Out of Ideas

It's the first of the year, which is a traditional time for prognosticators to do some prognosticating. Since I have already explained at length why it is quite possible to accurately predict that something will eventually happen, but near-impossible to predict when it will happen (due to total lack of relevant data on which to base such predictions) I won't repeat myself here. Nor will I offer any predictions as to the timing of various stages of collapse. (I know that the USA will collapse politically, financially and commercially, but I don't know when; nor does anyone else.) Instead, I would like to point out what I think is unlikely to happen in 2013: I find it unlikely that this will be the year when the various elites running the show here (elected and unelected officials, academic authorities, corporations, think-tanks, mass media, etc.) will admit defeat: “The financial collapse of 2008 was the end of an era. What came before cannot be brought back. We have been pretending that it can be brought back for half a decade, but now we give up. Let's let the whole house of cards fall down, so that we can start over.” Do you see any of them rising up and saying something like that? I don't.

There are a few of reasons why everyone wants to maintain the pretense. The first is that they are out of ideas: a state of affairs that one writer characterized as turbo-paralysis. The second is that doing so would mean admitting defeat—a career-ending move that nobody wants to take until circumstances force their hand, which they haven't yet. A third, even simpler reason is that they want to continue spending their loot, and to do that they have to keep up the pretense that this loot, consisting as it does of nothing more than paper, is worth something. A somewhat more complex motivation has to do with the sorts of thoughts they are capable of entertaining. They are all highly trained and specialized in pursuing certain agendas: protecting a certain constituency, or sticking to well-defined set of talking points that elicit the intended set of reactions within an electorate that's been conditioned like so many Pavlov's dogs.

The cost of maintaining the pretense is straightforward: continued deterioration in the moribund status quo; more and more people, young and old, left behind; entire communities in distress; places destroyed by natural disasters abandoned rather than rebuilt; more and more people going after fewer and fewer resources that are still being made available to those in need. It is a rolling collapse affecting one person, one family, one community at a time. It's what we have been seeing since 2008, and there is no reason to think that this will not continue for a while yet. Still, how much do you think is “a while”? When I arrived in Russia in the summer of 1990, I asked my uncle a simple question: “So, how much longer before the Bolsheviks give up?” He responded with a vulgar but very funny joke, which I translate as follows: “Do you know what's with the Soviet Dildo? Well, it still buzzes, but it doesn't vibrate any more.” (Here's the ruder, and funnier, Russian original version: “Что такое советская жужжалка для жопы?—Жужжит, а в жопу не лезет.”) And, sure enough, less than two years later the Soviet Dildo stopped buzzing too. Perhaps you've realized this already on your own, but in case you haven't: I do believe that the American Dildo has stopped vibrating some time ago. The remaining question is, When will it also stop buzzing? What do you think?

While it's still buzzing, don't expect official recognition of the problems we all face. Don't expect American society as a whole to mount a meaningful response to its challenges. Do expect it to continue to deteriorate. But I hope that you can do better than wait for the rich and the powerful to finish eating what's left of the country and the planet out from under you. That is why I wrote a book, which is being edited and is due off the press on May 1^st, with the title “The Five Stages of Collapse: A Do-It-Yourself Guide.” Make a note of the subtitle. This book is meant as an antidote to life in the age of turbo-paralysis. I hope that it will give you some options. Maintaining the pretense isn't one of them.

[For those who are wondering: the book will be available for pre-order right on this blog. I will make an announcement when this happens. Of course, you will also be able to get it through Amazon (or the publisher), so that other people get your money instead of me. But if enough of that happens then I won't be writing any more books, since I don't see why I should work for free.]