Excerpt from This Isn't Just Another Crash, by Charles Hugh Smith
1. Households have never been so dependent on debt as a substitute for stagnating wages.
2. Real earnings (adjusted for inflation) have never been so stagnant for the bottom 90% for so long.
3. Corporations have never been so dependent on debt (selling bonds or taking on loans) to fund money-losing operations (see Netflix) or stock buybacks designed to saddle the company with debt service expenses to enrich insiders.
4. The stock market has never been so dependent on what amounts to fraud — stock buybacks — to push valuations higher.
5. The economy has never been so dependent on absurdly overvalued stock valuations to prop up pension funds and the spending of the top 10% who own 85% of all stocks, i.e. “the wealth effect.”
6. The economy and the stock market have never been so dependent on central bank free money for financiers and corporations, money creation for the few at the expense of the many, what amounts to an embezzlement scheme.
7. Federal statistics have never been so gamed, rigged or distorted to support a neo-feudal agenda of claiming a level of wide-spread prosperity that is entirely fictitious.
8. Major sectors of the economy have never been such rackets, i.e. cartels and quasi-monopolies that use obscure pricing and manipulation of government mandates to maximize profits while the quality and quantity of the goods and services they produce declines.
9. The economy has never been in such thrall to sociopaths who have mastered the exploitation of the letter of the law while completely overturning the spirit of the law.
10. Households and companies have never been so dependent on “free money” gained from asset appreciation based on speculation, not an actual increase in productivity or value.
11. The ascendancy of self-interest as the one organizing directive in politics and finance has never been so complete, and the resulting moral rot never more pervasive.
12. The dependence on fictitious capital masquerading as “wealth” has never been greater.
13. The dependence on simulacra, simulations and false fronts to hide the decay of trust, credibility, transparency and accountability has never been so pervasive and complete.
14. The corrupt linkage of political power, media ownership, “national security” agencies and corporate power has never been so widely accepted as “normal” and “unavoidable.”
15. Primary institutions such as higher education, healthcare and national defense have never been so dysfunctional, ineffective, sclerotic, resistant to reform or costly.
16. The economy has never been so dependent on constant central bank manipulation of the stock and housing markets.
17. The economy has never been so fragile or brittle, and so dependent on convenient fictions to stave off a crash in asset valuations.
18. Never before in U.S. history have the most valuable corporations all been engaged in selling goods and services that actively reduce productivity and human happiness.
Related:
ZH: "Unprecedented" - Companies Slashed Over 20 Million Jobs In April, ADP
Showing posts with label decline of the West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label decline of the West. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Friday, January 10, 2020
Boeing: Building Planes Designed by Clowns Supervised By Monkeys
Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. At Boeing Corp. madness has grown from the top down beginning years ago when the management decided in its wisdom to locate the headquarters staff in Chicago, several thousand miles from the main manufacturing plant in Seattle, WA.
Without a bunch of engineers, machinists, and electricians to bug them with the everyday problems of a manufacturing operation, the management was free to focus on financial engineering and other matters of real importance to the success of the company.
Having so little need of engineering expertise, the Board largely dispensed with engineers, until there was only one who remained, namely Dennis Muilenberg, CEO, President and Chairman of the Board.
But as of January 13, Boeing will have no aeronautical expertise whatever on the Board of Directors. Replacing Muelenberg as CEO, will be Dave Calhoun, a graduate in accounting and a published author. Calhoun's published works include:
Having so little need of engineering expertise, the Board largely dispensed with engineers, until there was only one who remained, namely Dennis Muilenberg, CEO, President and Chairman of the Board.
But as of January 13, Boeing will have no aeronautical expertise whatever on the Board of Directors. Replacing Muelenberg as CEO, will be Dave Calhoun, a graduate in accounting and a published author. Calhoun's published works include:
How Companies Win, and
Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What (Even when the planes you produce aren't safe? -- just asking)And he's a musician too, having issued, among other albums, a CD entitled:
Day drinkin'.So it's not so surprising to find that, in a batch of internal memos, Boeing was obliged to make public what an employee wrote of the Boeing 737MAX, namely, that it was:
| "designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys..." |
| "Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t." |
Related:
Moon of Alabama: A Year After The Second MAX Crashed Boeing Is Faced With Ruin
Zero Hedge: Congress Rips Boeing's "Culture Of Concealment" & FAA's 'Jeopardizing' Public In Scathing 737 MAX Report
CanSpeccy: Boeing Got the Monkey Management Virus from Jack Welch's GE
Zero Hedge: Internal Boeing Emails Claim 777X Shares MAX Problem
Zero Hedge: Boeing Mocked Lion Air "Idiots" For Requesting Extra Training For 737 MAX
"Now friggin Lion Air might need a sim to fly the MAX, ... because of their own stupidity." one Boeing employee wrote in June 2017
Zero Hedge: 30 Year Boeing Manager Says "Fly Something Else", Won't Fly on 787 Dreamliner
Canspeccy: What's Wrong With Boeing's 737MAX Airliner?
Canspeccy: Boeing, Going, Gone?
Canspeccy: Boeing's Deadly Penny-Pinching Stupidity
Friday, March 8, 2019
Why Religion Matters in the Age of Science
Here’s why a wise Darwinian need find no conflict between religious faith and pursuit of scientific truth. Indeed, it is a statement of why a wise evolutionist can be, and perhaps always should be, an exponent of religious faith:
This statement draws urgent attention to the role of religion in determining the fate of civilizations. What it asserts is that religious faith, where it exists, through its influence on the behavior of both individuals and organizations alters the prospects for survival of human groups, whether they be families, tribes, or nations.
Evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins who deride religion because it is based on propositions that are inconsistent with scientific truth make a mockery of their own claimed scientific expertise. There is no reason why a religious faith should be based on literal scientific truth any more than nursery rhymes, fairy tales or epic poetry should be based on literal scientific truth. In fact, religion, like nursery rhymes, fairy tales or epic poetry, would have little appeal without an element of the supernatural. What matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is how faith, or for that matter nursery rhymes, fairy tales, or epic poetry, serves to shape individual and group behavior.
In abandoning Christianity, the West has abandoned belief in absolute values of right and wrong for the Humean proposition that "honesty is the best policy but the wise knave will take advantage of every exception." In fact, the condition of the post-Christian West, indeed the anti-Christian West, is even worse than that. Today, far from considering it knavish to be relentlessly self-serving, many consider it stupid to be otherwise. We know where that led the Soviet Union, but benighted rulers in the West unhesitatingly lead in the same direction.
That is not to say that all religions are equal. Some religious beliefs can no doubt be highly detrimental to human group survival, the Ebionite heresy, for example, which eschewed marriaged and child raising. There is little reason to doubt, however, that much of what has been best in Western civilization was the work of Christians and often inspired by religious ideals.
| Without a religious dimension, a commitment to human freedom is likely to be attenuated, too weak to make sacrifices in its name. Europe’s political elites especially, but its citizens as well, believe in freedom and democracy of course, but they are reluctant to put the “good life” on hold and put lives on the line when freedom is in need of a champion — in the Balkans, the Sudan, Darfur or, in the Middle East. The good of human freedom, by European lights, must be weighed against the risk and cost of actually fighting for it. It is no longer transcendent, absolute. In such a world, governed by a narrow utilitarian calculus, sacrifice is rare, churches go unattended and over time the spiritual capital that brought forth all that we know as the West is at risk of being lost. Let me name five things that might turn the tables and perhaps, even begin to, if I was so bold to suggest, revive Europe. First, coming to grips with its unique place in world history and renewing the importance and source of those original ideals. Second, some comprehension that culture matters and Europe’s culture has been the most formative for Western-Christian civilization, what used to be termed, Christendom. Third, accepting the social, political, economic and especially military responsibility of a great continent, now more and more united. Fourth, realizing the too evident demographic realities and Islamization and stepping up to reverse them so as to avoid an eventual Eurabia. And finally, and most critically in my estimation as a Christian, sparking the second great Reformation, spiritually such that there is a wider recognition of transcendence and a moving of the spirit of God across the whole continent from the western most shores of Portugal, Ireland and Britain to the eastern most steppes of Russia. I pray every day for such transformation and reawakening. Ted Malloch: The New Dark Age of European Progressivism |
This statement draws urgent attention to the role of religion in determining the fate of civilizations. What it asserts is that religious faith, where it exists, through its influence on the behavior of both individuals and organizations alters the prospects for survival of human groups, whether they be families, tribes, or nations.
Evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins who deride religion because it is based on propositions that are inconsistent with scientific truth make a mockery of their own claimed scientific expertise. There is no reason why a religious faith should be based on literal scientific truth any more than nursery rhymes, fairy tales or epic poetry should be based on literal scientific truth. In fact, religion, like nursery rhymes, fairy tales or epic poetry, would have little appeal without an element of the supernatural. What matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is how faith, or for that matter nursery rhymes, fairy tales, or epic poetry, serves to shape individual and group behavior.
In abandoning Christianity, the West has abandoned belief in absolute values of right and wrong for the Humean proposition that "honesty is the best policy but the wise knave will take advantage of every exception." In fact, the condition of the post-Christian West, indeed the anti-Christian West, is even worse than that. Today, far from considering it knavish to be relentlessly self-serving, many consider it stupid to be otherwise. We know where that led the Soviet Union, but benighted rulers in the West unhesitatingly lead in the same direction.
That is not to say that all religions are equal. Some religious beliefs can no doubt be highly detrimental to human group survival, the Ebionite heresy, for example, which eschewed marriaged and child raising. There is little reason to doubt, however, that much of what has been best in Western civilization was the work of Christians and often inspired by religious ideals.
Thursday, December 20, 2018
Crapademia, No. 79: The Higher Education System That Rates All Students Above Average
British university degree exam results are ranked on a six-point scale: First, Upper Second, Lower Second, Third, Pass and Fail. In my day, first class degrees were somewhat rare. In my class of over 100, just one first class degree was awarded (mine — to take this opportunity to boast of the fact, albeit anonymously). Of upper seconds, I recall only a couple. So the lower three grades accounted for well over 90% of the class (good folks, incidentally, one of whom was recently awarded a knighthood by her Majesty the Queen). Today, apparently, things are different, with 78% of British university students graduating with a first or upper second class degree.
What makes this vast improvement in university grades over a period of 50 years particularly remarkable is that, over that period of time, the proportion of the school-leaving population receiving a university education has increased from two or three percent to probably more than half today. In other words, the majority of students, including a substantial number who must as a matter of logical necessity be of below average academic ability, are being graduated by the British universities as scholars of high academic standing. How can that be possible? It is an obvious absurdity beyond the comprehension, apparently, of our academic elite.
Apparently, some universities in Britain have attempted to deal with grade inflation by creating a new grade above First Class, namely First Class Starred. But why only one star? Why not have five classes denoted by one to five stars, while dropping the traditional classification with its weird segregation of the second class into uppers and lowers, thereby, presumably, to save the lowers from the humiliation of being classified as Third Class, while allowing those of the fourth class to pass for Third Class, and those of the Fifth Class to pass as having, well, just passed.
Whether new nomenclature would put an end to ludicrous grade inflation is open to question. However, it would certainly seem better to graduate with a single star than a mere pass, while two stars seems very promising compared with "a Third."
Related:
CanSpeccy: The Rot at the Head of the University
What makes this vast improvement in university grades over a period of 50 years particularly remarkable is that, over that period of time, the proportion of the school-leaving population receiving a university education has increased from two or three percent to probably more than half today. In other words, the majority of students, including a substantial number who must as a matter of logical necessity be of below average academic ability, are being graduated by the British universities as scholars of high academic standing. How can that be possible? It is an obvious absurdity beyond the comprehension, apparently, of our academic elite.
Apparently, some universities in Britain have attempted to deal with grade inflation by creating a new grade above First Class, namely First Class Starred. But why only one star? Why not have five classes denoted by one to five stars, while dropping the traditional classification with its weird segregation of the second class into uppers and lowers, thereby, presumably, to save the lowers from the humiliation of being classified as Third Class, while allowing those of the fourth class to pass for Third Class, and those of the Fifth Class to pass as having, well, just passed.
Whether new nomenclature would put an end to ludicrous grade inflation is open to question. However, it would certainly seem better to graduate with a single star than a mere pass, while two stars seems very promising compared with "a Third."
Related:
CanSpeccy: The Rot at the Head of the University
Sunday, February 18, 2018
Niall Ferguson: The Decline of the West Explained – Not
First published by CanSpeccy on Wordpress, June 20, 2013
In his latest book, pot boiler, extended magazine article in hard covers for 28 bucks, whatever, Niall Ferguson sets out to explain why the nations of the West, so long dominant in scientific and technical skills, wealth and power, are now stagnating economically as China and much of the rest of the Third World rise in power and prosperity at an unprecedented rate.
The trouble, thinks Feguson, is the problem that Adam Smith identified as the cause of China’s economic stagnation in the 18th century: it is, he argues, our institutions. Our institutions of democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, and civil society, he says, have degenerated, resulting in the the concentration of wealth, the emergence of monopolies, a decline in educational standards and other ills that have resulted in a loss of Western competitiveness.
In form, Ferguson’s book is reminiscent of those vaguely interesting and generally incoherent lectures to which so many have been exposed during undergraduate education: a few interesting facts and ideas with many loose ends, leaving unlimited scope for further debate and literary output.
But as an account of the stagnation and relative decline of the West, Ferguson’s effort is almost entirely futile other than as an exercise in misdirection, distraction and cover-up.
If the institutions of democracy in the West are degenerating, those of the extraordinarily dynamic China are essentially non-existent. If the rule of law in America is increasingly the “rule of lawyers,” in China it is a concept barely even understood. If free and fair competition in Western economies has diminished as capital has been concentrated in fewer hands, China’ state capitalism is the complete antithesis of the free and fair market that underlay Adam Smith’s invisible hand. As for the the institutions of civil society, the West is still incomparably free compared with China where even association for the purpose of religious worship is prohibited.
So while Western institutions are in decline, China’s are absolute crap. Yet still China’s economy booms as the West stagnates. Clearly, then, there’s more to Western economic decline than the inadequacy of some vaguely defined sets of institutions.
To discover what has stultified the West, it is necessary to consider what drives economic expansion, and the answer to that is quite simple: increased investment and production. But you cannot have increased investment and production unless there are markets for the increased output, and there will only be markets for the increased output if the new production is competitively priced. But how can new output in the West be competitively priced when the legally mandated minimum wage in America and Europe is between ten and twenty or more times the rate paid factory workers in the Third World?
This is the simple, obvious brute fact that explains Western economic stagnation, to which Niall Ferguson, like any other tenured professor at a top US or UK university, must carefully avoid drawing attention.
The consequences of the fact of Western wage uncompetitiveness with the Third World are as obvious as this one basic fact itself.
Once the Uraguay Round of the Gatt (which led to the creation of the World Trade Organization) was signed by the Western states in 1994, the Western economies were on the skids.
It took a while, naturally, to export Western capital and technology, accumulated through the sweat of generations, to the Third World.
It took a while, naturally, to construct the factories, build the research centers, train the engineers, biotechnologists, the computer scientists, and the millions of production line workers in China, India, Bangladesh and a hundred other countries before the Third World was in a position to take the jobs of tens of millions of Western workers.
But the system’s in place now and the jobs have been bleeding away rapidly during the last ten years, the loss masked in part by housing bubbles that stimulated the construction industry, which is among the few that cannot be off-shored wholesale.
But now the real estate bubbles have burst or are bursting and the shrinking Western economies are plagued by deflation, falling incomes, rapidly rising welfare costs and unemployment, and ominous rumblings of social discontent. Add to the mix mass immigration of culturally disparate elements, which displaces from the workforce the least competent members of the indigenous population, and you have a recipe for both economic decline and revolution.
Hyperventilating about the degeneration of our social, legal and political institutions or getting everyone to join the Lions Club won’t solve the problem created by the treason of our elites, who have sold out the working people of America and Europe for the benefit of the money power, which has gained enormous profits through the success of globalized corporations such as IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and many others.
The only remaining question of real interest is whether the money power will get away with the genocide of the Western nations in its bid for a system of global financial feudalism. And an answer to that question, we can be sure, will not be made available by Niall Ferguson or any other member of the academic elite until such time as the question has become entirely academic.
In his latest book, pot boiler, extended magazine article in hard covers for 28 bucks, whatever, Niall Ferguson sets out to explain why the nations of the West, so long dominant in scientific and technical skills, wealth and power, are now stagnating economically as China and much of the rest of the Third World rise in power and prosperity at an unprecedented rate.
The trouble, thinks Feguson, is the problem that Adam Smith identified as the cause of China’s economic stagnation in the 18th century: it is, he argues, our institutions. Our institutions of democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, and civil society, he says, have degenerated, resulting in the the concentration of wealth, the emergence of monopolies, a decline in educational standards and other ills that have resulted in a loss of Western competitiveness.
In form, Ferguson’s book is reminiscent of those vaguely interesting and generally incoherent lectures to which so many have been exposed during undergraduate education: a few interesting facts and ideas with many loose ends, leaving unlimited scope for further debate and literary output.
But as an account of the stagnation and relative decline of the West, Ferguson’s effort is almost entirely futile other than as an exercise in misdirection, distraction and cover-up.
If the institutions of democracy in the West are degenerating, those of the extraordinarily dynamic China are essentially non-existent. If the rule of law in America is increasingly the “rule of lawyers,” in China it is a concept barely even understood. If free and fair competition in Western economies has diminished as capital has been concentrated in fewer hands, China’ state capitalism is the complete antithesis of the free and fair market that underlay Adam Smith’s invisible hand. As for the the institutions of civil society, the West is still incomparably free compared with China where even association for the purpose of religious worship is prohibited.
So while Western institutions are in decline, China’s are absolute crap. Yet still China’s economy booms as the West stagnates. Clearly, then, there’s more to Western economic decline than the inadequacy of some vaguely defined sets of institutions.
To discover what has stultified the West, it is necessary to consider what drives economic expansion, and the answer to that is quite simple: increased investment and production. But you cannot have increased investment and production unless there are markets for the increased output, and there will only be markets for the increased output if the new production is competitively priced. But how can new output in the West be competitively priced when the legally mandated minimum wage in America and Europe is between ten and twenty or more times the rate paid factory workers in the Third World?
This is the simple, obvious brute fact that explains Western economic stagnation, to which Niall Ferguson, like any other tenured professor at a top US or UK university, must carefully avoid drawing attention.
The consequences of the fact of Western wage uncompetitiveness with the Third World are as obvious as this one basic fact itself.
Once the Uraguay Round of the Gatt (which led to the creation of the World Trade Organization) was signed by the Western states in 1994, the Western economies were on the skids.
It took a while, naturally, to export Western capital and technology, accumulated through the sweat of generations, to the Third World.
 |
Collapsed Bangladesh factory where Loblaws of Canada (62% owned by
billionaire George Weston) outsourced manufacture of its "Joe Fresh" line
of apparel. More than one thousand workers died in the collapse, but as
George Weston remarked, they need the work. Garment workers in Canada
presumably do not need the work, or if they do, would be much more
expensive to hire.
|
But the system’s in place now and the jobs have been bleeding away rapidly during the last ten years, the loss masked in part by housing bubbles that stimulated the construction industry, which is among the few that cannot be off-shored wholesale.
But now the real estate bubbles have burst or are bursting and the shrinking Western economies are plagued by deflation, falling incomes, rapidly rising welfare costs and unemployment, and ominous rumblings of social discontent. Add to the mix mass immigration of culturally disparate elements, which displaces from the workforce the least competent members of the indigenous population, and you have a recipe for both economic decline and revolution.
Hyperventilating about the degeneration of our social, legal and political institutions or getting everyone to join the Lions Club won’t solve the problem created by the treason of our elites, who have sold out the working people of America and Europe for the benefit of the money power, which has gained enormous profits through the success of globalized corporations such as IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and many others.
The only remaining question of real interest is whether the money power will get away with the genocide of the Western nations in its bid for a system of global financial feudalism. And an answer to that question, we can be sure, will not be made available by Niall Ferguson or any other member of the academic elite until such time as the question has become entirely academic.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
What Accounts for the Past 500 Years of Western Global Dominance? Race, Culture or Blind Chance?
By Canspeccy
I have no sympathy for the imperialist enthusiasm of Oxford cum Harvard and Stanford Professor, Niall Ferguson. I am prompted, however, to come to his defense in the face of a viciously false allegation of white supremacism by a Pankaj Mishra, a cousin-in-law to the pseudo-Conservative and imperialist war criminal British Prime Minister, David Cameron.
Mishra's contemptible smear was published by the London Review of Books under the guise of a review of Ferguson's book, Civilization: The West and the Rest.
Mishra is a skilled exponent of defamation by insinuation.
 |
Mishra's contemptible smear was published by the London Review of Books under the guise of a review of Ferguson's book, Civilization: The West and the Rest.
Mishra is a skilled exponent of defamation by insinuation.
Friday, January 15, 2016
How America's system of education is being destroyed
By CanSpeccy
The United States, according to Chris Hedges, is destroying its system of education. A nation that destroys its systems of education, he writes, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. ..."
Hedges is surely right. But it seems equally certain that the process of destroying the American system of education is being undertaken without malice, intent or even awareness. System failure, whether in education, public transportation, healthcare or any other complex social arrangement is the inevitable result of evolutionary societal change.
In the beginning, education is rare and hard to come by. Those who get it are mostly people of exceptional talent and capacity for hard work. They are selected for their peculiar aptitude and schooled by a tiny group of committed scholars. They achieve brilliantly in a world of near universal ignorance.
Then every ambitious person wants their child to get an education. Taxes are raised, schools are built, thousands of teachers are hired. Some of the teachers are mediocre at best. Many of the students are not bright, some have no interest in learning. So this generation is mainly fit only for jobs in the public sector. Public demand (demand for public sector jobs, that is, not public sector services) results in a huge expansion of the bureaucracy, including the educational establishment.
Then comes the era of mass education. Everyone must have a university degree and a white collar job. Most school teachers are now incompetent. Most of them never teach: they become part of the management team. Someone invents the "bubble test", which can be marked by machine without the intervention of human intelligence at any point. Many university professors are ignorant and lazy. The students are mostly at uni only to socialize. The brightest are disgusted by their experience of "education" and shun an academic career.
Eventually everyone has a university degree and no one knows anything at all. Even the President of the United States.
In time, the economy collapses under the weight of an ever expanding burden of useless bureaucratic activity. Educational institutions decay for lack of funding. Furniture is removed for fuel wood, books for toilet paper. Buildings fall into decay and gradually disappear. Learning is despised and eventually forgotten. A new dark age ensues.
After a thousand years or so, some clever monk or hermit stumbles on a copy of Newton's "Principia," or a book of Napierian logs. They figure it out and tell other people. Some of the brightest students of this ancient wisdom form colleges where they train a few especially clever pupils. One of the newly educated elite unifies quantum theory and relativity. Practical men apply the new knowledge, making possible, among many wonders, faster than light travel, the generation of electricity from thunderstorms, and the renutrification of shit.
Then every ambitious person wants their child to get an education. Taxes are raised, schools are built, thousands of teachers are hired. Some of the teachers are mediocre ...
(During a Presidential election year in America, this piece, first published: 4/14/2011, seems worth re-airing)
The United States, according to Chris Hedges, is destroying its system of education. A nation that destroys its systems of education, he writes, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. ..."
Hedges is surely right. But it seems equally certain that the process of destroying the American system of education is being undertaken without malice, intent or even awareness. System failure, whether in education, public transportation, healthcare or any other complex social arrangement is the inevitable result of evolutionary societal change.
In the beginning, education is rare and hard to come by. Those who get it are mostly people of exceptional talent and capacity for hard work. They are selected for their peculiar aptitude and schooled by a tiny group of committed scholars. They achieve brilliantly in a world of near universal ignorance.
Then every ambitious person wants their child to get an education. Taxes are raised, schools are built, thousands of teachers are hired. Some of the teachers are mediocre at best. Many of the students are not bright, some have no interest in learning. So this generation is mainly fit only for jobs in the public sector. Public demand (demand for public sector jobs, that is, not public sector services) results in a huge expansion of the bureaucracy, including the educational establishment.
Then comes the era of mass education. Everyone must have a university degree and a white collar job. Most school teachers are now incompetent. Most of them never teach: they become part of the management team. Someone invents the "bubble test", which can be marked by machine without the intervention of human intelligence at any point. Many university professors are ignorant and lazy. The students are mostly at uni only to socialize. The brightest are disgusted by their experience of "education" and shun an academic career.
Eventually everyone has a university degree and no one knows anything at all. Even the President of the United States.
In time, the economy collapses under the weight of an ever expanding burden of useless bureaucratic activity. Educational institutions decay for lack of funding. Furniture is removed for fuel wood, books for toilet paper. Buildings fall into decay and gradually disappear. Learning is despised and eventually forgotten. A new dark age ensues.
After a thousand years or so, some clever monk or hermit stumbles on a copy of Newton's "Principia," or a book of Napierian logs. They figure it out and tell other people. Some of the brightest students of this ancient wisdom form colleges where they train a few especially clever pupils. One of the newly educated elite unifies quantum theory and relativity. Practical men apply the new knowledge, making possible, among many wonders, faster than light travel, the generation of electricity from thunderstorms, and the renutrification of shit.
Then every ambitious person wants their child to get an education. Taxes are raised, schools are built, thousands of teachers are hired. Some of the teachers are mediocre ...
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Civilizational Collapse: The West Versus the Hypercapitalist Entity
The other day, I wrote of "the self-hating racism of those experiencing civilizational collapse."
Afterwards, I began to wonder what exactly "civilizational collapse" is, and whether that really is what is happening to the West?
Here I attempt to answer those questions.
But first, what is a civilization?
Many definitions have been offered, but none seems to have been generally accepted.
Yet no one doubts that the term "civilization" as applied to the way of life of a community has meaning. Here, then, I offer the following definition, which corresponds closely with the ideas of the American Historian, Carroll Quigley, author of The Evolution of Civilizations.
If that is civilization, what is "civilizational collapse?"
The dynamics of civilizational transformation follow one of two courses: evolutionary or revolutionary.
Evolutionary change results most often from the emergence of new institutions serving new functions or performing old functions in different ways, or through the corruption of institutions, which then cease to perform their intended purpose well or at all.
Revolutionary transformation usually follows a period of decline due to the failure or corruption of one or more of the institutions comprising the social infrastructure. The immiseration and impoverishment that such decline brings about may result in a violent transformation of the institutions of government, which, in turn, may lead to wholesale reconstruction of other social institutions.
Because the decline or corruption of institutions tends to weaken the war-making power of the state, civilizational decline leads to the eventual subjugation of the state by another, and the wholesale transformation of its institutions under the direction of the conqueror.
This was is how the British and other European empires transformed much of the world, how the United States transformed the civilization of Japan after World War II and how the United States, today, is attempting to transform Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries.
What we see, then, is that Western civilization, which is to say the civilization originating in Europe as a successor to the civilizations of Rome and ancient Greece, which in 1914 extended its influence over most of the globe, is after the catastrophe of the World Wars, once again asserting its influence globally.
Why then talk of civilizational collapse just as Western civilization again aspires to universal domination?
As the Western states seek to project increasing power throughout the Middle-East, Africa and Asia, their own institutions have been infiltrated, and taken captive, by an alien power that I will call the "hypercapitalist entity."
This power, comprising an informal confederation of several hundred business corporations, now owns the governments, the media, and directly or indirectly many other social institutions throughout the West.
It is this entity, the money power, that has transformed the West from a collection of proud, dynamic and competitive nations that regarded individual liberty, democracy and the rule of law as among its highest attainments, into propagandized, humiliated and intimidated units of an increasingly tyrannical globalist empire.
The drive for global empire in the service of the money power has corrupted virtually all the institutions of Western civilization. Governments are democratic only in name; the rule of law gives way to a regime of universal surveillance, detention without charge or trial and assassination by remote control; Christianity, which provided the moral underpinnings of Western government and law, is publicly reviled and officially trivialized; education has become a channel for the indoctrination of a once free people; medicine is complicit in the mass slaughter of healthy children in utero and the institutionalization of euthanasia; the outsourcing of services and the off-shoring of production has robbed tens of millions in the West of their livlihood; the entertainment industry makes fiction into history; the news media make heroes and role models of corporate psychopaths, war criminals and porn stars, while promoting racial, cultural and national self-denigration, and stuffing our immortal souls with gossip, envy and greed; and the state, through taxation and legislation, systematically undermines the family, the essential institution for the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, faith, and ethics.
Western civilization has been largely destroyed from within. Should the West triumph in the domination of the World, it will be a hollow victory, for the people will have been subjugated by a tiny, hidden and criminal elite, who regard humanity, themselves apart, as animals to be bred, culled, and ruthlessly managed as any other domestic creature.
The triumph of the West will mean the death of humanity as we know it.
Afterwards, I began to wonder what exactly "civilizational collapse" is, and whether that really is what is happening to the West?
Here I attempt to answer those questions.
But first, what is a civilization?
Many definitions have been offered, but none seems to have been generally accepted.
Yet no one doubts that the term "civilization" as applied to the way of life of a community has meaning. Here, then, I offer the following definition, which corresponds closely with the ideas of the American Historian, Carroll Quigley, author of The Evolution of Civilizations.
Civilization, n.The central role of institutions in shaping and perpetuating the ways of life that constitute a civilization means that civilizations are coincident with political jurisdictions or states, although many states may share the same basic civilization.
A multiplicity of ways of life constrained and perpetuated by institutions of government, law, religion, education, war, medicine, production and entertainment, by conditions of climate and geography, and by inter-generational transmission of knowledge, faith, ethics, superstition and prejudice.
If that is civilization, what is "civilizational collapse?"
The dynamics of civilizational transformation follow one of two courses: evolutionary or revolutionary.
Evolutionary change results most often from the emergence of new institutions serving new functions or performing old functions in different ways, or through the corruption of institutions, which then cease to perform their intended purpose well or at all.
Revolutionary transformation usually follows a period of decline due to the failure or corruption of one or more of the institutions comprising the social infrastructure. The immiseration and impoverishment that such decline brings about may result in a violent transformation of the institutions of government, which, in turn, may lead to wholesale reconstruction of other social institutions.
Because the decline or corruption of institutions tends to weaken the war-making power of the state, civilizational decline leads to the eventual subjugation of the state by another, and the wholesale transformation of its institutions under the direction of the conqueror.
This was is how the British and other European empires transformed much of the world, how the United States transformed the civilization of Japan after World War II and how the United States, today, is attempting to transform Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries.
What we see, then, is that Western civilization, which is to say the civilization originating in Europe as a successor to the civilizations of Rome and ancient Greece, which in 1914 extended its influence over most of the globe, is after the catastrophe of the World Wars, once again asserting its influence globally.
Why then talk of civilizational collapse just as Western civilization again aspires to universal domination?
As the Western states seek to project increasing power throughout the Middle-East, Africa and Asia, their own institutions have been infiltrated, and taken captive, by an alien power that I will call the "hypercapitalist entity."
This power, comprising an informal confederation of several hundred business corporations, now owns the governments, the media, and directly or indirectly many other social institutions throughout the West.
It is this entity, the money power, that has transformed the West from a collection of proud, dynamic and competitive nations that regarded individual liberty, democracy and the rule of law as among its highest attainments, into propagandized, humiliated and intimidated units of an increasingly tyrannical globalist empire.
The drive for global empire in the service of the money power has corrupted virtually all the institutions of Western civilization. Governments are democratic only in name; the rule of law gives way to a regime of universal surveillance, detention without charge or trial and assassination by remote control; Christianity, which provided the moral underpinnings of Western government and law, is publicly reviled and officially trivialized; education has become a channel for the indoctrination of a once free people; medicine is complicit in the mass slaughter of healthy children in utero and the institutionalization of euthanasia; the outsourcing of services and the off-shoring of production has robbed tens of millions in the West of their livlihood; the entertainment industry makes fiction into history; the news media make heroes and role models of corporate psychopaths, war criminals and porn stars, while promoting racial, cultural and national self-denigration, and stuffing our immortal souls with gossip, envy and greed; and the state, through taxation and legislation, systematically undermines the family, the essential institution for the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, faith, and ethics.
Western civilization has been largely destroyed from within. Should the West triumph in the domination of the World, it will be a hollow victory, for the people will have been subjugated by a tiny, hidden and criminal elite, who regard humanity, themselves apart, as animals to be bred, culled, and ruthlessly managed as any other domestic creature.
The triumph of the West will mean the death of humanity as we know it.
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