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July 2009
Vol. 23, No. 6
Mappa Mundi
Street
Fighting Man
We live in interesting times. But
we're not necessarily cursed.
Doug
Casey is a contributing editor
of Liberty.
Longtime readers know my standard response to
questions about the severity of the Greater Depression: it’s going to be worse
than even I think it’s going to be. “Coming Collapse” books will undoubtedly
accumulate into an entire genre in the next few years, as they did a generation
ago. This time it’s not just fearmongering, although things won’t get as bad as
in James Kunstler’s book “The Long Emergency” and certainly not as rough as in
the movies “Road Warrior” or “I Am Legend.” But it’s a good bet that a lot more
is going to change than just some features of the financial system. Let’s
engage in a little speculation as to the shape of things to come.
I’ve long believed that this
depression would not only be much different but much
worse than the unpleasantness of the ’30s and ’40s. In those days, only
a few people were involved in the financial markets; now almost anyone with any
assets at all is a player. In those days, there were no credit cards, consumer debts,
or student loans; now those things are ubiquitous. It’s true that nobody will
lose any money because of bank failures this time around; instead, everybody is
going to suffer a loss from a collapse of the U.S. dollar, which is much worse.
In the ’30s and ’40s, the U.S.
population was still largely rural in character, including people living in the
cities. The average American was just off the farm and had a lot of practical
skills as well as traditional values. Now he has skills mainly at paper shuffling
or in highly specialized technologies, and it doesn’t seem to me that the
values of hard work, self-reliance, honesty, prudence, and the rest of the Boy
Scout virtues are as common as they once were. In those days, the United States
was a creditor to the world and the world’s factory to boot; now there are
perhaps $8 trillion outside the United States waiting to pour back in, and the
country is now all about consuming, not producing. Even with what the New Deal
brought in, there was vastly less regulation and litigation, leaving the
economy with much greater flexibility to adjust and innovate; today, few people
do anything without consulting counsel.
Of course things are immensely
better today than 80 years ago in at least one important way: technology. I
love technology but, unfortunately, improvements in that area do nothing to
prevent an economic depression or many of the ancillary problems that will
likely accompany this one. In fact, it can be a hindrance in some ways.
So, accepting the premise of a
depression, let’s examine some of its likely consequences.
Civil Unrest
I’ve puzzled over who will go into
the streets as the depression deepens and when they’ll do it. Nikolai
Kondratieff, of Long Wave fame, was of the opinion that the natives tend to get
restless at economic peaks (like the late 1960s, when riots broke out all over
the world) and at economic troughs (like the 1930s, when the same thing
happened). His reasoning is not dissimilar from that of Strauss and Howe. At
peaks, people are just feeling their oats, which can evidence itself
domestically in riots inspired by rising expectations, and internationally in
optional sport wars, like that in Vietnam. Such peak-time disturbances are
troublesome but don’t really threaten society. That’s largely because when
times are good, people feel they have a lot to lose and they believe things can
get even better. In prosperous times, people don’t usually feel like
overthrowing the government or transforming the basis of society.
Not so at economic troughs. People
believe they have little to lose, they’re eager to hang those they believe
responsible for their problems, and they’ll listen to radical or violent
proposals. We’re now just entering what will likely be the worst economic
trough since the Industrial Revolution.
But why do
humans tend to riot when the going gets rough? How can they think that
solves anything? Do they believe it’s going to make their jobs or money
reappear? Perhaps I ask that question only because I can’t see myself rioting.
You and I might discount the thought of Americans going wild, because we
wouldn’t likely join them. But we’re not, I suspect, the average American.
People, throughout history, have always been prone to violence when times get
tough. Is there any reason that should change now?
Recently, there have been — really
for the first time in this downturn — reports of large, angry demonstrations
all over the world. The UK, France, Eastern Europe, now China. If a place like
Iceland, as placid and homogeneous as any in the world, can blow up, then any
place can. And probably will.
A rioter is typically an angry
person looking for vengeance because he blames someone else for his problem. So
far, rioters seem to be directing their attention at governments. Correct target,
of course, but they don’t have the rationale quite right. They’re not angry
because governments inflated the currency, promoted fractional reserve banking,
and nurtured all the cockamamie socialist programs that caused this crisis. Not
at all; they rather liked all that. They’re angry only because their
governments haven’t adequately protected them from the consequences of what
they did. So as conditions worsen, we can expect governments worldwide to pull
out absolutely all the stops to show they’re “doing something.” And round up
scape-goats to satisfy the mob and divert anger from themselves.
I fully expect civil unrest to
spread everywhere, simply because the depression will spread everywhere. It
will be worst in places that have been most overextended, most debt-leveraged,
most urban, and have the largest numbers of unemployed workers — the United
States, Europe, and China.
In the last couple of generations,
most rioters in the United States have been students who basically just raise
some hell on their campuses and inner-city blacks who burn down their own
neighborhoods. Maybe the students who’ve wasted a huge amount of time and money
in gender studies and sociology will get angry as they figure out they’re not
going to have jobs when they graduate — forget about making $100,000 plus as an
investment banker. Maybe blacks, who have apparently been hurt the worst by
subprime lending and still may be the last hired and first fired, will take to
the streets. Maybe. But I think it’s more likely the turn of the Mexicans and
other Latinos. They’re the ones raided by la migra and stopped at
checkpoints, whether they’re legal or not. They’re the ones who may be
implicated in the wave of violence flowing up from northern Mexico. There is a
real strain of revanchist nationalism throughout their community that hopes for
the reconquista of lands the Anglos stole in the 19th century. And they
have all the other problems you might expect with an ethnic underclass.
But will ordinary middle-class
Americans riot? I don’t expect it until later in the game. Union members will
be treated well by the Obama regime. And most whites live in the suburbs; it’s
tough to get people who live in detached houses out into the streets. Ozzie and
Harriet just don’t seem likely to burn down their house, even if the bank owns
it. Besides, a lot of the parents are on Prozac and their kids on Ritalin. Of
course, on the other hand, most of the people who perpetrated mass murders over
the last 25 years were on some type of psychiatric drug.
Is there a catalyst that could turn
your neighbors into a mob? Two possibilities are gun control and higher taxes,
discussed below. But my guess is that riots will be headed off by the police,
who are far more numerous, militarized, and
better equipped than ever before, and by the military itself. You may think the
cops and the military (and today most cops are ex-military) would never turn on
their fellow citizens, but you’d be wrong. Cops and soldiers are far more loyal
to their colleagues and their organizations than they are to either some
Constitution or, absolutely, the mob that’s throwing bricks and bottles at
them. They are also among the forces pumping for gun control.
Gun Control
This issue is potentially explosive.
Although, sadly, gun culture in the United States isn’t nearly what it was even
a generation or two ago, it’s still pretty strong in some regions. Most states
make the open or concealed carrying of handguns a simple matter, and there’s
evidence lots of people are taking advantage of it. Personally, I find it hard
to fathom the psychology of people who want to disarm society. From a strictly
practical point of view, the idea of having to engage in hand-to-hand combat,
half naked, with an intruder in the middle of the night is most unappealing.
Especially since the odds of that happening are going way up in the near
future. Everyone should have a gun in his nightstand, at a minimum.
But that’s only a fraction of what
gun ownership is really about. A free person should have the right to possess
whatever he desires. End of story. And only slaves, or those with a slave
mentality, comply with no thought of resistance when they’re told what they can
or cannot own, especially if compliance means disarming themselves.
I’ve often wondered what would have
happened in Germany after Kristallnacht if every Jew had been armed.
None were, of course, because strict gun control had been imposed shortly after
Hitler came to power, and like good little lambs, the population complied with
the law. But my guess is that few would have defended themselves against the
Gestapo anyway. Partly because they would have figured they were certain to get
into serious trouble if they resisted, and partly because they couldn’t imagine
the fate that actually awaited them. It wasn’t until the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
in 1944, very late in the game, that people could finally read the writing on
the wall and summoned the courage to fight.
If you follow these things, you’ll
note that there’s been a lot of buzz about severe firearms regulation since
Obama’s inauguration. Bills are being discussed about things like a national
firearms registry, reinstituting the so-called “assault weapons” ban, requiring
secure locks on all weapons, prohibiting the import of ammunition, and levying
a substantial tax on ammunition, among other things. No outright prohibition,
because they know that would catalyze gun owners. But they keep dialing up the
pressure, moving toward a de facto ban.
I’ll guess there are at least 2–3
million Americans who adhere to a couple of succinct mottos: 1. You can have my
gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers, and 2. It’s better to be tried
by twelve than carried by six. This is a group that could catch fire at some
point. But I don’t think it’s imminent, simply because the chances of outright
prohibition of gun ownership are slim. The analogy of the frog in a gradually
heating pot is apt. The taxpayer must also feel like a frog.
Tax Revolt
State and municipal governments all
over the country are operating with rising outlays and radically declining
incomes and so are running large deficits that add to their already massive
debt. Since they can’t print dollars, they’ll raise taxes further, as New York
and California have recently done. Most people don’t have any philosophical
objection to taxes; they accept them, considering them part of the human
condition, like disease or death. That’s unfortunate, of course, in that
taxation is neither moral nor necessary. But such fine points of philosophy
absolutely never enter the public debate.
What will be debated is the level of
taxation. The last time we had widespread agitation on taxes was during the
last serious recession, in the late ’70s. The result was things like Prop 13
(which capped property taxes in California for some homeowners) and the Reagan
tax reforms.
I expect there will be serious
whining about taxes this time around as well, but little will come of it. To
start with, like every other organism on the planet, government puts its own
interests first; society comes in a distant second. Actually a distant third,
after powerful individuals who are wired to politicians and bureaucrats, and
groups that hire the right lobbyists. Every level of government is more
desperate for money than ever. Your taxes are going through the roof, and
you’re going to see lots of new ones. Don’t expect any support from Boobus
americanus. About half don’t earn enough to pay income tax. Most are net
tax beneficiaries. And low taxes have somehow become associated with the late
disastrous crack-up boom and the corrupt Bush regime. So a popular tax revolt
looks like a real long shot.
At the same time, a portion of the
productive people in the country feel genuinely resentful at having to
subsidize the losers and ne’er-do-wells. What are they going to do? I think
they have only two alternatives. Tax evasion, which is both hard and
increasingly risky, since the IRS will be hiring plenty of freshly unemployed
financial workers. And expatriation. My guess is that scores of thousands of
Americans are going to make “the Chicken Run” (as Rhodesians called it) in the
next few years.
But the biggest danger to your
personal freedom and your wealth, as well as to the United States as a whole,
is likely to be war.
War
It always impressed me as odd that
while Obama ran on a platform of ending the pointless and counterproductive
adventure in Iraq, he wanted to ramp up the war in Afghanistan. What possible
reason could anyone have for wanting to fight an optional war in what may be
the most backward and xenophobic place on the planet? Even if every Afghan made
a personal pledge of Death to America (which they eventually will, thanks to
the occupation), who cares? Who cares if the Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest or
the Y'nomamö of the Amazon join them? It’s strange that no one ever questioned
Obama on this nonsensical and contradictory policy.
Now it seems he’s very slow in
leaving Iraq. I expect the reason is that the United States has built elaborate
bases the size of small cities that they’re loathe to leave, partly on general
principles and partly because they might be needed to attack Iran or Pakistan.
The Obama regime is literally asking for trouble in both places. And partly
because he knows that the collaborators set up to run the Iraqi government will
promptly be deposed, and probably executed, by whoever might win the civil war
that would ensue if the United States really left. The U.S. government is
apparently set on having a stooge in charge of both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The National Security State has a
life of its own. Renditions haven’t been stopped. Guantanamo still operates, as
do other overseas prisons holding thousands. Military spending not only won’t
be cut, it will likely rise.
Wars start for all kinds of reasons.
But tough economic times probably rank number one as a cause. The 1930s were a
natural overture for the ’40s. Politicians like to find a foreign enemy to
blame problems on. Theft of foreign resources can seem like a good idea. And
part of the economic mythology fabricated by the malevolent and repeated by the
ignorant is that World War II cured the last depression.
Will there be another 9/11? It’s a
good bet, but there’s no way it will involve airplanes; the 50,000 zombies
employed by TSA serve absolutely no purpose except to accustom Americans to
being treated like prisoners. One possibility is the surreptitious placement of
one or more nuclear devices in U.S. cities. As Pakistan disintegrates, their
nuclear arsenal may fall into irresponsible hands. Or, perhaps, devices could
be procured in a number of ways from Russia, India, Israel, or North Korea.
Another, much more likely scenario is a repetition of what happened in Mumbai
recently. A small force of dedicated and well-armed operatives could create
unbelievable havoc in a U.S. city or in several at once. And probably will.
Americans just don’t appreciate how little people in the Islamic world like
having aggressive, blue-eyed teenagers kick their doors down in the middle of
the night, among other pranks.
You may be thinking that, with the
American military the most powerful in the world, it’s not about to lose a war.
I question that. The bloated military is a major factor in bankrupting the United
States, and a bankrupt country can’t win a war. Its $6 billion carriers, $1
billion B-2s and $400 million F-22s are all built to fight a kind of enemy that
no longer exists. They’re sitting ducks for massive numbers of cheap missiles
and jihadists that can swarm them where they’re parked. The military wanted to
fight World War I with cavalry and World War II with battleships. They’re
seemingly doomed to a repeat performance in the next major conflict.
In short, everything on this horizon
looks very grim for a long time to come. Incidentally, the U.S. military is by
far the world’s largest single consumer of oil.
Peak Oil
There hasn’t been much discussion of
this since oil has come down from its July 2008 peak near $150 to its recent
low of close to $30. Longtime readers know I’m philosophically quite reluctant
to give credence to any theory that would seem to imply we can run out of
anything. I come down firmly on the side of Julian Simon. Which is to say
resources are essentially infinite, and technology and capital can solve almost
any problem in the material world. That said, there are problems that need to
be solved. One is presented by the geological theory of M. King Hubbert, who
predicted in the 1950s that the production of light sweet crude in the
continental United States would go into irreversible decline by the early ’70s.
He was correct.
He also predicted that the same
would happen on a worldwide basis in the first decade of this century. It now
appears production has maxed out at about 80 million barrels a day and is
headed down.
This isn’t the time or place for a
detailed discussion of why and how this is true. It’s certainly not the end of
the world, as some appear to believe. Just a major inconvenience. Practically
infinite power is available from a wide variety of sources, starting with
nuclear. The problem is that oil is a particularly concentrated, convenient,
and (in the past) cheap source, so the entire world’s economy has been built
around it. It will take a decade or so to adjust to the much, much higher
prices that will be needed to bring consumption into balance with production.
And absolutely everything that relies on oil is going to become much more
expensive — especially transportation (for obvious reasons) and food. Food is
interesting in that mass production is highly mechanized and oil intensive, as
well as fertilizer and pesticide intensive — which again rely on hydrocarbons.
The oil-food problem is aggravated by so much of what we eat being shipped very
long distances.
Anything is possible, of course, but
I think the most likely scenario is simply a large reorientation in patterns of
production and consumption as a result of $200 oil. This would be tough enough
by itself. But it’s going to put tremendous extra strain on the average
American at exactly the time he’s already under maximum strain from a shrinking
economy.
Right now things aren’t so bad,
because energy prices are low. The depression has cut oil consumption and,
conveniently, prices as well. That’s taken a lot of pressure off the average
American’s pocketbook and at a felicitous moment. And prices may stay low for a
year or so as people the world over economize. But oil consumption doesn’t need
to rise to put pressure on the price; from here, the main pressure is likely to
come from falling supply, not rising demand. So oil prices are likely to start
heading up, for strictly geological reasons, even as the depression grows
deeper. That will prove most uncomfortable. And will have significant consequences
for two mainstays of U.S. culture: cars and suburbia.
Collapse of Suburbia and the Car Culture
Suburbs are creatures of the
automobile. I’ve been a car buff my entire life. I love cars for their
technology. I love them because they’re fun. But most of all, I love them
because even more than the ship, the train, and the airplane, they liberate the
average person to — cheaply and quickly — go anywhere he wants, whenever he
wants. They’ve made it possible for people to break the mold of the medieval
serf tied to the community he was born into. I don’t think cars are going to
disappear, but the internal combustion engine is, as a result of Peak Oil, on
its way out. I suspect battery power will start rapidly replacing gasoline and
diesel. The problem lies in the transition, which is going to be expensive,
considering the huge sunk investment in the current technology. There’s going
to be an interim period, when people can’t afford to drive their pickups, SUVs,
or practically anything else hundreds of miles a week to distant workplaces and
kids’ soccer games or on promiscuous shopping trips. But
neither will they be able to afford a new electric car.
American culture revolves around the
car. The car facilitated the growth of suburbs and exurbs, shopping malls and
big boxes, most of which will become completely uneconomic with the rapid
decline of the car. That’s entirely apart from the suburbs and exurbs being
exactly where people already can’t make their mortgage payments. And can’t
afford to shop. They can’t get by even at current bargain oil prices in the
$40–$50 range. It’s going to be much tougher when gas is $8 a gallon; if they
can get a job, they’re going to have to live within a few miles of it.
Entirely apart from that, people
aren’t going to be buying much stuff to store in the houses they can’t afford.
As George Carlin pointed out in his famous routine about “Stuff,” that’s what
houses are for — storing stuff. And people are going to be liquidating what
they have, not buying more, when they won’t even have a proper place to store
it. I’d hate to be in the furniture business over the next decade.
Even if unemployment weren’t going
much higher.
Unemployment
The official numbers say
unemployment is 7.6%. But just as the definition of inflation keeps evolving to
accommodate a number that looks better than the reality, the same is true for
unemployment figures. John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics
(www.shadowstats.com) computes the figures the way the government used to —
mainly by adding back in part-time workers and those considered “discouraged.”
They show 17.5% as the historically comparable
unemployment figure.
Society has been living above its
means for well over a generation, long enough to ingrain unsustainable patterns
of production and consumption in the economy. Did everybody need a personal
trainer 20 years ago? Was “shopping” a major recreational activity in the days
before everyone had a pocketful of credit cards? Do all kitchens really need
granite counter tops? I think not. As people cut down to the bare basics to
enable themselves to rebuild capital, millions and millions more workers are
going to have to find other things to do. And, while they’re figuring out what,
cut back their consumption drastically as well.
I suspect the readjustment will push
unemployment to at least the levels of the Great Depression, which would mean
going past 25%. But some will argue: “Yes, but we now have a safety net to
catch the fallen. That will make it less serious.” No, it will make it more
serious and more prolonged as well. The so-called safety net consumes capital
that could have been used productively. It decreases the urgency for each
person of finding a solution to his own problems. And it has given people a
false sense of security, leaving them to save less for a rainy day. The looming
collapse of things like Social Security and Medicare will be a bigger disaster
than all the banks failing. The Social Security “trust fund,” which has been a
swindle, a Ponzi scheme in slow motion, and a moral wrecking ball almost from
its beginning, is going to go much deeper into the red. Before they collapse,
Medicare, Medicaid, and their cousins will be expanded by some form of free
care for the legions of the newly unemployed. Will doctors and nurses be made
indentured servants (such as through mandatory voluntary community service) to
provide care for everyone who may need it? Perhaps not as long as taxes can be
raised further on the middle class.
Sorry this has all been so gloomy so
far. Now that the mood is set for recounting all the problems that are going to
beset us, some of you are probably saying to yourselves: “Yes, and that’s on
top of global warming.”
Global Warming
This is on just about everybody’s
list of Big Problems. Except mine. I’m not a professional climatologist, or
even an amateur, so I lack any technical qualifications for commenting on the
subject — like almost everybody else who does, prominently including Al Gore.
But my guess is that in the next decade, the global
warming hysteria (and that’s exactly what I believe it is) will be
viewed, with embarrassment, as one of the great episodes in the history of the
delusions of the crowd.
Have you noticed that “global
warming” is gradually being supplanted by “climate change”? The fact is that
the earth’s climate has been changing constantly for at least 500 million years
and has generally gotten much cooler over that time. It has certainly warmed
since the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago, and was much warmer at the
height of the Roman Empire than now. It cooled during what became known as the
Dark Ages, warmed again during medieval times (when grapes grew in Greenland
and northern England), and cooled again during the Little Ice Age (which ended
about 200 years ago). During the ’70s, as you may recall, some magazines ran
cover stories featuring glaciers intruding into New York City. And for the last
ten years, it appears the earth has been cooling, although that’s not widely
reported. Change is a constant when it comes to the climate, and warmer is
generally better.
Is the science “settled” on the
subject? The very concept strikes me as ridiculous, in that science is rarely
“settled” on anything short of it being proclaimed a law of nature. And,
contrary to popular opinion, it seems most scientists with credentials in the
field are either agnostic on the question or debunk the proposition of
anthropogenic global warming. But the intellectual climate is such that most
scientists are afraid to question out loud the reality of warming. Since almost
all funding today comes from politically correct sources, namely the government
and foundations, the money goes to those who are known to be looking for the
“right” answers. Science has been corrupted.
Of course man can change the environment. But our
power to do so is trivial next to the sun, volcanoes, cosmic rays, and the
churning ocean. None of those forces gets any mention in a popular press
fixated on carbon, which has replaced plutonium as public enemy #1. Carbon may
be the basis of life on earth, but it’s supposed to be our new enemy
nonetheless. The masses, who don’t even know carbon is a “natural” element and
think the periodic table is a piece of antique furniture, now feel guilty about
breathing, because exhaled breath is a source of carbon dioxide.
Interestingly, a rise in atmospheric
CO2
levels doesn’t precede but follows, by several hundred years, phases of global warming.
Everything you hear about saving the planet through carbon credits is as
ridiculous and counter-productive as recent disastrous programs to turn corn
into ethanol. In any event, carbon dioxide’s effects as a greenhouse gas are
completely overwhelmed by those of water vapor. God forbid anyone warns the
public of the numerous dangers posed by compounds like dihydrogen monoxide
(also known as hydroxic acid, also known as Water).
As a lifelong science buff, I find
the whole subject quite interesting and am tempted to do an article on it. The
reason I mention it here, however, is that the global warming hysteria, as
opposed to possible cyclical global warming itself, has serious economic
consequences. The chances are excellent that governments will direct scores of
billions of dollars into further research, devising computer projections of
catastrophe to come, and fighting the presumed warming. Much more serious are
the laws they’ll pass in the war against carbon (and methane, which amounts to
a war against cattle and sheep), which could retard the economy by hundreds of
billions of dollars. Most serious, in the long run, is the likely discrediting
of science itself in the eyes of the common man once anthropogenic warming is
exposed as a giant false alarm.
It’s actually been quite a while
since I’ve gotten an outraged letter. I expect and will welcome furious letters
for denying Anthropogenic Global Warming. But writers, do me a favor, in the
interest of intellectual honesty, and also because I always like to learn
something new: give me a reference as to why you’re a believer. Please don’t
include Al Gore or any tertiary news reports as evidence.
The Political Future
We can be quite confident the
economic future is going to be grim. The military future, ugly and busy. The
social future, turbulent. So is it reasonable to expect politics as usual? That
would be rather anomalous. Especially since the trend towards much more state
power, centered strongly on the executive, has been in motion, and
accelerating, for at least four generations in the United States, even during
the best of times. No surprises there. That is pretty much what observers of
history from at least Plato on would expect.
In that America is recently deceased
and only the United States survives, I see no reason that the trend won’t
continue accelerating, to be supercharged by the next Black Swan that might
land. After the next real, fabricated, or imagined 9/11-style incident occurs
or major war begins, it will be surprising if a state of emergency isn’t declared.
Perhaps martial law in the United States will, perversely, provide the impetus
needed to “bring the troops home,” in that they’ll be needed more in the United
States than in Fuhgedabouditstan or wherever.
I leave the practical implications
of that entirely to your imagination. But to maintain what little will be left
of domestic tranquility at that point, the authorities will almost certainly
feel compelled to round up dissidents, potential troublemakers, “un-American”
activists, constitutionalists, vocal malcontents, libertarians, and the usual
suspects generally. It seems inevitable to me, and I’d prefer to be somewhere
else when it happens. I’m loath to make outlandish political predictions, if
only because the inevitable isn’t necessarily the imminent. But if the United
States survives the current crisis in its present form, I’ll be surprised.
As always, there’s a bright side.
Obama will be a one-term president. And, as middle- and upper-middle-class
Americans come to see the government less as a cornucopia — that’s inevitable,
because the cupboard is empty — they’ll start to see it ever more as a
predator. The government will become increasingly delegitimized in the eyes of
what’s left of the middle class. But what will they do? If they still have a
home in the suburbs or a condo in the city, they’re not going to burn it down
like the poor. I’m not even sure they’ll riot. But they will seethe with
discontent. New affinity groups will coalesce. And they’ll wait until something
really catalyzes them. Is another revolution possible? Why not? The United
States is just another country at this point.
I’m convinced that the nation-state,
which is to say countries with governments based on geography, is on its way
out fairly soon. And good riddance. Perhaps the United States will be among the
first. What form of social organization will replace it?
In the near future, though, there
will be a struggle between the best features of what little is left of America
and the worst elements of humanity, whom we have in some abundance.
Emigrants and Sociopaths
Americans no longer appear to be a
special breed. Of course, absolutely every nation likes to think it’s a
special, better breed — the Chinese, the Japanese, the British, the French, the
Germans, absolutely everybody. It’s a stupid but universal conceit, like the
one putting God (presumably Yahweh) on their side during a war.
I used to fancy that Americans
actually could be a cut above simply because they’re all the progeny of
emigrants, and there are at least three reasons emigrants tend to be the “best”
kind of people — at least from the point of view of someone who values freedom.
First, emigrants tend to be more enterprising than their neighbors at home,
willing to leave everything they have to pursue opportunity. Second, they tend
to work harder, since they know they’ll get nothing they don’t earn from
strangers in a new land. Third, they tend to be anti-political, since political
elites and conditions are usually what caused them to emigrate in the first
place. Whether these things are because of a genetic predisposition or whether
it’s simply a cultural artifact within some families and groups, or both, I
think it’s a fact.
From the founding of the country,
America has always had a strong emigrant ethos, and that’s one of the things
that has made it different and better. But all things degrade and revert to the
mean with the passage of time. The country is now a fugitive from entropy.
Another reason for taking a
pessimistic view is that — notwithstanding the point I made above — there’s no
reason not to believe there’s a fairly uniform distribution of sociopaths
across time and space, including in America today. All countries, in all eras,
have them — but in good times, they stay under their rocks. Who would have
guessed that the Germans of the last century, who had a well-educated, orderly
population, much more than their share of writers, composers, philosophers,
scientists, and plain middle-class shopkeepers, would have bred the Nazis? The
Turks in the ’20s, the Russians in the ’20s and ’30s, the Chinese in the ’50s
and ’60s, the Serbs in the ’90s, the Rwandans. . . . It would be easy to
recount dozens of recent examples of perfectly ordinary countries that have
gone bonkers. The fact is that your neighbor or your mailman, who pets his dog,
hugs his kids, and plays softball on the weekends, might exhibit a much less
appealing, indeed an appalling, side when social conditions change.
You’ve, of course, heard of the
Milgram experiment, wherein researchers asked members of the public to torture
subjects with electric shocks, all the way up to what they believed were lethal
levels. Most of them did it, after being assured that it was “all right” and
“necessary” by men in authority.
The problem arises when a society
becomes highly politicized. In normal times, a sociopath stays under the radar.
Perhaps he’ll commit a common crime when he thinks he can get away with it, but
social mores keep him reined in. However, once the government changes its
emphasis from protecting citizens from force to initiating it with laws and
taxes, those social mores break down. Peer pressure and moral opprobrium, the
forces that keep a healthy society orderly and together, are replaced by
regulation enforced by cops funded by taxes. And sociopaths start coming out of
the woodwork and are drawn to the state, where they can get licensed and paid
to do what they’ve always wanted to do. It’s very simple, really. There are
two ways people can relate to each other: voluntarily or coercively. The
government is pure coercion, and sociopaths are drawn to its power and force.
After a certain point, a critical mass is reached. The
sociopaths who are naturally drawn to government start to dominate it. They
reset the social mores of the country they control. And it’s game over. I
suspect we’re approaching that point.
A Happy Note
There’s no telling how bad things
will actually get. The worst thing that could happen is a major war. But,
barring that, what’s happened in Zimbabwe, surprisingly, actually offers cause
for some optimism. I was last there a couple of years ago, when, although it
was a disaster, it hadn’t descended into the absolute catastrophe that’s going
on now. Still, with draconian taxes, regulations, and hyperinflation, life goes
on. Plumbers, electricians, and mechanics still repair things. Farmers still
grow things — albeit on a much smaller scale. Stores still stock merchandise,
even if there’s not much of it. And I just heard yesterday from an ex-Zimbabwean
that some of his friends there still play polo. And Zim is about as bad as it
gets. But maybe it’s also reason for pessimism. Why, out of the whole damned
country, wasn’t there at least one man with the courage to shoot Mugabe?
Look at Eastern Europe. After a
horrible depression that lasted from about 1930 to 1990, the whole region
blossomed in the space of a decade. It went from the grimmest dystopia, a
veritable hologram of Mordor itself, to being almost indistinguishable from
Western Europe. It shows how quickly things can improve, as long as there isn’t
a backdrop of purposeful stupidity. Try as governments may to destroy it,
there’s an immense amount of capital that the world has built up over the past
few centuries. Individuals and small groups will continue building their
capital everywhere, notwithstanding any kind of state action. The pace of
technology should continue, if not accelerate.
As someone who always looks at the
bright side, the final bit of good news I can offer you in this extraordinarily
troubled milieu is that things are likely to be very interesting, even quite
exciting, over the years to come. Notwithstanding the well-known Chinese curse,
I’m not completely averse to interesting times. For one thing, you don’t have
to be adversely affected by them; they set up opportunities for greater profits
than even the wildest bull market. They will also give some reality to what is
probably my favorite rock song: The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.” It
used to be the bumper music for my radio talk show ten years ago. Both the show
and the song used to outrage middle-class Americans nationwide. Turn up your
speakers (as Ed Steer is often wont to advise in his daily blog, “And then
there’s this . . .”)
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