John Michael Greer covers a lot of ground here, almost as large as Grand Tartary. The following quote can´t make this essay justice. Please read all of it (link below). I wonder if JMG isn´t talking about himself, actually. A seemingly crazy person with a big beard and strange dress, living somewhere in the Appalachians (OK, he moved, but you get my point)...who turns out to be, ahem, right...
>>>Consider the Roman Empire in the days of its power. While its politicians and bureaucrats laid their plans and built their careers on the presupposition that their empire would endure for all imaginable time, a prisoner on a Mediterranean island—exiled for his membership in a despised religious cult—saw the empire racked with wars, famines, and plagues, ravaged by horsemen galloping out of the east, and finally conquered and fallen into ruin, to be followed by a thousand years of triumph for his faith. We call him John of Patmos today, and his vision forms the last book of the New Testament. He was a figure of the uttermost fringe in his own era: isolated, powerless, and quite possibly crazy. He was also right.
>>>Thus it’s important to keep a close eye on the fringes of contemporary culture, the places where the future is being born out of the surging tides of unreason. One of the things I watch most closely with this in mind is the burgeoning realm of contemporary conspiracy theories. Those reveal far more than the conventionally minded imagine, irrespective of their factual accuracy or lack of same. As Alain de Botton commented of religions, whether conspiracy theories are true or not is far and away the least interesting question about them.
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