Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
America has become Alzheimer Nation. Nothing is remembered for more than a few minutes. The news media, which used to function as a sort of collective brain, is a memory hole that events are shoved down and extinguished in. An attack in Syria, you ask? What was that about? Facebook stole your…what? Four lives snuffed out in a… a what? Something about waffles? Trump said… what? Let’s pause today and make an assessment of where things stand in this country as winter finally coils into Spring.
As you might expect, a nation overrun with lawyers has litigated itself into a cul-de-sac of charges, arrests, suits, countersuits, and allegations that will rack up billable hours until the Rockies tumble. The best outcome may be that half the lawyers in this land will put the other half in jail, and then, finally, there will be space for the rest of us to re-connect with reality.
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What does that reality consist of? Troublingly, an economy that can’t go on as we would like it to: a machine that spews out ever more stuff for ever more people. We really have reached limits for an industrial economy based on cheap, potent energy supplies. The energy, oil especially, isn’t cheap anymore. The fantasy that we can easily replace it with wind turbines, solar panels, and as-yet-unseen science projects is going to leave a lot of people not just disappointed but bereft, floundering, and probably dead, unless we make some pretty severe readjustments in daily life.
We’ve been papering this problem over by borrowing so much money from the future to cover costs today that eventually it will lose its meaning as money — that is, faith that it is worth anything. That’s what happens when money is just a representation of debt that can’t be paid back. This habit of heedless borrowing has enabled the country to pretend that it is functioning effectively. Lately, this game of pretend has sent the financial corps into a rapture of jubilation. The market speed bumps of February are behind us and the road ahead looks like the highway to Vegas at dawn on a summer’s day.
Tesla is the perfect metaphor for where the US economy is at: a company stuffed with debt plus government subsidies, unable to deliver the wished-for miracle product — affordable electric cars — whirling around the drain into bankruptcy. Tesla has been feeding one of the chief fantasies of the day: that we can banish climate problems caused by excessive CO2, while giving a new lease on life to the (actually) futureless suburban living arrangement that we foolishly invested so much of our earlier capital building. In other words, pounding sand a rat hole.
Because none of that is going to happen. The true message of income inequality is that the nation as a whole is becoming incrementally impoverished and eventually even the massive “wealth” of the one-percenters will prove to be fictitious, as the things it is represented in — stocks, bonds, currencies, Manhattan apartments — hemorrhage their supposed value. The very wealthy will be a lot less wealthy while everybody else is in a life-and-death struggle to remain fed, housed, and warm. And, of course, that only increases the chance that some violent social revolution will take away even that remaining residue of wealth, and destroy the people who held it.
What lies ahead is contraction. Of everything. Activity, population. The industrial economy is not going to be replaced by a super high tech utopia, because that wished-for utopia needs an industrial economy underneath to support it. This is true, by the way, for all the other “advanced” nations. China has a few more years of dependable oil supply left and then they will discover that they can no longer manufacture solar panels or perhaps not even run the magnificent electronic surveillance system they are so artfully building. Their political system will prove to be at least as fragile as our own.
The time may even come when the young people, of the USA especially, have to put aside their boundary-smashing frolics of the day and adjust the pre-cooked expectations they’ve been handed to the actual contraction at hand, and what it means for making a life under severely different conditions. It means, better learn how to do something really practical and not necessarily high tech. Better figure out a part of the country that will be safe to live in. Better plan on hunkering down there when the people stuck in the less favorable places make a real mess of things.
I have debt bomb doom fatigue. I see people all around me (DC) without a financial care in the world.
The gutting of the basic-industry manufacturing base of the USA was nothing less than treasonous, never mind remarkably foolish. Same goes for turning over national monetary sovereignty to a private banking cartel controlled in large measure by foreign interests antithetical to the interests of the US population of the time. Can this be reversed at this late date? Doubtful, sez I; doubtful but perhaps not impossible, only highly improbable.
Putting into practice on a personal level Mr K’s “world made by hand” is no easy task, particularly without a network of like-minded folk with at least journeyman-level manual and light industrial skills, along with applied knowledge of farming and animal husbandry. I’ve been working at this for years now and it’s finally coming together, but it’s still something I see more as a fallback measure than an everyday priority. I imagine for most folks it remains a fantasy for the less optimistic rather than a modus operandi for themselves.
Greetings,
Here is a few minutes, I’m going to take a walk down to surfer’s point down at the beach. I’m going to watch people both young and old catch some waves. After all, surfing came to mainland USA right here, right across the street. What I’m not going to do is surf.
I’m not going to surf because it is not a skill I learned as a flexible child. As a flexible child living in the flat midwest, I learned how to ride a bicycle and later a skateboard and as a 51 year old guy, I still ride those. Also, I’m not going to buy those shoes that have that single wheel embedded in the heel that I see kids just tilt back on and go screaming down the sidewalk. Not me, no way.
If I attempted to ride those things – those things I did not learn to ride as a child then I would seriously injure myself. I know this for a fact because I’m stubborn and I’ve hurt myself doing things I have no muscle memory for. Yes, I probably could learn to surf but it would be a slow painful process and the ocean can hurt a guy real bad.
The millennials that have not bothered to learn how to do anything are not going to be able to transition to Kunstler’s world made by hand because they have no muscle memory for any of it. None. If for any reason the internet ever goes down then we’ll have an entire generation of 3rd graders running loose but 3rd graders with no curiosity or desire to take things apart and put them back together again.
I know much of this to be true as I open my museum/workshop to the public once a month. I may as well be a blacksmith in Heritage Village or do a turn of the century seance (complete with table knocking) for the level of understanding I perceive in the millennials. That you would use your very own hands to make something blows their minds apart.
Nickle, I was up in your neighborhood yesterday. Had a beer at TopaTopa and lunch at Blue Agave. It was great. Ventura is on the upswing and you have to give them credit. It has been much worse in the past.
Greetings,
I can just about hold my breath and run to Topa Topa from my location. You should let me know the next time you happen to be in my neighborhood. I’d meet you for a beer.
“pounding sand a rat hole”?
Stopped reading when he started cajoling about oil prices. Evidently, this author is one of those peak oil ass wipes. China will not run out of oil as long has they have the means to buy it using their reserve currency. They will buy from Russia and the middle east nations. Why f with the other nations that cater to the U.S.? No reason to at all. I am tired of all these shills touting the oil doom porn.
If you look at the price of gasoline, even at the current levels, it is still about what it cost in 1965. In 1968, I, as a junior in high school, still remember that in Mississippi gas was 29.9 cents a gallon. Unleaded gas was 32.9 cents. Mississippi’s legacy is they tax the F out of the people that live there. Texas at the very same time had gas for 24.9 cents a gallon. now if you allow for the debasement of the dollar as driven by the evil feral reserve, the cost of a gallon of gas was 11.5% of a troy ounce of silver selling for 2.14 (average for 1968). That would translate to 14% of a troy ounce of silver selling for the current market of 17.08. So since 1968 gas has risen 3 percent in value of silver. Think about that.
Pounding sand DOWN a rat hole.
Ya’ll Slickers hunker down in NYC because the Democrat government will be along any minute to put your White privileged building’s fire out, give you White Devils your next years supply of food and water, and provide you armed protection from the FSA, you betcha.