We are becoming accustomed to hearing doom and gloom from Peter Zeihan. The problem is that the message is getting worse as time goes by. Zeihan is the long range herald for the darker future, but others are slowly catching on.
Jordan Peterson is better known for his no-nonsense tough love approach to helping people make their lives better through clean, moral, honest living. But Jordan can get dark with the best of them, when he feels the need.
Peterson’s conversation with combat correspondent Michael Yon shines a light on the many wars being fought behind the curtain of international information war obfuscation. The enemies of an abundant and expansive human future are many, and come from the eastern totalitarian states as well as the western internationalists. For now, information is the main weapon being used against the future of your society. But things are likely to deteriorate, given the decadent leadership in the western world.
If you want to understand the varieties of doom-bringers walking the planet right now, you will have to seek out many multiple observers and sources. If you choose to ignore the forces that are lined up against your freedom and way of life — or even cheer your enemies on (!) — then the doom that gets you will be one that you do not see coming.
The most proximate bringers of genuine apocalypse to the affluent west, are those who threaten to destroy our energy and electric power infrastructures. Everything else is built upon those two things. Without them, our world crashes around us.
In Germany, the enemy is the German politicians who adopted a “Green Energy Transition” and made the country fatally vulnerable to Russian energy blackmail. And almost everywhere across the western world corrupt politicians, green entrepreneurs, air-brained true believers, and nihilist activists have pursued a green vision that progressively leads societies toward a bifurcation point of collapse and destitution.
The demographic implosion that Peter Zeihan talks about combined with a deep rot in academia/media/government, makes it easier for corrupt elites to take their countries down the garden path of oblivious self-destruction — combined with a growing vulnerability to malignant outside interests.
The best way to avoid a war is to be ready to fight and win a war. If you are only ready to lose a war, you probably will. That is the posture which modern elites are striving to force their societies into, for reasons that they themselves probably do not even know.
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He might have oversold the idea, but I think David P Goldman was on to something connecting the decline of religion to the fall of birth rates in the developed world. Urbanization makes children more expensive, but it is also associated with increasing mastery over nature, which tends to suppress religious belief. https://www.google.com/amp/s/asiatimes.com/2003/04/why-europe-chooses-extinction/%3famp_markup=1
From this point of view, The Lord of the Rings might be seen as the modern counterpart to the Genesis Fall of Man, as some have supposed the latter may be a mythical vestige of the transition from hunter gathering to agriculture. https://asiatimes.com/2004/01/tolkiens-ring-when-immortality-is-not-enough/
Though some replace the traditional deity with activism or government dependence, neither of those are usually associated with large, stable families.
Yes. The decline of religion stands alongside urbanization in reducing birthrates. The two trends reinforce each other.
There are all kinds of activism, but only pro-natalist activism is likely to promote higher birthrates. Government dependence usually works against high birthrates, but if the government treats mothers like child-bearing government property, then temporarily birthrates may be boosted. Governments are not forever, though. They are always changing and being toppled.
Tolkien reached deeply into history and mythology. But I am content to enjoy the entertainment value of his work for now.