““What tends to be forgotten, amid all the cheerleading for today’s technology, is that people in ancient times might have lacked our current theoretical understanding of nature, but they were perfectly capable of noticing what worked and what didn’t, drawing rational conclusions on the basis of experience, and trying out new techniques to expand their ability to work with natural phenomena—even when their theories about the nature of those phenomena strike us as primitive or absurd.””
![“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.” quote by John Michael Greer](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/9b6/john-michael-greer-28078_business_eroei-energy-returned-on-energy-invested_1034993.jpg)
![“[T]he ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a…” quote by John Michael Greer](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/337/john-michael-greer-28078_architecture_t-he-ideals-and-desires-of-the-majority_1072057.jpg)
