We’re entering an age of energy impoverishment. Richard Heinberg explains: “It’s hard to overstate just how serious a threat our energy crisis is to every aspect of our current way of life. But the problem is hidden from view by oil and natural gas production numbers that look and feel just fine. . . . Quite simply, we must learn to be successfully and happily poorer. For people in wealthy industrialized countries, this requires a major adjustment in thinking.”
A new stone age by 2114? Jared Diamond ruminates: “In this globalized world, it’s no longer possible for societies to collapse one by one. A collapse that we face, if there is going to be a collapse, it will be a global collapse.”
The zombies are already here — and they’re our digitally addicted children.
Education is not the answer: “It clearly is not the case that plausible increases in education quality and attainment will have a substantial impact on inequality. This will require much deeper structural changes in the economy.”
The secret history of life-hacking: The popular modern cult of self-optimization is, ironically, the descendent of Frederick Taylor’s much-despised “scientific management” of the early 20th century. But today instead of being “managed” at work by iron-fisted supervisors with stopwatches in their hands who enforce a faux gospel of maximum efficiency, we do it to ourselves, everywhere and endlessly.
The alchemy of writing: This recent Expanding Mind interview (click through or use the player below) features some great thoughts on the preternaturally inspired approach to writing from the Reverend Nemu, author of the Nemu’s End trilogy, a three-volume revision of the formerly published single-volume megabook Nemu’s End: History, Psychology, and Poetry of the Apocalypse.
Jeffrey Kripal on horror and religion (from a great 2012 Skeptiko interview titled “Dr. Jeffrey Kripal on Science Fiction as a Trojan Horse for the Paranormal”):
It’s a common misconception that religion is about the good. It’s about being peaceful and good to each other and holiness is some kind of state of equanimity and all positive things. In fact, if you look at the history of religion, if you even look at the Bible, a lot of encounters with the Divine or the sacred are incredibly terrifying, often very dangerous, and some are actually deadly. So the sacred is not just for good; the sacred is both profoundly attractive but also often terrifying and destructive.
So horror, the modern genre of horror films and horror fiction, are calling up these ancient religious impulses. I think the reason that horror is so powerful is that to get a profound religious experience, you somehow have to suppress the ego function. You somehow have to do something pretty dramatic to the person. One way to do something really dramatic to the person to get them out of themselves, as it were, is to scare the living crap out of them because that’s a form of ecstasy. It’s a mild form of ecstasy. So horror fiction often has these religious qualities to it. I think that’s why some people, lots of people actually, like to go and be terrified watching a movie or reading a book.