[Santa] is an obvious mushroom myth. He’s dressed in red and white, the colors of the Amanita muscaria hallucinogenic mushroom, and associated with reindeer, the typical animal totem of the Lapp shamans who preserved that particular mushroom cult from ancient times, and he flies through the air — those who have tried hallucinogens know that experience! The bright flashing colors of the Christmas lights and the gaudy wrappings of the presents are meant to mimic other elements of the drug experience. The chimney he comes down is of course the modern equivalent of the house-post of ancient dwellings, which symbolizes the axis of heaven, down which he descends from the North Star; there’s also some kundalini symbolism in there. “Ho ho ho” is a dim remnant of the forceful breathing patterns used to stimulate the kundalini ascent by which Santa returns to the Pole.
(Ahem. I trust nobody takes that seriously; I made most of it up on the spur of the moment. If John Allegro could insist back in the day that Jesus was a magic mushroom, why not Santa?)
Post number 220 by John Michael Greer, in this post.
I'm going to be honest, I thought that this was a serious connection before I read Greer's last sentence. Which goes to show you how much I tend to lean into confirmation bias for my ideas. I definitely have a mind which tends towards conspiracy theories, or at least ideas which are shaped like those, because my mind really enjoys unexpected connections, for better or worse.
Perhaps we could describe conspiracy theories as misguided ways to re-enchant our soulless world, this seems more productive to me than only looking at the level of facts and shunning anyone who doesn't believe in mainstream narratives.
An interesting post shared by Ran Prieur (but not written by him) about urban versus rural sustainability
Considering that the author and Ran Prieur both tried to go down into the whole self-sufficient homestead lifestyle, and came out with those conclusions, it's fair to say that we shouldn't romanticize rural areas for being "close to nature" or sustainable.
Because in practice, the number of rural people who genuinely have self-sufficient skills and resources is quite low from what I can tell. They are very reliant on their car, and thus on fossil fuels, to buy things and get to places they need to, and are more isolated than urban people. Not only does it take more than a decade to have the skills to be self-sufficient, you need to work hard each week to sustain yourself. People in the past had an entire village and an entire family behind them, which means they could specialize more and didn't have to go through a brutal learning curve. Nowadays people are more atomized, meaning that everyone has to work harder, while coming from a middle-class urban environment where they aren't used to this kind of physically demaning work.
This middle-class exodus is why in practice, rural communities are very scattered, physically but also culturally. They are not as tight-knit as people in the cities might think, because the background of the people there is incredibly heterogeneous. Some people simply want quiet and peace, others want to live out a low-tech lifestyle in response to our collapsing world, and others are living there for the lower price on housing.
Of course, I hope it is obvious that cities are also not sustainable. No food grows in a city, because that requires either lots of land, or if you want to go down the route of vertical farms, energy, technology and water. Every city needs a sizable amount of input to maintain itself, which obviously means that they will be hit hard by our declining world.
But their concentration of resources, and more importantly presence of infrastructure, means that they have more access to the things they might need, such tools, fuel, transport, medicine, etc. Maybe rural people have more access to food, not all of them as mentioned in the previous paragraph, but they will soon run out of the secondary stuff they depend on and which I just mentioned.
If the coming decline will be so awful that people in cities will die of starvation and be constantly looted by gangs, then rural areas will not be doing that much better anyway, because without cars, fuels and mechanized tools, very few rural people can actually maintain themselves.
And so the author of the article predicts that the best survivors of the coming decline will be neither the mega-cities nor the totally isolated rural areas, but rather the decently sized cities where people get on well with their neighbours.
I don't know about this type of stuff to have my own opinion, but I think in practice the future will be incredibly heterogeneous and unpredictable. I think this piece is a good corrective of the romanticization of rural areas from city dwellers, because self-sustainability requires a combination of social structures, physical hard work and knowledge which have been eroded over time.
Maybe some rural areas will be able to do well in the decline, but what was mentioned in the article is that during the Great Depression, urban people generally did better than rural folk, because goods tended to be directed towards the city, rather than scattered rural areas.
But the Great Depression was a financial and economic crisis, whereas what we're facing in the coming decades is an energy crisis. That crisis was met with breadlines and food rationing, but during an energy crisis, food production and its distribution, and the array of technologies we have come to depend on will be heavily disrupted, which means that it's unclear whether we can rely on that period as an indication for what comes ahead.
But still, I think the main point that rushing to rural areas might not be as good of an idea is worth pondering over, because this type of decision should be taken with a careful analysis of specific factors, not a vague sense of nostalgia and a desire to ape what we believe is a more sustainable lifestyle.
Barry Long has this idea that the future only exists in the past. In order to say that "tomorrow the sun will rise", you need to turn to your memories of past sunrises and the day cycle, and then extrapolate it to say something about the future.
It's interesting for sure, and I guess an interesting connection is that those who are obsessed with shaping the future are probably still holding onto some baggage from their past, wanting to make sure that some trauma they've experienced can never, ever happen again.
When filling a bucket with water, the water on the surface moves around due to its inertia. How do you make those ripples stop though? By simply leaving the bucket and doing nothing.
This parable seems to originate from the Zen tradition but I cannot find the exact one anywhere, but at least it's very much Zen-flavored. It's tempting to problem-solve towards the states we want, but problem-solving is inherently limited because it comes from a finite self trying to impose its will onto a Reality which is far beyond its grasp and understanding. Sometimes the only move is to do nothing, surrender.
The devil's eyes allow him to see the flaws of everyone around him in minute details, but never his own, such that he grows more and more distant from those around him.
The devil's ears allow him to only hear what he wants to hear, such that he is perpetually stuck in an echo chamber of his own making.
The devil's tongue allows him to taste the most succulent meals you could conceive, simply by imagining them, but as such he is perpetually dissatisfied by the food he gets to eat.
Perfection is the devil's work, a way for our mind to separate itself from the Reality around us, and as such from the others in our lives. A world of complete order designed by the self-informed mind is not Heaven, it's in fact Hell, because such a mind is never satisfied by anything.
Stoicism has merits to it, especially because in my assessment of the world, I think that things are progressively declining, on an economical and social level, which means that the stoic attitude is valuable when it comes to inevitable hardships. Most people will make their lives significantly harder in the coming future simply because they cannot accept the declining standards of living and the series of crises which will keep pulling our attention and drain us of our energy.
But from what I can tell, it has its limits. I view stoicism as a shield, which is valuable to have in your arsenal, because we are all confronted with situations we can't do much about, and where the best we can do is accept them. But not every situation is like this. Sometimes we can be proactive and attack the beast head-on, and sometimes there is no problem in the first place, only things to appreciate and love.
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2025-12-30