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Mark it down in your diary that in the first month of 2019 we all saw with our own eyes that the two leading democratic governments in the world — the United States and the United Kingdom — were in the thrall of an unprecedented seizure, unable to act, sliding toward irrevocable division, chaos and ruin. A third democracy — France — was spiraling through the smoke of widespread violence and nascent rebellion toward a very hard landing indeed. And there were many others, such as Venezuela, disintegrating before our eyes.
The government of the United States has been hamstrung by a partial shutdown that has lasted longer than any other such political gambit in history. (The Donald is fond of saying he is doing something “for the first time in history,” but for him all history begins with him — for him, this is the year 72 A.D., or “after Donald.”) But really, never in the history of our republic has the government been crippled for so long, never so many people deprived of their livelihood, over a policy dispute that is supposed to be settled by voting.
At issue is whether to build, at enormous expense and disruption, a 30-foot-high wall to stop an inflow of criminals, terrorists and drugs that, all reliable sources say, to the extent they exist at all are arriving by airplane. The legislative and executive branches of government can’t agree on what to do, so they are doing nothing at all except calling each other names and watching the waves of misery ripple outward from the initial million people to roll over everyone they know.
The government of the United Kingdom has been playing tiddlywinks for two years since “the people” — goaded by populists with shrieking dog-whistles of hatred for migrants fleeing North Africa for sanctuary in Europe — stampeded into a referendum demanding their country leave the European Union. Now this Brexit is an extremely complex proposition, involving every single transaction and personal movement across any European border. Having come up with a sort of a plan to deal with it all, with two months to go, the government was just humiliated to see its plan defeated by a greater margin than any government proposal has ever been rejected in the history of England (which is a lot longer than the history of our republic, and predates The Donald by several millennia).
It is more than remarkable that two of the world’s preeminent democracies are locked up at the same time. And it is tempting to blame a new birth of racism, directed against the migrants from Africa on the one hand and Mexico on the other. But the forces at play here are far larger and more intractable than racism, which is a symptom of the illness, not the illness itself.
The democracies are sick because they have poisoned themselves, especially since the 1980s and the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, with a deranged love of money and profit for the few, combined with increasing contempt for ordinary people and the things that permit ordinary people to thrive — things such as health care, education, decent wages and a reasonable hope for a better future. We can quote all the bright government propaganda we can find, and Lord knows there’s plenty of it available, but it cannot quench the knowledge eating at our gut — the certainty that ordinary people are not thriving, they are losing ground. And among people losing ground, racism comes easy.
The democracies are dying of self-inflicted wounds, greed being the worst, but there are others. The migrations that are destabilizing Europe and threatening North America have their origins in global climate change, which is depriving ever larger swaths of the planet of its ability to grow food. This is especially true in Africa, the Middle East, western Asia and Central America. The tide of humanity with starvation behind it and desperate hope in front of it, has hardly begun. And global climate change, we now know, is another self-inflicted wound, and not just for democracies.
Ignorance, in this age of information-technology wonders, is a self inflicted wound. Sloth, the unwillingness to exert oneself, even to vote, to change things for the better, blaming one’s inertia on a facile cynicism — that’s a self-inflicted wound.
Democracies were supposed to be better than this, but here we are, at the beginning of 2019, and there they are, paralyzed, unable to speak let alone act, dying the death of a thousand cuts. America has ever been the “last, best hope of earth.” To whom can it turn now for help?
Query: do you mean 2019 in lead sentence?
YES, DANG IT, I DID! I MEAN I DO!
Sorry, another 2018 in the last paragraph.
Thank you for your post today!
DAMN IT! I mean thank you.
Sir, you have hit the nail on the head. Democracy, it seems, is a luxury enjoyed at certain times and places by populations that are relatively prosperous and reasonably educated – peoples who can afford to collectively embrace grand projects in art, literature, science and government…As you point out, those times are on the wane, and, as the wolf approaches the door, your average Joe – be he an eastern ‘elitist’ or a fly-over ‘deplorable’ – becomes more concerned about protecting hearth and home, and less involved in the ‘big picture’. I’ve heard this referred to as “the shrinking of the trust horizon”, but I’ll be damned if I can recall the source.
This localism, or tribalism if you will, expresses itself not only geographically (nascent succession movements in Alaska, Texas and California illustrate this) but racially, economically, culturally and politically as well.
As the national consensus fades, tribal ideologies become more important and assume a delusional, rococo aspect: a great wall will protect us from demonic hordes vs. eliminate ICE and open the borders to all comers; Jesus will return in a cloud to whisk the righteous to paradise vs. the singularity will solve all our problems; homosexuality is evil vs. there is no such thing as gender…anyone reading this could expand the list.
I’ve known a number of deeply neurotic individuals in my lifetime, and more than a few psychotics. On the whole, they are a very interesting lot…but they don’t function very well. Such is the nature of collapse.
I have heard of “shrinking of the trust horizon” as attributed to Illargi.
Yes, excellent post.
You’re right; that’s where I read it. Thanks!
I was with you on this post all the way until you chide people for being too lazy to vote. What’s with the latent assumption that casting votes fixes things? Frankly, it doesn’t, especially when the candidates on the ballot are mostly foul, corrupt, and/or criminal. Plus, there are lots of folks who want to vote but can’t and lots of reasons for not voting. I stopped voting for about 20 years then restarted about 10 years ago because of goads like yours. I daresay that even if we had 85% eligible voter participation, we would still be saddled with awful choices and de facto corporate rule.
Yoking everything that ails us to self-inflicted wounds (e.g., climate change) is accurate but a little convenient when the dynamics that guide history are not just a little complex but hypercomplex. I’m unsure what the proper perspective ought to be when analyzing modern history, but a god’s eye view is probably too broad.
If voting made a difference, we would not get to vote.
The people that ostensibly want to represent us, are bald faced liars and actually represent either themselves or corporations (maybe that is the same thing).
Even local ballot measures are meaningless distractions where “they” get to choose the issues. We are asked to vote on a new Bond to fund the local school when we should have been (past tense) addressing much more pressing matters : over-population, climate change, etc.
“But the forces at play here are far larger and more intractable than racism, which is a symptom of the illness, not the illness itself.”
yes, but you missed the elephant in the room… which is “the limits to growth”. peak net energy in the usa peaked in 1974… add to this every 4.5 days we add (net gain) an additional 1,000,000 humans to the earth, so the quality of life has been steadily decreasing.
more people competing for depleting resources does not usually make folks more benevolent.
Todd has it right; the tighter things get, the less tolerance will be exhibited. I will add my opinion that human beings at their core have never been benevolent. Almost all good behavior that has ever existed has happened in a condition of plenty. Introduce scarcity and good behavior goes out the window. And, we are all part of that problem. It is an exercise in frustration to point fingers at anyone, including the worst of us. If you could succeed in hanging the top ten thousand offenders(anyone’s list), they would very quickly be replaced by a list of equally disturbing humans.
“The tide of humanity with starvation behind it and desperate hope in front of it, has hardly begun.”
Yup, this is the part of the trailer where the camera pans down from our protagonist’s face to a trickle of water forming at this feet. and we all know what’s coming next.
The director is going to cue some sinister music, cut to a closeup of our hero, whose eyes will register in short order puzzlement, growing recognition, and then sheer terror.
“Tidal Wave!”
It is a multi-star, big budget action thriller, and it is coming soon to a theater near you.
It’s not the first time the world seems to be spinning out of control and it surely won’t be the last. Can you imagine how we would have perceived such things as the great depression, the dust bowl, and a communist under every bed if there had been the Internet and a 24 hour news cycle (much of it fake)?
The setbacks and scares you list hardly compare to what’s in store for us. Elizabeth Colbert’s The Sixth Extinction poses the issues fairly lucidly. It’s not just industrial civilization teetering on the brink but the entire biosphere. And unlike other major extinction events over evolutionary history, this time there are 400+ nuclear reactors that will go critical when left unattended by extirpated humans. Not merely a depression or dustbowl. This time could very well be the last.
“…there are 400+ nuclear reactors that will go critical when left unattended by extirpated humans.”
Exactly. The idea that life will go on after humans are gone, or even partially gone, is an absurdity.
Nearly fifty years ago a group of remarkable people came together and with still new technology – computers, looked at the resources of the planet, our population and our pollution. Fifty years ago they came to a sane conclusion in essence continuous growth on a finite planet is not possible and give or take a few years those limits would begin to appear at the turn of the century and really get underway as we approach 2025. Nothing new there but we all chose to ignore it. Same thing with the issue of pollution – heat and heat trapping gas molecules, about a decade later about 1984 the first signature of our now exceeding the planets capacity to absorb that pollution also emerged – we chose to ignore that as well. Nearly 65 years ago a very sane and knowledgeable gentlemen with a liftetime in the petroleum industry thought about and calculated those limits as well, his assessment was at certain places at certain times, we would have consumed half of all the oil on the planet, he was basically correct again give or take a few years. And in terms of us, humans, it became clear about 1980 that we as a biomass were not too many and the impacts are covered in all the above sane thoughtful studies. We chose to ignore that as well.Finally a large number of other folk, specialists in chemistry and meterology and oceans got to work to determine what the impacts were likely to be of all the above especially pollution given that we have know since the 19th Century about gas transfers and the capacity to trap heat. In the 80’s, the 90’s the turn of the milleneum and every year thereafter they have warned us to stop – we have ignored that as well. So now is the age of consequences.
Tom is correct what we see is the illness or the symptoms not the disease. These are the consequences. Democracy and civil society is the first victim of overpopulation, the problems now facing governments all over the planet are not soluble within the existing frame work of never ending growth, substituting technology and energy for human activity or converting oil into food. Now another thing has also happened that has never happened before in the history of our species, probably about 80% of us live in dense urbanised environments or cities not 20% completely and utterly dependent upon doing what we do now as the migrations across the planet show, that is no longer sustainable because the planet is rapidly becoming inhabitable for a lot of folk and they are going to move because they are certainly not going to sit around and die.
Small wonder but no surprise that Government and Civic society is now in failure mode but hey we will pretend it is not like we have ignored everything else.
Brace for Impact summed it up TOM. Again thanks for reminding the cognisant few of what is about.
I certainly respect your opinion or I’m sure what you would call an educated guess, but none of us know the exact way things play out. There are often unexpected things that happen to alter any scenario. I’ve been listening to doomsday scenarios for years. And, while things are indeed dire, much of what was predicted has not come to pass or if it did happen it was not as predicted. Perhaps it will with more time. Then again maybe it will not unfold as predicted. The only certainty is that time will tell. In the meantime, we are still here.
The explanation of what is going wrong is based on the following.
Fundamental physical principles
All the operations of macroscopic physical (natural and technological) systems on Earth are characterized by six irrevocable principles.
The existence principle
There exists a wide range of gases, liquids and solids accessible by natural and technological systems for fast and slow operations sustainably. How they were created over a long time by chemical compounding and physical mixings of elements together with such natural operations as daily variations, seasons, plate shifts, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods and droughts is beyond out ken. This process has been occurring for many centuries and is currently partly understood by many physical scientists and some others including politicians and business people. Geologists have studied some aspects of the operation of Earth structures to gain understanding of developments in past centuries, such as the Ice Age, and what can possibly happen in the future. Paleontologists have studied fossils as a way of getting information about the history of life on Earth and the structure of rocks: Anthropologists have studied how societies over eons have coped with what nature has provided. Entomologist have ascertained what has happened to a lot of bugs that is leading to an ecological disaster. However, these experts do not recognize the limitations this principle has on the holistic operation of civilizations. For example, they never speculate on what it would be like if there was no water here on Earth although there is speculation about water on Mars in view of the data from probes. They accept this existence principle without understanding the dire consequences in many cases.
The uniqueness principle
The human being is unique among the organisms here on Earth in its inherent mental ability to learn how to cope with many intellectual and physical operations by using logical and mathematical tools combined with some understanding of natural operations. Other organisms, such as trees and microbes, have shown the ability to gradually adapt to changing circumstances but this is a very limited ability compared to that of humans..
The decision principle
The decisions by humans to implement operations to make use of some of the existing natural resources have slowly developed in the global range of civilizations that have existed in the past millennia to the current unsustainable stage as some of the multitude of irreplaceable materials become depleted.
It is ironical that intangible money is the basis of most of the decisions made by people while tangible physical operations, such as the depletion of natural material wealth by mining, are not fully taken into account. This dependence on financial “market forces” is a characteristic of most past and present cultures. It is an unrecognized temporary fallacious principle. Defense has also been a basic principle of civilizations because of the endeavors of societies to safe guard their range of cultural and material resources. Costly wars have one of the major outcomes of the human leaders’ decision process The past dominance of male decisions at even the highest level is now being subject to critical examination but that issue is having little impact on the decisions being made by societies about the irreversible usage of some of the remaining natural material wealth. The information revolution is affecting the decision process of humans without increasing understanding of its fundamental limitations in dealing with physical reality. Physical operations have always been the result of irrevocable natural laws. The decisions made by people are not constrained by any such laws. The very interesting essay on the uniqueness and power of the human brain’s ability to reason and innovate didn’t try to answer why such a useful adaptation as ontogenetic innovation emerged in only one species, and why that adaption exploded so quickly many years ago. Various religions have had and continue to have profound influence on the decisions made by their followers even when there is some conflict about behavior, food and dress. Financial markets have a major influence on the decisions made by the well off in the relatively small proportion of the global population. Xi’s Thought Map is a complex guidance for Chinese biased decisions. The Pope, Grand Mufti, Trump and Putin also have major influence on commonly unwise decisions in many societies.
The functioning principle
The functioning here on Earth of all organic and inorganic systems involves the irrevocable passing of time, the irreversible conversion of materials from terrestrial sources to waste, despite some recycling, together with the irreversible flow of physical energy from the Sun, in many cases when stored for ages as chemical energy in fossil fuels, doing positive work before radiating out to space while being accompanied by frictional forces doing negative work on the associated materials. Scientists have used some of their intellectual energy to formulate the Navier Stokes Equation to describe the impact of friction in viscous flow of fluids without noting that friction enables birds to fly and whales to swim. Energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is a measure used by engineers of the physical energy to mis understandingly describe only some aspects of such operations as the mining of iron ore or the extraction of crude oil. The invariable deterioration of the machinery used is also always part of the functioning principle. It is akin to the functioning of human beings although that is dependent on the functioning of so many elements of the infrastructure of civilization. They help to provide food and liquids inputs and the sewerage systems to deal with the wastes. They provide the electricity that powers so many systems used by societies. They provide the means of transporting people and goods by land, sea and air. The functioning principle also applies to operations of ecosystems with the interplay between species at all levels having a major impact. Ironically, the functioning of the systems of industrialized civilization is having a deleterious impact on many aspects of these operations of ecosystems.
The duality principle
This functioning of all these inorganic and organic systems consists of continuing operation together with growing, maturity and aging development during their intrinsically limited lifetimes. This principle is commonly recognized for human beings, for the wide range of creatures and for biological systems. Anthologists have noted how this duality has also impacted on past civilizations such as the Mesopotamia, Ancient Egyptian, Mayan, Ancient Chinese,
Ancient Greek, Persian and Ancient Roman Civilizations. Few commentators, however, note the consequences of this duality on the current immense global industrialized civilization which is still growing as it operates. Some countries, particularly in Europe, in this vast civilization have reached maturity and are showing signs of aging while others, in Africa and Asia, are still painfully growing.
The time scale principle
Lifetimes of these systems here on Earth are immutable characteristics that vary from seconds for many organic systems to millennia for some inorganic systems as well as civilizations. Work done by energy from the Sun in the biological growth that preceded slow conversion to crude oil is only one example of the application of a long time in Earth’s operations. Past cases of relatively slow climate change are being compared by some experts to the relatively rapid current climate change brought on by industrialization. It is an example of this principle that the lifetime of the current industrialized civilization will just be a dot in the life time of the universe.
According to the so called experts, we should be out of fossil fuels and our coastal cities should be under water by now. All I’m saying is just like we overestimate greed and human idiocy, we also tend to underestimate man’s resilience and ability to invent and adapt. The pendulum of life is doing what pendulums do. That is swinging from one extreme to the other. We may be a day, a week, or a month from extinction. I don’t know, but I for one am not ready to throw up my hands and lay down and die. I still believe that although major upheavals will happen that doesn’t necessarily signal the automatic disappearance of human life. There are surly more surprises in store that can and will alter the trajectory of what we think will happen. Crystal balls are just that. They are projections, not absolutes. I know we cannot violate the laws of physics, but I also suspect we are not as smart as we think we are. Making authoritative pronouncements are fraught with the danger of being wrong. Toward that end, more problems are solved with a healthy dose of optimism than the total pessimistic attitude which seem so prevalent today. So we while we undoubtedly face extraordinary problems we might be foolish to thinks we are all knowing and all seeing. We simply are not. I don’t say any of this lightly. i spent over 10 years working in the applied physics lab at Johns Hopkins University and one thing i learned is that the unexpected is to be expected.
Couple of quibbles, Mike:
1. I’m not aware of any reputable predictions in the last 30 years or so that we would be out of fuel or under water by now. There were predictions that we would be at peak production of oil, and those predictions were correct if you stick to the definition of oil they were using. And our coastal areas are going under water far faster than anyone predicted, they have had to revise their estimates every couple of years.
2. I’m not sure what you mean by the pendulum of life. It seems to me that nature works constantly toward equilibrium. Disruptive swings in life usually come from us, at least in the last 200 years or so.
3. I agree that the crash now under way does not necessarily mean the extinction of human life, because what I think is habitually underestimated is the capacity of nature — not humanity — to rebound. But rationality tells me that the crash now under way will impose a drastic downsizing on our species. There are too damn many of us.
4. I don’t think it’s pessimistic to point out what the consequences of our actions must be, given the laws of physics, any more than it’s pessimistic to recognize that we are all mortal, and will all die on a day certain that is coming ever closer. We don’t throw up our hands and lay down because we know we’re going to die, or that something bad is going to happen sometime. We’re human beings. We carry on.
Good points and well said. I know I am one of those optimistic souls.
Apologies, off-topic. Thought you might like to see this though (if you haven’t already), Chris Hedges interviews Michael Hudson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdPukQ96vEA
What is so maddening; it is all so simple.
Very scary and enlightening at the same time.Thanks for sharing.
I really like to read your blog and about 80% of the time i am in disagreement. But it’s your blog and I respect you for publishing it. You covered an awful lot of bases with this one. And you really made me think with the last one.”Unearned Money is Destroying the World”. While I’m not totally convinced GW is settled science I have to agree that Ike’s era of 90% tax on rentier monies is very logical and would like to see it re-implemented. While you’ll never find me wearing a MAGA hat I and apparently many knowledgeable folks agree that walls work (or they did when politically expedient). President Obama and HRC just a small example. It’s not hard to look up so I’m not going post a myriad of links red AND blue. But the guys on the firing line disagree with your blanket statement ”
“At issue is whether to build, at enormous expense and disruption, a 30-foot-high wall to stop an inflow of criminals, terrorists and drugs that, ALL reliable sources say, to the extent they exist at all are arriving by airplane”. I for one question the phrase “ALL RELIABLE SOURCES”. Ask Israel or these guys “CNN Cancels On San Diego TV Station After They Report Border Wall Works”. A simple copy and paste will get you there. You keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
Vote for whom, exactly?
There is no political party or individual espousing de-industrialisation as a coherent policy. For obvious reasons.
I’m not going to vote for anyone to carry on with BAU. Even the Greens want an oxymoronic sustainable growth now.
So, who do I vote for?
“oxymoronic sustainable growth” – kool!