Saturday, March 21, 2009

On my end, somewhat speculatively -- probably due to the cold medication -- I've been thinking a lot about collapsitarianism lately, and about the great "what if," if all this fails...if we're thrown into some strange proto-agrarian dystopia (dystopian in that the vast majority do not know how to produce), what next? The sequence is alarming, this kind of change isn't always good. It seems to me that the following is true: Stimulus is the preservation of government and business by both government and business. If these both fail to self-preserve, then you'll have your libertarianism, and a whole lot more.

But -- and here's the trickiness of it -- if both fail, and if money and all fiats fail, then this still doesn't sync with what most are talking about in these collapsitarian circles, namely, that we're screwed, that progress is down the shitter. In a sense, it's a tap of the "restart" button. We'll be faced with a massive re-thinking of value and other tenets we've taken for granted because money has allowed us to take them for granted. Debt and lending have thrown ideas of value and worth into a tailspin. What matters now is what you paid. What you'll pay, who'll pay you and how much. This is a great abstraction and it seems as though its time is up. So regardless of civil liberties guaranteed by a government nullified by empty coffers and emptier promises, as well as voided by collapse as a legislator of ANYTHING moralistic or economic or otherwise, rather what we'll be asking is what to do when money no longer fulfills a barter/commerce agreement.What do you have that will guarantee you a good, hot meal.

1 comment:

Stanley Bishop Burhans said...

Good point Ryan. what collapsitarianism doesn't recognize is that it never really ends, there won't be a shift into some sort of cinematic mode--life will continue to be a pragmatic matter of making your way around on a daily basis, and certainly won't be radically simplified in any sense.

As for me, I don't expect a collapse--I'm just unhappy that the Treasury is exhausting our country's credit paying off various financiers and refilling various coffers--so there will wind up being little credit left for infrastructure, for stimulating manufacturing, or for investing in the working class. You can't have a "New New Deal" if all the credit is being siphoned off to expand the financial sector. And of course it's unfair--this sector has already been allowed to absorb most of the profit made in the other sectors of society, and now it's absorbing all the credit too.