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Paul Kingsnorth Part 2 (of 3, apparently)

I’ve only had a brief sample but this is bound to be worth a read, being the follow-up to Paul Kingsnorth’s great piece from a fortnight ago.

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Very good Kingsnorth, going straight to the central heart of the matter: Which story do we adopt as our great guiding myth?

Well, for my money, obviously not ‘growth’n’PROGRESSforever!!’. That’s a myth already well past its sell-by, and now ensuring a steadily worsening debacle in our immediate future, until we finally ditch it for the new (but actually very old) ruling myth:

That we - homo self-described as sapiens sapiens (hah!!) - are in reality just one strand in the great tapestry of life - and behind that, of existence per se - and it behooves us to apply ourselves studiously to fitting in harmoniously and willingly to the whole pattern of that tapestry; with a good broad dose of effing humility.

The way practical matters are going - the limits to growth, and the consequent Long Descent, now making themselves felt well beyond our human power to do anything about them - it will be only a matter of a shortish time, perhaps a standard human life-span, before we are obliged to adopt a new mythic narrative, simply to keep going and stay alive. (See, for a couple of examples, Dr. Zach Bush’s and Tom Campbell’s mythic stories.)

I imagine that this story will have in it some version of the ancient, widespread reverence of the great Mother Goddess, who gives us birth and all the necessaries of life, simply in return for living by her rules, aka ecology. Significant that Paul was once a staffer at ‘The Ecologist’.

Significant too that even one of his background and inclinations should have been so roiled in the confusion of this time of myth-changing that it took him two years to escape from the covid lunacy into some degree of clarity: The technocratic-authoritarian approach to the covid-flu is flatly, completely wrong, leading us swiftly into catastrophe, and has to be dumped. It’s myth-renewal time! :scream: :innocent:

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