Are
You Crazy To Continue Believing In Collapse?
That
it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean you're wrong
by
James H. Kunstler
6
March, 2014
It’s
nerve-wracking to live in the historical moment of an epic turning
point, especially when the great groaning garbage barge of late
industrial civilization doesn’t turn quickly where you know it
must, and you are left feeling naked and ashamed with your dark
worldview, your careful preparations for a difficult future, and your
scornful or tittering relatives reminding you each day what a ninny
you are to worry about the tendings of events.
Persevere.
There are worse things in this life than not being right exactly on
schedule.
Two
simple words explain why more robust signs of an economic collapse
have hung fire since the tremors of 2008: inertia
and fraud.
Never
in human history has there been such a matrix of complex systems so
vast, dense, weighty, and powerful for running everyday life (nor a
larger population engaged in it). That
much stuff in motion takes a while to slow down. The embodied energy
has kept enough of it running to give the appearance of continuity.
For instance, agri-biz still sends its amber waves of grain and
tankers of corn-syrup to the Pepsico snack-food factories, and the
WalMart trucks still faithfully convey the pallets of Cheetos,
Fritos, Funyons, and Tostitos from the Pepsico loading dock to the
big box aisles of glory. The freeways still hum with traffic even
though oil is pricey at $100 a barrel. The
lights stay on. The gabble and blabber of Cable TV continues
remorselessly in the background of life. All of that is due to
inertia. It gives the superficial impression of the old normal
carrying on. Things
go on until they can’t, in the immortal words of Herb Stein
The
fraud is present in the abuse and misrepresentation of official
statistics used as metrics in government policy,
in the pervasive accounting chicanery of that same government in its
fiscal dealings, as well as in our leading financial institutions and
corporations, including control fraud in banking, interest rate
rigging, mortgage and title fraud, front-running, naked shorting,
re-hypothecation, money laundering, pumping-and-dumping, channel
stuffing, the endless innovation of swindles, and, most importantly,
the fundamental mispricing of the cost of money, which reverberates
through everything else, most particularly real estate, stocks, and
bonds. Beyond that, in the shadows of the shadowland known as shadow
banking, a liminal realm of secrets and intrigues, only a few are
privileged to know what is going on, and you can be sure they only
know their end of the trade — while immense sums of ever more
abstract “money” slosh through the derivative sewers on their way
to oblivion in the ocean of failed trust.
So,
don’t feel bad if this colossal armature of folly still stands, and
have faith that the blinding light of God’s judgment will
eventually shine even unto the watery depths where failed trust has
sunk. Sooner or later the relationship between reality and truth
re-sets to the calculus of what is actually happening.
Meanwhile,
the big questions worth reflecting upon are: What
is the shape of the future? How might we conduct ourselves in it and
on our way to it; and how will we think and feel about all that? It’s
very likely that the journey to where we’re going will be rougher
than the actual destination, once we get there. There is a hearty
consensus outside the mainstream financial media and the thickets of
academia that the models we have been using to understand the economy
look more broken each month, and this surely adds to the difficulty
of constructing our own mental models for how the everyday world of
the years ahead will operate.
Some
of the commentators in blogville and elsewhere like to blame
capitalism. Capitalism is a phantom adversary. It isn’t an economic
system. It isn’t an ideology, really, or a belief system.
If the word means anything, it describes the behavior of accumulated
surplus wealth in concert with the known laws of physics — the
movement of energy through time and space — and the choices we make
organizing society in relation to that. The energy is embodied
as capital,
represented in money for convenience. Interest expresses the cost of
money over time and the risks associated with lending it. By the way,
interest rates work the same way under all political systems, despite
attempts in some societies to criminalize it.
During
the high tide of the industrial expansion, when fossil fuels were
cheap and we accumulated the greatest wealth surplus ever in history,
humanity made some very bad choices, squandering this possibly
one-time bonanza. We
fought two world wars, and lots of wasteful lesser ones. Russia and
its imitators attempted to collectivize wealth under gangster
government and only succeeded in impoverishing everyone but the
gangsters. America built suburbia and Las Vegas. The one thing that
no “modern” culture did was plan for a future when the fossil
fuel orgy and the techno-industrial fiesta might wind down, which is
exactly the case now. Instead, we opted for the Julian Simon folly of
crossing our fingers and hoping that some unnamed band of genius
wizard innovators
would mitigate the problems of resource scarcity and population
overshoot just in time.
The
demonizers of capitalism propose to remedy our compound predicament
by just getting rid of money.
But the idea of a human society without money leaves you either up a
baobab tree on the paleolithic savannah, or in some sort of Ray
Kurzweil techno-narcissistic masturbation fantasy multiverse
with no relation to the organic doings on planet earth. I suspect as
long as there are human societies there will be things to exchange
that have a quality we call “money,” and as long as that’s the
case, some individuals will have more of it than others, and they
will lend some of their surplus to others on terms. What most people
call capitalism was a model of economy derived from a particular
transitory moment in history. It seemed to describe reality, but
after a while it didn’t because reality changed and it was,
finally, just a model. Nothing lasts forever. Boo-hoo, Karl Marx, J.M
Keynes, and Paul Krugman.
What’s
cracking up first is the complexity and abstraction of our current
money operations, sometimes loosely called the financialized economy.
If
we blame anything for our problems with money, blame our half-baked
attempts to mitigate the wind-down of the techno-industrial cavalcade
of progress by issuing ersatz surplus wealth in the form of debt —
that is, promises to fork over hypothetical not- yet-accumulated
wealth at some future date. There are too many promises now, and too
few trustworthy promisors, and poor prospects for generating the
volumes of wealth as we did in the recent past.
The
hidden (or ignored) truth of this quandary expresses itself
inevitably in the degenerate culture of the day, the freak show of
pornified criminal avarice that the USA has become.
It only shows how demoralizing our recent history has been that the
collective national attention is focused on such vulgar stupidities
as twerking, or the Kanye-Kardashian porno romance, the doings of the
Duck Dynasty, and the partying wolves of Wall Street. By slow
increments since about the time John F. Kennedy was shot in the head,
we’ve become a land where anything goes and nothing matters. The
political blame for that can be distributed equally between Boomer
progressives (e.g., inventors of political correctness) and the
knuckle-dragging “free-market” conservatives (e.g., money
is free speech).
The
catch is, some things do matter, for instance whether the human race
can continue to be civilized in some fashion when the
techno-industrial orgy draws to a close.
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