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5 Ways You Can Fix The World
5 Ways You Can Fix The World
With the exception of the very young, those who live in caves and people in comas it would be hard to miss the accelerated trajectory of America’s decline in the past few years. Regardless of which side you may find yourself on in the culture war, your party affiliation or self-proclaimed gender assignment, the one thing we all share in common, is a pronounced sense of dissatisfaction and unease. The camps are divided into a panoply of discordant sects, each jockeying for an ever decreasing slice of American Pie; Vegans vs Paleos, He&She vs Xe&Xer, the SJW’s, and the Bitter Clingers, the 1% or the 99%, Red vs Blue, Progressive vs Conservative, insiders and outsiders, MRA’s and Third Wave Feminazis- no one is exempt from the agita of the age.
The use of anxiety medications is at an all time high, politics has become polarized to a degree that hasn’t been seen since 1860, and human beings are so deeply disturbed with their condition that extreme body modification has led a portion of the population to cut off healthy limbs, install horns, drill holes, ink their flesh until their own mother wouldn’t recognize them. America leads the world in obesity while at the same time less than 1% of the population lives on a family farm, highlighting a disconnect from something as basic as the food we eat. At a time when technology has made communications devices ubiquitous, we have never been further apart.
This divide has been blamed on religion, on politics, on ideology and even on something as immutable as the genetics that make us what we are. The one thing that escapes all responsibility and the only aspect of our decline that we control is our own actions and attitudes. Americans aren’t the Captains of their Fate, they are victims of the patriarchy. They haven’t got personal responsibility for their path through life when they feel the world owes them something just for being born.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Following in Ancient Rome’s Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Wealth Inequality
Following in Ancient Rome’s Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Wealth Inequality
If you want to understand why Rome declined, look no further than the moral decay of ruling Elites.
There are many reasons why Imperial Rome declined, but two primary causes that get relatively little attention are moral decay and soaring wealth inequality. The two are of course intimately connected: once the morals of the ruling Elites degrade, what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.
I’ve previously covered two other key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline: complacency and intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination.
Michael Grant described these causes of decline in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending since 2009:
There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.
This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.
This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.
A lengthier book by Adrian Goldsworthy How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpoweraddresses the same issues from a slightly different perspective.
Glenn Stehle, commenting on 9/16/15 on a thread in the excellent website peakoilbarrel.com (operated by the estimable Ron Patterson) made a number of excellent points that I am taking the liberty of excerpting: (with thanks to correspondent Paul S.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Tragic Scenario: Narrowly Cast
A Tragic Scenario: Narrowly Cast
Book Review: The Collapse of Western Civilization
The Climate Conundrum
The anthropogenic roots of climate change have long been clear, and the dangers of inaction can be seen in melting glaciers and increasingly frequent extreme weather events. We already know how to solve the problem—rapidly scaling up to 100% renewables, increasing energy efficiency, and moderating consumption levels among the affluent—and we have the technology to do so. So why are we not taking action?
This question has long intrigued two well-known historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Their widely acclaimed book Merchants of Doubt (2011) chronicled one important part of the answer: a decades-long misinformation campaign against public interest regulations. Conservative scientists, whose Cold War anti-communism made them see the specter of “socialism” in any environmental or public health regulation, and corporate funders, seeking to protect their profits, collaborated through a network of “think tanks” to undermine scientific consensus and thwart action on issues from second-hand smoke to acid rain to climate change.
The Collapse of Western Civilization, Oreskes and Conway’s latest work, revisits this narrative through a different lens: a “view from the future” recounted by a twenty-fourth century Chinese historian. Although the authors describe Collapse as a hybrid of science fiction and history, it is more useful to view it as a scenario. Scenarios explore the scope of the possible, tracing paths out from the present to see how actors and drivers may interact, thereby providing insights into the uncertainty that lies ahead. Scenarios can generally be grouped into three broad categories: continuity, progressive change, and decline. Collapse is a scenario of decline. The question is whether it is a useful one.
– See more at: http://www.greattransition.org/publication/a-tragic-scenario-narrowly-cast#sthash.u1lZsG3E.dpuf
The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Three: The End of the Dream
The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Three: The End of the Dream
Let’s take a moment to recap the argument of the last two posts here on The Archdruid Report before we follow it through to its conclusion. There are any number of ways to sort out the diversity of human social forms, but one significant division lies between those societies that don’t concentrate population, wealth, and power in urban centers, and those that do. One important difference between the societies that fall into these two categories is that urbanized societies—we may as well call these by the time-honored term “civilizations”—reliably crash and burn after a lifespan of roughly a thousand years, while societies that lack cities have no such fixed lifespans and can last for much longer without going through the cycle of rise and fall, punctuated by dark ages, that defines the history of civilizations.
It’s probably necessary to pause here and clear up what seems to be a common misunderstanding. To say that societies in the first category can last for much more than a thousand years doesn’t mean that all of them do this. I mention this because I fielded a flurry of comments from people who pointed to a few examples of societies without cities that collapsed in less than a millennium, and insisted that this somehow disproved my hypothesis. Not so; if everyone who takes a certain diet pill, let’s say, suffers from heart damage, the fact that some people who don’t take the diet pill suffer heart damage from other causes doesn’t absolve the diet pill of responsibility. In the same way, the fact that civilizations such as Egypt and China have managed to pull themselves together after a dark age and rebuild a new version of their former civilization doesn’t erase the fact of the collapse and the dark age that followed it.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Field Guide to Negative Progress
A Field Guide to Negative Progress
I’ve commented before in these posts that writing is always partly a social activity. What Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the dance of ideas down the corridors of the centuries, shapes every word in a writer’s toolkit; you can hardly write a page in English without drawing on a shade of meaning that Geoffrey Chaucer, say, or William Shakespeare, or Jane Austen first put into the language. That said, there’s also a more immediate sense in which any writer who interacts with his or her readers is part of a social activity, and one of the benefits came my way just after last week’s post.
That post began with a discussion of the increasingly surreal quality of America’s collective life these days, and one of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Anton Mett—had a fine example to offer. He’d listened to an economic report on the media, and the talking heads were going on and on about the US economy’s current condition of, ahem, “negative growth.” Negative growth? Why yes, that’s the opposite of growth, and it’s apparently quite a common bit of jargon in economics just now.
Of course the English language, as used by the authors named earlier among many others, has no shortage of perfectly clear words for the opposite of growth. “Decline” comes to mind; so does “decrease,” and so does “contraction.” Would it have been so very hard for the talking heads in that program, or their many equivalents in our economic life generally, to draw in a deep breath and actually come right out and say “The US economy has contracted,” or “GDP has decreased,” or even “we’re currently in a state of economic decline”? Come on, economists, you can do it!
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The One Way Forward
The One Way Forward
All things considered, 2015 just isn’t shaping up to be a good year for believers in business as usual. Since last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, the anti-austerity party Syriza has swept the Greek elections, to the enthusiastic cheers of similar parties all over Europe and the discomfiture of the Brussels hierarchy. The latter have no one to blame for this turn of events but themselves; for more than a decade now, EU policies have effectively put sheltering banks and bondholders from the healthy discipline of the market ahead of all other considerations, including the economic survival of entire nations. It should be no surprise to anyone that this wasn’t an approach with a long shelf life.
Meanwhile, the fracking bust continues unabated. The number of drilling rigs at work in American oilfields continues to drop vertically from week to week, layoffs in the nation’s various oil patches are picking up speed, and the price of oil remains down at levels that make further fracking a welcome mat for the local bankruptcy judge. Those media pundits who are still talking the fracking industry’s book keep insisting that the dropping price of oil proves that they were right and those dratted heretics who talk of peak oil must be wrong, but somehow those pundits never get around to explaining why iron ore, copper, and most other major commodities are dropping in price even faster than crude oil, nor why demand for petroleum products here in the US has been declining steadily as well.
The fact of the matter is that an industrial economy built to run on cheap conventional oil can’t run on expensive oil for long without running itself into the ground. Since 2008, the world’s industrial nations have tried to make up the difference by flooding their economies with cheap credit, in the hope that this would somehow make up for the sharply increased amounts of real wealth that have had to be diverted from other purposes into the struggle to keep liquid fuels flowing at their peak levels. Now, though, the laws of economics have called their bluff; the wheels are coming off one national economy after another, and the price of oil (and all those other commodities) has dropped to levels that won’t cover the costs of fracked oil, tar sands, and the like, because all those frantic attempts to externalize the costs of energy production just meant that the whole global economy took the hit.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Archdruid Report: Waiting for the Sunrise
The Archdruid Report: Waiting for the Sunrise.
BREAD, CIRCUSES & BOMBS – DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE – PART TWO « The Burning Platform
BREAD, CIRCUSES & BOMBS – DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE – PART TWO « The Burning Platform.
In Part One of this article I discussed the similarities between the Roman Empire and the American Empire at a high level. In this article I’ll delve into some specific similarities and rhymes between the fall of the Roman Empire and our modern day empire of debt, decay and decline. I’ll address our expansive level of bread and circuses and how defects in our human nature lead to people willingly sacrificing their liberty for promises of safety and security. All empires decline due to the same human failings and ours is no exception. If anything, ours will be far more spectacular and rapid due to our extreme level of hubris, arrogance, willful ignorance and warlike preference for dealing with foreign powers.
It seems there were a few visionary thinkers in the late 1950s who foresaw the dire course our former Republic was setting. Their writings were a prophecy and a warning. There was still time to change course and avoid the pitfalls that led to the Roman Empire collapse. In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley warned against allowing a few amoral men using propaganda, scientific advancements, technology, brainwashing, and economics to control and manipulate a willfully ignorant populace into a dystopian dictatorship. The Soviet and Chinese dictatorships of the late 1950s are long gone, but Huxley foresaw how modern propaganda techniques would be used by the state to drown the masses in a sea of triviality, irrelevance, and consumerism.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Daily Bell – Are We Ready for the Fall of Baghdad?
The Daily Bell – Are We Ready for the Fall of Baghdad?.
I recently was in Vietnam and spent some time in prosperous, capitalist Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, and toured the American War Museum. I believe there are a number of parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq War and that history could repeat itself now in Baghdad. Who can forget the former Vietnamese supporters of America being left behind as the last helicopter left the roof of the US embassy? Today, America still has the strongest military in the world but our manufacturing capacity and financial situation shows the US is on a downhill slide like earlier over-extended and bankrupt empires throughout world history. We’ve already watched the frightening incompetence of the Obama Administration and the CDC in dealing with the Ebola virus. One would have to be blind not to see the petrodollar deathwatch as Russia, China and the BRIC countries build new trading alternatives to avoid using the dollar world reserve currency when trading energy and other financial dealings.
– See more at: http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35748/Ron-Holland-Are-We-Ready-for-the-Fall-of-Baghdad/#sthash.rAeLuT9g.dpuf
