From: "John Michael Greer" <Mezla@hotmail.com>

Steve et al.,

The engine of capitalism has been a race against time, racing to gain needed knowledges while capacity to acquire them exists, racing to possess them before consequences of limitations of the globe overwhelm and render achievement of ascending civilization forevermore impossible. Thus, it has been justifiable if some individuals must endure wretched want while others are prodigious in their vanities, as long as the progress is gained, otherwise unobtainable.

I'm not sure I follow you. In what way is "progress" so valuable that it justifies the absurd and disgusting spectacle of orgiastic waste in the developed world and utter deprivation across the rest of the planet? What will this "progress" bring us...other than more
of the same?

Let us assume that the tools we are using, we two who have not met one another, to communicate quickly across the electronic void is our working definition of progress at this moment.

It seems logical that an evolutionary cultural process better struggles out of primeval ignorance through localized concentrations of capital upon a global surface, rather than through a universal equal distribution of that capital, for it is the luxuriousness of capital which so often fosters invention. The yoke of suffering and want has been born by the many, and constitutes the measure of the greatness of our evolution. This phase naturally coincides with the increasing exhaustion of "hunted and gathered" natural capitals, and is rightly labelled capitalism. When simple liquidation of natural capital shall no longer suffice to maintain the measure of wealth, when diminishment of available energies and the limitations of the physical globe call for a new phase of evolution, capitalism may be said to have hopefully fulfilled its evolutionary purpose, that creation of the tools necessary for the next, more social phase.

I am beginning to think that the idea of Progress is the great myth of our time. I'm using the word "myth" here in its full sense -- a story that explains the world and justifies current social, psychological and spiritual approaches.

Progress now becomes in our relation to one another and to the Earth.

--
The movement of the seas is not limited to monotonous pattern, but ranges from a constancy of mildness in which the eroding shores would be perceptibly modified over the span of a lifetime, unto a vehemence of startling intensity in which suddenly, nothing within reach is left as it was. So it is with the changing of human culture, this ongoing evolution of existence with age beyond any meaningfulness of temporal measurement.

Steve Morningthunder

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