Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth.43 Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged.44 Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.
We are on the cusp of a megacrisis formed by the coincidence of two historical cycles: the lesser geopolitical cycle of war and peace and the greater civilizational cycle of rise and fall. If those who govern us were saints advised by geniuses, and if the populace were eager to embrace change, there might be some possibility of turning this epochal crisis into a grand opportunity to reframe civilization to be both humane and ecological. Unfortunately, it is more likely that events will spin out of control, engendering widespread destruction and chaos. Indeed, we cannot exclude the possibility of a deep collapse entailing the radical impoverishment and simplification of society—in effect, the end of industrial civilization as we know it.
“At the largest level, depression is all about a person pulling inward, so that they only think about what’s happening inside their own minds, usually in negative ways. But external stimuli like heat and cold force a person to reckon with their environment. It pulls you out of yourself,” he explains. The heat is a wedge that interrupts the things that reinforce feelings of depression. And maybe that is all a depressed person needs: to have a reason to look outward.
It’s one thing to read about an ice bath, or to imagine what it might feel like to catch a kettlebell in midair as it transforms in your hands from a weapon into a dance. These are things you have to feel to understand.
God is not a “being” at all, not even an infinite one. God is Be-ing in the sense that without God, nothing can be. The “being” of God is verbal and transitive‒ the being of God makes everything else be. God says “Be!” and things spring into existence.
Throughout most of human history and up to 100 years ago — up to 20 years ago, in some parts of the world — a man or woman could lead their entire life snugly within the cocoon of the local tunnel reality. Today, we all constantly collide with persons living in wildly different tunnel realities. This creates a great deal of hostility in the more ignorant, vast amounts of metaphysical and ethical confusion in the more sophisticated, and growing disorientation for all — a situation known as our “crisis of values.”
It was in quest of sea power—the search for a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean—that the Soviets ultimately invaded Afghanistan, a small part of the Heartland that had eluded its grasp. And by getting entrapped by guerrillas in Afghanistan the Kremlin’s whole empire fell apart. Now Russia, greatly reduced in size, tries to reconsolidate that same Heartland—Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. That, in and of itself, a century after Mackinder put down his theories, constitutes one of the principal geopolitical dramas of our time.
