A grasp of geopolitical realities is also essential. The US remains by some distance the world’s dominant power. Its naval power guarantees open waters for international trade, world credit markets depend on dollars. But, Washington does not have the power to direct China’s and India’s energy relations with Russia.
The coming midwinter will bring a reckoning. Western governments must either invite economic misery on a scale that would test the fabric of democratic politics in any country, or face the fact that energy supply constrains the means by which Ukraine can be defended. – Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University in the Financial Times, 19 August 2022 (A Winter Energy Reckoning Looms For The West). [My emphases]
Introduction
For the last few weeks, I’ve returned to the World Out There in earnest, having completed a mammoth software project that absorbed almost all of my time and attention for about two years. Specifically, I’ve been devouring material put out by Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou (The Duran), Tom Luongo (Gold, Goats ’n Guns), and Brian Berletic (The New Atlas). They have dedicated their time and intelligence to analysing in considerable detail what is currently underway across the geopolitical landscape. They present a sobering picture. I won’t set out their individual positions in any detail, but do heartily recommend their commentary to anyone interested in making sense of this breathtaking historical moment.
As a very crude paraphrase, their analyses, taken together, present the following picture: Decadence seems to have fully rotted The West. Visceral Russophobia appears to have addled the minds of The West’s ruling classes, who have taken leave of their senses to pursue strategies that can only drive them over the cliff. (If The West’s behaviour is ‘all part of the plan’, it is a deranged plan that will rob them of everything but ‘control’ of an economic backwater – The New Europe –, at best.)
Russia has declared its full opposition to what Putin calls “Western globalist elites”, who are hell bent on installing “neoliberal totalitarianism” by means of chaos and crises. This openly pits Russia against the WEF and the WHO, i.e. the main instruments of what Luongo terms “the Davos crowd”, and those elements of the US that support the Davos agenda of “neoliberal totalitarianism”. China, increasingly suspicious of The West – especially after Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan – is making clearer and clearer statements of support for Russia. Xi is set to visit Saudi Arabia to perhaps begin negotiations for Saudi Arabia to join the BRICS bloc – demise of the petrodollar ahead? OPEC has been rebuffing US demands for more oil. Africa showed Blinken the cold shoulder after welcoming Russia’s Lavrov with open arms.
Meanwhile, the Fed is raising rates aggressively into a recession and looks set to continue to do so, having shielded its banking system somewhat from Europe’s via SOFR, an interbank lending system that will make LIBOR redundant. Is the Fed’s calculation that the US is thus better protected than Europe and the UK from the harsh impact rate hikes will effect? Jerome Powell, likely backed by several US commercial-banking interests, seems to believe the US can weather the storm he has set in motion, a storm that will shake all but the strongest fruit from the tree.
And there is much else besides – India, Turkey, Syria … – each event as mightily significant in geopolitical impact as the other. Events are unfolding at breakneck speed. History is currently more sky-devouring firework display than cautious tortoise race. It is all we can do to keep up, and no matter how much we read and listen to, we can only ever be aware of a tiny fraction of what’s actually taking place.
I never believed there was but one hegemonic bloc of ‘elites’, one seamless hive mind, seeking evil control of reality. It has always been clear to me since studying state formation and money in depth, that multiple upper-echelon groups vie for control. But, having grown jaded about fine-grained analysis of what, precisely, is going on Out There, having experienced my own failure to communicate effectively my ideas about the stage of history in which humanity is mired, I changed tack and attended to family matters and my own spiritual development, leaving the world to do whatever it was going to do.
Then, when the lockdowns were rolled out, my intuition screamed out at me that this event was epoch shattering. It hit me like a tsunami of icy water. My articles since June 2020 have charted the thoughts and feelings that welled up from that incredible intuitive download in late March 2020. My sense now, after the last few weeks drinking in the material so crudely paraphrased above, is that I have been too hopeful about humanity’s ability to respond in a positive and open way to what is happening, and thus tone deaf to the actual nuance of its global ramifications. This article takes stock of my recent performance.
Briefly critiquing the bases of my analysis
1. Technological unemployment
Not particularly relevant if nations deindustrialise. Germany’s and the rest of Europe’s industrial base is being dismantled as a consequence of their refusal to fight off the Davos yoke, and by their ordinary citizen’s inability and/or reluctance to see this dismantling is well underway (see point 5). One gets the sense of collective fiddling while Rome burns, of oddly muffled hysterical delirium as the ground opens beneath us.
The love and courage needed to mitigate this debacle is not there, it seems, in sufficient supply. Love is doubtless the healthiest vector, but you have to earn it, walk the walk, pay your dues, answer the call, etc. Consequently, the opportunity to earn it is disappearing – if by “opportunity” we mean the next few months – if we are to have enough time to stop “neoliberal totalitarianism”. (That said, it always seems as if we have but a few short months, and yet things never quite become what one might have anticipated.)
One way or the other, then, technological unemployment cannot supply the shock for a radical historical leap in how humans build and run economies and societies when there is no capacity to build the factories, robotics and logistics systems this would require. It might not be the fallacious “lump of labour fallacy” that defangs this systemic drag on perpetual growth, but rather a generalised failure of courage and imagination, nourished and nurtured by political and professional-media classes reflexively unwilling to release their hold on power.
2. (State + market = symbiont) + (money = exquisite tool of control)
I’m still confident this ‘equation’ holds, but it doesn’t really matter right now. Affluence is being sacrificed at the altar of political control. The management classes employed to implement ruling-class diktat are strongly incentivised to maintain the status quo. For example, the political class is sufficiently allied with other professional classes, in particular mass-media professionals, to see selling out the poor (middle classes and below) as their best chance of survival. And it will remain in their interest while that mass fails to agitate effectively for change. Instead, the overwhelming majority continues to believe what the media tells them as consecutive crises spring fully formed from nowhere to dominate the headlines, shoving prior crises into the bottomless memory hole.
(And where is the New System the downtrodden might set up to replace the old? Not only is there nothing coherent out there to implement, there is no agreement whatsoever on the set of half-baked ideas available for discussion. As I am at pains to point out here, we are profoundly divided and conquered. The sort of new thinking we need to coalesce around will, in my view, only start to take shape after we have properly confronted the problem of dualism. We appear to be a very long way from wanting to grasp that nettle.)
3. Money does not really measure and store value
Not very relevant (yet). The reasoning on this point is as that of the above two points.
4. Love is healthier than fear and fear’s downstream emotions
True, but history has plenty more in store for us yet as we pay our collective dues.
5. Dysfunction cannot be sustained
This is true, but as I have often argued, it could take a long time before catastrophic malfunction, perhaps three generations before European/Western totalitarianism falls to pieces (assuming it gets installed). But here, again, I’m not really sure; events are changing so fast. And the spiritual element is unreadable on this point, and could be very significant. That perhaps 70% fear independence of thought does not necessarily mean a galvanised 30% is utterly incapable of establishing a humane new system the 70% can be happy with (see below). This is a very difficult one to call. History says one thing, but past performance is not a watertight predictor of future performance, especially when one epoch crumbles into the next.
6. East and West are at sea in the same holed, dualism boat
True, but to a limited degree. East and West are on significantly different timescales and vectors, particularly where economic affluence is concerned. As the West suffers severe demotion and loses mightily in significance, so the East could be freed to return to its more wholistic roots, which might include the sorts of trade relations suggested by Charles Handy’s The Empty Raincoat, and as implied by the fact of the interest-free money creation favoured by Islam. Weighing in against that potential, however, The East will also face the intractable problems of technological unemployment and decay/decadence after cresting the steep hill of success and wondering what to do next. When you’re no longer the underdog, when the simple vision of raising your people up into modernity has been accomplished, you face a very different set of challenges, one The West has so far failed to master. Furthermore, The East will also face the challenges of peak oil and the social and spiritual fallout of using numbers, in the form of money and price, to measure value and thus guide people’s aspirations and expectations.
I’ve often heard it said that roughly 70% of us humans cannot meaningfully disagree with or criticise authority. It certainly looks that way most of the time. On the other hand, there is now visibly growing suspicion and reluctance to believe all that authority says re. covid, but is this healthy skepticism too little too late?
Ukraine looks to have the vast majority of The West fooled. All NATO and Western powers have to do is prolong the war until economic collapse, or grinding slide, into Europe’s pending status as economic backwater. The endless war and attendant trumpeted ‘dangers’ from Russia-China will then provide the requisite backdrop for growing authoritarianism/austerity. The narrative for paving this path is already being floated: “We must all pay and suffer to defend Ukraine, no matter the cost! There is no alternative.” If this seems insane, that’s because it is (see point 5 above).
A fly in the ointment here, however, is Russia’s dominance in the Ukraine war. I know this is controversial, but cooler heads are unequivocal on this point. As Russia takes control of Ukraine and strangles The West’s ability to perpetuate anything except its own misery, until The West acquiesces to the multi-polar world the BRICS++ bloc plans to establish, it may well become incapable even of totalitarianism. Time will tell.
Crises, crises, crises…
Lockdowns look set to fall away and be replaced by other crises, except perhaps in Germany where the ‘ruling’ ‘government’ – Germany has become bafflingly idiotic – is making best efforts to sustain as many crises as it can. In China, it is apparently Xi’s obsession with “zero Covid” driving policy. Can Xi sustain this for much longer?
China supports Russia on Ukraine. The war there is not an existential threat to China by any means, but China’s need to re-inflate its ailing economy and navigate through its blossoming property crisis might well require Xi to gently drop his “zero Covid” fanaticism, especially as the rest of the world is no longer as impressed by China’s ‘success’ as it (allegedly) was in 2020. Not to mention increasing tensions between China and the US placing financial pressures on China being wholly incompatible with zealous lockdowns of large parts of its admittedly oceanic economy.
Bearing these sorts of complicating factors in mind, does the Davos crowd have the means to generate alternative, sufficiently different, sufficiently toothed crises, ad nauseam, in pursuit of their hegemonic ambitions? What Davos needs is a rolling tapestry of varying crises, behind which it can impose authoritarianism/totalitarianism on as much of the world as possible. But is this now only Europe, and perhaps not even the whole of The West? Will they lose the US, Australia and New Zealand?
Monkey pox cannot possibly justify lockdowns, and anyway lockdowns are quickly becoming a political turd no one want to touch; all-out unrest would be too risky in the midst of general economic collapse, especially with political winds turning against Davos generally. Pandemics and the medical tyranny they promise look far less effective than before. And as I write, the blame for the ‘vaccines’ – likely the worst medication in history – is being placed at Trump’s door, as if this bizarre move will somehow save those who so aggressively pushed them, with mandates and threats of all kinds, before and after their appearance.
The Ukraine crisis, obviously in the works since at least 2014 with billions poured into Ukraine to build its army and the state-of-the-art defence lines now being steadily ground down by the Russian allied armies, is a NATO/Davos affair that does not really trouble the rest of the world all that much. And it is backfiring catastrophically. Electricity prices per MWh have exploded to over €600 in many European nations, which is roughly 600% more than prices considered expensive in 2020 (anything above €100). Whom, exactly, are sanctions against Russia harming? Despite this asinine tactic, despite further billions being poured into Ukraine, despite perhaps decades of preparation, despite Hollywood stars gracing Zelensky’s presence – or being graced by it –, despite the finest public relations money can buy, despite the tightest-fitting green military t-shirts money can buy, NATO is losing the war. The West is concealing this most horrendous fact via its mass-media poodles and attack dogs, but nevertheless, NATO is losing this war. Russia is perhaps a few months away from dictating the terms of Ukraine’s future.
The loss of life on all sides is tragic and grotesque, but we normal folk are a mere irritant to those whom the gods first make mad. Should events in Ukraine proceed as they have done since March, what will Davos be able to build from the rubble of its credibility? What will Europe look like six months from now?
The people of Europe, deprived of reliable energy sources, having bankrupted themselves on lunatic, untested lockdown policies, having taken the worst medications ever produced as if their lives depended on it, faced with a political class as incompetent as it is corrupt and a media as obedient as it is shortsighted, will face a bitter choice between abject poverty, permanent Gulag, obedience, or effective resistance. “The people of Europe” of course includes the police and army, who will also face this choice.
In short, life for ordinary Westerners looks all set to be about blank survival, not the sort of ethical considerations I examine here at Econosophy. We are about to be locked down firmly to the base of Maslow’s pyramid. The East looks set to lift its people higher.
If the above is true, perhaps my most significant error is that this is not a truly global phenomenon in the sense of a simultaneous global awakening. It looks to be much more the fall of The West and the rise of The East (putting it crudely). If this is so, it nevertheless remains exceedingly difficult to be confident about how the various peoples of The West will respond: US, Spain, Hungary, Germany, UK … Obviously very differently from culture to culture, but how will this diversity effect proceedings? I simply do not know.
Would such an outcome be a failure for Davos? They’ll own Europe to a degree, but so what? It was already theirs, but affluent, influential. How affluent will Europe be six months from now?
Would such an outcome mean that the US still has Europe in its grip? Or would a weakened Davos be at ‘war’ with a weakened US over Europe, as Tom Luongo and others theorise?
Wouldn’t Europe be more liability than asset? And without the power afforded by ownership of the world’s reserve currency – assuming the BRICS++ successfully establish their preferred replacement – could the US afford to control Europe?
I’m not at all sure how to answer these questions, but I'm persuaded they are at least valid.
The same goes for the UK, in spades. While we are an inventive bunch, we have been royally dumbed down for several decades, and there is much bad feeling out there, much brooding anger and hatred, to work through. There’s no real way of knowing how things will play out here, either.
Will Australia and New Zealand pivot eastwards? Scott Morrison has just been exposed as a rank crook of epic proportions, and I suspect elements in both these countries clearly see that The West is on a hiding to nothing. Perhaps they will indeed pivot east, though New Zealand would have to rid itself of Jacinda Ardern first.
So if Davos had its shiny metal heart set on the whole pie, but ends up instead with a very third-rate slither thereof called Europe, wouldn’t that be a miserable failure? One way or the other, this all looks like a standard civilisational collapse with former underdogs, Russia, China and their growing cohort, stepping up to assume pole position, to build a multipolar world (they allege). It all smacks of the delusional grandiosity and itchy-feet ambition, so expected of too-rich overlords, backfiring in the most ugly way, just as it always does.
Conclusion
I thought we humans might do much better this time around, but it looks like I was wrong about that, certainly in the timeframe I had romantically begun to hope for. I had always estimated 75-100 years (three generations) of significant change to establish something far more humane and beautiful than current governance systems, then saw the suddenness and enormity of the covid scam as a sufficiently sobering wake-up call to accelerate implementation of that needed change. But if 70% simply cannot function outside their comfort zone come what may, then that hoped for possibility can’t really happen.
Furthermore, there’s really nowhere to go for the 30% (maximum!) of people who want to do things differently, to experiment meaningfully at large enough scale. There is no way we can learn and then demonstrate what’s possible; the opportunity just isn’t there. Blogs and books and documentaries are nowhere near enough. Without demonstrable results, we outsiders have next to nothing to offer. (And yes, I’m aware of The Greater Reset, Qortal, and many other endeavours. In my view, either the numbers are too small, the solutions don’t scale, or they are too rooted in the virtual world of computers, well meaning and noble as they all may be.)
I keep coming back to “failure of imagination”, a phrase David Graeber coined after the promise of the Occupy movement drifted away. The leap needed is so dizzying, the ravine we have to cross so wide, the drop into darkness so intimidating, we freeze. Stockholm Syndrome has us. We are too invested in how things are, too entangled with the powers that be. As is almost always the case, we will have to be shaken from our fear into desperate courage, perhaps even into abandon, by total breakdown. The looming threat of it alone seems not to be enough. Or perhaps the threat of it is so big it has to be ignored; our will to see it for what it is balks at its monstrous size.
We will see how this plays out. I’m nothing if not an eternal optimist. And while I temper that with brutal realism, I then temper that realism with hopeful romanticism, around and around, back and forth. I’m also caught on the pendulum of loving humanity for what it is – even though this includes depravity and unbelievable horror –, and despairing at modernity’s unattractive tendency to shrink from the hard work needed to attain true maturity of spirit.
Despite all that, and knowing full well that reality is far more than I can ever know, I do know that love, as health, as wisdom, is the vector that will stand the test of time.
Between now and then, it seems the time needed to learn the hard lesson that blind obedience and wisdom are mutually exclusive, far exceeds the time separating The West from its looming and bitter correction.
No comments:
Post a Comment