People who hang around here and read this blog from time to time know that I’ll tend to criticize people in public life, purported leaders, who rely on what I call “old-school” world models to guide their choices of what we do to deal with the current crises we are facing. Virtually the whole class of political leadership in the USA/the globe rely on a rigid kind of thinking you can call “linear thinking” which includes cyclical thinking about our present economic and resource crises.
In other words, we’ve had credit crunches, recessions, boom-and-bust in real estate, high oil prices, all these problems before, and if you just give it time, everything cycles back around and things go on as “normal”, much to the benefit of the global ruling class, fortunately for you if you’re part of that class.
I’ve linked two separate articles here that raise the question of whether the current economic storm we’re heading into is merely more of the old-school, usual fare, or something new.
Blue Moon Economics by Kurt Cobb asks
“Are we merely experiencing a cyclical,
albeit once-in-a-blue- moon event that will resolve itself in lower
prices for all the commodities that make our modern society
possible…or are we facing a long-term struggle for the declining
resources of the globe, a struggle that will potentially endanger our
lives and completely transform our society?”
While James Howard Kunstler’s
Black Swans Everywhere carries on Kunstler’s perspective that the “peak oil thing” is not going to behave as the old, cyclical crises of old: There is something indeed wholly new going on here, and the USA is in for a new kind of oil shock:
“The bottom line is that high prices for oil is hardly the only thing
America has to worry about. Pretty soon the US will have to worry
about getting the oil at any price — meaning, we’re in for shortages
and supply disruptions sooner rather than later.”
Myself, I tend to believe that Terence McKenna’s “Novelty Wave” theory has something to it. In the course of human history, inflection points or important moments in time occur which are actually novel–they’re not a cyclical repetition of some former phenomenon, but something that has never been seen before. And after the novelty event occurs, the world cannot continue in the way it did before.
For Generation Zero, turning 18 late in 2012, if this economic crisis is not just a “blue moon” and there really are flocks of black swans everywhere, there will be no possibility of living the way of life most of us grew up taking for granted. Events now happening will condition their lives into a kind of permanent crisis-mitigation mode. Sort of like, All Katrina Relief, all the time.
To grasp novelty, one needs to discard linear thinking and go fractal, embrace the complexity and chaos afoot in nature as well as human events, hang loose, eat your favorite hypotheses and paradigms for breakfast, and get on with dealing with whatever change is at hand. The end of the petro-economy, for one good example. Or the end of the usury-based debt-slavery system of illusory prosperity for another.
Unfortunately for us, people in public office do not subscribe this this novelty view of history, but rather, tend to cling to the past. When an economic system suddenly breaks down or collapses violently, they merely pull out the old toolbox and try to tweak the system back to “normal” functioning.
But if what we’re seeing is not just something that happens “once in a blue moon” but is truly a “black swan” occurrence, none of the old tools (for example, the Federal Reserve Board cutting rates repeatedly just as Alan Greenspan did in the wake of the 9-11 events) are going to suffice. In fact, just doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results is–well, you’ve all read the supposed quip from Albert Einstein about what that is.
Bobby G.