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 that are clear-thinking people, people who understand at an early age why community and religious myths exist, and why the reality of the universe would beg to object. 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. Yet I complain that conservatives tear down what progressives have built, as a pattern of history. So perhaps instead of tearing down conservatives, as I regularly do on this blog, I should focus more on building up, or at least, taking the big picture. That’s what my book about science fiction would be about.
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.
