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February 2. Thanks Roger for digging up this 2013 blog post from The Automatic Earth, Quote of the Year. The quote is from one of the authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report, that "we are going to evolve through crisis (my italics), not through proactive change." The idea is, forget about reducing consumption to prevent resource exhaustion and climate change, because that's not what humans do. "We don't change course in order to prevent ourselves from hitting boundaries. We hit the wall face first, and only then do we pick up the pieces and take it from there." That would have been a cynical take in the 1990s, and was unusual enough in 2013 to inspire that post, but in 2025 I think it's the conventional wisdom.
Here's a Limits to Growth simulator where you can set parameters and plot some curves, all of them falling. The most interesting critique I've seen of this model, was where someone applied it to the past. I forget if it was the year 1500 or 1700, but the model made the same prediction: collapse within a few decades, which obviously didn't happen. And here we are buzzing around in SUVs in 2025, when twenty years ago every peak oiler ran the numbers and proved that was impossible.
This leads me back to psychism. It's almost like the numbers will do whatever they have to do, to back up whatever humans want to do. If reality is a dream, then maybe the momentum of modern living pulled fracking out of a hat. But one way or another there are limits, if not in matter than in mind. What appears, to matter, like the conquest of inert nature, appears to mind like cutting ourselves off from the greater reality, turning away from God. If "progress" means replacing the nonhuman world with the human world, then the limit is how deeply we can go into our own obsessions, before we're too insane to maintain the complex systems on which our progress depends.
I'm playing a lot of Spirit Island, a game where you play nature spirits fighting colonizers, and there's something called a Fear victory: Even if the island is packed with towns and cities, if you get enough fear points, you win. So I'm wondering, what would that be like for the colonizers, to have all that success on the physical level, and still fail on the psychological level? Maybe they turn against each other in adversarial politics and compulsive tribalism. Everyone is cynical and opportunistic, or worn out and depressed. The rich flee to better islands, while public services are slashed and the streets are full of muttering homeless. Yeah, I live there.
February 17. Quick note. A reader has started a Ran Prieur Rap discussion page on Lemmy Today, which is an instance of the Lemmy social network, an alternative to Reddit, and part of the Fediverse, a decentralized network of social media not controlled by big tech. Thanks Eric!
February 17. I continue to think the best metaphor for Trump is a fire. John Mulaney had a bit, during Trump's first term, comparing him to a horse in the hospital. That's no longer valid, because a horse has no idea what it's doing, and this time Trump knows exactly what he's doing. But this part is still important: "You go to brunch with people, and they're like, there shouldn't be a horse in the hospital. And it's like, we're well past that."
I imagine the world like a big building, and in one room of the building, there's a fire. It's not the only fire. There are other fires in other rooms, but this one is the scariest. And I don't want to make any specific predictions about how far it's going to burn, because I don't have a clear sense of how burnable the world is. But what I do know is, a fire doesn't hold back because of human ethics.
I'm optimistic because culture is very hard to undo, and most of the progress of the last fifty years has been on the level of culture, rather than law. You could argue that the Democrats played it perfectly: They spent all their political capital pushing the culture left, and while they obviously went too far on a tactical level, they didn't go too far on a moral level or a strategic level. There was going to be a backlash anyway, and now they've framed it so that the backlash won't go as far back.
The Dems were fully on board with runaway wealth inequality, because there's a limit to how far that can go. Capitalism only works with cheap energy and an endless supply of suckers. Orwell said the future is a boot stomping on a human face forever. But forever is a long time, and the world has now passed the peak of people willing to get their face stomped for the promise of one day getting to do the stomping. Right now there are a lot of resentful people putting on boots. But when this is over, the survivors will have a good opportunity to do things better.
February 20. The Fremen Mirage is a multi-part series of history posts, about the popular idea that having a hard life makes people more badass, and these tougher populations inevitably conquer the soft and "decadent" populations in the more civilized areas. The author patiently explains why this is not the case. And I put "decadent" in quotes because the way the word is being used lately is not about decay or corruption, but about an educated cosmopolitan culture that rankles authoritarians.
I still think society is collapsing through misguided progress, but the cause of the weakness is not urbanization or soft living. It's the abundance and seductiveness of cognitive pitfalls, easy ways of thinking that lead to bad decisions. And the deeper cause is that we've defined "progress" as replacing the non-human-made world with the human-made world. This is something Jerry Mander wrote in 1991 in In The Absence of the Sacred: that the correct biological metaphor for modern technology is not evolution but inbreeding.
February 22. Two similar quotes on metaphysics. From the novel Lanark by Alasdair Gray:
God, you see, is a word. It is the word for everything not speaking when someone says 'I think.' And by Propper's Law of Inverse Exclusion (which enables a flea in a matchbox to declare itself jailor of the universe) every single 'I think' has intimate knowledge of the surface of what it is not. But as every thinker reflects a different surface of what he isn't, and as God is our word for the whole, it follows that all agreement about God is based on misunderstanding.
And from Lore of Proserpine by Maurice Hewlett:
Who knows what his neighbor sees? Who knows what his dog? Every species of us walks secret from the others; every species of us the centre of his universe, its staple of measure, and its final cause. And if at times one is granted a peep into new heavens and a new earth, and can get no more, perhaps the best thing we win from that is the conviction that we must doubt nothing and wonder at everything.
February 24. Today, politics. While I don't want to dwell in negativity, this sure is an interesting time to be alive. I keep thinking of the Warren Zevon song, "I was in the house when the house burned down."An insane list of words flagged for removal from the National Science Foundation, including "inclusive" but not "included", "excluded" but not "exclusive", and both "female" and "women". It's funny because not long ago the right was accusing the left of trying to erase women, and apparently not doing a good enough job of it.
A long Reddit thread of heavy answers to the question, How did Trump's presidency impact your life so far? One month down...
Again from Ask Reddit, Non Americans what are your thoughts on Trump? From a comment about the debate:
Talking total nonsense, but then yanks are saying "oh he came across well". I realised then that Americans react to tone of voice and might not actually understand basic language. Like dogs.
I think Trump's tone of voice is literally magical. I remember some comedian telling this joke around 1990, where a guy kills his whole family because he heard voices telling him to do it, and it turns out it was just his practical joker buddy. "Ha ha, I really got you this time Bob, I made you kill your whole family!" It's funny because, why don't crazy people just not do what the voices say? The serious answer is, the compulsion must be happening on a deeper level than words.