I’m not writing this to depress anyone or to suggest hopelessness. To the contrary, I believe the attaining of knowledge and an ability to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, offers us the opportunity to prepare our minds, hearts, and support systems for what’s likely to come. What we find when we zoom out and absorb the entire picture is a totality of circumstances that is pleading with us to recognize it fully. It’s clear by simple analysis of the facts that anyone who chooses to ignore these pleas or fails to hear them will find themselves in real peril in the very near future. This is what our circumstances promises us, most likely in the near term.
I’m not solely talking about climate change, abrupt or otherwise, though I will discuss it. I’m not talking solely about financial/economic catastrophe, though I will discuss it. I’m not talking about the threat of war, or civil unrest, or agricultural collapse and famine, or water shortage, or sea level rise, or rising fascism and nationalism, or terrorism, or cyber-attack, or earth/population overshoot and natural resource depletion, or pestilence, or grid failure, or mass extinction and ecological collapse, or some unforeseen and catastrophic natural disaster. Each one of these, alone, could - easily and feasibly – mean the end of modern civilization as we know it. Each one of these, by themselves, represent very real and very present threats to the entire planet and/or to civilization as a whole. Taken all of these things together, it becomes much easier to discern the bigger picture and precisely why we should pay attention to it.
I’ll be doing this in parts, as it seems like quite a lot to tackle in one post. I’ll try to do everything I can to source each of the threats in question with reputable materials. Please don’t take any one thing as the issue. All of what I will be discussing is the issue – they all affect one another. Many will directly lead to others, like falling dominos, it will be inevitable. Again, this is not to depress, but to empower. I implore you to see the bigger picture, "the forest for the trees."
The Fragility of “Developed” Civilization (Part One)
Before we go into what threatens civilization as we know it, we need to understand the fragility of that structure. We are living in a delusion. The stability of the world we know continuing to provide us with, not only comfort, but sustenance, is based purely on faith. The “money” that supports the banks continuing to lend, allowing business to continue moving, allowing food and power to keep on flowing, allowing you and I to eat, drink, and watch Netflix is all based, literally, on our faith that it will all continue functioning and that money even has value in the first place (it doesn’t, every penny of it is an IOU that will never have any payable value outside our own belief we can go to the gas station and buy gas with it.)
Our entire “developed” structure is based on something that, not only is of no real value, but quite the opposite. Money in all its current forms is ALL bad and wholly unpayable debt. Every last cent of it is a lie supported by our faith in that lie. Billionaires are only worth anything because we continue to believe in the total and complete illusion that the enormous numbers in their bank accounts are worth more than grains of sand (in reality, the sand has more tangible value.) However, the moment we collectively call out the illusion, everything we know falls apart. Quite the precarious conundrum, isn’t it?
The faith-based debt scheme isn’t the only illogical, insolvent, and intrinsically fragile system we depend on. We use that same insolvent system to feed ourselves via our precariously fragile and unsecured food-supply chain. We take our monopoly money to the grocery store, once a week, to buy food that would supply only a section of our communities for two to three days (at best) the moment the food supply truck finishes its delivery. Shelves are only restocked once the supply is all but depleted. And, keep in mind, this is how every vital supply chain in modern society functions - be it life-saving drugs, food, medical supplies, fuel, etc. Almost everything we need, as well as everything needed to make what we need, in our modern world is guaranteed to arrive at the very last second, or later. The “just in time” strategy of supply and demand is so precarious and so vulnerable to disruption it amazes me that it’s not resulted in a large-scale catastrophe already.
During the financial collapse (2007-2008) we were within hours of the entire “just in time” system collapsing due to the credit freeze:
I can’t recommend enough watching “Too Big to Fail” if you haven’t already – I’ve linked the Bing search results showing the streaming options available to watch it. If you have access to any of these services, I really hope you’ll take the time to see this movie. There’s so much to learn there.
Our modern version of civilization is only about 100-150 years old, to the extent that it exists now. In the context of the entirety of human history, that’s mere seconds. Why do we pretend it’s immovable? Why do we delude ourselves into depending on such an infantile and untried, unproven system with our very lives? And it has failed in the past. That amazes me even further. We’ve seen its weaknesses exposed in the Great Depression, the breeding grounds it’s created for the worst kinds of fascists monsters, in World Wars, the Great Recession, the collapse of entire nations’ economic systems. Yet, we still give ourselves over to this clearly flawed civil, social, and economic design as if it were impervious to failure. Why?
*I'll be posting again shortly with Part Two of this series. I hope everyone is able to gain something. Peace!
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