Tag: society

Categories
literature

A relic of another time

The Russians with Attitude podcast released to their subscribers a feature this week on the Russian writer and mystic, Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov made his way from a medical student in Kiev through the Civil War in Russia and Ukraine to a difficult life as a writer for newspapers, theatre and novels in the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote a great account of the Civil War in The White Guard, and of course the masterpiece for which he earned posthumous fame, The Master and Margarita. [Read more]….

Categories
history

The World Crisis, 2022, A Personal Record

“Everyone was dreaming, ruminating, full of foreboding, feeling his way.” (Nikolai Sukhanov on February 1917 Russian Revolution). Does this not feel a lot like us today? Do we all not feel the world is unfolding in surprising directions, and among our more difficult tasks is to feel our own way through these events?

Categories
history the real world today

Ukraine Crisis Shows Fault Lines of Multipolar World

Coll IMJ, photo (c) IMJ

We are not entering World War III, I think, I hope, I insist on believing. But we are entering the final phase of the Hundred Years Cold War of the Anglo-American Powers against Russia. My forecast is that the system of power that has led this war will collapse, perhaps surprisngly quickly, but likely over five to ten years. Seven great fault lines are cracking open during the Ukraine crisis that will shape the social, political, cultural and international orders we navigate through.

Categories
Flowers of the Mind history

Flowers of the Mind 14

Journalists draft history? The public sphere, Habermas and the post-democratic society. Emmanuel Todd on the tasks ahead for advanced societies. History as a moral art that encounters the living past in an infinite conversation.

Categories
Flowers of the Mind

Flowers of the Mind 12

Omricon, fear and crowd psychology. Jay Bhattacharya and the catastrophic errors of public health. Grieving memories of Stuart Macintyre. Szymborska on what matters. Paul Kingsnorth on fear, tyranny and the vaccine wars. Elena Shvarts on both hopelessness and hope.

Categories
Flowers of the Mind

Flowers of the Mind 11

Evil triads and power. Will the West decouple from America? Mattias Desmet and mass formation psychosis. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Troubadors and Pound’s Cantos.

Categories
Flowers of the Mind

Flowers of the Mind 10

Sunplus

Robert Lowell on George Santayana. The silence of the doctors and the rule of public health. Virus gonna virus. Jordan B. Peterson on saying no to tyranny. The exposure of the RussiaGate and Steele dossier hoax. On prophecy. Bhagavad Gita and the sacrifice of the soul in the fire of the Gods.

Categories
history The Burning Archive Podcast

Podcast #23 – The Eight Hour Working Day

How did the eight hour working day come into being, and is it still relevant to us today? In this episode the Burning Archive Jeff Rich will talk about how the eight hour day emerged in response to the industrial revolution, and what it means in the stressed out contemporary world after the “fourth industrial revolution”.

Categories
culture the real world today

Letter from Melbourne: mirror to the post-democratic world

Things are very serious here in Australia. There is a mental health crisis. We have endured a state of emergency since March 2020. Normal rules of government decision making have not applied. We have pursued a medical utopia of COVID Zero at stunning cost. It is really something that should never happen again, and hopefully, at the right time in the right way by the right people, will be deeply investigated and reflected on.

Categories
history The Burning Archive Podcast

Podcast #12 – Towards the Society of Islands

The latest episode of The Burning Archive Podcast is out and available on all the usual platforms, including Apple and Spotify. In this episode of The Burning Archive, I continue my history of our times, and the theme of increasing social fragmentation. If there is more distance between the elites and ordinary people – the 1 % vs the 99 […]

Categories
history The Burning Archive Podcast the real world today

Podcast #11 – Social progress and social fragmentation

The latest episode of The Burning Archive Podcast is out and available on all the usual platforms, including Apple and Spotify. In this episode of The Burning Archive, Jeff Rich explores the fourth large theme of the history of our times, that is social fragmentation. Life is better in so many dramatic ways. We are richer, older, healthier, and better […]

Categories
culture history The Burning Archive Podcast the real world today

The Burning Archive Podcast #10 – The Parallel Polis and the Power of the Powerless

The latest episode of The Burning Archive Podcast is out and available on all the usual platforms, including Apple and Spotify. When faced with cultural decay and ruined institutions, what is a podcaster to do? In this episode, Jeff Rich turns for hope to the traditions of the Eastern European dissidents of 1960-90 Eastern Europe. […]