great perspective. I'd love to believe in nuclear power and space exploration as positive solutions. But until humans stop this incessant in-fighting, it's hard to see how we deserve the benefits. We definitely can. Just not as things stand now. It is a pretty great dream, and it's important to remember what humans are capable of; throttling our potential is a damn shame. I don't agree with John Carter's take (the colonization mentality) but that was a damn good article to read. Thanks for putting a good spin on the topic.
John Michael Greer has written about best possible outcomes. If that is not to your liking, I don't know what to say.
The future would be brighter if there were 1 billion consumption units rather than 8 billion. If that makes me a eugenicist, I accept that label. To be clear, I'm not in favour of culling the population. That's mama nature's job.