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Guest Post: Habituating to Contraction
Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds
Habituating to Contraction
The Savior State has pulled out all the stops to prop up the Status Quo. Its gargantuan borrowing and spending have fixed nothing. Contraction is replacing expansion as the new normal.
For the past 67 years, Americans have been conditioned to expect expansion and more of everything: more income, more stuff, more opportunity, more benefits, more medical care, more government entitlements, and so on.
As a result, Americans have habituated to permanent expansion. The concept that contraction--less of everything--is the new normal simply doesn't register; it is rejected, denied, or decried as a great tragedy. The notion that it is simply reality does not compute with a populace habituated to permanent "growth" that is at worst interrupted by brief recessions.
U.S. politicians have learned that Soaring Rhetoric (TM) about "morning in America," "the New Frontier," "hope" and other ritualistic appeals to permanent expansion win elections, while accurate descriptions of reality lose elections.
The voting public's demand for "permanent good news" promising permanent expansion has spawned a feedback loop of officially sanctioned manipulated statistics and media spin (a.k.a. propaganda) that expands with every administration, even as the real economy visibly weakens. Though the Obama Administration has perfected the techniques of presenting "permanent good news," the divergence of the real economy and the official "story" that "we've returned to permanent expansion" is widening.
The real story is the "expansion" has cost the taxpayers trillions of dollars in new debt and trillions of dollars of backstops, shadow purchases and money-printing by the Federal Reserve. Roughly speaking, $6 trillion in additional Federal borrowing has been blown to simply keep the Status Quo from imploding, and around $13 trillion in guarantees, backstops, asset purchases, and losses made good have been issued to keep the Status Quo's financial sector afloat and in charge.
By any credible, unmanipulated measure, for example, the number of people with fulltime employment or household income, the economy has yet to recover to 2007 levels.
This reality must be denied, both by the power-obsessed politicos who fear the truth like vampires fear garlic-garlanded crosses, and by voters who fear a reduction in their personal share of the swag.
Humans habituate quickly to a wide range of conditions and expectations, but once they've settled into the new habitat, they are resistant to new conditions. Needless to say, humans prefer a future in which there will be more of everything over one with less of everything, as permanent expansion means there will be few if any troublesome cost-benefit analyses, hard choices or painful triage, and little need to adjust to new realities.
Changing conditioning is difficult and often arduous.
Americans have been conditioned for three generations to expect the Savior State to "do something" during downturns to "make it right." The idea that systemic problems are now beyond the reach of the Federal government does not compute; there must be something the government can do to "fix" everything.
This notion that the Central State is effectively omniscient and all-powerful is central to the belief system of Americans now. The concept that the government cannot fix the problem, or that government central-planning has made the problem worse, is anathema to everyone conditioned to believe government intervention will "save the day."
The basic reality is the Federal government has already pulled out all the stops in the past four years to "make the economy recover," and all its unprecedented actions have accomplished is to maintain the Status Quo via unsustainably gargantuan borrowing, spending and backstopping.
If we scrape away the rhetoric and bogus statistics, at heart the current fantasy that the U.S. has "decoupled" from the global economy and will remain an island of "permanent prosperity" in a sea of recession boils down to this belief: the Federal government "won't let us stay in recession." In other words, it's within the power of the Central State to make good every loss, guarantee every debt, maintain the Empire, solve every geopolitical challenge and find technological or military solutions to potential energy shortages. All we need is the "will" to force the government to use its essentially unlimited power to "fix everything."
A people conditioned to this expectation will have great difficulty accepting that their government has already done everything possible, and that these stupendous debt-based expenditures are simply not sustainable going forward. Some problems are not fixable by more government intervention; indeed, government intervention in the marketplace is like insulin: the system begins to lose sensitivity to Central State manipulation and intervention.
2012 is looking like the year that the American public will have to face up to the fact that the Central State's massive efforts to "fix the economy" have failed, and that Central State support of the Status Quo cannot fix what's broken.
We will have to habituate to contraction, and the belief in a god-like Savior State with unlimited powers and money will fade as the economy's systemic illnesses--extreme concentrations of power and wealth, corruption, financial leverage, excessive debt and so on--reassert themselves.
All that has happened for four long years is systemic problems were papered over to benefit the Status Quo. Everything that is broken awaits real repair.
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I agree that Humankind IS like a virus from the viewpoint of the Earth, or Gaia.
I never trusted the government to solve any of my problems. This article is spot on though. Your best bet is to find people of like mind and values. Even when presented with facts most Ameericans will simply blow you off or call you crazy. Society wants other people to solve their problems and that will not change.
People prefer to pass the monkey to others and then blame them for their problems or the solution you proposed to them. It boggles my mind and I am almost to the point of just discussing issues with close friends. Now that you or I can be hauled off to a deep dark place because we disagree with what is going on, bothers me even more. I do not see the collapse happening in my lifetime. TPTB can keep this going for quite some time.
As long as people have their new toys, reality TV, and food nothing is going to change for the most part. I do see more and more people waking up to what is going on but they usually blame one political party or the other for it. For the most part at one time or another we or I was one of the sleepers out there as well and believed all the propaganda.
What is most discouraging to me is that most of us who understand the nature of the problems and are willing to act... are unable to collaborate. I've tried collaborative efforts many times, but people are frozen like deer in the headlights. People will talk. People will complain. People will vote. A few people will take individual actions to secure their future. But by and large almost nobody will collaborate. That's a very bad sign.
The debt isnt real. Never was. Many people are coming to understand this. However, the energy is. Oil better get more abundant or we better restructure the energy economies inside a decade.
Actually, the government can fix what's wrong with a debt jubilee, followed by a return to gold redeemablity. Or put another way, the people of the US could do it by amending their constitution:
http://strikelawyer.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/saving-the-world-revised-ed...
http://strikelawyer.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/saving-the-world-revised-ed...
http://strikelawyer.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/seigniorage/
Damn, +1 for linking the truth.
A few Globalists still have a belief that the US Government can and should do something for them but most Americans I know believe the Constitution of the United States of America can and will do something for them. And that includes throwing the treasonist bankers and their pupet politicians into jail. Whether that means a rebolution must take place or just taking the money out of the control of the bankers and returning it to the people we shall see. The Elite have become impotent. The masses can no longer be hood winked. Honey find the oil for the whetstone. And, so on. If perhaps the US did not carry with it the history of its wars and great successes based upon the Constitution and if time and time again common folk didn't have to kick the scum bag bankers out by enforcing the ideals of the Constitution I would second guess the Elites capabilities. But, their arrogance blinds them from seeing all possibilities. Hell the Technocrats couldn't even get their way with Argentina. They should delay the inevitable for a few more generations before attempting to force a New World Order.
The old elite are nearing death so they want to live to see their dream come true. Looks like it is going to be a nightmare.
Some humans are awaking, yes. The number awakening is increasing, yes. And I absolutely hope that you are correct (and I am wrong) that a sufficient number of people will take actual actions against the predators-that-be and predator-class to overthrow them. Do understand - the predators will not step down. Like all predators, the only way to eliminate the human predators them is to exterminate or cage them. They will not give up. Period.
Expecting the predators to give up their power is like suddenly having the antelopes turn around and hunt down the leopards.
The federal, state and local governments in the USSA are dead weight on the economy. They always have been, but now they're such an extreme drag that nothing private individuals can do is sufficient to compensate. The USSA is the sinking Titantic, has now tipped up to almost vertical, and will soon drop into the abyss.
That so many humans think a bunch of overt predators who produce nothing can save them and everyone else is nothing but proof that humans are dumber than rocks, and a total failure as a species. No other animal species defends and encourages they predators who prey upon them. Only humans do that. SICK.
Fascinating that a new Gallup poll finds that 41% of Americans describe themselves as conservative while only 21% describe themselves as liberal ... I guess that makes sense if conservative means moving in the direction of Nixonian Republicanism, which is pretty much where conservatives and the RINO elite started going off the rail. Nixon did more to expand the cause of the liberal agenda than any Democrat up to Obama could have hoped. Job well done, Dick.
you could die waiting for the end of the world..
entropy rules the universe so you should understand it very well..
those that seek power over others should be ignored
This article seems awfully one-minded for Charles Hugh Smith. Shouldn't he be positing both views like normal?
Since he didn't, I will: The other view is that government COULD do something, but for various reasons isn't. They could streamline regulations to be less onerous for business, while investing stimulus into useful infrastructure. At this time, I would suggest Energy Infrastructure would be the way to go with that, combined with an energy production and research program and a new space program, such as sending a manned mission to Mars within n the next 10 years.
Complete Yucca Mountain with a focus on extracting useful materials from the waste.
As a condition, they could require X% to be made in North America, so the new jobs are created here rather than in China. Perhaps a new conflict to keep young men busy; a real war on drugs with an occupation of Mexico perhaps, combined with building The Great Wall of America to keep illigal immigrants out, with detectors to sense for underground tunnels crossing the border.
With improved grids and more nuclear plants and renewable energy, more efficient consumption of energy, new technology from the space program, and possible breakthroughs in Thorium or Fusion technology, long-term nuclear storage, Clean Coal plants, this plan creates lots of short-term jobs to allow households and companies to deleverage, so the private sector can take over and grow from there, with the increasing supply of energy needed to achieve this.
Some of you may ponder the cost of this. A couple Trillion a year for 10 years should do it. Even if GDP growth lags during this timeframe, Japan demonstrates a 200% debt-to-GDP is possible at low interest rates, at least in the interim. After these programs, the private sector should be able to take the torch from there, and the government can run surpluses for a couple decades to get the budget back under control.
Some good points (though nothing new, not even in the context of the last 50 years), but CHS has one extremely annoying habit that rankles almost as much as when lard-ass losers use "we" to refer to their favorite professional sports conglomerate: He uses the term "Americans" as if everyone within these borders are fat-bootomed, pointy-headed, dipshitted reality TV addicts. The rest of us are indeed greatly outnumbered by this foul misbegotten hellspawn of genetic debris, but please to be at least making passing noe of the difference.
'Tis true, however, that this massive group is good reason to dread the near future. We can't rely on them now, so in a crisis, I have to advocate shooting first and fuck the questions. It's the same reason you should never drink to excess in public: expecting other people to do the right thing is always a guaranteed losing strategy.