Here’s something I don’t explicitly acknowledge very often, though I think I’ve mentioned it before. There is a substantial portion of humanity made up of clear-thinking people, people who understand at an early age why community and religious myths exist, and why they don’t conform to the reality of the universe. These are the people who have thought around and through those stories and learned to deal with the world as it is. They are the ones who have built our modern technological civilization. But the next stage of wisdom is to realize that since those stories *do* exist, they serve a cultural purpose that is functional and cannot be denied, and that have to be lived with.
But by substantial, I think, maybe 10%. I’ve gone into length about this before and won’t do so again right now. And perhaps I am wrong.
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But this is why it’s fascinating for me to compile so many instances of irrationality. “Humanity cannot bear very much reality” according to T.S. Eliot. (Updated here on 10Oct) If I seem to be tearing on conservatives, it’s not because of any animosity toward conservatives per se; it’s because the people who believe things that are not objectively true, that are instead downright absurd, the people who fail to live up to the ideals of whatever documents — Bible, Constitution — they claim to venerate in preference for behavior easily explainable through an understanding of primitive human nature as it evolved over millions of years in humanity’s ancestral environment, those people claim to be conservatives. And it’s examples of those beliefs and behaviors that fascinate me, not criticizing any one group of people. There’s a distinction here. Still, it’s useful to look upward once in a while, and not downward.
So let’s skip the JMG examples for today. There are many of them every day. Let’s find a piece about the big picture.
Vox, Peter Turchin, 2 Oct 2025: Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out., subtitled “An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times.”
Long piece. It begins:
Anti-establishment parties and politicians are surging in Western Europe and Japan. In the United States, the MAGA movement, led by President Donald Trump, has seized power. Political violence is rising and by several measures — violent riots, anti-government demonstrations — the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?
Our current predicament is not unprecedented. We can learn from how past societies survived through, and ended, their crisis periods.
Again a long piece, which I will defer reading closely.
But this is history, which has been long studied. There’s a Jared Diamond book on this subject: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I have it on my shelf. (Every time an unread book on my self gets mentioned like this, it moves up in my TBR stack.)
More political and JMG items tomorrow.
