Collapse, Part 5: Things Fall Apart
It is impossible to wean an economy that relies on debt and leverage for its “growth” of excessive debt and leverage.
As noted earlier in this series, collapse is not an event, it’s a process, a process we experience as things fall apart. The phrase famously appears in William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem, The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Why do things fall apart? I have addressed a number of dynamics in the first four essays of this series, but there are many more expressed in Yeats’ few brief lines.
1. Magical thinking dominates all discussions. The truth, being too fearful to contemplate, is sidelined in favor of magical thinking:
— we can grow our way out of debt by expanding debt
— if we simply print enough money, we can pay for everything we want
— a miraculous new technology (insert current example) will provide limitless energy/food at near-zero cost
— if we tweak the system with some minor reforms, all the big problems will go away
— new technology always creates more jobs than it destroys
and so on.
2. Same as it always was: politics was always corrupt, humans have always been greedy, etc.–in other words, today’s problems are no different from those of the past, which we handled without major difficulty. The possibility that today’s extremes of financialization and political decay might actually be quantitatively and qualitatively different from the past 50 years is dismissed.
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