"We are living in what I call the 3rd Arc of American history, a period as consequential as the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War." —Gen. Michael Flyn
Yellowed leaves were already dropping here in August with the lack of rain and tomatoes won’t turn red when the air hits the mid-forties at dawn. Summer is trying hard to end, though technically there’s almost a month left. This is the real new year, of course, not the noisy one in January with all the drunken commotion and confetti. Tomorrow, it’s back to school, back to the job, the grind, the responsibilities, the worry, the rage, the hope, the yearning, as we gyre toward cold and fire. Enjoy ye burgers and hot dogs while ye can this Labor Day.
Anyway, the geniuses of Silicon Valley are attempting to end labor, at least any labor of the mind. A-I is coming for your job, ye middle managers, ye info manipulators, ye engineers, copy-writers, clerks, and numbers-crunchers, coming for whatever remains of the American bourgeoise. I’m telling you now: A-I will be a huge disappointment. Not only will it wreck the scaffold of our social order but, after it makes everything stupid — even worse than today — it will hallucinate so badly that anything it touches will become crazier than the Democratic Party.
That’s not a hard goal to reach either, with literacy at about what used to be age-eight-level for over half the US population. In such a milieu, gnostic communism is sure to flourish. The immiseration of all becomes the greatest good for the greatest number. We’re already halfway there — though it is a pretty sure thing that the story will turn sharply. It’s not for nothing that we call this moment in history a “fourth turning.”
One turning point might lie directly ahead. You are now in the season of financial fiascos, and boy-oh-boy are we ever set up for a humdinger. Are you following the money-bloggers? Those boys and girls are staring into the abyss staring back at them, with their hair on fire and their eyes bugging out. Just about everything is unreal and out of whack: equity markets, bond rollovers, the fun-house of shadow banking, the value of collateral (if it’s even there), the fate of currencies, perhaps even the fate of nations. France, for instance, is chattering about an imminent IMF bailout. Well, if that one goes, what do you think happens in Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium . . . Western Civ, that is?
The cliché these days is that looming financial chaos and potential economic collapse is what’s driving the EU countries to all their loose war-talk. As if. . . as if they were even marginally capable of prosecuting any sort of war except the war against their own citizens currently underway — which requires only bureaucrats declaring new restrictions on liberty, not missiles, drones, bombs, bullets, and live human troops and, most of all, some comprehensible reason to fight.
Paranoia about Russia seeking to invade Western Europe is not a comprehensible reason to launch a war against Russia — because it’s just paranoia, political crazy, in the absence of any rational aspiration in current European governance. The Germans have tried “green” energy planning, shutting down their nuclear power plant fleet, applauding the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. Where did that get them? I will tell you: it got them to a crashing standard-of-living. It got them to their current (maybe not-for-long) chancellor Friedrich Merz telling them last week to wave auf nimmer wiedersehen to their social welfare system, you know: cheap, subsidized medical care, free college, six-week vacations, cushy pensions. (And, meanwhile, do you mind if we spend whatever’s left of your taxes on free stuff for the hordes of third-world savages we stupidly imported into the country?)
But then, we’re not Europe. Mr. Trump has other ideas and is trying to lead a movement for re-ordering the economy back toward the production of real goods. It’s been tough-sledding, with every half-educated federal judge attempting to nix any-and-all executive actions in that direction. Anyway, if Europe’s banking system blows (and the accessories of banking, like markets and currencies, with that), then the damage is sure to spread to America, indeed probably all over the world, and then the fourth turning will rev-up to turning and churning at full speed. What will that mean?
A universal fall in global standards-of-living . . . the collapse of governments and sharp contraction of economies (Europe especially) . . . a period of very uncomfortable flux, how long, no one knows . . . and then the re-ordering of life that anyone with half a brain has expected, though perhaps not the way they expected. Here’s what I expect: the failure of most things organized at the giant scale: global corporations, national chain retail, distant supply-lines, and consequently the laborious, painful reconstruction of far more localized economies. I expect radical simplification of everyday life, including less high-tech, less intrusive government, irregular electric service, falling oil production, and a notable drop in population levels.
I expect a surprising shift in social relations, including a return to divisions of labor based on gender; de-pornified courtship manners and a revival of trad mating behavior, with priorities on motherhood and child-rearing in a crisis of infertility; a revival of religious communion (already underway in America’s youngest generation); a necessary return to the ethic of personal responsibility as government support withers; and a return to swift justice, including execution for significant crimes. I expect some nations to fracture into smaller regional and ethnic units, certainly Canada, possibly even the United States.
That’s a lot of upcoming action and, of course, it won’t all happen right away or at once, but it will get underway in earnest this fall. It’s not exactly Mr. Trump’s “Golden Age,” and surely not what a lot of people had expected in the way of a “Singularity” or a tech utopia or a unicorn nirvana. But it will have its charms and, for a while anyway, we will have to stop being stupid and crazy.
Author
“James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic, The Geography of Nowhere, the World Made By Hand novels, and more than a dozen other books. He lives in Washington County, New York," so says his website, Kunstler.com. He is, however, much more. During the past two decades, he has remained at the forefront of the alternative press, both online and in print, advocating against "Happy Motoring" and suburban lifestyles in favor of simpler, community-based living where people learn to rely on themselves and each other rather than corporations, government and our phony-baloney economy. His Monday and Friday Clusterfuck Nation blog gets the week off to a good beginning and closes it on a high note. He is also an accomplished painter who obviously enjoys the rural beauties of upstate New York where he has settled and detests contemporary culture's many eyesores. If this piece is your introduction to his work, check out his blog. If you know him well, support him at Patreon.
