The world just rolls along while the collapse of all systems accelerates. Not only is the world literally burning up from fires everywhere, but, like an insane villain from the comics, laughing with devilish glee, characters like Donald Trump are doing everything in their power to increase the rate of global destruction. While glaciers melt and oceans heat up, clogged with microplastic and dying from increasing acidification, most of the world, numb from catastrophe fatigue, just stumbles along on inertia, sleep-walking into the fire.
You thought World War II was bad ? World War II just saw millions of people dying off, while the earth was overpopulated anyway. Now it is not just people that are dying ~ it is our whole planet falling apart from ecocide. But, while so many people wring their hands in despair, all problems not only continue to get worse, but every report says that the problem (every problem) is not only six times worse than previously thought, but the problem (every problem) is getting worse six times faster than previously estimated. And still the guns are going off night and day, spewing death and destruction (and ever more carbon dioxide) in all directions. Still the mega-corporations increase the rate at which they extract fossil fuels from the planet, stuffing their pockets with ever more worthless dollars, while everyone else suffers the pain of death.
Today a dollar will buy about what a dime used to buy back in 1967. We’ve gone a long way downhill since the Summer of Love (in more ways than one, alas – this from an original hippy). This is a deliberate policy. It is a new twist on the Ponzi scheme ~ not only are all debts paid by borrowing more money, but they are deliberately eroding the value of the dollar to conceal the extent of the robbery going on. No, Virginia, none of the principal of that $40 trillion worth of US debt will ever be repaid (except by borrowing more money to pay the unsustainable interest costs for new loans), but even the interest that people think they are receiving in return for loaning money to the government is being paid with ever shrinking dollar values, so it is a loss from beginning to end. Why would anyone loan money to the government for 30 years at 5% interest when the principal will have declined in value by about 30% at maturity due to inflation, which is a deliberate scheme to swindle anyone stupid enough to invest money in loans to the government ? The smart money is quietly moving out of financial instruments in favor of buying up actual value, principally real estate. Money just melts away, but property earns real income ~ about 4 to 6 times as much as Treasury bonds, which just lose value the longer you hold them, and if current income is included (in the form of rents) along with capital appreciation, the increase in real estate value is more like 8 to 12 times over an investment in Treasury bonds.
War is the ultimate nihilism. Governments spend trillions of (other people’s borrowed) dollars building munitions, armaments, and bombs, and fielding and outfitting soldiers for battle, and the whole result and purpose of all of that is to wreak destruction and havoc upon “your enemy.” The whole business is a terrific short circuit that just destroys value at an astronomical rate. The gimmick, as I have expressed before, is that corporations are awarded contracts worth trillions of dollars of borrowed money, 90% of which is then vaporized into mindless destruction, sickness, and death, while the corporation pockets the last 10% of that money, laughing all the way to the bank. It is that fictional abstraction of “The Government,” as if it were just any other corporation, that piles all the debt onto the camel’s back, indifferent to the plight of future generations who will belatedly discover that they’ve been had.
War is caused by poverty and hunger, but the end result of war is increasing poverty and yet more hunger, leading to ever more war, in a vain effort to recoup their losses, like the gambler who tosses the deed to grandma’s farm into the pot, hoping that this time he will draw “a card that is so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another” (from The Stranger Song, by Leonard Cohen).
So, what to do ? Business As Usual is totally a non-starter. Most people seem to think that nothing can be done ~ our world is just trashed, down and out, so we might as well eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we all die. Old people may think that way, but young people, with a whole lifetime in front of them, may not be as willing to shrug off the death of the planet as “not my problem.” In fact, there are solutions, lots of them, but all of them are based upon the one and only path with any chance of success ~ the unification of the entire planet into one single social, economic, and political entity, replacing the Jungle and its Law.
Not feasible, you say ? Not easy, perhaps, but there is no other solution. Like many old people (I will be 80 in a few more months) I repeat myself more and more. (“Stop me if you’ve heard this one . . . ”) I have just looked over the October 2020 article, One World Government, and it’s all there, clear as a bell. There, and previously, I have celebrated some of the world’s greatest visionaries ~ Einstein, Teilhard de Chardin, Bertrand Russell, and H.G. Wells, all of whom have stressed the obvious and urgent necessity of completing this unity of the world, before any further progress can be made on any front. That means this has to happen first, before you can expect much progress on war, climate change, death, or taxes.
Obviously, this cannot happen as a result of playing the game of King of the Mountain ~ these days, such a course of action is just accelerating the mad rush to the End of the World. [Are you listening, Donald ?] What we need to do is to institute something altogether New that people and governments will want to be a part of voluntarily. Back in the 1950s, many people were looking to the United States to provide the Beacon that would light the way forward to a New World Order, but those days are long gone. The shortcomings of Jungle Democracy are all too glaringly evident. We need to find something new.
Perhaps China is finding a more effective strategy for government. As the people of the earth lose hope in the United States, perhaps China will show us the way forward. Now, instead of China following up on its economic advantages to become the new World Hegemon, replacing the worn out and senile United States in that role, perhaps it can be instrumental in setting up new economic and political institutions that can encompass the whole earth for the greater good of the whole planet instead of the narrow America First (or even Israel First) agenda of the abysmally stupid Trump regime.
The Key to the Mystery, as I have explained many times, going back to New Solutions of 1992, or even further back to the World Union Company of 1980 (out of print, never digitized), is the Source of Authority. China may lead the way to the development of new institutions that will replace the Law of the Jungle in determining the Way Forward, but what is needed is some way to introduce some new ultimate world-wide institution that will hold the final authority of the world in trust for the good of the planet, not for Exxon Mobil, or Amazon, Google, Palantir, or any of the other Robber Barons currently running rough-shod over our fragile planet.
While I have modified some of my views over the past forty six years since The World Union Company was first published in 1980, and later the New Solutions (1992), the basic ideas still seem to me to indicate the only possible way forward out of this current Vortex of Chaos, in which the earth is burning up and the oceans are boiling over, while beasts of prey are fighting all over the earth to be King of the Jungle.
This is not the way forward.
Curriculum Vitae ~ links about the Author and his work.
