As the next American military mis-adventure in Syria heats up and conflict with Iran & Russia increases, the price of oil will blast back into the triple digits. It has already breached $98 per barrel, which will push gasoline prices back towards $4.00 per gallon. Our economy just loves $4.00 gasoline. It keeps that dreaded deflation from happening. Kunstler is right. Our entire country has gone insane, believing that debt can solve a debt problem, being spied on by our government makes us safer, putting government in charge of our health will caost less and make us healthier, and that technology will save us from the reality of peak cheap energy.
Societies periodically go insane. Fallacious memes sweep through a frightened and confused populace and bad things happen, bad choices get made. Two bad ideas in particular infect the American thought-o-sphere these days: 1) that non-cheap oil can keep all the rackets of consumerism going; 2) that we can offset all the quandaries of non-cheap oil with accounting fraud and debt creation.
These ideas present themselves in the places of greatest authority and influence. The president says “we have a hundred years of shale gas.” The Wall Street Journal says that an inflating Dow Jones index stands for a growing economy. My recent favorite came out of the increasingly demented New York Times on Saturday:Even Pessimists Feel Optimistic About the American Economy. Quoting an econ professor named Tyler Cowen from George Mason University The Times said:
The recent surge in domestic oil and gas production signals “the start of a new era of cheap energy,” he said, while less expensive online education programs could open the door to millions of people who have been priced out of more traditional academics.
That was a two-fer of stupidities since A) it ought to be self-evident that $90-a-barrel oil is not cheap oil, and B) that because of A, there’s unlikely to be lucrative employment for people who learn double-entry book-keeping on their laptops. In fact, anyone who actually learns math over the Internet must conclude that $90-a-barrel oil will crash all the supposedly normal operations of a consumer society, including the ability of oil-and-gas companies to get the capital investment necessary for further oil production.
None of these accredited morons seems to get the basic equation between available cheap energy — e.g. oil with a high energy-return-on-investment — and capital formation — the accumulation of wealth that can be deployed to produce more wealth-producing activity. That was only possible on the way up Hubbert’s curve. On the way down, alas, the relationship enters a Ponzi unwind of too many claims on excessive promises to pay. The net result is a society with a lower standard of living. Personally, I think it will go way lower, and way sooner than later.
The idea that on-line education is a sovereign tonic for economic vitality is just another gloss on the inane belief that technology can take the place of energy in the equation above. Tom Friedman, grand poobah, of The New York Times Op-Ed page is the cheerleader-in-chief for that meme, but it is accepted by virtually all authorities in business and politics, and their handmaidens in the academic chairs. As the American economy dissolves in an acid bath of capital scarcity and grievance, these idiots will be waiting for the next iPhone app that can power the electric grid — and thus all the new iPhones streaming out of the Apple factories of China into the hot little hands of nineteen-year-olds in Michigan taking “Macroeconomics” on the Kahn Academy website.
Speaking of China, The New York Times ran another humdinger over the weekend: China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities that illustrates how meshugga that society is. Such are the tragic sorrows of late-blooming techno-industrialism that China is doing exactly the opposite of what the future requires — namely, destroying the basis for small-scale local food production. But, not to put too fine a point on it, China is fucked. They are simply in the hopeless zone of population overshoot and resource scarcity. There was some loose talk in that Times story to the effect that China will offset all its problems by colonizing Africa (and, who knows, other lands with other resources), but it will be interesting to see how it goes on the slow boat back to Shanghai with all that bok choy rotting in the hold as it plies east out of Mombasa under an ever-hotter tropical sun.
Chinese leadership apparently thinks this is the way to go. Just as the Princeton-bred American economists think that we can all migrate onto the Web and live a virtual existence on virtual wealth with virtual energy. The manifold disappointments that societies around the world face as they discover the falsity of their own memes is already leading to a lot of dangerous mischief, which is to say armed conflict. There is potential for a lot worse.
#233 — JHK chats with Jim Quinn, author of The Burning Platform dot com. Jim Quinn spent most of his career as a financial executive in the corporate world and now works on the business side of a major university (name of it omitted at JQ’s request). He’s a keen observer of the financial scene and the way it expresses itself in the decay of everyday life.
The new KunstlerCast music is called “Adam and Ali’s Waltz” from the new recording Waiting to Fly by Mike and Ali Vass.
Sounds like some enjoyable beach reading for my vacation. I’m just finishing Kunstler’s Too Much Magic. His books are not nearly as hyperbolic as his weekly articles. They are reasoned and well presented. My interview with Kunstler should be posted on his site tomorrow. His review below is well done and will leave you utterly depressed. I can see why RE likes Orlov’s stuff so much.
A Review of Dmitry Orlov’s The Five Stages of Collapse
by Jim Kunstler
For most people, the collapse of civilizations is a subject much more appetizingly viewed in the rear-view mirror than straight ahead down whatever path or roadway we are on. Jared Diamond wrote about the collapse of earlier civilizations to great acclaim and brisk sales, in a nimbus of unimpeachable respectability. The stories he told about bygone cultures gone to seed were, above all, dramatic. No reviewers or other intellectual auditors dissed him for suggesting that empires inevitably run aground on the shoals of resource depletion, population overshoot, changes in the weather, and the diminishing returns of complexity.
Yet these are exactly the same problems that industrial-technocratic societies face today, and those of us who venture to discuss them are consigned to a tin-foil-hat brigade, along with the UFO abductees and Bigfoot trackers. This is unfortunate but completely predictable, since the sunk costs in all the stuff of daily life (freeways, malls, tract houses) are so grotesquely huge that letting go of them is strictly unthinkable. We’re stuck with a very elaborate setup that has no future but we refuse to consider the consequences, so messengers are generally unwelcome.
Will the cost or availability of oil threaten America’s Happy Motoring utopia? There should be no question. But rather than prepare for a change in our daily doings, such as rebuilding the railroad system or promoting walkable neighborhoods over suburban sprawl, we tell ourselves fairy tales about how the Bakken shale oil play will make America “energy independent” to provide the illusion that we can keep driving to WalMart forever.
This is an especially delusional season in the USA, with salvos of disinformation being fired every day by happy-talkers seeking to reassure a nervous public that everything is okay. Just in the past few weeks we’ve seen an Atlantic Magazine cover story titled “We Will Never Run Out of Oil” followed by a report from the International Energy Agency stating that the USA would become the world’s number one oil producer by the year 2020, and many other bulletins of comforting optimism from The New York Times, NPR, and Forbes. The Atlantic Magazine used to be a credible organ of the American thinking classes, and the Paris-based IEA is vested with authority, though its political agenda (to prop up the status quo) is hidden. In any case, these are the interlocutors of reality for the public (and its leaders) and the memes they sow travel far, wide, and deep, whether they are truthful or not. The infectious conucopianism they gleefully retail has goosed the stock markets and made it even more difficult to put out the contrary view that we are in deep trouble, even on the verge of an epochal disruption.
Dmitry Orlov published a fascinating book on this subject in 2008 titled Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects. Orlov, born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1962, had the unusual experience of emigrating to the US as a twelve-year-old in the mid 1970s, and then returning periodically to what is now called Russia before, during, and after the collapse of its soviet system. He had a front-row seat for the spectacle and an avid intelligence rigorously trained in the hard sciences to evaluate what he saw. He also possessed a mordant, prankish sense of comedy that endowed his gloomy subject with a lot charm, so that reading him was the rare pleasure of encountering true prose artistry on a par with his countryman and fellow émigré, the late Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov was a scientist, too, by the way, working for years as a professor of entomology (insects, with a specialty in butterflies) to pay the light bill.
Recall the smug triumphalism in America that greeted the shockingly sudden collapse of the sclerotic USSR in 1991 (no bang and little whimpering). Serious historians were so intoxicated that one of them declared it to be “The End of History,” meaning that there would be no more geopolitical struggles henceforth, a preposterous idea that became instant dogma from Harvard to the US State Department. To our pols and their wonks it proved the manifest superiority of neoliberal corporate capitalism. Case closed. Now the USA could go forth unopposed and turn the Black Sea into a lagoon of pure Coca Cola, bringing liberty, democracy, Chicken McNuggets, and Michael Jackson videos to the disadvantaged citizens of long-benighted lands yearning to “consume” freely.
From his special perch between the two nations, Orlov saw the whole show differently: as a warning that the USA would probably meet a similar fate, but that the outcome for us would probably be much worse due to our massive stranded assets (the whole kit of suburban sprawl), our degraded sense of public goods, our lost traditional craft skills, and our pathetic lack of mental fortitude. The arguments he presented were clear, sensible, and absent in virtually every other venue where people discussed the repercussions of the Soviet collapse. To me, Orlov’s points were startling in the slap-your-forehead sense of “…but of course! Why didn’t I think of that.”
For instance, he pointed out that the food production system in the Soviet Union had been so direly mismanaged for so long — most of the 20th century — that a whole counter system of work-arounds had been established in the form of nearly universal household gardening. Even families who lived in the ghastly Modernist apartment slabs of Moscow had access to garden plots in the vast un-suburbanized Russian countryside, and they could get there on public trains and buses. The more privileged had dachas ranging from humble shacks to fancy villas, each with its garden. The Russian people were used to the necessity of growing their own food and had the skills for preserving it to offset the idiocy of the official distribution system in which citizens wasted whole days waiting on line for a cabbage — only to be told they had run out. When the soviet system collapsed, the effect on society was far less than catastrophic, perhaps even salutary, because a large cohort of people with an interest in growing food, who formerly only pretended to work in dismal bureaucratic jobs, were now available to reoccupy and reactivate the de-collectivized farming sector that had been a drag on the Russian economy for generations. After a period of adjustment, one thing was self-evident: no more lines at the Russian grocery stores.
By contrast in the USA even farmers don’t have kitchen gardens. This is not a myth. I live in an agricultural backwater of upstate New York where dairy farming modeled on industrial agri-biz reigned for decades (it’s in steep decline now) and as a rule the farmers do not grow gardens. They buy balloon bread, Velveeta, and Little Debbie Snack Cakes at the supermarket, just like the insurance adjusters and other office drones, and whatever leftover part of their farm is not planted in corn is occupied by an above-ground pool, or the carcasses of retired all-terrain vehicles, or the miscellaneous plastic crap associated with raising children in a “consumer” culture. When even farmers don’t grow any of their own food, you can bet that a lot of knowledge has already been lost. American supermarkets operate on a three-day resupply cycle. The system is much more fragile than most Americans probably suppose. My guess is that few even think about it. The resupply system has never failed, except briefly, in localities hit by natural disasters. However, a financial crisis could cripple the food distribution system of the entire nation. Truckers who don’t get paid won’t deliver. Trouble in the Middle East oil nations could provoke an oil crisis — something we haven’t experienced since the 1970s. There are many ways for this complex system to fail — the point being that when it does, there will be no backup as was the case in the former Soviet Union. So one might conclude from reading Orlov that our prospects for being able to feed ourselves are a lot worse.
Housing: a similar story. There was no private real estate in the old USSR. People just occupied apartments and homes that belonged to the state and were assigned largely on the basis of privilege and connections to the people in power. When the political system collapsed, nobody got kicked out of their dwelling place. No foreclosures occurred. Over time, the situation took care of itself emergently, shall we say. Private ownership resumed after a 75-year hiatus. Laws regulating it were put in place. Many Russians ended up in possession of apartments and houses they had occupied for decades and a real estate market emerged from that (with some strong-arming from the potent Russian mafia).
Contrast that outcome with America’s experience beginning in 2007 with the imploding housing bubble: an extravaganza of foreclosure and even homelessness. And that episode must be considered a preview of coming attractions because the USA has not entered the robust phase of collapse yet. When that happens, you can expect the tribulations of property loss to be epic. It could throw our system of property law into chaos for a generation or more as the volume of foreclosures would become virtually unmanageable. Property law is at the core of our political system, which would then follow directly into an unmanageable condition. Orlov’s point, I think, is that a political collapse in the US would leave many more people discommoded than was the case in old soviet Russia.
Similarly, too, transportation. The Russians never adopted a culture of car dependency. A small minority of connected people had cars that they ostensibly “owned,” but the vast majority of the population depended on an elaborate public network of subways, trams, buses, and railroad trains. As a result they never constructed an alternative universe of suburban sprawl. When the soviet system imploded, the trains and buses, etc., kept on running. Russians could still get where they had to go to do what they had to do (rebuild their lives). We in America have poured our accumulated national wealth into a drive-in utopia that has no future in the remaining years of non-cheap oil. Any kind of an oil problem, whether it is a sharp geo-political event or just the slow crushing grind of high gasoline prices, will leave American stranded.
Part Two: A Clear Picture of What to Expect
Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse was a tour de force of political writing with true literary panache. It announced the arrival on the scene of a major thinker — in a period of history that didn’t care much about thinkers (unless they could invent cell phone apps). After that first book, he published some books of assorted essays, and now he is out with another major statement titled The Five Stages of Collapse — Survivors Toolkit (New Society Publishers). The new book assumes that global industrial civilization is on a collapse trajectory, and he doesn’t waste any ink on arguments trying to prove that. Rather, Orlov lays out in detail exactly how the process of civilizational collapse may actually happen. For many readers and observers, the prospect is often conceived in narratives of Hollywood-style apocalyptic melodrama with some kind of chaos driving the story. Orlov avoids that and instead presents a clear declension of proceedings that unfold naturally and comprehensibly in a certain order — like the progressive organ failure that doctors encounter in the intensive care unit. Orlov calls his method “a taxonomy of collapse.” The point of the book, he writes, is “(n)ot whether collapse will occur, but rather what it looks like, what to expect and how we should behave should we wish to survive.”
As he conceives it, the five stages would tend to play out in sequence based on the breaching of particular boundaries of consensual faith and trust that groups of human beings vest in the institutions and systems they depend on for daily life. These boundaries run from the least personal (e.g. trust in banks and governments) to the most personal (faith in your local community, neighbors, and kin). The first stage of collapse in Orlov’s framework, therefore, is financial collapse, because the operations of modern finance are so deeply dependent on trust between total strangers and faith in the abstract financial instruments (bonds, stocks, paper securities) that they traffic in, which themselves derive value largely from the sheer faith that they represent what they purport to represent. In the circus of swindles that finance has become, with pervasive accounting fraud and FASB “mark-to-fantasy” collateral lurking by the bale in the too-big-to-fail bank vaults, and serial re-hypothecation by shifty fiduciaries of other people’s assets, and MF Global-style looting of accounts, and LIBOR fixing, and the new Cyprus-style “bail-ins,” and untold other rackets rampant on the money scene, faith and trust have taken a terrible beating. One might even say they have been hopelessly trashed and it is now only a matter of time before the global counterparty banking system runs out of sheer inertial momentum and implodes. When that happens, say goodbye to accumulated wealth and access to capital — which is to say available investment in anybody’s future.
Financial collapse beats a quick path to Orlov’s second stage, commercial collapse where there isn’t enough money to conduct the logistical operations of daily life — moving the merchandise, doing business. “Faith that ‘the market will provide’ is lost,” Orlov writes. Commodities grow scarce and are hoarded. Supply chains break down. Trust between people and companies who do business with each other erodes. This is where truck drivers who don’t get paid, and can’t get any diesel fuel, stop delivering food to the supermarkets.
This phase of breakdown is where real human suffering begins. Unemployment shoots the moon. People go hungry. They can’t pay the electricity bill and the lights go off. They shiver in cold houses. Evictions and foreclosures leave people homeless. Things turn political and collapse of government commences, largely because government is too incompetent or feckless to rescue citizens from the disruptions of financial and commercial collapse. Faith and trust in elected leaders and official agencies are lost, indeed often in the whole political system itself. In depression-era Germany, the political outsider Adolf Hitler spoke freely of his contempt for Weimar democracy and the Nazi party came to power largely on the promise of “effective leadership” unencumbered by a pettifogging Reichstag — that is, dictatorship.
If political collapse does not resolve favorably, whether by heroic reform, or some sort of revolution, or the rise of an effective autocrat, things proceed to the next stage: social collapse. Orlov makes the interesting observation that the collapse of the Soviet Union terminated in political collapse and did not go further. Historians sitting around their campfires decades from now may marvel at Russia’s good fortune in that episode. Russia was able to reorganize effective government under V. Putin, and rebuild the financial and commercial sectors that the soviets had mismanaged so woefully. There was little revolutionary bloodshed, though through the 1990s the rule-of-law remained so flimsy that the Russian mafia filled the vacuum in enforcing property and contract issues, often with violence. Orlov provides an especially lively, detailed account of the Russian mafia’s workings as the default shadow law enforcement agency in that period to illustrate the consequences of political collapse.
For all the tribulations of the soviet collapse, Russia was still endowed with rich natural resources, oil and gas in particular, which allowed them to reorganize a high order advanced economy for a period of time that may prove to be rather brief. The next time, the outcome may not be so favorable. Russia’s oil production faces decline and the soviet collapse may have only been a dress rehearsal for the main event, so stay tuned on that.
When collapse comes to the USA, the firewall between political and social collapse my not hold due to the poor choices Americans made about organizing daily life back in the 20th century, especially the fiasco of suburbia and the extreme car dependency it entails. As Orlov conceives it, social collapse occurs up-close and personal when “faith that your people will take care of you is lost,” meaning that the fabric of even local community unravels. Disaster management, peacekeeping efforts, charity support of the weak, organized cooperation… all lose traction.
This is where you get the rule of gangs, failure of local law and order, vigilante justice, and the loss of any other institutional armature for civil relations. In the practical realm you get the lack of water service and sanitation and a scavenging economy (if you can call it that).
Under the best circumstances, and in theory, even given the gross discontinuities and deprivations of a post-oil world, societies might reorganize emergently (that is, respond successfully to new realities) and re-set to a decomplexified lower energy level. Civil institutions might be restored, but not necessarily in a way that we would recognize as modern or normal — for instance along lines that we would call neo-medieval, with the rule of “strong men,” much more clear-cut hierarchical class and gender relations, and other social bric-a-brac familiar from pre-modern history. This is the stuff of much futurist fiction. My own World Made By Hand novels depict such an outcome, minus zombies. (A few readers reacted with consternation that, for example, the feminist revolution had apparently come to an end in my scenario.)
Under the worst circumstances, a devastated society just can’t get its act back together and proceeds to the final stage: cultural collapse. This is something that has never been seen on the universal scale since the rise of civilizations (as far as I know) but has happened under the most extraordinary extremes, such as life during wartime, or in highly localized situations. Orlov references the subjects of ethnologist Colin Turnbull’s 1972 book, The Mountain People about an African tribe named the Ik of Uganda, who devolved to such a level of Hobbesian barbarism under the displacements of post-colonial Africa that even the supposedly hard-wired instincts of compassion, kindness, and love for children and spouses sputtered out. Human life in that mode would self-evidently seem to have a limited horizon. Eventually, the Ugandian government was importuned to disperse and resettle the tribe, with no more than ten individuals from it in any given place of resettlement. One would have to surmise that such a collapse on a universal scale would logically precede human extinction, since there is not an alternative planet to resettle de-culturated humanity on.
All of these issues, Dmitry Orlov addresses with outstanding clarity and a surprising wit. The Five Stages of Collapse is something apart from the many other books about the difficulties facing human beings at this moment in history. And given the rather grave subject, it is really a pleasure to read somebody who writes so well.
Jim seems to think the Snowden revelations and the expected overreach of the government in trying to aprehend and prosecute him will be the match that lights the fuse and sets off the more interesting portion of this Fourth Turning. Adam Kokesh’s armed march on Washington DC on July 4 could get more interesting if the supporters of Snowden and the student loan Millenial serfs join the show. I do believe the fuse has been lit. The worldwide financial markets are exhibiting schizophrenic behavior, the oligarchs are cracking down on dissenters, the peasants are getting poorer by the day, and the corruption has reached epic proportions.
Hopefully it all holds together until Thursday when Kunstler posts our doom and gloom podcast.
At first glance, the growth of the super snooper state revealed this weekend — like one of those giant, hidden funguses that spreads for miles under the forests of upper Michigan — is a striking discovery. But I maintain that there is an inverse correlation between the technical abilities of the government to harvest data and their competence to use it for anything. The salient trend in our government is to become more inept, ineffectual, impotent, and feckless, no matter how big the compost heaps of sheer information it manages to pile up.
For spying on your own citizens, the Nazis and the Soviets were way ahead of us using technology no more elegant than phone bugs and filing cabinets. Our immersive techno-narcissism vests too much awe in computer magic itself. What would hurt much more — and work much better — is if Americans become a nation of snitches. That’s a possibility, of course, but I attach a low percentage to it because it requires a respect for authority that is just absent here now, and has been eroding steadily for decades, really ever since Jack Kennedy was gunned down.
Ironically, Barack Obama got where he did because he pretended to be the reincarnation of JFK — a young, dynamic change agent — and it took years to discover that he was a mere bundle of platitudes wrapped in a banana leaf of good intentions, stamped with a sell-by date that, alas, has now passed. His piled-up troubles seem more a matter of inattention than intent — especially his failure to apply the rule of law in banking — and his recent televised attempts to explain himself give off the demoralized vibe of somebody just sadly going through the motions.
Anyway, events are in the driver’s seat, not government officials. We’re in the Koyaanisqatsi zone now — everything is out-of-balance from our financial operations to our geopolitical relations to the state of nature around the planet. Too many stresses have built at too many stress-points and a palpable fear judders through the wireless waves that something has to break. Oddly, political cracks appeared this month in two of the least-expected places: Sweden and Turkey. WTF? I wonder a little now if the revelations of Edward J. Snowdon about the American Security apparatus will bring on a wave of street protests in Washington DC on the Fourth of July. Maybe I’m just channeling my own dim memories of 1969, but this historical moment has a similar tingle. We know that the amalgamated gun nuts are already planning what they’ve advertised as an “armed march” across the nation’s capital. Frankly, I’m kind of glad that they’re doing this. The government needs to be reminded that there are already enough small arms loose in America to temper its cloddish excesses. The time is ripe for others to join in a larger Fourth of July demonstration.
Most satisfying would be a Washington march by college loan debt slaves terminating in a bonfire of the loan contracts on the Ellipse. I keep waiting for the “magic moment” when millions of these poor swindled young grads will send the message thundering through Facebook and Twitter that they are done paying the inflated price for their useless degrees in “marketing” and “gender studies.” Aren’t you amazed that it hasn’t happened yet? (Although the default rate is rising so fast that a general renunciation may be accomplished without public fanfare.)
Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if the US government goes after Mr. Snowdon, who is currently on the lam in Hong Kong which, some of you may remember, belongs to China. Does that ever have the potential for a world-class embarrassment? There’s less than a month before America’s big annual birthday party, just enough time for this story to build to an explosive climax. The government will surely have to make some kind of move before than. Given its recent tendencies to over-reach on everything, the government could easily screw the pooch on this. The 29-year-old Snowdon has the look and demeanor of an all-American hero and it will be interesting to see the reaction if and when federal agents haul him off a plane in handcuffs. What’s more, Snowdon made a clear, concise, and eloquent statement explaining his actions: “The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong,” he said.
Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb? Mother, do you think they’ll like this song? Mother, do you think they’ll try to break my balls? Ooh ah, Mother, should I build the wall?
Mother, should I run for president? Mother, should I trust the government? Mother, will they put me in the firing line? Ooh ah, Is it just a waste of time?
The lyrics to Mother had both a literal and figurative meaning for Roger Waters. He was literally describing his overprotective single mother (his father was killed in World War II) building walls to protect him from the outside world. The figurative meaning is Big Mother sending its boys off to war and using fear to control and manipulate the masses. At the time he wrote this song in 1979, the Soviet Union was thought to be at its peak of power and the Berlin Wall represented a boundary between good and evil. Nuclear war was still a looming fear. Waters has always had a dim view of totalitarian states and institutions (English schools). Having seen his Wall Tour performance this past summer at Citizens Bank Park with a diverse crowd of 40,000, ranging in age from senior citizens to teenagers, it seems this song has gained new meaning. He sang a duet with himself from 1980 projected on the Wall and when he sang the lyric, “Mother, should I trust the government?” the entire stadium responded in unison – NO!!! This revealed a truth that is not permitted to be discussed by the corporate mainstream media acting as a mouthpiece for the ruling class. A growing legion of citizens in this country does not trust the government. This is very perceptive on their part.
In part one of this two part series – Hey You – I examined how an invisible government of wealthy, power hungry men have utilized the propaganda techniques of Edward Bernays and lured the American people into a narcissistic, techno-gadget, debt based servitude. Over the last one hundred years they have created a totalitarian state built upon egotism, material goods, and fulfilling our desires through Wall Street peddled debt and mass consumerism. It has been an incredibly effective form of control that has convinced the masses to love their servitude. The ruling oligarchs correctly chose the painless, amusement saturated, soft totalitarianism of Huxley’s Brave New World over the fearful, pain inflicting, surveillance state, house of horrors detailed in Orwell’s 1984.
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
The nefarious establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, launch of welfare programs in the 1930s, expansion of the entitlement state in the 1960s, creation of the credit card in 1970, mass media marketing propaganda, and the formation of an empire of debt laid the foundation for a society based on triviality, egotism, irrelevance and mass delusion. The conscious manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses by an invisible government of powerful men using media propaganda and easy to access consumer credit has reached its mathematical limit. The oligarchs built a society dependent upon exponential growth. This unsustainable prototype began to show signs of strain in the 1990s. The powerful interests have been growing ever more desperate and blatantly obvious in their looting and pillaging of the debt bloated carcass of a country. They used their control of the political system to repeal Glass-Steagall, allowing the Wall Street banking cabal to become Too Big to Control. The oligarch puppets at the Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve did the bidding of their masters by reducing interest rates and expanding the money supply to create two epic bubbles.
The Dot.com bubble was created by Wall Street utilizing hype and misinformation to fleece millions into believing we had entered a new paradigm. The only people who got rich were the Wall Street hucksters, shysters and shills.
When the Dot.com bubble burst, Alan Greenspan came to the rescue, at the urging of Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, by creating the largest banker made bubble in the history of the world. The combination of excessively low mortgage rates, complete lack of regulatory oversight by the Federal Reserve, control fraud committed by the Wall Street banks, and buying frenzy stirred up by the corporate MSM and NAR, led to the biggest financial collapse since 1929.
The white collared psychopathic criminals on Wall Street reaped billions in profits, paid themselves millions in bonuses, and cost taxpayers trillions when it all blew up in 2008. The ruling elite have added $6 trillion to our national debt and their central banker has added another $2 trillion to our ultimate tab, while providing free money to their Wall Street bank owners. They realize their efforts to restart the exponential growth engine have failed. They gutted our productive manufacturing based economic system by shipping the blue collar jobs overseas to Chinese slave labor facilities, replaced workers with machines, stimulated consumption with unlimited distribution of high interest debt, and allowed conglomerates to drive small business owners out of business with their cheap foreign sourced goods, all in the name of capitalism. The plan worked so well that real wages haven’t risen in 40 years, inflation has destroyed the purchasing power of the middle class, 47.7 million people are dependent on food stamps to survive, and the masses can’t even afford the cheap slave labor produced trinkets anymore. There is too little cash, too few jobs, too much debt, too many takers, too few makers, too many bankers, too much delusion, and too few resources to sustain the unsustainable. We have entered the end stages of a ravenous locust swarm. The fields have been stripped barren.
When the men in smoke filled rooms realized their soft totalitarianism was losing its grip on the oblivious, submissive, egoistical, distracted masses, they began phase two of their effort to retain their wealth, power and control. They began to institute Orwellian measures to strike fear into the populace. Their illusion of control is dissipating and they are resorting to force in order to maintain hegemony. It began with the immediate passage of the Orwellian Patriot Act one month after 9/11. Did the corporate media question how a 363 page all-encompassing expansion of police state power was written in a few weeks after 9/11 and passed by October 26? They did not. The bill was pre-written and ready for instant implementation when the time was right. The Orwellian version of America was launched.
“If the ideology had been a lie, then they are not heroes and gods on earth, but monsters and criminals, and their life has been self-serving and meaningless, without significance and honor. And that is the credibility trap. It is the impulse for the leaders to keep doubling down in the hope of a win, until exhaustion and collapse.” – Jesse
Obedience to Authority
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” - Stanley Milgram – Obediance to Authority
Just as Edward Bernays knew the unruly masses could be manipulated by propaganda and molded to believe whatever the small group of intellectually superior men wanted them to believe, conditioning using fear and authoritarian methods have also been perfected by the ruling class. Doctor Stanley Milgram unwittingly provided the oligarchs with confirmation the average citizen could be ordered to do anything by invoking expertise and authority over their subjects. Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolph Eichmann had begun. Eichmann’s defense that he was simply following orders when he exterminated millions of Jews roused Milgram’s interest. How could millions of Germans participate and condone such genocide? Milgram’s testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.
Writer Kendra Cherry describes the experiment:
The participants in the Milgram experiment were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 30 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with terms including “slight shock,” “moderate shock” and “danger: severe shock.” The final two switches were labeled simply with an ominous “XXX.”
Each participant took the role of a “teacher” who would then deliver a shock to the “student” every time an incorrect answer was produced. While the participant believed that he was delivering real shocks to the student, the student was actually a confederate in the experiment who was simply pretending to be shocked.
As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even complain about a heart condition. Once the 300-volt level had been reached, the learner banged on the wall and demanded to be released. Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock.
Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter issued a series of commands to prod the participant along:
“Please continue.”
“The experiment requires that you continue.”
“It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
“You have no other choice, you must go on.”
The level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver was used as the measure of obedience. How far do you think that most participants were willing to go? When Milgram posed this question to a group of Yale University students, it was predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 participants would deliver the maximum shock. In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks.
Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels. It is important to note that many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter. Yet they continued to follow orders all the way to the end. Why did so many of the participants in this experiment perform a seemingly sadistic act on the instruction of an authority figure? According to Milgram, there are a number of situational factors that can explain such high levels of obedience:
The physical presence of an authority figure dramatically increased compliance.
The fact that the study was sponsored by Yale (a trusted and authoritative academic institution) led many participants to believe that the experiment must be safe.
The selection of teacher and learner status seemed random.
Participants assumed that the experimenter was a competent expert.
The shocks were said to be painful, not dangerous.
The American people have been participants in their very own Milgram experiment being conducted by their government since 9/11. Since the passage of the Patriot Act, the government continues to demand that its citizens increase the voltage in the name of security. Since 2001, the Orwellian measures have included:
Warrantless domestic surveillance.
The ability to search telephone calls, emails, financial matters especially involving foreign individuals, and medical records for people who are “suspected” of endangering the country.
Color coded risk levels designed to keep citizens fearful of non-existent terrorists.
Pre-emptive invasion of foreign countries.
Committing U.S. forces to war without a declaration of war by Congress as mandated in the U.S. Constitution.
Assassination of people on presidential kill lists.
Extermination of “suspected” enemies by predator drones.
Camera systems monitoring the movements of Americans in cites and streets across the United States.
Torture of detainees in camps outside of the United States.
The authority to indefinitely detain America citizens without trial.
Executive orders giving the President the ability to unilaterally disregard the U.S. Constitution and take control of private industries.
Use of drones to monitor the activities of American citizens.
Allowing the very bankers that destroyed the worldwide economic system to blackmail the American taxpayers into handing them $700 billion.
Not prosecuting one Wall Street criminal after the largest Ponzi control fraud in the history of the world.
Cameras and listening devices on public transit and other public locations.
Military exercises conducted in U.S. cities in order to condition the masses.
Attempts to control and censor the internet through the introduction of the SOPA bill.
The use of tragic mass murders by mentally defective young men on psychotropic drugs to disregard the 2nd Amendment and disarm American citizens.
TSA thugs molesting little old ladies and young children to desensitize citizens to gestapo like tactics and treat them like criminals.
Government partnering with Facebook, Apple and other corporate entities to monitor, censor, and report the activities of citizens to the authorities.
The use of public schools to teach children what to think rather than how to think. Thought control is vital to an agenda of keeping the masses fearful and pliable.
Government agencies (FBI, ATF) creating terrorist plots, luring young dupes into the plots, providing fake explosives, and then announcing with great fanfare they have foiled a terrorist plot.
“See something, Say something” government media campaign designed to make citizens paranoid and fearful.
Just as Milgram pondered how the German people could follow the orders of those in authority to slaughter millions, one must ponder how the American people have allowed those in power to strip us of our Constitutional freedoms and liberties in the name of safety and security. They have conditioned the masses to passively accept their fate by utilizing fear, authoritarian measures, thought control, and propaganda. Human beings never change. They have been driven by emotions throughout history – fear, greed, love and hate. There will always be psychopathic men who seek wealth, power, glory and control. It happened during the decline of the Roman Empire and it is happening today during the decline of the American Empire.
“A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.” – Tacitus
Big Brother is Watching You
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” – George Orwell – 1984
What the average person can’t seem to process through their government public school educated non-critical thinking brains is that there are actually a small group of bankers, politicians, corporate executives, media magnets, and shadowy billionaires who call the shots in this country. They constitute Bernays’ invisible government, run the show, mold the minds, form the opinions, suggest the ideas, and create the reality for the masses because they believe they are intellectually superior. The left/right and Democrat/Republican discord is a planned diversion for the masses. The country has devolved into a corporate fascist warfare/welfare state. We are clearly moving in the direction of Orwell’s state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought will be against the law. The longer this is allowed to progress the more likely any effort to resist like Winston Smith will be met with brutal measures.
The parallels to Orwell dystopian nightmare state grow by the day. Those in control use technology to bombard Americans with psychological inducements designed to overwhelm the mind’s capability for autonomous thought. In Orwell’s 1984 the giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. In Obama’s 2013 the 72 inch Chinese made HDTVs in every McMansion blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the zombie-like occupants buy trinkets and gadgets with a thin piece of plastic and makes the failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya appear to be triumphant successes. Our corporate/fascist party uses their control over the media message to indoctrinate and control the public mind through propaganda and repetitive messaging. In Orwell’s world, the Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party. In our world children are indoctrinated in government run public schools that fill their brains with government manufactured history, social engineering claptrap and what they should think, rather than how to think. The Orwellian Department of Homeland Security (Thought Police) instructs them to report anyone they think is suspicious with their “See something, Say something” campaign. Children are “encouraged” to re-educate their parents about green energy and global warming. Corporations fund schools to advertise their products within the hallways of learning. The outputs of this corporate/fascist partnership are non-critical thinking, functionally illiterate, willfully ignorant Proles who obey the Party and consume products as instructed.
In Orwell’s 1984 the Party keeps the population in a general state of exhaustion by making them work long grueling hours at government run agencies. This was designed to keep them from thinking or having the energy to resist. About one in six workers work for the government in the United States, with a substantial portion of private jobs dependent upon government largesse. The true distinction in our society can be seen in the income levels over decades of our own Inner Party, Outer Party and Proles.
The government educated masses were purposely not taught about the impact of Federal Reserve created inflation on their lives. Even using the government manipulated CPI, the real household incomes of the masses have barely risen in the last forty five years. Using a true measure of inflation, the real household incomes of the average family have fallen. In addition, prior to the 1980s those household incomes were predominantly provided with one parent working and the other raising the children. Today the vast majority of households require both parents to work in order to just tread water. Child rearing was delegated to the state and parents have been kept in a constant state of exhaustion, like hamsters in a cage on a spinning wheel. Household income was replaced by credit card debt, mortgage debt, auto debt, and student loan debt peddled by our very own Inner Party (Wall Street bankers). The Inner Party members have seen their incomes soar over the last four decades. This was not an accident.
As those at the top accumulate an ever increasing percentage of the national wealth, while consolidating their power through ever more sophisticated use of technology for surveillance, warfare, and financial theft; urban decay and blight spreads across the land. Totalitarian regimes are ferociously effective at augmenting their own power and wretchedly incompetent at providing for their citizens. Just as the London in Orwell’s dystopian world was a decrepit, rundown city in which buildings were crumbling, amenities such as elevators never worked, and basics such as electricity and plumbing were exceedingly undependable, the urban killing fields that are home to tens of millions in the United States are dangerous, disintegrating, hallowed out carcasses of once thriving metropolises. Hunger, poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and violence are the earmarks of society for the Proles. True unemployment exceeds 20%, with youth and minority unemployment exceeding 40%. There are 47.7 million Americans subsisting on food stamps (program administered by JP Morgan), accounting for 20% of all the households in the country.
The incompetency and mismanagement by our totalitarian governing body is evident for all to see, as bridges collapse, water mains burst, gas lines explode, mass transit shuts down and structures deteriorate due to decades of neglect. The priorities of those in power are clearly visible as they spend trillions on weapons used to attack sovereign countries, distribute billions in “aid” to foreign dictators, provide trillions to the criminal banking cabal on Wall Street, and devote billions to technology designed to monitor and control their citizens. Our entire rotting, fetid, bloated, corrupt society has about reached its limits. It is only a matter of time until it implodes like the former Soviet Union.
“Diminishing returns of ever-increasing complexity addressed with ever-more layers of complexity, larded with systematic lying based on mystifying, opaque jargon, sanctioned statistical misreporting, felonious cronyism, and scuttling of the rule of law. In short, the markets have been taken over in effect by a criminal racketeering syndicate. In doing this, so much resilience has been removed from these market structures that they are riddled with rot, like a mansion infested with carpenter ants.” – Jim Kunstler
We Have Always Been at War with Eastasia
Hush now baby, baby, don’t you cry. Mamma’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true, Mamma’s gonna put all of her fears into you, Mamma’s gonna keep you right here, under her wing.
She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing, Mamma’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm. Oooh babe, Oooh babe, Oooh babe, Of course Mamma’s gonna help build the wall.
The concepts of Doublethink and Newspeak are alive and well in our increasingly Orwellian society. The massive long-term campaign of large-scale psychological manipulation, described in detail by Edward Bernays in 1928, has succeeded in breaking down the capacity for independent thought by the masses. Those in control of the media have molded the minds of millions to believe anything the government tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, the government and their media propaganda mouthpieces had convinced 69% of the American public that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, even though there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support that claim. The storyline of Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies in their incubators during the first Gulf War was another example of propaganda designed to manipulate public opinion. By controlling the media message, those in power control the present and can manipulate the past. The government controls the curriculum in public schools and writes our history to conform to whatever storyline that supports their agenda. With 20% of the adult population in this country functionally illiterate, the formulation of ideas or critical thought is virtually impossible for these people. This is exactly what is desired by the ruling class.
The outrageous example of Doublethink in Orwell’s 1984 occurs during the Hate Week rally. The Party shifts its diplomatic allegiance, so the nation it has been at war with suddenly becomes its ally (Eurasia), and its former ally becomes its new enemy (Eastasia). When the Party speaker suddenly changes the nation he refers to as an enemy in the middle of his speech, the crowd accepts his words immediately, and is ashamed to find that it has made the wrong signs for the event. The American people have been programmed to accept the same logic from our leaders. Saddam Hussein was our ally when he was fighting our enemy Iran, who had been our ally ever since we had overthrown their democratically elected leader in the 1950s. Then he became our enemy for using weapons of mass destruction, provided to him by the U.S., on his own people and threatening our control over Middle Eastern oil. Osama bin Laden was our ally when he was fighting our mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. Then he became our mortal enemy because we refused to leave Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War. Ghadafi was our sworn enemy after blowing up an airliner filled with Americans, until he helped us after 9/11 and became an ally. Then he became an enemy again for fighting to maintain his dictatorship. Mubarak was an ally for decades as we provided him billions in military hardware so he could brutally maintain control. Then he became an enemy when we decided he was no longer of use. Do you get the picture?
Do you see any parallels between Orwell’s Ministry of Plenty (oversees economic shortages); the Ministry of Peace (wages war); the Ministry of Truth (conducts propaganda and historical revisionism); and the Ministry of Love (the center of the Party’s operations of torture and punishment) and our Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, and Department of Homeland Security?
“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” – George Orwell
Should I Trust the Government?
So the oligarchs have utilized all the plays in Huxley’s playbook and are half way through Orwell’s playbook, but they are rapidly losing their credibility as a small minority of critical thinking people is using the internet to spread the truth and form phyles with like-minded citizens with similar values based on liberty and freedom. The political system is broken beyond repair as $2 billion was spent during this last “election” to maintain the status quo. The looting and pillaging of the middle class continues, while the poor are kept controlled, sedated and enslaved by entitlements, debt, drugs and prisons. The financial system is succumbing to the mountains of debt that have been accumulated trying to keep the game going. In the last ten years worldwide total credit market debt, on balance sheets, sovereign obligations, corporate debt, household debt – has grown from $80 trillion to just over $200 trillion. U.S. unfunded liabilities committed to by the politician parasites that pass for our representatives surpass $200 trillion. There are $1.2 quadrillion of interconnected derivatives outstanding in the world today, 20 times the size of the worldwide economy. The accumulation of worldwide debt, aging developed country populations, depletion of resources, perpetual war, financial fraud and rampant corruption are going to lead to a collapse of epic proportions. It may not happen in 2013, but it will happen within the next five years. Jesse explains why the status quo will never relinquish their power, illegally acquired wealth and control without a fight:
“A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including them. The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.
And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system. The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious hypocrisy.”
The people of this country must regain a sense of responsibility for their lives and the lives of future generations. Enough people need to perceive they are being manipulated, controlled and used by the thought leaders and awaken from their narcissistic materialistic debt financed lives. Our culture has failed. The animosity and anger in the country is beginning to bubble over. The masses are beginning to realize they have been screwed. They haven’t figured out who to blame because they are still trapped in the Republican/Democrat false dogma. There is one Party putting on a show, as displayed this week with the fiscal cliff farce, as the government controlled media proclaimed victory because the status quo was maintained, nothing was cut, and $4 trillion was added to the National Debt. More people need to question and challenge the authorities. We must cast aside our willful ignorance of facts and accept the consequences of decades of bad decisions and delusions of grandeur. More government is not the answer. We must break free of the conditioning and mind control used to make us love our servitude and trust those in power.
Kyle Bass recently revealed a fact about our government leaders:
“They’re not going to tell you that a collapse is coming. You’re going to have to see it for yourself. The government’s never going to tell you that it’s going to happen.These guys are never going to tell you the truth, because they can’t tell you the truth. Their job is to promote confidence, not to tell you the truth.”
We need more people to respond to Roger Waters’ question, “Mother, should I trust the government?” with this answer before we can begin to tear down the wall that seemed too high.
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
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Random Quote
“They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal. This they falsely name Empire. And where they make a desert, they call it peace.” — Tacitus
