In the same category

Paradigm Blindness

IMG Auteur
Published : October 08th, 2013
868 words - Reading time : 2 - 3 minutes
( 23 votes, 2.5/5 ) , 4 commentaries
Print article
  Article Comments Comment this article Rating All Articles  
0
Send
4
comment
Our Newsletter...
Category : Editorials

      Something is sucking the air out of the humid terrarium that is US politics, making the lizards, tarantulas, and scorpions within hyperventilate. That something is the vacuum of disappearing wealth. All the accounting fraud, statistical mis-reporting, price manipulations, naked-short beat-downs, high-speed arbitrage hijinks, and carry trade rackets can’t conceal the reality that the nation is going broke – at least 99 percent of the nation. The remaining 1 percenters, outside the terrarium, are swimming in a pool of notional wealth that is primed to go down the drain and leave them at the bottom, desiccated little husks of animal matter that the crows will feed on.

     The reason nobody seems to know what to do is because they know anything they do will make them look bad, so the only thing to do is nothing, with a sound track of lizard squawks and much darting of forked tongues. Nature is now in charge, not personalities, and nature is now leading a purblind humanity to the place it has to go, which is smaller, simpler, and local. The flailings and squawking of politicians can only avail to make the journey more painful and disorderly, but the march is on.

     Leadership in every realm — politics, business, the ivory tower, media — does not grasp that the terms for carrying on the human project have changed. The agenda now is to go medieval, and not in the Pulp Fiction sense, but in our arrangements for daily life. We are being asked by nature to say goodbye gracefully to the hubris known as the current edition of modernity. If we don’t do this gracefully, nature will kick our ass out of it and drag the stragglers along kicking and screaming into the next disposition of things. That is pretty much the true subtext of the struggle in government this season, but it is not being translated at the conscious level into a coherent narrative that the public can understand. The failure of narratives produces a failure of leadership. Failures of leadership lead to failures of action.

     I can especially understand this after being in a particular part of the USA for three days last week: Orange County, California, specifically the fiasco known as Irvine. This so-called “city” was once a ranch comprising hundreds of thousands of acres consolidated out of old Spanish land grants by one James Irvine, an Irish immigrant who made a fortune selling groceries and dry goods during the California Gold Rush and parlayed it into real estate — including eventually the nearly 200-square-mile tract of creosote bush and sagebrush forty-odd miles south of nascent Los Angeles. The so-called city named after Mr. Irvine — and still largely controlled by a private real estate development company he founded — prides itself on being rationally planned.  By this they mean that all the angles have been figured out for producing massive volumes of exquisitely-tuned suburban sprawl at a nice profit.

     One thing this demonstrates is that rational planning is not the same thing as intelligence because the end result on-the-ground is a nightmare of the most extreme car dependency in the nation, arguably even worse than Los Angeles. That it is also a nightmare of crushing uniformity, disconnection, boredom, and ennui probably matters less because the essence of the place’s character is that it has no future. There is absolutely no way that the American people can continue their Happy Motoring frolic for another generation, yet the Irvine Company is still busy slapping together new monocultures of housing pods, strip malls, and all the other usual furnishings with the kind of stupid confidence of people intoxicated on Rotary Club bullshit — which is to say zeal minus consciousness. It is the same frame-of-mind that produces the famous Orange County right wing politics.

     Orange County, and places like it, represent a tremendous tragic problem for this country. They were the products of emergent economic forces that humans only pretended to control with their vaunted rational planning. They almost certainly cannot be fixed. They’re too big and the money won’t be there; it’s the essence of our predicament that capital formation is crippled and that situation will only get worse.These places will enter a state of widespread crisis within the next ten years, and possibly much sooner. The people who live there will see their property lose all its value, and then they will have to make choices about where to move to. In the process, they will dig in their heels, cause an immense amount of political mischief, and eventually lose anyway.

     The emergent path of going medieval means living in smaller, tighter towns and doing some kind of business, or working some kind of trade, that is based in the economy of the town and its region. Under these conditions, things like the federal government are destined to wither. The dumbshow underway in Washington these days is just a symptom of all that.

Published as an E-book for the first time!
The 20th Anniversary edition
With an entertaining new introduction by the author

24hGold - Paradigm Blindness

Bargain Price $3.99

Amazon Kindle  …or …  Barnes & Noble Nook …or… Kobo

ALSO 

24hGold - Paradigm Blindness

This short, charming book will make you laugh (click here to buy)

<< Previous article
Rate : Average note :2.5 (23 votes)
>> Next article
James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. His nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
WebsiteSubscribe to his services
Comments closed
  All Favorites Best Rated  
James, when I go to a place like Irvine (Indianapolis) I ask myself: how could this Sameness-of-Riches become so boring and uninspiring ?? Driving down the wide boulevard of Meridian, you pass by million-dollar houses that are all the same. Those who "made it" sure settled for a very tiny bit of what was possible. Mankind could be on other PLANETS by now. What an incredible waste.
Rate :   1  3Rating :   -2
EmailPermalink
JHK needs to get around more. He states "The emergent path of going medieval means living in smaller, tighter towns and doing some kind of business, or working some kind of trade, that is based in the economy of the town and its region." Emergent path? What about the rest of north America that doesn't live in a metropolis, are they some sort of medieval hold outs? You know the small farming communities that have been doing it right for the last 200 plus years? Hell no they are just as modernized as them thar city folk dontchaknow, it’s just that they have a better understanding of how to live simple lives than JHK does. It's all well and good to complain about places like Irvine and LA but isn't this exactly what people like JHK want? High density environments where everyone can smell each other’s farts?

Putting a million people in a sardine can has drawbacks that socialists who promote this high density crap just can't get their head around because they believe we should all accept each other just the way we are. They never understood that this has never and will never work. Humans want space, enough space to not feel threatened by someone else's indigestion and certainly not by 200 noisy neighbors who all think that waking to a blaring call to prayer every morning is what we all need.

Sure I agree with JHK that we should all be more reliant on our own labors to feed ourselves but I can’t accept his contradiction that high density with public transit you still have to walk to through a neighborhood filled with low life scum waiting to rip you off because they have been spoon fed the liberal crap about how they deserve everything their hearts desire without having to work and those who have money should pay for it, just to have to wait for an inconveniently timed bus or subway train that will drop you off somewhere inconvenient and then you have to do more walking, leads to a better life! Having been part of a municipal planning board wherein high density was promoted and set up to be written into future bylaws for construction of new neighborhoods I fully understand that these planners haven’t got a clue how to incorporate distributed agriculture to reduce the need to truck in everything such a highly compressed mass of humans requires.

Will the economic situation require that at a future date, JHK says within 10 years, end up with people turning into vigilantly groups battling other groups for control of some turf, I don’t have that sort of clairvoyance and neither does JHK. Again, if he has an ability to see into the future with any real amount of accuracy then why isn’t he the richest man alive? No he’s just another liberal bemoaning that north America isn’t a shining light of socialism that he wants it to be.

This week’s piece is nothing more than a bunch of whining about how the world doesn’t fit his desires. Well JHK, shuffle on and stamp your little feet while cursing humanity for being smarter than you are.

Rate :   7  3Rating :   4
EmailPermalink
Kunstler, as he always does, states the obvious: that our economy is in trouble -- which is something all can agree to.

As to the cause of that, at least in this article, Kunstler is vague; but we know from previous articles that he thinks our civilization based on oil is doomed and about to collapse. He says as much here in the following: "There is absolutely no way that the American people can continue their Happy Motoring frolic for another generation, yet the Irvine Company is still busy slapping together new monocultures of housing pods, strip malls, and all the other usual furnishings with the kind of stupid confidence of people intoxicated on Rotary Club bullshit — which is to say zeal minus consciousness." However his premise of peak oil may well be wrong; certainly the premise of peak energy is wrong.

No, Kunstler just doesn't like the way people have chosen to live their lives. He doesn't like big cities, or strip malls, or private automobiles: all that depresses him as we have heard in countless screeds. He prefers a lower profile for human society as he concludes his article with: "The emergent path of going medieval means living in smaller, tighter towns and doing some kind of business, or working some kind of trade, that is based in the economy of the town and its region."

I have no problem with that approach if that is what individuals chose to do. My gripe with Kunstler has been my sense that he would use the power of government to coerce people into that kind of life. Nothing he says here indicates that but, in my opinion, the sum of his utterances certainly point in that direction and I've read a lot of them. Kunstler is Big Brother masked as Father Nature.

There are many that feel as he does and they are feel to set up communities based on his ideas, but I am not one of them and don't wished to be compelled to be do.

Rate :   6  1Rating :   5
EmailPermalink
Ha ha... "Kunstler is Big Brother masked as Father Nature." If you truly believe that you are as full of poo as a Christmas turkey.

"There are many that feel as he does and they are feel to set up communities based on his ideas, but I am not one of them and don't wished to be compelled to be do."

Say what?!!? Did you type that last sentence in between bong hits?
Rate :   2  6Rating :   -4
EmailPermalink
Latest comment posted for this article
James, when I go to a place like Irvine (Indianapolis) I ask myself: how could this Sameness-of-Riches become so boring and uninspiring ?? Driving down the wide boulevard of Meridian, you pass by million-dollar houses that are all the same. Those who "  Read more
Gypsy - 10/9/2013 at 1:35 AM GMT
Rating :  1  3
Top articles
World PM Newsflow
ALL
GOLD
SILVER
PGM & DIAMONDS
OIL & GAS
OTHER METALS