08/04/09 Saratoga Springs, New York
Whenever the herd mentality lines up along a compass point leading to “permanent prosperity,” or a yellow brick road lined with green shoots, or something like that, I tend to see the edge of a cliff up ahead. We are now completely in the grips of the deadly diminishing returns of information technology. The more information comes to us about How Things Are, especially from TV, the more confused or wrong the conventional view gets it.
A broad consensus has formed in the news media and among government mouthpieces and even some “bearish” investors on the street that “the worst is behind us” in this tortured economy. This view is completely crazy. It will only lead to massive disappointment a few weeks or months from now, and that disappointment might easily transmute to political trouble. One even might call the situation tragic, except a closer look at the sordid spectacle of what American culture has become – a non-stop circus of the seven deadly sins – suggests that we deserve to be punished by history.
The reason behind this mass delusion is not hard to find: it’s based on wishing, especially the wish to retain all the comforts, conveniences, luxuries, and leisure that had become normal in American life. These are now ebbing away in big gobs for most of the population – while a tiny fraction of the well-connected pile on ever-larger heaps of swag, enjoying ever more privilege. Those in the broad bottom 95% were content as long as there was a chance that they, too, could become members of the top 5% – by dint of car-dealing, or house-building, or mortgage-selling, or some other venture enabled by easy credit and a smile. Those days and those ways are now gone. The bottom 95% are now left with de-laminating houses they can’t make payments on, no prospects for gainful work, repo men hiding in the bushes to snatch the PT Cruiser, cut-off cable service, Kraft mac-and-cheese (if they’re lucky), and Larry Summers telling them their troubles are over. (If I were Larry, I’d start thinking about a move to some place like the Canary Islands.)
Too many disastrous things are lined up in the months ahead to insure that we’re entering a new phase of history: The Long Emergency.
- Government at every level is worse than broke.
- Our currency, the US dollar, is hemorrhaging legitimacy.
- Inability to service old debt at all levels or incur new debt.
- Bad (toxic) debt lurking off balance sheets everywhere.
- The housing bubble fiasco is far from over.
- Commercial real estate fiasco just getting started.
- Unemployment rising implacably.
- So-called “consumers” unable to consume consumables.
- Crucial energy import supply lines fragile.
- Food supply subject to energy problems and climate abnormalities.
- A world full of other societies who would enjoy watching us fail and suffer.
When The Long Emergency was published in 2005, I said then that the greatest danger this society faced would be its inclination to gear up a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs – rather than face the need to make new arrangements for daily life. That appears to be exactly what has happened, and it didn’t happen under the rule of some backward-facing, right-wing, Jesus-haunted crypto-fascist, but rather a “progressive” party led by a dynamically affable young man unburdened by deep cultural allegiance to Wall Street. Barack Obama has been sucked in and suckered. “Change you can believe in” has morphed into “a status quo you will bend heaven and earth to hold onto.”
Whatever else you might think or feel about Mr. Obama’s performance so far, this strategy on the broader question of where we go as a nation pulses with tragedy. What’s remarkable to me, to go a step further, is the absence of comprehensive vision – not just in the president, but in all the supposedly able and intelligent people around him, and even those leaders not in government but in business and education and science and the professions.
History is clearly presenting us with a new set of mandates: get local, get finer, downscale, and get going on it right away. Prepare for it now or nature will whack you upside the head with it not too long from now. Attempting to maintain anything on the gigantic scale will turn out to be a losing proposition, whether it is military control of people in Central Asia, or colossal bureaucracies run in the USA, or huge factory farms, or national chain store retail, or hypertrophied state universities, or global energy supply networks.
These imperatives are so outside-the-box of ordinary experience right now, that to drag them into the arena of politics can only evoke blank stares or nervous giggling. But whether we like it or not, these are the things that will really matter in the years ahead – not whether General Motors can ever make a profit again, or what Target Store’s sales figures are next quarter, or whether the latest high-rise condo-and-gambling complex in Las Vegas will be successfully marketed.
Here, in the dog days of summer, it seems to me that the situation in the USA is so fundamentally bad, so unpromising, so booby-trapped for failure, that I wonder if there has ever been a society so badly deluded as ours. We’re prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time, oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a wilderness of our own making.
Anything can happen now. I certainly wouldn’t rule out international mischief as we arc around into fall. The air is so full of black swans that the white swan now seems like the exceptional thing. Whatever else happens, it sure will be interesting to see the public’s reaction to Wall Street’s announcement of Christmas bonuses. The folks at Rockefeller Center better be thinking about getting a fireproof tree.
Regards,
James Howard Kunstler
for The Daily Reckoning
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James,
I haven’t heard a clearer description of the present calamity.
I can’t believe the US leadership is so stupid or ignorant.
I have to conclude that this is being done on purpose.
The conspiratory theorists must be at least partially right.
God help us all!
Cognative dissonance is the new normal.
Brilliant stuff!
Thank you.
there is not a thing in this essay with which i would quibble….
i definitely reject the peak oil fraud and the austerity gospel as vision but limits are the future because we squandered our heritage monetarily….
i have been blabbering since the 1970s about the irresponsible and foolish decisions of this government and its people and now that the roost has come home to crow it is not a pretty sound…
it didn’t have to end this way….there were sensible people who knew the way but pixie dust is a powerful drug….
my primary indictment is the chronic multi decade debasement of the currency and the replacement of gold with debt as currency….everything else is just a consequence
Kunstler is a brilliant writer, but his bit about how most of us have already bought our last car and don’t even know it yet is a little over the top. Just try getting around LA without a car. Besides, the Indians are coming out with those cheap, fuel efficient, little tin can thingy cars.
Jim – good stuff today. I’ve often found myself disagreeing with you in the past, but this is spot-on.
Good article Jim, but I could do without the “Jesus-haunted” comment.
I understand how you’re using it but even accepting the use of that kind of phrase is playing into a demonization that I don’t want to stand for anymore.
Otherwise – great piece.
These problems – in abstract – are not unique to the USA. I live in the UK, and things are about as deluded here also.
I would hesitate to agree that the world is ‘full’ of societies that would enjoy watching the USA fail. As irritating as the American Empire is – or ‘British Empire Lite’ as I like to think of it – I have enough historical knowledge to recognise that when great empires fall, what replaces it isn’t freedom and prosperity but anarchy and poverty. The outlook for client states (such as most of Europe) is especially bleak when this happens.
I do not want the USA to fail. I suspect that many people outside the USA, whilst mouthing off about the USA’s manifest economic, political and military idiocies, would recognise that the USA is the best empire we’re likely to get.
The alternatives are far, far worse.
At last an American who appreciates that the world is giving you the finger. You had it all, and blew it! Your country has bullied, tortured or gone to war with anyone who disagrees with you. You’ve squandered more than your fair share of the Earth’s resources and are the only country to have annihilated a civilian population with nuclear weapons. You’ve brought the world now two great depressions, without even an “Oops, sorry”.
This comment is from a friend – imagine what your enemies think!
I especially agree with the idea that our problems are an expression of moral decrepitude. Softened by comfort, we have nothing on the soldiers of Capua, or the guests of Circe. To take this a little further, we fail at traditional morality in that we fail to rephrase it for the confusing modern world. The end does not justify the means. Obliviating does not produce a morality.
Re. Tony Bonn’s little patchwork quilt of a comment:
and now that the roost has come home to crow it is not a pretty sound…
I’m still struggling with this one – any ideas ?
It all points to the vast conspiracy against God that has existed even before the Creation. The Bible tells us clearly that there is a great conspiracy and that in the latter days (that would be the present time) that there be a war between capital and labor (read: they won’t pay the workers of the world a fair wage) — that would be our current Free Trade policies. They already knew that this would lead to fewer and fewer buyers of their products, but that would be fine with them for this will lead to an opportunity to reduce the size of our current population as well. Yup, that too, is confirmed by their own testimony and, more importantly, by the Bible itself. Plan accordingly. Know what is truly important in this world. Time is shorter than you think.
Owen,
What version or translation of the Bible are you reading from? Conspiracy? Capital @ war with labor? How ’bout a little chap;ter & verse on that on e if you please.