Alex, thank you for allowing the conversation to continue. It's my first time on the forum, and even though I know you make yourself out to sound approachable on the podcast, honestly I'm a little bit pleasantly surprised.
So as not to bury the lede, let's do this part first:
sure, I'd be happy to have JMG on Skeptiko for a roundtable discussion like this. Pls reach out to him and see if he's interested.
I'd be happy to, but I just need to check I understood first: you are talking about inviting him for the Crowley discussion, not the other stuff I was digressing on, right? And by roundtable discussion, you mean it would be you and at least one other guest as well? And finally, that it's not that he's being invited to an hour long discussion of Crowley, but rather that Crowley is a jumping-off point for a discussion about the common traps people fall into when they try to come to grips with the reality of extended consciousness realms? If I'm correct on all counts, I'll go ahead and reach out. If not, please correct me before I do.
Oh, and when forum users "reach out", what does it mean? Is it, I write to him, he writes back to me, and then I write back to you here? Or am I asking him to get in touch with you directly?
I'm generally leery of anyone who thinks we are in some kind of "special time." Just about every age thoughout history has believed they were special.
That's a bit ironic, as the argument that we're living in a unique, special time is what people generally use to deflect JMG's arguments! JMG has written about this more than once, see for instance
here:
By and large, those who disputed Vico, Spengler, Toynbee, et al. either brushed aside the entire question of patterns of historical change, or conceded that, well, of course, those other civilizations of the past might have followed a shared trajectory, but ours? Never.That’s still the predictable response to any suggestion that the past might have anything useful to say about the future, and regular readers of this blog will have seen it deployed countless times in critiques posted by commenters here: in words made famous in any number of speculative bubbles, it’s different this time.
I'm wondering if maybe you have a misconception what JMG's "long descent" is about? He's not claiming any sudden apocalypse is on the way at all. In fact, it's the very opposite: he quite literally wrote a book called
"Apocalypse Not" collecting hundreds of different apocalypses that people of various generations throughout history have been sure were going to happen, and didn't. Instead of suggesting a sudden collapse, he's following the philosophy of the comparative historians mentioned above, like Oswald Spengler, who argue that civilizations go through predictable cycles of rise and decline. He takes their model, plugs in the modern variables (petroleum in the center, as the main target of the current empire's resource sucking "wealth pump"), and draws his conclusions from there.
And that's why he's called it a
long descent-- he thinks the current civilization's descent will take about 200 years to run its course! The very opposite of a apocalypse-fearing doomer.
But anyway the whole point is that things *aren't* any different this time. Anyone who believes that our civilization is going to be the first one that never declines and eventually fades away, but instead gets to just grow further and further forever, out into the stars (aka "the myth of progress") is the one who believes their age in history is the special one. (I'm not saying you are, by the way.) If somebody wants to believe that, that's fine, but if so then they ought at least acknowledge that they are the ones claiming we live in a unique age unparalleled in human history.
I agree... he was very level headed about it. then again, the "carbon footprint" thing assumes a whole bunch of stuff about global warming (and by extension NWO/Globalization stuff). I didn't want to get into all this with JMG because I thought it would take focus away from his book.
That was thoughtful. Yeah, you're probably not on the same page there, it's true. I don't think JMG's position on global warming is the one you think it is-- he actually seems to get misunderstood as a climate change denialist pretty often, because he has a nuanced view which acknowledges the problems with the way the scientific establishment has been handling the issue. But it's not really what yours appears to be either. As for NWO, I'm fairly certain JMG is of a different mind there as well. He knows his way around the conspiracy scene, he even wrote actually wrote an
Encyclopedia of Secret Societies. But if I understand him right, he is of the school that the people at the center of conspiracies are far from omniscient, and there are many competing conspiracies, none of which ever end up "taking all the chips". Also, he's written about how he feels that wallowing in too many conspiracy theories is a coping mechanism to avoid personal responsibility-- which is sure to rub most conspiracy theorists the wrong way!
That said, not being on the same page as you doesn't mean you couldn't have a good conversation about it. :)