Adam Taggart @ Zero Hedge:
It’s characteristic of the time that we’re living in that there simply is no sense of consequence. And that’s exactly what you get when you have a Federal Reserve that’s out of control and a public that is filled with technological narcissistic visions of Santa Claus delivering rescue remedies on demand. And so there’s no general sense that when you do things, bad things can happen.
James Howard Kunstler is concerned. Sure, he still has the same issues with the West’s highly energy-consuming suburban lifestyle that he famously brought to light in his books, The Long Emergency, the World Made by Hand series, and Too Much Magic. But beyond our decaying fundamentals, he’s distressed by society’s unwillingness to be honest with itself about the issue’s it’s facing.
Instead, we are embracing a narrative based in “magical thinking” (e.g., prosperity through the printing press, energy independence through domestic shale) that assures us everything is fine. That we’ll be able to enter the future without having to make any changes to our manner or standards of living, despite our massive debts and depleting resources:
History is very peculiar in the sense that sometimes cultures and societies go through very strange periods of their history, and we’re in one of those now. And I characterize this as the “great period of America lying to itself.” And the way that it’s really carried out as a practical matter is that accounting fraud is now the basic mechanism for running most of the important things in American life. Accounting fraud is now the basis for banking and finance, and it’s certainly the basis for government, and certainly for its fiscal role.
So I think what you’re seeing is a kind of deformity of the consensus. And of course, the most striking feature of our current times isthis inability of the country to construct a coherent story about what’s happening to us, and therefore the inability to construct a story about what we might do about it.
And the sad thing is there is much we can get busy on to address our situation. But to get started, we need to engage in an eyes-wide open assessment of our true state:
What’s really happening in reality, in this moment in history, is a comprehensive contraction in economic activity, because there’s a connection between the energy inputs into an economy and a culture and your ability to accumulate wealth of the kind that we’re used to, produced by industrial activity. And that’s coming to an end, and there’s no way around it.