Kunstler describes the same society that George Carlin describes, with less profanity. The unsustainablity of our economic, social, and political paradigm is a given. It’s just a matter of when it collapses into chaos and disorder. The timing is the question. This is where the Fourth Turning generational Crisis history comes into play. The existing social order is always swept away during a Fourth Turning. They usually last 20 or so years. We are entering year 5 of this Crisis. Within the next 15 years, the existing fabric of this country will be torn asunder. Will our future reflect Kunstler’s smaller, localized world made by hand? Or will it reflect and armed state on par with Orwell’s 1984? The choice is ours.
Do you know why scenes or even just shots of freeways so seldom appear in the movies we watch? Because they are so depressing that nobody can stand to see them. The jolts of terror that you get in a horror movie at least inform you that you’re alive, but the sight of a freeway only reminds you of what it’s like to be dead.
By extension, the true condition of the USA is too depressing to think about, and that’s largely the reason for our political paralysis. The “fiscal cliff” is only one step on a stairway to a different disposition of things, a world made by hand, in which we will no longer be prisoners of the freeway or hostages of the WalMart corporation, and I’m in favor of hastening the journey to get there rather than waste what remains of our wealth and spirits in futile rear-guard actions to stay where we are. There may be fewer frenzied days of Christmas shopping in that future world, but the company will be better, and the music will include the sound of your own voice.
It’s not that hard to imagine where history is taking us, if you accept the fact that it means a very different shape and texture of daily life. For instance: the jobs problem. We seem disappointed that none of our policy dodges — money-printing, stimulus packages, bailouts, wars — can bring back the working-stiff paradise of 1965 in which assembly line workers made as much money as tenured college professors and a year at the State U cost $500.
I don’t happen to be a political conservative in the standard sense, but the right-wingers have a point when they say there are a lot of idle people out there who can’t be supported forever by transfer payments. A lot of positions will be opening up in agriculture, but not in the way it is practiced today. The Agri-biz model of food production is not going to be operating much longer. We’re on the verge of a world food crisis that will provoke a complete revolution in farming, from the giant scale to the small and local scale, from industry to husbandry, from automation to loving care. The transition might not be a smooth one, since it entails questions of land ownership that, historically, get settled by political upheavals. But eventually we’ll get to that place of social re-set and there will be plenty of work for even the partially able-bodied. Hard to imagine, I know.
The future is quite the opposite of the robotic wet dream currently being sold out of the corporate propaganda mills. It’s much more likely that human labor (and human attention!) will be needed in millions of local economic niches, since rebuilding local economies is at the heart of that future. This will be true in the activities that support local agriculture, but also in rebuilding Main Street commercial networks, the physical reconstruction of towns and neighborhoods to replace failed suburbs and failed giant metroplex cities, in transportation, education, and medicine, and in running households that are organized differently than today’s familiar McHouses.
Right now the political process is resisting any effort to imagine that future, the aforementioned right-wingers most of all, despite their recognition of the transfer payment trap. More disturbing, though, is the likely apprehension by those in authority that the current arrangement of things is dangerously fragile. They are hostages to their own unwillingness to imagine living differently. So, doing nothing to upset the current system of organized complexity seems like the only safe option.
These implacable forces of history cannot be held back forever and will only move toward greater criticality in 2013. My annual forecast on these questions will come out next week in this space. Meantime, find whatever joy you can in the frantic exertions of Christmas, as practiced today, mostly on the freeway, coming and going to and from the WalMart or Target or TJ Max — and if you happen to be on the path to living differently tell us what your Christmas is like in the comments roll.
“the true condition of the USA is too depressing to think about, and that’s largely the reason for our political paralysis”
And a depressing article by JK. Economically, socially, and health-wise, we are headed for a collapse, an explosion. Millions of people that have destroyed their health will die when the collapse happens. Hospitals and pharmacies are already closing, and doctors are trying desperately to get out of practicing medicine.
People are depressed, and little of the real collapse has happened yet. They are eating themselves to death, taking pills toward their future death, spending themselves to death. Our whole society is committing suicide slowly but surely. And that’s because it’s gotten so awful, rotted from the inside, rotten to the core.
Nobody feels like supporting this system anymore. I feel like dying when I write out my huge property taxes check every year. I wish I wasn’t alive when I file my tax returns every year. I don’t own my property, the government does. I don’t work for myself, I work for the government and the FSA.
It’s depressing being a slave. That’s what Americans are these days, slaves. I look forward to the collapse, so people can get out from under the enslaving government, the abuse, the fraud, the lies and bullshit. I hope the government collapses, it’s the only thing that’s going to save the people that live here.
JK always wants to go back to some localized idyllic past that existed 50 years ago. Back when people had morals, values, ethics. But you can never go back, especially once morals, ethics and values have been destroyed.
The people that still have some semblance of these traits can only start anew, reawakening these concepts. The people of Rome, and every other civilization that failed, simply gave up and let it dissolve because it had become so corrupt and unsalvageable. Our country and government are unsalvageable, and with that I agree with JK. But you can’t go back. What he talks about is a pre-industrial society, and so we’re going to re-industrialize on a local level? I don’t think so.
The Sleeper Must Awaken
Via Mark J. Grant, author of Out of the Box
I am not sure the country is seeking a state of grace but we are surely seeking something of a much higher order than we are getting. Congress adjourns, the President spends twenty million dollars of our money flying off to vacation in Hawaii and we peer over the edge of a monetary cliff of our own making because we have elected people that have all of the leadership skills of some Grinch that is stealing our Christmas because we let him. Ultimately it is us you know, “We the People,” and perhaps it is our two party system of government that has failed us because we put people in power who know how to run for election and re-election but who somehow have no idea how to govern the nation. It is pathos, absurdity and frankly a tragedy that we face a financial calamity, and it is just that, and our elected leaders head off on vacation.
It may not be fiddling while Rome is burning but it isn’t that far off that course. In the end, I suspect, we will pass the deadlines and find ourselves in trouble. I say this because to date all we are discussing is who to tax and we have not made one serious effort to confront the social programs that have elected people but which the country cannot afford. It is not that complicated at its core; we cannot afford the entitlements that we have legislated and so the nation must, like any household, man up to what we can and cannot afford and get on with it. No use pretending that we are as rich as we once were and so we must first cut-back and then get down to the serious business of how we can increase our revenues. Households, corporations or governments; the fundamental issues apply and while different themes may apply for the fix; America’s economic condition must be fixed.
The awful truth is that WE are responsible. We elected these people. We condone a two party system where we end up with a choice between the mediocre and the inferior. We are left to choose between the fool and the idiot and the men of character, the people of intellect and those focused on the health of the nation are left behind either because they will not participate or because they cannot survive the taunts and tricks of those that have no other interest besides their own ego and their own self-interests. I make no apologies. This is our fault and until and unless WE start demanding a government that represents our interests and values and morals that sets-aside America from other nations; we have no one to blame but ourselves. That is the sad truth of it which is why going off our present fiscal cliff may be the best thing that could happen to the United States. We might just wake up!
Nice try, AWD, but I am convinced we are well past the tipping point. The folks who even want to right the ship, much less can figure out how to do it, are the minority. Welcome to Potterville-and/or Idiocracy.
i recall freeways in the matrix, to live and die in LA, bowfinger to name a few. this article is nothing more than hand-wringing doom and gloom. i can’t wait another year for his forecast. yes the world is going down the toilet, it has been going there since the days of carlin. what exactly is the world decaying from? the great gatsby is a novel. the real world, which includes you and me have been living in poverty for so long that down is up.why do you think we love to see people of walmart, we are looking to see if we made the weekly round-up. unless, of course, the hoity-toity are now posting on TBP
“some localized idyllic past that existed 50 years ago”
In 1962? Where, exactly?
Those were the times of my childhood, and I remember them well. There were remnants of “localized” societies, but they were disappearing very quickly.
It was the era of the Company Man and the corporate transferee, when IBM meant I’ve Been Moved, and our cities were being ruthless decimated by national policies that subsidized evermore cookie cutter subdivisions in former cornfields.
City neighborhoods that had sheltered 5 generations of the same family, where you could go to school, go grocery shopping, buy clothes and hardware, go to the doctor’s and get your prescription filled within a few blocks of your house or 3-flat, or get on a bus that ran every 10 minutes to go downtown, were being systemically destroyed and turned into ghettos, while slums that weren’t “ideal” but at least were places where families had whole networks of relatives and friends, and where crime was minimal, were being wrecked so their denizens could be warehoused in places like Pruitt Igoe or Cabrini Green.
This was the period that every other housewife began taking tranks and seeing a shrink after losing neighborly associations of decades and being stranded in some bedroom subdivision with total strangers hundreds of miles from her home.
It was when marriages began to fall apart, as young “silent generation” couples were thrust into the responsibilities of adulthood at age 19 or thereabouts but without the multi-generation stem families that had always been the support of young couples in the past.
I’d say that the post WW2 era was the beginning of the end. So much that was wonderful about our towns and cities was heedlessly destroyed by our policy makers and our novelty-obsessed population alike in that era of national hubris and obsession with whatever was new.
Idyllic it was not.
I was having having pre-holiday drinks with friends a couple nights ago, and we were lamenting things in general. One point I made was that I believe that we will see a return to manual labor production of food – the FSA will be hoeing fields and such – simply to provide work for them so as to allow them to survive.
They looked at me in stunned silence for awhile, then agreed it was a likely scenario.
Fuck your ‘wings’, Kunsler. Just another Cyclops.
llpoh
Lots of luck getting the FSA to work. Reading of places where the illegals kind of left and there was no one to pick tomatoes — and some good citizens thought they were willing to work. Only it was too hot, too arduous, and they sloped away after maybe two hours.
You’d need a lot of overseers and probably never enough.
If they starve, they starve.
Here’s to LESS Kunstler in the future.