First off, blame the bankers. Several hundred years ago one European kingdom went to the banking system to fund a war against a neighbour. Soon, all Europe did the same. It wasn’t long before realms began to accept banker’s paper money as payment for taxes. That changed everything.
Since then, banks have used interest to create scarcity and competition.
It no longer is about growing up amongst your people, living in large and small ways, affecting your culture with whatever legacy your talents allow, knowing your brethren exist in you during your time here just as you existed in them, and that it will always be so down through the ages. No. Now, you are forgotten, lost like a molecule of protein powder blended into a morning smoothie.
What about Hirsi Ali memorizing 900 years of her Somali ancestors? Meaningless: all gone.
What about the idea which brought comfort to our forefathers of a life in the hereafter? It has been obscured by science and the incremental demands imposed by a system hell-bent on using every possible resource to live today in service, or worship, of money.
We don’t pray anymore; instead, we use Emotional Freedom Techniques and… tap.
Will we get ours? Our share? It is THE question, with a person’s success or failure judged by whether they have met some measure of this in a system, coincidentally, gamed to accrue benefit to the top 20%: the elites. It’s rigged you see. Rigged. What, they’ll say, you weren’t an elite? And why not???
Our tribes are lost and scattered. Economies demand a growth rate of two percent per year at a minimum. Each time you make interest money someone else loses the same amount. It’s zero sum, that advantage is borne on the backs of our brothers and sisters… somewhere. Fewer corporations own larger and larger slices of the economy as they gobble up rivals. Barriers to trade are smashed down behind closed doors at the behest of the controlling oligarchs.
And you and I become mere… externalities.
Princeton’s Gilens and Page showed more than a decade ago the average American vote is meaningless unless it happens to coincide with elite desires (read corporations). Imagine that? Get this straight: The only time your vote counts is if it’s coincidental to what the corporations want. Straight up.
Then, Safa Motesharrei’ s HANDY model showed we are doomed in the next few hundred years (estimated at 300-400 years). That’s his graphic up top. There are always those who will take a piece like that and call it faulty science. Of course, the elites pay them. Look around for yourself: Just how IS Mother Earth doing?
Go back to your city of origin after living away for 30 years (as I recently did) and tell me what the trend is; tell me what it looks like now compared to before. I bet it’s growth at all costs: Quaint pastural scenes at the outskirts now filled with urban sprawl.
Scientism is a form of magical thinking. It’s the, “we’ll think of something, science will save us” mentality. Not likely: too many people, not enough resources to sustain growth, too wide a gap between rich and poor, and less power in the ordinary citizen’s hands.
And antipathy: No motivation, not enough pain.
Moving to the stars is not possible. It’s just too great a feat and there are no candidates within fathomable distance. None within range with even 300 years in which to make headway on space travel and all the rest this entails. That’s how far away the rest of the universe is.
Disposable earth? Nope. Not an option.
And the elites, those top 20% will never permit change because that would mean giving up their advantageous positions. Don’t be fooled by Bill Gates donating his fortune one day, or enlisting Buffet to follow suit. Noble gestures to be sure, but no cure for our ailments (no pun intended given the Gates Foundation’s work on diseases across the world).
The real controllers of the world economy will never agree to a redistribution of wealth, a slowing of growth, or the decisions necessary to preserve our environment. It won’t happen.
The way I see it, despite the economists’ fancy calculations and the books in my library about world money and affairs-—replete with lovely glossaries so the jargon is crystal clear—the math they turn away from, in what I can only call hubris…is the simplest addition.
Even 2% per year adds up to a lot of growth over enough time. Say… 350 years.
We’re in a bind. So if I was you, and I sought to be free and happy, I say just make a decision.
Decide to be happy in every moment and fulfilled or unfulfilled in each day. Because all you have is that: dominion over your thinking, feelings and behaviour. It’s all any of us control—and only in part as it is a given that we feel first, and then rationalize. Embrace Nietzsche’s Amor Fati like there is no tomorrow, because there may not be one.
Note: if you’re a determinist, even that modicum of control is illusory.
Then get back on your economic treadmill and start running like a good little hamster. Like a caged hamster, you’ll look like you’re having fun. You’ve seen those right? Happy little suckers aren’t they?
One more thing, a very remote one but a possibility:
Given the current US campaign idiocy, there’s a real chance that Trump is good pals with Bill and Hillary and promised them the presidency at that wedding they all attended a while back. “If I run, you’ll win, I promise you,” is the kind of sinister possibility we’ve unfortunately become inured to in this era. Too crazy to consider? OK, then how about this:
There’s hope in this morass: Help get Trump elected.
He’ll screw things up so badly that surely it will be a CATASTROPHE. Many may die, there’s no two ways about it. They’d be future heroes from where I sit. But it has to happen.
It could just be the catalyst needed to get the kind of numbers of people involved in overthrowing the system. If we hurt bad enough I could see taking this monster we call capitalism and scaling it back, with all its consumerism and deceit to boot. You’ve heard the wisdom: sometimes things need to get worse before they get better. In this case, much worse.
He could be our only hope. Trump could be this generation’s dictator… or something. We’ve come that far. Unwittingly, he could fall right into Chris Hedges’ hands and deliver a full Wages of Rebellion which might soon spread around the world.
So now that I’ve cheered you up. Carry on.
Make America Great Again…
©ckwallace, 2016 all rights reserved.
Contact me here:https://ckwallace.wufoo.com/forms/zwjcdyn11scnz4/
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- The HANDY model grapic up top is from: Methodological and Ideological Options Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies Safa Motesharrei a, ⁎, Jorge Rivas b , Eugenia Kalnay
- Oligarchy conclusions are from: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page - INFIDEL, by Hirsi Ali, Free Press, 2007
- Banking system comments are based on wide readings but one you’ll be interested in is: Rethinking Money: New currencies turn scarcity into prosperity, by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Damme, Kindle version
- Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize winning author and reporter who writes for Truthdig. He calls for an overhaul of the system and goes into great depth in his book, Wages of Rebellion, of how the corporate state is running things to the detriment of mankind.