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It's
the first business day of the new year and oil is trading above $80 a barrel,
which means the price has re-entered the danger zone where it can crush industrial
economies. This is a central element of the predicament we find ourselves in.
The US economy is essentially a Happy Motoring economy. During the
whole nervous period since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, American gasoline
consumption hardly went down at all, though so many other activities
collapsed, from house-building to trucking. Yesterday, The Seattle
Times published a story with the idiotic headline: Oil Touches
$80 on US Economy, Demand Optimism. Apparently, they think high oil
prices are "a good sign."
How much can a nation not get it? Would $100 oil ignite a new orgy of
"consumer" spending and another round of investment in commercial
real estate? Welcome to the Futility Economy. This is the economy where
Nature and its material companion, Reality, punish us for our stupidity and
fecklessness. This is the economy that will tear the United States apart,
after it bankrupts us at every level, and mercilessly drives the population
down by one-third through starvation, homelessness, violence, disease, and
sheer political cruelty.
Whatever you thought our economy was the past thirty years --
whatever model of it you have in your head -- that is definitely not what we
are going back to. Like one of Dickens's Yuletide ghosts, Reality is leading
us by the hand into new circumstances. We resist like crazy. We throw
our hands over our eyes. We don't want to look. We want to return to the
comfort of our dreary routines -- living in places that aren't worth caring
about, weaving endlessly in freeway traffic, drawing a paycheck at the
air-conditioned cubicle, inhaling Buffalo wings by the platterful, with
periodic side-trips to the state-chartered casino where there's always a
chance of scoring a lifetime's income on one lucky bet. And at the end of the
day, you can retire with a simulated prostitute on your laptop screen!
And not even have to fork over a dime -- except perhaps for the
Internet connection fee.
Reality is taking us out of that familiar, if sordid, realm, whether
we like it or not. Our destination is an everyday economy where you rarely
travel far from the place you live, where you have to make provision for you
own health, your own old age, your own income, your own diet, your own
security, and your own education. If you're really fortunate, some or
all of these necessities can be obtained in conjunction with your neighbors
in the place where you live -- but don't expect an increasingly mythical
federal government to supply any of it. Expect a new and different way of organizing
households based on extended families and kinship groups. Be prepared for
agriculture to return to the foreground of everyday life, where farming is
back at the center of the economy. Think about how you will cultivate your
best role in a social network so the things you do will be truly valued by
the other people who know you. Learn how to make your own music and write
your own scripts. Try to study history. Resist cults. Keep your mind clear
and your senses sharp.
Even if you have a dim sense that this is where we're headed, most of
you probably want to stay where you are. The investments we've made in the
current mode of existence are so monumental that we can't imagine letting go
of them. This will be the theme of American life for the next couple of years
as we struggle mightily to escape the confining armor of the Futility Economy
and move closer to ways of life that have more of a future. Right now, all
the power and authority in our culture has dedicated itself to remaining
inside that old armor.
The Master Wish around the country, including among people who ought
to know better, is that we can "solve" our economic problem by
finding some other way to run all the cars. Even hardcore environmentalists
yammer incessantly about hybrid and "plug-in" cars as the
"solution" to our blues. One of Barack Obama's first acts as
president was to "save" the giant car companies. This is exactly
the kind of signature behavior of a Futility Economy. It's based on the idea
that we have to continue driving cars all the time and for everything, at all
costs.
The religion of the Futility Economy is Techno-Triumphalism, which is
the belief that an endless sequence of magic tricks performed by shaman
scientists can defeat the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which rules the
universe -- which true scientists ought to know cannot be defeated. Their
colleagues, the shaman economists believe in parallel magic tricks, such as
the idea that increased borrowing can "solve" a problem of runaway
over-indebtedness. These are the actions that currently engage the people in
charge of things in our society.
Given this current state of things, and the current course we're on,
my guess is that when the falsity of these ideas and actions are exposed,
they will become evident not gradually but very rapidly and shockingly. The
people in charge of things will lose their vested legitimacy in a flash, and
the institutions they command will become irrelevant overnight. The process
would be traumatic for all of us as routines we counted on for a thousand
particulars of everyday life vanish or collapse. A Great Indignation will
rise across the land over the perceived swindles involved. A lot of effort
will go into avenging the swindles instead of rebuilding an economy out of
the ashes of futility.
Personally, I would like to see a different outcome. I'd like to see a
new birth of intelligence, perhaps in the same way that President Lincoln
invoked "a new birth of freedom" after an earlier convulsion in our
history. The question is: do we have the resources of national character left
to make that happen?
James
Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
Also
by James Howard Kunstler
My new
novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James
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
latest 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.
You
can purchase your own copy here : The Long Emergency
. You can get more from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork,
information about his other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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