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The staggering
incoherence of the election campaign only mirrors the shocking incapacity of
the American public, from top to bottom, to process the tendings of our time.
The chief tending is permanent worldwide economic contraction. Having hit the
resource wall, especially of affordable oil, the global techno-industrial
economy has sucked a valve in its engine.
For sure there are
ways for human beings to inhabit this planet, perhaps in a civilized mode,
but not at the gigantic scale of the current economic regime. The fate of
this order has nothing to do with our wishes or preferences. It’s going
down whether we like it or not because it was such a violent anomaly in world
history and the salient question is: how do we manage our journey to a new
disposition of things. Neither Trump or Clinton show that they have a clue
about the situation.
The quandary I
describe is often labeled the end
of growth. The semantic impact of this phrase tends to paralyze
even well-educated minds, most particularly the eminent econ professors, the
Yale lawyers-turned-politicos, the Wall
Street Journal editors, the corporate poobahs of the
“C-Suites,” the hedge fund maverick-geniuses, and the
bureaucratic errand boys (and girls) of Washington. In the absence of this
“growth,” as defined by the employment and productivity
statistics extruded like poisoned bratwursts from the sausage grinders of
government agencies, this elite can see only the yawning abyss. The poverty
of imagination among our elites is really something to behold.
As is usually the
case with troubled, over-ripe societies, these elites have begun to resort to
magic to prop up failing living arrangements. This is why the Federal
Reserve, once an obscure institution deep in the background of normal life,
has come downstage front and center, holding the rest of us literally
spellbound with its incantations against the intractable ravages of debt
deflation. (For a brilliant gloss on this phenomenon, read Ben Hunt’s
essay “Magical thinking” at the Epsilon Theory website.)
One way out of this
quandary would be to substitute the word “activity” for
“growth.” A society of human beings can choose different
activities that would produce different effects than the techno-industrial
model of behavior. They can organize ten-acre farms instead of cell phone
game app companies. They can do physical labor instead of watching
television. They can build compact walkable towns instead of suburban
wastelands (probably even out of the salvaged detritus of those wastelands).
They can put on plays, concerts, sing-alongs, and puppet shows instead of
Super Bowl halftime shows and Internet porn videos. They can make things of
quality by hand instead of stamping out a million things guaranteed to fall
apart next week. None of these alt-activities would be classifiable as
“growth” in the current mode. In fact, they are consistent with
the reality of contraction. And they could produce a workable and satisfying
living arrangement.
The rackets and
swindles unleashed in our futile quest to keep up appearances have disabled
the financial operating system that the regime depends on. It’s all an
illusion sustained by accounting fraud to conceal promises that won’t
be kept. All the mighty efforts of central bank authorities to borrow
“wealth” from the future in the form of “money”
— to “paper over” the absence of growth — will not
conceal the impossibility of paying that borrowed money back. The
future’s revenge for these empty promises will be the disclosure that
the supposed wealth is not really there — especially as represented in
currencies, stock shares, bonds, and other ephemeral
“instruments” designed to be storage vehicles for wealth. The
stocks are not worth what they pretend. The bonds will never be paid off. The
currencies will not store value. How did this happen? Slowly, then all at
once.
We’re on a
collision course with these stark realities. They are coinciding with the
sickening vectors of national politics in a great wave of latent consequences
built up by the sheer inertia of the scale at which we have been doing
things. Trump, convinced of his own brilliance, knows nothing, and wears his
incoherence like a medal of honor. Clinton literally personifies the horror
of these coiled consequences waiting to spring — and the pretense that
everything will continue to be okay with her in the White House (not). When
these two gargoyle combatants meet in the debate arena a week from now, you
will hear nothing about the journey we’re on to a different way of
life.
But there is a
clear synergy between the mismanagement of our money and the mismanagement of
our politics. They have the ability to amplify each other’s disorders.
The awful vibe from this depraved election might be enough to bring down
markets and banks. The markets and banks are unstable enough to affect the
election.
In history, elites
commonly fail spectacularly. Ask yourself: how could these two ancient
institutions, the Democratic and Republican parties, cough up such human
hairballs? And having done so, do they deserve to continue to exist? And if
they go up in a vapor, along with the public’s incomes and savings,
what happens next?
Enter the generals.
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