Oct.20 -13
(If you have trouble reading this, click on ‘home’).
Collapse?!
We have three bird feeders. In the past month no birds came. No, that’s not correct: one lonely chickadee fed on my feeder, a far cry from years ago when I routinely spotted sparrows, juncos, wood peckers and many others. We have lots of crows, however: their screeching wakes us up in the morning.
Monarch butterflies, you wonder? Well I saw one. For all practical purposes this beautiful butterfly has disappeared, another victim of our greed for speed. Now that most people live in urban areas, city people do not notice these changes, but we, some 5 km from the built-up area of the Village of Tweed, population 1800, see this and are dismayed and worried.
Are these disappearances omens of collapse?
Yes, they signify collapse of some sort. Apart from the lack of birds, it has been a fabulous year for growing. I have never had such an abundance of everything as this season: my root cellar is filled with apples, potatoes, cabbages and carrots. We had to buy an extra freezer to accommodate the apple sauce, apple-carrot juice, kale, leeks, beans, beets and other produce.
Each year I try something new. This year, for the first time, I made sauerkraut. Now that I have done it – it is so easy – I will do it every year from now on.
Collapse is not a popular topic, just as talking about preventing heart attacks is a taboo subject. Several friends of mine have had one: totally predictable, of course. It usually is the result of lack of exercise and fatty diets, resulting in expanding waistlines and clogged arteries. I was at a banquet a few weeks ago, sitting at a table with an overweight older man who was putting layers of butter on his bun: a perfect candidate for trouble which, out of the blue, hits: chest pains and a rush to the Emergency Room. Fortunately these people there are pretty good. After a bypass doctors recommend a totally changed lifestyle with daily walks and a different diet. In my book prevention is better than a cure. Prevention prevents the excruciating pain as well as the immense expense to society in Canada, and possible bankruptcy in the USA where a heart operation cost $100,000.
Just as a coronary is often the result of wrong habits which can result in some sort of collapse, our economy too suffers from faulty behaviour. Collapse there too is preventable but there too our living habits ensure that collapse is in the cards, and when it happens it means death of the economy and with it the death of many. Just as a heart attack is the result of undisciplined living so economic collapse too has its roots in discarding common sense, often the result of allowing spending and polluting to continue without regard for the consequences.
Our Golden Decades
As a Western society we have become slaves of the past. The half-century, from 1950 to 2000 were the golden years with 3+percent economic growth. It was a perfect period for politicians capable of promising the cake and delivering it with icing: bountiful support for retirement after 60 or 65; generous disability benefits; excellent support for medical problems and all sorts of extra help such as free prescriptions and subsidies for hearing aids and walkers. A growing Gross Domestic Product made that possible.
Today all we hear from governments is that their first aims are to engender economic growth. No politician can expect to win on a platform of cutbacks and reduced pensions and benefits. Yet these days are here, and have already come in many parts of Europe.
Growth is down to a level less than the rate of inflation, which means reduced tax income and greater deficits because the opposite is happening on the expense column: there more money is needed for food stamps in the USA and welfare in Canada. Higher unemployment places greater pressure on the health-care system as uncertainty and discontent are detrimental to one’s health and also causes more domestic violence.
I once was unemployed in my first year in Canada in 1951-52. My most miserable memories go back to that week when my brother and I lived in a room in downtown Hamilton: he sick, I no work. Fortunately it only lasted only a few days: a caring couple took in my brother until he was healthy again and I soon found work.
The plight of politicians
Politicians are caught in a real bind, evident in the situation in the USA. The recent last minute agreement there means nothing and has solved nothing because the Tea Party’s religion founded on theocratic theories of government exposes insoluble problems, not of a religious nature. What has developed over the last 50-60 years, ever since World War II, will not be solved in one session, actually will never be resolved: the era of extravagance is over. We are dealing with a total new economic environment since that post-war period was completely exceptional in human history. What is coming is a reverting to the normal: living within our means, economically and environmentally but that will not happen before there is a disastrous overshoot: a total or near total collapse, not unlike a heart attack in a person’s life.
In the 1930’s the new oil driven machinery made farmworkers redundant and threw a lot of people on the street for which there was no work and no other source of income. Then many still had roots in the farming community where they were fed by their relatives. Now farmers are mostly mono-crop producers. Only the cessation of the armistice of 1918 and the 1939 resumption of hostilities between Germany on the one hand and the World War I allies – France, Great Britain and Russia- on the other hand, created enough economic activity to soak up all available idle hands to ensure prosperity for the next 60 years. We now face a number of different challenges: where in the late 1920’s cheap oil furloughed thousands of workers, today, with at least four times the number of potential workers, robots and smart software are one important obstacle to rewarding work, potentially making untold millions of willing workers superfluous. The other drawbacks are environmental depletion, global pollution and massive population growth. These factors are setting the stage for a disastrous reversal, the real reason why we see political turmoil in the USA and Europe. People sense this intuitively. Rather than less government we need more, as the obstacles are so great that even universal action cannot reverse this predicament, made worse by our reluctance to face the truth.
The Disappearing Middle Class
Take robots. Robots pay no taxes. Robots also need no medical insurance. Robots never go on strike, never complain. Robots and software are taking middle class jobs in the name of efficiency, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, leaving unemployment and low-wage jobs in their wake. No work is disastrous in many fronts: psychologically, economically and physically. “Idleness is the root of all evil,” says an old proverb.
Don’t believe the official line. Governments face the impossible task to secure money for idled hands while at the same time forced to fund extra support for physical and psychological problems at a time when tax income is drastically reduced.
Just as a heart attack takes place when a person lives beyond his or her physical limits and so experiences a possibly fatal collapse so too the entire economy may experience a complete economic stagnation when too many simultaneous malfunctions cause monetary mayhem, resulting in total stoppage of normal life. A heart attack involves a small part of the body: clogged arteries leading to decreased blood flow, preventing the heart pumps from providing blood to the rest of the body, so too blockage of the money flow from taxpayer to government and back to where it is needed can lead to economic cataclysm. Had in the USA the debt ceiling not been extended, global chaos could have been the result. And someday soon this will happen. “You shall not live by debt alone”. Debt is financing much of our lifestyle, increasingly consisting of environmental debt as well.
By and large the reigning media fail to report the true picture in the world. Bad news does not sell, so they keep on repeating that technology or ‘fracking’ or ‘the tarsands’ will save us, fostering false hope. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” Absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.
Infinite Growth is Infinite Insanity
Infinite growth is infinite insanity. Just as patients after a by-pass must change their lifestyle or else, so we too must go back to simpler ways. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Obama-Care is a good example. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but of the laboring classes. They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve. They have no clue that by doing this we collectively are killing the planet ruining everything we hold dear.
Final times are upon us. As a human race we are racing toward the end, but deny it by frantically believing that what worked in the past will also work tomorrow and beyond. We insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will sustain the empire. We promote extravagant and senseless projects and imperial adventures. The predominant view is that economic growth can continue indefinitely, without slowing down or stopping. Last week Prime Minister Harper, in the Throne Speech has again pronounced the pursuit of economic growth as Canada’s national religion. In the USA Bernanke bombards the system with $85 billion each month. It is like a patient who needs constant blood transfusions to stay alive. Our current monetary system is built on Infinite Growth: it must work that way because debt and the repayment of debt depend on it. Only Infinite Growth makes it possible to have liberal state pension plans, Social Security, and the many wonders that our financial system can deliver. Only Infinite Growth makes more and better technological innovations possible because there is always an infinite supply of the resources available to make these innovations.
We all are victims of a false religion. All false gods are an illusion. My paternal grandfather started his prayer at meal-time with the words of Psalm 115: “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory.” That same Psalm relates something to us today: “their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands…..Their makers will come to be like them and so will all who trust in them.”
Our idol is Infinite Growth fueled by borrowed billions. Our society, constructed on the idol of Infinite Growth, will collapse as soon as infinite borrowing stops. We are rapidly reaching the point where the costs of increased debt and the expense of extracting oil and other minerals are so high that in total, society is worse off, in terms of the total amount of goods produced by society. We already are reaching diminishing returns with oil which is a major reason why world economic growth is slowing. It is also a major reason that many of the heavy oil consuming nations have been struggling with recession-like symptoms. These symptoms are mostly being covered up with deficit spending, ultra-low interest rates and Billions in Quantitative Easing. If this stimulus – new blood – stops, the economy – the body – collapses. Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.
Lord’s Day 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism comes to mind. “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer to that question is our only hope.