[Dmitry Orlov], Greer, and Kunstler are basically a peak oil era cohort that all subsequently went bananas in diverse and depressing ways.
From this reddit post on collapse about how Orlov sold out
There is a video from March 2017 which features all three of those people talking about societal collapse and a whole bunch of topic related to it. It very much seems like, as the post mentions, they started to go crazy in their own way in the years that followed.
If you don't know who these people are, in short they are three people who write about societal collapse on their personal blog, primarily from a peak oil perspective, the view that our world is still utterly dependent on fossil fuels for its energy base and that nothing, and I mean nothing, can replace them fundamentally. I'm not interested in convincing anyone of the reality of societal collapse, but if you want to read an article on it, my suggestion would be this one from the Honest Sorcerer (or any of his stuff really, he is good at both explaining and researching the technical details relevant to our energy situation).
John Michael Greer is someone that I've read a decent amount of, though not his books, mainly his blog titled Ecosophia, both on the side of politicis and societal collapse, or as he calls it the Long Decline, and the side on occultism, which I am not so groovy about now. Dmitry Orlov is someone I have listened to and read a tiny bit, and Kunstler is someone I haven't read at all, but his Substack is active and confirms the point made by the reddit comment. 1
Coming back to present-day Orlov, who is totally pro-Putin as of writing this, which can be seen in his interviews and his own videos. This isn't a strawman on my end, you can check him out yourself, everything he says in recent times is him talking about Russia as a single united country (dubious, although I can easily concede that they are doing better than Europe and the USA) being led by the great Putin, facing the old, decadent divided forces of Europe and Trump's stupid administration.
His analysis of Europe and the USA brings many important points, because those two are totally unable to see their corruption and lost glory, and thus cannot see how futile the fights they are engaged in are. But Orlov's inability to see the problems in Russia makes him a very unreliable source of information to say the least. Once again a case where the critiques coming from an intelligent person are valuable, but what they support and what they propose as solutions should probably be discarded. (again, make your own mind if you care about him)
Greer is an interesting case. He definitely has quite a lot of the pro-Trump boomer side which transpires, something which is in total contradiction with his working class and nature-loving ethos. No matter how much Trump's working class supporters deny it, their "hero" has nothing to do with them, even if they have a common "enemy". And for some reason he still hosts a weekly covid thread, which seems from the distance to be conspiratorial in tone. But when he can get his head out of the clusterfuck 2 of modern politics, the archdruid writes intelligently about the history of ideas and what we can learn about them, which strikes me as valuable and clear-headed.
I think it's fair to say though that if you understand the core of the peak oil and collapse ideas, you should probably stay clear of anyone who analyzes recent events too closely, because they will tend to miss the forest for the trees. As Greer himself says, collapse now and avoid the rush, which includes the rush of information and false solutions which a declining civilization will predictably produce. There is no value in what a desperate dying man says, because he is merely drowning his fear of death with his words, and such is the world at large.
The trend of these three people in the collapse-sphere highlights something important: there is no void which can be sustained in human lives. The Death of God, and then the ongoing Death of Progress—the modern God—leaves people with very few options for a source of collectively agreed upon source of meaning. This is very likely why there is such an overlap between people who believe in societal collapse, right-wing people who put their hopes in Trump (or a similar figure in their respective country) and people who are interested in alternative spirituality (which I include Buddhism in if you are in the West, because it's an alternative to Christianity, which has been the foundation of the Western World whether we like it or not).
These are not the only options of course. The primal source of meaning is not found in human institutions, or even in obtuse esoteric systems, it is ultimately found in my consciousness. Meaning is not something that I seek out there, or invent in me, it is what I experience when I am conscious enough to feel the boundaries between "you" and "me" dissolve. Such an experience is called love, though it has very little to do with the romanticized version of "love" we see in our modern world, 3 which is so graspy that it kills the very same experience it seeks to have.
Love sounds like a ridiculous thing to care about if you are the kind of person who aknowledges societal collapse, after all how will it solve the real issues of politics, economics, and deeper than that, our access and allocation of energy? But look at the type of worldviews sprung by people who do not feel any love in their life, those who look for worldly solutions to the predicament we find ourselves in. 4 Their attention is scattered all over the place, and they are almost possessed by their outrage and anger, because they cannot hold the fear of societal collapse in them, and instead need a target to channel their frustration.
A loveless person is utterly unable to accept the reality of death, including the death of the technological system, because they can only hold onto their self, they cannot let it go while they are alive, and they certainly won't let it go the closer they get to their death, or the death of the system.
Thus people turn to blaming this or that group of people for the failures of the system, they take partisanship and fantasize about overly simple solutions, because to accept the whole thing requires a radical orientation to death, and thus life, which is simply impossible for the self-informed selves who constitute the vast majority of the world. People are constantly agitated by the news, an agitation which then rises up in the mind and looks for isolated targets to relieve itself, because fundamentally they are running away from death.
When people find that a person that they love is dying, they are first in denial more often than not. Do not worry, you will get better in no time! they say. Eventually they find out that the other is not getting well, and struggles more and more to get out of bed. Then it's tempting to bury your head in the sand, and pretend that not visiting them will make the problem go away, but it doesn't does it? Escapism has a way of haunting us in our sleep.
At some point, whether it happens while the other person is alive or not, there is this radical acceptance which occurs. Yes, they are dying, and there is nothing that can be done. That means that I want to spend time with them, because I love them. And even after they've passed away, the love that you felt for them, and that they felt for you, is still there, it resonates through time and rekindles you, and the people around you.
People who are wise know how to keep this flame going without the horrible realization of death, the cold sweat you feel when you realize that there is no way out, that you or someone you love is going to die. But it often takes such a realization for us to surrender to love. And I think that ultimately, this is the lesson we can learn from those who run away from death, whether the individual death or the death of the system, that only love can speak through time, not blame, hatred or outrage.
1 Take what I have to say here with a grain of salt, or many many grains of salt in fact, but he strikes me now as a very generic pro-Trump boomer, constantly getting mad at anything which might be vaguely associated with libertarian values, and his attention is perpetually grabbed by the most current thing to get mad at. When I was listening to the 2017 video I mentioned earlier, he struck me as the most reasonable person of the panel in fact, seeing the deep problems of societal collapse, but also not wanting to blame it on a cohort of "bad" people because of their systemic nature. Weird how people change.
2 Kunstler's Substack is titled 'Clusterfuck nation'.
3 "If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship" —François de La Rochefoucauld
4 In John Michael Greer's terms, a predicament is a situation which cannot be solved, unlike a problem, and which we can only manage.
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Collapse Worldviewdrift Peakoil Deathofgod Void Love Death
2026-02-15