Embarrassing Times

At this point, I am finding the task of commenting on what is happening to the United States less than enjoyable. The whole thing has become an embarrassment.

Having spent many years living and working in the US, I justifiably feel implicated in what it does. Once upon a time its many crimes—bombing, invading, destroying and undermining countries around the world, poisoning the environment, promoting every sort of injustice for the sake of short-term profits—made me angry. It was the anger of youth, borne of the unfounded, optimistic conviction that it is possible to effect change by voicing one’s negative opinions. I am not so young any more, and have become dead certain that no amount of political involvement on my part (or yours, for that matter) would change anything at all, and so what I have been feeling for years now is not anger but sadness.

More recently this sadness has been overlaid with a sense of embarrassment, which has most recently become quite acute. It is one thing to rail against evil—a heroic, youthful stance—and quite another to feel self-consciously awkward in the presence of extreme stupidity. This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that of the Americans—at least of those I see around me and hear and read in the press and the blogs—virtually none seem quite capable of experiencing or manifesting embarrassment about the sad state of their country. Perhaps my ability to feel embarrassed by the actions (and inactions) of those around me comes from some place else—an import that fails to thrive on the thin, toxified soil of American public life. The feelings that do thrive here are increasingly vicious: buckets of vitriol are being hurled across the political divide. The fact that this divide is nothing more than an artificial means of gaming a political system that has completely failed in its ability to express the popular will, or to harness it for any useful purpose, only serves to increase the embarrassment.

The ability to feel embarrassment is key to any possible new beginning, be it for a person, a group or a society as a whole. Allow me to explain…

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Are humans even necessary?

What a terrible question to even ask! Of course, we are necessary: it is the function of the universe to serve our needs and wants, isn’t it? Isn’t that the point of everything—to provide for our well-being and security? Well, that’s one way to look at it, and it is based on a certain assumption: that humans are in control. But humans have been steadily relinquishing control to machines for a couple of centuries now, and by now the vast majority of us is unable to comprehend, never mind control, the machines on which our survival depends in all of their awesome complexity. A few highly placed specialists can still get at the levers that control some of the machines, but their function has been reduced to serving the needs of the machines themselves, not human needs. The assumption that humans are still in control is starting to seem outlandish.

The next assumption to question is that the machines serve human needs and wants. Yes, there is still plenty of evidence that they do, for quite a lot of people, and in the more stable and prosperous societies most of the people are provided for in some manner. But there has been a marked tendency for societies around the world to become less stable and less prosperous over time, as resources are depleted and the environment degrades. The typical solution to that has been the imposition of austerity, which deprioritizes human needs over those of the machines—industrial, commercial and financial—which must continue functioning in order for the rich to continue to get richer. Perhaps the situation where the machines serve human needs is a transient one? Perhaps most humans are just a legacy cost, to be eliminated in the next round of cost-cutting?

To be sure, the machines would still be required to serve the needs of the billionaires, and the millionaires who serve them. But as for the rest of humanity, perhaps at this point it is just an unnecessary burden from the machines’ point of view? Indeed, it would appear that many different efforts are underway to whittle away at this burden. Let us take a trip down memory lane, to see where we came from, and then try to catch a glimpse of where we might be headed.

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Prince Kropotkin is for sale!

I am selling my sailboat in preparation for building the first Quidnon. It's a proven and capable ocean cruiser set up for living aboard, either at a marina, at a mooring or anchor, for coastal cruising and for the open ocean. It's in good condition, carefully maintained, reasonably priced at 28,500 USD and is a turnkey solution for someone who wants to live aboard and cruise around. Here is the full listing with all the details. If you are interested, please contact the broker, Capt. Mark Covington.

The Terrorizers, the Terrorists and the Terrorized

The word “terrorism” is getting thrown around a lot. Wipe it out in one place, and it pops up in another. Outside of various places in which terrorism forms a backdrop of foreign invasion and civil war, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where the drumbeat of terrorist attacks is constant and increasing, terrorism is not one of the primary causes of death. Among Western nations, death due to choking on food is still far in the lead, not to mention fatal falls due to broken furniture and accidental impalements on household implements. But such deaths are hardly ever staged as public art pieces, whereas acts of terrorism are quintessentially public acts, designed to panic large numbers of people and cause even larger numbers feel unsafe in public spaces and while traveling—for a while, until the effect wears off. And then it’s time for another one.

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Past-Peak America

Most places we care to look, we can observe a commonplace pattern: some phenomenon reaches its all-time peak shortly before commencing a swift or a steady decline. Drug habits reach their maximum dosage right before the addict overdoses. Morbidly obese patients attain their maximum weight right before their internal organs give out. Fever reaches its peak right before it breaks, and then the patient either recovers or dies. Water surges to its highest level right before the dam breaks. Financial pyramid schemes reach their pinnacle right before they fail.

Even during the downward slide a temporary improvement is sometimes possible. For example, the US reached its all-time peak in crude oil production around 1970. After that, oil production declined for decades, with a minor, temporary improvement when production from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska went on stream in the summer of 1977, and a major one achieved using hydrofracturing technology and a very large and mostly unprofitable speculative investment.

If you still think that “fracking” is a game-changer, consider that the technique was pioneered by the Soviets back in the 1950s, but they determined it to be a waste of resources and have never used it. What made the Americans turn to this old and discarded technique was desperation: they had virtually nowhere else left to drill except in shale. While fracking has produced a temporary glut of both oil and gas, fracked wells deplete extremely fast, and thus the surge in production is going to be but a blip—an impressive one, but still just a blip—on a trajectory of overall decline.

But this, most likely, won’t even matter. If you look at other things that have recently peaked, are peaking now, or are likely to peak in the near future, there aren’t going to be as many reasons to burn oil in the US. If inexorable decline in crude oil production is paralleled by inexorable decline in other areas, then it will all work out nicely, at least in the sense that it won’t be an oil shortage that will be the main driver of collapse.

Instead, there are many drivers of collapse, and they are of two kinds: the waning of all that has so far prevented collapse from occurring, and the waxing of all that accelerates it. Let’s take a closer look.

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