This shit is not simple. If it were, we would not be up to our necks in it and desperately tapping our toes to find something more solid to stand on.
It would be easier if this were a no-win situation. We can understand those as that was what the 20th century was about. Joseph Heller wrote the book.
Catch 22 was about the insanity of war and attempting to escape death by claiming insanity. But the recognition of that insanity proved your sanity, so you could not escape.
We have graduated from Catch 22 to Catch [imaginary number]. Bifurcation means splitting into two directions, with, mathematically, either the location or the limit cycle being unstable. More or less.
You get the idea. The magic word is ‘unstable.’
In our inescapable political freak show, we see America’s economic success by all traditional standards, which produces a planetary disaster and, simultaneously, a political disaster by increasing wages and ordinary people’s incomes.
Why is that a political disaster? Because the knowledge of our reality and its imminent collapse is evident. It cannot be hidden; it can only be denied.
Because people desperately wish to believe the denial, they buy the narrative that the system is fine, but the administration is terrible. That’s familiar, so that must be what is happening.
Our current situation creates two contradictory conditions at once: everything is fine, but everything is failing. The Biden economy is the world's wonder and has finally brought income gains to ordinary people, but many people believe the opposite despite their own experience.
Both are true but at different levels of reality. Cognitive Dissonance is the common term for this now, but it is Doublethink. That is not healthy on a cultural level unless it produces significant change.
Materialism is all that exists, and the American Empire’s construction on racism and capitalism is the only way, even obviously wrong. No one knows of any other way, so none exists.
The planetary disaster is that we have built a system that is destroying our planetary environment, and the cause of that destruction is foundational to the civilizational or socioeconomic system itself. The capitalist model is brilliant at finding and exploiting assets in our environment.
The goods and toys produced grow exponentially. The concept of wealth is intimately tied to our instinct for acquisition. Value is defined as greed. Exclusive ownership is the ultimate good.
Ownership is critical to the capitalist system, and we know it is absurd. The process of determining value is based on scarcity. Things that are owned by all are valueless.
That means denying what is needed and not showing mercy to those denied, or our wealth will disappear. Then where would we be?
The erroneous argument against sharing is that no one would do anything if everything were free. But sharing requires cooperation and work. It is only a problem when exclusive ownership is demanded of everything, and sharing is forbidden.
That is a fundamental rule of our civilization. We have been acculturated to that for generations.
The promise is limitless wealth, which acts as the chains of slavery controlled by those who have been lucky or are affiliated with great wealth.
Capitalist reality promises limitless wealth but delivers endless denial. As a system, it can do nothing else. But this is not obvious until assets at the planetary level become scarce. Humans are gamblers. We gambled for centuries on hitting it big one day but now must face our loss.
You may remember the saying: I’m waiting for my ship to come in. That refers to the first joint stock companies established in 1601 and 1602: the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
Having shares in one of those ships that returned after one year produced great wealth for generations. Both companies went on for two hundred years and built capitalism in the West. We’ve all waited for our ships to arrive for the last four hundred years.
Some did, but most didn’t. But the ships are now an illusion. We were betting against the house, literally our planet, and the laws of physics.
We all know that limitless growth is impossible with finite assets. That is the reality that we face. Again, that fact is inescapable and can only be denied, but the promise that we will make it even if all others fail is finally tearing us apart.
Our success is dysfunctional, a contradiction that is too complex to handle. Despite centuries of experience, we cannot handle a situation where something worked well for a long time but no longer works.
This failure is so common that it is now a meme: to keep doing something that fails, expecting a different result. We now have a second-order meme on this called 'doubling down.’ If it fails, do it harder.
Our failure is a system failure, not an administrative failure, although we have those too. Multilevel failures further confuse us, but administrative failures are fixable, while system failures are not.
Our socioeconomic system is failing and must be replaced. Capitalism was predicated on private vices being pubic virtues. Greed as a motivator brought wealth to the community but only by relying on those with luck to share their success.
But greed was always a vice, a term we no longer use. Public virtue requires a strong, shared public morality, which we no longer have. But we do not have public virtues anymore, either.
I’m suggesting that these are the signs of our collapse. Systems fail as structural failures build weaknesses. People learn to game the system. We know that very well, as we usually admire people who succeed, although we know we are not supposed to do that.
For greed to work, there must be losers. Since our system typically denies a win, we are consoled by watching others lose.
What once worked no longer works. In our case, it is destroying the very world we need to live in.
Periodically, I read articles by people who denounce doom. There is enough food for ten billion or more people.
But our system requires scarcity, and most people must be losers in the game. Technically, what may be possible is impossible in the system we have built for this planet. And we must start immediately to change it or face hardship, destruction, and death.
Real change is impossible because everything is controlled by and for the military-industrial-empire. We all know this.
Our system, the essential element of the American Empire, requires war because the population cannot buy enough to meet the demand for continuous growth. It is easier to destroy things than to redistribute the wealth of the owning elite.
Genocide is now acceptable to allow land and resources to be taken by designated winners. The fight for resources to support those designated populations is spreading but cannot be acknowledged.
The response to this needs to be the universal deconstruction of our civilization. That can only happen from the bottom up. The shift must be from centralized governments to decentralized, commons-based administration.
As we see in many places, the collapse of the existing system is an invitation to plundering and a return to warlord feudalism. Most people recognize that the plunderers are not bright and are mentally crippled. They must not be allowed to have any power.
How do we run things? We can use direct democratic systems at regional levels, but that will require action and risk. It must be inclusive. Can we do it?
Or you can buy me a coffee. I would appreciate it.