Because things in a whole hang together, most everything in modern civilization, because it is driven ultimately by energy and natural resource depletion, is entering or will enter an end game, although in local variations at different times, places and rates. For most people, the reigning worldview of endless resources and growth will obscure the dead-end nature of these processes until late in the game.
The Marxian caution to view the present as history appears to gain the least traction in the US. Here, history tends to reduce in the collective consciousness to what happened last week. No amount of exposé of last week’s bundle of lies in the corporate controlled media seems to cure Americans of the habit of acceptance of this week’s media stories as depictions of the real world. With that understanding, some of the end games and their historical antecedents recounted below may come as less of a surprise.
Resources
Oil is essential to run an industrial economy because it has functions – as in transportation – that are not replaceable with other energy sources in an affordable way. Momentarily, the use of cheap credit to spawn economically nonviable tight oil production in North America has disguised the decline of most planetary oil production. That “fracking” and tar sands game is now ending.
Reliance falls mistakenly on alternatives – primarily nuclear power and wind and solar electricity. These alternatives are launched with great fanfare but will run aground eventually for several reasons. First, they are too energy intensive, making their net energy delivery too low to sustain Western industrial economies, which are themselves already in decline due to rising resource scarcity. Leading attempts at wind and solar in Europe have already stalled. Full energy cost accounting has revealed almost no net energy, again far too low to sustain those industrial economies.[2] Nuclear power, to avoid rapid depletion of its raw material sources, must use a technology that recycles its fuel in a breeder reactor system. Russia, the leading developer, has yet to achieve a commercially viable complete recycling system. Other efforts, notably in France and the US, have failed and been abandoned. Second, all of these alternative energy sources require the existence of the full panoply of functions of industrial economies, which are going away. Third, they contribute to catabolic collapse: any significant investment and build out of these energy sources and the costly conversion of whole economic systems to use them will massively consume and deplete the energy and raw materials on which modern civilization depends to survive. So, the end result of such efforts solves nothing, but actually accelerates the decline.
The fate of globalism: the economy
Both the global economy and attempts at global governance are costly luxuries of the fossil fuel age, and are thus entering an end game. Early in the oil age, transport costs centered industry around sources of energy, raw materials and cheap water transportation – in the upper Mississippi valley in the US, for example, or the Ruhr/Rhine region of Europe. In today’s global economy, an era of cheap energy and international capital’s incessant drive to maximize profits have allowed it to scatter the many parts of industrial production – from resource extraction to component production to final assembly and retail markets – to wherever in the world profits are greatest. The result – the progressive deindustrialization and impoverishment of the mature industrial societies of US, Western Europe and Japan – is destabilizing those societies. As the general public in these societies begins to realize that the transnational capitalist class always put its class interest ahead of theirs, revolts are developing in many nations to take back sovereignty in its several forms – political, economic, ethnic and control of natural resources.
Today, as the end of the oil age causes resource costs to permanently rise, it is weakening supply chains and economies of scale, thus shrinking the global economy in a snowballing process of decomplexification. The resultant combination of rising inflation at the same time as national economies are shrinking is causing demand destruction, starting with the discretionary sectors of mature industrial societies, which contracts employment and economic activity further in a reinforcing feedback loop, thus aggravating social unrest.
The fate of globalism: governance
For over a century, governance and social control in the Western world has been achieved largely via mind control. Ruling classes have used their control of major institutions – governments, mass media and the knowledge industry – to manipulate information the public receives. In the US, for example, these institutions deliver a constant narrative of how the world works, doctored to serve ruling class interests. This narrative has been highly successful, so that consequently most Americans entertain a view of their society and the world that resembles a Never-neverland of heroic Peter Pans, evil pirates, and Tinkerbell fairy tales. Elite control of the mass media has relegated serious critical analysis of its established narratives to the margins of the information business.
However, in these times of instability and economic decline, ruling elites encounter increasing problems of governance and even social control. To obtain public support for their harsh agendas, they have resorted to violent measures camouflaged in false flags, outright fabrications and cover stories.
Most of the public is naturally averse to war, but ruling elites often need wars to expand imperial hegemony. Also, they foment wars because the inevitable rapid turnover in product demand and the common practice of selling weapons to both combatants makes the war industry one of the most lucrative sectors of an economy. Hence, a pattern of false flag type deceptions has occurred to scare publics and stampede them into acceptance of war policies.
The first of these in my life (I was three at the time) occurred when the US high command learned that a Japanese naval fleet was en route to attack the US fleet in Pearl Harbor. Keeping the US military command in Hawaii in the dark, and Pearl Harbor therefore undefended, they allowed the Japanese attack to proceed, destroying much of the US Pacific fleet and personnel. This US-engineered catastrophe (and mass murder) achieved the expected result – public support for the declaration of war against Japan.
When Americans elected a president in 1960 who intended to end the war in Vietnam and refused to back a CIA-orchestrated invasion of Cuba, he was assassinated, an inside job revealed in a massive investigative literature, while a patsy who was a CIA asset was fingered in the cover story to take the fall.
The pattern continued with the Tonkin Gulf story, a fabrication that justified the full-fledged entry of the US into the Indochina wars in the 1960s, and in 2001 with the demolition of three sky scrapers in NYC Trade Tower complex, a crime of mass murder never subjected to a normal official investigation of evidence. Exposed later in a vast literature as an inside job, it was immediately blamed on Arabs in a prepared cover story fed to the mainstream media, and used to justify a US hegemonist agenda, labeled the “war on terror” for domestic consumption, of invading seven countries in five years, most of which wars occurred or are still in progress.
As the “war on terror story” unraveled and began to lose its scare value, elites have resorted to keep Americans fearful and submissive by fabricating domestic terror events, which in reality never happened. The Sandy Hook “school shooting” the “Boston marathon massacre” the Las Vegas hotel “shooting”, the Charlottesville “white supremacist attacks” and others designed to cow Europeans into submission , have all been exposed by meticulous private investigators as fitting this pattern.[3]
The current solution of the international capitalist class to the deepening crisis of control of the revolting masses is a global cultural revolution consisting of a grab bag of racial justice and green new deal programs. These are combined with the ‘Re-set’ – the replacement of a withering manufacturing base by automation, and high-tech digitalization of everyday life – the cashless, cardless economy, automated social credit scoring and the complete disappearance of private property for the masses (but saved for the elites). All this is being combined with more submissiveness-building false flag scare campaigns like the annual Corona infectious respiratory disease wave magnified into a “pandemic”, to justify a “lockdown” (a term for a weapon used to quell prison unrest) of whole societies, to habituate Western civilization to ever-increasing poverty and the eventual demise of modern industrial society.
At the same time, big tech and big business are using their control of increasingly digital media platforms to first create a culture war that pits identity groups against each other and thus atomizes the working classes, thwarting any chance to unify and resist the class warfare of the rich. Then they block all criticism, now mostly relegated to the internet, from reaching the public by deplatforming dissenters from the official narrative. In the US the culture war has worked as designed: it has generated an emotionally driven hysterical liberalism that begets pseudo-revolutionaries à la BLM/Antifa, and is reminiscent of the crazed liberal ferment turned nihilist in pre-revolutionary Russia that Dostoyevsky described so well in his novel, The Possessed. One recent commentator expressed it thus:
The “woke” are tools to fracture nations, a people, patriotism, social norms, families, morality, the future & anything which could possibly hinder the progress of the 600 odd (multi-billionaire) families who rule this planet.
Culture wars tend to get out of control, as Mao Tse Tung discovered in 1976. Witness the absurdity of “liberals” incited in a year-long rant by the Democratic Party hierarchy and the mainstream media in concert, to instigate violence all across Dem Party controlled states and cities last year (2020), while constantly accusing “deplorables” of white supremacist violence that is strangely nonexistent to date. To make up for that, liberals have fabricated a “white supremacist insurrection” out of a symbolic occupation of the Capitol in protest of an election, of which many such Capitol protest occupations have occurred over the years without anyone attacking them as an insurrection. How long can the absurdity of this blatantly elite-orchestrated campaign of polarization last before the social fabric gives way? What will elites do then?
[1] Examples of this holistic perspective on modern civilization are few. One is Ruben Nelson’s works, such as Exploring Civilization Overshoot or Civilizational Paradigm Change: The Modern Industrial Case
[2] Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 1
Germany’s renewable energy program, Energiewende, is a big, expensive failure
[3] James Fetzer has been a heavy lifter in this area, mainly for identifying highly scientific contributions from experts in fields relevant to the investigations, and bringing them together in a compelling narrative. In the now mature area of JFK assassination studies, his work has been especially useful. Once he turned to these endeavors, officialdom quickly denounced him as the kook professor (never mind his summa cum laude diploma from Princeton and an established reputation for contributions to the methodology and philosophy of science).
Author
Karl North has been a student, a farmer, a business owner, and a teacher. As a student, his strongest focus for over 50 years has been systems ecology and political economy (the power relations in social systems).
NOTE: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of Titanic Lifeboat Academy, its Board of Directors or its Leadership Team.
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