alt comment “Dreams Die Hard” thread

(gang, let’s try something different .. since Jim often won’t go out of his way to reboot the TRS-80 running his own blog, maybe we can comment here?)

The following post originally appeared on Jimbo’s blog and was written by James Howard Kunstler. No copyright infringement intended.

/begin quote

In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual – that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a giant midwestern farm. It is characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hypercomplex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.

It’s tragic that the avatar of hopefulness himself, Barack Obama, stepped into his role at exactly the moment when this set of conditions was getting traction. It is sure to get worse, and there are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there who will be suffering terrible losses and real pain in daily life. Societies don’t do well when the public falls into the broad despair that is the opposite of hope. That’s when the long knives and the tribal animosities come out and things get smashed.

Within the context of conventional party politics – the kind that has been baseline “normal” in the USA for a long time – we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for “hope” – if not hope itself – the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They’re flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government’s name. They’re willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against “the malefactors of great wealth.” They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a “consumerism”) that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy.

The trouble with self-delusion, either in a person or a society, is that reality doesn’t care what anybody believes, or what story they put out. Reality doesn’t “spin.” Reality does not have a self-image problem. Reality does not yield its workings to self-esteem management. These days, Americans don’t like reality very much because it won’t let them push it around. Reality is an implacable force and the only question for human beings in the face of it is: what will you do? In other words, it’s not really possible to manage reality, but you can certainly choose to manage your affairs within reality. We won’t do that because it’s too difficult. This harsh situation leaves the public increasingly with little more than bad feelings of discouragement and persecution. It’s astonishing that all the smart people around the president don’t get this.

Reality unfolds emergently, and this ought to interest us. For instance, I have maintained for many years that we are approaching the twilight of the automobile age – and the implications of this for daily life in the USA are pretty large. For a long time, I had assumed that this change of circumstances would proceed from our problems with the oil supply. But reality is sly. It has thrown two new plot twists into the story lately. America’s romance with cars may not founder just on the fuel supply question. It now appears that our problems with capital are so severe that far fewer people will be able to borrow money from banks to buy cars at the rate, and in the way, that the system has been organized to depend on. Our problems with capital are also depriving us of the ability to pay to fix the hypercomplex system of county roads, interstate highways, and even city streets that make motoring possible. What will we do?

For now, a cashless government gives out cash-for-clunkers, which is basically a self-esteem building program designed to make the government feel better about itself because it is ostensibly taking 11-miles-per-gallon cars off the road and replacing them with 27-miles-per-gallon cars, thus forestalling scary problems with climate change. It’s dumb of course, but the failure of leadership is comprehensive. Even the elite environmentalists at the Aspen Institute are preoccupied with finding new “green” ways to keep all the cars running. They put zero effort into the idea of walkable communities, or restoring the railroad system, which will be the reality-based remedies for the car-dependency problem.

The Republican right wing is, if anything, even more childishly delusional. For Glen Beck and Sarah Palin it comes down to “drill, baby, drill.” They know nothing about the geology of oil – they don’t even believe that the earth is more than six-thousand years old, meaning they don’t believe in geology, period – but they are inflamed with the faith of eight-year-old children that we must have a lot more oil in the ground because this is America and God loves us more than people in other parts of the planet so it must be there. As their disappointment mounts, their childish ideas will turn cruel and sadistic. They’ll seek to punish anybody who believes that the earth is more than six thousand years old. The catch is, If they get into power in the election cycles ahead, they’ll be impotent and ineffectual even at persecuting their enemies.

In the meantime, American life will just wind down, no matter what we believe. It won’t wind down to a complete stop. It’s near-term destination is to lower levels of complexity and scale than what we’ve been used to for a long time. People will be able to drive fewer cars fewer miles. The roads will get worse. They’ll be worse in some places than others. There will be fewer jobs to go to and fewer things sold. People who live in communities scaled to the energy and capital realities of the years ahead are liable to be more comfortable. We’re surely going to have trouble with money. Households will drown in debt and lose all their savings. Money could be scarce or worthless. Credit will be scarcer.

Both factions of American political life indulge in the fiction of control. History is reality’s big brother. It is taking us someplace that we don’t want to go, so it will probably have to drag us there kicking and screaming. For starters, both reality and history will probably take us out to some woodshed of the national soul and beat the crap out of us. That could be a salutary thing, since the crap consists of all the lies we tell ourselves. Once we’re rid of all that, we may rediscover a few things left inside our collective identity that are worth regarding with real self-respect.

/end quote

 

approximation of life + book review

During the weekend I scrolled through SlashDot just for kicks (ok, for the record, I am a confirmed Penguinista-type geek gal) and saw something interesting about space travel and microbes. No, this isn’t the usual science-fiction stuff like the Blob, the wonderfully irreverent Evolution, or the fantastically-campy Slither .. it’s more like a creeping awareness of the fact that when you cram living things (that’s us) into sealed containers for any length of time, the internal environment starts to get kind of Abbey-Normal.

Some of the problems of low gravity have been known for a long time: people lose muscle mass and bone density; there is radiation damage from living outside the protective envelope formed by an atmosphere piled deep atop our gravity well; often the returning [whatever]nauts cannot walk or stand without help; and more. Recent studies indicate that immune systems get compromised too, but the causational link is not clear.

I had been hoping that the folks at NASA would by now have spoken with the folks from the Biosphere 2 project, and that they would have deduced that solving the problem of having humans in space long-term is going to take more than just a significantly bigger spacecraft crammed with more stuff. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet devised a sealed environment, with a whole ecosystem inside that includes plants, animals, insects, humans, etc that will support all that life indefinitely ~ unless you include the planet we’re on, which wasn’t exactly “invented” anyhow and which seems immune to integer division.

As the good commenters at SlashDot noted, continuously-inhabited space vehicles (err, flimsy tin cans kept in orbit) tend to get parts of them gummed up with less-than-pleasant things that are also part of our natural world. That mold you sometimes find in an uncleaned bathroom? Stuff like that lives in and around standing and flowing water all over the world. Those annoying fruit flies? Ditto, they’re part of the natural world, buzzing around decaying stuff.

The first time I saw Greenbeans, we got to do some hiking in a little area along the Mohawk River, not far from lock 7. He made the very prescient observation that being outdoors among the plants and the other living things is far more relaxing to us (on a very low level we probably don’t know too well) than most other environments we could choose.

With that in mind, I sometimes go hiking at lunchtime in the woods behind the office where I work. One of the guys has made some nice trails back there, but they’re more like game trails than anything else .. there are no markers, and unless you’re right atop them you’ll never see them. I was out there last week, and again today, and it was amusing to see the fruit flies buzzing amidst the decaying leaves and such in the woods.

To totally switch topics .. I’m prepared to get flamed for this, but I wanted to say that from the perspective of a first read of it, JMG’s book “the Long Descent” is pretty damn good. It borrows more from other histories/theories of the constant rise & fall of civilization than it does from contemporary Americana (which seems to be Jimbo’s one-and-only inspiration) and as such, it’s missing a lot of the predictions that we associate with Mad Max outcomes or things from zombie movies. I need to read it again (taking notes this time) to make sure, but I believe he skipped completely over the negative form of American Exceptionalism that seems to, ahh, infect much of the doom community of the day.

Jimbo’s blog is a good example of that sort of thing. The plot line is that Americans are sooooo obscenely spoiled, so used to getting their way and no other way, that they’ll de-civilize at a scorching meteoric rate once the Cheez Doodle truck stops arriving on time, or when the power goes out just as American Idle (sp) gets to the interesting part. Another variant of the same assumes that formerly good neighbors will be hacking each other apart with machetes in order to steal gasoline so they can keep driving their enormous SUVs to Mall*Wart. This is American Exceptionalism flipped to the dark side, and little else.

Enough of this praise-for-the-AD stuff, however .. no, what I found really interesting was that even as “the Long Descent” painted a future just as stark as (or even worse than) what was contained in Dmitri Orlov’s book “Reinventing Collapse”, the former left me feeling more hopeful and open-minded about the possibilities of the future (along with the reinforcement that yes, things are going to get rough) whereas the latter nearly made me throw up a couple times, and left me in a pretty dark funk for awhile.

One of the many interesting tidbits in the AD’s book was that the smallest unit of human survival is not the individual, or the household, or the family, but is in fact the community. His notes on what constitutes appropriate technology were pretty good too, though probably none of it is new to anyone here. He did a good job dissing the beans & bullets type of survivalism. He also had what seemed like a very good set of suggestions for how to cope with the coming changes as America de-industrializes and ceases to be an empire.

 

whither go the forces of change?

The blogs are abuzz with hints that revolution is coming to our streets. The Housing Bubble Blog hosted a guest-author rant recently on this subject; Jimbo has been flogging his rented mule on this stuff for awhile now, with the vitriol mostly directed at Paulson or Blankfein; Faux Nooz keeps its big pot o’ rabble-resentment stew on a hot simmer, ready to be directed at whoever Faux’s corporate sponsors don’t like this week; and there’s no shortage of unbiased news stories showing how the rich are getting richer presently at the expense of everyone else, even (or especially) during the current economic downturn.

I live in Massachusetts and within the distant orbit of Boston, known locally as “the Hub” (short for Hub of the Universe) or as Beantown, and known in many places (albeit with some sarcasm) as the Athens of America. It’s where Paul Revere’s nighttime horse ride led to what was either an altercation between local law enforcement and domestic terrorists or an act of revolution, depending on whose history books are easiest to reach. What they don’t teach out here, of course, is that at the time of the revolution, roughly a third of the people were for it (for various reasons), roughly a third were against it, and the remaining third didn’t give a rat’s behind either way. What they also don’t teach is that the so-called founding fathers were, for the most part, rich business owners who stood to profit immensely from setting up a new nation which, by their own design, would be very much a pro-business environment ~ a great place for lazy fairy capitalism.

The founding fathers succeeded beyond their wildest imaginations. The resulting country became so pro-business that its political machinery was controlled almost entirely by business interests. The standard fairy-tale ending has not ensued, however .. just like Ebola virus spores do, those same business interests have essentially succeeded in wrecking the host economy upon which their survival depends, or so it seems at this point.

Due to a network glitch, the archived Facebook materials from the late eighteenth century are offline at the present time. I can only speculate on the nature of the two-thirds majority of the people who either did not care to revolt or who had no serious beef with the English ownership. The domestic terrorists, err, founding fathers, were the minority agitators who succeeded in politically outmaneuvering (or drowning out .. did any of them own media outlets?) the apathetic majority in what they would later call their “quest for democracy”. Heh, it just goes to show you that irony is a renewable resource.

What we have now is a similarly politically-apathetic majority being whipped up by a similarly economically-opportunistic minority. Coincidence? Don’t think so.

We are all familiar with the way the USSR tried to manufacture the ideal Soviet Man .. he was someone who would be perfectly co-operative, hardworking, unselfish, able to always overlook his own personal welfare in favor of the collective’s welfare, totally patriotic, etc. That the former USSR did not succeed in this effort is a matter of record.

Last week on another blog I read an interesting group discussion about Libertarianism. The upshot of the discussion was that to be a perfect Libertarian person, you would need to be fully informed about everything your government is doing, as well as able to express your political opinions coherently and to be able, as a sole individual, to get just as much access to (and influence on) the politicians as, say, the political action committee representing the interests of, say, the domestic tobacco growers or domestic automobile manufacturers. The discussion also concluded that democracies are rather fundamentally designed to be inhabited by perfect Libertarian persons, and that they don’t work properly otherwise.

This sounded very much like what the Soviets learned about how Communism didn’t work correctly unless its participants were all Soviet Men (and Women) .. and it jives with what we know about how intentional communities don’t work correctly unless staffed by dedicated communitarians. It also fits rather nicely about how, for millennia, practicing democracies included only the titled (ie, rich or property-owning) among their voting participants (and then only the males) ~ because the only way to be the perfect participant in a democracy is to have the time and resources to stay fully on top of everything political and to have just as much access to (and ability to be heard by) the largest of the wealthy interests vying for influence of the politicians in question.

What happens when a democracy doesn’t work? It gets taken over by oligarchic interests, as happened in Rome and in post-Soviet Russia and other places. I humbly submit to the readership that what we call “democracy” here in the United Parking Lot of America is actually “broken by design”. That is to say, the only people who can properly participate in it are those whose waking hours are not filled with work (for someone else!) but can instead be spent absorbing political news and exerting influence on the political process. Indeed, democracy is designed for the likes of Bill Gates, Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Nardelli, etc (folks who’ve got extreme wealth and who’ve got whole staffs of people to follow the news and report back to them with the interesting bits) and not for, say, single moms raising three kids while working two jobs just to barely survive.

If you had to show where most of us fall on a spectrum from the Bill Gates types to the struggling mom types, most of us are far closer to the mom than to ol’ Bluescreen Bill. That is to say, our waking hours are taken up by the exigencies of basic survival (without which we’d be living in our cars and then homeless & hungry in fairly quick order) and not by increasing our political awareness or exercising political influence. In fact, if most of us call our politicians and ask them to cancel their lunch with, say, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Group representatives so that they can meet with us personally, we’ll get told “no, thanks”.

Given that political/economic/social equality is at best a chimera (remember, it was originally designed as “political equality among rich titled/landed males, to the exclusion of all others”) and that the fundamental condition of most people has always been (and probably always will be) more time spent on personal survival than on following political events over which we’ve got negligible influence, it’s worth considering what form of government might best suit the needs of the people. Democracy, as we know it now, does not work because individual ordinary people have never had the same influence as well-funded political action committees or über-wealthy individuals with lots of time on their hands. As we know them now, democracies tend to devolve into oligarchies which sometimes, though not always, kill off their host nations due to excesses gone wild ~ as is happening now with Wall Streeters giving themselves enormous bonuses from monies made by borrowing from one part of the government at 0% APR and selling back to the government (and to others) at the prime lending rate. It remains to be seen if the host is in fact wrecked this time around.

I credit the Russians for having the tenacity to oust the oligarchy that arose just after the downfall of the Soviet Union. They seem to have replaced an economic oligarchy with a political one. Another name for a political oligarchy might be a monarchy. Given how many centuries monarchies survived and were stable compared to how few centuries democracies have survived without blowing up in spectacular fashion, it’s far too early in the game to say the democracy has succeeded or is the ideal form of government. Indeed, I would call democracy a decidedly less-than-ideal form because there’s no effective check on the power of the economic oligarchy that inevitably assumes ownership of the political processes. Observe the way the Wall Streeters neither have nor need a PAC .. they just call the Fed or Treasury directly and say what they want, and it gets done.

China and Russia are both far ahead of us in keeping economic oligarchies in check. China rather famously executes its economic criminals or managerial failures (ie, corruption), usually publicly and televised live. What the Russians do with theirs is best left unsaid .. suffice it to say that the recidivism rate is negligible.

What do we do with ours? Why, we give them bonuses so we can retain their “talent”!

Dang .. I lost LTL’s email address .. former CFN’ers will recall the discussion about a proposed government.

[kaka, I meant to go grocery-shopping this morning before work, but instead the Muses called .. Far, thanks for explaining how it works]