The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age by John Michael Greer.

2/5 rating. 243 pages.

Book #6 of 2022. Read January 23, 2022.

This book was a really boring, off topic, and just weird look at the likely consequences of Peak Oil.

I should’ve been the perfect audience for a book like this. I am always interested in environmental issues, peak oil, and discussion of how to improve our chances for a better future, but not even I thought this thing was worth my time. John ends up mired in discussions about magic and weird history, along with the other on-topic ideas that could have been summed up in about a page and a half.

I did appreciate his talk about our society’s blind belief in progress and how it can be as counterproductive as the other extreme of apocalyptic expectations for our future. His idea of the long descent is a slow backslide of the next many centuries – that will mirror, in reverse, our progress since the enlightenment – as we run out of fossil fuels. I personally don’t exactly think this will happen, but it’s worthwhile to think about how we can work to cushion and prevent things like this from happening.

The only other worthwhile part of the book was his discussion of myth. This reminded me a lot of Yuval Noah Harari’s discussion in “Sapiens” (which you should read and is actually an enjoyable way to explore this topic).

John says: “The crux of the problem, as I’ve suggested throughout this book, is that human thought is mythic by its very nature. We think with myths as inevitably as we see with eyes and eat with mouths. Thus, any attempt to bring about significant social change must start from the mythic level, with an emotionally powerful and symbolically meaningful narrative, or it will go nowhere.”

In short, don’t waste your time with this book.

Quotes:

“The world burns 84 million barrels of petroleum – more than three and a half billion gallons – every single day with about a quarter of that going to the United States.”

“Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. Human beings think with stories as inevitably as they see with eyes and walk with feet, and the most important of those stories – the ones that define the nature of the world for those who tell them – are myths.”

“Every culture has its stories, and if you pay careful attention to the stories a culture tells, you can grasp things about the culture that nothing else will teach you.”

“At its core, science is a system of practical logic, a set of working rules that allow hypotheses to be tested against experience so that they can be discarded if they’re false.”

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