Welcome

...or how the Honest Sorcerer came about

It began on the 7th of May, 2019. I was living the ‘happy life’ of a mid-level manager working for a respected multinational company, waiting in an airport lounge to board my flight. I was scrolling the news feed of my favorite news site downloading articles to have something to read during my trip above the clouds. It was the usual stuff: corrupt politicians stealing our money and cheating on elections, economic difficulties, news about inventions promising to change the world. And one about climate change. (‘I know, 1.5 degrees by the end of the century, how bad it will be for my grand-grand children, and by the way we’re all gonna die etc.’ — or so I thought back then.) After reading the usual news the announcement came: my plane was ready for boarding. I took my seat next to a window, and since I was traveling alone, I started to read the article about climate change. Oops. It’s not 1.5 degrees but 4... Which means at least 2 degrees by 2050 — still within my lifetime... The text referenced the seminal New York Times piece: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Boarding completed — came the announcement from the flight attendant so I quickly downloaded the referenced article and followed the rest of the links in the original news piece. The plane landed 2 hours later and a different person stepped out of that metal tube. I’ve collected the keys of my rental car, which happened to be a gas-guzzling monster sized SUV (they’ve run out of smaller cars), and drove to the hotel. By the time I got there it was dark already so I’ve locked myself up in my room and continued reading article after article, opening the referenced scientific studies, then the next reference in the one I was reading and so on. It was late night when I finally turned off the lights and tried to get some sleep.

“Why… Why? Why?!” – I asked a million times after that sunny day up in the clouds. How could ‘humanity’ let this happen? How did ‘we’ get here and how do ‘we’ get out? Who/what is behind all this? Why is this happening to me, to my family and to all of us…? Why now? Why didn’t anyone warn us? In the following months I read a number of scientific publications, news articles, books, and listened to podcasts spanning hundreds of hours in total looking for an answer. Luckily, I’ve found quite a few honest and wise people willing to tell the truth, but doing so I’ve slowly realized that climate change is far from being our only problem. In fact, it’s part of a much bigger predicament. In my quest for knowledge I’ve learnt about resource depletion, overshoot, ecosystem collapse, the coming and going of civilizations… Including ours. I spent countless hours walking in the neighboring woods pondering these topics. Gradually I’ve came to accept the reality of our time, realizing that the only way forward for me is to let it all out. Share what I learned. Spread the word. Start a good discussion.… Much to my dismay though, my friends and family looked at me like a lunatic when I started to tell them about these issues, so I quickly stopped doing so. I got stuck. Writing remained my only outlet channel, and the only way I could raise awareness among those who care to listen. Hence I started a blog, titled the Honest Sorcerer.

I wasn’t always a “doomer”, mind you. I was born in the early 1980’s in the Eastern Block of Europe. I was a normal boy interested in cars, technology, space travel and science. I sincerely thought that humanity will once become a space faring species and colonize other planets. I had no doubt that technological progress and enlightenment are not only unquestionably good, but will inevitably continue into the future. Of course I had my own bogeymen too: like many children growing up during the Cold War, I was afraid of nuclear war and asteroids hitting Earth. With the fall of the Soviet Union and my country joining NATO, though, I thought that all of these problems will now be taken care of. “Good old USA will protect us from the nukes and the asteroids at the same time! Hurray!” – or so I thought. During my studies at the Technical University, where I studied mechanical engineering in the early 2000’s, however, I accidentally came across the topic of peak oil. I was shocked. As an aspiring engineer I knew how important oil was to our way of life – animating all those machines responsible to harvest our food, bringing it to the supermarket and making mining and manufacturing lots of goods possible. Needless to say, I became instantly terrified. I imagined that our world would suddenly run out of oil (one day to the next, or so I thought back then) and everything would stop, then collapse in a matter of weeks… Ugh. This was way too much for me back then. I instinctively buried the topic in the deepest recess of my mind, put a 30-ton lid on it, and tried the hardest I can not to think about it… and I succeeded! Years later, I read news about the “success” of fracking for shale gas and oil, and thought that finally we are saved. “Good old USA will protect us from peak oil, the nukes and the asteroids at the same time! Hurray!”

Having an open, curious mind isn’t helpful — to say the least — when you are trying to squeeze every negative thought under a 30-ton lid, though. I kept reading news articles about the economic crash of 2008, IPCC reports, rising temperatures, natural and economic disasters. Then I came across that ominous New York Magazine article... “Shit. I shouldn’t have read that one” – was my first thought, but it was already too late. I could not keep the lid on any longer... It blasted off and flew like a bald eagle past the horizon. I never saw it anymore — and didn’t look for it either. My new-found awareness of our potential civilizational collapse sparked an explosion of interest in every direction imaginable. I could not stop reading, hearing, learning enough of it. Books, scientific journals, studies, blogs, interviews with dozens of scientists and experts of the topic, podcasts... I was exploring all aspects of collapse from anthropology to climate science, economics to geology, history to civil engineering... I finally started to see how things interrelate, how feedback loops form, how civilizations behave like complex adaptive systems. After weighing all the chances and risks, possibilities and realities, every argument supporting the continuation of this civilization felt like drinking the Kool-aid. It took a massive dose of disrespect to physical reality just to prove that humanity can save itself — from itself. After seeing how all our problems – or rather, predicaments – are interconnected, it has dawned on me that there is no way out, only through. In fact, it is now much too late to stop the great unraveling. We have an extinction debt to service.

Becoming aware of our situation has come with an unexpected benefit. It gave me the confidence and courage to communicate, despite the rejection of my friends in those early days. I wanted to raise awareness, not just about climate change, but also about the utter and total unsustainability of our ways. I felt I must talk about these issues only a few dare to mention; to connect far flung dots and to ask the right questions – even if they yield discomforting answers. My aim is to dispel magical thinking patterns based on evidence, good old science and a bit of common sense. As you will see from the articles published herein, collapse is a long, multifaceted process, and rarely a quick affair. It’s not tied to a single event, nor to a specific year or even decade. Preserving one’s sanity and critical thinking skills will thus be essential to navigate these challenging times ahead. So, join me in my quest for understanding. Let’s build islands of coherence together, discovering what is still possible and what is not.

Until next time,

B

About the author and his blog:

I’m an industrial product engineer by training, working for a large engineering company in the field of electrification and automation of road transport for many years now. Before that, I worked more than a decade for an American corporation in various roles, ranging from maintenance engineering to project management and process expert positions, as well as spending 2 years on a post-graduate leadership program in the supply chain and logistics areas. I’ve seen how investment and sourcing decisions are made in these great conglomerates, how our much cherished consumer products are produced and how they get to the end customer. I saw how ‘sausage’ is made.

I’m located in Eastern Europe and I’m an EU citizen. I’ve been several times to the US, but also to China, North Africa, the Middle East, Germany, the UK, Belarus, Russia and many other European countries – visiting suppliers and manufacturing locations in these places as well as for vacation. As a ‘hobby’, I’ve spent years reading and researching articles on ecological economics, petroleum and mineral geology, physics and climate science, as well as engineering topics ranging from ‘renewables’ to nuclear, or from electric grids to transportation. Recently, I’ve been reading and listening to more and more geopolitics related blogs and podcasts.

I chose to stay anonymous because my thoughts and ideas—as you will soon learn reading this blog— go face first and straight up against the dogma’s of our western societies; the companies where I work included. It was exactly this unbearable inner tension (between how I perceive reality and how my society tells me to think about it) is what got me started as a writer. If I were full in favor of nuclear power or building an electrified utopia, I would not needed a pseudonym. I could post under my LinkedIn account and get famous with it. As the late psychiatrist Thomas Stephen Szasz told once: “Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.”

And why the name, the Honest Sorcerer? One of my favorite authors, John Michael Greer, said once when he was asked about expanding higher education in hopes of solving the unemployment crisis and the much wider systemic issues affecting our societies: “to call this magical thinking is an insult to honest sorcerers.” Hence the name of the blog. One last word about the logo: it’s an icosahedron, a three-dimensional object with 20 faces, representing the multifaceted nature of our predicament, with only half of the faces visible from any given angle. The same goes to our set of issues: only by looking behind what’s visible can one really understand what is really going on. (Besides that, the object is also referred to as a d20 die in role playing games where I often picked the character of the Mage – another reference to the name of this blog.)