Welcome back everyone.
January was a busy time, just as I expected. It is no exaggeration to say that it has been the most tedious and labor intensive month I’ve had in seven years of teaching. But as my hands were busy my mind and soul continued to grow, and so I return to you one month later, exhausted in bone and body, but thriving amidst the chaos.
I watched a movie last night, Don’t Look Up. One of those movies which tries to sneak in activist commentary under a veneer of entertainment.
Don’t Look Up is OK if you are watching for mere entertainment, but if you can, ignore the climate change allegory the movie is really about. People, this is ham fisted propaganda, plain and simple… and anyone with discernment can spot it for what it is from a mile away.
So in case I have to make myself clear, if you’re asking me what I think is the main issue of the day, climate change does not even register on my horizon.
I don’t view it as a serious issue. On my list of things to worry about, corruption in my country, the continued wellbeing of my friends and family, cultural degeneracy, what I’m having for dinner are much more deserving of my time.
The climate has always been changing. Life goes on. Life finds a way to adapt or it doesn’t. Thinking that the feeble scratching of ants on an organism’s surface will kill the organism is deluded thinking.
Rumours of Earth’s impending demise are vastly overblown.
The Earth has survived asteroid bombardments, ruthless solar radiation, periods much of it was on fire, periods much of it was covered in ice, enough of its mass has been sheared off that we have the largest moon in the solar system relative to planetary mass – and yet, the biosphere we call Home found a way to endure. To prosper. To thrive.
The Earth will be fine.
We hairless monkeys, however, will not.
The true issue is twofold, and these are issues no one wants to discuss because admitting it would mean admitting that we chose this. We did this to ourselves. And no amount of greenwashing or carbon credits or technological hopium can dig us out.
The only two issues worth seriously contemplating for any sane human being are: catabolic collapse, and the decay of social institutions. John Michael Greer, Gail Tverberg and Dmitry Orlov are among those who have gone before me in paving the way to realising the shape of the century to come. And unlike climate change, this is isn’t an issue that is halfway to happening but always manages to be staved off.
Gentle readers, the collapse of our present high industrial civilization is happening. Has been happening. It started in 1972, picked up speed in 2005. And the world has been in free fall ever since.
We are at war with the laws of nature and we don’t even know it.
Do you understand EROEI? How many people do? Little surprise then that humanity has been having its collective clock cleaned.
Contrary to what you’ve been told, Manhattan won’t be underwater by the end of 2022. That won’t stop us from
treating the atmosphere like an open sewer;
poisoning our rivers with arsenic, mercury, cadmium and a host of other toxic shit;
filling the oceans with microplastics (I guess those disposable masks are looking like a bad idea, huh);
deforesting tens of millions of acres and destroying the homes of our animal friends who ask of us nothing but give us everything;
depleting precious groundwater reserves to grow almonds for China;
raping the soil another half-inch, leaving us with a few dozen more natural harvest cycles, after which we will most likely have to eat cricket protein and soy grown in synthetic plants.
The megacorporations that are the world’s largest polluters will, as they naturally do, continue to play their massive game of misdirection by shaming the middle class into not eating meat, using plastic straws, driving or taking flights, or owning homes bigger than a shoebox.
But at least our professional-managerial classes can pat themselves on the back for driving Teslas and complying with ESG directives!
Tokyo and Singapore and Manhattan can sink beneath the waves for all I care.
The sooner the better.
Bring it. Bring the rain. Bring the floods. Bring the purifying fire. Good.
This world is deluded and people are deluded in following lies and false gurus and prophets because they offer them a balm. They offer them absolution from confronting the fact that the true problems that plague humanity are the problem that we cannot escape from.
Here’s a taste of what the future looks like from our cushy vantage point in 2022.
The future is looking a lot like neo-feudalism.
Predator corporations move to subscription serfdom. We will see more companies move into the X-as-a-Service business model. Toyota now charges you $8 to start your car. They start with your music so you don’t own it, then you don't own DVDs or Blu Rays.
Companies like BlackRock are buying up houses in America, making it increasingly difficult to own land and a house, so you rent forever. Next they will rent you furniture, mattress, even clothing. You will own nothing and you’ll be happy.
The future is looking a lot like wage slavery – the poor get poorer.
“Last year, the British National Health Service (NHS) got a 1% pay raise.
But real inflation was 10+%, so they actually got a 9% pay cut.
In 2022, food, transportation, and especially housing prices will rise, and while many people will receive the tiniest of pay raises, they will be significantly poorer in real relative wealth.
Several million people will also fall out of the job market due to automation, monopolization, and financialization — made economically inefficient — never to return to the workforce for the rest of their lives.”
The future is looking a lot like the 24/7/365 biomedical surveillance state.
Look up digital currencies or CBDCs like China’s digital RMB. It’s convenient, but it’s an invasion of your human right to privacy. Every transaction can and will be tracked. And it will certainly be weaponised into a method of soft coercion, social control.
The control will come in under a multitude of benign causes including public safety, civic duty, and even your personal health. “Oh comrade, you’ve been to Krispy Kreme for 3 days in a row - we’re freezing your ability to purchase fast food for 24 hours.” It will start benign and eventually you may not be able to purchase much if the state labels you a person under surveillance.
Are you understanding the implications of this yet?
The future is looking a lot lonelier and more socially atomised. As Jared Brock pointed out:
“We’re engineering our society for loneliness.
After all, it’s far more profitable to divide and conquer your customers so they all stay home and spend online. No one makes money from a walk in the wild.
Between the loss of restaurants, cinemas, shopping, outdoor play, mass gatherings, and human-to-human sex, we’re seeing a long-term decline in face-to-face human interaction.
Soon, being together will be a radical act.”
The future will be run by a senile globalist kakistocracy that knows no loyalty to any particular nation or people.
Sheeplike citizens will keep voting for corporate-captured mainstream parties instead of defunding the corporations who bankroll the sociopathic politicians that execute the will of private interests1.
Many people are experiencing in this lifetime a severe drop in living standards. People will come to treat mince beef tacos as something special, to be savored on their birthday. They will be impoverished and immiserated and they will say, “this is a good thing.”
And I don’t weep. Because the time for weeping has passed and tears won’t bring the past back. This is the time to be sober and hard of eye.
Listen, my friends, from this point on, only the strong will survive.
The window is closing. The middle class as we know it may cease to exist by 2050. Latest by 2100. After that your descendants will either be part of the elite, or peasants. Have you realised it yet? The other side sure has.
Are you going to fight for your life and that of your bloodline or are you going to sit back and consume soy food and soy flix, mouth agape like some coomer zombie?
I can hear you protesting now. You think I am too skeptical, or too pessimistic. Maybe you think I am a conspiracy theorist of some sort. Stop reading here then. I don’t care. I am just a handsome, humble schoolteacher trying to connect the dots. So shush, let’s keep unravelling the phantom thread.
The whole covid situation has revealed an invisible longing for the end of days, the ESCHATON. Once covid 19 passes into the wastebin of history, the war horns and crisis alerts will be blaring nonstop as we lurch from one manufactured global crisis to another. War in Ukraine. Climate change. The “discovery” that aliens exist.
The ride never ends. Why would it? When it is so enriching to our corporate overlords and billionaire class? The people who added 5.5 trillion dollars to their wealth while the rest of the world suffered? Who will likely add to their wealth another 2+ trillion as global markets continue to ride the wave of inflation, rising consumer prices, while federal governments conjure money out of nowhere to keep people at home over a flu that 99%+ people survive.
Ask yourself: Why would they possibly want humans to be sovereign when they can extract so much more from people who are atomised, alone, depressed, weak and susceptible to psychic assault?
I don’t think enough people understand the scope and nature of the foe humanity faces: Predator corporations and corrupt government institutions. Authoritarian and neo-feudal governments drunk on power. Power we willingly and eagerly surrendered in 2020 and 2021 in the name of public health and safety.
Did you really think that once the pandemic has passed life will go back to normal?
That they would, having had a taste of unlimited state power by way of mandate and executive fiat, would relinquish it and once more ennoble the people?
No. No. And no.
I used to think that climate change was a serious existential risk. I’ve had a lot of time to read, these past two years. The evidence and historical record simply does not stack up. Complex life on this planet has survived far worse and far more rapid fluctuations in temperature and environmental conditions.
It simply doesn’t add up.
What does add up however are the myriad corporate and political interests that wish to capture and enslave the human race in a system Joel Kotkin has eloquently called neo-feudalism. A small group of elites with access to high technology and dirty energy, lording it over a planet of economic impoverished serfs who live in pods, eat soy and bugs, own nothing and are happy.
That’s the true nightmare. And that’s what they don’t want you to see. They want you on the defensive and vulnerable and panicked so you let them gain ground inch by inch. Eroding your standard of living through inflation and the modern monetary system. Eroding your sovereignty. If you cannot see it, if you’d rather listen to media shills rather than your heart and gut instincts, then what can I say? You’re not gonna make it.
I’m not a “climate denier”. I’m not an “anti-vaxxer” – whatever these completely made up and specious terms mean.
What I am, when everything is stripped away, is a seeker of truth. I am a man who questions. Who reasons. Who interrogates and thinks and pulls on threads no matter where they lead me.
Even when the truth is painful.
Especially then the truth is painful.
Who refuses to abrogate his faculty for God-given thought to authoritarians who hide behind the gloss of “experts” and scientists as they attempt to systematically strip the world of its wealth and freedoms.
I am not a prophet. I can’t do this for you. I can’t make you see unless you are willing, ready and able to see.
But a remnant among you are here. Some of you are ready and awake. That’s who I’m writing for.
So.
This is why why we read.
This is why we pray and meditate.
This is why we train to become faster, stronger, and harder to kill.
As the Chinese saying goes: “May you live in interesting times.”
My friends, we are living in VERY interesting times now.
Year 2 of Better Barbarians has begun.
We do not deserve democracy, despite its flaws. I am amenable to monarchy and enlightened rulers. We have become a world of people thoroughly unworthy of the right to self-govern. Just look at how many people abrogated their sovereignty to the state over the last 2 years. Who abuse their own bodies as much as they abuse the public commons and taint it with their degeneracy and social dysfunction. Do they deserve the right to vote? No. I don’t think so.
Interesting takes, but you don't offer any practical steps or solutions