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The trouble, of course, is that even after the Deep State (a.k.a. “The
Swamp”) succeeds in quicksanding President Trump, America will be left with
itself — adrift among the cypress stumps, drained of purpose, spirit, hope,
credibility, and, worst of all, a collective grasp on reality, lost in the
fog of collapse.
Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on and where we’re headed.
The United States is comprehensively bankrupt. The government is broke and
the citizenry is trapped under inescapable debt burdens. We are never again
going to generate the kinds and volumes of “growth” associated with
techno-industrial expansion. That growth came out of energy flows, mainly
fossil fuels, that paid for themselves and furnished a surplus for doing
other useful things. It’s over. Shale oil, for instance, doesn’t pay for
itself and the companies engaged in it will eventually run out of accounting
hocus-pocus for pretending that it does, and they will go out of business.
The self-evident absence of growth means the end of borrowing money at all
levels. When you can’t pay back old loans, it’s unlikely that you will be
able to arrange new loans. The nation could pretend to be able to borrow
more, since it can supposedly “create” money (loan it into existence, print
it, add keystrokes to computer records), but eventually those tricks fail,
too. Either the “non-performing” loans (loans not being paid off) cause money
to disappear, or the authorities “create” so much new money from thin air
(money not associated with real things of value like land, food, manufactured
goods) that the “money” loses its mojo as a medium of exchange (for real
things), as a store of value (over time), and as a reliable index of pricing
— which is to say all the functions of money.
In other words, there are two ways of going broke in this situation: money
can become scarce as it disappears so that few people have any; or everybody
can have plenty of money that has no value and no credibility. I mention
these monetary matters because the system of finance is the unifying link
between all the systems we depend on for modern life, and none of them can
run without it. So that’s where the real trouble is apt to start. That’s why
I write about markets and banks on this blog.
The authorities in this nation, including government, business, and
academia, routinely lie about our national financial operations for a couple
of reasons. One is that they know the situation is hopeless but the
consequences are so awful to contemplate that resorting to accounting fraud
and pretense is preferable to facing reality. Secondarily, they do it to
protect their jobs and reputations — which they will lose anyway as collapse
proceeds and their record of feckless dishonesty reveals itself naturally.
The underlying issue is the scale of human activity in our time. It has
exceeded its limits and we have to tune back a lot of what we do. Anything
organized at the giant scale is headed for failure, so it comes down to a
choice between outright collapse or severe re-scaling, which you might think
of as managed contraction. That goes for government programs, military
adventures, corporate enterprise, education, transportation, health care,
agriculture, urban design, basically everything. There is an unfortunate
human inclination to not reform, revise, or re-scale familiar activities.
We’ll use every kind of duct tape and baling wire we can find to keep the
current systems operating, and we have, but we’re close to the point where
that sort of cob-job maintenance won’t work anymore, especially where money
is concerned.
Why this is so has been attributed to intrinsic human brain programming
that supposedly evolved optimally for short-term planning. But obviously many
people and institutions dedicate themselves to long-term thinking. So there
must be a big emotional over-ride represented by the fear of letting go of
what used to work that tends to disable long-term thinking. It’s hard to
accept that our set-up is about to stop working — especially something as
marvelous as techno-industrial society.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. If you want a chance at keeping on
keeping on, you’ll have to get with reality’s program. Start by choosing a
place to live that has some prospect of remaining civilized. This probably
doesn’t include our big cities. But there are plenty of small cities and
small towns out in America that are scaled for the resource realities of the
future, waiting to be reinhabited and reactivated. A lot of these lie along
the country’s inland waterways — the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri river
system, the Great Lakes, the Hudson and St. Lawrence corridors — and they
also exist in regions of the country were food can be grown.
You’ll have to shift your energies into a trade or vocation that makes you
useful to other people. This probably precludes jobs like developing phone
apps, day-trading, and teaching gender studies. Think: carpentry,
blacksmithing, basic medicine, mule-breeding, simplified small retail, and
especially farming, along with the value-added activities entailed in farm
production. The entire digital economy is going to fade away like a
drug-induced hallucination, so beware the current narcissistic blandishments
of computer technology. Keep in mind that being in this world actually
entitles you to nothing. One way or another, you’ll have to earn everything
worth having, including self-respect and your next meal.
Now, just wait a little while.
Great Summer Reading… JHK’s new book!
“Simply the best novel about the 1960s.”
Read the first chapter here (click) on Patreon
Buy the book at Amazon or
click on the cover below
or get autographed copies from Battenkill
Books
Other Books by JHK
