Reveries of Collapse

Lady Gaga's meat suit

Energy deflation and dollar preference are large forces beyond the control of politicians, generals or central bankers. They are driving countries and events toward involuntary conservation. America’s new president is the product of economic failure; the inability of the economists to make correct analysis, a long grinding recession disguised as recovery; media falsehoods and the unwillingness of Americans and others to face reality, government policy failures and the headwinds of resource depletion. Trump and his cretinous gang of thieves represents the last gasp of a defunct industrial system that is sinking under the weight of its own costs.


Keep in mind, oil producing states like the US tend to be autocratic. The US, Canada, Mexico and others are on their way to becoming single-party police states like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Because of autocrats promise of access to energy, they gain ascendancy with their populations’ eager consent. What is at stake for Americans and the West is democracy itself: a choice between the right to have a say in our own affairs versus the false-promises of energy-driven ‘prosperity’ offered by autocrats … the choice between the (vague) promise of convenience or having a functioning republic.

King Trump the Irrelevant

I think these two paragraphs sum up our reality nicely.  They capture what is true about our situation.  I'm in agreement with everything quoted above. 

I've long said that the power of money is nothing more than the power of the energy we have at our disposal.  They can create as many digibits as they want to create, and with no consequence since digibits are digital and not really subject to any physical laws.  The banking insolvency is really just a ruse.  Like politics, like arguing about who would be the better president, like watching football, it's just something to talk about that applies to our reality only in a fictional way.  Our talking about it gives it it's strength and relevance.  The great reality behind it is the primary economy of energy and other natural resources.  However, those natural resources cannot support a global economy without the energy to make use of them.  Trees, food produced by the monolith of industrial agriculture,  our collapsing fisheries, fresh water, minerals, ores, all of those things require energy to harvest them, and then to fashion them into consumer items.  Money is simply the means by which we are able to claim our portion of that energy.  The more money you have, the more energy you can lay claim to by way of goods and services.

In the face of a finite world it's really all just an illusion of cohesion.  The great reset should have happened in 2008, but it did not happen.  Instead, the failing energy sector was propped up by the creation of more digibits.  It's not the banks that were too big to fail but our way of life.  If they had not exercised the ability to create digibits ad infinitum, and to put those digibits in service of bringing energy to market, than we would have been forced to engage with the reality of our diminishing resources.  The trillions of digibits that have been created by the Federal Reserve and the Federal Goobermint have amounted to nothing more than the largest financial subsidy in the history of the world.  Just like our industrial agriculture is made possible only by it's subsidization, our energy is now only made possible by subsidy.  It's not a direct subsidy though.  It's a subsidy of money creation loaned into existence for free.  The 3.8 billion dollar DAPL pipeline had to be financed by this money that the banks create by turning the digibit knob.  It could have just as easily been 3.8 trillion dollars, and had it been that price the banks would have created that money and loaned it into existence.  The truth is that without that energy our civilization will become transparent, and we will all be forced to wake up and see the house of cards that we have built. 

The simple truth is that everything we do is only made possible by fossil energy.  Our food, transportation, electricity, buildings, cultural methods of inhabiting our world, clothing, medicine, everything all hinges on the energy being present to create them in the first place.  It's not that we can't create those things using the power of our own bodies and that of our beasts of burden.  It's that we no longer have a human scaled way of inhabiting our planet.  That is why robotics have become so important, and it's why NAFTA had to happen.  NAFTA simply made slavery legal again for the first world, buy it was hidden in third world countries.  We took their resources, and the energy of their people, and exploited it to feed the 1st world empire.  We sold a lie that their people were joining ours by becoming "developed" countries, as if to have a culture made by hand, a culture that is actually a culture made of people and their skills and engagement with the natural world, was not a real culture. 

Now we have what amounts to what I like to call a "global anti-culture."  Now science has enabled us to live a culture free life where we are kept busy by free entertainment glistening on flat screens, the flat lands that are devoid of virtue.  Now robots are set to do all of the work that must be done to continue inhabiting our world the way that we inhabit it.  Every year more and more people must scrap by with mailbox money that must be meagerly portioned out to overcome the cultural atrophy that has descended down upon us all.  Our bodies are becoming nothing more than energy sinks without a purpose.  What jobs there are, that are not part of the service economy, are jobs where we sit and do what amounts to nothing.  Driving around, staring at computer screens in inefficient climate controlled box buildings made of glass, engaging with fictional digibits.  Our bodies are no longer required and so they atrophy along with our brains.

We are entering into the last act now.  This last act is symbolized by the election of Donald Trump to lead the first world "democracy" that we supposedly have.  How perfect is that?  This is a man of no substance beyond that of ego gratification.  A man who has done nothing of any real value, but a man that is filthy rich for it.  Trump is like a mirror of our national consciousness.  He is only reflecting back to us what we have become.  It doesn't matter who the president of the United states is, because the system of business as usual has so much momentum that only it's own weight has the power to destroy it .  The momentum is built up by what social critic, James Howard Kunstler, has aptly titled "the psychology of previous investment."  It's the way we inhabit our landscape that has become to big to fail.  But like the psychology that created it in the first place, it is fundamentally flawed and wrongheaded.  It is based on an infantile wanting with no regards to limits and consequences.  It is a hallucination that continues to exist because we give to it our energy.  We infuse it with our psyches and it is failing us.  It is failing to produce anything of any substance.  It has choked the very life out of our bodies and made us powerless and useless. 

Now all that is left is for this pointless business as usual to slam into an immovable wall that is corporeal limitations.  Just like cancer cells that kill their host and thereby commit suicide.  Our way of life is failing, and like all civilizations that have come before us, it will collapse.  It has been collapsing during my entire life.  The cancer has become a global entity, and it has already metastasized and gone systemic, and all that is left is the awareness that we are dying.   I suppose the silver lining is that this has always been the case.  Just like individual beings who are born, mature, and then die, our civilizations are no different.  All civilizations overshoot their resource bases and end up in collapse.  This collapse won't be on the nightly news (as if anybody under 60 years old even watches MSM now).  It won't be televised any differently than it has been already.  It's not something that will be talked about, but that in no way diminishes the reality of it.

Or maybe I'm just deluded and living in a fictional world made up of the laws of physics.  Time will reveal the truth of my words.