Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation

by Charles Hugh Smith





Introduction Since launching my blog www.oftwominds.com in May 2005, nothing seemed more important than warning readers that the unsustainably leveraged credit-mad global financial system was poised to break down. Once the system finally crashed in late 2008, my goal switched to writing a practical guide for not just surviving the coming Great Transformation but prospering: a concept I called Survival+ (Plus). This requires liberating ourselves from failed models of credit expansion, resource depletion, financial looting and a counterfeit prosperity built entirely on debt. I immediately ran into several great difficulties. Many others had foreseen the same calamity, and their focus narrowed on individual survival: relocating to a remote/sustainable spot and preparing for societal collapse by stockpiling self-defense and food. While prudent and practical on a short-term timeline, this response struck me as incomplete on several levels. Most importantly, stockpiling six months' supplies would not sustain anyone through a 20-year Crisis and Transformation; their own Crisis was simply being delayed a relatively short time. In other words: "what happens in month seven"? Secondly, many "survivalist" proponents focus on individual preparation, as if a single person or household can prosper without a stable, caring community for reciprocal support. This notion ran counter not just to my own experience but to all of human history. While I understood the desire to "opt out" and become an Isolationist--a solution to general turmoil which has roots going back to the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the Warring States era in ancient China--I felt a more practical, longer-term option to Isolationism should also be presented. The second great difficulty is that individuals, households and communities exist in larger units: city-states, counties, nations and continents. Even if nation-states were to break apart, the world would remain tightly interconnected. Events, weather, shortages and surpluses in distant places would continue to impact us all. States (by which I mean all forms of government) will continue to extend control over resources and wealth. Trade has been a key component of security and prosperity since the dawn of civilization. Long before fossil fuels dominated the global economy, land and sea trade in both goods and innovations bound Asia, the Mideast and Europe. Thus a retreat to isolated islands of self-sufficiency, while understandable and practical on one level, does not align with what history teaches us about prosperity. Prosperity ultimately depends on stable communities, surplus production and trade. These essentials have been largely ignored in analyses of the coming Great Transformation. Thus our individual survival and prosperity are inextricably bound up in larger contexts: we cannot just ignore community, State and trade forces as if they will cease to exist. Even as they no longer function as they did in the past, it seems wise to influence the larger Transformation rather than view ourselves in an isolation which is ultimately misleading. That is why I subtitled this book "Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation." To believe that we can prosper individually without regard for the actions of our fellow citizens and the State (government) is simply not practical. Yes, a handful of very rugged people have the experience required to live in the deepest remains of wilderness; but the wilderness cannot support more than a handful of people, and most of us do not have the requisite skills or ruggedness to survive that splendid isolation. This, then, is a practical book for the rest of us. As I organized the book, another great difficulty quickly arose. I realized that the way a problem is phrased implicitly stakes out the eventual solution. As a result, the greatest challenge in understanding our plight, both as individuals and communities, is essentially conceptual. The forces which benefit most from the status quo are pouring all their prodigious resources into framing the "problems" in such a way that the "obvious solutions" leave their own power, influence and wealth intact. Lest you wonder how this works, recall that all through the initial phase of the financial crisis in 2008, the mainstream media and standard-issue financial punditry (SIFP) blamed the entire crisis on foolish low-income homebuyers who had chosen to finance their purchases with subprime mortgages. Framed in this way, the "problem" appeared to be caused by credulous citizens in the lower socio-economic levels. The "solution" was thus to eliminate these people from the pool of potential homebuyers, and auction off their foreclosed homes to worthier buyers. But subsequent events revealed this framing of the problem to be highly selective: the "problem" extended far beyond feckless subprime borrowers into the top rungs of American Capitalism: the money-center and investment banks, and a politically driven absence of oversight by the very governmental agencies tasked with protecting the public. The status quo's convenient "framing of the problem" insured that any "solutions" would leave their power, wealth and influence entirely intact; only the impoverished subprimers would suffer, not those who profited so immensely from the housing/credit bubble. It was thus clear that a practical analysis of the crisis and coming Transformation requires a deep understanding of how "solutions" are set in the framing of the "problem." Indeed, what is "obvious" must be questioned on the deepest levels, for what is "obvious" has two powerful characteristics: it can be managed/manipulated via the mass media, and it directs "solutions" which leave the rentier-financial Power Elite (what I call the Plutocracy) intact. The nature of propaganda in a so-called free State must then be explored in depth as well. The last great difficulty is also conceptual. It is relatively straight-forward to present the causes of the coming global crisis: Peak Oil, disintegration of the credit bubble, demographics, etc. Many books do a fine job of outlining the nature of these interlocking crises. The books attempting to present solutions typically focus on either individuals (along the lines of "get rich as the world falls apart") or idealized policy "fixes" based on academic understandings of large-scale structures (articles on G-20 trade policies, etc). The flaw in both approaches is that neither flows from what I call an integrated understanding of the actual problems. (Key concepts are italicized when introduced.) Practical solutions must follow from this integrated understanding. Without such a comprehensive conceptual framework, then all proposed solutions will be ungrounded and thus dangerously misleading. Any "solution" which ignores key elements of the problem is doomed to solve nothing. As in our example of the so-called "subprime crisis," the "solution" of limiting uncreditworthy borrowers did nothing to address the actual problems: highly profitable and highly fraudulent practices riddling every level of the mortgage/rating/securities industries, perverse incentives that created unprecedented opportunities for windfall exploitation, over-reach and looting, etc. I cannot claim that reaching such an integrated understanding will be easy. Many of the concepts presented here may be unfamiliar and thus difficult to grasp at first. Many are so alien to status quo "explanations" that they may well strike you as the opposite of "obvious." But since I have thought about these concepts and forces for years, they seem "obvious" to me. In the language of our Declaration of Independence: I hold these truths to be self-evident. So let us begin. We stand on the threshold of a Great Transformation that will unfold over the next 20 years--a generation. The exact turn and sequence of events is unknown, but a clear-eyed appraisal of the forces, trends and cycles already at work will help us, collectively and as individuals, weather the challenges and turn what could be a catastrophe into a positive transformation. To the status quo understanding of how our world works, this appraisal will be anything but "obvious." (Sorting out what is "obvious" is a big part of the analysis which follows.) A number of other writers have addressed preparing for the Depression which has just begun. These books are, within their limited scope, practical and useful. This book aims at a different goal: once we understand the complex forces at work, then we can structure a response on all three levels: household/family, community and nation. For if there is anything we can confidently predict, it's that the nation's crumbling finances will drastically affect every family and every community.





Key concepts in this Introduction: Plutocracy (rentier-financial Power Elite) integrated understanding windfall exploitation over-reach





Chapter One: An Overview

A great clash between what we are told is unfolding and what is actually unfolding lies just ahead. The status quo "Powers That Be" and its mainstream media repeatedly insist that: We have abundant cheap energy for a long time to come; Peak Oil is decades away. We have plenty of time for technological wonders to arise and replace petroleum. The Social Security and Medicare entitlements promised to all Americans, though totalling some $50 trillion in excess of projected tax revenues, will be paid; all that is needed are modest policy adjustments. The current financial meltdown was unexpected and could not have been foreseen; it is a temporary "bad patch" which has already been fixed by government intervention and modest policy/regulatory adjustments. Environmental issues such as the stripping of the world's fisheries, dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay, dwindling fresh water acquifers, etc. can all be fixed with modest policy adjustments. The consumerist culture which has evolved over the past 60 years is a natural and highly successful perfection of capitalism, prosperity and American values; Americans are the happiest, most prosperous people on the planet. The fast-growing epidemic of obesity and related chronic diseases in the U.S. are puzzling and worrisome, but we have the finest healthcare system in the world. Yet all of the above is demonstrably false. In reality, the decline of abundant cheap oil (oil under pressure in supergiant fields) has already begun. The iron laws of demographics dictate the promised entitlements cannot be paid and that Medicare is only a few short years away from insolvency. The current financial meltdown was not only easily predictable, it was inevitable, as the consequences of systemic fraud, deception, embezzlement, misrepresentation, collusion, debauchery of credit, exponential expansions of risk, debt and speculative leverage could not be held off forever. The devolution of American culture and values to a one-dimensional "consumerism is the highest good in the land" was not natural, and rather than produce the perfection of capitalism, it has produced the perfection of crony capitalism, monopoly capital and an ever-expanding State beholden to an Elite which owns or controls the vast majority of the productive assets, financial wealth, income and lawmaking machinery of the U.S. Rather than being the happiest people on the planet, Americans are visibly unhappy, anxious, depressed, distracted and all too often heavily sedated with powerful psychotropic medications. This is not to question the positive contributions made by psychiatric medications to those suffering from psychiatric disorders; but we should question the idea that tens of millions of our citizenry (including children) are suffering from serious psychiatric disorders. We should wonder if the overzealous dispensation of such drugs masks cultural rather than psychiatric disorders, and an unspoken desire to "treat" these cultural disorders in a relatively low-cost fashion by numbing the patients' awareness of their own alienation, anxiety and unhappiness. Rather than having the finest healthcare system in the world, we have the worst, most perniciously incentivised system in the industrialized world, a system which consumes a staggering 16% of the nation's entire output but which provides little to no healthcare for tens of millions of citizens and which supplies incredibly costly but largely ineffective care to the elderly covered by a fraud-riddled and increasingly unaffordable Medicare. Up to 40% of the entire sum spent on healthcare is paper shuffling, fraud and useless/harmful "care." Despite this vast outpouring of the nation's wealth, the health of its citizenry continues to decline in measurable ways; this vast expenditure has done nothing to stop the astonishing rise in obesity and related chronic diseases, arguably the most pressing public health issue facing the nation. In effect, the U.S. healthcare system is bankrupting the nation even as it fails to improve the health of the citizenry at large. It is thus a stupendous failure, creating ever smaller marginal gains with ever greater expenditures for costly tests, drugs and treatments. Rather than look to an increasingly unhealthy diet and lifestyle, the nation's "sick-care" system seeks ever more costly "treatments" and pharmaceutical "fixes" for complex chronic diseases which are simply not curable by "magic bullet" drugs. Contrary to the constantly repeated assurances of The Powers That Be, modest policy and regulatory modifications are not replenishing the nation's fisheries or ground water, nor is tweaking the parameters of various systems reversing environmental and economic decline. You may think these assessments are sensationalist, harsh or even offensive. That is not my intention. I believe the evidence is overwhelming that all these soothing contentions pressed upon us by the Powers That Be on a daily basis are in fact false. If this assertion is true, the vast majority of what is "reported" and "consumed" as "news" and "commentary" is essentially propaganda, either conscious or subconscious. If the status quo's intellectual justification for their dominance is fundamentally false, then we can anticipate the wholesale destruction of that justification as events undermine all the self-serving propaganda. As a result, we will have to construct an alternative understanding of our world which aligns far more closely to reality than the current status quo's complacent faith in a decaying, failing system. If this is true, then we have no time left for distracting little debates about policy tweaks, economic hairsplitting and modest adjustments; the time such modifications could have any measurable impact are long gone. We have run out of time for trivializing conversations along ginned-up ideological lines, "I'm a conservative and you're a liberal" and the mass media's entertainment-passed-off-as-analysis. We have also run out of time for the easy distractions of complexity itself, the unspoken idea that things are now too complex to modify in any meaningful way. Reality, in contrast, has no problem adjusting complexity downward. If all the fundamental contentions of the Powers That Be are demonstrably false, we are forced to ask why they press them so mightily and persuasively on us. The answer to this critical question can be found by asking cui bono: to whose benefit? Although we are constantly told the system benefits all of us, that it is the very perfection of prosperity, free market capitalism and thus of happiness itself, this is also demonstrably false. This leads to the conclusion that the entire intellectual structure which supports and enables the U.S. economy, government and culture is nonsense, and those pushing it so mightily and perseverently are doing so out of a highly refined self-interest--a self-interest which does not magically better the nation or those not fortunate enough to belong to the Elite (the Plutocracy) or to its high-caste technocratic workforce. These are troubling assertions, and they require careful analysis. Before you decide this is merely sensationalist, please read the following analysis and look into the sourced books. Compare your own lived experience and intuitions with the mass media's "happy story" that everything is just fine, minor financial perturbations have been resolved and a consumerist Utopia is still firmly in place. It is my contention that the global meltdown has exposed the Plutocracy's over-reach via ever-larger bets, ever-riskier leverage and ever-larger redistributions of global income to its own coffers. To protect its interests and dominance, it must defend at all costs the intellectual framework which enables its dominance. Thus there is a whiff of desperation in its campaign to convince the world that this is not at heart a global crisis which threatens to bring down the entire structure but a "normal" if slightly deeper recession which has already been repaired by the usual "fix" of State manipulation of interest rates and money supply. We must be alert to the concentrated ownership/control of the mass media, and alert to the overwhelming need of the global Elites to reassure their restive, anxious populaces that the structure of Elite dominance and wealth is robust, secure, and in the populace's self-interest. We must be alert to the irony that the Elite's first task is to convince the underclasses that there is no Elite, no Powers That Be and no Plutocracy. While there is no "membership" card in the Plutocracy, the simple facts of concentrated ownership, influence and income roughly define that class. Conflicts between various segments of the Elite does not mean there is no Plutocracy--it only means that greed and over-reach naturally set up some shuffling and pushing to head the line. In actuality, the structure is not in the populace's self interest, and it is increasingly insecure, brittle, and vulnerable to decay and/or disruption on numerous levels. Much of the vulnerability stems not from Elite over-reach but from the fact that we as a species have reached the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of a high-energy consumption dependency on cheap abundant petroleum for food, transport, water, "growth," etc. Nonetheless those who control the vast majority of assets, wealth, and tools of persuasion have the most to gain from a continuing belief in the system's soundness and stability. Thus their defense of the system which serves their interests above all else will be fierce and unremitting. The human mind harbors a bias for what I call independent agencies, a bias which finds full flower in conspiracies both real and imagined. Ancient humans saw an independent agency of fickle gods who punished or rewarded human supplication with drought or rain. All human groups form loose confederacies, alliances and "secret societies" (such as cliques in high school) which outsiders rightly identify as conspiracies formed for the benefit of the members. This bias to perceive independent agencies has a selective advantage: the ability to discern causal agents and agencies offers substantial advantages over a passive perception of chaos/randomness. Why bring this up now? Only to note that The Plutocracy is not a conspiracy in the formal sense of a membership which gathers like the Bohemian Club or even an informal assemblage such as the Bilderberg Group. "Membership" is granted solely by great wealth and control of productive assets; political influence flows from that. People who control, say, $100 million or more (via family ownership or managerial position), tend to meet one another socially or to do business, and while they jockey for advantage within a group like the rest of us, they form a small class of citizens possessing virtually unimpaired political influence. Thus in describing a Plutocracy I am not positing a semi-formal conspiracy but simply a financial elite which controls some 2/3 of the productive wealth of the U.S. This is simply a statement of fact. Their collective self-interest is in maintaining the conceptual, legal and financial systems which enable their continued dominance of wealth and influence. It is important to note this bias for independent agencies is founded both in our minds and in the real world; people with similar self-interests naturally band together in self-organizing networks and groups to protect those interests, and since information is power then the inner workings of various self-organizing groups are confidential as part of that self-protection. Thus when I speak of The Plutocracy I refer not to a formal conspiracy with meetings and officers but to a self-organized Elite based on protecting their ownership of 2/3 of the productive wealth of the nation. As each acts to protect his/her wealth at the highest reaches of influence (tax shelters, tax breaks, legislative exclusions, legal rulings, etc.) then they are also acting to defend their class. Why would intelligent people consciously or unconsciously defend and support a conceptual system which so heavily favors an Elite over the common good? Certainly self-interest plays a major role. If you are reporting events and trends which undermine your employers' wealth and power, you may well conclude that favoring the status quo in all matters will protect your career, income and status far more effectively than announcing the Emperor has no clothes. As a free-lance writer in the mainstream media, I witnessed how such mechanisms work in the real world. Media organizations depend on large advertisers for their income, and even though "editorial" (news and analysis) is separated from "advertising/marketing," everyone is aware that negative reporting could influence income and thus eventually detract from each individual's ability to pay their kid's tuition, make the car payment, etc. Thus stories which reflect poorly on major advertisers like realtors and builders are not killed outright--they are merely strangled by demands for more evidence, more documentation, etc., or watered down in the name of "fairness" and placed in little-seen areas of the media outlet's offerings. In other cases, otherwise independent people have never encountered a serious critique of the status quo's conceptual foundation and thus they believe that conceptual understanding of the world is "obvious." Without a skeptical accounting of cui bono (to whose benefit?) then what is "obvious" will naturally tend to defend and support that status quo which has labored to construct and defend an "obviousness" which protects its own wealth, ownership and influence. As its own interests diverge from those of the culture and economy at large, the Plutocracy has an irresistable incentive to foster the illusion that policies which benefit the Elites also benefit the middle class. Thus while the Plutocracy and its mass-media minions trumpet the benefits of the free market, these same Elites work with unremitting zeal to exempt themselves and their State factotums from these very same free market forces. Lastly, the status quo understanding of the world is that any problem is inherently "fixable" with minor policy tweaks. Thus even as the global financial pyramid of highly leveraged bets and debts unravels, the status quo response is bureaucratic shuffling of oversight duties, minor tweaking of regulatory rules trumpeted as "major fixes" and behind the scenes, trillion-dollar bailouts of the Plutocracy funded by the non-Elite taxpayers. When the non-Elite citizen comes to understand this, a new mechanism takes hold which I call when belief in the system fades. This is how empires fall: complacency joins hands with self-aggrandizement. There are four other subtle processes at work in the dissolution/erosion of the system's intellectual foundation: 1. As we shall see in the following chapters, Elites and underclass alike respond to the visible crumbling of the empire with a sublime complacency grounded in vague appeals to some mythical past spirit which will magically arise to enthuse a torpid, self-absorbed Elite and populace. In the U.S., appeals are made to "the can-do spirit" which powered America's past confidence and resolve. Unfortunately for both the Elite and the underclass (both of whom depend on State largesse and a vibrant middle class paying high taxes), rousing but ultimately empty appeals are no substitute for difficult choices, trade-offs and sacrifices. 2. Even as interconnected crises afflict the empire, the Elite moves deeper into an increasingly visible self-aggrandizement marked by pervasive over-reaching. Having mastered its influence over the State, the Plutocracy finds few limits or obstacles to its over-reach. This over-reach has the characteristics of a positive feedback loop: the more wealth the Elite controls, the greater its influence, which then enables even more wealth acquisition and ever greater influence, and so on. 3. As a result, the interests of the Plutocracy and thus the State diverge from the common interests of the citizenry as a whole. This widening structural imbalance of power creates a profound cynicism and political disunity which cripples any attempt at structural solutions. Given that any real solution would reduce the Plutocracy and State's share of the national income, both the Plutocracy and the State (including all those dependent on its various fiefdoms) resist all structural change, preferring stagnation and eventual collapse to any reduction in their income and power. One of the single most powerful mechanisms at play is windfall exploitation. Windfalls in Nature are rare, and thus all organisms are selected to exploit them as fully as possible--gorging, to the speak, on the newfound riches. The Plutocracy's influence enables it to suppress or weaken various counterforces (such as regulatory systems) and thus open up windfalls designed to be exploited by the Elites. Having dispensed with troublesome barriers between finance and banking and nettlesome limitations on securities ratings and off-balance sheet assets, investment bankers opened up stupendous windfalls to be exploited. A second, related mechanism is over-reach. As barriers to Plutocratic expansion fall and its share of national income rises, then a positive feedback loop forms: the more the Plutocracy expands, the greater the profits, which then fuels greater political influence, and so on. At a critical (and largely invisible) juncture the Plutocracy inevitably over-reaches. Over-reach takes many forms; it might be an unparalleled expansion into highly risky derivatives, or a domestic Plutocracy reaching into international speculations. The key point is that over-reach pushes the Plutocracy's financial speculations beyond a level of known, controllable risk into uncharted territory, a territory which promises stupendous profits along with equally stupendous but often obscured risk. Over-reach inevitably pushes a stable system into instability. Once the Plutocracy's income, power and influence are threatened by the rising instability caused by over-reach, then the Elite resorts to propaganda, simulacrum and other mechanisms to mask the structural instability from the populace. The hope is that the system which so greatly benefits the Plutocracy can be restored to health, but the mechanisms of "recovery" are essentially inauthentic: simulacrums of reform, propagandistic manipulations of financial and economic data to mask the structural instability, and outright fraud/looting of State resources (bailouts, loans, etc.)--that is, publicly-funded exemptions from risk and free market forces that would otherwise require the Plutocracy to absorb the catastrophic consequences of its over-reaching leveraged gambles. This failure to address the underlying cause--systemic over-reach and Plutocratic domination of the economy and political system--insures the instability will only worsen. As ever-more frantic attempts to protect the interests of the Plutocracy fail, then another feedback loop forms: the more sham reforms and State bailouts fail to restore stability, the more desperate and transparent the Plutocracy's attempts to retain power. It is worth recalling that the average compensation for the 10 top hedge fund managers during the go-go years of the 2000s was $600 million each. That is not a typo. This is an excellent (if extreme) example of over-reach and the resulting windfall exploitation. As it enriches itself via quasi-protected, semi-legal or simply officially sanctioned looting, fraud, deception, embezzlement, collusion, "sweetheart" State contracts, tax avoidance, environmental loopholes and a hundred other mechanisms of over-reach and windfall exploitation, the Elite inadvertently provides the lower classes with a compelling example of increasing wealth via fraud and manipulation rather than production. Both the high-caste technocrats (who keep the State and economy running smoothly for their Plutocratic overlords) and the underclass sense their shares of the national income and wealth are diminishing as the Plutocracy redistributes both to their own pockets, and quite naturally they seek some way to maintain or grow their own declining purchasing power/wealth. As they watch the Plutocrats in action, they learn the most effective ways to increase one's share of the income/wealth are looting ("gaming the system" of pensions, benefits, State entitlements, etc.), deception, fraud and embezzlement (accounting trickery, collusion, sweetheart contracts, etc.) and influence-peddling, known in the Third World as corruption, baksheesh, etc. As the middle class increasingly runs afoul of the byzantine, Kafkesque regulations imposed by an ever-expanding State, they find that financial leverage and legerdemain is far more lucrative than actually producing goods and services. (Unsurprisingly, the Plutocracy finds ways to gain exemptions, loopholes and special dispensations which greatly reduce the reach of troublesome regulations and taxes.) As the middle class abandons thrift and production for financial speculation and highly leveraged debt (following the example of their Plutocratic overlords), tax revenues soar as leveraged speculation pyramids into bubbles, enabling vast expansions of a State which is inherently seeking constant expansion of its income and powers. When these financial bubbles eventually deflate, then tax revenues plummet, as productive work and investment have declined. Why bother working hard when the big, easy money is made via leveraged speculation? Only fools would tolerate all the regulatory costs and high taxes imposed on producing goods and services; far easier to speculate in bubbling assets like housing, stocks, energy, etc. The State responds to this drop in tax revenues by raising taxes on the remaining productive middle class, creating a positive feedback loop which reinforces the incentives to either drop out, move to speculation or game the system. Though heavily marginalized, the underclass also copies the Plutocrats' lead by gaming whatever entitlements the State offers to buy the underclasses' silence, passivity and compliance. Thus petty corruption and fraud increases in all State entitlement programs as every sector of society seeks to suck off the maximum benefits while contributing the least possible to the public coffers. Thus does a nation or empire built on the sacrifices and communal spirit of its citizenry degrade into a doomed culture of self-aggrandizement in which sacrifice is for suckers and looting, manipulation, fraud, embezzlement, exploitation of position/influence, debauchery of credit, maximization of leverage and the pursuit of speculative riches are the order of the day from the Plutocracy on down through the technocratic upper caste to the underclass. 4. In a society with what we might term an adult understanding of the world, it is understood that difficult trade-offs are a necessary part of life. One cannot pursue every path at once, acquire every desired object at once or learn every skill at once. Priorities must be established via vigorous, open-minded debate (either within oneself for one's own decisions or within the nation-State for larger issues) and a painful triage laid down in which some wants are set aside in favor of actual needs. Broadly speaking, this is the result of a cost-benefit analysis. Items with increasingly higher marginal costs and increasingly lower marginal returns (a topic covered later) are sacrificed in favor of projects with low costs and high returns. This is, after all, mere common sense. This painful "adult" process has been replaced in the U.S. by a permanent adolescence in which difficult trade-offs have been banished by stupendous borrowing. Infantile tantrums and various states of psychological denial have crowded out open-minded discussion; every want has been funded by breathtakingly massive borrowing by the State, private enterprise and households alike. A pernicious, largely unexamined system of laws creates tremendous incentives for unnecessary actions designed to ward off lawsuits, feeding vast armies of high-caste technocratic parasites who produce nothing in the way of wealth-producing goods and services even as they burden the remaining productive sector with make-work rules and costly strategies to avoid potentially ruinous lawsuits. In true Orwellian fashion, much of this parasitism is described by its practitioners as protecting the "little guy" from the oppressive Elite and State. But as the Plutocracy and State increase their share of the national wealth at the expense of the citizenry, this claim rings increasingly hollow. Thus we have seniors covered by Medicare receiving multiple costly (and often useless) tests designed less to identify the active causes of disease than to shield the practioners from lawsuits and to enrich those administering the tests. Meanwhile, millions of non-elderly citizens cannot obtain even a single test as they lack the benefits provided to the upper-caste technocrats in the State and upper tiers of the corporate economy. Rather than face the impossibility of funding such a morally and fiscally bankrupt system of parasitism and profiteering, we as a nation have simply borrowed trillions of dollars to stave off any painful prioritizing or trade-offs. Very few weapons systems are ever cancelled for the same reasons; the profiteering by a few enterprises and the contributions they make to lawmakers insure that every weapons system will receive funding, even if that requires borrowing gargantuan sums year after year. This evasion of hard choices (and free market forces) via endlessly rising debt will eventually bring down the nation's currency and its debt-ridden State. The irony is that this seemingly care-free self-indulgent adolescent avoidance of cost-benefit analysis guarantees systemic collapse.





Let's begin our search for an integrated understanding with a look at how over-reach, windfall exploitation and the divergence of Elite/State and middle-class interests illuminate the disintegration of post-World War II America into the present Depression. 1. The great postwar income convergence (i.e the rise of the great middle class, the reduction of poverty and the relative reduction of the Plutocracy's share of national income) reverses in the early 1970s as the "true prosperity" of the postwar era ends and is replaced by income flowing increasingly to the top as stagflation, globalization and the decline of the dollar gut the purchasing power of the middle class. 2. The rising productivity of the 50s and 60s slips to the flatline through the 70s and early 80s, only picking up again as computer software and hardware revolutionize the back office, sales, manufacturing, just-in-time shipping/production, etc. 3. Concurrent with this gradual return to increasing productivity is the rise of finance as the key profit-center of corporate America. As income skews ever more heavily to the top 1%/5%, then capital (productive assets) become ever more heavily concentrated in the hands of the rentier-financial Plutocracy. The top 1% now owns some 2/3 of the nation's entire productive wealth. 4. As profits rise (from rising productivity) then the profits flow not to wages (which remain flat to down 1975-2009 for all but the top 10% upper-caste professional class) but to those who own the capital. 5. As the middle class experiences a decline in their income and purchasing power (for reasons cited above: declining dollar, rising income disparity, and wages falling due to global wage arbitrage) then they turn more and more to borrowing and ever greater debt to fund what they have been brainwashed by the media to believe is "the American dream" of imported luxury goods, bloated homes, vacuous cruises, etc. The only other mechanism available to the middle class to increase household income is for Mom/Aunt/Grandmom to enter the workforce, which she does in the tens of millions, with sociological consequences which are still unfolding. 6. This advert/media-driven desire to borrow to fund the "good life" is hugely profitable to the money-center and investment banks, which expand rapidly into mortgage securitization, derivatives and consumer credit to the point that they come to dominate corporate profits. 7. The financial Plutocracy, observing that actually producing goods is not very profitable unless you can fix prices as per ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) or gain government subsidies and tax giveaways (oil lease depreciation, etc.) sinks its capital into the FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate), eschewing real-world investments as comparatively unprofitable. Though rarely noted, this is a longstanding trait of capitalism stretching back to 1400-era Venice. When trade became less profitable than mainland farmimg, the Venetian Elite stopped funding trade and bought farms on the mainland. As a side effect, Venice ceased to be a military and trading power. But the Elite remained immensely wealthy. 8. As the tech bubble expands, middle-class investors see the Plutocracy (those with enough capital to qualify as angel investors and vulture, oops, I mean venture capitalists) reaping huge gains, and they enter the dot-com stock bubble buildup with a vengeance. 9. In a happy accident, the Soviet Empire collapses just as productivity begins its computer-fueled rise in the U.S. In a so-called Unipolar World in which U.S. military, political and financial influence is unrivaled, non-U.S. investors seek the relative safety and high returns (based on appreciation of the dollar) of U.S. financial instruments. 10. The dot-com bubble implodes in a speculative meltdown, and retail investors (a.k.a. the middle class 401K investors) are devastated. The ephemeral wealth they once possessed, however briefly, fuels their speculative desire to get into the next get-rich-quick game, which just so happens to be "something everyone understands:" real estate and housing. 11. Having exhausted the dot-com play, Plutocratic capital is seeking a new high-profit home. The miracles of derivatives (CDOs, credit default swaps, etc.) and securitized debt (mortgage tranches, etc.) open up vast new opportunities for leverage, off-balance sheet shenanigans and outright fraud/debauchery of credit. As chip wafer plants disappear from Silicon Valley (too dirty, too costly, etc.) then they're replaced with paper: mortgage-backed securities. (Over-reach and windfall exploitation writ large.) 12. Sniffing gold in them thar exurban hills, the under-capitalized and over-indebted U.S. working class and middle class reach for the chalice of easy-money gold: leveraged real estate. (Over-reach and windfall exploitation writ small.) 13. With the Federal financial regulatory agencies in a Republican/Democrat-enforced somnambulance, the coast is clear for brigands, shysters, fraudsters, con artists, liars, cheats, and assorted riff-raff in the realty, mortgage and appraisal businesses, who all feed the ravenous maw of the money-center banks' apparently limitless appetite for real estate assets to securitize and leverage in exotic and stupendously profitable ways. 14. For a wonderful five years circa 2001-2006, the game is afoot and no-down-payment Jill and $100 million bonus Jack are immensely enriched. Meanwhile, the underlying real economy is becoming ever more imbalanced and ever more fragile as real production and real productivity plummet as everyone rushes to the speculative riches of exurban McMansions and malls. 15. Elite and middle-class interests seem to converge during this speculative mania: everyone is benefitting from the real estate bubble except the poor, who are bought off with minimal social welfare programs and endless entertainment (via TV) then safely ignored, as they don't vote or spend. But this convergence was illusory; while the Plutocracy and State functionaries benefitted (via stupendous capital gains for the former and vastly richer pension promises for the latter), the private-sector middle class is in essence the bag-holder: when the newfound 'wealth" in housing and stock market gains vanish, it is the middle class wealth which is destroyed en masse. 16. This last best speculative leveraged credit bubble pops (alas, exponential expansion of credit cannot go on forever), gutting the stock market which had grown utterly dependent on leverage, debt, gamed/fraudulent accounting and asset bubbles for its rising profits. 17. Doubly devastated by the implosion of housing and their stock investments (mostly in 401K and IRA retirement funds), the middle class faces the terrible consequences of its 26-year stupor of ever-rising debt and leverage. Alas, the Emperor's clothes are revealed as remarkably transparent. 18. Having borrowed and squandered trillions of dollars since 1981 on unaffordable entitlements, military misadventures and assorted bridges-to-nowhere pork spending, the Federal government (The Fed and the Treasury) finds that its ability to borrow its way out of its current debt hole somewhat annoyingly limited. The rest of the world has finally caught on to the con, and Chinese university students are openly mocking Treasury Secretary Geithner's Orwellian claim of "we support a strong dollar." The rest of the world shuns Treasury debt and works to create an alternative reserve currency, shutting down the "dollar con" (we take your tangible goods and give you paper in return.) 19. With the global media concentrated in a scant few corporate hands (less than 10), this pulling away of the curtain is deleted/excised from media coverage in a ruthless campaign of pure propaganda. 20. As the wheels fall off the U.S. economy and the bubbles cannot be re-inflated, fruitless attempts at holding back the tide with incantations (stop, tide, I speak for the U.S. Treasury!) and loopy sand castles (the bottom is in, buy now!) abound. Unresponsive to propaganda, the real world grinds down into a global Depression without visible end. If we do nothing, we will be swept along with the Great Descent. Alternatively, if we want to prosper, then we must first gain an integrated understanding of all the interlocking crises we face.





New key concepts in Chapter One: cui bono (to whose benefit?) independent agencies self-organizing networks and groups high-caste, upper-caste (technocrat/government employee class) when belief in the system fades simulacrum







Chapter Two: Contexts and Causes

Any guide claiming to be practical must first present all the contexts and causes of the interlocking challenges we now face. Without such an integrated understanding, all response planning is like building a house on shifting sand. If we are indeed entering a multi-decade Great Transformation, then as prudent as it is to stockpile a few months of food and supplies, that will obviously not get us through the Transformation, either as individuals or as communities. We need a thoroughly integrated understanding before we can fashion a response that will make the Transformation a positive one. Our goal is a sustainable, productive economy and a full appreciation of the fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I know it is tempting to skip ahead to the list of proposed responses, but they won't make sense unless we ground ourselves in the contexts of our planet, era, society and economy. First, we must identify the fundamental contexts; second, critique the status-quo understanding of the "problems" and "solutions," and then third, present solutions which flow directly from our critique. Our goal is a critique so incisive that the solutions become "obvious," that is, they are implicit in the critique itself. Not all critiques manage this; the grandfather of cul-de-sac critiques was Marx, whose profound critique of capitalism did not produce any coherent alternative system. It is also important to understand that every "solution" benefits someone, and the key to establishing that "solution" is to frame the "problem" in such a manner that the self-serving "solution" becomes essentially inevitable. This is why we constantly ask: cui bono, to whose benefit?, and why we take such care in analyzing how "problems" are being framed by the status quo. It is my thesis that the standard (status quo) understanding of our "problems" is heavily promoted precisely because it benefits an elite at the top of the income/asset pyramid which I call the Plutocracy. This carefully designed and marketed understanding of the "problem" is presented in ways which can only be described as artful propaganda. The chief goal of this relentless marketing is to convince you that the "solutions" being presented are in your self-interest; that is, that they will benefit the entire nation (if not the entire planet, too), including you. The possibility that these "solutions" exclusively serve the interests of a small Elite is rarely considered, for the obvious reason that the question itself threatens the entire understanding of what constitutes our "problems" and the Elite's "solutions." A key feature of the current era of interlocking crises is that the interests of the Plutocracy are increasingly diverging from the interests of the society as a whole. This divergence must be masked by simulacra and propaganda, lest the citizenry become aware of the widening split and start demanding that the Plutocracy and the State relinquish some of their ever-growing share of the national income. By way of example of such divergence, consider globalization as a catch-phrase. We are constantly bombarded with shrill warnings that any limits on globalization will cause a worldwide Depression akin to the 1930s. Yet this is disengenuous for a number of reasons. To the degree that trade is globalization, then the world has been globalized for thousands of years; Imperial Rome, India and China were trading partners. But "globalization" covers not just wealth-creating trade but also the most one-sided exploitation of materials and labor. The one catch-phrase conveniently covers both beneficial commerce of the sort which has gone on for thousands of years and exploitive looting of local resources by global forces. So when hardwood forests are leveled and the seas poisoned, do the local people really benefit as much as promoters of "globalization" insist? Do all the workers displaced --not just in advanced industrial economies but in Africa as well--really benefit? Or is the entire intellectual framework of "globalization" essentially a front to provide cover for the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many? The intellectual framework which supports the Elite's dominance and makes it apparently "natural" or "beneficial" is the Plutocracy's key defense; and the limits of human language and thought make it relatively easy to undermine reasoned skepticism. Thus a defense of "capitalism" turns out not to be an appeal for open markets but the exact opposite, an enabling of crony capitalism. The defense of globalization is not a promotion of the exchange-of-surplus-production that characterized trade for millennia but of a targeted grab-and-run exploitation of vulnerable resources and peoples. Regulations to curb the Plutocracy are undermined by the Plutocracy pursuading the State that "these are the regulations we want," that is, a simulacrum of regulation that imposes virtually no limits on Elites but effectively strangles the middle class and keeps it "in its place." Given the enormous benefits to be gained by this relentless obfuscation, mystification and superficially appealing framing of contexts and problems, we must prepare ourselves for a difficult analysis. Our first step is to ask cui bono, to whose benefit? Our second step is to tease apart the intellectual defenses of over-reach and income redistribution, and consider how the status quo dismisses our actual "problems" as mere bumps in the technocratically maintained road to consumerist Nirvana, i.e. "prosperity." One often effective technique deployed to quell questions about Elites' dominance or self-interest is reduction: that is, reduce the situation to "us versus them" or an "all or nothing" conflict, or frame it as an extension of a current situation which can be addressed by modest tweaks of current policies. Thus Peak Oil is not a problem as we have 400 years of coal, etc. Those in charge of the machinery have a huge stake in technocratic "solutions" which leave power, profit and consumption structures firmly in place. Identity itself can be reduced; thus a once-active citizenry is reduced to "consumers." As long as "consumers" benefit in any way, then what might be lost to workers, voters, citizens, etc. can be cast aside as meaningless. Since profits are made by selling something to consumers, it's extremely handy for all other roles and identities to be extinguished, diminished or marginalized. The key point here is that dominance flows directly from an intellectual framework which constructs and justifies that dominance as natural and beneficial to all believers. In this sense consumerism is in effect the de facto state religion of the U.S.A., and it directly benefits the Elites who own or control the vast majority of the nation's financial wealth, income, law-making machinery and productive assets. The second point is that it is impossible to make a clear-eyed assessment of the actual problems and challenges we face when our understanding of those realities is constantly being massaged, manipulated and "framed" out of existence by an elite-dominated media. (Most of the world's broadcast, Internet and print media is controlled by a few global companies.) It is important to understand that the low-level conflict, confusion and anxiety created by the media (blatantly rabble-rousing entertainment such as Rush Limbaugh being passed off as political commentary, for instance) are directly in the interests of the Plutocracy. Anything which undermines critical thinking or a sustained, coherent understanding of the Plutocracy's over-reach, redistribution of national income in their own favor and the inherent injustice and brittleness of the system which enables and supports their dominance works to the advantage of the Elites. The third point is that many people who consider themselves smart realists nonetheless end up defending an oppressive and manipulative status quo because they have been persuaded by their salary and other benefits (such as enhanced personal status--ooh, my own Blackberry!) to defend a self-serving Elite--or more precisely, the intellectual framework which enables, supports and justifies the Elites' dominance. This leads to the fourth point, which is the Elites' have already won the key battle once their high-caste technocratic "army" of academics, managers, majors and captains, et al. identify this intellectual framework as being in their own self-interest. This "army" of bureaucrats and technocrats forms an upper "caste" which defends and enforces the Elites' dominance over the rest of the citizenry. Even as the economy slips into a Plantation-like structure populated by debt-serfs laboring under the illusion they are free spirits pursuing their own self-interest, the upper caste bureaucrats and technocrats labor to maintain the facade via the distraction of "entertainment," the "staging" of "news" and the dispensation of "justice" even as "theft by other means" (looting, embezzlement, fraud, collusion, etc.) is the modus operandi of an unaccountable Plutocracy. As on a Plantation, the power and wealth owned by a small Elite indentures the majority of wage earners via the mechanism of crushing debt (debt-serfdom). Debt-serfs are managed and policed by a managerial and technocratic caste of overseers ("lunas" in the terminology of the Hawaiian plantations). The fifth point is that this process of persuasion/gaining compliance is not a conspiracy; it is a complex mixture of conscious and subconscious realignments of incentives and disencentives to maximize attractive risk-return opportunities (i.e. windfall exploitation and exemptions from market forces) for the Plutocracy and its upper-caste workforce. Thus the incentives for public employees to game the system to boost their retirement pay, effectively looting the public treasury in the process, are high while the penalties, thanks in part to union protection, are minimal to nonexistent. In a similar way, the chicken farm which dumps its waste directly into the bay has a large incentive (profits) to avoid regulations which would require treatment of its vast waste. If it only costs $1 million in campaign donations to persuade lawmakers to exempt the farm from environmental regulations while the treatment plant would cost $10 million and crimp profits, the cost-benefit analysis is clear: buy the legislative loopholes and continue killing the bay. With elections becoming ever costlier, the lawmakers have incentives to garner large contributions from enterprises who need "to present our perspective." It isn't corruption per se, simply the "rational response" to incentives and cost-benefit ratios embedded in the very structure of the system. Once the entire system is riddled with gamesmanship, looting, special loopholes and exemptions for the Elite and secret dispensation of public funds, then belief in the supporting intellectual framework and the fairness of the system fades. The middle class outside the "caste" of State technocrats is squeezed by Plutocratic and State over-reach; as they drop out then the taxes they paid to support the ever-growing State decline, eventually leading to the State's insolvency. The sixth point is that empires and States collapse when the costs far outweigh the marginal gains; in effect the cost of maintaining the over-reaching State and Plutocracy far exceeds the increasingly marginal benefits provided by the State and "belief in the system." Marginal benefits are low, marginal costs are high. One example of this is medicinal. Antibiotics provide enormous benefits for low marginal costs. In contrast to this tremendous leverage--low costs produce enormous gains--modern pharmaceuticals are often staggeringly costly even as their benefits are minimal, Adding a costly medication to a senior's already long list of drugs is extremely costly (high marginal costs) even as it offers scant or even negative benefits (low marginal benefit). The seventh point is that structures (both political and intellectual) which once made sense are extended to absurdity/non-sense as the State and Plutocracy over-reach (over-borrow, over-leverage, take increasingly large gambles/risks to sustain the status quo, increase taxation and looting, etc.) Thus regulatory systems which once controlled the Elites' excesses now smother the middle class while the Plutocracy operates beyond any accountability. The eighth point is that a terribly ironic mechanism gathers force: since free markets are inherently risky (that is, ontologically based on risk and return and shifting supply and demand), the Plutocracy and State functionaries/parasites both have compelling incentives to escape exposure to market forces via exemptions. Thus State functionaries buy political support for public-sector wages which are two or three times higher than market wages, and healthcare/pension benefits which are unmatched by private enterprise. Parasitic firms such as defense and healthcare contractors gain "guaranteed contracts" or other exemptions from market forces, while the Plutocracy gains exemptions via public guarantees (backstops, bailouts and low-cost loans) of private bets, tax exemptions, etc. The irony is that neoliberal Capitalism supposedly reveres free markets: but that is mere propaganda. A simulacrum of free markets is erected for middle class consumption but behind the veils of obscure tax laws, sweetheart deals and the like, the Plutocracy and State functionaries both avoid any exposure to actual market forces which might expose them to risk or limit their share of the national income. The ninth point is that reality does not respect the intellectual constructs of the Elite (let's call this dominant ideology Neoliberal Capitalist Democracy for want of a more accurate term). As a result, as reality increasingly conflicts with this understanding of "how our world works," then that intellectual framework must increasingly substitute carefully designed simulacrum for authentic structures (for example, elections in which 98% of all incumbents win re-election) and work to derealize any direct experience which runs counter to the Plutocracy's narrative. This process of bridging the widening gap between what we experience and what we're being told we should be experiencing via the substitution of simulacrum for authentic structures is central to this entire analysis. Why are the State and the Plutocracy (two sides of the same coin) substituting simulacrum for authentic structures and truthful accounts? Let's answer by asking: what would a truthful accounting of cui bono-- to whose benefit?--reveal? A truthful accounting would reveal that the entire status quo system benefits the rentier-financial Plutocracy and the high-caste class of State employees and corporate technocrats at the expense of the rest of us: the 99% who do not own 2/3 of the productive assets of the nation and the 75% who do not belong to the State/technocrat upper-caste which serves and enforces the system for its own self-aggrandizement. In sum: a truthful accounting of cui bono would result in the exposure of the over-reach, exploitation, deception, fraud, mismanagement, malinvestment, manipulation and self-aggrandizement of the Plutocracy and its high-caste State/corporate technocracy (two "masters," one system). A truthful accounting would result in the shattering of the illusion that belonging to and supporting the status quo is in your self-interest. Maintaining this illusion is the key to maintaining the Plutocracy and the State's share of the national income. This explains why the Plutocracy and the State (two sides of one coin) are obsessed with creating simulacrum structures and narratives designed to lull the citizenry into the comforting illusion that they are the beneficiaries of: -- democracy (when 98% of incumbents win re-election, can that be authentic democracy?)

-- a free press (when a handful of corporations own the vast majority of the print/broadcast/radio/web media and the State manipulates statistics without media challenge, can that be an authentic "free press"?)

-- higher education (a factory for producing high-caste overseers/enforcers for the State/Plutocracy Plantation)

-- healthcare (a quarter of the citizenry have no healthcare, another quarter have sham "coverage")

-- "ownership" (of debt and rapidly declining collateral--the perfect setup for debt-serfdom)

-- low-tax (low tax for the Plutocracy and unproductive class, high tax for the dwindling productive class) "free enterprise" (crony Capitalism of the most refined order). To maintain their share of the dwindling national income, it is essential that the Plutocracy and State mask the devolution and insolvency of the State. The primary prop of non-elite belief in the system is the faith that the Savior State will fund everyone's retirement, healthcare and security as promised--a promise which cannot be fulfilled. (A Savior State promises to save everyone from personal responsibility via entitlements funded by demographic and financial fraud.) As a result of this pervasive substitution of simulacrum structures and narratives/explanations, truthfulness evaporates, replaced by deception and propaganda. Transparency is replaced by obscurity and staged entertainments are presented as "news" or "democracy in action." Facts are replaced by carefully massaged statistics; accounting is replaced by trickery. Common purpose is replaced by self-aggrandizement and game-the-system looting. The Elites' interests diverge from those of the society as a whole. The result is a profound political disunity of hardened, bitter camps warring over the remaining spoils of a decaying State. Regulations are replaced by protection schemes and layers of purposefully inpenetrable obfuscation which provide the Elites exemptioms from market forces (risk and subsequent losses). Healthcare is replaced by a highly profitable simulacrum structure in which 25% of the citizenry receive no care and another 25% pay for sham "healthcare coverage" which offers little to no actual care. The high-caste class of State and corporate technocrats is rewarded for their services to the State/Plutocracy with full coverage. (Observe the parallels to State employees' coveted positions in Third World kleptocracies.) The unfettered free press is replaced with a corporate media tasked with protecting the interests of the State and Plutocracy which owns it lock, stock and barrel. Truthfulness is replaced by lies, deception, trickery and a pervasive, willful obscurity in every level of society and the economy. Simulacrums of capital are passed off as assets. A sham prosperity based on exponential growth of credit/debt is presented as sustainable "capitalism." Misallocation of capital and looting are masked as "market forces." Incomplete, misleading, and romanticized information is presented in support of simulacrum while truthful accountings are suppressed, belittled and undermined. Lived experience is derealized by ever-present media fantasies ("we have the finest healthcare system in the world," "the banking sector is free enterprise at its finest," "you too can be a star," etc.) and the schizophrenic gap between experience and media fantasy is papered over with drugs (prescribed, illegal and legal) and distractions (celebrity worship, entertainment/sports, narcissistic indulgences, shopping, etc.) Dissent is filtered into distracting, meaningless simulacrum of "ideological debates" of no substance, "debates" which leave the Power Elite and State in control of the national income. Obesity, passivity and addiction are incentivized as poor nutrition and chronic illness are the highest-return "profit centers" for the agribusiness/packaged/fast-food industry and the simulacrum "healthcare" (actually sick-care) industry. The unavoidable failures and destructive consequences of the status quo are systematically internalized as personal failings: lack of will power, poor judgment, etc.; a simulacrum of "personal responsibility" masks the internalization of propaganda/master narratives which leave the Plutocracy and State safely unaccountable. From the perspective of a media sustained by marketing, the ideal internal state is a deep, unresolvable insecurity which can be temporarily soothed by shopping/entertainment. A simulacrum of citizenship reduces a self-directed populace to passive "consumers." This process is so subtle and subconscious that it is difficult to discern. But once you understand this substitution mechanism, a type of enlightenment occurs; you no longer accept simulacrum for "the real thing," and the State/Plutocracy has lost your compliance, that is, your belief in the system's fair accounting of your self-interest. This conflict between direct, lived experience of our ever-worsening problems and the State/Elites' "ignore reality, keep believing in our system" machinery causes a pervasive cultural and individual schizophrenia which causes participants to feel adrift, depressed, alienated, isolated and misunderstood. The Elites' intellectual framework has a ready response to this ever-widening divide between their increasingly rickety narrative and reality: the metaphors of illness and medicine. Thus the "solution" to the deep misgivings of those who sense the divide between a false narrative and their own experience is prescription medications in quantity. This growing gulf between lived experience and the Elites' heavily hyped narrative of how our world works eventually causes an enlightenment in some of the managerial/technocrat caste: their belief in the system fades and they drop out. Once they realize the institutions they have given their lives to will fail, they either withdraw or begin work on an alternative framework of understanding based on their own experience. In seeking experience-based ways to understand our challenges and potential solutions which don't simply serve and enrich Elites, they become part of The Remnant, a self-selected assembly of citizenry who lead by example, not exhortation--in other words, the advance guard of a sustainable economy and free society. The Remnant is a diverse and self-organizing group of people who are skeptical of overly simplistic contexts and solutions, and skeptical of the Elites' authority structures (the prison/drug gulag, taxation of everything and everyone but the sheltered Elites, recruitment of the poor to military service so the Elites' offspring need not serve, a food and "healthcare" system which encourages illness and chronic ill-health as the most profitable possible conditions, etc.) The Remnant has learned that the Power Elite has essentially rendered itself unaccountable and thus the consequences of its vast over-reach will fall not on its own small membership but the ill-prepared citizenry below. The entrenched high-caste bureaucrats and other technocrats are busy looting the coffers of the State on behalf of themselves and their Plutocrat Masters, and this large caste will only wither when the State becomes insolvent--the end-game of the current borrow-and-spend debt orgy which has sustained the American economy, Plutocracy and State for decades. Thus The Remnant is preparing for life without State largesse, because the State will no longer be able to borrow or print enough money to support its increasingly burdensome castes, entitlements and fiefdoms. In my terminology, the Remnant's goal is radical self-reliance. Lastly, The Remnant is acutely aware that the environmental, financial and FEW (food, energy, water) dilemmas facing the planet are not ones of interpretation; they are very real and cannot be explained away or "framed" out of existence with appeals to soothingly vague future technocratic wonders. This book is an attempt to strip away the obfuscatory intellectual framework which has cloaked and protected the Elites' self-serving over-reach. It is an attempt to speak directly to the real problems we face. Once we understand our own experience and the world directly then the messy, conflicting realities of various solutions and trade-offs will become clearer. Then we will have to choose which trade-offs have the best chances for long-term success--not in preserving the bankrupt, unsustainable structures of the present but in constructing a sustainable, productive economy and a political culture based not on self-serving game-the-system looting but on the radical self-reliant appreciation of the fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.





End note: I know this must strike some readers as lunacy; there are no simulacrum, and the State cannot possibly dissolve in insolvency. Others will be tempted to enter the merry-go-round "debate" as to whether the State should or should not be a "Savior." It doesn't matter; the State cannot print up $100 trillion without reducing the value of the dollar to zero, nor can it fund the military/security/Empire, its own domestic fiefdoms and the Savior State entitlements now promised to 300 million citizens without borrowing/printing $100 trillion-- so however you care to calculate the end-state, it remains the same: insolvency and the complete devolution of the Empire/Savior State.





Key concepts in this chapter: Plantation-like structures debt-serfs derealize/derealization Neoliberal Capitalist Democracy (the dominant ideology) profound political disunity Savior State belief in the system fades The Remnant radical self-reliance







Chapter Three: Toward An Integrated Understanding

The first task is replacing the crumbling intellectual framework of the present status quo system with one grounded in reality. There are five distinct issues to sort out: The elements of human nature which lend themselves to cycles and manipulation The nature of the energy, financial and environmental trends/crises which are heralding the Great Transformation The nature of the negative and positive feedback loops which determine the system's stability and direction The responses which have a high probability of making the Transformation positive The nature of future work and the skillsets best suited to prospering during the Great Transformation If we mischaracterize the nature of the crises and fail to grasp the forces powering these trends, then we will select inappropriate responses which will not prepare us to prosper. If we fail to understand how the status quo benefits various Elites, then we will inaccurately frame the "problems" and reach guaranteed-to-fail "solutions." You may well disagree with much or perhaps most of this book; that's fine, because the primary goal of the book is to spark a reappraisal of our situation and generate practical responses. I don't claim to have "the answer," or even answers; what I hope to present is a way of thinking about the challenges which is more productive than the status quo. You may also find some of the ideas presented here difficult to accept. None of us like to think of ourselves as debt-serfs (yes, I have a mortgage, too), yet how can we move forward if we cannot be honest about our responsibilities and dilemmas? We are all vulnerable to groupthink, propaganda and marketing at various times; there is no shame in simply being human. Some of you may find parts of the analysis smacking of warmed-over Marxism, while an equal number may find certain sections "right-wing." This urge to categorize any idea or analysis ideologically is part of the simulacrum of thinking we accept as "obvious"-- the largely unconscious politics of experience. That much of what we accept as "obvious" might be wrong is deeply unsettling.





Context One: Human Nature The first context we must understand is human nature. Regardless of the era or challenge, humans remain "wired" to respond to crisis in the same basic ways. Unfortunately for us, our responses in "default mode" (our first emotional responses) and the solutions we find highly compelling in default mode (inertia/complacency, fear/panic, casting our lot with a "Big Man"/leader or fatalism/giving up) are often not constructive, and may well be highly destructive. Even more pernicious, our default mode is extremely short-term. As small groups of hunter-gatherers, we simply walked away when we'd depleted the environment of resources; there were always other lands (or islands) available. In this fashion, ancient humans wandered the entire planet long before the first tilled crop was ever planted. Our default ability to foresee the consequences of our actions is poor; thus time and again human societies have added population and "overhead costs" during prosperous times of ample rainfall and grain yields, only to collapse in catastrophic decline when a string of lean years inevitably came along. In abundance, we freely spend what's "cheap" and in shortage we mourn what is now "dear" or no longer available. It's not difficult to see the same pattern repeating today. While it is possible for humans to fashion long-term plans out of self-interest, we are peculiarly ill-equipped to make the critical distinction between relative scarcity and absolute scarcity. Thus we will hunt a species to extinction without regards to the long-term negative consequences for own diet. To a mind selected for hunting and gathering, the local scarcity (that is, relative scarcity) of any one critical food or energy source is remedied by simply moving on to a new hunting ground with relative abundance. In cases where humans have hunted a species to extinction, such as the woolly mammoth, then the human solution remains the same: move on. In the event some other tribe already occupies a territory of relative abundance, the human response is to begin hunting their own species of the "other tribe." In terms of straight kilocalorie analysis, this is entirely rational: the "cost" of war in terms of lives lost and calories expended is well worth the longlasting benefits of conquering new fertile territories and elminating competitors. Thus it is not at all specious to suggest that monopoly capital and conquest by whatever means the most attractive cost/benefit ratio have long been a human strategy to maximize gains/profits, and marking off another human group as the "enemy" is a highly useful tool to gain support of one's own tribe for the conquest/looting. Monopoly capital is the mechanism by which capital finds elminating competition to be far more profitable than competing in a free market. Thus mature industries with high barriers to entry by new competitors (often these barriers are political or regulatory, purchased by the Plutocracy for modest sums) end up being dominated by a mere handful of enterprises. The global mass media is but one example of many. A similar mechanism is the exempting of capital and high-caste Elites from risk--that is, from the risks inherent in free markets. Just as monopoly capital strives to eliminate "uncertainties" (i.e. losses or reduced returns) by eliminating competition, capital and high-caste Elites (public employees, technocrats/professionals, etc.) strive to exempt themselves from risk and the free market by constructing fiefdoms protected by the State. In both cases, the goal is to lock in hefty returns without absorbing any of the risks demanded by a free market. The returns are funneled to the Elites while the risks are spread to the middle class (which still must deal with the uncertainties of a true free market for labor and capital) via high taxation. The advent of language gave humanity tremendous powers of knowledge acquisition and storage, but it also provided methods to influence our interpretations of experience. Thus we all support "taking care of the elderly" and this automatic support has enabled a relatively small number of enterprises to reap enormous profits selling medications and care to Medicare which in many cases actively increase the elderly's suffering and dimimish their health. An estimated 100,000 people die from prescription drug errors or hospital infections, but Medicare spending continues to expand at twice the rate of the overall economy, year after year. Seniors quickly gain prescriptions to a dozen or more medications once they qualify for Medicare--a brew of drugs whose interactions are poorly understood and whose benefits are often marginal at best. The compelling catch-phrases which are deployed to mask looting and profiteering are legion: "defending our nation," "restoring the health of our banking sector," etc. Thus we have to be especially alert to how elites deploy these powerful linguistic/emotional attractors to cloak their monopolies, influence, over-reaching and looting. Lastly, the mind is remarkably easy to hijack via emotional reward receptors. Former FDA head David Kessler recently described how the food industry designs its products to activate these reward centers with faux-foods loaded with sugar, fat and salt (from his book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite): They aren't selling just any commodity. They've designed highly stimulating products, and consumers come back for more. Nothing sells as much as something that stimulates the rewards-circuitry of the brain. It's all about selling product. Unfortunately, humans are prone to a formidably long and varied List of cognitive biases (Wikipedia). Those tasked with manipulating public opinion for political or financial gain are of course well-versed in these biases, which I would characterize as cognitive traps, and highly attuned to the most productive times and places to deploy them. Despite the many traps in our default modes of thinking and our pernicious tropism toward short-term contexts, when we have no choice left then we are capable of making short-term sacrifices to further long-term gains. This is the response we need to foster to survive the Great Transformation just ahead.





Context Two: Cycles and Patterns of History While every era of crisis is unique, authors such as David Fischer (The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History), Jared Diamond ( Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed ) and Joseph Tainter ( The Collapse of Complex Societies ) have carefully researched how cycles of price, conflict and resource depletion/exhaustion tend to repeat as human populations rise beyond the carrying capacity of their environment. I address these cycles in Food Shortages, Rising Prices, Stagnant Wages:

Welcome to the 13th Century (reprinted in a later chapter). As we seek to understand long-wave cycles, we must also recognize that the crises of our era are unique even as they are manifesting within historical cycles. A number of recent books have described the unique set of challenges we face: for instance The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (James Howard Kunstler) and Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Michael Panzner). Other books have addressed critical environmental, energy and demographic issues: The Future of Life, Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak, Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future, The Rhythm of War and The Fourth Turning. Given this wealth of material, I hesitate to even attempt a short summary of all the interwoven structural challenges of our era. But the key context is this: financial and resource crises are not new; they are recurring features of human civilization. But many aspects of our era's crises are unique in all of human history: never before have we faced depletion of fossil fuels and the population pressures of over 6.5 billion humans to feed, house, clothe, transport, heal and care for in their old age. Never before have we as a species been so dependent on fragile supply chains and fast-depleting global resources. Consider the overfishing of the world's oceans; what once seemed inexhaustiblethe supply of fishis now heading to near-zero. Ironically, this cyclical nature of crisis lends itself to the emotional power of complacency: if we managed to get through those crises, then we can do it again, the power of human innovation will save us, etc. Unfortunately, there have been many times when the human populace did not "get through" the crisis; populations collapsed to mere shadows of their levels reached in the years of rising abundance. Current structural challenges include: 1. demographics (promised retirement benefits are unaffordable) 2. global financial deleveraging (renunciation/write-off of debt) 3. high-cost advanced economies, "Planet of Slums" developing economies 4. rising interest rates (shortage of surplus capital) 5. de-scaling/disruption of entrenched industries/State fiefdoms by the Web 6. scalability traps/structural job losses in all economies 7. crippling regulation and overhead burdens on small entrepreneurs 8. fossil fuel depletion (Peak Oil) 9. "head-fake" drop in energy costs removes incentives for alternative energy 10. political disunity; elites' interests diverge from those of the society as a whole 11. rising income disparity 12. depletion of fresh water, ocean and soil resources 13. climate change (weather extremes, rising sea levels, etc.) 14. increasingly drug-resistant bacteria and viruses 15. rising chemical and industrial pollution levels (air, water, soil, etc.) 16. increasing availability of bioweapons and nuclear weapons I summarize the four primary cycles in my book Weblogs & New Media: Marketing in Crisis: 1. Peak oil, or the depletion cycle/end-game of the global economy's complete dependence on inexpensive, readily available petroleum/fossil fuels. 2. The cycle of credit expansion and contraction (approximately 60-70 years), which is now beginning the transition from unsustainable credit expansion (bubble) to renunciation of debt (credit collapse) and global depression. 3. The generational cycle (4 generations or approximately 80 years) of American history which leads to nation-changing social, political and economic upheaval. (The American Revolution: 1781 +80 years = Civil War, 1861 +80 years = 1941, World War II + 80 years = 2021) 4. The 100+ year cycle of price inflation and stagnation of wages' purchasing power which began around 1901 is now reaching the final stage of widespread turmoil, shortages, famine, war, conflict and crisis.

Without a firm understanding of the cyclical nature of human history and the unique challenges of our era, we are hard-pressed to escape the comforting illusions of complacency and fatalism. A key point is that the above crises (or potential crises) are not discrete phenomena which can be solved in piecemeal fashion but rather interlocking, overlapping and in some cases reinforcing problems which range from long-term depletions to volatile geopolitical tensions which could burst into conflict. Over an intermediate time scale, a weather crisis such as extended drought could cause a food shortage which might then put a match to a smouldering geopolitical tenderbox. The complacency and misplaced confidence of the status quo render these unpredictable interactions all the more combustible because so little has been done to anticipate the potential domino effect of these global crises.





Context Three: Interlocking/Reinforcing Crises, Time Scales and Globalization One of the factors which renders the intersecting crises of the next 15-25 years so difficult to predict is the multiple time scales at work. A global petroleum shortage, for example, could stagger the developed world in a very short time span as hoarding and govermental rationing would quickly magnify the disruptions. Food shortages might develop over a longer period of months as drought, energy shortages and geopolitical issues caused a sharp decline in grain production and/or shipping. A nuclear war between two long-standing adversaries such as India and Pakistan could erupt in a matter of weeks should internal crises trigger border tensions. China might suddenly deem the moment ripe to conquer Taiwan with military force, loosing a cascading crisis which could lead to limited or even nuclear war between the U.S. and China. Any war involving the Mideast, East Asia or the U.S. might dramatically effect oil, currencies and trade which would quickly impact economies, food supplies and the psychology of instability/fear/hoarding. Ironically, the great benefits of globalization--long oil-dependent supply chains leading from distant factories to free-spending debt-fueled Western consumers--can reverse with extraordinary speed as these very same fragile supply chains degrade or shatter in moments of energy, finance or geopolitical crisis. Very long-wave crises are only visible to historians and those willing to root around obscure data. Thus the slow, steady redistribution of national wealth away from the middle class into the pockets of the State and Plutocracy is barely discernable. Yet just because this movement of wealth, capital and income appears glacial does not mean the effects are insignificant; on the contrary, this over-reach by the State and Plutocracy at the expense of the tax-paying middle class is in some ways as important a cause of collapse as more immediate crises such as Peak Oil and the depletion of fresh water acquifers. That crises unfolding in different time scales will overlap is easily predictable, but the precise intersection or overlay of various crises is entirely unpredictable. Some geopolitical tension might close the Straits of Hormuz or Malacca, and the resulting restriction of sealanes and oil tankers might trigger some other unstable crisis. It is also easily predictable that any one nation and its citizenry will have limited control or influence over a truly global crisis. We can also safely predict the complacent and/or fatalistic nations and citizens will suffer more than those who proactively anticipated the likelihood of interlocking, reinforcing crises occurring within the next decade or two. Ideally, such proactive anticipation should involve households, communities and the nation at large. But if the State (government at all levels) is in denial or deadlock, or crippled by debt or otherwise insolvent, then households and communities will also have to prepare themselves for dwindling State aid. Even if the State does set aside prudent reserves, these are designed to smooth short-term crises, not semi-permanent declines in the FEW essentials (food, energy, water). For instance, the 600-million barrel U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds about one month's supply of oil (20 million barrels a day consumed in the U.S. X 30 days). While this is certainly a reassuring number in a short-term crisis, it would be foolhardy to think a one-month's supply will prove to be anything more than a stopgap should oil imports plummet over the long-term. As we shall see later, various feedback loops (both positive and negative) are at work as each crisis erupts; in some scenarios negative feedback might stem the crisis; in others, a domino effect could transpire, toppling vulnerabilities which encircle the globe. This is why time-sensitive predictions are foolhardy, both those predicting "the end of the world as we know it" and those spouting the "it will all work out just fine" complacency favored by the mass media and Plutocracy. What we can predict is that fragile systems without redundancy are vulnerable to disruptions which could then freeze up or degrade the entire supply chain. If these impact the critical FEW resources (food, energy, water) then the disruption can quickly expand to other systems which were previously thought secure/safe. System prone to positive feedback (the runaway self-reinforcing crisis) are inherently more vulnerable to collapse than those with multiple negative feedbacks--forces which counteract the trend. The problem for the complacent is that time scales, vulnerabilities, overlap and interactions differ for each crisis. Thus a fast-moving crisis with slow negative feedback (correctives) could race beyond the reach of corrective action, triggering other fast-spreading crises in its wake. In a world so deeply dependent on cheap, abundant liquid fossil fuels for everything from transportation to food, the vulnerability and interdependency of all energy-dependent systems to shortage or disruption is acute and works across all time scales.





The Commodity Unlike Any Other: Oil Standard-issue economists tend to treat oil/fossil fuels as a commodity like any other; when demand rises, new or alternative supplies will emerge once they become profitable. But this model is utterly misleading, for liquid hydrocarbons are special in three distinctive ways: they contain very high energy densities, they are stable at normal temperatures and they are readily transportable via pipeline, ship, train or vehicle. No other energy source possesses all these traits, and those that get close (lithium ion batteries, for instance) are very costly to manufacture and are dependent on dwindling metals/ores (in this case, lithium). Supposedly "renewable" sources like biofuels and "unlimited" sources like shale oil require so much energy to produce, process and transport (when calculated in equivalent energy densities) that the net energy (useful energy produced minus energy used in production) is actually rather paltry. Until very recently, oil had the distinct advantage of being cheap to extract. Super-giant fields under pressure gushed oil for as little as $1 per barrel in raw costs. But the super-giant fields which supply much of the world's oil now require costly extraction technologies such as water or gas pressurization. New production has been located offshore, in deep water or in extreme climates like the Arctic Circle. It is no longer cheap to locate, extract or process oil or oil equivalents like shale oil. Oil's most unique charcateristic is that every other industry in the global economy depends on oil or oil equivalents: transportation, military, agriculture, tourism, and on and on. Thus a global shortage or disruption will quickly cascade into every corner of the global economy, for new supplies of oil cannot be brought on line quickly (five years would be incredibly quick, ten years would be average). Even worse, new production is not even replacing fields in decline; that is the essence of Peak Oil. As for alternatives: currently, all alternative energy production, including both "old technology" like hydropower and new wind, solar, biofuel and tidal technologies, account for considerably less than 5% of the world's energy consumption. Thus a ten-fold increase in alternative energy--a scaling up which is not yet even technoloigically feasible, and one that in any event would cost trillions of dollars to accomplish--would leave the global economy totally dependent on petroleum for 2/3 of energy consumption. Thus any model which views energy/petroleum/fossil fuels as subject to the same forces as other commodities such as copper is fatally flawed. Every industry and financial sector ultimately rests on cheap, abundant petroleum. Once petroleum is no longer cheap or available in sufficient quantity to meet demand, then the energy domino will topple all the rest in rapid succession. The unique commodity petroleum is thus the very foundation of interlocking/reinforcing crises on a global scale. For more on these topics, please read John Michael Greer's two books, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age and The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World.





Context Four: Ontological Forces Which Power Trends, Reversals and History Within each context, various forces are at work to resist and accelerate trends. These forces include feedback loops (both positive and negative), marginal returns and the illusion of incremental change. Negative feedback can be understood as systems with built-in stabilizers, while positive feedback can be understood as self-reinforcing. I will cover ontological forces and analytic tools in Chapter Seven.





Context Five: The Environment It is tempting to hope that all the structural environmental challenges will "sort themselves out" or be solved by some new technology that magically scales from the lab table to global ubiquity. But the realities do not lend themselves to either benign neglect (that is, just leave everything alone and it will rebalance itself naturally) or technological "fixes." The human population has exploded in a geological eyeblink from several hundred million to 6.5 billion. In terms of energy and resource consumption, each resident of the First World (Europe, North America, Japan) has an environmental impact up to 100 times larger than that of a Third World person. As 2 billion people in China, India and elsewhere aspire to an energy-intensive consumerist First World lifestyle, the reality that the planet does not have the resources to support 3 billion middle-class consumers is readily visible. The list of global environmental ills is well-known. Overfishing driven by insatiable demand and politically popular subsidies of national fishing industries has driven the world's fisheries to the point of collapse. The technological "fix" is aquaculture/aqua-farming, but artificial fisheries spawn another entire host of their own challenges to long-term sustainability. The depletion of cheap, easy to reach oil is also well-known; less well-known is that all the alternative energy sources in the entire worldgeothermal, hydro, solar, wind, tidal, etc.--make up less than 5% of global energy supply. While natural gas and coal can fill some of the gaps as oil supply falls, neither of those fuels is endless, either and "clean coal" is yet another technology that is promising in the lab but not scalable globally without horrendous cost. Fresh water aquifers are being drained everywhere from the American southwest to China, and there are no sustainable ways to compensate for this drawdown of irreplaceable fresh-water resources. Schemes to desalinate vast quantities of seawater requires stupendous amounts of energy; a recent plan by Saudi Arabia would burn fully 1 million barrels of oil a day1 million barrels that could no longer be exported to the U.S. Regardless of what we believe the causes might be, glaciers are melting at increasing rates. Once the Himalayan and Andean glaciers vanish or recede to mere patches of ice, the rivers 2 billion people rely on for irrigation water will become seasonal. Add in massive soil erosion in China and elsewhere, extended droughts in Australia, etc., and you get a picture of global resources stretched to the breaking point. The more you know about the technical details of supposedly miraculous technological "fixes" like desalination, tidal energy, algae-based fuels, etc. etc., the more you understand that very few if any of these emerging technologies may "scale up" to global applications. In other words, algae-based fuels can work just fine on the rooftop of a university lab, but the hard part is scaling it up to produce 1.7 billion gallons of gasoline-equivalent liquid fuel a daywhich is only half of the world's current consumption of oil. (Total global consumption of oil, 80 million barrels a day, so 40 million barrels a day X 42 gallons/barrel.) Add these realities up and the context is a potential crash of global food and fresh water supplies, exacerbated by energy shortages. As authors such as Jared Diamond have explained, eras of resource depletion/drought often trigger unending war/conflict between competing groups and nations. In essence there are four interlocking crises: environmental, energy, financial and geopolitical. Excellent sources abound on these topics: The Future of Life, Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak, and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century come to mind of the many useful texts in print.





Context Six: The End of Debt-Based "Prosperity" The "prosperity" of the past two decades was based not on savings, investment and productivity, as the mainstream financial media and think-tank punditry maintain, but by extremes of speculative credit, leverage, debt and risk-taking, all enabled by a financial system based on obfuscation, deception, embezzlement, fraud, abuse of credit and grossly inflated asset valuations, a.k.a. bubbles. This debt binge was fed by a marketing-based consumerist culture in which shopping and acquisition became recreation, therapy, self-fulfillment and status all in one profit-driven package. Compounding the collapse of this debt-based bogus "prosperity" are two long-term trends: the end of cheap, abundant fossil fuels which enabled inexpensive global supply chains and tourism, and the "end of work," a global contraction of paid labor.





Context Seven: Squeezing the Middle Class The intersection of various long-term political and financial trends is effectively squeezing the middle class, which the State (government) depends on to pay most of the taxes. Caught between the over-reach of both the state and its elites (the Plutocracy) and the end of debt-based, cheap-oil "prosperity" which enabled it to maintain an illusion of wealth, the middle class is being squeezed to the breaking point. I address this topic in a later chapter.



Context Eight: The Nature of Prosperity and Happiness The U.S. Declaration of Independence recognizes the inalienable rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Oddly enough, happiness turns out to be a slippery concept, and much of what Americans spend their lives pursuing does not actually increase their happiness. Indeed, it is self-evident that the stress levels, medication usage and miseries of the "American lifestyle" even in times of prosperity are far higher than one would expect were happiness as abundant as cheap consumer goods. And even prosperity itself turns out to be rather more slippery than rising GDP or other metrics would suggest. It seems that much of what passes for "essential accoutrements of prosperity" such as large suburban homes, multiple vehicles and closets crammed with clothing do not bring happiness to their owners. Rather, they are largely the mirage-like results of marketing propaganda conjured up to generate profits, not life satisfaction or happiness. Indeed, were we to travel back in time to 1870s San Francisco, for example, we would find people feeling quite prosperous even though they lived in what we would now consider relatively primitive poverty: no electricity, no vehicles except public streetcars, (On August 2, 1873, the inventor of the San Francisco cable car, Andrew Hallidie, was the system's first passenger), trains and horse-drawn wagons, primitive healthcare, costly consumer goods, etc. Thus the entire notions of prosperity and happiness must be examined objectively before we can even say with any reliability what the words actually mean.



Context Nine: The Framework of Our Response Our responses to these interwoven, reinforcing challenges of our era can be organized into three inter-related levels: --family --community/networks --nation Each level requires different skills, resources, inputs and solutions. I will cover these topics in the second section.





Key concepts in this chapter: politics of experience simulacrum of thinking cognitive traps scalability traps FEW resources (food, energy, water)







Chapter Four: Complacency and Fatalism

Let's begin by considering Context One: Human Nature in more depth. Entire libraries have been written on the subject of human nature, but for our practical purposes those which probe humanity's "default settings" such as Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal and E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis are the most useful. Although we can slice and dice complex human responses in hundreds of ways (for instance, Who am I? The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Actions an