From The Honest Sorcerer substack, June 15, 2025:
The collapse of the Euro-Atlantic system into fascism and beyond
Politics is an integral part — if not at the epicenter — of our predicament. The crisis faced by this civilization is multifaceted, ranging from the depletion of cheap easy-to-get resources to ecological collapse and climate change — all eventually due to overshoot. While the fact that this civilization is wholly unsustainable starts to gain traction, there is still a great deal of denial when it comes to the heartfelt acceptance of the decline which logically follows… Not to mention admitting the fact that collapse is already well-underway for decades now. But what if our elites in the West, still clinging to the idea of world dominance and limitless power, would suddenly realize that this iteration of a world spanning civilization has indeed arrived to its terminal phase? Would they risk nuclear war to destroy whatever is left of the civilized world? Or, more surprisingly perhaps, is there something completely different in the making?
Thank you for reading The Honest Sorcerer, and special thanks to those who already support my work; without you this site could not exist. If you are new here and would like to see more in depth analysis of our predicament, please subscribe for free, or perhaps consider a paid subscription. You can also support my work by virtually inviting me for a coffee, or sharing this article with a friend. Thank you in advance!There is a lot to unpack here, so let’s start with the basics by stating that politics is a function of available surplus energy and resources. No surplus, no accumulation of wealth, no power struggles or trampling on freedoms. The more surplus a society can muster, the more intricate and complicated politics becomes. This is why you won’t find political parties and parliamentary elections among hunter gatherers. Similarly, you could find no despots and autocrats there either: foragers are famously independent and prize their freedom more than their own lives. This is what anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow called in their book, The Dawn of Everything, the three primordial freedoms: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. Needless to say, none of this is given in our present day societies. (Why, imagine yourself moving into another country without being stopped, disobey your boss whenever the task is not to your liking, or start a radically new form of governance in your home town. Good luck with any of that.)
As soon as wealth became accumulable — in the form of grain, land, gold etc. — despots were quick to claim ownership of it all, and were even quicker to get rid of those who dared to disagree. In ancient and medieval societies, where the availability of human labor put a hard cap on the amount of resources which could be accumulated, social hierarchies were rather flat and more rigid than nowadays. One big boss, a few lesser bosses with soldiers, and a million peasants. Kingdoms and empires were in essence large protection rackets, where the big boss and his lackeys generously refrained from killing you and defended your village from attacks by the neighboring big boss; as long as you payed your dues.
Fast forward a millennia into modernity, and we see extreme amounts of surplus being accumulated by the wealthy few, with still plenty left for the average citizen. Even the poorest among us in western societies enjoy more comforts than the noble class did two centuries ago. However, this surplus did not only allowed for a broad middle class to appear, but nation states with parliamentary democracies, large multinational companies and international organizations with their huge apparatuses. With such an immense amount of wealth sloshing around, and with so little human labor needed to feed the entire population, a historically unprecedented number of interest groups, governmental and non-governmental organizations, agencies etc. are now vying for power, making politics more complex than ever in human history. It is safe to say that we are at an absolute pinnacle of human social complexity thanks to the industrial revolution fueled by fossil hydrocarbons.
With growth came growing inequality, though. As fossil energy got increasingly harder to get after peak US conventional oil in the 1970’s, almost all economic growth was channeled to big corporations and their shareholders, resulting in decades of stagnation for the 90% of the population. Thanks to the immense wealth generated by financialization of the economy for the top 10% and an unprecedented rise in corporate profits, social complexity kept rising — but only at the upper echelons. The system became dangerously top heavy, hallmarked by an overproduction of elites. As wealth and power kept accumulating at the top, the middle class got slowly eviscerated and the bottom 90% of society began to lose its political power. (Remember, power is always relative: it doesn’t matter if you live a more convenient life than a lord did centuries ago, if your elected officials tend to listen to those who funded their campaigns. Nothing buys you more power than money.) Large parties have thus long stopped catering for the needs of their constituents, except for campaign seasons when everything is promised, only to be forgotten a few months later. And while there were temporary reversals in this trend for short periods of time, the direction of travel was clear: an ever growing wealth inequality eventually resulting in the rule of the rich, aka oligarchy....
....MUCH MORE, along the way he takes a few hairpin turns at high speed but its an interesting ride.
Related from January 2017:
So there I was, reading the abstract of "Hazelnut economy of early Holocene hunter–gatherers: a case study from Mesolithic Duvensee, northern Germany", thinking about Nutella and Frangelico when this grabbed my eye:
...High-resolution analyses of the excellently preserved and well-dated special task camps documented in detail at Duvensee, Northern Germany, offer an outstanding opportunity for case studies on Mesolithic subsistence and land use strategies. Quantification of the nut utilisation demonstrates the great importance of hazelnuts. These studies revealed very high return rates and allow for absolute assessments of the development of early Holocene economy. Stockpiling of the energy rich resource and an increased logistical capacity are innovations characterising an intensified early Mesolithic land use...Stockpiling, storage, commodities, well that's right in our wheelhouse,* and if I can combine it with the last remnants of interest in Piketty's approach to inequality.....maybe I can synthesize something halfway original...
Yeah, it's already been done.
Here's VoxEU, September 2015:
Cereals, appropriability, and hierarchy....
....MORE, including the golden age of commodity manipulation.
