“We have to make other arrangements for living. We have to behave differently in the Western World, but particularly in North America. We’re going to have to do farming differently; we’re going to have to do commerce and trade differently; we’re going to have to do schooling differently; we’re going to have to learn to make some things in our own countries again….”
More by James Kunstler at the Rude Awakening.
Comment:
Exurbanization — the trek to small towns and rural areas, enabled by the Internet – is one development along these lines. I think others include the rise of what Daniel Pink calls the free agent nation — people opting for working for themselves, instead of for others; for self-sufficiency over consumerism; for certain forms of survivalism.
I am not overly pessimistic about recession. I guess, like many people in the middle class, who saw a dramatic decline in living standards in the last few years, I have got used to adjusting to things. And I have found that “doing without” is not only not scary – it’s positively liberating…and creative. Nothing like learning how to forage for fenders at Junk Yard Dog or do cordon bleu cooking on a ramen noodles budget.
One of the arguments we (Bonner and I) make in “Mobs” is that people don’t really need a lot of the stuff they think they do. It’s all relative. A lot of it is simply status. We make quite a thesis of that and it’s something I fervently believe. Take college education. Having waded through a few degrees myself, I can assure you that most of that knowledge – all, I would say — can be got much cheaper and faster in other ways. Hanging out with intelligent people and working with other people have useful aspects to them, for sure, but on the whole, unless you are in some of the sciences , engineering, or medicine, the negatives exceed the positives.
Somethings get ruined – perhaps permanently – by education. Intuition, street smarts, independent thinking. Then you get a nation that will let any expert tell them anything. Just what’s led us into the financial and military mess we are in now.
Get the book. Not just because it will help me eat (that too). But it really does put the picture together – financial and socio-economic. Don’t fall for the guff. We are not that helpless. We don’t need politicians and pundits to run our lives….
Lila, I have no doubt that you can adjust to things. So can I and millions of people, especially if you have a science degree but survived the encapsulation of your thoughts by institution such as universities. It is the Google millionaire type of people, who will have the hard time.
After reading Kunstler’s Long Emergency, I couldn’t sleep for few nights. Being an Agricultural Engineer, it was a rude awakening for me. During one of those nights, a thought came to me as a half awake dream that there is not enough fuel left to bring the US and Australian troops back home. That’s how American imperialism ended. Now I feel good when I get any fact that we are going to finish fossil fuel soon.
P.S. Your book; Mobs, Messiahs and Market is still not available in book stores in Sydney.
Dara –
Thanks for writing. I will let Wiley know about availability in book stores there immediately.
I have nothing against google millionaires. It’s the central banks, the financial professionals (some) and the people in government in cahoots (what is a cahoot and how do you get into it??) with them whom I blame.
I think capitalism is not a zero-sum proposition, but everyone, supposed free marketers and socialists both — behaves as if it is….
LR
The problem with education is that it isn’t education, it’s credentialization. It doesn’t give you an education, it gives you a credential. Consequently, people pay attention to credentials instead of knowledge because 1) they’re programmed to value credentials and 2) they don’t have the tools to distinguish knowledge from crap.
That’s very true. Studies show that what people like is heavily influenced by what other people think. People like quite a variety of things until they find out what experts or their peers think…then they start preferring what they are told is more popular or better. We becomes products of conditioning in classrooms…and elsewhere.
It’s hard to be completely free of conditioning, but we can try, and we can certainly not take it lying down when people tell us what we ought to think and what’s beyond the pale. Especially when our consciences and good sense tell us something else.
Oh, and Wiley tells me books are usually available in Australia about 8 weeks after they come out here. I have no idea why that long..
Also, Kunstler is a bit off. People have always wanted something for nothing. What has changed is that people no longer consider nothing to be nothing. In the popular mind the $1 spent on the lottery ticket and the time it takes to pick the numbers is an investment that fully justifies a $1,000,000 pay-off. This change in the rank and file should come as no surprise. For decades now the financial leadership in the US has been justifying huge returns for marginal effort, whether it was brokerage houses raking in commissions from churn, M&A firms using OPM (Other People’s Money) to skim the cream from take-and-break LBOs, or CEOs making millions while their companies circled the drain. With a steady diet of leadership like this, is it any wonder the masses have concluded that all they need do id mail it in?
Yes, the relationship between mass thinking and elite propaganda is circuitous ( rereading this, I mean circular….)…you wonder which drives which at the end.
Which is why deconstructing propaganda has to go along with strengthening people’s powers of judgment, emotional self-control, and critical thinking. If people would just wise up enough, propaganda would have no effect. It wouldl collapse, as it did in the Soviet Union — except as the butt of jokes.
Initially, of course, people outside the mainstream are going to be classified as deviants, but how long can you keep doing that? Pretty soon, regular people will begin to catch on and see that what Greenspan, for eg., said just 3 years ago is vastly different from what he is saying now as he pushes his book.
Or, that many of the prowar people have jumped ship. Or that the people who said the war would be a humanitarian and financial disaster and that we were living on borrowed time and money…they were right all along. And maybe they are right about other things too…
Deconstructing the propaganda machine will be a difficult task. Few understand how the machine works. They believe that the newspaper or the evening news is the product and they are the consumers, when in fact THEY are the product and the advertisers are the consumers. The media’s object is to continue producing product (audience) for their consumers (advertisers). Given that, it isn’t hard to see why people are served pablum intended to keep them in line.
Well put. Although you have to admit the relationship is symbiotic.
Both consume each other. I don’t think people should be absolved so easily from their culpability in allowing themselves to be manipulated.
By being indiscriminate in consuming, consumers also shape what manufacturers produce – they lower standards and create a vicious cycle.
Oh, I’m not absolving them, I’m just noting the difficulty in moving from what is to what ought to be. I believe this move will require fighting against a basic element of human nature. I believe Erich Fromm was right in “Escape from Freedom”: The overwhelming majority of humanity takes every significant opportunity from cradle to grave to divest itself of all meaningful responsibility, foisting it on any shaman or fuehrer or pundit at hand and then crawling into the nearest womb.
You said it. People are a good deal more powerful than they think.