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The Twilight of Investment

It’s been a few weeks since the conversation on this blog veered away from the decline and fall of American empire to comment on points raised by the recent Age of Limits conference. Glancing back over the detour, I feel it was worth making, but it’s time to circle back to that earlier theme and take it one step further—that is, to shift from how we got here and where we are to where we are headed and why.

That’s a timely topic just at the moment, because events on the other side of the Atlantic have placed some of the crucial factors in high relief. A diversity of forces have come together to turn Europe into the rolling economic debacle it is today, and not all of them are shared by industrial civilization as a whole.  Still, a close look at the European crisis will make it possible to make sense of the broader predicament of the industrial world, on the one hand, and the way that predicament will likely play out in the collapse of what remains of the American economy on the other.

Let’s begin with an overview. During the global real estate bubble of the last decade, European banks invested heavily and recklessly in a great many dubious projects, and were hit hard when the bubble burst and those projects moved abruptly toward their real value, which in most cases was somewhere down close to zero. Only one European nation, Iceland, did the intelligent thing, allowed its insolvent banks to fail, paid out to those depositors who were covered by deposit insurance, and drew a line under the problem. Everywhere else, governments caved in to pressure from the rentier class—the people whose income depends on investments rather than salaries, wages, or government handouts—and from foreign governments, and assumed responsibility for all the debts of their failed banks without exception.

Countries that did so, however, found that the interest rates they had to pay to borrow in credit markets quickly soared to ruinous levels, as investors sensibly backed away from countries that were too deeply in debt. Ireland and Greece fell into this trap, and turned to the IMF and the financial agencies of the European Union for help, only to discover the hard way that the "help" consisted of loans at market rates—that is, adding more debt on top of an already crushing debt burden—with conditions attached: specifically, the conditions that were inflicted on a series of Third World countries in the wake of the 1998 financial crash, with catastrophic results.

It used to be called the Washington Consensus, though nobody’s using that term now for the "austerity measures" currently being imposed on the southern half of Europe. Basically, it amounts to the theory that the best therapy for a nation over its head in debt consists of massive cuts to government spending and the enthusiastic privatization, at fire-sale prices, of government assets. In theory, again, debtor countries that embrace this set of prescriptions are supposed to return promptly to prosperity. In practice—and it’s been tried on well over two dozen countries over the last three decades or so, so there’s an ample body of experience—debtor countries that embrace this set of prescriptions are stripped to the bare walls by their creditors and remain in an economic coma until populist politicians seize power, tell the IMF where it can put its economic ideology, and default on their unpayable debts. That’s what Iceland did, as Russia, Argentina, and any number of other countries did earlier, and it’s the only way for an overindebted country to return to prosperity.

That reality, though, is not exactly welcome news to those nations profiting off the modern form of wealth pump, in which unpayable loans usually play a large role.  Whenever you see the Washington Consensus being imposed on a country, look for the nations that are advocating it most loudly and it’s a safe bet that they’ll be the countries most actively engaged in stripping assets from the debtor nation.  In today’s European context, that would be Germany. It’s one of the mordant ironies of contemporary history that Europe fought two of the world’s most savage wars in the firt half of the twentieth century to deny Germany a European empire, then spent the second half of the same century allowing Germany to attain peacefully nearly every one of its war aims short of overseas colonies and a victory parade down the Champs Élysées. 

Since the foundation of the Eurozone, in particular, European economic policy has been managed for German benefit even—as happens tolerably often—at the expense of other European nations. The single currency itself is an immense boon to the German economy, which spent decades struggling with  exchange rates that made German exports more expensive, and foreign imports more affordable, to Germany’s detriment. The peseta, the lira, the franc and other European currencies can no longer respond to trade imbalances by losing value relative to the deutschmark now that it’s all one currency. The resulting system—combined with the free trade regulations demanded by economic orthodoxy and enforced by bureaucrats in Brussels—has functioned as a highly efficient wealth pump, and has allowed Germany and a few of its northern European neighbors to prosper while southern Europe stumbles deeper into economic collapse.

In one sense, then, it’s no wonder that German governmental officials are insisting at the top of their lungs that other European countries have to bail out failing banks and then use tax revenues to pay off the resulting debt, even if that requires those countries to follow what amounts to a recipe for national economic suicide.  The end of the wealth pump might not mean the endgame for Germany’s current prosperity, but it would certainly make matters much more difficult for the German economy, and thus for the future prospects not only of Angela Merkel but of a great many other German politicians. Now even the most blinkered politician ought to recognize that trying to squeeze the last drop of wealth out of southern Europe is simply going to speed up the arrival of the populist politicians mentioned a few paragraphs back, but I suppose it’s possible that this generation of German politicians are too clueless or too harried to think of that.

Still, there may be more going on, because all these disputes are taking place in a wider context.

The speculative bubble that popped so dramatically in 2008 was by most measures the biggest in human history, considerably bigger than the one that blew the global economy to smithereens in 1929. Even so, the events of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it remain the gold standard of economic crisis, and the managers of the world’s major central banks in 2008 were not unaware of the factors that turned the 1929 crash into what remains, even by today’s standards, the worst economic trauma of modern times. Most of those factors amount to catastrophic mistakes on the part of central bankers, so it’s just as well that today’s central bankers are paying attention.

The key to understanding the Great Depression lies in understanding what exactly it was that went haywire in 1929. In the United States, for example, all the factors that made for ample prosperity in the 1920s were still solidly in place in 1930. Nothing had gone wrong with the farms, factories, mines and oil wells that undergirded the American economy, nor was there any shortage of laborers ready to work or consumers eager to consume. What happened was that the money economy—the system of abstract tokens that industrial societies use to allocate goods and services among people—had frozen up. Since most economic activity in an industrial society depends on the flow of money, and there are no systems in place to take over from the money economy if that grinds to a halt, a problem with the distribution and movement of money made it impossible for the real economy of goods and services to function.

That was what the world’s central bankers were trying to prevent in 2008 and the years immediately afterward, and it’s what they’re still trying to prevent today. That’s what the trillions of dollars that were loaned into existence by the Fed, the Bank of England, and other central banks, and used to prop up failing financial institutions, were meant to do, and it may well be part what’s behind the frantic attempts already mentioned to stave off defaults and prevent banks from paying the normal price for the resoundingly stupid investments of the former boom—though of course the unwillingness of bankers to pay that price with their own careers, and the convenience of large banks as instruments of wealth pumping, also have large roles there.

In 1929 and 1930, panic selling in the US stock market erased millions of dollars in notional wealth—yes, that was a lot of money then—and made raising capital next to impossible for businesses and individuals alike. In 1931, the crisis spread into the banking industry, kicking off a chain reaction of bank failures that pushed the global money system into cardiac arrest and forced the economies of the industrial world to their knees.  The world’s central bankers set out to prevent a repeat of that experience. It’s considered impolite in many circles to mention this, but by and large they succeeded; the global economy is still in a world of hurt, no question, but the complete paralysis of the monetary system that made the Great Depression what it was has so far been avoided.

There’s a downside to that, however, which is that keeping the monetary system from freezing up has done nothing to deal with the underlying problem driving the current crisis, the buildup of an immense dead weight of loans and other financial instruments that are supposed to be worth something, and aren’t. Balance sheets throughout the global economy are loaded to the bursting point with securitized loans that will never be paid back, asset-backed securities backed by worthless assets, derivatives of derivatives of derivatives wished into being by what amounts to make-believe, and equally valuable financial exotica acquired during the late bubble by people who were too giddy with paper profits to notice their actual value, which in most cases is essentially zero. 

What makes this burden so lethal is that financial institutions of all kinds are allowed to treat this worthless paper as though it still has some approximation of its former theoretical value, even though everyone in the financial industry knows how much it’s really worth. Forcing firms to value it at market rates would cause a catastrophic string of bankruptcies; even forcing firms to admit to how much of it they have, and of what kinds, could easily trigger bank runs and financial panic; while it remains hidden, though, nobody knows when enough of it will blow up and cause another financial firm to implode—and so the trust that’s essential to the functioning of a money economy goes away in a hurry. Nobody wants to loan money to a firm whose other assets might suddenly turn into twinkle dust; for that matter, nobody wants to let their own cash reserves decline, in case their other assets turn into the same illiquid substance; and so the flow of money through the economy slows to a creep, and fails to do the job it’s supposed to do of facilitating the production and exchange of goods and services.

That’s the risk you take when you try to stop a financial panic without tackling the underlying burden of worthless assets generated by the preceding bubble. Much more often than not, in the past, it’s been a risk worth running; if you can only hold on until the impact of the panic fades, economic growth in some nonfinancial sector of the economy picks up, the financial industry can replace its bogus assets with something different and presumably better, and away you go. That’s what happened in the wake of the tech-stock panic of 2000 and 2001:  the Fed dropped interest rates, made plenty of money available to financial firms in trouble, and did everything else it could think of to postpone bankruptcies until the housing bubble started boosting the economy again. It doesn’t always work—Japan has been stuck in permanent recession in the wake of its gargantuan 1990 stock market crash, precisely because it didn’t work—but in American economic history, at least, it’s tended to work more often than not.

Still, there was a major warning sign in the wake of the tech-stock fiasco that should have been heeded, and was not: what boosted the economy anew wasn’t an economic expansion in some nonfinancial sector, but a second and even larger speculative bubble in the financial sphere. I discussed in posts late last year (here and here)  ecological economist Herman Daly’s comments about shortages of "bankable projects"—that is, projects that are likely to bring in enough of a return on investment to pay back loans with interest and still make a profit for somebody.  In an expanding economy, bankable projects are easy to find, since it’s precisely the expansion of an expanding economy that makes a positive return on investment the normal way of things. If you flood your economy with cheap credit to counter the aftermath of a speculative bubble, and the only thing that comes out of it is an even bigger speculative bubble, something significant has happened to the mechanisms of economic growth.

More specifically, something other than a paralysis of the money system has happened to the mechanisms of economic growth. That’s the unlearned lesson of the last decade. In the wake of the 2001 tech stock crash, and then again in the aftermath of 2008’s even larger financial panic, the Fed flooded the American economy with quantities of cheap credit so immense that any viable project for producing goods and services ought to have been able to find ample capital to get off the ground. Instead of an entrepreneurial boom, though, both periods saw money pile up in the financial industry, because there was a spectacular shortage of viable projects outside it.  Outside of manipulating money and gaming the system, there simply isn’t much that makes a profit any more.

Next week we’ll discuss why that is happening.  In the meantime, though, it’s important to note what the twilight of investment means for the kick-the-can strategy that’s guiding the Fed and other central banks in their efforts to fix the world economy.  That strategy depends on the belief that sooner or later, even the most battered economy will finally begin to improve, and the upswing will make it possible to replace the temporary patches on the economy with something more solid.  It’s been a viable strategy fairly often in the past, but it worked poorly in 2001 and it doesn’t appear to be working at all at this point. Thus it’s probable that the Fed is treading water, waiting for a rescue that isn’t on its way; what will happen as that latter point becomes clear is something we’ll be exploring at length later on in this series of posts.

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Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush

I’m not sure how many people outside the writer’s trade realize how much of writing is a cooperative process. That’s as true of those of us who write late at night in the privacy of a silent room as it is of the more gregarious sort of writer, the kind you can expect to find in a crowded café, surrounded by voices and music and the clatter of street noises coming in the door: every writer is simply one voice in an ongoing conversation that includes many other voices, some living, some dead and some not yet born.

As I write this week’s post, for example, it’s difficult not to notice some of the other voices in this particular conversation. The bookshelf an easy reach to my left has a row of brightly colored trade paperbacks by some of my fellow peak oil authors—William Catton, Richard Heinberg, Jim Kunstler, Sharon Astyk, Dmitry Orlov, Carolyn Baker and more. Close by, the rolling brown landscape of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, all ten volumes, confronts the twin black monoliths of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, while Giambattista Vico’s New Science offers an ironic Italian commentary from one side. Other shelves elsewhere in the room contribute other voices: biology and ecology textbooks from my college days; appropriate tech manuals from the Seventies brimfull of unfulfilled hopes; old texts on the magical philosophy that forms the usually unmentioned foundation from which all my thinking unfolds; and a great deal more. Poets, as often as not, these days: Robinson Jeffers, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot. Without the contributions of all these other voices, the conversation and thus my contributions to it would not be what it is.

Still, there are times when the conversational nature of what I’m doing becomes more obvious and more direct than usual, and one of those happened the weekend before last, at the Age of Limits conference I discussed in last week’s post. One of my presentations to that conference was a talk entitled "How Civilizations Fall;" longtime readers of this blog will know from the title that what I was talking about that afternoon was the theory of catabolic collapse, which outlines the way that human societies on the way down cannibalize their own infrastructure, maintaining themselves for the present by denying themselves a future. I finished talking about catabolic collapse and started fielding questions, of which there were plenty, and somewhere in the conversation that followed one of the other participants made a comment. I don’t even remember the exact words, but it was something like, "So what you’re saying is that what we need to do, individually, is to go through collapse right away."

"Exactly," I said. "Collapse now, and avoid the rush."

Outside of that conversation, I doubt I would have thought of the phrase at all. By the end of the conference, though, it was on the lips of a good many of the attendees, and for good reason: I can’t think of a better way to sum up the work ahead of us right now, as industrial society lurches down the far side of its trajectory through time. Longtime readers of this blog know most of the reasoning behind that suggestion, but it may be worth walking through it again step by step.

First, industrial society was only possible because our species briefly had access to an immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy—that is, the amount of energy needed to extract the fuel was only a very small fraction of the energy the fuel itself provided. Starting in the 18th century, fossil fuels—first coal, then coal and petroleum, then coal, petroleum and natural gas—gave us that energy source. All three of these fossil fuels represent millions of years of stored sunlight, captured by the everyday miracle of photosynthesis and concentrated within the earth by geological processes that took place long before our species evolved. They are nonrenewable over any time scale that matters to human beings, and we are using them up at astonishing rates.

Second, while it’s easy to suggest that we can simply replace fossil fuels with some other energy source and keep industrial civilization running along its present course, putting that comfortable notion into practice has turned out to be effectively impossible. No other energy source available to our species combines the high net energy, high concentration, and great abundance that a replacement for fossil fuel would need. Those energy sources that are abundant (for example, solar energy) are diffuse and yield little net energy, while those that are highly concentrated (for example, fissionable uranium) are not abundant, and also have serious problems with net energy. Abundant fossil fuels currently provide an "energy subsidy" to alternative energy sources that make them look more efficient than they are—there would be far fewer wind turbines, for example, if they had to be manufactured, installed, and maintained using wind energy. Furthermore, our entire energy infrastructure is geared to use fossil fuels and would have to be replaced, at a cost of countless trillions of dollars, in order to replace fossil fuels with something else.

Third, these problems leave only one viable alternative, which is to decrease our energy use, per capita and absolutely, to get our energy needs down to levels that could be maintained over the long term on renewable sources. The first steps in this process were begun in the 1970s, with good results, and might have made it possible to descend from the extravagant heights of industrialism in a gradual way, keeping a great many of the benefits of the industrial age intact as a gift for the future. Politics closed off that option in the decade that followed, however, and the world’s industrial nations went hurtling down a different path, burning through the earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves at an accelerating pace and trusting that economic abstractions such as the free market would suspend the laws of physics and geology for their benefit. At this point, more than three decades after that misguided choice, industrial civilization is so far into overshoot that a controlled descent is no longer an option; the only path remaining is the familiar historical process of decline and fall.

Fourth, while it’s fashionable these days to imagine that this process will take the form of a sudden cataclysm that will obliterate today’s world overnight, all the testimony of history and a great many lines of evidence from other sources suggests that this is the least likely outcome of our predicament. Across a wide range of geographical scales and technological levels, civilizations take an average of one to three centuries to complete the process of decline and fall, and there is no valid reason to assume that ours will be any exception. The curve of decline, to be sure, is anything but smooth; it has a fractal structure, taking the form of a succession of crises on many different scales, affecting different regions, social classes, and communities in different ways, interspersed with periods of stabilization and even partial recovery that are equally variable in scale, duration, and relevance to different places and groups. This ragged arc of decline is already under way; it can be expected to accelerate in the months, years, and decades to come; and it defines the deindustrial age ahead of us.

Fifth, individuals, families, and communities faced with this predicament still have choices left. The most important of those choices parallels the one faced, or more precisely not faced, at the end of the 1970s: to make the descent in a controlled way, beginning now, or to cling to their current lifestyles until the system that currently supports those lifestyles falls away from beneath their feet. The skills, resources, and lifeways needed to get by in a disintegrating industrial society are radically different from those that made for a successful and comfortable life in the prosperous world of the recent past, and a great many of the requirements of an age of decline come with prolonged learning curves and a high price for failure. Starting right away to practice the skills, assemble the resources, and follow the lifeways that will be the key to survival in a deindustrializing world offers the best hope of getting through the difficult years ahead with some degree of dignity and grace.

Collapse now, in other words, and avoid the rush.

There’s a fair amount of subtlety to the strategy defined by those words. As our society stumbles down the ragged curve of its decline, more and more people are going to lose the ability to maintain what counts as a normal lifestyle—or, rather, what counted as a normal lifestyle in the recent past, and is no longer quite so normal today as it once was. Each new round of crisis will push more people further down the slope; minor and localized crises will affect a relatively smaller number of people, while major crises affecting whole nations will affect a much larger number. As each crisis hits, though, there will be a rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way out, and as each crisis recedes, there will be another rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way back to what used to be normal. The vast majority of people who join either rush will fail. Remember the tens of thousands of people who applied for a handful of burger-flipping jobs during the recent housing crash, because that was the only job opening they could find? That’s the sort of thing I mean.

The way to avoid the rush is simple enough: figure out how you will be able to live after the next wave of crisis hits, and to the extent that you can, start living that way now. If you’re worried about the long-term prospects for your job—and you probably should be, no matter what you do for a living—now is the time to figure out how you will get by if the job goes away and you have to make do on much less money. For most people, that means getting out of debt, making sure the place you live costs you much less than you can afford, and picking up some practical skills that will allow you to meet some of your own needs and have opportunities for barter and informal employment. It can mean quite a bit more, depending on your situation, needs, and existing skills. It should certainly involve spending less money—and that money, once it isn’t needed to pay off any debts you have, can go to weatherizing your home and making other sensible preparations that will make life easier for you later on.

For the vast majority of people, it probably needs to be said, collapsing now does not mean buying a survival homestead somewhere off in the country. That’s a popular daydream, and in some well-off circles it’s long been a popular way to go have a midlife crisis, but even if you have the funds—and most of us don’t—if you don’t already have the dizzyingly complex skill set needed to run a viable farm, or aren’t willing to drop everything else to apprentice with an organic farmer right now, it’s not a realistic option. In all likelihood you’ll be experiencing the next round of crises where you are right now, so the logical place to have your own personal collapse now, ahead of the rush, is right there, in the place where you live, with the people you know and the resources you have to hand.

Now of course the strategy of collapsing ahead of the rush is not going to be a popular thing to suggest. When I’ve brought it up, as of course I’ve done more than once, I’ve inevitably fielded a flurry of protests, by turns angry and anguished, insisting that it’s not reasonable to expect anybody to do that, and how can I be so heartless as to suggest it? Fair enough; let’s take a look at the alternatives.

One alternative strategy that gets brought up now and then has at least the advantage of utter honesty. It has two parts. The first part, while the benefits of industrial society are still available, is to enjoy them; the second, when those benefits go away, is to die. Often, though not always, the people who bring up this option have serious health conditions that will probably be fatal in a deindustrial world. I have no quarrel with those who choose this path; it’s an honest response to a very challenging predicament—though I admit I wonder how many people who say they’ve chosen it will be comfortable with their choice once part one gives way to part two.

The problem with most other proposed strategies for dealing with our predicament is that whatever they claim to do in theory, in practice, they amount to these same two steps. Consider the very widely held notion that advocating for some alternative energy technology is a workable response to the twilight of fossil fuels. I have no quarrel, again, with people who are actually doing something concrete to get some alternative energy technology into use—for example, the people whose enthusiasm for the Bussard fusion reactor leads them to build a prototype in their basement, or to help fund one of the half dozen or so experimenters who have already done this—but that’s rarely what this approach entails; rather, it seems to consist mostly of posting long screeds on the internet insisting that thorium reactors, or algal biodiesel, or what have you, will solve all our energy problems.

As Zen masters like to say, talk does not cook the rice, and blog posts do not build reactors; with every day that passes, despite any amount of online debate, more oil, coal, and natural gas are extracted from the planet’s dwindling endowment, and the next round of crises comes closer. In the same way, those who put their hopes on grand political transformations, or conveniently undefinable leaps of consciousness, or the timely arrival of Jesus or the space brothers or somebody else who will spare us the necessity of inhabiting a future that is the exact result of our own collective actions, are not doing anything that hasn’t been tried over and over again in the decades just past, without doing anything to slow the headlong rush into overshoot or the opening stages of decline and fall.

Check out the glossy magazines and well-funded websites dedicated to portraying "positive futures" and you can find the same sort of thinking taken to its logical extreme: soothing pablum about this or that person doing this or that wonderful thing, and this or that deep thinker coming up with this or that wonderful idea, all of it reminiscent of nothing so much as the cheerful tunes the Titanic’s band played to keep the passengers calm as water poured into the hull. There’s quite a lot of money to be made these days insisting that we can have a shiny new future despite all evidence to the contrary, and pulling factoids out of context to defend that increasingly dubious claim; as industrial society moves down the curve of decline, I suspect, this will become even more popular, since it will make it easier for those who haven’t yet had their own personal collapse to pretend that it can’t happen to them.

The same principle applies to the people who donate to environmental causes and put solar panels on their roofs in the same spirit that led medieval Christians to buy high-priced indulgences from the Church to cancel out their sins. T.S. Eliot countered that sort of attitude unanswerably when he described salvation as "a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything". What we’re discussing belongs to a much less exalted plane, but the same rule applies: if you’re trying to exempt yourself from the end of the industrial age, nothing you can do can ever be enough. Let go, let yourself fall forward into the deindustrial future, and matters are different.

It’s difficult to think of anything more frightening, or more necessary. "In order to arrive at what you do not know"—that’s Eliot again—"you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession." Which is to say: collapse now, and avoid the rush.

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Some Things You May Not Know

I’ve rerun the numbers and have once again, determined that less then 1/10 of 1% of the population of the United States is adequately preparing for collapse.

Less then 3,000,000 Americans are making sufficient preparations for the future, despite the accelerating evidence that the collapse is gaining significant momentum.

Another way to represent this figure is 99.99% of the people remain totally dependent upon the whole of the system to provide them with the basic requirements for their daily existence.

This is the true meaning of the off-abused “we are the 99%“: whole system co-dependents. Apply this to “Occupy” and it still fits perfectly.

Other points to ponder: 1/10 of 1% cannot possibly assist the remaining 99.99% in crisis, nor can they even protect themselves from the 99.99%.

The 99.99% survive (exist) not because of all the other 99% co-dependents — but because of a very tiny fraction of actual “providers” (food, fuel, energy, water, etc.) that make life possible for them. Most, if not all these providers are themselves are whole system co-dependents.

The whole of society exists because this tiny fraction is engaged in cooperative enterprises for the basic necessities you need (they provide it, you buy it).
This means that a very high percentage of the 99.99% are not needed (don’t shoot the messenger). Ponder now why so many lives are simply wasted so easily and you will start to understand how life has become so cheap.

A society built upon this design cannot endure anything very long. Even in a perfect world, it is a recipe for disaster.

This shows up virtually everywhere you care to look. Homelessness, indebtedness, bankruptcy, poverty, inequality, war (competition for resources), inflation, injustice and tyranny.

The “haves” of this design become the plantation owners and control virtually everything — food, water, government, media, education, resources, supplies, production, war, propaganda — virtually everything. The rest are all indentured co-dependent slaves begging for crumbs.

The 99% have zero “voice” or effect (despite many efforts) — and remain utterly ignored as bleating cattle in a stockyard.

——–

All efforts to become independent of this life-penalizing paradigm are swiftly crushed and extinguished. A “third party”, or “free state” or even tiny efforts to try and bypass the corporate / federal symbiosis level of “consumer protection” (control) through direct marketing or efforts brings down the wrath of the Corporate State.

Tyranny and oppression of free expression, independence and autonomy swiftly crushes any budding opposition.

Tyranny perpetuates the oppressive cycle “total dependency and reliance” of the 99%, who for the most part, cannot even comprehend any other type or form of existence. Most become their own jailers, in perpetual bondage to unenlightened belief systems.

——–

The gatekeepers of this “Great Society” take on all roles and responsibilities for the daily existence of their prisoners. Wars must be repetitively fought against manufactured “enemies”, providing the illusion that the “society” is just, true and “chosen” and therefore “worth protecting”.

Enemies are manufactured as required. Anything that does not fully identify with the Great Society is demonized, debased and dehumanized leading to war.

Wars also serve to establish new territory and control over people, nations and resources, furthering the co-dependency and “justification” for even more war and control.

——–

Entire generations must pass to allow the people to “forget” who and what they once were. Suppressing knowledge, history and culture become common practices, ensuring that only sanctioned and approved history and “beliefs” are passed from generation to generation.

Eventually (now), all this becomes completely unmanageable and uncontrollable, as various factions fight and vie for control in the upper echelons of the plantation. The 99% are thrown to the wolves, over and over again, losing “rights”, freedom, liberty, independence and “choice”.

Many, many “requirements” are forced upon the 99% through newly enacted fiat, executive orders, laws, regulations, permits, fees, licenses and restrictions.

The gatekeepers employ vast standing armies of police, military and “security” personnel to enforce these restrictions upon the 99%, who in turn like all jailers, begin to abuse the people, assuming additional self-appointed roles and “responsibilities”.

This leads to growing dissent and division, conflict and crime with the 99%. The duplicity practiced (double-standard) is obvious to all, but the people have become totally incapacitated and helpless, entirely dependent upon virtually everything for their daily existence and can offer little meaningful resistance.

Eventually the dissent and division leads to civil conflict, a force of arms (guns and assassinations), which is often delayed through distractions (sports, television, entertainment) but not forever, resulting in much bloodshed and suffering.

The whole of the people suffer as the conflicts escalate, resentment and dissent, division grows and retribution and repression is enacted.

The 99% are a vast, seething mob by now, uncontrollable, nearly inconsolable and incapable of self-government or sufficiency. They still remain co-dependents but will blindly wreck this relationship in their ignorance.

Society collapses as things spiral out of control, rebuilds from the ashes and reasserts itself once again, following nearly identical the same patterns as before.

Climate / environment collapse is now accelerating this decline, exaberating the dependency, and dramatically increasing the likelihood that “rebuilding” anything like before as extremely unlikely.

Resource depletion will also make rebuilding anything like before very unlikely and even unreachable.

This will lead to an even worse societal arrangement on orders of magnitude worse. Concepts such as freedom, liberty, democracy, justice, fairness and individual expression do not survive under extreme conditions of crisis, they are swiftly extinguished.

The near-total co-dependency of the 99% will mean that only the most brutal, violent and viscous will survive, elevating themselves to the new “gatekeepers” of the new society (of what remains) to exercise control over the rest.

———

The desired peaceful transition to self-sufficiency, alternative energy, agrarian community is very unlikely, mostly due in part to the refusal of the 99% to take these necessary steps now, or to support those who are trying.

The current gatekeepers are suppressing the knowledge and awareness of these requirements and the likely outcome of what this means. They are now “victims” of their own propaganda and are the architects of their own destruction.

The stage has now been set, the players put into motion and the script is fully written. It’s actually an old story and will play out as before, except we now have climate / resource collapse to spice things up.

Technology will be mostly employed to manage and control the 99%, restricting their declining freedom and options even further. A sizable percentage will be killed and imprisoned as long as resources allow.

Every effort will be made to preserve the gatekeepers, convincing even the 99% that this is right and just to do so. Most will agree and cooperate, supporting the imprisonment and death of “dissenters”.

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This future is a guarantee — the end-result of removing the independence and self-sufficiency of the whole of the people worldwide into the hands of the few, controlling and abusing all of the resources and the planetary environment.

The aggregated accumulation of resource depletion, environmental collapse and climate collapse is now so severe that this will all occur within a single generation.

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Optimism is not warranted in the face of mounting evidence. A precipitous decline of 85% of Americans engaged in personal preparations has already occurred (this year). The “blame” for this is irrelevant. The meaning is not.

We are just 7% away from critical “state shifts” within the planetary environment. Only fools would believe that the present inertia in motion could be stopped in time. Global governments are incapable of acting swiftly or responsibly. Corporate control is increasing, not decreasing. Abuse of the planetary environment is accelerating, not decelerating. Evidence and facts are also increasing, yet denial, ignorance and disbelief (cognitive dissonance) is increasing, not decreasing.

The world’s top scientist are warning that failure to listen to the results and analysis being obtained now spell doom for the world’s civilization. They have further widely acknowledged that a “near-total failure” conditions exists on the climate and the environment, despite numerous (tens of thousands) of studies and analysis.

The world is not preparing within the 99%, yet evidence exist that the 1% is fully aware of what is happening, furiously preparing. It should not come as startling news that none of you are being included in their plans. Do not forget that a very high percentage of the 99% are not needed.