Reconsidering Doom

Nothing like an historic exertion of the will of the people to reorient the world

I’ve long been a reluctant doomer. I have an optimistic spirit generally, as do many of my fellow Americans. After the credit collapse of 2008, I was sure America would hold a few bankers accountable and restructure the banking system, like justice would require. How could we not satisfy justice, that is the way of things, that is what is required, to satisfy Nemesis, yes?

Instead, Mr Hope and Change gave the banks the keys to the kingdom. Obama bailed out the biggest boats, because nothing says hope and change like leaving regular Americans to drown in foreclosure. All of the pathological incentives for the funneling of wealth up the social pyramid were left in place and even reinforced. It became clear to me then, the next economic collapse would be worse than this one, that it would dwarf 2008, an even greater transfer of wealth from the poor to middle class, to the wealthy. Then along came Covid.

That little bump and dip there just right of the middle was the credit collapse of 2008. It took a few years, but the Federal Reserve printing 10+trillion above board 2010-14 allowed the ultra wealthy to buy up the wreckage of the Great Recession. 2021 the Fed printed about 20+tril. As of April 2024, there were 2781 billionaires controlling 14.2 trillion. I guess central banks haven’t been printing as much since 2021. That is about 10tril morein billionaire holdings, than in 2007.

And then just lately, in the spirit of justice, something like a reckoning, finally, 2024. Hopefully.

I became an Admin at a website called the Doomstead Diner after 2008. That is where I first became familiar with the ideas of Spengler and Toynbee, who had taken the new biology and naturally applied it to civilization, and realized like any living thing, a civilization is born, it has a life and eventually dies. It seemed clear to me, America and Europe, the West, was in terminal decline, and nothing would arrest it’s path to a new dark age. The Doomstead Diner was all about fast collapse, apocalypse by another name (which is merely the polar opposite of utopia and just as likely.) I was more in the spirit of John Michael Greer’s catabolic collapse, a step down process, taking about 200 years.

I learned at the Doomstead Diner, contemplating doom/apocalypse all the time is not healthy. It reinforces itself, the will to find doom everywhere in everything. It is stultifying, it saps agency. Too much doom contemplated makes one dull, not very much fun to be around, and repetitive, all one can do is regurgitate the same theme over and over again, it is all going to hell. I literally saw such thinking physically deform people. I left the DD, I thought it died, then I found it again last year and quickly ascertained - a decade later they are having the exact same conversation.

After I left the DD I wandered around the internet like some itinerant thinker of antiquity, traveling anywhere there was word of a gathering wisdom. The alt-right back then before Trump, for me was a little too subversive, a little to white supremacist ackshually, literally¹, while the left even then before Trump, was already tilting into petulant purity spirals, before it went pathologically insane in 2016. John Michael Greer’s various websites, among the commentariat, was about the only place I found solace, though the doom could be pretty heavy there too² Then I found substack, and specifically the right on substack, the first place where I felt like my ideas that doom was not necessary, had a place.

Doom or Agency?

It is one thing to say, in the macro as in the micro, a living thing is born, it lives, it dies. That historically, clearly, applies to society, the mass of people come together in cities and states that make up a civilization. But people are not single celled organisms, we are thinking creatures (relatively speaking), and the civilizations we build are a collection of thinking people with agency (relatively speaking.) So it should follow, that while civilizations follow the path of a life, death for a civilization, because it is not strictly a living entity, could be a choice.

It seems clear to me, the death of the West and of America is a clear choice for a lot of people, particularly on the left. I have not called the left in America a death cult for no reason. There seems no reason to me, at all, that the choice has to be doom one way or the other: an Age of Militants and Warlords, or the left utopia that just looks like communists deciding who lives and who dies, as they grind civilization into the dirt. Of course the mainstream notion is basically status quo consumerism forever and a day, which is not going to happen either.

There is also, particularly on the right, a notion that the future is rapid tech advancements unto colonizing the solar system on the way to colonize other solar systems. Theoretically, if the essence of creativity (magic) is, imagining it, intending to fulfill what is imagined, bringing it into being doing whatever is necessary, suggests we might be able to get off this “rock”. At the very least it suggests we can transform this civilization into something healthier for people generally: physically, mentally and spiritually. A civilization does not die as much as it is transformed into something new. That can be intentional.

We call ourselves part of the West, here in America, but America is not entirely of the West, I keep repeating.

A Great Awakening?

A lot of alternative spiritual movements have trafficked in a Great Awakening, some subconscious shift would happen and humanity would suddenly find itself operating on some higher spiritual plane. Terrence McKenna used to talk about it in his lectures, the Eschaton he called it. Truly brilliant in so many ways, he also believed Dec 21, 2012, we would be thrust into this new eschaton and everything would change, the earth and all life including humans would transcend matter, and we would be conscious of it, what he called the “concresence.”³ He died before that date, cancer right there in his frontal lobe in that traditional “third eye.” Not a few of us believed, he had used too many psychedelics to peer into the abyss and it killed him prematurely, at 58 in his mental prime.

Our circumstance is awe inspiring. We are about to take the step out of matter. The planet is on a collision course with the most profound event it is possible to imagine, the freeing of organic life from the chrysalis of matter. For a billion years there has been life on this planet, but never life outside of matter, but this is obviously what’s in the cards, and we are privileged to be central to that.

After Dec 21, 2012, I would occasionally hear people mocking the notion that the world ended then, that silly Mayan Prophecy. It did kill the New Age movement, for the most part. I would casually reply, does it seem to you like things have gotten better since 2012? Or like it has all gone to shit? You know, that was about the time of the first smart phone. Speaking of being disembodied…

Then when I heard

Tree of Woe

talking about the American Eschaton in the context of doom, I had a little deja vu.

American Eschaton Part III

How will my prophesied End of America as We Know It come about? I predicted several possibilities might occur:

• Managerial Triumph;

• Managerial Collapse;

• Peaceful National Divorce;

• Civil War (Violent National Divorce); or

• Global War

He was much in the school of doom, the American Eschaton would be the collapse of the American empire, the dollar, thrusting most Americans into a poverty they have never truly known. But then it began to look like Trump might be reelected, and the Tree of Woe started changing his tune, sounding a little more like a right wing Terrence McKenna, the American Eschaton might be positive.

The Dawn of a New Civilization

The Rise of the Aenean Civilization: From Infinity to Liminality

As it reached the precipice of environmental, technological, and societal upheaval, the Faustian soul faced a reckoning. It is here that the Aenean spirit began to emerge—a soul animated not by ambition for ambition’s sake, but by the delicate knowledge that humanity stands at a threshold, a liminal space with a clear choice: to transcend or perish.

Named for Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, who fled the ruins of Troy to found a new and greater Rome, the Aenean soul embraces the duality of destruction and destiny, of depletion and rejuvenation.

The Aenean soul is defined by its understanding of humanity as poised on the brink of cosmic destiny, aware of our uniqueness in the universe, and yet haunted by the specter of extinction, the Great Filter that looms ominously in our future. It seeks to establish a new civilization that, because threatened with existential perils of collapse, is thereby driven to transcend Earth’s boundaries to ensure human survival.

Spengler called the West after the enlightenment, Faustian society. Faust you will recall made a deal with the devil, Mephistopheles, that all knowledge would be available to him, until he decided he was content with the knowledge he had, and then he would be dragged down to hell to serve for eternity. Not a few aware of Spengler have noted, the West has largely given up knowledge and the pursuit of understanding, for mere power, consumerism and rank ideology. It has seemed a bit like hell on earth the last four years, the covid psyop, the trans movement going after kids, woke cancel culture, tens of millions of military aged male migrants pouring across the border, increasing crime and cartel activity, increasing censorship, increasing hostilities over-seas threatening WWIII and nuclear exchange. Another four years of the Clinton-Obama-Biden faction in the form of Kamala would have been the End Times for the American experiment. It looked very bleak.

A Change For The Better?

Life in America has felt comparatively light, since the election. Many right and some on the left have remarked about a sense of relief, like America is back! Elon tests the largest rocket ever tested, Trump is there to watch, and it begins to feel like maybe we could get to Mars sooner rather than later. Athletes on the field and in the ring are doing the Trump dance. The Woke and Trans are in retreat, despite Dems on the Hill ready apparently to die on the Adam’s apple of the new sexual fetishist legislator from Delaware, where our current cognitively disabled president “leading us” into WWIII is from. The Biden Admin and Deep State seem to want to blow up the whole world, to save Ukraine rather than relinquish power - but a Trump Admin with a mandate to dismantle the deep state seems inevitable.

Make America Healthy Again. I am totally on board with that. It wasn’t that long ago, Americans still had a can-do spirit, which our food and health cartels have tried to extinguish, but these cartels too seem on the defensive. I’ve been calling like Cassandra all my adult life for local resilience and food security, which would mean robust local food production, which is both efficient and healthy.

There are very deep, intractable problems that remain, namely the presence of about 30mil and counting illegal immigrants, voting infrastructure still in place that can steal elections, and 35tril of debt that is really like 250tril of unfunded liabilities, an aging population and Americans not breeding sufficient to sustain the nation, and worst of all, declining resources globally, which the Tree of Woe also addressed in great detail, which I was very grateful to see.

The Aenean Challenge

I agree, while America as a nation state was birthed out of the traditions of the West, if we are to continue to thrive, if we are to continue to grow mentally and spiritually as a people, we have to transform ourselves into something new, some new civilization. I don’t know if Aenean is the name for it, but the theory is worth considering.

I’ve long assumed America, the West and really all of humanity was headed for doom, for decline and fall, for the end of modernity and globally reduced circumstances. I’m not sure I still don’t believe that, though I’m sure it isn’t necessary, at least not any descent into anything like a dark age, but rather something like a restoration.

1. The alt-right before Trump in a sense had to be a little white supremacist, as we say now, to move the Overton window, so that white people could say it is ok to be white, after a decades lecture from on high ivory tower that white people are the source of all evil. So that we can now post stuff like this:

2. Greer’s catabolic collapse sounds like doom to anyone who believes in technological progress. But the Western magical tradition, of which John Michael Greer is a part, believes generally in reincarnation, in a divine universe. From that perspective, progress is not technological necessarily, it is spiritual, across innumerable lifetimes. As to technological progress, I consider myself agnostic. I am less about going to the stars, not against it, just focused more on local, earthly health and wellness for regular folk.

3. McKenna’s theory about us transcending matter is quite similar to something described in Dion Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine, that humanity is currently grounded in matter here on Earth, but eventually we will graduate to the next plane of the cosmos, which is Mars, though we will not be doing that mechanically, but in the etheric body (if I understand that correctly), though that will not happen for many hundreds or thousands of years. So maybe McKenna was just intuiting something in the far future, misinterpreting that as happening in his lifetime, or rather what he imagined would be his natural lifetime.