Suicide

From Suicide and the chimera of American prosperity:

If you are the sort of person who needs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to inform you that Americans are miserable, it's now official. According to the nation's top public health agency, the rate at which we are killing ourselves is higher than it has been in half a century. Fifty years of relentless technological advances, social liberalization, optimization, and GDP growth, five decades that brought about the end of Soviet communism and the birth of a new global order based on free trade and open communication and an infinite array of goods and services and what have we got to show for it? Suicide.

[...]

It will be tempting for some liberals to argue that the drug and suicide epidemic, which is most pronounced in states like West Virginia and in the post-industrial Midwest, is the muted response of white Americans to the prospect of their irrelevance in a rapidly diversifying country. But that's not what I think is happening — and not just because David Duke probably says the same thing. For one thing, the despair that is the underlying cause of these phenomena is universal. The difference is that black and Hispanic communities have more hard-won resilience than whites who have led increasingly atomized, if comparatively more prosperous, existences for half a century now. They live in self-segregated communities in which the only meaningful bonds with their neighbors and even their extended families are those to which they have consented. Their experience has not prepared them for financial uncertainty, violence, atrophying attention spans, and drug taking. For them there really is no such thing as society. They have achieved Auden's terrible dream — not universal love, but being loved alone. Now they are discovering what it means to hate themselves alone as well.

On Sanity

Sanity is defined according to herd norms which necessarily vary according to the age, culture and society. Indeed many modern human would likely be judged insane by pre-industrial standards. Our obsession with time is a case in point. Yet by present precepts, those older notions might appear counter to apparent survival instincts. A driver in heavy, fast traffic cannot always wait to act. Horses will refuse drunken commands, but an automobile has no more intelligence than a rock. Constant attention is required. The maladaptive appears to be relative. Even extremes may vary. Yesterday's mystic or berserker is today's lunatic. Balance depends upon circumstances. The civilizing process stunts certain traits while promoting others. However, paradoxically, certain atavistic characteristics are occasionally called upon for survival or even the supposed benefit of society. A certain level of agitation is necessary to ensure these traits are not submerged too deeply. Unfortunately, the conflicting stimuli may drive some over the edge, resulting in simmering resentment and pointless violence. For those who feel the urge to snap, a certain hope may sustain them through the dark night. In its present form, our civilization is doomed. The time for revenge must wait. The official power structure must do everything in its power to convince us otherwise...

On Unstable Equilibrium 2.1

A system may be in a state of unstable equilibrium, but this says nothing about the potential of its fall.

Unemployed Vets

From Unemployment for Young Vets: 30%, and Rising:

Dig deeper into the pages of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data and it becomes apparent that while the job market is slowly improving for most Americans, it’s moving in the opposite direction for Gulf War II vets (defined by the BLS as those on active duty since 2001). The youngest of veterans, aged 18 to 24, had a 30.4 percent jobless rate in October, way up from 18.4 percent a year earlier. Non-veterans of the same age improved, to 15.3 percent from 16.9 percent. For some groups, the numbers can look a good deal worse: for black veterans aged 18-24, the unemployment rate is a striking 48 percent.

Via Global Guerrillas:

IF we keep going in this direction, and there's no reason to think we won't, these young men find new groups to care for them and they shift their loyalties to new gangs/mafias/cartels/militias etc. at a pretty amazing clip. Given the danger this shift in primary loyalties represents for the future, going it alone isn't an option. You need a community at your back.

And since community has ceased to exist for many, this situation will not be pretty. Unlike the mid-1990s, post OKC bombing, the government is not quietly employee those with combat skills (as was related to me, when I had business at the Federal Building), but others will be more than happy to do so.

Deserving of Nothing

As George Monbiot describes in The Self-Attribution Fallacy, the 1% are simply where they are due to luck and the willingness to screw everyone else:

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves(1). He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers, across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

In other words, they deserve nothing.  In fact, if not for the circumstances of their birth, they would probably be in prison:

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded(4). Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you're likely to go to business school.

One other thing, not touched upon, is that psychopathic tendencies, on so wide a scale, considering the 1% is not drawn randomly from the population at large (as in more the case for prisons) but rather from the very rich, is sign that these people are horribly inbred.  In the poor, inbreeding is derided; in the rich is is celebrated. The only thing they are deserving of is to be aborted.

Systemic Failure

Systemic failure is the face of entropy.

Ideological Crisis

John Robb is absolutely correct that capitalism is facing an ideological crisis similar to that which resulted in the collapse of communism 20 years ago.  Although culturally speaking, capitalism as a means of economic exchange is probably not going anywhere (just as authoritarianism in Russia), it's ideological basis is under assault as confidence in its resultant system erodes.  In addition, governments (to varying degree) have been "hollowed out" by globalism, so there is really nothing left to step up to fill its place.  The only recourse is to switch one's orientation to "primary loyalties" as described by William S. Lind in his past writings.  In the West, much like other parts of the world, the result will be division into smaller entities than the current nation-state arrangement.  The question is how small will it go?

Global Economic Meltdown

...in 3 weeks (see Here).

We can only hope.

Bigness

Size creates complexity.  Economic collapse can therefore been seen as a consequence of "bigness."  Fifty years ago Leopold Kohr warned of the perils of large states and advocated smaller political entities.  See Disunion Now: A Plea for a Society based upon Small Autonomous Units.

Financial Crisis II Electric Boogaloo (Part 4)

Home-buying season the worst in at least 50 years. Total bust.

Market nerves hit Morgan Stanley. Will it fail?

Is Capitalism Preparing to Bury Itself?   More like eating itself, just like communism.

Markets suffer large quarterly falls.  How low will they go?

Cracked China?  What nobody wants to consider.

Wall Street protesters gain traction — but now what?  Incoherent as usual, the opposition is as intellectually bankrupt as the establishment.   Granted, their protest is vastly superior to voting.  At least they are trying, but they need more. Revolution requires a program and this bunch has none.  (It does not require a leadership.)  Also, if the most they can get to show up is 2000 people (in a city of millions and a country of 300 million) then it most certainly does not look like Egypt.   (Not to mention that the largest turn out was really a side-demo against police brutality.)

Voting is Worthless

From As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe:

“Our parents are grateful because they're voting,” said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. “We're the first generation to say that voting is worthless.”

Why anyone would think otherwise never ceases to amaze.  The belief that an elected authority figure is going to do anything positive for anyone but the rich is outright delusional.  One thing the economic crisis is revealing is that people need to take matters into their own hands.  Although it is my opinion that non-violent protest is pretty useless (unless backed by the threat of a massive uprising), it is still superior to voting--at least the participants are taking matters into their own hands.  (If voting is worthless, why would a peaceful appeal to corrupt scum be any better?  One reason the Tea Party is so utterly pathetic is their stupid belief that voting matters.)

Quite simply, the real enemy is not corruption, it's leaders, elected or not.  They deserve to be replaced by nothing, which means the establishment of a citizenry that does not feel the need to be lead anywhere.  Once the politicians are dispatched, then the economy can be destroyed (as befits its parasitic nature).  I believe this can only happen when everything has fallen so far, that there is no alternative to starting from scratch.

In the 21st century, everyone will be an anarchist whether they like it or not.

Head in the Sand

Having one's head in the sand is preferable to having it shoved someplace worse.

OR

Ignorance is preferable to delusion.

Past It

Q: When something edible is "past it," it is rightfully discarded.  Why is this not true of systems?

A: Vested interests want you to eat shit.

Hard Landings

Hard landings usually occur when someone is not paying attention and/or doing their job.  Sound familiar?

Knock Down

If you are going to knock something down, be sure to get out of the way.

Grandstanding

Amongst the decadent, grandstanding passes for wisdom.

Falling Down

Falling down does not necessarily mean one can climb back up: sometimes the grade is too steep.

Waking to the Truth

Per Morris Berman:

We are now, I believe, in a position to answer the question of what all of this frenetic activity is designed to hide; what Americans are running away from. Toward the end of his life Williams wrote: "America is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." This is a haunting, if enigmatic, sentence. What truth, after all? Possibly, an example of what not to do. For the truth here is an emptiness at the center, to which is added a desire to never grow up. It should be obvious by now that the American definition of "progress" is little more than a joke, and that running away from the responsibilities of adulthood–including the construction of a society not based on endless consumption, competition, and expansion–could be the single greatest thread in American history. That there is a possible alternative history, and a very different type of progress, characterized (for example) by marginal figures such as Lewis Mumford or the late Jane Jacobs, is something Americans don't wish to contemplate, for alternatives to the life of running faster to get nowhere scare them. No, the expansion game, and the life of limbo, as Williams puts it, will continue until we hit a wall, and the game cannot be played any longer (although I suspect we shall be able to limp along with "crisis management" for two or three more decades). This game, of self-destruction and the destruction of others, will continue until there is no place for America to go except to the graveyard of failed empires. And as Williams suggested, violence is very likely part of the equation.

I do disagree with the assertion that things will limp along for "two or three more decades."  The desperation of political elites is too palpable for anything lasting that long.  Their spectacles have become too frantic.

Link.

High-Tech Sociopaths

From Stars and Sewers:

Online anonymity has created what the computer scientist Jaron Lanier calls a “culture of sadism.” Some Yahoo comments were disgusting. “She got what she deserved,” one said. “This is what happens when dumb sexy female reporters want to make it about them.” Hillbilly Nation chimed in: “Should have been Katie.”

The “60 Minutes” story about Senator Scott Brown’s revelation that a camp counselor sexually abused him as a child drew harsh comments on the show’s Web site, many politically motivated.

Acupuncturegirl advised: “Scott, shut the hell up. You are gross.” Dutra1 noted: “OK, Scott, you get your free pity pills. Now examine the image you see in the mirror; is it a man?”

Evgeny Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” told me Twitter creates a false intimacy and can “bring out the worst in people. You’re straining after eyeballs, not big thoughts. So you go for the shallow, funny, contrarian or cynical.”

Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” says technology amplifies everything, good instincts and base. While technology is amoral, he said, our brains may be rewired in disturbing ways.

“Researchers say that we need to be quiet and attentive if we want to tap into our deeper emotions,” he said. “If we’re constantly interrupted and distracted, we kind of short-circuit our empathy. If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn’t have occurred before.”

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, recalled that when he started his online book review he forbade comments, wary of high-tech sociopaths.

“I’m not interested in having the sewer appear on my site,” he said. “Why would I engage with people digitally whom I would never engage with actually? Why does the technology exonerate the kind of foul expression that you would not tolerate anywhere else?”

Why indeed?

Technology is not amoral.  It is a machine morality.  The technical morality promotes efficiency above all else.  For example, omitted from the above op ed piece is any mention as to why a MSM organization would allow these posts to be placed on their site.  They could easily moderate.  If Internet trolls are so despicable, the why allow them to post in the first place?  The controversy attracts and holders readers, of course.  Hence the technical requirements of technological commercialism may only equate "good" with more eyeballs.  Although hardly a revelation, it is part of a pattern that imposes itself on the human technological society and culture.  Of course, humans are not machines, and therein lies the conflict.  Technological society may materially elevate.  As a result, expectations are raised and cannot be met.  Well being ceases to be a factor.  Survival instincts grow decadent.  One must grow hard against nothing.  Sociopaths lash out.  So might everyone else, but who really wants to be like a sociopath?

And the mass stays in line a little longer.

Why the Surprise?

Where children are an economic liability:

i. The rate of replenishment is low.
ii. Culture declines.
iii. One society is replaced by another.