Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Written in 1919, the lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” can be read as a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

The good want power, but to weep barren tears.

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.

The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;

And all best things are thus confused to ill.

Buddha’s Example of the Burning House

Bertolt Brecht

Gautama, the Buddha, taught
The wheel of desire on which we are bound,
And bade us
Put off desire, and thus without it
Go into the Nothing that he called Nirvana,

And one day some disciples asked him:

“Master, what is it like, this Nothing?
We all wish to put off desire, as you bade us, but tell us
If this Nothing, into which we go,
Is a kind of oneness with all creation,
As if a man lay in water, limbs at ease, at midday,
Empty of thought, lay lazy in water, or sank into sleep,
Scarce knowing if someone tucked a blanket round him, so deep was he under;
Tell us if it is a pleasant thing, this Nothing, a good thing,
Or if it is simply nothingness, cold, empty, without meaning.”

The Buddha was a long time silent, then shrugged.

“There is no answer to your question.”

But in the evening when they were gone
Buddha sat under the breadfruit tree and gave to the others,
Those who had not asked, the following example:

“Once I saw flames licking the roof of a house,
And when I went to it I saw that there were men inside.
I called to them that the roof was burning.
But they were in no hurry.
One, while the fire singed his very brows,
Asked me what it was like outside, If it was raining still,
And if the wind had stopped, if there was another house nearby
And suchlike things.
I did not answer him and came away.
Truly, my friends, to the indifferent who see no need for change
Have I nothing to say.”

Thus Gautama, the Buddha.

And we too, no more concerned with the arts of patience,
Rather with the arts of impatience, of manifold means to improve man’s lot,
Teach him to lift away his worldly suffering,

We too to those, who, when any day the bombs may fall upon the cities,
Ask us what savings books and Sunday suits will be like in the new society,
To them have we little to say.

(Translated by Arnold Hinchcliffe in The New Reasoner Winter 1957-58 number 3).

Delusional hope produces nothing of value. Throughout my life I have sought to see things as they are. The past few months have provided me the opportunity to ponder current events against the tapestry of history.

“We have destroyed the Holocene biosphere, and it can never be rebuilt. We have inadvertently terraformed Earth into a different planet. This act cannot be undone; it is thermodynamically irreversible.” Desdemona

I leave it to climate change deniers to explain the recent wholesale collapse of fisheries with the increase in both reef and oceanic dead zones, the desertification of the world’s most productive land and the rapid transition from forest to desert by mega-fires.

The once frozen “methane bomb” has already gone off. The Arctic permafrost is already melting.

Large areas of Earth are becoming uninhabitable to mammals and their food plants. Most charismatic megafauna, such as elephants, rhinos and whales, will become extinct in a few decades. It is entirely likely that humans will follow them into oblivion.

For sure, this will be a bumpy road to total collapse and a few will manage to arrive in luxury SUVs. The rest of us, the vast majority, will see family and friends fall as we circle the drain together.

There are still resources that could be directed towards easing the necessary scaling back of empire and civilization as we know it. Scaling back in and of itself would help a great deal, perhaps forestalling human extinction as we adapt to an Earth that every day becomes more like Mars.

While President Obama takes on the ‘fat cat’ bankers the underlying collapse of the United State financial industry has yet to be addressed. The root problem is an excessive level of debt in the system at all levels, a level of debt that exceeds capacity to pay.

The problem in a nutshell – the banks are still hiding losses – big losses. Very little of the debt securitized by the housing bubble has been written off or yet foreclosed upon.

Loans are not being made to small business people because they have no collateral to pledge.  Being asked to pledge personal assets as collateral for a small business loan is standard operating procedure.

With most homes underwater, most small businesspeople have no assets to pledge as collateral. Debt problems go beyond the largest banks.

China bought zero U.S. Treasury debt in October. Now foreigners have become net sellers of U.S. Treasury debt instruments.

The problems began when raw materials producers stopped receiving parity pricing and needed to borrow in able to start a new round of production. A principle method of under-paying, paying less than parity, appears in the form of paying in debased money.

Meanwhile, here we are, nearly a year under a new administration. For feds, more get 6-figure salaries, in an attempt to keep up with debasement of U.S. money.

Seduced And Abandoned

Both Democrats and Republicans demonstrate a history of saying whatever seems required to become elected, seduce the electorate, and upon election conveniently explaining away or otherwise abandoning their earlier promises.

Everyone seems to condemn this behavior between individuals. The victims often appear unable to disengage on their own initiative. If fortunate, their family and/or friends provide counseling and intervention to help end these cycles of abuse.

Yet society as a whole suffers serial victimizations by these two mainstream political parties. Ever since the Reagan Administration identified government as the problem the resulting orgy of deregulation and bureaucratic bloating continues unabated from one election to the next.

Some wish to call them incompetent idiots. Others wish to call them lying frauds. I suggest we make peace and call them incompetent lying idiot frauds.

The system they destroy also provides all the wealth and power expended in the destruction. Literally self-destruction. It seems an entire spectrum of pathologies plague our financialized government.

Narcissism

Borderline Personality Disorder

Characteropathy

Sociopathy

Psychopathy

Witness the unnecessary pain, suffering and death. Unnecessary because it results from a financial services industry that compounds debt exponentially inevitably demands more wealth than the total sum of raw materials entering the economy.

Unnecessary because the government fails to enforce the Prompt Corrective Action Law and administers regulation in the interest of the financial services industry contrary to the interests of citizens.

This occurs simultaneously with a prison industry growing faster than it can expand, militarization of local police forces, the historic first ever active deployment of U.S. Armed Forces within the United States of America, de facto nullification of the Bill of Rights and an overall heightening of domestic security.

I hope you are debt free and likewise free from any form of wage slavery. At least that can give you a running start.

FNORD

For anyone without income, a home or even hope, the collapse has already happened. The number of those people on the ropes certainly seems to be increasing daily.

On the other hand, in this personal sense, you may not experience collapse during your lifetime. Of course that is not what the doom and gloomers say.

I used to be a doom and gloomer, an authentic doomsday freak pointing out the failures of our system and its imminent collapse. I’ve learned to temper my fears simply by living long enough.

However, in a larger more empirical sense, we may ask what exactly constitutes a societal collapse. Here we are asking about the nature of the collapse of the Euro-American Empire indicated by the ongoing disintegration of its global hegemony.

If you are someone who does not want to read social criticism, stop now.

If you are worried about you head exploding when you are presented with new information, stop now.

OK, now that I know you are willing to deal with this, I will continue.

As a first step, we have to acknowledge certain conclusions by Karl Marx. I know he is widely disparaged in the mainstream media, at community colleges nationwide and in state universities structured to provide occupational training in technical fields.

Rest assured, at elite institutions training the nest generation of leaders Karl Marx is read and discussed. The children of the hegemonic elite destined to inherit the reigns of power over 99.5% of the rest us know and study his work.

Well, they do if they actually did the work and didn’t just have their families purchase their degrees with another endowment. But that is another issue.

Sure, Karl Marx gets a bad name because of the abuses of the word ‘communist‘ by authoritarian megalomaniacs. To be honest, the world has never seen an authentic communist system in operation.

Part of the problem is that in the day and age of Karl Marx communication was a problem for those living in rural areas. Most people living today cannot imagine the isolation experienced by those living outside of city limits.

Karl Marx proposed an urban workers’ vanguard party to represent those in the hinter lands. This idea of a vanguard party has been much abused by totalitarian regimes around the world that bear little resemblance to his proposed communal life.

He was spot on in exposing the fatal flaw in capitalism. Bear in mind that Karl Marx thought capitalism was a good thing at the time and a step in the right direction away from the manorial serfdom that was the previous norm.

Anyway, capitalism depends upon continuous growth.

The capitalistic system just does not function as a steady state model.

Growth is required to pay off the interest charged on the debt incurred during the capitalization of industry and business. Without growth, only enough profit is made to pay off the principle.

Karl Marx realized that the earth is finite and possesses limited non-renewable resources. Once capitalism went world-wide it was destined to collapse.

In the time of Karl Marx, world-wide pretty much meant Europe in the predominant narrow ethnocentric view. And there were those of his (and later) generations who just couldn’t wait.

Just like the early Christians who grew impatient with God’s promise to destroy the world and started setting fires to help God out, early adopters of the Communist Manifesto perceived revolution as the fast track to post-capitalism.

That turned out badly for all concerned, both Christians and communists.

Karl Marx merely pointed out that given the requirements of capitalism regarding growth, eventually it would hit the limits of growth. With this realization he predicted the certain collapse of capitalism and projected forward from there, betting on human intelligence to come up with something better.

Of course, he thought he was as smart as anyone and perhaps he was. Anyway, communism was merely his projection into the unknowable future and the actual shape of things to come is totally up for grabs.

It is understandable that capitalists the world over took offense. This became the primary driver for political acrimony and national conflict ever since, at least as far as the general public was concerned.

Anyway, capitalism did hit the wall in the early 1970s. China, the last big holdout market, joined in capitalist expansion and left capitalism with no place else to grow.

A whole slew of events indicate the truth in this. Not only did we see the abandonment of the gold standard in the U.S. and the free floating of the U.S. dollar but we also saw the beginning of the first giant debt bubbles.

I first ran away to the mountains in the 1970s believing the collapse was in motion. I was right about that but wrong about the timing regarding my personal situation in the U.S.

The capitalistic hegemons turned to their own populations and began capitalistically monetizing every aspect of personal life, expanding into spheres of influence long felt to be intrinsically off limits. They did this with the full support of governments indebted to their central banks.

The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the economy merged to form the financial services industry once government regulations that previously prevented this were abandoned. We now live in the era when all biopolitical production falls under capitalist control through the monetization of the once common property of social networks.

Without real growth, growth that is only possible through capitalist expansion into new markets, debt accumulates with no possibility of ever being paid off. The ballooning consumer debt, commercial debt and government debt are merely symptoms of the current crisis of capitalism.

The global debt crisis is a symptom of capitalism reaching the limits of growth.

This largely financial crisis will predictably cause a great deal of needless pain, suffering and death but all by itself is something that the human race as a whole can overcome. History is full of examples of empires falling in part due to the debasement of their currency by corrupt politicians and their financial handlers yet people survived to prosper again.

However, in the effort to extract greater profits by depressing the price of labor through population overshoot to produce a surplus supply of labor, other limits have been quickly approached. Paid labor, after all, originated after the population collapsed during the Great Plague and is part of the foundation of capitalism itself.

History indicates that the loss of productive farm land through extractive agricultural methods and the resulting decrease in productivity, coupled with erosion, also contributed to the collapse of empires. Despite so-called advances in food production, decreasing food value and exploding populations drive us towards a Malthusian Catastrophe of global proportions.

The so-called advances in food production have literally been fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons. Not only that, but civilization itself, especially as we have experienced it, has been literally fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons.

The remaining hydrocarbon reserves are being used by the global hegemonic elite to maintain their positions of privilege and power rather than used to enable a transition to another form of civilization. The U.S. armed forces is the largest user of non-renewable hydrocarbons and it is a safe bet that they will use the last of the extractable reserves maintaining the privilege and power of the global hegemonic elite.

This greatly complicates things.

Empires have fallen due to financial collapse and agricultural collapse but none have faced the exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons. This evokes the specter of peak oil.

All the statistics surrounding peak oil originate from within the oil industry itself. We simply cannot know if peak oil is real or simply a clever ploy to increase profits.

In any event, either actual or engineered scarcity will drive huge profits even higher until it is no longer economically viable to extract hydrocarbons from the earth. People just are not prepared for that and, in fact, the global hegemonic elite works against even the possibility of energy independence.

Then there is the issue of climate change as it seems no longer politically correct to refer to global warming. In the end it does not matter if it was caused by people or not because it is happening and the hegemonic elite refuse to risk their privilege and power to enable meaningful change.

Population overshoot, financial collapse, agricultural collapse, exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons, climate change and the machinations of the global power structure to stay in power creates an environment ripe for rampant deadly new diseases. The next Great Plague is now overdue and the ability to globally respond to it with adequate measures simply degrades by the hour.

Plastic pollution, acidification of the oceans and the collapse of one fishery after another are all further symptoms of an impending global collapse of Biblical proportions. This situation is real and very few are even thinking about preparing for it.

Think about preparing for collapse now.

Do you really want to be dependent on society as it is currently structured?

It seems to me that in order to prepare, concerned people need to be reducing dependence upon the status quo. This is becoming increasingly difficult to do because every effort to disengage from the system will be perceived by the system as an act of rebellion, criminal and terroristic.

I believe some people will survive and a few will continue to live relatively well. But to be able to do so will involve becoming responsible for all aspects of your own life.

It may well be that it will be only the minority who actually does the work to prepare will become the few who survive. And eventually, as the facts of the case become irrefutable and obvious to many more people, the remaining carrying capacity of the planet will not support those who start too late.

As long as the system prevails, you will have access to the Internet. The Internet offers more possibilities for creating income independent of mainstream employment than any brick and mortar opportunity in the world.

Perhaps you should be thinking about creating your own Internet business sooner rather that later. Then you will have a measure of control over timing the collapse, at least as far as your personal life is concerned.

What do you think?