Saturday, May 8, 2010

"Guest Rant"














My dear pal on this, and other blogs Sion Liscannor is today a guest ranter. Have at'em Comrade!

Sion sez,...

I would like to post a comment in response to one of Zaek’s recent comments:
“That's exactly right, Ed: a permanent decline for western economies. Things will never return to what they were.”

Zaek has been saying this kind of thing for a while. I suppose I would agree with him. Things will never be the same again. But I’m not sure it’s altogether a bad thing.

I shall regret the pain and discomfort, of course – and I shall certainly regret the pain and discomfort that it will cause me personally. However, there are alternative ways of looking at it.

The Western economies have enjoyed a long period of domination of the world economy. I would probably date the beginning of that domination at some time around 1800 (the initial efforts of Western powers to break into the economy of China...). By the 1970s several Western economists were making calculations about the long term consequences of this domination and concluded that it was unsustainable.

The original Brandt Report (1980) is probably as good a date as any to define a watershed in economic expectations. The three decades since the Brandt Report have demonstrated the veracity of almost all of its predictions.

Unfortunately Western governments did not act on the Report’s recommendations.
We are now in a mess.

Good!

Being in a mess is a wonderful opportunity for change.

The immediate cause of this mess is not the fact that Western economies are being challenged by the economies of India, China, Japan and other industrialised nations of the East. Not even the fact that Indians and Chinese are nowadays eating more because of their increased prosperity and are thereby pushing up the world market prices for food (a fact discovered by that brilliant social scientist, George Bush Jr) – not even this shameful satisfaction of hunger on the part of two and a half billion people who previously survived on a diet of rice and rice has caused the present mess.

The immediate cause of the mess is not the growth of world population and the pressure on resources. The immediate cause of the mess is money and how we deal with it.

A metaphor: Money is to the world economy as blood is to the human body. When it keeps moving the body thrives. When it pools and accumulates in one place you have problems.

Money is what? A promise? A piece of paper? A trust? Ultimately money is what money does – it makes things move. It therefore works best when applied to things – and people – who are moving already. When you tie it to bricks and mortar or pension schemes or other illusory and static inventions it ceases to move.

What we are seeing right now is a global redistribution of money. The riches we had laid in store for ourselves in our trust funds and pension schemes and all the rest of it are evaporating.

We in the West are going to have to adjust. We shall probably have to start taking seriously the way that we use scarce resources. We shall probably have to wean ourselves from our addiction to consumer goods. How families will suffer! No more heaps of toys under the Christmas tree, kids – just love and hugs from your Ma and Pa and a cake your Mother had to bake because the shop cakes were too expensive.

Will we survive?

The West’s pious-sounding anxiety about ecological and economic issues for the last half century has not been about sustaining life on this planet: it has been about sustaining the living standard and lifestyle of the privileged Western nations.
We spend a lot of time calculating our wealth – the wealth that an industrial economy has given us.

Do we calculate what it has cost us? Who really believes that we are better off in the areas that really matter – in interpersonal relationships above all – than we were two or three generations ago?

Where we have made real progress is entirely in the spiritual realm. We created – once – the beginnings of a liberal society that respected the individual and threw off the trammels of religious dogma and religion-inspired prejudice, and all our other atavistic garbage about race and sex and gender. We don’t have to lose what we have achieved. These achievements do not depend on economic prosperity. They don’t depend on income and consumer goods and the rest. They will very possibly thrive all the better in a poorer soil.
______________________________________














Thanks Sion. Words to live or at least survive by. Above are the founding slave holders,...eh, I mean founding fathers. Founders of the gleeful madhouse we call Liberal Democracy. Note that none of these folks had cars, insurance, ipods, tv's or security clearance.

Despite that they gave us the best game in town.

..."poorer soil" indeed.

Btw, I was going to call this a "Guest Editorial", but the word "rant" turned up during the dress rehearsal for this post, and sort'a stuck. Sorry Sion.

Stay Tuned.

178 comments:

Alfred X. said...

Some interesting points but nothing I haven't heard or thought before. The main problem is that it's all such a cozy and rational analysis with only minor bumps in the road that the author suggests will require some adjustments. (Mothers baking instead of buying toys. Hugs and kisses instead of cell phones and texting, I guess.)
Nevertheless, Black Swans have a way of swimming into the middle of things and creating messes beyond our wildest dreams. These are nodal points in history where time thickens. We are in one such period right now and have no idea just how much will survive. In the end, China and India, at least in those minuscule geographical areas where they have developed, have the farthest to fall. But China is not Shanghai, and India is not Bangalore! Those are the anomalies. Drive a few kilometers away and people still know how to live in the stone age we are recapitulating since those agrarian based areas have stood the test of thousands of years. In the West, all the tools for survival have been lost and long since forgotten.
Those living in urban areas are little more than parasites and now will perish under the weight of their own uselessness.

Anonymous said...

here is the trouble with the baby thing. none of the parents is gettin the CONSENT of the baby that is getting popped out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
you guys are alwways blabbing about the CONSENT stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

nobody is agreeing to get popped out and get born!!!!!!!!!!!

So the one popping the baby out is criminal becuse there aint no CONSENT!!!!

then when the thing is popped out and born it gets condemned to death by getting popped out!!!!!!
there is no birth without death as part of the deal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you get born then you gotta die!!!!!

so the baby poppers are criminal by lack of CONSENT and by dooming the baby to die!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NOTHING CAN BE SIMPLER ABOUT ALL THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

all this crap about blessed events is a big pile of fucking bullshit to distract you frum the facts that the baby poppers are fucking CRIMINALS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

don't give me no fucking bullshit about this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Zaek said...

It's true that the immediate cause of our current problems is our economic system, whose ideology of infinite growth ultimately won't work on a finite planet. But a deeper problem underlying that one (as well as partly resulting from it) is our depletion of physical resources. This we will learn to our growing distress in the decades to come.

It's also true that the end of western global domination will likely redress the imbalance of resource and wealth distribution in the world, as recommended by the Brandt report, which at the time was probably a good idea. Unfortunately it will not now produce "a world in which sharing, justice, freedom and peace [will] prevail," as suggested in that report. This may have been possible when it was published, but after three decades of reckless squandering that is no longer the case. Now the coming changes are far more likely to produce a struggle for resources by the great powers of the world as they lose their grip upon the wealth which they imagined would be forever theirs.

The west in general and the USA in particular are very ill prepared for what is to come. Russians underwent a similar economic collapse to that which looms on our horizon upon the fall of the Soviet Union, but for various reasons they were better equipped to handle that crisis than we are. Nonetheless from what I've gleaned online it appears that as a result about a million Russians died, possibly more. This will not be a wonderful opportunity for spiritual growth. It will be a painful process of adjustment to severe and irreversible economic contraction, and a lot of people are not going to be all right.

This incidentally is very far indeed from being the future I want. The future I would have liked Sidney has already described very well: the United States as a just social democracy, such as was beginning to develop here about forty years ago, rather than a predatory empire. In that geopolitical context the proposals of the Brandt report could have been implemented and would, I fancy, probably have worked. But we are far past any such possibility. We're simply too far down the road of resource depletion. We're on the cusp of a slow but complete civilizational collapse. Those among us who are young will witness a great part of the painful demise of global industrial civilization, and the rest of us are already seeing the beginnings of it.

Anonymous said...

@Zaek,
You are absolutely right! In fact, you almost always seem to hit the bulls-eye in your comments.

Uncle Sydney 2012 said...

The recent thread of comments have been brilliant, but not hopeful for our future.

Despite my cynical static I refuse to abandon Hope. This is not Hell.

It's only Earth.

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