John Michael Greer Quotes

• Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.

  John Michael Greer

  Reality, Important, Answers

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• ... the future is under no obligation to wait patiently while we get ready for it.

  John Michael Greer

  Waiting, Obligation, Ready

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• It's still popular to ... insist that globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the hard reality is that the last thirty years have seen America's once proud and prosperous working class thrown to the wolves, so corporations could keep boosting their quarterly profits and the middle class could maintain a filmy illusion of wealth through access to cheap consumer goods.

  John Michael Greer

  Reality, Years, Class

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• I've long suspected that one of the reasons why human beings haven't yet figured out how to carry on a conversation with bottlenosed porpoises, African gray parrots, et al. in their own language is quite simply that we're terrified of what they might say to us - not least because it's entirely possible that they'd be right.

  John Michael Greer

  Long, Might, Als

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• When people insist, as so many of them do, that of course we'll overcome the limits to growth and every other obstacle to our allegedly preordained destiny out there among the stars, all that means is that they have a single story wedged into their imagination so tightly that mere reality can't shake it loose.

  John Michael Greer

  Stars, Mean, Reality

  6 Copy quote

• EROEI [energy returned on energy invested, or net energy] is to a civilization what gross profit is to a business, the source of the surplus that supports the entire enterprise.

  John Michael Greer

  Civilization, Support, Energy

  9 Copy quote

• Authenticity is about where it comes from; validity is about whether it works.

  John Michael Greer

  Authenticity, Validity

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• There’s no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.

  John Michael Greer

  Technology

  John Michael Greer (2008). “The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age”, p.192, New Society Publishers

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• Between the poor and any appreciation for modern science stands a wall made of failed schools, defunded libraries, denied opportunities, and the systematic use of science and technology to benefit other people at their [the poor's] expense.

  John Michael Greer

  Appreciation, Wall, School

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• One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.

  John Michael Greer

  Hands, People, Water

  4 Copy quote

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