{"id":9468,"date":"2015-06-26T06:19:19","date_gmt":"2015-06-26T11:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9468"},"modified":"2015-06-26T06:19:19","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T11:19:19","slug":"collapse-part-5-things-fall-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9468","title":{"rendered":"Collapse, Part 5: Things Fall Apart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Collapse, Part 5: Things Fall Apart<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/a>
\nIt is impossible to wean an economy that relies on debt and leverage for its “growth” of excessive debt and leverage.<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

As noted earlier in this series,\u00a0collapse is not an event, it’s a process<\/i>, a process we experience as\u00a0things fall apart<\/i><\/b>. The phrase famously appears in William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem,\u00a0The Second Coming<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
\nThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;
\nThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
\nMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
\nThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
\nThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;
\nThe best lack all conviction, while the worst
\nAre full of passionate intensity.<\/i><\/p>\n

Why do things fall apart?<\/b>\u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

1. Magical thinking dominates all discussions.<\/b>\u00a0The truth, being too fearful to contemplate, is sidelined in favor of\u00a0magical thinking<\/i>:<\/p>\n

— we can grow our way out of debt by expanding debt<\/p>\n

— if we simply print enough money, we can pay for everything we want<\/p>\n

— a miraculous new technology (insert current example) will provide limitless energy\/food at near-zero cost<\/p>\n

— if we tweak the system with some minor reforms, all the big problems will go away<\/p>\n

— new technology always creates more jobs than it destroys<\/p>\n

and so on.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0Same as it always was<\/i>:<\/b>\u00a0politics was always corrupt, humans have always been greedy, etc.–in other words,\u00a0today’s problems are no different from those of the past, which we handled without major difficulty.<\/i>\u00a0The possibility that today’s extremes of financialization and political decay might actually be quantitatively and qualitatively different from the past 50 years is dismissed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Collapse, Part 5: Things Fall Apart\u00a0 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,\u00a0collapse is not an event, it’s a process, a process we experience as\u00a0things fall apart. The phrase famously appears in William Butler Yeats’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[127,150,6633,4924,1266],"class_list":["post-9468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-survival-2","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-collapse","tag-collapse-of-civilisation","tag-oftwominds","tag-social-collapse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9469,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9468\/revisions\/9469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}