The Useful and the Useless

 

USEFUL
USELESS

The battle lines are forming.

Guest Post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

You’re standing on the prow of an ocean liner cutting through the icy waters of the North Atlantic. A huge iceberg looms dead ahead. You’ve seen it for some time, but now it’s too close, and the liner too big and fast, to avoid the collision. You quietly make your way to the lifeboats, knowing they’re the only chance for saving yourself and your loved ones. Below decks, an orchestra plays a waltz and oblivious revelers dance.

Most people don’t foresee the world’s inevitable collision with the iceberg of unsustainable fantasy. When it happens, they’ll respond predictably, with panic and cowardice. Those who’ve seen it coming and moved to the lifeboats will experience their own roiling emotions, attenuated by recognition of the logic behind the disaster. While the forewarned have dreaded impact, many will also welcome it, in the way one welcomes an unpleasant medical procedure: let’s get it over with. The motive is not malice, but conviction born of experience that actions have consequences and there’s no escaping them. After seemingly inexplicable and interminable delay, consequences shall arrive, amplified by the tawdry stratagems that promoted delay.

It will come as a surprise to many, but governments cannot suspend reality. Their arsenal, when things break down, comes down to their arsenal: the capacity to coerce. Violence or its threat enables governments to exact compliance. Proponents of government power invariably see themselves exercising it. Once the ship hits the iceberg, it will be obvious that governments’ guns are not wands, freeing citizens from the necessity of producing as much or more than they consume. They cannot compel innovators to innovate or producers to produce. While coercive power comes from one end of a gun, none of the powers that produce progress (and the gun) magically materialize at the other end.

It is said that America is a society divided. True enough, but the important question is: along what lines? Crisis and social breakdown will provide clarification: it’s governments and their beneficiaries versus producers. In other words, those who don’t do useful things versus those who do.

Huge shifts in social mood and direction are presaged. President Trump’s election presages the coming division. Among the analyses of the election, few noted an obvious dividing line. Trump’s supporters by and large do useful things, or are angry because they’re prevented from doing useful things. They build, engineer, manufacture, plant, grow, operate, maintain, repair, transport, and sell the things we find useful or essential. When we ram the iceberg, their skills, brains, and adaptability will be sorely needed.

Politicians and bureaucrats and the millions dependent on them for their fake jobs, income, food, shelter, transportation, and medical care will find little demand for their skills, such as they are. The useful may well conclude that keeping them alive is more trouble than it’s worth. There will be those who are too young, old, or infirm to produce, but whom the useful will support out of friendship or kinship. However, it would be surprising if they felt anything but contempt for the faceless hordes demanding that someone, anyone, take care of them.

Take away the undeserved from the undeserving and you get a tantrum. Steal the earned from those who earned it and you get righteous rage. One’s a firecracker, the other a volcano. The game has been to impress upon the useful a moral obligation to support the useless, but the volcano’s about to blow, burying that obscene morality in lava and ash. Given the staggering levels of accumulated debt and promises, the useful know their talents, skills, hard work, productivity and futures have been mortgaged for the useless. This is the salient and intractable social division. No reconciliation is possible between the useful and those who believe themselves entitled to their enslavement. The Trump fissure will become a yawning chasm when the Good Ship Profligate Government collides with the iceberg.

Centralization serves the needs of government and its dependents. Honest production and exchange require little government, perhaps none at all. Those who believe current arrangements should persist have to believe that the useful who support those arrangements will provide more and more while receiving less and less. The implicit premise has to be that when it all finally breaks down, the useful can be brutally subjugated—but kept producing—while receiving nothing more than their subsistence. Slavery cannot support the police state necessary to impose it, much less a modern economy. Those who believe any outcomes other than destruction and death are possible are delusional. If those are the outcomes they anticipate and desire, they’re homicidally and suicidally psychopathic.

Governments will have their surveillance apparatuses, police, militaries, prisons, torture chambers, concentration camps, killing fields, and the like. The useful will have their minds. Totalitarian accounting is daunting. All that money going out for suppression, so little coming in from a populace whose best and brightest have been imprisoned or murdered, or who produce the minimum necessary to survive. The day comes when the policeman, soldiers, and guards can’t be paid with anything of value and all hell breaks loose. Or, less colloquially, centralization gives way to decentralization.

To what depths governments will descend and how long they will survive as agents of repression is unknowable, but their dissolution is foreordained. They cannot commandeer the resources necessary to sustain the current level of tyranny. The useful will vote with their feet and if that’s not possible, bullets will be their ballots. They will establish enclaves and protect themselves from the tantrums, chaos, and depredations of the useless. (Useful in such a context may require nothing more than a willingness to work hard.) The useless depend on the useful, who of course don’t need them at all. The useful will eventually triumph, if the species survives (not a sure thing). Tragically, the butcher’s bill is likely to be exorbitant.

THEY REALLY ARE BASTARDS

AMAZON PAPERBACK

KINDLE EBOOK

 

 

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Uncola

Whenever I suffer from doom-porn malaise or prepper fatigue, I shall henceforth recall these ominously wise words of foreboding and admonishment:

After seemingly inexplicable and interminable delay, consequences shall arrive, amplified by the tawdry stratagems that promoted delay.

Thank you Robert. Excellent piece.

Ed
Ed

Robert, this article was picked up by LRC.

TJF
TJF

“Take away the undeserved from the undeserving and you get a tantrum. Steal the earned from those who earned it and you get righteous rage. ”

Love it.

Flashman

As an old guy I’m fortunate. My kids are married and have families of their own with solid men who are more than capable of defending them. My wife is Australian so I can get her to the airport. I’ll be fully armed of course. Then I can come home and wait for the shit to come to me. And as I consider myself already dead, this old Marine is going out in true Marine fashion. No quarter asked. No quarter given. If I can take 5 or 10 dregs with me I’ll consider it a service to God and my fellow man.

Boat Guy
Boat Guy

Good night chesty where ever you are !

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

Damn jar-heads. It’s “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”

pyrrhus
pyrrhus

But don’t be confident that Australia will be better…

NtroP
NtroP

Flash, as another old and armed vet (Army) I more or less have your same plan. Take a few with me, the more the better. Kinda sounds like “a rifle behind every tree”!

Flashman

I’m sure there are others out there like us NtroP. Too bad all of us can’t hook up. Be nice to have a squad of old coots who love America and are “good to go”. You know those folks that thank you for your service? Well God bless ’em. But what they don’t realize is that it was my privilege.
I love this Nation. And I owe it and the “ones that gave all” a debt. I’d like to repay it.

DurangoDan
DurangoDan

All wars are bankers wars. Thank you for serving the bankers? You must be joking. America exists only in your imagination. We live in a world of corporate feudalism where Trump is merely middle management. Love and protect your family and you will have lived an honorable life. Wake the fuck up!

Robert (qslv)
Robert (qslv)

Sounds like a plan.

BB

I guess we are going to have civil war in parts of our country.There will be civil unrest in the Big urban areas.I am not looking forward to seeing our republic burn to the ground but only Satan has committed the greater Sin of rejecting God.No other nation on the face of the earth has been so quick to abandon Our God ,our Christian principles and founding Documents.Now we know why America is never mentioned in the Bible…If the foundations are destroyed , what can the righteous do..Psalm 11- 3

Rojam
Rojam

Amen BB. Well said, I am sad to say.

DC Sunsets

Agreed. The center of the USA is anti-life.

There can be no greater sin than to reject the greatest gift of all, to turn one’s back on the only real way to hold back the cold of entropy.

DC Sunsets

Robert, great work.

I sincerely think that where we’re headed is a reversal of much of the last 100 years, and the biggest, most general aspect of this is scale.

For 100 years people increasingly looked to the center, to the massive, for direction. I think every trend of significance in this regard is openly reversing. The future is local, familiar, and small.

I consider this to largely be a good thing. The adventure continues until its end, and all that matters is the Path we take.

My goal is to cultivate nimbleness, so that as the pace of change picks up, I can identify those people whose skills and situation I can complement. We’ll find our way together.

Rojam
Rojam

One of the finest pieces I have ever read on TBP. As a 38 year toolmaker/machinist it makes me rather proud, though simultaneously humbled and ultimately saddened, that an article dedicated to the producers (which seems to be a rarity these days) is really an article about collapse and eventual demise. A sobering and reflective article, indeed.

TrickleUpPolitics
TrickleUpPolitics

This site seems to specialize in articles about doom and gloom. Pfffft.

William Quick

Probably because it has a better, more rational grasp of the state of reality than most people do.

MMinLamesa
MMinLamesa

Reality is a bitch pal. Ignore it at your own risk.

Ed
Ed

” Pfffft.”

I hope that’s the sound of you flouncing off to your usual forum.

starfcker
starfcker

Great read, Robert. One question. Jim put a Galbraith quote up this morning that I thought was spot on, it mirrors some of my thinking, and I’m curious as to your thought about it. I see both of us as small government guys, with your ideal being even smaller than mine. That said, I often have a different enemy in my sights. Here’s the quote, “When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality.” Again, straight forward question, where does that sort of thinking fit in your worldview. Not trying to stir anything up, or detract from your excellent essay, just curious.

Norman Franklin

Nice job Robert, it reads like a course on atlas shrugged. I believe we hit the iceberg in 2008 when the banksters and politicians got away with the crime of the century (the bailout). Everyone who has skills should go on strike as soon as they are able. The wife and I downsized and moved from vegas to a town of 4500, cut our living expense nearly in half. It has been a struggle, but very rewarding as well. “The game has been to impress upon the useful a moral obligation to support the useless.” I decided some time ago to stop playing that game as I am not my brothers keeper.

lmorris
lmorris

we did the same, told my kids all grown you are on your own. no debt. nice.

Jason Calley
Jason Calley

My wife and I are in the process of doing the same. Going to a small town of about 3,000.

Peaceout
Peaceout

I don’t know why I have never thought of this before but I found this statement by Mr. Gore to be spot on and very profound;

“Among the analyses of the election, few noted an obvious dividing line. Trump’s supporters by and large do useful things, or are angry because they’re prevented from doing useful things. They build, engineer, manufacture, plant, grow, operate, maintain, repair, transport, and sell the things we find useful or essential.”

It is the nature of folks like this to quietly and humbly go about their business and continue to get things done in spite of all the noise and racket that emanates from the heads of the useless,… until it is not.

It feels like that day is getting closer everyday.

MrLiberty
MrLiberty

Government is just people. Not magical people, just people. ANYTHING the government does can EASILY be done by some other group of people. The difference being of course that when government does it, it is done with money that is STOLEN, NOT EARNED. It is done with property that is TAKEN, not voluntarily exchanged for something else. It is done because a POLITICIAN, LOBBYIST, or other financial benefactor of the project, service, agency, etc. has decided it needs to be done – NOT BECAUSE a consumer in the voluntary exchange marketplace decided they wanted it done or because an entrepreneur decided there likely was a market demand. When an entrepreneur decides to do something, he/she takes the risk (and reaps the reward or suffers the market punishment). When a politician decides to do something, he/she begins simply by TAKING – first money, then freedom, then rights, then options, etc. REJECT government “solutions” at EVERY turn. If we do not unravel ourselves from the net they have woven throughout our society – displacing private alternatives and private capital in the process, the end of this charade will be even worse.

Anon
Anon

Mr. Liberty, I wish I could give you a 1000 thumbs up. Mr. Gore’s fine article is only enhanced by the comments I have read thus far. Clearly, this is a blog of heightened awareness, and take stock in the fact that there are outposts of reason, such as this blog still in existence. Excellent!

MrLiberty
MrLiberty

Your new “captcha” verification system is quite “useful.” Much nicer than trying to reproduce blurry numbers or vague letters.

rhs jr
rhs jr

Flashman, I’m 71 but I think hit and run works better, especially at night. BB, that’s when Is 28:10 kicks in.

botclan

Today in history is Patrick Henry “give me liberty or give me death” day.

Dennis Roe
Dennis Roe

Well, there goes that last salt grain of optimism lodged in the attic of my skull. Bye. You’re right Mr. Gore. Dead on and righteous. Amen. “When the music’s over , Turn out the lights.”

Capn Mike
Capn Mike

Nice Doors reference!

Backtable
Backtable

“The implicit premise has to be that when it all finally breaks down, the useful can be brutally subjugated—but kept producing—while receiving nothing more than their subsistence.”

Exactly. Brilliant writing, Robert. One of the most concise pieces I’ve read on our current predicament to date. And make no mistake, it’s not a “problem” we face. Problems have solutions, like hanging from a tree, someone may come to rescue you. A predicament is when you’ve already fallen. There is no solution other than attempting mid-fall to mitigate the impact.

Trump faces nearly insurmountable odds in getting the ship righted. Yes, he’s damn-near unrivaled in his Machiavellian machinations; at every turn he seems to get the one-up on the a**holes in the Lame-stream media and DC. If nothing else in his entire term gets set straight, this alone in my mind is a HUGE triumph. Like a boxer letting loose with a wicked volley, give it to them, good and hard! The bastards had this coming for decades and we’re finally able to see the venting of some rage.

But at some point he’s fighting The Hordes. In a very real sense, so are the “the productive” across this nation. Starfcker is dead-on in his take of corporations. The productive are caught between two groups – the Elites, and their entitlement-to-power mentality, and the unproductive, and their entitlement-to-anything-they-damed-well-want mentality (fueled and supported by the Elites).

This isn’t going to end well. There truly is no middle ground. At some point the lines get permanently drawn and both sides become irretrievably divided. It seems only a matter of time before some critical mass occurs and the entire issue of personal accountability vs. socialism comes to a raging head. I’ve noticed this, with some sadness, even in my own family. The divisions have become more pronounced with each passing month.

MrLiberty
MrLiberty

I would say that there is indeed a “middle ground.” In fact it is occupied by MOST of America. Despite the belief that there are “2” Americas, there are indeed dozens, each with its own agenda. There are those of us who REALLY want FREEDOM back (and government mostly if not completely gone, and then there are those (many of whom are republicans) who are more than happy with huge government programs (so long as they meet THEIR needs – ie. warfare, big business welfare to keep the stock market alive, central banking to keep the government deficit spending going and keeping Wall Street profitable, government monopoly schools so they don’t have to pay the full cost of their kid’s “education,” and so many other programs). Of course there are plenty of democrats who demand big government for other welfare programs and jobs programs, and then at the other end of the spectrum are those who want total government, total welfare, and total socialism, etc. If our nation were easily divided between just TWO ideologies, a division would likely have happened a long time ago. In Congress, the “right” is handed programs that make their constituents happy in return for votes on programs that the “left” wants, and visa versa. That is how we got so far down the welfare/warfare road with the two-party oligarchy leading the charge. It would be nice to hope for the divisions growing greater by the day, but I fear that people are fearing the prospects of freedom, individual responsibility, limited government, and all the programs that will inevitably HAVE to disappear, rather than embracing the only solution that will provide a sound and secure future for everyone.

DC Sunsets

Agreed. The middle will follow whatever Narrative becomes dominant. For 100 years or more, Leftism of one sort or another was dominant. I think that’s in the process of turning over to not-leftism for a while (maybe 100 years give or take) and once the turn is fully complete, the middle will follow the New Narrative.

Life will go on for the nimble, I think.

Boat Guy
Boat Guy

Remember there are desperate people ready to band together as a gang / tribe / family or even a modest to highly effective military unit in a SHIT HIT THE FAN MOMENT and Deputy Barney with his Intercontinental Ballistic Winnebago Crisis Command Center and his crew of “Just doing my job bunch ” may be surprised what they are capable of !
I know our little liberal snowflake coexist bunch are not prepared for a snowstorm let alone an all out collapse !

Ed
Ed

Damn, BG. That first sentence was so fuckin long that you only used two exclamation points in your whole fuckin post. Way to go, man.

Boat Guy
Boat Guy

I was a marine electrical mechanic installing generators and power supply systems on big boats , not an English and composition major ! I actually had to produce on time and under budget and was held accountable for my work !

Ed
Ed

Did you get extra credit for using exclamation points in place of periods?

Macumazahn
Macumazahn

It’s the productive versus the parasites – always has been, always will be.

Mark
Mark

How stupid of the. Left to have walk outs.

Turn about would be fair play. A day without white men.

Dr. Doom
Dr. Doom

Smile White Man, the enemy has done half the dirty work for you. For decades they have culled your kind from Government and Business. You should have noticed the dearth of White guys in any government offices. “Affirmative Action” has taken the talent out of every Big Business on Earth. Where once innovation was, now there are dullards who do nothing but look busy and have no actual skill to do anything. That Titanic Analogy is outdated. It was merely one cruiseship. The largest and most opulent but only one. What you are seeing is a Total Collapse. Money makes this fake world go round, like a hamster wheel. This Monopoly money has no value and the ones who run the hamster wheel have no idea why it goes nowhere. The Collapse is already here. Austerity in Europe and Bailouts in America, call it what you will. Those empty malls and retail bankruptcies are THE END OF THE ROAD. Cities are already broke, so are most states, and now the Feds join them with unpayable debts and spiralling budgets. The Collapse already happened. They blew up bubbles and tightened, but at this point you can see all it did was hide and delay the Inevitable.

Boat Guy
Boat Guy

In 1960 America was 80% white and lead the world in everything now America is 60% white ! Any guesses what happened here !

The tax man
The tax man

To stop the undeserving growing at a faster rate than the producers simply change the tax laws.
Zero out the tax deductions for the second & subsequient kids below (say) $30,000. Take out the earned income tax credit, head of household credit and a few more. Let the Census department share data with the IRS, thats how to find about 20 million extra families to tax.
This is all very fair – and overdue – its fair to tax the people who generate the costs.

DC Sunsets

Meh.

Eliminate welfare of any kind for people who have additional kids while on the dole.

While all this sounds great, the reality is that until John Q. Taxpayer is scared to death about keeping his own kids sheltered, safe and fed, he (or more likely, his wife) will not countenance leaving the “poor kids” to suffer for their parents’ stupidity.

There is no way to mitigate the suffering of children without enabling the barbarism of their parents. It will take very hard times indeed for people to turn their backs on suffering children, and that, my friend, is what will be required to cut the dysgenic imbalance in births between the stupid and the smart.

Pete
Pete

The “poor kids” of the stupid parents should not be born at all.
The goal should be to push the stupids into having fewer little stupids.

MrLiberty
MrLiberty

Get rid of government and let the market provide the services PEOPLE WANT, rather than just what politicians and lobbyists want. Why a call for MORE GOVERNMENT REVENUE? They get WAY TOO MUCH now. We managed up until 1913 without an income tax and during the last half of the 1800s and up until 1913 without a central bank and on a (not perfect) gold standard (not perfect because the government still manipulated it). We were the richest, most prosperous nation on earth. Savings actually held value and for some periods during that range, actually increased in value as productivity allowed the dollar to buy more and more. Charity should ONLY be voluntary. The MARKET should determine what society wants, and people should pay for the services they use WHEN THEY USE THEM. ONLY by restoring market forces, eliminating government control over the 90% of society they now regulate, manipulate, control the monopoly on, etc. can we ever restore society to balance and harmony. One group simply cannot continue taking and taking without consequence….and as the posts keep voicing…there WILL be consequences. It is not as issue of not wanting to pay (as so many claim). It is simply an issue of not being FORCED to pay the government for inferior services, no choice in services, and for services the majority of the theft victims NEVER ASKED FOR. When the market no longer demands a service, the company goes away or changes products. When government fails, it begs for more money, gets it, and starts doing something else in addition that nobody (except the beneficiaries – not the payers – wants). Time for a complete rethink.

Francis Marion

Robert,

Superb piece. I think this sums our situation up very nicely:

“The day comes when the policeman, soldiers, and guards can’t be paid with anything of value and all hell breaks loose. Or, less colloquially, centralization gives way to decentralization.”

Humans are funny creatures, both simple and complicated all at the same time. An enigma.

Governments of the world are confident that they can control people with the apparatus they have put in place. But the truth is, even within their own apparatus, they cannot predict with 100% certainty how people will respond to orders.

Some impromptu surveys have been run north of the border here amongst one of our national policing forces on a number of occasions, I won’t tell you how or by whom, as to what percentage of the force would follow orders if the government were to begin cracking down on its own citizens in a draconian manner. The number sits consistently around 80%. Seems big and ugly until you realize that 20% of the government’s own people would either walk away or resist in a shit storm situation. Think about the impact a number like that would have on moral and organization internally.

When TSHTF it will not be orderly. It will be chaos, and the continent will fracture into a million tiny frontiers. Decentralization indeed.

Rdawg
Rdawg

I wonder about this as well. Yes, the western governments of the world have erected an enormous surveillance/police/military edifice, but if the economy tanks will the worker bees be eager keep the thing going, or walk away to take care of their own?

Per your informal survey, one in five dissenting inside an organization could really gum up the works, if applied properly.

Anon
Anon

And, that 20% can do a disproportionate amount of damage TO the organization. See: Edward Snowden. Within these organs, the smarter folks tend to rise to the top, or at least to higher positions. They know better than to voice their real opinions, kind of like Trump voters that worked at libtard workplaces. They were not going to lose their job over water cooler talk, but when in the privacy of the voting booth, well, we saw the outcome.
That same principle works in other things as well. The higher ups, that don’t believe in what is going on, will have access to much more damaging information that can be leaked to resistance organizations, and since the lower down sheeple would never believe that their “glorious leader” would ever turn, they can secretly bring more blast radius to an already hemorrhaging organ than some simple “clerk” or foot soldier.

underfire
underfire

Very good article.

This brings to recollection the saying from the former Soviet Union, before the collapse.
“They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work”

mangledman
mangledman

Excellent

Penforce

Her: “You still reading comments?”
Me: “Yep, I learned a great new sound, ‘Pfffft.’ I’m going to use it when I flounce from the room.”
Her: “What was the name of that website again?”
Him: “It’s not important, but if you use too many exclamation marks they beat you with their full shell belts.”
Her: “What caliber?”

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