John Michael Greer was just introduced to me by Jim Fry For Our Progeny And Theirs by way of this article that keys on the pulp fiction of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. Thus far, Mister Greer manages the best brief discussion of the reoccurring phenomenon of societal collapse in my reading experience. If you are about to read Jared Diamond’s Collapse I would recommend this article as a primer.

Mister Greer concisely puts the lie to our civilization's collective, self-worshipping delusion of perpetually lineal progress in less than a sentence:

“…the fantasy of inevitable linear progress toward us.”

Ever since the earliest glimmerings of my childhood it has seemed preposterous to me that I was so lucky as to be born into the single human society blessed with an infinite upward climb. Mister Greer’s writing immediately took me back to the sense of cognitive rebellion that bloomed in my tormented adolescent mind in the early 1970s. Through A Glass Darkly.

Below is an example of his clear exposition.

“The interplay between the human brain and the natural environment is considerably more significant than has often been realized. For the last forty years or so, a scholarly discipline called ecopsychology has explored some of the ways that interactions with nature shape the human mind. More recently, in response to the frantic attempts of American parents to isolate their children from a galaxy of largely imaginary risks, psychologists have begun to talk about “nature deficit disorder,” the set of emotional and intellectual dysfunctions that show up reliably in children who have been deprived of the normal human experience of growing up in intimate contact with the natural world.”

Check out The Cimmerian Hypothesis at the link below.